A Shed for All Seasons — Let The Toolery Begin

Saw sings, "work... work... work... work... work..."

Two bits, too short, 4b2.

Hammer blows, "duh... duh... duh... duh... done"

Jointed, made up, long and true.

Trimmed and offered up to what I judge by eye to be right height, pilot drilled through at two-thirds length. Fine masonry bit plunges through wood, pebbledash, render, biting into brick beneath. Large masonry bit chucked, hole drilled, hole plugged, length screwed in place at a dangle.

Second pilot two-thirds t'other way brought to level. Bubble checked, process repeated. Bubble checked — near as dammit. Ready for fixing proper.

Spewing wood, spitting brick.

Drill screams, "eeeeeeeeeeeeasy..."

Clockwise, driver, twist, twist, twist.

Ten plugs in and the wall plate fixed.

Hmmm....

Sit a long, long while to contemplate this.

Bottle of nose-bluingly cheap but effectively sobering where thought about quantity of materials needed and where to secure said is concerned, Spanish plonk later...

I have ~

In stock.

1. Couple of hundred bricks with attached paint and lime mortar. Handmade. Late 18th Century. Sourced last year from skip across Longford Road. One of three shops sold on to neighbour surplus to requirements — dividing wall between Stone Pizza and Charnley Memorials demolished. Hence bricks. Fast food joint now has sit down parlour where Charnley's parlour once was but retains extant mason's funereal signage above what is now their main entrance — diners unaware of the glaring incongruity and the irony.
2. Pair of 18th Century plank & ledge doors with peeling paint & original furniture — rusty Suffolk latches and penny-end T-hinges. Sourced long ago from derelict doctor's house behind our yard wall. Doctors house now fully 'restored' by asian taxi driver — palatial vestibule complete with rearing elephants its welcoming glory.
3. Length of hearty English oak retrieved from River Sowe, thickness of garden door post. No rot. Somewhat wormed pine door jamb with some paint. Garden door, ledged and braced, pine, painted, good condition. 
4. Boxes of screws and nails and bolts of various types.

Out of stock.

1.  Everything else.

Undeterred by shortfall in necessary materials and readies to buy said in, set to work next day on mission to source and acquire entire deficient requirement by 'alternative' means.

Within no time have a pile of lumbers of various length and scantling gotten from skips parked around the village of Longford. Looks enough for job.

Permanent skip used by a local window fitter provides three almost undamaged panes of early 1990's vintage tudor, but made with proper soft lead came as the Elizabethans would have and with individual diamond lights set in.

Sag across pane makes for trippy kaleidoscopic reflections of surrounding skyline.

Fit for purpose.

Rest of 10 similar windows in same skip beyond repair. Wrecked apart, the came goes in the scrap bucket. 40lb's of lead = 18 kilos. Lead weighs in around about a quid per kilo most days so I'm into profit...

Offer up bricks, windows, doors and timber. Fit is nigh perfect with just an inch of leeway to take care of the left side wall out of both plumb and line by up to four inches with rainfall neatly draining away to the right and down drain a couple of inches from where the three course brick base and back wall meet, just so.

Find a load of corrugated bitumen roofing in another skip. Lucky that!

Take five full sheets for use and a half sheet scrap bit for beating about. Retails at £18 per sheet as new. Few small holes in it, but also have a whole tin of bitumen repair mastic from skip too. No problem foreseen then excepting how to flash the stuff.

Time to think about that later. It's dry in the sky and remains so.

Earlier on. First job.

Wooden fence between rotted in five years because of damp winter conditions so brick wall dividing our yard from the next, the necessary first step. Pains me that I can't find good bags of cement when plenty piles of free sand are seen loitering about. Found alright — water damaged all. Therefore mortar first cost of the project which robs lead scrap profit and when more than first bargained for is soon required, bites deep into pocket. 

Never laid a brick in my life — though process seems easy enough. Problem is these bricks are handmade items, therefore (somewhat!) irregular, so, bricklaying career commences in at the deep end with the most difficult easy task in the trade — laying bricks end to end and atop one another but with no two in the entire pile the exact same size and hardly one amongst the lot with a flush face. 

Because this is to be a 'half-brick' wall only one brick thick, this means creating a wall with two faces — the public and the private. Public face where bricks are laid in a nice clean, and as far as possible, smooth plane with nicely pointed mortar joints. Private face where differences in brick thickness show dramatically and pointing beyond nicety. 

Doesn't matter. Entire environment round Longford way made in same fashion. Congruous no matter what!

Hang garden door off house wall first as sight line and plumb line. Judy's son, Ben, helps out. Complete quickly and efficiently, both learn the art of bricklaying along the way. Of course, first course laid straight atop the concrete slab...

Foundation not dug......

Learn later of frost heave.............!

