Up to no good

Yesterday was spent erecting the stone pillars which have been causing me so much grief for the last 9 months, and today will be spent putting the final finish onto them, hopefully in the glorious sunshine that Bath woke up to this morning.

We couldn't get a fork-lift anywhere near the site for fear of tearing up the lawn, so the stonework had to be man-handled, with the help of a steel gantry standing about 10 feet high. We had to move it to one side yesterday, in case we frightened the pilot of my client's helicopter, which came howling over our heads from behind a group of trees to land about 50 feet away from us, kicking up the dew on the grass like a fine dust and threatening to blow our wigs off. It was bloody enormous, with rows of windows along the side, and could easily have lifted the half-ton pillars into place for me - just so long as I had communication with the pilot to guide him.

Having said that, I have a friend who is also in the stone business, and he once hired a helicopter to put two life-sized, stone figures in place on the parapet of a large country house at a place which will remain nameless, like he will. He doesn't like the story to be mentioned these days, which is why I am mentioning it here.

Anxious to give his business (which is very well known in Britain) as much publicity as possible, he alerted the national media to the forthcoming spectacular event, then wished he hadn't. It was much more spectacular than he ever intended it to be.

The helicopter picked up the first of the figures and slowly but noisily ascended to about 50 feet above the fixing position, which was about 100 feet above ground. Then the pilot seemed to ignore his frantic shouting into the radio and started to drift up and down and from one side to the other, smashing the three-quarter ton figure against the Grade One listed building and causing about £500,000 worth of damage over about the minute that the pilot took to try and find a place to drop it down. How everyone laughed.

Oh yes, those boys at the header of this post. I was in our flea-market last saturday, and saw this kitsch, French picture for sale, so took a photo of it. I was struck by how the lads bear an uncanny resemblance to two other small boys who are the sons of one of the barmen at our local.

These kids are perfectly charming, but they piss off the locals by sitting at the pub's computer almost every day after school, playing noisy games on it whilst everyone else is trying to drown their sorrows after a hard day's work. Their father refuses to buy them a lap-top so they can play the games in a room upstairs and leave us in peace, and will not hear a negative word spoken about the situation.

I emailed the picture to one of the girls at the pub yesterday, and she put it up on the computer as a screen saver. We have been waiting to see if the kids will recognise themselves when they clamber up to play games, but somehow I think it will be a waste of time. It gives us some small amount of pleasure though.