grandad kit

Thank you for reading my blog. If you have difficulty seeing your grandchildren, or have any views about my situation, I would welcome your messages by e-mail through this blog site. If you wish, just use a first name or a nickname and your identity will be protected, like mine – “Grandad Kit.”

Dear “Tom”

Biggest cotton reel in the world

I am you other grandfather, the one you have never met. You are three years old, and although I have never met you, I love you dearly and always will. You are my flesh and blood, and always will be. We will meet one day, I am sure. I am writing this daily "blog" to you to make up for the fact that I can't speak to you right now. I hope that one day you will be able to read this.

Imagine the biggest building you've ever seen. Well, today I've been to the biggest factory I've ever seen. It's huge, really big. And inside they make all kinds of pipes and tubes - great big pipes and tubes that they use for moving gas and oil long distances under ground and under the sea. A lot of these pipes go to the oil rigs out to sea.

These pipes are flexible - that means bendy - and they are wrapped around huge wheels that look like giant cotton reels, the biggest cotton reels in the world. If you want to know what a cotton reel looks like, ask your Mam and get her to show you one in her work basket - I'm sure she's got one. The imagine this tiny little cotton reel, no more than two inches across, as tall as a house! And, instead of cotton wrapped round it, that is cotton which is a thin, thin thread, imagine a huge tube that's nearly as wide as you are.

When this great big reel is full with many many turns of the tubes wrapped round it, it is very, very heavy. Too heavy for any number of men to lift. It needs a giant crane to lift it, more than one in fact. First, there's a crane in the factory that lifts the spool (that's the thing like a giant cotton reel) on to a lorry, but again a lorry like nothing you have ever seen. This lorry is as big as a large house or a small block of flats. And it's square, not long like a lorry. And it ceratinly couldn't travel on the roads - it's far too wide. And this lorry has ten sets of wheels, each with four wheels on - that's forty wheels all together.

The driver doesn't sit in the lorry - he stands outside and operates the lorry with a remote control, just like you or your Dad might do with a toy car! Then the lorry is driven out of this huge factory and across the factory yard to a quay where a ship is waiting. Didn't I tell you this great big factory is down by the river? Anyway, it is, because the only way to mive these big reels is by sea. Then another giant crane takes the reel off the lorry and loads it into the ship. Then the ship sails away and takes its cargo of reels to the oil and gas rigs in the North Sea or to other countries where they are needed.

This is just one marvellous thing I could show you. Maybe I will, one day.

Love from

Grandad Kit and Nana Ann