Oops, (again)

I knew, as soon as I did it, that I had been stupid again. It's not the first time, and I suppose it isn't going to be the last either. I had leant on the spade with my right hand curled around the handle, wedged against my chest, trying to push it through the soft earth underneath the wire mesh that was woven tightly into the hedge, just to clear a channel for the water to get away into the ditch. The spade moved forwards a couple of inches and then seemed to spring back slightly. I braced my feet harder, and lunged forwards. The blade met something solid, and the knuckles of my right hand were forced hard into my ribs. It felt for an instant as though my hand had actually gone between them.

The pain was intense, not only in the ribs at the front, but also round in my back, below the right shoulder blade. My first thought was "I've got no health insurance", and the second was "it's only a bruise." After walking around for a while it didn't hurt quite so badly. I was committed to getting several jobs completed ready for the concrete lorry and delivery pump that was due to arrive the next morning, and I couldn't get anyone else to turn up in the few hours left to do what I was supposed to do, so I carried on. I know it sounds stupid, but I was certain I hadn't actually broken or cracked any ribs. I hoped that I had simply sub-luxed one of them, just like the last time.

I found that if I bent down and stayed down, I was able to do a little spade work without it hurting too badly. Mostly, though, I just had to fit one last long drain pipe on, cut it to length, and backfill the trench it was in with gravel and clay. I managed to fill five wheelbarrows full of gravel and get them dumped in the trench, and then threw the clay back in by hand. After six hours I had done enough and could go home to try soaking in a hot bath.

The phone rang that evening, and my brother said 'There's a slight change of plan. The concrete lorry will be there tomorrow at 8, but the concrete pump won't. We'll have to barrow it round."

I told him that I although I could manage a wheelbarrow, I wasn't going to be up to the pace that would be required for the two of us to shift eight cubic metres of concrete in the limited time that the lorry was able to wait. "No problem," he said, "I've got three lads with wheelbarrows turning up."

I was still a bit dubious, because the distance between the point where the lorry had to stop and the four pits was over a hundred yards, over rough ground, and also effectively single-traffic for half of its length, but I got there early the next morning, dragged some old flooring chipboard along to bridge the worst point, and cleared the rubble from what I had worked out was the best path for the barrows.

As it happened, it went perfectly, The three lads and brother went backwards and forwards on the double, and I wandered around with a spade clearing the odd bit of spill at the edges of the holes, and fetching the tyre pump and chainsaw oil to deal with a couple of soft tyres and noisy wheels. With two of the four holes full, I went to find a kettle and enough teabags, milk and sugar to give everyone a drink. I found that I could use a saw, and was able to cut up enough timber for brother to shutter around the tops of the holes so that he could tamp the concrete level. There wasn't a single barrow load of concrete left over, so I needn't have dug out the two places I had prepared for surplus the day before. I rigged up the hose so that they could clean out their barrows, and went back to see how brother was doing.

"It's a pleasure to see youngsters work so hard," he said, and I agreed with him. Too many school leavers have no idea how to be useful or how to work at a decent pace, but these three had been absolutely right up to scratch.

I went back home to have a lazy afternoon, hoping that I would improve. Little Petal was concerned, but not too pleased with me. She blamed me for going straight into a hard-working job without building up to it gradually, and also was insistent that I was not eating enough. I told her that since I was obviously strong enough to do that sort of damage to myself there was nothing lacking in my diet. I also told a friend what I had done, and she suggested plenty of Nurofen. I told her I didn't want pain-killers.

"Are you a masochist as well?" she asked. No. I don't get any thrill out of it.

I don't rush for the painkillers as a rule. If the acupressure trick of stroking the web between finger and thumb can't control a severe toothache, yes, I might take a couple of pills, but for sprains and bruises, no. I think as a generation we have gone a bit too soft. If I was experiencing some of the pains that my mother gets from her cancer than I might use them, but this was just an intermittent pain when I moved my arm just a bit too far, or turned too quickly. The only time it was intense was when I sneezed, which was a pity. Sneezing is high on my list of pleasures, and a couple of hundred years ago I would have been a snuff-taker for certain.

I also knew that it is possible to regulate pain by a combination of breathing and groaning. I came across some of these techniques years ago when I was fascinated by the occult and the fringe sciences. There is a yogic technique called prana-yama, breathing carefully from each nostril in turn, that can calm the nerves down and help keep low-level pain in the background. And groaning with a low deep intensity on certain notes also seems to dissipate some of the sharper twinges. I didn't want to use painkillers, because they mask the warning signs when you have gone just a little bit too far, and I intended to work the next day.

