Wet time

I believe Forestry Commission workers used to get paid ‘wet time’ when the weather was so inclement that backbreaking jobs like knapsack spraying of herbicides were not feasible.

The blokes by us in Wales would gather in our old black-painted tin garage and play cards, smoke, drink tea and eat tinned sardines.

As a boy passing this dimly lit den of Welsh-speaking otherness in the wind-blown drizzle it was a place both fascinating and alarming. Something of an innocent I didn’t know of that curse-word rich world of hard bloke-ishness.

I remember the utter shock and displacement I felt as a very young teenager when two real old time country blokes in Linton up on The Claims behind what was to become the zoo, where dad rented allotment land off the village poacher, started up with their vernacular strange effing and blinding. It was almost as if they wanted to knock the hardness of their lives into my lucky bastard middle class life. All nicey nicey to my Dad it’s like they wanted to show Master’s boy what life were like when Master weren’t around. A very Hodge and his mates moment. Almost Tolstoyan.

Later or before Vic, who ended up in Fulbourne with the home made booze-itis, showed me gently how to strike a fire in any weather by pulling dead thorn and twigs from a hawthorn hedge. They said he had shoes with the soles on toe-to-heel backwards to fizzle the gamekeepers on the big estate farms.

Needless to say it rained here today and last night. The new tank is half full - 1,500 litres. Don’t have no bottom tap in it yet, do it. But a siphon’ll do.

I caught up with the website. More tributes to the gracious, graceful ever-giving ever-listening Anna. The Pope’ll be putting in for a sainthood, so he will. And yet from my side of the stage it looked quite different. How many and who’s life are we celebrating here anyway?