Sunday morning I woke up with this earworm.

Spookily later on a rag-and-bone man did come down the street; I've not seen one of those for years. OK, it was more of a pikey yelling out of the cab of a pick-up truck, but the coincidence is still uncanny.

The Aged had had a new knee the previous week so was hobbling about on crutches and generally trying to do far more than he should have been (apart from the physio-terrorist's exercise regime where I suspect he was doing far less than he should have been).

Saturday we (by which I mean I, under instruction from The Aged) did a few odd jobs around the garden. I filled the bird feeder, sorted out a blockage in the pond pump, vacuumed the scum from the bottom of the pond, topped up the water in the pond (to replace water lost in previous two activities), refilled the water feature in the front garden (previous owners of the property must have watched too many garden makeover programmes and/or were extremely pretentious as they put a water feature in the front garden).

We worked quite well together and I enjoyed the afternoon - a good bit of father-son bonding. The pond vacuum cleaner sucks up water and sludge until it is full, then switches off, disgorges its contents through the outlet hose and switches back on again. This means that you have about three seconds to put the inlet hose somewhere safe, switch off the machine (so it doesn't start up again until you are ready) and point the outlet hose at a bucket. Having an invalided The Aged sitting by the machine to switch it off and on at appropriate times made this job a whole lot easier.

The topping up and refilling activities required the unrolling of the garden hose and generally feeling a bit like a fireman, which is somewhat satisfying. Or is it just me?

I also fixed his internet browser. The page was compressed to about half the height of the screen. Removing the six search bars soon sorted that out.

The magic moving pictures machine was showing one of the ubiquitous fly-on-the-wall police programmes. A report came in about a car driving the wrong way along the motorway. The commentator gave the useful insight "as the police rush to the motorway, they are given details of the vehicle they are looking for". "AS IF IT WOULD BE DIFFICULT TO SPOT", I shouted at the magic moving pictures machine.

Monday we didn't actually do a barn-raising. That title was a bit of hyperbole. We didn't even do a shed-building. We did, however, do a shed re-roofing. There is still a bit of tidying up to do round the edges, but it was getting late and we wanted to go to Waggamammas.