I can hear the grass grow...

There was a stand off at our house yesterday, involving a frustrated electricity engineer and the husband.

Some of you may remember the incident with the hedge outside my house.  All I had said to the husband was that I wanted it lowered slightly so I could see over the top.  I hadn't allowed for him making the decision (all on his own - I must remember not to leave him unsupervised again) to remove the hedge altogether.  Once the initial shock had worn off, I really liked our hedgeless lawn, and before too long, the husband was feeding, weeding and mowing the newly revealed green stuff, meticulously mowing in his stripes, and generally just standing around looking at it.

When the electricity company called at the house last week when the kids were at home, to tell us that our power would be disconnected for a couple of days for some maintenance work, I wasn't too worried as I would have been at work anyway.  Never mind the kids with the laptops, phone chargers, and televisions, I would be fine, so no problem.

However.

They then passed son number one a pencilled diagram.  It was like a treasure map.  There was the outline of our house, the drive with a couple of cars pencilled on for authenticity, and there in the middle of what was meant to be the lawn was a very large 'X'.   'This is where we need to dig your lawn up', said the engineer.

Well, you can imagine how well that went down with the husband.  When he came home that night and saw the diagram, he was straight onto the electricity company, telling them in no uncertain terms that if they touched a blade of grass on his lawn, then they would have to replace the whole bloody lot, and not just the two feet square patch they needed to remove.  There was no way he was going to sign the form authorising this, until he had it in writing that they would replace the whole thing.

So leaving work yesterday morning for my first day at Binland this week, various workmen were turning up, armed with small diggers and long ladders.

Daughter number one called the husband at work, and told him that they had arrived to dig the lawn up.  Throwing down whatever Stanley tool he had in his hand at that particular moment, he raced home and had a rather loud contretemps with the electricity engineers.  I like to think that at some point he shouted 'Get off my land', and when that had no effect, he laid down across his precious lawn, screaming 'You'll never take me alive!' 

Well it was a small victory for the common man, and the workmen left without touching a single blade.  They're coming back on Thursday though which should give the husband plenty of time to bury the land mines and train the fuzzballs to 'kill'.

I may be out...