Deconstruction

I advertised that heap of rubbish as"Firewood - Several lengths of old shed that could be cut up for a wood-burning stove. Beware rusty nails."  

Bingo! It's all in the marketing. Someone requested it and turned up this morning with an electric saw to cut almost all of it up and load it into his car.

He cut up one extra long piece in the back garden but I was glad I'd carried all the rest through to my very small front-garden-with-no-hedge yesterday as his conversation was somewhat, um, forward. I changed the subject to the safer ground of his nine years' English teaching in Saudi Arabia but he soon got back again to where I didn't want to be so I think he was sounding me out rather than just being 'liberal'. 

I was pretty safe and I've had a lot of practice at looking after myself but it's a long time since I've felt I needed to have my antennae on full alert, to have my phone charged and to be aware of whether my neighbours were in their gardens or not. I went back to the front door to check on progress and with perfect timing Z, my lovely Afghan neighbour, happened to walk by. Woodcutter tried to impress him (and me, I assume) by speaking to him in Arabic but Z doesn't speak Arabic. Woodcutter asked him what he did speak. "Pashto, Persian, Urdu, Punjabi and a very little English," he said, in impeccable English with a little smile that I shared. My friendly and easy conversation with Z, and telling him I was going to pop over soon, got me very securely back onto high ground.

And indeed I did pop over soon because the next round in our food-swap escalation game was me making then delivering some chocolate easter nests with mini-eggs - in particular for his two children. To slow things down I'd waited nine days but I thought Easter was a pretty good time for my turn.

Then I walked a bottle of thank-you wine to the kind person who taught me grafting a week ago and who hadn't responded to my text offering to pay. Another good neighbour.