Almost there

Carpet man Duncan was here by 08:00, and has fitted a carpet to the ex-garage, which looks quite welcoming, though we haven’t all got the sticks downstairs yet.  I spent a while trying to organise the wiring for the phone, the router and all the rest, so now the technology is lurking in a corner where it’ll be largely hidden when the sofa bed comes down.  By some miracle, it works.  Duncan is going to nag his removal man brother-in-law to deploy a couple of heavies for an hour to do the necessary.  The bed for the new guest room (my old study) is ordered, but won’t be here for best part of a month.  Meanwhile, we’re solvent, but by a much eroded margin!

Delicious though the charlottes are, the crop is not huge this year.  We’ve turned out a few bags, so the spent compost is now distributed round the garden to improve the soil texture a bit.  The climbing beans are already feeding us generously, though we’ve had to do a jury rig on one of the wigwams: the poles I used were far too slight, as I feared.  The leeks are filling out nicely, but the weeds are the year’s real success story.  As for the flowering subjects, the rudbeckias are resplendent, as are Chrissie’s tagetes.  We grow the latter from harvested seed each year, but the supposedly annual rudbeckias come back year after year.  Penstemons grown from seed last year have responded well to being cut down to the ground in the spring, and are giving us a fine range of colours.

After we’d finished painting the hall last week we decided we’d have Friday off, and headed out to another of our usual coastal favourites, Birling Gap.  Unfortunately, the wind was distinctly brisk (and the car park ticket machine didn’t recognise my NT Life Membership card).  We motored on, and had fine views from Beachy Head, and enjoyed a profusion of wild flowers by the roadside.  We parked in Eastbourne, and legged it (a bit painfully, alas) to Harry Ramsden’s for lunch - we’re such creatures of habit!  We hadn’t eaten indoors in a restaurant since pre-pandemic days, and I have to say I found the noise level quite distressing.  Perhaps I’m cut out to be a troglodyte.

71 of them.

The day began at an indecent hour with a visit from Building Control, whose man has signed off our work on the basis of perhaps 15 seconds on the premises.  If he’s happy, that’s something, though we can’t help remembering that we’ve paid £450 for three perfunctory visits.  We keep finding irritations with the work: the new window frame doesn’t match the rest of the house, the window ledge has a distinct list to port, and we have far more decoration to do than we’d expected.  Enfin, merde.  We are still capable of some painting, sanding and filling, so should be grateful for that at least - and the bill was much lower than we expected.

Martyn has treated me to a new watch (in anticipation of which the faltering old one has not missed a beat for the past couple of weeks).  He also got me a kneeling stool which will allow me to garden with much less Ach und Krach.  We took a ride down to Rye Harbour for lunch at the Bill the Conk, and a half-mile stroll down the side of the very low Rother estuary.  

On the way home, we called in at one of the big sheds and bought a pressure washer that has removed much of the crap left on the drive by the builders and their skip.  The chap at B&Q steered us towards a product that he reckoned is more reliable, and much cheaper, than the much-mispronounced market leader.  We shall see.  

We also dropped by the butchers for some gammon steaks, of suitably modest proportions, given that we’d lunched out.  

There have been worse birthdays.

Modest achievements

Before builder Hemen fitted the door from the hall to the new ex-garage room, he obligingly stripped off the wallpaper from that stretch of wall.  We did toy with just slapping on some paint, but found some textured wallpaper that was close enough to the original, and hung it this morning.  Nice to know that we are still capable thereof, but I suspect my joints and vestigial muscles will tell me about it in the morning.  No word from window man, but we expect a call on Thursday to say whether has has received the glazing - evidently the frame is made.  The good news is that the skip was taken away this morning by a friendly young woman, so we now just need to sweep and hose down the drive, which is looking distinctly manky.

Google seems unwilling to let me upload the photo I took earlier of our first hollyhock flower.  You can find it on my Facebook page.  Anyway, it is the first to flower of the seedlings we were given last year by Celia and Andy, whose seedlings have evidently yet to flower.  We must be getting something right.

Predictable, I suppose…

There has been some progress with the building work: Hemen fitted the threshold and the window ledge yesterday, and both look pretty good.  The window for the new room promised for yesterday did not materialise.  The cast-iron promise of delivery and fitting this coming Monday has already been broken, with an earliest possible fitting date of next Friday.  One tires of this.

The plumber was here yesterday to flush the central heating system.  There were signs that he didn’t really know what he was doing, but when I tested this morning it seemed to work, albeit with much gurgling and protest from the machinery.  When the boiler kicked in it sounded as if we had a growling beast in the airing cupboard!  

Fortunately, the weather yesterday was fine, so we spent much of the morning outside on the terrace, admiring our handiwork in the garden, and listening to the crashing and banging coming from indoors.  A neighbour, meanwhile, was mowing his grass, adding a Briggs and Stratton accompaniment to the copious aural surround.  I later retaliated in kind.

It’s actually pretty noisy here most weekdays: there’s a lot of building work in the neighbourhood.  Just up the road, neighbours are having an extension and conservatory replaced, just round the corner another neighbour is having a huge extension added at the back.  The prep work involves much pneumatic drilling and to-ing and fro-ing of a dumper truck.   The noisy tenants next door appear to have moved out, so we’re hoping the new owners will be more neighbourly - and that they don’t need massive building works!  Hemen tells me that he is going to convert the garage next door, so it’s going to be a repeat of earlier this year: no sooner had Ben finished our landscaping than he started on next door’s.  So we had a double dose of excavation, angle-grinding and all the rest, and have another garage job to look forward to.

