At the end of March, work finally began on creating a pond in the back garden at Burnbank. Over the course of the five years since I bought the pond liner, the idea in my head was that it would be a rectangular shape. Recently, I managed to find a scrap of paper from 2020 which intimated that the liner measurements were 8m by 6m. So let's crack on! In the interests of completing the project before climate change renders water even more of a luxury, a local gardening business was recommended to me, and so it was that VB duly arrived, full of enthusiasm and seemingly undeterred by my cautionary tales of tough ground to dig. VB is very much on board with the whole wildlife gardening malarkey. Indeed, he is an interesting chap with whom to discuss environmental matters, not least because he has his own manifesto available on Amazon. And so it was that we broke ground, although not exactly in a classical rectangular shape. By the end of the afternoon, VB was coming around to the ...