A really bad haircut

Hah. New life indeed. I just paid £100 to a previously impecunious young undergraduate to mow the lawn and prune the bushes. Result? He uprooted the bushes, and left the lawn looking like GI Barbie with tufts of grass trying hard to cover the bald bits.

In any case, well, at least he did a thorough job. And I have been helping with economic stimulus, so it can't be all that bad. This morning, I received my lavender and toddled off to pot them. I hadn't dug more than 4 inches deep when the roots of the old bushes sprang up to surprise me. Never mind, I thought, I can do this. Surely it's just a few roots. Nope. It was an entire root system our young friend left for me. So I called him and gently explained that he'd left the roots. Showing. As it were. He advised me to put down some weedkiller and volunteered to come back next week to upturn the roots. No apologies. No confession of a job half done.

So what do I learn from this? There are a lot of idiots out there. I have been an idiot to give him the benefit of the doubt. So now, £100 down, I have learned a very important lesson. By all means, philantrophy is a good thing. Sometimes we just have to leave it to the likes of Bill Gates, who actually has cash to burn. I'm off to the garden centre now to get some tools to sort out the mess left behind. Just like the good old days when some idiot hairdresser left me with a really bad haircut. This time, it's not hairbands and pins. It's pots and compost, which are far more expensive.