The long and winding path

The disappearing path

Most of you will have heard of the Virgin Experience Days, where you can treat yourself to such things as Afternoon Tea at the Ritz, I believe there are also things such as Boot Camps where you can go to improve your fitness. For a couple of days this week myself and Bob have been on the self imposed official Lincolnshire Gulag Experience, breaking up paths and lumping concrete posts and gravel boards around. I'm not sure it will catch on.

We had to take up a 60ft concrete path and put up a new fence, all part of the grand building work plan. Monday arrived the sun was shining and after a leisurely breakfast we fired up the breaker and off we went. there was a sense of optimism that we would knock this job off quickly. However It soon became clear that the path wasn't going to give itself up easily, we tried various techniques, but found that the old 'smash it with a sledge hammer then break it with the breaker technique' worked quite well. A cheer went up every time a hairline crack appeared that could be exploited.


The last section of path, for some bizarre reason was double thickness and it was tedious slow work, I did half mention to Bob at one point about packing in, but he rightly pointed out "you'll have another days hire charge to pay" well what more motivation could a couple of Yorkshire lads need to press on to the bitter end. The final piece of path gave itself up just as it was starting to go dusk. We slumped ourselves down in the pub at 9:00 and caught the second half of the football, if only the path could have been as fragile as Liverpool's defence!

The first post

The following day we woke with aching and scarred limbs, to face a day of digging holes and setting concrete gravel boards and fence posts. It took us a while to check out all our measurements but once we had got the first and last post in with a marker line in between we were on a bit of a roll. As the day progressed I'm sure the holes got deeper and the posts got heavier, even the wheelbarrow decided enough was enough and just collapsed under the strain.

Whoever invented Postcrete deserves a medal. Dig a hole put in a post fill it with a bag of postcete and just add water, and within minutes its set solid, just like magic - jobs a goodun!

A couple of tired workers made it back in the pub on Tuesday night, we may have been battered and bruised, but with a real sense of achievement. You couldn't have got another stone in the skip and hire charges were kept to a minimum, talk about a real sense of satisfaction, it makes you proud to be a Yorkshireman - oh and the fence looks good too!

All our own work!

Just missing the fence panels