Digger John's Garret Studio

Yodelling would have been more productive

2011-12-22T17:45:00.000Z

"Please call me to arrange redelivery of your parcel" read the message on the little green card I found on my return home yesterday. It was from Yodel. Never heard of them, but a quick Google reveals it's the new name for Home Delivery Network. Sod's law, really. I was only out of the house for an hour. I've been in all week.

I called the number as soon as they opened this morning. 8am. It went to voicemail.

Hello. This is the Yodel service centre at Ashton.

Well, let me stop you right there. Because surely to justify the title "service centre" you have to, you know, provide some service. And I've been calling that number all day and getting no reply, so I ain't seen much service to speak of.

All our operatives are busy dealing with other customers.

Maybe it's just because I've dialled the number over 100 times today, that I have a vision of "operatives" being just one overworked postal worker rushing between the office and the storage depot. The alternative vision jostling for ascendency in my mind's eye was of a depot full of operatives dressed in festive costume sitting around sipping sherry and eating mince pies, telling each other to "let it ring - it's Christmas!"

But if you leave a message and a contact number we'll get back to you as soon as possible.

Well, no you won't actually, because immediately after the conclusion of your message that nice lady from BT comes on to say

This mailbox is full. Please try later.

And close the call. The only option is to ring again. Which I did. Over and over.

Now I know what you're thinking. Maybe there was no-one there. But while the majority of calls went to voicemail after 30 seconds, just occasionally one would be diverted immediately, suggesting that someone was on the phone at that very minute. During the morning, such an event would spur me on to dial a few more times, thinking if there was someone at the desk right then, I stood more chance of getting through. In this case, more chance was equivalent to two or three times nothing. Still nothing.

While I ate lunch, I dialled the number constantly for over half an hour with no luck. Then, I got the engaged tone. Back came the nice BT lady to advise me (in case I didn't recognise the engaged tone which, you know, hasn't changed for at least fifty years):

The number you have dialled is busy. To use ring back, key 5 now.

Yes! Ring back! Great idea. I keyed 5.

Ring back is not available on this number.

Well why did you offer it to me then you utter arse?

In sheer frustration I Googled "yodel couriers". I had typed only half of "couriers" when the second suggestion in the list changed to "yodel couriers complaints". Oh dear - that doesn't look good. I followed the first link, to a review site.

First time I've ever known a company to have an average of 1 star (yes, out of 5) after 1203 reviews. That's a pretty impressive indictment. I'm surprised any online retailer still uses them.

My package turned up around 3pm. I never did get through to the "service" centre.

"Ah, Yodel!" I cried as the courier handed over his ruggedised tablet for me to sign. "I've been trying to call your depot all day."

He looked sheepish.

"Wasting your time there, mate."

Tell me about it.

Cat man do.

2011-12-21T09:52:00.001Z

As I mentioned in an earlier post, our cat man promised to send loads more pictures of New Kitteh (name still being debated) between my first visit and the day he's ready to come home. Four weeks later and there hadn't been much evidence of promise fulfilment on the photo front. OK, no evidence. A prompting email provoked a blurry shot taken with a phone along with the promise of more pix "when I get home", a couple of days more nothing and then a brief whinge that emails "weren't getting through."

However eventually, this arrived:

and I think it's true to say he's even cuter now that he was when I first saw him.

Anyway, since we're fetching him home the day after tomorrow, it's suddenly become quite urgent to tidy up all the non-kitten-friendly parts of the house (i.e. ALL of it) and make sure all those tools, boxes, bags, screws, nails, pots of paint, piles of wall plugs, etc, etc, are either put away, thrown away, or behind a closed door.

Good job I finished all the wrapping yesterday!

Recommended just for you

2011-12-19T06:08:00.008Z

Searching eBay to see whether or not the pile of old tat we've brought back from Mum's is worth selling has had a strange result on my emails:

"You recently searched for these things. Still interested? Grab them now!"
OR
"Based on what you looked at you may be interested in these.."

Things that have appeared in the list, and which I am DEFINITELY not interested in acquiring more of include:

bakelite castors
Elizabeth & Philip silver wedding coins
vintage OWZTHAT cricket games
mediaeval style "Jousting Knights" wall plaque

etc.

Of Bosuns, Bosons and Bozos

2011-12-18T07:09:00.003Z

The hunt for the elusive Higgs Boson has been much in the news this last week, as the particle physicists at CERN pore over the latest outputs from the Large Hadron Collider and believe they may have seen tantalising hints of its existence.

Sticking with my recent theme of poor science coverage by the nation's media, this has largely been reported as a search for a totally different entity. Something apparently called a Higgs Bosun. Now I'm not overly familiar with the subject, but to me a bosun has always been something to do with sailing. The oldest rank in the Royal Navy, more properly rendered as boatswain, and the chappy who supervises the deck crew. He also, optionally, may have a locker. But he's got absolutely fuck all to do with particle physics.

Now I know it's an unfamiliar term, but you radio and TV Johnnies really mustn't use that as an excuse to fall back on something you ARE familiar with. It's a BosON. Phonetically: BOSE - as in the world-renowned purveyors of high quality audio equipment - and ON - as in the opposite of off.

I really don't see what the problem is. You never see or hear of people referring to protuns, or neutruns, or electruns. Surely even the densest of media hacks must have noticed by now that sub-atomic particles generally, with some notable exceptions, have names ending in -on. And that this not pronounced un.

I know I shouldn't really get so wound up about this stuff but, well, I do. It's just not proper.

Last day

2011-12-16T06:33:00.001Z

It's my last working day of the year today. Hurrah! Even better than that, it will be foreshortened by having a Christmas "do" to attend at lunchtime, which will stretch comfortably into the afternoon. The only "work" that will be done after noon will be setting my Out of Office reply saying I won't be back until January 3rd next year.

Marvellous.

I love the feeling at this time of year. Even leaving aside Christmas (my favourite time of year in any case), the feeling of *completeness* - that work is over for the holidays - is somehow even more liberating than with a regular holiday. Because it's not just over for the time being, it's over for THE WHOLE YEAR.

Mind you, it would suit me if it was over for the rest of my life. Have I mentioned that I'm sick of it? It's at least controversial and this year has occasionally been suicidal (career-wise, for some high-profile bloggers) to diss one's employers in a public forum, so I won't go into detail, but yes, I've had more than enough. It's mainly that which was behind the Great Absence of blogging earlier this year, when I took a couple of months out to get my head straight. What I was really working on was a medium-term plan to get me out of the place for good.

I never expected to be in this place. Metaphorically. My Dad toiled for most of his working life at a job he loathed, just to do what we all have to do - put a roof over us, feed, clothe, etc. I admired that in a kind of disconnected, unempathic way, because at least in the early days I loved my job. I couldn't really comprehend why anyone would carry on doing something they hated just because of the money. That kind of comprehension only comes with experience. Well, now I have both. Experience and comprehension. And a job I hate. Full house. But at least, after 12pm today, I won't have to think about it until... next year.

Supermassive black hole collapses Radio 4

2011-12-07T18:56:00.001Z

There's been a scientific discovery. One that deserves a modicum of awe, along with a pinch of excitement and a sprinkle of gravitas. Instead, the matter was subjected to the usual treatment on the Today programme this morning. That is, amused disdain and wilful missing of the point.

Oh, those scientists! What have they gone and done now? I don't know. Something about a large hole or whatnot.

Humphreys - and don't get me wrong, when he's up against a politician, that is to say firmly in the middle of his comfort zone, he can still deliver an illuminating interview along with the occasional barbed question or withering put down - is always totally out of his depth when attempting to cover science. In fact Radio 4 in general seems to have a schizoid approach to science in all its guises. Material World's guests have to fight with Quentin Cooper's attempts to squeeze a bad pun into every sentence, while in the same slot on a different day we have to endure, in The Infinite Monkey Cage, Brian Cox and some other equally populist drivel merchant trying to out-do one another to find the needle of comedy in the haystack of current science. Dumb, dumber and even dumber than that, science on Radio 4 is already a joke and recently it's been presented (it seems) by nothing but jokers.

But outside of the science programmes themselves, any current affairs reporting of matters scientific - especially by the channel's headline anchor men - is inevitably accompanied by an obvious embarrassment at their total lack of understanding, or even interest. So their stock compensation for that is to make fun of it, or make light of it. Faced with the news of the largest black hole ever discovered, we get the usual re-runs of guff like "we thought at one time the LHC was going to create a black hole, didn't we? Chortle, chortle." No, we didn't. "Do I remember reading that a teaspoonful of black hole material would be so dense that if you dropped it, it would fall right through the Earth?" Well... where to start. The teaspoon wouldn't be dense enough to pick the damned stuff up in the first place. Even if it could, it would be way too heavy for you to lift, so the idea of dropping it never arises. And so on. Pathetic.

One a related but different topic, the dinosaurs on the Today programme never did, as far as I'm aware, pick up on the story of Kepler-22b.

For the first time, astronomers have found a planet smack in the middle of the habitable zone of its sunlike star, where temperatures are good for life. We can't yet determine if the planet has a surface, but if it does it would have a temperature around 21°C. What we do know is that it's about 2.4 times the size of Earth, orbits its (smaller, cooler than our) sun every 290 days, and is unlike any planet in our solar system. Could be rocky, could be icy, might even have a global ocean. No idea. But at a distance of 600 light-years we won't be visiting any time soon.

How not to invest £6000

2011-12-06T18:38:00.019Z

So*, we were at my Mum's** the other weekend and I decided to tackle the stair lift.

This'll be the stair lift she had installed in 2007, used approximately three times and then decided she'd move a bed downstairs and not bother going up there at all. We came across the bill for it shortly after she moved into the care home. £6000. I researched the company that installed it, hoping that they'd have a scheme for buying them back. Yep, you guessed it. A flock of pigs just flew past.

Worse than expected, not only did the company no longer exist, they'd been the subject of a BBC Watchdog investigation into the shady practice of selling stair lifts for way more than they were worth to vulnerable elderly people, often with dementia. Disgusting. As my Nan used to say: "their hands should drop off." Another brief stint of Internet research suggested she'd been overcharged roughly double what it should have been.

Back in June I was reluctant to write off such a massive amount of money. Surely someone could make use of what was effectively a brand new machine? OK four years old, but hardly used at all and still in perfect condition. Three mobility companies were advertising in the local paper. Two of them didn't return my calls, one said they were only interested if it was a straight staircase. Well, it isn't.

It turns right 180° at the bottom, and again 90° at the second kite wind further up. I found an Internet stair lift trading site, snappily titled stair lift trader dot com, and posted this photo there. I received two phishing replies within a couple of weeks, then nothing.

There was a brief flurry of excitement in September when someone telephoned to ask about the stair lift, but it was just one turn too short. The guy's upper landing was another three stairs and a final right turn away from Mum's, so no go.

By the time the end of November was upon us, I'd pretty much resigned myself to having to write-off the majority of the cost of this damned device. But getting rid of it was another conundrum altogether. Professionals would charge for removal which was like throwing good money after bad. I decided to do it myself, so this particular weekend we arrived in Nottingham armed with a set of Allen keys, an adjustable wrench, Mole wrench and anything else I could think of that might help get it apart.

I'll spare you the details. It took me about six hours to get it down, starting on Friday afternoon and finishing on Saturday morning. The tricky bits turned out to be the "hidden" Allen bolt that held the rail sections together (one more bolt that the other 5 that had visible heads), and working out how the heck the seat/battery pack/motor/gear assembly was connected to the rail. But eventually it was a pile of (very heavy) bits. Nikki wondered whether there was a local scrap merchant who might be interested. At least we'd make SOME money back. Good idea! One Google search, one phone call and one short drive later and we were unloading the bits into a skip.

Skip was duly weighed, and the scrap man handed over our dosh. 102kgs of mild steel at £100 a tonne: the princely sum of £10.20.

*All the best posts, and replies to questions, begin with "So" these days. Just ask the Today programme. They've debated the phenomenon several times already. Usually followed by a package in which the interviewee begins all his or her replies with "So." So I'm only keeping abreast of the trend, before you start. What's that? You weren't going to start. I'm sorry. It must be the way you're sitting.

**Strictly speaking it's not my Mum's any more, of course. It's mine. But it still feels disrespectful to even think of it that way, so I think it'll be "my Mum's" for a while yet. Probably until it's sold and we don't have to refer to it at all.

Happy Birthday!

2011-11-30T06:01:00.000Z

It was my birthday last week, and I was amused to receive two greetings emails from forums I've signed up to in the past which have stored the date and programmatically fired off happy birthday wishes to me at the appointed hour.

One is from a writers' forum I've used extensively in the past (although shockingly I haven't been back there much at all this year, since writing - even blogging - has taken a seat at the back of the bus while we've been on our magical mystery tour of home improvements, illness, death and... er... no. No famine. Yet.

The other made me laugh out loud. Because although I recognised the *name* of the forum in the email, I absolutely couldn't remember the subject. Until I checked it out. It's an online home for various distributed computing projects (like protein folding and SETI@home) that I hooked up with back in the day when Nikki's Dad was recruiting spare CPU cycles to his protein folding team. An unexpected, but not altogether unwelcome, blast from the past for my birthday.

It's beginning to look a lot like...

2011-11-29T06:19:00.001Z

Yeah. Early exposure to Christmas has spilled out of the malls and department stores and infected commercial radio. Friday night we're listening to Smooth FM and here comes Bing bending our ears with his 1951 Christmas number, and it's still only November 26th.

It' s felt like a quiet couple of weeks but although at the time nothing seemed worthy of blogging, or I couldn't muster up the enthusiasm, looking back there's been quite a bit going on.

The big news is that Nikki decided she wanted livestock again this Christmas, after having plumped for tropical fish last year, so a week ago last Friday I took off for Yorkshire and left a deposit (in the nicest possible way) on this little guy.

He's about six weeks old here, and won't be ready to come "home" until a couple of days before Christmas, but we've been promised more photos between now and then, and the hunt is now on for a name. It's been a while since we last owned a cat, so his impending arrival prompted a trip to Pets At Home to stock up on supplies (a bed, scratching post, bowls, etc).

On the kitchen front, the news is that there's no news. No recurrence of the leak problem, granite guys haven't said when they'll be coming to fit that last short bit of upstand, electricians haven't said when they'll be coming to fix the intermittent fault on the lighting transformer. Only the flooring guy has come up smelling of roses, having said he'd pop round to add beading to those few places where we thought we were going to replace the skirting board but later decided it wouldn't look right, he DID pop round, exactly when he said he would, beaded as necessary and refused all payment. Top bloke.

Subtitles

2011-11-06T08:20:00.014Z

Last week I was stuck in a hotel where BBC1 had been set to display subtitles without any apparent way to switch them off. This was annoying in the evening but the next morning on breakfast news it turned out to be hilarious.

One article about Russians doing a fake Mars walk ended with the presenter's comment "And all in the name of science!" which the subtitler translated into

"And all in the name of signs!"

Later, a package on the effects of bonfire night on pets included a comment by "some vets at one animal charity," which became mangled into

"Sunbeds at one animal charity..."

And in the same package when explaining that the nervous dog they wanted to "interview" was on his way into the studio but would be late on account of his owners' car having broke down, we got

"The owners kart broke down."

Being a big fan of Damn You Auto Correct I wondered whether there was a special site for subtitling howlers, but all I could find was a few blogs with examples - a bit like this one really :o) Digital Spy does have an interesting explanation about how they're done for live broadcast. An operator rereads the speech into voice recognition software, so that explains a lot!

Unwired

2011-11-05T05:19:00.002Z

Virgin Trains, eh? It's been a while, but this week I had occasion to delight in their services again. Since I last travelled they've been plastered with WiFi stickers. HotSpot (they shout): fast, reliable, wireless internet. Log on now.

Love to mate. But not at £4 an hour. And not when you're already stiffing me (well, my company) £142.50 for a single ticket to London. Our local cafe, which charges £1.99 for a cup of coffee, can offer me free WiFi for as long as I continue drinking. The least you could do is match this with free WiFi as long as I'm travelling. I guess you don't get to be a millionaire by giving shit away, huh?

