Monday 29 November 2010

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.

Monday 22 November 2010

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.

Friday 12 November 2010

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.

Sunday 7 November 2010

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.