I built a wall today. More accurately, I built the foundation. Twenty-five feet of brick wall rising almost a foot from a concrete filled compacted trench. The effort took me eight hours, and truth be told, I'm knackered from the effort.

I can appreciate the relaxing aspects of wall building that must have drawn the legendary Churchill. Once you get past the rough work on the foundation, compacting the earth, mixing and pouring the concrete, leveling and backfilling, the repitition of stacking brick becomes quite addicting.

As the sun dipped below the horizon this evening, I was still out back throwing mortar and stacking bricks. The light slowly turned from grey to black as I scraped the last bits of mortar from the bucket and layed the last brick for the day.

There's still more to build. The wall I've been working on is intended to be a retaining wall running along the slope in the back yard. As darkness fell, I had completed roughly 1/3 of the actual wall, enough to clear the foundation trench and make a full course of brick visible above the soil. I'll let that much set overnight, backfill the trench tomorrow, make sure everything is stable, and begin work on the visible part of the wall later.

For now, there's a huge dirt pile, a hundred or so bricks, and a lawn cart full of mortar mix strewn across our back yard. Claiming it as my own, I jammed the broken stub of the old shovel into the pile of dirt as I quickly cleaned up this evening before calling it a night. Unfortunately, the weather calls for rain the rest of the week, so the rest of the wall may just have to wait.

Given a spare day of beautiful weather, I took some advice from Winston Churchill and built myself a wall. My body spent and my mind clear from the effort, I have no other options now but to relax.