Saved!

Two things...

...the piano. Yes, a waste company said; they would come and collect the remains of our dead piano. It would cost me £50 for the privilege but hey, it would get rid of it from the driveway and negate the risk of it falling onto my car and smashing the lovely metallic blue paintwork to smithereens in a high wind. The company would collect late afternoon, possibly tomorrow. So, mid-afternoon there was a knock on the door. A small and smiley and muscley man was on the door step.

'I see you've got the insides of a piano on your drive,' he said.

'Are you from the waste company?' I said.

'No,' he said. 'But if you want to get rid of it, I'll take it now. No charge.' And he showed me his official card that proved him to be a properly licensed scrap merchant and not some shyster who would dump what he didn't want in some Kentish beauty spot somewhere. Not that there are many Kentish beauty spots left, not since John Prescott started concreting over the county, but I digress....

So what are the chances of something like that happening? Mr Small - Smiley- Muscley loaded the piano innards onto his lorry using the dinkiest crane I've ever seen, I refilled his squash bottle for him, and he went off happy with his spoils leaving me happy at saving £50.

...the bees in the roof. Which turned out NOT to be bees after all, but WASPS!! What a relief! Not for the wasps, obviously, who are now in the process of becoming ex-wasps, but ooooh the angst I've been suffering thinking I was going to be party to a bee massacre. You spend the whole season nurturing your numbers up to an excess of a quarter of a million, then you commit an act of deliberate murder.

The Wasp Man came out and stared at the roof for a while. 'Are you sure they are bees?' said he.

'No, 'said I, 'it's an assumption based on my being a bee-keeper and the fact we've got a full-to-bursting top-bar hive at the bottom of the garden.'

Wasp Man hummed, got out his binoculars and stared at the roof a bit more. 'Definitely wasps,' he declared. 'That's a relief, isn't it?' he added. Obviously he had picked up on my bee-ocide guilt.

So he got out his cannister of insectijollop and had a good old squirt around and declared his job done.

I apologised for not being able to tell a wasp from a bee at 45 feet.

'Don't worry,' he said. 'It amazes me the number of people who think that bumble bees are wasps. I knew what a bumblebee looked like when I was two.'

I thought that was very impressive. My only memory from when I was two is walking around the back garden with a yellow bucket on my head and banging into the fence.

Two good things to end this stressy week, then. I'm keeping everything crossed that more stresses on my list will meet with equal efficiency next week.