Blob the builder.

Blob does Bish,Bash Bosch : Hieronymus Bosch that is.

Workshop project – third post : trying to be a DIY builder (with lots of help).

Plus….That certain bonus Cringe moment.

Blog time, late summer 2025. It’s late summer and we’re back from our usual summer break – the one that we take before they release the feral teenagers on the world and jack all the prices up – the cost of even camping just about doubles for example. Call me an old fart but the last place I would want to be is on a camp site packed with alcohol and Testerone rich teeangers being loud and oh so cool !. What a strange summer it’s been though ? – it’s incredibly dry here and iv’e all but run out of tanked water although at the same time our garden has turned into a weed infested nightmare. I’m pleased to say that Steve (the actual builder) has compacted the hardcore sub base of the workshop and both barrowed in and flattened out the blinding layer of sand so it’s all ready for the DPM and new concrete slab. All well and good on that project except that I seem to have lost my big Mattock : it’s probably in the same place as I left my marbles !

In May of this year (2025) I completed the excavation stage of my workshop rebuild with filling the second skip load (6 yard skip) of clay soil and mostly Granite rock debris that constituted the original floor. My eventual plan was always to have a new floor and a new roof – both of them dry, unlike the original ones, and then fit out the inside with insulation, new lighting & power and new benches. My thinking, at this stage, is not to have a dedicated wood workshop as I won”t be using it to build a boat inside but to reuse my old boatbuilding bench outside – the long bench under the shelter – in that role should I ever need to work with big bits of tree again. I think that several of my main power tools, my table saw and lathe for instance, can live out there from the outset because I don’t want the inside shop always full of dust – anyway, that’s a problem for future Steve.

At the end of the month my work so far got the nod off approval from Steve (a different Steve) the actual builder. There is still some of the harder bits of the old concrete floor still in place that I don’t have enough bash effort to chip off so Steve the actual builder is going to set his Kangoo hammer on the job. Steve the builder jokes that iv’e spent the last 2 months digging the floor out only to put the same volume of material back in except that now it will be a more careful lasagne of hardcore with a layer of sand and only then the actual concrete slab – as I said before i’m a complete ignoramus when it comes to being a DIY builder.

In the previous post in this series I wrote about some of the things that I was thinking about while I spent my days with a mattock and a bucket, in this, mainly work, post I wanted to take up on something I said in another post – that I was going to have a go at clay modelling so here goes with a bit of Bish Bash Bosch……Hieronymus Bosch that is.

What i’m having a first attempt with is this figure below which I am calling ‘Bagsy’ – or the bagpipes from hell : my first attempt is sitting all misshapen and lumpy on my crafting table so maybe I will start on take two this weekend. Usually now I write for several hours five days of the week and then spend the last two days doing other projects – this week, for instance, iv’e been hacking out the matrix of stones, clay soil and Ivy roots behind the workshop where my new water collection tank is going to go. Today i’m in blogging and house bitch mode so i’m editing posts and deciding what to keep of my rather wobbly story beginning – it has a Smack in it but that’s as much as i’m going tom say, except that i’m having a go at writing fiction.

This is, oddly enough another partial post about my own attempts at personal stroke recovery and gives a nod towards the world of occupational therapy (OT) but perhaps as it was before I started my nursing career and more like what I saw of my late mother’s care, many years ago, when she had to have back surgery. When I had my series of strokes and ended up in hospital for a few days the modern OT was one of the people who saw me with a view to clearing me for discharge and seeing what I might need in the future. In the past, this is at least 40 years ago, the then OT was the rather nice lady that had patients working on wicker baskets to give them something to do ; during my actual nursing career the OT’s were often referred to as The Raffia whereas their Physiotherapy colleagues were known as The Mafia.

