William / Spike

I knew it was a mistake.

After all, if you take a look at the update we posted on 21 August, you’ll see that, when I employed William to come around to do a little light gardening for me, not too much horticultural work actually got done at all.

In fact, for all the improvements that that young man made to my prize blooms, they might as well have christened cum-ellias rather than camellias.

Still, on that occasion I gave William the benefit of the doubt.

Perhaps he’d simply got bored – after all, we all know just how short young people’s attention spans can be.

And maybe he’d simply decided to relieve his boredom in the only way he knew how, no matter how unsuited to the real task in hand.

So I gave William a second chance.

But as you’ll see if you look at the update we posted on 8 September, when I allowed William to bring a friend along to help him out with the work… even less got done!

The combination of William with his friend Spencer just resulted, you’ll recall, in a massive water fight, with both boys getting drenched to the skin – and not just, so I understand, with water.

Am I really to be expected to have to waste my precious time personally drying two such stupid boys off with towels afterwards? (And having, I may add, to do so TWICE, as a single session of rub-a-dub-dub was certainly not enough for either of these growing young men.)

You might think, then, that by that point I had learned an important lesson - that William and gardens (or, indeed, any kind of work) just don’t mix.

But, well known as I am in my local community for turning the other cheek, I decided to give the miscreant just one last chance to earn a few bucks.

Would he like to clean my pool for me?

And I told him that he could even invite another friend to help him – as long as it wasn’t that dreadful character Spencer.

William jumped at the chance and assured me that his other best friend Spike was far more respectable and sensible than Spencer.

As pure luck would have it, when Spike arrived at the pool one afternoon later that week - and, very sensibly I thought, immediately stripped off to work in the water - I had my camera with me to capture the results.

And I leave you to judge whether or not it was, from my point of view, a case of “third time lucky”…