Repointing the Wall

Dispatches

Failing to Repoint the Bricks each Year ~ Calamity Guaranteed

May 2026

We do not always repint with cement

The drystone Cotswold Stone Wall is built by hand, each stone placed as a jigsaw piece, perfectly suited to fit only the position it is allocated.

All hold each together. When storm loosens an individual stone, then the task of the stone mason is to perfectly repoint that part.

Here is the very essence of life in Cotswold.

Introduction

ANY builder will emphasise the importance of regularly repointing the wall. We clear from the cement that holds together our bricks, weeds, cement afresh any area where old cement is weakening or crumbling. Up and down the country, anywhere in the world, we see the result if this simple principle is not applied.

I apply this useful allegory to everything I am involved in. I learned it many decades ago, when visiting family and seeing work being done on what looked, to me, to be a very sound corner of the 19th Century cottage, my brother-in-law replied from atop the ladder “… yep, I’ll be down shortly. Repointing the bricks.”

Later, over tea, we talked about this phrase “repointing the bricks.” It became one of the foundation stones from then on, and I’ve always used this allegory. We are always imaginative. And it does not take long to envisage a disregarded wall eventually succumbing to the Elements.

One

Now 73, I enjoy research and working on this website. Long hours at the desk are rewarded by long hours out and about, driving the length and breadth of the country, weekly journeys to Cheshire and Lancashire, the occasional slip into my city Liverpool.

An active retirement brings with it the chance to do some of the things that a very active working life proffered but which I could maintain. My friend R.S. in Germany is of like-mind. We have both discovered one physical drawback. I put it like this as a simple way to explain, tongue-in-cheek, as I try not to take life too seriously:

Well, Rita. As you know, once upon a time I rode to Dressage, today yes, I could mount a horse, settle in the seat, and no sooner am I saying to myself ah, this is good…than I fall promptly off the other side. My horse quietly bends her neck, looks back and down… See? I’m right. You cannot just take up where you left off when the gap is three decades!followed by a snort of approval and sense of comedy.

Two

It is an extraordinary thing to find, in Britain, that no matter what time of the day or night, to switch on the BBC 24/7 news has the immediate distasteful sight of a fake tan holding court in an oval shaped room, from behind an enormous desk that once upon a time was highly respected, and testimony to a Nation’s uprightness.

But no one has ever done what I’m now doing. No president has ever achieved what I am achieving.

That is a paraphrase of a man with a very limited vocabulary, a man with a total absence of national and international history, a man who has in just 339 days

·      hollowed out the American Constitution

·      put to flight the principle of the rule of law

·      waged war when there has been no cause to wage war

·      allied himself to a man intent upon destroying the international rules based order in place since the end of the Second World War

·      denigrated NATO

·      denigrated his European Allies

·      denigrated the sovereign nation of Ukraine

·      withdrawn military support for Ukraine

·      done everything in his power to give Russia the advantage even though it is the aggressor

·      reminded everyone in that horrid little room to his mic-controlled media audience that American presidents have mentioned that they’re in full support of his Illegal war in Iran

·      reminding them also that this is the view of King Charles III

·      reminding them too that lovely Cuba is next on his list

And so he prattles on.

The greatest generation has gone. Can one imagine President Eisenhower dealing with this five times draft dodger?

Can one imagine Churchill’s former military aide during six years of war, General, Lord, Hastings Ismay and first NATO Secretary-General calling President Truman “daddy”?

He would not receive the dignity of impeachment. The man would be quietly escorted away under Article Twenty-Five of the American Constitution. In this man’s case, what I tend to call the “kind men in white coats clause”.

Only the American people can resolve the situation. Do the majority of them measure up to the greatest generation? If they do, they will. If not, then America will slide further down an ever steepening gradient, and recovery will take the remainder of the twenty-first century.

May 2026

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© 2026 Kenneth Thomas Webb