Walls Come Tumbling Down

A visit to Barrow today to record some snippets of Shakespeare that may be used to cover scene changes in the play. A few of us have been asked to record the same things and then the director can pick and choose between them. I don’t have any voice recording equipment or software myself, but I know a man who does! It took a little while to get the levels right - Stuart said it was because his studio is set up for recording music, and a mic set up for lead vocals is not necessarily ideal for short spoken pieces. But we managed in the end, and I will submit a memory stick with the finished pieces at tomorrow’s rehearsal.
After all that effort(?) we went up into town for coffee. Weather was miserable, but not actually raining hard. After the coffee, I suggested a visit to the guitar shop as I wanted to investigate buying an extra speaker and another bass guitar - trading in one of my existing basses that I’m not as keen on any more, to finance it all.
As we rounded the corner, we were greeted with the sight of a fire engine and several police vehicles - all with lights flashing - across the road from the shop. It seems we had just missed a wall falling off the building diagonally opposite and landing on top of a car parked in the alley. We were told it was a hell of a crash and it was very lucky no one was actually underneath when it happened. The car is quite battered but it looks like the roof would have been strong enough to give some protection if there had been anyone inside when it happened. It looks like the wall that fell was just a single brick skin over the original sandstone block building. The marked absence of any obvious wall ties might explain why/how this collapse came about, probably helped by the atrocious weather of the last few days. Anyway, that’s one for the insurance companies to argue about. By the time we left the guitar shop most of the emergency vehicles had left - nothing they could do, nobody hurt, private land, etc - just a lone copper putting up tape to stop cars driving past. No attempt to stop us walking past or taking the photo though. A general air that there is nothing more to be done until the arrival of structural engineers, loss adjusters et al. I have a feeling I might be seeing a lot of scaffolding in place next time I walk past that particular building!