man with arms like string attempts to dig own grave ...

A drive up-date has been requested by my reader...

as darkness descends, the yellow brick road extends ..

Gosh, we worked hard up to Christmas. It was the typical team effort for which I am massively grateful. But when the white stuff came down our holiday plans were snowed under.

But hey ho, the work continued after the snow cleared and I can proudly report that we are now fully gravelled. Well, not properly fully. Almost fully. You can still click your ruby slippers on the yellow brick road but not all the way.

We have stopped just before the entrance and now await Colin the bricklayer to join us at the weekend to build us couple of Ancaster stone walls before gates and fence panels can be erected.

team effort

The plan is to use the unused building stone left over from the building work in walls on either side of our drive gates. These walls require footings, so there's an opportunity for the man with arms of string to make a meal of a job that would take someone with the full male chromosone quotient very little time at all. Over three hours for the 1.5m long, 750mm wide and 600mm deep hole. Dave looked at the hole and said simply 'One hour tops'. I'm not in this for what our American cousins would call 'positive strokes'. Good job really. On her way to the shops, Jill (knowing too well my physical inadequacies) told me very firmly to 'Go in - you look tired' as I laboured. I told her that the beauty of this activity was that, should I keel over, she'd just need to kick the soil over me on her return. I carried on. And contemplated leaving my fluorescent jacket just visible in the bottom of the finished hole after I went in and before she returned. One of us thought that would have been funny.

Anyway, Roger and I finished the holes on Sunday and Jill and Judith continued their life of ease and high glamour by barrowing bricks, shovelling spoil and mattocking further holes.

And today, the concrete was poured into our footings and covered in case of frost.

Now, we await Colin.