I overcame a long-standing hang-up about reversing a trailer a while back, and it’s one of my proudest moments. My grandfather taught me how at the Pikes Point Transfer Station in Onehunga when I was a teenager: hardly a low-pressure situation, but I’m very grateful he did. I used to call it Zen and the Art of Trailer Backing. “Let the trailer lead you,” he would say.

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A few years ago, something changed. Specifically, a new car with a backing camera and a lot of beeping. I lost my moxie. Backing a trailer into our carport involves a 90-degree turn in a very narrow street between tightly parked cars. I became anxious about this. We’d pack up the trailer after camping and I’d start to strategise how not to back it in when we got home.

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Then, at the end of our annual camping holiday this summer, we fetched up in the carpark of McDonald’s Whangārei with the kids in the back seat, hungry, and a trailer loaded with gear. After briefly attempting to navigate the drive-thru, and realising we’d never get around the bend, I had to reverse. I called for quiet. I turned the beeping off. And instinctively, I turned around, eyeballed the trailer, and backed it around the corner. Getting it in the driveway at home was a cinch.

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I tell this story as I’m doing a lot of trailer-backing at the moment. We’ve embarked on a rather large landscaping project involving chainsaws, diggers, retaining walls and fences, and this has spun into several months of work, which has – finally – started to pay off. One afternoon the other day, we marked out the new garden with orange spray paint, stood back, and realised how bloody big it is.

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This weekend, after a false start involving me, the trailer and a sprained ankle, which need not be discussed further, we’ve got a lot of planting to do – oh, four years after we moved in. That’s four years of staring at a falling-down fence and a barren bit of lawn, and feeling a bit lost with it all.

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You can live with substandard appliances and a lack of storage, to a point, but a garden has the ability to make you feel secure – to make you feel safe. Planting a garden, for us, anyway, is a way of creating a private world – one that evolves and changes as the years pass. It’s enormously satisfying.

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Similarly, it gives me great pleasure that all the houses in this issue – even the loft apartment of Sam Mannering – are really grounded. They all seek to make their own world – to create a safe haven. I think we’re all seeking that... even if it does require you to brush up on your trailer skills.

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