Equality of misery

Kent is a big county, and in the north and east of the county, three boroughs have very high infection rates.  The rate in our borough stands at 87/100k, but our whole county is placed in the most restrictive category, Tier 3.  The Council District next door, where I usually do the shopping, has the much higher rate of 138/100k, yet is placed in Tier 2 because some other East Sussex boroughs have among the lowest rates in the country.  For once in its life, the next village is all over the news: it straddles the county boundary, so one of its pubs is closed and the other is allowed to stay open.  

This doesn’t make a lot of difference to us, since we’ve been behaving for months largely as if we were in the top risk category.  But it means that, unlike during lockdown proper, I am not allowed to shop where I usually do.  Granted, once I’d clocked the figures ‘next door’, I’d decided to give my nearest Fortnums a miss for the duration anyway, but of course this means that our shopping bill is a good bit higher.  We struggle to know what we’re allowed to do.  We also struggle with the logic that confines us to the county, yet leaves tattoo shops, massage parlours and nail bars open, even in Swale, which has the highest rate in England.  I fear that many people will either carry on disregarding the rules, or start disregarding them out of bolshiness or inability to master the detail of the rather complicated regulations.

Lawyers’ Benefit

Well, the big orange fool was never going to admit to being a loser, an epithet he has always been happy to spit out at others.  It’s a shame the predicted landslide didn’t materialise; indeed it’s worrying in the extreme that he picked up more votes than last time.  True, the Democrats have stuck to their miserable tradition of nominating unsuitable candidates - Obama was a rare exception - so lacked a charismatic figure with the power to sway the impressionable idiots who vote for the larger (and nastier) than life Trump.  Perhaps the best news is the Vice-President elect.  

Meanwhile, the lawyers will be rubbing their hands, and stringing things out as long as they can, however hopeless their cases.

Closer to home, I wish I saw a real prospect of a robust trade deal with the EU.  As things now stand, I think the best we can hope for is a deal in name only, with enough loopholes to keep lawyers raking it in for years.  At worst, the UK will become a marginalised irrelevance to the world economy.

But turning to important matters, we now have two genuinely soft-closing bog seats again, gutter fascias that don’t bubble up when it rains, and a down pipe from the top roof that projects water away from the wall.  I’ve started the next round of domestickery by asking the agent for our absentee neighbours to shore up their fence with some concrete spurs, replacing the current arrangement by which the rotten posts are lashed back to their trees with climbing ropes.

The garden is still showing some colour: the cosmos that sulked their way through the summer are flowering rather better, just as we await the frost that will cut them down.  The polyanthus are flowering well already, and I’ll be splitting them up soon to stock the little bed by the front door.  The rudbeckias meanwhile continue to flower, and I’ve done a modicum of staking to keep them going a week or so longer.  I think we’ve had the last of the beans, so we’ll probably get the plants up and out in Monday’s garden refuse collection.  They have done very well, despite a rather poor bean frame.   

On the health front, I’m a bit less anxious than of late: an MRI scan has revealed no sinister reason for a persistent sore throat, and a regime of antacids is helping.  When I mentioned it to the doctor on the phone (our now normal consultation mechanism) she called me in there and then, and decided on an urgent referral to EN&T.  This put the wind up me somewhat, prompting morbid thoughts of life without a voice box and breathing through a hole in my neck.  So now I suppose I’ll be looking around for something else to worry about!  

Martyn, meanwhile, has built another model railway layout that fits on the desktop in his study.  It is built with lightweight materials, so is easy to lift on and off.  I’ll try to find out how to post a picture: used not to be a problem.  Thrombosis, I expect: clot behind the keypad.

Two steps forward, one step back

The new plastickery has now been installed: it took three shortish days, and initially looked pretty smart.  

A couple of days of cold, damp days revealed what looks like a manufacturing fault: on some of the verticals, the fake wood film lifts away from the board, leaving a long line of blisters.  So we shall have another day or crashing and banging when they  come to replace the boards.  Yawn.

Yesterday marked the fourteenth anniversary of our civil partnership ceremony.  We don’t generally make a song and dance of it, since the more important date for us is the day we met, well over nineteen years ago.  