(It was such good fun though that I'd demolish and start over with pleasure should it crack apart come February time.)

Next job. Third job. Roof support.

In an hour it's taking shape and within three almost finished.

Enter loved one.

"It's up and it's true, your job looks a good 'un,

Seems so correct and so deft in the wooden,

I like it so much but forgive me, I wonder...

Try make me suspect that there's nowhere a blunder?"

Meself. Blithely sure.

Suspection? No worries, (nor Queen's English either!)

I'd rather correction than caught by the neither,

Cast your eye over and task me thereafter,

I'll rip it back down again, plate, beam and rafter."

Exit loved one, convinced. Hero picks up where he left off.

Well after that, just as the saw sang on her very first cut, it was work, work, work, work.  The frame hung together quickly and the windows and doors fitted snugly as imagined. In a week or so it was looking just as good as could be expected. Though there wasn't a straight line to be seen anywhere, it was perfectly in tune with the wonky old walls that kept it aloft, so it looked upright enough and began to stand proudly as a thing in its own rights.

Small is what it was, though. Very small indeed!

But small enough to be a shed of consequence?

A Shed for all Seasons — Nutcracking

My yard is square and sixteen square of 'em. A penny black. In need of franking.

Surrounded on three sides by high walls and with a northern aspect. Shady and cool in summer, dark and dank in winter. Because mould grows from the ground up from November through March and by Spring the off-white pebbledash turns mildew green at eye level. Because wet nets fester but never dry and tackle stored is subject to the light fingered. Because of this and that and one thing and another, to an angler it's neither use nor ornament.

My house is years old and 200 of 'em. Four stories high on thirty yards square. Small but tall and in need of repair.

Bedroom windows are rotten. Sawdust and linen do not good bedfellows make and my efforts to fix the one but avoid soiling the other are thwarted by the demands of domestic bliss. Because nothing dulls a man's cutting edge quite so quickly as a feather duster does. Because the accumulated stuff of his lifetime must be stashed and stored where womenfolk with their oil and grease banishing detergents fear to tread. Something needs to be done about this yard and its house, and while summer lasts, be done at a good march and long before next.

Ergo, shed.

Domestic conversation, moment well chosen.

"I'll build a shed." Confident. "And it'll be a good un' too..."

"Explain yourself my love..." Says she. Less so.

"For foul nets to dry in and maggots, my dear. Pupation through flyhood without wailing or crying, it's quite an idea!"

But also thinking...

Backyard retreat fettling rod, reel and gear, escapes the Ire of Demestos with tin of cold beer.

"And what about me? " From the side of her mouth.

        

... A tough nut this. Where does the almighty 'She' fit into my plan?

A pause for thought, because up till now I hadn't, and...

"Well, you'll see the back of me more often than the front of me..."

"Hmmm.... you have such a lot of front to see the back of, darling dear, that that might be a very good thing."

Crack appears in nutshell. 

"It'll be no Tom's folly, I will get it finished. By end of September (... or October at least!) an end to my hammering and 'our' problem diminished." 

"Good, I'll have windows, shall expect them delivered. The first installment on the debt of my favour, you might say." 

Shell splits open, out falls the kernel. Chew off half. Offer hers.

"You won't ever be sorry, I promise, my lover"

"But what shall you call it? It must have a name..."

"I was thinking 'Jeff's Foolery' or this or the other." 

"It's 'Hatt's Toolery,' and you're stuck with it. Go sharpen your plane..."

Canal Roach — Magic Numbers

For years I've believed that roach to surpass that 'magical' two-pound weight were not only possible to catch from the canals of the midlands but certain if only enough anglers bothered to try for them. For at least three years I know for certain that I was the only angler in this country who was concerned with trying after that fish and underwent the Labours of Hercules to prove it. I failed over and over, coming so close though that I truly thought that at least one other angler would finally believe it possible and back up my claim with his own efforts.

One-pound, fifteen-ounces, 8 drams. My best remains a cruel half-ounce under critical weight.

However, backed up with plenty of mid one-pounders and stacks of fish around and above the benchmark one-pound weight telling you it's worth persevering, I thought that the sheer weight of my numbers would convince, but I was wrong. Two-pounds and in excess is for some unfathomable reason the only number that will make anglers take a roach venue seriously enough.

That's very sad. A terrible indictment of modern angling if only when there's proof banked in excess of an arbitrary numerical target do people want to bother.

To all intents and purposes, my best fish was a two-pounder. The difference a gob full of water...

But it wasn't above two-pounds. And that was crucial. A fish that more or less proved that larger fish were swimming in the same shoal and that simply couldn't have been the best the canal had to offer was ignored as evidence they were there in numbers!

The numbers say they must be. Numbers are never wrong.

