‘My spirit is Herculean, my flesh more Laurel and Hardy’
PROJECTS: GARDEN & SHED OVERHAUL
Ten days ago I tweeted: ‘Looking back I wish that my school had devoted a couple of hours a week to teaching us basic DIY.’ In fairness to the school it did provide me with an excellent education, yet experience has taught me that while a grounding in Latin declensions and Euclid’s Elements is very helpful for showing off during an episode of University Challenge it isn’t, to be honest, much help when trying to unblock a toilet, stop the incessant dripping of an overflow pipe, bolstering a sagging decking or repairing an extractor fan.
I’ve tried to do all of those jobs in the last few weeks (part of my Grand Plan to use the lockdown to good effect), but the decking still sags, the extractor now brings smells into the house and the toilet flushes less effectively than it did before I decided to deconstruct and restore it to pristine condition.
I also abandoned my plans to repaint inside the house when Indy (having discovered his sister’s felt tips) decided it was the appropriate moment to demonstrate his new-found fondness for Picasso and ersatz Pointillism. Kerri, my extraordinarily patient partner, doesn’t encourage my DIY desires. That’s probably because she has seen me fall out of trees; almost impale myself on a fence when I fell off a roof; whack my head when I stood on a rake prior to trying to saw down a small tree (by the way, they all look small until the first branch lands on you); and just miss being clobbered by a whopping self-assembly cupboard which fell apart when I left the room.
She has also seen me slide down the stairs on my back; fall out of her hammock three times, once holding a piping hot cup of tea and a terrified cat; and watch a neighbour shaping up for a stroke as he held the ladder upon which I had reached the top rung and was stretching — at an extreme right angle and on one leg — for a window ledge with a paint brush. I could also assemble a garden shed from the bits of wood and assorted screws that have been left over from other projects. When it comes to DIY my spirit is Herculean, but my flesh, sadly, is more Laurel and Hardy.
But I was determined to do something I’d be proud of during lockdown (I gave up on the Chronicles of Narnia after ten days) and the garden seemed the obvious challenge.
Yet for every plant I lowered lovingly into place, Indy removed it and threw it towards his sandpit.
He also discovered the sheer pleasure of just sitting around on sleepers and clumps of ‘something or other’ — killing things off in the process.
Lilah, meanwhile, using lockdown to improve her knowledge of snails, turned part of my new wildlife area into a remembrance garden for a snail I had managed to squash.
But after three months there is flowering colour; new wooden panels; a re-sorted vegetable patch; a patchedup garden shed (even though it seems a lot shakier than I remember it); a badminton net (which usually falls down when our robin sits on it); and a place I can drink Pimm’s and praise my own efforts (there is a remarkable silence from everyone else on the subject).
Somewhere in this not-sosecret garden I have also lost three tools, a tin of paint, an un-drunk glass of vodka and white lemonade (which may explain the behaviour of both Indy and the blackbirds) and one of Indy’s shoes.
Ah well, finding them can be my next lockdown project.