Blue Witch

And we are off again...

For the next 2 weeks, we will be replacing the roof of the original house, the Velux window in the upstairs bathroom, and the flat tops of the dormer windows on the back of the house.

The roof was very tired (having been done in 1974 to the cheapest possible specification), but not leaking; it could probably have waited a few more years, but we wanted to do it now, while we were doing it on our terms, rather than on 'emergency' terms. Future proofing is all.

The salesman who sold me my car back in December recommeded the roofers. The roofers recommended the scaffolders, who were excellent. After 3 sets of bad scaffolders on past phases, it was great to find some good ones. And they even said thank you for the refreshments we provided!


Yellow wagtail site foreman on the ridge:

Missing mortar on the ridge, with old flat roof felt:

Supplies were delivered yesterday (including 2,600 new slates):

The roofers start on Monday.

Wish us luck...

Things ain't what they used to be

Customer disservice goes from strength to strength.

We have 4 or 5 ongoing unresolved issues with goods and services we have purchased. None of them trivial, all of them things that could and should have been resolved straight away, and all of them utter time-sinks.

Companies no longer seem to bother to respond to emails in a timely manner (if at all), and issues are handled by a succession of people who rarely leave the previous email chain intact, so it is never clear to the next person who picks up the issue what has been happening (or not happening), or, in most cases, even what the issue is.

Emails seem to be answered in foreign countries by people who have a very limited command of English. Plus they seem to use a random selection of cut-and-paste phrases which together are absolute nonsense.

Take this example reply to the 4th email I sent to a company regarding missing parts (and this is not an isolated incident, and the only thing I have changed is the writer's name at the end):

"Good Afternoon,

We extend our sincerest apologies for any inconvenience this situation may have caused.

We are disheartened to learn about the issue concerning your order. It has come to our attention that the parts have not yet arrived. We consistently strive to provide exceptional service, and we greatly value your feedback. We would be grateful for the opportunity to rectify this situation, as you are a valued customer, and we do not wish to disappoint you. We have been in communication with the production unit, which has informed us that the parts are currently out of stock. We sincerely apologize for this and assure you that once they are restocked, we will ensure prompt dispatch.

We truly regret the inconvenience this has caused you. Should you have any further inquiries regarding this matter or any other concerns, please do not hesitate to reach out to us. Our operating hours are from 9:00 AM to 5:30 PM every day.

Best Regards,
CustomerServices"

There are lots of companies who now supply goods under more than one brand name, and so many items that you cannot now buy from anyone other than these huge conglomerates. Once small independents who used to provide excellent quality and service have now been bought up and swallowed by huge conglomerates who keep the once-reliable brand name but increase prices and put customer service offshore or into call centres who handle problems for multiple organisations - only you don't find this out until you have an issue and start investigating online, or until your email is eventually (accidentally) answered from another company's email address.

The other day I was e-chatting to an English friend who has lived in the US for many years now and mentioned how appalling customer service was these days. "Ah, good old Blighty has finally caught up with the US in that regard!" he said.

Progress, eh?

We made that

I went up to the top garden on Friday to check on the hostas. The only benefit to having had 66 days without rain (the driest spring for over 100 years in this part of the country) is that the slugs and snails have been non-existent. We put out (home-made) slug traps in the third week of February, which attracted the over-wintered early spring ones (hundreds of them, and a mouse), and haven't seen any evidence of their nasty destructive habits since. We used to use slug nemotodes, but they have become so expensive, and we would need so many packs to effectively cover the area of our garden, several times a year, that we had to find a better way.

As I turned round to go back to the house I suddenly noticed how the spring flowers had come out this week.

"Ooooh!" I thought as I looked at the display. "We made that!"

A great feeling of achievement, finally back to where we were down south about 10 years ago (when we were at Peak Garden, before local development aorund there took the joy out of everything).

And for not very much: a lot of plants from cuttings or divisions from our garden down south, a lot of plants bought very cheaply at local village plant sales or from roadside stalls, some grown from seed and some grown on from small plantlets bought cheaply from online commercial companies. Oh, and a lot of nurturing, largely by Mr BW, who actually likes weeding.

To further our future-proofing plans, after a lot of research, we have bought a ride-on mower for the orchard/meadow. Last summer it was taking me 4 hours every week to cut just the paths with a powered petrol mower, and Mr BW 4 knackering days (on and off) to cut the lot down with a petrol strimmer and then remove the strimmings in late summer (as you need to do with a meadow). I can't manage to mow for 4 hours every week any more, and there are plenty of other things Mr BW can do with 4 days.

Plus, Vroom Vroom can do the job much better than I ever did, in 28 minutes flat, including getting out and putting away (and I'm getting quicker every time). Mr BW is not allowed to use Vroom Vroom as it is far too much fun.

Vroom Vroom can't access the garden lawn, so we bought a Goat.

However, it proved impossible to train it or keep it under control, so it went back to The Long River. Let's not even mention the saga that became, but it did involve a Section 75 intervention.

As the technology clearly isn't quite there for our upper lawn needs yet, I decided that we would reduce the garden lawn area. This is the third time this border has been extended (it's never been quite right anyway), and, given the grow-through of what was once sheep-proof grass from when we originally made the border in 2020, and extended it two years later, we reluctantly decided that we needed to kill the grass with weedkiller before we started.

Mr BW sprayed in late evening, after our Buzzers, and other beneficial insects, were home for the night. We garden organically, using permaculture principles, and it grieves me very much to have to resort to chemicals. But, I guess it is all relative, given the horrors that the local farmers constantly spray on their food crops, by date rather than need.

In another week we will be able to remove the dead grass, add grit and compost to the expsoed soil, and then plant up. We have lots of perennials, grown from bare roots, to put in.

The weather at yesterday's show turned out OK - just a couple of short light showers, but those who go regularly say that there were far fewer attendees. For a one-day agricultural show, with a usual attendance of around 20,000, this could be disasterous.

I spun up 420g of fleece in the day, which is a huge amount (the carded prepared batts filled a 42 litre trug), and talked to what seemed like hundreds of people (one of the stated aims of the group is public education), but could have been more or less. I just know that we got home at 5.23pm and I was fast asleep an hour later.

There were supposed to be 8 of us demonstrating, but one pulled out the day before due to her husband being unwell, so another also couldn't attend as she couldn't then get a lift. This left 6 of us, and, unbelievably, only two of us had brought anything to display, or indeed our traditional wooden sp1nning wheel5.

Only two of us were there demonstrating all day: the others seemed to spend their time wandering around and returning with carb-laden sauce-dripping handfuls of unnecessary calories that made me feel unwell just looking at them. As soon as one 'snack' was finished, they seemed to go off in search of the next. Each of them must have spent at least £40 in the day on over-priced and unhealthy food and drinks. Mind you, there seems to be a large plateful of some chocolate-based confection with green lumps (smarties?) in it, attempting to hide in the fridge, and I did not make it or indeed put it there.

This is what happens when events are just left to happen rather than be properly organised. I must sit on my hands and keep my mouth shut or I know I will end up with the show organiser role.

The pigs were in the next but one marquee. This isn't a pig county, so there weren't many, but there was a Middle White: my second favourite breed. I always think they resemmble a Large White that has had an argument with a wall:

There was finally rain here last night - enough to fill the smaller water butts where there is only one on a downpipe. It's been intermittently showery today, but with sunshine in between. The rain has finished off the final tulips, but the alliums have taken over.

Missing times

Forgive me Blogland for I have sinned. It has been 15 days since my last post.

My life is in shreds and I have been dyeing.

The Shreds

When the conservatory was redone, the 40+ bankers' boxes of suspension files and paper files that had been waiting in there - some since since September 2022 and others since October 2024 - to be gone through and shredded were moved next door into the lounge.

The lounge is now designated as The Library as it is doubful we will ever again use it as a lounge: the new room, with its solid insulated roof and solar-powered Velux windows with roof blinds, and powered window blinds (yes, we are future-proofing), is 20 degrees cooler by day and 10 degrees warmer at night than it ever was when it was made completely of glass, so should be able to be used all year round. Plus I have bought a Dyson hot and cold non-fan fan. So, these boxes of solid paper have finally been getting processed. Most people would do this sort of stuff before they move house, but our move wan't like that, plus I didn't want to get rid of stuff pertaining to Coven Sud until we no longer owned it. You never know what will come in useful.

Having already killed two and a half normal paper shredders in the last 5 years, I invested in a semi-industrial shredder and have done 40 giant thick black bags so far. As the local council will not take shredded paper for recycling, and as there is far too much to compost at once, Mr BW has been burning it so that we can use the ash on the fruit trees and bushes. It seems only right.

The papers were about half and half, work case files (quick to do) and old financial etc documents (slower as there are some things that need to be extracted). How things have changed in the banking game over the past 30 years! I have kept some gems that I might eventually get round to posting.

The dyeing

We've now had 66 days without rain here - well, a tiny bit of drizzle in mid-April on the day they finished off the new what-was-the-conservatory (which is wonderful now) and 20 minutes one Thursday late afternoon about a month ago when it poured for 23 minutes, but otherwise none at all. Drier than down south! Unheard of up here. All our water butts are empty and have been for weeks - and we have 19 of them, all huge, totalling 7 cubic metres (being a Longhouse 30 metres long - we have a lot of roof to catch water so we might as well store it for use in the garden).

But... it is due to break tomorrow. Rain all day. Guess who is demonstrating spinning of f1eece at the Annual County Show - now in the rain - tomorrow? I must be mad, but I was asked, so I didn't like to say no...

So, I spent most of 2 days this week dyeing then drum carding the fleece I will be using. I like to confuse young visitors by suggesting they go and find the blue sheep and then come back and tell me where they found it.

I killed one of our 4 old microwaves in the process (the LH one). RIP and that's another glass turntable for my collection. Always useful. As we no longer use microwaves for cooking food, I don't know what I will do when the remaining ones die.

This is the dyed fleece drying in the once-conservatory in what I have called 'a woman's work is never done' corner. My collection of old flat irons:

And then I have been helping a young friend (who I actually taught to read when she was a failing reader at age 9) 'proof read' her latest two 4,000 word end-of-module essays for the MA in English Literature that she is doing at a Russell Group University. The 'proof reading' she requested turned into needing to be 'heavy editing' and 'teaching how to write an essay'. How anyone can have an A* at GCSE, an A at A Level, a 2:1 BA, and still not know how to write an academic essay is totally beyond me. That has taken up probably 30 or 40 hours since the beginning of the year. I appear to have agreed to similar input into a 15,000 word dissertation. Do I get half an MA if she eventually passes? One can only wonder how many advanced qualifications only succeed because the writer has a learned friend, or pays for an editing service. Having reviewed the papers from when I did my Masters 36 years ago now, during my shredding process, all I will say is that qualifications definitely aren't what they used to be.

There aren't any groups of retired men round here who meet up to do anything other than drink, and talk about the price of sheep, and most of the retired are 80+ anyway, if not 90+ (farmers don't like to retire) so Mr BW has to make his own entertainment. The 'M3ns' Shed' in the nearest town (12 miles away) consists of 2 very elderly ex-engineers and about a dozen care-in-the-community or learning disabled younger men. We went to their open day last summer. The 2 leaders were very keen for Mr BW to join them. Mr BW was very un-keen to join them. They wouldn't let us go until they had his phone number so they could keep in touch with him, and, I am ashamed to say, it was easier to give them a false number than to explain why it wasn't going to happen.

But, finally, to fill the void, Mr BW is, unexpectedly, and slightly unwillingly, after the recent local elections, now Administrative Lord of the Manor. He knows more about official governance and procedural matters than anyone else for miles around (due to him having been trained down south, where they actually bother to train people to fulfil voluntary community roles, as well as a lifetime of professional business experience and knowledge), although he lacks the network of local contacts, not having lived here for 20 generations. Given that he will never have lived here for 20 generations, and has been doing most of the development work for the past 4 years anyway, it's probably going to be OK. At least it will get him to meet a few more local people, even if it is mostly the ones who are annoying the locals and contravening local sensibilities.

So, that's (most of) our news: how about yours?

Distraction

I am not religious.

I do not condone or understand war.

I am unimpressed that the Catholic Church have chosen to detract from VE80 today by announcing the new Pope.

Am I the only one who finds this very distasteful?

Mayday, mayday, mayday

The Ballerinas and Princess Irenes are at their best:


The meat factory in the field behind us grows daily:

This scares me:

But not because of the rise of a Trump-like mentality in the UK, or that Mrs Badenough (our previous MP) has suffered a crushing defeat (which she fully deserved - we have first-hand experience that, as media commentators have said, it's true that she is uninformed, arrogant, and could start a fight in an empty room), but because many of the new councillors will have no idea of how 'officialdom' works, what can and can't be done, and will require so much hand-holding and education by council Officers that costs will rise and efficiencies will decrease.

We are now living under a hung council (although fortunately our county councillor in this area might be in a minority, but has not changed colour):

What scares me more than the state of the political world is that we have had no rain since mid-March, aside of a drizzle on the day the conservatory revamp was completed in the first week of April and a few spots last night.

The northernmost county is not supposed to be the driest place in the UK, but, from conversations with old friends down south, they have had much more rain than us in the last 8 weeks. The water butts are empty and the reservoirs are so low one would think it was the end of the summer.

That was the week that was

The auricula theatre, moved from Coven Sud, looks better than ever, despite being on a north-facing wall now, when it was on an east facing wall before, even if some of the pots are a little on the large size:

Mr BW worked very hard over the Easter weekend, completing all the jobs that needed to be done to get everything ready for the carpet fitters on Tuesday. When we booked them I allowed an extra few days, because I am now an expert on Project Creep caused by the vagaries of workmen.

