Identity crisis

With the threat of Identity cards looming, the subject of identity and how to prove it is big news here in the UK at the moment. We have in recent years had to jump through extraordinary hoops, for instance, to open new bank accounts because anti-money laundering legislation now requires proof that you are who you say you are, and live where you say you live, before the account is set up.

So it was with some surprise I learned recently that a friend who is getting married this year has been able to apply for a passport in her married name, and has actually had the passport issued, several months before the ceremony is due to take place.

Naturally I hope things go well for her and that her and her partner enjoy a long and happy married life, but the simple fact is she is now in possession of a legal document for someone who effectively doesn't yet exist. What would happen if, between now and then, the wedding is called off? Would anyone check the validity of the passport if the wedding didn't take place? I very much doubt it. Passports tend to be taken at face value, and this attitude to the validity of such an important document as a passport, widely seen as a lynchpin of someone's legal identity, is only legitimate if the checks that are made before issue are completely watertight.

The last time I got married, my new wife travelled on her original passport in her maiden name and we took the marriage certificate with us. She was only able to exchange her old passport for one in her married name by submitting both the original and the wedding certificate to the passport office, thus proving that the marriage had already occurred.

This new approach, undoubtedly instigated in an attempt to be helpful and "citizen-centric," appears to be open to unwitting or deliberate abuse in those cases where the expected marriage doesn't happen (or indeed, in nefarious cases, was never intended to happen).

Going "home"

I took my girls home tonight. It's been great having them here since Boxing Day - a much longer time than we usually get to spend with them, and even when we don't do much more than eat, talk and watch TV, it's still wonderful to be able to spend time with them and just be "normal."

But however long they stay, there always comes that time when I have to take them "home." The trips back to Yorkshire are totally different from the journeys to Manchester. When I pick them up, we all have news of what's happened since we last saw each other, school events, social events, how we're all getting along with various projects. We hardly stop talking until the moment we pull up outside the house.

On the way back? Mostly silence. We usually kill the emptiness by listening to some music (this time round, Black Holes and Revelations by Muse) but there's very rarely any conversation. I can't speak for them, but for me this is largely because I'm feeling a bit down knowing that I won't be seeing them again for a while - usually two weeks - and that I'm gonna miss them. The house always seems so quiet when I get back and they're not here.

Have you read The Bible?

We were all watching a celebrity edition of The Weakest Link this evening when the question came up "who betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver?" to which I immediately responded "Judas."

After a few minutes, Blythe asked me if I'd read the Bible. I said no (although in my teens I did give it a go. I never got past the middle of Genesis - all that x begat y and y begat z and people living to the age of 900 kind of put me off) and asked her why she'd asked.

"Well you knew the answer to that Judas question," she replied.

No bad reflection on my younger daughter, but she's thirteen and growing up in what ostensibly is a Christian country. I've never considered myself a devout Christian or a bible-basher, but I knew the story of Judas by the time I was eight, purely because of the teaching I was exposed to in what was then an average junior school. Now, my daughters have both studied all sorts of alternative religions as part of their "religious education" - Hindu, Buddhist, Islam, Shinto - and I honestly believe this is a good thing. The less ignorance there is about other people's beliefs the easier it is for everyone to rub along together (IMO). But why should that be an excuse not to teach about Christianity, especially when that is the mainstream religion of Britain? I'm no Christian fundamentalist, but it seems to me that such woeful ignorance of even the most basic stories from scripture loosens the bonds of our culture and can only be a Bad Thing.

This is an old story - many newspaper headlines from the past year and before tell it - but why must we be so apologetic about having, preaching and teaching a religion in Britain? All around, Christian symbols are being taken down, greetings at this time of year are watered down to "Happy Holidays" instead of "Happy Christmas" and the number of cards on sale with nativity or religious scenes reduces year by year, all for the sake of avoiding "offence" to other religions.

Hang on - I'm not offended if someone wishes me "Happy Hannukah" or a colleague at work brings in a box of chocolates so we can all celebrate Diwali. And of all my many friends, colleagues and acquaintances, whose various faiths are numerous, none of them are offended by me wishing them Happy Christmas. Why would they be?

First fire

Owing to a trauma suffered as a teenager, Nikki has never been very keen on open fires. I should rephrase that: she's actively avoided having one. But our new home has four fireplaces, three of which are open and one - in the study - which has a wood burning stove. So it was inevitable that at some stage during the winter, I was going to want to put a fire in.

And what better time to do that than when we're all at home intending to enjoy a quiet day watching "Christmas telly" - i.e. old movies, DVDs and catching up with stuff that's been languishing on the PVR since the summer? So off I trudged to the wood store and filled my bucket. I'd not been certain of being able to persuade Nikki that this was a good idea, so I wasn't prepared with firelighters or quantities of kindling. I did have a couple of old newspapers lying around though, and soon had a small fire set with twigs, bits of broken door and (very) small logs.

Within a few minutes, we had our very first fire and in true "real fire" style it looked a lot warmer than it actually was. Even so I still think it's true that you can't beat real flame. We turned the lights down low, snuggled up on the sofas, put Pixar's "Cars" on the DVD player, turned on the demo surround sound system and settled down for a cozy afternoon's viewing (interrupted only by three further trips to the wood store - I'll have to get a bigger bucket!).

I wimped out mid-evening. It had started to rain around 4 o'clock and I'd already made one damp trip for more wood through the downpour. Faced with a combination of torrential rain and darkness I decided to let the fire die out, which it did around 8. Lovely while it lasted though, and with a fine mesh fireguard in place, Nikki learned to love it too :o)

Christmas at the Azad Manzil

Last Christmas Day, we took Mum and our good friend Annie out for a Christmas curry to the Azad Manzil. The food was fabulous and the place was rammed, with a 'party' atmosphere to die for - everyone wishing everyone else a Happy Christmas - so we really enjoyed the experience and had originally intended doing the same this year. That was, until we'd been in our new home about a month and I began to feel that for the first Christmas here I'd prefer a traditional meal around our own dining table.

Having bought a massive turkey crown, our plans were royally thwarted when the oven packed in last Thursday. We'd cooked a perfect pizza the night before, when suddenly the oven decided it would leave its burner languishing at a height of half an inch and never rise above a temperature of 250°

So it was back to plan A, and we booked in at the Azad Manzil.

The first change we noticed was the menu. A choice of only one traditional or one curry meal, either of which had to be booked in advance. I've been a dedicated curry eater for over 30 years and I'd never heard of the dish on offer as "Meal B" - a chicken Kurzi - but we ordered two of those and two traditionals. The second difference was that they wouldn't let us book in for two o'clock: they were only catering for one sitting, which was at 3pm. Both of these changes, while perfectly understandable from a catering point of view and not being especially disappointing, did put a slight damper on our expectations.

We were right to be concerned. We arrived shortly after 3pm to find only two other tables occupied. Half an hour later when the "single sitting" began to be served, no more than six tables were taken and the atmosphere was more like a graveyard than a celebration. Service was quite slow and perfunctory (in complete contrast to the jovial atmosphere of last year) and although the Kurzi - which turned out to be a tandoori chicken covered with something like a curried bolognese sauce - was pleasant, it would never have been my first choice. To top it all, the Rasmalai promised on the menu (my favourite Indian dessert) was never offered, and Gulab Jamin (which I hate) were substituted without a word.

We left feeling completely let down and I doubt very much whether we'll be back for a third visit next year (oven willing!).

Entertaining Mother

Christmas Eve, and for the fifth year running I set off early to pick up my Mum. She spends three days with us, and normally enjoys the change, but after a year of failing health I was expecting this year to be more of an ordeal for her. Looking on the bright side, it would have been worse had we still been at the old house, which had many more stairs to negotiate. With deteriorating hip joints and muscle wastage in one leg, she finds stairs increasingly difficult and had at one point declared that she would sleep on a sofa because she wouldn't be able to get upstairs.

Having assembled the portable pharmacy she needs to carry with her these days, we set off back home just after 11am. The roads had been relatively quiet on the way down, but by this time everyone had woken up to the fact of it being the last shopping day, and the journey through Stockport was very slow.

The journey from Nottingham takes about two hours so we arrived at the predicted time and gave Mum the ground floor tour, leaving the upper floors until my cousin and her husband arrived. I needn't have worried quite so much about the stairs - turns out in the last couple of days Mum has improved slightly and developed a way of getting up that is slow but effective.

Trish and Rob stayed for tea and sandwiches and headed off around 6pm leaving us with the evening telly. There was a time, and I'm sure this is not a rose-tinted memory, when our whole family could sit and watch TV quite happily together. Maybe the lack of choice back then (when I left the parental home there were only three channels available) forced us to be less discerning and/or more easily satisfied, or perhaps it's a complex combination of factors, but I find it almost impossible to watch in the company of my mother for any length of time. So much has changed since those days of my adolescence. Back then television was our main form of entertainment. Now, while my Mum remains glued to the same narrow spectrum of programs (soaps and crime dramas such as Poirot and Morse), we barely watch an hour's TV per night, preferring instead to spend time online, playing games, reading, or with friends.

