Not about the weather

Perhaps I have commented enough in this blog, no, more than enough, about the weather in Britain. Now each time I am tempted to write more I exercise all the restraint I can muster, forcing the text down other avenues. So despite the exceptionally low temperatures we have all endured here, cold so intense that the lying snow (it fell from the sky more than two weeks ago) only slowly evaporated into the dry atmosphere, transitioning from a white solid to an invisible vapour without actually melting, despite the snow which covered pavements and roads being compressed to ice, changing from white to translucent, frozen water, despite our friends Kyle and Maryanne who are over-wintering on their boat in Preston cleaning their hull by walking around on the frozen surface of the water in which it sits, I shall not mention the weather subject again. (No, I don’t believe this either!)

Anyway, all good things must come to an end and finally when we poked our heads outside just before retiring to bed one night we stood for a while, listened and heard a sound we had not heard for many days, the sound of water dripping. The change had crept up on us silently, stealthily, with no warning, warm air from the Atlantic finally sweeping in towards the British Isles, the South West being the first area to feel the benefit but soon to affect the whole country. By the following morning we were in a changed world, one no longer totally dominated by the colour white. By afternoon only the most persistent lumps of ice remained and the ground was covered with a layer of grit, dust and leaves, natural fallout which had been held above the ground, suspended in the snow for so long. Warm air coming into contact with a still frozen lake caused moisture to condense out and an unnatural mist floated just above it but apart from such isolated blocks of cold, the grip of frost has now left the land.

In fond memory of last winter we prepare the Christmas pandoro that we found in our local Lidl supermarket. For the uninitiated this is a type of sweet yeast bread, traditionally eaten at Christmas time in Italy and is served with a dusting of icing sugar so that it resembles the snow-covered peaks that make up the winter backdrop there. The Lidl version is packaged with a large plastic bag so that the sugar-dusting process can be carried out just before serving (see the picture) and the colour within the bread is just as the name suggests, golden. The taste is exotic, light but very rich.

So this just about sums up the full extent of our Christmas festivising for 2010; our main pleasure has been just enjoying having a smart new kitchen as a present from Santa. The house refurbishment tasks have continued, but at a more leisurely pace, as we both feel that we would not want to be thought of as house improvement fanatics.

We now have new wooden floor boards covering the hall which nicely insulate our feet from the cold beneath but these did not go down without the assistance of a few blasphemies. There is a foam underlay with one sticky side covered in a plastic film which is designed to be peeled from beneath the boards as they are held in position with both hands. (Read this again and you’ll get the picture.) Just how this process is achieved by an ordinary human being only blessed with two hands is best left to the imagination but as the film slides away the glue makes contact with the underside of the boards and sticks hard, instantly, leaving no margin for error or later adjustment. There are some choice words that I am now able to recommend for use when the plastic film breaks off unexpectedly or when the hands slip so that the boards are stuck in the wrong position, words you will not find on the fitting instructions.

Despite these problems we are pleased with the final results – the real wood adds a touch of class to the place. But not all wood is welcome in our house. No sooner was this job done then I found myself up a ladder in the bathroom tearing down the varnished pine cladding which was nailed to the ceiling there, a job I have been looking forward to for some time. When we first started our project we had to make ourselves promise that we would tackle each area of the house separately, completing one area before moving on. One consequence of this was that every time we lay steaming away in the comfort of our bath we had to gaze up at the hateful sight of those pine boards. We could only rip them all down when we had finished the previous jobs, the kitchen and the hall but when the time finally arrived the experience was all the more pleasurable and satisfying for all the waiting. The generations of spiders who had made their home in the small space above the cladding were sucked up in a vortex of vacuum cleaning and whisked away to a better place. Or so I like to think.

Late in December

It is December, traditionally a time when many will be anticipating sitting back in an armchair during the long afternoon and letting life roll on, liquor glass in hand, stomach full to bursting, younger relatives finally quietened and the endurance of the Queen’s speech a duty done.

Here in Yeovil, however, we see things a little differently, as indeed most who know us would expect. But although Kate and I will go out of our way to avoid the seamier aspects of this increasingly secular holiday period, the commercialism, the flagrant over-use of motifs such as holly, reindeer and snowmen, the over-consumption and over-indulgence, we do still try to enjoy the holiday atmosphere that this time of year promotes. One of the (few) things we do like is the way that commercial activity comes to a complete halt to an extent that is not replicated at any other time of year. Shops and restaurants are closed, public transport becomes non-existent, in fact just for a few days every year the modern world as we know it almost stops working. Even buying the basics of life, food for example, will be difficult over this period as shopkeepers across the nation respect the public holiday and close their doors. Step outside the home over this period and you are transported back to another age. People will walk about the streets, often in the family groups that they have brought together, a strangely rare occurrence today. As we walk about we greet our neighbours unselfconsciously, with a smile and a friendly chat. All this, to my way of thinking, sounds good. It is what life should be about.

What does sadden and even appal me is what western society has done to this season, the way we have turned it into a standardised set of behaviours and experiences, filled it with things we must do, must eat, must sing, and the way it has conditioned us to anticipate something wonderful, something that can never really live up to expectations. Earlier and earlier each year we are pushed into anticipating the enjoyment the season will bring by spending money, acquiring goods, as if this is the whole point of the thing. Stop to think about it and it makes no sense at all, yet we do it, come what may, almost against our wills. I find myself resisting all this as I struggle to think of it as just another month in the year.

One other feature of this season that has slipped effortlessly into our mental landscape is the snow covered scene like this one and its association with the festivities of the season. This should be a strange sight for most of us living on these isles where snow is infrequent and my own memory tells me that it is more common for winter to get properly under way only once January has started yet almost every card we send depicts just this scene. My reasons for its inclusion here are more mundane – the scene simply presented itself before me as I was en route to buy tiling adhesive from one of our local suppliers – but I hope that this does not detract from the photograph itself which tries to capture the way in which the everyday has been transformed into something of beauty.

