Oh cr*p

Hmm, not sure of the chain of blame or shame here: you can look at it in so many ways! Was it my fault because I asked Pete the excavator driver to smooth out the ridge so that we make the grade with the Rural Fire Service? Was it Pete's fault that he didn't see the pipe? Or... was it the sewerage contractors' fault that they neither dug the pipe in at the usual 600mm below ground level nor marked it with coloured tape so that any excavator would be alerted to the pipe's presence in the hole?

Well who cares - the whole thing stinks (ha, ha). What I do know is that the ridge is beautifully smooth, the pipe wasn't marked, Pete inadvertantly drove a large piece of machinery through it and the end of the pipe was obscured by dirt and only made apparent in the recent rain and... every drop of water (clean, 'grey' or 'black') expelled down the drain has been neatly by-passing the Biolytix sewage system and instead trickling its way slowly down the hill.

I discovered the result this afternoon as husband and I struggled down the hill laden with two trees, two buckets of liquid seaweed solution, six recycled plastic stakes, two 'green' water-reservoirs to keep the trees suitably irrigated, compost, a large shovel and a wheelbarrow. Yes, folks, I trod in it before I quite realised what "it" was. In fact I was so oblivious to the totality of the situation that I merely commented on the ground being surprisingly boggy in the area... Dearest Husband had to point out what was really going on.

Yuk!

Anyway, all thoughts of toilets firmly out of our heads we are celebrating the planting of the first tree: a Seville Orange that should keep me in marmalade for decades once it starts bearing fruit, and has been named in honour of my mother, "Sylvia's Orange Tree". Hoorah.