Outdoor Frustrations

I'm not a farming girl; I'm only a gardening girl, but today I had one of those days of frustrations that, over and over again, I have seen farming people having in the past. They are just ready to do something when a bit of machinery breaks or won't work and they have to wait for a tiny spare part. Or the sheep get out. Or it starts to rain. Or a gale sends a sheet of corrugated iron up into the air and through the roof of the glasshouse.

My three frustrations started with these three situations:

(a) that I didn't have any rubber gloves long enough to clear a blocked drain, now that I've dug as far as I can, so it's still gurgling up like the icy well at the world's end. And it's just too cold to get my bare hands (and, well, it would be arm as well!) into that water.

(b) that the lawn mower wouldn't start, just when I had the one lovely dry and windy day in which I could have cut the grass that needed cutting at the end of the autumn.

(c) that the wooden lintel fell off the greenhouse door when I put the lawn mower in there to warm up, and I saw that the whole outfit was rotten.

But the real frustrations were with:

(1) this stoopid world that sells things like Hello magazine and mountains of crisps and chocolate that make us fat, and tan-coloured nylons for ladies in every corner shop, but no long rubber gauntlets.

(2) horrible Honda who can manage to serve 700 people lunch of both English and Japanese food in 20 minutes flat on the other side of Swindon, but who didn't make my very very very expensive mower good enough to start at least 5 times out of 10, thus costing me hundreds of pounds as it goes back to Walfins time and time again.

(3) that if you live in the country and want something like more glue than you have in the house, you might have to drive somewhere to get it just when you are in a carbon footprint state of awareness.

I didn't kick the cat or anything. I just ruefully thought that over the centuries farming people must have had far worse frustrations than me, and so I got my water fix by having a perfumed bath; I dealt with the lawnmower by phoning nice Walfins and at least having a lovely moan about Honda with the man who comes to get my mower ("You 'as a lot of trouble don't you?"); and I got my greenhouse fixed by hunting through all my sheds for a tin of anything resembling Unibond (in the process I spilt a tin of green gloss paint over my arm, found what looked like old, now-dark-beige Unibond, and certainly managed to unibond a paintbrush to the kitchen floor with it). I also got a lot of satisfaction from using my little G-clamps that my Dad gave me many many years ago after asking me what I wanted for my birthday. I hope he was watching from Heaven.

Now it's going on midnight and minus 1 centigrade and suddenly I think I'd better go out and see that I haven't glued the greenhouse door shut.