A tragedy in green

Up late, for it is a bank holiday. As it was supposed to be raining all day, our plan was to make a Lego tower of astonishing proportions, something that's just begging to be done, when you have as much curiously shaped Lego as I do.

But then Jof said the neighbour is cutting the hedge between our gardens, why don't you go and show willing and help him out, after all, it is our hedge that's totally swamping their garden. This is when we found that the neighbour (who claims to be a non-gardener) had pruned it using the simple, effective and yet terminally destructive method of cutting all the plants at wall level (about 3 feet off the ground) and then pulling bits out from the trellis that's holding it all up. This means that everything above an altitude of 3 feet (all of it) is now dead.

This includes all the: grapes, hops, virginia creeper, jasmine, orange blossom, canary creeper, elderberries and buddleia, all of which were either fruiting or flowering.

So now we have a compost heap that we may have to rename Kilimanjaro, a lot more light coming into the garden, we'll have to have a bonfire (hooray) for the twigs alone, but a strangely quiet and pensive Bud, who has spent actual years creating an impenetrable hedge.

Later we did some Lego tower, his job is sturdiness and height, my job is to decorate the tower with all the Lego humanoids, jet engines, propellers and flags I can find.

But as it was supposed to be raining, I called Pirate Petes' so off we went. There was nobody there I knew so changed that by getting to know some people of similar height and devising a jumping game in which the floor was hot lava, a perennial favourite.

Then Bud went off past the kite festival looking for number rocks and I stayed as long as possible (you're supposed to only stay for 1 hour). I had chicken lumps and chips in the Wimpy. When we got home he was already there, completing my Lego tower. The final measurement was 261cm = 8 foot 7 inches, even taller than Mr Tall. It misses the ceiling by half an inch, as you can see by the shadow. The floor is still a snowdrift of Lego bits, even with a skyscraper with 49 distinct floors, a castle and an aerial.