Welcome the newest member of the old farts club

You'll remember what a glorious time I had celebrating my 50th last year. (If you don't remember, then you can look here, here and here) Today it was the turn of my long-time mate Pete to join the ranks of the over-50s.

Of all the mates I've kept in contact with over the years, I've known Pete the longest. Way back when, our Dads both used to give us a ride to school on their way to work, with the result that we found ourselves hanging around a virtually deserted school at 8.20 every weekday morning with not much to do apart from talk to each other, and hang around the drinks machine waiting for the service guy to finish cleaning it, at which point he would "test" it and hand out free drinks.

So approximately 40 years later - give or take a year - we're still mates and we "just happened" to be visiting my Mum on the day of Pete's birthday, and we "just happened" to suggest that it would be good to pop down the Test Match for a few sherbets. Meanwhile a mutual friend was busy emailing everyone we knew to make sure they'd be there too, and organising with the landlord to lay on a private table, food and a cake. What we didn't know until we arrived at the pub was there'd be live music on too. So the whole evening went off with a bang, even though two of our close friends and their partners were unavoidably detained in Greece and/or with family matters.

The Test Match is one of those places that looks very ordinary on the outside, but inside is like a home from home. It has a large crowd of regulars and an even larger crowd of semi-regulars like us. People who live out of town but who make the pilgrimage there whenever they can. There are many reasons for this. Partly it's because you can always guarantee to bump into someone you know, some of it is down to the memories of great parties that have been there before. Added to that the staff are friendly, the beer is good, it's within walking distance of "home" if we're staying over (or a short bus ride if it's early enough), it has a fabulous chippy right next door, but even after you've put all these reasons together there's still an intangible "something" about the place that remains undefinable. A sense of belonging. More, a sense of continuity.

The Test Match was home to drinking buddies when I was attending the junior school less than five minutes walk away. Now it's home to some of my drinking buddies. And when I'm too old to make the 150-mile round trip to drink there, it will continue to be a haven from the frantic pace of the 21st century. With its quirky art-deco interior, some might look askance and think it just another seedy, run-down, suburban boozer. But they don't know the heart that lives there. Countless years of good times, good friends and good vibes have soaked into its bricks and its plaster and imbue the rooms with a welcoming aura unsurpassed by any other single hostelry of my experience. Long may it thrive.

Friday...err...ten

Here's a change from the usual Friday list. Nikki pointed be at this cool set of stuff on the BBC blogs site. It's entitled "10 things we didn't know last week"

1. The Amazon is the longest river in the world, not the Nile.
Full story

2. The QE2 had the unglamorous name "Job number 736" while being built in a shipyard on the Clyde.
Full story

3. Europe has a vodka belt comprising Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Denmark and Sweden, although the drink is also made in countries such as Britain, France, Italy and Spain.
Full story

4. The average cash withdrawal from an ATM is £100.
Full story

5. Bernard Manning worked as an armed guard watching over senior Nazis locked up in Berlin’s Spandau prison, when aged 16 after the war.
Full story

6. Sugar from fruit could be converted into a low-carbon fuel for cars, with far more energy than ethanol.
Full story

7. EastEnders actress Susan Tully, who played Michelle Fowler, was in the Islington restaurant Granita when Tony Blair and Gordon Brown famously discussed the future Labour leadership contest, on 31 May 1994.

8. There are 1,200 people employed at Glastonbury just to pick up and sort the rubbish.
Full story

9. There were 6.3 million 999 calls made in the last year, which is almost double the number of calls received 10 years ago.
Full story

10. A white tie given to Gordon Brown as a gift from the Daily Telegraph to wear for his Mansion House speech ended up in a charity shop in Notting Hill.

Testing, testing

Have you ever worked with a tester?

I've done some unit (aka alpha) testing before, and I've defined the occasional test script, but I've never done the job in a mainstream way.

I attended our project kick-off meeting a few weeks back and following on from my presentation was a 15-minute slot for our test manager to describe the test strategy, environments, etc. He's an enthusiastic guy with a great deal of experience in testing. He's made a career of it. In fact one of the points he made during his presentation was that the people he'd be recruiting on to the test team would all be ISEB (I think he said) certified, and he was very proud that there was a testing career path defined now in his part of the organisation.