Even when our telly habits overlap - as with soaps - it's not always a good match. We watch EastEnders; she doesn't. She watches Emmerdale; we don't. And our attitudes to the storylines couldn't be more polarised. David Platt's exposure of grandma Audrey's affair with Bill Webster, for instance, which took place over the family meal on Christmas Day in front of Bill's wife was greeted by us with cries of "Excellent!" and howls of laughter. My Mum sat stony-faced and muttered: "He needs a damned good hiding."

And once the soaps are over for the night, there is very little we can find that will satisfy our mutual viewing needs. Mum's lived on her own for 13 years now, and is used to having sole charge of the remote. Since we're not prepared to sit in front of endless rehashes of Midsomer Murders or The Inspector Linley Mysteries, whatever we choose to watch is punctuated by regular tuts or exasperated exhalations from Mum's corner of the room followed shortly with "I think I'll go to bed, John." No, it's never relaxing watching TV in the company of the aged P, but in some strange way it has come to represent the distillation of 21st century Christmases.

Mulled wine, mates and home cinema

What a weekend this has been! New friends and old friends in abundance and although not the official housewarming, our new home now feels even warmer and more friendly than it did before.

We learned from the previous owners that they had held a mulled wine evening somewhere close to Christmas for the last five years. Right from the off we were very keen to uphold this local tradition. There was a momentary hiccup while we debated with some other neighbours who should hold it, because we'd been told they had expressed an interest in doing it this year. Having spoken with them, it turned out this was only a backstop in case "the new people" didn't want to do it. As soon as we convinced them we really wanted to have the party here, they more or less insisted we do it.

With most of the house still to some extent in a mess, we had to leave it until the last possible weekend before Christmas to organise it, so eventually the date was set for Friday 15th and invites went out. We had one decline (previous engagement) and no other replies, so we didn't have any idea what to expect - but the last thing we anticipated was the arrival, on the dot, of the person who said she couldn't make it. "Hubby's been delayed at work, so I thought I'd just pop over and show my face," she laughed, and was joined a few minutes later by another neighbour in a similar situation. Both she and her husband were off to different works' dos but she wanted to support the event and stayed for a glass of wine.

We learned from the first that she was still getting "funny mail" having been here more than ten years (not sure whether that was a comfort or not!) and from the second that her kitchen man had managed to install her entire kitchen for less than a quarter of what we were quoted. A useful man to know!

After slightly overstaying their declared thirty minutes, both these ladies made their apologies and left, and Nikki and I stood in perfect pre-party gloom, alone with our cups of mulled wine wondering whether anyone else was going to turn up. We needn't have worried: during the next hour more-or-less the whole street turned up, and the wine, cheese and excellent conversation flowed well into the night. The "second era" of mulled wine parties was well and truly ushered in that night and we thoroughly enjoyed it.

The following day we were up early again and preparing to welcome all my mates from Nottingham for the weekend. After the successes of the Great Orme weekend and the 50th birthday celebrations we were determined to keep up the pace of get-togethers since there'd been a bit of a cultural desert in the middle of the year. We just managed to squeeze this date in before Christmas and it was the first time anyone had seen the new place.

Once everyone had arrived, had a brew and been given the 50c tour, we caught the bus into town to take in the Christmas markets. Not surprisingly (this was the markets' last weekend of trading) they were all rammed, but we had a good look around and then repaired to Sinclairs Oyster Bar for a very welcome couple of pints. We timed it perfectly - hitting the upstairs while there was still one table free and space at the bar. Within 15 minutes of our arrival it was standing room only and three deep at the bar!

Walking back up Market Street, we caught the bus from Piccadilly and on arrival home sat those who were fans down in front of Strictly Come Dancing while we prepared a chilli. It was a squeeze fitting eight around our dining table, but SO great to have everyone there enjoying the meal, laughing and joking. For me, at that moment, the spirit of Christmas crystallised. There is surely nothing better than welcoming your oldest friends and their partners into your home and sharing a wonderful meal together.

There then followed a shift change in front of the TV as the Strictly Come Dancing fans made way for the X Factor fans and we watched the final, with (naturally) rather more piss-taking than normal service would have expected. Pretty soon after we were all showing our age - various nodding heads paying homage to the lateness of the hour, the full bellies and the quantity of quaffage, so we declared an end to proceedings and went to our various beds.

Sunday morning dawned bright and bleary and with a traditional breakfast of bacon baps tucked away, the mates departed each to their own destinations. For while I still refer to them all as "my Nottingham mates" the truth is they only originated in Nottingham. Nowadays only two of our group live there (and one had not come for the weekend). The rest of us are more widely dispersed but still answer to the title "Nottingham mates" and ever mote it be.

The excitement of the weekend was not yet over, however: a further surprise was yet to come in the form of Annie offering us an option of a second-hand home-cinema-surround-sound system she'd been hawking around on behalf of another friend. Scarcely pausing to draw breath she was upon us, wiring up a demo (sans sub woofer) and insinuating the delights of surround sound under our skins to the point where we could hardly refuse the deal. Like I said at the beginning: WHAT a weekend!

It's *your* responsibility

One of the most apparently innocuous aspects of the weekly grocery shop is something I find really irritating and makes me keenly aware on a regular basis what a topsy-turvy world we've created for ourselves.

It's the warning on the travelator between the ground and first floor levels at Asda Trafford.

A model of high technology, Asda have installed detectors at the top and bottom of each travelator and, when anyone comes within range, the detectors initiate a recorded woman's voice saying "Approaching landing level; please take care." The detectors are finely tuned and can distinguish people standing only a few inches apart. The message is played for each person detected and when walking around that end of the store there is an almost constant background noise of "Approaching landing level; please take care...Approaching landing level; please take care...Approaching landing level; please take care."

How much money it cost to install I have no idea, but Asda clearly believed it was money well spent to ensure that not only had they done everything possible to avoid a customer falling off the end of the moving walkway and suing them for negligence, but also each individual customer would, as far as possible, hear their own personal message. But negligence? Like it's not their own responsibility, having stepped onto the device, to maintain sufficient awareness of where they are to know when the end is nigh.

Not so very long ago, it would have been sufficient to install a (silent!) sign saying something like "end of travelator approaching - face forward." Indeed airports still seem to manage perfectly well with this simple measure - I have not yet heard a verbal warning in an airport and I hope I never do. And of course, before the advent of such signs we had something called "common sense" which imbued everyone with the ability to face the right way, watch out for the end of an escalator or travelator, and step off it on their own like real grown up people. What's more, if they tripped up off the end, they would most likely have thought "stupid me," got up and walked on.

In recent years we've heard a lot about "human rights" but not much about human responsibilities. Like taking responsibility for your own actions and not looking for someone else to blame when something happens to you that you should have foreseen, or could have avoided with a bit of thought. I despair sometimes, wondering how today's kids will survive growing up in a "warning environment" where they are never expected to fend, or even think, for themselves. Where they learn to expect to be told what to do at every step of every process. Like when the landing level is approaching.

Spare room decorating: Finished!

Today was a day for finishing things. The boiler refit was completed and the boiler commissioned by about 6pm, after a freezing day at home with both front and back doors open all day. In the end I shut myself in the study with only an oil heater for company but at least I was warm enough for my fingers to move over the keyboard.

With the painting complete (including retouching where the "low touch" masking tape had pulled off paint - and sometimes paper - from the edges of the peachy walls) we could move the furniture back in to spare bedroom and rehang the curtains. OK, being the original curtains they don't exactly match the rest of the room anymore, but they'll do for now. And the room needs a light fitting (one I've saved from several houses ago which has been looking for a home for almost 20 years) and some small bedside tables and a small dresser, and we haven't yet decided what to do about all the stripped doors in the house, but hey - it's decorated!)

Lunchtime was taken up with completing the assembly of the wardrobe. I reckon this has taken about nine hours to put together, but the end result looks great and we can finally take the rest of our clothes out of boxes and portable wardrobes exactly two months after moving in!

Finally, we erected and decorated the new Christmas tree. With so many cracks between floorboards we decided a long time ago that we'd give up having a real tree. We both love them but they're a pain to fetch, you can never find exactly the right shape and getting rid of them afterwards is more pain, so artificial it is. Still looks nice though and it fits the hall perfectly.

Spare room decorating: Day 8

Another day working at home (in this case because I had to be here to let the heating engineers in - we're having the old boiler ripped out and a fab new combi boiler installed) so the second coat of copper on that fourth wall was my lunchtime task again for today.

Since we're without heating tonight (old boiler has gone; new boiler not yet connected) we kept warm by carrying on with the assembly of the wardrobe. Completed the two-door section and the complete carcase of the single-door section. These imports are very well put together, but as always the instructions are not quite up to the mark. For instance - the picture shows that the strengthening blocks at the four corners at the back have to be screwed in at stage 4, so when you come to bolt the two sections of wardrobe together at stage 12, you can't get two of the bolts in because the blocks are in the way! Doh!

Oh, and we figured out where those two weird feet go on the bed. With it being a super king (6-foot) bed, the central support strut carrying the slats needs those two feet screwing to it to hold it up. And the rest of the screws? They're for the slats themselves - three each side - so they don't slide about under the mattress. That would have taken just one picture - come on guys!

