In a throwback to the sixties and seventies we have been hearing a lot about pickets recently in the Midlife Garden. Initially, it was the striking kind, bringing memories of the bad old days of industrial action, when donkey-jacketed men (and women) formed lines outside factories and mines in protest about working conditions, pay and the rest. Nowadays the picket lines have been staffed by doctors, of which our daughter is one, protesting at something even more fundamental and far reaching than just pay and conditions.
But the other pickets casting me back to my childhood are the type forming a fence, making me think of Peter Rabbit crawling under the gate to raid Mr McGregor’s cabbages and lettuces. In those days I was siding with the rabbit, but today I would not look kindly on an errant rabbit gnawing their way through my burgeoning brassicas. But my intention to build a fence around the Midlife Veg Patch was not to keep anyone out, so much as to keep a certain Long Dog in.
The cost of a good picket fence looked prohibitve, but Mrs B spotted some discarded lengths at ‘The Etihad’ opposite (they are our “noisy neighbours”) so we offered to take it off their hands. Our neighbour was delighted to be rid of his discarded pickets, so for a few months the fence resided in a pile in our garden instead, while I debated with myself how to get the job done.
When contemplating DIY jobs it is always with the sound of my father’s voice in my head, giving “a word of advice”. I listened to his words, advising four inch posts with a bag of Postcrete for each. And then I compromised (as always), selecting three inch posts and less than a bag of Postcrete per post. And I also sawed the posts shorter, as it was proving far too much like hard work to dig the holes deep enough. It was cheaper and easier, but who knows, it might just stay up?
The end result was pretty fair, though I say it myself. But our good friend Richard, who puts up fences for a living, took the Old Man’s view, and politely suggested I would need “a helluva lot” of wood preserver to ensure the fence outlasted me. I nodded knowingly.
But, more positively, our noisy neighbour, who spent most of lockdown sawing ceramic tiles and recently replaced his own fence posts, gave me a Paul Hollywood-style handshake in recognition of my fine work.
A handshake from Pep – must make me star fencer of the week.
Of course, the ultimate test was yet to come, when Badger exited the side gate to try his hand at escapology. The glee in his long-dog dash was short-lived as he came face to face with the pickets like a scab miner from the eighties. I stood on the outside while he barked from the inside, and a line from the film ‘Back to the Future’ came to mind, as Marty views his jail-bird uncle as a toddler, standing in his playpen.
“Better get used to those bars, kid”.