After weeks of effort we now have a fully functioning fitted kitchen of which we are proud. The final details are now in place and as we unpack the last of the cardboard boxes to bring our more obscure and exotic pieces of crockery and domestic machinery into the daylight, we can finally relax our construction efforts and enjoy the results. And as promised, here is a link to the movie of the whole thing…

Safety webs

Not for the first time on this blog, I must report that once again health and safety has raised its ugly head and tried to meddle with our lives. It saddens me to think about just how many of the changes occurring in our world today derive from the efforts of those in authority to make the things we do safer, freer from risk. Driving this along, as ever, is the insurance industry which thrives on making us feel less safe so that they can charge us for their protection. This gives rise to requirements and regulations galore and deepens the mystery of how we ever managed to get through the bulk of our lives without them.

Living without a car of our own as we do, transporting shop-bought goods often gives rise to some novel or imaginative solutions; necessity is, after all, the mother of inventiveness. On this occasion we were purchasing some bits and pieces in our favourite DIY store, amongst which was a two and a half metre length of wooden beading (quadrant) intended to grace one edge of our kitchen worktop. Now as it happens we didn’t need anything like this length – something less than one metre would have sufficed – but in this particular shop if you want wooden quadrant, this is how it comes. To a handyman this is no penalty as a little spare piece tucked away in the shed always stands a good chance of becoming useful for something else. No, the problem for us was that we had travelled to the store by bus and with three heavy boxes of tiles to take home in our shopping trolley we had every intention of going home the same way. We knew full well that we would not be Mr & Mrs Popular on the No.2 bus with a long, thin piece of bendy wood threatening to poke out the eyes of anyone foolish enough to venture into the aisle so it seemed logical to us to ask the store if they would please cut the wood into two manageable pieces of equal length. Now if this had been a sheet of hardboard or a pine plank this would not have been a problem as there are machines and staff fully trained to use them on hand. Our thin piece of quadrant, however, would not fit into the powerful wall-mounted saw benches so the request was refused. OK then, I helpfully suggested, how about you use a small hand saw or better still, lend me one so I can do it myself. I came close to exploding when the store manager came out with the sentence: ”Sorry Sir, our staff are not insured to use such a tool and we cannot allow you to do so because you might injure yourself and our insurance would not cover you either” So it was that after having spent most of the previous day sawing up great chunks of kitchen worktop I am now being told that I wasn’t a fit person to be allowed near such a dangerous weapon and that everyone else in the store was similarly incompetent. And what really gets to me about this health and safety ‘overkill’ is the fact that one simply cannot argue against it. What is not to like about someone else looking after our safety? Why would we not want this?

It was only that I sensed some sympathy from the manager, despite the hard-line attitude, that I was able to contain the bulk of my inner conflagration until I was outside the store. Here I swiftly pulled out the offending piece of wood and as neatly as I could, broke it over my knee into two roughly equal parts.

This, I might add, I managed to accomplish without injuring either myself or anyone else, a fact of which I am rightfully quite proud.

In the mean time we still have work to do. The Italian sink pipework has coalesced into a compact entanglement somewhere beneath and finally our last kitchen cabinet has been assembled and screwed into position. It feels like we are on the home run now. What seems to have taken forever in reality has so far taken less than two weeks from first beginnings. What remains now are the details, the door knobs and the trimmings, things that we know will take a lot more time to finish off. But with the weather remaining so cold outside we are happy to keep ourselves closeted away, gradually changing our internal vista.

The spidery-beasts who live outside in our back yard must have been mortified to see what the overnight frost had done to their home. Just imagine all the hard work that this chap had put in on the construction - the design, the build and the final fix – and, rather like the pipework under our kitchen sink, this masterpiece was never intended to be seen; a spider’s very livelihood depends on the invisibility of his web for bringing unwary titbits to its dinner table. I also have a suspicion that these frost-dappled strands draped across our fence might be quite embarrassing in a spider’s world, rather like displaying naughty underwear on a washing line, all the foibles and fetishes being revealed, all the mistakes and the shortcuts visible for any other spider to laugh at. To us this may be a thing of beauty but down in arachnid-land this may be an example of a what not to do with your spinnerets, something only a very immature spiderling would produce. But what do we know.

Coming soon to this blog: Kitchen – The Movie!

Piping hot and cold

It was predictable that of all the tasks involved in replacing the kitchen in our house, fitting and plumbing the new sink was always going to provide the most challenge for us; we are, after all, just amateurs in this game.

First of all the sink has to be sunk into an opening in one of our worktops (these are things that arrive on our doorstep as three metre long pieces of chipboard weighing in at forty five kilograms). Any item this size is long enough and heavy enough to cause all sorts of problems when being manoeuvred around inside a house. Lifting it requires one person at each end and once we have it off the ground and moving, its momentum is transferred back to us making us weave around like drunks. We stagger towards the line of recently assembled kitchen units and gently lower our burden into place, only then realising that the worktop needs to be reversed; the rounded edge is not usually fitted against the wall. Spinning it around is a black art, an exercise in brinkmanship that could easily demolish much of what we have created since we started the refurbishment project back in September, but thankfully between us we manage it successfully so that I can take a saw to the thing and trim it down to a more manageable size.

Next comes the hole. A large rectangle has to be removed from the worktop, positioned exactly where one day we would like the sink to rest. I have a tool for this, an electric jigsaw, which grinds along noisily converting chipboard and laminate to a fine choking dust which it sprays into the air around me. It requires focus and concentration for one thing is certain - cutting with a saw is a one way process; there is no way back once the blade has done its work. Just a few carefully measured millimetres can separate a good job from a complete disaster. Make the hole too small and it can be adjusted. Make it too big and it cannot.

We let the dust settle for a while then breathe a sigh of relief as we watch the shiny new stainless steel sink drop into place. Round one to us.

Now for the next bit of fun. Nestling innocently in the box alongside our sink was a large pack of plastic pipes and connectors, silver in colour, just the sort of thing an alien in an episode of Doctor Who might wear. There are so many ways these items might be connected together, all of which except one are wrong. But if we can solve the puzzle in a particular way then all our washing-up dreams come true. What we really need for this is that little blue pen-torch thingy the Doctor uses to open doors, analyse cryptic diagrams and find his way back to his police box space ship. The diagrams supplied with the pipes are translated from Italian into a strange dysfunctional English that on first read seems to make sense but then again doesn’t quite.

