The Mystery of the Thing That Was in the Garden

This week, in lieu of Casual Friday, which, let’s face it, wasn’t that interesting anyway, here is a photo of a mysterious and possibly priceless artefact that Terry discovered in our garden, buried deep under the earth.

Weren’t expecting THAT, were you?

Neither was Terry, to be honest. He’s been out working in the garden for the past few weeks/months/feels-like-years now, and in all that time, absolutely nothing of interest has happened whatsoever. UNTIL NOW, that is. Duh-duh-DUUUUUHHH!

Now, those of you with a good memory for mundane details may recall that when we moved into this house, the garden looked like this:

A few months later, it looked like this:

Which was better, but obviously NOT IDEAL.

This week, it looks like this:

It’s still obviously nowhere near done, but hey, we have a deck! And a wall! And some random planks of wood! Yay!

These photos completely fail to convey just how much work Terry has been forced to put into this. (I’ve done absolutely nothing, I should add. Oh no, wait, that’s not true: I’ve complained a lot about the mud that keeps being dragged into the house. That’s not NOTHING, is it?) It so happens that the people behind us are having some landscaping work done by an actual, professional garden-type person, and he told Terry that the work he’s done so far would’ve cost us thousands if we’d paid someone to do it. He also offered Terry a job, but unfortunately Terry never wants to see another garden as long as he lives now, so there’s that.

(It’s ironic that we’ve had to put so much work into creating a low-maintenance garden, purely because we both hate gardening with a passion, isn’t it?)

It was while digging the foundations for another wall (or a bench, or a veg patch, or some other thing) that Terry made the shocking discovery of The Mysterious Thing That Was Buried in the Garden. We think it’s a candle holder of some kind, so obviously we had to ask: what the hell was a candle-holder of some kind doing buried in our back garden?

If our house was an older one, on an estate that people had been living on for years, we’d have just assumed it was something that belonged to a prior owner, and which had either been buried by a child/animal (When Rubin was a puppy, he used to frequently steal stuff from us and bury it in the garden. He was particularly fond of pens, I seem to recall…), or had simply been dropped and then, during decades of gardening work, become buried far down in the earth. But! This is truly a mystery to us because…

1. It was buried really quite far down: much further than you’d expect if it had been done by accident, or by a child or whatever. In fact, it’s almost as if whoever buried it wanted to make sure it would NEVER BE FOUND. *Shiver*

2. It is a candle-holder.

3. Our house, and all of the houses surrounding it, are only about 4 years old. Before they were built, there was nothing here: this was all just fields back then, seriously.

4. The house has had one previous owner, and one set of tenants, and none of them had done anything to the garden at all: certainly nothing that would lead to a candle-holder being buried in the ground. (They also didn’t have a dog…) As you can possibly see from the first photo, the garden had been literally untouched since the house was built, so there has been no digging/burying/other candle-related activities, as far as we can tell. (And I mean, I guess you can never really know for sure, can you? Can YOU be sure – REALLY sure, I mean? – that no one has buried a candle holder in YOUR garden? CAN YOU?)

All of this led us to suspect (I say “us”: I’ve made this all up in my own head, obviously. Terry was just all, “Oh yeah, I found this in the garden. Catch you later!”) that the Mysterious Thing could only have been buried at the time the house was built, as that would’ve been the one and only time there was any movement of earth in the garden. So, I guess one of the builders working on the house used to always carry a candle with him while he worked? And he carried his candle in a glass holder, shaped like a cherub? And then one day, he dropped it while digging in the garden, and it fell into the ground and was buried? Yeah, that sounds about right.

So it’s a mystery, then. And I should probably say at this point that I am under no illusions of The Mysterious Thing ACTUALLY turning out to be a priceless artefact, or anything like that. I think it’s probably quite modern, and there’s obviously some totally mundane, not-even-remotely-mysterious explanation for its presence. There HAS to be.

I also think it’s probably going to try to kill us in our sleep, though, so, yeah. If this was a horror movie, the hapless home owners would place the Mysterious Item on their mantelpiece, little realising that it carried a powerful curse. THAT part would only become apparent after it had killed a couple of people, or otherwise wreaked havoc with their lives. The tag-line would be, “Some Things Should Stay Buried”. And in other news, I think I’ve FINALLY come up with a plot for that novel I’ve always been meaning to write!

Of course, this ISN’T a horror movie, though. It’s my blog, and the tag line is “lots of photos of me wearing 50s-style skirts and bardot tops”. Also, we don’t actually have a mantelpiece, so I’m sure we’ll be fine. After all, things like that don’t happen in real life.

Do they?