Listening to him speak about testing with a glint in his eye made me realise (yet again) how different people are. I could no more get excited about testing than fly to the moon by flapping my arms (even if the physics didn't prevent me, before you get all scientific and start going on about vacuums and such). But it's a good job someone can, because if we didn't have testers we wouldn't be able to deliver. It's back to the old arsehole scenario again. Some people are made for the job. Years ago I worked with a guy who looked on testing as a challenge. It was him against the developer and may the best man win. His goal? To break the system, any way he could. Fair means or foul. If there was a way in, he'd find it. Garbled inputs, unexpected fields in data, pulling out network cables mid-transaction, corrupt files on disk, malformed packets. You name it, he'd try it. And every time that system crashed, he'd chalk up another point on his side of the scoreboard.

But you know what? Even though he was just about the most hated person on the payroll as far as the developers were concerned, they had to admit a grudging respect for him. He was damned good at his job, and they had to raise their game to get their code drops past him and out to integration, which had a positive effect on the project overall.

Blades of rain

An unexpected day working at home today, owing to the fact that much of Sheffield, where I was supposed to be going, is underwater. Train services are suspended, the station was evacuated yesterday afternoon and several roads into the city are blocked with either water or abandoned cars, so I made the executive decision not to even attempt the trip.

When I arrived home from Bracknell last night at 10.30, Nikki had been watching News 24 most of the evening. Within 10 seconds of seeing the footage of the streaming rivers where the roads should be I said "I'm not going there!" Even though the floods aren't that close to where I would be going, they're not that far away either!

One of the buildings affected is quite close to the river and coincidentally the place I'd had to visit the week before last to have my photo taken for a new photo-ID pass.

"Just go along there," my contact in the security section told me, "and they'll sort you out."

So I did. Walked in on a group of building security guards doing what building security guards do best (sit around on their arses all day talking about the football, the woman in accounts, last night's telly and where they're going drinking tonight. Pretty much like all the other office workers then. Except most of the women don't talk about that woman in accounts. At least, not in the same way).

"Hello," I said breezily. "I've come to have my picture taken."
There was a sharp intake of breath and looks of consternation passed from man to man. There were shrugs.
"No-one told us you were coming."
"No, they told me I didn't need an appointment. Just turn up, and you'll look after me."
"Well, see, the thing is, I haven't got the camera with me here today."
I look forlorn.
"The only reason I've travelled to Sheffield today is so that you can take my photo."
The breath, taken in so sharply only moments before, is now blown out in resigned fashion.
"You'd better follow me then."

We leave the building. We walk to the next building, which is in fact less than 100 yards away. We enter that building, walk behind the security desk to a small room that contains a desk, a chair, and a filing cabinet. The filing cabinet is locked. Security man unlocks it, opens it, reaches in and retrieves...a digital camera! Aha! So the only reason you tried to put me off from having my photo taken today was so you could avoid taking a little exercise. "I haven't got the camera with me today." Right!

I was still chewing this over in my mind as I walked back through Sheffield centre to the other office, when I was spoken to by a traffic light. It took me by surprise at first.

"Take care! You in the red jacket! Look both ways!"

I was crossing the tram lines and approaching the roadway. I was indeed wearing my red anorak, so I knew the traffic light was addressing me. As if to confirm this, the light repeated its warning.

"Take care! You in the red jacket! Look both ways!"

Then I remembered reading that some cities were installing "talking" CCTV cameras to help with petty crime. So they could yell at scallies for dropping litter, that kind of thing. How cool, I thought, that they use it to make people aware of their road safety obligations too. I stood on the kerb, waiting for the traffic to clear so I could cross. Now that my mind wasn't full of how lazy the security guard had been, and I was right on top of the talking traffic light, I could hear its message properly the next time it issued forth.

"Take care! Two-way traffic! Look both ways!"

The Street Barbecue 2007

We were introduced to the concept of the "street barbecue" on the day of our very first sight of our new house. We came round to view it for the first time in June last year on the day of the party, when our "vendors" (as we called them then) were preparing salmon steaks as their contribution to the communal nose bag.

A year later, here we are in the middle of this community, and now it's our street party too. Our neighbours opposite arrange the hire of a bouncy castle for the kids, everyone brings chairs, tables, barbecues and food, and we all have a great time. In defiance of the weather, it has to be said, which despite being extremely wet for most of the week leading up to the party, managed to hold off until early evening and allow us some time in the garden.

