Where do the weeks go?  Well, we’ve been out and about, spending a long weekend with Annie in Yorkshire.  It's been an ambition to go to Spurn Head since I first saw and read about it in the Nat Geog.  The fragile promontory lies an hour or so from Annie's at the mouth of the Humber, and we headed off there on Sunday, with a picnic and a flask of tea.  It’s a captivating place, even on a day when the sun was a bit sulky.  Long beaches with the rollers breaking on them on the east side, with three or four levels of tide marks in places ; calm waters and wading birds on the west.  Enormous skies.  I was surprised at the amount of traffic entering the estuary: the pilot cutter was busy all the time we were there.  At one point the sand spit is very low and narrow, and there are often warnings during the winter storms that it’s at risk of breaching, as indeed it has at intervals over the centuries.  Evidently, there used to be a railway all the way to the coastguard station at the point, and a spot of googling reveals that they even had a couple of sail bogies, to take advantage of the wind that nearly always blows there.  There are stories of near-disasters, such as when drunken soldiers ‘borrowed’ a trolley one windy night and lost control!

On Monday we did Beverley things: visits to the Minster and St Mary’s, and to an exhibition of painting and sculpture by Jacqueline Stieger.  I can’t link to it, unfortunately, because the art gallery web site is way out of date.  A casualty, no doubt, of the cuts.  All impressive stuff, I assure you: she masters several media perfectly, from oils to bronze via any number of imaginative materials along the way.

We spent a day in York as well, visiting the National Railway Museum, the Minster and the tiny and ancient Holy Trinity Church in Goodramgate.  When we picked our dates for the trip, we’d quite forgotten that it was half-term week: consequently, the museum was jumping with sprogs and pretty noisy.  The rolling stock collection is remarkable, but I think I was more attracted by the stack of other memorabilia, like old station and locomotive name plates, dining car and railway hotel furniture and table settings.  They also have an ample collection of chamber pots, stored in a cupboard clearly labelled ‘Empty Before Moving’.  Quite.

The fact that it was half-term may have accounted for the awful travelling conditions on the way there and back.  A stretch of the M11 was closed, so we finished up heading in to the North Circular, and bitterly regretting it.  We ultimately abandoned it and groped our way through Palmer’s Green, Southgate, Cockfosters and places like that.  We’d been three hours on the road by the time we were outside the M25.  The return was a bit less worse, though conditions on the M25 forced us to head way out east on the M20 and hack our way home along the country lanes.

I wasn’t really sure I was in the mood for Thursday’s art class, but set off anyway with my two current canvases.  I did some final fiddling on the latest landscape, then quickly slapped on some varnish before I could change my mind.  I also did a bit more on a still life of autumn flowers, and left feeling happier than when I arrived.

We’d a bit of fun in  the evening, though: four of us took the little steam train that runs nearby and were served (lukewarm) fish and chips.  Actually my third lot of fish and chips in the same week; shame on me.

The garden is starting to look a bit bedraggled, but I paid a bit of attention to it yesterday.  My new rose arrived during the week, and is now planted, replacing a rather overgrown euonymous, which yielded only to blood, toil, tears, sweat and a pickaxe.  The rose has been bred to mark the 650^th anniversary of the Magistracy, and mine looks like a healthy example.  So together with Edna, an English rose ( actually named after Geoff Hamilton) that I bought for Martyn just after his Mum died, it will guard the steps up to the grass.  Or as I put it rather more succinctly on facebook, I’ve dug a big hole and put a Justice of the Peace in it.  I managed to slither across the grass behind the mower as well yesterday, so it’s looking a little better than it usually does at this time of year.  The main problem is leaves from the neighbours’ ash tree.  The grass is already well carpeted with leaves again even though I cleared a lot of them yesterday afternoon.  If we get a couple of dry days, I’ll get out with the mower again.  But I notice that the October-April quagmire is starting to get established again.  Such is clay.

The kitchen is still a  bit of a mess pending tiling, But Paul’s coming to make a start on Wednesday, and will do most of the work while we’re in Lagrasse for an autumn break.  Martyn, meanwhile, has repaired the base of the cupboard beneath the sink, propped it up on new telescopic legs and fitted it out with a new set of shelves.  Next, a shelf in the boiler cupboard to take the cookery books, then we’ll start to feel we’re on the way back to some kind of order.

Chaos diminishing

It's an inordinate joy to have a working sink again, and to able to run the dishwasher.  The latter was at capacity yesterday by the time it was re-connected to the drain.  Our intrepid Mr Waterman, who had agreed to do the sink for us, wished he hadn't: the job was awkward in the extreme, and cutting through inch-thick beech was quite a test for our DIYer-grade jigsaw.  Mr W specialises in central heating systems, so, as I remarked to him, getting him to fit a sink is a bit like asking a neurosurgeon to lance a boil. 

