In my meetings with persons from other countries, I am often told that the thing they find most puzzling/amusing/annoying about the British (not me personally, they hasten to add) is that I am (or rather, we are) seemingly wholly obsessed by the weather. Well, I think it's probably fair to say that if they had to put up with what we in these isles have had to endure over the last few weeks, they would doubless be developing a similar complex by now.
Whilst it may or may not be true that the Eskimo have 28 different words to describe snow, it is certainly the case that the British have several more phrases to describe rain - the vast majority of them take the form "___ rain!" where ___ is some choice adjective, normally Anglo-Saxon in origin. And rightly so in my humble opinion. However, it is all too easy to forget (in mid-July 2007 as I write this) that as recently as early June we were all longing for rain, having experienced one of the driest May months on record. How we all vowed then not to complain when it decided to rain again; how we wish now we had kept our collective British trap shut.
Since the beginning of this noble venture I had been attempting to find a window in my crowded schedule in order to create the Badman Pipe Factors dock side, on which would be built the (by now, I am sure) legendary 15-inch gauge railway:
Rain
Rain
Rain
:
:
Rain
Dry, Sunny (attended nephew's wedding, so no chance there)
Rain
Frogs
Locusts
Rain
Hot Hail ('Flash' Gordon, anyone?)
Rain...
...And then, last Saturday, without any warning the clouds parted, revealing a strange and wonderful sight - the sky was a wierd blue colour! And a big yellow ball hung in the sky. It felt warm!
So, straight to work: first things first, get the kettle on - any British artisan will tell you that a job like this cannot be rushed, so best to partake of a 'wet' to steady the nerves.
I used the bricks and blocks that were there for prototyping purposes to form the basic dock side wall, and cemented them in with a mortar infill to create the 'floor'. The mortar in this case was a 2:1 cement:sand mix, with enough water to set the mixture off, but not make it sloppy. Getting a level surface proved to be a challenge, which I approached by mixing up a more 'fluid' mortar with 1:1 proportions of the aforementioned materiel and applying that over the top. Certainly it was easier smoothing out, and the resultant surface was less undulating, but it still ended up with a slight gradient. But here's how it looked:
When I come to bury the track, I will have another attempt at levelling the surface - if anything I need to at least ensure that the gradient if any is away from the garden boundary wall, so the ever-present rain has a chance to drain away to mother earth.
Finally, I took the opportunity to record a short video of the first out-door run of the Hornet, over loose-laid track in more-or-less its intended position. Spielburg I am not:
I'll bet Spielburg couldn't find 28+ phrases to describe rain though.