Spare room decorating: Day 7

Since I've now run out of holiday and had to go back to work, progress has slowed to a crawl but luckily I can work at home today and with only one wall left to paint I can get the first coat on in my lunch hour. This is the feature wall, so it's copper.

Spare room decorating: Day 6

Last day of the holiday and as I applied the second coat of peach to the three walls it was clear I wouldn't be finishing the room in the allotted time - that ceiling had set me back a day and I never recovered it. I have to wait until the peach is properly dry before I mask off around the edges of the fourth wall, so that will have to wait.

The painting didn't take too long, so I was soon on to the next task of the day - assembling the three-door wardrobe that was delivered yesterday. Most of the furniture was delivered already assembled, but the wardrobe had arrived in five separate packages and it wasn't until I opened the fifth package that I found the instructions! A small panic there! It was obvious from the off that this isn't a one-person job and what's more, it's going to take more than one evening, but I managed to get the first two-thirds of the carcase together so at least it would stand up on its own.

The Christmas do

A day off from decorating! After five solid days I was ready for it, and yesterday was the day of Nikki's work's Christmas do at Moorside Grange. The celebrations started early - too early to do any decorating as we had to be there between 2 and 3pm for post-check-in drinks.

After checking in and dumping our bags we joined the other early birds for a couple of beers in the bar. I'd had a feeling of déja vu since learning where this place was, and turning into the lane it's on I'd finally remembered it as the place I'd spent a rather unhappy two days at a business conference almost seven years earlier. I think it might have been called something else back then.

Early drinks over we escaped to our room to shower and prepare for the evening's "entertainment" - which consisted of more drinks in the bar (including cocktails) and then being frogmarched into the Pennine suite banqueting hall with about 180 other unfortunates. It was bloody freezing in there but before long we were served our gruel to mark the start of the meal. Now I know "Christmas party" catering has an apocryphal bad name but this reached new depths. I wonder whose job it was to count the sprouts onto the plates, because we all had exactly four baby sprouts, along with two slivers of carrot, four small balls of something that resembled roast potato, two slices of turkey breast and a very small pig in a threadbare blanket. In my case this was followed by one of those individual cheesecakes that you only get at mass catering dos - looks like a small gasometer and tastes like shaving foam.

With only a disco to look forward to after that, and neither of us fancying our chances on the postage stamp dance floor we beat a retreat as soon as it was politely possible and crashed out in the (passably comfortable) room, only to be woken at 6am by the sound of the very high moorland winds rattling the tiles beside our window, which was set in a cross gable.

Spare room decorating: Day 5

Big painting day today, starting with the second coat of gloss on the picture rail and then moving on to the ceiling, where I hope one coat of white emulsion will be enough (I hate painting ceilings). I'm using the same builder's grade white emulsion on the walls above the picture rail.

After lunch I moved down to apply the first coat of peach emulsion to three walls and once that was complete it was obvious that the walls above the picture rail needed another coat of white, so I cracked on with that too.

I would have finished painting earlier had it not been for the arrival of the OvenU man to clean our range. For the first couple of days after we moved in we were convinced there was a gas leak in the kitchen, but it turned out to be the cooker - it was absolutely filthy. We did our best to clean the worst off the main oven so that we could use it, but we didn't want to go anywhere near the grill pan which was an inch deep in rancid fat. Nikki found these guys online - they turn up, take your cooker apart, clean it with industrial-strength stuff and reassemble it. We had them do the cooker hood too, which was also thick with grease. It took the man almost four hours but by the time he'd finished it looked like new. Trouble was whenever I came down from the decorating for a brew, he'd regale me with oven-cleaning tales. Each cuppa ended up taking half an hour!

The second distraction was the arrival mid-afternoon of our new bedroom furniture from Ivy House. After several weeks' searching online we finally went for the Quebec range and it was delivered today in twelve packages (plus mattress). The delivery guys were very helpful and agreed to take most of them up to the first floor, but the two largest wouldn't go up the stairs, prompting Nikki to worry that we'd have to send the whole lot back. I was pretty sure that whatever was in those parcels would fit once the packaging was removed, but even so there's always that small voice of doubt.

Fortunately we'd already arranged to eat with Annie at Wetherspoons so she gave me a lift up with (what turned out to be) the headboard and footboard for our new sleigh bed. Nikki was keen to get the bed assembled - we'd moved our old bed into the study the previous night to leave room for the delivery - so it was another late night by the time we'd figured out where everything went.

Well, not quite everything. We had two strange looking feet left over when it was all put together. Just blocks of wood really with rubber feet on, and a bag containing ten screws. There were no instructions with the bed, and it was too late to work it out, so we gave up wondering and went to bed.

Spare room decorating: Day 4

Today felt like a turning point in the decorating project - the first day I'd dipped a paint brush to apply a final coat - the first coat of satinwood gloss on the picture rail.

My main target for today was to complete the papering. This was the second experiment in the room - to investigate whether heavy-duty (1000 grade) lining paper was good enough to cover the blemishes on the rather strange plasterwork. If it wasn't, it meant that in all the other rooms we'd have to strip the plaster back to brick and have them replastered - obviously a much longer, dirtier and more expensive process and one we wanted to avoid if possible.

We still haven't figured out exactly how the walls in this house have been plastered, but one thing's for sure: we've never seen anything like it. Every wall of the house is roughly finished in what looks like Artex. None of it is done in traditional Artex patterns (apart from the bathroom). It's as if the original plaster was in really bad condition so they had someone in to do the cheapest repair possible - only he wasn't a professional plasterer so he's skimmed it all with Artex. Yuck. Anyway, we're giving the lining paper approach a try - simple, quick and cheap :o)

Another late finish tonight - after 11pm - but the whole room is papered and ready for painting - yayyy!

Spare room decorating: Day 3

After the previous day's disaster with the mega-plank, the first task for today was a trip back to B&Q for a more realistically-sized version. I had another surprise in store - all the shorter planks were more expensive. Didn't take me long to figure out the answer to this though - I bought another 3.6 metre plank and had the man at the cutting desk chop it down to 2.5 metres. Much easier to fit into the car too!

Back home the first job was to sand down the stripped picture rail & rub it down with wire wool soaked in white spirit. Once done, the surface of the wood was a lot cleaner and smoother. If I'd taken more care I could easily have varnished it and left it at that, but I knew that would mean having to strip the skirting boards too and I was on a deadline for this room. It had to be ready for my Mum to use at Christmas, and Blythe a day or two after that.

Final task for today was papering the ceiling - and I knew I had to get the whole lot done in a day to remain on schedule. I've only ever papered a ceiling once before, but the task was made easier by having the new improved plank to hand, and also by the choice of paper - an embossed vinyl which was quite lightweight while still being very resilient. I finished papering a little after 9.30pm and collapsed into the bath exhausted.

Spare room decorating: Day 2

As I mentioned yesterday the spare bedroom, along with most of the other rooms in the house, has some cracks in the ceiling. I'd assumed these were similar to the cracks we used to get in our previous house - that is, they were due to shrinkage or settlement and could be filled and sanded in the usual way. Err...wrong. Turns out the old lath and plaster ceilings have been covered with some sort of heavy-duty paint (possibly latex paint) which had cracked in places and started to peel back. Once I started at this with a scraper it quickly became obvious that I wasn't going to be able to get a good result with filler - the cracks were too shallow - and in any case large areas of paint started to flake off.

I concluded the whole lot needed to be taken off before papering the ceiling; a decision which cost me the whole day and a very sore shoulder!

After climbing repeatedly up and down my step ladder for several hours last night, I'd also decided it was time to buy a plank. This was the first task of the day, as I figured it would save a lot of time and bruised feet. But finding a supplier was tough going. I really wanted a simple scaffolding plank, but couldn't find anywhere that sold them. Eventually I reached B&Q Warehouse in Trafford and found something close to what I was looking for in the builder's yard - a 3.6 metre length of rough-sawn timber for a little over £8. They had shorter ones, but I wanted to be able to set the plank up between two ladders and walk the length of the room without getting down. 3.6 metres looked perfect.

It wasn't so perfect when I got it out to the car though - it wouldn't fit! I had a verrrrry slow journey home, with the plank sticking out of the passenger window and me hanging onto it with one arm; driving with the other. For a start it would slide off its resting place on the door mirror if I cornered too quickly. If I drove any faster than about 25mph the plank would catch the air like a wing and fly up to the top of the window, and if that wasn't enough I was seriously worried about clipping a street light or a parked car with the front end of the plank. I knew I'd only do this once - even at 20mph it would have taken out the rear of my car in a second since the plank was so thick and heavy. Ever noticed how when you're in this situation there are always more police cars around than normal? None of them paid me any attention beyond a few funny looks.

Once I'd safely reached home I soon realised I'd made a big mistake. The plank, which now looked MUCH bigger than it had in the builder's yard - was almost too long to fit through the front door. With great care I got it into the hall, and then upstairs, but it was obvious that it was going to be too long to use in the little room. Back to the stepladder for the day. Doh!

Spare room decorating: Day 1

My last week's holiday starts today and the goal is to complete redecoration of the spare bedroom - the smallest room in the house (besides the smallest room, of course!). It's a bit of a test case in two respects. Firstly I'll be investigating the most effective way of removing the metallic gloss paint from off the picture rail.

