Seemed like a nice idea…

Since the weather is cool but fine today, we thought we’d make a trip to Emmetts, where the primroses and bluebells are beautiful at this time of year.  Had I thought to check the web site, I’d have learned that access from our side of the mountain is blocked by roadworks.  The detour would have taken quite a while, so we opted for a gentle drive home, pausing at Bough Beech to watch a moorhen fishing - and a bunch of old geezers (said he…) sitting on canvas chairs and wielding enormous cameras.  Well, we saw plenty of bluebells by the roadside anyway, plus honesty, lilac, apple and cherry blossom etc, so it wasn’t a wholly wasted journey.  Quite apart from the flowers and blossom, it’s always a joy at this season to see the countless shades of pale green as the trees come out of dormancy.

The little orange car passed the 100 mile mark today, and coped well with the appalling road surfaces that epitomise the legacy of the past fourteen years of - at best - incompetent government.

My new desk arrived on Sunday: fully assembled, thank goodness.  My IKEA skills remain intact, but preferably unused.  Having last used said skills on oak-finish bookshelves, the study thus looks a bit less incoherent than heretofore.  

The packaging was pretty generous, though I feel rather guilty about heaving so much polythene and expanded polystyrene into the bin.  (Given what else has to go in there these days, maybe the plastics are no worse.)  The cardboard, on the other hand has a more honorable future: our new neighbour Lisa is completely restarting the garden across the road with a Japanese theme, so she’s suppressing all the grass, laying cardboard and wood chippings and planting through them.

Chaaarge!!

After much frustration trying and failing to get the car to charge, and three visits from the installers (one of whom put his foot through the garage ceiling), we’re assured that the car will now charge (‘a wire had come off’), and is programmed to be fully charged by 07:00 tomorrow.  You can’t just plug it in and throw a switch: you have to download an ‘app’, register on the same, say who provides your electricity and on which of their list of dozens of tariffs (it didn’t include ours), state inside leg measurement and colour of grandma’s eyes, and goodness knows what else.  Just at the point at which I was running out of blood pressure pills: I’m afraid the installers got somewhat short shrift (though I did offer them tea /coffee which they declined, perhaps fearing I’d lace them with laxatives).  Well, we’ll see in the morning whether the car is fully charged.  Next job is to get the cruise control working.  We use it a lot, largely to keep us down to the speed limits, so would miss it if it didn’t work.

The garden has had a lot of attention today.  We got Ben to weed the bed under the apple tree last time he was here, and I planted it up today with lots of aquilegia seedlings.  Ben was here again today, and lifted a lot of thrift plants from the side of the pond.  They were full of grass and at least one ants’ nest, and are on their way to municipal compost.  He has also moved an acer from where it was too close to the Judas tree.   The garden bin is pretty full now, given also that I cut and edged the grass yesterday.  

The aquilegia seedlings have come long nicely in the nursery bed, so I lifted them with plenty of root ball before planting them out.  Let’s hope they have some of the spectacular flowers of their parents.  I have a lot of trailing fuchsias and lobelias in the greenhouse, ready to replace the cyclamens in the basket at the front door.  Some will populate the pots on the garden steps, replacing primulas and tulips.

Today I’ve had a notification that my new desk is due for delivery on Sunday.  Said notification required me to confirm, which required me to enter both phone numbers twice (even though they’ve got them already), email address (which they’d got by bloody emailing to ask for it), stopping short only of paternal grandmother’s maiden name and date of birth.  Why is everything so complicated these days?  Perhaps, I suppose, because I take longer to learn as I enter my dotage.  

Well, why not?

A flamboyant gesture in one’s declining years.  It’s taking a bit of getting used to: the on-line handbook is practically illegible, looking as if it been three times through a fax machine.  For example, it took me hours to find out how to open the bonnet - no thanks to the manual - and when I finally got in there, apart from the 12v battery, the brake fluid and screenwash reservoirs, there wasn’t a thing I recognised as part of a car.  We haven’t worked out how to make the cruise control work (time for a call to the dealer) and tomorrow’s other job is to try to commission the charger in the garage.  

We went for a ride over the Ashdown Forest this afternoon, so are slowly getting used to how the car drives.  It rides well, even over the atrocious potholes that remind us endlessly of 14 years of Tory government.  Over the 60 miles we’ve put on the clock, we’ve used a quarter of the charge, so that’s pretty satisfactory for our purposes.

End of March

The pension’s in - a few days early because of the Bank Holiday - so that makes for a longish April.  We’ve had a good Easter weekend so far, with a visit last weekend from friends we met on a cruise over four years ago, and next day from Sandra, with whom we’d planned to lunch out.  Martyn not feeling well, we opted to lunch at home instead: I knocked out a pilaff with what there was in the fridge: chouriço, mushrooms, red peppers, onions and garlic, and so far we’ve lived to tell the tale.  with the cruise friends we had home-made sausage rolls, hot cross buns and lemon sponge cakes, so you’ll gather that your obedient servants’ shadows are not exactly shrinking.

Between activities last weekend, I planted a few rows of potatoes in the raised bed at the kitchen door.  Alexandras, chitted from a bag bought at Fortnums, and Charlottes, bought as seed potatoes from an altogether more established seedsman.  Watch this space.  Sandra brought us a fine little azalea, so we’re busily plotting where to plant it.

