Shakespeare got it wrong.
He said, probably after a few sharp words from Anne Hathaway, that Hell Hath No Fury Like A Woman Scorned.
He didn’t know what he was talking about.
I can jolly well tell you that a scorned woman is just mildly miffed in comparison to me today.
Hell, I can assure you, hath no fury like a woman whose husband has dumped a load of filthy planks in her garden and crushed all of her hyacinths.
Hell would be getting out of the way and sloping off to the pub by now.
I was not pleased. I was very, very not pleased.
I discovered the hyacinth disaster when I set to cleaning the yard. It was Clean Sheets Day, and much of the morning was taken up with washing-hanging, in the house, obviously, since the yard was full of planks, and fell walking with the dogs. The planks could not be ignored, though, not least because of the horrible mould-and-rat-wee smell every time I opened the back door, and so once I had been to Booths for some ethical bananas and yoghurt, I pulled my boots and coat back on and left the dogs snoring on their cushion in front of the fire.
Fortunately we have got a working saw.
Most of it had already been sawn up into randomly-sized chunks, all of which shared the feature that they were completely the wrong size for the fire, being either too big or too small. I sorted it as well as I could, and hacked the driest pieces into almost-fire-sized chunks to stack on to the firewood shelf. This is covered over, and I thought that it had a reasonable chance of drying out and becoming usable after a week or two.
It is a pretty big storage space, but I filled it.
I was a bit reluctant about this, because all of the wood is so dirty that really I don’t want it coming into the house at all, but dirty firewood is better than no firewood at all, and I supposed, grimly, that in the interests of not wasting any potential asset, I should use what I could and just resign myself to sweeping the floor more often.
Once the wood shelf was filled, though, my conscience was clear. I covered the boot and back seats of my taxi with a couple of large dust sheets and began hurling the rest of the firewood into it, with the final destination of Ambleside Tip.
There was a lot left.
It took some time.
It took a very long time, partly because the skip for wood at Ambleside tip turned out to be very full already, and I had to trot around it trying hopefully to find spaces into which planks could be stuffed without causing the whole teetering lot to plummet.
In the end it was finished.
I was filthy. I mean, really filthy. My coat was black, my trousers were black, my boots were heavy with a thick, grey plaster-dust mud, and the poor taxi was horrible, even despite the dust sheets.
I had to take my coat off to clean out the taxi because it turned out that my grimy presence was just making things worse.
I swept the yard and filled two buckets.
It had gone dark by the time I had finished. I stood in the alley for a little while, trying to brush my trousers clean, without a great deal of success, and then took the dogs for a calming-down amble around the Library Gardens before I had to get ready for work.
I can also tell you that it is not easy for a very dirty person to put newly-cleaned sheets on a bed. A great deal of care has got to be taken.
I had had a jolly good wash but my trousers hadn’t. Indeed, I had several jolly good washes, because every now and again I thought about my hands and was so overcome by revulsion at the thought of the things they had been touching that I had to rush off to the sink again.
I remembered after a while that this was the sort of anxiety that could send you completely barmy if you don’t keep it in check, and stopped.
It is all done now, and I am feeling restored to calm. The yard is tidy once again, and it is as if all of the horrible wet wood had never been there at all, although I can’t do anything about the poor crushed hyacinths, or the crocuses. I might have a walk over to the garden centre across the road and see if they have any in there.
My world is recovering.
