Note to trans Atlantic readers: a yard is what you have at the back of your house when you’re too skint to afford a house with a garden. It has a wall just about the right height to lob things over or for a medium sized burglar to scale if he stands on his mate’s shoulders.
Although at least one gained an incompetent entry over the top of the shed, which is how I came by my least-favourite back yard find: a large swathe of roofing felt. My son, H, and I had felted the shed roof one vile afternoon, climbing gingerly up a scary ladder then boiling our brains in the sun while we crawled round, getting holes in our knees and slapping on black gunk to stick the wretched stuff down. Seeing the results of that vile afternoon shredded on the ground induced a string of fantasies involving roofing tar and an oversized brush.
Amongst the sweetie wrappers, slugs, discarded joints, pizza boxes, condom wrappers, used fireworks and cat shit, there is the occasional inexplicable gem, such as the pile of gravel, swept underneath the gate into a neat pile. Baffled, I was.
Particularly irritating was a collection of empty mayonnaise and ketchup bottles, flung over the wall in a bitch fit by the petulant old queen who lives next door, revenge for a myriad of misdeeds, both real and imagined, perpetrated by my son. At least that’s what the accompanying poison-pen letter said.
Then there was the small dead rat, flat, blackened and dessicated with age. Mr Rat Catcher found it underneath a stack of bricks. ‘It’s a boy,’ he said happily, holding it up in a self satisfied sort of way.
One bright sunny morning, I found a syringe, mercifully without its spiked counterpart. It lay next to a plant pot, where it stayed for a while, mostly because I didn’t know what to do with it. Delighted, H took a photo of it and posted it on Facebook which puts it in the category of ‘dodgy but with entertainment value’.
Years ago H found a couple of chavs in the back yard. ‘Mummy, some people are trying to get into the house!’ he shouted up the stairs.
‘We’re just, er… shelterin’, er … from the rain, like,’ one of them said, raising a pale, pustule-spattered face towards a blue, cloudless sky. Then they ran off, baggy pants flapping over malnourished hips. (Category: useless and absolutely no entertainment value).
But out of everything I’ve ever found in my back yard, the most unexpected of all were a white sparkly candle shaped like a snowball, a gold Buddha, a neat stack of Christmas cards and several of my son’s birthday cards (minus birthday money). All sitting out in the rain they were, placed there by the filthy little scrotes who had moved them off the window ledge after they climbed in through the kitchen window to relieve us of everything that was important to us, including my battered old Mac with my half-written novel on it.
Category – useless . Of entertainment value only if shoved in a chair while I hold the dead rat behind my back and say, ‘Open your slimy little mouths please, you little shits, here’s something I prepared earlier.’
