Early One Morning...

Did you know that ITV4 shows episodes of Minder at six o'clock in the morning?  No, nether did I until I came down with a bout of nasal congestion so bad that I couldn't breath through my nose over the weekend.  Unable to sleep all night, I found myself on Sunday morning watching an episode involving Billy Connolly.  It was followed by an episode of The Professionals involving John Junkin and Nick Brimble - Google them if you aren't my age and recognise them as fixtures in 1970s and 1980s crime series, (actually, Junkin was also a prolific comedy script writer who even wrote for Morecombe and Wise for a while) - which I got halfway through before the congestion eased enough for me to go back to bed and try sleeping.  Whilst I was lying there, waiting for sleep to come, I heard it again.  The 'it' I refer to is the sound of a wheelie bin or bins being shifted around in the alley way running behind the terrace of houses I live on.  Now, I know that you will say that there's nothing unusual in that, but for the past few weeks I've heard someone moving bins around not just early in the morning, but often in the evening and even late at night.  And not always on or prior to refuse collection days.

Often the bin-shifting is followed by the sounds of wood being sawn, leaving me to imagine that someone is using two bins to rest timber on before sawing it into pieces.  As I can't be arsed to actually get up and go outside to see what's actually going on, I'm left to speculate as to what is actually going on in that alley.  I'd like to imagine that my neighbour is constructing something so secret that he can only work on it at times when he thinks nobody will see him: late at night and early in the morning.  Bearing in mind the time of year, I'd like to believe that this project is some kind of tableau featuring a nativity scene.  All that sawing is the sound of him constructing life-size wooden cut-outs of shepherds, wise men, mangers and Virgin Marys.  Perhaps that's why the sawing seems to have ceased - he's busy inside the house, painting them.  I live in hope that he will publicly unveil this fully illuminated tableau and that children will queue up to see it.  Maybe it will be erected in his back garden.  However, I'm fervently hoping that it will be mounted on his roof, for the whole of Crapchester to see.  Every evening now, when I come home from work, I look hopefully up at his roof, but so far I've been disappointed.  Maybe tomorrow.  Or maybe what I'm hearing is somebody cutting up fire wood...