Sometimes I even impress myself

Been working on an official movie site for my mate, hot shot movie writer/director/producer Colleen Patrick recently. Well, I say "official." It's official at the moment. With the film in pre-production they needed a web presence. Initially a quick-and-dirty web presence just so that anyone paying a visit to the official URL wouldn't get one of those impersonal hosting pages.

Once the film was in the can and slated to have its premier at the Seattle International Film Festival, "quick and dirty" needed to become a little more polished.

Once the film finds a distributor, they'll swing into action with their army of Flash/PHP/Java programmers and dump all over my work, but for now I'm the official webmaster. Go take a look. We're at http://www.thewholetruththemovie.com.

Recently, to follow up the trailer on YouTube, Colleen and her fellow producers and tech crew have been releasing interviews from the EPK - the kind of thing that will eventually find its way onto the "extras" DVD. Now originally, The Whole Truth website featured just that one trailer, on its own page. About a week ago, Colleen emailed me asking if I could put up all the rest of the interviews.

Problem was, the website was conceived as a fixed space. The list of interviews from the EPK is already 14 long and increases by one a day. I have no idea where it will end. I needed a way of displaying YouTube videos in a kind of gallery, where you could pick from a list, and see the result in a "display area." A few minutes' research uncovered one way of doing this that YouTube themselves offer. A YouTube Custom Player. Associated with a playlist, this can be embedded in a site in exactly the same way as a single video file, but offers a selection panel containing all the videos on the playlist. It has the advantage that any additions to the playlist are immediately reflected in the custom player, so updating the site with each new day's interview would involve just a single operation on YouTube.

I tried it out, and it worked fine, but it wasn't exactly the image I wanted. What's more, the available colour schemes are quite limited and didn't match the livery of the site. I needed something more configurable.

As always when I'm stuck for a solution, I turned to Stu Nicholls' marvellous CSS Play site. Browsing through his list of inventive galleries, I came across this one, which was uncannily close to what I'd envisaged for the YouTube gallery. I downloaded the code and read through it quickly.

Obviously, the main difference between this and what I was trying to do is that Stu's gallery handles img tags, and the standard YouTube embedding code uses object tags. But the simple Javascript array handler seemed eminently editable to handle object instead of img, so I set about fiddling with it to see if I could make it work.

With remarkable ease, I proved the 80/20 rule. I got 80% of the way to what I wanted in the first half-hour. That last 20% proved a little more tricky. For a start, the left and right arrows, which remained as imgs, were not being picked up as part of the array. It looked certain this was screwing things up somewhere. If they weren't part of the list that could be "clicked" then they would remain dormant and there'd be no way to access videos beyond the visible elements of the list.

I reasoned that since images ARE objects of a sort (indeed the CSS/HTML standards body intended object to replace img, although most browsers still handle img tags better than objects and they have much wider currency) I could replace the left/right arrow img tags with object declarations. Immediately things started to work a little better. The main problem remaining at that point being that YouTube videos are considerably wider than Stu's original photos, which required some pixel-counting and adjustment of widths and array limits to get the main functionality working as intended.

It was then only a simple matter of positioning the whole gallery correctly on the page, and amending the text and background colours to match the site. In fact the hardest (well, most tedious) part of the whole exercise proved to be the creation of thumbnails for each of the 14 YouTube videos.

The final result can be seen here. And yes, as the title of this post implies, I impressed myself. You might think I'm easily impressed; I couldn't possibly comment.

The editing requirements for this version will be slightly more onerous than for the YouTube Custom Player, involving the creation of a new thumbnail for each new video, adding an entry to the array and adding a new item to the HTML list that forms the basis for the gallery. But that's all mechanical stuff. The gallery is unlimited in capacity and looks much more a part of the site than the nearest Custom Player livery - a rather dangerous looking cherry red.

It's true to say that if there were hundreds of entries it would become very tedious scrolling through them one at a time if you knew you wanted #93, for instance, but I doubt that will be a problem in this case and if it does turn out to be an issue I can always add extra left and right buttons to skip an entire section (8 entries) at a time.

