Ragun Bow

Karen and I availed ourselves of a traditional English street service over the weekend – the good old Rag N Bone man.

After the removal of our palatial greenhouse a couple of weeks ago the garden was left with a few metallic stragglers whose rusty loitering was beginning to make the garden look extremely untidy. Swift action was called for... and it came fleet of foot on a white charger just like in the days of old.

Well. Maybe not exactly like the days of old. Today’s modern Rag N Bone man no longer employs a magnificent dray horse to pull his cart or even wields a mighty wheelbarrow with which to collect household junk. Instead our particular Rag N Bone man turned up with a huge white flatbed truck with which he merrily transported various shelving units, two old broken hoovers and a vast array of assorted mystery metal work back to his yard or wherever it is that he deposits all his hard gotten gains.

He did however have a magnificent horn (please, ladies and gentleman, please!) which sounded his approach from at least two whole blocks away. Once he entered the mouth of our street we could clearly hear the carefully enunciated call of “Ragun Bow! Ra-Bow!” and knew that our saviour was near.

The garden now looks a hell of a lot tidier but there’s still loads of work left to do... weeding, pruning, removing an old water butt....

And the water butt is going to be a job and a half. Turning on the tap to empty the damn thing I was dismayed to see nothing but a pathetic trickle dribbling out onto the path rather than the expected rush of water akin to a damn bursting.

At the current rate it’s going to take 2 weeks before the ruddy thing is empty.

Peering inside the butt I was horrified to see a thick brown soup stodgily glooping up its innards with a surface skin thick enough to land a Cherokee helicopter upon. Administrations with a space merely brought various unwholesome looking bubbles up to the surface... and a slight sense of resistance near the bottom indicated that there was something softly organic submerged somewhere in the depths of the water...

I wasn’t brave enough to find out exactly what.

Rags and bones indeed...