A year in bricks

Today is the last day of the first year of walking bricks up and down the back garden as an alternative to, for example, the Ewell Village anti-clockwise. The trouble with this last being that it involves walking through the middle of both Epsom and Ewell, both places where it is hard to avoid other people. That said, after the first burst of lockdown, March and April last year, I switched from walking to cycling, having discovered that it is much easier to avoid people from the top of a bicycle.

The snap above shows the sixteen bricks in the down position and the end of this afternoon's walk of half a heap. It being my custom to do half a heap on the afternoons of a Jubilee Way morning. The right hand brick marks the active heap, a helpful marker when I am half way up and half way down. Easy to forget which way one is going. The wear and tear rather more noticeable than it was a year ago, when I raised the subject at reference 2.

The pivot table above gives the year in numbers. A slight untidiness in that the months at the start and end of the year are both incomplete. 

What it does not tell us is that bricks were not walked on 101 days out of the 366 (2000 being a leap year), about 1 in 4. Knowledge derived by allowing null lines in the record, an inclusion originally driven by the need to improve the appearance of date pivot tables, rather thrown by missing dates. This being one of a number of quirks in the data design, done on the hoof rather than by proceeding in an orderly fashion, taking proper account of the requirements. Requirements which are not always, as they were not on this occasion, well known at design time.

With this graph, drawn from the numbers above shows the effect of cycling kicking in after April and a minor bump for the second lockdown, during which outings to places like Hampton Court Palace and Wisley Horticultural Gardens were suspended.

The total height of 14,760 metres is higher than any one mountain but it is the height of Skil Brum and Gimmigela Chuli taken together. The former is 7,410 meters high, in Pakistan at the western end of the Himalayas, known as the Karakorams. Just right of centre in the old Italian snap above. Looks like a tough cookie from here.

While the latter is 7,350 metres high, on the border between India and Nepal, at the other end of the Himalayas. A much more recent snap.

On the way, I came across reference 1, which mountain buffs are invite to peruse.

Reference 1: https://www.peakbagger.com/.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/03/bricks.html.