Wall repair under lockdown

Total lockdown has been lifted in England and today we can meet in groups of six, or meet family of five plus two grandparents equals seven and in our garden today, we plan to meet family. That'll make it a busy place because we also have three builders fixing our old wall that fell down last year. 

This garden is enclosed by a wall, a hundreds year old brick wall with lime mortar, two bricks thick with capping stones - beautiful. But it is a lot of wall, and the previous owner who replaced a lot of the wall made it only one brick thick, thus halving the cost. Unfortunately, he also used cement not lime mortar to repoint some of the old bricks. That doesn't work because the cement is harder than the brick, and water has to get out through the brick thereby dissolving it. So we have patches where the brick is eroded. 

You can see the capping stones on the wonky piece of wall in this photo, and the crack where it's leaning into our garden, though there's a buttress on the other side. 

When the gardeners took the ivy off last year,  it was obviously unsafely wobbly, so we got our builder, GP, to take it down safely. Unfortunately, because the cement mortar stuck to them, the bricks were not salvageable and we're having to source old bricks to rebuild. 

This afternoon then, when our lunch time guests arrive there could be ten of us in the garden. What sociability after lockdown!