Allotment / Slow Worms

My humans keep disappearing up the road and coming back again, but I finally got a ride in the van and we went to the allotment gate.  Hmmmmmm……..  there’s a lot to check out here.

Off the top of the van a big sheet of plywood went in to the allotment, and the tool boxes.  This should be good; it clearly means that supervision will be required.  My job.

Mr B.  put a new roof on the shed.  The shed isn’t very interesting, it doesn’t have the right sorts of smells.  F plodded about in the big boots covered in mud and levered big weeds out of the ground with the garden fork.  That dirt looks very wet; I’ll stick to the grass and the dry bit under the hedge.  That dirt makes a nasty sucking noise when F lifts it up with the shovel.  Stay well away from that; supervise from the top of a nearby woodpile

Before long a fox arrived on the garden next door.  It didn’t seem to care that we were there and was waiting by the open back gate of a neighbouring house.  Maybe the fox has a friend in there.  I wanted to go and take a closer look at it but Mr B wouldn’t let me.  He said he had to leave now anyway, hustled me into the van and we drove back to the house leaving F behind still levering up those weeds with the big long roots.

Sunday usually means a lie in bed, but F wandered off quite early pushing my sports-car.  She was wearing those boots again.  More levering up weeds I guess.  She came back for lunch later in the day, dragged me out of my comfort zone, bundled me in a box with one of my bed fleeces and carried me right out across the Common.  That Common is a swamp.  I can hear it sucking at her boots.  Yuck!  I was glad to be carried  and not just because we were out in the open.  Mind you we did get a ‘squirrel opportunity’ half way across but F just isn’t fast enough – especially slow with those boots on.  That’s another lesson she needs…..

With the weather being a bit less wet and F concentrating on digging with her shovel, I didn’t need to supervise too closely all the time and checked out all the other gardens – nice dirt if a bit wet, a few interesting obstacle courses with good places to find things that scuttle, and a few people, although I did notice that they would come over to talk and F would stop digging.  So I’d have to rush back and do the talking so that she would get on with the digging again.  No slacking.

F did startle me at one stage when she was digging in the compost heap.  She started calling me and I had a nasty sense of déjà vu….please let it be not another rat.  It turned out to be a snaky looking thing, not very big and not at all fast.  Boring.  Safe….. but boring. 

F said it was a slow worm.  It was definitely slow.  She went on to explain that it is in fact  legless lizard. 

Now, let me explain: the only other time I have heard the expression legless was after Mr B’s 50^th birthday party.  Legless had something to do with all those empty bottles in the bin by the garage door.  The slow worm didn’t smell like legless, but maybe lizards get legless on something other than sloe gin.  Sloooooow Worms…...... Sloooooooe Gin ........ Legleeeessssssss .....................Hmmmmmmm?

When I wanted to go home I sat in my sports car, but F said she still wanted to use it as a wheelbarrow and we did a deal; I’d let her use it a bit longer if I could drive all the way home.  Done.  The only drawback was that she put the mobile home conversion on the back, and with those boots on never really got out of second gear.  It was probably just as well really; the suspension is a bit shot and there’s an off-road section in the route home round the edge of the Common.