Underground activity

Since the spell of heavy rain ten days ago, the hole in the street outside has re-appeared.

Or to be more precise, tarmac and rubble shovelled in and rolled over on two previous occasions began to sink and produce or should I say reproduce the same circular depression three feet across and a foot deep. This time, someone else noticed and called the Highways Department. This time the mini-excavator brought in dug down well over a metre, into the bed of clay beneath the tarmac and rubble layers until it had reached the end of the range of its bucket. With great skill, the driver then placed two large steel panels over the hole, using the ram on the machine's front and the jib arm to shift them into place. Then the crew left for the day.

Chatting on his lunch break, one of the crew told me that he'd seen several recurrent holes of this kind in other parts of the city. He attributed them to the excavations made by sewer rats, who take advantage of any loose brickwork in a tunnel to burrow into the clay and create chambers in which they can rear their young. These can become quite large, and when uncovered, found to be stuffed with plastic bags and other materials borrowed to make nest bedding. They hadn't so far come across such a chamber in our street, but we'll see what further digging reveals in days to come.

Here's a few action photos

Yesterday and today we've had an excellent carpenter in making us a new linen cupboard at the top of the stairs. We're very pleased with it. This kept me at home most of the day, so it was gone for when I left home to drop of some work done at City Hall. I waited 25 minutes for a  sixty one bus to appear in my direction. In the first fifteen minutes of my wait no fewer than four  sixty ones passed, going toward Pentrebane. Is this a record? I have no idea of what was going on out there in the suburbs.

The poor driver was clearly coping with a lot of pressure, well aware that he was late. A small boy was misbehaving at the back of the bus, winding up three younger children and their mother. I think he was also dinging the request stop bell constantly. Two minutes into the ride, the driver stopped, got out of his seat and shouted angrily at the kids, threatening to put them all off the bus. The three smaller children all started weeping loudly and hysterically, making things worse. When they got off, the mother of three apologised for the behaviour of the brat, not her own but a friend's she was minding. Several passengers got off too, and made kind, sympathetic, appreciative noises to the driver. Such is  life on the sixty one bus.