The Saga of the Leak – part the first

There was once a town in Somerset in the west of England where a bearded man called Malcolm lived with his young wife, Catriona. The man’s wife, a flaxen-haired lady, was often to be seen paintbrush in hand smoothing a coating of some exotic elixir across the walls within which they lived for she enjoyed, if not the smell, then the feel of the paint as it flowed from her brush and the resultant effect. Despite all this they lived happily together in a house which was blessed with many wonderful features, not least of which were the pipes and tubes through which electricity, gas and water flowed to and fro endlessly, both into and out of the surrounding land, seemingly without effort at all. Without these hidden pipes and tubes life would have been difficult indeed but by using their contents carefully and wisely Malcolm and Catriona were able to do many strange and amazing things and were able to live their lives in warmth and comfort. For example they could talk to others around the world as if they were next door, they could make tea using water as pure as many a mountain stream and they could warm their toes before a fireside glowing hot without the use of coal or wood. All these things were made possible by the pipes and tubes which ran into and out of the house.

Many years ago, when the house was built, there were men who had knowledge of just how these pipes and tubes were connected, of where they entered the building and where they left, men who used their knowledge wisely in constructing such a splendid dwelling but men who, nevertheless, chose to keep their knowledge to themselves. Perhaps they passed on this knowledge to their sons and daughters who, as is the way of things in the land of Somerset, then filled their own heads with so much else that the knowledge became lost for ever. Perhaps the men who built the house drew plans and drawings which described how everything worked, what secret places there were within the house where this pipe or that tube could be found so that water or gas could be drawn off when needed. Perhaps when they buried those pipes deep beneath the house they never expected anyone to need the knowledge they alone possessed as once hidden down under the clay on which the house was built those tubes would forever continue to bring electricity and water to those that lived there, no matter how many years should pass. Who can now tell what these men thought or did for time has passed and the house still stands but the pipes and tubes are older now and access to the wisdom of those who built it is now lost to those who now live within.

So it was that the Malcolm and his lady awoke one day to a strange sound, a sound which followed them about as they passed within the house, a sound which comforted the lady Catriona while she painted the walls but which nevertheless unsettled them, especially at night when the house was peaceful and quiet. To describe this as a hissing sound, high in pitch but its source low in the house, may not adequately portray the noise nor the effect it had on them both for this was the sound of a leak, of a liquid escaping from a pipe somewhere beneath their feet, something uncontrollable and mysterious, out of sight but not out of hearing and persistent in its nature, annoying. Somewhere, they knew, the pure water that provided them with so much comfort and sustenance was escaping, oozing out, and running away into the land beneath them. And of course, not having the knowledge of those who built the house so many years ago, knowledge secreted away or simply forgotten, the location of the pipe with the mysterious hole which was allowing the water to spill away could only be guessed at.

Now this part of the land of Somerset used to be named Wessex and water which flows over and under the land is owned by a company called Wessex Water who allow many different pipes and tubes to pass through the land. Many of those pipes are known to them and the location is drawn on maps and plans so that men can dig down and allow light to shine on a pipe when this is needed. But sadly, because the men who built the houses were secretive or forgetful there are many pipes which are unknown even to Wessex Water. Fortunately however, Wessex men are well versed in discovering lost pipes and they have many skills and machines available to them which enable them to locate a pipe when they need to, even when this is hidden underground. The first of these is the ‘listening stick’, a steel rod a metre and a half long with a cup-shaped wooden piece at one end which is placed against the ear while the other end is thrust into the ground. All leaking pipes share the same characteristic, the whistling and the hissing, which can be heard through the long rod of the listening stick, especially where a leak is beneath or close to a solid structure such as a house. Where the pipe is leaking into the soil away from a house a second and highly sophisticated skill is deployed – the hole. As it happens no modern equipment is needed for this; the requirements are simple. First there is the fork and then the spade. These shamanic tools are placed in the hands of a skilled artisan who is plied with cups of tea until eventually, a hole appears in the ground.

Thus the saga begins, with all this technology available and after many cups of tea and many holes having been dug our brave Somerset couple should reasonably expect to know where the mysterious pipe lies, where the water is running away, where the hissing is hissing from, to have rediscovered the knowledge long lost since the house was built.

