Blokes on a roof

About four weeks ago, it had been pretty cold, with snow and everything. I was walking home, and heard a loud "clomp!" "crash!" sound. Over on the other side of the road, some people were looking out of their third floor window at the ground. There were some big bits of masonry lying there - I looked up, and could see that part of the architrave of the roof had fallen down.
By the time I'd gotten up to the apartment, the fire department had already arrived, and were carefully bashing away at the crumbling section, getting big chunks of plaster and concrete off the overhang.


Figure 1: Man on a mechanical stick

That was exciting - lots of people stopped in the street to watch the fun. The next step was to erect a scaffolding (Gerustbau) so workers could get up there to repair things. Scaffolders here are a tough bunch - and have romantic company names like Anarchie Gerustbau with a red and black anarchy symbol as the logo. The guys looking after our opposite neighbour didn't have a cool name, but the workers were straight out of a 13th century Frisian viking look-book. Note the awesome natural red-haired enormous handlebar moustache with beads. What you can't see is his down-to-the-middle-of-the-back thick plait of red-orange hair. Yes those are great big metal earrings, too. Hands like trucks, as my mate Cathy would say:

Figure 2: Leather trousers and plaited beards

The scaffolding was erected in about five hours. Time elapsed from initial avalanche: 29 hours. Things went quiet then for a long time. Some weeks passed, and it began to look like there was going to be no change for months. It's not unusual for houses here to have scaffolding for months or even years with nothing changing. Strange, since you have to pay monthly rental fees to both the scaffold company and the city, and they're not insignificant. Sometimes the scaffold is covered with thick plastic gauze which degrades over time, blowing in the wind like sails, giving the buildings the appearance of rotten, abandoned pirate ships which have come to rest between their land-locked cousins. Today, finally, some workmen came to work on the roof and architrave, hauling up sheets of tin and buckets of concrete and plaster to repair the leaks. Obviously, water had been working its way into architrave and mouldings, melting and re-freezing during winter, causing it to break apart. The workmen are a tough bunch, too, just walking about up on the roofline without a safety harness.

Figure 3: Bang bang tap tap.