14 March 2009
I had gone off to do some Saturday morning things: buying a few more bricks for the barbeque, looking at circular brick-cutting saws in the DIY shop (far too expensive, I’ll use a hand saw), that kind of thing. In fact, I didn’t get very far at all because the car started shrieking “get me checked” kind of messages at me, so mostly I sat in the mechanic’s, waiting to be told that there was nothing wrong with it at all, rather than getting things done. By the time I rattled back down the drive, a bouncy boy in a mighty four wheel drive pick-up was in the middle of the lawn, looking like he’d been given a big box of sweeties to tuck into on his day out. He was clearly enjoying the challenge.
He had only been able to get his beast of a car down there because we had spent much of a morning filling in the narrowest point. At a (luckily) quite early stage in our own fruitless attempts to drag the caravan up the path I had taken the trouble to measure (1) the narrowest bit of the path and (2) the caravan wheelbase and realised that only by a miracle would the trailer get up there without toppling over. The narrowest bit had been a gradual erosion kind of a hole, a straightening off over time until the edge of the lawn there had been much further back than originally intended. So shoring it up made sense in lots of ways, including aesthetically.
It also meant that this massive Nissan pick-up could back down there with minimum difficulty. And that the caravan, with a little to-ing and fro-ing could make it back up. There was an anxious moment when Demolition Boy was gunning the accelerator, and the caravan was teetering horribly, two wheels riding way up the bank… and right over one of my roses which, however, seems not to have expired immediately at the affront. But while I was panicking about my rose, Demolition Boy was heartbroken because he had snapped a bit off the hose reel with one of his front wheels. I don’t quite know how he ended up that far over, because the hose reel was nowhere near the path. And thank goodness he got that rather than the standpipe, otherwise we would have had a gusher and desperate need of a plumber.
Up in the car park the caravan had to be unhitched, swung around manually and reattached to the pick-up. And then, after some documents and banknotes changing hands, off he went, out the gate and up the lane. It was gone. The end of an era. Whoopee!
