- a tale of two cooks, 5 broken mixers and 7 nadgered wheelbarrows.

 Friday

Liz and I arrived at the Tom’s end-of-camp party – a good time was had by all and our toast orgy skills were refined by Gav. With that the training for the upcoming camp was complete.

 Saturday

Woke up, found the campers from the previous week were still partying hard at 9am. After a quality Harri fuelled Breakfast - Tom, Dave, Liz and I headed to site for a handover session. The work for the week: continue the rebuilding of the Leddon Brook Aqueduct arch, repair the downstream spandrel walls, cut up a lot of stone and raise the lower lock wing walls. Back at the hall and the last of the volunteers from 200515 were just leaving (well apart from Kate and Jenny “Head-office” Black) and Gav and Adrian had volunteered to collect the shiny new volunteers from the station. Liz and I pottered about the accommodation while people started appearing, including an unexpected Phil, Sam and Phill who had apparently booked on in the last week. Including the weekend visitors we ended up catering for over 25 on the first night! We discovered we had 3 James’s and a Jamie, which wasn’t at all convenient.*

Sunday

First day on site and with team leaders assigned their teams after a quick tour work started very quickly. Kate went off to lead a small team to finish the tree felling on the pathway from Newent station to the aqueduct, Adrian spent the day training Elanor and David Miller as excavator drivers and James Butler showed off his new dumper instructor skills by training Elanor as a dumper driver as well.

On the main site Phill Cardy and James Wi were ripping out some of the knackered stonework from the downstream spandrel walls – by the end of the day the rebuild had just about reached the point where they had started. David Miller had a small team consisting of Caroline and Jamie learning rough stone walling on the arch, which was to be the primary job for the week.

The remaining people were assigned to Chris as the mortar making and stone cutting team – first job make some mortar! I softened up the local group liaison for Ed’s request for a generator for our electric mixer by failing to start all four petrol mixers from the on-site plant graveyard. With the failure to resuscitate any of the mixers (even with the liberal application of Alan Lines and Gav) board mixing of mortar was the order of the day and the rest of the team turned to learning how to operate the Stihl saw and table stone saw. I helped several young lady DofEers to make a baby (or at least I trained them on the table-mounted stone saw, they referred to the strokably-smooth results as ‘our baby’ and I’m taking the credit.) The stone-cutting team rigged up the pulley system for moving big rocks, and Liz promptly dubbed it a sex swing. A chocolate biscuit to the first person to send in a diagram of what a sex swing actually looks like. Much discussion was had over the difference between straps and strops, the general conclusion being that a strap was a small strop (probably involving quivering of the lip and moaning, rather than full-blown bawling and foot-stamping). Frances discovered the joys of the disc-cutter and spent the rest of the day with an itchy trigger finger and a need for speed and Suzie established the essential phrase “Team Leader Chris Boss Sir”, which kept me preening all week.

By 6pm a lot of work had been done and it was time to test the local showers – first problem, getting into the building. Soon sorted as we managed to set the alarm off while trying the doors and a man appeared with the keys.

Monday

James and Suzie were dispatched off early to the hire company in Hereford to get a generator (what has happened to those mythical kit generators?) so we could use the kit electric mixer. On site and Phill continued with the spandrel wall, David carried on arch building and as Andy “Kate” had replaced Kate (girl) a team removed the large cut stone from the stream with a rope and plank before going off to size up the dry stone walling job. Chris continued his sterling work as chief stone cutter with a different team from the previous day who even had a working mixer to play with! Phil The Hair cemented (ha-ha) his reputation as Mortar Man, Chief Sludge Artisan, by complaining that you just couldn’t get those handcrafted results with a powered mixer. Not that it stopped him knocking up a creditable amount of the stuff before tea break. His title of Most Alliterative Nickname was soon stolen by the newly appointed Mortar Maidens (Caroline, Julia & Frances), though the Barrow Bitch came close.

Andy’s team having cleared the vegetation from the towpath retaining wall knocked off for a brew break – on returning to site I received a disturbing radio call “Ed – we have a problem up here.” The problem being that a section of the dry stone wall had collapsed into the drained canal. Answer to the problem – better start digging that out then! On the main site David was going great guns assisted by Liz (who said leaders couldn’t work on site?) and Phill was finishing up with the downstream wall. The multiple-James problem was reduced by one as James Wi was renamed ‘Fingers’ due to his penchant for chopping them with knives (at work) and resting coping stones on them (on camp). Cook one for the week, Harri T, left to go home leaving us with a packed stew for dinner. The evening entertainment was a cinema trip, “Wedding Crashers” proved to be a very good canal camp movie – just waiting for the sequel “end-of-camp party crashers”!

Tuesday

Team Chris was officially established by a mention in Ed’s job allocation speech, following two days of lobbying from the eponymous MUP. The locals were on site today, fitting escape ladders to house lock and chain sawing the last of the trees on the path from the station site. Brian Fox (our local contact) seemed very impressed with the work we had already completed, Phill having completed the downstream wall switched to bricklaying on the arch, David moved down to dumper drive for James Butler with Martin acting as banksman. The stone cutting team continued its fine precision work and Andy’s dry stone walling team spent the day digging a trench out of the canal puddle for the dry stone wall foundations. (Controversially we decided that foundations would be a good idea for the wall – a pile of clay hadn’t seemed to work to well on the previous iteration.) Numerous DofEers were to go home muttering “10 by 7 with the laminations going that way” after Chris started demanding very specific stones to cut. Andy’s mud-shifting team decided to brand themselves with clay – a process that escalated to a point where Julia ended up with a muddy handprint on her bra…

Due to the hall being used by the local steam society the camp headed off to Over basin for fish and chips followed by a David Penny directed tour of the site. Only minor corrections to his spiel were required by the Over veterans in the audience (David, Phill and I).