Here we are, having already consumed copious quantities of kebabs, burgers, samosas and salads, having a go at "Play Your Cards Right" (some readers may have to Google that to understand the concept). Men vs women, and I'm happy to report that the men won 5-nil. ;o) After that we had a three-legged race (I found my niche as a course marshall, standing behind the bouncy castle to make sure no-one took a short cut) and pretty soon after that we all had to head indoors as the first of several cloudbursts hit.

We'd managed to arrange things so the party coincided with a "girls' weekend" and it was great to engage in the community with them around too. One of the most unusual and gratifying aspects of this group of friends is how all age groups come together and enjoy the occasion. Even the teenage lads, who are usually notorious for a "Kevin the Teenager" attitude to family or neighbourly social interactions, took part in great spirit.

Having exhausted the list of outdoor recreations, our hosts proceeded to whip us into several indoor games, the first of which was a hilarious romp called, simply, Animals. A simple idea - the names of animals are written in pairs on small pieces of paper. There were 28 of us playing, so 28 pieces of paper; 14 animals. Everyone stands around in a circle and the gamesmaster throws the papers into the middle. There's a massive scrabble for the papers and, once you've retrieved one and found out which animal you're supposed to be, you start making the noise of that animal and searching out your partner who's making the same noise. Once you're paired, you sit down. The last pair standing are out.

Sounds simple, but it's as mad as a bag of frogs and great fun. Scrambling through a crowd of people ranging in ages from eight to eighty, shouting "oink" or "hissss" or "moooo" and listening for the one other person in the crowd who is also shouting "oink" or "hissss" or "moooo" is not as easy as it sounds. Not to mention the fact that you might be oinking while your partner is grunting. Things got off to an unfortunate start when the organisers forgot to take the paired papers of the losing couple out of the game, so in the second round we were left with two papers on the floor and an unpaired couple bleating and growling their way around the room. This was soon resolved however, and the game continued at a mad pace. Hilarity reached a peak when, halfway through the game, the last couple standing were making different noises even though the papers were correctly paired. They both had "monkey," but only one was going "ook, ook." The other was shouting "hee-haw" for all she was worth, having misread the paper as "donkey."

Around 10.30 Annie fired up the karaoke (by special request, it having been such a hit at our housewarming) and we carried on singing for most of the rest of the night, with two short interruptions for more games. The girls gave up shortly after midnight, Nikki left me to it at 2.20am, but us stalwarts (Annie, myself and four other guests) continued blasting out the old favourite tunes until 3.30am. What a great party. And we get the chance to do it all again next year!

Friday Five

I'm still way behind on these things, but I like 'em :o)

1. Are you attracted to the naughty or the nice?
Naughty is fun in the short-term, but it's wearing, unpredictable, dangerous and ultimately unsatisfactory. I know it remains some people's bag throughout their life, but for me it's got to be nice.

2. Do you let your dirty laundry pile up?
Nope. And I should probably add that right now doing the laundry is not one of "my" chores, but when and if it is, I don't let it pile up. I once lived in a house where the ironing pile reached over the top of a radiator and you had to dig out and iron the thing you wanted to wear minutes before you wanted to wear it. I can't live like that.

3. What's the last excuse you made?
This is a tough one because I'm writing this retrospectively (I know, I know, ...) so I don't know whether this really *was* the last excuse I made on June 22, but the last one I remember is claiming that I didn't take a colleague's call in the evening because the cell phone signal in my house is very variable, when in fact the reason was I'd forgotten he'd be calling and turned my phone off. Tch.

4. Do you play it safe or do you take risks?
Safe. That's why I am where I am in life, on all sorts of levels. Not complaining; that's just the way it is.

5. Friday fill-in:
Let's go to ____ and ____.
Let's go to bed and eat vanilla slices.

Door-to-door begging now?

I worked at home today for the first time since returning from leave. I needed some quiet time to make progress on critical technical documents the rest of the project is waiting for.

Quiet time did I say?

I started late on account of having to stop by the local sorting office to pick up a recorded delivery package that they failed to deliver yesterday. Remind me to blog sometime on how archaic postal practices assume there'll be a "housewife" or equivalent at home every day just on the off-chance postie will require a signature. Anyway, after a twenty-minute search of the entire sorting office the jobsworth there declared it lost, and informed me I'd have to call back after my postman returned from his round and told them where he'd hidden it.

