Playing out

Is it my birthday?! 2 sunny warm days in a row, and still bunking off. How lucky can one person be? In order to make the most of the beautiful day I thought I would go down into my extremely overgrown garden and give it a good seeing to. For almost 4 months The Wig and I have been too scared to venture into the garden since a dirty great, rutting fox moved in, hence it' a complete mess. At first we tried getting rid of the fox with amonia smelling crystals, then we tried shining a heavy duty torch at it, then we shouted at it and in a final desperate attempt, my downstairs neighbour even did a few wee's around the shrubbery to put it off. (The idea behind this being that the fox will smell the wee of a bigger animal than itself, get scared and move on.) However, this had no effect whatsoever on the Hackney Fox, so its basically dug itself a huge hole / cave at the bottom of my garden and has had the run of the place since last year. Like some sort of flea bitten old war lord. I was going to call the Council to remove it but apparently it had more rights than me to be in the garden. There is no justice in this world. But fingers crossed, I think it might have gone as I haven't seen or heard it for a couple of weeks. Although as its parting gift to me it has left behind the most unusual hoard of stuff which I discovered today. So if you see a fox roaming around E8 wearing one black plimsoll (size 2) on its right paw, can you tell it the left plimsoll is in my bin? Along with 2 x un-matching gardening gloves, 1 x fluorescent dog chew, 1 x pink slipper and 1 x Pinocchio figure with its nose chewed off. Ta

Despite the fox detritus, being in the garden all day was lovely. Not just because it was something to tick of the dreaded 'To Do' list but also because it gave me time to think, and being in the garden reminded me of being a kid and how much I used to love 'playing out'. When I was growing up, it was pretty much my favourite thing to do and when you're a kid and its sunny and you're outside the days seem to last forever. We were lucky when we growing up that we lived in a village with fields to play in and woods to build dens in, and mates up the road, we even had a field behind where we lived that used to have cows in and on more than one occasion one of the neighbours looked outside in the morning to find an escaped cow staring back at them from their garden. It was a pretty nice place to grow up and the older I get, the more I appreciate how lucky we were. I buried a 'time capsule' in my Dad's garden once, under a conifer behind the crazy paved pond. I blame Blue Peter for this idiotic act and god only knows what was in it, probably a Wham Bar, a 5 Star poster and a copy of Judy Blume's 'Forever'. My dad wasn't much of a gardener, which is why he had half of it crazy paved over, but he did try. I remember there being a lot of rose bushes in the 70's, big bright bunches of them dotted about the place. Also, as you can see from the photos I was often asked to pose next to them. Or sniff them. Bonfire night also brings back memories of our our little garden and being oustide. Every Bonfire Night when we were very little, our friends would come round to the garden and Dad used to have a little fireworks display out of a bucket. Probably a bit dangerous, but Health + Safety hadn't been invented in the late 70's. He also painted a tree once. It was dead and he said it looked ugly, but rather than cut it down he painted it. Pink. But then he decided it looked a bit garish so he painted it again. Back to brown. . .  Chop it down man! Anyway, happy days. Maybe next time the weather's nice and the garden is completely tidied I'll plant a big rose bush in my Dad's memory. Or paint a tree.