Blue in the rain

Blue in the rain, originally uploaded by nogbad the bad.

I'll try to summarise today. Firstly it started a great deal earlier than I'd have preferred - I picked up Cal at 07:20. We arrived at the Denbies Vineyard at 08:30 and hit the queue. That filled the time to midday and we were finally given tickets for the 15:00 session, yes we queued for three and a half hours. Apparently the earliest arrivals were at 04:00 and had traveled from Manchester - we were in Dorking.

The restaurant (posh cafe) had posh food but we're blokes so we went with the burger van and then cakes and hot chocolate in the cafe. Back outside to watch the building work. The task today is to make the big bricks which will be used to build the house. They are hollow and use 272 Lego bricks. They are all the same size (12 long by 5 + 2 halves wide) and are each of a single colour. As the clock ticked down towards our session time the light drizzle turned to rain. Our ticket number meant that we'd be working outside and by the time we went into the build area the bricks were floating on the tables. Working with a father and his twin nine year old sons we set about a crate of white bricks and when they were all done we were restocked with blue. All up we made more than ten bricks in our hour and we were slowed down by me building a brick which was too narrow (because I can't count I suppose) and by the filthy weather - it's difficult to manipulate Lego bricks with cold, wet, pruney fingers. They need about 4,000 bricks, they'd taken delivery of 3 million Lego bricks, and had completed about 3,000 when our session started. The house will be built over the next few weeks.

Check out the Flickr stream for more photos. Oh, and James May? Yes - he shouted at us through a megaphone a few times but one can't blame him for not wanting to stray too far into the rain.