Christmas in Scotland

We've just spent a week in Scotland over Christmas, -10 when we arrived and it didn't get much warmer for a few days.  We think we had it bad down here!  There were huge piles of ice that will take weeks to thaw but it looked good though!  I took a laptop to do some work, spent a lot of time thinking about doing work, but didn't do any.  So here I am on New Year's Eve wondering where the last 2 weeks have gone and with a list of things to be done in just about 9 days.  Remind me, why am I doing this again?

Greenwich Park Final Presentation

On Thursday we had our final hand-in and presentation of our Greenwich Park Historic Garden Conservation project.  We had to do a 5 minute presentation and were supposed to have a model showing one of our proposals, one of mine being the building of a new cascade down the slope near the General Woolfe statue.  I decided to go all Blue Peter and create a working cascade and seeing as I didn't have a statue of General Woolfe handy, I decided to go with something even better...General Morph.

Square Peg in a Round Hole

Yesterday was decision day.  We had to present our three A1 sketch designs for Calverley Grounds in Tunbridge Wells to Jamie, Julia and Paula.  Nerve-racking doesn't even come close to describing it!  I had spent most of the weekend preparing my work, which I was satisfied with, but when they are put on the wall there are always someone else with a design when you think "ah yes, I could have done mine like that..." (Alick, Adele, Sue...).  
So Jamie wanted someone to go first, so I volunteered, better to get it out of the way I thought, did anyone hear the quivering in my voice?  The tutors are lined up, front row centre, along with over twenty other pairs of eyes all wanting you to explain why you did it this way, why you didn't do it that way!  So I picked the design I wanted to go for much to Julia and everyone else's surprise, square pegs in round holes are the best way to describe it. 
So now I am stuck with it, too late to change.  Have I picked the right one?  Probably not, but we shall see.  Tune in next June to see if I managed to hammer my square peg into the round hole, or if it just becomes one big mess.  I will put the sketch designs on here if I ever learn to work an A1 scanner.  
We shall become intimately acquainted, my design and I, over the next six months, too late to bail out but it feels like I am standing at the bottom of Everest, all I can see is a huge mountain in front of me but I guess a journey starts with one small step...

The French know how to do a water feature

 Bordeaux

Bordeaux 

 Parc Diderot, La Defense, Paris

 Parc Diderot, La Defense, Paris

Is that Paula on holiday in Albi?

Parc de Bercy, Paris

Parc de Bercy, Paris

Parc de Bercy, Paris

Base Map

I've been trying to create a base plan for Calverley Grounds for Monday at A1 with contours and spot heights.  I've come up with the above from Digimap then taken into Photoshop.  It was set at 1:500 at A1 in Digimap but for some reason it is too short and too narrow.  I saved it as an A1 in Powerpoint and it shows this clearly, help...

Back to it!

After the fun...

Back to the reason we are all here.  As a group of about 25 split into 3 groups, we had to write out our thoughts as to what the 3 words connective, educational and alternative mean to us.  From now, this is it, masterplanning.

We now have to come up with 3 masterplan idea using these 3 words, so we need to have a vision and a brief for all 3,than do a sketch design for each and we will choose one to take on as our final design.  Couldn't I just go sledging... 

Snow

Uni work can wait when there's sledging to be done!