Corona Wildlife Diary: Day Fifty-two

As the world shuts down around us the uplifting role that wildlife plays in our lives becomes more vital than ever. So, for my own sanity as much as anything, I’m going to keep a daily diary of what I find around my garden.  Photograph the wildlife you can see from your window or in your garden and post your pictures on the ‘Sussex Wildlife Trust Nature Table’ page.  

Day Fifty-two

Way back in March, 57 days ago, I made a short video of my back garden.

(You can see what my garden used to look like here.)

It struck me yesterday that things have changed so much in the garden in that time that it's time for an update.

The first flowers are coming into bloom in the wildflower meadow, the pond looks healthier and I've gained some bee hotels and a compost heap. Not too sure my shaved hair dispenser has been appreciated by the birds though.

I've made another short film of the back garden for you to watch on the Bank Holiday. 

I wrote about my unusually shaped pond a few days ago (here). People seemed interested in this strange-shaped garden feature. In fact one lady even said she'd pay to come and look at it. So if you watch today's video I'm sure some of you will be sad to see the vulgar pond is hardly visible anymore. It is now overgrown and abandoned and it's been condemned. There's a story behind this. 

The Dark Secret of the Unusual-shaped Pond

A few years back we were restoring the pond in the autumn. We trimmed around the edges to reveal its suggestive shape and I was tasked with clearing the pond itself which had become clogged with pond weed. As I mentioned a few days ago, the pond also had a fountain feature and we thought it would be nice to get this working again. The fountain was powered by a submerged electrical water pump at the bottom of the pond.

The pond before 'the incident''.

Removing the overgrown pond plants was really tricky. It was a thick tangled mass and in the end I had to resort to taking a hacksaw to cut the thick roots. I couldn't see what I was doing (as I was sawing in the black water) and I inadvertently sawed through the water pump's power cable. This now meant I had both my hands in a pool of water along with a sawn-through electrical cable (with its wires exposed) which lead straight to a plug in the kitchen's wall socket. I had no idea.

I wanted to see if the fountain still worked so, with my hands still underwater I yelled to my wife to turn the power on. In the kitchen she pressed the wall socket's 'on' switch and...

A year or so previously an electrician had come and looked at the electricity circuits in our old 1960's bungalow. He declared half of the electrics 'illegal' and noted that the whole place was a 'death-trap'. So we had paid him to Blencowe-proof the house and he installed every possible safety feature and circuit breaker just in case at any point in the future I decided to stick both hands in a pool of water alongside an exposed live wire. 

So, Clare pressed the wall socket's 'on' switch and the entire bungalow's circuits tripped. The house lights turned off, the washing machine stopped and the record player's turntable slowed down. The music silenced mid-song.

On my knees in the garden I pulled out a severed cable from the black water and stared at the three exposed wires. I felt a chill as I realised how close I was to electrocution. Each time I see the pond it reminds me that I almost died right there. I think of friends gathering each year in the garden, dressed in black and laying wreaths alongside this erotically-shaped pond in memory of me. That's probably why we've let it become overgrown, the bindweed and brambles hiding the memories of that (almost) fateful day.