After many hours, and despite the lack of blue light, the puzzle finally starts to come together in a way that makes sense. It is not the most obvious solution, of course, but it is reasonably elegant and the best my brain can come up with. Maybe I need to park the problem overnight and let the sub-conscious do its work.

While all this indoor activity takes place the world outside is reeling under an early winter weather-fest. There is no mystery as to why when meeting for the first time, the first topic of conversation the British generally come up with is our own weather. The immense variability and variety, inevitable given the position of our isles on the globe, still directly and profoundly affects our lives.

Take this last week. We returned from a light shopping spree via our favourite footpath which follows the River Yeo through what in modern parlance is termed a ‘country park’, an area of undeveloped or abandoned land considered unsuitable for habitation or commercial building which is allowed to revert to nature in a managed sort of way. The light was fading and the land around us was monochrome, trees pointing their leafless branches skywards to where, high above, an airliner glowed orange as it caught the dying sun.

The branches were a black tangle against the sky but each one was also picked out in white, as if someone had taken a white crayon and carefully drawn a line from trunk to tip. The thin line of snow, frozen in place so it could no longer be dislodged by the wind, picked out every fine detail. Bird nests high in the treetops, normally invisible, were etched in white too and even the finest twigs could be seen clearly, despite the poor light. It was a frozen landscape and our feet crunched loudly through a crust of leaf litter where the snow had not fallen, pigeons flapping away noisily at our passage.

Our own front garden tree, festooned with bird feeders, has become a fast food stopover for the neighbourhood and it too carried a snowy burden, locked on firmly by several days of penetrating frost that looked set to continue. Then, startlingly, only a few hours later we peer out in amazement as the rain falls, warm rain that is melting away the snow, brushing clean the white-etched twigs and branches. It is as if Yeovil has time travelled into another season, from winter to spring in the blinking of an eye. Come the dawn and every house roof has shed its winter load, the pavements are still a lethal mix of residual ice but the air has lost its familiar nasal nip. For a short while we experience a warm maritime blast and we store up the experience to talk about with strangers.

Coincidences

Take a door, any door, but one with a slot through which letters can be posted. It is placed facing the street on which we live. Nothing remarkable in this but how many of us, I wonder, can describe the front door behind which we live. Even if we can do this, I venture to suggest that few would know anything at all about the letterboxes through which our letters pass and fewer still would know the colour of the thing.

But there is a person who does.

How we discovered the identity of this person is down to something of a coincidence, two totally disconnected things which happened to coincide exactly in time and space. The first of these was a passport, mine in fact, which ran out and needed to be replaced. The second was the weather which dictated the timing of the arrival of our builders, Geoff and Andrew, to carry out a modification to our house. On this occasion they were removing our tired and inelegant front door and replacing it with something shiny and new. And naturally the new door came complete with a letterbox.

So there they were, half-way through the job, the wind whistling through the previously door-filled opening and our two lads just sizing up the new one, still in its shrink-wrapped, just out of the factory state, when what should come up the front path but my new passport, clutched firmly in the hands of the postman. Now when delivering registered mail, there needs to be a record of when and to whom it was delivered. This all makes perfect sense. But what I hadn’t previously realised was that a postman also has to make a note of the colour of the letterbox through which he posts such items, this presumably to enable him to deal with later challenges as to his integrity and honesty. The problem being presented to this postman, therefore, was something he had never before encountered, viz, a house with no door physically attached to the house but a choice of two potential doors nearby, the letterbox on one being hidden from view behind bright blue plastic and the other lying prone in the front garden so that its letterbox led only to the front lawn.

To give him his full due, he wasted not a moment in deciding that the correct letterbox was the shrink-wrapped one (somehow it did not seem right to slip his precious mail down through the old one onto the grass beneath) but he then had to explain that he could not deliver the mail until he could see for himself the colour of the thing. My passport would still be undelivered had we not dutifully unwrapped the new door so that he could feast his eyes on our letterbox and record its colour.

Both door and letterbox, which incidentally are both white, are now safely fitted and not a moment too soon as the weather catapults us suddenly from autumn to winter.

Standard fare for the start of a cold spell these days are sceptical comments in the press about global warming, or the lack of it and I recall recently reading that the rate of warming has been slowing – positive news for a change, or so it would seem. Temperature measurements on which these conclusions are based have in the past come from ships making passages around the world, some poor crew member having to hold a thermometer out over the sea each day and then transmit the reading by radio so it can be recorded. The modern way of doing things is to remove the human element - the same data is now largely collected by a network of automated buoys which regularly transmit temperature data from fixed locations around the world’s oceans.

It seems to me that the chances of a single temperature reading coming from one of the few remaining ships doing this at precisely the same time and in precisely the same place as an automated buoy must be staggeringly remote, but it seems that this is indeed what did occur. The ship must have barely missed the buoy. The likelihood of anyone then noticing that the positions and times were identical and bothering to compare the two readings taken must be even more remote. But nevertheless this is what happened and it was noticed that the two readings were slightly different. So it is that we have the discovery that temperature readings from the buoys are consistently slightly lower than those taken from ships, which led to the discovery that the global temperature model on which the climate scientists are basing their predictions is wrong. The rate of global warming has not been slowing at all, it seems.

Somehow I am heartened by the thought that coincidence can step in to lend a hand when things are in danger of going awry. If only we could rely on it.

Washing up in the bath

Gradually our house is coming together, the ideas we have nursed all along as to colour and style are now being put into effect and we are seeing for the first time how it all works.

The latest job we are getting stuck into is to lay a laminate floor all across our Space, starting in one corner and working piece by piece across the room. This is a massive job and although not the first time we have laid a floor of this type, the sheer size of the room, a distance of more than six and a half metres from window to window, does demand a different technique, and a bit of teamwork. One of the tricks I am learning, slowly, is to miss my thumb when tapping the laminate sheets into position. I have a small rubber hammer and a swelling that feels even larger as evidence of this.

