Paving–how to…

I am generally a stranger to the garden, but one recent sunny, Saturday afternoon I thought it might be nice to help Sally with a bit of weeding. One thing led to another and we started to talk about taking down the old shed that has been at the bottom of the garden since Adam was a lad. But what to put in its place?

“A patio”, Sally agreed.

“Good idea”, I decided, “somewhere to sit in the sunshine”.

See how my mind rushed immediately to thoughts of balmy days, lounging on the patio, cooled by lashings of ice-clinking lemon barley water?

Anyhow, within minutes, I was tearing down the shed (almost literally) with my bare hands. I was motivated by the sunshine and wanting the exercise (no run that day) and I was full of visions of laying the patio and saving money (particularly the money – have you any idea how much paving costs from a proper bloke?). How difficult could paving be, anyway?

The next morning, off to B&Q bright and early: paving slabs, sand, ballast, decorative stone chippings and a rubber mallet, plus some advice from one of the men working there. I could feel success coming on.

In the garden, I decided (with Sally’s “help”) that I would leave the concrete sleepers that had been supporting the shed in place, to provide a level base (error no. 1 (or no. 2, counting deciding to do it in the first place)). I tamped the ground, spread ballast and sand, got it level. I even thought to put in a brick edging to stop it all flowing all over the place under the pressure of the sun-loungers. By the time it got dark, I was ready to lay the paving. A good day’s work; I felt I had earned my dinner.

I should point out that the brick edging was poor and the concrete sleeper base, plus ballast, plus sand made the patio quite high off the ground. Also, I had realised I had only bought about half the required number of paving slabs and far from enough stone chippings. Over the next couple of days Sally obviously gave a good deal of thought to the progress I had made. No doubt she compared the quality my work with the quality she had previously experienced from a professional paving guy. Whatever, on the Tuesday evening, she sacked me! How embarrassing: weighed in the balance and found wanting by my own wife and fired! I was upset, but brave!

To add to the injury (I would say, “to add insult to the injury”, but I couldn’t have been more insulted), a day or two later, just as I was getting used to the idea of being sacked, and looking forward to getting back to doing what I liked (which is mainly messing about and stuff) she summarily re-instated me, giving me “one more chance”! The cheek of the woman!

So, up came the sleepers, the sand and the ballast, and I dug down. I unearthed stuff – broken paving slabs, posts, roots, bricks. I got the ground as flat as I could and whacked it down with a post I had dug up and checked it was level with a spirit level. I pulled up the edging and laid it again (flat and square this time) and carefully laid the paving (including the extra paving) – another couple of days work! Was it OK this time? It was better, but not right.

I took a radical step – I asked for advice and was told to lay the paving on a weak sand and cement mix. After deciphering this advice, I bought some sand and cement, and mixed them and laid the paving. Mixing cement is a very manly thing to do, don’t you think? And edged it with some nice stone chippings. Good? Yes! But…

…there was “just” a bit of additional stuff. So more digging, and removing bushes and replanting them, laying huge, incredibly heavy paving slabs (that had been hiding behind the shed), and moving rocks in the rock garden that had been uncovered, to make an area for storing bins. Oh, and there was a little ramp so that the bins could be wheeled up to their new storage area.

Then there was a bit more edging, more whacking and more stone chippings; and finally, the grouting between the paving slabs (and re-grouting in the old patio where it had come out) and some alpine shrubs and plants for the re-discovered rock garden. Finished at last!

So what do you think? The project cost about £200 and about 5 or 6 days labour. Funnily enough, I actually enjoyed it. I want to build a wall next…

Inheritance Tracks

I heard an interesting idea the other day - Inheritance Tracks. Which are what, you ask? The idea is that they are music tracks which have been handed down to you by a previous generation or tracks that you would like to hand on to the next. I'm not sure what other criteria there are (this was a 30 second slot on the radio), so I'm going to say that the tracks should be precious to you in some way, and they should not be dead obvious (no "Angels" by Robbie Williams; unless, of course you are Robbie Williams or his Mum, in which case I can see that it would be very precious indeed). I don't think there's a set number (unlike "Desert Island Discs").

When I was growing up in the late 60s and early 70s (I know, you'd think I was much younger than that), we didn't really take much notice of what previous generations had been listening to - we  didn't even take much notice of songs that were six months old! Maybe all younger generations are like that, I don't know - I've only been young once! So, there isn't much that I inherited from an older generation. My Mum liked Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett and the Beatles. I thought they were all rubbish.

The inheritance tracks I'd like to pass on are all old now, and there aren't many of them - in truth, I no longer really listen to music. I feel I could or should include something from all the artists I have loved, but there are so many: Leon Russell, Carole King, Paul Simon, Leonard Cohen, Richard Thompson, Sam Cooke, Bob Dylan, Beethoven, Puccinni, Charlie Parker, Miles Davies, Chet Baker, Van Morrison, Marvin Gaye, Bob Marley, Eric Clapton, Paul Weller and I could go on; choosing is really hard!