I wasn't best pleased about this, since I assumed the letter was in fact my tickets for the forthcoming Genesis concert (*squeeeeeeeee!!!!!!*), but I didn't create a scene having learned from bitter experience that this is more likely to *reduce* my chances of getting hold of my letter than *enhance* them.

An hour after I arrived home, my concentration was interrupted by the doorbell. Another parcel. Delivered by courier, rather than postie, so I never had chance to ask him where he'd hidden my Genesis tickets.

After another hour the phone rang. It was the sorting office to tell me postie had revealed his hiding place and would I like to come back and collect my letter. Had it been anything else I would have left it until the end of the day when I'd be going out anyway to pick Nikki up from work. But Genesis fans will recognise my reluctance to leave those tickets anywhere but in my own sweaty hands. I drove round there immediately (and it was, indeed, the tickets).

On my return home I settled down once again in front of my embryonic technical document. What seemed like only minutes later, but was in fact only minutes later, the doorbell rang again. "What now?!?!" I expostulated to myself (and if you've never tried self-expostulation, believe me it can be a cathartic experience) and set of once again to the front door.

There, on the step, stood a dark skinned and colourfully beswathed woman, one hand resting on the handle of a buggy in which slept a very small child. "Spare small change for baby?" she enquired in broken English, "spare change?"

So it's door-to-door begging now, is it? Time was when the only doorstepper you had to hide from was the Betterwear man. Now it's immigrants with babies in tow, hoping to melt your heart with their immediate and personal need. Not in the street, where you can walk around them. Not on the tube, where you can bury your head in your novel or your Metro. No. Right here, on your doorstep. Like Jehovah's Witnesses on crack. I felt violated. Belatedly, I remembered to close my mouth, only to have to open it again to mumble "no, thank you," rather feebly before closing the door.

So much for quiet time.

Friday Five

1. If you could have a superpower, what would it be?
Telekinesis. The ability to control the physical world with your mind opens up all sorts of possibilities, including personal flight, saving other people from falling objects, or falling themselves, car crashes, etc. Not to mention never having to get up and fetch TV snacks ever again ;o)

2. Which is more attractive to you: physical appearance or personality?
It took many long hard years for me to recognise the truth of the old adage "beauty is only skin deep." Having known many people who look great but are really total shits, I finally understand the beauty that can only come from being a "beautiful person" - and that can only be found inside. It's personality every time.

3. Who did you last fight with?
My Mum probably. She can wind me up like no-one else. I know she doesn't do it deliberately, but there's history. Just one or two words from her and I'm seething.

4. What did you eat last night?
Is that last night, or tonight? Last night was fish fingers, chips and mushy peas. Tonight was curry (chicken vindaloo), tricolour rice and mini onion bhajis. Followed by custard tart.

5. Who are you mad about?
That's a bit teenage isn't it? I guess I'm expected to say my lover, but we've been together a long time now. We're still "mad" about each other, but not in that desperate clingy, breathy way you are when you first meet. Now it's a slow-burning, deep, passionate, lifetime kinda thing.

Chorlton Players are putting on their "hotpot" show this week. A comedy sketch show, only this year the head chef got bored with hotpot and decided to make chilli instead. Works for me. I went over there on dress rehearsal night (Wednesday) to take the photos. After ten days of mad travel, long hours and stress, I was so dog tired I kept falling asleep with my camera on my lap. Still managed to take almost 300 shots though. And more decent ones than usual, for some reason.

Snaking over the Snake

I've been working in Sheffield a lot since returning from leave. After a week, I got bored with using the train. I was never a train person to begin with, but I've been converted to the benefits over long distances. Sheffield's pretty local though, so this week I thought I'd give driving another chance.

What brought me to this conclusion was the time it was taking on the train. Ten minutes to drive to the station and park, a half-hour wait for a train, something like a 55 minute journey and another 5 minute walk at the other end. About 1 hour 40 all told. I was convinced driving would be quicker *and* more convenient.

So Monday morning I set off, dropped Nikki at work around 8.20 and headed round the M60 to the M67. I expected the main queues to be coming the other way - into Manchester - so I wasn't prepared for the slow traffic heading into Glossop, or the long line of cars stuck behind the articulated lorry which was negotiating the Woodhead Road on its way to the M1. I didn't have an opportunity to pass it until after the Flouch roundabout and by then it was only 5 minutes or so before I hit the tail-end of the rush-hour traffic heading into Sheffield.