We have this in most rooms of the house - it's one of the ubiquitous and idiosyncratic décor features beloved of the previous owners. We've kept it in the lounge (for now) but up here I'm going to see what it looks like with a more traditional white satin finish. This particular room has a gold rail but we also enjoy copper and bronze rails in other rooms.

The other experiment involves lining paper, but more of that later. Today's job is to strip the picture rail and I'm all set up with a can of Nitromors, a pile of wire wool, some white spirit and a pair of heavy duty rubber gloves. One small drawback is the fact that the bedroom window is painted shut so I can't get as much ventilation in the room as I'd like when using Nitromors. Nevertheless I began on a two-foot section by the door, painting the solution on as instructed and waiting five minutes. I spent those five minutes on the computer in another room in deference to the fumes! The next part of the procedure is to work another thick coat of Nitromors into the loosened paint on top of the previous coat, stippling the paint with the brush. I have to say it looks like the brush I'm using will be ruined so I'm glad I chose a cheap one for the job, and I'm also a little concerned at the globs of Nitromors-soaked paint that are falling onto the skirting board and blistering the sleeving on the telephone wire tacked down there.

After a further twenty minutes soaking, the blistered gloopy mixture is ready to be scraped off (carefully!) with a shavehook, revealing the bare wood. Except the wood isn't completely bare - it has several small sections where the paint has not been completely lifted from the surface, so according to the instructions I have to go over this again with coarse wire wool soaked in Nitromors. More mess, more fumes! I'm not enjoying this.

After scraping the rest of the mess off I went over the section again with more wire wool, this time soaked in white spirit. I have to say this is not the most rapid process - it's taken me two hours to clean off two feet of rail (it's the small white section in this picture, which also shows the interesting original rag rolling on the walls) and it's not been pretty. The room is full of carcinogens, the floor is covered in chemical waste and the rail still doesn't look especially clean. If I was intending to varnish onto bare wood it would need more processing but luckily I'll be painting it.

Having wasted so much time on this I decided to "blow torch" the rest using a hot-air stripper and the next two hours saw me stripping off almost twelve feet of rail. Much more effective and a much better finish. I think the rest of the Nitromors can will be relegated to stripping small sections of detailed moulding, if I ever have any. With the picture rail stripped bare, it was time to start scraping and filling the cracks in the ceiling, but I soon realised this was more of a job than it looked.

My new teenager

I've got a new teenager. No, I didn't get her from a shop: she grew up! My younger daughter turned 13 yesterday, and as this weekend was one of their visits, we took them out to Chorlton's newest Japanese restaurant: Yakisoba. We'd heard good things about the place from friends and online forums so we took a chance and went straight there. Normally with a new place Nikki and I will suss it out before taking the girls, in case the menu is weird, or there's something wrong with the place. This time, we put out trust in the good reports, and it paid off really well.

The only online review I could find wasn't very complimentary, but we found the food appetising, the menu varied and the presentation impeccable. But the highlight of the evening was the aromatic crispy duck which both Blythe and I ordered. Not especially Japanese, I hear you say, but it is a firm favourite with all of us and when we realised they serve individual portions, we couldn't resist. SIX pancakes per portion, and easily enough duck to fill them all. Fabulous.

Epigenetics, or "why I got fat"

So following on from the programme on graphene was another fascinating Radio 4 show, this time about epigenetics. There's a huge amount of material available online explaining what this is (try this BBC Horizon link or this news item on the link between epigenetics and obesity, or there's always Wikipedia) so I don't intend to go in for a huge long explanation here, but simply put epigenetics is the idea that it's not only your genes that control how you develop but also the effects of external environmental factors on your genes. These factors can turn genes on or off and are especially influential during foetal development or, in males, before sperm start to develop.

A boy's environment, behaviour, nutrition, etc can affect the gametes and effect changes not only on that boy's children but on his children's children.

Of particular interest to me was the statistical revelation that a father who started smoking before reaching the age of puberty was much more likely to have children that were fatter than average in later life.

So it's nothing to do with all the pies I've eaten! It's because my Dad started smoking when he was eight!

Graphene

There's an interesting science program on Radio 4 called The Material World that I often catch when I'm in the car driving from work to pick Nikki up. Today it was about something called Graphene, which I'd never heard of before but which sounds very exciting. I knew of Buckminsterfullerene (or bucky balls) which is made of a number of carbon atoms - 60 if I remember right - arranged in a sphere or ball shape and is one of the most stable carbon molecules to be discovered. It's named after Buckminster Fuller, the American architect who invented the geodesic dome, because the carbon atoms are laid out in hexagons and pentagons around the face of the sphere in exactly the same way as a dome is constructed.

Well graphene, it turns out, is a planar sheet of carbon atoms just one atom thick - a bit like a bucky ball that's been unzipped and laid out flat. Actually that's not entirely accurate because to be a perfectly flat sheet the atoms must be laid out in hexagonal cells only. The pentagons that are necessary to achieve a spherical shape, if present in graphene, cause it to bend into other shapes. Carbon nanotubes, which have caused such excitement recently in the field of nanotechnology because of their potential use in building very small structures, are simply rolls (cylinders) of graphene.

The really exciting thing about this stuff is that electrons on a sheet of graphene act as if they have no mass. They move as if they were light waves. This makes graphene extremely conductive (I think the guy on the radio show said something like a thousand million times more conductive than copper) and hence a much better bet to use in microchips. Since its isolation in 2004 graphene has become relatively easy and cheap to manufacture (it looks like soot) and physics is now in the middle of an experimental phase learning more about its amazing properties before coming up with real-world applications. The potential for extreme microminiaturisation using graphene is high, and graphene-based transistors have already been made.

If you're interested there's more on Wikipedia (as always!) and some of the external links at the bottom of that page make fascinating reading too.

Serendipity, or the hand of fate

Making sure you're in the right place at the right time is often the key to success in business, or in life. Sometimes, you don't need to make any effort for this to happen. It's as if the cosmos conspires to put you where you need to be without your conscious involvement. This happened to me today.

I've been working in Croydon for most of this year, travelling down there on the train usually once a week, often more. In all that time I've never driven myself to Piccadilly station from home: I've always taken a cab. Today, following a conversation with a colleague who takes pride in submitting the minimum expenses claims possible, my conscience was pricked and I decided to drive in and save a bit of the firm's money.

Arriving at the station after the morning rush, I discovered the surface car park opposite the station was full. I checked out the short-stay car park at the station but this cost more than price of two taxi rides, so that was a non-starter. I ended up having to park in Charles Street - about a ten minute walk away and still costing the same as a single taxi ride.

On the way home on the train this evening I was thinking about the walk back to the car, and wishing I could jump straight into a warm taxi right outside the main door of the station rather than have to walk to the car park. It wasn't raining - it could easily have been - but it was still bitterly cold, so I decided this would be the last time I worried about saving on expense claims. For the sake of eight quid I would remain comfortably ensconced in warm taxis from now on.

A few minutes later walking down Whitworth Street on my way to the car park, a woman approached me from the other side of the road. She looked really distraught.

"Can you help me?" she pleaded. Before I had time to react, she held up a car key in front of my face and continued, "look, here's my car key, just to prove what I'm saying. My car is parked over there and I've got almost no petrol left. I just need a gallon to get me home, so I'm asking three people for a pound and no-one will listen to me! I didn't want to ask for all the money in one go because three pounds is a lot to ask for isn't it? But can you give me a pound?"

This area of the city is full of vagrants and beggars, but even though she wasn't especially well dressed it was clear she wasn't one of them and the story rang true. I thought ruefully that even if it wasn't true, she deserved full marks for coming up with something so original. I looked in my pocket, intending right away to give her all the money she needed. Whitworth Street was pretty deserted at that time of night and it looked to me like her chances of finding two other people prepared to give her any money were slim to none. I asked her if £3 was really enough to get her home and where home was?

"I'm staying with my Mum in Holmfirth," she replied. An uncanny coincidence, as anyone who's read my website will know, because I used to live two miles away from Holmfirth. Without intending to prove or disprove her story, I engaged the lady in a brief conversation about the area and it was clear she knew it well. I counted out £4 in coin and handed it over with the hope that she find a petrol station somewhere close and have a safe journey home. With obvious relief she thanked me and returned across the road in the direction she'd said her car was in.

Continuing on along Whitworth Street my main thought for the first few steps was a concern that I'd given her a good chunk of my remaining cash and might not now have enough left to release my car from Charles Street car park, but I hadn't gone more than twenty yards when the reality of what had just happened hit me. This was the reason - the only reason - I had "decided" to drive into the city today for the first time this year. So that I could be there, on Whitworth Street, at exactly the right time to meet that woman and help her out. It's as if I was picked up and put there. I felt a shiver of something more than the night's cold run through me, and the frustrations and tensions of the day fell away leaving me with wonderful sense of rightness. I hope she made it home alright.

Half century celebrations #3

With uncanny serendipity, the day after my birthday was the start of a girls' weekend (you might even think we planned it that way ;o)) so the celebrations continued for another two days.