Leaky

2011-11-04T18:16:00.010Z

When we arrived home, having taken a slight detour to Bolton en route, Nat was at work, so there was no-one available to explain the towel on the kitchen floor.

Dropped by accident? Left over from the last load of laundry? Who knew. Didn't take long to discover it was there to soak up the water seeping out from under the corner of the cupboard unit housing the oven. But where was it coming from? It continued to seep out slowly overnight, so the following morning we called Kitchen Guy. He was round within the hour. Removed the plinths, revealing evidence that the water had been there for some time. Wet footings under the tumble dryer and washing machine, but which was at fault?

And why had it taken so long to manifest, when neither machine had been used for a week?

He pulled out the dryer and sat it on a table protector to avoid damaging the floor. We ran a programme through the washer. Nothing. We dried a wet towel in the dryer. Nothing. We let the dishwasher run an empty cycle. Nothing. The mystery remained.

After an hour or so he had to leave, but we agreed it was sensible to leave the dryer out and see what transpired. The answer was... pretty much nothing. We'd brought a suitcase full of laundry back from the Lakes, so Nikki attended to all of that - three loads; washing and drying. No further leak. We loaded up the dishwasher with the Sunday pots. No leak.

The dryer sat in the middle of the kitchen through Monday, Tuesday, until on Wednesday morning Nikki discovered a small puddle on the dryer's mat. On closer inspection the puddle was larger than first thought, having seeped under the mat. I tilted the dryer to let Nikki wipe under the wet side, and more water pissed out on the other side. Where was it all coming from? The dryer hadn't been used since Sunday!

I checked the configuration of the drains and spotted what I thought was the problem. The dryer was connected to the same outflow pipe as the boiler condensate. I figured there was some siphon action going on when the boiler was pumping out. We called the plumber. He looked sheepish, and extended the home-grown standpipe he'd installed to take the dryer output, so that it had more than 1" of head above the condensate outflow. Sheesh.

For the time being, we've left the dryer out to prove the solution, and I'm left wondering if we'll ever have a job done in this house without something going wrong :(

R&R

2011-11-03T18:15:00.037Z

Never have I been more ready to spend 7 days in the Lake District with our mates than this year. Two significant deaths in the family, two months off work with stress, three months major upheaval with kitchen fittings, an emergency trip to Canada. Exhausted doesn't even begin to describe it.

But a week spent looking at scenery like this...

...enjoying the company of good friends, excellent meals cooked in turn by each of us, or taken in the delightful ambience of local hostelries (of which The Strands Hotel in Nether Wasdale deserves special mention), taking the occasional stroll around a lake, or on a beach, was enough to scrub away the gloom and lift the spirits. It's been two years since we last did this, and we all agreed it will not be the last time. Hall Flat Farm is "our place", almost ideally suited to four couples relaxing together or separately and one in which we've created many special memories.

Christmas is coming

2011-11-02T14:42:00.015Z

For a few years now - pretty much since our first Christmas in the last house - we've been decorating the Christmas dinner table with all sorts of gold sprinkly bits. We've gone through flying cherubs, "Merry Christmas" banners (which were a bit useless as they tended to get bent and clump together), snowflakes, etc, but the favourite by far are those little gold stars.

They're easy to spread about, and they tend to stick together when they're new, in clumps of between two and seven, so you can while away the time between cracker jokes separating the clumps.

Their only drawback is... they get EVERYWHERE. And it's a standing joke in our house the way they keep turning up throughout the year, in the most unexpected places.

But this year has to be a record. 1st November yesterday, and I found this one on the stairs. From last Christmas.

Sign of the times

2011-11-01T12:41:00.003Z

I had an appointment in the city (Manchester, not that London) this morning at 9.30 to attend a "probate interview."

That was annoying enough in itself. To manage an estate you need a Grant of Probate. A certificate, effectively, that officially states to anyone who needs to know "this person is allowed to handle all the affairs of this other, dead, person."

There are two ways to get one of these. You can engage the services of a solicitor, who fills in the form for you and pays the fee, and everything goes through on the nod. Because solicitors are trustworthy people aren't they? And if they sign something, then it's right and proper and true. This alternative, you won't be surprised to hear, is expensive.

Alternatively you can fill the form in yourself. It's not complicated. Because you're not a solicitor you'll have to pay an inflated fee - roughly double what the solicitor would have paid (or, more accurately, what you would have paid through your solicitor) - but the really galling part is that you then have to attend a meeting with a representative of the Courts & Tribunals Service to make a formal declaration that what you put in the form is the truth. Because let's face it, since you're not a solicitor you can't be trusted and have probably made it all up. Despite having proven who you are, and being the person named IN THE WILL as the one the deceased chose to handle their affairs.

Still, all that is not what this post is about. I just got carried away a bit. Sorry.

Since the Probate Registry offices in Manchester are in the Civil Justice Centre (an imposing steel building in the Spinningfields area) I parked in one of the central car parks. One of those with a "pay before you leave" machine. Returning to the car after the brief meeting (I was in there a total of five minutes) I was urged by the machine to "Please insert your ticket."

And the second language the machine gave this prompt in?

Polish.

A Kitchen with Knobs On

2011-10-31T18:13:00.031Z

Although it felt like ages, it was less than two weeks between completion of the main kitchen fit and the final arrival of our knobs. Since we elected to retain our AEG fridge and freezer (the only appliances left from the original kitchen), we also chose the Franke "silk steel" sink and tap, and decided therefore to continue this theme in the knobs and cup handles, which are all brushed steel.

It's hard to take an impressive photo of the kitchen from any angle, with it being so long and narrow. I've been wondering whether it would be possible to get hold of some "photo stitching" software and take a row of pics at 90deg to the units, ending up with a long photo of each side, but I've experimented with PhotoSynth and the results are patchy at best. It doesn't cope well with panoramas in small spaces, apparently, so these will have to do.

So this final stage was completed on Thursday 20 October, the day before we left for the Lakes. Apart from the small section of granite upstand under the boiler cupboard, some short lengths of oak beading around those bits of wall not covered with cupboards (which we'd intended to fit skirting board to, but changed our minds), and fitting a proper door stop to replace the lump of wood that's behind the door right now, it's... ALL DONE! :o)

Leave to take Leave

2011-10-30T18:09:00.005Z

On the morning I was due to return to work - Monday 17 October - I logged in to find a reply from my manager to my urgent email informing him of our emergency visit to Toronto and that I'd be off for the rest of the week. Company guidelines in the event of the death of a close relative allow five days compassionate leave, but in view of everything that's happened in recent months, he had replied that if I needed longer I should just take it.

This falls into the category of "things I don't need to be told twice." I replied with thanks, reset my Out of Office message, and logged off for the rest of the week. And since we were due to spend all of the week after THAT on holiday in the Lakes, I'll have been off for three weeks by the time I go back. Sadly, Nikki's firm aren't quite so generous when it comes to compassionate leave.

Shirley Margaret Fletcher

2011-10-29T18:03:00.009+01:00

I've been thinking (worrying) about this post since before we flew to Toronto. Knowing I should write something, knowing that it would be hard. That it could be upsetting, both to write and to read. The best I can do - ALL I can do - is to relate how she appeared to me. I knew her for a little over ten years. We first met in 2000 when I visited Toronto. Meeting your partner's parents for the first time is never easy, no matter how old and experienced you are. But in this case the circumstances were perhaps even less auspicious than normal, there being the unspoken possibility that I would be spiriting her daughter off to live with me in England. It came back to me later that Shirley had said something like "I wanted to hate him, but I couldn't. He's such a nice guy."

So the first thing I learned about Shirley was that she was a very astute judge of character ;o)

Some people are an open book, others more guarded. Shirley could appear quite abrasive, but if I were to continue with the book analogy I'd say she was like a book that was bound in cactus, but turned out to be a heartwarming story of infinite warmth and humanity when you eventually read it. Whether on this side of the Atlantic or that she was always pleased to see us, always generous to a tee (paying for the overwhelming majority of our meals out no matter where we were, and brooking no argument on the subject), and always made sure we had a full supply of breakfast bagels and coffee when we went there, and that she brought a good supply of Riceroni and pumpkin pie mix when she came here. And marmalade. Oh that homemade marmalade! There's nothing like it on Earth, and the frighteningly meagre supply now sitting in our fridge is the last there will ever be. I hardly dare spread it on a single slice of toast, but when I do - and for as many times as I do - I'll offer up a silent prayer of thanks. I tried many times without success to persuade Nikki to make it while Shirley was still with us. Now I just have to hope that the recipe is one of those that "just works" without her magic touch. What are the chances?

My Inbox is considerably less busy these days too. Shirley was well-connected, email-wise, and the constant stream of jokes, funny photos, or inspiring PowerPoint slide decks that flowed from her was a regular and welcome source of laughs, gasps and awwwwws.

But inevitably our opportunities to get better acquainted were limited by both time and distance. Listening to Nikki, Paul and Stewart relate tales of their childhood in her house, reading the emails of condolence from her widespread friends and acquaintances met on her many cruises, seeing the effect of her passing on everyone we came into contact with on our visit, brought it home just how much she was loved by everyone who knew her, or whose lives she touched.

"It's a great life, John, if you don't weaken," she regularly said to me. And until the very end, she never did. A remarkable woman in every way.

Should Not Have Got On This Flight Tonight

2011-10-28T05:59:00.005+01:00

Not being one to like a lot of fuss, Shirley had always said she didn't want Nikki to fly over in "emergency mode" whenever she shuffled off the mortal coil. Since she wasn't here to argue, we went anyway. The first flight we could book, Tuesday 11 October, arrived at Toronto Pearson mid-afternoon. A few seconds of Neil's reaction to Nikki's arrival would have been enough to convince anyone we'd done the right thing going over. We stayed 5 days, flying back Saturday night on the red-eye and arriving back in Manchester on Sunday morning.

The trip was a surreal mix of doing the things we would have done on a normal visit, only without Shirley, and in the midst of dealing with our grief as best we could, trying to help in any small way to organise lawyers, Neil's long-term care, Shirley's possessions, and comply with her last wishes. One of the most unusual of these was to donate her body to medical research. She'd been inspired to do this by a friend who passed before her, and although not having the closure of a formal funeral service proved a little hard for Neil to deal with, everyone was very glad that Shirley's final generous gesture was accepted by the University of Toronto medical research centre (not all are).

In my experience people often talk, or joke, about "donating their body to science" but very few have the courage or conviction to really do it.

Ups and Downs

2011-10-27T17:49:00.010+01:00

I'm in danger of writing more apologies for hiatuses (and possibly apologies for incorrect plurals of 'hiatus') on here than 'real' blog posts this year. It's been a year for interruptions. Or to put it another way, a shit year. One with the usual ups and downs, but where the downs have tended to overshadow the ups. Which only underlines the seriousness of the downs, because the ups - especially where our house is concerned - have been huge. First the shed (whose saga fell in the middle of the Great Blogging Hiatus and hence has never been told) and now the kitchen.

So when we left the kitchen, we were knobless but otherwise to all intents and purposes complete. The appliances plumbed in and working; cooker and hob connected and working; fridge and freezer back where they belong; lights all shining brightly. All that remained was to empty the contents of the dozen or so plastic crates piled up in the dining room which comprised the totality of The Kitchen Before (crockery, dry & tinned goods, etc), decide where it would live in the new scheme, and follow it up with everything else we own that could possibly, legitimately, live in a kitchen (glasses, decanters, bottles of booze, candle supplies, the old Kenwood chef - hardly ever used - that has been languishing in a forgotten cupboard since we moved in, ...) thus freeing up space in the last ground floor room to be given The Treatment.

And that's how we spent our time for the whole weekend following completion. In between cooking on The New Hob, we washed and dusted, carried and discussed and packed away, opened and closed the cupboards and drawers with their temporary handles (wood screws covered with masking tape) until by Sunday afternoon the dining room was looking much more like a dining room than it has for the last three months, and everything was put away. Not that I could find anything, but it WAS all put away.

Inevitably there was some jousting for position. No, we can't put the bean-to-cup coffee machine under there because we can't get to the reservoir to fill it with water. No, we can't put in on that side either, because the water level indicator is against the wall and we can't see how full it is. And so on.

That was an Up, that weekend. We got a lot done, felt very happy with it all, and excited about the new kitchen. The following morning, Monday 10 October, just after I'd returned from ferrying Nikki to work I took a phone call from Paul to say their Mum had passed away. Downs don't get much bigger, or come much quicker, than that.

Kitchen fit: Day 14

2011-10-06T17:44:00.027+01:00

A day of surprises. A day that, I thought, would be wall-to-wall painting, but which turned out to be hardly any painting at all and other much more exciting things like downdraught extractors, induction hobs and putting the fridge and freezer back into place.

Neff induction hob, with de Dietrich extractor (in "deployed" mode). Ooooh. Finally, after all the waiting we can... er... boil a pan of water. But! Never was boiling a pan of water *quite* so similar to being on the bridge of the USS Enterprise. Touch sensitive surfaces and a whizzy little dial thing that is held in place with a magnet and taps and spins to control the hotplates.

The extractor raises itself out of the depths with the touch of a finger and sinks back down again when it's finished sucking.

All this more than satisfies my life-long fascination with knobs and buttons.

Nice to have the fridge and freezer back in the kitchen too, even if it does mean that for the next three or four days we'll be performing a reversed version of the dance we first started back in July. Now the usable cooking facilities are in the dining room and all the food is in the kitchen. Back then it was t'other way round. Not for long though.

Well, I SAY not for long, but as we discovered today it'll be slightly longer than expected. Here's a photo that gives you a bit of a clue, even though the main reason for including it is to give you another perspective on the lovely new hob (purr, purr)...

See the problem? Yes, that's right. No knobs. No, I mean on the cupboards and drawers. The hob is supposed to be knobless. The drawers aren't. Slight delay in delivery. Slight as in "the week after next."

Well, we can't wait THAT long to get into our new kitchen, so the fitter's going to come up with some Heath Robinsonesque solution involving screws and masking tape apparently. Lovely.

Kitchen fit: Day 13

2011-10-05T17:46:00.006+01:00

Plumbers returned again today. After yesterday's gorgeous tapness, today we were being treated to a radiator.

This radiator, to be precise. We thought it looked good in the brochure but it looks even better on the wall. And what's more, it gets warm. When the heating's on. In't central heating brilliant? (TM)

Meanwhile, back in the rest of the kitchen, there was painting. There will, apparently, be painting again tomorrow too. And with all other significant installations either complete, or not happening until Friday, I might have to find something else to blog about.

Kitchen fit: Day 12 - at last a tap

2011-10-04T17:35:00.007+01:00

When you've been filling your kettle, via a large plastic jug, from a wash basin under the stairs no bigger than a loaf of bread, for a month (almost to the day - the last time we had a kitchen sink was way back here), and also using that basin to slop out the coffee maker, and empty the fish tests, and pretty much everything else vaguely sinkish apart from washing up, then this picture is like a vision of heaven.

Yes. We have a tap. Awesome isn't it?

The rest of the day's progress was limited to more painting and, as I may have already mentioned, putting a second coat of cream onto cream-painted units makes little visible impression, there are no "progress" photos to share today. Apart from the awesome tap, of course.

Kitchen fit: Day 11 - the granite men

2011-10-03T18:21:00.002+01:00

After the templating activities of ten days ago we had been awaiting the delivery of the granite worktops with eager anticipation. From template to cut normally takes a week. In our case the extra time was down to the complexity of the cuts and the need to radius several of the corners to match the curve of the units.

Today, the wait was over. The granite men arrived just before 10am and within an hour more than half of the worktops were in place.

This is the small worktop to the left of where the hob will be - at the south end of the kitchen on the right. There used to be a tall built-in cupboard here. The finish we've chosen is called "riverwash" - neither the most common highly polished version (fingermark hell) or the slightly less common but still not uncommon matt (greasy fingermark hell), this has an etched surface that is slightly rippled. Still relatively rare (only the second one these particular granite guys had fitted and something the plumber hadn't ever seen). The colour is "absoluto" - the darkest kind of black.

