Bricks

Following the practise noticed at reference 1, moved up a notch on moving the bricks, moving a total of 40 today, two and a half piles at sixteen to the pile, the equivalent of a bit more than 5km, something more than half my usual walk.

Gradually learning to go careful on the odd bit where damp moss or damp algae makes downhill a bit slippery, so far without accident. And it dawned on me that we are lucky enough to have a proper, all weather path running the whole length of the garden, even if there is a bit of moss and algae. Since in fact, a run of wet springs pushed me into laying council slabs on the back third. Walking up and down would not work nearly so well on wet grass or on wetter mud.

Noticing also that with these old bricks, every movement leaves a few crumbs of brick behind, so, guessing, more than a year of this and one might need to consider renewing the bricks. I associate to the way that important bits of stone around holy relics get worn down and smooth with years of touching by the faithful.

Furthermore, the bricks are not all the same width, and in some permutations, the top row of a two by eight pile is too big, with the last brick more or less toppling off. Permutations which vary with the order - left to right or right to left - in which one takes bricks off piles and put them back on piles. Given that some of the bricks are quite old, some small change in width coming with metrification? Old enough to have nipped in before the eurocrats, the bureaucrats and the trading standards people got around to setting standards in these matters?

Another problem is that is it quite easy, thinking about something else altogether, to forget which part of the cycle one is on, moving the pile from the back of the garage to next to the garden bench by the ponds or vice-versa. I think I am moving to a convention whereby the diminishing pile is marked by one of its bricks being placed crosswise.

One of the something else altogethers, was the idea, at the Treasury during at least some of my time, that all contingency funds should be held at the centre. The centre knew best  and was much better placed to allocate reserves than the periphery, should that become necessary. Needless to say, all the fund managers out in departments wanted their own little stashes, their own contingency funds, so that they did not have to come cap in hand to the Treasury every time they needed a little extra. Needless to say also, with a little cunning and imaginative labelling of accounts on their part, it was pretty much impossible to stop them. Which reads across, after to a fashion, to the current wave of food hoarding. We have yet to learn to trust the suppliers to do their stuff, even when the going gets a bit rough.

Perhaps there is someone out there who knows how the business of reserves was or is handled in battles. Perhaps in the Napoleonic wars or in the First World War.

PS: following the postscript to reference 2 about Sainsbury's, what looks like the very same run is featured in big  on the front page of today's Metro, still available in Epsom.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/03/dry-run.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/03/penultimate-outing.html.