And that is just what I did. I didn't try any heroics with the pick or spade, just burnt forkfulls of rubbish in the incinerator and trundled a dozen wheelbarrow loads of hardcore around the house to the new soakaway that brother had scooped out with the digger. As the hours passed I realised I wasn't feeling bad at all, in fact I was feeling quite cheerful. It was only the arrival of teeming rain after six hours that persuaded me it was time to stop and squelch away home.

It's actually the second time I've done this to myself. The first time was about fifteen years ago. I had just moved into the station, and was working at Southampton. Driving through the back roads early on morning, I came round a corner and realised there was a road junction horribly close ahead. I braked too hard, and the car slid up a bank to the left and came to rest. I tried to reverse, but the wheels were spinning.

I got out and went to the front of the car. If I could just give one good push, it ought to roll back down the bank into the road. I tried, and realised that the engine must be wedged on the muddy earth. So I bent my knees, got a good grip on each bumper, and stood up. The car came up with me, and I stood there waiting for it to roll, but nothing happened, and I knew that although I had picked up the front of the car, the wheels had drooped on their springs and were still held firm in the sticky mud. In a fury I dropped the car back down, and something went pop in my back, just below my right shoulder blade. It was so sharp and unexpected that I staggered and fell down the bank, rolling into the road. My first thought was "I haven't signed that health insurance proposal form", and the second thought was "How do I get out of this one, then?"

I got up, and someone asked me if I was alright. A man in a white terry-towel bathrobe had come out to see what had happened. I told him that I had been fine up until I had got out of the car, but was now a little bruised. He invited me into his house so that I could phone the AA to get them to come and pull me off the bank, and then made me a very welcome coffee. As I sat there, testing my still-painful back, he told me that out of all the gardens I could have chosen to slide into, I had picked the very worst one of all. He looked through the window, and we saw that a man was standing looking at the car.

I went out and climbed the bank. I apologised for waking him up so early, saying that the road had been a little slippery around the corner. He seemed relieved at that, but then said "Well, I'm afraid we're going to be claiming off your insurance for the damage to the hedge." I looked at the row of crinkly brown holly bushes, all decidedly dead, but decided not to press the issue just yet. "Of course," I said, "no question about it."

The AA arrived at that moment, or at least, a Land-rover from a garage nearby that took sub-contract jobs over the phone, and put a cable onto the back of the car. It came free and rolled gently back down the bank before he had turned the handle more than twice. The garden owner looked amazed as his dead holly trees all popped back upright one after the other as the car came off them. I was amazed that an AA man had turned up within minutes of the phone call.

"I ought to tell you," he said, as I signed the recovery man's ticket and thanked him, "that we, or ,my wife, well, actually she made me call the police. When we heard the thump and looked out of the window, we saw you staggering around in the road and falling over, and my wife was certain that you were blind drunk. She said you were a maniac. But since you're not, and there's no real damage done, it might be better if you just popped off quickly, and I'll tell them it was nothing important."

And so I went in to work. I could have gone home and to the hospital, but I had realised by now that although the pain was frightening at times, it was also bearable, and there was no sense of anything broken or dislocated. I went to see the doctor that evening, of course, and was told that I'd probably just popped a rib momentarily out of the socket where it meets the spine. Not a good thing to have done, but not life threatening. I didn't need splinting or plastering, and probably didn't even need to take time off work. "Next time," I was told, "put things down gently."

I asked if I could have some painkillers. "If you really must," he said, "I'll write you out a prescription. But I'll be honest, you're the sort of person who can probably do better without them. There's nothing wrong with pain if it's intermittent. Stops you from overdoing it. It might save you from picking up a bit more than you can handle while you're getting over this."

And so I suffered for a few days, groaning and breathing carefully, both then, and now. It's all for the good of the soul, you see. Sometimes you'll be somewhere where there aren't any painkillers, and then this sort of knowledge is useful.

By the water, under the water

We took my mother out for a day in the Isle of Purbeck. The plan was to pick her up and drive down to the park-and-ride just north of Corfe Castle, and then take the train down to Swanage. I had done the drive several time a few years ago, and knew how long it should take me. We picked her up at half past nine.