And here's the new sink. There's been a small miscommunication about what's happening under the boiler. Granite men assumed a small box around the pipe work; we wanted a completely flat surface under the cupboard so the boxing in will eventually stretch along most of the wall, meaning the upstand had to be recut and left loose until the box is complete.

They took it all in their stride though.

Beyond ridiculous

2011-10-02T21:28:00.001+01:00

Even as I start to write this I can't believe I'm (a) wasting my time with it and (b) sufficiently annoyed with what is essentially a vacuous pile of herd-fodder to bother devoting a post to it, but we just got through watching this year's X Factor "Judges' Houses" round, and I'm dumbfounded at the depths they've plumbed for the inevitable "twist."

I can't remember when it first happened and I certainly can't be bothered to look it up, but by now regular viewers of X Factor are very familiar with the concept of Manufactured Groups at boot camp.

It started one year when the number of groups being put through was pitifully low. Suddenly someone had an "idea." Let's take all these soloists that haven't quite made the grade individually, put them together and pretend they're a group! I swear one year two out of the three groups that made it through to the final rounds hadn't existed at the start of auditions (I *have* checked this, and it was series 4 - 2007 - the culprits being "Hope" and "Futureproof". I'm sure you remember them).

So we've been used to this for at least the past four years and the number of groups going through from initial auditions has continued to be... on the low side. Is anyone surprised? Why would you audition as a group when there's a very public history of the producers making groups up on the spot and giving them - effectively - a free pass to the later rounds at the expense of people who have been singing and practising together for more than a week.

Well you may have thought that was ridiculous, but here's where the title of this post comes from. Because THIS year's shenanigans have taken that level of ridiculousness and multiplied it not once, but twice.

First of all, the groups that were manufactured at boot camp were still not good enough, so right at the end, a few members from a handful of groups were given "a life line." Formed into a new stratum of meta-manufactured group made entirely from left over pieces of worn out manufactured group, these groups were then given tickets to Judges Houses. Or judge's house, in fact, since there's just the one for the groups.

With stupefying surrealism, when THOSE groups weren't good enough either, another random selection of members from two groups were given another "life line" (these really are 'cats' - and they haven't yet run out of lives) and made into a third level of uber-meta-manufactured group who then (surely not?) made it through to the final.

Like I said: beyond ridiculous.

iBeer

2011-10-01T19:09:00.017+01:00

Here I am in the living room, with an iBeer, doing an iBlog on my new iPad. Crikey. Saturday nights will never be the same.

(Back on the old - well, new - desktop now). We went out shopping today. Nikki wanted to change our pillows. So... four pillows. That's what we needed. We came back with seven movies, Kasabian's new album (it was playing while we were in HMV and we both quite liked it), a funky clever folding chopping board (Chop2Pot by Joseph Joseph) and a set of ice cube trays, two bags of food from M&S for a "picky tea", a 32GB iPad, an Apple TV box, black leather smartcase, camera connection kit, and... four pillows.

These may well be the most expensive pillows I've ever slept on.

Lovin' the iPad though :o)

Kitchen fit: Day 9

2011-09-29T17:22:00.001+01:00

While the electricians busied themselves finding the source of yesterday's black, quiet fell on the works. The quiet of a solitary, painting man.

Priming and sanding yesterday, and a start on the first coat today. No photos for the time being. The colour we've chosen (Gardenia by name, but cream to you and me. A kind of creamy ivory, to be precise) is virtually indistinguishable from the colour of the primer that the units came with, so yesterday's, today's and even tomorrow's look remains largely unchanged apart from a subliminal increase in richness and lack of blemish.

The only change that impinges on the senses is the faint smell of paint, and as Blogger doesn't yet support smellyvision I can't convey that :o)

The lights are going out all over Britain

2011-09-28T17:41:00.000+01:00

Well... all over the house anyway. Well, the ground floor.

Nat stepped into the hall around 9pm last night. Dusk had fallen and darkness lit the hall with a soul-sapping lack of light blacker than the black pit of the blackest black thing anyone ever went back to, when they were trying to go back to black. She turned the light on and it didn't. She did the only sensible thing.

"Dad? The lights aren't working."

The trip had tripped. I noticed in passing that it was now a blue trip, where before it had been... black. Black thoughts clouded my mind as I returned to the dark hall and tried the lights again. They did. But flicking a switch in the newly wired kitchen brought the black back. I tripped it twice more, just to prove I had the knack for a black attack in the shack.

Kitchen fitter phoned the sparky this morning. "What's the crack, Jack? We've got black, you'd better track back."

Sparky came. The problem was the blue trip. Rated at 30mA, it was no match for 5x78mA bulbs in the hall light (from cold), or six 12mA spots in the kitchen. "These RCD trips are the bane of any sparky's life."

So, rather spookily, the solution was to change the blue trip back to black.

Kitchen fit: Day 7

2011-09-27T17:14:00.001+01:00

A very noisy day in the house today as the fitters were filling and sanding the joints in the cornice all day. Electricians returned to complete their installation, with a tail for the possible later addition of a kick space heater (after we've lived through a winter and decided whether a single radiator is enough), hob lights, connecting up the new ring main, cooker and hob feeds to the board and completing all tests.

So today I was able to set the time on the cooker. Never thought I'd be able to say I enjoyed THAT chore!

Kitchen fit: Day 6

2011-09-26T17:01:00.000+01:00

Another leap forward in visible progress today as the electricians returned to start second fit.

All the lights went in (with the exception of the two over the hob space), light switches, socket covers (still not powered up) and power supplies to the appliances and appliance spaces (i.e. the hole for the fridge and freezer). A very full day's work.

On the "units" front, the kitchen fitters stayed out of the way of the sparkies and concentrated on cutting and fitting the plinths.

But the most obvious, and in many ways most exciting change, was the installation of the oven. The phrase dog's bollocks comes immediately to mind. The wiring still has to be tested so there's no power to the (double) oven as yet, but a kitchen never looks quite like a kitchen until there's an oven, and now there is.

Hare today

2011-09-25T17:36:00.031+01:00

Having taxied back to Chesterfield from Friday's nuptials, yesterday morning was largely taken up with breakfasting and then heading off in one car to pick up the other two (the logistics of which are fairly simple compared to some of the stunts we've pulled in the Lakes).

Neither vehicle had come to any harm during their enforced stay in the pub car park, and duly retrieved, we set off for an afternoon's amble around Chatsworth gardens, taking in the general ambience and enjoying some of the unusual sculptures that adorn the gardens at the moment as part of their "Beyond Limits" exhibition.

I christened this one "Hare On My Bell End" - for obvious reasons. Never did find out what it's really called, and as it's not mentioned over here or on the "sculpture map" I'm still none the wiser. Maybe it's a permanent feature.

Anyway having indulged in more ice cream and pasties than were entirely good for us, we returned to P&V's place (via the Robin Hood for a quick quaff) to refresh before wandering over to the Market Pub for a couple of extra pints in advance of dinner at The Old Post. And WHAT a dinner. Superb.

All too soon the evening, and this morning's breakfast, with such charming and erudite companions was over and we returned home to examine what progress had been made, kitchen-wise in our absence on Friday afternoon, which was - as I'm sure you'll realise if you've been following - "Kitchen fit: Day 5".

The answer was "not a lot" - certainly nothing that would be visible in a photo. The guys had been concentrating on completing the essential and fiddly bits that aren't especially noticeable, while staying out of the way of the granite men. Expect more obvious progress tomorrow.

Wedding of the Year

2011-09-24T07:44:00.000+01:00

Can't be many happier occasions than witnessing two of your best friends getting spliced, and that's exactly where we were yesterday afternoon, in the company of most of the rest of our best friends, their friends, family and a bunch of very energetic small people. The kind that make weddings... um... loud. No, fun. That's it. Fun.

Starting as we meant to go on with a glass of bubbly at Phil & Vicky's (excellent hosts as always), we wended our slightly circuitous way (on account of an overturned lorry on the A617) to Mansfield Registry office for the ceremony and then, with the day's official business out of the way, we settled down to the more important business of celebrating the nuptials with further champagne, and related (and unrelated) beverages, relieved on occasion by the odd sausage roll (really nice ones, as it happened) and dollop of coleslaw.

Called upon - owing to my acclaimed position as "resident wordsmith" - to pen something in the wedding book on behalf of the mates, I can't help feeling I disgraced myself somewhat, on account of the evening's overindulgences and the ebullient flavour of the day, but what's done is done, and whatever I wrote it was written from the heart, with feeling, and with relatively little time for reflection or composition, so f**k it. As long as it's not the last thing I write in a public place, I'll be alright. I think.

Anyway many, many congratulations to Ritchie & Helena (or Helena and Ritchie as they are in the above photo). May your days be long and your troubles few, your friendship strong and your love stay true, and if things go wrong and the air turns blue, just bite your tongue and have a damn good screw.

E.J.Thribb has got nothing on me.

Kitchen fit: Day 4

2011-09-23T10:34:00.000+01:00

After the "excitement" of the previous night, the first order of business yesterday morning was to ask the fitters to shove some spare bubble wrap into the ducting hole to prevent a repeat visit from kitteh.

Luckily, one of them remembered just as they were leaving at 4pm!

The rest of the day was taken up with de-boxing and positioning three of the appliances - washing machine, drier and dishwasher - packing the bases and fitting the tops that will carry the granite worktops, in preparation for the granite "templating" that was scheduled for today.

Once this was done, the guys filled in their time with detailed work like filling the gaps at the sides of the cupboard with carefully scribed panel sections to match the carcases.

The "granite men" arrived today and for some reason I was expecting the templating procedure to be very hi-tech and involve laser measuring equipment and computerised drafting of the worktop areas.

No.

Strips of 4mm MDF, cut to size and glued together to form a kind of latticework representation of the surface area. I kid you not. I guess, although it LOOKS a bit Heath Robinson, it's actually the quickest, cheapest and most accurate way of representing a space, when that representation has to be millimetre-perfect to avoid a very expensive mistake.

Anyway, we didn't hang around to see the finished article as we had a wedding to get to, so here's how the kitchen looked at close of play yesterday (Day 4). You'll have to wait for Friday's progress until we're back from our keenly anticipated weekend in the company of friends.

The cat burglar

2011-09-22T05:00:00.001+01:00

1.18am, and I become vaguely aware of a house alarm blaring away in the distance.

Nikki: "Is that our alarm?"
I listen more carefully, in my sleep-befuddled state.
Me: "Don't think so. It *is* close though."
I get out of bed and plod over to the window. When I pull back the curtain I can see our alarm box flashing its blue light angrily.
Me: "Fuck! It IS ours!"
As I open the bedroom door and the internal alarm becomes clearly audible, several thoughts crowd my still-not-fully-awake mind.
Should I go back and get my baseball bat?
Should I turn the alarm off BEFORE I check downstairs, alerting any intruder to the fact there's someone awake?
Has someone noticed the appliances being delivered and decided it's a good time to go on the rob, while they're all still in boxes?
I quickly decide plenty of light and an aggressive demeanour is the best approach to scare the intruder away. I cancel the alarm, turn the lights on and start downstairs.
Halfway down, I hear a noise in the kitchen. Bloody hell. How have they got in without making a noise?
I reach the hall, turn all the downstairs lights on and march boldly into the kitchen with a no-nonsense face on and the most don't-mess-with-me posture I can muster. I come face to face with the intruder.

A young tortie-and-white kitten, cowering at the other end of the kitchen.

She utters a frightened miaow and scuttles under the nearest cupboard unit.

Then I remember the fitters have just the day before completed coring out a 15cm hole in the wall for the ducting. A hole that presumably, from the outside, looks like a cat flap.

I retrieve the keys for the patio door, prop the kitchen door in the doorway to prevent the kitten escaping into the rest of the house, open the outside door and persuade her to go and burgle someone else, by which time Nikki has come down to check that I'm alright. With around 16 gallons of adrenaline pumping around inside me, I decide going back to bed isn't an option, so we set the coffee maker going and settle down in the lounge for some (very) early morning telly.

Kitchen fit: Day 3

2011-09-21T16:50:00.015+01:00

Appliance day! Well, the delivery of them anyway. And suddenly once again the house became an obstacle course with boxes everywhere.

Dishwasher, double oven, hob, sink, taps and fixings in the hall; washing machine and tumble drier in the kitchen, and the downdraft extractor already unpacked and stood in place so the fitters could marry up the outflow fitting with the position of the ducting (coring for which was completed, with much cursing and swearing at the quality of Victorian stop brick, this morning).

The rest of the day was taken up with cutting the cupboard to fit around our wall-mounted combi boiler. The cupboard went up and down more times than a fairground pony, largely due to the shape of the wall, which kept distorting the carcase during fitting. In the end drastic measures were necessary, in the form of a diagonal cut across one corner of the cupboard to relieve the stress. This will be invisible after painting, but it did make me wonder how the joiner would have coped with the problem if we'd chosen solid wood cabinets.

Kitchen fit: Day 2

2011-09-20T18:33:00.038+01:00

Today was mainly about positioning the remaining cupboards and starting to hang the wall units.

Even without doors, the wall units took the kitchen another huge leap towards "looking right" and their consequential absence from the dining room meant a step away from it being such an obstacle course, since they were no longer blocking access to the kettle station and the cutlery drawer.

Visible progress was somewhat hampered by having to core out two walls to take the ducting for the downdraft extractor, which proved a slow and noisy task. So slow that our fitters decided to abandon the second hole halfway through, to give the drill time to cool down! Even so by clocking off time the kitchen, although still full of tools, ladders and boxes of fittings, was definitely taking shape.

Kitchen fit: Day 1

2011-09-19T17:08:00.021+01:00

And so finally, we come to the start of the actual fitting of the actual kitchen (actually). The project we started on July 9 and which has had more than its fair share of ups and downs already, is (hopefully) on its final up. Finally.

The two fitters - Mr Kitchen Guy himself and his mate - turned up at 9am as promised and got started right away. The units were delivered almost coincident with their arrival and pretty soon the kitchen was a storm of bubble wrap and tape as the wrappings came off and things started to move into place.

But it wasn't just the kitchen. Oh no. We had plastic-wrapped cupboards in the dining room, in the hall, and "cheeks" (the shaped side panels that fit alongside each cupboard) propped up against just about every wall.

Walking around the house suddenly became a bit of an obstacle course. Trip hazards, too, with coving and other long sections lying on the floor in front of the dining room door.

By close of play (4pm, without a lunch break - a solid day's work) we were beginning to get the merest hint of what the finished article will look like.

Insurers have a laugh

2011-09-18T17:08:00.017+01:00

Coincidentally I've just received renewal notices for the buildings and contents insurance on our place AND on my Mum's house, which is currently in the process of being emptied ready for sale, but isn't quite empty yet (by several tons).

Our monthly premium has crept up by a few pounds every year, which I put down to inflation, and increased charges owing to the scrotes who regularly scam money off the insurers, but this time round I noticed that - compared to my Mum's quote - our people don't show an annual charge. So I worked it out, and had to pick my jaw off the desk. Suddenly 5 years after we've moved here, we're paying over a thousand pounds a year for combined buildings and contents insurance.

Hang on, that can't be right. The bill for Mum's place is less than 400. OK, it's a smaller place and Nottingham isn't *quite* so bad for crime as Manchester, but even so that looks a bit ridiculous. Let's do a quick check on confused.com. See if they can redress the balance of all those irritating adverts they've subjected me to over the years. Hey look! They can!!

Five minutes on the Internet and I've saved us about £600 a year. Love it.

I'm sure you'll be able to predict what the original insurers said when I phoned to cancel. "Well, we could look at the underwriting - I'm sure we'll be able to do it cheaper." Yeah. Thanks. Maybe you should have thought of that before assuming I'd carry on letting you rip us off.