In order to fit the floor across the whole room we have to take out a kitchen, one fitted years ago and no doubt being the pride of the owner who had it fitted. In a short morning’s work Kate and I dismantled every piece, this involving a good deal of destruction, a tearing apart of what we could not easily disassemble. Kitchen units are rarely assembled with deconstruction in mind - fastening screws are hidden, sealant or glue is often used and on ours, even where the screws were accessible, time had left its mark by seizing many in place. There were water pipes to be dealt with, some to be disconnected and others to be unthreaded from where they passed through the worktop but there is no point in being too precious about something that is going to end up on the tip. Having made space to swing the hammer, next to go were the wall tiles, chips of broken earthenware flying under my blows. By lunch time the air was filled with dust (again) but the tiles had moved from the kitchen wall to plastic bags in the back yard.

But wait! What has happened to the sink, the cooker and oven? How do we feed ourselves now? What about a cup of tea – how do we do even this?

We still have a kettle so water is drawn from an outside tap just beneath the kitchen window and we sit down with a brew to consider our position. Fortunately my inventive partner has planned all this down to the last detail. We still have a microwave oven and we still have a freezer full of food so at least we won’t go hungry. It seems she has everything sorted except for the washing up – with no sink we’ll soon be running out of clean plates.

Fear not, worried reader, for the solution is at hand. Scarcely having removed the dirt of the day from my body with a nice relaxing soak, Kate is knocking at the bathroom door with a bowl of dishes for washing up.

Wow moments

Coming, as we have, direct from our sailing voyage around Britain, something that has occupied the best part of the first two years of our lives since retirement from work, and en route having negotiated many of the more scary headlands, fast-flowing channels and rock-fringed islands around these isles, one might be tempted to think that excitement and satisfaction has been hard for us to find in a house refurbishment project. Scraping wallpaper from the walls, ripping out old carpets, pulling off wall and ceiling cladding, decorating one room after another with fresh paint, none of these things have quite the same cachet as sailing around the coast of Scotland, for example.

But strangely, there is a real feeling of excitement about watching our living space change before our eyes. Some changes are small, like a new lampshade or some fresh paint around a door, but much of what we have done of late has been of the ‘stand back and admire the difference’ variety, what the presenters on a certain TV property programme insist on calling the ‘wow factor’. The change in our environment that demolishing an internal wall brought about, converting our downstairs space into one, was one big ‘wow’ for us. But then there was another when we first applied some paint, covering up for good the last of the children’s pencilled scribbles and the remnants of original paint layer, the one underneath the terrible wallpaper which was hidden again under more paint. Another ‘wow’ escaped when the new supporting beam, now covered by its smooth plasterwork, joined the colour of its neighbouring walls, this removing the last visual barrier between the two former rooms. The final touch, for me, was when I stood back after applying a contrasting ‘warm terracotta’ to the alcoves either side of our false chimney-breast. Suddenly The Space had acquired some character, some depth and a little of our own personality. Kate’s reaction when she saw the effect was rather less enthusiastic as the fresh paint had taken on a pink glow in the early evening - natural light was fading and we had seen the last of the sun for the day. Pink is not a colour Kate will ever admit to admiring, least of all on the walls of her own house and immediately I could see her thinking that the colour choice was wrong, not what the brochure implied it might be.

But colour is a strange thing inside a house. No colour will stand alone unaffected by what is around it. It will always reflect or be reflected or it will absorb a tint from a nearby surface. Our white ceilings rarely look white – they pick up colour from the walls, the lights, anything. Then there is the light itself which if natural, changes moment by moment as the day (and the year) progresses. In artificial light, colour will depend on the ‘temperature’ of the source, whether it is tungsten or fluorescent, and what it passes through before it reaches our eyes. Though the paint is barely dry, already the colour we are seeing has shifted more than once, to such an extent that even Kate will admit that her fearful first reaction was a little too hasty. Which is comforting as I am not really enthusiastic about applying another layer. I’m just about painted out for the time being.

We can predict a few more of these ‘wow’ moments to come before our Space is complete. We still have a floor to lay, tile-imitating laminate from window to window across the house, and then beyond this someone has to destroy the kitchen then fit a new one. Oh, that would be me!

There will be a few challenging moments in all of this, of this I am sure, so no change from piloting the Western Isles there then.

While all this has been going on inside our house, life goes on for one colourful character who spends much of her time in our front garden. This is our neighbour’s cat, who we believe is named 'Jelly’. She belongs to a house nearby (in the sense that this is where she is fed) which she shares with three small, and rather grumpy, dogs. These are taken for walks morning and evening and Jelly, being elderly and just a little confused about what she should do on these occasions, starts off following. She is completely ignored by the three canines, who by contrast will snap at anything and anyone else who comes near, then by the time she reaches our house she has had enough, or perhaps has reached the conclusion that going for a brisk walk is really not a very suitable thing for a cat to be doing. Whatever it is, her behaviour is the same most days, which perhaps tells us that feline dementia is not far away.

Her favourite of all places to hang out used to be in the corner of our garden, tucked away under a shrub behind our garden wall, a place from where she could observe life pass by. Presumably as a result of living with three of them, no dog, large or small, bothers her at all. She will sit there quite still and let them give her a sniff then, gazing into a space just beside them, a technique which most dogs seem to find quite unsettling, wait until they have been called away by their owners. I can’t help but imagine she has some unearthly powers, telepathy perhaps, which she uses to convince them she is not worth the effort of disturbing.

With our garden wall being no more, Jelly has been keen to show that this change in her life can also be taken in her stride. Far from being stoical about it, she seems pleased since she can now take a shortcut direct to her favourite shrub without having to get physical and deal with the wall. What is more she can now get to the trunk of our tree which she has shown makes an excellent clawing post. Having thinned out the higher branches in which we hang our bird feeders, we like to think that Jelly’s continued presence in our front garden will dissuade other more able cats from hunting here. Jelly’s own tree-climbing days, however, are well past.

