1st July 2026
A sense of déjà vu descends. We have form here. See ‘Many hands make light work’, 18.1.25. The original VIPs put in a shift and filled a decent sized skip. You know who you are 😎. Bravo!
As I say, that skip was a decent size. You can get a hell of a lot in one of those. Now imagine a skip the size of a shipping container. 20 feet by 8 feet. Here’s what one of those looked like last October when all our gear arrived:
Cavernous. Well, as you know from the recent ‘Working holiday’, we are renovating the cottage. The roof work alone has produced an awful lot of crap:
Can’t just leave all that lying there. Ooh – did someone say “Skip”? Oh, go on then.
It turns out that our usual skipmeister Trevor is only doing very small skips at the moment – I mean, what’s the point of that? Might as well use the garbage bin (which incidentally has been stolen – must tell you about that another time). Regular sized skips seem to be non-existent. Hurricane season, busy busy, scramble to fix up de roof before de rain, blah blah blah. Fair enough. What now? Well…Infra Rentals are doing shipping container sized skips at very reasonable rates…and of course we have the Lair of the Beast to sort out…SOLD!
Here we go:
Believe it or not that little pile of stuff in the skip took me about ten hours’ sorting, dragging, humping, huffing, puffing, driving and wheelbarrowing. And quite a bit of sweating and diving in the pool to cool off. The pace soon picked up once the roofers put their backs into it:
Until finally:
Of course, what you’re all dying to know is which inhabitants of the shed I encountered during this exercise. Many invertebrates with numerous legs scuttled around, but the four-legged bad boys were conspicuously absent…until, right at the end of the clearout, I dragged a rusted storage unit outside. Hmmm – what’s that on the top, at the back?
Zooming in…the incisors are a dead giveaway. I might donate the specimen to the Natural History Museum.
Skeleton? Could be worse. So it proved a couple of minutes later when Nicola and I were checking the drawers. A very alive Roland poked his nose out. After a yelp I snatched up a nearby whip of bamboo cane and, when he made his bid for freedom, I lashed out. Amazingly, I hit him first time. We’ll leave that tail there 😆. His red mobile home ended up in the car boot of one of the roofers who took a fancy to it – tenant evicted 💪.
So, this morning it was arrivederci to the giant skip. Job done ✔️
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