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.

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