Birthdays

Ninety years ago this week, a baby boy to whom his parents gave two names entered the world; he was George Arthur. Ever since, for various complex reasons, there have been two distinct groups of people, one of which has always known him as George and the other, as Arthur.

Despite falling firmly in the George camp, Kate and I were honoured to be invited to join a distinguished group of ‘Arthurs’ proudly celebrating his birthday at a small dinner. The venue for this, the guest list and even the menu was organised and selected by himself. Throughout the day he had been showered with gifts, with cards and with best wishes although none of this prevented his first putting in a couple of hours gardening, raking up fallen leaves from his back lawn. The guests at the meal were his friends and his peers - hardly surprising, therefore, that we represented the younger contingent - and inevitably one begins to speculate on one’s own future at times like this. As we approach George’s age will we too have the energy to keep the garden tidy, the presence of mind to remember our birthday and the strength to cut a cake to celebrate it.

Finally, a few days after the meal, as companion to my mother, he jetted off for a few weeks’ holiday in Hawaii. I am greatly encouraged by his comment about needing to be equipped with shears to deal with the grass skirts out there. There’s plenty of life in him yet!

Also celebrating a birthday this week is our son Ben, considerably younger and far less sober than George, as can be seen in this picture. He is of an age when one just doesn’t ask too much about what he gets up to late at night - it is better not to know. One just has to hope that it is legal. All we know about his birthday is that he organised a ‘tea party’ for his friends and at some point this picture of him was posted on Facebook. And he is not likely to be jetting off to a Pacific island any time soon.

On our way back from the meal with George we popped in on friends Rich and Gerry and repossessed our long-abandoned cycle trailer, something we’ll be putting to good use around Yeovil when we need to transport building supplies.

The mice who had lived for a time inside the body of the trailer while it languished in storage in Rich’s garage had left their bedding behind (along with one or two smaller gifts) but the wheels still spin happily and no harm has been done.

Then whilst away from home we found time to visit a few more old friends down in the mud-silted ditch they call Faversham Creek. There was a time when out sailing in this area we would regularly cross the paths of the sailing barges Greta, Lady of the Lea or Repertor during one of their match racing events in the Swale or the Thames estuary. On more than one occasion we found ourselves returning home to our mooring on the River Medway just when such a race was beginning or ending and steering smartly aside to avoid being crushed by one of these beautiful lumbering giants.

Stepping onto the quayside at Faversham today is like moving into another century, home as it is to so many of the surviving barges. This is one of the few places left in Britain where all the skills needed to maintain and sail these vessels are being kept alive. Each time we visit there is a new restoration project under way and our old favourites, like Greta, gleam with new paint. How all this activity is funded, how those working on these big restorations are paid for their efforts, is a mystery but I am certain that without the quay on Faversham Creek most of these hard-worked old ladies would be lost to us and the skyline of the east coast of England would be forever changed.

Finally on the subject of birthdays, one of our builders admitted having one of his own this week. Andrew has a talent many would admire, particularly those engaged like us on house improvement. With consummate ease he can lay a film of plaster on a wall, regardless of the angle, and produce a perfect surface, smoother than a baby’s bottom and minus the smells. Watching him closely as he runs his float over what we think is a finished section of wet plaster, we experience a mild panic that he is going to spoil the surface he has just created. But no. He slides his fingers over the surface to sense the moisture then glides on another layer, his efforts always bringing a slight improvement, even when it seems impossible to better what he has already done. The job is done and our steel beam now lies forever hidden. The illusion is complete.

Although we will be needing their help again elsewhere, the two brothers have now completed re-modelling our downstairs space so we must now crack on with the painting and decorating. We have run out of excuses now. The hard work starts here.

More on walls

It is a little understood quirk of human nature that we all like to stand around and watch others working, undertaking manual tasks of one sort or another, particularly when those working are good at what they do (or at least seem to be). This is the reason viewing windows are placed in the hoardings around large building sites and it also goes a long way towards explaining why we have so many programmes on TV dedicated to cooking. Simply watching other people is not quite sufficient, they really need to be doing something worthwhile to hold the attention fully. Better still, of course, is if they are doing something destructive. Demolition will always beat construction if for no better reason than because it is a quicker process, satisfaction coming much earlier and holding on right until the end.

We have waited months for our opportunity to watch the destruction of a wall separating our kitchen from the living room and when the moment finally came it was every bit as satisfying and exciting as we expected, perhaps even more so.
There was a terrific banging noise accompanied by vibration which shook both our house and our neighbours’ but slowly, starting at the top, a hole appeared which became larger and larger until it could no longer even be called a hole.

Peering through the cloud of choking plaster dust, so fine that it penetrated the covers placed over our furniture and crept into firmly closed cupboards, we began to see daylight from the other side of our house, light from another world. Slowly our two rooms became one as the hole became a whole.

For all this fun we have to thank our builders, Geoff and Andrew, two brothers who take the whole process in their stride and who certainly don’t seem in the least bit phased by the fact that with the wall down, the house is now supported only by slender steel bars placed around the room.

We just stand open-mouthed as we try to take in what they have done, then smile. Without curtains at the back or the front our neighbours now have a fine view of our back yard they never had before but who cares, we’ll deal with that later. The vision held in our heads is finally a reality, albeit a dusty one.

With the rubble carted off to fill the skip on the front lawn, next comes the job of placing our massive steel girder in position across the ceiling where it will hold the house together again.

This is a three-man lift, above head height, so we all muck in, again our two lads staying as cool as cucumbers as we move the props into place. It is terrifying to watch this, but far worse to actually be involved in it, as one false move will let gravity take over with forces far too great for any of us to handle. Fortunately the procedure goes off without a hitch and there it is, a red steel bar sitting up there just where it should be, with more props in place preventing the floor from hitting the ceiling.

There is much still to do but the day comes to a close and our building brothers depart leaving us in peace for the weekend. We would like to sit and stare, to get the feel of our new space, but more of the white dust which coats everything floats around us so it is not yet a place to linger.

