20.06.2006 08:29 - The Gateway To Hell
Not content with the nightmare last weekend resulting from her purchase of furniture, Her Maj has bought a house in her home village, although fortunately not via Ebay. We have spent a long weekend there, doing what is laughingly called "gardening".
When I last saw this house, it was full of the furniture of the previous owner, a pensioner who had been hospitalised. In the attic, there was a strange cupboard, that looked like the sort of furniture that could hide a gateway to another dimension, the contents of which would very likely inspire a lawsuit from a major studio, not to mention a large publisher.
It did not, however, contain the gateway to Hell that I am talking about.
Oh no.
The particular gateway to hell I'm talking about happens to be behind the house, and leads to the garden - via a path that skirts the septic tank, which is badly in need of drainage, and then into the miniature jungle that has grown up.
At the base of this miniature jungle, there runs a brook. Opposite is a SPAR. (Oh yes, we have them too) The Spar is also what would be called an Off-Licence in England. It is the favoured emporium of the local pissheads, who buy Schnapps in small, 1/2 litre flat hip-flask bottles which are known as flachenmännchen (flat midgets) in germany. The pissheads, once they have made their purchases, sit by the brook to drink them, and then throw the empties into what is now our garden. Since this part of our garden has, until about six hours ago, consisted of dead trees covered in brambles and ivy to waist height, practically all of the bottles, and some wine and beer bottles obviously dumped in a similar manner by the local youth, have all survived intact, although bereft of content.
Do you know how many there were?
Enough to fill eight buckets. That's four trips to the bottle-bank. The white glass container is now full.
But this was not the sole content of the jungle. Oh no. Our next-door neighbour, the former mayor, had generously donated a large amount of dead tree that he had cut down from his garden. Furthermore, the former resident of said property had left a few items himself. Like three reels of bailing twine, numerous large bags of plastic sheeting, which scared the shit out of Her Maj, because she thought I'd found a corpse, and two iron gates, about six feet high, which were totally covered in ivy, and get this : the ivy had had so long to grow through the gates, that it had gotten through, and then slowly warped the iron plates of the gate as it grew.
That was my weekend. I thought I was going to spend it scraping horrible eighties wallpaper off, but no. It was spent hacking my way through a nightmare jungle.
Don't be the least bit surprised if I start screaming about Charlie being on the wire.