Making baskets doesn’t seem to be a part of being an OT these days and the one I saw was rather keen on doing a poor version of cognition testing and suggested that it might help me to send the boys round to check out my workshop for it’s suitability and safety – I seem to remember laughing a lot but then I had had a recent stroke and my humor may have been a bit industrial. I realized even then that it was obvious that my workshop was as unsafe as it was because I was always tripping over one or other of the 5 different levels of blocks and concrete that comprised the floor – having just smashed it all out I really hope I won’t miss it’s Cornishness.

The OT link here is that I figured out that I needed some way of working on my loss of fine manual dexterity and I decided to have a go at making things in a style iv’e never used and in materials that I have no experience with. The final clincher came when my Youtube feed gave me some videos produced by actual clay modellers and one of them (Barry) encouraged me to give it a go which is why, last week, I was round at the arty/crafty store buying tools and materials.

I have long had a fascination with the odd Renaissance works of Hieronymus Bosch, one of his pupils and several of his contemparies – Breughel for example. Many readers will be somewhat familiar with his best known painting titled ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights‘ although I guess that most of you are as baffled by it’s strangeness and complexity as I am – it’s very rich vein of sheer weirdness and is the main source of my inspiration for my first projects. If you don’t understand the painting then fine as nobody really does although there are lots of theories about it out there, from Bosch maybe having been exposed to hallucinogens such as LSD (Ergot is more likely) to his being a member of a secret occult group although the only group he seems to have been an actual member of was a religious one. Art historian Waldemar Januszczak points out that it is fully in keeping with a more pessimistic Catholic mindset of that period.

Several fruitless trips into town later in search of the missing hobby store,, which has either closed or moved elsewhere I did what sensible people did and ended up on Amazon street for some clay, some tools and some armature wire. I then realized that I didn’t have a picture or a drawing of the Bosch figure that I had in mind – it being the peculiar blue monk with a spoonbill like head so I spent several hours on the tinternet trying to track down some images of details from the original painting (Garden of Earthly Delights). I failed on that, tried and failed to enlarge a small section of a larger part of the original and eventually figured out that what I really need is a full sized poster to work with ; to photograph the original and digitally enlarge it.

Given that the greater plan here was only to start on this kind of model after I had a bench (which I haven’t built yet) in a workshop which won’t be finished until some next year I thought that I was perhaps getting a bit ahead of myself. I knew though that iv’e got several more exhausting weeks of trundling a wheelbarrow up our shared drive and back so I came to the compromise that I needed to set up temporarily inside the house and start with something that I could work out the dimensions for a lot more easily – or where they don’t matter as much.

Here’s the kind of thing that clay modeler Barry does.

The hardcore is in, Steve the actual builder gets jiggy jiggy with a compactor and fills in around the base of the wall with some fresh concrete.

Post edit – The actual cringe moment.

In my previous post : as I write, that means the recent one that I actually finished, edited and scheduled, I said that I was having problems with my Prostate – in fact things were getting pretty miserable – so eventually I did something about it. In this post I thought I should add something about men’s health but using my own recent experiences as a starting point : i’m sorry if you think that talking about Prostate problems is a bit Cringe but at least four men I know, or did know, have had or did have Prostate problems. One of them was my partner’s late father who died a couple of years back directly from the secondary effects of Prostate cancer although sadly in his case it’s likely that the more proximal cause of death was the rapid decline from his Prostate cancer spreading to his bones. With the other older man that I am thinking about he probably needs a radical Prostatectomy and is having a generally miserable time with the whole problem.

I’m really glad to say that I don’t have any indication of Prostate cancer because one of the outcomes of my face to face with my GP was that I had a sample of blood taken for a simple test for PSA (Prostate Specific Antigen) and which, in my case, was on the low side of normal. Iv’e always been somewhat prone to UTI’s (urinary tract infections) because I have a long history with Prostate problems before and after having surgery for a tight urethral stricture : the urological surgeon told me, some forty years ago, that I was likely to have problems later in my life and he was right. I needed a second operation fifteen years after the first and for the whole year following that I had to pass a low friction catheter/dilator once a day : the urology specialist nurse wanted me to do it for life but it’s a difficult thing to manage given that, at the time, I was both a long term sailor and expedition style bushcraft hiker.

