Yard retaining wall (phase 2)

Phase 2 poured on Tuesday, having settled for just one shutter and not going for the two. I have doing the bread at the same time for an excuse, bread which, despite all the rush, turned out really well.

Don't know about phase 2 yet as the shutter is only half struck. Let it loosen up a bit before striking it altogether. The cloths are to keep the curing concrete wet. The tatty looking bits of plywood nailed onto this end of the shutter are the lazy alternative to cutting the shutter end into the earth bank. Something which I do not have a very good eye for and which would, in any event, have taken a hour or so, rather than a minute or so for the plywood. But you do get a good view of the way the earth bank has been undercut.

I did have some computational problems. During shutter assembly the brain was not doing very well at solid geometry, not being able to compute very reliably whether a suitably rotated part of the assembly would fit in its intended hole. You can get the same problem with jigsaws with the brain refusing to work out whether a piece fits or not unless you turn it the right way round - something which is rather easier with a piece of jigsaw than a piece of shutter.

Half the second batch of old bricks were lost down the garden again, this time chopping them up a bit first. The other half went into rubble bags from Travis Perkins, maybe £4 for 5 and made out of some woven white plastic stuff, amazingly strong. The three I have used so far have not torn or punctured at all. Bags emptied at the waste transfer station at around 1000 yesterday (Thursday) when there was no queue, but the place was busy enough with most of the dozen or so parking slots being taken.

The screwdriver is older than I am, that is to say more than 65 years old, with the sort of properly shaped wooden handle you get a good grip on and give a bit of welly. Much less likely to give you blisters than the plastic equivalent, possibly made by Marples, but probably more or less obsolete in the builders' era of battery packs. But not quite, as I see from http://www.marples.co.uk/ that they still sell the things under the moniker of cabinet screwdriver, although they do seem to have stopped making chisels. When I was little they were the best and I still own half a dozen or more, including the fearsome half inch mortice.

PS: a quick call has revealed the truth. The marples above is Joseph Marples, the chisel one is William Marples, whom a glance at Google suggests has ceased trading.