On My First Visit to the Imperial Palace

I just paid my first visit to the Forbidden City (the abode of M’Lady S, for the uninitiated.)

I was nervous, as you’d expect; it’s very posh and not the sort of place to which peasant stock like me is at all habituated. But you know us peasants – nothing if not presumptuous when given adequate incentive, and I had been granted an explicit invitation for the purpose of collecting some horse manure. So in I went, all ready to bow at the first hint of an encounter with the resident nobility.

There was no encounter. There was nobody at home, save the little princess who barked at me briefly. I’d been told that, in such an event, I should feel free to help myself, so that was what I set out to do.

I’d gone equipped with two buckets, but no shovel. I’d assumed that they would have a dung shovel, and so there would be no need to carry one half a mile there and half a mile back. I was a little concerned that I might not be able to find it without assistance or the opening of doors to which I hadn’t been invited; but that, it transpired, wasn’t the problem. The dung shovel was hanging in plain sight on the stable wall. The problem was that I couldn’t find the dung heap. So there I was, having dung shovel but no dung to shovel with it.

I walked home with two empty buckets, salving my disappointment by planning a blog post about today’s splendid adventure. And now you have it.