It was all done in the nick of time, with the aid of a few Bunny Chomp Chomps (Malteasters) and Bunny Bang Bangs (the Gigantic Bunny is now residing with The Deceased Pope). Actually, probably not, as that bastard thing that ruined so many trees, and was over twice the size of The Black Familiar, and nearly as big as a small child, must surely be in Bunny Hell now.

The carpet was fitted, and part way through (just below) I had a horrible feeling that I'd messed up on colour choice and picked Old Peoples' Brown. The take-home samples were out with someone else, so I had to make a choice in the shop (or, more accuratly, in the shop car park, where there was natural light) by comparing swatches of the existing colour and what I needed it to match to.

Fortunately, once fitted and flat, with the light falling on it, it was a neutral colour, of various fawns and creams, and exactly matches the exterior paving, as I intentended. And hopefully won't show the muck. Not very sensible to have carpet in a conservatory, but there was carpet before and tiles would be just too cold for most of the year, and this is commercial quality looped berber, allegedly cleanable with bleach.

Mr BW also nearly managed to get my objets and pots back as I would have arranged them:

When we went to the viewing day of a farm dispersal sale yesterday he spotted something he'd been wanting for a long time:

So, having researched its worth, I decided what I'd pay (which was double what he said he'd pay), and eventually got it today for £10 more than his top price. I also successfully bid for lots of other metal objets, some for his sculptures, and some for my garden collections.

While viewing yesterday we were chatting to the farmer selling up and retiring. I love farm sales, but I am always sad for the outgoing incumbent. A lifetime of useful things and tools of the trade reduced to a few lines of numbered lots in a barn:

and the larger items and machines outside:


The retiring farmer asked Mr BW what had caught his eye, and when Mr BW told him, and said that he wanted to use it for its proper purpose, rather than a decorative piece, he seemed pleased.

All the locals who work the land were there, nothing like a farm sale to bring them together, most of them built like the proverbial 'brick shit houses' and in clothes, and with dogs, that haven't seen a wash this year:

All's well that ends well:

Hot Cross Bun Day

I can guarantee that I am doing something this Easter Weekend that no-one else is.

Scooping/pouring vermiculite between a dwarf stone wall and a dwarf block wall and between the dwarf block wall and the internal plasterboard. Currently at 260 litres, and it might yet settle some more before Mr BW finishes making and securing the windowsills, particularly with some well-directed prodding with a reclaimed wooden sapling stake. Prodding that needs to involve minding the electric cabling that runs inside the wall, and ensuring there are no pockets under the dots and dabs of the plasterboard. There was supposed to be vermiculite insulation in the wall already, from when it was originally built on in 2006 by Bodgit and Coverit the previous owners, but, as ever, they clearly failed to check that the workmen did the job properly and there seems to be one ten litre bag in the whole of the wall's cavities rather than the 300 litres it needed.

Mindnumbingly slow and mindnumbingly boring. It's relieved me of 6 hours of my life so far.

Mr BW has just realised that when we take off the plug sockets to paint under them, it is highly likely that some flakes of vermiculite will cascade out as there are holes in the back boxes (that the fronts screw into) to allow for different cable entries. I've just realised that if the back boxes are metal it is highly likely they will have rusted (like the pins in the carpet gripper) and will need replacing with plastic ones. It's never-ending this project... except that our parts need to have ended by Monday evening as the carpet is being laid first thing on Tuesday.

What are you doing this weekend?

Easter Bunny Count: Mr BW 9, The Black Familiar 12. She has the battle scars to prove it, and the sawdust to prove she's been supervising Mr BW cutting pieces of windowsill:

One big bunny bugger still eating our trees and plants and escaping murder.

A Paneful Tail

We'd noticed that some panes of the new conservatory glass had stickers on the outside, and some on the inside. Well - the glue from the stickers, as the labels themselves had been scraped off. Fortunately I'd taken a photo of the glass when it was on the pallet, because, well, you never know when photos will come in useful.

The information on the stickers themselves made absolutely no sense:

Now, what would you think (the bottom line of) that meant?

When we asked the roof boss man about this 10 days ago, he said it didn't matter which side faced out, but we were unconvinced, so, when Mr BW got back from his week away, he sent an email to the window manufacturing company.

And so it came to pass that a window man turned up this morning to turn 6 panes around to be the same way as the other panes. And all was well. Well, we hope so.

The roof men have now finished. Almost all is now good, and Mr BW can polish the bits that aren't. As well as do all the other jobs that need doing before the carpet is laid on Tuesday.

However, as one workman job finishes, another re-opens... some of the composite 'slates' on the summerhouse/museum roof have changed colour in the 15 weeks since they were installed.

Apparently there were some rogue batches that didn't have UV stabiliser put in. Why, oh why, are we always the ones to get the rogues?

Conservatory revamp latest

The plasterer who failed to attend the weekend before last arrived at 7.17am yesterday. He took one look at the amount of boarding and plastering work to do and phoned a friend who turned up at 11am.

They finished here at 3pm, and were then off to another job. I strongly suspect it was a 'put aside your other work and do this as first job when you get back from your week's holiday or lose our work' directive from the roof installation company. Previous issues aside, they did an excellent job on what is a very difficult 'P' shaped roof with two huge Velux windows.

As it is now:

As it was on Sunday:

As it was 2 weks ago:

This pair made the least mess of any of the 5 different sets of plasterers who have worked here.

I have now finally (on almost out last project that needs workmen) deduced how you work out how tidily tradesmen will work and how well they will clean up. It's so obvious once you've clicked. I have no idea why it has taken me so long.

It does not involve looking at online reviews, or asking other people they've worked for.

You simply look at their vans, and their clothes.

The ones here yesterday had pristine vans: clean and polished outside and neat and orderly inside. The worst set of plasterers (the local ones who were our only option in the middle of the first covid lockdown when we were first here) drive around in a filthy rusting van, which is a huge, grubby mess inside, everything thrown in together, not cleared out for at least the last ten years, and even on a Monday morning they wear dirty (non-washed) clothes.

Fortunately, I have a day's peace today, with only Mr BW working here - cutting, fitting and painting the new skirting boards and windowsills, levelling the concrete floor and painting the ceiling. The latter two jobs not for a while as the plaster needs to dry first. The good thing about Mr BW as workman is that if I don't like how something is looking, I can just say, whereas with workmen, it's almost impossible to say anything negative without being in fear of them walking away. Not that that's ever happened, but only because when I can see that things are going really badly I get Mr BW to tell them and hide.

We have now discovered another big issue that will have to be rectified by the window company while the roof finishing crew are here tomorrow, but more of that another time.

It drizzled a bit last night - the first rain in nearly a month. Tomorrow, finishing off day (ie sticking on all the internal and external cover strips and soffits, and cleaning all the plastic and glass), it is forecast to rain all day.

Given that the new carpet is being fitted on Tuesday, and Mr BW still has a lot fo do before then, and it's chocolate eggcess weekend, there is no room for further delay caused by workmen. Hmmmm.

Bad practice?

"Will you come round in the morning and witness my latest will?" asked Nice Nearest Neighbour.

Given that she has witnessed umpteen documents for us, including several at ten feet with her own pen during covid times when we first moved in and were signing off various covenants, I couldn't say no, even though she wanted me to appear at a time I would rather still have been in bed.

She employs a will writer. This profession is not regulated. This is not the first time she has used this woman, who, I discovered, is very middle-aged and very personable. Think Sarah Raven crossed with Kitsty Allsopp and you'll have the right image.

She appeared at NNN's front door, just after I had (and I was ten minutes early), with a brown A4 envelope and a stapled bundle of maybe 8 sheets of paper.

With little pre-chat, but lots of podgy-faced smiles, she informed NNN that the brown envelope contained a copy of what she was about to sign, together with her invoice ("which I'm afraid has a little uplift due to the number of new beneficiaries you've added this year"), instructed NNN to initial in the bottom right hand of each page and then sign and date on the last page.

I shuddered inwardly. NNN is lovely, but she is a widow in her 70s, with no children, and has lived alone for many years. No she doesn't have cats. Over the 5 and a half years that we've known her we've learnt that she needs to feel that any ideas are her own and that she is making all the decisions, so it is often hard to offer advice.

"Erm... do you think it might be a good idea to read everything through before you sign?" I ventured. "Oh, it's OK," she said with gay abandon, mid-initial, "I've already checked it online." "Even so...." I said, "Do you know, Mr BW still always reads through every last word before he signs anything even if he's read it before. It's very easy for the electronic draft versions to get muddled up in the printing..."

Mrs Will Writer snorted. NNN laughed, "Oh, we're OK BW, we've worked together before, I trust Mrs Will Writer implicitly!"

I know when to admit defeat, and dutifully signed and dated on the dotted line where instructed.

Mrs Will Writer left, telling NNN that the will would be deposited with the National Will Register, and the £30 annual fee plus handlig for that would be invoiced as normal.

After she'd left, NNN opened the brown envelope. The 'invoice' was for £350 plus VAT. For adding a couple of beneficiaries on this 'annual review'. Yes, she comes to see NNN at home every year to review her wishes, and visits again if any changes are required. But £350? And £30 annual fee plus 'handling' and VAT for will storage?

NNN seemed a bit put out by the amount. "It was only a couple of small changes!" she said. I saw my opportunity.

"Yes, but, more importantly, how do you know that what you signed is the same as the copy of your new will in the envelope?" I asked. "I always check documents side-by side, and then take a photocopy or photos of each page of the final signed and witnessed document." NNN looked at me as if I was mad. "Oh, I've known Mrs WIll Writer for a few years now, all is always in order!"

I chose not to ask how she knew that, if she'd never checked.

I have no reason to suspect that Mrs Will Writer is disreputable, or is taking NNN for a ride, although I do feel that a (chargeable) annual review of a will for a widow with no direct family, leaving the bulk of her estate to charity, is rather excessive. I also wonder how someone working alone in a non-profession service can be VAT registered (ie have a turnover in excess of £90,000). And I do think that anyone who doesn't insist that their elderly client reads a document before signing it is encouraging an attitude that is far far too trusting in this day and age.

Am I just over-cautious and cynical?

Do you read documents before signing?

None of you believed me...

It is magic because it flew in having journeyed from Lincolnshire via High Wycombe (my home town) and The Borders (which is one hell of a roundabout route), because it was on a mixed load which included enormous control panels for a gigantic - let's say - weed factory which is being set up and run by the government.

I Googled and it really does exist, and we know exactly how far it is from The Coven in miles, although not the exact location. Mind you, the new conservatory workmen think we have such a facility of our own, as the first-floor bedroom just above the new roof has a windowsill currently covered in tomato plants which are now nearly 2 foot tall. I saw them looking up and laughing, and I don't think they believed me when I pointed out that they are tomato and not weed plants. Mind you, it's a thought...

Our postie has a knack of turning up at interesting points in many of our projects.
Fortunately, he is a man of few words and keeps his own counsel.

I call this image 'GPO: The Good Old Days'.

Now, if anyone knows where there is a grey 1970s c0in p@yph0ne for sale, please tell.

Here's my cunning plan to keep the lambs from the butchers' knives:

One yowe (I speak Northern now) in the field behind us lambed yesterday afternoon, and the second lamb looked decidely frail for a while, but eventually it picked up and is fine this morning. All the rest are still to pop.

Lamblets

Mr BW found these two looking at him when he went to the bins on Sunday morning:

Being quite high up, they lamb comparatively late in these parts, so the first ones are just beginning to pop out.

The temperatures by day are high teens, and it's been very sunny with blue skies for well over a week now, but by night it's still getting down to zero, with hard frosts most mornings. It hasn't rained since the 18th of March, and then not much, so it is scarily dry everywhere already.

In such nice weather, many farmers leave all but the first-time mums out in the fields to get on with it, and spend their days touring their fields to check all is well and provide supplementary feeding (sheep nuts and hay).

Clearly out-of-touch with what happens in the most rural parts of the county, the council have chosen now to sequentially close the roads to do yet more ineffective and short-lasting patching. To get round the need to apply for road closure permits weeks ahead, they are claiming that all the repairs are 'emergency repairs' so they can cause havoc to the poor farmers trying to get from field to field to provide maternity services. What would normally be 2 mile circular trips are turning into 10 mile trips.

While little lambs are cute, I can't get away from the 'meat factory' aspect. I am hatching a cunning plan.

10 years on

We always had a plan to retire at 50.

No kids, no dependents, good fiscal management, living within our means, frugal outgoings, overpayments into pensions, serious saving, all on track... and then Goldfish Brown changed the rules, meaning that private pensions couldn't be accessed until 55. Grrrrr.

Then, unexpected company takeovers and restructurings meant that Mr BW was still able to exit the corporate world at 50, with a beyond good redundancy deal, which enabled us to have 5 careful years before pension began.

Mr BW's last day of corporate world work was 10 years ago today.

Yes, 2 days into the new tax year, on a day chosen by us, to get maximum tax benefit.

5 years down south, during which Mr BW continued to do some self-employed work as a speaker and a teacher of courses on traditional crafts, to enable us to survive. And then 5 years up here, renovating and supervising renovators, with a big side of regular journeys to the south to keep Coven Sud going until it eventually sold, which is, unbelievably, now 6 months ago.

The Conservatory revamp should have been finished last Friday, but of course wasn't. The plasterer should have been here Friday, then Saturday, then Sunday, then, at 7pm on Saturday night, we got a message to say he wasn't coming on Sunday - no reasons given. We told the boss that the finishing crew were not to turn up today as planned as there was no point until the plastering of the new internal roof was finished (too much dust and mess that they, not us, should clear up).

So guess who turned up at 8.50 am today? Boss man plus foreman, with the rest of the lads loitering at the bottom of the (400m) drive in another van. We sent them on their way with their tails between their legs, but very apologetic, and acknowledging and understanding their failures, and totally on the back foot and wanting to make things right and meet our requirements.

