The Porcelain Preservation Society

Many of you (unless you live in a yurt) will have seen the new IKEA television adverts that extol us to do away with boring old traditional garden furniture and splash out on some Swedish decking and a hot tub. And by boring old traditional garden furniture they expressly mean garden gnomes (weirdly no mention is made of conspicuous clumps of pampas grass); those poor, rashly fired clay figurines that clearly classify their owner as being (a) stuck in 1970’s sitcom land and (b) pretending and failing to broadcast to the world that they are actually middle class.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has received a number of complaints about the myriad violent ways Mr and Mrs IKEA are shown dispatching the various garden gnomes that infest their gardens. In scenes that have probably made Oliver Stone puke his ring in sheer horror gnomes have been smashed against garden fences, eviscerated with high powered water hoses and skull-fucked with throbbing lengths of garden hoe.

Actually I made that last one up but it illustrates perfectly the 18+ tone of this gore-fest advertisement that glamorises war and extreme violence just to push a few deckchairs onto an unsuspecting public.
The ASA, however, have decided not to uphold the complaints as they feel that the “clearly fanciful and light-hearted” nature of the advert mediates the eye-wrenching, gut churning gratuitousness of the shlock violence.

And I have to agree. The only good garden gnome is a dead garden gnome and that’s all there is to it.

Of course, I am joking.

Garden gnomes cannot be killed. They cannot be killed because (and this may come as a bit of shock to the complainants) THEY ARE NOT ALIVE IN THE FIRST PLACE. They are inanimate objects. They are lumps of fired clay cunningly moulded to look vaguely like humanoid figures. They have about as much sentience as an IKEA barbecue fork. They do not have feelings, cannot feel pain and, I am pretty sure, do not have an aesthetic opinion one way or another as to the state of the garden they find themselves dumped in.

People have merely complained because of the anthropomorphic nature of garden gnomes.

Day in day out, all over Greece and in other parts of Europe, plates and cups are being wantonly smashed during the climax of Greek weddings. These poor plates have never even been eaten off; they have been denied the single, defining purpose for which all plates are made. Instead they have been made for one reason only: to be wedding fodder. They have been created to be destroyed, nothing more.

Where are these people when these innocent plates are being killed? Where is the “no plate born to die” campaign in the national press and on the internet? Wasn’t it Roger McGough who once poetically cried, “Monica, think of the saucers”?!

Why do these people not rush to defend these defenceless items of cheap porcelain?

I’ll tell you why. Because they are just plates. Because they are just manually manipulated bits of clay that have been unlucky enough not to be fashioned into little men with fishing rods and other spurious items of horticultural equipment.

Well, such hypocrisy and inconstancy really gets my goat. It’s time to restore the balance.

It’s time to stand up for teapots, claypipes and ceramic butter dishes everywhere. I am forming The Porcelain Preservation Society and I invite you all to join me in saying no to IKEA and yes to little clay men in galoshes. It’s time to love your mug, savour your gravy-boat and hug your jugs.

If nothing else we will do wonders for the Cornish pottery industry.

Now if you’ll excuse me, me and my Toby-jug have a titillating date with a hot tub…

Speak Of The Devil...

...and he's sure to appear and ask for your compost bin.

No, that wasn't what I was expecting either but it was what I got last night.

Regular readers of this blog will know of my love/hate relationship with our window cleaner, Wayne. Well. I'm not sure it's love/hate. Possibly hate/hate. Certainly irritation/relief that I don't have to clean my windows myself.

Anyway, none of this is important. What is important is that through sheer wussiness I find myself putting up with his monthly visits to collect his £7 for cleaning our windows simply because I haven't yet told him to go and sling his chamois round somebody else's sash window.

Wayne is weird you see. As expounded further in the link above he is a commie hater. Beneath his cheeky-chappy gor blimey guvnor smile is a festering Bible spouting end-timer who wants to see all the bankers of this world boiling in the devil's own hot sauce. I don't really want to get into a protracted conversation with him. I certainly don't want to have to risk his ire by laying him off and then find myself on the wrong end of a McCarthyist witch hunt. I literally just want him to wash and go.