A-building we will go

2011-09-17T17:01:00.015+01:00

But first, a-shopping. To somewhere I didn't even know existed: the Northern Computer Markets held at Bowlers every Saturday. How, you might ask, can any self-respecting geek live in Manchester for ten years and not know that was there? And you might ask. I don't have an answer. But I know it's there now :o)

Wandering round trying to stop the drool from soaking into my beard was hard enough. Then we smelled the bacon and egg baps. Then we looked around a bit more, worked out a buying strategy and started spending. A Gigabyte 3DMars case, power supply, a 22" LG LED monitor (just the one for now), a 2TB hard drive (Western Digital of course) 8GB of Kingston memory, BD rewriter, Gigabyte motherboard, i5 processor, Nvidia graphics card, card reader, wireless card, new keyboard and mouse (why not?) and we were done.

Back home on the double to start assembling and by about 4pm the machine was assembled, booted first time, and I was busy reinstalling software. Bloody brilliant.

The old machine, stripped of its disks (the 1TB to keep, the 250GB installed just long enough to suck its data off) is over there, pretending to be a door stop.

No.1 Chinky Buffy

2011-09-16T22:11:00.014+01:00

Diane's been in town unexpectedly this week, so tonight we headed into town for an almost ad-hoc get-together at Manchester's renowned No.1 Oriental Buffet. Or at least it was renowned last time I looked (2-3 years ago maybe). On this particular occasion, although the company was as usual excellent, the meal was a little under par. A bit predictable in choices and some of it not as hot as it could be. Maybe that's what gave me a gippy tummy the next day. Anyway fun was had, drink was quaffed and faces were stuffed.

Then later Annie came back with us and we sat for an hour or two speccing up a replacement for the deceased beased. The death of the old war horse was distinctly to be treated as an opportunity to be grasped, rather than a tragedy to be mourned. Truth be told there had been more grinding of teeth, muttering and swearing in its general direction in recent months (years) than praise and soft words. Slow, error-prone, noisy, slow, many of its application exhibiting less than normal behaviour, and slow.

So one requirement for its replacement stood out from the crowd: Not Slow.

I think an Intel Core i5 and 8GB of memory should be fast enough :o)

Wake up, time to die

2011-09-15T17:26:00.018+01:00

The line, for those who don't recognise it (are there any? lol) is from my favourite movie: Blade Runner.

It's posted in honour of my dear old Fujitsu-Siemens PC, which I've had since December 2004 and which didn't wake up this morning. Since I've used it pretty much every day, apart from holidays spent away from home, in almost seven years, its "not waking up" had happened before.

Usually it means a crash has occurred overnight for some reason, prior to the sleep kicking in. This time a warm reboot didn't fix the problem, and neither did a cold reboot, which is usually enough to clear down any hardware registers that have got their knickers in a knot. No, this was more than just a "not waking up." This was the Big Sleep.

Fingers crossed it's just something like the video card, and not a hard disk crash and the loss of all that lovely data. That lovely, unbacked up, data. Who'd have thought I'm a 33-year computer industry veteran who doesn't back up? There must be thousands of us.

Corporate bollockspeak

2011-09-11T17:49:00.002+01:00

A quiet week on the kitchen front (silent, actually), so I thought I'd share some examples of talking bollocks that I found buried in a comments thread on one of the sites I read regularly.

Phrases that those attempting to climb the greasy pole litter their conversations with, in an attempt to sound knowledgeable, when in fact all they achieve is a demonstration of their scroteworthiness.

"Quantum leap"
Bandied about to mean a fundamental, radical change, but in reality an inconceivably small distance.

"Critical mass"
Clever manager types use this to mean the gathering together of sufficient resources (er, people) to complete a task in the optimum time. It's original meaning is the minimum quantity of something that is guaranteed to make it fly apart catastrophically.

All for now. Feel free to contribute.

The New Floor

2011-09-10T06:06:00.001+01:00

Well, it might be totally devoid of anything remotely resembling a kitchen unit, but the new floor received its last two coats of sealer yesterday, and now has a deep, rich, satin sheen and a colour that - remarkably - is an almost perfect match for the oak staircase we had fitted back in March, as you can see:

Now we wait for a week, while the kitchen manufacturer catches up with the order, and the kitchen echoes loudly with every small noise inside or outside the house. We just know it's going to feel a LOT smaller once the units are in. We've had the whole space to ourselves since the beginning of July, but it'll be good to finally move out of the dining room!

Down tools. Oh... they weren't up.

2011-09-09T17:34:00.001+01:00

My inner planner (Yes, I do have one. Yes, he's well buried) has sat slightly on the irritated side of the fence throughout this kitchen refurbishment business. My estimates for how long things should take, and when (and in what order) they should happen, suggested an optimum elapsed time of between 6 and 7 weeks for the whole job.

This perfect, shiny, back-to-back plan was thrown off kilter as soon as we left the blocks when the builder offered July 9th as a date when he could come and alter the chimney breast. So effectively, we've been forced to live out of the dining room for a month longer than *absolutely necessary*. In an ideal world. But, as is often brought home to us, it's not an ideal world, and most of the tradespeople who have come and gone during the works have commented that the elapsed time we ARE achieving is still pretty good. All things considered.

But, you know, when "living out of the dining room" means this:

...and this...

Then it all gets a bit old after a few weeks. Still, it's not all bad. At least we still had a kitchen sink until the start of this week. The start of a week that had been even more carefully planned than usual so that it dovetailed perfectly with the start of actual kitchen fitting on Monday, thus keeping to an absolute minimum the time when regular living is even more of an obstacle course.

Plans, as we've proved over and over again with this project, can change with a single phone call.

In this case, the phone call from the kitchen unit makers, to say they were very (very) sorry, but they wouldn't be able to deliver the units for fitting on Monday. One of their main joiners had broken his leg in a motorbike accident and they'd tried everything but they just couldn't honour the date. We've been pushed back a week. The knowledge that this is much more of a disruption for the Actual Kitchen Guy, since he now has to twiddle his thumbs for a week and then explain to all the customers he has booked in that their fitting will be delayed a week too, is no consolation. It doesn't make us feel better to know that other people are affected too.

No, there's nothing to be done apart from suck it up, and live out of the understairs cloakroom for another week. So you'll understand why, having been slightly on the irritated side of the fence, I'm now well into the middle of the irritated garden.

Flooring: Day... um... 4

2011-09-08T18:26:00.012+01:00

I've been studiously avoiding posting progress photos of the flooring because, well, I didn't take any. The last couple of days have looked pretty similar to the first except with gradually increasing floor area covered and decreasing piles of material and junk. So I thought I'd wait until it was all down.

So Day 2, Der Floormeister completed the laying of boards in the kitchen, and sheeted the hall. And put the doors back on.

Day 3, he floored the hall, fixed a minor problem with the hatch (the leading edge was standing a bit proud), and implemented the chosen hatch fixing method (secret screwing).

Today was sanding, and the first coat of sealer. Being a water based sealer the first coat inevitably raises the grain in the North American White Oak boards, so the final effect will be much smoother than this, but here's how it looked at the end of Day 4.

Wednesday meme, because I say so

2011-09-07T06:20:00.007+01:00

Stolen from Diane, this headlines as a "time wasting meme for a Sunday morning." It just happens to be a Wednesday today. Am I bothered?

1. What kind of soap is in your bathtub right now?
We don't keep any kind of soap in the bathtub. None of us use it. (The bathtub that is)

2. Do you have any watermelon in your refrigerator?
No.

3. Is there anything moldy in your refrigerator?
No. And there's nothing mouldy either.

4. Are there any dirty dishes in your sink?
We don't have a sink at the moment. Kitchen refit in progress.

5. What would you change about your living room?
I would have sealed the floor before laying the carpet, to stop the dust lines blowing up between the boards. And I would fit that cable tidy we bought 8 years ago, to tidy up the TV, PVR, PS3 and AV amplifier cables.

6. Are the dishes in your dishwasher clean or dirty?
Dishwasher not fitted yet. See #4

7. Do you have a can of mushrooms in your pantry?
No. No pantry. See #4

8. White or wheat bread?
Multigrain.

9. What is on top of your refrigerator?
Spare shelves; large pyrex baking dish; large ice pack for the cold bag.

10. What color is your sofa?
Dark brown.

11. What color or design is on your shower curtain?
Don't have a shower curtain. The door to the shower enclosure is glass.

12. How many plants are in your home?
5

13. How many candles are in your home?
About a dozen (not counting tea-lights)

14. Is your bed made right now?
Yes.

15. If you have a coffee pot, what color is it?
Brushed stainless steel.

16. Electric or standard can opener?
Standard.

17. Comet or Soft Scrub?
I have no idea what you're talking about.

18. Is your closet organized?
I imagine so. I never go in there.

19. What color is the flashlight that you use the most?
Black and yellow.

20. What kinds of things are in your junk drawer?
Radiator and gas meter keys, bits of string, rubber bands, flyers from local takeaways, instruction books for kitchen appliances, popular recipes, unpopular recipes, recipes of unknown popularity, spare batteries, old pens, freezer clips, ...

21. Do you drink out of glass or plastic most of the time at home?
Glass.

22. Do you have iced tea made in a pitcher right now?
No.

23. If you have a garage, is it cluttered?
No garage.

24. Curtains or blinds?
Curtains.

25. How many pillows do you sleep with?
Two.

26. Do you sleep with any lights on at night?
No.

27. How many ceiling fans are in your home?
None.

28. How often do you vacuum?
When the dust/bits become noticeable.

29. Standard toothbrush or electric?
Standard.

30. What color is your toothbrush?
Blue & white.

31. Do you have a welcome mat on your front porch?
Yes.

32. What is in your oven right now?
Oven not yet fitted. See #4

33. Is your microwave clean or dirty?
Clean. And it's the only thing we have to cook on at the moment besides the slow cooker.

34. Is there anything under your bed?
No.

35. Chore you hate doing the most?
Ironing.

36. What retro items are in your home?
Wood burning stove in the study (never used), several items retrieved from Mum's in the process of being sorted/sold.

37. Do you have a separate room that you use as an office?
Yes.

38. If you have a yard, who mows it?
Me. And being British, it's a garden. With a lawn. Whoever heard of "mowing the yard"?

39. Is there anything on your kitchen floor right now?
A stack of new oak flooring, the flooring man's tools and fixings, a door, quite a lot of sawdust.

40. How many mirrors are in your home?
Two in bathrooms (third bathroom yet to be kitted out), two on the study floor waiting to be hung.

41. Do you have any hidden emergency money around your home?
No. Emergency money lives in the bank.

42. What color are your walls?
Which ones? We currently have walls in the following colours:
Plaster; Natural hessian; White; "Gentle" (a shade of lilac); "Armagnac" (a shade of aubergine); Peach; Brown (can't remember the name); Olde English Gold; Willow Tree (pale shade of sage green).

43. Which rooms in your house have wallpaper?
None.

44. Do you have a peephole in your front door?
No. Some stained glass though.

45. Do you keep any kind of protection weapons in your home?
A small baseball bat. Oh, and the old Kalashnikov, of course, but everyone has one of those.

46. What does your home smell like right now?
Fly spray.

47. Fave candle scent?
Sandalwood.

48. What kind of pickles (if any) are in your refrigerator right now?
Mango chutney; branston pickle. Might be some old lime pickle in there at the back.

49. Who are in the pictures you displayed?
On here? In the house? We have a "family wall" with pics of, you know, family.

50. What color is your favorite Bible?
Well this will totally amaze my regular readers, but I don't have a favourite Bible. Or an unfavourite one come to that.

51. Do you have plenty of cabinet space in your kitchen?
Not at the moment (see #4). Once the refit is complete there'll be LOADS.

52. Do you own a stereo?
Not any more. See this.

53. How many TVs do you have?
Two.

54. How many house phones?
Two.

55. Do you have a housekeeper?
LOL.

56. What style do you decorate in?
The style of the 17th century master Emulsio Emplastro.

57. Do you like solid colors in furniture or prints?
I prefer them to colours made of, say, plasma.

58. In case of fire, what are the items you would grab if you only could make one quick trip?
Wallet, keys, and anyone who was in the house. I don't think I could carry the aquarium, so I hope the end will be quick for the fish :o(

59. Do you know how to work your electrical box?
Of course.

60. What temperature in your home is most comfortable to you?
20° works for us.

Wasps

2011-09-06T05:57:00.025+01:00

Three in the study again yesterday morning. One last week. Three the week before that. No sign of another nest around the house (such as memorably happened two years ago) as far as I can tell. But THIS morning we were inundated with the nasty buggers. I must have burned through a quarter of a can of fly spray, leaving 8 or 9 dead bodies littering the carpet, before I noticed that outside the windows dozens of them were crawling animatedly around, looking for a way in.

And finding it. By squeezing through the draft strip between the sashes. Time to start closing the curtains, and hope the consequent removal of the hypnotic lure of our electric lights burning into their dim hymenopteran brains will give us some respite from the daily invasion.

Flooring: Day 1

2011-09-05T17:56:00.025+01:00

The penultimate process of kitchen refurbishment began today, as the kitchen (and hall) flooring began to be laid. First order of business: lay a wide enough strip to store all the remaining materials, thus ensuring they all only need to be moved and restacked once, and then prepare as much of the plywood sheeting that carries the oak boards as possible, to enable rapid floor laying on Day 2.

Progress was hampered by our desire to install a "hatch" - replacing the original - to allow access to the subfloor void without destroying sections of floor if and when new services need to be installed. And also by the scribing, removal, and cutting of any doors that happened to be in the way.

By the end of the afternoon, things were looking... um... different

Another side-effect of starting the floor laying process is, of course, the sudden lack of a kitchen sink. Yes, from now until the worktops are fitted in approximately two weeks' time and the sink can be installed and made waterproof, we'll be filling the kettle and the coffee maker from the understairs cloakroom sink, and washing up in the bath. What was that I was saying about things getting worse before they get better?

Stags and Hens

2011-09-04T14:00:00.023+01:00

I thought my days of attending stag dos were long behind me, but then I also thought that pretty much everyone whose stag do I might attend was either already married, or unlikely to go that way in the foreseeable. How little I know. The weddings aren't over quite yet and neither, therefore, are the stag dos. Or the hen dos for that matter.

So last night, we enjoyed both. Stags for me, Hens for Nikki, and an amalgamation of both at the beginning and end of the night, since we all got together for pre-do drinkies at Ian and Gill's, and then met up again in time for last orders (just!) at the Test Match.

In between times it was another delightful curry for the lads at the Bombay Bridgford, which equalled its last effort (let's face it, it was never going to surpass it), followed by copious quantities of quaffage on the meandering path back to the TM, via the Larwood and the Pet Shop. Lovely.

Having sunk our last pints at the TM (after somehow managing to convince them to serve us even though the towels had been on the pumps for five minutes before we showed up - the benefits of being regulars :o)) we repaired back to Ian & Gill's to round the night off in similar style.

In fact the whole weekend, despite being Ritchie & Helena's respective dos, had a bit of an "Ian & Gill's" theme to it, as we were back there for breakfast this morning. Much appreciated. Next get together: The Actual Wedding.

The flooring cometh

2011-09-02T17:01:00.010+01:00

The excitement mounts as we experience the Arrival Of The Materials For The New Floor.

OK, it doesn't look much right now. Just a pile of wood on t'floor. Which ironically is exactly what it will be once it's laid. Only by then it will be a pile of wood exactly one board thick and as wide and as long as the room.

Or rooms, to be entirely accurate, since we're having both kitchen and hall done at the same time.

Starting Monday.

Frog hops to it

2011-08-28T13:46:00.007+01:00

After last week's disappointment, masking-tape-wise, I bit the bullet yesterday and went into repair mode, sticking short lengths of Frog Tape on the newly-painted walls under the damaged sections of ceiling, applying daubs of white emulsion, and pulling the tape off immediately to avoid it becoming too well stuck.

