A room with five corners

Even before we moved into our present home (we're not yet at the second anniversary) we knew that we would have a big job on our hands. Whilst we loved the house, the location, the views from the windows, and much else, we knew for certain that we would not be able to live with the interior decor. It was tired and dated, representing an era that we had fallen out of love with years ago, if ever, so it would have to go. But we also knew that transforming the house decor was not going to happen overnight. It would be a lengthy process that we would have to tackle one room at a time, maybe on rainy days when nothing else took priority.

Already described in these pages are some of our transformational efforts, the priority being the areas of the house where we spend most time during daylight hours, places where we could not avoid viewing that which we disliked. I am, perhaps, more tolerant of the aged wallpaper than most but I live with someone who is clearly not, which means that whenever I left the house I was likely to find another room being stripped when I returned home. Each room, as it turns out, had multiple layers of wallpaper, each representing a different generation or perhaps a different householder's ideas on what looks good. Removing each layer, sometimes one at a time, requires patience and care, especially if we intend to paint the walls exposed beneath, but

what is revealed once a wall has been stripped can be quite interesting. Often we find guiding words written by the individual who put the first layer of paper on the wall some sixty years ago. These notes will be lost forever once the first covering layer of paint is applied so the photo here is of archeological interest as it is the only record.

The room here is our dining room, so described because we use it mostly at breakfast, lunch time and for when we have visitors, so it has taken a while for us to note that this room, along with several others in our house, has five internal corners! Realisation came about quite suddenly as I was applying sealant to each corner to smooth over the ragged joins in the plasterboard exposed after the wallpaper had been peeled off. (Paint will hide most things but any gaps need to be thin enough or else the result will look unprofessionally untidy.) I now realise that the five corner phenomenon is actually quite common, if one applies a little thought. In our dining room the rear of a chimney breast intrudes in from the adjoining living room (where the fire opening is filled with a small wood burning stove) and this takes space away and changes the shape of the room from a standard rectangle to a slightly more irregular shape. It has this shape in common with our kitchen and with one of our bedrooms, each of these having intrusions created long ago for different purposes. In fact the kitchen had no less than six internal corners when we moved in and only our hard work and the drive to modernize what was there before has brought this down to a more sensible five. I did wonder whether this five-cornered phenomenon should have been pointed out when we bought the house although I doubt whether it would have put us off buying.

Coming back to the dining room, we start with the now smooth walls, stripped and  sanded as best we can so the paint can be rolled on. We made our colour choice for the room and after masking off everything we do not want painted we go for it... and the effect is transformational. Any recollection of the brown stripey wallpaper is now lost to the world. Next in line is the carpet, a dated patterned thing that has now become splattered with spilt paint as a result of us doing the walls. We could not wait to rip it up. We knew from previous experience that there might be horrors hidden beneath the tired and crumbling carpet underlay, possibly even messages tucked away from view again, but sadly there is nothing exciting to see this time, just a few loose boards to secure and some holes to fill up. Some of these holes were made to allow the water pipes for a radiator to emerge from underneath... before a new radiator was fitted in a different position.

The plan for the floor in this room mirrors what we have done elsewhere as we are great believers in laminate, interlocking boards laid across a room to form a clean, smooth surface, more commonly with a woodgrain pattern on top. (An ugly patterned carpet stands no chance in our house.) We collect the laminate from a local supplier and then stagger up to the house carrying the heavy boxes, laying them down carefully ready for action. A very thin expanded foam underlay goes down then the first line of boards is laid along the longest wall. Working across the room one row at a time is very satisfying, each one covering up more of the floorboards until finally the opposite wall is reached and some lengthy sawing is required to fit the last strip.

Once the floor is laid the furniture can go back in, not least of which is our new sofa which doubles as a bed if needed. Suddenly the room is transformed into a place where we can sit and admire our handiwork and push the memories of the horrible patterned carpet and the stripey walls out of our minds. There is a fresh, clean feel to the room and, something we didn't expect, a resonance that was not there before. The dining room is now a music room, the faintest of echoes adding much to our musical efforts.

Shrimper update

Months have passed since news was posted here about our Cornish Shrimper so it must be time for another instalment.

This picture is merely a taster, of course.

After waiting and waiting we finally got some good news. The boatyard which had agreed to carry out the repairs to our little sailing boat now had the capacity to begin the work. So we hitched up the trailer outside our house on which Eun na Mara had been resting for so long and we trundled her off to Ardfern so they could make a start. We always knew that the work needed was going to be a messy job, grinding out the tiny pieces of iron ballast from the bottom of the bilge inside (technically called the 'cabin sole'), and the short visit we made to the yard two weeks later confirmed this. Inside the cabin everything was covered with small pieces of iron shot, like large dust, and some had even bounced out from inside the cabin as they were being ground away so the cockpit was also covered with them. We couldn't help but feel sorry for the poor guy doing this job... but to us it was good news. Work had started. Looking inside the boat it was clear that what had been ground away had taken pressure off the keel box and the distortion had already straightened out a little. Progress!
 
