High

Usually I'm fine working on scaffolds. But today, I have decided to finish and climb back down the ladder and put the kettle on. I don't know if it's because Cathy and the kids have been unable to come, but high up on the scaffold, repairing the broken roof tiles that are on the over hang that shoots rain water away from the wall, it felt kind of lonely. Maybe being so high, without the sight or sound of anybody except the gentle breeze that swirled around my head as it came over the roof from the west, it made me feel removed from the normal flow of things. I suppose the fact that the scaffold had to be erected over a metre away from the wall because of the over hang made it worse. Although I had tied it off around the bars of the renaissance window half way up, it was rather wobbly and added to my sense of unease. Coming down the ladder though, I had to smile to myself. Triggered by the wobbling and the sound of Jean Pierre's cockerel crowing, as he does sporadicaly day and night, I thought of a similar scene years before when with Danny I was rendering a chimney on a cottage down a little country lane. It had been raining on and off all morning, but after lunch it brightened up, so scaling back up the ladder and taking the bucket of lime plaster off the pully that Danny had sent up, I started to second coat the chimney. At first it was very subtle, an almost imperceptable move away from the wall. But just as I was thinking it was more of a stretch for me to reach the top corner than I'd remembered from yesterday, I instinctively  dropped my trowel into the bucket, and with a good chunk of my heart in my mouth, grabbed the corner of the chimney stack and wrapped my legs around the safety barrier of the scaffold. Danny, thinking I had gone mad as it looked like I had joined a hug a chimney society, started to yell up some admittedly funny obsceneties that are a feature of chaps in his line of work. But soon after deciphering help from my straining grunts, he realised that the back legs of the scaffold were sinking in the newly dampened earth. With an admirable quickness of mind he shouted up that if I could hold on for a couple of minutes, he had noticed that the woman of the house had an old wooden ladder in the chicken run and he could use it as a wedge to stop any further movement whilst I climbed down. Relieved he'd got a plan I hung on for dear life until I heard the noise of chickens almost barking their anger followed by a familiar stream of Danny's invectives. Sensing that the slipping scaffold had stopped, I strained my head to see Danny, the crotch of his jeans snagged on the wire fence as he tried to straddle it, swinging at an irrate cockerel with a long cumberson old Ladder. The more he swung, the more snagged he became and the cockerel, easily evading his clumsy defence, moved in to attack the leg remaining in his territory with claws and beak. Dropping the Ladder it broke, its years sitting unused in the run, contributing to its rotting demise. It seemed an eternity scaling down the poles nearest the gable end of the cottage, expecting to have to jump at any time, but I made it, the scars of the day belonging to Danny, both on his leg and being bettered by a bird. Sipping my tea and listening to Jean Pierre's cockerel, I went and pulled at the scaffold pole in the same way I have done ever since that day, and gave a little stamp on the sun baked earth.

Bubbles

The hammock is perfect. Slung between the old elder trees that I very nearly cut back a few weeks ago when everything was growing like mad in the rain, it's perfect for musing on life and cradling the laptop. I start the day early now, getting up at six and working until about one when it's too hot to work. The floor's finished, so it's onto some plastering tomorrow and maybe when Cathy gets here next week it will look like I have made some progress. With a room plastered out, it looks like it's nearly finished. The early start was difficult today though. Last night in the local town there was a fete. I had seen it advertised on a poster outside the boulangerie last week, and bored with the sound of my own hammering and tinned food in the caravan, decided to see what the poster meant by a mousse party. Standing on the edge of the square, brightly lit stalls linked with garlands of light bulbs, I was intrigued by a big contraption that was set up on the stage next to the DJ's podium. As the sunset faded away and I started to tuck into my sausage in a baguette that the latex gloved man on the food stall handed to me like a prized possession, I watched as groups of friends, mostly young people but with more than a smattering of children and their parents, move towards the stage at the urging of the DJ. As the music level increased, so the mystery machine cranked into life spewing huge amounts of mousse, or to my eyes at least, a type of foam that looked like everyone was indulging in a giant communal bubble bath. Soon most of the teenagers had disappeared as they had surged to the front, but they were quickly followed by the children, darting in and out, throwing foam at their smiling parents. To see people of all ages in a community having such innocent fun made me smile, but I did see one young chap emerge from the foam mountain grimacing as he limped away rubbing his knee. The way his face sagged and his sodden shorts clung to his thighs reminded me of Jack. I was working at a courthouse repairing tiles with my Dad. It was in the Edwardian toilets just off the main entrance and all was progressing well when we had a call asking us to re-grout the joints in the long urinal with epoxy grout. Well you can imagine what we thought of that. Still, my Dad said he'd had worse jobs and we were just to get on with it. He boiled some water to clean what in fairness was a clean area, but before we could start we needed the flushing water switched off. Finding the valve rusted solid I phoned the main contractor for a plumber and was told he would be there as soon as possible. Twenty minutes later in walked Jack. Jack was a nice chap, but he was a joiner. In his eagerness to please his boss whose plumbers were overworked he had volunteered to help us as he said he was au fait with all things plumbing. Soon coming to the same conclusion as us that the valve was stuck he went to ask a court usher if he could turn the mains off. They were reluctant, so not wanting to be a nuisance he said he'd manage.
"You must be joking," said my Dad as Jack outlined his proposal. He said that he would cut the pipe in a discreet area and slip on a new valve excepting that he would get a little damp but that as all the walls and floor were tiled the spilled water would soon mop up. His smiling face of confidence was met with our scorn but if we wanted to get the job done he said, it was the only way. Stripped off to the waist, he stood on his saw bench and asked me to pass him the relevant tools as he required them. With his hacksaw he made quick progress as I watched, my Dad in a cubicle, determined to play no part in Jack's scheme. As the water came screaming out of the severed pipe, Jack could not have known that it's source was a huge tank on the roof of the police headquarters seven stories high next door, but as the water gushed onto the opposite wall before splashing in all directions he could have done better than to collapse down with a look of horror on his face. Seizing the valve off him I jumped up and attempted to push the new valve on. A difficult task was made impossible when I found he had got the wrong size valve and I urged him in quite forthright terms to pass me another. Staggering like a shell shocked soldier, he told me that he hadn't got one, whereupon I coaxed him with some not too soothing words to fetch one. Holding my thumb over the pipe in an attempt to stem the flood like a soggy little Dutch boy, I watched him leave the room and saw that my Dad had taken the broom to the door and was brushing the tide away back towards the urinal.
"Grab this quick," he called and was gone as I swept like one of those brush hands in the Curling event. Just when I thought that my efforts were about to be overwhelmed, the water suddenly slowed then stopped. My Dad then appeared smiling, explaining that with a little bit of charm he had persuaded the usher that he would only need the water turning off for a minute or two.
There was just room for the both of us to stand on the saw bench and look through the window to see Jack's van come screaming round the corner on his way back from the builder's merchants. Pulling up on the space reserved for emergency vehicles, he came dashing in with the precious valve. My Dad back on the brush and me with my thumb over the end of the pipe, I growled,
"Get up here quickly."
Jack jumped up like a man possessed and I told him in dramatic fashion that when I counted to three I would let go and he was to force the valve on. Reaching three I released my thumb, and as a tiny trickle emerged form the pipe, his face registered first shock and then relief as he stepped back off the saw bench and then sat on the floor.
After he had finished, I watched him walk back to his van rubbing his knee like the lad at the mousse fete, and was impressed for the first time with him that day when the usher approached him and asked if there had been a problem.
"No," he soggily replied. "You get a bit wet sometimes in this game."

Martyn Walker is the author of Stopcock, available globally on Amazon