Fresh Air

On with the vest, shirt, pullover with thermal lining, Fortnum's best insulated work trousers, thick socks, fake Timberland boots, warm jacket and a hat.  The day dawned bright and glistening, but not cold enough for the path through the woods to be frozen - I'd to navigate a sea of mud on the way to a briefing at a layby on the Common.  What's all this about?  The Disgustedville half-marathon, which I was marshalling at the corner nearest home.  The organisers feed a little into a number of local charities that provide marshals, including the local Citizens' Advice Bureaux.  I was teamed up with a retired Colonel, who chairs the said CAB.  We'd met at committee meetings, but it was good to have the chance to get to know each other a bit better.  Delightful fellow.

Somehow, quite a few cars made it through the cordons, and one dame in a small red Toyota nearly took out one of the competitors.  An angry white van man and his mate threatened to drive through at one point, but a spot of military/judicial diplomacy and firmness sent him back the way he'd come.  Most people were very understanding, but some were bolshy, despite lots of advance publicity about road closures. 

We were stationed just before the ten mile marker, at the end of a long gentle upward slope, so people were plainly starting to hurt.  Lots of encouragement: 'That was the worst bit!'  'Almost at the ten mile marker!'  'Only three miles to go!'.  The leader was a good quarter mile ahead of the field.  Interesting point of etiquette: a lot of the more experienced runners made a point of saying 'thank you, marshals' as they passed.  Well, we did dissuade quite a few homicidal motorists, I suppose.  One feels good.  The ears have stopped glowing, and the toes have just about thawed.

I finished my latest little daub at class on Thursday.  It is of a boat that has been transported in to decorate an oyster bar next to the salt pans near Gruissan.  It couldn't have sailed or motored there, since the salt pan is only a few inches deep!  Decorative, nonetheless.  We wouldn't have seen it had the art gallery we'd gone to visit been open at the published hours: we'd gone looking for someone with keys when we stumbled upon it.  I posted the picture on Facebook, and a friend already wants a scaled-up reproduction!  We'll see.

We noticed the other day that one of the hub caps on the VW had gone missing.  'Bugger', I thought, since VW spares are notoriously expensive.  Well, some googling later I found a supplier that wasn't exorbitant.  Since the remaining three were pretty manky, I ordered up and have fitted a full set.  They are now the only part of the car that is approaching clean.  This isn't the season for car-washing, since the roads are covered with grit and salt.  They are also spectacularly pot-holed, so you can spot the drunk drivers by their driving in a straight line, rather than weaving from side to side avoiding the suspension wreckers. 

Matters domestic

Well, the dining room is now equipped, at last, with a full complement of sealed double-glazing panes following the umpteenth and finally successful visit from a fitter from Jokers"Я"Us Home Improvements.  As ever, a polite and competent young man.  Such a shame their back office, though much improved, still screws up so comprehensively.  The warranty on the sealed units expires next year, and I gather that we may be invited to buy an extended one.  Meanwhile, another unit upstairs has also blown, so we've zeroed the stopwatch and started it again. A large number of the sealed units on the sunny side of the house have had to be replaced, some before we moved here (the original installation was in 2001) and quite a few since.  I may research what some of our local firms would charge to replace a blown sealed unit.  I'm disinclined to buy from Jokers"Я"Us in view of the collossal costs of failure that must be factored into their prices.

As for the hobby, I spent a couple of enjoyable evenings last week chatting up groups of people who want to join in, prior to more formal interviews next month.  In between those two sessions, I'd a day at the hobby proper, earning a streaming cold in the process, dammit.  I'd just about completed the 100-day cough that followed the one I got in Portugal last October, so have no doubt started again on that cycle.

Still, the garden is starting to look encouraging.  We have crocuses and snowdrops in flower, plus a few primulas.  I did a few minutes' token gardening this afternoon until rain stopped play, so can admire the snowdrops at the front as we come in without wincing too much at the bittercress, couch grass and moss.  I noticed some daffodils in flower as I walked down to the village a few days ago, so spring isn't too far off.