Not only was the journey painfully slow, I found the closest car park to the office was a 15 minute walk away. I was not best pleased when I finally arrived at my desk at 10.40. Total journey time 2 hours 20: a full half an hour longer than the train and about a hundred times more stressful.

I couldn't even claim to be saving the company any money doing the journey that way. The car park in Sheffield is almost as expensive as the station car park in Manchester, and the train ticket only a pound more than the mileage allowance. I decided Monday would be my last journey by car, but going home I took the more scenic route via the Snake Pass and Ladybower reservoir. The road was much quieter going back and the journey only a few minutes longer than the train. My morning determination was swayed by the easier return journey and I made up my mind to try again one more time, using the Snake Pass both ways.

I needn't have bothered. Once again the Glossop-bound traffic snarled up the M67 interchange and once I'd cleared Glossop I found I was stuck again behind a slow-moving lorry, this time with NO passing places. The journey over to Sheffield this morning was marginally better than Monday at 1 hour 55, but still no contest with the train. Added to that, with the research into the timetable that Nikki has done, I can now arrive at the station either end minutes before the train departs, so the door-to-door journey by train has been shortened to about 1 hour 20 minutes.

A little knowledge...

We had a lot of fun ripping out the study - removing the skirting board and picture rail. The "demolition" part of a job is always so much more enjoyable than the recreation even if the latter is, in the end, more rewarding.

It's easy to go too far though. And if it's easy to go too far, you can bet I will.

Many of the "outside" corners in our rooms (mainly on chimney breasts) have the old dowel finish to the corner rather than the modern angle bead. It makes the corners look as though they have piping on them. In it's original condition it looks really nice (IMO) but as most of our rooms have been Artexed (yuck!) the corners have ended up looking like the edges of a badly-iced cake so, in the study at least, we planned to replace them with new angle bead to get that crisp modern corner.

It seemed natural to me then, while I was ripping out, to take the dowel out too. Nikki's side of the study wasn't too bad - being originally a small room it doesn't have any cornice to worry about, and the dowel came right out nice and clean. My side wasn't so clever. I didn't realise until the dowel was almost out that it disappeared behind the cornice. By then it was too late...a large crack had appeared and it was clear I wasn't going to be able to remove the dowel without causing more damage. Here's the hole after replastering. There's a similar one on the other side.

"Oh well," thinks I, "I can fill it afterwards." But here's where the title of this post comes in. The plasterer arrived and while he scoped out the job I disappeared into the kitchen to brew up. A few minutes later he came to find me:

"What possessed you to take the dowels off the corners?"
"Err...I thought it would make it easier to bead up."
"I usually nail the bead to the dowel! Oh well, I'll figure something out. Life's full of little challenges."

Doh!

Four rounds of filling and sanding later, and the cornice is almost back in shape. This still has one more sanding to go, just to straighten out that leading edge so that it doesn't skew to the side so badly. Once it's all painted you'll hardly be able to tell there was a hole there at all. The rest of the cornice isn't exactly pristine having suffered some shifting and cracking over the years, but we love it and we definitely wanted to preserve it, so I'm glad I managed to put it back almost how it was. But if I hadn't been so gung-ho about ripping everything out in the first place, life would have been much simpler - for the plasterer and for me!

Any old iron?

When the plasterers arrived last week, we had the radiators removed so that we could get the best result. It's not really surprising that most people don't take radiators off when decorating, even though the end result is never as good as it can be when you have a clear run with brush, roller, or wallpaper. But what does surprise me is the number of times you see a room skimmed without removing the rads. This always ends up looking like crap.

So anyway, we're doing things properly and the radiators came off - even though in this case it was a traumatic process. Once they'd been removed, we started considering replacing them. The originals were old, overlarge and relatively inefficient compared with newer finned models. Once we'd investigated the cost of replacement it was a no-brainer.

We'd taken the rads down into the hall to get them out of the way of the plasterers but it was clear they couldn't stay there for long. Paul and I carried the larger of the two (it was about 2500mm long) out into the front garden and propped it under the dining room window. The smaller one fitted easily in the car and I took it to the tip along with the few bags of plastering rubble the guys had left behind. But the larger one was more of a problem. A problem I decided to defer for another day.