It needs to be left alone to settle out so we adjourn upstairs, carefully, lest we disturb the equilibrium beneath.

The morning after and our vacuum cleaner overheats as it tries to suck against a blocked filter but gradually our lives return to something approaching normality. Looking around we begin to notice little things, unexpected vistas now having opened up. After drastically pruning the upper branches of the tree in our front garden, we hung what was left with fat balls and a seed-filled feeder in the hope that this might attract the odd passing wildfowl. Word travelled so quickly that by the time we emerged to partake of our breakfast, the starlings were well into second helpings. And sitting at our table in what was previously our back-facing kitchen we find we can now peer out front and watch all the bickering and chatter, the acrobatics and the aerobatics. Far from being dull, seen close up starlings are brilliantly coloured birds whose feathers have an iridescent sheen when they catch the sun. But they have few manners and do rather take over the place so sparrows and blue tits need to be fearlessly bold if they are to get a look in.

We are also starting to navigate around the house differently, using only the former living room door to enter our large new room. Our builders are contracted to block off the former internal kitchen door so that we can install a new kitchen across the same space, a kitchen that is already ordered and on its way. But by what name should we refer to our new and vast open-plan kitchen/diner/living room. Ideas on a postcard please but Kate has already rejected my suggestions of ‘The Auditorium’, ‘The Hanger’ and ‘O Mighty One’. It may just end up being ‘The Space’.

MENDING WALL by Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

---

Ours is a wall past mending, a wall that is now no more.

The poem was written about another wall, one on the poet’s grandfather’s farm in Derry, New Hampshire. Here is a picture of the wall in question, included here to put this beautiful writing in context. Had ours been a wall like this, made of massive lumps of stone, we too would have been mending. Walls like this bring back memories of our own travels in places where all the land is contained within similar boundaries.

Time for a change

For virtually no good reason at all, we have changed the look of trotty.net, the whole thing now having a much more watery theme [This site is no longer active]. The blog is now replicated in Blogger (where you won’t notice any change) and WordPress. These two sentences will mean something to those with a keen interest in the world of the Internet and a good knowledge of the world of blogging but maybe less to others. For everyone though, we hope you like it. Feel free to pass comment using the link below.

Meanwhile the focus of lives has shifted upwards to our guttering at the back of the house which, perhaps in sympathy with some of the internal pipes, leaked when it rains. The drips from this seem to accelerate to near light speed whilst falling and hit the ground underneath with a deep thud, something which at first we don’t notice but eventually this crept into our consciousness and became annoying. I resolve to climb up there and fix it so when dry, sunny weather arrives I’m up a ladder with my sealant gun, squirting the stuff into every crack I can find. We had to wait no more than a few days for some good heavy rain to test my repair – it is fixed.

Kate is currently on a mission with some new paint brushes we bought in a rush of enthusiasm at our favourite DIY store. The boundary wall and fence around our back yard have succumbed and turned cream and brown, after which she shut herself in our largest bedroom and applied ‘Bumble’ to the walls. Someone, somewhere must be making a fortune thinking up names for paint colours although I must confess it is not a science I have ever properly understood. What sort of a mind thinks up things like ‘Feather Down’ or ‘Lunar Falls’ and expects us to associate it with a colour? And why would you want to paint ‘Delicate Cobweb’ or ‘Dragon’s Blood’ on your walls anyway? Notwithstanding this, the effect in the bedroom is highly agreeable and it is one step forward in our top to bottom refurbishment. We are still waiting for our designated builders to find time to come in and change our lives by merging our downstairs living space into one so jobs like this fill in our time nicely.

Taking some time out from decorating we wander up Wyndham Hill which lies on the south-eastern edge of Yeovil and whose summit is graced by three very ancient trees which we think are elm. Their heart-wood is long gone leaving hollowed spaces to climb into and investigate but somehow the massive trees remain standing. If they are elm then they have survived Dutch elm disease and no doubt many other traumas in their long lives.

This is a grand spot from which to admire the countryside for miles around. We are afforded a view across the town as well, even as far as the grass airfield used by the aircraft factory which lies at the centre of this town. For Yeovil is where helicopters are made, Westland helicopters, to be precise, and without this big employer the place would be a shadow of what it is today. Helicopters, of course, are used by the police and military so the fate of Yeovil is very much dependent upon national security and defence spending plans. Recently many in the town have been holding their breath while the government carries out its defence spending review but there are happy faces around now the outcomes are known. The news is good for Westlands and that is good for the town too. This may mean a few more helicopters over-flying our house but I suppose we shouldn’t complain.

Finally I tackle the wall in our front garden which is leaning dangerously as if with the slightest knock it might fall over. Over the years the tree growing adjacent to the wall has expanded, its roots gradually tipping the foundations from underneath, thus making the whole structure lean dangerously sideways and unstable, or so we thought. Expecting that no more than a few hammer blows would bring the thing tumbling down I ventured forth dressed in protective gloves and boots but soon discovered, to my dismay, that all is not quite as it appears. The concrete blocks resist my efforts to bring them down. I rapidly reach the same conclusion that Police Chief Martin Brody reached in the film, Jaws, when on first confronting the giant fish he said, ‘We need a bigger boat’. I need a bigger hammer and even with this I see many more days of effort stretched before me. The wall seems determined to hang together and oppose my efforts to remove it. But I will not be defeated.

Reconstruction begins

Yet another minor excitement in our property improvement lives…. our new shed has been delivered, in pieces and complete with a rich smell of preservative. Originally our plan was to throw out the pre-existing one, a misshapen and rotting thing that stands (just) in our back yard, home though it is to every wood-loving creepy-crawly for miles around and safe haven though it is for spiders so large, it is a wonder we don’t hear them stomping around at night. But then we discovered that we could actually move the structure sideways a little way without too much of it falling off or disintegrating to dust and having done this, a brand new one will fit nicely on the old concrete platform. Well, you can never have too many sheds, can you? One of them will soon act as a garage for our cycle trailer, soon coming home to us after living with friends Rich & Gerry for a few years.

