Three Sheets To The Wind.............

Not an admission of failure relating to my lamentable beerless lifestyle, but rather, an approximation of yesterday morning's activity, in trying to cover a poly-tunnel in a blustery gale. (I say "gale", of course I mean "slightly stiffer than desirable breeze").

A couple of friends are in their first proper allotment season, and I have very helpfully been giving them the benefit of my deep font of knowledge, guesswork and general bullshit on all matters vegicultural.... Usually without even being asked! I am just that kind of guy.

They have also decided to erect a rather large & splendid poly-tunnel, using plans gleaned from the interweb, and materials gleaned from here there and every where.

So naturally, when it came to the tricky business of handling and fixing the polythene cover, I was just the man to turn to..... Not because I had impressed them with all the semi-plausible advice I had offered in the comfort of the pub, but because I had impressed them by being 6'3". As compared to their own joint altitudes of roughly five-foot-fuck-all.

After the potentially difficult job of unrolling a 12m x 7m sheet of polythene, and re-rolling it up along its other axis, in the "gale", getting it onto the frame turned out to be a doddle. All of the other lanky mercenaries they had on standby in the end were hardly needed.

Just at the critical moment, the wind got up, stretched the sheet out, flapped it up over the hoops for us, and then died away again.... exactly as I had planned all along of course.

The proud owners had already spent a lot of time, building the structure, and digging the trench to build the bury the plastic in, but the whole business of covering, battening and fixing the doors and windows only took 5 of us a little over 2 hours. (Including time-out for coffee and bacon sandwiches.)

The last picture is a carefully stage managed shot of me posing as if I know what I am doing, in a rather tallish way.

So if you want to build a tunnel of your own, rest assured that I have all the half-baked advice you could ever want.