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.