Napoleonic & ECW wargaming, with a load of old Hooptedoodle on this & that


Wednesday 4 November 2020

Hooptedoodle #377 - The Siege of Chateau Foy

 Further to the reference in my previous post, work continues on the landscaping here. 

The old rhododendron bed has been cut back, and the big edging stones shifted, though the Royal Engineers won't be pleased with the wobbly lines, so some tweaking is in hand. It should all be a lot more OCD-compliant by the end of today. I understand that the big rocks came from our beach - I reckon the driveway was laid when the garage was built, in about 1975, so they've been here a while. There's a lot of earth to be dug out, then hardcore to be put down, and then a few loads of whinstone chips over the whole drive. Should be fine - almost makes me wonder why we didn't do this years ago, though I'd really rather not focus too much on the reasons why. To quote an old coffee mug I used to have when I was working, I guess we finally got a Round Twit - we've needed one for years.

In an experimental mood, Barry, our Iraqi War vet, hacked a hole into one of the juniper trees, to see what would be the best way of attacking these. It's dark in there, man.

Barry is more than capable of shifting any amount of earth with a shovel, but in the interests of speed we also have a very old Italian digging machine on site - known as The Green Shovel (to distinguish it from The Red Shovel - similar naming system to WSS Bavarian grenadiers, apparently). This machine has front and rear wheel steering, and you can, if you so wish, set all the wheels at, say, 45deg and drive along diagonally. Good toy, eh?

Result of this is that we temporarily have cars parked in some imaginative locations - I've given advance warning to neighbours, to minimise the inconvenience. At present rate of progress, work should be finished next week sometime. I'll double-check Vauban's original checklist for estimating timescales.

19 comments:

  1. How much fun can a man have in one week?! Definitely better than using a herring.
    Regards, James

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  2. I think you are missing a golden opportunity here Tony...
    You are drifting slightly towards Capability Brown when you really should be going full on Vauban...

    Trust me the neighbours would love it...😂

    All the best. Aly

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    1. What do you reckon to alligators in the moat?

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    2. Well... you’ve got to keep them somewhere,haven’t you...

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    3. You two are quite funny! Where will you be appearing next?

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    4. I'll have you know that we have appeared in front of the Duke of Cambridge and the Prince of Wales, and several other well-known pubs on the Dock Road.

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    5. Ah... remember when we performed ‘in residence’ at that big holiday camp... it was in Devon... Dartmoor or something like that I think...
      Anyway it had a big wall... we apparently had a captive audience...

      😂😂😁🤣🤪

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    6. Great days! Mind you, prison gigs are not that much of a challenge - you can get away with murder.

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    7. Excellent! You guys have made my day much more pleasurable after having spent 45 minutes trying to track down a rogue beeping smoke alarm only to finally discover that the source was an expiring CO2 alarm tucked away behind theatre lounges in the basement home theatre room.

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    8. That can be quite trying - it's good to know your smoke and CO2 levels are OK, though.

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  3. Hmm, a large triangular trench with a wall behind it. Foundations for a ravelin?

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    1. Could be - I guess it would be facing the wrong way, but we could regard it as an experimental prototype.

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  4. Next best thing to Matchbox in the sandbox.

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    1. Yes indeed - very similar, in fact - just supersized for the myopic.

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  5. Tony, this is taking siege warfare too far - go and lie down in a darkened room or better still paint some more Marlburian figures!

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    1. I'm all right, I'm all right. I just get hyperactive with the Lucozade.

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  6. Excellent stuff - this could be your Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim moment in the garden.. and how excited would Vauban have been if he had only had access to something like your 'green shovel'?

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    1. Yes, you would think that possession of a couple of these machines would have been a major advantage, and yet the economic thing comes into this as well; Vauban would probably have failed to understand what was wrong with simply using a large amount of very cheap labour. I was pondering something similar today - the 1975 work on my driveway was done by the farm company - they wouldn't have used much plant, I guess - just a bunch of their own men digging and lifting things. Nowadays, of course, the farm company hardly has any of "their own men" - most of the planting and harvesting of vegetables is carried out by outside firms who lease the use of the fields, and the rest of the work, including the grain crops, employs about 3 men with a few tractors and a dirty great combine hervester. The bit of the farm company which is doing my landscape work is an independent organisation, doing contract work externally, a lot of it for the local council. I'm paying £12 an hour for the labourer's time, which is very reasonable, though Vauban would have been horrified!

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