I'VE just spent the weekend feeling like a completely pathetic female.

It's all very well wanting to be treated the same as the boys, but, when it comes down to it, there are some things we're never going to play at their level, and, having just had a weekend trying, I don't want to either.

It all started on Saturday morning when a delivery of building blocks, sand and cement arrived (the saga of the council and the garden wall continues).

If I was a bloke I'm sure I'd have been jumping all over the delivery lorry helping, but all I could do was stand and watch, leaving my spot every now and then to try and look busy by walking to the corner and gazing up the road.

Pathetic moment number two occurred just a couple of minutes later. I'd expected all the bags and blocks to be piled up neatly in my garden. Instead, they were sitting in the road. Worse still, they were occupying one of the tiny amounts of tarmac to have escaped the recent double yellow line bonanza.

Here was my dilemma - should I leave them where they were, robbing a neighbour of a rare parking space, risking being robbed myself by a passing sand and cement thief, and, with my current spell of bad luck with all things local authority-related, risking being issued with some sort of council order for leaving bricks on the highway.

So, I rang a friend. I suppose, in an ideal world, he should have dropped whatever he was doing and run around immediately. But no, he simply advised me the council was unlikely to check up on me on a Saturday and that any passing thief would need a large van and several strong pairs of arms to help.

My next wave of girliness hit me in Wickes yesterday. Now I love shopping, I even quite enjoy going to DIY shops, but Wickes is a different ball game. Go anywhere else to buy a tin of paint or packet of nails and you get lots of nice things to distract you, like lampshades, plants and matching plastic boxes. Go to Wickes and it's straightforward sand and cement.

In need of just under 100 bricks, and feeling too weak and pathetic to try and lift them, I went in search of an assistant. Now this assistant was the saint of all store assistants. He didn't laugh at the fact I was carrying half a brick with me to make sure I got the right colour and pattern, and he didn't mind helping me load them.

The problem was I couldn't just stand there and watch him. So, two at a time, instead of the standard male five to seven, I started picking up bricks, managing to hurt my back after just three bends.

Not wishing to look more pathetic than I had already I decided to grit my teeth and carry on, leaving me barely able to walk by the time I got home.

Pathetic female or not, the end result is that I've turned my house and garden into a building yard, but should soon have a new wall that I, and more importantly, the council, can be proud of.

Imight have lost a lot of face, broken my back (and while I'm being girlie about this - half my nails) in the process, but at the end of the day the council made me get the job done. With a bit of luck they might threaten to take action to make me reseal my bath and redecorate my disgusting spare room.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.