By ten o'clock it was obvious that I wasn't going to get there for the first train with the comfortable ten minutes in hand to allow her to walk slowly round from the car-park to the station. First it was oncoming traffic through Stalbridge, a village suffering from the current principle of "we don't approve of building bypasses to avoid heavy traffic having to squeeze through the narrow eighteenth century streets, so we'll put in traffic calming measures instead." Then it was a pair of delivery lorries struggling to do 40mph, and then it was a crawl at less than 20mph behind a mini-JCB.

With great relief I turned off the road to Poole and sped along the back roads towards Wareham Forest. I managed to make up a few minutes along the straight stretches. With three minutes to spare I swung into the car-park, and asked the volunteer if they would hold the train for us. He said they would be happy to do so, and Mother with Little Petal set off with the folding wheelchair while I dashed to park the car.

I caught them up as they neared the platform. "You get straight on, I'll get tickets," I yelled, and dashed to the ticket office. I was behind two people, but they finished in short order and I stuck my piece of plastic under the glass and asked for three adult returns. From the platform I heard an "I'll take that, thank you very much." It was the volunteer guard as he took the collapsible wheelchair that mother had hired for the day. His tone was very much that of the physics teacher who has discovered that Debberson-Smythe and Bindersham Junior have just assembled a working replica of the first atomic bomb on the back bench.

I sat back triumphantly in the carriage seat as the last door slammed and the whistle blew. We accelerated briskly towards Corfe, and through the window we could see the tallest part of the ruined castle encased in scaffolding and blue sheeting. They are making the crumbling parts safe. I sometimes wish that they would use the lottery money to rebuild Corfe Castle, and maybe Tintern Abbey, in the same way that the volunteer force rebuilt the Swanage railway after it was closed and left to dereliction back in the Beeching era.

We crossed the viaduct where twenty years ago I had walked along the earth and stones, devoid of sleepers and rails, and suddenly thought "someone's dropped their bracelet", and then almost immediately "that isn't a bracelet." It was a very small adder, perhaps only ten inches long, but it hissed and curled back into the strike position as I nervously crouched down and tried to get the camera to focus close in. I must have been too nervous, because the pictures were blurred. Years ago, as I walked along to the playing fields in Biddenden with my next-youngest brother, a speckled shape had wriggled smoothly out from the grass across the stones almost at our feet. I stopped my brother from reaching out for it; although I was only just old enough to go to school I knew inside me that this wasn't something you picked up and played with.

Corfe Station had been changed since we last came through it, perhaps four years ago. It now has a footbridge, so the second platform is open, and our train halted there. We moved out again, and Mother suddenly exclaimed "Look at the yearlings!" The carriage suddenly filled with excited German voices as everyone else watched the small herd speed alongside the train like shaven Bison. I'm sure I heard a lady describe the solitary brown calf as an 'Almond Cow', if my rusty German was correct. I realised that the two large coaches I had dashed between back at the park and ride must have been full of them.

Mother turned to Little Petal and told her that I first traveled on a steam train when I was three weeks old, and it was the only time I stopped crying. In fact, a few weeks later, worried about my constant crying, she took me to the doctor. "Hmm," he said, as only doctors can, "let's see, shall we?" He pulled his pipe out of his mouth and stuck it in mine, and I went suck-suck-suck so rapidly that the tobacco glowed red and crackled. "Oh dear, you're a bit of a poor cow, aren't you?" he said to Mother. "Try giving him bottled milk."

It worked. That story, by the way, is as related to Little Petal by Mother when they first met. She had never told it to me, and I had no recollection of ever smoking a pipe at so young an age. Funnily enough, though, my earliest distinct memory is of a steam engine. I was sat on my Father's lap, behind the steering-wheel of his car, and up above us loomed an arched bridge, across which a dirty grey engine rolled from left to right, steam drifting across the brickwork. From talking to Mother, we know that she was in hospital ready to give birth to her second child, because the scene I described was of Three Bridges, where they were living for a short while before moving back out to the countryside, and she insisted that she would never have allowed Dad to have me on his lap if she had been in the car with him.