But - jumping through time to last night - we hadn't seen anything of Wayne for weeks. He hadn't been round to collect his fee for last month. It had lain in the kitchen untouched (amazing given how brassic we are at the moment) awaiting its master's call. Wayne didn't even seem to have been round to smear up our windows this month. Normally he puts a calling card through. But there had been nothing.

I know I was foolish to do this but I chanced fate. I turned to my wife and posited aloud the theory that maybe we had seen the last of Wayne. Maybe he had gone out of business, fallen off his ladder or had embarked on a crusade to the Holy Land? Maybe I could be allowed to reclaim that £7 and place it back into the forlorn pocket of my wallet?

Now this is no word of a lie. I haven't messed with the timings here just to cobble a blog post together and inject it with some semblance of drama. There was literally a knock at our front door the second after I had stopped speaking. A smart business-like rap.

I turned to Karen; it couldn't possibly be...? She had turned white. She suggested it was a late delivery of something or other. Clutchable straws perhaps?

I girded my loins and opened the front door... and found myself staring into the crazy shotgun eyes of Wayne the window cleaner. "Hello Mr Blake..." he announced and his Max Wall hair seemed to lift in a breeze that stank mildly of brimstone.

Not only had he come to collect last month's money but he wanted this month's too 'cos he'd done our windows on Tuesday. He just hadn't put a card through. Gulp. But I only had money for last month and I'm totally skint until I get paid on the 19th. From deep below Wayne's feet I swear I heard screams as if a billion souls were being tortured by trillions of imps who all (for some reason) looked like miniature versions of Russell Brand. What would he demand as payment?

He looked me in the eye and said, "No worries, Mr Blake, just give it to me next month, it'll be fine... er, by the way, is that a compost bin in your trailer...?"

Er. I told him that yes it was. It was our old compost bin in fact. We'd bought a bigger one. Emptied the contents of the old onto our winter beds and were going to take the old compost bin down to the local recycling centre.

"Oooo," said Wayne (though it sounded quite demonic to my ears and not so effeminate as it appears in text), "I could do with one of those..."

"Please do take it," I offered/begged. "It's yours if you want it; we're only going to dump it anyway..."

"Cheers, Mr Blake, I'll be back in the morning with my truck." And off he stomped into the night.

Now, Karen bless her, being an accountant, pointed out that actually that old compost bin cost about £7 - the equivalent of a month's window cleaning. If I'd been canny I could have bartered the month I owed for the bin and completely wiped out my debt.

That's a fair point. But I'm just glad - though slightly unsettled - that when push came to shove and the ol' devil could have demanded my soul fair and square he instead sized me up and went for our mouldy old compost bin instead.

But what the hell does that say about me?

That I'm untouchably saved? Or just not worth wasting good hellfire on? Or I have a superlative taste in compost bins?

Answers on a trident to the usual address, please...

Brown Bread

The life of yours truly should have come to an abrupt end last Sunday at approximately 3.37 in the afternoon.

I was, as you might have guessed, doing a form of DIY (the single biggest killer of the average male in the UK after cancer, stress and marriage. I am, of course, joking regarding the latter – a woman doesn’t have to be married to a man to be able to kill him). I was doing the gardening.

For once it wasn’t a lawn mower based accident. With a little ‘un running around I’ve become very OCD about always unplugging the mower before I empty it or even leave it untended for the smallest amount of time.

On this occasion the agent of my destruction was the hedge trimmer. A nasty biting brute of a device that lays our front hedge low with the slightest of touch. I’d unwound the cable. I’d plugged it into the extension lead. All seemed good to go.

I pulled the trigger.

And if the world had been any different – if human technological advances hadn’t brought into being such things as fuses and trip switches – my life would have been over at this point. I’d’ve been a goner. I’d’ve been, to quote my old granddad, brown bread. And you wouldn’t be having to read this ‘ere blog post right now – a fact, I’m sure, which will have many of you lamenting the safety features on the average electrical plug.

The cable you see had, unbeknownst to me (because I was tired / daydreaming and didn’t check it properly), become interwoven in the moving teeth of the trimmer.

