Simon English found that this spring all film work ceased with the national lockdown. He had no excuses left now but to try to reassemble an old stone bell tower. This he had bought over thirty years ago and squirrelled away in a friend’s hedge where the stones had disappeared under brambles and tree roots. Digging them all out he found that he had forgotten what the original structure looked like. Before he could even start making sense of the collection he needed to prepare the foundations, which involved digging out and repairing an old septic tank and landscaping the area. Matching the stones by lime mortar marks and weathering did eventually, with a lot of heaving, get them up in their original structure with a gothic arch under a rather nice ‘broken ogee’ profile with a cross on top about fifteen feet high. So, what does an OAP do in a national lockdown? He self isolates in a garden and does a six-ton puzzle!
