Take these beautiful, higgledy-piggledy buildings..
Over the last decade, or so, I have watched as this range of old buildings have slipped from charming decay into down-right dangerous. I have often been surprised to see that they have weathered the fierce gales and torrential rains of a storm.
Despite their charming appearance, these old buildings were the slaughterhouse and butchery for this end of the village. Old Oscar has shown me inside - the hooks, pulleys, etc. It made me feel ill and very glad that I am vegetarian.
They are now deemed to be very unsafe and are being carefully demolished. The village road runs directly behind them, so we don't want any accidents with falling masonry, tiles, and the like.
I spend half an hour down there every day, as I keep old Benedict the horse company, check on his water, feed him, and so on. His paddocks are just across the yard, his view of the road will soon improve.
He doesn't have any field companions and old Oscar is finding it more difficult to get around these days, so Benedict gets very lonely, to say the least.
So, while I have been spending so much time down there I got thinking about the bricks, tiles, etc from this demolition job. As you can see, they are being carefully stacked on pallets, ready to go to the reclamation yard. This set me thinking.
Way back in the 1970's there was a rather spooky BBC play called 'The Stone Tape'. (A note for my family, there is a copy on one of the dressing-room shelves.) The programme put forth the idea that ghosts could be energy which has been absorbed, at times of high tension, into inanimate materials, like stone. It is possible that this energy, or recording, can be subsequently released, hence the visuals, the sounds, etc. of ghosts.
So, I fell to wondering about these bricks.. any energy they have stored would be truly nightmarish.
Max has plans to build a large porch onto Parsonage Cottage, these bricks are the same colour, shape and size as those used to build our home, all those years back when it was the Stables and Cow Shed for the big Farmhouse.
Our home is a place of peace, I never feel the need to put a light on during my midnight ramblings, well, not until I go into the Boot Room, for there always seems to be a pesky slug somewhere or other in there, no matter what we do. I think that much of that wonderfully peaceful atmosphere comes from the century and a half when the animals were housed in here.
No way am I going to risk adding old slaughterhouse bricks into that happy home, after all, if The Stone Tape theory is even partly correct, surely the same thing could happen with bricks?
We'll use new bricks for the porch, just in case. ;-)
