The Hills hoist taunts me with its wiry eye.

[reddragdiva]

Well, not a Hills hoist. Instead, a ridiculously pissweak plastic and aluminium thing from Homebase, a large home depravements warehouse famous for its vast selection of precisely not quite the thing you were looking for, that just happens to be just around the corner from my house. This is, of course, fatal to newly-moved-in suburbanites.

Today's suburban slapstick involves said pissweak rotary clothes hoist and a spike for mounting it in the ground. The instructions strongly suggested mounting it in concrete, but we (well, I) went "naaah" and we got the screw-in mounting spike. arkady got the plastic spike into the ground with some effort, got it level (the spike has a spirit level built into it. Really.) and put the hoist into it and loaded it with washing.

It proceeded to tip over at an alarming angle. What does a good suburbanite do? Improvise! We got some spiky shards of wood that had been left behind the shed. Arkady proceeded to break them up with a good kick, got a hammer (Arkady had a mallet years ago, but not here), put another bit of wood over the end of the spike to spread the blow, and propped up the hoist with it. The hoist promptly leant to the other side. Break off another spike, bludgeon it in and let go of the hoist. Hoist leans at right angle to both — break off another spike, bludgeon it in. Hang up just-washed and thus quite heavy bedspread, hoist leans in the one direction left for it to lean, repeat. Hoist still leaning, give up and decide to concrete it in tomorrow. Or maybe the next day.

The hoist package contains detailed instructions on how to mix and pour the concrete base. There's a bag of gravel in the shed and there's Homebase around the corner for sand and cement. What could possibly go wrong?