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.

Indian summer days out

At Martyn’s suggestion yesterday, we cut some sandwiches and took ourselves out for a spot of sea air, motoring down to the coast at the Birling Gap, part way along the line of chalk cliffs between Seaford and Eastbourne in East Sussex.  The drive took a bit longer than expected, since soon after leaving town we got caught up behind a tractor and trailer.  The driver sportingly pulled over into a lay-by to let the tail get past and press on to the next set of roadworks.  Of which there were many.  We got slightly lost in the outskirts of Eastbourne, so got a small bonus of a tour via the Long Man of Wilmington which (whom?) I hadn't seen before.  On reading up when I got home, I find that he is almost certainly not of prehistoric origins, But dates at the earliest from the 16th century, And quite possibly from C18, depending which story you read.  Neither is

he carved into the chalk, since the soil thereabouts is too deep.  The white outline at one time consisted of whitewashed yellow bricks, which have subsequently been replaced by breeze blocks painted white.  Striking all the same.

We were astonished to see how many cars were parked at the Birling Gap.  Fortunately, as a life National Trust member, I get to park free of charge close to the stairs by flashing my membership card at the machine.  There were a lot of people on the beach and in the water, including several exuberant dogs!  We didn’t hang around too long, since the beach was so busy.  We’d no trouble keeping our distance while we had our lunch, but I was a bit anxious about using the stairs to and from the beach since there was no hope or maintaining the recommended two metres distance.  We slapped on masks,  unlike anyone else we saw, since we each have plenty of reasons to try to avoid infection.

Although I no longer send people to clink, I retain the letters after the name, so can be asked to authenticate signatures on declarations not involving oaths.  I had four to deal with yesterday evening in a pleasant rural environment.  But when one punter drove in with his mobile phone clamped to his ear, he got the benefit of a beakish dressing down.  Old habits die hard.

Today our outing was somewhat more mundane.  When I was changing bed linen this morning I could see that it was time for some new pillows.  We took ourselves off to a well-known big shed just outside the county town, and I foolishly remarked en route that we were out of town within twelve minutes compared with the usual 25-30 when I was doing the journey first thing in the morning for days at the hobby.  We had a long wait at a four-way traffic light where they are tinkering with a roundabout, and had two or three other waits at roadworks on the way.  So, one way and another, in the past two days we’ve seen enough traffic lights to last us a lifetime.

Anyway, at said big shed we quickly found what we were after, and had paid and left within five minutes. Sad, the rewards of life in retirement: I feel modestly pleased at having got two lots of bedding washed and dried, the new lot out on the line and well on the way, and two pillows in the washing machine (they’ll do for spares).  Stand by for further balls-achingly boring bulletins of elderly domesticity.

Autumn already

 

A consolation of approaching autumn is the emergence of some old favourites, like this cyclamen, which colleague Jane invited me to plunder from her garden before she moved - gosh! - ten years ago.  So that’s as long as we’ve had the motor mower, which she didn’t need in her new garden.  It’s therefore entitled to be on its last legs: like its owner, the engine is in good shape, but the bodywork is rotting away.  It’s still working, however, and saves a whole lot of effort compared with the old electric job.  But I’m researching rechargeable battery machines

Tomorrow being shopping day, I was rather scratching around this evening for supper ingredients. So it was a mug of pasta into lots of boiling water, a packet of smoked lardons sweated over a medium-low flame, followed by half an onion finely chopped and a clove of garlic, the remaining half of a red pepper, the last mushroom and a handful of our tomatoes, halved and de-seeded.  Salt, pepper and basil, plus a good dollop of crème fraîche, and freshly grated Parmesan.  Bob: uncle; Fanny: aunt.

I can’t begin to describe my feelings about our political masters either side of the pond.  All I’d say is that HMG is thrashing around like a rudderless dinghy in a gale, and N°45 is advocating voting felony to his supporters, while doing all he can to undermine the voting system itself.  The times are depressing enough as it is without the increasing threats to democracy.

Closer to home, the third visit from the wasp man seems to have done the trick.  I sent him up into the garage loft this time, and he admitted that the latest nasty materials are less effective than the old stuff, to which he has reverted.