Nothing is happening this week now as Mr BW is away and I am not prepared to supervise workmen on my own - I am totally exhausted after last week and have had enough of that! Workmen in the North - even the young ones - are beyond sexist and they give me the creeps. Next week, when Mr BW is back, hopefully, it will all be finished off.

In other news... Clem Burke of Blondie fame has died at 70. Saddened, but I was always touched by your presence dear.

That sort of thing - plus the experience of my recent brush with premature impending death - just makes me more and more convinced that we made the right choice in retiring early. Almost everyone we know has chosen to retire before state pension age None of us know what the future holds. Why wait?

Sunday

At 7pm last night we got a message saying that the plasterer was "now unable to attend your job tomorrow" (no excuse given), but that the finishing crew for the structure would be with us on Monday as planned..

Given that Sunday had already been moved from Saturday, and was originally expected on Friday, we sighed deeply and retaliated, stating that, for reasons of cleanliness and aesthetics, we would not allow the finishing cleaning and trimming until the plastering was complete.

Anyone who has ever had plasterers in will understand this. We have had 4 previous experiences of plastering crews, and well understand the mess they make. Never again.

We have no intention of doing the end cleaning up ourselves, and plastering after the protective film is off new windows is deifnitely not a good idea.

We've stated a schedule that suits us, which no doubt will not suit them.

No problem, the money I withdrew from savings to pay them on the day they should have been finished (last Friday) (the remaining 50% was due on completion to our satisfaction) is now safely residing in the new tax year's ISAs and new fixed rate savings accounts. My head is spinning from 4 hours of advanced money management and unexpected account opening.

It is scary how quickly the best rate accounts are disappearing from sale. Thank you Orange One, attending the Lettuce Truss School of Economic Management was never a good idea.

Once the work is finally finished, trust me, they will be waiting exactly the number of days that we have waited after the agreed completion date (which was last Friday) for their payment.

Mr BW is away all next week, so has spent the day making use of 'gained' time and getting ahead of schedule on skirting boards, mending some internal stone wall, and making good some imperfections in the internal walls remaining from the original structure. And rectifying imperfections in the work done to date. Good job they left all their supplies here on Friday when they knocked off for the weekend.

One day something we pay other people to do will run to plan, and be completed on time.

I'm not sure which day, but I live in hope, because, without hope... well....

5 days

Monday morning:

Monday evening:

Friday evening:

Total cost: 20 hot cross buns, 300g of butter, 30 chocolate bar biscuits, 150g of coffee, 20 tea bags, 6 pints of milk and a kilo of sugar, and many sleepless hours trying to stay one step ahead of them and ensure everything was as it should be and that everything we needed to finish off was ordered. Unfortunately, because they were half a day behind on Monday evening because N'c'le won the cup for the first time in 70 years and then they had to have a celebration last weeked, it is not now finished as it should be, and we have the plasterer coming at 7am on Sunday morning and the delights of more workmen on Monday.

But... it's getting there. And it looks much better than it does in the pictures. Some of you have seen the original in real life, and so will appreciate the difference.

Tis the season

We have a few relief post people around here, trained up to cover our usual postie's occasional absences and days off. Actually, postmen, but one's not allowed to call them that these days is one?

There was one today who hadn't been for a while. "They gave me the code for the new gate!" he said, "But I can't see it?" "It's open" I pointed out, "Because of the workmen." "More workmen?" he entoned. "I'm sick of supervising workmen," I confided. But at least the gate is now adjusted to work in winds. Finally, nearly 7 weeks on. And, for the future, Mr BW has now extracted from them a link to the online installers' instruction manual.

And then we decided to leave the workmen to their insulation and tiling and we decamped an hour south to see a roof our chosen roofer is currently working on. The slates were fine (using new slates worried me, but good ones aren't shiny, we discovered), and we pushed him to give us a definite date for starting, weather dependent. "May" given last December had turned into "before the winter" by yesterday, to "June or early July, before I go on holiday abroad" today.

Beautiful countryside to drive through, narrow rural lanes, lots of hills, heather being burned off to regenerate it, warm and sunny, top down. A million mles away from workmen, expanding airports and increasing Orangeness and global disharmony.

Current Bunny Count: The Black Familar = 5, Mr BW = 8. In... is it 3 or is it 4 weeks? Something like that. They, of course, have made more in that time than have been relocated to Bunny Heaven by Bunny Chomp Chomps or Bunny Bang Bangs. I hate waste of any type: if only I knew someone who liked rabbit pie or wanted a rabbit fur coat. It's against my vegetarian principles, but it's rabbits or trees and veg, and the latter wins every time in my book.

While it's (finally) been glorious full sun and warm by day for the past 4 days, it's still close to zero at nights. And, everywhere is soooo dry and the reservoirs are all very low for the time of year. The climate seems to be changing nearly as fast as my levels of fitness.

Conservatory

Three young and keen workmen this morning, plus the "Installation Manager' who I swear introduced himself as the "Insulation Manager". Although, given the amount that has been used in the roof, he could well be the latter.

Five young and keen workmen this afternoon. I don't think we have seen any workmen work that hard ever. They just didn't stop, and neither of us saw them even looking at their phones, let alone wasting time on them. Unlike the two - older than us - workmen from the window company who failed to complete their task on Monday, so putting the job half a day behind. Not only were they a man short but they stopped for 20 minutes every time we made them a cuppa, and were constantly scrolling on their phones.

How we put up with two and a half years of workmen most days just a couple of years ago I don't know as we are absolutely exhausted.

It's amazing how quickly you age, and start to feel you are ageing, once you get past 60.

On something I half-heard on the radio the other day, they were discussing how some care homes only show old TV programmes, like Only Fools and Horses, The Good Life, and Bergerac. I've never liked the former, but do like the last two. Apart from the extreme sexism of the episode of the latter that we watched tonight. I'm surprised they showed that again these days, but it does demonstrate the difference in attitude that 40 years makes. Or maybe that should be 'acceptable to be broadcast attitude'; as, certainly in the North, every kind of non-PC -ism is still in widespread evidence.

I hope I never have to live in a care home, but I could quite happily watch just old TV programmes, as long as plenty of them were about gardening and exploring the geographical and geological treasures of the UK.

A warning

Dear Workmen of Numberland

IF you turn up one man down on Monday because of "The Toonies' Celebration" on Saturday, so putting out the whole construction schedule on our conservatory's 'top hat' (and so all our plans for the next 3 weeks, and maybe beyond), DO be aware that we WILL tell your boss when he turns up unannounced on Tuesday to see how the follow-on constructors are doing with completing the remains of your tasks, as well as their own. Very subtly, but we will tell that you weren't honest and didn't admit the issue, so preventing substitute labour being sent.

Similarly, if you piss off home at 4pm without making any attempt to remove all the old screws from the wall, or the old silicone, and without telling us that you have dislodged 5 stones in the old dwarf stone wall while (unnecessarily) shaking down the structure that you were removing, plus leaving 3 screws and umpteen pieces of plastic in the drive, we will tell. Not least because it took us 3 hours (each, so 6 hours in total) to sort out and clear up your mess last night.

Plus, just to say, if the householders have been kind enough to provide limitless teas, coffees, chocolate biscuits and hot cross buns to you, and lend you their ladders because you claimed to have left yours on the last job, do please remember to thank them before you leave.

Love and kisses

Blue Witch

Today's three (young blokes, polite, explanatory, and appropriately deferential, with a tidy van - always judge workmen on the tidiness of their vans) were much better. The UPVC 'frame' is now up, and the roof aluminium supports.

In other news, Gate Bloke is finally to reappear to do the resets on Friday. Apparently.

And Old-Part-Of-The-Roof-Re-Roof Bloke (the very final task, not urgent) has tonight now unilaterally moved himself from "May" to "Before the winter". Grrrrrrr.

In other other news, it's finally been a glorious warm and sunny day, and maybe summer is finally coming. It's been a veeeery long winter.

The current score

Fruit and native specimen trees, minus 10.

Mr BW, minus 7, plus a few hundred quid and some slugs.

The Black Feline Familiar, minus 5.

Easter Bunnies, minus 12.

Tomorrow work starts on a 'Top Hat' for the Conservatory. Replacing all the (mostly) blown double glazed units with new windows and a solid insulated roof.

It is supposed to take 5 days, but undoubtedly won't. It has already started to go wrong as (it is claimed by the window company) the roof company ordered the incorrect Veluxes. As premonitioned by me. After a mini-tantrum on our part, they seem to have found a way around. My judgement is suspended, but teetering. Let's not mention that the roof company measuring man made all the dimensions 3" less than the - separately measured - window measuring man, but we did notice and did point this out, in writing.

Over 6 weeks on, we are still fighting Electric Gate Man to get him back to adjust the sensitivity of the new front gate, because it won't open when it is windy. Which is, of course, most days up here on our windy ridge. Mr BW originally wrote them a good review, which they needed as a start-up company, but that is likely to be revoked.

It's been a hard time, with a month of facing impending mortality, and wondering whether all our efforts for a happy retirement have been in vain. A '2 week NHS pathway'... which anyone who has been on one will understand... and then totally inconclusive results, and total indifference and reticence to review regularly, as per official guidelines, from medics. One thing that never occurred to us was that, even if we could afford private medical care if push ever came to shove, there might not be that choice in the NE.

How have things been for you?

Because Joho says he's bored with beaches...

We've been chasing (far too many times) for the registration number for Mr BW's new car, as the new insurance can't be sorted until we have a registration number, and the cost of the new policy is rising by the day as 1st March - the date of inception - gets ever closer.

At first we were told it couldn't be allocated until the car (a 'special build' as we required a towbar and a heated front screen) was in the country. The website says it has now 'landed', but today there was some rubbish about the salesman's admin person having to go home at 3pm and not being in again until Monday. Having been admonished by Mr BW, the salesman then rang me and said he'd, "Noted your husband's expressed displeasure, so I've called in a favour and a colleague's admin assistant is now doing it instead and you should expect the list of numbers to choose from by email in the next 10 minutes." I'm left wondering how many tens of thousands of pounds one has to spend before one gets decent service these days, without hassle or having to be assertive. I already know what we will be putting on the inevitable feedback form on him that we will receive...

I'd insisted on seeing the choices for plates as I am very particular about such things. They don't like giving you any choice at all these days, but, they were eventually persuaded.

In the eventuality, all the choices (ie all their allocated numbers from DVLA) were horrible, but some of them were hilarious. I'm surprised that a couple of them were even considered suitable for issue.

The choices were:

BW25 FFS
BW25 FEK
BW25 FEM
BW25 FFO

We decided that any of these choices would only be funny for the first ten minutes, and eventually went for a choice that was the abbreviated name of an ultra-high-tech product manufactured by the company with whom Mr BW spent his working life. As Mr BW said, ultimately, it was the sales of that product that had paid for the car.

It's hard to believe that it is now almost 10 years since Mr BW retired. Or, as he said at the time, as it was 17 years before his official government pension age, he took his 'gap year'. Which has turned into a 'gap decade'.

Our new entrance gate was initially installed 2 weeks ago today, but their electrician, originally due at the beginning of last week, turned out not to be available until today. And then, the job could still not be finished, as a crucial component was 'not in its box', so tonight the gate is still secured shut by a loop of old-fashioned sisal baler twine off a large spool that I purchased at the local auction a couple of weeks ago.

They might be back tomorrow afternoon, depending on how quickly some cement they are laying elsewhere sets, as they want paying and we made clear we wouldn't be paying until the job was actually completely completed and working to our satisfaction.

FFS. We clearly should have picked that registration. You just can't get the staff.

When you've had enough of gateposts and gates, there's always the beach...

Too obvious

From time to time I realise that something I have been doing for years and years is not the best way.

Yesterday I had such an epiphany.

We spent 3 years with a seemingly endless stream of tradesmen who needed regular watering (for which read tea-ing and coffee-ing). I sourced 24 cheap white mugs, and, it being Peak Covid, when they had finished a cup they had to put it in a washing up bowl of bleachy water, and, at the end of the day, we put them through the dishwasher.

We had a list of names and requirements blutached up in the kitchen: beverage of choice, milk or not, sugar or not. We had plastic "Builders' Trays" (which also went throiugh the dishwasher at the end of every day) and these were lined with a sheet of kitchen roll (if there were a lot of them) or a post-it if there were only 2 or 3. On this paper we wrote the codes for which cup was which, by the base of the cup. For example, C1, C2, T3, T5 (yes, really) etc.

Yesterday, when the two were here digging out the old stone gatepost and then putting in the new, quarried to order, one, my lightbulb moment came when I realised that all I actually needed to do was to write each cup's contents on the cup handle, where it joins the main body of the mug, with a black sharpie. The pen ink washes off easily in the dishwasher, and no bits of paper blow around.

Doh.

Anyone else have these sudden realisations?

Renovation Update

It is now 15 weeks and 6 days since we finally sold Coven (aka Millstone) Sud.

If my observations and calculations are correct, I don't believe that any other houses have sold (purchases completed) in that Parish since then, and several others that were sold have now fallen through and are back on the market. There are now more than ten times the number of properties for sale in that Parish than there were pre-2020 (and twenty times more than at most times within our nearly 30 year memory).

Many of the new builds that have led to many long-term residents wishing to exodus the area have had significant price reductions (think, over a million pounds originally, down by several hundred thousand: which is farcical when the mere reductions involved would buy several average houses in our now-local villages), yet still remain unsold. There are also more new builds built but not yet displayed online for sale, and yet more green fields with planning permission that have not yet been built on. I'm very happy to see greedy developers getting burnt, but less happy to see people, in the 'unable-to-sell' position we were in for over 2 years, still desperately trying to sell. Not all of them are able to take the financial hit that we did in order to make a sale.

