Last year I procured a couple of wooden pallets from which I salvaged sufficient wood to make my grandchildren a mud kitchen and a bug hotel and so, flushed with success – something which, of course, would generally only happen to the contents of a toilet – I managed to bag a couple more with which I planned to make some Rustic (badly finished and not put together properly) Garden Planters with which to keep my wife similarly happy.

I have only a very small car, but having removed the child seats and dropped the back seat I pushed and cajoled the pallets into the space created, having previously spent no more than a couple of hours assuring my wife that they would contain no spiders with plans to transfer their silken little abodes into the space underneath the passenger’s seat, from where they might startle and alarm a woman of delicate disposition.  (For the record, I am assured that in this country spiders do not, by and large, bite humans, but merely frighten them from their tuffets.)

Some time later, having pulled into the front drive of my house with a suspension that gave up the ghost several miles away, I discovered that I have now unearthed two absolute truths which I can reveal about pallets:
1. They hide spiders very well
2. They are much easier to get into a car than out of it.

In the end I spent some considerable time pondering the options: either take the pallets to pieces inside the car, or call the fire brigade to remove its roof.  Eventually I did manage to remove the pallets complete from the car which, as it turns out, is even more fortunate than it sounds as I have since spent several hours armed with an arsenal of hammers and jemmies, attempting to retrieve usable timber from the aforementioned frames only to be left with a mountain of splintered firewood and more cuts and abrasions than a Saturday night in A&E.  As it turns out, disassembling the car may well have proven more practical than dismantling the pallets in situ.

So, now I have two giant wooden trellises on my lawn that I am totally unable to strip down into constituent parts, due to the manufacturers decision to use what appear to be six inch nails hammered into place with 81mm mortar rounds, and after the merest sprinkling of rain I am now unable to lift them without an unprecedented hike in the NHS physiotherapy budget, a surgical truss and the loan of an industrial grade crane.  I may leave them for the bugs to eat, they are, after all, making a perfectly passable job of my shed, but they are currently a) somewhat mid-crease in my grandson’s cricket pitch and b) preventing me from getting the lawnmower out so, sooner or later I will attack them with an axe and, pausing only to put any severed limbs on ice for later reattachment, set fire to what remains prior to having the lawn re-laid.  I will get the seed whilst I am at the Garden Centre buying Rustic Planters…