Vanishing brush

I’ve hurt my wrist – throwing a stick for David. Some may say that’s just desserts for leading him a dog’s life, but it wasn’t like that…!

We hired a chipper/shredder for three days, which was too big to fit in the car, so we also hired a trailer.

Given that it was nearly £100 a day for the combo, we were trying to get all the chipping done in time to return the machine on Friday evening.

The money that would save would pay for my (much dreamed of) night in a hotel. And, more importantly, that soak in a bath! So quite an incentive to keep going when we’d had enough.

I was already quite achy from chopping down the trees/pulling up the ivy and hauling all the remains to the piles to be shredded or the compost heap, and after about four hours was getting tired.

I threw the stick, but caught my thumb in the pocket of my boiler suit, so the stick sailed off at right angles, and I jarred my wrist!

David needed the stick to prod into the chipper to clear any leafy residue that would block the machine. [Given that everything was sodden – intermittent, but heavy, rain being order of the day – and that we’d cleared blockages a couple of times, we were keen not to have to poke around the blades another time. Yes, motor turned off, spark plug removed!]

When I was doing the chipping, I just prodded with a long branch to clear leaves and then let that go through the machine, but each to his own.

Needless to say, the Law of Sod was fully operational; we finished the chipping about 15 minutes too late to be sure of getting the chipper back to the hire shop before it closed.

As we’d got so close, David kindly sent me off to have a shower, while he tidied up the fallen leaves and cleaned the chipper as much as possible (without getting out the power washer). We also loaded the chipper back onto the trailer to be able to get going early the next day.

In a way, it worked out in our favour: the nice man in the hire shop only charged us two days hire (it was one of those “could go either way” choices – we’d been told the machine would be available after 10.30 on the Thursday, so we did have it a little less than 2 days, but we were returning it on day 3...); we visited the depot vente and bought three flat irons for less than a tenner; we got to have lunch out in Troyes.

So, no complaints then!

And it looked lovely when we got back to a clean tidy drive/garden.