Abstraction

It was inevitable from the very moment she opened the first can.
Nearby on Hallett’s Mountain is a medium sized pond. It fills by natural seepage. Given a suitable supply of fresh water it could easily become deep enough to make a summer bathing pool. And it is on land that belongs to She Of The Town House. Given that set of circumstances, and the fact that a stream runs through the same field, it was as easy as pushing the first domino.
50m of sturdy blue pipe has been cunningly concealed in the stream bank and below a couple of trees and now several litres of water are splashing in to the pond every minute. This is probably the sort of thing that you need a license for but we have managed to ignore that inconvenience thus far. Anyway when the pond overflows it will probably run back over the boggy patch towards the stream it came out of albeit higher up.
The other scenario of course it that it doesn’t run back sensibly but breaks the bank of the pond. This would release all the water in one mighty (and I really should look for a mot juste that implies a ‘medium sized mighty’, this isn’t a dam on the Rhur) inundation. The path of this flood would run straight through the sitting room so recently finished by Bob The Other Builder. So fingers crossed it doesn’t happen. 50m of blue pipe is going to be difficult to spirit away when the finger is being pointed.
Anyroad, I seem to have gone a bit Corbett again. The point is that She Of The Town House spotted a couple of old plastic buckets in the centre of the pond. Buckets that had once held an unction that would allow shepherds to do something unspeakable to sheep. This I must skate over, but I may come back to at a later date as there is probably a rich seam here that I have yet to tap ( note to self).
Rather than spend five minutes walking back to Hallett’s Mountain to collect something sensible, she decided to apply beer to the problem. After a couple of tins, she figured it would be a practical solution to lean out across the pond with a stick. A stick that was clearly far to short for purpose. She started waving it in a manner that might attract a bucket. Failed miserably. After a while I was called from my spade work to assist. Her opinion was that if I held her firmly by one hand she cocould lean far enough out over the pond. In such a way that the short stick would seem extra sparkly attractive to the buckets and she would be able to bring them home.
The entirely foreseeable happened. After a few seconds of bucket lunging I was forced to let go.