I didn’t even make it off the sofa to take my pic today (yesterday as I type). I reached out to my camera on the coffee table at great personal cost (aches), lifted the camera (seemingly a major feat of human strength), and shot this photo. I returned the camera from whence it came and forgot all about PaD until the morning after the night before – it’s a shame there is no “morning after pill” for the relief of the aches and pains of hard toil because I am now a shadow of my former self – hobbling and hunched.

The photo is at least a celebration of clean feet, freed from the confines of my steel toecap boots for what feels like the first time since I finished my finals. I might as well have been on a chain gang having committed some terrible crime although perhaps this photo could be considered a terrible crime against photography. Today is the fulfilment of a recently formed but nonetheless important goal for the summer – we have finished laying the new concrete patio and it has required herculean effort from this BOB. I worked all day with only a short break digging out the remaining one third of the area, extracting the granite kerb stones from their original positions then re-siting them in their new positions, levelling and finally mixing and pouring concrete.

It’s been necessary to get it done in a day because the weather breaks tomorrow (today). Still, it’s done now. It’s covered in wooden pallets, then tarpaulins to stop it all from being washed away by the forthcoming rain and finally an array of garden furniture, sack barrows, step ladders and other “preventatives” placed on the tarps to prevent the dogs from wanting to run over it all to get to the lawn.

Despite an extremely frosty relationship prevailing all day between me and ‘im as I insisted on doing the whole thing in a day, he’s now thawed out and is really glad it’s all done. There is one small bit remaining that we should really have done before pouring the concrete and that’s the mortaring but we decided that if something had to wait until a break in the rain then this was the thing to leave.

This is another photo from the Shameless series and is named after the fourth film in the famous Bruce Willis action movie series “Die Hard”...what? You mean “Die Hard 4” was really called “Die Hard with A Vengeance”? Never – it was all about old Hillmans, wasn’t it?