But they don’t.

Twelve months ago

Every so often Kate and I find ourselves posing the question to each other, "What were we doing this time last year?”, not for any deep or meaningful reason, but simply because in the two years or less since we both ceased gainful employment and began doing other things with our lives, even we are beginning to lose track of where we have been and what we have done. The answer to this question if posed at the present time is that we were mid way through six months of living in northern Italy, for me the longest period I have ever spent outside the UK and therefore an experience of some significance. What is rather strange, however, is that it takes no effort at all to remember our Italian sojourn because a number of rather bizarre happenings are combining to act as reminders for us, things that seem to be stretching the boundaries of coincidence considerably.

The apartment in which we were living, tucked away in the village of Torri at the end of an ‘interesting’ fifteen minute drive from the Italian Riviera town of Ventimiglia, was owned by native English speakers, a fact that became evident when we first glanced at the content of the bookshelves that would sustain us throughout the winter months. It would be no exaggeration, indeed a considerable understatement, to say that our lives were made more enjoyable through having such a library at our disposal. Many a rainy day did we spend in front of our log fire, reading our way through novel after novel, all of which were new to us and most very much to our taste. How could whoever placed these books there have known?

So here we are back in the UK, twelve months has elapsed, and a film based on the Stieg Larsson novel we read in Italy, ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’, is opening at cinemas across the country. It doesn’t stop there though. At least three of the books on our shelves were written by Henning Mankell whose creation, the Swedish detective Wallander, really got under our skins. So to see him come to life on television here in Britain has been a real treat, as well as taking us straight back to the fireside sofa in Italy. Then as if this wasn’t enough, when we recently heard the name Aurelio Zen this too immediately rang bells for us. Michael Dibdin’s novels featuring this Italian detective have an amazing feel to them, Italian life just oozes out of every word despite them being written in English by an Englishman. Having now watched the TV version we are not disappointed. It is almost as if whoever stocked those now far off bookshelves must have had an uncanny, even spooky, ability to see into the future. Surely this cannot just be coincidence.

The reminders of our Italian living do not, however, start or end on the bookshelves. Being ever conscious of our making best use of pension pounds (or Euros), it was not long before our daily and weekly shopping in Italy had introduced us to a new experience. We have my brother Graham to thank for our initiation to the place - he shops there regularly – and we did have our reservations at first but sooner or later we found we had caught the ‘Lidl’ bug. Now if you prefer to buy your foodstuffs with labels you recognise, Kelloggs for breakfast, Heinz for lunch, Cadbury’s for a snack, then a Lidl supermarket is not for you. The problem is not that they don’t sell any products you recognise (they do) but simply that the brands and labels are not those you will be used to. So for example you may find yourself buying ‘Crownfield’ corn flakes for breakfast, ‘Campo Largo’ is the brand for canned goods and if you are looking for a Mars Bar then you’ll need to find a sweet bearing the name, ‘Mister Choc – Choco Caramel’ which only reveals itself for what it really is when you bite into it. All this was part of the learning experience we went through when we first arrived in Italy so that by the time we left in April 2010, we had become thoroughly Lidl-ised, possibly even addicted.

Imagine our surprise when we first started exploring Yeovil after our arrival here in August last year when we found ourselves within easy walking distance of our own Lidl supermarket. This was like home from home for us and the reminders of our Italian life were everywhere we looked. But there was still one thing missing for us, one product that was a particular favourite of my brother Graham, and soon became ours too as thanks to his generosity a bowl full of these things always appeared before us at the end of our climb up to his Torri apartment. It was not until early December that our local Yeovil Lidl finally started to stock our favourite ‘Crusty Croc’ crisps, paprika flavour. Thanks Bro’ for introducing us to a snack that now takes our minds back twelve months with consummate ease.

And what has been happening around the home whilst all this reminiscing has been taking place? Well, I am doing another apprenticeship in plumbing, connecting complex bits of copper together so that water can flow around the shower and the small sink we have squeezed in. Kate puts herself at great risk by holding the pipes together so that I can apply the blowtorch and solder them up; such bravery. She still has both eyebrows so things must be going reasonably OK.

