Friday. Mild and dry.
He didn’t get much done today, because the car wouldn’t start. Dead battery. Called his friend, who came hurtling down the Bodmin bypass while Ted was taking the battery out of the car. It’s in the boot isn’t it. The boot either opens by a switch in the car, or an electronic signal from the key. He took the battery out, setting the alarm off. Sorted that, closed the boot, couldn’t open it again. He realised he needed to connect the battery to open the boot, so that he could ... connect the battery. There is a physical key, which he had never used since he got the car, but he couldn’t get it to work. He rang the dealers, they laughed. Just as Steve arrived to cart him off to the battery factory, he finally worked out how to open the boot with a key. Phew. This is all being watched by Graham (remember, the farmer) who is wetting himself laughing, telling Ted “That’s what you get for buying a bloomin’ foreign car.” They hurtled off up the Bodmin bypass, with the dead battery in the back of Steve’s car, swapped dead battery for new battery, hurtled back down the Bodmin bypass, fitted new battery, it was flat as a pancake. Hurtled up the Bodmin bypass, swapped flat battery for one that had been charged, hurtled back down the Bodmin bypass and fitted the working battery. That was half the day gone.
Then he decided to undo the door bars for the greenhouse, and put them back up properly. He undid the bolts, slid the door guide into its correct position, watched as one of the two tiny clips fell off and hid in the long grass. After 5 minute’s searching, out came the extension lead, thrust once more roughly through the cat-flap. Then out came the strimmer, which hasn’t been used for months, and as he switches it on, three pounds of dry compacted grass covers him from head to toe. I told him he should have cleaned it before he put it away last Autumn. The strimmer wire, of course, broke during this process, and it took him three attempts to rethread it. By now Ted was not in the best of moods, and he attacked the area where the clip was lurking with perhaps a little too much determination. Grass, small stones, weeds and a little aluminium clip were sent flying in a 20 foot radius around the garden. Luckily the clip made quite a ping when it ricocheted off the metal LPG tank, and he just caught it out of the corner of his eye as it launched over the garden wall and onto the road outside. The second piece of good luck was that it didn’t bounce when it hit the road as the farmer had just moved his cattle. It was perhaps slightly warmer and more fragrant when Ted removed it from a fresh, wet cowpat. He brought it into the house to clean it and himself down.
Turning the tap on at the kitchen sink, his hand was perhaps slippier than normal, but that was not the cause of the tap handle’s turning without producing the expected warm water. The tap had chosen this moment in time to collapse. Cursing, swearing and washing his hands in cold water he stormed off back into the garden to fix the now clean clip, and finish off the two-minute job he had started 40 minutes earlier. The strimmer, by the way, is still in the middle of the lawn, where he threw it earlier, and this time the cat-flap nearly came to pieces when the plug on the extension lead got caught on it while he was tidying it up. It was at this point that I suggested we go out for tea and cakes, as I felt the sledgehammer was a bit too close to the greenhouse for safety.
