Humanity

Last Saturday I trekked to Bedfordshire for a day out with the girls and today it was to Hampshire with the boys. Easy-peasy train journeys; first a blue train from Chatham to London Victoria, then a green one to Clapham Junction and finally a red one to Haslemere. After that a little orange car across the county boundary into Hants. A thoroughly delightful day in a stunningly beautiful home; a visit to D's place of work in tenderly landscaped woodland and a quick shufti inside N's pottery.

Like me, D has turned his back on the ego-centric world of architecture and now works in waste management, though his of a very different sort from mine. D's work brings him face to face with the recently bereaved and he helps them to select the most fitting final resting place for their recently departed loved ones. It is wonderful work and it suits him perfectly.

Just as last Saturday, I was so involved with the conversation that the camera remained in its bag, so it was lucky that I had some photo opportunities en route. This is taken through the train window at Woking Station; inexplicably tall towers being erected there, the tallest is currently at 33 storeys, but there is a spinney of them and I cannot help but wonder why.

I was drawn to the method of construction, which made me think of Brunel's tunnel under the River Thames at Rotherhithe. In that instance a tunnel-diameter scaffold supported men digging by hand proceeded sedately from one side of the river to the other. At the front of the scaffold were men with picks and shovels digging out the earth, which was carted back out through the open end of the tunnel already dug, and behind them on the same scaffold were the bricklayers shoring the whole thing up.

At Woking Station a similar contraption is traversing upwards. A platform with sides around an outer walkway provides a safe working place for the construction crew who will first fix in place steel reinforcement bars, then add shuttering and finally pour fresh concrete into the mould. Once that is set firm the crane will hoist the platform up another storey to continue the same procedure. From my knowledge of construction I know that within this core will lie the staircases, the lift shafts and the toilet blocks. Naturally there must be apertures from this core to allow egress onto the floors which will be steel frame construction and will be added once this stage is complete. The exit from each storey is clearly labelled on the outside of the core structure, and what amused me was the fact that level 13, even in this day and age, is left unmarked.

My homeward journey was happily uneventful until I reached Rochester station, my penultimate stop. A gleeful youngster got onto the train and sat opposite me bearing a pink box, formerly packaging for Evian mineral water. I presumed from his smirk that he had filled it with illicit hooch for which he was perhaps underage. He smiled and asked me if I had had a nice day. I told him that I had, and then he told me about his.

He had just witnessed a bunch of young bullies trying to kick to death a pigeon which was clearly unwell. He had chased them off, grasped the pigeon, found the box and was taking it round to the charity vet another stop down the line. I don't imagine that the charity vet will go out of its way for a pigeon, and I decided it best not to mention that I have a colony of hundreds less than a yard above my bed. But I loved his humanity and I told him so.

The pigeon is called Peter, in case you need to know.