Fule Grit speaks too soon

Because I have entered the dark pit of hell, otherwise known as the garage and hauled out from there an old bed. Then I have scattered bits of the old bed on the patch of land visible from the kitchen window. Until now I had been pleased to call this delightful shady border the wildlife garden in an attempt to romanticise over the fact that it is really a patch of soil round the side of the house undisturbed by any creature except rats for the past ten years. Now it resembles an overflow landfill site.

But anyway, the bed is there. In bits. Some parts are strapped together with duct tape and the whole resembles what we are calling a den.

Like I thought I might get away with not turning the entire house and grounds into a den building activity area following yesterday's session down at Interaction.

After I'd hauled the old bed about from garage to garden, grunting and sweating and covered in bee droppings and twigs, of course a fight breaks out immediately over whose den it is. Mine! I shout, hoping that by offering Shark and Tiger a common enemy I can unite the warring factions and they can both play in it and defend it from the mummies, otherwise known as the Watties (why I don't know, don't ask).

That tactic didn't work. Shark is now standing guard over the old bed in the rat garden with a snarl on her face looking like a particularly bad-tempered, snake-strangled Medusa.

I am pissed off that my total devotion to the den building enterprise, even at the cost of myself, our once delightful grounds, and the relinquishing of an old bed that I'm sure would have been alright somewhere should we have needed it - all of that was futile. Not for a moment did my labours create the joyful garden day I had fondly dreamed about, and which I might have called, with misty tears pricking my eyes as I speak to Dig on Skype, that yes, the children are happily playing in the summer sun.

So I took a box containing a hammer, screwdriver and lots of screws and I set about spitefully making a den only for Tiger out of some old wood and a lot more grunting and thrashing about. Here it is. A work in progress.


Soon it looks like this.


So now I have two areas of my once beautiful garden covered in old beds, bits of wood, the contents of my fabric box, and piles of junk. Along with two daughters who aren't speaking to each other, and a mother who looks like she has dragged a bed from a disused garage infested by bees and mice and creatures of the swamp and has been thrashing around in garden undergrowth for three hours before hitting her finger with a hammer trying to bang in a screw, then losing her temper and having a big squeal.

And somehow, I do not think I am going to get away with having only two den areas here when Squirrel returns.

There is only one word to cover this mayhem and mishap. Let's call it education.