The shed is the first part of our order placed a few days ago which started as a long shopping list of kitchen-related parts but which we added to once we realised that the discount we were being offered would be applied to anything we bought at the store that day. We very quickly thought up some more goodies, throwing in some rather nice flooring which we have used to cover up the bare and rather unattractive chipboard in one of our bedrooms. We do a lot of our shopping for materials at B&Q, largely because every Wednesday is their ‘Over 60’s’ day when they offer discount to all who have reached this age. As you might expect, on these days the place is full of grey-haired old men and the clatter of Zimmer frames can be deafening but fortunately they also employ people of a certain age at the checkout. It was here we met Reg who was in no doubt that his role was mainly to ‘translate’ for those who need it - things like metric measurements for those who grew up with imperial or the wonders of the economy light bulb.

We really feel we are turning a new leaf and getting into reconstruction mode now, using different skills and different muscles too, many of which are complaining, but then that’s nothing new. There are still little distractions, of course, like when the house catches us out with one of its bits of botched DIY. One evening we spotted water emerging from beneath the refrigerator, just a small pool, but it was coming from somewhere hidden away at the back. Investigation revealed a tiny hole in an innocent looking water pipe which had been dribbling happily away for days, even weeks. Replacing this pipe with a new section disturbed another joint nearby which started squirting water down the wall and once again this needed to be ripped apart and replaced. These are examples of poor quality plumbing work that is dotted about the house, little of which is fatal but it is annoying when the water won’t stay inside the pipes.

While I am still grovelling under the sink, Kate is watching TV, absorbed as I have never seen her before. She is not normally much of a sports fan but the Commonwealth Games in Delhi has been the focus of her attention for some days now as she waits for the hammer-throwers to begin. Why?

Because she has a nephew competing, not for this country but for Australia, in this little-understood event. We both still remember him as a small boy when he visited the the UK and came out for a walk with us. His concern over dangerous snakes in our countryside was a rather touching sign of his Aussie-ness. Both Simon and his brother Jamie giggled and imitated the word “woods” in a terribly English accent, then corrected the name. “It’s not woods, it’s the bush, Auntie Kate”. Simon Wardhaugh is now a giant of man but still very young for his chosen sport and the 5th place he gained at the Games does him great credit, competing against some of the best in the world. Well done mate!

We are spending much time out of doors here this week as it has been unseasonably warm and dry for some days.

Time therefore to crack on with jobs that will soon become impossible when the rain arrives and the cold winds recommence, like repainting the fence and wall around our back yard. Kate calls my attention to the telephone wires above us where no less than twenty-eight goldfinches are sitting watching us and laughing, no doubt, at our attempts to entice them to our seed feeder. We know there are thistles in full seed in the country park just a short flight away, far more tasty than what we have on offer. These birds will soon be packing for their flight over to Spain where most of them will spend the winter. Let’s hope they make it!

The Visit

After waiting expectantly at home all morning, finally we peer through our front window to see a white car draw gently to a halt at the kerbside. A silver-haired head turns our way and a small hand appears above the door to wave. Our distinguished visitors have arrived. We go out to meet them as the car door cracks open and my mother emerges creakily onto the pavement, still stiff from three hours of travel. We hug her slender body as her companion, George, unfolds his own lanky body from behind the wheel across the other side of the car and advances towards us, hand outstretched in greeting.

Inside the house planning for the visit of the ‘Seniors’ has been the focus of our attention for some days, even weeks, as we are aware that our half-renovated property will struggle to provide them with many of the comforts they are used to in their own homes. We do not have soft carpets underfoot, the walls are bare, plaster pitted and cracked, still scarred from our scraping at the many layers of wallpaper and there is an unfinished look about everything. But at least the sun has come out for their arrival and the air is warm, unseasonably so for early October.

Although it may be a little irreverent to mention this, we cannot help but see a parallel with another recent distinguished visit. The pope is similarly advanced in years and preparations for his arrival were no doubt made long in advance (and at considerable cost). There would have been a dedicated team who, like us, were concerned to make sure everything went smoothly, to ensure that his comforts and needs were provided for. And there was even a white car.

We were greatly relieved (if that is the correct word) when our builders finally arrived to unwrap the toilet that had languished for weeks in our living room (it had made a convenient coffee table) and install this in our downstairs cloakroom. The flushing noise was like music to our ears, timed just days before the Seniors’ visit began and giving us a much needed downstairs facility. Unlike the pontiff, however, the beatification of a new saint does not feature as the highlight of our visitation. We settle for Sunday lunch at our local, the Great Western, with sons Mike and Tony joining us.

No sooner had our visitors left than we found ourselves engaged in some heavy kitchen planning. Everything from the wall cupboard doors down to the floor we’ll soon be standing on has to be ordered. Every screw, each hinge and knob, every last millimetre has to be accounted for, our biggest dread being that the bits and pieces we buy won’t fit in the available space, or the reverse, we will have gaps left over with nothing to fill them.

Some hours later we have a terrifyingly long list in front of us and we know when to expect delivery.

But of course none of this can be fitted until our builders have opened up the house, front to back, by removing our internal wall. The whole kitchen is planned around this. We know that this is scheduled to happen quite soon but were still surprised when, on arriving home from the DIY store, we find an enormous lump of steel in our back yard. We still don’t know how they got it there, over a two metre wall and past a locked gate, (maybe someone else dumped it there) but it is just what we need to prevent the bedroom wall and the roof above it from tumbling to the ground after their support is removed. This beam will soon become part of the structure of our house, giving us a view from front to back so we can view the sunrises and sunsets from wherever we are.

Achievements

Two completely different and unrelated events dominate our lives at this juncture. One concerns our son Ben, whose band’s first single “Little Love” has just been released and is available to buy on the Internet. After talking to him, any understanding we thought we had of the world of the modern music industry has been revealed as hopelessly inadequate. But this does not prevent us from appreciating the effort and skill that has gone into the performing and actually we love the music; it is played here over and over again. Success or failure of the enterprise that Bang Bang Romeo represents now rests upon the readers of this blog buying the music, or so I am led to believe. Just follow this link – SPOTIFY

The second event is a little closer to home. It concerns our living room and the stone monstrosity that we have made into something we like and can admire. At one point only a few weeks ago we came close to demolishing the whole structure, in fact the only thing that stopped us was the risk that in doing so we might create far more work for ourselves than by leaving it in place.