These are the first three that come to mind:

This first one (chronologically at least) would be "Handbags and Gladrags" sung by Chris Farlowe (see the Wikipedia entry for more details about the song's history). Probably I prefer the Rod Stewart version, but Chris Farlowe was first. I remember buying it with a record token I was given for Christmas when I was 11, which was the year I got my first record player, it was my first year at grammar school, and the year I had my appendix out. At the age of 11, I didn't really like it, but I thought it would be cool to like that sort of thing (a bit like, a couple of years later you were supposed to like Monty Python, even though it wasn't funny). I grew to love it (the song, not Monty Python, I just learned to be honest about that), and that sort of rough, R&B, soulful sound has remained a favourite of mine, and always speaks to my heart.

The next one is Elgar's Cello Concerto, and there can only be one version, Jacqueline du Pré's. And it's in my list simply because it's the most beautiful thing I have ever heard; it gives me goose-bumps every time I hear it.

I always like songs of love and loss; so I had to include the dreamy, breathy, soaring "When I'm Old and Wise", sung by Colin Blunstone on the Alan Parsons Album "Eye in the Sky". Definitely non-obvious and precious to me - I hope one day to be old and wise and to look back wistfully on the loves and friendships I've had.

And I bet there are others, but I don't know which I would like to pass on that the next generation hasn't already found! Maybe I'll add more as I think of them

AV and all that

I've decided to vote in favour of AV in the coming referendum; not because I am actually in favour of it, but because the "No" campaign talks such bollocks.

For example, they say that AV is like the third placed person in a race being given the prize - of course it's not like that at all. This "argument" is just an example of the type of sloppy thinking by analogy that I do my best to beat out of people. Analogies are fine to illustrate a point, lend weight to an argument and occasionally give insight into a complex subject. Unfortunately, lazy and cynical people use analogies in place of actual thought, and you can see how easy it is to end up talking nonsense.

Then the Noes say that it is unfair that some people get more than one vote. This is just either a deliberate misrepresentation of the facts or a total lack of understanding of how AV works. In truth it works as if every round of counting started again from scratch, but with the first preference votes of the least popular candidate being discarded and the second preference votes of their supporters being counted instead. The reality is that everyone gets the same number of votes - one for each round of voting.

But perhaps I'm doing the Noes a disservice in thinking that they are cynical and or deliberately misrepresenting the facts; the other "argument" against it that they use is that its too difficult to understand! True for themselves perhaps, but anyone who can understand the complexity of the voting for "X-Factor" or "Strictly Come Dancing" will surely have no trouble ranking the candidates in order of preference. Patronising so-and-sos.

My own objection to AV is based in my view that the purpose of voting is to choose a new government - that is, one that is constituted of new people - every 5 or 10 years. People get fat and lazy and start to believe in their own infallibility if they are in power too long. My fear is that under AV there may be a party (Lib Dems for example), who are permanently in power and become corrupted. Happily, I'm persuaded from reading a few articles on the Internet, that AV is no more proportional the FPTP and my be even more perverse! I feel oddly comforted...

Hello, World!

I wonder how many blogs there are that are called "Mike's Blog"? I should really have tried to be more creative. Perhaps a little less literal. Anyway, I'm here now.

Strange that I should take so long to get round to blogging. My first experience with the Internet was in 1992 - yes, 1992! There weren't even proper web-sites then; it was email, newsgroups and FTP sites. To sign up and use the Internet wasn't straight forward. Here's what I had to do.

First of all, the computer I had was an Amstrad PC clone, with a black and white screen (I think), limited graphics capability (like high lighting, reverse video, one font plus italics). It had 2 x 5.25in floppies and 512k of memory! I upgraded it with a 10MB (yes, MB) hard disk, which cost almost £100 (which would only work if the expansion bay were left open) and a 1440baud modem, which I think also cost about £100 (but I managed to get the company I was working for at the time to pay for that).

So I called Demon Internet (on the phone) and signed up to pay my £10 per month - I was customer number 64. Then I had to set the modem to dial up their server and down load the software (which I think include an TCP/SLIP stack or something similar, a news group reader, an email client and a few tools like FTP, Telnet, whois, ping etc.). Then I had to figure out how to install it all (not too difficult I recall, but I was a lot more technical back then), and then I was off.

Naturally, in those days the main fascination was in newsgroups (some were very rude indeed), looking through the library catalogues of universities, FTPing interesting stuff and pinging computers in Australia! I quickly realised that I could buy books from O'Reilly in California (so cool - I bought Ed Krol's The Whole Internet Guide, which mentioned in passing this new thing called the "World Wide Web" and predicted that it would be a big thing) and chat to people in Russia about them buying second hand computers from the company I worked for. There were lots of technical forums which were really interesting to me in my then job. I was instantly a fan! This will change everything, I told my wife. Yes, I saw the bandwagon coming, it stopped at my front door, I didn't get on and I watched it roll past and on over the hill!