Every day we thank our lucky stars that the right people came along when they did.

During the 4 months that have elapsed, we have put plans in place to complete all of our desired and/or necessary projects here:

Summerhouse/Museum (completed before FOTCR™)

Replace old stone drive gatepost (today - the insurers of the delivery van that hit and demolished it nearly a year ago finally coughed up after a lot of 'persuasion')

Replace rusting decrepit 50+ year old metal driveway gate with a rabbit and hare-proof electric auto-opening variant, designed by us but manufactured in Cumbria due to it being, at 4.9m, a bit big for construction within Mr BW's facilites (tomorrow and/or Friday)

Replace 19 year old conservatory windows (most double glazed panels now blown) and glass roof with new windows and a warm roof with Velux windows, hopefully making it more usable year-round (contractually, signed today, for completion before Easter)

Replace the remaining old slate roof of the house, with its rotting soffits and damaged guttering and downpipes, and ridges and water tables with departing/departed pointing, disintegrating felt-covered dormer window tops, and a rotting Velux window, with a complete new roof (which was considerably cheaper than doing all the jobs separately) (May)

Replace both BW Brooms (11 and 12 years old respectively: mine already, sadly and unexpectedly; Mr BW's on 1st March)

Source a ride-on mower capable of cutting paths/the grass in the orchard/meadow (delivery in the next few weeks; hurrah, no more exhausting having to push a mower not fit for purpose, so living on borrowed time, around)

Buy lots more engineer's toys for Mr BW's workshop (I have no idea if this project is/will ever be completed - more items arrive by the day)

Buy a... something I have always wanted... the 'flying delivery' will be very interesting... (arriving within the next month, apparently, once its restoration is complete, although ascertaining exactly when is more trying than herding cats)

As Old Friends BW remarked recently, "You never let the grass grow under your feet, do you?"

All those projects also nicely reduce the 'interest on savings' that the tax man will get too.

It is scary, after so many years of frugality, spending that much in the space of a few months. As I've said to several people, "We did our time - our years in the South - to be able to afford our retirement in the North."

But, all this is our future proofing. Doing all the necessary jobs to see us out, while we are still easily able to research and supervise them, and (hopefully) have time to enjoy them, is important.

Powerful again

The power eventually came back on yesterday evening after nearly 56 hours.

Scoakat asked how much fuel we are allowed to store: and therein lies the problem.

You are only allowed to source/transport 20 litres of petrol at a time, and you can only legally store 30 litres.

A generator uses about a litre an hour, so (if we had only the allowed 30 litres) we need to go out every day for fuel. This is a 26 mile round trip which takes at least 2 hours in bad weather - even if it is safe to go out, which it often isn't when the power goes off due to extreme weather (usually wind or snow).

While you can apply for a special licence to store more than 30 litres of petrol, you need a specialist tank (cost - thousands of pounds), and I don't think we'd be granted it. Plus, you really wouldn't want to keep more than 30 litres as petrol goes 'stale' in a couple of months.

We are slightly better placed now in that we have Zebra (who runs on petrol) rather than 2 diesel cars, so we can keep more 'in stock' (although illegally) and rotate it through Zebra every few weeks, rather than needing to go to the fuel station every single day.

The electricity distribution company always leave 'Isolateds' (as they call us) until last for reconnection after extreme weather as they have strict metrics for getting certain %s of people back on supply withint certain time frames, and getting our dispersed rural dwellings back on supply quickly doesn't bump up the numbers enough, so we always have to wait until the end. But, they refuse to give any consideration to bringing round a fuel truck to supply us with petrol - the isolated farms are OK as they have huge tanks of red diesel (for agricultural purposes) and huge diesel generators, but the isolated houses are left to their own devices.

They are happy to pay for us to go to a hotel, and will provide vouchers for hot food, but that is no good when you have animals to care for, live 13 miles from the nearest place that serves food all day, and need to keep your generator topped up with fuel to keep your hen protective electric fence, freezers and heating controls going.

A lady who lives a mile or so away with her husband in a rented house (so they don't have a generator or a generator port - and rely on a solid fuel fire for heating and a very old Rayburn for cooking) in her late 70s/early 80s with severe MS was told by a call centre operative yesterday, after ringing to say they were very cold after 50 hours off supply, "Have you thought about wearing a hat or getting some extra blankets?"

On one of my early calls to them, I was told that I should have candles and a torch with batteries to hand at all times, and that many tinned foods, such as baked beans, could be eaten straight from the can with no need to heat them. All I said was, "You live in a town, and probably with your mum and dad, don't you?"

The sheer ignorance of the call centre staff makes me very angry, and despite all we were promised after Storm Arwen, this weekend's repeat storm situation stress-tested their plans and found them severely lacking, on exactly the same points as previously. And it's not that they weren't told.

Now, can you imagine how we'd cope if we had electric heating, electric cooking, and an electric car? And people wonder why we chose oil and petrol rather than electric...

And there are thousands and thousands of people like us in a similar situation, and most of them also have very little insulation in their old stone houses, so they are hard to keep warm even when there is electricity. It's not easy to retrofit wall or floor insulation into any house that is any more than perhaps 100 years old, and many people who live in this sort of house in a rural area (particularly in the North) do not own their own homes, and have landlords (often the 'landed gentry') who are not interested in upgrading their (often inherited rather than deliberately bought to rent out) property stock. I don't know what the answer is, but it isn't to keep giving grants for energy efficiency to those savvy enough to apply for them, because those who need the measures most are those least able to access them.

Powerless: Day 2

31 hours on and the estimated supply restoration time is now 11pm tomorrow night. I had to phone to ascertain this as we have received no info since yesterday.

The repair job is still 'unallocated'.

"We can put you up in a hotel or send you a voucher for some hot food!" said the woman on the phone. Not helpful.

As Nice Nearest Neighbour said, this is just like a repeat of Storm Arwen and its aftermath, and they clearly haven't learnt a thing about what people in isolated areas need.

Interestingly, the 'line down' problem appears to be in or near the same inaccessible location as it was after Storm Arwen. How about the distribution company invest some money and put those clearly 'highly vulnerable to extreme weather' cables underground? The fibre broadband company managed to put all the fibre cables for the whole area underground in about 3 weeks...

And our energy supplier's usage page is now telling us that there is a problem with our smart meter. Erm no, the problem is that there is no electricity to flow through the smart meter, not that the meter has a problem...

Weather Report: Storm Éowyn

Commentator Caroline kindly asked, in the comments box below (which has now autoclosed as it's been a while): I was just wondering how you're surviving the latest storm. How bad has it been?

The wind speed began to build at around 2am yesterday, and got to 70+mph by 6am. It was then 60+mph for most of the day, with frequent stronger gusts. It was only when we went outside that we appreciated the true velocity. I'm glad I'm not an 8 stone stick insect because I'd have blown away!

The power went off at 10.45am yesterday, and the electricity distributor haven't even got anyone to where the high voltage line is down yet (despite erroneously sending several text messages during the day saying that it was back on). The latest news is that they 'hope' to have 'assessed' the situation by late afternoon today. 73 households are off, which is a huge area up here - tens of square miles, and no-one seems to know where the line is down.

The generator port was our best ever investment, as it allows the central heating and Aga controls and lights, TV and other low power appliances to run, albeit not at the same time. It doesn't allow us to run anything that is power hungry (eg vacuum cleaner, dishwasher, washing machine, greenhouse heater).

This is our 5th power cut since 31st December. One 5 hours, two just a few minutes, one nearly 13 hours, and this ongoing situation, currently heading for 22 hours, with no end in sight. We were 11 days without power after Storm Arwen...

Thankfully there is no significant damage that we have noticed yet - but the house has been here since the late 1600s, so has seen it all before, and we have designed everything we've done to be as robust as possible - and we are very careful not to leave anything around that high winds could pick up.

The wind was supposed to drop around midnight, but it is still fairly blowy now.

How has it been where you are?

The Cold

We still have iced snow here, with - 9°C expected tonight, and even colder temperatures tomorrow. Several hundred feet below us, down in the valley, the snow is almost gone.

Having - until recently - lived in a very flat county for nearly 30 years, I still find this demonstration of 'O' Level Geography learning interesting. And yes, I have previously skied and walked in mountainous areas and seen this phenomenon there, but it's somehow different when it is 'at home'.

I realised while watching the weather forecast on TV this morning that I am no longer looking first at East Anglia, then at the northernmost county where we now reside.

I think it took me about 8 years to stop looking at the south west first, when I left there for the east in 1991. However, I do still look at 'other places I have lived' after digesting the meteorological joys in store in the NE.

Do other people who have lived in different areas of the UK do this too?

In other news, I think/hope/believe that I now have my young friend trained up in essay writing, and enjoying her writing process. How someone can get to Master's Level these days and not know how to write a structured and coherent course paper, when they have already been studying English at an advanced level for five and a half years, scares me.

She tells me that she has asked one of her lecturers for guidance on another piece of work, but has been told that, "I don't respond to emails because it is bad for my mental health!" and that she must see him in person. He doesn't have a regular 'office time' and is not prepared to be tied down to appointments, so expects students just to catch him when he happens to be in the Department. Given that she is - for financial reasons - living at home, some 45 miles away from the Department, and that the return train fare is nearly £50, this seems very unreasonable to me. She has asked him for a brief telephone conversation or a video call, but he says he only sees students in person. Complaining could be very counter-productive I fear. This is what you get for your £12,000 a year course fee these days.

Still snowy

There's still snow here, frozen solid, and not about to thaw anytime soon according to the weather forecast, despite beautiful sunshine and crisp blue skies all day.

At this time of year we usually have pretty sunrises sometime around 8am, even if it goes on to be grey all day:


And often nice sunsets around 4-something-pm, and getting later every day. It was still light at almost 5pm this evening.

I have spent the day sorting out the sewing room, shredding old papers (39.5 bankers' boxes to go, then we can have the summerhouse 'top' redone) and cleaning (with white vinegar and bicarbonate of soda - works a treat), polishing, cataloguing and preparing my old £1 coins and pictorial 50p pieces for display:

Note one silver coin and one fake (hmmm, and maybe 2, looking at that image now). Neither noticeable before cleaning.

I eventually decided to make the coins into coasters (for use in the new museum/summerhouse), and ordered what I thought were appropriate acrylic coaster 'blanks'. The 50ps fitted OK (kept in their places by washers from Mr BW's magic washer and O-ring box - we'll be taking a coaster apart next time something for repair needs one that size):

But the £1 coins didn't fit (they were slightly too fat - I understand their pain). Some Magic Tape may come to the rescue tomorrow, in better light.

Having referred to Wikipedia and DG's excellent guide to £1 coins I worked out that I am only missing old £1 pieces from 3 years (1988, 1992, and 2011, just in case anyone has any spares).

I had done this exercise some time ago, but the written evidence has seemingly disappeared. Odds-on I'll find it inside of a week.

Winter Wonderland

Mr BW has been out in the snow taking pictures.

And then taking down the FOTCR™ decorations. All reused every year and now probably carbon neutral after so many years.

I have been trying to tell my young friend gently that writing in To The Lighthouse Stylee is perhaps not the best way to approach her work. I always hated Virginia Woolf, and I still can't decide whether it's my issue or hers.

It being Sunday afternoon we are, as ever, listening to Johnnie Walker (but now Ghost Edition), which today is the Juke Box Edition from early 2021. Sad, and doubly sad because R4's Dead People's Programme couldn't even be bothered to broadcast his obituary in a timely fashion last Friday.

Does anyone know how we can easily make a track recorded from the TV/digital radio onto hard drive recorder (so in video format) into an audio-only track? Mr BW has been copying from the recorder onto DVDs, so he can then play as a DVD via his (old) laptop (that has a DVD recorder built in) and external speakers, but it is very time consuming (transfer only happens in real time). If we could get it from the DVD format it was recorded in, into MP3 (or audio-only) format, we would have a lot more options for playing it more easily. All suggestions welcome.

The snow on the Velux windows in The Atrium is melting in a most peculiar way. We are hoping that it will clean them as it slides off:

It does show that the extra cost of triple glazing is worthwhile though.

Our snow is lingering as it is drizzling, but it is so cold that the drizzle is freezing before it hits the ground. We have the generator fuelled and ready to go again, just in case.

It amuses me that we had a hand-delivered notification from the area power distributor that they will be turning off the supply all day next Thursday (when the maximum forecast is for zero degrees) so that they can replace equipment to ensure 'future resilience'. FFS, the time to do that is in the summer, surely? Years of neglect but unwarranted ongoing fat bonuses for directors and dividends for shareholders...

I am 22 today!

Nearly forgot. Happy BlogDay to me.

I am currently attempting to proofread a young friend's first course paper for her English MA. I can't decide whether I am just too old, too cynical, and too far removed from academic study to understand it or whether it is a complete load of bollocks. I asked for a copy of the official style guide and that didn't help. Either way, I have a dilemma.

The snow is set to fall again. The generator is ready to go again.

At least in the North they make an attempt to grit the roads - I got pebbledashed 3 times during a half hour journey home from a craft group meeting this afternoon. Mind you, there is a one mile stretch of pure sheet ice along the lane outside where it hasn't yet been gritted. That'll be fun tomorrow.

It hasn't been above freezing by day or night for a couple of days now (and this is set to continue for the next week) but by Wednesday it is forecast to be minus 2°C by day and minus 8°C by night, plus windchill from a northerly wind. Anyone got a pattern for knitted bootees for hens?

End of year, end of era

Saddened by the news that Johnnie Walker died earlier (at 79), a year to the day since his last live Sounds of the Seventies on Radio 2, and 9 weeks and 2 days after his last radio broadcast.

What a legend.