Choked

Had hoped to finish the burning today in between showers. Unfortunately I ran into the same problem as last week - the incinerator became choked. The embers just weren't burning down fast enough to make space for any more fuel - only this time I'd only been going a couple of hours.

Maybe chopping the boards into four pieces instead of three wasn't such a good idea? Or maybe the wood was still damp from the rain. Whatever the reason I was left with about another hour or two's burning to do so I guess I'll be back out there tomorrow.

Found a load more bricks too, buried around the site. No idea what I'll do with 'em, but the stock now numbers around a hundred so there's easily enough to repair the wall and probably build a couple of gate pillars to close off what was the entrance to the garage.

The next conundrum is what to do with the four rusting poles that were lying under the floor. Look like they were once part of a garden swing. Now they're so flaky that every time I move them they shower me with rust. I won't be able to get them to the tip without wrapping them in something (or making a helluva mess inside the car!). Perhaps I should just bury them and let the rusting process continue!

We're on a roll

Second recording session last night went MUCH better than last week. Whether it's because we're back in the groove artistically, or I was better prepared having listened to the backing track on and off all day, or we chose a slightly more upbeat and easier song to sing, or a combination of all three I don't know, but we called it a rap at 9.30 and I was much happier with the end result even though there's still lots of "producing" to do on it.

We were keen to record this song early in the process but when we were firing on all cylinders, because it's very much of its time. Called 'Spin Doctor' and written, presciently, in March/April 2007, it tells the story of corrupt politicians and people's slavish sheep-like reaction to them before they realise the grim truth, so you can see why we wanted to record it soon and get it "out there" while all the political fall-out is still fresh.

Annie's going to work up a clever video montage of politician clips and out-takes as a back-drop. Expect to see it on a YouTube near you soon!

Waspy

Driving Blythe home on Sunday we passed a sleek, low sports car with the number plate W44 SPY. I don't think I would've realised this was intended to spell "WASPY" had it not been for the cool paint job. Similar to this classic Dodge EV it was yellow, with a twin black stripe. Waspy, indeed!

Clumps of conversion

Returning to my PC last night after taking Blythe home I was surprised to find the WMA->MP3 conversion process had finished. Well, when I say finished, I mean stopped. The program thought it had reached the end of the list, but it was clear that quite a few files had been skipped.

I sorted the list by file type and removed the successfully-converted MP3 files, which reduced the list size from 2670 to 899. It sounded about right. At the estimated rate of progress I'd expected completion around 8am this morning; that number of files should have taken around 15 hours; and the program had clearly terminated while I'd been out.

I set it running again last night on those 899 files and this morning the conversion had stopped again. This time 199 files had been skipped. I repeated the process and left it running while I took Nikki to work, only to find 49 files still doggedly unconverted on my return. What is this? Some kind of binary chop? No, it seems clear that the freeware conversion tool I'd found has a bug in its list processing code. No matter, I started it off again on the 49, which first reduced to 17 and then to 6 at the fifth attempt. I ran it manually against those, one at a time and finally, shortly after 9am, the whole job was done.

Remember I said WMAs were more space hungry than MP3s? Completing this conversion has freed up 16.4GB space on my hard drive.

Burn, baby, burn

It was too wet to continue the incineration of our erstwhile garage floor yesterday, but I made an early start this morning. Well, early for a Sunday. I had the fire going by 9.30. Took a while to get going - it required a great deal of wafting - but after a lifetime of barbecuing I'm an expert wafter, and pretty soon the fire was crackling and spitting nicely.

The remains of fire #1 had charred their way down to a two-inch layer of reddish brown ash inside the incinerator, so having thought I'd need to tip out a whole pile of ash in the end all I had to do was shake the bin around a bit until about half of it had fallen through.

What's left of the floor consists mainly of larger boards - some of them eight or ten feet long - which all need cutting down before burning. On the positive side, this makes them easier to fit inside the bin, reduces the number of dropouts and general sped the process up quite a bit. In between loading the fire and sawing more planks, I continued retrieving bricks from the sub-floor space and began deconstructing the footings which had been left behind by the demolition crew. It didn't take me long to discover that each wall had been supported by a double line of bricks, so I started a second brick stack with a slightly larger footprint than the first. By the end of today's burning session this new stack was 12 courses high, each course having 8 bricks. At this rate I'll be able to build another garden wall.