Wednesday

Concrete pour day –Andy’s walling team had to face off the local swan family before getting down to the hole – a bit more digging and some cunning shuttering (well a plastic covered scaff plank) and they were ready. Chris gave up teaching people to cut up stones in favour of having fun with the Stihl saw on his own. The stone cutting team was to be ably led that day by Frances and Martin. James 'Fingers', Phil and Jamie were initiated into the ways of making concrete (5:1 and keep it coming) while Sam, James T-G and anyone else who stood around looking spare used the three working barrows (one with a wooden wheel) to shift the concrete. James, David and Julia having finished the path up from the station the previous day were shifted to coping stone duty – the idea being to use some of the large stones in our pile to raise the lower wing walls by the required amount in one easy step. Midday and our second cook of the week arrived, Jenny Wilson. (moral of the story – never get drunk with Ed Walker when he’s on the lookout for volunteers for something, he will remember the next morning that you said yes.) The afternoon was spent measuring stone and continuing with the other jobs on site, at one point Liz and I managed to spend a pleasant hour without radio interruptions, breaking out some of the rough stone walling near the upstream arch. The euphemism “I’m mixing mortar” (read: I’m sitting in SAD listening to the radio) was created. James Butler tested the entrance and exit from the bottom of the canal with the excavator. Results on entry: fine, tracking around fine. Results on exit: new shorts please! Moral of that story – always scrape the slippery plop off your exit ramp before driving up it. Due to the evening entertainment (the, now traditional, brewery tour) we left site early – well 5.30pm, every other day it was after 6!

Ed and Liz messed with everyone’s head by putting showers after dinner instead of before. The Harems were established: James B’s harem of DofE girls and Frances’ harem of DofE boys. A select group (basically the people not aligned to a harem) attended a well-organised piss-up in a brewery (Wye Valley Brewery, where we were shown round by the Head Brewer and the drinking started within 30 seconds of walking in the door).

Thursday

The concrete footing having gone off overnight, Elanor lead a team to start the rebuilding of the wing wall, by the end of the day one course was in solid and stones had been picked for the next. James, David and Julia were back on big stone laying; the use of a five tonne excavator makes it very easy to lay coping stones. James thoroughly drop-tested a copping stone with the excavator and we can confirm that it is indeed possible to snap a scaff plank like a twig, given sufficient weight and height. Job for Friday – clean the James shaped mud silhouette out of the cab. Phill, Martin and Laura continued the arch building – the locals had expressed a preference for a keystone and so Chris was set the task of carving it. I had fun (hmm) trying to turn a lump of rock into a keystone for the arch – in the end I hosed it so badly that I gave up and started again with a different stone.

Evening entertainment was a swim at the Great Malvern leisure pool – unfortunately the slide and wave machine weren’t operating but it was nice to collapse in the training pool. The Dear Leaders further screwed with our heads (sorry, ‘took us out of our comfort zone’) by having swimming straight after site, followed by dinner and everyone passed out of heat-induced knackeredness almost immediately afterwards.

Friday

Last day on site and we still had a lot to do – Elanor headed straight off with her crack team of dry stone wall laying experts including Caroline, Sam and Cathy and managed to lay another two courses of stone. David and Laura pointed up the copers they had laid yesterday; Phill finished the arch and did a concrete pour to tie it all together and Martin finished the patching of the lower arch in brick. My new stone proved to be equally incapable of surviving my ministrations, cracking as its width was tampered with for the severalth time because the gap seemed to keep shrinking – so we completed the arch with bricks instead. The sight of a team of WRGies hitting a stone with a scutch hammer (apparently the stone masonry kit was on the other camp) to try and shape it was just too much for the poor stone involved. Kit cleaning kept the rest of the camp busy in the afternoon and we finally managed to leave site at 6 for showers and the end of camp party. Jenny Wilson had done us proud with an Italian feast and we found out that the girly drinks (or tart fuel as Chris labelled it) were solely being drunk by the DofE lads! Jenny’s Frankenstein-esque ambitions came to fruition with the creation of sentient flapjacks, which escaped from the pan and attempted to establish a utopian nation in the oven. Sam won the Cornflake Box Game with grace and style (mainly due to his tae kwondo training). The evening rounds of Twister descended into an extended session of Twisted (whereby the caller makes the moves up according to what will be most amusing).

Overall a very good camp, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, the locals were happy and Liz and I didn’t get stressed at all. It only leaves me to say thanks to Jenny and Harri T for cooking for us, all the volunteers for the hard work they put in on site; particulary to Chris, David, James, Phill, Andy “Kate” and Elanor for being the MUP’s for the week, which meant we could just say “can you just…” and be sure it would be done.

Week’s Awards

Plant-Head of the Week – for getting a scary look in her eyes upon picking up a disc-cutter: Frances
Radio Silence Order – as an attempt to stop them abusing the airwaves: Jamie and James T-G
Silent But Deadly Award – for high-quality work with minimal talking: Sam
Mud-Packers of the Week – for squeezing seemingly infinite amounts of goo behind a large number of copers: Cathy and Caroline
Stoner of the Week – for moving lots of stones: James the Fingers
Mortar Man – for dedication to brickie support: Phil
Team Leader Chris Boss Sir – for high-performance motivation, expectation management, team dynamics analysis and redesign and other management consulting buzzwords: Chris (he wrote this)