On arrival at the house, my beautiful daughters presented me with the most original, thoughtful and touching birthday present ever! "We knew we had to get you something," they said, "but we didn't know what...so we came up with this," and they handed me a heavy, suede-bound notebook upon which they had mounted the title "Book of Memories." Inside, on the first couple of dozen pages, they had glued a selection of photos, programs, tickets and drawings of many of the times we'd shared together. Holidays, baby photos, school drawings, programs from Christmas concerts, all with added messages of fun and love.

I flicked through the book with a huge smile on my face and a burgeoning tear in my eye - what a great idea! Thanks girls, that is the most special present and I will keep it and add to it with our new memories always.

This was also, coincidentally, the weekend we met Natalie's boyfriend for the first time. OK, can I say that having written that sentence I've now been sitting here for ten minutes trying to decide what else to write. It's not that I feel I have to say nice things (cos who knows who will be reading this, right?), because to do that would not be hard. It wouldn't be "an effort" to find something nice to say. It's more that...I guess some Dads would build it up to be a big deal meeting a daughter's first serious b/f for the first time, but it never really felt like that. He's a nice lad, very polite, has a good sense of humour (and I don't just mean he laughed at my jokes, before you start - he gave as good as he got) but really none of that is important to me. The main thing - the only important thing - is that he makes Natalie happy, and as long as he continues to do that he's alright with me.

So the celebrations continued with an evening visit to the Nawaab - our local and much-loved curry buffet restaurant - which never fails to impress - followed by a group watching of Galaxy Quest (a family favourite). It doesn't get much better than this! I never knew being 50 would be so much fun!

Half century celebrations #2

It's always a pisser when your birthday falls on a working day isn't it? Well actually, not this time.

For a start I was working from home, which is always much more relaxed and convivial. A good supply of tea and the quiet atmosphere broken only by the obligatory 10 o'clock revving of the neighbour's Reliant Robin engine as he reversed out of his garage. Today the atmosphere was greatly improved by the early arrival of two esteemed colleagues for an "off-site meeting" at MANJB - the new designation of our house which (kind of) follows the coding convention applied to our office locations.

After the obligatory tour of the premises (one of the guys had not been here before), second pot of tea, and connection of the mini-switch to the home network to give them both access to the corporate VPN, we settled down to discuss important matters of business. It was a bit of a crush since we still only have one table in the study (the other is doing double-duty as a kitchen table at the moment pending relocation of the microwave), but that only served to engender a sort of enforced camaraderie and a feeling of "camping out" which added to the fun.

With the massed brains all firing at full capacity the work was quickly dispensed with and we repaired to the pub for lunch. I'd selected the excellent Metropolitan in West Didsbury and despite the car park being almost full on our arrival we managed to secure seats on the comfy sofas, settle back and enjoy a pint of Tim Taylor's Landlord and a fine lunch (made even tastier by the fact that my colleagues insisted on paying for it in honour of my birthday).

With beer and excellent conversation flowing freely the time passed all too quickly and we realised we were pretty much the only ones left in the place, so the lads drove us back to MANJB, picked up their stuff and headed off leaving me to put the final touches to our presentation just in time to pick Nikki up from work.

The celebrations continued almost without pause as we then headed straight out for birthday dinner at one of our favourite restaurants before the evening rush started. The perfect end to a perfect day, and the celebrations weren't over yet!

Half century celebrations #1

I miss being the oldest out of my mates from Nottingham by eight days, beaten off the top spot by Ritchie, but since this year those eight days were bifurcated almost exactly by a weekend, that was the natural time to celebrate. We headed off to Chesterfield, arriving midday Saturday and intending to spend the afternoon ambling around Chatsworth gardens.

Unfortunately our visit was curtailed by news of serious family illness so while half our party shot off to deal with that, the rest of us repaired to the Wheatsheaf in Baslow for a few comforting pints, returning to Chesterfield early evening where the party was almost completely reunited. After a surprise exchange of presents to mark the significance of the occasion we walked around the corner to one of Phil's many locals and enjoyed another couple of pints there, being very lucky to secure a table by the door before the Saturday night crowds mobbed the place. Around 9pm we took a further short walk to our chosen eaterie for the evening, the Golden Star, where we enjoyed some of the most fabulous Chinese I've had in years. Funny...the food remains clear in my memory, but I can't remember a thing we talked about at the table the whole evening. The walk home is a bit blurry too.

The double is

I don't know if this was a regional phenomenon years ago, but for the first eighteen years of my life I never heard the double is. When I went up to UMIST I became friends with a guy from Windsor who used it all the time. I used to take the piss out of him mercilessly and he could never understand it. As far as he was concerned it was perfectly normal to say "The difference is is that I come from the South," or "What I think is is he should not of (sic) done it," or "reaching out for human faith is is like a journey I just don't have a map for."

Brief Net research suggests this abomination began in the United States (source of most English grammar mangling, unfortunately) around 1971 - which explains why I didn't hear it until 1975 - and jumped the Atlantic relatively quickly, worse luck.

In the last 10-15 years, like most appalling grammatical errors, the incorrect double is usage has gained wider currency. Whether this is due to the diaspora of "estuary English" or the dire state of grammar teaching in schools (by which I mean the almost total lack of...) or a combination of those I don't know, but it can now be heard regularly all over the country, even on what used to be considered the last bastion of grammatical correctness: Radio 4 (although the presenters on there now can't even manage their verb-subject agreement properly most of the time).

It's almost as if the speaker believes the first 'is' has become part of the preceding word. That's often how it's spoken: all run together. In the examples above it's "difference-is" or "think-is" etc.

There is, of course, a correct usage of the double is, but it is far rarer than current usage would have you believe. Used mainly for emphasis, your response to the question "what is that?" for instance, might be: "What that is, is a way of explaining how to use the double is."

The difference is that (not "is is that") in the correct usage the first "is" is always followed by a comma and is not run into the preceding word as if they were one. Try it - strike a blow for good English and a return to how things should be. And if you hear it used on Radio 4? Get on to the complaints show.

If is is is bad enough, then more recent developments are even worse. Some kind of bastardised past tense has been introduced, so we get constructs like "The only thing was is..." and only last week on The X Factor I heard Simon Cowell say "The difference being is that..." Aargh!

Back to School

My elder daughter had an interview today at Manchester University and asked me to go with her, which of course I gladly did. Apart from the chance to spend the day with her and have her stay over an extra night beforehand, which is always welcome, it meant I could revisit the hallowed halls of my university years - or at least very close to them since I was a UMIST man.

We arrived early and wandered up and down Oxford Street for a few minutes taking in the University Precinct and the student cafe until it was time to register for the event. Most of the early birds seemed to have come alone or brought young friends with them and for a while I thought I was going to be the only parent there, but after ten minutes or so it became clear this wasn't the case and I relaxed a little on Natalie's behalf. Registration complete, the "ambassadors" called us up to Whitworth hall - a most impressive oak-pillared hall already laid out with lunch which we helped ourselves to, found a seat and sat watching the rolling Powerpoint presentation detailing the Life Science departments successes while we munched on our sandwiches and canapes.

After lunch students and guests separated, and Natalie went off for her interview. Us parents and friends were treated to a tour of the campus which I found very interesting given that I'd not spent a lot of time in "Owens" buildings. I was a little insulted to find that, since the merger of the two Universities in 2004, UMIST was now referred to as "the North campus." It seemed to belittle the achievements of that fine institution and reduce it to the status of an annexe. I was reminded of the agricultural department of my home town Uni - Nottingham - which is situated in Sutton Bonington several miles south of the city and always feels like a second class citizen. Now here was my old stomping ground reduced to a similar status. I was affronted!

Still the girl assigned as our ambassador for the day - Dannika - did an excellent job showing us around the main library, the students' union, the university precinct and health centre and the main life sciences block. I was struck by how much had changed in thirty years and how much had stayed the same. The demonstration plastered all over the union building concerned abortion being a woman's right to choose - exactly the same topic as we had campaigned on in the mid 70s - and in the laboratories, aside from the water and gas taps being colour-coded and the benches being equipped with LAN points, things were pretty much as I remembered them to be. Yet in speaking with Dannika I learned that her degree course was in a branch of Biochemistry that hadn't been invented when I was at UMIST. Back then, the whole subject had been lumped together in a single course. In the interim thirty years so much more has been learned that the course has been split several times, and now there are many different Biochemistry degrees one can study.

One tradition I was glad to hear hadn't changed was the Friday Night 'Bop' at Owen's Park hall of residence. Some things are worth hanging on to! When I found out this was still going on it turned me all philosophical, wondering why it is that good things have to change - or be changed by people who don't understand their importance. I decided that outside of academia (I hesitate to call it the "real" world) things often become jaded. If you are working at a job or in a company that is the same year after year, you might feel you have to ring the changes just to keep your interest from flagging. Students never hang round long enough for this to become an issue. Most people are conservative (with a small 'c') in nature and most degree courses are only three years long, so by the time a student has become familiar with a local tradition like the Bop, or even grown with it to the point where they take over its organisation and running, it's time to hand the baton to someone else who has arrived and become enamoured with the tradition and keen to keep it going. No-one has time to get bored with it and think it needs changing.

