It was not raining, and I let the chickens out after lunch. It was cold, though. While we were eating lunch the buzzard soared lazily past over the ploughed lettuce field, and we thought that it was pretty good to be able to look out of your kitchen window and see a buzzard. I'm not sure the hens took the same view. They were slow to come out of their run, and scuttled almost immediately into the shelter of the Eleagnus hedge, where they amused themselves scratching among the dead leaves. I couldn't always see them, but I could hear them burbling to each other. It was a relief to be able to get on with weeding the gravel along the bottom of the hedge, a job which needed doing, instead of having to play hunt the hen around the garden as one or another wandered off. I might have the buzzard to thank for that too, since I could hear the occasional faint, wild cry from somewhere downwind.
Meanwhile the neighbours are going to have a summerhouse. Or at least we think that's what they're planning. A couple of days ago a digger appeared and scooped out a rectangular area of soil in their field, about as far from their house as it's possible to get and just the other side of our hedge. We wondered at first if it was going to be a wildlife pond, but apart from the fact that nobody would make one rectangular, the flat bottom and lack of any attempt to level the sides made it look more like the base for a building. They were scrupulous about putting in for planning permission for their garage block, so we assumed that whatever it was going to be must fall into the permissible temporary structures category. Unless the aggravation of dealing with the local planning department was so bad last time that they decided they couldn't stand doing it again. There are lots of temporary structures in the gardens of the various houses dotted around the farm, some of which probably sail quite close to the wind in planning terms, and we have all adopted a live and let live attitude.
Today, just as I was about to go out, a low loader appeared in their field with a large black box on the back of it. I eyed up the lorry with some misgivings and a feeling of You don't want to put that there, mate. When I worked at the plant centre a lorry got stuck after reversing over grass to the polytunnels to unload, and finding itself unable to return up a much more modest slope than the one in our neighbour's field, and we managed to get our old builders' truck spectacularly stuck in the edge of the wood, trying to retrieve firewood. Lorries do not operate well on wet grass and any kind of a slope.
I decided to escape quickly before they discovered that the lorry was stuck and the lane filled up with rescue vehicles, and when I got home a couple of hours later learned that my dark suspicions had been right. The lorry had indeed been unable to get back up the grass slope to the farm track, and was eventually towed free by a couple of the tractors from the farm, the lads from the farm apparently finding rescuing lorries much more exciting than lettuces, and the lane had been blocked for chunks of the duration. The mysterious black box was still sitting on the grass several yards from the levelled ground where it was supposed to go.
The Systems Administrator's theory was that the black box did not contain the neighbours' new summerhouse, it was their new garden room. The box had a sliding panel on one side and a white logo on the other, and the SA had looked up the logo and discovered it was part of the fashion company the neighbour works for. The SA's best guess was that the box had been previously used as a pop up shop, or on fashion shoots, or something, and our neighbour had got it cheap to recycle it as a room in the garden. Which is quite ingenious, not to say ecologically sound, if that's the case. Once it's in place (however they manage to do that) we'll scarcely see it, except that we'll have to ask them if we may paint over the logo or cover it with black plastic, otherwise it's going to be distractingly visible through the hedge all winter.
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