Ever had something you wanted to get shut of? Something that took up much-needed house room but for which you couldn’t find any legitimate method of disposal (what with the Council being picky about what they let you put in the communal dumpsters) and so you just had to put up with it.
Well now you know how Shana feels!
But I digress…
For the last five years (i.e., ever since we moved in here) we have been lumbered with a relatively small but inconvenient quantity of builder’s rubble in the garden. Apart from about forty red bricks, it’s mostly broken concrete slabs. Originally used as the base for a free-standing wooden shed by our house’s previous tenant, Mad Harry Burton of the King’s Own Slight Infantry, they are what a concrete expert would describe as ‘past their best’. They’re more broken and wrecked than the Spanish economy and have, without a word of exaggeration, more chips than Harry Ramsden. They’re not much use for making a patio or crazy paving and, bearing in mind that you have to pay if you want someone to remove such things, it has been a constant headache trying to figure out what to do with them.
Gathering together most of this mound of miscellaneous masonry, I first tried my hand at a spot of drystone walling. However, I created not a dry-stone wall but a heap of builder’s rubble roughly six feet long by about three feet high. This sat at the end of the garden for about one year as a testament to my skills.
It had to go. But where?
Next, we laid some of the biggest slab sherds on the rear border behind the main lawn. They lay for most of a year on top of a sheet of anti-weed membrane. This year, though, we have other plans for that border, so the slabs had to be moved again.
This time, I stacked them in our downstairs shed where they immediately caused a brand new nuisance: on opening the shed door, i could enter for about one metre before being halted by a miniature display of the ruins of brutalist architecture. Forget Johnnie Ruskin‘s Stones of Venice: these were the Stones of Menace. The only place left for proper gardening tools was wedged on one side. Open the door in a hurry and you could be instantly pronged by a wayward lawn rake. (If printing out this article, feel free to insert your expletives of choice here.)
Naturally, this situation was less than ideal.
Then, late last week, a chance conversation with a neighbour brought an instant solution to our lingering problem. The neighbour in question, Mrs Woman, said I could sort out a few slabs and place them underneath her bushes to discourage the local cats from pooping there. So that’s what I spent yesterday afternoon doing: no, not pooping under the lilacs, but chucking carefully placing every last one of those dratted slabs under the bushes (literally where the sun don’t shine) and quickly, before the lucky recipient could change her mind.
So now everybody’s happy. The local moggies can find plenty of other pooping venues, the neighbour’s (presumably) pleased, and I can at last get into the shed and use it for its proper purpose–hiding from the housework.
If I’d had a pound for every time I’ve shifted those slabs, I’d be a rich man, or I’d have a fiver anyway. And the exercise has kept me fit. But still I can’t help thinking: if I’d known about those mucky moggies when we first came here, I’d have lobbed those slabs over the fence five years ago and good riddance to them. Ah well, better late than never.