I'm less than six months away from a change in my relationship with the Department of Work and Pensions, so recently sent off for a statement of my entitlements.  It seems that I qualify for a full state pension, plus a few quid a week from the graduated pension scheme of the 1960s and 70s.  Just as well I don't rely on it, however: after income tax it will pay the council tax, gas and elec and maybe some of the water in and out charges, but not the bread and butter, let alone the jam.  I'm not sure I have the energy to enquire more than perfunctorily whether social security payments were made on my behalf when I worked in France, Belgium, Switzerland and Germany.  I continued to pay into the UK while I was abroad, but imagine my host countries will have exacted their dues.  My brother is in receipt of a pension for the time he worked in France, so it may be I'm entitled to a few bob as well. 

For those who don't follow one's facebook ramblings, you might like to know of our canelloni trick.  If you fancy a meaty pasta-bolognese supper, canelloni offer a much easier deal than lasagne.  Lardons, finely chopped onion, garlic to taste, red pepper, carrot and celery sweated and set aside.  500g good mince browned, previous act heaved in together with a can of chopped toms and a belt of passata, seasoning, herbs, or however you'd prepare the meat for lasagne, simmer gently for a good hour.  (Plenty of other veggie possibilities, of course.)  Count out the tubes you need to fill your gratin dish (for this amount of bolognese, twelve, to feed four), strap them together with an elastic band, and spoon in the filling.  You will in any case want the fallout in the bottom of the gratin dish.  Once the tubes are filled and the filling firmed down with the handle of your wooden spoon, pour any remaining bolognese sauce into the dish, cut the elastic band and arrange the tubes horizontally.  Top with béchamel and whatever grated cheese comes to hand, slap it in the oven until it starts to brown, dish up, wash down, doze off.  Observera: do not get distracted by a phone call while filling the tubes.  When in due course you return to the task, the tubes will have softened and stuck together, and you'll finish up with a random dish of pasta and bolognese.  Learned the hard way.  Of course, when buying the tubes, you have to select your product carefully.  I bought some from M*rr*s*ns a while back, and had to sort through all the packets on the shelf before finding one with a reasonable number of unbroken tubes.  The more recent purchase from S**nsb*rys was better, but there were still rejects. 

February already

Back to the Smith Towers layout, mirror image

Jokers"Я"Us Home Improvements continue to impress.  We waited in on Friday as asked.  Did they turn up?  Did they buggery!  (Neither in fact, so there's something to be grateful for, I guess.)  The plumber, on the other hand, arrived as arranged on Monday morning, and replaced the old dining room radiator with a tall thin job that chucks out plenty of heat (part-funded by the February-March council tax holiday).  The change was to make space for a dresser or sideboard.  Three walls of the dining room are mostly glazed, and the fourth was largely taken up by an old radiator and some gravely ugly pipework.  The late Charles Henry's old Stag chest of drawers, which served as a sideboard at Smith Towers, fits in perfectly, as does the late Doris Eileen's armchair, so we'll patch and polish the former and get a new cushion for the latter, and see if we can get a few more years out of them.  They also mask the need to redecorate, so we can put that off until the weather allows us to have the doors open.  We'd miss Miss's beach painting if we had a dresser, so there's yet another good reason to Do Nothing.  Except keep the pressure up on Jokers 'Я' Us Home Improvements.  I suggest that, if you have been watching this space, you desist now, unless I can find diverting ways to narrate the endless litany of failure.

Delightful lunch at the Rayners' on Sunday.  Ricotta, spinach and pine nut tart; beetroot, parsnip and chick pea casserole, and excellent company as always.  We'd hoped to entertain them here to tea today, but we learned, just as I put the spiced teacakes to prove, that their local meeting had been cancelled.  Ten out of the twelve teacakes are now in the freezer (two having been pronounced satisfactory) so we hope it's just partie remise.  It's been a bit of a baking orgy today: a dozen chouriço rolls are proving fragrantly as I type.  We're running out of freezer space.

