Dear LPG readers,

I have a story to tell…

It begins relatively early one morning at that time of year when, at last, the weather is on the turn for the better.  I started to notice that my gardening efforts were not yielding the benefits I had expected.   I don’t do that much out there anymore.  My aim these days is to ensure that the grass is low enough not to be a tripping hazard for any visitor who might venture out on a good day, but there was one very dry-looking patch that was letting it down.

It was a little upsetting, and vigil keeping became part of my routine for a while.  With my first cup of tea of the day in hand, I would take a look beyond the window to the back garden before settling down with that drink for a catch-up with the early morning television news. 

I was not happy when I realised that a fox had adopted the dry spot as its own.  It had to be there regularly and had to be responsible.  

I decided that evasive action was needed and started by opening the back door and shouting at it as loudly as possible without upsetting my neighbours.  ‘Grrrrrrrrr’ and ‘scram’ were my words of choice.  That worked for a while, and the fox would bolt and disappear, but a couple of minutes later, it would be back and intent on something which appeared much more important than my interruptions.  To make things worse, it only took about a week for the menace to realise that my bursts through the back door were not going to harm him.  I tried to provide a sudden cold shower on occasion, which had an initial desired effect, but I think that I was getting wetter than the fox overall.  My water jug-dashing skills achieved nothing but a demonstration of my inaccuracy when it comes to exacting water on a specific destination.  And it always seemed as if the fox had more important things to worry about than me.

For some reason, one morning a week later, I decided that my early morning cup of tea needed to take a higher place in my routine. Having made it, I took it upstairs.  Breakfast television is much the same when watched up there, but I still felt the need to take a look out of the window.

Looking at the situation from the elevated angle that my bedroom window afforded revealed the whole story, or at least a lot more of it.  There was a ‘ménage à trois’ playing out right in my back garden.  

From the upper angle, I could see a couple of snuggled-up foxes on top of my garden shed, and they were the object of the fox on the grass’s attention.  It was as if they were doing precisely what a couple intent on upsetting the third element of such a triangle would do in many a feature film, and the desired effect was playing out right in front of my eyes.  

My observations lasted a lot longer than that morning, and our grass-bound suitor did attempt to interlope on the roof, at which point a fight broke out between what I can only assume were the rival males, while the other fox looked on.   It did not last long, and soon the loser was back on my patch of grass, which was lacking in greenness, while the snuggling on the roof resumed. 

This scene played out for a few mornings after that, while I observed from upstairs. Even though I did not know which fox was the cheetah in the mix, I had a little more compassion for the fox on the grass. Such situations do not go on forever.

My grass is now an even shade of green again, and I don’t know what happened at the end of the story.   I look at the grass differently now.  I have come to realise that the on-looking fox was starving my lawn of sunlight because he was being starved of his heart’s desire.  I feel pretty sorry for him, but I have learned never to get involved in any affair of the heart...

Perhaps this is proof that both the course of true love and the state of my grass are destined never to run smoothly… 

NP, Dartford