Returning to the main hall and reunited with Natalie, we were treated to a final, in-depth look at university and faculty life. I watched the glossy presentation with half my attention, but having already switched into philosophical mode I couldn't help but be distracted by the thought that this time next year my first-born daughter would be here, or somewhere very like here, spreading her academic and social wings and (if you'll forgive the mixed metaphor) swimming in a much larger pond than she is used to.

I well remember the excitement of those first few weeks at UMIST (sorry, the "North campus") and in a way I envy her the burgeoning opportunity. Only it's not envy. I wouldn't take her place and deprive her of the chance to do it. It's more ... second-hand excitement. Excitement at the thought of all the experiences she has to come: the new friends she'll make; the new things she'll learn; and the growing she'll do as a person.

Go mail

I complied with their request and the redirection service kicked in today - almost three weeks after we moved. What about all that mail we were missing? I called the estate agent and they called the new owner. Yes, they had a pile of mail and had been worrying about what to do with it! When I eventually picked it up from the estate agent I found, amongst other things, a credit card bill that had gone overdue for payment the day before, costing me a late payment charge as well as over fifty quid in interest. I don't suppose the Post Office would be interested in settling a compensation claim?

No Mail

After a full week in the house, we began to be concerned that we weren't getting much mail. We had signed up for the mail redirection service the week before we moved and knew that it took five working days to get started, but we were expecting to receive redirected mail from the middle of the first week, at the latest. We'd had nothing.

I called the number on the form and spoke to a very nice lady who had no record of our redirection at all. They didn't know we existed. All our mail was still being delivered to the old place (except for the few things we'd managed to update our address for already). I blustered that we'd paid over sixty quid for a service we weren't getting. And the redress? I'd have to fill in a new mail redirection form, send it direct to the mail redirection service centre and - get this - attach a photocopy of my receipt to prove that I'd already paid.
With all the whizz-bang electronics and computers in use in the Post Office, with the receipt I had containing not one but three separate transaction identifiers, as well as the date and post office code, the best they could do to find my payment was for me to photocopy the paper.

The Kitchen Man

Unlike our previous home, which was a new build, the "new" place is almost 100 years old and consequently in need of some refurbishment especially in the bathroom and kitchen. Before we moved in, we'd assumed the kitchen would be the first priority. It's long and relatively narrow and has hardly any counter space apart from a couple of feet beside the sink. It has a very old decrepit boiler, a butcher's block table we bought with the house and pretty much nothing else, apart from two cavernous Edwardian cupboards that stretch up on each side of the chimney breast - just like the ones my Grandma had in the back room of her Victorian terrace.

We had several ideas about what to do with the space, and had arranged for a local firm to visit to do the detailed design and give us a quote. With appalling planning the kitchen man was due to call on the afternoon of our last day at the Great Orme, which accounts for us having to curtail our walk around Bodnant Gardens.

Even so, we were very excited by the design he drew up. He listened carefully to all our ideas, supplemented them with some of his own and came up with a fabulous plan that turned the kitchen into a modern living space with plenty of room and some wow factor. But oh dear! As soon as the design phase of his visit was complete, someone flicked a switch in his head and he turned into Salesman of the Century. Worse. Double glazing salesman of the century.

Now I have some very longstanding experience of the worst kind of double glazing salesmen. As early as 1979 I sat in my own lounge being regaled by a spotty herbert on the benefits of thermal break and the fact that a particular deal was only available if I signed up right then and there. I didn't get rid of that guy until well after midnight and I had thought such practices had been outlawed long since. The Kitchen Man proved me wrong. He had all the old tricks, and I do mean old.

Rule 1: Build up your product so that it looks great compared with the competition and yet justifies its high price. So he explained to me why B&Q, Ikea and Magnet & Southern kitchens are all rubbish, because they're made out of "Weetabix" (by which I understood him to mean regular chipboard) - and Magnets will even charge premium prices for their Weetabix! Then he explained why Johnson's kitchens are so much more expensive than B&Q etc, because they use triple-ply Weetabix. His sales pitch was obviously geared towards a complete moron and he didn't have the sense to tailor it for his current audience. Honestly, I would have understood the term "MDF" but it never once passed his lips.

So while I might expect to pay between £5- and £10,000 for a kitchen (to his design) from Ikea, and up to £50,000 for such a kitchen from Johnson's HIS firm could do it for the knock-down price of £19,000!! What an incredible deal. I almost bit his arm off. Almost. Luckily, (a) I had seen this sales technique before and (b) I didn't have anywhere near £19 grand to spend, so it was no hardship to me to simply stare dumbfounded at him as if he'd landed from Mars and wait for the next stage of the sales process to kick in. I did wonder later what would have happened if my kitchen budget had been £20,000. I might have thought £19,000 was a good deal and signed up right away! But wait...here comes that all-important second sales kicker.

Rule 2: The time-limited deal. Turns out they have this massively expensive kitchen-making machine and in order to cover its costs they have to keep it running 24x7. Now it just so happens that they've had a cancellation which would mean this poor machine lying idle - costing them money! So if I can have the kitchen fitted within the next three weeks, they could bring the machine back up to full capacity and pass the consequent savings on to me in the form of a free installation, saving £2,000.

Does anyone fall for this crap? I deployed my dissembling tactic (which, in case you were wondering, is completely legitimate) - that we were not going to sign up for anything until we'd had quotes for both the kitchen and bathroom, to see if we could afford to have both done or only one. So he asked me what our budget was and I gave him a ball-park figure of 10 grand. We started working through some options how we could reduce the cost of his design - taking out the more expensive cupboard designs (corner units with interior racks, etc) and the built-in fridge/freezer. With the free installation we managed to get it down to £11,000. Amazing that - a saving of £8,000 in a matter of a few minutes. I still wasn't biting, so he deployed the final Double Glazing Salesman closing tactic.

Rule 3: The manager's phone call. "You've said you have £10,000 to spend. If I phone my manager now and get him to agree to do this work for £10,000 will you sign up today?"

How can you trust a price like that? Give me the price, dammit! The real price. Stick to it. Do a straight deal. If you can do it for £10,000 you might have been able to do it for £9,000 or £7,500 or £5,000. How can I tell I'm getting a good deal? I pointed out again that I wasn't signing anything until we'd had the bathroom quote. He left, taking his design with him.

Interestingly, we subsequently realised we had been planning to demolish the chimney breast (at a cost of £2,000) only to rebuild it six inches to the right to house the range, at an approximate cost of another £2,000. We decided we'd leave the chimney breast where it is and build the kitchen round it.

A Weekend on Great Orme

One of the things causing us to stress out over the moving dates was the fact that we had a long-standing booking to spend a weekend with friends at the Great Orme lighthouse. With teeth-grinding timing we'd managed to complete and move house the weekend before, and during the week leading up to our weekend break I had to work away for three days, so when the Friday (a day off!) finally arrived we were more than ready to get away. Read the full story of the weekend, with pictures, on my travelogue pages.

Strange Mail

Less than a week in our new house and it's already clear something strange is going on with the mail. The previous owners lived here for 11 years and have set up mail redirection, so we're not getting any mail for them, but we are receiving letters addressed to people we've never heard of. People who can't have lived here for at least 11 years. There's been a lot of "return to sender" going on, but eventually something is going to turn up without a return address and I'll have to choose to open it, or bin it.

Finding things

When we left our old home behind, I wrote a ten-page document for the new owners. A room-by-room resumé of how the house worked, what day was bin day, where the gas meter key was: the whole bit. What did we get?
1. This is the alarm code
2. The cat likes tuna (we inherited a cat)
3. Err...that's it.

So for the first day or so things were, shall we say, a little hit and miss. Like it took us two hours to find out how to turn the central heating on (the main power switch was painted the same colour as the wall and hence well camouflaged). I had to read the electricity meter and the search for that would have been even longer had the previous owner not been staying at his friend's house two doors down. It was hidden behind a panel in the downstairs lav.

Over the next couple of days the hot water gradually ran out. It got cooler and cooler until eventually there was no difference between the cold and hot taps. We couldn't understand it: the boiler was on for the "normal" amount of time. I went hunting for the hot water tank. Don't laugh - it wasn't anywhere to be seen. Eventually I found it hiding in the half of the attic space that wasn't floored, behind a panel in the cupboard. It looked like it didn't have any lagging on the top half, so I assumed it was cooling down faster than we could heat it up with the boiler. I switched the boiler on to 24-hour operation. After a day, there was still no hot water. In desperation, I tried the immersion heater. Success!

Later, in conversation with a neighbour, I said we were settling in better now that we'd got some hot water. "Oh," he said, "didn't they tell you it was an immersion heater?" *$"*?#! (I found out some days afterward that it's perfectly normal for the top of the tank not to be lagged, when it's a combination water storage cylinder).

Moving Day

After the week we'd been through, we expected moving day to be hell. In the event, it was a breeze. Our movers, Kevin and Scott from Andrew Porter were top guys and within five hours, the massive truck was loaded and the house was empty. Checking through the house one last time was a little poignant, and I couldn't help thinking back to the last time I'd been alone in the empty house - on the day I got the keys when it was brand new - and how exciting it had been to stand on the brink of property ownership again after all that had gone before. Back then we had moved in with nine car loads of stuff in the back of my old Cavalier. Four years and four months later we'd filled more than two thirds of a forty-foot removals van, and some of the things we were shifting had sat in the attic since the day we moved in. As you can tell, I was in reflective mood.

