Quiet day

Long day yesterday.  Though Worcester was delightful, and the cathedral in particular, I think that’s the last time I’ll pay a premium to spend eleven and a half hours in obsolete, cramped coaches.  By the time we got to Oxford on the way back I was ready for bed, but with a locomotive change and numerous delays as we wove our way round west and south London, it was another three hours before we got back, over half an hour late.  As I’ve mentioned before, the engine we thought we were getting was substituted at a late stage, and then the sub was subbed.  We learned as we were nearing home that substitute N°2 had a couple of days earlier come within an ace of going dis as well.  We finished our journey behind a diesel locomotive, leased from a Deutsche Bahn subsidiary, gawd ‘elp us.  Said locomotive is frequently rostered to haul the Royal train, we gather, so the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha connexion is plainly alive and well. 

Although the day was cold – and Tonbridge station, where we’d to wait for the delayed departure, is notoriously the coldest place on earth – we only got rained on between the car park and the station in the morning.  The walk into the city is unprepossessing for the first ten minutes or so, but after that it is a delight.  We were surprised how quiet the place was, although crossing the inner ring road, as we’d to do a few times, was not too easy.  After we’d enjoyed a walk from  the cathedral along the riverside, we hopped on a bus to the station.  Everywhere we went we met friendly greetings and banter, and it was surprising how many people asked us whether we’d come on the steam train. 

In the cathedral I stopped and chatted with a chap who was tuning a little three-stop continuo organ.  He’d been one of the builders of the newish quire organ, which I’m looking forward to hearing when I dig out the CD I bought.  He told me that the world of organ building has changed quite a bit since I last paid attention to it.  Willis and Harrison are largely victims of their complacency, having run, some might say, a comfortable duopoly for decades.  Walkers and Hills have gone to the wall, and Mander’s operation has shrunk considerably.  (Mander rebuilt the St Paul’s organ - not a moment too soon - in time for the silver Jubilee, and was responsible for the nice little organ on castors in St Anne’s & St Agnes’ in Gresham Street, near my first office.)  Not without a whiff of marketing, the fellow I chatted with was quick to sing the praises of Kenneth Tickell Ltd. 

Today I feel rather over-fed.  It’s not that often that I have two breakfasts (one of them a ‘full English’). A doorstep sandwich for lunch and then four courses at dinner time.  To their credit, the caterers on the train turned out a pretty good meal, but I’m rather well aware that yesterday’s rations included a fried breakfast, pastry, panna cotta and cheese.  We’re postponing today’s planned vegetarian splurge, however: two of the intended participants therein are under the weather.  Time for lunch nevertheless! 

Must be spring

All sorts of bird life around this morning.  Delighted to see that the mallards are back - they came crashing in about 06:30 and stayed for a quarter of an hour or so.  They don't exactly conform to type, our ducks.  Normally, the male pushes off once the eggs hatch, but our drake seems to have stayed put up at the big pond, and we are of course convinced that it's the same pair that comes back to visit us each year.  Probably sentimental nonsense.  But they're Doris and Arthur, OK?  Our neighbourhood heron was down at the pond when I came down around 06:00, but flapped off the moment it saw movement in the house.  Pairs of robins, dunnocks and chaffinches have been down to feed already, plus the occasional blackbird.  And of course it doesn't take long, once you've put the feed out, before the garden is full of wood pigeons, the greedy brutes.  A magpie just dropped in, and fled immediately - not unprompted.  Haven't seen the jays yet, probably because we're out of peanuts.

The traction for our Worcester jaunt has changed yet again.  Originally it was to have been an un-rebuilt Bulleid Pacific.  Then that was changed to 70000 Britannia.  Now it's to be the new-build A1, Tornado.  Pity - that's the one we had last time.  It did its steamy job very well, granted, but it's nice to ring the changes.

I bit the bullet a week or so ago and got a couple of new tyres for the VW.  They are pretty big tyres, and come with a correspondingly big price ticket.  Still, by shopping about a bit I got the price down by £40 per cover from the supposedly much-discounted figure I paid Kwikfit the day we had to replace a tyre on the way to Brighton - and SETyres even gave me a small discount on their web site price.  Still a bit of a dent in the bank balance, however.  Talking of big tickets, my desktop computer is getting unreliable.  It's hard to know how to research a replacement: my needs are pretty modest, but web sites seem to demand ever more bandwidth and processing power, and I'm very bad at weeding out the rubbish in my photo library.  I'll probably just go to the manufacturer of the laptop, which apart from a problem with the screen, quickly replaced under warranty, has been a delight. 