I had to call a halt to proceedings after a little over four hours. The glowing embers in the bin had reached handle level and made it almost impossible to add more wood without it falling out, or risking tipping the incinerator over. I let it burn down to the point where the chimney-lid would fit back on, and left it to do its thing. I reckon there's another day's burning left in the stack so I'll be sending off my request for good weather next weekend!

I've been converted

Or perhaps, I should say, I'm being converted.

Several years ago when my PC was young, I decided to rip my music collection to it. After all, I reasoned, I spent many of my waking hours in front of the PC, we have no means of playing music in the living room, and the "media centre" idea was beginning to be established as the way to go. Intoxicated by the vastness of the space available to me (I had an almost-empty 250GB disk - luxury!) I chose to rip my collection to the superior, but slightly more space hungry, Windows Media Audio (wma) format, rather than the, perhaps more traditional, MP3.

The more tech-savvy of you will have predicted what comes next, and long-standing readers of this blog will already know.

I bought an iPod.

iPods don't play WMA format music files.

The frustrations of grappling with iTunes, expressed in that blog post linked above, have stayed with me for so long that I've only ever synced it once. That first time. You might even say I'd been traumatised. It did change my behaviour though. As soon as I discovered the WMA restriction I changed my rip options, and have been ripping in MP3 ever since. But still, more than half of my original music collection remained inaccessible, and none of my newer albums, despite having been ripped in the right format, have been synced.

This has long been a source of disappointment to regular travellers, as they discover nothing new on the iPod, but recently came to a head with my purchase of the Best of Nightwish, which both Natalie and Blythe wanted to listen to almost continuously. We even had to resort to the CD player!

Finally reaching the end of Procrastination Road, I sought out a file converter and pointed it at my music collection early this morning. It initially found almost 6,000 files, but after running it for an hour or so I realised it was wasting time analysing the MP3 files to detect that they didn't need converting, so I stopped it and removed everything from the list except WMAs, thereby reducing the number to 2,670 files. A few minutes progress monitoring suggested the conversion process would take almost 48 hours to complete, and when I checked a few minutes ago, this was still true.

You'd have thought with all my experience I'd know better than to use proprietary formats for *anything*. Maybe this will be the final lesson on that subject.

Waving goodbye

I've always tried, with my daughters, to follow the example my own Dad set. Nothing was too much trouble for him. He'd always be there with the offer of a helping hand, or a lift to take me wherever I needed to go. So there I was, at 2.30am, knocking on Natalie's door telling her it was time to get up and go to the airport to catch the first leg of her three-flight journey to this year's field trip in Belize.

Belize? Flippin' 'eck! The most exotic educational trip I declined as a student (I never went on any school trips) was to northern France. Mind you, she has been through the mill a bit these past few months what with Hep-C, rabies and typhoid injections and anti-malaria pills she's felt pretty sick a lot of the time, so I hope the trip is worth it. I'm sure it will be. Trip of a lifetime, probably, but before the excitement comes many hours of flying. 6am flight to Amsterdam, then the 10.45 transatlantic leg to Houston (10 hours flying) and a final 90-minute flight to Belize. They're on Central Standard Time there, 7 hours behind the UK, so when she lands at 4.45pm local time her body will think it's 11.45pm, and she'll have been awake for 22 hours. I have no idea how much more journeying there is at the tropical end between the airport and the resort.

Check-in for the Amsterdam flight didn't open until 4am but the trip organiser had insisted everyone be at the airport by 3am. I know. What can you do? At least, when we walked into the departures hall at 3.05, a small group of her mates had already gathered near the desk. So we hugged, I waved goodbye, and left her in St. Christopher's (and KLM's) capable hands.

First song is in the bag!

Well, it's been a long time coming but at last, after an absence of more than three years, I once again find myself in Annie's bedroom.

