Councils, Cabbages, Staging and a Bolt That Simply Didn't Want to Be Found
Where do I even start with this week.
Actually, I know exactly where to start. I'm going to start by telling you that this week has gone so fast I genuinely had to count the days on my fingers to make sure I hadn't skipped one. Between the council, the allotments, the wood merchants, the merry tiller having a personal crisis, and me building staging in the garden like some sort of one-man joinery operation, the week has absolutely flown by. Sit down. Get yourself a brew. This one's going to take a minute.
Monday — The Great House Clearance Nobody Asked For
Monday. No allotment. And the reason there was no allotment is because the weather here was absolutely not playing ball — grey, damp, uninviting — the sort of day that even the garden doesn't want to be outside. So we stayed in, and that meant one thing.
The clear out.
Now. I knew we had a fair bit of stuff to shift. The council were coming to do work on the kitchen and the stairs, and we needed everything out of the way. Fair enough. Perfectly reasonable. We rolled our sleeves up and got stuck in.
I was not prepared for what we apparently own.
It started with the kitchen and the hall. Fine. A bit of a job, but manageable. Then the stairs. Then under the stairs. Then whatever had accumulated in the spaces that you don't really look at until you have to look at them, at which point you discover things that make you question whether you've been sleepwalking and shopping. I'm not entirely convinced some of it was ours. I'm serious. There were items in that hall that I do not recognise and cannot account for. I'm a very happy-go-lucky sort of person, I really am, but I'll tell you what — standing in your own hallway looking at a pile of things that could comfortably fill a small skip and wondering where it all came from does give you a moment's pause.
Down came the shelves. Down came the oven extractor. Off the walls came things that had been on the walls so long they'd almost become structural. The dining room was the staging area for all of it — and I use the word "staging" loosely, because by the time we'd finished there was nothing staged about it whatsoever. It looked like a very disorganised furniture showroom after a minor earthquake. Sara navigated it like a professional. I just kept carrying things through and trying not to drop anything on the dog
The council were coming tomorrow. It all had to be done tonight. And it was. Just about.
Tuesday — The Day the Council Came, Looked, and Largely Left
Right. Tuesday. Up early, everything cleared, house looking like we're in the middle of moving in or moving out or possibly both at the same time. Half past eight — and I'll give them credit, they were on time — the first van arrives. A council workman. I open the door with the quiet optimism of a man who has cleared his entire house in preparation for a productive day of works.
He takes one look at our stairs.
One look.
And I can see it happening in real time — that particular expression spreading across a face that says this isn't going to go how you hoped.
"We can't do that," he says.
Can't do what, I ask.
"The stairs. We'll have to get contractors in for that. Health and safety."
I stood there for a moment in silence. Which, if you know me, is not my natural state.
Health and safety. On a flight of stairs. In a house. A normal, standard, domestic flight of stairs that people — including, I would point out, myself, Sara, and three of our children — walk up and down multiple times every single day without incident or paperwork. But a council workman cannot work on them. Health and safety. I'm not sure what they were expecting — a via ferrata? A cliff face with crampons required? It's a staircase, not the north face of the Eiger.
Off he goes into the kitchen. And here we go again.
"We won't get all that done today," he says, surveying the room. "We'll strip it, but that's it."
It was at this point i remembered the text, And it says, in plain English, on the fifth of May: take tiles from ceiling in kitchen and stairs, board and skim.
That was the plan. That was what was written down. That was what was supposed to happen.
Health and safety, apparently, had other ideas.
By eleven o'clock they were done. Gone. Finished. One tenth — one tenth — of what they'd said they'd do, done. And off they went, presumably to fill out some very important paperwork about the existential dangers of a carpeted staircase.
I won't dwell on it. I'm a glass-half-full sort of person. But I'll tell you what — all that stuff that had taken most of Monday to clear out? It all had to go back before I left for work that afternoon. Every last bit of it. Back it went.
Health and safety. I still can't quite get over it, to be honest.
Tuesday Afternoon — Six Cabbages, the Onions, and the Grass
Now. Here is where the week starts to actually improve, because once I'd navigated the chaos of the morning and got myself sorted, me and Iris were off to the allotment. And the allotment, as it so often does, fixed my mood within about four minutes of arriving.
We were there with a specific job in mind. We'd already got a dozen cabbages under the net, and we needed to get another six in alongside them. In they went, tucked up nice and cosy, eighteen cabbages sitting there very pleased with themselves under the net. I'm always happy to get the brassica netting sorted properly — there's nothing worse than getting to midsummer and finding your cabbages have had a visit from the butterflies. We are not running a caterpillar hotel. The net stays on.
that was done, Iris and I had a good hoe through. And here's something I always say and I'll keep saying it because it's the most honest advice I can give to anyone growing on an allotment: hoe little and often and you'll never have to kneel in the mud pulling weeds out with your fingers wondering where the season went. We do a full hoe of one plot at least once a week. You catch the weeds when they're tiny. They haven't got a grip. They haven't got roots worth talking about. One pass of the hoe and they're done. Leave them for three weeks and you've got a different problem entirely — you've got commitment, root systems, and a weed that's got plans.
So we hoed the onions. A nice tidy job. Then we cut the grass and did something I really like doing — spreading the mowings along the potato trenches. It's such a simple trick and it works beautifully. The grass cuttings sit along the trench, trap the moisture underneath, and mean we're not out there with watering cans every other day chasing dry soil. The potatoes sit under there quite contentedly and the ground stays damp for far longer than it would otherwise. Works a treat, every time.
Iris is good at this, you know. She just gets on with it. No fuss. She turns up, she works, she knows what she's doing. She could run those plots better than a lot of people twice her age. I'm a very proud dad and I make no apology for saying so.