So what happened next. For step two the boat was lifted up onto stands so that the keel plate could be removed from below. This heavy lump of iron does the job of keeping the boat upright and also prevents her from sliding sideways when sailing into the wind. It is designed to pivot downwards through the bottom of the hull, lowered from inside the boat on a rope, and this is something that the distortion had prevented from happening. Once the keel plate was extracted from below the internal distortion to the fibreglass keel box could be corrected and then layers of epoxy and fibreglass fixed internally to prevent the distortion from occurring again. Sounds easy eh?

News eventually came saying that the work was complete, good news at last, which gave us a target to prepare for and a date when we might finally be able to cast off and sail away.

We turn up at the boatyard one morning to see our boat propped up high on stands so naturally the first thing we do is to lower the keel plate using the rope coiled up in the cockpit. To our great delight it descends smoothly until the whole thing is exposed underneath, just as it should be, a large triangular lump of iron. In all the years we have owned the boat this has never happened!

Next we open a large tin of antifouling paint and slop it on the hull below the waterline (it stops the barnacles growing on the bottom). The boatyard had tried to clean up the mess inside the cabin, black dust and grit, but there is still much to do so we stay over on a nearby campsite to continue working the next day. The mast goes up (it is designed so that two people can do this easily), the outboard engine is lifted onboard and we work our way through the long list of jobs we need to get done so she can be lifted into the water as soon as possible...

which turns out to be the next day! 

Getting ready for sailing after a long lay-up is all about lists, things we need to place on board so that when the need arises they are ready to hand. We need water, food, bedding for when we stay overnight, warm and waterproof clothes, the VHF radio, fuel for the engine, the list goes on. We are replicating a set of everything we rely upon for everyday life at home, plus a few extras.

The sails need to be 'bent' on (a technical term for attaching them to the mast and boom)
but we don't get the chance to raise them fully as Eun na Mara now lies tied up beside a pontoon and this is where she will rest until the right weather comes along. Forecasts of rain and thunderstorms are not what we need for the journey home.

What's in a name?

The urge that drove us to put our redundant computing technology out to grass is still with us, driving us in other directions. Cupboards and drawers not opened for months are exposed to the light of day. Bookshelves are examined closely, exposing titles thought lost to us but which in turn make us examine our priorities. Once read, what purpose does a book have? Does it have a right to a space on our bookshelves when it will never be picked up and read? Might we read it again? What about saving it for those who might visit us?

Then, tucked in amongst the hardbacks we spot something else, slimmer volumes, lightly bound things one might have once called 'exercise books'. They are different from the published novels. These are written by us, not as novels but as day to day records of our sailing activities. These are our ship log books, something we decided, for reasons now lost to us, that we should maintain for each of our sailing boat trips, paper records of our own lives that we would never want to lose.

And they go back many years, back to our first voyage in our first sailing boat. However this was certainly not a sea tested vessel waiting for us in a sheltered harbour somewhere. Far from it. She had spent her entire life in the fresh waters of Lake Windermere in the English Lake District. Her name was 'Rondo', a rather dull sounding offering that was never going to suit us with our rapidly growing young family. So how and when did we rename her?

I return once again to the log book collection, amongst which I find a notebook and on opening at the first page I find written in big letters: "JOBS TO DO ON RONDO". The date, which is noted at the top of the page, is 26th October 1985, so long ago that my memory of it is almost gone. It was in this notebook that I used to sketch out my plans for, amongst other things, boat improvements, measurements noted down in feet and inches (not a measurement system I would use now) with helpful comments on how something might work best. There are sketches in pencil or sometimes in ink with dimensions and arrows pointing to particular features from explanatory side notes. It might be a modification to the galley, a whisker pole, coachroof sheet clutches, a folding sink for the heads, a radical self steering mechanism that I designed and built myself, sail measurements, there is even a pre-Holland checklist and then a list of 'Lessons Learnt' from our holiday there in 1988. The variety and the detail is amazing to my present day eyes yet the writing is mine, long forgotten maybe but undeniably mine.

So to return to the name. For how long did we retain the name Rondo and what was the thinking behind any change? To answer this we need go no further than page four of my notebook for here are recorded all the potential names we considered for our cosy little ship. I can do no better than list them all here:

BLODWYN

GOLDEN BIRD

JAMIE FIVE (PIP)

OBSESSION

BLIND PANIC

FURTLE (PIP) FURTAL FURTEL FERTLE FIRTLE

DRAGON

NOGGIN THE NOG

The final name in the list has a ring drawn around it, for the very good reason that this is the name we chose to call our first boat.

So who or what is Noggin the Nog?

This is a fictional character appearing in a BBC Television cartoon series originally broadcast between 1959 and 1982 and in a series of illustrated books which were published from 1965. The creators were Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin who were inspired to create "The Sagas of Noggin the Nog" by the discovery of 12th century Norse chess pieces on the Isle of Lewis which they saw in the British Museum. It is considered a cult classic from the golden age of British children's television, Noggin himself being a simple, kind and unassuming "King of the Northmen" in a roughly Viking Age setting, with various fantastic elements such as dragons, flying machines and talking birds. He is the good-natured son of Knut, King of the Nogs, and his queen Grunhilda and when King Knut dies, Noggin must find a queen to rule beside him or else forfeit the crown to his uncle, Nogbad the Bad. Noggin meets and marries Nooka of the Nooks (an Inuit princess), and becomes the new king.

