So, I’ve been busy. Apart from welcoming a new Baby Rogenous into the fold late last year, I’ve been arsecrack deep in manwork — something of a radical departure from the poncy stuff, like blogging, with which I prefer to fill my idle hours.

Anyway, chief among my domestic projects has been the construction of a sandpit to hold three 1000lt water tanks I scored for Christmas. The job, up until the weekend, had involved digging out part of the lawn in my severely sloping backyard and building/propping up a level timber box. This left me with a large hole to fill — too large for me to be able to afford all the expensive packing sand I’d planned to sit the tanks on.

The classifieds in the local paper came to the rescue, with one woman — who we’ll call Jane — advertising a metric shitload of free cleanfill for pick-up not far away. So on Saturday morning, at what I assumed was the reasonable hour of 10am, I grabbed my phone and called hers.

After about 10 rings, an extremely hung-over-sounding man answered:

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