A single circumnavigation of the kitchen proved 100% successful this time, and there's now a crisp even line between walls and ceiling with no gaps or tears. Phew. At one point I had visions of getting into a kind of painting loop. Masking the ceiling and painting the walls and then masking the walls and painting the ceiling and then repeat from #1. It didn't happen, I'm relieved to say.

Now we have to settle in for a long wait before the new floor is fitted. Everything was going according to plan until this week. The floor fitter became nervous that the kitchen fitter hadn't confirmed his dates, and so pushed us back a week to avoid having nothing booked in next week. When the kitchen fitter did eventually come up with a date (w/c Sep 12) this strategy was proved right, as this was a week later than we were expecting. Anyway a deathly hush of no progress has now fallen on the kitchen until a week Monday.

Adding a remix to the mix

2011-08-27T09:11:00.007+01:00

These weeks between kitchen construction phases, and especially between painting phases where we wait (almost) patiently for the last coat to dry well enough to hold masking tape without causing more damage, are beginning to drag a bit, but it doesn't mean we've been idle.

I can't believe it was (*checks*) last July (!) when we began the process of re-recording and remastering our first album Suburban Nostalgia, but it really has taken this long to find enough spare Thursday evenings to record the ten tracks over again with the key changes, vocal warm-up routines, and additional harmonies, and for Annie to lay down the new backing tracks, add new instruments, and generally spiff it all up.

Having only formally released one album (our second) for digital distribution way back in March last year, I had to refresh my memory of the process, but I'm happy to report that it all came back to me eventually, and I soon had the song files and the (slightly amended) album artwork uploading to the distributor.

The new tracks are already available for streaming from our website, so you can hear the difference right now. Official release of the remixed version of Suburban Nostalgia to iTunes and other online retailers will follow shortly as soon as the distributors have done their thing with all the material. Whoop!

An addition to the family

2011-08-24T06:10:00.024+01:00

We suffered another small bereavement a little while ago. Not on the same scale as my Mum, of course, but closer to home, at least in a geographical sense.

One of the cherry barbs developed dropsy and had to be humanely euthanised (i.e. transferred to a small bowl of water and left in the freezer for half an hour). This, coupled with the mysterious loss of another fish somewhere along the line (eaten, presumably, although there was never any evidence), reduced the number of cherries to 7 and started me thinking about adding another shoal of something different to the tank.

So on a recent visit to the aquatic centre to gather more food supplies for our fishy friends, we dropped into the basement to see what was on offer, and found these:

They're red ocellated barbs, and they look even more attractive IRL than in this photo.

They also have the added advantage that - being barbs - they should mix in with our existing cherries just fine.

Which is exactly how it went. After a short period of argy-bargy, the new shoal of five all settled down and got along swimmingly (*cough*) with the other seven. For the first few days the ocellated crowd were *extremely* excited at feeding time, rushing up to the surface and gobbling the food while it was still floating. I guess they don't feed very often at the shop. Within a few days they'd realised that food was going to be a regular feature of life in the new place, and calmed down a bit.

Potato technology

2011-08-22T05:52:00.036+01:00

It's no secret that I love potatoes, but until this last weekend my love-affair with them had only extended as far as the usual mashed, roasted, chipped and baked, with the odd portion of home fries thrown in for good measure.

With the kitchen refit well underway we've been looking to get rid of (i.e. sell) the washing machine and tumble dryer. The latter proved quite easy, since the electrician who turned up to do the first fix electrics had a washer like ours and was interested in the matching dryer. We shook hands on a price and he took it away with him the same day.

Not so simple with the washer. I was going to put it on eBay, but a few minutes research revealed that, even though we've not had any trouble with it in 4+ years, this model is widely reviewed as the worst thing Hotpoint has ever produced. The reviews even mention the faint odour of mildew that we've been noticing over the past few months.

Instead, I offered it on Gumtree at a knock-down price. I had four enquiries within four hours and the first of those emailed to arrange collection on Saturday. They duly turned up, inspected it, handed over the dosh and went away happy while I carried on painting.

It wasn't until a few hours later, when I'd finished painting, washed my roller in the sink and was listening to the gentle splatter of green painty water onto bare floorboards as the sink emptied, that I remembered disconnecting the washing machine would leave a spigot-shaped hole in the drain.

Bugger. I scouted around in vain for something to plug the gap. No "official" blanking plugs for the drain assembly exist - it was installed long before we moved in. No gaffer tape. No glueable artefacts of any kind. Luckily my natural inclination to think of potatoes every few minutes soon came to my rescue.

Deploy the potato! Obvious really. That's something of which we always have "a spare" handy. I made doubly sure of a seal by coring out a plug and then twisting the other side of the spud over the spigot. Works a treat. I'm keeping another one in reserve in case it dries out before the sink is removed in a week or so.

Ribbit, and rip it

2011-08-21T13:59:00.020+01:00

21-day tape, it said. Masking tape has a "day value". It's meant to be the number of days you can leave the tape in place and still be able to remove it without damage to the surface. My Frog Tape has been up since yesterday morning, and today, after completing the second coat of Willow Tree, I took it down. My previous traumatic experience in the bedroom has been on my mind a lot this weekend and I was determined not to leave the tape in place a moment longer than necessary. The "oldest" piece was up for about 27 hours.

Do not use on paint that has not been properly cured, it said. Leave it at least 3 days, it said. I left it 7.

Click on the photo to see the full extent of the damage. True, it was nowhere near as bad as the bedroom. Only somewhere between 10-15% (linear) of the ceiling had its paint pulled off. With the old blue tape it was closer to 90%.

A six-fold improvement is, however, still not perfect, and leaves me with a patch-up job to do next weekend. On the positive side, Frog Tape's clever system of a polymer gel (or something) that expands as soon as the emulsion paint wets it, sealing the edge of the tape and leaving a perfectly clean line, did work very well in those areas where the tape came off without damage. I'd definitely use it again.

Greening the kitchen

2011-08-20T16:57:00.015+01:00

When we left it, the kitchen was all over white. That was a week ago, and today it was time to begin the process of greening. Because for the walls, we've chosen Willow Tree from Dulux's Kitchen & Bathroom range.

This was also my first chance to use the spiffing new masking tape supplied by Lady Fletcher of East York (thanks Shirley!). Strangely matching the green theme of the day, Frog Tape (it turns out) is actually made in Hemel Hempstead and is - according to the packaging at least - every decorator's friend.

So up it went to protect the white loveliness of the ceiling while I engaged in covering the walls with Willow Tree.

Put it on eBay

2011-08-18T06:24:00.053+01:00

That's a phrase that has echoed around our house - both houses actually - for almost ten years. Whenever we inherit or find something, or for one reason or another it becomes surplus to requirements, but it's "just too good" to throw out. Like it still works, or it was originally quite expensive. We have some sort of investment in it still - emotional, financial, psychological - that prevents us from driving it to the tip.

I'm not pretending we never chuck stuff out. We do. But there's always more. And increasingly (it seems) the stuff is still OK. Still serviceable, usable, whatever. Just not by us.

So "the eBay pile" has been growing for many years. That old hi-fi stack I never use. It was all wired up in our previous house. Played occasionally. But that was in the B.I. years. The time Before iPod. When listening to music entailed physically inserting a CD or a cassette tape (a WHAT? Google it) into a device and pressing a real, solid, play button. Not clicking an icon that just *looks* like a play button. Anyhow when we moved, this lovely old stereo stack in its smoked-glass-and-mahogany cabinet came with us and lived under the stairs - well, the loft ladder - for three years. Then the loft ladder was replaced with stairs and the cabinet had to move into the study. Then into the dining room. Still never connected. Never played. Listen, I spent over £2,000 on in it 1984! I can't just throw it out!

The Christmas tree stand that we don't need since we started using an artificial tree that has its own feet. An old telephoto lens for a camera long since crushed under the boot heel of digital technology. The camera that it fits. The aluminium flight case I carried them both around in. The socket set I used to use to service my car, in the days when I did my own car servicing (OK, this item has been kicking around for a lot longer than ten years. It sat in the garage of my old house in Yorkshire quietly rusting away for most of the 12 years I lived in that house, and I hadn't used it much in the ten years before THAT).

You get the picture.

Three months ago something snapped. "Put in on eBay" became something more than just one of those things we say that doesn't really mean what the words imply. I actually listed some things on eBay. What? Yes, you read that right. I started small. A couple of things on the Saturday, and a couple more on Sunday. Just to ease myself into it. And you know what? It was easy. I said I started small, but one of the first things I listed was that stereo. I figured hey, if I'm going to dump my emotional baggage let's start with the biggest bag. It had 11 watchers within 12 hours. It sold easily, and for more than twice the starting price. The guy drove up from Northampton for it.

There's no stopping me now. Well, not quite. I still wait for those "zero listing fee" weekends. eBay gets enough money out of me when I sell the stuff. I'm not giving them anything up front. But gradually, all that tat that's been hanging around for years is disappearing. And the bank balance is rising!

I picked a good time to get into this, when you remember that we just inherited the contents of an entire second house. And 95% of the stuff in it is both stuff we don't want, AND stuff that is "too good to throw out." Only one answer to that. Put it on eBay.

Print this

2011-08-15T06:51:00.040+01:00

A 6-month-long experiment concluded today. The experiment, if it had enjoyed a title, would have been called something like "How long will printout continue to be usable in the face of dire warnings regarding ink levels from the Lexmark print dialog?"

Some background: Four or five times a year, I print off a set of posters for the Chorlton Players containing groups of the photos I've taken at dress rehearsal. Six pages of A4 in total. Back in January when I was printing the panto photos I had the first warning from Lex (the American guy who makes such handy announcements as "printing started" and "printing complete" just in case, you know, you hadn't noticed that the paper had started being fed through the machine, or stopped, respectively).

"Colour ink is low!" he declared in his pleasant, mid-Atlantic tones.

Well I was near the end of the run back then (why am I talking like a Texan in my head? I almost added "y'all" at the end there) so I didn't worry about it, and I don't print much colour stuff normally anyway. Just those nice little green Asda vouchers that pop out almost every week as a result of their "10% cheaper than every other store" claim.

So I continued to ignore the little red "X" in my colour cartridge silo, until it came time to print the next set of Players' photos, in March. Way back when I first started to do these posters, I'd reckoned on getting 3 sets out of a colour cartridge. The panto posters had been set #3 and that little red X had been glowering at me for a couple of months. But then I figured hey! Paper is cheap. Ink is expensive. Why don't I just carry on printing stuff out until it starts to fade? That way, I've only wasted a sheet of paper, and I'll have made sure that ALL the ink is used up.

The more quick-witted of you will probably have reached this conclusion several years ago. Sometimes, in prosaic matters such as these, I can be a bit slow.

Players Posters Set #4 printed off, in their entirety, without incident. I'd checked the little box to stop Lex warning me weeks before, so not only were the posters just dandy, but I didn't get nagged either.

Fast forward to the Players' annual comedy sketch show (normally known as the Hotpot show, but this year featuring a specially written farce cleverly embedding several sketches within it) and by this time there wasn't much black ink left either. So little, in fact, that I'd been warned several weeks previously that the cartridge was now on its reserve tank! Order your new cartridges immediately!

Naturally I'd bought replacement cartridges several months before, but I'd got the bit between my teeth now. No way I was replacing those damn cartridges now until they'd been bled completely dry. Dagnabbit!

The posters for Hotpot, aka Players Posters Set #5, printed off, in their entirety, without incident. Now THAT was a surprise, I can tell you. By the end of the run the little colour ink marker had been swapped out for a diluted, faded version no doubt intended to offer a compelling visual clue to the impending colourlessness of my printing. The black ink "X" had long since disappeared altogether, the black silo showing completely empty and devoid of any X, faded or otherwise.

That was back in May. Finally, today, I printed a letter and the last paragraph was illegible. So that's an expensive lesson learned. If I'd swapped out the cartridges when first warned, assuming there wasn't enough ink left to complete a poster run, I'd have missed out on almost half a year's worth of printing.

Paper is cheap. Ink is expensive. I'll remember that from now on.

Next morning is no time for mourning

2011-08-13T16:21:00.001+01:00

If plastering is the stage where a room turns its back on being a building site, then the first coat of paint is where it starts to look forward to being a room again. Back from yesterday's funeral, if we were to have any chance of staying on schedule with the kitchen then today was the day I had to start painting. And I did. An 8am start, a 15-minute break for breakfast on the hoof, I was finished by half past three.

Well, it's a big room, and the first coat always takes the longest. The plaster slurps up the paint as fast as I can apply it, and the entire area - walls AND ceiling - needs painting, so it takes a while.

Worth it though:

Not bad, as funerals go

2011-08-12T18:47:00.019+01:00

Kind of ironic, having a funeral on "the glorious twelfth," but knowing both my parents' sense of humour I'm sure they will have appreciated it.

Yes, I have the tense of that sentence correct. Sitting up there, on their cloud (or whatever imagery you prefer), they are still present, and have a future, both in grammatical and spiritual terms.

It was a very nice service, even though the lady who took it was in (or near to) tears for most of the time. She knew Mum very well. Let no-one ever try to tell me there’s nothing “in” Spiritualism. When we originally met with the funeral director, he asked if Mum belonged to any particular religious denomination, and naturally I told him she was a Spiritualist. This didn’t faze him in the slightest. He told us he had several contacts from that neck of the ecclesiastical woods who might be prepared to hold the service, and called me the next day to say he’d found someone and she would be phoning me shortly to go over what we wanted in the service, gather some anecdotes etc to mention in the address – the usual sort of thing.

Anyway this lady called me the next day when we were back at home. She was the first name on his list (of five) that the funeral director had called. When he told her who the service was for, she said she got chills down her back. Because Mum had asked her FOUR YEARS AGO if she would give the eulogy. And they’d sat down for half an hour with a tape recorder running, discussing all the memories and music she wanted at the service.

Some people would no doubt say “coincidence.” I think different.

I have that tape albeit with nothing to play it on. I'll be arranging to have it transferred onto CD soon. So thanks for asking how I am, but really... I’m fine. I’ve been fine all along. My Dad’s passing back in 1993 was a shock – unexpected, and traumatic because it separated him and my Mum. Mum’s passing was not unexpected. More: it was wished for (by her). They are reunited now, and happy. I have nothing to be sad about...

Since the "family seat" had been tarnished by years of living downstairs - bed in the dining room, clothes, pharmaceutical supplies and medical notes everywhere, etc - it wasn't really suitable for "keeping up" the funeral, so we repaired to the Test Match where the new landlord laid on a fine buffet lunch for the 20 of us and we sat and chatted and reminisced in the usual way of these things. No-one stayed much past 3pm, which suited us as it meant we could hit the road back to Manchester before the Friday afternoon rush started. Something else Mum would have approved of :o)

Plastered again

2011-08-11T09:04:00.086+01:00

Probably my favourite part of "doing up" any room, this. The plastering. Not only a fascinating skill to watch, and one that I have never mastered (so it impresses me every time) but also the single most impactful change to a room. The one where it goes from tatty old building site to almost-pristine new room in a few days. Three days in this case, as our plasterer Neil was working on his own.

Day 1 (Monday of last week) was pretty much taken up with preparing for the skim coat. The inside of the chimney breast, where the new induction hob will go, was "dot and dabbed" with plasterboard, edged with... er... edging strip, and scrim cloth applied.

The rest of the room had browning plaster slapped on all exposed brickwork and deep gaps, as well as a bit more dot and dab at the original cooker site, and a clever rectangle of metal mesh laid over the plywood sheet that occupied the space where the new radiator will go. The plumber was convinced the entire room would be dot and dabbed, rather than simply skimmed, and wouldn't be gainsayed, so he wanted to make sure there was a good purchase for his mounting screws. Fine for him; a bit of a headache for the spread.

Day 2 and the skimming started with the ceiling and the long wall starting to look finished. Our plasterer carries with him the traditional tradesman's portable radio, tuned permanently to Rock Radio. Not only an expert spread but a fine taste in music too!

After lunch, the end wall was completed, along with the insides of the chimney breast, and the sides of the left-hand ex-cupboard space. Things were definitely taking shape.