Until the other day, we hadn't seen snow here for a couple of years.  So far, the snow has come and gone pretty quickly the couple of times we've had falls.  But the fridge and freezer are stocked for a siege just in case, though if the snow comes, I might have to trudge down to the village for a spot of Mother's Ruin: systemic insulation.  The snowdrops may have to live up to their charming French name of perce-neige.

We're starting to plan this year's first trip south.  Flights are booked for late April and early May, and we're shopping around for car hire.  I'm beginning to find the drive a bit of a pain, though we'll probably drive a couple of times later in the year, since there's alway stuff to schlepp out and/or back.  On the back of a virtual fag packet, Martyn has worked out that, if we can get cheap flights and car hire, and don't need immediately to schlepp stuff, it's cheaper, taking fuel, hotel, dinner, tunnel charges and tolls into account.  Not to mention wear and tear on your elderly and as ever obedient servant.

Thursday ramblings

A particularly unpleasant meeting at Hobby Club HQ last week has left me somewhat lethargic and disinclined to scribble.  Suffice it to say that I have left said club, membership of which is not necessary for one to participate in the hobby.  The saving in subscriptions will buy ten bottles of Fortnums' excellent Navarra rosé per annum, which seems to me to be somewhat better value for money. 

I've spent half an hour in the garden today cutting back roses, fuchsias, escallonias and the cherry tree, and hauling out a few miles of brambles and couch grass.  Nice to get out in the fresh air and sunshine, though the forecast is not encouraging.  Snowdrops are starting to show a bit of white, and quite a few polyanthus are in flower, together with some primroses, though not yet those that I promoted to the front row for spring colour visible from behind the protection of double glazing.  Oh and on that subject, Jokers 'Я' Us Home Improvements did at least call early on Monday (by which time, of course, we'd cleared the diary for the day) to say that the replacement units had failed inspection, and to enquire whether we could be in on Friday.  Watch this space.

Before that, our next visitor is the plumber.  His eye-watering estimate to replace the dining room radiator was as good as it gets, so if we've to have the system drained down, it occurred to us yesterday, we should have something similar done in the kitchen, to gain a bit of wall space.  Meanwhile, we wonder where things stand with tradesmen's work in Another Place: might it be a builder-free zone by the time we get there in the spring?

One wonders what 7 May will bring.  The concept of a Lab-Green-SNP coalition is not without its attractions, though the white-socked Essex barrow boys, aka the City of London Institutions, may perhaps not agree.  I'm glad I'm old.

But I don't plan to peg out before I get my pension this summer, and for a few more summers to come.  Funded by Vic's, of course.  His coffin, when he left us at 63, carried a poster saying 'Some other bugger's got my pension!'.

Oh, and the vaults of the sitooterie resounded to the voices bzw. trumpet of Ella and Louis again on Monday: our local fettler has returned the hi-fi to working order for £60.  Not bad, eh, considering we were on the point of sending the whole bloody issue over the wall.  And à propos music, it occurred to me in the insomniac small hours, to download that superb organ piece, Max Reger's Variations and Fugue on an original theme, Op 73, from iTunes.  Strange, how the wakeful hours move one.  Anyway, I did so, and - damn me! - only got the fugue.  Referee!  But it only cost £0.79, so I may refrain from rattling cages, for once.  And I wonder how many iTune downloaders have selected that piece for their first essay in the medium?

Modern times

Having seen the quality and prices of new dining room furniture, we've almost arrived at the conclusion that there's nothing much the matter with second-hand shabby chic, though it could do with a bit of elbow grease.  The table, which cost me £45 second-hand in 1980, could do with a polish, and the upholstery could benefit from a visit from my whizzo new steam thingy.  Part of the motivation is to get rid of a couple of very tired corner cupboards that the parents got from 'Auntie' Phyllis back in the early 1960s.  We have a few bits and pieces that it would be nice to keep on display, but the last few years in the conservatory have taken their toll on the already rather sad cupboards.  We'd toyed with replacing the glazed bit with a dresser in the dining room, but since the room is around 3m x 4m, we're starting to conclude that it would be a bit overpowering.  Martyn for his part has a murderous eye on an old hi-fi housing, the contents of which are no longer working, probably also because of the extreme temperature range in the sitooterie.  The speakers will shortly migrate to Lagrasse once again, the cabinet and electronics to le dump.

