03.14.05
Building sights
I am aware that posts have been rather thin for the last few weeks. I could offer a number of excuses.
I could, for instance, argue that work is keeping me more than occupied. I could note, with a whimsical aside, that we are currently without a kitchen, meaning (the horror) that there is an unfortunate amount of dining out and taking up of old dinner invitations being done. I could point to a recent couple of days in Scandinavia as evidence of, well, something other than indolence.
The truth is that, at present, I only have to lift my eyes by ten degrees and I have a sumptuous panoramic view of a building site. With JCBs. With dumper trucks. With flatbeds delivering girders, with drills and white vans and portaloos and machines I can’t even comprehend, let alone name. Reader, when I say that I can see boring machines, do not misunderstand me.
Oh, and there are tea breaks and site surveyors and gothic edifices of scaffolding and huge piles of shuffled earth and bored builders throwing tennis balls at each other and it is all, from this angle, a shimmering, muddy, vision of the best toy set in the world.
I recall the reason that they started to put viewing grilles into those huge blue hoardings used to seal off building sites. They are an iressistible draw. Building sites are the soap operas of the built environment, and they share this similarity in particular: the more closely you follow them, the less appears ever to be happening. Then you miss a couple of episodes, and everything has changed.