Weeding barrow

Rain. It has been raining for days. It is raining now. It will rain till the end of the week, according to Mr. Darcy, and he is never wrong.

Neither gluing nor painting nor anything else interesting can take place in the rain so I am reduced to gardening, and this is helped because weeds are more readily dislodged from wet than dry soil. And since nobody is interested in gardening I shall discuss my Chinese wheelbarrow which is unutterably brilliant because I designed it. - Well, not unutterably, because I'm uttering it, which is a crime - the crime of Uttering - which I haven't looked up since I discovered it to be a crime, and I haven't looked it up because life is more interesting if it is full of mysteries. Life, for example, is much duller now I found out how a fly lands on a ceiling. Wondering how they managed it kept me happy for many an hour's bicycle ride. I used to imagine a quick barrel-roll while ascending, a manoeuvre requiring the most delicate judgment given that you have to hold on, upside-down and therefore in total defiance of gravity, when you accomplish it. But apparently your fly stretches out his front feet, and grabbing the ceiling rather mundanely spins his body underneath himself, a sort of reverse somersault. And there, I've just ruined a mystery for you. We all need to spend less time on the Internet. Life was so much fuller when you couldn't Google everything. You used to be able to talk about the dance but these days you just type in size of the room or the number of couples and press Enter, and the answer appears instantly.

My Chinese wheelbarrow - I should say one of my Chinese wheelbarrows, for I have built several - is a frame with a BMX wheel, and I have arranged matters so that four buckets disport themselves round about it like a lucky clover leaf. The buckets are a good plan because you can empty them easily. A single large container gets too heavy if the weeds and their clod of earth are wet from the rain. I say "you" can empty them advisedly, because my wife doesn't. For her, a wheelbarrow of any nationality is a form of mobile compost heap. You fill it up and thereafter ignore it, and it either empties itself or, like an earthworm, practices storage excretion. - Earthworms don't wee. - At the end of their life they give a great deal of stored ammonia back to the soil. - There, another mystery ruined. - One of the few lessons from A-level biology that I can remember, though actually another was the expression that overcame our biology master when summoned to examine Dddeborah's dogfish during dissection, she puzzling over the strange oesophagus-like structure running down its middle, unaware that she had been deliberately distracted by the boy behind her while I neatly pinned the earthworm I was supposed to be dissecting inside her dogfish so that the ends didn't show. (It was dead, you will be relieved to know, along with the dogfish.)

Anyway, the only features of the wheelbarrow that need pointing out are the little round bits on the legs, which being big stop it sinking into the mud, and the handlebars, which being wide allow you to balance it. They are wider than in the picture because I replaced them with Dutch town handlebars, but I can't photograph that right now. Because of the rain. Up with which I am fed. And am so restricted by that I have just googled earthworm storage excretion out of boredom, and have thereby discovered that earthworms do actually wee. I shall now google Stuff I can remember from A-level biology. I will not tell you the result.