Oo-err missus! No! Not like that. I was there to SING.

Yes, we've finally started recording for the second album. The songwriting process, interrupted as it has been by house moves, creative dry spells, changing jobs, other projects, and all the minutiae that life throws in the path of the struggling, part-time artist, has stretched from November 2005 - when we wrote the last of the songs for our first album - to now, when we decided it was about time to put voice to microphone and lay down some of the twelve new tracks we've been writing during those three-and-a-half years.

I had only the vaguest realisation somewhere in the back of my mind that it had been so long, but looking at the dates on some of the music and lyric files brought it home to me. The one we recorded tonight - Flight of the Raven - was written in April 2006!

And boy, am I rusty. It's been at least a year since I did any serious singing, so the first hour of tonight's recording session was spent trying to blow the cobwebs off my pipes and get back in the groove. But we got there in the end, and without THAT much help from Annie's clever pitch-correction software. I think she only needed to get that out of the kitbag once, although we did struggle to come up with a decent harmony line for the chorus.

The sense of achievement though, after two-and-a-half hours, when I sang the last line and we both nodded at each other in recognition of a good "take," was every bit as powerful as that first time back in 2005 when we recorded Broken Rules. We'll be doing this every Thursday for the next few weeks. I'll be impressed if we can maintain a rate of one song per night - we chose a relatively easy one to start with - but whatever the rate of progress, we've made a start. And as we all know, the journey of a thousand songs begins with a single note. Or something.

English as she is spoked

As you might expect, with being a writer, I love the English language. Not just the wealth of vocabulary or the beauty of a well-crafted sentence, but its fluidity. It's ability to change and grow, adopting new words from other cultures and adapting existing ones to meet new needs.

Sometimes, the invention of new words, which can sometimes appear to be a full-time job for the tabloids, works really well. One of the best examples that springs to mind is "squarial" - a type of satellite dish introduced by British Satellite Broadcasting in the late eighties which was, you guessed it, both square and an aerial. As with most things these days, there's a Wikipedia page on it if you're interested, but the point of mentioning it is that it was a newly-coined word that, for me, worked really well because it correctly and succinctly described exactly what it was. Sadly the word, like the thing it described, became defunct in 1990 with the demise of BSB.

And also sadly, the phrase "works really well" can't be applied to all new words. Especially words like the one I heard on the radio today: nanobreak.

Intended to mean a short break (holiday) - one shorter than a weekend break, i.e. one night - it fails at the most basic level. The level of naive use of a term that has a specific, scientific meaning. "Nano" is an SI prefix meaning one billionth of something, as in: nanometre - one billionth of a metre. It also has widespread usage in relation to things on a nanometre scale, such as nanoengineering, nanotechnology, etc, but unfortunately it is also entering the popular consciousness as a "cool" way of saying "very small."

But, see, the problem I have with it, and the thing that made me roll my eyes in exasperation at the kind of marketroid thinking that does this to English, is that a nanobreak would be WAY shorter than a one-night stay somewhere. A nanobreak would be a billionth of a break. So assuming the measure "break" relates to what most people take as their annual holiday - two weeks (in which case, incidentally, a one-week break could be referred to as a semi- or demi-break) - then taking a nanobreak would involve going on holiday for 0.0012096 seconds.

Mind you, a lot of my holidays feel as though they've been that short, on the day I go back to work.

Comestible confusion

As usual on my way to pick Nikki up from work today I was listening to Radio 4. The pundits were discussing research into links between diet and prostate cancer and when I joined the programme one guy was going on about how he has recognised that dairy foods carry an increased risk and that he's eliminated them from his diet completely.

Now I'm as worried about prostate cancer as the next man. Well, actually, it's probably the examination to check me out for prostate cancer that me and the next man are worried about, but anyway... a life without dairy? No butter? No ice-cream? No CHEESE? No thank you.

