I’ve just had a wonderfully frustrating few days in which I feel quite lucky to have avoided trench foot. I think I have, but it’s been a close call.
I love my garden, which I have stupidly designed so there is plenty to do, which is great until you lose a summer to surgery. The foundation of a garden may well be the grass but the foundation of the foundation is the paths. You’ve got to have somewhere to walk.
Last week I pressure washed the drive when I realised how utterly filthy the bit under the OH’s car wasn’t after he had gone shopping. (We will never be short of peanuts, though I never ate them much even when I could.) Then I followed up with a squirt of that stuff that inhibits the growth of mould and lichen and wished afterwards that I had examined the pressure washer more closely to remember how to turn the jet into a broad blade instead of a point. Now it looks as if someone has been scribbling on the drive with a white pen. Mostly I was being frustrated that as soon as I had got the pressure washer going the hose disconnected itself and sprayed the person rushing to help it. One drive= two pairs of jeans and a top and all the underwear.
So now I had a clean drive, my side passage, where the bins live, looked worse. Utterly filthy. I had put trays of plants there but was seriously worried about them catching something from the path they were standing on. And the patio! Well, don’t talk to me about the patio. For some time, if I miss the washing line or I’m not fast enough with a clothes peg and gravity intervenes, I have to rewash the droppage.
See? Black as your hat.
I had had a frustrating day yesterday, ‘losing’ fifty pages of a novel on the computer while the OH was out supposedly getting more printer paper along with his shopping but, realising that the pub sold peanuts too, went there instead. So I rang the S&H who helped his poor old mother who will now have to proof read fifty pages that he magicked back from the ether. He is a good lad, that lad and very patient, as I used to be before I caught impatience from his father.
So I had the choice: do the computer stuff today or the patio, path and steps and as many soakings as that took.
The pressure washer won, mainly because we are in for a few days of brilliant sunshine and this is the UK. The stuff you put on the clean patio to keep it that way has to dry before the rain arrives and it has to be put on a dry surface.
Yesterday, however, in the garden it was too hot to work by midday. I could tell this because the workers who have dug up the entire street to lay cables for broadband looked very hot when I went out to ask them to move the barriers so I could do a bit of shopping (frightened of running out of peanuts, obvs.) ‘No blocky dee drive’ they all intoned in chorus before blocking the drive. So I explained in pigeon English that I would return and needed to back in to the drive because of the main road. ‘No blocky dee drive, Missus! No blocky!’ Despite being a practiced cynic I drove off, returning half an hour later, nut laden, to a blocked drive. So they let me in and then blocked me there.
So, as I couldn’t go anywhere, today seemed the perfect day to get soaked but not once the sun was up.
I woke shortly before six. I do wish I wouldn’t do this. Miniatura, I’m alert as a lert at five, usually.
I gave up and got up at seven and had my first shower, though I need not have bothered, it took about five minutes for the pressure washer hose to disconnect and soak me.
Who invented hose connectors? It must have been a man. The mangled hose end (I cut a new bit with the hedge loppers eventually) is inserted into the receptacle, a hole in the plastic doodad, then a screw thingy is slipped over the join and screwed then the entire palaver is pushed on to the locking joint on the washer, then the water is turned on, then the electric switch on the back of the machine, then you pick up the gun and squeeze the trigger, then the hose end flips out and describes arcs of spray like an enraged King Cobra, then Jane gets soaked then she turns everything off again.
I found the tin of hose connectors in the garage. Some are brown (1970s) some are several shades of green (1990s) some are orange (1980s) some are black and none of the ****ers work.
I did three mash ups before I found a combination that slightly worked, by which time my wellies (which have a teeny hole, somewhere) were floating and I was seriously damp.
But I did my side passage, including the bit where the land drains erupted up the wall, then I went and washed my feet, which had gone very 1990s looking, got new socks and donned my wet wellies. Nasty. But I did the patio, which looked a lot better.
Still a bit damp but a lot lighter.
Then, after another two changes of hose end, I cleaned fifty shades of grey off the steps.
Which have pink mortar!
Then I attached the hose to the big bottle with the hose connector (theoretical) of moss and mould inhibitor. You know what happened next, I even got the pink stuff in my hair, wrestling with the hose snake.
Another foot wash and pair of socks later and I was onto washing the tree broom.
This free broom, which had been helping all morning, was discovered in the tree that used to be in the front garden after a particularly fierce storm many years ago. I left it there in case anyone wanted to collect it and because it required rescue by ladder, for a few weeks. Then it joined the household and, like the Woolworths reject camellia ‘this bargain 43p’ has been wonderful.
Then, finally, I had a proper shower and washed my hair (Do not get on skin or clothes, wear gloves, if gets in eyes seek medical attention). (If my hair goes a stranger shade than usual you’ll know they missed a bit off the warnings) collected all the hose end bits, and went online to order wellies that do not leak.
The joy of cleanliness, not to be underestimated, either in the execution or the result.
Now all I need is some mortar to fill in the holes blasted out of the paving by the pressure and I will go and get the makings just as soon as the workmen let me out.
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