Explosive Easter
I managed to go the entire Easter weekend without turning my computer on, hence the lack of blog posts. I thought you wouldn’t mind waiting as turning my computer on would only mean that I’d end up working. Staying away from it and out of the office was best. That said, I did of course check emails on my phone and still had work emails coming in, but I did my best to ignore them. There’s lots of catching up to do now though.
Easter wasn’t that exciting for us really, there was certainly less chocolate than usual, and with Morgan all grown up and in Canada there were no Easter Egg hunts to organise. Although, I don’t think we’ve done one of those for a while! Anna and I did have some chocolates and an Easter egg each and we did have some nice dinners at home but we didn’t really do anything particularly Easter-y.
Spring Garden
The weather was a little drier than it has been though so it was good opportunity to get out into the garden. The bees were making the most of the weather, so I thought I should do so as well. In fact, it was good to see that both hives seem to have survived the winter so far and both were bringing in lots of pollen which is usually a sure sign that the queen has made it through the winter and is already busy laying eggs and raising larvae.
I managed to get quite a bit done in the garden in the end. I didn’t have to mow the lawns of course as Hector and Harriet our robot mowers were already on top of that for me. I did strim here and there and tidied up all of the edges which makes a big difference. I tidied up around the pond somewhat and cut back some hedges here and there. I started digging over and weeding some of the borders and I repotted all of the hostas and day-lillies that were in pots. I divided these as I did so and planted some out into the garden. The Hostas rarely survive in the garden but it’s always worth a try. I even managed to repot some of the starter bonsai trees and got the water feature up and running.
The biggest job of the weekend though was cleaning the slabs and the patio with the pressure washer. The slabs had been slippery for quite a while and I had slipped on them several times whilst rushing around so it was well overdue. It took a while but pressue washing is quite satisfying so it was a good thing to get done and looks much nicer now that it is.
Explosives?
I would have probably got more done if it weren’t for the fact that one of the first things I managed to dig up was a length of rusty metal. At first I though it was just a branch or a root but as I pulled it out it didn’t feel like that. The area that we live in was used as a testing site for various types of explosive device in the 2nd World War and unexploded ordnance is always being discovered here. There was one that was detonated in a controlled explosion on the beach last week and I often see or feel explosions as such devices are made safe from time to time. It’s a regular occurrence and there are signs all over the beach warning people not to touch them. This metal object looked quite a lot like one of the photos on those signs.
With the hint of an explosive device in my mind I decided not to extract it any further just in case. The trouble with that was I now had what was possibly an unexploded bomb in the garden so had to down tools and decide what to do.
A call to the police on 101 meant that we soon had an officer of the law pay us a visit. He wasn’t sure what it was either. The photo that I’d sent to the police to help with identification made it look more like a stick than anything too suspicious
I felt pretty silly having the police out to look at a stick I’d found in the garden! None of us were convinced either way though so my photos and the police officers’ photos were sent to the bomb disposal experts. After they’d examined them they thought that it did indeed look enough like unexploded ordnance for them to visit us to investigate further. This was despite the fact that it was a 6-hour round-trip drive for them. We’d have to sit tight until they arrived and no one was to go into the garden.
No more gardening for me! And, the police officer had to stay until the bomb squad arrived too, so as to secure the area! After a long drive from Tewksebury the bomb disposal experts arrived, they poked the ‘bomb’ had a good look at it and then decided it was safe. Once that had been ascertained they scraped some of the mud off, poked it a little more and then decided that it was indeed just a rusty piece of metal. Apparently, it did look just like a particular type of unexploded ordnance though so we were right to have been careful.
We gave them a coffee and they had to then turn around and drive home with a rusty piece of metal in the back of their van!
Not quite what we were expecting for the Easter weekend!
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[…] well as spending some time in the garden over the Easter, Anna and I also paid a visit to the garden centre to buy some new pots for some of the […]
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Better to be safe than sorry x