As the programme continued, the alternative viewpoint came from a lady researcher, who shot the guy's argument down in flames. That's my spin on her arguments anyway. "Dairy hater obliterated by gorgeous cream-loving temptress." Or something. Her counter-argument was beautifully executed as a pincer movement. From the North came the revelation that this "increased risk" to dairy-eating prostate owners was only 10%. So if 1 person in every 1,000 is at risk on average, among the dairy eaters the risk will be 1.1 people in 1,000. Or, to put it another way, 1 person in 900. (Presumably. Stats was never my strong point.) Wow. I'm so scared. But she wasn't done. Remember the pincer movement. From the South came marching the second offensive. That dairy foods have positive effects too. In particular their calcium-related compounds have been proven to reduce the chances of suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

So there we have it. In stark, tabloid terms: go mad and keep your man gland, or stay sane but lose the juice.

But of course it's not as simple as that. These things never are. Foods are remarkably complicated chemical and biological agents, which often have beneficial AND deleterious effects in combination. And as if that weren't hard enough to get your head around, those effects can be reduced or exacerbated by your individual susceptibilities, whether genetic, environmental, or behavioural. Research continues into the complex interplay of all these factors, but increasingly I find myself asking: what's the point?

I don't want to live in a world where I have to eat exactly this much of this and not more than that much of that, not more than once a week and certainly not after consuming the other. Where I'm instructed to have five-a-day, exercise three times a day for twenty minutes at something that elevates my heart rate by 50%, avoid dairy, saturated fat, barbecued food, strong alcohol, sugar, cholesterol, and on, and on, and on. Jeez I'd be so stressed with worrying whether I was doing the right thing at the right time, the very act of trying to stay healthy would make me ill!

No, the research is all very interesting an' all, but I'll carry on doing what I like, when I like, and avoiding what I don't like, when I don't like it. If that approach has consequences then that's no different from any other approach. There's more to life than how long it is. It may be an overused phrase in these days of multi-forwarded emails, but it's still true that life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.

We're baffled

As I mentioned yesterday, on our trip to the garden centre we had intended to buy a fat snax holder. These little balls of goodness come in their own nylon mesh bags, but with a warning that small birds' claws can become trapped. They shouldn't really be hung up in these bags, but rather in a specially-designed holder. Perhaps more frustrating for us was the constant attention of the squirrels, who found the bags altogether too easy to lift off their hooks. The sight of several fat snax balls being dragged away across the lawn had made up our minds that we needed to protect them behind a strong wire cage.

Imagine our delight then, while perusing the various fat snax holders on offer, along with other garden-bird-feeding equipment, to discover the existence of a specially-designed Squirrel Baffle. For only a fiver, this clear plastic dome is attached to the feeding station pole, preventing Tufty from ascending to the banquet above. A bargain! They've already cost us more than that in stolen fat snax!

The baffle, even easier to assemble than the incinerator, was in place in minutes, and so far today each of us - Nikki, Natalie and myself - has witnessed its efficacy in foiling Tufty's attempts at purloining our avian comestibles.

The squirrels still climb the pole. They can see the food, hanging temptingly, through the baffle. On reaching the underneath of the baffle they adopt a confused look, glance right and left hoping to find a way through, or past, or over. Finding none they slide dejectedly back down the pole and slink off across the garden in search of alternative aliment. Result!

Incinerate!

With several things on our garden-related shopping list today and Mr Weatherman promising heavy rain later, we made an early start and took breakfast at the garden centre this morning. The bacon baps and toasted teacakes were excellent, so this may become a semi-regular thing (constrained only by the slight ache in the wallet caused by paying £5.25 for a bacon bap).

No visit to Woodford is complete without a full tour of the grounds, so along with the planned purchases of an incinerator, a fat snax holder for the bird feeder, and some rooting compound, we ended up with a trolley full of goodies including this rather attractive dianthus which now graces the deck, and a compact patio clematis (down there on the right) whose colour might have been especially bred to match the tub vacated by our dogwood, which we planted out in the border the weekend before last.

I left all the planting and arranging to Nikki. My attention was focused on man things. Assembling the incinerator (a rather grand title for the simple task of screwing its three feet on) and getting started with the burning.

