Red and Black

'Hoist with his own petard'. Everybody knows what it means - something like 'caught in his own trap' - but why it means that is not obvious. I know I've looked it up before and was irritated that I couldn't remember. It's easy enough: a petard is a small military bomb or charge for blowing open doors, so the metaphor is that someone is blown into the air by their own bomb. It seems an odd use of the word hoist (maybe that's why I can't remember) - we think of 'hoisting' as pulling something up, like a crane, rather than pushing it, like an explosion, but the phrase comes from Hamlet, so I guess the meaning has evolved a bit since 1600

In the context of the play, Shakespeare changes the metaphor slighly and pushes it even further. He has Hamlet say that he will outwit his evil step-father and
"delve one yard below their mines
And blow them at the moon"
That is exactly what the miners on both sides in WWI tried to do, laying underground charges to destroy the enemy's nearby tunnels, and their soldiers. Did something similar happen in 16th century warfare, or was Shakespeare eerily prescient about what was to come the 20th, and now the 21st? 

The saying is not even entirely appropriate for what I was engaged in, but it's what popped into my head as I was on my hands and knees on the green (and wet!) roof of the shed. A couple of years ago I installed a simple drip irrigation system. I should have removed it over winter, but was too idle this year and last. The irrigation has been successful, but the plants have grown up, over and around the pipes. I sensed last summer that efficiency was dropping off, so needed to get at the system to investigate - requiring a lot of trowel-work

One problem was immediately obvious (extra!), but even with that fixed, some nozzles were not delivering water. Deeper 'delving' revealed that the envigorated plants had sent roots up the nozzles into the taps and pipes. After a lot of unscrewing, poking and probing, I hope all is now clear. Perhaps a victim of my own success, but it sounds less dramatic than hoist with my own petard 

The ultimate point, I suppose, is to provide something wildlife-friendly. There is a mass of freshly germinated seeds up there - too small yet to identify - and some evidence that something with a big beak has been digging for insect larvae. And several of these - we have had a couple of warmer days so they must have emerged for a poke around. Over the moon