Finally on Day 3 the front of the chimney breast, old cooker wall and the boiler/window wall all got their skim coat and the job was done.

All we can do now is to wait until the whole room dries out (from previous experience I'd estimate about a week) before I can start slapping on the paint.

Access all areas

2011-08-10T08:03:00.001+01:00

First job of the reconstruction, and carefully scheduled so that any inadvertent damage to the plasterwork comes *before* the plasterer's visit - the replacement of the old, drafty, maintenance-intensive wooden patio doors with a new set of draft-free, maintenance-free, high U value, PVCu patio doors with a single pane above:

The manufacturer's tape, just in case you were wondering, has been left on deliberately to protect the frames from (a) the new plaster and (b) my painting. It'll come off in a couple of weeks.

A bit of knock-off

2011-08-09T07:02:00.000+01:00

The final final deconstruction was something else I felt competent to manage myself. I'm pretty good at demolition :o)

The skirting board and picture rails had to come off. Me and my trusty crowbar accomplished that in considerably less than half an hour (including cleaning up time). The only slight accident - and it's one that we predicted given its extremely loose attachment - was the total loss of plaster on the chimney breast beneath the picture rail. An area about 18 inches deep and already disturbed by the reconstruction work on the brickwork, it never really stood a chance once I got going with the crowbar.

With this and the section behind the old cooker now both back to the brick, we thought it prudent to call the plasterer back for another look before he gave us his final quote!

Deconstruction - final phase

2011-08-08T06:01:00.000+01:00

Another short hiatus for this blog - how the time flies. Good job I don't rely on a regular flow of posts for my income or I'd be destitute.

We've been distracted from the ongoing kitchen saga by a 2-day trip to Nottingham to sort out legal and logistical stuff following Mum's death (death certificate, notifying various authorities, meeting solicitor, arranging funeral, that kind of thing) as well as trying to sort out almost 60 years of "stuff" in her house. Yes, that's going to take more than 2 days, but at least we made a start. Not surprising that I've not felt much like blogging; just annoying that I'd only just picked up the metaphorical quill again before all this kicked off. Anyway, the funeral's Friday, so I thought I'd bang out a bit more kitchen-related news to pass the time.

When we left off, I mentioned there were two more demolition/deconstruction jobs to do before things began to get better. The first of these was the first-fix plumbing.

A couple of small items - disconnecting and removing a radiator from one end of the kitchen and plumbing in a supply for the new radiator in its new position behind the door; and sinking the main supply pipes to the boiler under the floor from their previous run which was behind the old cupboard, and in the new world would have been behind the cooker (not to mention in the way of coring out the wall to allow the tumble drier to vent).

The main thing though, was to resite the sink unit away from the wall to allow the plasterer space to plaster, while still allowing us a usable sink until the last possible day.

<---before

after--->

Looks a bit strange, but it serves its purpose. And our plasterer is a big guy. Needs a lot of room. I only wish we'd remembered to move the old cooker out before the plumber reconnected the sink. Doh!

For once, I have no clever title

2011-08-03T02:39:00.001+01:00

Woke at 1.01am for yet another nocturnal "visit" and, still wide awake more than an hour later, I finally decided I might as well get up. The clock check was 2.22. I experience a lot of these nicely patterned times, especially at night (I've written several times about them before under the 'spookiness' tag) and I have no idea why. Maybe seeing patterns in things is a sign of mental illness. But there again, being able to wonder if it is is probably a sign that I'm alright. :o) But this post isn't about spooky patterns on the clock, or insomnia.

My Mum died on Sunday night.

Didn't get much sleep that night either, but more a case of never getting to sleep in the first place. At least, not until after 3.30. And then I was up again two hours later. Last night was a bit better (being knackered helps) but tonight it looks like I'm back on the merry-go-round of thinking of everything I need to do, and things I already did. Things I didn't do that maybe I should have.

I've been telling people it wasn't unexpected, and it wasn't. She had COPD, and everyone knows that's a one-way street, but more than that - after the events of recent weeks we would have to have been abnormally ostrich-like not to expect "the worst." But can you ever be prepared for it? Maybe on an intellectual level. Perhaps that intellectual preparation allows you to skip the traditional first stage of grief - i.e. denial. Although, you know, the irony of denying that I'm in denial is not lost on me. I seem to be missing out on the 'anger' part as well. Who would I be angry with? Mum? It's hardly her fault (apart from the smoking of course, but it feels like it's always been decades too late to do anything about that). The care home? They did what they could. God? Let's not even go there. And what would I be angry about? That she's free from pain? No longer has to fight to get every breath? That - the next few weeks of estate management aside - I'm absolved from the duty of those five-hour round trips to visit someone who had become unrecognisable as the woman most often referred to as "awesome" by my friends, old and new, and those of my in-laws that met her. Whose failing memory left her incapable of remembering conversations we'd repeated four times since our arrival not half an hour earlier? And, perhaps more significantly, of remembering that we had visited at all. Or telephoned, on the weeks we couldn't visit.

I'd rather friends remembered her as the vibrant capable welcoming whirlwind who cooked up a full fried English breakfast for eight when we dropped in unannounced one Bank Holiday Monday morning after an all-night party. That breakfast is still fondly remembered more than thirty years later by all who partook.

There's a lot more to say, but I have that happy memory in my mind so I'll stop for now.

Hoodless

2011-07-29T06:30:00.002+01:00

Electricians - or at least the ones employed by our kitchen guy - do electrics. They don't do deconstruction. So following the first fix we were left with a disconnected cooker hood. Quite literally a "hang over" from the Days of the Old Kitchen.

Fortunately removal proved fairly simple. It was held up with two screws in those adjustable slots, and slid off easily once I'd loosened them.

Long term readers may spot another hang over - a remnant of the Days of the Flame Effect Ragroll - visible in the space vacated by the cooker hood. A telling clue that I didn't remove the hood when last I painted the kitchen. What can I say? Those few coats of Hint of Apple (or whatever it was) were always intended as a quick fix.

With the hood gone it was time to knock off the tiled splashback - another task completed in double-quick time. Endampened by years of boiling pans, the plaster behind the cooker came off with the tiles. Finding an "edge" in these situations is always tricky. If you're not careful you can end up stripping the plaster off the entire wall. Luckily this time I managed to detect the point at which the remaining plaster was secure enough to take a skim coat, and leave it at that.

Only two remaining "demolition-type" jobs before we can start building back up again.

Sparks fly

2011-07-28T06:07:00.000+01:00

After a few days hiatus in between cupboard removal and arrival of the electricians, during which we prepared three not-quite-so-enormous-as-usual-on-account-of-some-neighbours-being-away salads for the annual neighbourhood barbecue, and attended said barbecue, and spent a day recovering from said barbecue... the first fix for the electrics got underway.

And after two days, we had a lot more holes in the ceiling than we're used to - 12 to be precise - along with copious amounts of trunked twin-with-earth and some scars in the plaster where the wall lights used to be. There were also some forlorn little dusty holes where the old power sockets lived, sharing wall space with some equally dusty holes in new positions which weren't quite so forlorn, being tightly packed with coils of more twin-with-earth eagerly awaiting their double socket covers.

Did I say it would get worse before it got better? There's a way to go yet in the "worse" direction.

The final cupboard

2011-07-27T05:45:00.001+01:00

With the electricians booked in for the following week I decided to dedicate my last official day off work - Friday 15 July - as Cupboard Removal Day.

It didn't take anywhere near a day. What appeared to be a very substantial structure proved to be nothing more than a few bits of wood nailed together. Certainly no match for my trusty crowbar. Within a couple of hours the space was looking like a perfect match for the rest of the kitchen.

Behind the plywood carcase, several years of ancient damp wallpaper hung limply from the walls. Blown plaster fell off in chunks. And on the left of the space, the cupboard had offered sanctuary to a run of burglar alarm signal cable, which was the main reason for the demolition taking two hours rather than 45 minutes. I had to unpick it carefully from each shelf, saw it out of the bottom shelf, and avoid breaking any of its fragile core.

Demolition also revealed the strange light switch that had been sited inside the cupboard and for which we have never been able to discern a purpose. My decision to leave it dangling awaiting the services of a qualified electrician (read: someone with a multimeter) later turned out to be the right one, as the electrician discovered it was still live. It isolates the security light over the back door (whose bulb, long blown, has never been replaced).

Getting abreast of things

2011-07-26T07:30:00.001+01:00

In preparation for the builders' arrival, we cleared everything movable out of the kitchen on the evening of July 8th, except for the cooker. Amazing how big a room it is when there's nothing in it!

The following day, we closed all possible doors to prevent egress of the inevitable dirt, dust and soot, and left them to it. After several hours of grinding and banging noises, and a couple of very worrying sounds of falling masonry, we were greeted with a beautifully remodelled kitchen:

The height of the hob space in the chimney breast has been raised to 1900mm and a new lintel installed, hearth tiles chiselled off and the entire structure of the largest cupboard removed including all the redundant central heating pipework from the old boiler. As you can see, things are looking a bit "industrial."

It's going to get worse before it gets better. I have the last remaining cupboard to strip out myself before the electricians come to do the first fix. In my naive way, I had hoped that the tradespeople could be scheduled to visit one after the other in quick succession, and immediately preceding the kitchen fit-out. No such luck. The builders first available date - 9 July - precedes the manufacture of the new kitchen units by a full 8 weeks, so we'll be camping out in the dining room until September, while the kitchen degrades even further towards a building site.

Putting the kit in kitchen

2011-07-25T07:08:00.003+01:00

Without further ado - because at the time of writing we're already more than two weeks in to the project - here we go with the Story of The Kitchen. I can almost sense your excitement.

So here's our starting point.

On the left, the view towards the garden, showing an almost-original, traditional kitchen for this style of house, its old fashioned cupboards and drawers still in place, and the tiled hearth (where the old boiler used to live) pressed into service as a storage area for garden tools, plastic crates full of decorating materials, and other general bits of tat. That boiler has been gone for more than four years, but in the absence of any investment the space is just a space.

On the right, looking towards the front of the house, you can still see the cupboard, but now enjoy the view of the vast expanse of work surface (a couple of feet at most) that we've been preparing meals on for 4+ years, atop a very basic set of units, along with a tiny sink, the now-bricked-up side door, and the 5-burner gas range with cooker hood.

Space on the opposite side of the room occupied by, from left to right, tumble dryer with microwave atop, matching AEG fridge and freezer (the only appliances being retained), a butcher's block table carrying slow cooker, kettle and toaster, and a tile-topped kitchen table and four chairs.

I say "almost" original kitchen because the cooker end was at one time walled in to create the traditional Victorian/Edwardian scullery, with the remainder of the room being a "morning room." Those walls had been removed long before we moved in, leaving us with a rectangular space approximately 3metres by 7.

So here we go. Eyes down for a new kitchen, starting with stripping back the chimney breast to make space for a new hob, tearing out the old cupboards (with not even a nod to the traditionalists who would have kept and refurbished them), rewiring, replumbing, replacing the patio doors, installing a new floor and fitting several yards of new units with new integrated appliances. The builders arrived bright and early on the morning of Saturday 9 July...

Manchester calling...

2011-07-24T08:19:00.003+01:00

*tap* *tap*
This thing on?
*cough*
Hello!
Welcome back. To me, that is. You've probably been here all along, wondering where I was. Turns out *I* was here all along too. Just not saying much. Shit happens, they say. And shit is pretty much what has been happening. I might even write about it one day, but not right now.

So, when last we spoke, Nikki & I were in Toronto. April 26. Good grief! Was that really the last entry? That's almost three months ago!! *slaps wrist* Well that pretty much puts the mockers on my usual "chronological" approach to blogging. As regular readers (if I have any left!) will know, I like to keep things in order. Even if I'm writing the entry two or three weeks behind the event, it'll still have the real date on it. The date it actually happened. That's not so bad if I'm only three weeks behind, but three months? No. I'd never catch up, and besides one of the reasons for blowing the dust off this cobwebby part of the Intertubes is a pointed request for pictures of our CURRENT project. If I wrote up everything (significant) that has happened in the interim then the kitchen would be finished before it even got started, if you see what I mean.

No the only way to do this is to package up the last three months into a little box and leave it over there in the corner. Over the next few months I might open up the box and take one or two choice pieces out for display purposes, but for the time being we need to get started with what's going on right now.

Although perhaps, before we get to that, I should tidy up the news from our Toronto trip. I wouldn't want to leave us hanging there, so to speak, having apparently only just been lunching in the distillery district and then magically transplanted three months into the future back in Manchester. Here, then, are the rudimentary details of the few draft entries I'd queued up covering the remainder of that trip, with their prospective titles drummed into service as headings:

Man-daRIN
(Family joke). Shirley & Neil took us for dinner at the Mandarin all-you-can-eat restaurant. Now, we have AYCE outlets in Manchester - the ones we visit most often being the No. 1 Chinese buffet, and the Nawaab Indian - but even though they are both firm favourites and very good value for money the quality is nothing like Mandarin. Wow. Absolutely fabulous Chinese food, lots of it, masses of choice, and everything tastes as fresh as if it had been cooked to order. This place became a firm favourite almost on the first mouthful. We'll definitely be back.

My fortune cookie for the evening: Accept no other definition of your life, accept only your own.

How apt.

Kensington
Shortly before our return, Paul took us for a wander around Kensington market. We lunched at Big Fat Burrito (delicious) and picked up some cool Christmas presents from the various shops and stalls.

That evening we had dinner at the Tulip steak house, which surprisingly (the place looks a little run-down and basic) proved by popular acclaim to be the best steak we had all holiday. And also, after a little persuasion, the best rack of lamb!! (*ahem*)

JB @ JB
After a last minute trudge around Walmarts to pick up those few essential items that just aren't available in the UK, we returned to Jawny Bakers for dinner. Hard to beat for atmosphere and quality (in my opinion - but I admit to being completely biased since this place holds very fond memories for me), it ran the Tulip a close second for steak quality but it's somewhere I couldn't imagine visiting Toronto without going.

Pack it in
Packing for the return trip became interesting, and a little Dickensian:

Suitcase #1: 25kgs

Suitcase #2: 20kgs

Allowance: 40kgs.
Result: misery.

Ah, but... at this stage, Carry on #1 weighed 2kgs and carry on #2: 2kgs, with a carry-on allowance of 10kgs. So after some judicious redistribution of contents...

Suitcase #1: 20kgs
Suitcase #2: 20kgs
Carry-on #1: 4.5kgs
Carry-on #2: 4.5kgs
Result: happiness.

I was also going to post something humorous about the pharma ads on Canadian/US TV. Honestly, if you haven't seen one check it out. Little beats them for unintentional black humour. I might still do a post on that at some stage. (Probably during our next trip, when I'll be exposed to them again :o))

And finally...

I just read this back and realised that I've waxed lyrical about all the wonderful meals we had OUT, but nary a mention of all the many wonderful meals we had IN. So many grateful thanks to Shirley for repeatedly proving that home cooking easily beats bought. Amongst numerous other successes, a roast turkey dinner to die for - or, at least, worth travelling 3,000 miles for!

Distilled fun

2011-04-26T22:12:00.004+01:00

Went for a wander around the distillery district today with Paul/a. One of those cool "urban renewal" projects that takes a bunch of old Victorian warehouses and factories and regenerates it as a series of shops selling cool shit, and pubs.

We lunched at the Mill Street Brewpub, where they offer sampler trays for those who can't choose between the impressive array of beers, and/or don't have time for a "session." Each of these glasses is a third of a pint, so not only do they all slip down remarkably easily, but by the time you've emptied the tray you've had more than a pint; just about the perfect amount for lunchtime drinking. My tray included an IPA, and ESB, a raspberry fruit beer, and a pilsner (which I swapped for the Wit beer on Nikki's tray as she's not a huge fan of wheat beers).

Lunch was some kind of pulled beef sandwich with amazing BBQ sauce, the by-now traditional sweet potato fries and slaw, after which we staggered over to Soma Chocolate for a cup of Mayan chocolate.

