Metaphorical Communist Bricks

For the past week or so, we – by which I mean my Dad and occasionally me – have been building a new deck in the back garden. And as much as I was expecting this post to be a humorous account of my inability to use hand tools; or not knowing what an ‘Impact Driver’ is; or how can a screw be self-tapping, is it sentient or something? Etc. Etc. The post ended up going down the route of Communist, Victorian bricks that aren’t as metaphorical as I had first hoped.

Yeah – I know…

So obviously, as we all know, a deck consists of bearers that support joists, that in turn supports the decking. The bearers need foundations that go at least 500mm into the ground, which therefore requires holes to be dug and filled with concrete, naturally. As it has been a while since these finely manicured, soft hands have graced anything that may even be remotely associated with manual labour, we hired a two-stroke post holer to help do the job.

We had pulled up the existing patio in preparation for the new deck, and stood either side of the twirling machine, gripping it tightly as it bored its way towards A Coruna in Spain (don’t belive me, I checked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipodes#Cities). The first couple of holes went quite well, until about the 6^th one when after 200mm we hit solid rock. The house was built at the end of the 1800’s, so there was a certain amount of intrigue into what exactly we may have unearthed.

Getting out the shovel, it slowly became apparent that we had hit a layer of bricks – OK, we were probably hoping for more, but let’s see where this goes.

More digging unearthed an old patio – right… well, I don’t think any of us were expecting that.

It appeared that at some point in time, the past owners of the house had decided to install a new patio, by covering the existing one in a bit of sand and just laying bricks over the top. So had we decided to have designed the deck a bit differently, we could have potentially had a deck, over a patio, over a patio.

Which is where the metaphorical bit comes in. I can’t help feel that there should be some deeper meaning in there; a commentary on civil liberties under a Labour/Green/NZ First government; or the social rights of the native flora and fauna of Canterbury; or highlighting an injustice of some kind.

But as I think I’ve already implied, I’m not a deck person. So instead will just end with a rhetorical question of how exactly Communism managed to infiltrate the Canterbury brick industry during the late 1800’s?