Then George Burton arrived on the scene. An angler who fishes canals nowadays for specimen roach but was once a canal match angler who'd scratch a net of blades for the same weight as one good fish, he took my work seriously. He's also a great one for numbers — though not arbitrary ones — as proof.

George began to adapt my outrageously heavy methods for the pole, refining and refining till the rig was a fraction of the size, the baits tiny by comparison and the feed as fine as powder snow. He caught good roach and plenty of them but failed over and over to break through the one-pound four-ounce barrier for what seemed like an age.

Then abandoning refinement he went as coarse as I (and you) should like.

Bread discs the size of a quid, roughly mashed bread with chunks of crust in it for feed. Suddenly he'd bagged a pound and half roach.

I wasn't at all surprised. He'd discovered for himself what I'd worked out through my own experiments — that big canal roach like big canal baits, coarse feed and plenty of it, and that big canal roach do not respond at all well to tiptoeing delicacy.

Employing scales of approach seemingly ridiculous on venues considered fit for only the finest methods and microscopic baits, we'd discovered what everyone else had overlooked. That our canals are no longer scratching venues but true specimen waters ranking alongside any other and surpassing many, where two-pound roach are numerically commonplace, but where serious roach anglers who might catch convincing numbers of them are not...

While George fished I'd hardly wet a line after the canal's roach. Dabbling now and then but never too seriously, it's no surprise that I caught few in the meantime because you can't do it lightly and get away with it. Canal roach require all the attention you can muster and your effort must be entirely focussed upon them. Failure is certain otherwise.

I'd taken a long break from it content to watch as George plucked fish after fish from the murky waters till his total in terms of numbers caught matched my own and his results in terms of catch weight data matched mine perfectly. What we then had were two sets of proof that argue very convincingly what truly great roach fisheries these canals are. And they are — beyond any shadow of a doubt.

And then... finally... it happened.

George surpassed my achievement (but not my unswerving belief) by supplying the proof in cold number that others will require in order to bother themselves when he banked that 'fish of a lifetime.'

So. Rifle through the back catalogues of both blogs and you'll get the gist of it. The way to go about it is explained both here and there. And, we'll see you on the towpath, no doubt, soon enough. Where George has set the bar high...

But believe me, they run bigger still.

Numbers are never wrong.

Float, Flight & Flannel — Big Bend Theory

Avon Perch — A Change of Sky

Our regular Thursday evening sessions over the last month have seen night draw closer and closer to afternoon and now arriving at the river means hitting dusk running rather than taking a leisurely stroll up the bank toward it. Martin has toughed it out for that monster barbel 'with his name on it' and I've persisted trotting bread for roach. Neither successfully.

Chub, I like. But catching little else for what's seemed like months on end with every approach employed resulting in more and more forces a rethink. A worm crawls out the grass of the towpath verge during a damp dog walk and she/he gives me an idea...

What better fish for the short autumn evenings can there be than perch?

I'd clean forgotten how engrossing this form of fishing can be but I'm reminded soon enough...

Flicked into the eddy of the pool the float ambles about a while. You'll wait ten minutes sometimes, twenty or thirty often enough, an hour or more if they're lazy but they'll come by. Dip, dive, bob and slide. The wait is rewarded within minutes.

The dithering bite sets me on the edge of my seat. It's missed. That's fair enough. It won't bother perch. Sure enough the next bite up comes a specimen a tiny fraction of the size I'm after. But at least it's not a chub!

The worm threaded up line not down the throat is rehooked and sent out once again to do its business. Ten minutes later the float performs that unmistakable dance. When to strike, when to strike? It's been said you should always give them enough rope but how long is long enough rope to hang a billy?

I don't know!

Often perch are right under our noses but they're so sensitive to depth you might never know they're there fishing too high, too low. It's eight feet deep right under the reeds, ten a few yards further out, but I feel I'm fishing too shallow in it.

The worm lowered a foot to hang the same from the riverbed creates an immediate reaction and from then on in it's never much longer than I can bear to wait hung on tenterhooks before it's nabbed. Between approaching dusk and inky darkness a series of five strapping perch around and over the pound mark are banked.

I haven't done such a thing since boyhood but after dark a stationary torch is set to shine a beam across the water to illuminate the float...

Drifting on the lazy current in and out of view, one minute bright as a beacon, the next almost invisible but never quite lost from view, modern contraptions may have made such a thing anachronistic practice but it still remains a fabulously exciting way to fish!

A better specimen is lost. Powerful enough to be a convincing chub if it wasn't for that jangling head shaking sensation transmitted up the line, I'm at least assured that next Thursday evening I might have my reward with a perch to gorge on the pounders I've had tonight.

Last bite and along comes a surprise!

Odd that none are reported for what must be a year then three come along in separate blog posts from different people in the last few days....

The first ruffe I've had in ages and the only one ever caught from a river.