Given my previous history, and then seeing that my PSA was low/normal I wondered if my problem was the more common one of Benign Prostatic Hypertrophy (BPH) as I certainly had the signs : in fact, I was having an uncomfortably miserable time with it – especially the discomfort and extreme urgency. According to the research paper that iv’e linked to : https://pavilionhealthtoday.com/gm/benign-prostatic-hyperplasia-prevalence-and-diagnosis/#:~:text=GPs%20in%20the%20UK%20will%2C%20on%20average%2C%20each,and%20assessment%20in%20general%20practice%20of%20this%20condition. …..the average GP will have some fifty or so men on their books with the lower urological symptoms that go with BPH – and it can be treated but warrants further investigation. As a global picture I have it in mind that as many as 98 million men worldwide will have prostate problems : the rate of new cases of actual Prostate cancer are 55,000 per year with around 12.000 deaths – what the incidence of BPH in the UK is I haven’t found out.

My own GP practice has at least five working GP’s so not only is it difficult to have a regular GP unlike the previous surgery I was registered with which only had two – anyway, what that means is that each GP in my current practice most likely has ten men that they have seen, each with urological symptoms most likely to be BPH. I was incredibly lucky in that the GP tasked with seeing me is not only the practice’s most senior doctor but she is also the one that I get on with the best. As it turns out she thinks I have Prostatitis rather than anything else and a short course of antibiotics and then a single daily dose of an NSAID (Ibuprofen) plus a bit of self management seem to be reducing my symptoms.

I want to finish this post though by going a bit sideways and talking about communicating with our GP’s as I think I have found what works for me. As most readers will know i’m a retired specialist nurse and a large part of my role was in communicating with hospital doctors and I went from being a quite poor verbal communicator to being an effective one. The problem for me was that not only my working day extremely packed with lots of patients to see but also that the doctors that I had to communicate with, as succinctly and accurately as possible, were even busier than I was so I fell back on the communication methodology based around the SBAR model (Situation Background Activity Recommendation) thus when it came to dealing with a GP about my own health I used to do it as a kind of verbal handover to the medical registrar : in simple terms that I used to tell my GP what was wrong with me and what I needed doing about it !

Of course, I don’t wear those shoes any more and what’s more is that iv’e had a series of minor strokes that seem to have scrambled my software to some extent so using the system that I used tom use with my GP : requesting a call back to deal with the problem via telephone triage, doesn’t work so well because i’m a lot less able to express myself verbally – in that respect i’m more like many older patients and I find it frustrating when I don’t express myself clearly.

What iv’e found works for me and the GP both is that I now use the online referral system which allows me to explain myself in written form in an online contact form. Because I spend at least some time each day blogging or trying to be a budding writer I can say what I need to about what the problem is (Situation), a bit about the background, what iv’e tried to do about and what I would like my GP to do about it. In this case it was simple enough to describe my urological symptoms (dysuria, urgency, frequency, poor stream and poor emptying) remind her (my GP) about my past history (urethrotomy twice and frequent UTI’s) and that what I felt needed doing next was a blood test for PSA and probably a physical exam.

Given that what I was anticipating, in terms of the physical examination, went far better than I expected : the only other time I had a Per Rectal digital examination of Prostate it was so inflamed that I almost shot off the couch. This time it was nothing like as bad and my female GP was far gentler and more proficient than the urology houseman that did it some forty plus years ago. Like most patients that know a bit about cancer I needed to ask the questions ‘what if’ and what next ? : that is – what if my PSA is elevated what happens next. In the style of medicine that I grew up alongside the answer would likely have been a cystoscopy and then biopsy but my GP tells me that the new approach is to have an MRI scan before anything else. The heartening news for most men is that the 10 year survival rate for Prostate cancer is currently 78% which compares extremely favorably with other soft tissue cancers.

Hope that wasn’t too cringe…….Wa-Oh !