Leave no stone unturned ... certainly not toe-punted

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If you can remember from my blog last week I found myself at a lose end after the rain stopped me from mixing up barrows of mortar to lay slabs on a concrete hard standing intended for the final arrival of our greenhouse.

Well, this weekend I managed to get around to it. Mrs V off to work and our eldest (17) on standby to run barrow loads of sharp sand for me … I started to clear the concrete base of the rubbish that gets dumped on it … you know the stuff … I’ll sort that later, rolled up bits of chicken wire, bags of “I really need to get that to the dump”, lengths of useless hose and other such evidence of laxness.

I finally come to shifting a pile of bits of rubble (the ‘I’m saving that’ stuff), angrily I use my efficient steel toe caps to kick it off the hard standing. It came to the final remaining lumps of flint – I draw back my leg hammer and just notice a slightly panicked toad anticipating his last moment on the end of a boot. Luckily I barely skimmed him.

After placing him in the bucket , I wasn’t too sure what to do to him … if I released him I was quite worried that something would get to him before he got to proper toady cover … and I was hell bent on keeping my new slug-munching and very warty friend safe.

This was a matter for consideration. I placed the toad in the shade partly covered in the bucket – it was now time for a fag, a drink and a ponder.

Cup of tea in hand I stood there weighing things up and decided to build him a little house in the weedy bit behind the compost bins. He stayed for the rest of the day – but vanished by the next morning.

Talking of vanishing – that’s exactly what our son had done when it came to help move the sand!

• 15 Jun, 2010
• 9 likes

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