Skip to my Lou

Lunchista has been back to the scene of the building-work, though to be honest it looked more like the scene of the crime. The object of the game was to make it look like somewhere that someone would like to live in, or at the very least go to work on as a "project" and then live in.

I'd never hired a skip before: it wasn't easy trying to imagine "Three cubic metres" over the phone, or working out whether the huge pieces of blockboard from the old floor (which were 200 miles away at the time) would be longer than "seventeen hundred millimetres". In the end I went for a bog-standard size skip like the one in the picture (thank you Snowmanradio), complete with drop-down ramp which, might I add, is an absolute must unless you happen to be a 20-stone Olympic fridge-thrower.

I arrived on a Friday morning and set to work on the garden. It might, I thought, look better if it wasn't strewn with junk, so out it all came. Now Lunchista, in 20 years as a "student and young professional" in the 1980s and 90s, moved house about 15 times. And each time, I took all my things with me. But this bit of basic housekeeping, judging by the state of the garden, seems to have gone right out of fashion. I unearthed no fewer than six wooden chairs, all beyond use through having been left to the mercies of the Great British Climate. Then two clothes-drying racks, a zed-bed, a wheeled table, a beer-barrel, several track-suits and, incredibly, an unopened ten-litre tin of sunflower oil. You could do a couple of hundred miles on that. Later on I spotted a tee-shirt, in the first-floor gutter of all places. Luckily the same people had considerately left a gardening-fork, two shovels and a stiff broom. There was even a brand-new pair of working boots in the dry part of the shed.

The fence had blown down, which meant I could see that next door had a compost dalek. Other than that, their garden was in an even worse state than this one. A very elderly lady answered the door and said she'd never used it but I could help myself. I thanked her and removed some of the junk from her garden too.

The skip arrived at mid-day, which meant starting the real work. It had rained every day since the building work had finished, doubling the weight of the blockboard and old carpet, and making most of it too heavy to lift, so each piece had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the skip. I found myself wondering whether this was really an optimal use of time for someone with a bad back and a Ph.D. Then it was 3 pm and the realisation dawned that not only had I not had any lunch, but the light would start to go in 90 minutes, so I might as well carry on to the bitter end.

At which point my life was saved by an all-day breakfast at the local Greasy Spoon, followed by a hot shower.

The following day was a bit easier: all that was left to do was tidy up the living bits of the garden, get rid of the dead bits of fence, sweep the muck off the path and patio and unblock the drains. Declared before lunch.

I wondered what all this activity would actually be worth compared with, for example, a typical day's work in an office. That house will eventually be sold: the speed with which this happens, and the eventual price, both depend on the buyers' enthusiasm. This may (or may not) be helped by being able to see all the way to the pretty patio at the end of the garden, or indeed to the foot of the front wall.

The odd thing is that, because of the way house prices in the UK these days so totally dwarf the wages for ordinary work, any effect Lunchista's two days of labour may have will be measured in thousands, rather than hundreds, of pounds.