Next door neighbour called around today.

You may think there is nothing strange about that, but it’s only the second time I have met him in all the years he has been living there. We like to keep ourselves to ourselves in this area. So anyway we re-introduced ourselves and got chatting.

One of the topics I had been meaning to raise with him was the trees out the back. I hasten to add that they are my trees not his so there was no complaint involved. So we started walking around to the back of the Manor.

“FUCK!!” say I.

“What?” says he.

“It’s gone!” says I.

“What’s gone?” says he.

“The skip” says I.

“What skip?” says he.

“The skip that was here but isn’t” says I. “It was here yesterday but now it isn’t.”

Somehow, they had snuck into my garden and removed the skip. How the fuck did they do that? I was up and about from the early hours [around ten] and a skip is a fucking noisy thing when it is being moved. I should know because there seems to be an endless traffic in skips up and down the main road and they clatter past with their chains swinging, making a hell of a racket. Yet somehow a lorry had backed into my garden and soundlessly removed a skip without my even noticing. That is really fucking weird.

Anyways it is gone. Finally. They said they were going to remove it on Thursday and seeing as it was still there on Friday I was beginning to see it as a permanent sort of fixture in my front driveway.

Even more weird is the fact that my gateposts are still standing.