Pond scum...

I would like to offer you, my gentle readers, a cautionary tale and a piece of advice.

The advice is: stay away from water features.

Over a year ago Tallulah (three l's and an h) purchased a small house with a concrete channel (it would be somewhat of an exagerration to call it a pond) across the garden.

Said channel held water very nicely for a few months and then (as a result of an over enthusiastic power-washing [can we have it back if you're reading this, spanglepuss] and/or lawnmowing session) it sprung a leak.

Various pieces of advice were offered by friends and relatives and a couple of plans were tried with little success - apparently there is a difference between waterproof and water resistant, who'd have thought it?

So, Tallulah and I decided to take our plight to the experts.

I've now learned that a water feature expert (and this was news to me) is someone who can paraphrase the sentence "you could try it fixing it that way but it would be very expensive and probably wouldn't work" in at least 6 different ways in the course of a conversation.

It also appears that there is absolutely no way to fix a pond and if one ever springs a leak you might as well destoy it and start again. Pond recycling research is an area that appears to have been underfunded for a number of years - possibly along with re-usable condoms.

To cut what appears to be becoming a long story short Tallulah (three l's and an h) and I are going to try lining our frankly puny feature with something that I keep calling 'Butyl kryptonite' (it probably isn't called kryptonite but is about as expensive and difficult to find) and hope for the best.

I would also like to send a message out to all water feature experts everywhere:
Chill out.
Take a breather.
Have a long walk in the park, smell the flowers and just try to forget the relative inadequacies of non underlaid EPDN and PVC liners. It'll all work out, chaps!

Ona totally unrelated note - here is a webpage about installing a computer in a stuffed beaver http://www.engadget.com/2007/04/13/compubeaver-case-mod-the-pc-stuffed-beaver/