The torrential rain and strong winds (40-50mph) have been relentless here today, but the wind seems to be set to drop around midnight, and then temperatures plummet to 5°C maximum by day and below zero at night for the foreseeable (ie the next 14 days according to the weather forecast), with sleet and snow, but also sunshire forecast.

I'm not a great one for reviews of the year.

Our 2024 summed up in 3 words would be: selling, sorting, completing. What would yours be?

We haven't been on holiday for nearly 5 years now, and have only spent 5 nights away from home this year (which is 5 days more than in 2023). But, we now live in our English Happy Place, so every day is a holiday, in the middle of nowhere, in an area of outstanding natural beauty, and as it was always late October/early November when we visited, we are used to leafless trees, short days, and inclement weather (although we were only saying this morning that there were never such strong winds and such torrential rain then).

And, oops, just as I was about to hit publish at around 6pm, the power went off.

We'd been expecting it all day, with this weather.

We are now running on generator power.

I rang the electricity distributor, just to check they knew about our outage, and was delighted to experience their new customer focus, tell the customer everything we know, mode. It was almost worth all the hours I have spent on the phone to them telling them that they weren't doing enough, in previous years' power cuts.

There are currently 245 customers off (which is an area of probably 20 square miles), with 500 already restored, and our circuit is only off so the linesmen can work on the downed lines about 5 miles away, as-the-crow-flies. So, hopefully, with no actual local damage (yet...), we will be back on inside of 11 days, as was the case last time there was an extended issue.

The nice man on the phone even apologised for 'spoiling your evening'. I didn't tell him we were only doing the usual, and didn't have a wild party planned.

Happy New Year to you all, and thank you for reading and commenting throughout the year; here's to the next one. Perhaps with more pictures.

Top that

We were finally having a nice lazy morning, watching telly in bed, having had a nice decadent breakfast of oat and banana pancakes with creme fraiche and my jealously-guarded-until-now this year's one jar of home-made strawberry jam (made with slugged and/or bird-pecked strawberries - waste not want not) when the roofers that the car salesman (who is currently part-way through a house renovation over on the coast), had highly recommended, rang to say they'd be with us in 45 minutes.

They wanted to come out before the FOTCR™ but we put them off as I was out on that day as sussing out workmen is a Two Witch Job. They promised to come out before New Year, and we hadn't had to chase them, so they were already in our good books before they arrived.

After an hour of looking, listening, discussing and measuring, they assured us that it would be cheaper and more sensible to actually replace the whole of the roof to the double storey bit that was not touched during the renovations/extension work, rather than to do the repairs and replacements that were actually warranted in the short-term. While the roof is currently sound (for which read, not leaking; there are many broken or cracked slates and almost all of the pointing along the ridge and water tables needs reinstating), it is unlikely to see us out, and there are already areas of concern, particularly the felted flat roofs over the dormer windows, and the soffits and gutters that Bodgit and Coverit (the last owners) had had done - when UPVC plastic was simply stuck over rotten timber, meaning it now sticks out too far in relation to the roof slates, which causes water to run down the stone walls in torrential rain.

We had vaguely already thought about replacing the whole roof, and deemed it sensible but likely prohibitively expensive. We have got quite good at pricing building work, and had decided that repairs etc would be x, and a new roof at least 3x.

No tradesman in the NE gives quotes within at least a week, and often a month, of being asked, and rarely without being chased. I think they all have a Tradesmen's Agreement about that, and we get sick of chasing them.

We already knew that the roofers' order book was full until at least the end of March, so we were expecting their quote sometime just before then, after at least 3 chases from us.

Imagine our surprise when we received their quote late afternoon, and it was less than 2x for everything we'd discussed. Which will totally future proof the house, and mean we are replacing the roof in our early 60s rather than as an emergency when it leaks in 10 or 20 years time (when Mr BW likely won't be able to get on the roof to effect temporary repairs).

Replacing early 1970s bitumen felt with modern membrane will also make the house more wind resistant, so better insulated and warmer. Currently the tiny loft hatches in every upstairs room tend to lift a bit in extreme weather as the wind gets under the slates - and storms seem to be getting more frequent.

So, at some point this spring/early summer we will be entertaining more building work. AGGGHHHHHH!!!

Now, who can tell me why people give 'older' people calendars as festive gifts? We seem to have acquired three this year. Do they suppose you need to keep more check on time post 60?

I wouldn't mind, but I always buy the same pig calendar every year, as soon as it is published in September, so they are utterly redundant. As two of the giftees visit quite regularly, we shall have to put them up somewhere visible. Call me ungrateful but don't give me calendars, give me wine!

One question - does anyone have any experience of rubberised flat roofs? Down south we replaced a felt flat roof with a fibreglass roof/balcony, but rubber options weren't available then.

Finally

The objets are organised.

The pigs are in place. I didn't count them, but nearly a thousand I'd guess.

The MuseumHouse is full - well, at least until I find some more objets (easy round here with regular auctions in at least 3 places, the like of which I last saw down south 25 years ago or more), when I will find space.

Mr BW has done a sterling job of keeping me regulalry supplied with food, drinks and meals, and putting up hooks where required.

But, who in their right mind would spend more than 4 days in temperatures of a maximum of 12°C in an outbuilding 15 metres from their house when it was a cosy 19° inside their house? Yeah, I know, I know.

While curating my collections, I've been listening to 2 audiobooks. Books that I would never have read on paper, but which were fascinating as audiobooks: Douglas Coupland's 'Generation A' (15 years old now, but the only thing he got wrong was smartphones - which he foresaw as PDAs, and I'm more and more convinced that the end of b33s is nigh, as in the book), and Christopher Fowler's Bryant and May's 'Peculiar London'. Very different to the other B&M mysteries, which I have enjoyed, and I'd call it fascinating rather than peculiar, but interesting nonetheless.

We haven't had any fog here at all - although it seems that it is going to be wet, windy, and minus 8 by Thursday. But, it's been at least 2 degrees warmer up here than in the south for at least the past week.

How have you spent the last week?

Another unboxing day

One more day unwrapping and arranging my objets should get it finished.

I decided today that I should have been a museum curator.

Acrylic mini-shelving was a great discovery, and a great investment.

Now, if I could just think of a good way to display all my pictorial 50 pence pieces.
And work out where my collection of old £1 coins is hiding.

RestDay

I said I'd post something every day in December, and I'm nearly there, so I'm not giving up, but, havng done nothing useful today (give or take sorting a few end-of-month financial things, putting one load of washing in the machine, and winding one bobbin of previously-spun yarn onto a niddy noddy, tying it in a few places, and putting it in water with conditioner to soak overnight).

I'd dearly love to know why Google keeps reverting to google.com, even though it has noted my location (as it tells me at the bottom of the page). I can no longer get it to return 100 results at a time on a search either. Is this because it is punishing me because I don't have a Google account to sign in with?

If so, it will have to join Twatter/X, Pinterest, Farcebook and Instagram in no longer being part of my life as none of them now allow people to look but not join. Their loss.

Unboxing Day

Yet more unwrapping and re-staging of objets was planned for today after a very happily lazy day yesterday when we did not even bother to get dressed.

But some people had other ideas for our day.

If you were a normal person, you wouldn't drop in on people you hadn't seen for 8 or 9 years (when you all lived down south), unnannounced, yet alone late morning on Boxing Day, would you?

And bring with you an uncommunicative 20-something year old with a surgically implanted smartphone and headphones that your unwitting hosts had last seen when she was a baby, would you?

No-one normal would make a 100 mile round trip on the off-chance that their once-just-slightly-more-than-acquaintances would be in, would they?

Mr BW's facial recogniton software (he sees people for one second and can identify them in any situation for the rest of all time - what the police call a 'super recogniser' I think) malfunctioned for the first time in over 32 years. Also abnormal.

Two hours later they departed, leaving my plans for the day in tatters, and our FOTCR™ snacks in crumbs.

Now, I love welcoming people who have let me know they are coming (even if only half an hour before) but even Nice Nearest Neighbour knows better than to call unannounced.

Grrrr.

"It's Christmas Day in the morning"...

...as Mr BW always sings, once the reused for umpteen years Advent Calendar is empty of chocolates.

Many fewer times than normal this year, as he has been on Indoor Duty while I have been unwrapping and arranging objets onto the summerhouse shelves and bookcases he has painstakingly constucted to my exact(ing) requirements.

I'm bored with unwrapping presents now.

Actually, many of them I have actually unwrapped before, as many of them were FOTCR™ or WitchDay presents in the past. We don't really 'do' presents, we just store up things we find all year and give them to each other on the recommended/appropriate dates. And waste paper wrapping them up.

The International Space Station has been passing overhead on most mornings for the past week. Unfortunately we have only seen it once due to low-hanging cloud, but it promises to re-arrive tomorrow: Wed Dec 25 6:06 AM, Visible: 3 min, Max Height: 46°, Appears: 45° above SSW, Disappears: 10° above ESE.

Joyeaux Noel to you all.

32 on 23

I've had a lovely day rediscovering, and working out how to resdisplay, all my objets as I unpacked them from boxes packed in December 2020 newspaper into their new home in Museum Summerhouse.

Mr BW supplied full boxes at a suitable rate, together with regular refreshments, and took away the empties.

It was after dark when I finally gave up as there is no electricity supply to out there yet, and I didn't have a headtorch, but that should be rectified in early January. The electricity, not the headtorch, as that is simply a question of ensuring light is on head before darkness falls.

An errant Evri delivery man had a shock when he detoured from his track back to the entrance gate as darkness fell to nose into Museum Summerhouse, only to find a person in the summerhouse waving very very slowly, from side to side, at him. I hope he thought I was a ghost. He certainly looked as if he'd seen one. It will be interesting to see what transpires next time he delivers.

Tonight we celebrate 32 years since we first met. Which, Mr BW reminds me, was at 9pm. These days I've usually been asleep for an hour and a half by then. How times change.

All presents are now wrapped, all festive chocolates deposited on appropriate windowsills, and a temporary fix on the Aga made: put the oil flow on manual and sod the expense. Hopefully the required spare part should arrive tomorrow, provided that Special Delivery by 1pm works as it should. I bribed the postie with some home-made FOTCR™ goodies today (for which he seemed genuinely touched), so hopefully it will.

Is there really still another day before the FOTCR™? I am tired of receiving daily emails from every company from whom I have ever bought something: wishing me well, with an underlying message of 'buy more of my stuff'. No, just no.

How's the excitement level in your house?

My hot rod has failed

The Aga is not working properly. FOTCR™ dinner could be consigned to either Mi1dred's tea stove, or Bri@n's propane stove.

Or both, which would give us 3 burners but no oven.

Maybe we could cook inside a tin in the wood burner?

Or in the incinerating bin outside?

What fun! Not.

I should have realised when the kettle took 10 minutes to boil this morning, but I was doing other things at the same time and was just irritated rather than inquisitive.

Luckily, when the Sunday dinner wasn't cooking as expected, Mr BW remembered what one of Mi1dred's sisters' daddies (who used to be an Aga service man) told him when we had a similar problem at Coven Sud, years ago.

Now, can we get a spare part in the next 2 days? Not in these parts I fear.

But, really, a vital part on a premium priced appliance going wrong in less than four and a half years? They don't make 'em like they used to...

What a brilliant finish to Series 90 of Countdown though. Give or take Christopher Biggins' extremely sexist comments in the second semi final. I still can't believe that Channel 4 thought it was acceptable to broadcast them. Anyone else see that and wonder?

In the Blowy Midwinter

Happy Winter Solstice to you all. It all gets lighter again from now on.

It's been blowing yet another hoolie here since late yesterday (40 - 50mph winds), and it is all set to continue until tomorrow evening. Such stormy weather is now so much the norm that we never leave anything around outside that might blow about, and the henhouse has two huge lumps of stone on top so it doesn't blow over.

The sunny day forecast all last week for the 25th has now morphed into a cloudy day, albeit an 11°C one by day with 8°C by night.

It feels like FOTCR™ Eve, but the calendar tells me there are still 3 whole days before then. We're all stocked up, with the final grocery delivery arriving shortly after 8.30am. I do hope it's not the growers who are bearing the cost of all the cheap veg being sold by the supermarkets, but I fear it might be.

Today I have been making non-sausage rolls (2 sorts), nut roast, and adding heading tape to voiles for the summerhouse (got to stop those nosey delivery men looking in at my objets). Mr BW has been painting shelves, putting up lights, Briwaxing anything old and wooden, and doing mysterious things in the workshop that I have yet to fathom.

Seasonal

We took Nice Nearest Neighbour to see the UK's tallest living FOTCR™ tree today.

We had a flask of tea and cranberry and cheese puff pastry pinwheels in the car park to save getting a load of germs in the cafe which would disenable the festive season.

We are therefore now officially old.

Resurrection

No, it's OK, I haven't muddled up my Christian festivals.

But.

IT is BACK.

IT has been banned from the house for years - since Mr BW carved it in fact. At one point I threatened to put IT in the wood burner.

If you are a long-term reader, you might recall the nightmare horrors of ITs inception.

But now, I have thought of a good use for IT.

I have been talked into teaching a small group of ladies who like knitting but have never been able to master crochet, to crochet, in January.

In my time I have taught quite a few people to crochet, but only on a one-to-one or one-to-two basis. The main thing that beginners struggle with is corerct tensioning, largely because they cannot master how to hold the yarn, and even if they have grasped it one week, by the next they have often forgotten again. If I'm not constantly having to re-demonstrate correct threading, I can be helping individuals gradually learn the stitches (which are actually just loops or various descriptions).

And this is where The Thing comes in. IT can be a 3D model of 'correct' yarn threading. The yarn will also keep IT under control, and if IT starts misbehaving, IT can be tied down to a table.

Mr BW has been playing with his new/replacement toys and made The Thing a metal stand.

