More of the same...

 I eventually managed, with the help of the Waitrose call centre, to order a couple of bottles of wine for our Wakefield friends’ golden wedding anniversary last weekend.  Said call centre persuaded me to pay for delivery on a specified day.  They then proceeded to deliver two days early.  I went back to them, saying that no harm had been done, but that I hadn’t actually got what I’d paid for, and they promptly refunded the whole delivery charge, and not just the difference between standard and specified day delivery.  Good, eh?  If you don’t ask, you don’t get.  The sweet irony is that I’d wrongly diaried the date, and in fact the parcel arrived on the day of the anniversary.  Just a shame we weren’t all celebrating it together as planned on the Queen Victoria in Propriano.

Autumn is beginning to make itself felt, though a lot of leaves have still to fall.  The grass has had a cut despite not really being dry enough, and most of the tomato plants are in the compost bin, with their compost spread over the bed where we hope to have raised beds next season.  There’s a big tray of more or less green tomatoes on the sitooterie window ledge, so we may get some more of them to ripen.  (Don’t even bother suggesting green tomato chutney: pickling vinegar has no place in this house.)

The replacement of soffits, fascias and gutters is due to begin next week, so I suppose I’d better put biscuits on the shopping list and check the instant coffee supplies.  The replacement of our gas meter remains outstanding, so yesterday I had a long and so far fruitless conversation with a nice lady in an Asian call centre.  We’ve decided to shelve our other project for the time being (the refitting of the bathroom).  We’re still a long way from the point at which we’d be comfortable with the idea of having various different tradesmen inside the house.  But we think we’ve worked out how to get a bath and a drive-in shower into the space, as well as a wc, bidet and wash basin.  The bath would be smaller than the one we have, but since we so rarely use it in preference to the en suite shower, that ain’t a show-stopper.

Conscious that we aren’t out and about much, I’m trying to get into the habit of doing some old geezer type exercises.  I’ve been using some YouTube videos by a likeable young Australian, Mike Kutcher, whose web site is morelifehealth.com, and is intended to cater for the over-60s.  He also shows up on any form of social media you care to name.  Wild horses couldn’t drag me into a gym, so Mike’s syllabus is fine by me, requiring no more than a sturdy chair and a few hand weights.

Martyn, meanwhile, is building a table top model railway layout that he can operate on, and easily lift off, the desk in his study.  Impressive stuff as always.  Pictures anon.