New Year forecast: showers

As we move into the final phase of our house refurbishment we start it with a new spring in our steps because it is an important transformation we are about to make. The plan is to install a shower in a large fitted cupboard connected to our back bedroom. We bought the pieces for this some weeks ago – the shower tray, the shower cubicle, two large plastic sections to make the walls watertight and a funny little waste trap – so all we have to do is to connect these bits together and its done. Easy really.

Except that this is a first for us both. We are complete virgins when it comes to shower installation, babes in the wood. So the first task is to convince ourselves that we can do it! Well we can check that one off because we did all the convincing necessary months ago before we started on the whole project. A shower is a simple thing after all, water flows in through some pipes and goes out through some other ones.

A shower cubicle is merely a means for airing the water for a short period, the time it takes to get the human body clean, and then it allows the used water to escape the house under gravity. Simple really.

Next comes the difficult bit. Where does one start on a job like this? Well there is the cupboard space to make ready, wallpaper to strip off (Kate loves doing this), some wooden bits to demolish (I’m getting good at this) and then… Well sooner or later we’ll need some holes for all those water pipes so this seems to be a good place to start. Gravity is the medium by which the water will flow away so this means that the pipes will need to be slanted downwards. Hmm, this is suddenly a little more tricky as the shower tray, by its very nature, is already level with the floor. So either it will have to be raised up higher in some way or else the pipes will have to run under the floor. A decision has to be made before we can go any further.

At this point we decide to read the instructions. Sadly this is not like assembling kitchen units where there is a clear path starting with “Stick the little round plugs in all the holes on part A” and ending with “Now fit the legs”. With the shower there is no one clear thing that has to be done first, no natural order. So after much deliberation we finally decide that the shower waste water must flow down the same pipes as used by the bath, which is in the next room, and I begin by making a hole in the wall at what I hope is the appropriate spot. This is by no means easy as our walls are solid but after a lot of noise and banging, whirring away with the drill, chipping away with a chisel, there is a passage through which a pipe can pass. Straightforward really.

But the other piece of this part of the project is the bathroom, the same one that lies just beyond the far end of the hole I have made. We have a whole host of ideas for smartening things up in there, starting with the pine ceiling boards (may they rest in peace) and moving on through new tiling and replacements for the sink and the toilet, both of which are cracked. Oh, and we have already bought those bits, too. There is just so much to focus on, too much is buzzing around our heads. We need to re-group our thoughts, take time off perhaps, and let our unconscious brains come up with a plan.

So we leap on an early morning bus headed for Taunton and treat ourselves to some New Year’s Eve shopping, not really our style at all but enough of a distraction to give our heads a rest. After a cold day ducking in and out of shops to find warmth Kate comes home with a nice new outfit and some shoes while I manage to force open my wallet sufficiently to buy a matched pair of cup shaped pieces made from a soft silicon-rubber. Be careful not to let the imagination wander here; these are PoachPods, the latest cooking tool for making perfect poached eggs. They float like green lilies in boiling water until four minutes later the egg is cooked right through and waiting to be flipped out onto its toast underlay. Quite exquisite.

En route home from Taunton we drop into our local pub, the Great Western, to sample some ale and we slip easily into conversation with the owner of a dog which has the head of a Great Dane and the hind quarters of a Bulldog. When this perfectly proportioned beast turns her large brown eyes towards us we are done for, trapped in their gaze, but she is fickle too and the next person to arrive gets the same treatment. She has a habit of leaning gently against your leg and will actually fall over if you move away, making you feel the guilty party. We like this pub because of the random nature of the customers and their willingness to chat to whoever comes in through the door. An itinerant portrait artist called Peter modestly starts to show us his latest sketches and talks too about dinghy sailing. He is about to head off to London for the New Year festivities whereas we stagger homewards to warmth, hoping for an early night. Fat chance! There is a party happening across the road. This and the fireworks make sure we are still awake for the start of 2011, which is sort of nice.

Soon we’ll be back at work after our short break. One thing we can forecast for this year is that there will be lots of showers.

Happy New Year all!

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.