Blame childhood Lego

When we moved into our house and took down a lot of internal walls, I kept the bricks. After a while, the stacks started to create problems (social, mostly) so I built brick stores that people would find less offensive. I built a double-skin dry brick wall to hide the fence at the end of the garden, and I built a spacious patio in one corner of the garden to catch the evening sun. When I'd finished it there were a lot of bricks left so I covered it with sand and built another layer. 

Now that I am moving, it is time to rescue my bricks so I can take them with me, not least because the back of the house I am moving to is less stable than my dry brick wall and needs to come down and be rebuilt. So I am excavating. In this picture I have already removed the top layer of the patio and I am discovering what I had completely forgotten - that in places it was four bricks deep. In the intervening 20 years, tree roots have spread among the bricks, sometimes hugging them very tight, so it is a lot of work to release them. But I will, and then I will rebuild the patio one-brick deep for the people moving in, who never regarded it as my brick stack but as an amenity.

I haven't yet worked out how to transport them to the place I am moving to. Drivers of strong-axle trucks and owners of wheelbarrows who are prepared to help me will be richly rewarded.