Nice evening yesterday at the Assembly Hall for the Mayor's annual quiz.  A few of us beaks and other halves for the time being go along for a rather boozy evening of quizzing each year.  We finished last night slightly higher up the league table than in the past, though a long way behind our target, which is to beat our MP and his team of Commons researchers.  Their advantage is age, I think: we've improved our performance by drafting in the parents of a few recent graduates, but are still nowhere near.  Interesting that the quizmaster now announces at the beginning that any team seen using a mobile phone will have its score for the round in question disallowed: o tempora, o mores.  We had an inkling a few years ago that this was the secret of the win by a certain team whose leader I congratulated on our next meeting through gritted teeth.  But WTF, as one seems to be allowed to write in public these days [v. supra]: it's only a game!

Another wasted morning

If you're thinking of getting double glazing from JokersЯus Home Improvements (name on application, but think of the car Ford replaced with the Escort), be prepared to haggle robustly.  Their costs of failure, if our experience is representative, must be astronomical. Their man (at least he was on his own this time) has just been to measure, for the FOURTH time, the units that need to be replaced.  After the first visit, which was over three months ago, they made units of the wrong size.  They had to come back and measure again, then proceeded to lose the measurements.  Next time two chaps came and measured a third time, and we have stayed in today for the replacements to be fitted.  Well, fancy that: they've made the wrong size again.  Fitter highly embarrassed: I asked him if he'd like a door key and a note of the alarm code.

While I'm grizzling, I should perhaps admit that I have finally given up the struggle with my Samsung smart [sic] phone, which seems to have been silently guzzling my credit, despite being practically unuseable.  I have moved the SIM into my old faithful Nokia, which does date from the 21st century, but only just.  It does what I need, and holds a charge for weeks, unlike the later model.

Fine sunshine today, and there are lots of signs of life from the garden - and I don't just mean the greenfly!  Lots of bulbs are shooting up through the soggy soil, and a few primroses are in flower.  Thr ground is very wet, though the flood water down in the river valley has receded a bit.  Last week the fields at Penshurst were under water, and some of the puddles on my usual route to the hobby were the width of the roadway and axle-deep.  The car hasn't been washed for months, and there's little point doing it at the moment.  I think I'll specify road-dirt grey next time I change cars. 

Here comes another one

Festivities over, Twelfth Night almost upon us and we're starting to loook at the projects list again.  I think the kitchen may be next.  Wooden work surfaces are a terrible idea, particularly if, like us, you lack the will power to give them the maintenance they demand.  The cupboards have already had one refreshment, and the carcases are plainly getting tired.  Much space is wasted, and the cupboard doors seem to have been purpose-built to trap dirt.  I don't look forward to getting the work done.  Nothing is quite so disruptive as a kitchen refit as I remember from the last experience, so we'll probably decamp for the duration.

The festive hostilities went much as usual: enjoyable moments with family and friends, including the annual skirmish with the M25.  I think we'll officially postpone Boxing Day next year and arrange a family gathering some time in January.  It was lovely to see the Smith great nephews again: Tom is now a lively, articulate two-year-old, while Toby, at seven months, is placid, smiling and rotund.  Both boys are blond, with startling blue eyes, so will break a few hearts when they're older.  Martyn's great niece and nephew are smart  kids, beautifully behaved and self-sufficient.  The pleasure of getting together is slightly dented by the fact that so much of the conversation at the table seems to be about disease, surgery and death.  An age thing, I suppose.

The garden is largely dormant save for the weeds, but we still have colour on a few roses and penstemons, the primroses and polyanthus are starting to flower and a lot of bulbs are sending shoots through the surface.  It's difficult to get out and enjoy them, though: the grass is the normal winter quagmire, and we have to wait for hard frosts before we can take the compost up to the bin.  That will be plentiful in the next couple of months, I've no doubt.