After

(cf. Jan 2)

It was Ernest Hemingway who had a character in his novel say that he went bankrupt "gradually then suddenly". It seems that building walls is similar. I began work today with no expectation that the job would be done, and with a frustrating pile of rocks ill-suited to the task. After a lot of putting on and taking off again, I gave up and raided a reservoir of stones that I have salvaged from previous projects and built into a tower just to keep them tidy. Somehow this was the key to rapid progress and, 'suddenly', I was placing the final layer of large stones on the top

I'm still puzzling over the fact that I have taken quite a lot of stone from the tower, and also used all the fallen stone from the previous incarnation of the wall - there is no residue of unusable pieces (as there usually is), but the rebuild is not noticeably higher or wider. Somehow I must have created a structure with more rock and less space in the same volume. Does that mean it is more stable? I hope so

The job is strangely immersive. You have to be physically careful, handling quite heavy lumps of stone, or you get hurt; you have to think about the stability of the stone you are placing and, at the same time think about the platform you are creating for the next course; you have to think about maintaining a reasonably perpendicular wall and a reasonably straight line from end to end; you have to hold in your mind the shape of the space you are trying to fill while searching for a rock to fill it. "What do you think about while you are working on the wall?", asked Mrs M. Nothing (else) at all! Like this Blip