Boomerang jobs

yellow, black, white, badger, meles meles, natural history, illustration, illustrator, Hannah Foley, alphabet, educational, children, kids, familySometimes it feels like Big Dreamer and I are trapped in an episode of Fawlty Towers on a loop. We can’t seem to do any jobs around the house without them boomeranging right round and pinging us in the head again, sometimes multiple times. A “boomerang job” is now an official term in our house. The latest of these concerned the water butt.

Big Dreamer took Little Owl and Finch off to our local garden centre to buy a water butt. They proudly bought it home. A few weeks later Big Dreamer got round to setting it up as an off-shoot from one of our down pipes. Unfortunately when the rain poured so did the water butt. It had a leaky tap. By now the receipt for the butt was long gone and another few weeks passed before Big Dreamer had time to go back to the garden centre. Fortunately a kind lady at the check-out took pity on him and believed that he had bought the butt from them (sometimes it pays to shop local). However they didn’t have any of those sort of water butt any more, only bigger ones. That wasn’t a problem, except they didn’t have any stands for the bigger ones. Having sawn thorough the down pipe we needed a stand that would raise the butt up to the height of the broken one. Sigh. Big Dreamer thought we might be able to manage with the smaller stand so brought the bigger butt home, and got it all set up.

Weeks went by where we thought this butt must have a leaky tap too because it just wasn’t filling up no matter how much rain there was, but we couldn’t find any perceptible leak. That was when we realised that Finch kept turning the tap on and letting all the water out when we weren’t looking. Tap firmly closed we awaited the next downpour. It came this weekend. In the middle of the night the poor waterbutt, heavy from the deluge, overwhelmed the stand and with a huge crash toppled over, and…you guessed it…it now has a hole in it. So after all that, we are right back where we started; in need of a water butt. No hang on, not quite right back where we started, we’re also nursing beautiful purple bruises on our foreheads where that boomerang has well and truly got us. Please tell me this sort of thing happens to you too!

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