As soon as I turned it on the trimmer severed the source to its own power. A single spark – like a dud firework – leapt forward and fizzled out before it hit the pavement. This was the first I knew of my death. I say death because I’m sure that in a parallel universe somewhere funeral arrangements are even now being arranged for a full state burial and my wife is celebrating gymnastically with the milkman.

Bizarrely, this close encounter with t’other side didn’t hit home until much later. My first reaction was to run cap in hand to my wife and apologize for coking the trimmer at a time when we can’t afford a new dibbler let alone a hefty new electrical gardening gadget. I’d also tripped the main electricity supply to the house and my youngest son was complaining vociferously that Woody and Buzz Lightyear had rudely vacated their usual slot on the TV screen.

In the panic of trying to find the distribution board and right these myriad wrongs by restoring the appropriate switch my missed appointment with St Peter completely slipped my mind. Life went on as normal. Life indeed went on.

It is only now, days later, that I realize how lucky I had been. How lucky and how foolish.

How easily and unthinkingly we go about our daily business blasé and nonchalant to the many potential death traps that litter our modern world!

My humble thanks go to all those boffins who over the years have contributed to the safety mechanisms of the common-or-garden house plug. My thanks go also to whatever deity decided to give my miserable soul a second chance. And my biggest thanks go to you, dear reader, for the bouquets of flowers you would have undoubtedly sent, the donations to my favourite charities and the selfless acts of throwing your mini-skirted selves (and that includes the guys) down onto my coffin as it is lowered into the damp earth and your wails and protests that there simply wasn’t the time to ravish me one more time.

‘Cos on the bright side, folks, there still is.

See. All’s well that ends well.

A Fence Is The Best Defence

The Bloggertropolis security compound was strengthened and fortified against all rogue incursions of the canine variety over the weekend.

A sterling local company of fencing experts who go by the name of ID Fencing descended on the ol’ homestead early Saturday morning and disgorged enough woodery and nailery from the back of their flatbed truck to construct a fully functioning watchtower complete with machine gun posts and sniper slits.

Alas, such an item of garden furniture was beyond their remit to build and so instead they worked like Trojan’s to put up a 6ft fence that greatly diminishes the possibility of anything larger than a squirrel ever gaining access to the inner sanctum of my lawn and herbaceous borders.

I’m proud to say my backyard is now tighter than a gnat’s arse.

We’ve even seen a drop-off in the amount of cat poo that normally bullet-holes the lawn which, as far as I’m concerned, is an added bonus.

Although we’ve lost a little bit of view and the illusion of space the good definitely outweighs the bad. For the first time ever we feel safe and private in our garden. And more importantly we feel that the kids are safe. Our troublesome neighbours with their rampaging rottweiler left over a month ago but we decided to push on with the fence plans regardless. You never know who might be moving in after them – a wild cat maniac, a boxing kangaroo aficionado or even a man in a cloth cap with a penchant for cock fighting. It’s better to be safe than sorry.

As it happens the fence was a wise move.

The fencing boys – being local lads – were able to inform us that the garden that abuts onto the bottom of ours belongs to a “half way house” of indeterminate variety.

Marvellous. And I thought we lived in a nice area. Hyacinth Bucket as opposed to Onslow and Rose.

Seems I was wrong.

Seems we have the Gallagher’s living at the bottom of the garden. Or to be exact, rejects from the Jeremy Kyle show. During bouts of weekend gardening Karen has been able to eavesdrop on drunken protestations of love and drunken death threats should one or other of the rehabilitatees veer from the path of physical faithfulness and exclusive intimacy. Not so much the course of true love as the coarse...

Anyway, Mr and Mrs Ex-Jailbird own a ruddy great pit-bull.

*Sigh*

I’m wondering if there is still time to electrify the fence and build that watchtower...

Playing Hide And Seek With The Neighbours

Our neighbours are many things but they are not nudists or naturists or given over to holding Druidic ceremonies in their back garden.

Which is fortunate as the fence that divides their good green earth from ours is (a) dilapidated and (b) only about 3ft tall even when it is upright.

We can see absolutely everything.

Every barbecue. Every attempt at sunbathing. Every sweaty session with the lawnmower.

And they of course can see us doing the same. With the exception of the barbecue as that’s an activity that Karen and I haven’t yet embraced (we’re quite capable of burning our sausages in the oven, thank you very much).

