Brick strain

One of the bricks used to count my progress up down the garden could not take the strain and fell apart this morning. It was replaced by a brick from the reserve stock, from the late Dorking Brick Company, an old brick with a shallow, flat frog, rather than the modern deep, hipped frog.

I remembered that I once used to know a chap, a boxer in a small way, who used to work for the company, once telling me about how clearing hot bricks from still hot kilns (or whatever it was that they used to fire the bricks) did bad things to the lungs, not good for someone who wanted to box in his spare time.

It was also a time of much twittering from the bushes and trees round about, plus one tweet of a couple of long tailed tits in the ancient apple tree just across our southern fence. An apple tree which is probably a relic of the orchard which preceded our estate. From where I associate to my paternal grandfather's orchard in Hemingford Grey in what was then Huntingdonshire, also a housing estate for many years now. The pin marks the spot. With thanks, once again, to the Ordnance Survey. And to gmaps for doing the street name bit of the identification.

PS: I notice that the Ouse, just above the pin, has acquired the blue petals used to mark some kind of a beauty spot. Probably the manor house of reference 1, rather than the river.

Reference 1: http://www.greenknowe.co.uk/. I believe my father was involved in the gramophone concerts mentioned here. Perhaps he supplied some of the records, being the proud owner of large  numbers of 78's. Green Knowe being taken from some children's stories involving an old house, based on this one.