I walk to this orange homeware shop down the hill.
I already know they accept card for any amount. Even take Amex.
They’ve bailed me out on a number of occasions. Most notably when I waited 2 weeks for a “heavy duty” spatula from Amazon (I don’t know what I was thinking/planning at the time), which when it turned up was thick as tyre rubber and couldn’t even get under a bridge, let alone an egg. With my steak going off that day, I scampered down the hill and paid £5.99 for quite possibly the exact same flimsy spatula I had binned 2 weeks earlier (later confirmed to be true when I got home and found the school label with my name on it my mum had sewn onto the back of the handle).

The Orange Shop’s chemical makeup is:

Orange Shop = Bargain Buys + Twice the price + 50% Higher quality – 50% Floor space – Judgement for requests + Neon Open/Closed sign 

The till is on the right as soon as you go in.
I walk straight in, turn left and do the obligatory lap of the shop, not actually looking at the shelves, before asking for help.
Back at the till, I ask “Do you have a gardening section?”
“What do you need?”
“A trowel”. He clearly understands and is about to say something. But I need to make sure he knows I know what a trowel is. So I interject, wrapping my mouth around every word, “A spade. A small spade”, I look down and find I’m also miming a digging motion.
He politely waits and then points into the shop and says “On your right. But there’s not much left”.
So he’s just made a physically gestured direction plus two directional words in a sentence. I’ve spent so much brain power nailing “trowel”, I now found myself beaten.
I think I heard “right” so I pivot 90 degrees clockwise.
I’m now staring at the door.
Is this a veiled message for me to leave?
If it is, it’ll be his mother wearing a black veil bright and early tomorrow mourning…

I give him the benefit of the doubt and turn 180 and go further into the store proper.
I walk past the gardening section three times, as he shouts directions at me. It’s like we’re doing that office team building exercise where one person is blind folded and their colleagues try to guide their butt onto the photocopier and the blinded person has to realise they can’t trust anyone.
I find it and my untrustworthy colleague wasn’t wrong, there really isn’t much.

When I come back round the corner bearing fruit, the snake has transfigured into a Cheshire Cat. He thinks he’s just sold snow to an eskimo.
But then he sees what I’ve picked up and he begins to quiver.
I’m holding a double trowel set, cable tied to a piece of cardboard. One trowel has a V-shaped scooper and the other’s is flat ended. Both have nicely varnished wooden handles.
So far, so good.
But from handle to scoop, the trowels are no bigger than my dainty office job hands.
One of the trowels has a fire engine red scooper, and the other’s is sky blue. Towards the top of the cardboard it says “Roots and Shoots!”, and above that it says “Kids”.
They’re made by the same factory that makes those red spades and castle-shaped buckets for kids to make sandcastles with. Except these spades are for kids whose parents booked a holiday to Brighton without realising the beach was stones and not sand. They’re as close to a pickaxe as you can give a child without being investigated for child labour violations.
The reason he looks worried is because he now thinks an eskimo has asked to buy snow from him. When this happens, a salesman is forced to think “What do they know that I don’t?”
(Of course, the alternative is that I’m just massively desperate. He’s discounted this theory by wrongly interpreting my monotone and emotionless face as a sign of imperturbability).

I pay. With the transaction going as smoothly as using card in a card shop.
I walk back up the hill, now carrying about 2 grams in extra weight. My weighted-down marginally slower gait has alerted a sniffer dog on the other side of the road and he takes a second sniff at me.
I dive into the Starbucks halfway up the hill. It’s the one I once got mistaken for being a staff member when I was wearing my tattiest tracksuit (initially I wondered if I should be offended. But then I realised I did indeed look like a scrunched up fiver, so it’s the real staff who should have been offended).
I order my standard: grande white americano. I resist adding with a wink, “and all the trimmings” even though it’s christmas season and the pumpkin shite latte has long been delisted from the stock exchange.
I leave and finish the mountain stage of the tour back up to my flat.

Arrive back at the flat.
As always, I try to rip the cable ties off by hand. As always, I tear the cardboard the trowels are tied onto into sawdust and the cable ties remain intact, now only arresting the handles, and tightly so.
Get scissors and try to prise an opening to cut the ties. I get one of the blades between handle and plastic, but it’s flat against the handle and will be doing less cutting than a comedian’s remarks.
I get a knife and easily cut the ties. I cut with the blade pointing towards me. This is the unsafe way to do it but I lack the physical strength and coordination to cut going away from me. I’m lucky today, and the knife doesn’t come close to my face.
I partly wished it did to spare my ego. In the evening, I FaceTimed my mum and she opened with, “What happened to your face?”
I replied “Well you married Dad and the combination of your mugs created mine.”
She countered, “You forgot the bit where God used your face as a punchbag when you were in the womb.”
“Shall we move onto agenda item 2?”
“Yes. When are you getting your oven fixed?”
I start to answer, “I rang-”
Turns out she wasn’t done, “Maybe British Gas will give you 2 for 1 on getting your oven and your face fixed?”
“Sorry mum, for the benefit of the tape, are we on item 1 or 2 now?”

I step out onto the balcony for the second time in six months.
I sink to my haunches and take the V-shaped sky blue trowel and drive it into 10cm of upside down cheesecake textured sludge. I break through the Greg Wallace base. As I feared, this was a lead lined wall surrounding a bunker full of nuclear waste. Then as I part the cheesecakey bit, my lungs immediately inflate with the pungent actually awful sewage-type smell. My fate has become entwined with this smell. We’re like Harry and Voldemort. That is if Voldemort only ate Domino’s and Papa John’s and lost his wand so just farted non-stop in Harry’s face. And Harry also lost his wand, but in his time of need Godrick Gryffindor presented him with a child’s spade to repeatedly smack limited edition flatulent Lord Voldemort in the buttocks with.

