So I was walking back from work today, after a three a.m. start and working all weekend, and I was about a third of the way back to the carpark which is about two kilometres away from work and gets further after a long day or when it's raining. So this van pulls up alongside me and this oldish guy leans out and asks if I want a lift back to my car.

So I read the sign on the side of the van which says it belongs to the Seafarers' Mission. So I assume, since I'm still wearing my work uniform identifying me as some sort of seafarer, that at best I'll get a nice free ride back to my car, and at worst all I'll have to do in exchange is be missionaried at for one minute maximum. So I said OK.

The Reverend Law, for such proved to be his name, told me he was going to one of the overseas container ships which had arrived at a wharf just past the carpark, to collect some boxes of books. In the process of telling me this, he drove right past the carpark without noticing. So I said, never mind, I'll come and help you move the boxes of books and you can drop me at the carpark on your way back.

So I suddenly realised, as we drove THROUGH the No Public Access gates and INTO the international container terminal area, where I had never been before, that WE WERE GOING RIGHT UNDERNEATH THE LEGS OF THE VERY MACHINES which I have found inexplicably charming and fascinating since I was a kid: the huge, huge, huge, HUGE cranes that lurk around the shipping port like bionic neon giraffes on steroids.

These look, to me at least, like the walkers from "The Empire Strikes Back". I am incapable of driving past the port without my head swivelling automatically like an owl on a turntable to look at them. They're unbelievably cool and I don't even know why I think so, except that they're SUPERNATURALLY HUGE MACHINERY and they look like the walkers from "The Empire Strikes Back".

So I got to see a ZPMC Post-Panamax 1,093-tonne, 95 metre high crane, which can lift 60 tonnes in one go, close up, from underneath even, and a guy who worked there told me all about how it works, and pointed out the tiny little glass-floored bubble suspended between vast girders twenty-eight storeys in the air, from which it is driven. And he kindly pretended not to notice my abject look of Huge Machinery Geek longing to ask what I could possibly do to persuade him to take me up there. There was an *elevator* to get up there, running up one leg of the crane. I'd rather have climbed up to the bubble on the twenty-eight storeys of ladders, catwalks and steel staircases stuck all around the legs, though.

After moving the boxes of books, I somehow managed to tear myself away from crane worship long enough to get back in the van and be dropped off at my carpark by the Reverend, who by this time probably thought I was completely insane, because I kept thanking him and raving about how much fun I'd had.

Brunnen-"all right, they don't look THAT much like walkers, but I can dream"G