Paul, who refitted the kitchen at the old house, will make a start on the tiling on Monday: we shall be away from home while the really horrible task of lifting the floor tiles is in progress.  Good planning, eh?

The local takeaways will start to feel the draught, however, now that we (almost) have a fully serviceable kitchen.  We could have cooked at home last night, but, it being Martyn's birthday, we had dinner at La Dolce Vita in Lamberhurst, and it was excellent.  Generous amuse-bouche, lightly battered fried fish starter and racks of lamb with spinach and a small serving of sauté potatoes.  A nice touch is the listing of alcoholic strength in the copious wine list: we chose an Apulian red at 12.5% (noting, with no intention of ever trying it, another wine on the list at a whopping 16%).

Chaos

Even superficial work on the kitchen is enough to throw the whole house into chaos.  We've taken off the wall tiles, and Martyn has sanded down the beech working surfaces.  Our environment is consequently a miasma of fine sawdust and grit from disturbed plaster and tile cement.  We've ordered a new sink and gas hob: the latter at the second attempt.

We went into Currys and chose a hob we liked.  The one visible assistant was busy, so we decided after a quarter of an hour to go home and order it on-line.  Mistake.  It arrived damaged, and Martyn has had the devil's own job getting them to take it back.  The first call ended, after bum-shuffling across three departments, with a promise of a call back, which didn't materialise.  The second call dropped out while he was on hold in the third department he'd been shunted to.  The third call resulted with instructions to ring again and press the star key twice.  The fourth call, in which he followed those instructions, failed completely.  The fifth eventually elicited the information that the hob we wanted was out of stock.  They are to call us to arrange a collection appointment, and will refund the money once they've got the damaged hob back.  So, we've ordered a different hob from a different firm.  This all sounds hideously familiar.

We have a lot of preparation to do for decorating: we discovered when we took down the ugly cornices from the tops of the cupboards that the extractor fan ducting was not connected, so the grease of ages is decorating the ceiling, walls and plaster coving, and I suspect sugar soap won't be up to it.

So, the point at which we couldn't cook for fear of getting grease into the stripped beech or wet coats of Danish oil was not really the best time to find that the barbecue had burned out.  The local takeaway shops are putting the flags out.  Neither is it a great time for our local rubbish dump to have closed for roadway repairs.  Fortunately, there's another one at Crowborough, so we clanked and clattered down there yesterday with a car full of dead barbecue and computer, disused computer desk and several lengths of greasy mdf cornice. 

A bright glimmer in the gloom was lunch yesterday with Barbara at a pub in the South Downs behind Brighton.  Beautiful drive, good sound food in a comfortable pub, and excellent company.

October?

We abandoned the plan to have lunch outside yesterday because we couldn't find a space on the terrace to put the table in shade from the hot sun.  Ain't complainin' - I've had breakfast and lunch in the fresh air a few times in the past week.  This includes chewing my sandwich while pacing up and down the car park at the courthouse: I usually refer to it as the exercise yard. 

Back to art class on Thursday: I slapped a bit more paint on a little piece I started while we were in France, and am instructed by Miss that I'm allowed one more session on it, maximum.  I think that'll just about do it: there are a few mistakes to correct, and it needs a bit more light and shade.

We'd a trip to London last night for another 60th birthday party, this time at a gentlemen's club in Mayfair.  It helped that the railways were in a state of chaos as they cram in the weekend maintenance jobs before the weather deteriorates: trains from our neck of the woods were going into Victoria rather than Charing Cross, and that suited our purpose well.  Excellent do, with the birthday boy accompanying two operatic soloists at the piano in a nice medley of arias from Mozart to Massenet, including some favourite lollipops.  I'd never seen the cats' duet (attrib. Rossini) performed before, though I've heard the de los Angeles/Schwarzkopf recording often enough.  Elizabeth Llewellyn and Hannah Pedley are definitely names to watch: they both gave excellent performances of a very diverse programme.

The car is back, swept, washed and with a clean pan of oil, but otherwise unchanged. The coarse noise from the transmission is now said to be a 'characteristic' of that combination of engine and gearbox. I've responded with 'not good enough: if I'd wanted a car that sounds like an army lorry I'd have bought a Land Rover'. Watch space, but keep breathing meanwhile.

Our next brush with Trade is due presently: another of our kitchen window seals has failed, causing a build-up of condensation between the panes. The kitchen door is now quite unpleasant to operate, and is just within its 10-year guarantee, so the representative of Jokers Я Us Home Improvements is briefed to look at both while he's here this afternoon.  Might show him the peeling veneer on the front door as well.