A mystery solved

I have been wondering about all the scaffolding and all the works on the fairly new blocks of flats which have been built up against the railway lines at Epsom Station for some time now.

Then this morning, going that way on the off-chance that there might be a trolley (there wasn't), I came across this long cradle, hauled up and down the front of the building by two pillars of rack and pinion. The right hand pillar being visible in the snap above, starting behind the black and yellow stripes. Never seen anything like it before.

One of the men explained that it was all part of the fallout from the Grenfell disaster. I think the story was that the bricks one can see are just cladding, with a cavity behind, which should have been filled with something fire-retardant but wasn't. So now they are having to go to huge expense to cut holes at intervals in the brick work, squirt in some foam or other and then patch the holes. All of which is costing vastly more than it would have cost to do the job properly in the first place. Were the council building inspectors asleep on watch? Had they all perished in some round of cuts?

The only catch was that the fancy cradle only works where the face of the building is flat and where there is a suitable footing for the pillars. Which there is not on the track side, where they have to make do with old-style ropes strung down from the top and the cradle swinging in the wind.

A bit later, having got around to the Costcutter in Manor Green Road, I came across a maintenance man giving the lock on the pillar box there a good going over. That is to say, a proper, round, red pillar box with a black cap. I had never taken a proper look inside a  pillar box before, and I was impressed by the old style engineering. Built to last. No doubt the inside of one of the modern boxes would look very flimsy by comparison.

And then home to read in a short letter to the Guardian about the Wollemi Pine of Australia, with the letter suggesting that there was a very old tree at 200m years old. Being a bit tired at this point, I wondered whether they meant that the trees suckered as they grew, which meant that the complex as a whole could be considered to be very old. I think hazels can do something of the sort. But maybe not 200m years which is well into geological time. 

Checking, I find that it is indeed an interesting tree, a botanical curiosity, only recently discovered and with less than a hundred of them in the wild, in a particular spot in the Wollemi National Park in New South Wales, although it is now being successfully grown as a garden or house ornament. And they can live a long time, perhaps up to a 1,000 years. A relative of the monkey puzzle tree of South America, that is to say a member of the 200m year old family Araucariaceae, which must be where the 200m comes from. Can't get the proof readers these days. Just bang the stuff in, hit the button and forget about it. Which calls to mind the pot calling the kettle black...

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wollemia.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/10/wonked.html. For an interesting planting of the monkey puzzle tree in the west country, that is to say Devon.