When I had my interview with the careers advisor at school, I don’t remember digger driver being mentioned as a possible choice. Perhaps that’s just as well.

Joel, the builder, phoned today to say that he’s bringing forward the date to start work on our house to October; fantastic! But that does mean we’ll have to get on with the preparation sooner than we’d planned; so while Nick and Kieran lifted beams into position on the roof of the hangar this afternoon, I started digging the trench through the grange to run the water pipes in, for our new house.

All went well for a while; I’d dug out the entire length to about half the required depth and was making my way back, digging further down, when I noticed one of the tracks was quite close to the edge of the trench. I tried to reposition the digger, but as I was going backwards, I turned the wrong way. The digger started to lean as the track went closer to the edge, then the weight of the digger started breaking the edge off, making it slide even further into the hole!

Kieran just happened to come in at this point and stood, laughing like a drain at my panic; so I did what any sensible woman would do – abandoned ship (or digger) and left him to sort it out. Such was my fear that I’d broken the digger and possibly my son into the bargain, that it didn’t even occur to me to take a picture; sorry! But I needn’t have worried; by propping the digger up on its bucket until Nick could wedge enough huge lumps of wood into the trench to take the weight,  he was able move it onto solid ground 😉

It was 7.30pm by then, so we decided to call it a day.