today was a going to the hospital day and it started off well because i was waiting at the bus stop at mad o’clock and along came my brother. so i got a lift all the way there and had a nice little chat into the bargain.

and this afternoon i had to go to see my lovely doctor, which means walking along the towpath and then crossing over to the basingstoke canal and walking along THAT towpath, which is a bit more rubbish than the navigation towpath, but at least it is still a towpath.

remember i was telling you about the railway bridge over the road that is being replaced at christmas? well, a bit further down the track the railway crosses the navigation and, same again, they are replacing the metal half of the bridge. and this is a picture of part of the crane that they are going to use when replacing the bridge…

this bit is what i guess you would call the ‘boom’ of the crane. it weighs 64 tons.

if i keep up my diet of cakes and sweets i will need a hundred-wheel lorry thing like that to carry me about so it’s a good job i saw it today because now i know where to hire such a thing.

when i was taking the picture a man in a fluorescent jacket and hard hat came up to me and said “And you are….?”
he had a funny nose. if i knew someone with a snout like that i would call him AIR-BRAKES behind his back. he looked like stanley baxter. i said i was a nosey parker.

having just typed that i have just realised that i should perhaps have said something else but that’s what i said. so sue me. he just wanted to make sure i didn’t get squished so even though i felt affronted at the time for being ordered about on my very own towpath i now feel a bit mean. but only a bit.

they have had to build a special timber road right there under DEAD MAN’S BRIDGE because all the ground round there belongs to the national grid and under the ground, less than a metre deep are twelve-billion squizzavolt power cables in oil-cooled casings that run power down to guildford. and they don’t want snapping by the enormous crane.

when it snows you can see the pattern of the lines under the field-that-may-never-be-ploughed because of the heat they give off. and how do i know all these things? because i walk round talking to people and i store these little nuggets away.

here’s a picture of the bridge. i’ve got to take the charlotte rose under there tomorrow before the navigation is closed. the brick arch on the far side is staying but the steel bit nearest the camera is being switched…

i can’t tell you how excited i am by the power of this scale of engineering. i had just taken the bridge picture and i turned round and i saw chas, the man who works the dredger, on the other side of the water. he was having a gaze in wonderment too.

mustn’t be late for the doctor! off i went

at west byfleet i saw a funny thing. now then, i didn’t go to university and i didn’t pay much attention at school. i confess that i haven’t really mastered the apostrophe, that i was knocking on for thirty before i realised that there is no apostrophe in ‘its’ unless you are abbreviating ‘it is’. i would rather write about clothes for children than childrens’ clothes or children’s clothes. but i DO know that when it comes to apostrophes they certainly shouldn’t be doing this…

but look at what’s happening; there’s a weird sort of maverick, punk-rocking logic behind it all. why is there no apostrophe at all in ‘ploughmans’?
well, that would mean two ploughmen, which would be silly, so no apostrophe there.
apostrophes simply mean two or more of. simple.
looking at that sign made me feel distinctly ovine. i like making up words and i do it all the time but the chalkster here is like a wild west outlaw when it comes to punctuation. ride into town, rob the bank, shoot the sherriff, make your horse go WHHIHHIHIHHNN on its back legs and then gallop off while everyone is still picking their jaw off the ground.
“wha?”
“it’s THE TOAST’IES KID! yee hah!”

on the way home i stood on the bridge again and got cold while the boom was taken off my ‘obesity-chariot to be’ and then twiddled round so it could be fitted to the rest of the crane…

as i sit and type this in the midnight hours they have shut the road outside. no more traffic until the bridge has been switched on christmas day. a nice man from the site came round the other day and presented me with a massive tin of toffees to placate me in case their noise had disturbed me.

cranes, boats, canals, cranes, national grid, no traffic, cranes, fluorescent jackets, toffees… ahhhh blisssssssssss, it must be christmas!

season’s greetings, readers. have a great holiday.

safety boots and helmets must be worn at all times.

there’s no end of engineerifying going on around here; quite a lot of it just outside my window. every night the bridge pixies come and they shut off the road that goes under the bridge. then they do secret things until it is light when they scurry away only to reappear when darkness falls. it’s marvelous.

once there was a railway line. actually there were two lines, one up and one down, and that was good. we knew where we were. but then the queen decided to have double the fun and two more lines were installed, so now we had two up and two down. except we didn’t because the old brick bridge was too narrow to take four lines. the queen held a competition throughout the land to think of what we could do with the problem of the bridge that was thin and the lines that were fat.

up stepped a brave young engineer and his name was ‘fresh-faced jim’. he was very poor and very young and his idea was to build another bridge out of old corned beef tins and have it next to the brick bridge.