Drills, lathes, welders, angle grinders, you name it, he's enjoyed playing with it today. Think of all the tools James May has in The Dull Men's Club and that's Mr BW's workshop, albeit in an eighth of the space.

He's also stuck a hole up IT's wrist so that IT can't creep across the floor when I'm not looking.

But we still haven't got any cards or decs up.

And no, I shan't be asking IT to give us a hand.

Report back

I got a BW Blue train for my WitchDay. As you can see, it was very speedy.

I have no idea what all the different colour trains are these days, but we also saw a silver one with red doors, and one that looked like it was painted in the old-stye British Rail blue/off-white colourway. I think I need an I-Spy Guide to Modern Train Liveries.

We were up at our favourite beach near Berwick for low tide at 9.30am yesterday (which meant we got to see a spectacular sunrise as we crossed lots of moorland on the way up) and had an enjoyable couple of hours amongst the rocks collecting pebbles and shells, lunch on the (almost deserted, save the occasional dog walker) beach, then went to Bamburgh Castle - first time we have ever been, but we've just treated ourselves to a year of Historic Houses membership (basically, most/many of the private houses not in NT or EH). £18.75 per person, plus £5 parking has always seemed too much for a couple of hours' visit there, but free is OK! Will only need to go to 3 sites and it will have paid for itself. The castle was all blinged up for the FOTCR™ so we will have to go back in normal times.

It was meant to drizzle all day but didn't, although sunset was almost the only time we saw the sun. But, as is so often the case on the coast, the ever-changing quality of the light was amazing.

Tomorrow is Decorating Day at The Coven. It is not allowed to happen before my WitchDay and will be minimalist.

Are you decorating/decorated? I know someone who has 5 decorated indoor trees!

"Drizzle and a moderate breeze"

Will not dampen our spirits as we spend my WitchDay at our favourite beach, and then visit a coastal castle, picking up a sack of locally grown spuds along the way.

62 from 62.

Time flies

How does visiting the optician (5th time lucky with getting some new contact lenses I can actually see with), a short visit to Nearest Neighbour to deliver a dozen eggs, and a Zoom call with the Old Friends BW take all day?

I just about had time in between these three things to check the banks, measure up for new summerhouse curtains (the old ones annoyingly being 8" too short), send 3 emails, and make a batch of yoghurt.

Grey and very windy again today, albeit 10 degrees warmer than of late.

Sunday: FOTCR™ -10

Today passed by.

I made 2 batches of clementine marmalade and one of lemon curd for gifting to, as Peter and Jane would say, 'People who Help Us'. Or, having looked for a link, maybe it wasn't Peter and Jane who said that after all.

Mr BW finished assembling the bookshelves and CD shelf for using in creative ways in The Summerhouse (aka houser of many collections of objets).

We listened to an old episode of JW while Bob Harris's 'takeover show' was on, and then, being very tired, ate our Sunday Dinner (almost all home-grown) and went to sleep early.

One day I will catch up with myself...

14th

I said I'd attempt to post every day in December.

Today's post isn't what I had thought about as I was out all day and had an unexpectedly traumatic time, playing doctor while all those about me were gawping in horror without the faintest idea what to do, and I'm now exhausted and about to fall asleep to process it all.

Why do most people not have even basic first aid skills?

Or perhaps they do and real life medical emergencies make them forget everything they ever learnt?

Signs of December

The Yarg has arrived.

It had been dumped on the doorstep when we got back from Edinburgh with a full car of flat-pack bookcases and wood for shelves, despite there being a fluorescent hand-written notice on the front door saying 'Please leave parcels in shed'. Good job it hadn't rained.

For any other cheese lovers, we noticed the other day that Aldi have a brilliant selection of festive offerings at very reasonable prices.

Wild Garlic Yarg is definitely my favourite cheese. What's yours?

So much to do, so little time...

One of those lovely dates today, and also the date that dave, once of this Parish (albeit about 10 years ago now), and well known to very long term readers, turns LX today.

Now living about 30 miles from us, or us from them, D&D have helped us put up several sheds since we moved up and are always happy to visit to polish off an Eton Mess or meet up to reciprocally pat Mi1dred and Sparky. Happy Birthday dave; Darren tells me you are having an 'Indian Banquet' tonight, and while I still think that is some kind of euphemism, I hope that you enjoy it. Thanks for the fun and friendship over many, many years.

It has been grey and misty all day today and chilly - only around 4 degrees. We have spent the day cleaning the summerhouse (construction blokes' idea of cleaning being different to 'my' idea of cleaning) and moving 'stuff' out of the living room, the guest room, and the sewing room, into there. It's amazing how much space has been created by moving a few boxes and sofas outside. And it's only 3m by 3m (plus adjoining store room).

We have also ordered bookcases from IKEA for displaying Les Objets (much cheaper than Mr BW making them from scratch), but, as the only date they could deliver before mid-January was on my WitchDay (when we won't be here), and as not all items are in stock at our 'local' branch (29 miles away), we are being forced to have an outing to Edinburgh tomorrow to collect.

I still find it hard to believe that Edinburgh is so close to us now. Hopefully we will find something interesting to see/do/visit en route. One thing that National Trust/English Heritage/Historic Houses (we are members of all of them) do very badly is provide lists of what is open out of season. It takes hours to go through their websites searching every property for one that is open at this time of year. There are some, it's just so hard to find them, now that none of their handbooks list opening dates and times.

Today I had yet another instance of a bank unexpectedly ringing me to discuss something but first requiring me to give them my security details. For the first time, though, I did feel the woman understood my frustration at banks on one hand telling people never to give out personal and security details to unexpected callers, but on the other refusing to enter into discussion unless customers are prepared to share these same details. Anyway, they gave me £50 to settle my complaint and a promise to pass my concerns to the "Continuous Improvement Team", which is considerably better than the feedback I have been getting from our very long-term main bank every time I have raised an issue of late: "If you don't like it, we don't care, we know best, you are wrong, we're not listening, if you don't like it then bye bye..."

This post useless without pictures. I hope to post them tomorrow.

The summerhouse is finished. It is fab. I'm thinking sod the Museum and stick a bed in there and a porta-potty (out of Bri@n) in the attached storage bit, call it "upmarket shepherd's hut" (they are three a penny round here, and it's better insulated than our house after all) and charge £300 a night, plus flog punters guests eggs, veg and h0ney. And maybe some craft/permaculture/'whatever is the latest wanky environmental trend' classes. And also Wall Walking Days (we can sub-contract these to Nice Nearest Neighbour, who will be delighted to have some company on her jaunts).

The gate problem has been solved; one gate on one motor is apparently good up to 1.2T, there will be one metre of supporting metal post buried in a lot of concrete in the ground, and strangely with the extra bar necessitated for rigidity, it is almost the design I sketched out when we were thinking of 2 gates rather than one. We got excited about it being finished and installed before the FOTCR™ and then the maker finished his last email with, "Best wishes for Christmas and the New Year', so maybe not.

The Sally Army out-of-town warehouse in Carlisle (that we went in while killing time) is wonderful. 15 DVDs for £1, 5 books for £1, and if you buy more than one thing, they ask you what you want to pay. There was one (very) young woman clearly buying toys from the large selection on the shelves for her (very) young children for FOTCR™ and it was at that point that I realised there is still hope for the world, if only in the North. There was a poster extolling the over 60s to join their friendship group on Tuesdays, for warmth, company, and free coffee. I was glad that I do other things on Tuesdays. And that we live across the country. It still amazes me how narrow the county is at its northernmost point. And that we now live, geographically, further up than Gretna Green.

My latest gripe is companies who send out parcels complete with the backing paper from all the attached labels. I guess it saves them rubbish removal costs, but it's not exactly environmentally friendly, transporting all that shiny paper from them, to us, to the recycling centre, to the destruction depot.

Home made

I've been out all day at the local craft group FOTCR™ event, which was a shared lunch at the home of a person who loves the FOTCR™, albeit in a tasteful and refined way. There is another lady in the group of a baker's dozen who, like me, doesn't eat wheat, and she very kindly made me a WitchDay cake as I shall be out at the coast with MrBW on the actual day next Tuesday. As there was so much other food, they insisted that I took the whole cake home, rather than just the leftovers as is normal.

Mr BW was very impressed that the cake is chocolate.

I was so impressed, and very touched, that everyone had gone to a lot of trouble to make things wheat free to bring. While it's hard to find safe wheat-free food in restaurants and cafes in these parts (so we no longer even try), the group today managed a feat never managed by any group I ever belonged to down south. The difference seems to be that people up here still know how to cook, and bother to cook, rather than just buy pre-prepared food in pretty packets.

The summerhouse is not quite finished, despite the three constructors turning up at 8am and not leaving until 5pm, and, Mr BW said, not stopping for lunch. Rather than rush the final trims, they will be back for a couple of hours in the morning. I'm glad that installation was included in the price.

Hopefully they won't be here too long tomorrow as we have to go across the country to see a man about a gate. It's touch and go whether our current metal drive gate, which dates from the 1970s, will survive until the new one arrives. The bottom corner by the hinges is rusted through and disintegratihng.

Having been collecting photos of gates we liked for some months, we finally got round to designing the gate last week and it is being fabricated this week. There is a slight technical hitch, but we need to see it 'in the metal' to know how to solve it. Given that we were told it would be January or February before it would go into production, we are very happy that it is likely to be here sooner. At over 4m long, it was just too big for Mr BW to contemplate making himself, plus it needs to be galvanised, sprayed and fitted, and we don't have any contacts for these processes up here yet.

In other news, I have finally got my head around which switches work which lights. Because our house is very very long but very very narrow (just one room deep), we have lots of light switches which turn on and off in 3 different places, and, up to now, it has been a case of chance whether the correct one illuminates.

I never got to work out the switches down south, in nearly 30 years.

At last, a home for the objets

The summerhouse construction team (of three) arrived at 8.10am and got straight to work putting the base on the concrete slab they laid at the beginning of last week:


Things are progressing. And they brought their own bin bags for the rubbish, and mentioned that they'd need hot soapy water for cleaning it all up tomorrow. Lots of boxes ticked on the 'BW How To Be A Perfect Tradesman' sheet.

10.30am and the base and floor are all down and the walls are begining to go up. It's actually a huge Meccano kit.

13:45pm and the main structure and roof support is up, the back panels are in, and the front is now being secured to the rest. The Boss fell off the trailer (frontwards, did the splits in the air, and fell awkwardly onto a pile of metal struts, hitting his leg and arm) as they took that huge front panel off their trailer - I was watching from the utilty room - I thought it would be a hospital job, but he just laughed and carried on - amazing what having 2 young lads along can do to your perception of pain cf your older man's pride. When their backs were turned he started examining his wounds. Owwww.

The grey blocks in the foreground are the insulation for the roof. I swear it is thicker than what was put in the new part of the house...

Watch this space:

Daisy Daisy

The stripes that Mr BW painted on washed off in the torrential rain over the weekend.

Thankfully.

He must have used the wrong paint.

He does have form with this.

Back in 1997, when I had had a very bad year, and hadn't laughed all year, he bought me a staddle stone for the FOTCR™ as I'd always wanted one.

In an attempt to cheer me up he painted it with rusty brown spots, using some old tins of powder paint he'd had when he was a child. He thought they were red spots, but he is red/green colourblind.

It took 5 years for them to wash off.

But it did make me laugh for the first time that year.

We still have that staddle stone, and although these days it has a light coating of lichen and moss, it still makes me smile when I look at it.

Anyway, he's repainted Zebra again now, and this one is in honour of Caroline's past with the predecessor of this vehicle:

OK, so that's enough about cars now.

Unexpectedly

Nice Nearest Neighbour (who lives half a mile away) rang me at 9.30am. I'd been up since 6am as Mr BW was snoring and showed no signs of abating, and I have lots of sorting and shredding still to do. However, I had gone back to bed for breakfast in bed around 8.30am, and so was still in my nightie at the time she called.

"While I was out walking recently I discovered this wonderful place that is only open a couple of weekends a month where they sell all sorts of objets very cheaply, I'm going over in half an hour, would you like to come?"

"Is the Pope a Catholic?" I thought, and then ran about to get ready in time. NNN is always very punctual.

I have always loved pressed glass (of a simple form, clear glass, variety), but didn't know much about it. I now appear to have started a new collection of objets (small clear dishes, ideal for my seaside shell and pebble collections) that were locally made in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The lady who runs the emporium is very knowledgeable and I shall take along my mystery creamware plate (that I still haven't manage to properly identify) next time I go.

We returned home after 2 hours to find that Mr BW had been very busy painting my new car:

Not exactly camouflaged to this countryside is it!

The hoolie has now abated after a day and a half. No damage that we can see. I guess this house has been here for several hundred years, and much as the builders may have driven us to distraction, what they did was good, so should last many more years.

Stormy

FOTCR™ cards seem to be flying through the postal system. Most of ours, sent 2nd class at the beginning of this week, seem to have reached their respective destinations the length and breadth of the country the next day. We've been receiving cards sent from all over the day after posting too.

I suspect it is because fewer people are sending cards/letters and Royal Mail are now totally overstaffed. They won't know what's hit them once the Czechs own RM!

I know about this 'potential' takeover because we are still shareholders (should have sold ages ago, but didn't), so have to be kept informed, but I've not heard/read about it anywhere (but then I don't use unsocial media, and rarely watch more than a few minutes of TV news in passing, and rarely listen to the radio any more as the schedules have all changed and the presenters I like have all gone).

We still have electricity currently, but that's probably because we have the generator ready to go, and loads of petrol.

Now we (unexpectedly) have a petrol car, it's going to be easier to keep adequate fuel stocks 'just in case' - petrol goes 'off' in about 3 months, so we can now rotate it through the car and keep in enough in cans for several days' running.