Out of all my loves and hobbies, railways have been the most enduring. I have dabbled with hang-gliders, sailed small yachts around the coast and across the Channel, restored old sports cars to dash around circuits and chase through the lanes in night-rallies, and moved on from all of those. But railways, (and once again, bicycles), have persisted in capturing my imagination. As I grew up, the railways were already dying. We moved twice to places where the local line had just closed, and I became used to seeing rusty derelict rails in the hop-fields of Kent and Sussex on our car journeys to Hastings. I joined a model railway club in my teens. They were very keen on exact-scale modeling, replicating every tiny detail. So I took along my first effort, a short stretch of tree-lined straight rusty track crossing a road, with a single siding, a cornfield made from a piece of doormat, and hop-fields modeled from straws and painted cotton threads. "But where are the trains?" I was asked. "The line is closed," I told them, "It's the crossing at junction road halt on the Kent and East Sussex." They accused me of mickey-taking, and for a while I grew out of railway-modeling.

We reached Swanage, and I went to respectfully ask the guard if I could please have my mother's wheelchair back, and we wouldn't misbehave with it again. As we moved down the street towards the sea I suddenly realised I had left the parcel in the car that I meant to post. It was an ebay sale. "I've got mine in my bag," said Little Petal smugly. What a shame she couldn't have also put mine in her bag too.

We reached the coffee shop that Mother had remembered from an earlier visit. It had a curved front that therefore faced both away from and towards the sea. We picked a table from which we could see Ballards Down and the distant shape of the cliffs of Alum Bay on the Isle of Wight, and started elevenses. I had ordered a tomato and cheese and red-onion pannini, with the smug satisfaction of someone who that morning had discovered he weighed eleven stone and ten pounds. As I bit into it, Mother asked me if I had ever been to the Singleton Museum. I shook my head. So she started to tell us how, back in the late sixties and early seventies, when the craze was to dam up rivers and flood valleys to make reservoirs, (and I froze in shock, thinking "How could she know that I blogged on this very subject less than six hours ago, completely unplanned?"), back then, a man heard that an old house was going to be flooded, and determined to save it. So he bought it, had it dismantled completely, and stored it on his land. A few months later, someone rang him up, saying "I've got another house for you", and so began a collecting obsession that makes my jumble look quite normal. Finally, a wealthy landowner, having learned what this man was trying to do, offered him the use of some land at a peppercorn rent to re-erect this collection of houses. Immediately, I knew I wanted to see it. It reminded me of Ikuta Park in Japan, where in a similar way they had moved old examples of historic housing away from the bulldozers and concrete-lorries and preserved them for all to see. We made plans for our next outing.

We strolled along towards the pier, she walking for a while because she was determined she would stand on her feet, and then riding in the wheelchair as she saw how far away it actually was. She had never seen the new pier, and as we neared it I pointed out the rusty rails set into the paving slabs where in Victorian times there had been a horse-drawn tramway to carry goods to and from the old pier. As we started along the new wooden decking an idea was forming in my mind. I began to photograph the area.

We came to the point where the trippers were clambering onto a small boat that ran from Swanage out into the bay towards the Isle of Wight, and watched it pull away from the pier. I had to convince Little Petal that the distant land she could see was St Catherines Point, and not France or Beachy Head. Her geography is limited to "born in these streets, you're a Geordie, born anywhere south of this line, you;re a southerner." As they sat and ate the Swiss chocolate bars I had bought from a souvenir shop that also had cheap socks on sale, I photographed more and more of the pier, thinking what a lovely model it would make if it also had a small railway running along it to carry the lazier tourists to and from the end.

Something caught my eye,a table for the convenience of the fishermen on the pier, complete with a measuring stick a yard long, with the inches marked off, to settle all those disputes of exactly how long the fish was. And mounted to the back of the same table, I found a piece of grey plastic drainpipe two feet long, arranged vertically, with a second piece of curved pipe on the top. There were two signs on it. The first said it was for disposing of old fishing line, and the second said that you must not put your hand inside it. Is there some small section of each council called the Standard Idiot Department, whose job it is to ensure that everything has a sign on it to try and stop the incorrigibly-stupid from harming themselves? And were they fighting a hopeless battle, doomed to failure because anyone stupid enough to need a sign telling them that doing something was hazardous was probably too stupid to understand the sign in the first place? I managed to persuade Little Petal to put her arm into the curved portion of the pipe so I could take a photograph. She even mimed shock and surprise; oh, the power of the lens. If I'd thought to buy more chocolate I could probably have persuaded them both to "get 'em out and jiggle them around a bit."

