June 18 -Day 77 - 'Scientists investigate that which already is; Engineers create that which has never been.' Albert Einstein

I know that (again) you might say the picture doesn’t fit the title. But - there is something about the grass that feels very structural - the engineering in nature. - with the strong straight stems and the rounded husks.

Today in history actually celebrates two acts of engineering. The first is that in 1815 (The year of the battle of Waterloo) Thomas Telford, civil engineer, built Waterloo Bridge, at Betws-y-Coed It was only the seventh such bridge to be built. Anyone who has stood on another of Telford’s structures, the aqueduct at Pontcysyllte, north Wales, can’t help but be amazed by the engineering involved as canal boats move past you on the footpath 126 feet (38 metres) above the river on iron arched ribs carried on masonry pillars. It’s even more impressive when you realise Telford was born in a remote part of Scotland. His father, a shepherd, died when he was a few months old and he was raised by his mother and left school to work for a stonemasons at 12 years old.

Two years after Telford’s Waterloo Bridge, on June 18 2017, the first Waterloo Bridge over the Thames was opened by the Prince Regent and the Duke of Wellington. John Rennie's design of nine 120 ft arches, made from Cornish granite, was admired and featured in a number of famous paintings. When it was replaced, built by mainly a female workforce (leading to its nickname Ladies’ Bridge) during the war, it became the first reinforced concrete bridge over the Thames in central London.

So this weekend - whether it’s looking at grass or the needs of the vulnerable in a different way or recognising the strength in yourself, others or the structural features that have marked changes in Britain (or if you just play Pooh sticks on a bridge!), try to think about these two quotes.

‘Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known.’ A. A. Milne

‘Love is that condition in the human spirit so profound that it empowers us to develop courage; to trust that courage and build bridges with it; to trust those bridges and cross over them so we can attempt to reach each other.’ Maya Angelou