OneAndOneIs2

Yesterday, for the first time in a while, I drove to work in my car.

It sucked. Takes half again as long & costs a lot more. Argh.

But I had a reason for this: On my way home, I diverted from my usual route and went instead down the road I used to travel along when I was on my PGCE, the Horsham-Chichester road.

Why? I was stopping halfway along it to go to Chichester College for the first of my evening classes. Yes, I have gone back to school!

The course is in metalworking, primarily blacksmithing. I thought it sounded interesting, and it looks fairly promising so far.

There was all the usual, expected paperwork to be done. And then we were given a 10-second demo on lighting a forge and told to get on with lighting up.

My first effort failed - complacency because the teacher had made it look so easy, perhaps. So I took the thickest piece of wood, put it on an anvil, and clouted it with a hammer until it had split into more flammable pieces.

Then I stacked it on top of some fresh newspaper, lit the blue touch paper, and turned on the air blast. Shortly afterwards, after slowly adding coke to the fire, I had some impressively bright light coming from the center: Coals glow impressively when they're white-hot, don't they?

Then she handed round some small horse shoes & told us to try hammering them flat. Just to get an idea of what it's like to hit glowing bits of metal with a hammer.

I got mine mostly flat by the end: I was hamstrung by having no decent tongs to hold it with until I finally tracked down a useful set near the end. Some of the more experienced students had managed to create a straight squared rod by this time, but on the other hand I had gotten as far as I had without any input from the teacher, whilst others hadn't even been able to get the fire going. So I was happy enough with that.

I set out for home having enjoyed the evening, and smelling quite strongly of smoke. I arrived a little less happy and smelling even MORE of smoke, because my car had caught fire on the way back.

Yes, really.

But only a little bit.

Came in on my bike this morning.

As I came around the final bend to the last couple hundred yards of road before my workplace, I saw the cars in front of me all slowing and then turning round and heading back. When I worked my way to the front, I saw a few policemen had cordoned off the road & set out a bunch of "Police Accident" signs.

Is it terrible to say that my first thought on seeing this was "Damn, they started without me!"? :o)