It's very blowy here, and extremely rainy, but that didn't stop the local non-lord of the manor and his cronies shooting down in the woods this morning. The trees there are not maintained, and I cannot think why they needed to be taking unnecessary risks on the roads and under trees. They've also churned up all the grass in the field behind The Coven as they don't know how to drive their 4WDs. Stupid tossers. We have the greenhouse top vents tied up with cable ties to stop the wind getting under them. Everything else is permanently battened down, such is the frequency of unusual weather events these days.

The weather forecast for these parts is still predicting heavy rain and gusty winds over 50mph until tomorrow lunchtime.

How is the weather where you are?

Browned off

The Pantone Colour of 2025 is, apparently, brown.

Or rather, to be more exact, Mocha Mousse:

Brown?

Just exactly what the world needs currently.

Or maybe it's a portent of things to come.

A disguise.

Brown is an interesting colour, in many ways, for many reasons, even if it not the prettiest. Look it up if you are interested; I'm not. Brown is my least favourite colour, bar none.

An old friend of mine started a PhD into "The Perception of the Colour Brown". The research was state of the art at that time, sometime in the late 70s. He abandoned it after a term as he found it just too depressing.

Fortunately for me, as, after a time as a driver for an abbatoir company, and some serious reflection, he went back to university and took a Masters to qualify in the profession which I eventually entered, and, in time, became the supervisor on my first professional placement. Thanks to his encouragement, I became the questioning, suspicious, supportive, enabling, and whistle-blowing professional that I (am told I) turned into. So I suppose I should be grateful to the colour brown.

But I just don't have it within me.

In other news, we have battened down the hatches against the latest storm. Again. All day tomorrow, and until 4pm on Sunday, up to 58mph winds and torrential rain, from the north. The generator is at the ready and my book is open on the time the power pops off. Quelle joie. *deep sigh*

Stay safe if you are in the storm's path.

Picture This

OK, congratulations to Scoakat and Lyle who are the Chief Detectives amongst you today. As promised, now they have correctly guessed, here is a picture of Blue Broom and Zebra having a little chat yesterday at the car dealer's before the former is abandoned for the latter:

Note Blue Broom's nice new 4 seasons tyres, put on at considerable expense at the beginning of October. We have only done just over a thousand miles since then. There was also two thirds of a tank of diesel left, and the anti-syphon devices work rather too well, despite Mr BWs best efforts to salvage something from a purchase unexpectedly forced by a rapidly deteriorating engine/emissions situation.

As I filled in the change of ownership form online I felt like I was giving away a member of the family, such has been Blue Broom's contribution to our resettlement in the ultra rural North. Up and down the A1 over four and a half years, often towing a trailer full of useful items. I do know which auction it is going to though...

Old dashboard:

New dashboard:

Here is Zebra in the car park by the beach:

It was very muddy and she is now very dirty.

It is the most impractical car style and colour when one lives on top of a windy ridge at 600 feet, in the middle of nowhere with mostly tractors in the lanes and where it frequently snows in winter. But hey, who cares?

Probably only the person who washes her! Mr BW has very kindly spent half the day reinstalling the dash cam, putting bump bars on the doors (I don't think anyone bothers about those these days do they, but we had some 'in stock' and they are black and make her look even more zebra-y?), and sorting out the 'carry around junk' to fit in a much smaller car. Think the size of an original Mini - which is where my car ownership started in 1985.

Back to the future. I love retro.

Exchanged

The Blue Broom has been successfully swapped for the new Zebra (and, to be clear, that is pronounced Zeb/ra, not Ze/bra), who then had to have a proper drive up the coast and then a blast back across the country lanes home, with the roof partly down some of the way, despite it only being 7 degrees at best. The climate control set at 25°C kept us nicely warm, and nothing blew away.

A one litre petrol/mild hybrid is never going to be able to compete with a nifty1.6 turbo diesel (which was so comparatively green when new that it still pays no road tax), and the seats are a lot less comfortable (think cushions needed for long journeys, but we haven't bought it to be used for long journeys), but, small in size diesels are no longer made, I didn't want an automatic, we didn't want to spend well over twice the amount for the same model as an electric (greenwash), and I wanted a key for the ignition and button controls not touch screens. In another year's time none of the simplicity I wanted will still be available, and the Blue Broom would have been costly, unreliable, and constantly an unknown quantity until it died and we had to pay to have it taken away rather than get a good deal on a PX. Given that it only managed 68,556 miles before it had increasingly serious issues, whereas the 2 litre turbo diesel Peugeot 205 I had in 1988 did 170,000 miles with almost nothing going wrong, modern engineering certainly isn't what it used to be.

Who'd have thought that an idea I had last Friday late afternoon would already have come happily to fruition, and all our car problems would be solved?

One bonus: in chatting to the salesman at handover, he mentioned he had an excellent roofer currently working on his renovation project, and a couple of texts later, we now have his details and an idea of availability. At last, a lead on another decent tradesman to enable us to finish off the house project properly. Yes, Mr BW could undoubtedly do most of what still needs doing, but, as I keep telling him, after his recent Big Birthday, he is now Officially Old, and he's more than done his bit when we had no spare cash, so now we have a bit, we are able to support the local economy. Plus, I don't want him sitting 20 feet up on the roof apex repointing the ridge to the slates.

I am now knackered, but as I am deterrmined to publish at least a few words every day this month, this will have to suffice for tonight.

Pics tomorrow, if someone manages to guess what breed Zebra is.... 3 clues the other day, several more today. You're all slipping... not as good as you used to be at cryptic.

Things I have learnt today

1. It is a really bad idea to put a couple of sheets of toilet paper on a patch of spilt bleach on the bathroom floor when squirting it in a cistern with a busted flush, prior to the flush being replaced the next day, once the parts arrive from Amazon, because you will forget the toilet paper had bleach on it before it dried out, and pick it up, tut at the waste of earth's resources and then utilise the paper for its usual purpose. Ouch.

2. There actually are some excellent creative craftspeople in these parts, who are just as frustrated as us with the tardy and unreliable ones, it's just that we are only finding them this week, getting on for 5 years on. One new drive gate jointly designed and ordered. Let's hope it arrives before the base of the present one rusts away completely.

3. One tradesman thinks that an acceptable 'detailed quote', for which we have been waiting for over 3 weeks, is an email containing just the words "about five grand".

4. There might be some unexpected news concerning the Chopping Down The Tree Trial, due to start today. If sources are reliable. (Update: they were; sorry I had to leave you hanging on that one before.)

5. It is quite sad saying goodbye to a Blue Broom in which we have travelled nearly 70,000 miles in the past 11 years. It is maybe fitting that its very first trip, directly from the dealership where we bought it new, was to the area where we now live. It is a sorry state of affairs that I could not remember how the bonnet catch opens, such has been my deskilling at the hands of a competent engineer. However, I now know how to turn off the speed limiter that has had to languish on 'pause' since Mr BW accidentally turned it on (and then couldn't work out how to turn it off) during a solo trip South last year sometime. RTFM.

Trying...

... to manage a post every day, amidst all the sorting, shredding, and building work. And the need to get FOTCR™ cards dispatched asap. They are all written, designed, printed, sliced and folded, and the envelopes stamped, but the 30 year old Access database for the address labels is misbehaving and the thought of handwriting that many labels, or retyping all the addresses into Libre Office is more than I can cope with right now.

Yes, we never learn, more construction work, but at least this time the builders were not employed directly by us, and, despite a bad start when they managed to angle the shuttering for the new summerhouse's concrete base towards the house rather than the view, despite my very clear instructions first thing, all was amiably resolved by the addition of some KitKats to their hot drink order, and some hot water for the young labourer's pot noodle (it worried me that Mr BW looked longingly as it, despite having been weaned off them by me shortly after we met 32 years ago) and they worked from 8.35am to 4.55pm, the last hour in the pitch black. They return next Monday and Tuesday, once the base is fully set and cured, to put up the new building.

I spent 5 hours sorting out car insurance today. All I will say is, if you are ever tempted to save a few quid by going with an online-only insurance company, DON'T.

I knew it was a mistake when I took out the policy last summer, but we were so short of cash then (having had to run 2 Covens for 4.5 years) that it seemed a good idea. I have no idea how much it should cost to change a car on a policy mid-term, but I doubt it should be 90% of the original policy cost (when only 3 months of cover had been used), particularly when the new car is 2 insurance groups lower than the existing car. It wasn't that much by the end of my 1.5 hours on their awful online chat (necessitated because the system refused to let me do it myself online), but NEVER AGAIN.

I cancelled the policy and went elsewhere (to not-an-online-only company), but I am still £70 out of pocket, plus I undoubtedly had to pay extra for a 'close to start date' new policy. My refund has yet to arrive back on my credit card, and I can see this one running and running, but, as I said to them at the time, I am quite prepared to take it to the Insurance Ombudsman if I have to.

Still, the new Broom on Wednesday will be lovely :)

It will be the first car I have ever owned that will not be blue, and back to my first car (a BW Blue Mini), in terms of fuel and engine size, although with lots of added fun (some clues: very small, very retro, and Lucy Jordan - although sadly I am rather more than 37 these days). I had the idea on Friday afternoon, found it online in a nearest city showroom on Friday evening, test drove it and fell in love with it on Saturday. Pre-registered, but with almost 30% off list price, plus more off for a part-exchange, after Mr BW had finished negotiating with them, and only 7 miles on the clock (well, 18 now as we took it for a long test drive). And it has a brilliant registration for such a car!

I've only owned 6 cars in my life, which is 5 really as one was written off after catching fire in a flood when it was 11 weeks old. At least we will now have a ready supply of petrol for the generator for when WW3 starts shortly after Orange Nellie arrives back in the White House in January.

And yeah, it's not particularly Value, but you're a long time dead, and the current Blue Broom is now 11 and has some very worrying things starting to go wrong which isn't good when you live in the middle of nowhere, so we are Carpe Diem-ing.

Sunday's Best

Well, it used to be.

Now there is only Bob Harris' Sound of the 70s on Sunday at 3pm and we tried it for 3 weeks and hated it just as much as we thought we would. Whispering Bob can go Whistle as far as we are concerned. The Bob Harris Show is just 'Bob's Boasting' and he sets every nerve in my body on edge compared to JW's laid-back, jovial and self-effacing presenting style.

Luckily, we foresaw this moment and have probably 100 - if not 200 - episodes of Sounds of the 70s with Johnnie Walker recorded on a hard disc recorder, which Mr BW is busily transferring to hard drive, via CD, as there is seemingly no way to directly transfer as the technologies are of different eras and not compatible.

We'll be listening to these old episodes on rotation for the rest of all time, at 3pm on a Sunday, along with a Sunday Sherry, while the roast is cooking. Rest assured, my ears will prick up when we are mentioned (several times), although JW's last show was on the Sunday before Mr BW's 60th, and there were no requests played on that last show. Just as well we unexpectedly got 2 mentions, albeit 2 (or was it 3?) weeks apart, of our 30th anniversary earlier this year.

Talking of compatibility, do manufacturers never learn from the Betamx/VHS debacle?

I note from recent necessary replacement purchases of malfunctioning technology that we are now into the USB A v USB B v USB C era. It's so hard to tell the difference at a glance, and a number of different adaptors are now required, each of which must introduce a slight degradation of signal.

Tomorrow they are supposed to be arriving to lay the base for our new summerhouse. This has already been delayed from last Thursday because of the day's snow the previous Saturday. This time we chose to have someone else control the builders and paid extra for a 'base included' installation. And luckily we told them that erecting tomorrow after base last Thursday was wishful thinking, so delayed the building's arrival until next Monday. Last Thursday was a beautiful day, perfect for concrete pouring. We are now experts in this, having experienced multiple non-pours due to climatic conditions during the *shudders at the memory* 3 years of building works we had to endure to get to our present happy state, whereas tomorrow it is due to rain lightly all day and be -4°C overnight.

My book is open on the likelihood of having a suitable base come Tuesday morning....

Oops...

...I very nearly didn't manage a proper post in November. Sorry if you have missed me.

I have been very busy sorting out and reducing most of a lifetime of accumulated paperwork to 1mm crumbs, and we have been busy enjoying SKI-ing (ie Spending the Kids' Inheritance)... except that we don't have any kids.

Every time we have gone out in the last month, just to 'look at' something, we have come back having made a major purchase. At least one of which was never intended or on the 'To Spend List' (yes, we really do have one), but was made necessary by prematurely/unexpectedly failing technology. Two arrive next week and the week after, one arrives on March 1st, and another sometime in February, red paint depending. Several other projects are still in process, as soon as we can extract better quotes than the "about five grand" that we have been furnished with thus far.

Mind you, we still take our flask of tea and our packed lunches with us when we go out, even though we don't actually have to any more. Old habits die hard, and when a cup of tea made with a cheap tea bag and antibiotic-laced milk of indeterminate fat percentage and freshness, served in a none-too-well-washed cup, costs well over £2, and sometimes closer to £4, Value Witch - with a wheat intolerance - finds it hard to swallow.

The tooth fairy who also refills strings of advent calendar mini-stockings as a side line, is cross with us as we have failed to put up the requisite item ready for her visit tonight, despite Mr BW having already retrieved it from its resting place for the other 11 months of the year. Here's hoping that she they simply dump and go, leaving me to do the actual individual refill myself in the morning.

I had a nightmare last night. I rarely remember my dreams, but this one kept me awake last night after it woke me the first time, and has haunted me on and off all day: it still seems far, far too real.

In it, I was climbing a rickety old wooden open-tread staircase, when I stumbled and fell into a sheet of glass (which may or may not have been an old greenhouse) and badly cut the skin webbing between the base of my thumb and first finger on my left hand. At the time I felt the pain as I would have felt the pain of such an actual deep cut, and every time it has popped back into my head today, I have felt the same actual excrutiating, dragging in slow-motion, pain again. I've tried to block it out by massaging in hand cream in an attempt to generalise and diffuse or displace the pain, but it makes no difference.

