Friday, May 21, 2010
DIY timewatch
At the same time as playing with the hydraulic drill, indulged in a spot of taking old house to pieces. Just like taking furniture to pieces, gives one an excellent insight into how the thing was made in the first place. Up to a point that is. Given that the house in question has been serially mucked about with over the last three hundred years or so, mainly downhill in an easterly direction, so lots of relics and vestiges on and under the surface. So we had a very smooth concrete lid to a trench, maybe six inches under today's floor. And three inches under another part of today's floor some old flagstones. Various shapes and sizes, averaging maybe a foot square. Maybe blue lias (see http://www.bluelias.co.uk/). More or less finished on the top, rough cast underneath but with the under edges bevelled away to make it easy to get the top more or less rectangular. Traces of old brick walls, the purpose of which was lost in the mists of time. Drains which vanish into rough cast stone walls, never to be seen again - although they must go somewhere or the place would have been rather stinky. One tea-cup handle of some blue and white ware.
Sundry small bones, probably chicken. One larger bone, possibly the bottom end of a femur. One would have thought a cow more likely, particularly since the next door lane used to be the town shambles, but the picture of a human femur I could find in Britannica online looked more like the thing we found than the picture of a cow's femur which Mr G. dug up for me at http://www.shopzilla.co.uk/. He wasn't so hot on humeri. He got me onto, via an advertisement which looked helpful, what turned out to be some people called Nuffield who want me to get them to reshape the head of my right femur. Do they get some surface grinding contraption from JCB to do the business? It seems that despite being an NHS outfit, it is not above paying Google to pop up adverts alongside my bony searches.
Pondered about the possibility of a chicken having been placed sacrificially under the threshold at the time of original construction. Bricklaying informants at TB tell me that such things were quite common in the times of their fathers.
Ground under the house very various. Mainly disturbed ground with bits of sharp broken stone, broken tile, bits of root, the aforementioned bones and other oddments. Some ground black, some brown and some yellow. All fairly damp. Broke through into what seemed like undisturbed ground once or twice. One can see how timewatchers might get excited. You discover the end of something which you decide must be something interesting. Get really geed up. Maybe a bit of Saxon pottery. Spend half an hour wheedling the thing out of its sticky clay bed a foot or so below floor level to find that it is a common or garden pebble. But the possibility keeps one on the case.
While this was going on amused to hear of the doings of a rusticated old Etonian in a house down the road, this one being a televised house by a river (http://www.rivercottage.net/) rather than a blogged house in a small town. This chap has done so well selling the good life by the river that he has been able to afford to get himself a nice new wife and a nice new house in the country and not to have to live in the shop any more. No more smelly customers who went to bog standard schools. No more damp winters by the river. No more organic carrots. No more slugs in the lettuce. Long live home delivery from the nearest Waitrose! Despite the rustic supplement to the delivery charge. Which is all very well, most of us are glad not to have to live in the shop. But in his case, living in the shop is the whole point. The fact that he does not care to do it any more makes one wonder why we should carry on thinking that it is all so wonderful and paying him so well for the thought.
A bit differant if you are a luvvy. You are paid to pretend to be a sexed up version of an eleventh century Scottish king. But we all know that it is a pretence. It is not necessary for the thing to work for the luvvy to be a king or even to like the thought of being a king. Pretending to like stringy rhubarb does not seem quite so cool somehow. For that to work, you do really have to like it? Or do you? I shall reflect further.
# posted by Jim @ 5:52 AM 