and so the bridge was built but then it went all rusty and needed to be replaced. the end.

they are going to whip out the old metal bridge, like a magician with a table cloth, and slip a new one in before all the trains fall through the hole. there’s nothing wrong with the older, brick one of course. aah, those were the days…

just up the road they are replacing all the electrical strings on all the pylons. there are loads of these pylons nesting here, feeding off the tasty electric that they slurp out of the national grid.

there is scaffolding and chainsaws for the trees and tractors and up, up, up so high that they almost touch the sky we can see the cradlemen. when they paint the pylons, which they do, they paint them yellow so they can see where they have been and the paint turns grey. the new electrical strings are thicker and they sparkle in the sunlight. the new strings have more of the electric in and the new insulators are lovely clear glass ones and not the cheap looking maroon ceramic ones.

now lets nip over the road and go up the towpath to pyrford lock and see what the stoppage there is all about.

the lock is closed. no one may use it while the maintenance takes place. there is a gantry over the bottom end of the lock which has been used to lift one of the bottom gates out so it can be worked on. the gate is lying across the boat and the balance beam has been taken off it and is lying beside the lock. on trestles is a part of the lock gate itself which has been removed because it is broken.

the whole gate must weigh, what? a ton and a half? something like that. when it is fitted it turns on a metal spike that you can see at the bottom of the gate. the top of the gate is held by a metal collar. a while back this gate came away from its fittings when part of the lock wall holding the collar collapsed. the piece of wood which forms the ‘hinge’ side of the gate had its neck broken. you can see the ’snap’ in the last ’snap’.

the gate had its bolts undone and the parts of the gate were loosened and dismantled by having wooden wedges driven into the joints. and then it gets a coat of that blacking on the new wood and the gate is re-hung, ready for yet more boats to smash into, full steam ahead.

all these men who do these engineering things were once small boys who played in sandpits and dug tunnels, armpit deep, into the sand until their clawing fingers felt the grainy, wiggling digits of a friend’s hand, digging towards them.

i’d have loved to have been under the channel when the two halves of the tunnel met. mind you, i’d have loved to have mended that lock gate too.

can i wear yer fluorescent jacket, mister? can i?

well lookey here, it’s the first of dec! (adjusts wristwatch).
i don’t do christmas cards so you will all have to share the nice picture that i took yesterday. that’s as christmassy as i want to get.

the thing that really IS worth celebrating is the hijacked WINTER SOLSTICE. when i was wandering about on night duty in a former incarnation i used to get up onto the roof of a block of flats or another and gaze at the stars. i had a little book of stars in my pocket and i would open it at the correct page for the date and time and there they all were…
the book knew where the stars would be! how great is that?!

and during the night i would keep an eye on the stars and follow them across the heavens and, this is the really good bit, I COULD FEEL THE WORLD TURNING.

it doesn’t seem to work so well during the day with just our rubbish old star, the sun, blocking out all the other ones but at night, oh the magic, you can feel where you are in the universe. well, i can anyway and that is one of the reasons that i can believe in god without being religious.

so celebrate the solstice, it’s only three weeks from now and you know what THAT means, don’t you? that’s right, it means that when six long, boring weeks have finally dragged past it will still be exactly as dark during the day as it it now and that all the days in between will have been even darker.

so put that in your cracker and pull it.

on a glum note, i see that ALLEN CARR has snuffed it and i think that’s a shame. he discovered ‘the easy way to stop smoking’©. his book was strongly recommended to me, not by staff, but by a fellow inmate of windmill house (blessed be its name) and so i bought it. carr’s simple message has helped me in other areas of my life too but if you want to stop smoking, carr’s the man.

god bless you mr carr, sleep tight.

what else has happened?

oh yes, i am still reeling from yesterday’s SHOCK PROPOSAL from katie. reel reel reel. and i’m still not reeling from yesterday’s visit to the painting class thingy that i went to have a look at. before i went i said to trouty, i said “i’m not going if it’s old ladies painting pansies in a pot", i said.

well, it wasn’t pansies.

my problem is that i’m not technically competent enough to paint HOW i want to. so either i have to learn (but where?) or i have to paint WHAT i want to and see if it comes up acceptable.

my other problem is that i’m not actually painting anything at all.

mebbe i should go back to that holly tree, cut off a big branch of it, and then whip my own arse with it until i get going.

like nearly everyone in the world i am sick, tired and scared of making mistakes. but then the man who never made a mistake never made anything.

come on, ghost of mr carr, write me a book on how to be a successful painter. what’s that you say? read the smoking book again, it’s not just about smoking?

BLIMEY!