Still, just for fun, we booked ourselves a ride on the local heritage railway, which has acquired a Bulleid  light Pacific engine of the Battle of Britain class.  Quite nostalgic: I still remember watching them hauling the boat trains - and the Golden Arrow in particular - through Orpington when the family first visited well over 60 years ago.  We booked a whole compartment yesterday, to avoid proximity to the masses, and took a picnic with us.  In other times we’d probably have gone for a meal out somewhere, but we did at least buy ready-made sandwiches to make it a little out of the ordinary!   

We’re adopting top-level precautions as the country shambles blindly into another spike of infections.  As we queued to join the train, mask wearing and distancing were far from universal.  I admit it: I’m scared.

Histoire de chiottes

Last year we replaced two lavatories, one in the shower room and one downstairs in the cloakroom.  The seats thereof were of the soft-close persuasion, and for a time both worked well.  When the downstairs one developed a preference for clanging shut, Martyn contacted the suppliers, Victorian plumbing, to ask for their comments.  They asked us for pictures of the fault, so Forges-l’Evêque Media Inc produced an audio-visual masterpiece of my shutting the bog lid with accompanying clang-shut sound effects, and off it went.  Next email told us that the product we had returned (we had not) had been tested and found to be fault-free.  Martyn wrote back to put them right, and the next thing we heard was that the replacement we had ordered (we had not) would be delivered today.  Well, delivered it was.  Broken.  Watch this space.

The awful leylandii across the back of the garden are no more, likewise the ones that overhung the cold frame and mini-greenhouse.  The hacking down was done by two brothers from the farm down the road, who left the place clean and tidy, and charged us a very reasonable sum for their day’s work.  Watch these spaces too.

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.

Stubbornness score: 15/10

Regulars will recall my dialogue with a certain motor car company and its dealership, when bits of a newish car went scrofulous.  That process persuaded me that persistence can pay - or, at least, mitigate losses.

Though I’ve been using a smartphone for years now, I’ve never given up on my ancient GSM Nokia thickphone.  For a time, my late mother-in-law used it in her care home.  She got it from me as a hand-me-down, and she died over twelve years ago, so it is no spring chicken.  I last used it to make a call from a ship at sea when the fancy-dancy iPhone couldn’t see a transmitter, and it still had £20-odd worth of credit on the SIM. That must have been last December.  Meanwhile, Vodafone has introduced a rule by which unused numbers are disconnected after 90 days.  In fact, they disconnected mine after nine months.

Well, yesterday I found an on-line Vodafone dialogue site, and eventually persuaded a distant person to reconnect the number.  When I checked this morning, the number had been reconnected, but the credit showed as zero.  I eventually managed to find the dialogue site again, and enquired why this should be so.  Vodafone’s story is that, when a number is disconnected, any remaining credit ‘is vanished’.  At this point my stubbornness index kicked in.  ‘That is unacceptable, [name of correspondent].  If I had been told this would happen, I’d have taken the necessary action.’  Same answer repeated.  ‘Thanks for the explanation.  Would you be so kind as to connect me to your team leader?’  

Cutting a long and doubtless deadly boring story short, I now have a working thickphone with £20 credit on it, and it sends and receives.  Apart from one use of the word ‘theft’, I stuck to courtly courtesy throughout, and addressed my correspondent by the stated name.  That, together with a good ration of Hartnäckigkeit, has paid dividends.  Just wish I’d estimated the outstanding credit at £150, but that wouldn’t really be me, would it?

Last of the fine days

 

With an eye to the weather forecast, we thought we’d go and take a look on Tuesday, from a safe distance, at some of the cruise ships berthed at Tilbury.  Only one at a riverside mooring, the much-renamed Columbus, last operated by the now bankrupt CMV.  Its stablemate (sorry - bad analogy) Astor is also berthed in the port, together with Gaga’s latest along with many others.  Our future cruise plans are now in serious doubt.  The next one is scheduled for next July, and I suppose someone may have pulled a rabbit out of the pharmaceutical hat by then.  Though one has to say that Gravesend is not exactly the jewel in Kent’s crown, the promenade is pleasant enough a place to sit on a wall and eat an egg and cress sandwich from M&S.

I’ve picked best part of a kilo of tomatoes today, and two modest portions of passata are cooling down for the freezer.  Our home-grown spuds are now a fond memory, but we’ve had gardener Ben round to estimate for some raised veggie beds, so we may have a more varied and longer lasting crop next year, if we’re spared.  The runner beans continue to crop well, so with luck we’ll be picking for a week or two longer.