Do you see the cobbles on the streets? Everywhere you look, stone & rock. Can you imagine what it feels like to reach down with your bones & feel the living stones? The city is built on itself, all the cities that came before. Can you imagine how it feels to lie down on an ancient flagstone & feel the power of the rock buoying you up against the tug of the world? And that's where witchcraft begins. The stones have life, & I'm part of it. - adapted from Terry Pratchett
I like it lots when things I have sown years before come to fruition. Regular readers will remember the spot of bother at work I had some years ago, largely because of my manager at the time, Zippy. She was a bit screwed up to start off with, but was hit by the menopause, lost any interest in her job, and started asking any man she met to impregnate her. She shagged a friend of mine on the organisation's premises - sadly I couldn't cause her grief because although he had given me a rather sickening blow-by-blow account, I have a certain loyalty to him. She then tried to get him in trouble the day after for doing something which really wasn't a thing, which merely indicates what a cow she is. Then she married the least evidently heterosexual man in world history who made her pregnant in circumstances I don't care to think about. Another of her former friends who she has stabbed in the back told me that Zippy's husband doesn't like sex - since he previously gave me the come on with a very obvious hard on, I feel he likes sex perfectly well, just not with his wife. She miscarried his baby and then discovered she had Lady trouble, and they spent a fortune on IVF which failed - all while they didn't own a house or even a bed, and their baby was conceived on a mattress on the floor. She was already pushing fifty at this point and had stopped doing anything which might look like management of the team.
This is all background to say that I saw a job advertised in the team this week and Zippy is no longer manager. I got the cards depicted as an explanation of what happened and that's definitely pushed by a lot of stuff coming home at once. I love it when a plan comes together.
I came across the picture which illustrates this post on somebody's Twitter and it brought back a flood of happy memories. When I was a young puppy (not in a fetish way, I hasten to add) there were many empty sites around the city centre. I think this one has been cleared preparatory to building Brindley Place but a lot of them dated back as far as the second world war and were of course the result of bombing. This meant that when the Inner Ring Road was intact you had the very small city centre proper, and a circle of post-industrial or just plain empty land before the inner city started. Of course this circle was incomplete or patchy but it was very strange to have just nothing near the centre of the city.
