A brick

I'm at the snagging stage of the build now, where I spot things that are not properly finished and let the building management know. So I haven't seen the site manager for about three months. I have some questions only he can answer, both about what's been done and about things I want to do, so last week I asked him whether he'd be prepared to meet me.

He came over for coffee after work today and said he'd missed our discussions about politics. So we covered:
- the recent Polish elections (me: won't the coalition make a difference?; him: no),
- whether people of Indian heritage should be British Prime Ministers (him: Sunak is not part of British history; me: he absolutely is since so much of British history happened in India),
- electric cars (him: mining metals in DRC damages the health of very poor people and anyway the electricity to drive them will be generated with coal; me: totally agree, the solution is to abolish private transport for almost everyone and replace it with cheap frequent, reliable public transport; him: harumph).

He's very good company.

We also walked round the house and he told me what was behind every wall, i.e. whether I could drill into it or not.

I handed over the present I'd bought for him well before he stopped working here but hadn't given him because all of a sudden he was gone.

The card is a photo of the bit of house wall where he asked the bricklayer to build in the prettiest brick he (site manager) had found after he'd searched for my missing favourite brick. Later, after the wall was built, he found it and I have photoshopped it into the wall in this image.

The paper round the present is left over from when my dad made me a dolls house when I was a child. (It's now very brittle.)

The present is not a brick. It's the best book on English grammar for EFL learners and their teachers, since our discussions that weren't about politics were about language.