Thursday, May 05, 2011

When Shit Comes up with a Really Nice Thing

24 months ago I asked a friend if I could get some poo from her horse - to put on my plants in the Mead.

She said she couldn't guarantee it would be from her horse - the rather royally named William - but probably from a mixture of fine Wiltshire ponies.

The result was one of the most enjoyable after-work evenings of my adult life culminating in a bare back ride on William which left me happy as a 5 year old for days and a bag of steaming shit carried home in a bag in the back of the vanu which didn't even spill or leak, much to my relief.

Sadly William is no longer with us but on Sunday we decided to pay him the homage of using some of his poo on the newly laid lawn and some of the plants we'd planted in the garden including TSK's plum tree that's about to bear its first fruit and could do with a nutritional boost.

TSK peered into the bag first and summoned me quietly. There were baby mice in the bag. Tiny, blinky baby mice.

I rushed carefully through the pile of brambles to look but they were long gone, hidden in the now-perfect flaky manure but as I held the edge of the bag, a sweet, dun brown mammy mouse with wide, staring chestnut eyes stood on the edge of the bag. Her tiny claws held the edge of the bag like the hands of a tree frog cling to a stem. She thrust her soft gossamer whiskers forward in the summer breeze to investigate our presence and observed us like she'd never seen a human before.

We stared back at her like we'd never been so close to nature in all our lives.

We were in her house (not the other way around for once) so we left her to her shit and declared that William's poo would get another year to rot down and quite likely go up for sale with the house and the rest of the garden.

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