Eating and Eaton

2011-04-25T20:12:00.020+01:00

Latest in the series of awesome meals on this trip, which so far has consisted mainly of eating, sleeping and shopping, was yesterday's Easter Sunday dinner. A traditional family dinner to rival the Thanksgiving dinner we enjoyed on our last visit, this one featured the same cast and pretty much the same menu.

Roast turkey, homemade stuffing, garlic mash, sweet potatoes, peas, sprouts and carrots, cranberry sauce and gravy, followed up by three different kinds of cheesecake. I'm finding that it's getting easier to move after meals of this size, so much of the nutrition must be finding its way to my leg muscles.

Today we travelled into town on the street car, visited the Eaton Centre (more shopping) and lunched at Mr Greenjeans (more eating - here's our burgers and very yummy they were too, washed down with a couple of pints of Sleeman's Honey Brown) before travelling home again for a significantly simpler family meal, which was quite a relief after the massive indulgences of the last 3-4 days.

Nice horsey

2011-04-24T14:29:00.001+01:00

When I was a young lad - we're talking pre-teen (yes, my memory really is that good) - Saturdays could occasionally be really boring. If the boredom reached #8 or #9 on the scale, I might put the TV on and watch the afternoon sport, which in those days inevitably consisted mostly of horse racing.

It wasn't long before I discovered a talent for picking a winner, just by going on the name that appealed to me most. I can almost hear the experienced race-goers groaning at that, but this was years before I discovered that's a typical noob approach to racing and utterly frowned on by the cognoscenti.

Fast forward to Easter Sunday 2011 and here we are waiting for the turkey to cook and the guests to arrive, with one of Neil's favourite TV programmes hammering away in the corner: horse racing. And guess what, following immediately on the heels of my first win (I've already forgotten the name, but it was significant enough for me to pick it) comes Forever Awesome - chosen purely on the basis that its name is very similar to Forever Autumn, one of my favourite karaoke tracks of all time - and it's romping home by about five lengths.

So I've still not lost it. You can be 100% certain that if I were ever to start putting money on these nags, my gift would disappear as mysteriously as it came.

One of those things

2011-04-23T12:58:00.062+01:00

Whenever you visit another country, you see things that are better than back home, things that are worse and, just occasionally, things that make you scratch your head and say: WTF?

For me, from the very first time I saw one 10 years ago, to the most recent time today (and every day of this trip so far), one of those "wtf" things is the All-Way (or 4-way) stop.

In the UK, and as far as I can remember in every other European country in which I've driven or been driven, whenever two roads cross there is the concept of one of them being the "major" road, and the other the "minor". So you get something like this:

Cars on the horizontal road *always* have priority; those on the vertical roads have to wait if there's traffic on the horizontal, or at least slow down to check and "give way" before turning out/crossing.

However, in North America, while this system applies to "really" major roads, in general it isn't extended to the vast network of roads around local suburbs. Here, there is no concept of a 'priority' road. All roads are equal. And because of that, when two equal roads cross, you get an All-way stop.

What a crazy, outmoded idea! Self-explanatory I'd hope, but just in case: everyone approaching this crossroads has to stop. Always. Even when there's no other traffic around at all. And because the roads and verges here are so wide, mostly you can see down the approaching roads for anything up to 100 metres. Easily far enough to tell that nothing is coming. And of course two cars coming from opposite directions and intending to go straight on would have NO effect on each other whatsoever. But both still have to stop, and then set off again.

What is even more surprising to me, as someone who spends a lot of time bemoaning how everyone ignores the rules of the road in the UK (especially cyclists), is that everyone rigidly obeys this rule. No traffic cops around, no cameras, and yet everyone stops. Always. What a waste of fuel, wear and tear on brakes and clutch, and time. And on suburban streets it's not unusual to have one of these every couple of hundred metres. You're not even allowed to "give way" (a concept that doesn't seem to exist here) - i.e. slow down, check, and proceed. No, it's a mandatory full stop. Does my head in every time.

How did this happen?

2011-04-22T12:45:00.022+01:00

Something about our flight to Toronto yesterday triggered one of those gestalt moments for me. A chilling realisation of a modern truism. And it's this:

When I was young, the world was geared around older people. Us youngsters had to defer to our elders, treat them with respect, shut up and get on with doing as we were told, and not make a fuss.

Now I'm older, the world is geared around younger people. Us elders(*) are invisible. Virtually ignored by marketeers, shoved out of the way in queues and generally not given as much respect as people of our age commanded in "those days."

So it seems, or at least yesterday it seemed, as if somehow everything had flipped 180° and I'd missed that crucial nexus - if it ever existed - when I was the "right age" for the world.

(*)OK, 54 isn't THAT old, but... you know... sometimes it FEELS as though it is.

Vinyl: Making Movies

2011-04-19T07:11:00.019+01:00

Artist: Dire Straits
Owned on digital media: No
Want to replace: Yes

This is the one. The album that first really got me into Dire Straits. The album I remember listening to lying on the floor of a Lake District living room, cans firmly fixed to head, trying to ignore all the point-scoring shit that regularly flew around that particular bunch of in-laws. I immersed myself in the music for as long as I could. Which turned out to be until Momma In-Law burst in and ordered all the "children" (the youngest of us was, at that time, 23) out so that the "adults" could sit in comfort with their "adult" conversation.

Interesting to reflect with my traditional 30-year perspective that the behaviour that was soon to follow that event was not what anyone could pretend deserved the tag: adult.

Even with such uncomfortable associations, the music's still good :o) I've marked the "want to replace" flag as 'yes' above, but a closer look at the track list shows there's only a couple that I don't already have on various digital compilations (Alchemy, Very Best of...) so I'm not convinced it's worth it.

How's your geography?

2011-04-18T06:43:00.011+01:00

Sorry that the scoring bot was apparently out of action after I played this, so there's "no score" to beat, but I thought it was worth posting anyway as the game itself is a bit of fun. I had two goes, and my highest score was something a bit over 20,000.

First round you're given a choice of blobs as the target city. Second round you only get the countries. Third round you're left alone with just the landmass to play with.

How can you do?

Random last-minute jobs

2011-04-17T18:54:00.041+01:00

Most of the time, procrastination is my middle name. Just occasionally though, those little niggly jobs that I usually put off forever have to be done RIGHT NOW. Today was a day for jobs like that.

1. The keyhole cover.
After decorating the hall, I replaced the brass keyhole cover on the front door. Trouble is, I didn't get it *quite* right. I reckon it was somewhere around 5° off the vertical. Not much, and not enough to make it impossible to lock/unlock the door (or I'd have had to fix it right then), but just enough to require a bit of key jiggling and make opening the door harder than it should be. Reason for procrastination? Initially, annoyance at myself for getting it wrong in the first place. Subsequently, not being arsed.

I took it off and spun it those 5°.

2. The shower light.
Our bathroom has 10 spots. Eight covering the main area of the room, on one switch. Two above the shower cubicle, operated off a separate switch. One of those two blew a few weeks ago. Reason for procrastination? In the 4 years since the bathroom was reconstructed, I've not had to replace one of these bulbs, so I don't know the type and I've been constantly forgetting to (a) bring the stepladder upstairs and (b) pull one of the bulbs on a shopping day so we can be sure of having spares.

I pulled a bulb from the eight and swapped it with the blown dude, checked our extensive collection of random spares, found a match and replaced it.

Umm... that's it. Fish will need a 50% water change on Wednesday which will last them until we get back, at which point I'll do another 50% change. But other than that we're all set.

The rest of the morning was taken up with lawn mowing and a spot of digging, leaving the afternoon free to watch Glorious 39 and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Handkerchief. I'd not seen Glorious 39 before. Definitely one for the eBay pile - we won't be wanting to watch it a second time!

Book Swap

2011-04-16T16:49:00.020+01:00

Chorlton’s "Big Green Festival" today and the book club were invited to man a book swap stall again. I did this once before, at our first book swap back in 2007, but hadn't been involved the last couple of times. This year the previous organisers of the book swap table weren't available, but this coincided with us having rather a lot of books we wanted to get rid of, so I volunteered. I turned up this morning with one plastic crate full and another containing half a dozen hardbacks.

The festival proper opened from 11am to 6pm, but that's a long time to be stood behind a table full of books smiling politely while passersby sift through the multiple copies of book club cast-offs looking for a good read. I never intended to stay for the whole afternoon, but I'd assumed - since several other book club members had volunteered to help man the stall - that I wouldn't be the "last man standing" and could hand over to someone else. This cunning plan also hid the main reason for leaving early: not to be left with piles of books to look after.

We may have only done four of these, but that's enough experience to know that we always end up with way more books than we start with, and I was under strict instructions not to bring the remainder back home. But at 4pm, having been left on my own since my only two helpers had to leave around 1.30, I had no option but to pack the books back into my plastic crates (which were now BOTH full to the point of books falling off the top) and start to carry them to the gate.

In between carrying off one box and returning for the second some generous individual had come along and dumped FIVE carrier bags full of books on the table. My reaction by that stage was "you have got to be joking." Less than two hours before the event closed? I left them there.

Even so, returning home with two full crates is not the most popular move I've ever made :-/

AI & EQ

2011-04-15T22:37:00.045+01:00

American Idol Season 10 is well under way now and I've been thinking for some time that I should comment on the changes that were rung for the 2011 version.

Indeed, regular readers may remember that I predicted, around this time last year, that 2011 would be the end of Idol following the departure of the man Cowell. Well there comes a time when all good bloggers have to eat their words and for me, this is that time. I have to say that the choice of judges to replace Cowell, along with Ellen Degeneres and Kara Italianame, has been nothing short of inspired.

Randy Jackson was always my favourite judge anyway so I was delighted he stayed. The other two empty seats were filled, as the entire televisual world must by now know, by Jennifer Lopez and Steven Tyler. I'm not going to pretend I had a clue who Steven Tyler was before AI started this year. I mentioned a little while ago that I've never been one for learning, or even finding out about, the names of bands I listen to, although naturally (?) I had heard of Aerosmith. Didn't matter though. His unique blend of empathy, honesty, and mad-crazy wacko otherworldliness soon had me hooked and converted to a fan. He just seems to be permanently enjoying himself, which I find totally infectious.

As for Jennifer Lopez, what's not to like? Recently voted the world's most beautiful woman, not only is she easy to look at she talks a lot of sense too, so she's easy to listen to. It's sense that comes from years in the industry, a successful career on stage, and a heart that seems genuinely to want the best for the contestants and wants them to be able to produce their best work too.

So: judges? Tick. Seacrest? Tick. Well come on he's been doing it ten years. He's part of the woodwork. Production values? If anything a slightly bigger tick than before. And when you couple all that with a set of contestants that include a handful of real originals, Idol is once again back on track as far as this household is concerned. Admittedly when compared to last year's dire choices it didn't have to go far to be on a whole other level, but it could have gone either way. Now, it looks like it might be around for a few years to come.

I just have two issues left. One, it's getting harder and harder to avoid the spoilers. I've had to "hide" two or three Facebook friends for the time being, because they insist on posting the results the day before the show even airs here.

And two, there's another show that Cowell left last year. Britain's Got Talent. It starts its fourth run here this coming weekend. So with Cowell and his cohort Piers Morgan both taking the US shilling - er, nickel - and leaving us for the West Coast, how does the UK measure up in the Judge Replacement stakes when compared to the success of American Idol? Well, we got David Hasselhoff and Michael McIntyre. FFS.

What's going on?

2011-04-14T05:47:00.001+01:00

Dunno what's happening recently with the spooky bedroom clock, but after yesterday's marathon spookiness my first time check last night was 12:34!

Crikey.

Spooky overload

2011-04-13T06:18:00.002+01:00

Almost managed a hat-trick last night...

First time check: 2.02
Second time check: 4.04
Third time check: 5.04 - OHHHHhhhh... missed it by a minute!

Vinyl: Dire Straits

2011-04-12T06:09:00.000+01:00

Artist: Dire Straits
Owned on digital media: Yes
Want to replace: n/a

Like pretty much anyone who was listening to music at the end of the 70s, I'd heard "Sultans of Swing" and revelled in the fresh new sound of Dire Straits, but it was some years later that I bought my first DS album, and it wasn't this one.

Only later, when the completist in me began to assemble their back catalogue, did this album find its way into my collection. With 30 years of perspective it still seems incredible that BBC chose not to play Sultans on its first release, but then they've never been particularly smart about their music choices. Well at least, not until the advent of 6music.

Bee hive yourself

2011-04-10T06:56:00.031+01:00

Amazing what you can learn while ripping up privet. Yesterday, on my return from carrying a chunky stump to the discard pile, I found a bumble bee sitting quietly on the soil beside a bumble-bee-sized hole.

She looked pretty dopey. I thought how lucky she had been to avoid being squashed while I was yanking the privet stump back and forth to dislodge its roots, but until then I hadn't realised that bumble bees hibernate (a fact later confirmed by our resident Keeper of the Zoological Knowledge - aka Nat).

Their post-hibernation warm-up routine was fascinating to watch too. A few minutes of abdominal exercises (a slight pumping action visible) followed by a couple of tentative - and very short - hovers, only a few millimetres above the ground, to warm up the flying muscles. And then a lazy figure-of-eight flight, gradually increasing in both height and area as the long-unused wings remember their skill and strength, until eventually sufficient altitude was gained to make it over the low wall (see photo on previous blog entry) and cross the lane to the conifer hedge on the other side which at that time of day was in full sun.

The bee sat on that hedge for well over half an hour, soaking up the rays. Clearly a much easier way of warming up than all that tiring flying, especially when you're running on the food reserves that have brought you successfully through a few months hibernation.

Nature in the raw - in our front garden! Brilliant.

Getting preprandial with privet

2011-04-09T16:18:00.050+01:00

The brilliant forecast for this weekend turned into a gorgeous reality, and after months of being cooped up in the house and the almost endless decorating it was good to be outside, making a start with the traditional first gardening jobs of Spring.

But our small lawn takes less than 15 minute to mow, so it wasn't long before I was casting around for something else to do.

The remnants of next door's raspberry canes were starting to make themselves known again around the roots of our copper beech hedge, in various parts of the border, and popping up in the middle of the lawn, so I spent an hour or so trying to tease their roots out from around all the other roots. I managed accidentally to bring up a chunk of the lupin that had become totally enveloped by raspberry tendrils, but 80% of the lupin remained, so not too much damage done.

I was in the mood for a larger challenge than this though. Like digging up the privet in the front garden. I'd cut this back in late summer last year as it was up to about 15 feet, and starving all the trees of light. Cutting them back revealed the size of the main stumps. Comparing them to the trunks that I'd helped my Dad pull out of the front garden in Nottingham 30 years ago, I reckon that hedge must have been there as long as the house. But, you know, privet? It's a bit 1950s isn't it? So we wanted rid.

I didn't feel like breaking my back on the privet trunks back then, but I was up for the task now. It's funny how those jobs that you dread tackling, and put off for the longest time, usually turn out to be nowhere near as bad as you expect. The first three stumps were so shallowly rooted that all I had to do was grab them and pull, and they came up in my hand. Admittedly it began to get tougher after that. The further away the privet stretched towards the road, the deeper the soil in the bed, and consequently the deeper the roots. Some of them even headed off under the wall, requiring the application of a bow saw.

Even so the whole job took a lot less time than I'd expected, and left behind quite a wide bed, filled with lovely rich loam, that I'll be able to fill with some nice dwarf rhododendrons once I've dug in a few bags of peat.

Let there be light

2011-04-07T18:59:00.011+01:00

We continue to tick off the final few finishing flourishes in the (almost) never-ending saga of hall and staircase refurbishment. Today's instalment: a new light fitting in the hall.

