We All Stand Together

The weather was glorious on Sunday so, while other people were wearing bikinis and Speedos and sunning themselves or generally doing more sensible and relaxing things, Marianna and I emptied our pond in preparation for covering it over. The idea of having a pond is nice enough but ours is impractically positioned. It’s just a foot away from the house’s two floor-to-ceiling windows which we intend to replace with folding glass doors and it may be a little risky to have a pond outside of the doors positioned like a Welcome Mat. We began by pulling the many different plants and the buckets they were in out of the pond and leaving them to dry on the patio. We then became aware of how many frogs were in the pond since they began to panic thinking the bailiffs had been and all of their hiding places had gone. Marianna was very concerned about them but not sufficiently concerned to lift them out of the water. I picked them out and sent them in the direction of the people with the children’s paddling pool three doors along but like little kamikaze frogs they kept heading back to our pond. We then emptied the water into the drains and onto the boarders and lawn until we got to a point where it was more sludge than water and so left the last couple of inches in there. Later in the day we put the dried plants into the green waste bin.

By Thursday there were five frogs in the pond. It must have come as a shock to them that the water was now a foot from the paving rather than the inch it had once been.

It rained heavily on Friday and the level of water in the pond was heading back towards the paving.

Not a fish pond, a vegetation pond

How beautiful she was the day I met her. Stick with me i told her and you'll smell like a sewer and be covered in pond gunk