make no sound

Almost all trees are good trees but proper broad-leaved deciduous woodland smells, looks, feels, sounds and probably tastes better than this stuff. Some mock-forests are better than others and this bit didn't really have anything interesting going on at ground level at all. A few old shop mannequinns dressed in old sinister coats and placed just far enough into the trees to make them easily glimpsable out of the corners of the eyes of people walking past would liven the place up a bit, especially if they were mounted on little platforms which made them duck behind trees every now and then.

More art-in-odd-places-around-the-landscape today before we trundled home at Skyscape, essentially a round stone building in which one is meant to sit to look at the sky without being distracted by the tops of trees in the periphery of the vision. Unfortunately the creator deemed it more than this and spouted some wafflegarbage about solidity and meditation and nonsense which I shall not repeat nor attempt to find on the web in order to accurately quote. It was sited half a mile from Kielder Observatory (which appeared to be made out of wood and built on legs) so should probably benefit from the low levels of light pollution which apparently make the local forest one of the best places for observing stars. It's also a good place to sit and clap and hum to see what happens to the echoes in a small circular building.

Plasterbloke messaged as we were taking a long route home to say that he'd finished, though he mentioned various things which implied that he hadn't bothered to do anything to the wall where the kitchen cabinets used to be on which I thought he was meant to be moving various electrical fittings and replacing plasterboard to leave a nicely-finished wall without the large holes it currently features. Apparently this wasn't in the agreed spec but the presence of a large dent (confirmed as not present a week ago after I removed the kitchen cupboards but definitely present the following day after plasterbloke had removed the kitchen ceiling) means that he can perhaps be forced to do something when he comes to make good his (admittedly quite minor (but he used up our spare bit of plasterboard leaving us nothing to fix it with ourselves)) damage. Despite the large puddle of water in the middle of the floor and the needless transport of the radiators from where they were perfectly happy to where they were blocking the first wall we want to paint and the exceptionally large amount of dust everywhere and the removal of the dust sheet from the fridge and kettle everything else appeared to be fine.