Apologies for Absence

Not that it’s much of an excuse, but we’ve had quite a busy month, with a fair few medical visits, a spot of entertaining, gardening and the inevitable home and vehicle admin.  

We had a very pleasant lunch here with our friends Chris and Jon.  Chris and I met at art classes, which gave way to largely unstructured Thursday morning meetings where we’d sometimes work to a theme and at other times just pleased ourselves.  That all ended during the pandemic, alas, though the group has met once since then, but for tea and chat rather than painting.  Anyway, Chris and Jon were on fine form, and we had a good catch-up.  Another day we had tea and cake with our neighbour Annie, Martyn having baked a superb chocolate sponge cake - gluten-free: he has the knack of getting the texture perfect.

As to vehicles, Chris and Jon rolled up in a rather natty red Tesla.  My Scenic was in dock for a couple of days on a recall to deal with a potentially troublesome fault in the battery cooling system.  Martyn’s Fiat too has to go in on a recall: evidently there is work to do to ensure compliance with emission regulations.  Er, hello?  Aren’t EVs supposed to be emission free?  All will doubtless be revealed in due course, and we’ll book it in for an overdue annual service at the same time.

Our other form of locomotion, Martyn’s bike, has also been in for some attention.  Bike fettler Chris diagnosed it a couple of months ago, and sent us off to order up new brake and gear shift levers and cables.  Chris does a monthly session at our village’s repair café, where you may remember we’ve had the clocks fixed in the past.  Next month I’ll take some secateurs along for sharpening.  Wonderful institution.  While we were there I asked Chris whether he knew Nick (The Bike) Gritton, a keen competitive cyclist and bike fixer.  Nick lived directly opposite me when I was in our nearby homophone town.  He is now Chris’s next-door neighbour, just down the road from us.  We’ve thus re-established contact, and hope to catch up soon.  I’ve noticed before that, the older I get, the more frequent are the coincidences.

The garden is doing well.  We’ve had a first lot of potatoes: we’d inadvertently left quite a few in the ground last year, and they have done well.  We have another bed of potatoes further up the garden, and they have not appreciated the drought and 30°+ temperatures.  A good spell of rain last night seems to have refreshed them, but we’ll need to get them up soon.  The tomatoes are starting to set fruit - we started them rather late this year.  I couldn’t restrain myself from rooting a handful of side shoots, so we have another half dozen plants to add the the dozen originals.

Driving hereabouts continues to be hellish.  There are many road closures on account of the need to replace the crumbling network of iron gas mains.  I had to go to the County Town on Friday to collect a sleep study test kit from the county diagnostic centre.  Fortunately, I’d left enough time, since I had to reroute to avoid the very long queue at the local road works.  It didn’t help that on the alternate route an absolute Arschloch in a Range Rover decided he didn’t want to wait while a car approached from the opposite direction down the single track stretch.  He consequently had to reverse, and almost hit me.  I had to sound the horn!  A bit closer to my destination, I got stuck behind a tractor for five minutes or so.  I was pretty shaky by the time I got there.  Small wonder that I no longer enjoy driving.  That said, I’m enjoying the silence and responsiveness of our EVs - ah: that reminds me to go and disconnect the Renault from the charger!