There’s some good news on the noise front though: the great reduction in commercial flying means that approaches to Gatwick are much shorter, and we rarely see an airliner.  A few years ago, we’d an approach right overhead every couple of minutes.  This may change, of course, if restrictions are lifted as threatened.  

Worries and consolations

Surprising, what pops up in the garden some years.  This year, in addition to this blowsy poppy, we have a pure white foxglove and an onion spike, identified by our friend Carole as a Sicilian honey garlic.  Interesting, but not exactly beautiful.  The honeysuckles Celia gave us last year are putting up some good flower spikes, so I’m busting to see what colours we get.

The strong winds and heavy rain have played havoc with the tomatoes and spuds, so I’ve tried to do some running repairs.  Maybe we shall still have some crops.  In the raised veggie bed the rocket and spinach beet were taking the place over, and the beasties were getting more than we were, so they are chopped down and in the compost bin.  They may grow again from the base, they may not: we are inexperienced with the subjects.  Out the front, Lynn’s hanging basket pots are stocked with fuchsias and lobelias, and are looking promising.

We are starting to get impatient with the building job.  There’s still a lot of builders’ junk in the garage, and the skip is still on the drive.  Martyn rattled Hemen’s cage this morning, and we gather he’ll be back on Friday, together with the window (and probably the fitter thereof) and the plumber who is to flush the central heating.  Once the snagging list is all crossed off, we can get Duncan in to fit a carpet, and get the furniture in.  Once that’s done, I think we’ll draw breath for a month or so before we get estimates for the bathroom job!

I wish I had more confidence in the decision to end SARS Cov-2 restrictions two weeks hence.  With the number of cases of a new and far more infectious variant rising exponentially, it seems to me that the decision is based in political expediency rather than science-backed common sense.  But that’s what you get when you elect a shower like the current lot.  We shall deprive ourselves of trips to night clubs, footie matches and pop concerts (we’re reluctantly ready to make such sacrifices), and shall continue to get stuff delivered, shopping where inevitable only at quiet times, and masked up.  Of course, the real danger is from the un-jabbed and un-masked, so my motto is: distance makes the heart beat longer.

Saltimbocca alla Disgustedvilleana tonight, using the first leaves we’ve cropped so far from this year’s sowing of sage.  We’ve been improving our recipes with chives, dill, fennel, oregano, rocket, spinach and thyme from the garden, which makes us feel better about these depressing times.  I just hope we beat the snails to the runner beans!

The ‘market economy’

This morning brings an email from EDF Energy, that ultra-efficient arm of the French state, saying that they will be debiting our account for over six months’ worth of juice in one go.  We would never have chosen EDF, which we suspect may be milking UK customers to subsidise its more regulated home market.  But EDF is where the regulator sent us when our previous supplier ceased trading.  On the advice of Money Saving Expert, I shut down the direct debit to the failed company, expecting the transfer to go through rapidly.  Ha!  Well, the huge bill is just for money we haven’t been spending for six months, but that together with the inflated Council tax bill exceeds our monthly budget for July.  Good job for us that we have sufficient headroom in the household account, but I fear for others who have been using the delayed billing to pay off other debts.  This is what privatisation does for you.  Fly-by-night retail suppliers, rocketing prices, utterly Delphic tariff structures that default to the most expensive price structure at the end of each supply contract: all this plus an ineffective regulatory environment that fails to act promptly when suppliers go tits-up.  Snarl over.

Meanwhile, back at the building site we’re still waiting for the new window to arrive.  But the walls and ceiling are plastered, the electrics and phone line are installed in the new study, and the radiator is on the wall but not yet in service.  The plumber advised us to get the system flushed before we use it - which is fine at this time of year (but another expense).  The carpet man is coming to measure up this evening so we hope it won’t be long before we can look for some muscle to bring the necessary furniture downstairs (that’s beyond us now, I’m afraid!) and get the room into use at last.

The garden is growing vigorously, and the first flush of roses has been impressive, notably from all but one of the new ones we planted following the garden works earlier this year.  The roses we transplanted seem reasonably happy too.  The climbing beans are doing well, despite the attentions of the mountaineering snails, and the potatoes are taking over the world.  Leeks are slowly fattening up, so should be useable come the winter.  The tomatoes are doing pretty well, and the fruit has begun to set.  I’ve got into a routine of early morning watering when the weather has been dry (so have had a bit of time off this week…).  Quite a few rudbeckias overwintered again, and we have planted dozens more, so though the buds haven’t yet opened, we should have plenty of yellow daisies well into the autumn.  Most of the seeded patches in the grass have filled out well thanks to the warmth of May and the deluges of June.  On fine days, the garden is a pleasant place to be - except that the unstoppable weeds keep us pretty busy.

This morning I’ve had a 40-mile round trip to have a couple of lumps examined with ultrasound.  They confirmed my GP’s diagnosis that there is nothing to worry about.  Quite a pretty drive along the leafy lanes of Kent, but I’m bound to wonder why there’s nothing on offer closer to home.  Last time I had such an examination, I only had a 30 mile round trip, but the radiographer was so bloody rude that I asked not to be referred there again.  When it was my turn a while back for the abdominal aortic aneurysm screening, it was done here in Disgustedville, and Martyn’s more recent one was at the same practice.  I’ve mentioned already the routine three-week waits for telephone appointments with the GP, and the lead time for x-rays - they used to be a matter of turning up unannounced with a referral form.  In another department I was told seven weeks ago to expect an appointment in four to six weeks.  Silence.  There is something definitely amiss with the NHS.  It can’t all be down to the ‘£#@“ing hopeless’, adulterous ex-minister, nor to the resourcing of the amazing vaccination campaign, which hereabouts seemed largely to be manned by army medics.  I sense a redisorganisation coming on.