The Ace of Spades

So we finally had the back garden done.

The pond has gone, the other daft water feature has gone. The two rocky mounds have gone. The muddy quagmire that was the lawn has gone. It has all been filled in, levelled and re-turfed. The dogs have a separate fenced off area for them to ruin and Helen and I have madly planted the beds with shrubs and flowers. It actually looks like a garden for the first time since we had the dogs.

The day after the pond was filled and the new turf put down I was sitting with Molly in the lounge very early in the morning, when a huge heron plonked himself down on the grass. I watched as he did a very obvious double take, looked left, right and up and down and clearly thought to himself "I am sure this is the right garden, where has the bloody pond gone ? There was definitely a pond here before. It was right....here. I must be going mad." Then he took off again. It was a wonderfully comic moment, I just wish I had been able to catch it on video.

Anyway, as usual we took our enthusiasm a step too far. I decided to create a herb garden in one of the raised beds. This meant removing a large fig tree which I assumed would be a fairly easy task. I chopped the branches off in no time at all and left a stump about 2 feet high. I gave it a good shake. It was disconcertingly solid. I gave it a jolly good kick. This resulted in a short informal walkabout in the garden as I mouthed a few obscenities and hopped to relieve the pain in my stubbed toes. So I decided to dig it out. I dug all around it exposing several inches of roots. Cut through a few, but still it stayed rock solid. So I decided to take the spade to some of the roots. I raised the handle of the spade high above the ground and put my whole (not insignificant) weight behind it and brought it down as hard as I could in the expectation that it would scythe its way through even the toughest of the roots. Had I realised that there was risk I might miss the roots and had I known that there was a lump of concrete just below the soil where my spade was about to land I might have been a little more circumspect. The jarring pain that rocketed through my hand, wrist, elbow and shoulder was truly excruciating. The doctor has confidently predicted that I have done the sort of damage that will take "a bit of time" to mend. In the meantime he has given me the sort of painkillers that require insertion not ingestion and the pain is breaking through even those with no trouble.

I did get the stump of the tree out though, by chipping it away, with an axe, piece by piece, very gingerly, with my left hand.

So The Ace of Spades, as I am now known around here is feeling a bit sorry for himself.