Mother would have been 95 today.  I wonder what she'd have made of the fact that Charles was in fact her second brother, after Frank.  Cousins Pip and Frank's daughter Gill are due to meet some time this month.

If it ain't one thing...

The Orbieu seems to be back to its normal butter-wouldn't-melt benign trickle - or at least to its normal winter foot or two.  The flow meter has been out of action for four days now, no doubt as a result of its being exercised a bit when the flood was at its height.  Here in Disgustedville, however, we've had a couple of days of snow, which has confined us to barracks.  Neighbours are teetering along in 4-wheel drives or with chains on their driving wheels.  I note in passing that the neighbours' Polish builder swept up the hill with sure-footed precision in a front-wheel drive Honda without chains.

Colleagues report horror stories of their journeys home last night.  One took 4 hours to do the 14 miles from Sevenoaks to his home half a mile from ours; another took 5 hours to get from there to hers between Maidstone and Rochester.  I had expected to have to venture out today and tomorrow, but fortunately my sessions were cancelled.  So it's a day for staying in and trying to decipher the heap of bumf we've had from the new bank.

Nails bitten to the elbows

It has been one of those worrying days.  Our friend Beverly was grizzling on Facebook about having returned from South Africa to a very wet Narbonne.  Today one of our part-time neighbours posted some photos, then a few video clips, of the Orbieu in spate.  In the 24 hours to 10:00 today, the river had risen by almost four metres, and the flow from an already healthy 20 cubic metres per second to close on 300.  It normally hardly registers on the measuring devices.  I saw the warning signs on the weather forecast a few days ago: when a clockwise weather system meets a widdershins one in our part of the Mediterranean, it means strong water-laden winds off the sea.  Not only does that lead to huge cloud formations over the Corbières, the Montagne Noire and the Pyrenees, but it also greatly slows the rate at which the rivers, notably the Aude (of which our perfidious Orbieu is a tributary) and the Agly can empty into the sea.  Said Orbieu rose and took a stroll through the ground floor of Château Smith in 1999, a year almost to the day after I bought the place, and about two months after I’d furnished the ground floor.  Well, the rate of flow has dropped to a merely diluvian 170 m³ per second, and the level has fallen a metre from its highest level this morning.  I wonder what tonight will bring.

The Agly at Rivesaltes is above its 1999 level, and the whole P-Os départment is consequently on red alert – immediate danger to life and property – spare a thought for the poor souls affected.  Lagrasse has not risen above its orange alert status yet.  Not that there’s a lot one could do about it from here in any case.  As I’ve mentioned before, we can monitor the situation in something approaching real time on the vigicrues.gouv.fr web site.  At one point I simply had to go out and endure ordeal by Fortnum’s and Sainsbury’s, simply to get away from the on-line graphs.

So it’s odd to be in leafy Disgustedville and able to walk on the grass – well, here and there – without sinking into the mire, for the first time since autumn.  But rain is forecast, so we ain’t out of the waters yet.  Here or There.

A phone call from the grocers this afternoon confirms that they are willing to take on the financial risk of banking us, so I just need to pop in tomorrow, sign some bumf and flash a driving licence, and we shall soon be free of the egregious RBS.

Spring, dare we say?

The snowdrops and crocuses are blooming fit to bust, and the last two mild, sunny days have brought a few polyanthus into flower.  The iris sibirica plants on the staging are starting into growth, so should be on their way to new quarters soon.  I've hauled out several miles of couch grass, and given the penstemons their annual haircut.  Not as fiercely as last year, when we came close to losing a couple of them.  They are getting a bit leggy now, so I'll see if I can bring on some of the cuttings to replace them later in the year. 

The sunshine and mild weather have also kicked me into activity, however mundane: laundry (dried on the line) and housework for the most part, but also a lengthy session with a candidate to replace my long relationship with RBS.  I think we're almost there now, and I'm happy to find that there isn't really a lot I need to do, except to set up a couple of standing orders and notify a few occasional payers-in - the bank will see to the direct debits, and provide forms to send to the pension crowd et al. 

Looks like our train ride a fortnight today will be behind a slightly more recent engine: the BR Standard class Britannia.  Shame: I was looking forward to the old Southern Railway Pacific.  Dare say it'll get us to Worcester just as efficiently.