We’ve invested in a compostor or composter or compost bin, depending on your vintage and grammar. MY vintage means I’m picturing Tom and Barbara Good, in dungarees and holy (as in ‘With Holes’) jumpers. We’re not getting pigs, though.

To install it, you have to dig a bit and flatten some stuff and do some jiggery-pokery (stop me if i’m getting too technical). So shovels and sieves ahoy, we dug a hole and filled it in again. Some of us aren’t really gardeners, though:-

“uuggghhh a worm”

“Sophie, they’re kind of the POINT of a Compostor. Don’t be so girly”

“oh reeeealllllly – well YOU pick it out of the sieve, then”

“ah,well, um, I WOULD but ..ah…ooo look, more earth”

Sophie wondered aloud how good the earth was. I informed her that the way to tell was to taste it, rapidly adding that I had no idea what it SHOULD taste like and no, I wouldn’t like to try it, thank you.

20 minutes of grunting and shoving later and we have a rather natty black tub stuck in the soil. As I was putting the tools away, I heard an almighty “AIEEEEE” followed by a bit of a watery plop. Fearing for my Banjo (Sophie is of the belief that the best sound produced by said instrument is ‘Splash’ as it enters the canal), I dashed round the garage to find a sheepish looking Sophie lying on the ground with one foot soaking wet and a formerly-horizontal concrete slab now sticking out of the fish pond at a rakish angle.

From “The Good Life” to “Terry and June” in half an hour. That’s a record, even for us.