But it was lunchtime, and Mother remembered a restaurant she had been to once before, so we went back to the Mowlem Centre and found a lift to help her get up to the first floor, where we could sit in Victorian-style decor and look out over Swanage Bay. I told them how much I liked the roman blinds, and was asked "what roman blinds?" "Well, those," I replied, pointing to what I would describe as regularly-bunched floral pelmets. "They're swags," I was told in stereo, with a derisive undertone. I marked it mentally as a word to remember.

I agonised over the menu, firstly spotting smoked trout salad, then thinking I had found the dressed crab salad my heart desired but realising as I read further that it was a sandwich, until I turned the page and saw that the seafood platter contained not only crab and prawns with rose-marie sauce, but smoked salmon. I knew that I couldn't have a starter as well as a main course and retain my new sub-twelve stone weight, so I made the most of my platter and finished off the onion and peppers that mother and Little Petal both declined to taste.

Outside, although the sky was covered with steel-grey clouds, I saw that beyond Ballards Down the sun was lighting up some of the taller columns with a strange silver glow, and wandered over to the window to try and get a photo through the glass. A woman glanced at me curiously as I tried several angles. "It's these wonderful swags," I told her, "I must have a shot of them." "Are you an interior designer?" she asked, showing some interest. I paused, and said "No, I'm actually a jobbing gardener." She asked, still interested, what sort of things I was good at. I thought quickly about what I had been doing these past few weeks. "Cutting and clearing, uncovering, re-arranging, oh, and tying things up decoratively." She asked if I had a card, and I had to say I was word-of-mouth only. I feel a whole new avenue of opportunity is opening up in front of me.

We made our way back to the station to find a train had fortuitously arrived, which then carried us back up the line to Corfe, where I turfed them off onto the platform, complete with wheelchair, and continued on to the the park and ride. I sprinted to the car, fetched the forgotten parcel, sprinted back, and managed to get on the same train as the engine finished coupling up the the seaward end. The same lady who had clipped our tickets on the way up was now behind the buffet counter. I caught her eye, and asked if it was alright if I rode back to Corfe on my earlier ticket. Yes, of course it was. I hung out of the window with the camera set to video mode and recorded the short trip under the narrow-gauge bridge and around the curve through the short cutting into Corfe station. Mother and Little Petal were still sitting on the seat, and didn't recognise me as I passed them, just another face behind a camera.

I took both parcels to the little post-office in Corfe, and went back to the station. We walked along to the museum for another look round. I have a photograph from there taken several years ago, where Little Petal stands on a platform weighing machine, and stares at the pointer on the dial with a mixture of disbelief and anger, as though a voice has just said 'Get OFF me!" Mother was obviously tiring now, and when the diesel railcar pulled into the platform, she looked relieved when we suggested we could hop on it and get back to the car quickly.

We were just early enough to miss the Wareham rush-hour traffic, but got caught behind a large taut-liner lorry going along the back road through Wareham forest. We crept along at 30 mph as it struggled around some of the tighter bends, and I was glad to see it keep heading along towards Poole as I turned off to Spetisbury. Once again, we crawled along behind tractors, and cars that didn't know quite where they were going, and lorries that did know but weren't going to get there in a hurry. I could see in the mirror that Mother was asleep in the back, so at least she wasn't suffering the same frustration that I was. There are still some wonderful places to go and see, but it is proving to be harder to drive to them and back at what I call a sensible speed. I would like to be able to do the 50mph average that my 2002 copy of Autoroute Express says I should be able to do, but a quick calculation shows that an average of 40mph on any roads other than motorways is something to hope for, not something to expect.

Mother is now seeing each place as though it may be for the last time. I too am looking at everything with a slightly different viewpoint, because I am wondering if we are going to be able to enjoy the use of cars and the roads as much as we have been doing so. Fuel price is only part of the problem; my main concern is that there is now so much more traffic around that getting to anywhere not on a dual-carriageway or motorway is taking significantly longer than I would have expected. Most of the places that I want to see are, while not exactly off the beaten track, certainly not beside the high-speed roads. I would like to take her out to the Singleton museum, which I would have said was a two-hour journey each way from where I live. Allowing for a degradation in average speed, the journey is now probably more like two hours and twenty minutes each way, and I have to allow for a stop each hour so that she cn stretch out her legs and relieve the pain of sitting for too long and the traveling time has extended to nearly six hours. That doesn't leave much time for actually doing anything at the destination, does it? I have an idea that our world is going to shrink quite rapidly soon.