Returning home from work on Tuesday of last week, Nikki and I were puzzled to see a black mark on the front path. A smudge, several feet long, splashed right down the middle of the path, with smaller splashes on the bushes at either side. We were nonplussed; momentarily unable to work out what the mark could be. Paul had cleaned the path with our spiffy new power washer the week before, and the plasterers had left creamy boot prints all up and down the path, but this was something else; something entirely different.

Then my gaze moved to the dining room window. Something was missing. The radiator. Of course! The mark was dried-up radiator water, heavy with black iron oxide. Someone had come into the garden and "stolen" our large radiator! For a split second I was outraged at the theft. Then I came to my senses. We were throwing it out anyway. All the thief had done was solved my problem of how to get it to the tip. I was reminded of the tongue-in-cheek advice offered on a local bulletin board to someone who was finding it impossible to give away some unwanted furniture: Leave it on your front path with a sign saying "second-hand furniture for sale" and someone is bound to steal it!

Paint...paint on

As luck would have it, I reached the end of the second 10-litre bucket of slimy magnolia this afternoon with only about eight square metres of wall left to paint. Still, I figured, the whole room needs another coat of primer, so I don't need to worry about "contaminating" the trade-quality white emulsion we'd also bought. So I didn't bother washing the roller, or tray, or the paint scoop; I just carried straight on with that. Don't ever let me buy that cheap B&Q emulsion again! What a difference. This white paint is Crown and it goes on like a dream. Roll this way; roll that way and it's covered. I reckon if I'd started off with this I would have completed the entire room in about three-quarters the time it took with the slime. A lesson learned: cheap paint is a false economy.

Another lesson learned is that I don't have the stamina I did years ago. At one time I thought nothing of starting decorating at 8am and working through till 8pm or even later. Now three or four hours is enough to leave me completely knackered.

Still, being knackered gave me chance to sit with my lovely love and enjoy a fabulous tea, and then watch and blog on yesterday's latest episode of Doctor Who. As expected, it was a cracker.

Colour me a hob-nob

Painting started today. New plaster is extremely absorbent so we'd planned to slap on a couple of coats of cheap emulsion to prime the walls and ceiling before using the (vastly more expensive) final colour. The plasterer had also advised us to do this but he'd recommended white, whereas we were intending to use up the buckets of cheap magnolia we'd bought for the lounge. It's really awful stuff, slimy and thin, and it had taken four coats to cover the flame-effect rag rolling in the lounge. We were glad of the excuse to get rid of it. Not that it went on very well, slipping and sliding on the polished plaster surface and requiring very frequent reloading of the rollers. After five hours strenuous effort, we'd covered both ceilings and all of the walls in the smaller half of the room.

After dinner, we set off to a garden party to hob-nob with the in crowd. Annie is good friends with one of the stars of Coronation Street and we've been invited to her annual garden party for the last three years. The first year we had to miss out as it coincided with our holiday in Greece. Last year was a bit of a wash-out as it rained for much of the evening and we left early. This year though, the weather forecast was promising and we'd planned to go en-masse (well, seven of us) and better equipped than last year with chairs and plenty of food and drink. We also planned to arrive a little later than before. The party is arranged in two notional halves, with the late afternoon being primarily for those with children and the evening more for adults, although the lines aren't drawn very strictly. It's a laid-back affair where everyone just turns up, mingles, and does their own thing. We preferred to do our own thing when at least some of the kids had cleared off.

This year the event was very well attended by the Coronation Street cast. Jenny McAlpine, Tupele Dorgu, Kate Kelly, Rupert Hill and the guys who play the O'Connor brothers (sorry guys - I could have cheated and looked you up, but the truth is you've just not been on the show long enough for your names to impinge on my old brain) were all in evidence and there may have been more - I didn't really pay much attention. With my track record of celebrity interactions I try to steer clear of any chance of catching foot-in-mouth disease. Sadly, the same can't be said of many of the other attendees. Unlike last year when the stars were left very much to themselves, this year there was a preponderance of people jockeying to have their pictures taken with the hapless actors, who were really only out to enjoy the party and be left alone. I have to say they took it all in good part though, bravely enduring all the picture taking and autograph signing.

The highlight of last year's party for me had been meeting Brigit Forsyth, who I've been watching on TV for forty years or more. She was delightful but sadly didn't attend this year. Brigit you were missed!