I’m nonstop gagging as I shovel sewage to the flat ground on each side of the drain.
I feel like Moses parting the red sea. But if God had forgotten to reflood the gap after Moses and the Israelites had passed through, and the seaweed and dead fish on the exposed seabed were rotting. (My only thought is that God must have used the water to flood the Watford Gap service station instead. Presumably after it ignored demands to convert from a cold sandwich of a Roadchef into a double Whopper of a Welcome Break).
I’m wondering what to do with the piled up banks of sewage. It looks like I’m digging a grave (possibly my own).
I stand up. This is where I do my best thinking and my least gagging.
I’m the middle flat of three so I don’t have a garden to chuck it on, nor a roof to roof it on. I don’t particularly want to risk walking it through my flat like I’m in an egg and spoon race with sewage instead of an egg and a spade smaller than a spoon as a spoon.
Especially because I follow a preventative cleaning methodology (PCM). This is where I consider myself a clean person, but not a clean-er. I minimise dirt creation opportunities as opposed to cleaning dirt. Examples of this include:

• Eating one third of my meals directly over the sink
• Having a designated “sobering up pen” where I put wet or muddy clothes to regain their senses until the next wash.
• Not walking sewage through the flat.

It means my greatest threat is dust. You can find a cleaning remedy for almost any situation if you research hard enough. But after reading hundreds of journals and conducting thousands of hours of interviews, the only way I found to prevent dust is to not go in the flat.
After this discovery, I knocked together a quick mood board of what my life would look like if I lived in a flat I couldn’t go in. The colour palette is mainly made up of fading browns and 50 (or so) shades of grey.

I decide to ignore the dilemma of what to do with the sewage, and distract myself by doing what I do best – weird stuff.
I drop back down to my haunches. But they’re tiring. They can’t support me, neither physically nor financially, and I’m forced to go to my familiar right knee down, left knee up formation. My right knee slides slightly as it touches down. Without looking down, I’m able to convince myself it’s moss on the paving stone and not sewage.
The reason I’m here is because there’s this drip near the drain that’s been there for at least 2 years. I’ve tried to fix it on a number of occasions but never made much progress. By “tried to fix” I mean I’ve stared at it a few times.
The reason it’s such a tricky one, is because there’s a thin grey metal pipe 30cm above the drip. I don’t know where this pipe starts nor where it ends. But for some reason it catches the eye. It draws you in. An enigmatic pipe. Give it a past tense pie and rats would follow it (or children if the townsfolk don’t cough up…)

But earlier today, Jupiter moved into Capricorn as Mars left Gemini, which put me in an open and tolerant mood, able to see clearly into the estuary as the waves crash over me. I feel like the Thames Barrier.
So for the first time in 2 years I look above the grey pipe. I venture 1 metre vertically into uncharted airspace until I come to two ends of normal black plastic drain pipe which have come apart. One of them is dripping. I mentally flag this section of the skies to come back to later.
Taking advantage of my current outlook, I gaze higher and higher, past international airspace, out of the atmosphere, through the Hubble Telescope and into the stars. Suddenly I see Mars heading back towards Gemini and I realise my open-mindedness could soon end. I zero back in on my bin-bag-black pipes.
With a light touch, I delicately line up the two ends of the pipe as close together as I can without compressing the plastic. Then I use my left hand to hold the left end still, and with my right fist I furiously start punching the right end into the left. After 10 seconds, it’s still not perfectly connected but it’s pretty much there. I release my grip carefully like I’m playing Buckaroo.

I still haven’t eradicated the guilt I feel for leaving the sewage piled up and uncleared. So I look for odd jobs to kill a bit more time.
I go to the other end of the balcony where the upside down plant pot is. I notice what, 2 years ago, were the webs of some harmless little spiders have now had 5 Monopoly hotels built on top of them and the years have matted the cobwebs into thickly woven dreadlocks which both Aragog and Shelob could comfortably live in together and never feel cramped.
I hack at it with my trowel. I’m struggling. The V-shape of the trowel blade lacks any sort of cutting edge and in substance is a U-shape.
Through sheer persistence I manage to make a clean break between the webs. If only drain pipes were built as strongly as cobwebs.
Next, I have a go at scraping some of the slime green algae stuff off the paving stones. It comes off easier than I thought, but it was only ever a proof of concept, so I stop after 30 seconds.
Feeling ready to call it a day, I spot a dead woodlouse on the floor. I use the trowel to flick it as far as I can. My power is there but I don’t connect cleanly and it only goes about 5cm, with 10% of its body remaining on my trowel.
I’m opening the balcony door to go inside when I look down at my 25 minute old trowel. It’s wearing a jumpsuit of sewage, a belt of spider webs, bright green algae fake tan and scented with Eau de Dead Woodlouse.
So I start whacking it against the bricks of the outer wall of the flat. Barely any of the crap comes off because it’s cheesecaked on with an already set buttery biscuit base.
I realise I have to take it into the flat to clean it under running water. Part of me wishes I still had the drip so I could rinse it out here.
But then I vaguely remember facing a similar situation before. I had something I didn’t want to take from the balcony into the flat. Try as I might, I can’t remember what it was, but I do remember the solution. I take the trowel, find a drain, and pile it up on a mound of sewage on the side of the drain.

As I head back into the flat I bump into the gas meter. I felt he’d been a bit off with me the last time we spoke so I don’t really want to engage. But something’s been nibbling at me.
I’m courteous and affable, “Peter the meter! Can I pick your brain a sec? While I was inhaling sewage, I suddenly had a thought. If I were to fart in your face, would that make your reading go up or down?”
“8763”