Locke

Readers may have noticed a sentimental regard for concrete, a material with which I spent a happy year and with which I am always happy to renew acquaintance.

Well, yesterday, I was able to watch a film all about pouring concrete, a film called 'Locke'. And the makers cunningly included some material of interest to ladies, so making it a film that all the family could watch.

Started badly with several minutes of advertisements for the sort of film where you have large muscular men with tattoos charging around in vests with weapons which look far too large to be fired from the hip. The sort of thing that Schwarzenpigger went in for before he took the Reagan path to political glory. Annoying that you get this sort of thing in a DVD which you have paid Amazon good money for and one day we will learn how to skip over it without missing the start of the film one does want to watch. As it was, we did start to worry about the film we were about to watch.

Continued badly with a great deal of F-word, which did calm down a bit, but which continued intermittently through the film.

And last but not least the star of the film spent far too much time on his mobile, admittedly hands free, while driving fast on a motorway, tired by a day's work, not to mention by the events of which the film was made. Not a good example to the rest of us.

That apart, an excellent film, which managed to achieve a great deal in a very small compass. Never seen anything like it before.

PS: I suspect they may have overdone the concrete for effect. But they did include various words like 'slump' which I recognised and a lot of what sounded like very plausible concrete gang argot, fifty years on from that which I once knew. I went to sleep wondering what would happen if the test cubes from a large foundation pour turned out badly. By which time quite a lot of building has been built on top? The one time such a thing happened on my watch, the materials engineers poked around for a bit with their toys, could not find any evidence of a problem in-situ and let the thing go but I did get into trouble with the concrete gang for disturbing their bank holiday overtime arrangements (triple time at the time). The concrete in question was the stuff used to join together some crosswise precast units, large for their time and which can still be seen as one pulls out of Paddington Station. A slightly different view is included above, courtesy wikipedia.