Work this one out


Signed up this week for the new Government on-line service which advises when suitable contracts are coming up.
To ensure relevance, you key in some search terms. Mine were, alphabetically arranged: Brand, Communications Skills, Conferences, Internal Communications, Marketing, Video Production.
My first suggested contract arrived this morning:

Remediation of well, St James Park – These are works which proceed from the clearance and pump testing of a well on Duck Island in St. James’s Park, Westminster. The works are to make permanent the temporary works so far carried out, to install a steel casing and pump within the well and to provide a permanent single duty and single point of discharge to the lake.

Summer’s coming, and as you can see, it’s a pretty little place. Charles I walked beside the lake between breakfast and execution.
As it happens, I was thinking the other day of writing a story in which the twist is John Milton realising and confessing to Charles II that the two groans he writes in “Paradise Lost”, when first Eve and then Adam fall...

Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat
Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe,
That all was lost...
&
Earth trembled from her entrails, as again
In pangs, and Nature gave a second groan...

...were based on JM witnessing the decapitation of CII’s old man and hearing (according to an observer) Whitehall and Westminster shaken by...

such a groan by the thousands then present, as I never heard before and I desire I may never hear again...

Anyway, what I thought I might do is work out the exact plot and dialogue while installing the casing and the pump. And endings are always a problem for me, so concentrating on a “single point of discharge” might be very helpful.

[Two days later] My latest potential contract has arrived: Maintenance works to the masts and towers making up the MCA’s remote radio site estate throughout the UK and Northern Ireland... The works in general consist of painting of towers, guy tensioning works and the replacement of minor items such as bolts, brackets etc on the tower structures...
Vertigo might be a difficulty. Think I'll stay on Duck Island.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Westward, TSW and the Cadbury ghost

Image
[Archaeology: Westward/TSW complex, Derry’s Cross, Plymouth, 2011. Rubble covers the old studio and transmission areas; I used to work in an office by the four windows at the back; the canteen and bar ended where two vehicles are parked; new executives arrived triumphant and departed bruised just beyond the upturned tray, old drink can and squashed plastic bottle] It annoys me that I never met Peter Cadbury. I arrived at Westward TV shortly after his final defenestration, which was rather like going on an exchange to a foreign family who’d just concluded a vicious divorce. On one side were the remaining and new management: the parent left in possession of the home. On the other, the staff: his orphaned children. Enmities. Flashes of inexplicable anger. Sarcasm. False smiles and denial. I’d never before experienced anything like this (nor have I since). What was it about? “There is, I suppose,” I’d said to Ronnie Perry, the MD, at my interview, “no chance that you’re going to lose this
Read more

Leveson: Billy Bunter to testify?

Image
“I say you fellows, budge up, what? Room for another posterior on the old Chesterfield, I’d say.” Harry Wharton groaned. The former Captain of the Remove, now Director General of the BBC, couldn’t work out how William George Bunter, aka the Fat Owl, had wangled himself membership of the Garrick Club. “But that,” he’d murmured to Bob Cherry, when Bunter’s name was first posted, “is just damn’ symptomatic of the way the world’s gone.” Cherry, ever the loyal Patroclus to Wharton’s Achilles, was beside him now, sipping a green chartreuse. The friends had lunched on Dover Sole with minted peas, fondant potatoes and an icy Chablis, chewing over matters of weighty media portent – for Bob had become editor of The Guardian , and the old pals therefore now held between them the principal engines of bien pensant news manufacture and the shaping of enlightened popular opinion. Bunter, the aforesaid posterior straining his pinstripe to such a width that the vertical line of stitches between his b
Read more

It was nineteen years ago today...

Image
The wooden eggs are still there on the roof, a perch for seagulls and an enigma for the young. The vertical metal lettering at the front of the building, however, has been obscured by four fat blue discs. Lorraine Kelly and Mike – Mike who, for heaven’s sake? I sat with him at lunch in the Camden Bistro while he raged, close to tears, I thought, at the injustice of the auction in which TVAM had been stripped of its franchise. Now I’ve forgotten his name. Nineteen years ago today, October 16, I was in Plymouth, sitting in an office with Nick Smith, Pete Colebrook and Tom Goodison. It was a grim morning, soot-coloured clouds rolling down from the Hoe. We were watching the internal TV service. Harry Turner, our MD, stepped up to the microphone. “We’ve lost,” said Tom, before Harry said a word. And we had. TSW was history. So were Thames, TVS and TVAM. We went to a pub called The Bank and got drunk on Mr Bass’s bitter and Mr Bell’s whisky. Mike Morris. Thank you, Google. Apparently he we
Read more