To continue with the saga of my sons and ex-husband and the cleared front garden hedge, here is the next installment.  My deaf white Staffordshire Terrier, Snowy, was trying to attract my attention (on Monday morning while I was in the bath,) by playing the piano.

I heard the ghostly strains of the Moonlight Sonata drifting up the plughole...No, seriously, I heard some irritatingly loud 'plink plink plonk, blammmm, blink blink blonk, plomplomplomp BBrrrroooommmm!!! - In fact, sounding more andmore like an avant garde minimalist piece. This continued for a while, up and down the keyboard, until I curiously began to wonder if I'd left the front door on the latch and had a bored visitor telling me I should be downstairs receiving...

Hastily wrapping my towelling robe around me, I padded downstairs to investigate... I discovered that Snowy was the culprit and was even now trying to dig a hole in the back door with her paws...

Since she is totally stone deaf, profoundly so, (it takes the Earth moving to wake her, or a sudden light,) it occurred to me that she had learned that a piano makes a noise by watching me playing it and seeing the expression on my face -or something. 

Anyway I came down in my robe, and the sight of me triggered the can't wait any longer mechanism.

She ran madly through the door I'd entered, up and down the stairs, and promptly disgraced herself on the front door mat.

As the front gate was shut I opened the front door in order to clear up the mat and lob it outside (the way you do).

This provided the opportunity that Snowy was anticipating as, having discovered the gate was shut, she raced around the inside of the hedge until an area now cleared of debris allowed an escape.

Casting a backward glance (reproachful, yet defiant) she legged it down the road.

Whereupon I got dressed, and awaited the inevitable phone call...

Which came 45 minutes later fom the High Street.

Armed with the lead, I went to fetch her, where she enjoyed yet more attention and managed to avoid totally any remonstrance (which would hardly have been fair due to my bathing habits delaying the morning constitutional) - since it was by now far too late to remind her...

Until I got home and showed her the spot, and the replacement door mat...

But the front garden again became an object of scrutiny.

There isn't much in it apart from the ash tree, the elder, the three sided hedge, the fuschia bush and the bluebells...

Oh, and a very small Horse Chestnut from a conker I planted the year before last, which my grandson picked up at the park, when he was three...

And of course the muddy patches and dents in the hedges where my son and friends lean their bikes, and then lean over to retrieve them, or wheel them through the shrubs and bluebells...

I'd got a bit fed up with this abuse and bought some low wire fencing with which I looped off the bare areas around the lawn (and the central ash tree with its cluster of aubretia), thus creating instant 'flower beds' - or at least, no-bike areas.

I issued dire warnings of flattened tyres at the very least for trespassers Will and other transgressors...

And bethought me of what to put in these 'beds' to add to their status...   Which leades me back to the canine pianist...

'Oh no', you're going to say, 'she didn't...'  and quite right too.   She didn't.

What happened was, I was thinking of what an excellent dog she was, playing the piano and being deaf and everything.  I began to wonder if she were a reincarnation of Beethoven... In fact, she became quite a talking point in our friendly independent High Street mini-supermarket.

I happened to notice that the manager had kindly put a cooked, plastic-sealed bone in the reduced bin.  Don't get me wrong, she is fed Pascoes and scraps, and that does, with the occasional chew from a '100 for £1' market stall.  But on this occasion, it being marked at 55p, and myself considering that roses were not enough, she needed the doggy equivalent of an accolade, I bought the (literally) perishing thing...

'Not in the house though'  I muttered, as I slung it as far as I could out ofthe back door.  Which wasn't very far as I'm such a rotten lobber -useless to throw her sticks as they either refuse to leave my hand or else fly over the fence and land on the bypass down by the school playing fields. The bone ended up in the middle of the rear garden.

Of course, having seen what I was up to, Snowy couldn't wait to get out the backdoor and at that bone.  She has an endearing knack of thrusting herself at your legs until, just as you are in the act of falling, and lift a foot to steady yourself, she follows through her advantage and shoots out of the backdoor almost before you have had the chance to regain your balance and to open it.  But she hates getting her feet wet.

I was interested to see how she would cope with this dilemma, as the retrieval of the bone required high stepping, daintily, gingerly, through the long wet grass to where it sat, eyeing her juicily from the centre of the back lawn. She cast the backward glance to make sure that I was watching (she does that a lot, it comes with the deaf dog territory, making her as expressive as Rowan Atkinson, and myself as intuitive as Johnny Morris, or at the very least - 'SSSitttt!' -Barbara Woodhouse - but with a little less conviction, and hence, authority!)

Having sniffed, and clamped her great jaws around it, she high-stepped and high-tailed it to the rough planking on logs leaning against the back wall of the house, that we call a bench.  There, leaping up onto the wobbly yet dry surface, she began her gnawing antics..

Now (late November) last year 'at a time suitable for planting' - Spalding Bulbs had delivered (via Parcelforce - maybe they'd had it since October) a box of phlox in assorted colours, or so they purported though looking suspiciously like pieces of hessian rug wrapped in sawdust...

By the time they arrived, there was heavy frost at night, and I determined they'd be safer in their cardboard conservatoire than in the frigid, hard, unreceptive ground, that had reverted to barren crone status...  So I left them in their box on the bench.  But with Snowy grinding away at that bone, and the shifting plank disturbing the cardboard box, it was not long before it had somersaulted, and I thought - 'Them thar phlox is making a beeline for the backdoor, and to the front door, and to the new 'flower beds' I just fenced off...'

So I followed them.  We emerged, pally as anything, arm in arm, from the frontdoor, and I found an ancient rusty spade who had definitely lost the backbone and was suffering from sloping shoulders to boot...

Digging as delicately as I could (standing on the thing like a pogo stick and swaying from side to side like a quiet metro-gnome, as opposed to the garden variety,) I succeeded in making a shallow impression in the earth at the foot of the hedges. 

Ignoring all the instructions on the plastic bags, but gratified to notice that some of the contents had sprouted shoots, having ignored the instruction to lie down and die if not planted in a week, and having woken up six months later to say 'Hey, it's Spring, get me outta here' - I put them in the various unmarked and scattered holes, irrespective of colour, and covered the evidence as quickly as possible. 

Snowy, meanwhile, continued to grind and slobber her bone lovingly in the back garden.

I went indoors to play the piano....

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