Now, our garden lives are quite innocent. Neither of us are growing marijuana or opium. Neither of us are burying hated relatives under the patio of even stuffing their decomposing body parts into green wheelie bins for the local council to take away.

We ain’t got nuffink to hide, guv’nor.

But a little privacy would be nice. A little privacy would be welcome.

We get along fine but I’ve noticed that whenever they are in their garden, sat around their Ikea table, we have only got to appear around ours for them to immediately disappear inside. Or if we’re in our garden playing with the kids and they suddenly appear we feel strangely inhibited. That entire side of the garden is somehow off limits for us to approach or even look at. Especially when Mr and Mrs Neighbour are stalking around in their very highly cut European shorts (they’re Polish) ‘cos let’s face it, a camel toe on a man is not a great look.

Instead we nod hello politely and one of us relinquishes their claim on the outside world and disappears back inside, no doubt grumbling a little.

It’s a ridiculous situation.

And one Karen and I intend to remedy as soon as possible once the money from my aunt’s will is divvied out.

The plan is to erect a good 6ft fence along that side of the garden. Previous quotes gave us a ball park figure of £1000 – which is why we are currently unable to ring-fence our little compound to our mutual satisfaction.

This will have the benefit of not only allowing nude sunbathing and gratuitous camel toeing without risk of causing offense or traumatizing the children but also prevent a certain rogue rottweiler* from invading both our gardens like a canine blitzkrieg.

We’ll effectively be erecting a Cuprinol enhanced Maginot line only without the watchtowers or the gun emplacements (though I’m hoping that these can be added at a later date).

Happiness, it seems, is a warm high fence and good border control.

Which sounds scarily like some kind of BNP manifesto. Gulp. But honestly, folks, it’s not meant to be. I just don’t want any more glimpses of my Polish neighbour’s man bush...

I just want to be able to enjoy my garden without being reminded of 1970’s editions of Health & Efficiency magazine.

Is that too much to ask?




*Re: the dog. We’re no further forward. The dog warden makes regular visits and the owners pretend to be absent. However, although we’ve heard the dog barking on several occasions we haven’t see it marauding or pillaging for a number of weeks now. But until the fence is commissioned neither us nor the Poles can fully relax our guards.

Tilling The Good Green Earth

This post is in praise of my gorgeous wifey, Karen, who for the past few weeks has worked her little green wellies off enforcing some kind of ideal middle class order upon the bramble infested jungle that once was our expansive garden.

The thorn bushes at the back of the garden have been brutally slashed and uprooted – uncovering various grotesqueries from within their thorny bowels: dead cats, the skulls of Cro-Magnon man, broken pot shards and ale bottles and a castle straight out of the Brothers Grimm replete with dainty maiden throwing down mile upon mile of golden flowing hair. All this detritus has gone into our green wheelie bin to be recycled whenever the local authority deigns to perform their fortnightly pick-up.

Actually, apart from the shards and the ale bottles all the rest was true rubbish, i.e. a complete fiction.

My wife has balanced this secateur driven frenzy with some choice acts of cultivation.

We now have a magnolia tree.

We now have a herb wheel (with an ‘h’ officer).

We now have a vegetable patch (red onions, potatoes, garlic and chillies being some of the produce that will shortly be available for consumption).

And I believe plum trees are also on their way.

It has been a sterling effort completed (gratefully) without the assistance of either Alan Titchmarsh or Charlie Dimmock. Indeed, in deference to the neighbours and clear notions of public decorum, all Dimmocks have been kept properly covered up.

After all, cultivation and titivation should never be mixed – unless, of course, the beds involved are not herbaceous...

Gardener’s World And Monkey Nuts

What a weekend!

Task 1: Karen and I purchased and collected a brand spanking second-hand car trailer from Meriden – our latest acquisition from eBay. You know you’re going up in the world when you buy a car trailer. You know you’re going down in your own estimation when you start getting trailer envy on the journey hone... “Hmm, they’re trailer is a lot bigger than ours...”

