AFTER the efforts of knocking down our old garden shed and filling the space it had left with a colourful collection of plants in carefully chosen pots I naively thought there would be a chance to sit among the blooms with an air of contentment at a job well done and maybe enjoy a small tincture - as the late great Brenda Harris would put it.

“You were wrong to assume,” announced the housemate. “You know what assume does?”

“Yes… it make an ass of both of us,” I replied quoting a former colleague who never quite picked up the point of ‘assume - making an ass of you and me’.

“I still think tiling the wall where the shed used to be to give it a sort of Mediterranean feel would be a great idea,” chipped in my sister, the originator of this ‘great idea’.

“But we live in Abergavenny not Andalusia,” I replied knowing I was already the bull in this particular bull fight.

“I know but I like to have different areas in the garden and we haven’t got a sunken Mediterranean garden,” said the housemate.

“Just because it’s down some steps doesn’t make it a sunken garden,” I muttered, hoping in vain that pedantry would prove a distraction.

“It would lovely and we’ve got to render and paint the wall where the shed used to be, so tiling it would only be an extension of that really,” she added.

“I’m going to start searching for some tiles…actually you could have a look when you go to France for the weekend,” she announced to my sister.

“I’m not bringing a car full of tiles back from France,” replied my sibling with the same tone which called a halt to the housemate’s plans to bring home a giraffe statue from our last family trip to the continent much to the horror of The Mother who had visions of sharing the back seat with the beast.

With the tile planning going at full pelt a distraction did come from an unlikely source when my neighbour decided to cut down a massive tree which dominated a far corner of our gardens.

“Look how much extra space that has given us!” announced the housemate in delight as she reviewed the work.

“We’ve got a whole new space to plan a project in,” she pointed out as she gave The Mother a guided tour of the garden.

“I think we should just extend the gravel and stick some nice big statement pots there for the moment,” I said, hoping for an easy life.

“We could I suppose,” replied the housemate. “Or we could move everything that is in that corner of the garden over to the other corner so that we’ve got a much better area to do the barbecues and pizzas when we have people around and much more shade to sit in when it gets hot,” she continued, clearly as pleased as punch with her new plans.

“Shade to sit in?” I muttered as I stalked off to get the spade and the rake to begin levelling the area.

“Chance would be a fine thing!”