But above all, I am still marveling at the coincidence of reading something in the morning which triggered memories from my youth, and Mother then raising almost that very topic completely unprompted over coffee a few hours later. As Charles Fort said, "it steam-engines when it becomes steam-engine time." And he never even went to Swanage.

By the water, under the water, (Into the blue again)

What's in a name?

I see on the BBC news site that the drowned village of Stourhead Gardens has finally been located by divers. The team found a couple of cottages, and stone walls. They even bought up stone with paint on it.

In my teens I used to go out some evenings with friends to a pub called 'The Bull' at a place called 'Three-Legged Cross'. We played bar-billiards there. It was a small, quiet pub, with only a few other people in it, who weren't bothered that we were possibly under-age.

A few years later, the Bewl Bridge reservoir was created near Lamberhurst, and after the damming and the filling-up, 'The Bull' was under forty feet of water. I sailed over it some time ago in a dinghy when I met up with my sister and her husband for an outing in Kent. It was appropriate, they were often with me in the pub as we raced to get as many balls pocketed before the bar clacked down and they would stop coming back.

I have often wondered about diving down to find the pub and peer through the windows to see of the bar-billiards machine was still there. The village of Three-Legged Cross, now drowned, was so-called because it was situated on a cross-roads that had only three arms to it, by the way. But it sounds much better than calling it T-junction. Names are far more important that you first realise.

I don't know who the architect of the Bewl Bridge reservoir was, but the Stourhead lake was created by Capability Brown. That's the way to choose a name for yourself, no-one's going to boast at the dinner table that thier garden was created by Snoop Doggy Dog or Sin with Sebastian.

I've finally found out what I am, after three or four weeks of slashing brambles and ripping out nettles. I was walking back down the lane yesterday morning towards the orchard when a car pulled up and a woman hopped out to deliver a newspaper to one of the cottages. I had to laugh because she was in her slippers. We chatted for a while, and after I said what I was doing, she asked me if I was a 'Jobbing Gardener'. I paused, thinking about all the unfortunate connotations my mind could make, and then said guardedly that I might be.

"I know a couple of people who are looking for someone to do some work for them," she said, and so I decided that I might be a Jobbing Gardener, after all. It has the sort of feel to it that makes me think of The Battle of Epping Forest, but I've put that to the back of my mind.

So now I need a name. How about Hackability Smith? Or Slasher Jones? My favourite at the moment is Billhook Bowles.

Looking for someone from afs?

Just in case you're looking for the poster you and I know as Dubsie, you'll find her under "opus Pea" in the sidebar links.

You're welcome, G

If you're not from afs, well, there's no way I could really explain in one small blog post what that was all about.

Pass the time, please

Life in the village shop runs at a different pace to life elsewhere. I think it is one of these so-called 'Temporal Anomalies', and I suspect it is caused by the postmistress. She uses it to stop her queuing customers from getting frustrated. It has certainly worked on me. I used to have the patience of a crowd of angry wasps, especially with village post-offices, where I fretted as I waited to post off a deliverable, eager to rush back home to get the next piece of work completed.

Standing in the queue today, the conversation seemed to veer ever so smoothly to a topic I have a fascination for, the dead men on the mountain. The gentleman ahead of me had heard that someone this year was climbing Everest wearing similar clothing to that worn by Mallory in 1924, all natural fibres, to prove that, far from being frozen and incapable of sustained effort, Mallory and Irvine were as warm and comfortable as today's climbers who trek to the summit and back in garish shades of pastel pinks and purples.

We switched topic to the theory that the American moon landings had been faked in film studios. It was an easy and a graceful switch, because I had told them that the man making the climb in the replica clothing was a descendant of the climber who in 1924 had loaned his pocket camera to Mallory and Irvine for their summit bid, and Kodak had already said that should the camera ever be recovered, they felt confident they could develop the film. Another gentleman in the queue had met two men who had purchased all of the moon program footage and stills from NASA and analysed them for contradictions. There are, of course, many, because most people don't appreciate how much editing work goes into published materials. My interest in this started when I came across the holocaust denial analysis of the pile of shoes outside several concentration camps.

