Another brick in the wall

Quentin Letts is having a thorough rant. He has reached the topic of the BBC and their rubbish provision of religious programming.

He is of the opinion that a Good Sing is one of the magnificent experiences of the human condition, and that hymns are the perfect vehicle for this.

I am not interested in listening to Songs Of Praise, because of all the talking that goes with the Good Sing, but apart from that I entirely agree with him. One of my favourite bits of Christmas is the carol services, because everybody knows the words, and we can all bellow along nicely together. I do not at all like these services which thoughtlessly include some unfamiliarly modern carols, especially if they have also omitted The Holly And The Ivy. There should be some rules.

I read some excerpts to Mark and Number Two Daughter over breakfast this afternoon. I think that I like him very much indeed.

After breakfast we suddenly realised that it had stopped raining.

We bounced out into the garden to make a start.

It all involves a huge amount of head-scratching, and scribblings on bits of scrap paper. We have only got a tiny space, and it is absolutely full already. We have got to decide where to put everything whilst we dig bits of it up.

Today we have started with the flower bed at the end. This is a long brick affair about two and a half feet high. We needed to empty it, because for the usual economic reasons, we needed the bricks to build another flower bed further up the garden, and because Mark’s new shed will be going in its place.

I dug out the plants that we wanted to keep and re-earthed them in the front garden.

The front garden has been untouched for years until now, because of the trampoline, and it would appear that it has become a dating site for invertebrates.

I have never seen so many slugs and snails in one place.

I have covered it with slug pellets, but even so, this morning I spent ages capturing the wily ones who had escaped by climbing into the plants and hiding between the leaves. I chucked them into the road. I do not feel good about this, but at least they are in with a small chance at a new life, they can always go and live in the garden of the staff house up the road. Kitchen porters do not seem to be very interested in garden maintenance.

After that we started demolishing the flower bed.

Mark knocked the walls down, as carefully as he could in order to preserve the bricks. My job was to bash the mortar off them so that they were tidy enough to be re-used again.

This is hard work.

I had been bashing away with a stone chisel and a hammer for ten minutes before Mark had a genius recollection, and disappeared into the shed to produce a large machine that I had never seen before. This turned out to be a mechanical chisel, given to him by my father on some past occasion when we were trying to do some impossibly labour-intensive job with medieval equipment.

The mechanical chisel was magnificent.

You squeezed the trigger and leaned on it, and it bashed away with hardly any effort at all.

Mark set up a little workbench with a block to stop the bricks from sliding about, and after that I blasted my way through bricks with industrial efficiency.

He mixed cement, and started building the wall.

The sun almost shone, and there was a soothing warmth on my shoulders. I battered away at the bricks, and occasionally my fingers. Mark kindly provided me with some goggles in a rare moment of Health And Safety thoughtfulness, and in the end we had laid a couple of rows of bricks and made a complete mess.

Mark looked at my fingers and pointed out that I had fundamentally altered the shape of my wedding ring, and that I was unlikely to be able to get it off. He turned out to be right about this, because not only had my ring become misshapen, so had my finger, and it took some swearing and application of washing up liquid to separate the two.

I did in the end, and Mark fixed my ring. He said that I ought to leave it off until the swelling went down, but it felt so peculiar not to be wearing it that I shoved it back on anyway, and it was all right.

I did not at all want to stop and go to work, but of course in the end we had got to.

We can have another go tomorrow.