Wednesday — Wood Arrives and a Staging Revelation
Now. The staging situation.
I have been looking at staging. Proper greenhouse staging, the kind you see in the catalogues and on the auction websites. And I sat down and I looked at the prices and I — look. I know what things cost to make. And when I tell you that greenhouse staging — four foot lengths of the stuff — was averaging out at seventy-five pounds a section, I want you to understand the look that was on my face.
Seventy-five pounds. For four feet. And it didn't even look that sturdy if I'm being completely honest with you. I could see it. That slight wobble-in-waiting. That thing where you put a seed tray on it and it's fine, but you put two seed trays on it and you're tempting fate. Seventy-five pounds for that.
I sat down with a pencil, a piece of paper, and a calculator. I'm old fashioned like that — I like a pencil and paper, I find it helps me think properly. And I worked it out. For just over a hundred pounds in timber, I could build my own staging. Not wobble-in-waiting staging. Proper, solid, built-to-last staging. The kind that will still be there when the grandchildren are borrowing the allotment. The saving? A very satisfying two hundred pounds over what the auction website wanted for the equivalent.
The decision was made in about thirty seconds flat. I got straight on to the wood merchants.
Wednesday morning — and I was genuinely impressed by this — bright and early, the wood arrived. Just over sixteen hours from order to delivery. Sixteen hours. I don't know what people are doing complaining about modern services when you can order timber in the evening and have it on your lawn by morning. That is efficient. I was very pleased.
I laid it all out on the lawn, which I'll admit did temporarily make the garden look like a timber yard, but Sara is used to projects appearing at various stages of construction around the house. She barely looked up.
Then me and Iris were off again to the allotment for a shorter visit this time — just watering and fitting a new belt on the rotavator. We were there less than an hour. Back home, and then it was out with the tape measure, the pencil, the saw, and a good long afternoon marking out and cutting the timber to length. I love that stage of a build. Everything is still potential at that point. The wood is cut, the pieces are there, and in your head it already looks magnificent.
Thursday — The Merry Tiller, the Tilth, and the Mystery of the Missing Bolt
Thursday. Sam came this time, which was good — we had a proper task ahead and I was glad to have him there.
The plan was to get the Wolseley Merry Tiller out and start working the second plot. We rough dug it last week and after the rain earlier in the week I was quietly confident the soil was going to break down beautifully. The tiller has been such a wonderful restoration project and I have to say, for an old lady she goes absolutely brilliantly. Deep, consistent, powerful — she digs down like she means it. You'd never know the age of her. I do love that machine.
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We looked. We searched. We probably looked a bit like two men doing a very slow and confusing dance across the plot, heads down, poking at the soil. Nothing.
I went to the tool boxes. Now. I have fixed lawnmowers. I have fixed strimmers, generators, hedge trimmers, rotavators, tillers and things with engines that didn't have a name on them by the time they got to me. I have been fixing small engines for years. I have tool boxes. Proper ones. And I am standing there going through them at the allotment and I cannot find a single nut and bolt that fits.
Not one.
I'm not embarrassed to tell you — I was absolutely astonished. I have every size I could possibly need at home, obviously. But up the allotment? Nothing. Not a bolt. Not a spare nut. Nothing. Decades of engineering experience, years of fixing everything that moves, and I am standing in a field holding a tiller that won't till because I haven't got a bolt.
That was Thursday's rotavating done. We packed up, came home, and I added "put a bolt tin up the allotment" to the mental list of things that are obvious in retrospect.
But here's the thing — and I mean this — that's gardening. That's what it is. Things don't always go to plan. A pin goes missing, a van turns up and doesn't do the job, a council man stands at the bottom of your stairs like they've never seen one before. You don't let it get you down. You just add it to the list, you come back, you crack on. The plot doesn't mind waiting. The soil isn't going anywhere. You come back on a better day with the right bolt and you carry on. That's the whole thing, really.
Friday — Staging Takes Shape and It Looks Brilliant
Friday came with decent weather — genuinely nice, the sort of morning where you want to be outside — and me and Sara got straight out into the garden and cracked on with the staging.
And I'll tell you what — it went together beautifully.
There is something enormously satisfying about building something from scratch and watching it become the thing it was always going to be. The cutting was done. The pieces were there. Me and Sara worked through it together and by the time we stopped — painted black, both sets fully assembled, looking exactly as they should — I was absolutely chuffed. Proper solid. No wobble-in-waiting whatsoever. A hundred pounds worth of timber doing three hundred pounds worth of work, and built to a standard the auction website simply isn't offering.
Just the tops to do now and then they're finished. Then into the greenhouse they go and the season can properly begin in there.
Sara, I should say, is an excellent person to have alongside you on a project. She doesn't stand there offering opinions on the angle of a bracket. She just picks up the other end and holds it while you drill. Forty years together and she still knows exactly what's needed. I'm a lucky man.
So there we are. A week that had no right to go as fast as it did. Council chaos on Monday and Tuesday — the workman who couldn't face a staircase, the inspector's text message that was ignored by health and safety, all of our worldly possessions relocated twice in forty eight hours. The allotment doing what the allotment does — grounding you (quite literally), getting you back to what matters, cabbages netted and onions hoed. A missing bolt on a Thursday that could have been catastrophic to the mood but wasn't, because that's just gardening. And a Friday where the staging came together and the week ended on exactly the right note.
Next week — we get back to the tiller, we finish the staging tops, we plant on, and somewhere in all of that there will be a bolt tin permanently installed at the allotment. Mark my words.
Until next time. Keep digging, keep building, and never — never — let health and safety stand between you and a perfectly ordinary staircase.
Keep digging.
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