DAY 2

‘Do you want anything doing with a hammer?’

The dog-walker in the lane looked surprised, ‘No thanks, I’ve got a new fridge freezer coming this afternoon.’

Fair enough, not everyone’s comfortable with a hammer-happy granny. When I got home, I couldn’t find the sledgehammer so had to use a toffee-hammer to tap the plastic drainpipes back over their grids. It was probably the better option.

*

David is a brilliant gardener. He turns up when he feels the garden is ready for him and wields his strimmer and mower with terrifying speed and efficiency. If I catch him in time, I indicate with a sweep of my arm that the primroses planted under the apple tree need a gentle mow. To somebody as profoundly deaf as David a sweeping arm also means, ‘Please strim under the apple tree until the earth flies.’

This afternoon I hammered holes into the building rubble left by the house’s previous owner (he’d covered it in grass and called it a ‘lawn’). Then I slotted canes into the holes and leant them against the apple tree in a teepee kind of arrangement. Finishing off my anti-strim defence is a dangling sign – ‘Primroses sleeping’.  David might pause long enough to read it.