I’m walking to the station in driving rain, under the protection of a £12 umbrella I bought at a newsagent the day before – during a previous rainstorm – which is already turning up on one side. My head is down, and I do not immediately see the young man approaching from the other direction, arms full, who stops in my path.
“D’ya wanna buy one?” he says, holding out one of three bottles of white wine he has clearly just shoplifted.
Or maybe they’re his. My cynical assumption rests entirely on the basis that he’s so keen to get rid of the bottles that he’s approaching strangers in the middle of a downpour.
“No thank you,” I say, but still: I feel seen. The pavement was crowded, and he picked me.
double quotation markEven as the words ‘no thank you’ formed on my lips, I scrutinised the label to see if it was my sort of thing
I imagine him sprinting from the shop, thinking: what possessed me to steal white wine? How am I going to unload all this at 11am on a wet Wednesday? But look! Here comes a likely prospect now!
And it’s true that even as the words “no thank you” were forming on my lips, I was scrutinising the label on the bottle to see if it might be my sort of thing. I’m not claiming to be insulted by the quality of the white wine on offer. Let’s just say we both made unflattering assumptions that morning. I suppose, in his case, he was going by the umbrella.
When I get home that afternoon the rain has stopped, and I face an unpleasant chore: the ivy climbing the garden wall has pulled the trellis on top of it to bits, and I need to cut and clear away all the greenery and replace three trellis sections. I bought all the stuff to do it two weeks ago, but it has rained every day since. It’s also supposed to rain tomorrow – and forever thereafter – so this is my only window.
The ivy vines are as thick as a tree in places, threaded through with tough creepers, thorny rose suckers and pieces of old trellis. I rotate between hedge trimmer, branch cutter and saw, excising the dense mass in chunks and piling it up behind me.
Once a 2-metre length of wall is cleared, I fix two new posts into place and attach a trellis section between them – one down, two to go.
The remaining ivy is very firmly attached. I hack and saw and pull, working at it for about an hour, until finally the whole thing comes away as one lump, taking the top half of the wall with it. Loose bricks tumble into the bed on my side, crushing the plants below. I sought to repair the overgrown barrier between our garden and the alley on the other side, and I have inadvertently created a gate.
double quotation markMark is the builder my wife retains to undo all the damage my repairs create. I appreciate his reassuring presence, but don’t like how it makes me seem
“Is it going to stay like that?” my wife says, looking out of the kitchen window.
“For now,” I say. “I’m not sure what else I can do.”
On the other side of the jagged gap, people walk by, stop and peer through.
“I suppose Mark can deal with it when he comes to fix the pergola next week,” she says.
Mark is the builder my wife retains to undo all the damage my repairs create. I appreciate his reassuring presence in our lives, but I don’t like how it makes me seem.
“Yeah,” I say.
“In the meantime,” she says.
“I’ll sort it,” I say.
It’s dark and raining when I go back out to gather up all the fallen bricks. Then I gently stack them back into place, imitating the pattern of the surviving wall.
I prop a trellis section on top and screw it to a post on one side, jamming the other end into the thicket of leaves.
“That looks fine,” my wife says.
“You can’t tell it’s all just balanced there,” I say. “That the slightest breeze would push it over.”
“It’ll do for now,” she says.
“That’s my motto,” I say.
Hood up, I walk to the nearest shop. The rain beneath the street lights is falling at a pronounced slant. I wonder if my repair will last the night.
Once in the shop I decide I wish to seem like a person well acquainted with the finer things. I select a bottle of white wine with an unmistakable mark of quality: a plastic anti-theft collar.
At the till, the man removes the collar and runs the bottle over the scanner. I don’t say anything as I touch my card to the reader, but I think: I know where you can get a whole umbrella for that price.