A Week Later & It's Still Pretty Damn Good - Mostly

Friday 8 May 2009

We have been invited to lunch at St Erth, Blackwood by one of Ros' nursing colleagues Rosemary. It's a pleasant misty grey trip with Kingsley & Chris taking about 90 minutes. Feels more like winter than autumn and while I'm enjoying the damp outside I'm also wishing that the rain would hold off for a couple of weeks more. The caravan is coming and if there's too much moisture, getting it up onto the flat could be quite a challenge. In fact it will be nearly impossible.

As I've discovered on more than one occasion that I have no control over the weather, its easy to just sit back and hope that at least it won't be raining too heavily at St Erth. The gardens are well worth a longish wander and a light misty rain would be quite pleasant.

Speaking of pleasant, haven't been up this way for about 6 months and the freeway extension bypassing Deer Park is a very useful improvement. I'm not quite sure where I stand on more freeways in general but this one has my blessing.

Lunch was very enjoyable as was the company which also included, Keith, A... , and our most delightful hostess Rosemary who has a soft Dublin accent that I ignorantly mistook for educated Liverpudlian because it reminded me of my best mate's older sister. My trout fillet was enormous and very tender. I'd loved to have caught him but I suspect he was farm bred and had never seen a mountain stream.

While we were enjoying lunch, back at the farm the Grocon team were busily removing dead cars and roofing iron. We weren't certain whether they'd got a start on Friday but it turned out they were working right on schedule. Only a couple of young blokes, a 13 tonne excavator and as many trucks as they could get their hands on.





After filling ourselves to the brim and a little beyond - I didn't order any dessert but was obliged to help Ros & Chris finish theirs, we wandered outside and hastily put up hoods, hats and umbrellas to keep our heads dry. It wasn't particularly cold but I was glad to have three layers as well as my new waterproof outer jacket.

A very pleasant walk around the gardens with a knowledgeable and enthusiastic A... was interspersed with the odd photo-opportunity or two.

By the time we were ready to leave it was approaching 16:00 and no way were we going to be back in time to collect Angus and Phoebe from Fiona's before Cait finished work. A quick call to Cait and she'd organised for the kids to stay with Fi until she arrived. We breathed a grandparently sigh of relief that our failure to recognise that lunch might well be of the extended kind would cause no major drama on the home front.

Farewells concluded, Kingsley once again took the wheel and conveyed us back to Eltham via the wilds of Trentham, Whittlesea and Diamond Creek. "It's a hard life...." and this has been a great end to a very good week. Amazing what a day away in congenial company does for the soul.

Saturday 9 May 2009
Keen to see whether the Grocon guys had actually started as scheduled, I drove up to th efarm on Saturday morning and was pleasantly surprised to see them hard at work. Introduced myself to Jay the supervisor and had a bit of a chat about what they were doing. Also met the excavator operator whose name I've unfortunately forgotten and identified what needed to be left.

Unfortunately this did not include the borrowed giant webber which had already been removed with a mangled pile of roofing iron. I'd meant to move it but had completely forgotten and now I have remembered I need to tell Rhonda that it is no more ... rather a big oops!

It was while I was feeling regretful and not a little guilty about the webber that I noticed that the only thing of value remaining - our cast iron single-piece chiminea was not where Richard and I had left it. Bloody thing weighs a tonne and I couldn't imagine anyone just walking in and knocking it off. So much for my imagination!

Asked the Grocon guys whether they'd seen it on Friday and got a negative together with the information that when they'd arrived, there'd been a log dragged across the driveway preventing access and nothing on the side of the drive, where I'd left several bundles of flattened fencing wire stacked up for Grocon to take.

At this point I got fairly bloody shitty as the realisation that the looting bastards who had stolen it had obviously been watching the site for some time. When I first started going up, upon leaving I dragged a log across the driveway as discouragement to casual passers by. I'd stopped doing that after about three weeks so its pretty obvious that these thieving shits had been looking at the place early in the piece and had returned just before the Grocon team to knock it off, presumably hoping that Grocon would get the blame.

If it was some homeless poor bastard from Kinglake who needed something to keep them warm this winter then I guess they are welcome to it but my suspicion is that it was just an act of bastardry by some reasonable well organised and opportunistic arseholes. Fuck 'em!

Of course I reported it to a sympathetic policeman at Diamond Creek but neither of us held out much hope for it's recovery. Note to the new police commissioner - add the word "chiminea" to your list of stolen-item descriptors. Chimineas are reasonably common and it would save a few minutes of trying to find something acceptable to the system.

Well on that note - it's time for bed.