I've had a lifelong fascination with fire, almost to the point of pyromania. It explains the large, strangely shaped scar on my right hand, and manifested itself when I was a child in hours spent in the woods collecting fallen branches, building bonfires and watching them burn. And then returning to the embers the following Saturday to rake them back into life and begin the whole process over again.

Using a garden incinerator isn't quite as satisfying as that - having to wait until the wood has burned down before adding more slows the whole process down too much - but it comes a close second. In the end the promised rain didn't arrive and I was able to keep the fire going from noon until late afternoon, reducing the stack of oily floorboards by about a third and seeing off the various lengths of pruned tree completely.

In the intervals between loading wood into the bin, and picking up the odd smoking remnant that fell out, I busied myself collecting bricks from the site and stacking them by the wall, along with sorting the multitude of detritus that litters the area into piles of keepers and chuckers.

After four hours the air holes in our shiny new incinerator were totally blocked with ash, which had built up to more than half fill the bin. This slowed down the rate of burn considerably. It wasn't shiny any more either. The galvanising, or whatever had given it that shiny appearance, had all burned off within the first five minutes. I waited until the fuel level dropped below the rim, slotted the chimneyed lid into place, and left the rest of the burning for another day.

Floor found to be fire fodder

Weather forecast was good for today; not so good for tomorrow, so I was determined to make a start on lifting the garage floor.

Expecting at least some of it to be salvageable, I spent the first hour or so moving our collection of dried logs and tree stumps (which would be ideal for log fires, if we ever lit one in the dining room any more) from the shed to the wood store. Funny how a pile of wood looks fairly small until you try to move it. I adopted my usual mental approach to tasks of this kind: "each piece moved is one piece less to move" and sure enough when I surfaced from that self-imposed mental idle, the job was done and the shed looked considerably more capacious.

Nikki retrieved my crowbar and hammer from the study, and I set to lifting the boards, starting at the door end and working towards the house.

It soon became clear that not a single piece of floor could be rescued. Those two planks that had looked so promising were both too thin to support a man's weight (well, THIS man anyway) and too rotten underneath to be used for anything else. Indeed all the boards, including the ones that looked OK from above, hid a total mess underneath. Whether they'd been chewed up by the hundreds of woodlice living in the sub-floor space, or rotted with the damp, or been turned into dust by woodworm and mould, they were all only good for one thing: burning.

The main reason? None of the floor had been protected from damp. I don't know who built that garage, or when, but they had a pretty strange idea of construction technique. The boards were carried on joists that rested on... earth. Yep, directly on the soil. In many cases these joists had rotted away to nothing - as you can see from the photo. When I tried to pick them up, they would fall apart leaving a trail of dust in the soil. Or they'd split in half, leaving the rotten half behind and me holding the chewed-up top half of damp, spongy timber.

These central joists had transferred their moisture to the floorboards, which were also in various stages of rot. Only at the edges, where the joists rested on a couple of courses of brick, made level with small pieces of slate, had the wood remained dry, but this had only stopped the rot - not the ravages of worm, beetle, and louse.

The patched section, as predicted, had suffered years of oil damage and had in fact given way, the boards beneath split and crumbled. Putting a positive spin on all this - at least the job went quickly. Only the first five or six boards had been nailed down, the rest simply laid loosely on their joists. With the boards neatly stacked against the wall, and having uncovered a couple of 2x2 flagstones, we're all set to have a cracking good fire so we'll be off to the garden centre tomorrow to buy an incinerator. Those oil-soaked boards should burn a treat!

Flawed floor

We dodged the showers yesterday to take a quick peek at that mysterious garage floor. It's built more like a floor you'd find in a house rather than a garage. Every garage I've ever seen has a huge slab of concrete for a floor, not floorboards.

Most of it, I should say, is made of boards. In one small area - which looks in the right position to have been beneath the old MGC's sump for most of the time - the boards have been reinforced with additional timbers laid perpendicular to the run and screwed into place. Presumably the wood beneath had softened under the influence of countless oil drips. It certainly feels spongy to the tread.