The rest of the spuds are planted out.  Rather than fanny about with canvas bags and compost, we’ve planted them in the raised bed, and heaved in some blood fish and bone to encourage them.  Which exempts us from the decision what to plant in the raised bed.  I spent an hour in the garden yesterday dragging weeds out of the solid clay of the top bed, and shudder to think how many more hours it will take to clear the rest 

Today we parted company with Egg2, which has served us well for 16 years.  We liked the same model, Egg1, bought a few years earlier, so much that we bought another, so called because they are pointy at the front and round at the back.  Anyway, they both served us well, and Egg2 was altogether more reliable than its elder sibling.  Time has begun to take its toll, however, so we’ve replaced it with an electric car which, right now, is proving rather frustrating.  These days, you need a a moderately ungifted child to guide you through the maddening software and apps that attend modern day motoring.  If I finally master this one, I’ll be happy to hang up my stringback gloves.

The joys of home ownership

The EV charger was installed on Monday - sort of.  The kit came with a missing part, so we have a further visit next week.  We have still not been able to register it, since the necessary app demands the plate number of the car, which we haven’t got yet.  Much frustration, hypertension and bad language on my part as I poked clumsily - and fruitlessly - at my mobile phone.  And it didn’t help that, while routing the cable through the garage loft, the boy put his foot through the ceiling.

Still, it’s an ill wind and all that, save that this one identified a roof leak, so we’re waiting to hear from roof fettlers.  Talking of wind, the fence between us and Annie next door has been flapping round in the breeze of late, thanks to rotten posts in the metal shoes they sit in, fastened to a short brick wall.  Repairs tomorrow, we hope, and une facture plutôt salée to follow.

Having had to do a mighty clear-out in the garage, we’ve shipped a lot of junk to the tip, and demolished the rickety shelving we inherited from the previous administration.  A new set of (we hope) robust shelves is on order, and we’re hoping to install some better means of hanging the various bits and pieces that currently threaten to fall on the car when it’s in the garage.

Today has been mild and sunny - for a welcome change - so we have gardened.  We had a delivery of fuchsias and lobelias this week, so have been populating hanging baskets and potting up the plants left over.  Since the fence repairs are at the back of the nursery bed, we’ve been digging up and planting out rosemary cuttings to replace the devastated box hedge round the front garden.  Some of the little plants are flowering, so we’re hoping to have a pretty hedge ere long.

A useful local resource

Some time ago, the pin that fastens the hands of our ex-Aunty Jessie clock went missing.  The local monthly repair café offers clock repairs, so I gently put a sock in the mechanism and took it along.  All sorts of interesting things going on: a bike fettler (who was also mending a chair when I arrived), someone overhauling and sharpening gardening tools, someone doing textile repairs and a chap doing electrical and mechanical works.  It turned out that this last also loves fiddling with clocks.  When my turn came round, he told me he usually cut down and filed a paper clip to fit, but my clock called for something finer.  So he went and scrounged a couple of pins from the textiles lady, and cut and filed one to fit.  No charge, but a request for donations, gift aided, so that’ll help marginally with my tax bill.

There was also someone there to test electrical stuff before any work was done on it, and it turned out to be the husband of one of my former bench colleagues.  We’d last seen the two of them when we did our last Macmillan coffee morning pre-Covid, so had a nice catch-up.

The EV charger is due to be installed on Monday, so we’ve done a bit of clearing out in the garage.  Two black bags full in the bin, and we have a booking at the tip next week.  Egg2 is full of junk: odd offcuts of timber, a fluorescent light fitting that I’d hung on to for no good reason, and much else.  Years ago I bought a wall-hung bicycle rack, with a view to hanging it on the back wall of the smaller garage.  Never got round to it, and of course the smaller garage is no more.  So the bike rack ought to depart tomorrow, Freecycled to someone who can make use of it.  The bike, meanwhile, reposes in the summerhouse, and it’s moot whether either of us will ever ride it again.  Still, I’ll take it along to the repair café next month and see if the chap can get the gears working, just in case!

Curiosity satisfied - partly

Good old Fortnums do theme weeks for much of the year, and a couple of weeks ago it was the Alpenfest again.  We’re always pleased when it comes round, since it gives us the chance to get some Rösti into stock for days when we feel really decadent.  This time they also did frozen Bretzels, which are very good if you like that sort of thing.  Martyn does not, having tried one in Riquewihr just when he was starting a pretty vicious gut bug.  One the way south we’d had supper at the home of my former secretary, whose baby son had just come home from hospital with said bug.  He is for evermore known to us as Typhoid Mario.  But I digress.

Well, I’m enjoying the Bretzels, at least.  Another of Fortnums’ offerings was Currywurst, which I fancied trying, having failed to persuade Martyn to try the same when we were in Berlin.  It is the street food par excellence, they say, and the curry powder given by GIs to starving Germans in the forties brought them some welcome spice for a starvation diet.  I bought a packet from Fortnums, and used Martyn's absence at lunchtime today to try it out.  Hyper-processed Frankfurter style bangers, sliced and packed in a tomato sauce, and supplied with a sachet of curry powder to sprinkle over, all in a plastic container that went in the microwave.  Tasty in a guilt-inducing kind of way, but not sufficiently so to encourage me to try it again: or not that brand, at least.  I’ll give it another try if I get to Berlin again, but I suspect that may conclude the experiment.