Whilst pre-dating the lives of our children by many years, the name would have meant a lot to our young boys as they had grown up with us reading bedtime tales from one of the books. To us the name just felt right. It was unique, in sailing circles, it was quirky and of course to anyone of a certain age who grew up when the sagas were first broadcast it would bring a smile of recognition and remembrance. It was also easy to recognise clearly when spoken over the VHF radio when we were entering a harbour, an important point, although cutting out the fabric for the letters on our spray dodgers did prove to be quite tiresome.

She was a compact little vessel, brought across from Windermere on the back of a lorry and launched at Blyth in Northumberland, close to where we were living at the time. Although only twenty four feet in length she had enough space inside for us and our three boys to sleep in, was solidly built and with the benefit of a less-than-reliable outboard engine slung off the transom we made numerous voyages along the east coast of the UK and even went across the North Sea to Holland, as described in the notebook.

On some of these voyages she was accompanied by a substantial fibreglass dinghy which had come with the boat when we bought her. This was towed behind us, even on our passage to Holland, and was later converted into a sailing dinghy by adding a windsurfer mast and sail. She had her own name, of course. She was called 'Darth Wader', again a name that would have meant something to us all.

Redundant tech

Whilst we don't regard ourselves as being particularly 'techy' we do have smartphones and these are used for more than simply making phone calls. In fact for many years computers have had a significant role in our lives, both for work and in the course of our retirement activities. Different computer operating systems don't scare us (too much) as we have just the right amount of background knowledge to transition between one device and another without too much mental effort. What goes on inside any particular electronic gadget might be beyond us but the 'need to know' principle means we can live without this knowledge and focus on the functions instead.

Over time, of course, our needs have changed and a piece of kit essential for one range of tasks - the right operating system running at the right speed and connecting to other things with the minimum fuss - may not necessarily be right for our current uses. We started our computing journey on what are now known as 'PCs', large boxes with noisy fans inside combined with a screen mounted on a desk and a separate keyboard and mouse, whereas today's technological gadgets have touch sensitive screens, are more about using imagery - pictures and sound - and much of the processing and storage is handled by the internet. Previously it was all about recording text and numbers whereas now this is often just supplementary, adding context but not being used on its own. In our working lives computers were first introduced to replace typewriters which created paper documents which were then stored in filing cabinets, in folders kept safe for future reference. But this is a world left far behind us. The focus is now almost entirely on communication and the technology which enables this has shrunk dramatically over the years. Hence the smartphone.

So what's the problem? Well, every now and then we get the urge to have a clear out, to simplify our lives and rid ourselves of the things we no longer use or have need of. This might be a cupboard full of clothes, a tray of assorted cutlery, a sock drawer or a collection of keys, the purpose of which is long forgotten.

Which brings us to the PC, a large box sitting in the corner collecting dust, which hasn't been switched on for months. Then we remember that we previously used laptop computers, which we still have, several in fact, quite powerful things each representing a different time in our lives when the functions they carried out necessitated something more portable. Then when our needs changed (or when something went wrong with them) they were put aside, out of sight and mind. So how do we deal with all this redundant technology?

One of the problems is with what is inside, personal information (the modern term is 'data') and it is partly this that explains why we haven't simply thrown these things in the bin. In those pre-computer days gone by we might have emptied the filing cabinet and thrown all the paper onto a bonfire in the garden. Job done! But there is more to think about now. There is plastic, rare metals, and components that are really not ideal for the bonfire - like batteries. But if we leave the gadget for the bin men to collect and it ends up on the local tip, who's to say what might happen to it then. Are there bad guys out there just waiting to take it away, to plug the thing in and download all our personal emails, my embarrassing photos or maybe even my bank details which they will then use to hack into my bank and take all my money? OK, so this is probably an exaggeration but let's just do a clean-up first on our redundant kit. Perhaps then the old, but still functioning, PC might actually have some value to someone else, who knows.

Which brings me to the cleanup operation. I am sure there are guides online on what should be done so I do not intend to try to cover this here. Suffice to say that what might appear to be a straightforward operation can have its flaws. There is a thing called a Hard Reset which is supposed to wipe everything from the device except the operating system itself and when it has done this it will then try to restart the machine again so someone can use it. If you stop at this point then you effectively have a clean machine, wiped of personal data. But if you do find a buyer willing to purchase your old PC then you will be unable to demonstrate the device actually working unless you once again enter your personal details and log in. Hmmm.

I realise that all this will have been a somewhat dull to those who have no interest in gadgetry of any sort so just for you, here is a distraction. The picture below is of two damsel flies taking a rest on a rock at the edge of our pond. The male is clasping the head of the female and, staying attached this way, they will both fly off to a carefully chosen spot so that she can lay an egg, attaching it to something just below the surface of the pond. They will stay together like this for thirty minutes or more and whilst it may not seem very romantic to us, to them it is...well, just part of everyday life.