Closer to where the door was, the boards give way to more substantial planking - pieces of timber stretching the whole width of the building but more than an inch thick and a good six inches wide or more. If these are in good condition when I lift them, they can supplant the rather too large and heavy planks which I originally bought for decorating. Even closer to the door the whole mess dissolves into small offcuts, bits of pine and whatnot which would make good kindling should we ever again have a fire in the dining room.

About three-quarters of the way across the floor, one of the boards is loose and gives a hint of What Lies Beneath: eight or so 2x4 joists supporting the boards and which themselves are resting on what looks like a mishmash of brick, concrete, and old tarmac. I don't think I can be entirely certain what it is until I start digging it up. At the moment it's covered in a film of white dust. I'll be ignoring discomfort and my long-time hatred of the damn things, and wearing a mask when I tackle this. There is a chance this dust is years of slough from the cement asbestos walls and I don't fancy keeling over with mesothelioma in twenty years.

This is turning into yet another example of how one job leads to another. The demolition was just the start!

BBQ 2009

Last year we missed the good barbecuing weather by a day. This year we missed it by an entire week. Yes last Saturday, as my UK-based readers will fondly recall, was a blisteringly hot and sunny 27° - perfect weather for a BBQ, garden games and sitting under the shade of a gazebo sipping Pimms, or your tipple of choice. Yesterday the only outdoor tippling was provided by the iron-grey clouds blanketing the city, which proceeded to dump their load on us from early morning until mid-afternoon.

Hardly the stuff to inspire thoughts of garden gallivanting, or to enthuse the weary salad-maker (me) as he chops his parsley and soaks his bulgur wheat for the tabouleh, or empties tins of assorted beans into a large stainless-steel bowl for the three-bean salad, especially when he'd been up since 5.30am to boil the potatoes and eggs for a classic potato salad.

Still, the late afternoon forecast was for the weather to dry up between 2-3pm and remain dry for the rest of the evening, so at least the day wasn't set to be a complete wash-out even if it didn't match the gloriousness of the previous weekend. Having sussed the weather, it was with some dismay we learned via neighbourhood runner that the BBQ - its early stages anyway - had been forcibly decamped to the local club for the hours of 3-6pm.

Our forlorn troop of salads wended its way down the road and around the corner shortly after 3pm to join the other cold food on a series of low tables, to be picked over while the kids were entertained with various games of musical chairs, bumps and egg & spoon races (Health-and-Safety-mandated plastic eggs, naturally).

After this brief exile we marched the remaining salads, quiches and trifles back down the road to their rightful home, alongside the soon-to-be grilled burgers, sausages, toasties, kebabs and an assortment of breads. At the urging of several neighbours I once again performed my erection in the garden - an impressive affair that can easily shelter 20 people - while other assorted male partners looked on with envy from their more traditional positions manning the barbecues.

It wasn't long before I'd put myself on the outside of three hot dogs, a burger, two toasties and two portions of tiramisu, at which point I realised I was almost incapable of sitting down so I'd better stop. Luckily it was time for the quiz, a marginally easier version of last year's organised into 26 questions whose answers began with successive letters of the alphabet. Our team - named Royal Jerseys in honour of the potato salad and other potato-related delights - won with 17/26. It would have been 18 if I'd been able to remember the Nikkei in time. Why is it when you need Nikkei all you can think of is Hang Seng?

All this tongue-in-cheek hilarity belies the fact that I was totally not in the mood for a social event yesterday. In fact all of us agreed we'd far rather be sat cosily in front of a good film than trying to find the other person in the room going "oink" (the Animal Game) or trying to pick up a rapidly-diminishing cereal carton using only our teeth, and without touching the floor with any part of our bodies other than feet (the Box Game). Looking on the bright side, we did manage to avoid any hint of Choo-Choo.

So for the second year running, we didn't stay until 3am. We didn't even stay until midnight. We left as soon as the Box Game had run its course (with five limber contortionists attempting to pick up a flat piece of cardboard from the floor), thereby relieving the remaining party-goers of our bah humbugnesses.

Garage Sale

Not so much a "sale", to be fair, more a giveaway.

