Fell off the Back of a Lorry

It was the village plant sale yesterday – a one-and-a-half hour gardeners’ feeding frenzy, with tray bakes afterwards for tea. I didn’t have anything to bring as my only spares, my squash seedlings, had succumbed to some sort of a wasting sickness. But as we walked up to the waterfall to check on Noticeboard Tree what time it started*, we noticed something strange in the river. Closer inspection showed that what looked like an enormous stack of planting seed trays was in fact exactly that. The other half nobly scrambled on boulders and retrieved about fifty of them, still in their parcel packaging, but unfortunately with no sort of a packing slip or delivery address that would allow us to track the owners down.

The river below the waterfall was also littered with seed trays so we ended up going back, getting our wellies and wading out to retrieve as many as we could. In the end we fetched more than a hundred of them out of the river. I’ve no idea how they might have got there – it’s been a long time since anyone delivered things of the sort of lorries something might genuinely have fallen out of the back of. My guess is that some courier got lost, or annoyed with his SatNav insisting that You. Have. Arrived. when he was miles away from anything that looked like a habitation (our postcodes cover quite a large area round here) just gave up and dumped them in the river. It’s the second time we’ve found something that looks like it was packaged for delivery in the same spot. I don’t understand it, but at least this time the fly tipping means I have ended up with a lifetime’s supply of plant trays. Indeed several lifetimes’.

So all that was left for me was to find some way of getting the surplus down to the village for everyone else.

A Three Bungee Problem

And then join in the mad rummage for goodies of my own.

Oh, and a top tip for anyone attending a village plant sale? Don’t bring a £20 note. You have to buy loads more plants than you can fit in a pannier to make it up to a non-embarrassing amount…

*This is important. Anyone rolling up half an hour after the start time would be left raking over the second rate stuff. In fact, anyone turning up at the start time would have been cutting it fine: the gardeners started baggsying the best plants twenty minutes early

Broken Britain

I got back yesterday to the news that somebody has flytipped an old cooker in the clear-felled bit of forest down the road. I was going to report it, but I checked the council website and found they’ll only act if it’s on council land and it’s up to the landowner if it’s anywhere else. There is a number you can ring, but that’s only for dobbing someone in if you’ve seen them flytipping, not for getting it cleared up. It’s a bit tough on the landowner having to get rid of someone else’s rubbish, but if it isn’t cleared soon it will only attract more dumped waste. Grrr. We might as well still be living in Lambeth where there were dumped kitchen appliances under every railway bridge, possibly gone feral and almost certainly breeding.

the depths they'll sink to

But that isn’t all. We saw the council van down working on the ford this afternoon and naturally we had to go and have a look and a chat. They were taking advantage of the dry weather to fix the epic potholes the frost had left and clear out the blocked pipes under the road bed (we may have trouble reaching any new high scores if this goes on). We pointed out the broken plank on the foot bridge and the chatty chap told us how his colleague had driven the snow plough down the one-in-five hill last winter (‘you just point it down the hill, and let it go where the road takes you’). And then we admired their pothole filling progress (quick drying cement is the key, apparently). ‘We only fixed it last year and now look at it,’ he said. ‘And we had to replace the water depth level signs because someone had pinched them. They’re made of aluminium, you see, so they’re worth money. They’re riveted on now, but if someone wants them, they’ll take them.’

Seriously, is nothing sacred? Still, maybe if the metal prices go up again, the cooker problem will solve itself…