A two part dream

A dream this morning during which I had the strong sense of having had it before, perhaps earlier the same night or perhaps the night before. A dream reverting to my gap year, perhaps also picking up yesterday's reference to Spanish.

I was a very junior concrete technician out in the jungle. Very green and steamy. Far enough out that the rule of law and order was a long way away. A large construction project, by virtue of my presence involving concrete, although there was no wet concrete in the dream, which took place inside the sprawling project accommodation sheds, brown wooden affairs, overgrown and dilapidated garden sheds, which also included the concrete laboratory, or at least what passed for one in the jungle.

The workforce was Spanish and it seemed to be expected that the small number of English concrete technicians would provide their supervision, despite their more or less complete absence of Spanish. No engineers, either Spanish or English to be seem. A fairly rough & rowdy workforce and the cramped & slummy dormitory style accommodation included plenty of wives and other women. Catching rats & mice both for the pot and for pleasure seemed to be an important part of the life.

Being rather young, I found all this rather intimidating. But I also wanted to do my duty and was very concerned that nobody seemed to be bothering about making test cubes out of the concrete, the concrete being poured that is, not the concrete that was left over. A vague sense that we had the moulds (see http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/new-patio-phases-ia-and-ib.html or ask Mr. Google about concrete test cubes, to whom I am grateful for the illustration). Not good enough just to do the humble slump test.

But there was no proving tank - it being the custom to store the maturing cubes under water, this adding a significant 25% or something to their final compressive strength - and no crusher. The fresh cubes would have to be shipped back to base somehow, and the best that I could do would be to label them in such a way that a cube could be tracked back to the bit of the construction of which it was a sample. I think one used special wax crayons for the purpose. Something which I once famously failed to do for a cube taken from a very unsatisfactory batch of concrete used to stick together two successive, pre-cast segments of, I think, the Royal Oak to Westbourne Park section of Westway. See gmaps 51.520487, -0.195270. Possibly a mix known as B¾, B for it being weaker than an A mix and ¾ for the maximum size of aggregate. D1½ being the rubbishy stuff used for the huge pile caps around the top of deep piles.

It was all very difficult and the workforce seemed to be much more interested in rats and women than in cubes, despite all our attempts at (outdoor) briefing sessions before kick-off in the morning. A strong sense that it was all out of control and that there little that us Brits could do about it.

PS 1: I now find that one can also do the referencing trick for Google maps. Click here. Maybe there is life yet!

PS 2: Facebook has just seen fit to remind me that I failed to observe the world suicide prevention day yesterday. See http://www.iasp.info/wspd/, where I find that I have missed the opportunity to to download e-cards or postcards in any or all of over 50 languages.