Petard

I have been hoist by my own petard.

I have not got the first idea what a petard is, it sounds a bit like a French waistcoat. Monsieur, vous avez un joli petard, ou la la, n’est ce pas?

You don’t need to bother emailing me with the correct answer, if I cared that much I could always look it up.

Anyway I have been hoisted by it, which sounds like a better form of the verb than just ‘hoist’ which managed to sound a bit unfinished, what does Shakespeare know anyway?

Actually as opening sentences go, that one was not my finest.

In any case, I wasn’t really being hoisted etc anyway, because really that means that I was doing something horrible, which I wasn’t.

The thing was that this morning I complained to Mark that he has been leaving me out when he does interesting things. I have been collapsed by the bat flu, and generally shambling about in a state of exhausted indifference, and so he has largely carried on building things and repairing things and inventing things, all by himself.

Things came to a head yesterday when I offered to help, and he looked at me and said kindly that I should really just sit down with a book. He did not need help with his manly mending things activities, but if I really wanted to do something, perhaps I could try something girly and un-taxing, like maybe get dinner ready later.

I was not impressed with this, and we finished up having cheese and crackers for dinner. You can fill in the rest of the conversation for yourselves.

Today he was prepared to agree that of course I could join in with man things if I wanted to, and I have always been able to manage a drilling machine and a saw, and that if I felt put down and undervalued, then basically, I could fill my wellies.

So I did.

We are still busy rebuilding the back yard. I nailed the rest of the tar-paper tiles on to the back of the shed, and then between us we painted the roof.

You can see the roof in the pictures.

You will not be astonished to hear that after weeks and weeks of practically the only drought in the Lake District ever, the day we decided to paint the shed roof, it rained. We carried on painting anyway, and you can’t really tell, so it was all right.

I wanted it to be that colour because I wanted it to look as though it had a lovely clay-tiled roof like the beautiful ones in Yorkshire, and Mark wanted it to be that colour because he had a tin of red oxide paint kicking about under his workbench, so we were both happy.

In fact we were all happy, because our next door neighbour was busily painting the inside of his shed with the same colour, because he had some red oxide paint kicking about as well, and when he ran out we shared the last of ours, so we were social and chatty as well as happy.

He has emptied his shed to tidy it up. Mark is doing the same. You can’t see either back yard in the photograph but they both look like an explosion at the end of a car-boot sale, when everything useful has already gone. There are several bits of cars in ours as well.

You get a nice view of the world from the top of the shed, and we chatted to passing neighbours, because being six feet above their heads counts as social distancing, and painted.

The thing was that when I finally came down I was so tired I could barely stand up.

I collapsed in a chair in the conservatory and the dogs jumped on me, in case I might be lonely.

I could hardly move. I felt as though I had combined an afternoon of competing in the World Wrestling Championships with running the London Marathon.

I know that there is no London Marathon this year, and instead you have got to run twenty six times round your garden, or something, but even that would have been more than I could have managed in my current state.

Mark helped to get dinner ready, but it was more difficult than I can tell you.

Tomorrow I am just going to sit quietly and read my book.

I have looked it up anyway. It is a small bomb.

If you learn something new every day, by the time you die you will have a head as stuffed with rubbish as an Oak Street shed.