tales from a pigsty

I have a huge pile of branches that I pruned off the elders and plum trees. It resembles a bonfire but will never be one because of the no-bonfire-rule here. It is in fact kinder to the environment to season it for the wood stove next winter anyway, so I am preparing a place to store it. There is a wonderful redundant pigsty on my plot. I have already, with the help of my husband, cleared out the far end of it as a receptacle for farmyard manure, which I’m hoping the local farmer will deliver into it. The original door end of the pigsty, I am finding, was used for dumping stone and rubbish over the years. The stone is what we need at present, so that’s good and the rubbish is excellent material for the imagination. I do wonder how much we have been conditioned by literature and the media. Would I, pre- Agatha Christie and ‘Z-cars’, on discovering a bottle containing a clear liquid, immediately have thought that it could have contained poison and been hidden there after a terrible crime being committed by its owner?