I must admit in the end I couldn't help myself. Having had enough to drink to think this was a good idea, we'd gone looking for the face-painting crew only to discover they'd recently packed up and gone home. As we were milling about at the top of the stairs, Jenny McAlpine walked past.
"Hiya!" I said brightly.
"Hi!" she replied, sounding as much like Fiz as you'd expect.
"Seen anyone famous?" I joked.
She looked completely nonplussed, giggled nervously and beat a hasty retreat. Shame, I'm sure I would have enjoyed a normal conversation with her. Sadly I really don't think I'm capable of holding a normal conversation with a famous person.

Although we all had a good time, in one respect the evening was characterised by lost opportunity. The producer guy Annie knows was in attendance. I've been trying to get my (co-written) horror script in front of him for most of this year. This was the ideal opportunity, I thought, to meet face-to-face and gain his agreement to read it. We decided to leave it until after we'd eaten...by which time he'd left! Doh! I also failed to meet David Neilson ... again. After the karaoke was closed down at 12.30am I went for a quick comfort break, during which time he came over to say goodbye to Annie.
"That bloke with the beard is a great singer," he said to Annie.
"That's my mate John," says she, "he writes the lyrics for our songs."
"I'd love to meet him," says David, "but I have to leave right now."
So there you go. My best chance to hob-nob with a really interesting sleb - one with whom I certainly could hold a normal (and exceedingly interesting) conversation - and where am I?

In the toilet.

Good grief

Sorry I was absent this week. There were two reasons for this. Firstly there was no news to relate about the house. We naively thought we might be able to start painting the newly-plastered study the weekend after plastering was finished. In the event, it took almost a full week to dry out properly. This process was aided by the warm weather, but also inhibited by the increasing humidity as the week went on. I never realised plaster drying was an atomic process. It's like it had a half-life. Half the plaster was dry in a day, and then half of the remaining wet parts were dry in another day, then half of that much, etc. By yesterday we were left with three small patches of darkness in an ocean of light: underneath the smaller window; around the top of one chimney breast; and at the very bottom of the rearmost corner of the room. We began to wonder if we'd even be able to start painting this weekend! In the end by tonight these dark patches had faded enough to be called dry ;o)

The second thing keeping me away was work. When I first planned to have two weeks off either side of our party, we hadn't won our big contract and in any case the project plan showed my holiday comfortably after the initial burst of design activity. With delays in the procurement introduced by the customer, delays in the decision, and more delays before the contract was signed, the project plan slipped further and further back until by the time we could start, my holiday coincided with weeks 1 and 2 of the project. It was too late to change though - Paul's flights and the plasterers were already booked so the best I could have done was cancel two days of a two week holiday.

I was missed, apparently. I returned to 250 emails but that was just the start. What I wasn't prepared for (and should have been, had I given it even a moment's thought) was the tsunami of questions that would be fired at me over the course of the week. And like a true tsunami, the initial very large wave of questions was followed shortly after by another smaller wave, and then another, and another. By Thursday I was beginning to realise that my life over the next couple of months at least is going to consist of answering people's questions and trying to fit the work I have to do to deliver the architectural framework of the project in around that.

Which doesn't leave much time for blogging.

Plaster Master

As good as their word, Wayne and Pete were back here at 7.30 this morning and straight back to business. I had to drop Nikki at work today, and hang around the local Vauxhall dealers to have the door mirror replaced. By the time I returned, around 11am, work was almost complete.


By 1pm, the room looked something like this (it's dried out a little in between them finishing and me taking these pictures) and our plaster masters were on their way. All the extra sections where plaster had unexpectedly turned out to be blown and was either pulled off or fell off, which amounted to the whole of the window wall on the left side of the study, and the whole of the chimney breast on the right side, only cost us an extra £50. As you might expect, we'll definitely be having these guys back to plaster the other rooms that need it.

We, of course, are left with a massive clean-up job (the floor is covered with plaster blobs and splashes) followed by a massive decorating job. I also have to fix the cornice where it's cracked or damaged, fit new skirting board and we have to choose the new radiators and arrange for them to be fitted. But the messiest job is done and the result is everything we'd hoped for. Even before it's painted I think the answer to our decorating experiment (whether to paint, paper and paint, or replaster) is clear.