It is a very beautiful gate, even though it was a bit of a last-minute idea. The winter of small improvements continues: the other day, we had our builders Dwayne and Troy around to rebuild a retaining wall that our neighbours broke during their renovations – it’s a long story, one I won’t get into here – and to build a very, very tall fence between us. While they were here, I thought it would be a good idea to get a new gate.

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Gates are funny things. No one really wants to design them for you. We have a very tall Cape honeysuckle hedge out the front of our place. It must be very old, though not as old as I’d thought: the other day, my neighbour sent me a delightful photo from the 1920s of our suburb, and you can see our house, sitting up high and mighty above a completely scalped section. Anyway, the hedge is now very tall, and it looked silly without a gate. We didn’t want a tall one, and we didn’t want any security or anything like that. Just a gentle wooden garden gate, maybe with some battens. Painted white and not very high. Troy turned up and suggested 40mm-square battens, which sounded good to me. I bought a new letterbox, which was another highlight – in 12 years and two houses, we’ve never had a nice letterbox – and then we bought new house numbers to match. It’s the small things, right?

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Anyway, the builders then proceeded to build something that I can only describe as beautiful. They laboured over it for days. It is built from the aforementioned battens, and the battens are lined up perfectly so they close against each other and you can’t see where the gate is and the fence posts are, and the letterbox sits in there behind it. The tops are cut at an angle, so the water will run off. It is magnificent, and it has what I now know to be called a snap latch, which makes a satisfying dunker-dunk when it closes.

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We got the bill. I shouldn’t have been surprised: it cost half as much as we’d spent on our share of the retaining wall and fence. I don’t care. You can stand across the street, and look at the gate, and you can see the garden waving about behind it: it’s nearly spring, and the garden will soon explode. You come into the garden and the tall fence makes it feel like a courtyard, enclosed and sheltered. Now I just need to finish painting the bloody thing.

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