A quiet day today, with just the 5 of us in attendance. One of the regulars is on holiday, the other packing up to move house. A third has just returned from a short illness, so there's been a bit of coming and going in the team.

So, as they used to say in that Pontins ad, 'What fun could we have?'

The first thing to do was punish Keith for spending a whole month away off work, towing a caravan round France and making it unsafe. It was decided by the other 4 that he could break into hardcore a broken piece of slab we had lying about, in a further effort to tidy up the site and make it ready for tarmacing.

It wasn't as easy as it looked. The concrete slabs at Broadway break up dead easy, often with a single blow, but these at CRC are made of genuine rock and while they spall terribly, they won't break up.

After 5 mins of sustained whacking, Keith takes a rest and is subjected to some pensive comments from John. A man leaning on a shovel is always ready with some helpful suggestions like 'I wouldn't do it like that if I were you'.






At the northern end of the site JC was wound up at finding some fly-by-night fly tipper had tipped a load of patio slabs just where he was about to take a roller driving exam. That would have been a bumpy session indeed - I wonder which idiot did this to us?

A nervous hand was raised at the back in reply. 'I was that idiot' came a sheepish answer. Names are being withheld to protect those that had the courage to confess their crimes.

Then Fairview arrived with a long awaited delivery of 200 new concrete edging slabs. These will be laid at the back of the platform, to give the tarmac and edge to work to.

The trick with this heavy stuff is to get it off the lorry straight on to a PWay trolley, in order to avoid onerous double handling. We managed this with 80 of the slabs, and here they are being trundled down to the far end for unloading.

Brian in the meantime had loaded up the sprayer with biodegradable weedkiller, and was giving the platform surface the treatment. We hope it did its job before the afternoon rain came. In the background John and Keith lay out the slabs. Next to Brian you can see a steel peg, one of a row which delineate the extent of the platform, and hence the line of the edging slabs. This needs to be dug out still.

Here John and Keith start unloading the edging slabs. Some are needed at right angles to form the end of the platform, and you can also see the steps that were cast. Looks quite neat really.

The final job was a fill in - will it rain before we are finished? We needed to remove the surplus spoil from the excavations for the running in board posts.

It then indeed started to rain, just as predicted. Before that we had seen some dire looking clouds creep over the distant Malverns - how long before they got to us? About 20 mins it turned out. We hurried indoors, and ate our lunch. More next time then.

Next Monday the digger and dumper and 30 tons of infill will be there, and we will finish off the back filling, and make a start on widening the platform to its full extent, and digging the channel for the electrics for the lamp posts still to be placed.