But with only a brief stop to grab a sandwich and/or chips for lunch, there was no time for reflection. The afternoon was all about direction: telling Kevin and Scott where to put the stuff as it was unloaded from the van. Since unloading didn't involve unpacking, the job was done before 6pm and the intrepid movers, who refused to keep still for a decent photograph, drove off into the twilight.

After a full day's work (admittedly not much of it by us) we were left with a kitchen that looked pretty much like the one we had left behind earlier in the day, except bigger, and a whole lot of unpacking to do, but we were in! Finally, almost five months after we first found the house we had been looking for since January 2005, we were in!! Of course, there's a heap of decorating to do. Of course, we want to refit the kitchen and the bathroom. Yes, we don't yet have a phone, and consequently no Internet (yes, I'm writing this retrospectively). True, we have no carpets, and the boiler needs fixing, but none of that matters. Within hours of our arrival we had been greeted by three separate sets of neighbours and that is worth more than a pristine house and plush carpets. Since I moved out of my parents' house 28 years ago I don't think I've spoken to any neighbours for more than a minute at a time and I've lived in places where I have never met the neighbours at all. By contrast, our new house felt like home the moment we stepped through the door. There is a real community here - the kind I have been unconsciously searching for. Welcome home!

Moving Week

You regularly hear people say that the three most stressful things in life are death, divorce and moving house. I've never really understood that last one, because all my house moves have been (relatively) stress-free. Until now.

Maybe it's just rosy-coloured hindsight that makes those other moves seem so straightforward, but in this week leading up to the move I've finally come to realise what a crappy process we have in England for house sales/purchases, and exactly how many problems can arise.

The Moving Company
They sounded so good. Their rep/salesman's patter was the best, the most reassuring, their quote was not the cheapest but seemed to be the most realistic. Their approach to damages was fair, equitable and understandable. We chose them, we called them and told them we were hoping for a move on Friday 13th (gulp!) and they said fine, call us back when it's a firm date.

So we called back on Friday 6th.
"We can't fit you in that day."
"!!!What do you mean you can't fit us in. We called. You pencilled us in. You were the best."
"There's no such thing as 'pencilling in'. We only take firm bookings."

There was a short panic. I called the second best company, and they could fit us in. But I wasn't happy. The second company never gave me a warm feeling that they would look after our stuff, or turn up on time.

Forty minutes later the first company called back to say their transport manager had "moved a few things around" and they could fit us in now. I cancelled the second company. This was stress I could do without. Little did I know what was to come.

The Drive
Or rather, the lack of one. The house details mention there being a drive leading to the garage, but legalistically they do stop short of saying the drive actually belongs to the house. Because it doesn't. It doesn't, apparently, belong to anyone. So how can we guarantee that we will always be able to get to the garage? Turns out that it takes 25 years unfettered access to establish a right of way. The previous owners have been in residence 11 years - almost halfway - so we have to get a sworn statement from them to that effect, so that we don't lose the benefit of those 11 years on our way to the 25 year mark. Problem solved.

The Conservatory
Even though the property is freehold, there is still a "Chief Rent" payable. But it's never been collected. However one of the requirements of the chief rent is that permission is sought before making any material changes to the property (like erecting a conservatory). But if you don't know who the Chief Rent owner is, how can you ask for permission? We decided we didn't want to worry about this. If at some time in the future someone turns up demanding we demolish the conservatory, we'll worry about it then.

BasTard telecomms
The capital letters are significant. We'd asked BT to move the phone line several times (each time the move date changed, as it happens). Only trouble is, the last time we tried to change the date, it didn't register with their system, so they still thought we were moving on the 10th, not the 13th. Cue call from the engineer at 10am on the 10th.
"We're coming to install your new line."
"Oh no you're not, we don't move 'til Friday."
"Right, I'll put it back in the system."

Unfortunately, "putting it back in the system" didn't involve avoiding the disconnection of the old line, and at 5.30pm on the Tuesday before moving day, we found ourselves without a phone. Thank God for (a) mobiles and (b) broadband (which for some reason didn't get cut off). And meanwhile, the packing went on...

The deposit
OK so this was mostly my fault, but it finally dawned on me Wednesday morning that we would soon be called upon to pay the deposit, and the money was sitting in our Egg savings account. I'd assured our solicitor that I would do an online transfer, which I mistakenly referred to as a "BACS" transfer (for historical reasons I won't bore you with). She was horrified. "Don't use BACS - it can take up to 5 days. CHAPS is what you want." Which is fine, cos that's what the banks use, right? Wrong. After I'd completed the Egg transfer I read that little message that says, basically, "Egg uses BACS, please allow up to five days..."

Aargh!

The emergency overdraft
So the next day I'm frantically calling my bank trying to set up an emergency overdraft to cover the deposit in advance of the funds arriving from Egg. I guess they thought they were being really responsive after I'd called at 9am and they got back to me at 1pm, but in those four hours we'd gone through agonies of wondering if the whole transaction would fail, if we'd have to unpack all those boxes again, if our buyers would finally get hacked off with the delays and go elsewhere. And meanwhile, the packing went on...

Half an hour before the bank finally called back, I checked the online accounts again. The transfer from Egg had come through! Praise be! Nothing can go wrong now, surely...?

The transfer limit
Well, actually...it turns out there's a daily limit on the amount of money you can transfer out of your account with online banking. Not a limit you'd normally have to worry about (it's £10,000) but when your bill is over £11,000 it can be a bit of a stopper. Only a minute's panic this time though (we were getting used to living on the edge!), as we put our heads together and came up with a workaround. There's no limit on transfers between accounts, so I paid the ten grand and then transferred the balance to our joint account, whereupon Nikki could pay the remainder herself, since the limit is per person, not per account.

Completion
Normally, solicitors like to complete about a week before moving. We completed at 4.30pm the day before moving. And, incidentally, ten hours before Nikki's folks were due at the airport to fly back to Toronto. Jeez.

IVR - what *is* the point?

As you might have gathered, we're moving house :o)

So there's a lot of phoning around to do, getting the utility bills changed, updating address records and all that. And what's the worst thing about all that phoning? What's the one aspect of customer service that almost everyone complains about? IVR - Interactive Voice Response - those annoying "press 1 for this, press 2 for that" messages that all call centres use now.

Search on "IVR" and you'll find lots of happy people using it. Images such as this, and the smiling operators on the other end. Do they really exist? Does anyone ever look this joyful when undergoing the IVR experience? Don't get me wrong, I'm quite happy to select from a list of options, I don't forget what the options were halfway through the list and I don't even mind when the options are so detailed they have to be nested three levels deep. What I do object to though, is when having selected all the right options, the information isn't used! Which seems to be most of the time!

Take United Utilities today. "For billing enquiries, including moving house, please press 1"...next level..."To supply a meter reading, please press 1, to enquire about a current bill, please press 2, to inform us you're moving house, please press 3"...I think there might have been one more level after that, but anyway the point is when I got through to the very nice lady, one of her first questions was "is it a problem with your bill I can help you with?" NO! I just TOLD you why I'm calling...by PRESSING NUMBER 3!! IVR and call systems designers please note. If you're going to ask for information, then at least present the answers to the call centre agent.

BT used to be the worst. The last time I had anything to do with them, which thankfully was many years ago, you used to have to key your entire 20-digit customer reference number into the IVR system. And then 30 minutes later when someone eventually answered the phone, they would ask you for the number again. "I just keyed the flipping thing in," I exploded to one hapless helpdesk jockey at the end of a particularly frustrating hour where I'd had to redial twice to get through. "Sorry sir," she replied, "our system isn't integrated with the telephone system, so we can't see what you put in." Doh!

A Moving Moment

If you're moving house and things aren't going as quickly as you'd like, post a note on your blog to that effect to get things moving right along! Barely twenty-four hours after me saying that things weren't happening...they started happening!

We're now trying to get everything sorted in time to move on Friday - yes, Friday the 13th, but we're not superstitious. The rest of the boxes should be coming today and packing activities, more or less suspended for the last four weeks, will resume in earnest. This will be tricky, as we have family staying with us right now, so we'll have to pack around them and hope none of their stuff gets moved by mistake. They fly out on Friday morning a couple of hours before the removal van is scheduled to turn up.

The most agonizing thing about the move? Having to disconnect, and be without, the Internet access. We won't have a phone line for all of...three days. That will be weird. Do you think I'm addicted?

In Limbo

I read in the papers this week that the Pope has officially deleted the concept of 'Limbo' from the Catholic Consciousness. Traditionally this was the state of non-being to which souls were despatched that deserved neither to go to heaven nor hell. Interestingly (1) it was where the souls of unbaptised children were supposed to go and (2) there was never any escape from Limbo. Unlike Hell, where the souls could possibly be redeemed at the Last Trump (or whatever), anyone who found themselves in Limbo was stuck there forever. Nice. I've always thought organised religion of any kind was a hateful thing, but for parents who have already suffered the grief of losing very young children to have their religion pile on the agony by declaring that their children's souls are lost forever is (or was) totally wrong. Still, it's over now.

