According to the BBC:

On Planet Greece some civil servants get a bonus for turning up to work on time. Foresters get a bonus for working outdoors. At least they show up.

There are civil servants called ghost workers because they never go into the office, head to a second job and still claim a state salary. They can’t get sacked, because a civil service post is for life. Unless the incumbent decides to retire in his or her forties, with a pension.

And the government can continue paying for the afterlife. Unmarried and divorced daughters of civil servants are entitled to collect their dead parents pensions. Another lucrative sinecure is to belong to a state committee. The government has no idea how many there are.

It has been estimated that they have 10,000 employees and cost nearly £200m a year, and that includes the committee to manage a lake that dried up 80 years ago.

In the beginning:

Halfway

Stop for triple coffee:

The end of the truckle:

Fried rind:

Finished:

Polystyrene tower destined for tip:

Six stare wood store added:

Breakfast the day after: toast, butter and marmalade:

Alternative breakfast: buckwheat groats.

Robert Preston says:

“Airline executives and engineers want to know why they can’t be given permission to fly at 20,000 feet, below the ash cloud, till the cloud clears.”

Indeed.

INDOORS:

OUTDOORS:

He had his scheme of life worked out to a fine point. About once a month he would take three days writing a few poems; the other three hundred and twenty-nine days of the year he rested. I didn’t know there was enough money in poetry to support a chappie, even in the way in which Rocky lived; but it seems that, if you stick to exhortations to young men to lead the strenuous life and don’t shove in any rhymes, American editors fight for the stuff. Rocky showed me one of his things once. It began:

Be!
Be!
The past is dead.
To-morrow is not born.
Be to-day!
To-day!
Be with every nerve,
With every muscle,
With every drop of your red blood!
Be!

It was printed opposite the frontispiece of a magazine with a sort of scroll round it, and a picture in the middle of a fairly-nude chappie, with bulging muscles, giving the rising sun the glad eye. Rocky said they gave him a hundred dollars for it, and he stayed in bed till four in the afternoon for over a month.

A wayside stall:

Struggling through a mire:

Mire coated feet and wheels: