It’s not a great picture, but this is the patch of what used to be grass on the verge outside of my house. They run all along the road, both sides. My bit is the only bit that looks like this.

In May of 2005, builders were coming close to completion of the new building opposite, a small residential home for the disabled. Then one day they dug a big hole in my grass verge for the electricity to be connected. They filled it in again – not properly because they still needed access, because, a few days later another hole was dug a couple of feet further along to connect the water. They filled it in again. It’s already looking like a building site. Then finally, about a week later, a third hole was dug, next to the other two, for the gas. They filled it in again and left. Left a mess. Rubble and old bricks that had been dug up were scattered on the surface. There was very little actual grass and it had not even been made flat. No attempt was made to repair the damage. Then we had a lot of rain.

Of course, the verge opposite outside the new building was also in this state. And then, just a few days later, my wife and I went out one morning to walk the dogs and there, on the other side of the road, were two men and a trailer load of turf. At last the verge was going to be repaired. Except by the time we got back the men had vanished and only one side of the road had been turfed and it wasn’t ours. We waited. And we waited some more. By this time, the patch was looking like something from a world war 1 battle zone. Cars had driven over it and got stuck in the mud and burned deep tracks.

So – figuring this was council business as it is, after all, public land, I wrote to them and asked them to repair the damage. This was in June 2005. I won’t bore you with the letters, visits, phone calls, promises but it all came down to who was responsible. Clearly the last lot to dig a hole were but tracing them was proving difficult. And then, one day in November, we arrived home to find that the whole patch had had some topsoil spread over it and raked flat. At last.

A couple of days later I saw a van pull up and two men got out. I went out to greet them expecting the turf to be in the back. But what they actually had was a small – and I mean small – box of grass seed which they attempted to spread thinly over the entire area. As everyone knows, if you are sowing grass seed (or turf for that matter) the ground has to be flattened and rolled down. This ground, of course had not been prepared. The very next day a cyclist attempted to ride over it and left a groove six inches deep plus the footprints where he had to bail from the bike! We tried to protect it with barriers but it still seemed to attract walkers, cyclists, cars and kids who thought it would be fun to leave their mark. And then, it poured with rain for about three days solid.

And the picture shows what it looks like now. And the grass on the other side of the road is looking pretty good.