Task 2: We spent practically the entire day on Saturday using the newly acquired car trailer to ship the mountain of junk, trash, garden waste and assorted detritus that we’d cleared out of the shed the previous Monday down to the local tip. Three round journeys of approximately 120 minutes each. By the end of it Ranulph Fiennes had stomped off to mountains new and I was covered in bruises, lacerations and puncture holes... but enough of Karen’s “incentivizing techniques”...

Task 3: Far more enjoyable. We took the kids to Twycross Zoo on Sunday. Tom isn’t old enough to really appreciate either the entertainment value or the dodgy politics of imprisoning animals from different habitats in big cages in the UK but seemed to enjoy the experience of new sights and new smells greatly. Ben quite enjoyed it too but Karen and I both suspect that his personal Holy Grail was the acquisition of an ice cream at the end of the visit. This was confirmed by his opinion that looking at the animals was “all very enjoyable but you wouldn’t want to spend all day doing it”.

Ah kids. If it’s not got a joy-pad attached to it, it just ain’t cool.

Twycross for me, at least, was something of a trip down memory lane. (Cue brass band music akin to that used in the Hovis adverts of old...) When I was a young nipper my Nan and Grandpa took me to Twycross Zoo with my sister and I had a great time looking at all the monkeys but my overriding memory is that of buying a rubber spider on a piece of elastic. It was quite a big spider as I recall and covered in small rubber spines that made it seem both furry and springy at the same time. The elastic meant I could also bounce it quite menacingly into the face of any adult female that came within range (I guarantee I didn’t get my face wiped with a spat-in hankie that particular day, no sirree). Anyway, boys being boys – and me being a boy – the spider was taken on many joyous trips to school where me and my best friend at the time, John McCrae, would throw it to each other as high as we could across the school yard. Such fun and larks lasted until the flying spider found itself at last flung over the school wall and into the garden of one of the houses that abutted the school grounds...

Never to be seen again.

I mourned that spider for a good week. They don’t make them like that anymore I can tell you (I know; I’ve looked).

But now I am a man. And I have a car trailer instead.

Growing up sucks.

Shed Love

Karen and I spent the Bank Holiday clearing out the garden shed; an onerous task that we’ve been putting off for ooh about a year. Ever since we bought the old homestead in fact.

To fill you in: Karen and I rented our house for about 2 years before buying it (not a long story, just a boring one so I’m going to gloss over it) – the upshot being that there were parts of the shed from which we were denied access by our then landlord (yes our shed actually has 2 rooms inside it). This wasn’t a problem. We just figured it was full of personal stuff – homemade porno, the odd manacle, perhaps the entrance to a hidden dungeon – and therefore left well alone. We bought our own gardening equipment and stored it in the portion of the shed that we could use and that was that.

Quite literally in fact. I have to say our gardening equipment hasn’t seen much action since we bought it (about the same amount as Prince William in fact) but that’s the subject for another post.

Anyway, a year after buying the place lock, stock and dungeon we finally got round to clearing out both sides of the shed to fully appraise ourselves of what we now own.

No homemade porno. No dungeon entrance.

Just loads of gardening equipment, including a complete lawnmower. Basically duplicating what we’d already bought ourselves which is rather galling but hey, at least our stuff is brand new as opposed to pre-1985. We also found we were now the proud owners of several large tubs of paint, several rolls of wallpaper, 15 panes of glass (which we shall sell on eBay) and a rather large bumble bee.

The bee seems to have set up home in a plastic bag which contained of all things a woollen Christmas stocking – the kind used for hiding presents in as opposed to naughty lady’s leggies – and was determined not to be moved. Even after the bag and stocking were removed the bee kept returning resolutely to the shed hoping to find it. It was quite affecting in a mildly impinging way.

Bees aside the task is at last complete. We’ve kept the good stuff and freed up so much space in the shed that getting access to the tools is no longer a problem. This bodes well for garden based DIY type activity this summer.

And we’ve amassed a huge pile of junk and detritus in the garden that Sir Ranulph Fiennes would be honoured to climb. This bodes well for several laborious journeys to the local tip.

None of which is terribly exciting but I was moved to record it here by Inchy’s recent post about garden sheds... and I felt the need to join in. Sheds are traditionally a bit of a man thing but I know that several humans of a feminine persuasion are also into sheds, my wife included.

