Yournamehere

oh my! <clutches pearls>

lobs in a dynamo and runs...

That's the one!

This is an outrage <shakes fist> Down with this sort of thing! Hornbeam you say...

And all cos of felix an 'is damned fifty pee; And all cos of felix an 'is damned fifty pee.

slowering and glowering, slathering and blathering and slithering onwards across the lee...

Bless.

^ Whatever hap't to Billy Twelve Bollocks? Is he still around?

What the f**ks a disco??? (sorry, on a plate, had to be done)

Too late mate. The beast is risen. We're doomed! Doomed!

Fixed that for you... er me.

That would indeed be a challenging piece of work. To juxtapose the existential and real world fragments in any meaningful way without surrendering the subjective nature of the art in itself to a more meaningful paradigm would need a greater hand than mine. I am flattered and I thank you for you confidence in me and my ability that is demonstrated by your offer of this great commission but I must, alas, respectfully and sadly decline.

Oh Wow! no, I didn't. I love how you get something new from it every time you revisit it.

This is mine. I call it The Imperceptible Likelihood of Improbable Pain.

That's fab eggman! I love the black cat in the corner and the ravens along the top; it's that attention to detail that separates a true artist from a mere daubster. Well done.

Monarch of the Glen is what it was. Was hoping to find the clip on youtube but nothing comes up.

Hee hee! Ther was a thingy on the tele years back with Richard Briars and some other peoplein it that wasn't the Good Life and may have been scottish but wasn't Hamish Macbeth either but he lived in a big house and was married to susan hampshire or hannah gorden and the bloke Fellows that did downton abbey was in it too and he was called sharron because he was born in arabia where sharon is a noble name and lots of things happened including richard briars trying to train his little terrier to retrieve things... which he finally got the hang of... with highly comedic if fatal consequences when something hap't with a stick of dynamite or an old wartime hand-greanade as above. Boom! Happy Days Yourn

Sounds like they should have been a bit more stringent with their pre-production investigations doesn't it? They should have done a lab test.

The bit about a minute in, when he jabbed it in the ground like a garden fork? Noticed that m'self. I thought, 'there's a man who doesn't clean and sharpen his own saws.'

Thought it an odd thing to say m'self.

Hmm! Looks a bit like the Purple Screaming Death-bringer. What does it taste like?

...and every year you when you go to cut it down someone will come along and say oh don't cut that down I don't want you to cut that down oh it looked so nice before you cut it down so you take 'em aside and have a chat and explain how the willow was put in as a living revetment and that it needs cutting back to keep it tidy and small and to encourage growth to as to actually form that living revetment because it was considered much more pleasant to have a living revetment than a load of steel pilings or railway sleepers held in with scaffold boards and they just look at you blankly and say yes but I still don't want you to cut it down cos I like it how it is and it will look horrible if you cut it down and it will die so you try again and say that the bank isn't strong enough to support the weight of a big willow because as the willows grow they lean out over the water and as they form an enclosed canopy no light gets through and because no light gets through nothing grows beneath them to knit the bank together with its roots and so eventually if the willows are not cut they fall over and take the bank with them because if the bank had been strong enough to support the willows the willows would not have had to have been put there as a living revetment in the first place not withstanding the additional fact that all the leaves drop into the pond and form a black stinky oozy mud that again because there is no light and no vegetation creates so much gas that if you wade through it and release the gas it stinks worse than walking into a cat's fart and that cutting them back won't kill the willows that willows are often cut back and they grow again and they just look at you as if you are mad cos they can't believe that anything would grow again after being cut down so they go and tell the owner who tells them it's fine the willows are a living revetment and that they have to be cut down every year. ...and the year after that all this happens again, and again and every year thereafter until one day the owner sells up and someone new moves in and this time instead of saying that it's ok the willow will grow back again it's part of the seasonal maintenance you've been doing it for forty years, the new owner comes rushing out with cries of oh my god oh my god what on earth are you doing you're killing all the trees why are you cutting them down you're ruining it... ... and as much as you love the place and you love working there and have spent your whole life there because of your love for it when really you know you should of have moved on years ago but hey who wants a proper job when you've got paradise you realise that well you're nearly sixty and life is short and there's not much left so time to move on and the willows grow up and they grow out and the bank that wasn't very strong still isn't very strong and the willows are only shallow rooted and one night there's a great storm and all the willows topple over into the lake and willow being willow the branches all take root in the mud and throw out new growth which all joins up and creates a lifeless stinking swamp even further out into the lake and over the years the willow spreads further and further out into the lake until, eventually, there is no lake, just wet woodland but it happened so slowly no one really noticed; early on there was a pond fringed with willow and later on there was some willow fringed with a pond but the pond was lost and no one missed it because by the time the pond was lost no-one new there had been a pond there - it was just swampy woodland - it had always been just swampy woodland. And all because you didn't use railway sleepers and scaffold tubes like you were told to!!! Happy days Yourn

Ha yes! If ther's a digger on site that does save an awful lot of work.

I'm surprised you had trouble with oak; we removed some platforms that were built on oak legs about twenty years ago and they were still solid - could of have used the posts again if we had needed to. I've heard that some 'oak' is imported turkey oak rather than proper english oak and that it is made of mush.

Oh yeah. Put landscaping fabric behind the woodwork. The water will find its way into any little hole it can and will soon wash the soil out; landscaping fabric stops this.