Sometime in that last few days of World War 2, a photographer took a shot of a mountain of empty shoes near a gas chamber, footwear discarded by the soon-to-die. It was published in a paper. Then, a couple of other papers also published photographs of other concentration camps, also with mountains of empty shoes. Someone with a very keen eye noticed a certain similarity between some of these piles of shoes, and with a little analysis soon realised that the other photographs, taken at camps that didn't happen to have such gripping details ready and waiting for the newsmen, had been embellished by superimposing shots of a mountain of shoes on them. News is big business, and if you also happen to be in the business of supporting the winning side you are allowed a little artistic license with 'the truth', whatever that might be.

For me, the evidence that men did indeed go to the moon is in the details that most people don't bother watching, because it isn't the main story. For instance, vacuum-locking. We came to this because we had just been discussing the problems with using film on the moon where the temperatures can range from icy cold in the shade to roasting hot in the full glare of the sun. I have a memory of a little moment when mission control have just advised the astronauts that although they are getting TV pictures from the camera mounted on one of the landing legs, it is only black and white. "Gosh darn it guys, we go to all this trouble of getting you up there and we aren't going to win an award for best color (sic) footage". An astronaut ambles over to the camera and rests his glove on it. "Can't feel anything," he says. After a pause, mission control replied "Chroma-wheel's not spinning, then. Can you give it a tap?" Almost as a cliche, the astronaut thumps the camera, the wheel starts spinning, and the black and white picture changes to, well, black and white, with just a hint of red and blue where the stars and stripes stand out from a pole. In vacuum, surfaces that will slide freely over each other suddenly stick and start to misbehave.

We had just moved on from moonshots to the astronomical cost of a proposed European satellite system for GPS, when delivery van man came into the shop, most appropriately. You can always tell delivery van man, he looks lost. And he was. He knew where he was, but didn't know how to get to where he was supposed to be. The queue considered his predicament and sent him on his way. I hope they were honest with him, in fact I'm sure they were. But we got back onto satellite navigation systems again. Up till a few years ago, everybody used the American satellite positioning information, which was primarily military, and because of this, the Americans were a little bit aggrieved when they realised that anyone could receive this information for free and start using it. So, they introduced deliberate errors into the information being transmitted back to the ground in order to confound those knavish freeloaders. Of course, they failed to anticipate the obvious response. Someone else set up a receiver in a fixed position, linked to a radio transmitter. This receiver would take the incoming satellite information, work out the position as given, compare it to what it knew it should be, and if it suddenly found it had jumped several miles, broadcast a signal to let other subscribers know that the last transmission from the satellite was one of the dodgy ones and please to ignore it, thank you very much.

We slid smoothly from deliberate errors in GPS information to deliberate errors on Ordnance Survey maps, which apparently have odd little items in them, say for example, a fence line between fields shown instead as a blue line, suggesting a stream, so that anyone copying the map and then attempting to pass it off as their own work could be shown to be a fraud and a mountebank and a person of generally dubious character and questionable virtue. And, of course, we learned, there were certain areas of the maps that just weren't filled out in detail because of the need for military secrecy. We are just on the edge of the army grounds that for years were known for UFO sightings. In fact, two people in particular did very well on books about the Warminster conspiracy, and then moved on to crop circles as these became more prevalent. On of the two authors was debunked by a paper who used the two Welshmen, Doug and Dave, to produce a circle, which the author 'authenticated', and then was gleefully shown the film of the duo thrashing around with ropes and planks the previous night. The sad thing is that, despite being presented with such evidence, there are still people out there who refuse to accept it. One radio show that featured an interview with the circle-makers had listeners phoning in to comment, one of whom said he couldn't accept the program's veracity because "The Welsh, as a race, just aren't clever enough to do things like that."

I made it to the head of the post-office line and sent off my two ebay sales, and then moved back to the end of the queue to hear the rest of the conversation. Then, it was a quick trip to the goodies counter for a jar of crunchy peanut butter; (and I've found out why it made my teeth rot, by the way, I shall post more in time); and a couple of liquorice bars, because I knew when I got home little petal was going to want to know what I had been doing all that time and would need mollifying. To my surprise, when I parked the car and rushed inside, I had only been gone twenty-five minutes, and at least twelve of those minutes had been spent driving.

I think the postmistress has a time-blender under the counter, and switches it on when more than two are gathered together in her area. Certainly I didn't notice any delay today. What I want to know is, where did she get it from? Does she know more about these 'debunked' UFO's than she admits to?

