Martin excelled himself by getting the van to Waterloo by five to seven! He'll never hear the end of this. Unfortunately we then had to wait for half an hour for 2 or 3 people to turn up, so he's not likely to do it again! Seriously, though, parking the van isn't easy (or legal) at Waterloo and the idea ought to be that we, the passengers, arrive before the van, so that the van doesn't have to stop for very long.

Anyway, enough whinging. There were 12 of us in the van, so Martin had brought the trailer on a rare outing. It was very useful having it along, and we all agreed that we should take it on digs more often (it must get lonely being left in Aileen's garage).

Three more people met us at Dymock hall (well, in the pub next door) so there were 15 of us to cook breakfast for on the Saturday morning. Lesley and Dan did a great job, despite the missing bits of cooker. Quote of the weekend was waking up to hear Lesley saying "I can't find the knob..."

Martin and others were up before breakfast and had the sandwiches made before breakfast was served! This was because muggins had foolishly agreed that we should meet the local organiser on site at 9am! (It sounded perfectly reasonable at the time!).

As we were now 16 in number (John having joined us for the day) and there wasn't enough work for that number at House Lock, Oxenhall, a number of us were sent away to work at the Over Hospital site, after splitting up the sandwiches, crisps, fruit & cakes into what we hoped were the right proportions, and ditto with the tea & squash (but managing to take all the milk to Over).

Work on the Oxenhall site was mostly stonework: clearing out old stone work from the lock sides, cutting new stones to fit with a brick saw, and fitting some new stones in place.

Meanwhile over at Over (which is pronounced Oover)_ Some of us were putting up shuttering ready for a concrete pour to form part of the wharf wall, some of us were cleaning bricks (extremely dirty dusty bricks - Lesley was covered all over in fine black dust by the end of Saturday!) whilst those without wellies (it being rather muddy down in the hole which is the canal basin) were assigned to removing stone window sills from the demolished mortuary building. One pillar of bricks about 15 ft tall had been left standing, and below it was a nice stone window sill such as we were looking for, so Dan & Rupert felt the need to demolish the brick pillar by throwing things at it! It worked eventually.

Back at the accommodation most people felt the need for a shower, of which there are two, only one of which seemed to work, and both are in the gents toilets. So we swapped the identity of the toilets over for half an hour while the four girls all had showers (we got first go because I was cooking!). Once everyone was clean I was left in peace to get on with cooking while everyone went next door to the pub. Strawberries & cream for pudding, carefully picked at the PYO (identifiable from miles around by the large inflatable red thing with white spots) by the window sill team once they'd found and moved all their window sills (who claimed they hadn't eaten any during the picking, but nobody believed them).

On the Sunday, those at the Over site were subjected to a torrential downpour around lunchtime, whilst those working at Oxenhall stayed completely dry! By the end of the weekend volunteers on both sites felt that a useful amount of work had been achieved, and we set off on the journey home to London.