Looking more like a Second World War Nissen hut, our "garage" has blighted the bottom of our garden since before it was our garden. Since the very first day we came to view, and sat at the picnic table enjoying a cup of tea with the previous owners.

I can't remember if we decided then and there it had to go, but if not it wasn't long after. Barely wide enough to accommodate the smallest car (it used to house an MGC GT) and accessible only down a lane that is itself barely wide enough for a car to pass (our neighbour used to drive a Reliant Robin, which was OK, but anything larger? Dicey.) it was a garage in name only as far as we were concerned.

Various options were discussed and discarded over the years. Its cement asbestos construction allegedly meant that extreme care had to be taken in any demolition. Panels were not to be broken, and afterward had supposedly to be wrapped in heavy-duty polythene sheet and taken to the councip tip, which required 24-hours notice. Although not mandatory, it was also recommended to wear protective clothing - a mask at least and preferably a disposable cover-all.

Imagine my surprise then, when our two-man demolition crew arrived in shorts/jeans and t-shirts and proceeded to take the erection apart piece by piece, apparently unconcerned as they broke panels in half and barrowed them out to the road (the lane having proven to be too narrow for their Transit tipper).

I had intended to take "progress" shots on-site, but having witnessed their method from the study window I decided it would be more prudent to remain out of range of the dustclouds surrounding them. Progress, unhampered by protective suits, masks, or the desire not to disturb the integrity of the panels, was impressively rapid. The crew arrived at 9am and within an hour had removed the asbestos sheet, membrane and wooden boards comprising the roof structure, completely exposing the trusses.

Half an hour later the entire roof had disappeared.

After a further half-hour the lane-side wall and door end were down, and the garden side wall can be seen here leaning drunkenly inwards. By noon, the final wall - the gable end nearest the house - had fallen and the garage was, effectively, no more. The men had been on-site less than three hours.

After a quick tea break and the first trip to the tip to dispose of all the timber, they returned to bag up the cement panels and sweep up.

Taken from the same position as the first photo above, this is how the garden looks now. A little less like a 1950's throwback and a little more like the 21st century suburban haven we want it to be. Admittedly the flowering currant stuck apparently haphazardly in the middle of the plot gives it a slightly bizarre aspect, but the plan is to take back-up cuttings from this before trying to transplant the mature tree to a more sensible location.

We have been left with one final interesting task. The disposal of the garage floor.

Not, as for modern constructs, a concrete float, but instead what appears to be a suspended wood floor made up of various gash pieces of timber, off-cuts of floorboard and whatnot, all resting on a low course of bricks. Some of this flooring timber can, I hope, be rescued and used to repair some of the more chewed-up boards inside the house (although they will need sanding and treating). The rest will have to be burned. Probably the first use of the new space, once we've purchased a traditional garden incinerator.

Back in the groove

What with one thing and another, the replaced tiling around the new shower tray wasn't grouted up until Saturday, which meant New Plumber had to call back yesterday to seal the tray and the door, which in turn meant we had to wait until today to try it out. But you can bet there was a queue for that bathroom once the sealant had dried.

Since the whole problem was caused by the tray being set too low and with insufficient support, I expected to have to step up into the new tray. As it turned out the extra couple of centimetres makes hardly any difference to the "entering experience" which has definitely got my subconscious confused. My "exiting experience" came with an in-built assumption of a step down with the result that I stubbed my foot on the bathroom floor. Kind of like when you're walking downstairs and there's one less step than you expected. I'm sure I'll get over it.

Sadly I must admit to being not entirely happy with the result. Compared with the old tray, this one doesn't have much of a fall, so the water runs away much more slowly and also pools in the tray and around the edges rather than disappearing completely. It's also significantly shallower, so we'll have to be ultra-diligent about keeping the trap clear or else we'll be flooding the bathroom floor. At its highest point, opposite the trap, the tray is less than one centimetre deep.

Still, if I was to accentuate the positive I'd have to say that after three consecutive showers (Nat's been staying with us on study leave for a few weeks) there's no sign of a leak, and as that was the whole point of the exercise I think we can tick that box.