The Garden Barrow

A gravel training yard of a military depot in Northern Ireland on a drizzly grey morning, wet hedges and a low corrugated-iron shed behind, puddles in the gravel, a low tracked vehicle with a dark olive-green hull of bolted steel plates, black rubber tracks with cross treads, at its front a round headlamp with a chrome rim, on top a black-painted tubular frame carrying a long light-grey tube with a hexagonal end, a small black camera with a coiled cable at its side, a thick black cable trailing back across the gravel to a wooden cable drum, a hand in a leather glove paying out the cable, every surface plain and unmarked.