Free Once Upon A Time in the West . . . Country by Tony Hawks

had absolutely no chance of making my appointment with the councillor to discuss buses. Momentarily supporting the weight of the piano with my back, I fished in my pocket for my mobile phone and called the town councillor. With only one bar of signal on the phone, I knew that the line wouldn’t be a good one.
    ‘Hello, it’s Tony Hawks here,’ I began, sounding strained as a result of the weight on my back. ‘You know we’re supposed to be meeting at four? Yes, well I have a slight problem . . . I’m currently supporting a piano that has a leg on it that won’t come off . . .’
    ‘You’re where ?’ I heard from the other end of the line.
    The situation wasn’t helped by a poor signal on the phone.
    ‘I’m waiting on my neighbour, who’s fetching this tool we need. I can’t move from the piano till he gets back.’
    ‘You’re at your neighbour’s, playing the piano?’
    ‘No, I—’
    The line went dead. Curses. The one bar of signal had buggered off. Where does it go when that happens, I wondered? And why does it come back again? Does it drift off in the wind? Whatever the reason, the councillor was now left thinking that me playing the piano to my neighbour was more important than honouring our appointment. I stood there, disappointed, a piano at my shoulder. Alone. Trapped. Once again I had been undone by my own misplaced confidence. I’d thought I knew how two men could move a piano, and I’d thought it would be easy. How wrong I’d been.
    Finally Ken returned brandishing an odd-looking tool unlike any I had seen before. It somehow resembled a cross between a screwdriver and a scythe.
    ‘Sorry, Tony,’ he said, as he let himself in, ‘it was a bit trickier to find than I was hoping.’
    What followed was crunch time. If Ken, with this new and unfamiliar tool, failed to remove the leg, there would be nothing for it but to give up and call in the professionals.
    Ken strained as he pulled on the tool. He went blue again – for the third time in one afternoon. This time, though, his final gasp was exultant.
    ‘Gah! Dunnit!’
    Heroically, Ken had loosened the leg, and now it could be unscrewed.
    I’m not going to begin to say that the rest of the procedure went smoothly. We dragged the piano between rooms easily enough, but lifting the piano to get the legs back on tested us once again and we were unable to manage without recourse to the car jack. I’ve since looked at YouTube clips of pianos being dismantled and moved with relative ease and without a car jack in sight, but for some reason Ken and I couldn’t have managed without it.
    So much for it taking less than an hour. We were still toiling away when Fran made it back from yoga.
    ‘Why are you both purple?’ she asked.
    I dodged the answer and suggested, not without a sense of urgency, that she make us both some tea.
    A little later, poor Ken went home exhausted.
    I left a nice bottle of wine on his doorstep that night.
    ***
    The summer continued to be the kind that made the front pages of the newspapers.
     
    PHEW! WHAT A SCORCHER!
     
    This sort of headline had always puzzled me. The weather was not news. Whilst a correspondent might be required to bring us the latest on missing planes or the latest conflict in the Middle East, we didn’t need the newspapers to tell us what was happening bang outside our front doors. Was it hot yesterday? I hadn’t noticed. Thank goodness for that alert newspaper reporter.
    Whenever it’s hot, I want to swim. Devon’s beaches were only forty minutes away, but we’d discovered that they weren’t Britain’s best-kept secret. August brought hordes of holidaymakers, who selfishly got into cars and formed themselves into traffic jams, doubling the journey time for us. They made the beach experience uncomfortable and sometimes disagreeable. I’ve always much preferred being on a beach in a foreign country, where the conversations of the families on adjacent towels remain a mysterious burble of