Investigation soon revealed that the massively built structure was only loosely attached to the wall behind; the reality is that it was little more than a folly. So began the job of changing this into something a little more functional which would not fall on top of and maim our first visitors. This has involved taking a risk and following a vision locked somewhere inside our heads, for better or worse, and now that it is complete, even alongside the bare walls in the rest of the room (which we cannot decorate until our builders have finished remodelling the rest of the room) we feel we have created something better than before. We are quite proud of our handiwork and also in some way surprised that we should feel this way. Perhaps this is because making things was not a part of either of our working careers so we are discovering for ourselves the sense of achievement that working with our hands can bring.

Outside the house autumn is beginning to show off in the Somerset countryside and there is much to admire just a short walk away. Not only do we live conveniently close to what we need for our DIY – we have no less than four plumbing suppliers within a quarter mile radius and our corner of Yeovil also happens to be the Mecca for screws – but a short stroll from the front door takes us into another world, a valley where the river Yeo trickles softly by and nature is busy producing its bounty – berries in all shades. Alongside this the landscape is gradually tinting from green to the reds and browns of autumn and a leaf carpet is beginning to form. We have discovered a little wonderland on our doorstep, somewhere we plan to visit regularly to watch the seasons develop.

Salcombe

Finally we could resist it no more. The strings attaching us to what has been our floating home for so long have eventually and inevitably pulled us back on board Cirrus Cat for a short, late-season break. A quick study of the five-day forecast tells us that there is nothing in the way of equinoctial gales in prospect so we gather the necessities, some food and a few clothes, then charge off west to Plymouth. Our son Mike is with us, which surprisingly is all it takes to tilt the economics of public transport away from trains and buses towards a hired car, still a form of public transport, but one usually thought of as expensive by comparison. Not so, it seems and certainly when you take into account the inconvenience of changing trains, missing buses and walking for more than thirty minutes up hill and down dale with luggage, the decision is an easy one to make.

We are not strangers to hiring cars and this time the hire company, almost apologetically and for the same price, gives us one larger than ordered and so brand new it still has that lingering smell of molten wax that is unique to all new vehicles. My only complaint was the colour, black, a rather obviously negative safety feature.

A fast but rough sail on Cirrus has taken us to Devon’s Salcombe Harbour, a place clearly reaching the end of its busy season for this year. We know this because moorings are available for us to pick up and there is space on the visitor pontoon. In the main street the town’s shops are well, to be brutally honest, rather strange in that they are all remarkably similar, being small and selling high fashion leisure clothing of one sort or another. It is the end of season and we find the word ‘Sale’ pasted here and there across the plate glass although obviously there is a ‘Salcombe’ way of doing these things. There is a shoe shop, for example, where a price reduction means that everything is reduced to a mere £100. We consider ourselves fortunate indeed that we have enough shoes between us so we can pass on by without being tempted.

So here we are lounging about at leisure on board as the sun dips behind the surrounding hills, entertaining ourselves as usual by observing the comings and going of others on boats and bemoaning the misbehaviour of our dinghy’s outboard engine which forces us to row ourselves ashore. We try in vain to persuade the thing to run for more than a few seconds without over-heating and leaving us stranded just out of reach of land or boat. I have cleaned it by poking its inner parts with stiff wire, replaced its little rubber impellor which is supposed to pump cooling water up from the sea and generally molly-coddled it by polishing various parts, all to no avail. We watch enviously as everybody else’s outboard engine chugs smoothly past. We end up contemplating ways and means by which we might casually exchange our non-working outboard engine for an identical but fully-functioning one we have just seen going past on the back of a small dinghy. Can we resist the temptation secretly to row over in the dead of the night and swap ours for that hanging off the back of this boat?

Maybe because of the influence upon our consciences of the Papal Visit (Deo Gratias) we are still bereft of motorised dinghy power when we depart Salcombe the next day. 

The light wind is now from a south-easterly direction so once out past the turbulence of Bolt Head we hoist our secret weapon, the multicoloured spinnaker, which brings out the sun and pulls us along for hours across Bigbury Bay towards Plymouth. Suddenly there are German voices on the radio warning all ships to keep clear of an area just three miles to the west of us. Loud booming comes echoing across the sea as warships start firing out to sea. This is not playing, it is live ammunition and only a few miles away from us! Strange, we think, didn’t the war end over fifty years ago? We hear the radio operator on the German warship Hamburg getting excited when a sailing boat (not us) sails too close beneath the guns and a rather alarmed and embarrassed yacht skipper replying over the airwaves for all to hear. All ends well for them while we escape unnoticed into the River Yealm, a beautifully sheltered, wooded chasm that has no less than three pubs at its head. It is a favourite stopping place for yachtsmen all along this coast. We can cope with a little excitement at sea but being this close to significant naval action is not really our thing and we are glad to be out of it. We leave them to their games.

Tying up to a convenient pontoon we suddenly find ourselves surrounded by large catamarans – Cirrus is amongst her big sisters between whose hulls we could almost slip unnoticed. 

The south-west just seems to have more multihull yachts per square inch than another other corner of this country and they are here in the Yealm because it is mid-week and end of season; the river is a little too overcrowded with moorings to attract them normally. This is a busy place but the fast-flowing tidal river is rich with life, much of which hangs onto the pontoon itself just below the waterline. Peer over the side and you’ll see a colourful world which is unnoticed by most of those who stop here overnight.

It seems we have had the best of the weather for our few days away. Our final night is quiet but the day dawns misty with rain floating in the air although just enough wind to enable us to sail our way past all those warships into Plymouth Sound. Hamburg is still there making trouble for small vessels but we ignore it and sneak stealthily back to our mooring.