My reason for raising the subject of Limbo is: the Pope might have abolished the concept, but as far as our house move is concerned, we're still there! In Limbo!

It's been a week of mounting stress and frustration. Trying to aim for a moving date of next Friday, but with a short but significant list of snags. Do we really have access to the garage at the bottom of the garden? The "driveway" of the house doesn't actually belong to the plot! Are we likely to have a visit from someone telling us to tear down the conservatory? It doesn't need planning permission or building regulations approval, but there is an old covenant requiring the "consent of the chief rent owner" for any building erected on the property. But the chief rent hasn't been collected for at least 11 years.

It's a nice idea buying an old house, but if you expect it to be simple...think again!

Is It Really That Long?

God! More than two months since my last post? I haven't really got the hang of this blogging lark yet, have I? Mind you, I did warn you I was a bit hit-and-miss with diary type things. Or if I didn't, I should have.

So what's been happening?

Well we still haven't moved yet. If I had been doing a blow-by-blow account of the house moving process you'd probably have slit your wrists by now. I nearly have. Our lovely buyers have had private finance in place since about June, so keen were they to (a) get going and (b) not lose out. So they didn't need to sell their place and have been sitting on their hands ever since. We found a new place pretty soon too. It's lovely. But then I would say that wouldn't I, since I'm buying it? At least I hope I'm buying it, but the actual buying part never seems to get any closer.

It's just one thing after another. First of all the guy who we're buying off is moving a long way away, and couldn't find anywhere. Then he found somewhere and offered the asking price only to find that they run a pyramid scheme in the area, and the asking price is the minimum they expect, so he lost out on that. Another two week delay. Then he found somewhere else. His offer was accepted! We were off! Well, no, not "off" exactly. Not exactly sure what the delay was at that point - he didn't get his fixtures and fittings list, or something. And it took him ages to arrange a survey. And then the woman couldn't let the surveyor in on the appointed day. The list of delays and the waiting and the not knowing - it just goes on and on. My good lady points out that in Canada, when you buy a place, you fix a completion date there and then. Great idea! Sure, it means that some people fix a date 90 days in the future, or 120 days, but at least you know what you're aiming for. I can't even book the removals men and I've had to put the telephone move back twice already. Sheesh.

We thought we'd be really good and get a head start with the packing, so we ordered 30 boxes off t'Interweb (I can really recommend the A1 box company - fast, efficient and cheap, with great quality product) and they're all packed already.

This is one of the smaller piles we've been living with for three weeks now. The in-laws are coming to stay on Friday and we've packed all the spare towels.

Shall I go down the Parkway?

What is it with Manchester cabbies?

Don't get me wrong, most of them are the salt of the earth and I've had some great chats over the years owing to the fact that I slog between my house and Piccadilly Station quite a bit. But when I get back from London, quite often at approaching 9pm having left home before 5am, just about the last thing I want to hear is...

Do you want to go down the Parkway, mate?

No! What I want is for you to take me home, using your finely-honed taxi driver skills, local knowledge, and road craft to determine the best route for the time of day. It's not up to me to tell you which way I want to go. I'm paying you to decide. Get me home the quickest way.

What? Do they think I'm gonna suspect them of deliberately taking the longest route, or the one most choked with traffic, and then refuse to pay because they should have gone another way?

When I get a cab in London, I don't hear "should I go via Lambeth Bridge, mate?" or "do you want to go down Kensington High Street?" They just get on with it. God.

Chip & Pin

What annoys you most about Chip & Pin? Apart from the fact that you may have lost thousands if your card has been cloned, of course?

For me, it's the fact that (I assume) the checkout operator's workstation indicates that the card machine is ready to accept your PIN a fraction of a second before the card machine itself does. That's the only reason I can think of to explain the EXTREMELY IRRITATING fact that, at the very split-second the machine displays "Please enter your PIN" the checkout person will say "can you put your PIN in please?"

Yes!! I *know* I have to put my PIN in for God's sake! I was waiting for the machine to tell me it was ready! I can't type it in BEFORE, can I? So just shut up and give me a chance to do what I already knew I would have to do, at the time I'm invited to do it!

Actually I've developed a kind of sixth sense that tells me when the machine is about to ask me for my PIN, so I can start putting it in AS THE PROMPT APPEARS! Brilliant. I can't tell you how satisfying it was the first time the words "can you put your PIN in please?" died in the throat of the checkout girl as she realised I was already halfway through it.

Small pleasures :o)

Oxymorons

You've got to laugh, haven't you? Well at least, I did this morning walking through Westminster on my way to another of those interminable government meetings. I saw three things that ordinarily would have made me smile quietly to myself, or chuckle, but in the way of things comic their effect was cumulative, so by the time I came across the third I laughed out loud:

1. London cabs

Some of these have now started sporting the strapline "London black cabs - so much more than just a taxi" (or something like that). But are they though? No, not really. A taxi is a taxi - except of course for the legal difference between a hackney cab and a private hire vehicle. Why in today's world is it necessary to employ whizz-kid marketeers to tell us that something is "so much more" than it really is? I know what a taxi does. I know what it looks like. If it's raining, or I'm in a hurry, or where I'm going is too far to walk, I'll hail a cab. Otherwise I won't bother. I know how it works and what to expect. Why should I have to expect "so much more"? What else is there? Is the cabbie going to start offering me financial advice? Make me a BLT with tangy mayo to go? Cut my hair? No. Well, apart from the financial advice of course. Cabbies have been offering this unsolicited since time immemorial.

2. Scotland Yard.

The Met have employed the strapline "working together for a safer London" for some years now, but it's been a while since I've walked past their HQ. Last time I was there it looked quite accessible, but in the interim it has been surrounded by a steel-and-toughened-glass blast shield that could probably withstand the force of a Saturn V rocket from three feet. On top of that, the main door is protected with half-a-dozen of those thick concrete blocks that crop up in semi- permanent motorway repairs because they stay standing when hit by an articulated truck doing 60mph. So, lads, are we expecting trouble? Not QUITE achieved "a safer London" yet, then?

3. City of Westminster Cleaning Department.

My walk was briefly interrupted by a reversing council refuse collection vehicle (in the days before Political Correctness, we used to call them bin lorries) . This sparkly new vehicle was emblazoned with the words "Clean Streets" in two-foot-high green letters. As the driver completed his reversing manoeuvre, he flipped his cigarette butt out of the window onto the street, which heretofore had, presumably as a result of his colleagues' efforts, been Clean. Physician, heal thyself.

Freedom!

If you believe that open access to information is a good thing
If you believe, as a UK TV licence payer, that anyone in the world should have access to the archive material controlled by the BBC but which YOU have paid to create
If you believe that British values are worth promulgating in a world increasingly divided and misguided
If you believe that creativity would be nurtured, fostered and encouraged by being able to use, reuse and adapt material created by some of the most talented artists on the planet

...then you need to get yourself over to http://www.freeculture.org.uk/letters/CreativeArchiveLetter and sign the petition being run by the Open Knowledge Foundation and Free Culture UK to persuade the BBC to open their archives to the world.

Some small degree of access is already being set up by the BBC, and good on them for that, but a culture of restriction, licensing and control still pervades Auntie. In the 21st century, the world needs a better way. Go on, do your bit.

CP's Visit Report #1

Well my mate and writing partner CP arrived from Seattle yesterday into a squall of Manchester's finest mist.

This is her first visit to the UK and she is wired. She's brought with her a whole pile of writing ideas that we'll be doing together, some exercises to open up my throat for karaoke nights, and lots more besides. Jeez we're gonna be so busy we'll hardly have time for all the sight-seeing I had planned!

We did the 50c tour of the (unsold!) house, chewed the fat for a couple of hours until jet-lag set in and later we treated her to her first traditional English meal. Sorry to be predictable but what else than...fish and chips? With mushy peas? You bet.

We crammed more laughs into that first 12 hours than I believed possible but one of the best was when she said she was looking forward to seeing some British TV...and the major viewing we had lined up for the evening was the American Idol Final! Hahaha!! She'd already seen it live on Wednesday night, so was sworn to secrecy.

You won't believe the excitement we have arranged for today! A trip to Tesco's. Yes, I know, we're pushing the boat right out here. If word of this gets round we could become 2006's holiday destination of choice.

Come on! Move!

This moving house lark is a pain in the arse innit? That guy I told you about before, our first viewer? We thought he wasn't gonna come at all but then it turned out he'd got lost. He loved the house (allegedly), as did his girlfriend. In fact, it was our house he was "really interested in" according to the agent. That was a week ago and we've not heard anything from him since.

We had a second viewing though, mid-week. Be still my beating heart. This lady brought her entire family with her. I'm not kidding there must have been second- and third-cousins in the mix, godchildren, next-door-neighbours. I started to wonder if they were testing the capacity of our house for parties. She loved the house (allegedly) and could "see herself living here." Then she phoned the agent to say unfortunately it was out of their price range. So why did you come and look at it then? Sheesh.

Still let's look on the bright side. Four weeks in and we've already had twice as many viewings as when we tried to sell it last year. That's got to be a good sign. Hasn't it?