- You could hardly think of a simpler job. We have a delightful old lady who wants us to clear quite a large area, I cannot call it a garden, and basically de-weed it. I agree this is not the most exciting topic in the whole world but nature will not be trifled with. We have tried to clear this area, pictured, of weeds on about seven occasions and dug them all until there is nothing left but each time nature brings on a new genre of unwanted plants or weeds shall we say.
We have already done one blitz this year and we left it five weeks before coming along that was a mistake. Before this picture was taken we have taken out individually hundreds of chickweed and now we have these minute weeds of which there must be thousands. If we take each one out of the ground that would take us at least a day and the budget does not cover that. My unilateral decision had been to take a cultivator and then pick out the weeds that appear on the surface and next time hopefully they will not be so difficult or numerous. I tried the cultivator but the ground was too dry.
This is not the most exciting picture in the whole world but just imagine picking out the weeds individually it would have taken the whole day so eventually I hoed the whole
.This brings me to the whole topic of allowances for things that may go wrong on a job. Crossrail, the railway system that was designed to go across London with access to Heathrow has been delayed for about two years now due to signalling problems – would you believe. The U.K.’s ability to mess things up is available for all to see in wonderful technicolour. The idea to enable universal contact within the whole of the national health system was given to IBM. I wonder why they failed after £250 million was spent and let’s not even talk about HS2 the wonder railway system with no economic reason for its is it 56 1/2 billion pounds? Who cares, it’s the government money but we pay through our taxes. I would love to have spent this money on nurses, doctors, police, social workers, people who really make the system work. Just imagine, all this money just to make sure people get to their destination 20 minutes earlier.
Overruns are more common than you think. Normally, I don’t go over budget with my gardening work but nevertheless it is necessary to build in a factor no matter how simple the job may seem. I have told the dear lady. We are working that there will be an extra charge and she is happy to comply but I did not expect the weeds that you can see here. We have been doing this particular plot of land over the course of 18 months and we have never seen this genre. Nature is full of surprises.
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