A rake and a shovel

Monday morning. We had spent the weekend doing a lot of quite physical jobs in the garden so this morning, when we started to plan our day, Brian said that he would like a day not doing too much, certainly not to do anything too physical.

We had been waiting for a new charger cable for our laptop, as ours had broken, and it was supposed to arrive this morning, so the plan was for him to be able to spend the day doing some admin work which he needed to do.

All was going according to plan, until I remembered that the gravel we had ordered for the courtyard was turning up at 4pm. I wasn’t sure Brian remembered it was arriving today, other than he was with me when we went to Gedimat to order it.

I don’t think five cubic metres sounds like very much, but 7.5 tonne does!

Let me turn back the clock a little and give some detail. We had been told by the gravel company that they would deliver the gravel in two loads of 2.5 cubic metres each over two days (well that’s what we thought they said), so I wasn’t really that worried about it turning up, but at around 3.45pm this arrived.

‘Hun, the gravel is here’ I sheepishly called to Brian. ‘The gravel…today?’. He ran outside to be greeted by the driver, who promptly told him that he couldn’t drop it where we wanted it. A difficult, limited French conversation ensued without resolution. I had something to finish, so hadn’t rushed out straight away. Brian came to get me. ‘Jo, we have a problem, he’s going to dump it at the gate!’. I didn’t know what to say at that point, but I thought ‘Ok, if that’s what has to happen’ I’m not sure we have a choice’.

However, in our absence the driver had obviously made the decision that he would try and get through the gate. Things soon became a little scary, and I think we wished we’d just let him dump it all where he had said. He had pulled forward into the parking area opposite us, and was soon reversing across our quite narrow road, across our fragile, little bridge over the river, through our gate and into our courtyard, in this huge lorry. It was definitely not the little flat bed truck which we thought was going to be delivering it. We were both looking on nervously. Was the bridge going to hold? Would the drain take the weight? How was he not going to hit the gate? Never mind my lavender plants! All in all, a bit scary.

We sighed once he was half in, had missed the gate and the lavender and was no longer on the bridge. The drain was fine, thankfully. But now the side legs were coming out of the back of the lorry to balance the crane, the right side leg narrowly missing my rose, and the left nearly knocking over my cast iron vase, which Brian hastily moved to safety. Phew! He was now safely in position.

‘How’s he getting it off?’ I asked. ‘The crane’ Brian replied. ‘Is there room?’ ‘We’ll soon find out!’. We were able to get him to put it as far down this end as possible, meaning we could move it a smaller distance to reach both areas that needed doing.

We were both amazed at the accuracy of the driver operating the crane, and how he carefully placed each container of gravel where we asked. By 4.30pm he’d packed the crane away and was driving off, with a friendly wave. Panic over, except we now had over 7.5 tonne of gravel to move into place, and only a rake and a shovel to do it!

It was going to be a tough evening ahead, but we knew we needed to get it done. Neither of us wanted to end the day with the job half done, so I got on the rake and Brian on the shovel, and bit by bit, shovel by shovel we moved the gravel to all the corners of the courtyard and patio area. It was an incredibly tiring job, but we just kept going and going, and eventually got the job done.

We finished around 9pm, stopping for a snickers bar and a cup of tea half way through. We were both very pleased with our evenings work.