Just another quirk of fate

I wrote the recent post What goes up...: Malt nearly three weeks ago now. It shows how busy I've been that I've only just got round to blogging it. At the end, I wondered how my life might have changed if I'd been successful in getting a copy of the free paper and been able to look through the job adverts. Knowing my luck, I would have spotted something and got myself a part-time minimum-wage drudge job.

Fortunately, that isn't what happened, because if it had, I wouldn't have been able to take on the role of doing the ground-clearance at my brother's house. For two weeks now I've been cutting back brambles that have wound their way to the very tops of the apple trees, felling dead trees that were dangling perilously over the neighbour's cars, lopping off the tops of some fast-growing conifers that were threatening to bring down the low-flying jets from nearby Boscombe Down, thinning out rampant willow trees, and scything through chest-high grass.

My arms ache. My legs ache from carrying pitchforks of cutting up to the dump area. My fingers are scarred and punctured by two dozen bramble thorns. But I'm loving every minute of it. Even the shouting and flailing act when the brambles and stinging nettles bite back. Foolishly, I cleared all the easy dock plants away, the only ones left are buried deep in the last cluster of stinging nettles. Next time, I'll do things differently.

So now I'm wondering if it's time for a career-change yet again. From software engineer to ground-clearance operative. I hate that term, operative. One of the local minimum-wage jobs I could have applied for was a 'hygiene operative' spelt exactly so, which was, of course, a cleaner. So I'll be honest on my business cards. I am a labourer. A navvie. I dig, I carry, I steer a wheelbarrow. I'm not very bright, but I can't half lift things. If I can get that translated into latin I might just adopt that as the business motto.

Malt

A few weeks ago I rode through the little village of East Knoyle, just a couple of miles away, because I was feeling bold enough to attempt to cycle up the steep hills by the village church. As I turned left and headed towards the church I noticed a new building on the edge of the green, and read the signs. It was a post-office. Another one. The old post-office which used to be almost opposite the site of this new one had only opened four mornings a week, and had rows of depressingly empty shelves inside. It was no surprise when it finally faded away.

When I first began working from home, almost fifteen years ago, I had a nightmare time trying to learn when all the local shops and post-offices opened and closed. I would jump in the car to get a packet of work sent off to a customer, arrive at the local shop, and find it was only open half of the week. After another frantic dash through the lanes to the next village, I would either be lucky and find the post-office section open, of more likely find that although the shop was open, the post-office section wasn't.

So the following week, I thought I would get a copy of the local free-adverts paper from the new local shop, and rode up to East Knoyle. They were sorry, but they'd had a rush demand for the paper that day, and had none left. I wandered around the shop anyway, finding it was closer to a delicatessen, bought some soft liquorice and some dried beans, and pedaled off to the next nearest village stores, who also had run out of the free papers.

In the following following week, when Little Petal had a clutch of ebay sales to post out, I persuaded her to not drive up the hill to the big post-office where you always stand for five minutes in the queue, but to drive up to East Knoyle instead. She still had to stand for five minutes waiting for the customer who was already there to finish his deals, but they were chatting quite happily to each other when I looked across from the shelves where I was having my trip down memory lane.

When I was growing up, there was a system called "family allowance", where mothers got weekly coupons to get supplementary foods for their growing children. I remember orange juice, cod-liver oil, rose-hip syrup, powdered milk, which I hated, and a strange turgid-coloured sticky mixture called malt extract, which I loved. And now I was staring at a jar of malt extract on the shelf in front of me, for 95 pence.

I haven't seen malt extract since leaving home all those years ago. I sat impatiently in the passenger seat while Little Petal drove at a respectful pace back home, and then dashed inside for a spoon. I twisted the cap off with the jar held at an unfortunate angle and had sticky threads of a strange turgid-coloured lazy liquid dribble across my hand as I hurriedly moved the lid back over the jar.

Bliss, joy, an "A la recherche du Temps Perdu" moment as the spoon gave up its burden; it was the same stuff. Happiness of haphazard happenstance. It must have been fate that put that jar on the shelf in front of me not half a dozen hours after I had realized my love of malt was piling on the weight again. Like Charles Fort said, "It steam-engines when it becomes Steam-engine time"

Now, perhaps, I can stop using malted wholemeal flour in my bread and get back to spelt and rye mixtures, with a single daily hit of malt straight from the jar.

And, what is really bugging me, is, what wrong turn would my life have taken if, two weeks ago, I had managed to get a copy of the free-adverts paper and looked through the part-time situations vacant section?