I say new, but this particular fitting has been with us since our previous home, where it hung in the dining room. It was reasonably expensive, but more importantly I really liked it, so it came with us when we moved and in the four-and-a-half years since it has lived in various boxes, cupboards, and most recently spent almost a year under my desk in the study. All this procrastination had two main causes. We couldn't decide where we wanted it (and even if we tried, it was odds-on that particular room wasn't "done" yet, so it would have had to wait anyway); and since the ceilings in New Barns were considerably lower than these, it being a new build, the light fitting had been shortened. Made too short, in fact, for the Edwardian ceilings we now have.

In an unusual spurt of enthusiasm several years ago, I had ventured out to B&Q (Home Depot for my transatlantic readers) and secured a length of decorative chain and a roll of electric cable of the right hue with which to recable the thing, but at that point the procrastinatory shutters came down again. The chain and the cable have followed the light fitting around the house from box to cupboard to under-my-desk, unused, ever since.

Finally, with the hall newly skimmed and painted, we decided that was the best place for the light. I began taking it apart to find out how hard a job the recabling would be. The answer? Hard. It wasn't so much the disassembly/reassembly, or the convoluted path of the cable, but once I arrived at the business end of the fitting - a small space in the innermost cylinder in which the cables from all five lamps, and the incoming power cable, all came together with thermal sleeving and industrially-crimped clips - I realised I wasn't going to be able to get the darned thing apart electrically, let alone put it back together again.

A professional was called for.

And, in the way of professionals, he took a Gordian Knot approach to the problem. "Why don't I just splice on an extra length of cable, and hide the join inside the top cup?" Why indeed.

Vinyl: Derek & Clive Live

2011-03-28T17:42:00.037+01:00

Artist: Peter Cook & Dudley Moore (aka Derek & Clive)
Owned on digital media: No
Want to replace: Good question

So we arrive at "D" in our occasional journey through my old vinyl collection and happen across this oddity from 1976. My list originally had "no" in the 'want to replace' flag, but while researching what to write about it I found the track list on Wikipedia. Even that was enough to make me chuckle.

There's no getting away from the fact that I'm still singing the whole of "Jump" at any suitable opportunity (and quite a few unsuitable ones) to this day - 35 years on - and there are other tracks similarly dear to my heart that crop up in conversation from time to time, such as Squatter and the Ant.

Any description of mine concerning the actual content of this album is either totally superfluous or liable to get me in trouble with the Blogger police, so I'll leave those of you unfamiliar with Derek & Clive to your own research. Suffice to say that finally, following links from the original Wikipedia article to the second instalment in the D&C catalogue (Derek & Clive Come Again - which I never owned but listened to several times at various mates' houses), the track list made me laugh out loud. I think it's a fair bet that I will be replacing this one at some stage. It's clear that my toilet humour is still alive and well somewhere under this thin veneer of sophistication (*cough*).

Reject!

2011-03-26T07:12:00.006Z

I sent a partial. It came back. Although I usually get form rejections with no requests for material (we're busy, we're not taking on new clients, it's not really what we're looking for. This last despite my carefully researching all the agents and ONLY querying the ones who say they take what I've written), this is now the third partial I've sent out which has eventually come back (months later, on account of agents being incredibly busy people) with the same message. Basically, we love the idea but we "just didn't fall in love with your writing" or words to that effect.

And they're right. Really. With the perspective of the almost three years since I finished the manuscript and the experience of those three (main) rejections in my pocket, I admit that the first 30-50% of the book is nowhere near as good as the last half.

It's not a good place to be, but it's hardly surprising. It took me seven years to write and I was a better writer at the end than I was at the beginning. Not surprising, no, but no excuse either. I finished the book, but then I supposedly revised it half-a-dozen times. But each of those six times was cosmetic surgery when what was really required was amputation. Ditch the chunks that don't work. For God's sake if you're going to have ANY parts that don't hang together very well, don't put them at the beginning! Duh!

While I'm baring my artistic soul, I should also admit that it's two stories jockeying for ascendancy. There's the headline story, and then there's the thinly-disguised personal catharsis. You probably heard that a fair percentage of first novels are at least partly autobiographical. I think this one could happily ditch that second, struggling, semi-autobiographical story, along with 20,000 words or so, and emerge leaner, fitter and with a better chance of publication.

Guess I'm going to have to grit my teeth, dust it off and rewrite that first chunk if I've to have any hope of it ever seeing the world. >sigh<

All the world's a carpet

2011-03-25T17:42:00.025Z

Well, all the stairs anyway. And the landing.

Yes, the stair carpet arrived this morning as expected, and fitting completed inside two hours. I know there's a knack to fitting carpets, and obviously it's one that can be taught, but it still looks like magic to me. A very nice job they made of it too, with a complete avoidance of the type of problems we had with the other lot. Carpet was the right size, they didn't forget the underlay, etc.

So here's how it looks, and I couldn't be more pleased. As a handy side-effect the carpet muffles the last few remaining creaks (stair fitters did a reasonable job of screwing and gluing the bits they didn't replace, but there were still a couple of squeaky treads) as well as looking good and feeling very comfy underfoot. Luxury!

More spooking

2011-03-24T05:56:00.008Z

Last night was a bumper crop as far as "significant times" goes.

Bathroom visit time: 3.21
Next wake-up time check: 4.44

I began to wonder whether this would be one of those occasions where things come in threes, but when I did eventually get up, it wasn't at a 'notable' time.

Bargains and hot new music

2011-03-22T14:33:00.003Z

Had one of those marketing emails from Amazon, or Play, or HMV (frankly, they arrive so frequently that they all blend into one) this morning entitled, rather breathlessly, "bargains and hot new music."

The first linked entry in the body of the email? Simon & Garfunkel's Greatest Hits.

Well at that price it wasn't a bargain, and I hardly think it qualifies as "hot new music" either, with a release date of 1972 :-\

Diamond geezer

2011-03-20T14:46:00.027Z

Fresh from the completion of the stair refurb, we were keen to get them carpeted as soon as. The garish red-and-white stripes which we've lived with for 4+ years seemed even less appealing now they were surrounded on all sides by that lovely new oak.

After the fiasco of the front bedroom carpet last year we decided to keep it local, and set off this afternoon for a jaunt to Diamond Millennium carpets which, as we soon discovered, is no longer situated in the rather seedy looking shed opposite Chorlton Park, but has moved to much more salubrious accommodation closer to the cemetery (and, in this incarnation, has employed a sign writer who knows how to spell 'millennium').

We couldn't have been in the shop more than ten minutes before we happened across a remnant in the colour we were looking for, and were assured by the friendly and helpful owner that it would be more than big enough. This soon turned into one of those "too good to be true" moments, as we scoured the showroom for something that fitted our needs more closely. Surely it can't be as easy as this? Half an hour of looking, deep contemplation and talking around the subject later, we finally decided that at that price, if we didn't like it once it was fitted, we'd rip it out and buy another! Yes, the deal was THAT good.

Fitting has been arranged for Friday.

Stairway to heaven

2011-03-18T12:45:00.022Z

Refurbishment of the stairs started promptly as planned on Tuesday morning shortly after 8am.

I say "refurbishment" rather than "replacement" deliberately, as we're not having the entire staircase replaced. This particular company don't do that in any case, but it would have been (a) far too expensive - more than double what we eventually paid - and (b) unnecessary, as the main carcase is still sound. The bits we don't like are the more visible and slightly less structural items, like newel posts, rails and spindles. As it happens, these guys also work on the external and internal stringers, but only to encase them in new wood, rather than replace them entirely.

The project stretched beyond the original estimates of either the designer (a full day, maybe two) or the surveyor (definitely two days, possibly a few hours on a third day), which was strange because when it was booked in, they said they had two other jobs to do the same week. During a break in proceedings on the first day - with all the hand rails sawn off and only two of the original newel posts still in place - one of the joiners admitted that they "never do these in less than three days" and in the end, for one reason or another, one of them had to come back for an hour or so this morning for some finishing touches.

Still, the end result is definitely worth it. You'll have to wait for pics until a carpet has been chosen and fitted. The original stairs were painted red and white, and since they're the only bit that remains unchanged they don't really set off the lovely warm oak to its best advantage!

New newels a-coming

2011-03-13T06:32:00.013Z

Our mental schedule had the new stairs being fitted after May Bank Holiday, so it was a surprise to receive a phone call last week to say all the "product" was ready and they had a fitting appointment free next week.

Fortunately I'd been pressing on with the decorating so that we would stand a chance of being ready whenever they were, and the intervening weekend gave ample time to complete the last phase of the painting - the top coat on the woodwork (at least around the stairs area) - before the joiners arrive on Tuesday.

I set to yesterday morning with a brand new tin of Dulux Satinwood - my "gloss" of choice for many years owing to its classy satin finish, but by teatime I was beginning to worry that it was taking an awfully long time to dry. A tentative touch in an out-of-the-way corner gave a surprising result: it was dry already. Dry and glossy. Not what we wanted at all.

At first I thought Dulux had suffered a manufacturing wobbler and packaged regular gloss in a Satinwood tin, but as usual Google is your friend, and a quick search threw up several references to DIY and professional decorator forums where everyone was bemoaning the new paint mix - light on volatile organics as per new EU regulations, and consequently taking much longer to dry out properly than it used to.

"Don't worry," wrote one professional long-time user of Satinwood, "you'll see the difference after 24 hours, but it can take a couple of weeks before the satin effect is completely there."

Sure enough this morning the high gloss sheen is already toned down a couple of notches. Phew.

Greek Night

2011-03-11T23:48:00.003Z

As regular readers will know, we have a tradition of "safari nights" on our street where we journey from house to house for each course of an n-course meal (depending on the number of houses involved in that particular safari). Each one has a different theme, tonight's being Greek.

As you'll have seen earlier this week, tonight's safari was only organised last Friday, so we've not had long to arrange a costume. I was thwarted at every turn, as I wanted to do something a bit more original than a draped sheet (no offence to draped sheets, or those who wear them!) but every costume I found was either out of stock or not available in my size.

Until I found this. Which gave me the idea I was looking for, and was do-able in the time remaining. Especially since we still had a large cardboard box lying around from the last flat-pack furniture delivery which was the perfect size for the top and bottom plinth.

Cannibalising an old fitted sheet sufficed for the both the column (with Nat's help to spray-on some suitably Doric fluting) and the drapery around the "bust", white body paint turned my exposed body parts to stone and the whole thing was topped off with a "gold leaf" laurel from an online costumier.

Here's the final result.

With a little more time and thought I could probably have made a better job but even so I was quite pleased with it, and the surprise (or even shock in some cases) of the arriving guests was well worth the effort. I chose to stand over in a corner, unmoving, until each group of guests realised it was me.

Walking was somewhat hampered, and sitting impossible, so once everyone had enjoyed the full effect (i.e. shortly after we arrived at the second house) I removed the bottom half of the costume, but remained in "bust mode" for much of the rest of the evening, even though it made negotiating doorways... interesting. Chalk up (haha!) another successful safari night, with buckets of stifado, moussaka and ouzo thrown in. Brilliant.

Statue of liberty

2011-03-08T17:30:00.004Z

The liberty being our neighbours - Torsten & Keith - who are shortly to depart these shores for a new life in Portugal. The statue being my chosen costume for the forthcoming Greek-themed safari night in honour of their leaving, for which we had less than a week's notice. It's happening on Friday, and I'm trying to pull together a statue costume in time.

Thank God for Internet shopping, rapid order fulfilment, and first class post. My body paint arrived today (successfully tested for wear, smudging, washability and skin reaction) and I'm hopeful that the laurel wreath will arrive tomorrow. The rest is all bodged together from old cardboard boxes, sprayed with B&Q project paint, and an old fitted sheet that was surplus to requirements.

First stage assembly of the top and bottom plinths of a mock-Doric column was completed today. Now I just have to figure out the best way of spray-painting the fluting on the column and I'm all set.

The last coat...

2011-03-05T14:22:00.009Z

...is in sight.

For today, a bonus: I finished before 2.30pm. Second coat of undercoat on the front door (that's the last of the undercoating) and cutting in the second emulsion coat on walls and ceiling, leaving only the rolling to do. That'll be a quick job, so I'm on track for an early finish tomorrow too :o)

Another thing that came to mind as I carefully cut in around the dado rails and skirting: this job marks the final demise of the rag-rolled flame-effect colours that used to dominate the whole house; a legacy of the previous owners. Flame yellow in the dining room, orange and red in the living room, blood-red in the bathroom. One by one they've been built over, plastered over, painted over, or all three. The last bastion of rag rolling was the sub-dado area in the hall and stairs. Orange and yellow, it was. Now it's only visible as a slight mottling of the first coat of white emulsion in the photo here. The second coat, coming tomorrow, will be enough to see it off for good.

I researched the Feng Shui-ness of these colours. Knowing a little about those previous owners I'm pretty certain the colours were chosen for a reason - along with the copper, gold and bronze paint they used on all the picture rails. Sure enough, they're all "Yang" colours. All associated with vitality, ambition, joy and optimism. Interesting to note during my research that white - now the predominant colour of the hall - is the "colour of ultimate purity." It is, allegedly, "an all around colour of protection, bringing peace and comfort, alleviating emotional shock and despair, helping cleanse emotions, thoughts and spirit."

I think that's a pretty good choice for the first room you enter after an exhausting day at the coalface of life. All we need now is to add in a little gold. Because it is "related to abundance and power, higher ideals, wisdom, understanding" and is "mentally revitalising, energising and inspiring." Just what we need.

Stunning Lines

2011-02-27T06:48:00.000Z

I've written almost two dozen original songs, so I know from personal experience that some lines stand out as being especially memorable, poignant, apposite, meaningful, moving, or beautifully crafted. And unless you're a particularly gifted songwriter, those really good, stand-out lines are few. I reckon probably three in my case, so far, and I'm probably being generous to myself. I bet everyone can think of at least a couple from their favourite songs that really grab their heart and give it a squeeze.

Never mind, I'll find someone like you.

Adele has been all over the UK and world media for the last four years or so, but nothing quite prepares you for the quality of the songs - all the songs - on her second album: 21. For me though (and apparently, since 21 has only been out a little over a month and sales are already in the hundreds of thousands, for many others too), even among the many gems on this album that single line from the chorus of Someone Like You is one of the most breathtakingly, heart-achingly powerful I've ever heard.

So few words to crystallise the loss of hope, the final realisation that love has gone, but even while it's leaving you don't wish any hurt for the other even though you're hurting. You loved them that much. Never mind. Don't worry about me. All I need to do is find another you. Simple.

The power of the words is, of course, multiplied by Adele's amazing performance. If you haven't seen it I suggest you get yourself over to YouTube sharpish. You'll be glad you did. But it is the words that do it for me every time. The album insert credits Adele Adkins and Dan Wilson as co-writers. Top job guys. It really is a line I wish I'd written.

Vinyl: Airborne

2011-02-24T05:18:00.002Z

Artist: Curved Air
Owned on digital media: No
Want to replace: No

During that eventful year when I was the student union Socials Secretary, one of the bands I most enjoyed putting on was Curved Air, mainly because it gave me chance to get close to lead singer Sonja Kristina; every inch the young man's dream.

I can't honestly claim to have been a huge Curved Air fan - this was the only album of theirs in my collection - and with the passing years the memory of how it sounded, or even what tracks it held, has faded to almost nothing. So I was grateful to Wikipedia (and the *real* fans who maintain copious detail of the music) for some insight into what was on this particular album, and also for the unexpected memory jog that the title "Hot & Bothered" gave me, bringing back as it did the recollection of sitting in my garret room in halls, spinning the vinyl and singing along while pretending to write out my lecture notes for the day.

That Wikipedia page held a few more surprises. You can tell I've never been much of a "fan boy" when it comes to music. Never really followed many bands to any great extent (apart from the obvious Caravan and Genesis), or got to know the names of the band members much beyond the lead singer. So I never realised Stewart Copeland was their drummer before he went on to The Police, or that he later married Sonja Kristina. Following her Wikipedia link (purely in the interests of research, naturally) uncovered the revelation that at the age of 61 she is still touring, still making music, releasing a (compilation) album as recently as last year. Good onja, Sonja!