Richard Hearn goes by the book

The Tip, The Trellis And The Carwash. It doesn’t exactly have the same ring as The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, but in The Boy’s eyes, it’s as much of an adventure. He unexpectedly volunteered to come on this exciting journey. The tip, (except when I almost got skewered by someone else’s Christmas tree – we’re in March!), was uneventful. The Boy was finding it an unexpected treat, however, sitting on a booster seat in the front. Allowing kids to sit in different places often works. Meanwhile I lift bags of soil into a skip. We’re all having fun.

Excitement mounts at the garden centre. The Boy gets to ask me to choose my favourite water feature, without being interrupted by Youngest™. To transport the trellis, it’s necessary to rearrange the car seats again. This adventure just gets better and better.

“Trellis inside the car adds to the sense of peril”

The climactic scene is the car wash. Not only does he get to enjoy the car wash, there’s trellis inside the car which adds to the sense of peril, plus he gets to hold the little ticket with the code on it. Normally this is something to fight over with his brother as if it’s the ring in one of those Tolkien books.

Sticking to my book theme, two days later, in the style of Harry Potter, it was Richard Hearn And The Search For Bricks. The bricks were to replace a few in our garden wall that had come loose. By ‘come loose’ I mean ‘fallen off’. Anyway, this time my dad was the co-protagonist, knowing more about bricklaying than I do (or to put it another way, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king).

LBC Sandface is not an underground DJ, but the name of the brick, as we found out at the first builder‘s merchants. They did have its nearest cousin, A Brick Called Heather (a provisional name for my romantic novel, as yet unpublished). While my Dad drove around the East/West Sussex border in our six brick quest, I sat in the passenger seat, cleverly using the internet on my phone to contact various places about their brick stock. Our quest took us to Worthing, and when a different builder’s merchant steered us towards Heather, I could both nod and then shake my head authoritatively. The nod in recognition to its similarity, the shake a demonstration of my unwillingness to settle for second best. Recently acquired jargon conveyed with chutzpah is a powerful combination.

We got our six LBC Sandface bricks. All we had to do now is to re-build the wall. Preferably straight. And that, dear readers, is another story…

Illustration: Paul Lewis www.pointlessrhino.com