There is something ineffably great about owning a shed. A garden with a shed is like a Bugatti whereas a garden without one is like a... a... well, the crap car of your choice basically.

I’ve got a shed with 2 separate rooms in it. 0 to 90 in 8 seconds, dudes. Vroom vroom. They're getting a hospital bed ready for Richard Hammond even as I type...

Ragun Bow

Karen and I availed ourselves of a traditional English street service over the weekend – the good old Rag N Bone man.

After the removal of our palatial greenhouse a couple of weeks ago the garden was left with a few metallic stragglers whose rusty loitering was beginning to make the garden look extremely untidy. Swift action was called for... and it came fleet of foot on a white charger just like in the days of old.

Well. Maybe not exactly like the days of old. Today’s modern Rag N Bone man no longer employs a magnificent dray horse to pull his cart or even wields a mighty wheelbarrow with which to collect household junk. Instead our particular Rag N Bone man turned up with a huge white flatbed truck with which he merrily transported various shelving units, two old broken hoovers and a vast array of assorted mystery metal work back to his yard or wherever it is that he deposits all his hard gotten gains.

He did however have a magnificent horn (please, ladies and gentleman, please!) which sounded his approach from at least two whole blocks away. Once he entered the mouth of our street we could clearly hear the carefully enunciated call of “Ragun Bow! Ra-Bow!” and knew that our saviour was near.

The garden now looks a hell of a lot tidier but there’s still loads of work left to do... weeding, pruning, removing an old water butt....

And the water butt is going to be a job and a half. Turning on the tap to empty the damn thing I was dismayed to see nothing but a pathetic trickle dribbling out onto the path rather than the expected rush of water akin to a damn bursting.

At the current rate it’s going to take 2 weeks before the ruddy thing is empty.

Peering inside the butt I was horrified to see a thick brown soup stodgily glooping up its innards with a surface skin thick enough to land a Cherokee helicopter upon. Administrations with a space merely brought various unwholesome looking bubbles up to the surface... and a slight sense of resistance near the bottom indicated that there was something softly organic submerged somewhere in the depths of the water...

I wasn’t brave enough to find out exactly what.

Rags and bones indeed...

The Gone-House

Hello and welcome to Gardener’s Corner...

Yes, the wife and I spent the entire weekend playing Charlie Dimmock and Alan Titchmarsh in our many acred garden. I’ll leave it up to you to guess who played which role.

What brought on this sudden splurge on greenfingeredness?

Answer: getting rid of the humungous greenhouse that came with the house when we bought it back in March of this year.

I’d actually put the ruddy thing on eBay for the princely sum of £1 with the proviso that the buyer must collect and dismantle it and I quite expected to get no more than a tenner for it.

Imagine my surprise then when it sold for a whopping £142!

A nice gardening mad couple from Northants bought it and the poor things spent 7 hours on Sunday taking it down. I actually felt quite sorry for them as none of us had any idea it would require quite so much work. It seems the original construction crew had sealed every individual pane of glass so the poor gardeners from eBay had to painstakingly cut every single pane of glass out before they could unscrew the frame. Talk about determination. Amazingly they only broke 4 panes which is pretty good going.

Anyway, we felt so sorry for them we ended up refunding them £40. I know. We’re soft touches but as I said I would have been happy with a tenner provided someone else did all the hard work of taking the greenhouse away.

Not that I’m a complete lazy dog you, understand – I spent most of Saturday and Sunday with my loppers and my trimmers hacking back the Forest of Arden that had sprung up around the greenhouse and its environs and uncovering various lost cities and civilizations that had risen and fallen in the verdant depths of the undergrowth.

I worked up quite a sweat I can tell you.

Now, as you can see from the before-and after photo, our garden feels like it’s gained a couple of extra acres with all the space that has been opened up. The plan is to move the paving slabs nearer the house to make a patio and then to turf over the area where the greenhouse once stood thus extending the lawn even more.

After that who knows? Herbaceous borders. Vegetable gardens. Roman water features.

Whatever. Charlie and I will be sure to fork and trowel our eager little bulbs into the hot earthy beds with fertile abandon...

Oo-er? Or Oh-ar?