Life in a building site - day one

Up just before eight this morning on a grey overcast, slightly damp morning with the arrival of the scaffolding team to complete yesterday's job, with the roofing team hot on their heels. It was going to be necessary to move the car to make room for the skip due to arrive today, if not tomorrow. I asked for help the do a bump start, but it turned out not to be needed as the car fired into life first go, so I moved it fifty feet down the street and left the engine idling until we'd had breakfast. Lots of noise and dust followed with the activity being concentrated on the back side of the house. The big Velux window was removed, ready for replacement by a new one with a high specification.

Clare went out to shop for a new coded lock for the alley gate and returned with one which couldn't be opened, so she had to return to the hardware shop and get help. Meanwhile, I made the video for this week's Morning Prayer then retrieved the reading texts for next Sunday's Eucharist, and emailed them to the usual recipients. That was quite an achievement against the background noise!

Clare extracted from the freezer the unused half of the port sausage meat bought for stuffing the Christmas turkey, and I turned half of it into a sauce with onions, tomatoes and mushrooms. It was quicker to do this than making it into meat balls to fry, especially as Clare was in command of the frying pan, heating up her veggie 'meatballs'. I was pleased with the outcome. It might have stretched to two days' worth of lunch, with pasta, but with rice instead however, it didn't look as if it would stretch.

Then I went out for a walk, and bumped into Fr Andrew in the park, on his way home from a meeting. We sat on a bench and chatted for half an hour - it was just about mild enough to do this without getting chilled. The roofers had already finished for the day by the time I returned at sunset. At half past six, there was a commotion in the street outside the house, so I went out to investigate. The skip lorry was parking and was just about to deposit its load in the empty space prepared outside the house. The driver said that a forty five minute journey from Rhoose had just taken him an hour and a half in evening traffic. All is now ready for the stripping of the front roof tomorrow.

After supper, I watched this week's double episode of 'Silent Witness', which was all about establishing the identity of three different unknown people whose deaths were discovered long after they died without any usable physical or circumstantial evidence to suggest who they were. The same kind of forensic science as is showcased in 'Bones', but woven into a bigger story in a more thorough way. Very British in its way, but very much the same kind of investigation.

Thankfully, despite the dampness in the air, we got through the first day of roof tile stripping without rain.