I have always been interested in the significance of dreams, and phantom pain, and had any of this happened over the past nearly 5 years, I could have understood and explained it from any number of psychological perspectives.

A few months ago I was half-joking about having PTSD brought on by recalcitrant estate agents and builders, but the stress and torment of all that is fortunately now well behind us. A quick Google hasn't turned up anything relevant, but I do still have online access to professional journals, so I shall investigate further when I have time. Rod Stewart may have sung that "The First Cut is the Deepest", but the pain sensations still feel just as bad many tens of times on.

Most odd.

Let them eat cake!

Because I know that Mr BW is not the only one around here who likes chocolate, and for posterity, here is the chocolate cake I made him:

It's gluten free (but no-one would ever guess), made from this recipe (although I use 35g of ground almonds instead of 35g of the Dove's GF self-rasing flour, walnut oil instead of vegetable oil, and bake in a 2lb loaf tin for around 45-50 minutes, oh, and I never use xanthan gum as it is a highly questionable product), with lots and lots of ganache (for those who don't know, this is basically hot double cream poured onto an equal quantity of chocolate and stirred until smooth, thick and cool).

The recipe makes a dense, easy-to-cut cake which is not too sweet, and of a perfect even texture for using as a celebration cake.

I split the loaf-shaped cake horizontally into 3 and then sandwiched it back together with ganache, and I didn't bother to stand the cake on a wire rack to allow the ganache to drip through the wire mesh as it slid off the cake as I decided the surplus on the cake plate could usefully become part of the scene. The daisies are made from roll-out sugar paste (bought - gone are the days when you could only have it if you made your own), using a set of nifty daisy-creating-devices from Lakeland. The bees had stripes made of chocolate, although they were a little shaky as my hands aren't as steady for perfect piping as they used to be.

Here is the cake with its fountain candle alight. The numeral candles should have been gold, but I had substitutions on gold candles every time I ordered them with the grocery delivery. All 6 times. On the 6th occasion, the driver took pity on me and told me to keep the white spotty ones they'd sent that time for free. They looked less awful in real life than in the picture.

And because eating that much chocloate makes me feel really ill, I made myself a lemon drizzle courgette cake:

Although I forgot to remove the cling wrap before taking the photo.

Flying tonight

Treasure hunting

At the beginning of last week we went to an auction of household items and antiques.

Mr BW was not going to come, but, after having followed me round the preview (in a big barn-like building), decided he would; I suspect because he'd seen how many notes there were on my catalogue and he was keen to be present to, erm, deter purchases.

Now, I've been to many auctions of objets in my time, ranging from those in discrete sale rooms in nice market towns, to those in farmyards, fields, and even marquees.

But, I have never been to one held in a livestock auction mart, where the same auctioneers who usually deal in animals are knocking down 170 to 180 lots an hour. Usually 100 lots is more of an average for an auction of household items.

Neither have I been to an auction held in the Mart Cafe, where farmers were buying and eating food, as well as talking in their normal voices at the same time as the auction was going on! I was totally exhausted by the constant barrage of words and the constant background of other competing voices, together with the lightning speed of proceedings, by the time we got home.

But I did buy some nice shoe lasts to add to my collection, some glass bottles, old milk bottles and crate, an old foot warmer, some more old irons and trivets, and some other items thrown in to the boxes seemingly randomly: for instance, old dark brown plates that will be useful under plant pots in the greenhouse next summer when it is hot, and a grubby old electric kettle (in a ghastly dirty maroon colourway) that will go to Kettle Recycling Heaven next time we go to the tip.

It's interesting how cheaply lots are sold up here compared to down south. My collections of objets are definitely going to flourish, and now that Nice Nearest Neighbour has expressed an interest in attending future auctions with me, there is future in the past.

While on the subject of old things, does anyone know anything about metal detecting? I fancy having a go at being a detectorist, largely because we keep losing hand tools - including ones that Mr BW has loving hand-forged to be perfect for particular tasks - around The Coven. Plus, of course, there are bound to be lots of Roman objects just waiting to be located and exhumed.

Happy 60th Birthday Mr BW!

All my love, BW xxxxxx

Pumpkins and figs

If there's one thing I hate about Halloween (aside of the rampant commercialism that we have increasingly imported from acrosss the pond - what's wrong with a sheet anyway?), it's the waste of good food. All those pumpkin insides that end up in the bin as they are scooped out during carving.

This year we had three huge pumpkins that grew, two of them unseen, in the field veg plot. This wasn't the biggest:

There are lots of lovely pumpkin recipes here, which is just as well as we have a lot to get through. Those onions are also our home-grown - and large.

Pumpkin freezes exceptionally well, either raw in cubes, chunks, or cooked and pureed.

I have been steaming diced pumpkin in a metal colander over a large pan of water (put foil over the top if your pan isn't big enough to accommodate your colander, but be careful removing it as steam burns hurt. DAMHIK), letting it drain until cool, and then running it through the food processor before freezing it in plastic takeway-size containers. It takes up much less space in the freezer in puree rather than chunks, and is great for soups, and pumpkin pie recipes (and others from the link above).

For anyone who may have green figs that are unlikely to ripen now, here is a wonderful South African recipe for making a delicious sweet accompaniment to cheeses, or for eating mixed with oats, yoghurt and other fruits for breakfast.

We discovered this delicious preserve in South Africa back in 2012 when we first visited, but the recipe came from one of Mr BW's southern wood carving friends.

Sadly we are now on our last batch: we picked the unripe figs from the south house wall at Coven Sud on the day we left. I can't imagine we will ever have that sort of quantity again, although we have managed probably a dozen ripe figs from a plant in an old tin bath in the greenhouse. Mind you, if global warming proceeds as fas as it has over the last 5 years, never say never.

Finally finding things

Reunited with many things now that we are thankfully no longer custodian of two houses, the barometer is back on the hall wall. I've missed my tap-taps as I pass it.

It's been pouring with rain on quite a few days in the last couple of weeks (although beautifully blue-sky sunny and unseasonably warm on others), but the barometer now seems to fall no lower than 'change'. It was hitherto very accurate.

And then I remembered: the atmospheric pressure is different at 600 feet up to what it was at 100.

Here's how to adjust a barometer.

Now, this, from that link, is interesting (well, I think so): "hPa (hectoPascal) is the unit that pressure is measured in, and generally varies from about 950 to 1050hPa. It used to be called millibars (mb) which may be the units shown on your barometer. If your barometer is even older, then the pressure will be shown in inches, with a range of perhaps 27 to 31 inches. To convert from hPa on the Met Office website to inches, you will have to divide by 33.86. So, for example, if the Met Office observation shows 1013 hPa, then you should set your barometer to 1013/33.86 = 29.92 inches, or as close as possible to this."

That was an item for Mr BW who is currently making a table for an 80 year old engineering lathe out of a piece of the old kitchen worktop that I saved from the tip a year ago. "That will never be useful!" he decreed at the time. The legs appear to be constructed from offcuts of roof trusses that I also saved from the builders' skip and put in the shed.

Here it is in the back of the car yesterday (and this is just one reason that I am against buying a new car until needs absolutely must):

And for those who appreciate old engineering, this is the oil thingy:

I hasten to add that that is not my thumb nail. You wouldn't believe that there are nail brushes by every sink in the house would you?

Probably not a good enough initial image to blow up a small section, but:

Now that Mr BW no longer has access to other boys' kit for fettling pieces for Mi1dred, and (more likely in my opinion), because he is due to enter his seventh decade in the next few days and needs to re-find his 16 year old self who learnt to play with lathes to make all kinds of high tech thingies, at the beginning of last week, he was trying to decide whether to buy a modern lathe (made in China) for a few hundred quid (which would likely be a juddery mistake), or a fully refurbished by the original manufacturer old lathe for a few thousand. I knew he'd been looking at all sorts as they kept popping up in pop-ups on my computer - even though our computers are not linked in any way other than by sharing a router.

When I asked how much a new Made in England (or at least Made in Europe) one was, as I thought it was false economy to buy/inherit someone else's problems, and cheap is always cheap for a reason, I learnt that it was about £10,000.

Now, even I draw the line somewhere, Big Birthday or no Big Birthday.

And so it came to pass that yesterday, after he had consulted Technical Boys' Forums, various of Mildred's sisters' parents, and the classified ads on the internet, rather than having the recuperative day in bed I'd planned, I was pulled from my restorative dreams, bundled into the car and driven over to the East Coast where an old lathe, made in England in the 1930s or 1940s, that had been carefully and lovingly restored by its current owner in the tiniest workshop I have ever seen, was heaved into the boot with brute force, in exchange for little more than the price of a couple of boxes of good wine. Bargain. And if, in a year's time, Mr BW finds it won't do all he needs, and that he is using it sufficiently to justify the expense, he can buy a different one and sell this one on.

Here's where we went:



There was evidence of a lot of recent building - for instance, the building in the right foreground and the houses on the hill between the two foreground buildings - but, for once, I felt that it had been done sympathetically, and with respect to the existing local architecture, which included old warehouses and fishery buildings, as well as older terraces of fisherfolk cottages.

I was delighted to finally find not one but four fishmongers, none of them as ridiculously over-priced as the two in our own county - which has a coastline of close to 80 miles, but, seemingly, no longer a fishing industry.

This one was posher-looking and open longer than the other three (which shut by 2.30pm) and in a different location in the new-ish 'bar and restaurant quarter' (gentrification hits a once poor fishing village, although not with the usual accompanying inflated pricing, and I didn't see any amounts written to only one decimal place), but was fresh-off-the-boats fresh, reasonably priced, had a huge variety of fish and shellfish, and sold the most delicious smoked then roasted fillets of salmon we have ever bought anywhere. And the staff could not have been more friendly or helpful. And they didn't charge extra when we asked for a bag of ice to keep our purchases cold until we got home.

Is there Life on Mars?

No idea, but Space.com will tell you if there is.

A daily newlsetter briefing on everything going on in beyond-the-world.

More info thrown at you than you will ever be able to assimilate. But fascinating stuff and refreshingly different to the squabbling, fighting and consumerism that currently pervades/peverts this world.

Sign up half way down the page here.

The Friday Question

Rather late today as we decided yesterday that we weren't up to a trip to Cumbria to go to Potfest in the Pens (a ceramics fair) today, and then decided at 7.40am (having watched Countdown as we usually do of a morning - how I do determines what sort of day I am likely to have) that we were going to go, so somehow managed to be up, showered, dressed, hens and cat fed, flask of tea made and home made vegetarian gluten free pasties heated from frozen, and out of the door by 8.30am.

The ceramics were fab, we bought a few pieces, got a few ideas to copy/adapt in glass (particularly adding textile panels into hard material frames with strings of various materials and thicknesses), and went to test drive some cars on the way back.

Over the past week I have discovered that National Insurance Numbers (NINOs - how I love that acronym) are the new currency in opening bank and savings accounts (and not just ISAs) but also for confirming details when test driving cars.

People are always surprised that both Mr BW and I both know our NINOs by heart. I know mine as I worked for an agency for several summer holidays as a student and each week's 'hours worked' form required it to be handwritten in before submission. I also know Mr BW's, but that is a special skill perfected from opening online bank accounts for him many times over the past 30 years.

Do you know your NINO by heart?
And if so, why?

It never rains but it pours

Yesterday's online grocery delivery was 20 minutes late. It's rare that they arrive outside of the given hour-long slot.

The driver was new. Morrisons seem to have a problem retaining staff, so there is a new driver every other week it seems to me.

He didn't greet me (against company policy - I know as our favourite driver is the Branch Trainer of new drivers and has told me exactly what should happen), he didn't apologise for being late (also not following the rules), and all he said (in a very thick Geordie accent - try to imagine this) as I opened the door, was,

"It's bloody flooded eveywhere!"

Rather nonplussed, as his non-arrival at the expected time had caused us issues, as my car was due to go for service and MOT and we had intended that I follow Mr BW to the local garage and then we go on to the local town in the other car (nice that the two are now finally reunited after 4.5 years and we have some flexibility in movement again), I decided to take the piss.

I can nearly do a reasonable Geordie accent (although once-blogger dave, a native of the NE, would disagree). Read the words in quotes in Geordie.

"Is "bloody flooded" worse than "flooded"?" I enquired, innocently.

"AYE!" he shouted. We laughed.

It rained and rained all day and night. I wondered whether we would be better off buying a lifeboat rather than the planned lawn (field) cutting tractor. Little Garage Man told us that he has never seen flooding like it on the fields and lanes in these parts in over 40 years.

But that nice Mr Trump still says that climate change is a myth.

Vegging out

Doing as little as possible after several weeks of over-exertion.

The those who grow veg and don't already know, D T Brown's £1 a packet sale on all varieties of seed (veg/flowers/herbs) is on now. Order £35 or over (and it needn't all be seed) and it's free delivery. It's been on since last Friday, and there doesn't seem to be a final end date, but availability last night when we finally had the time to do a seed audit and order was still good.

DTB/Mr Fothergill's (same company) are now the only mainstream seed merchants we will buy from.

Thompson&Morgan and Suttons are now part of the same huge conglomerate ("Branded Garden Products Ltd") and woe betide you if you have a problem. The germination rate of their seeds and the quality of the plants they send out is appalling and if you dare to complain, customer disservice and indifference appears to be their aim. The founders of those once- excellent companies must be turning in their graves at what their offspring have done by selling out.

We do use home-saved seed and also buy from several smaller companies, including Tamar Organics, Chiltern Seed, and Premier Seed Direct, but the basics at £1 a pack (a quarter of the standard price on many varieties) is a very good offer.

Help Please (Question 3)

This one isn't about buying something, it's about sending it back.

A couple of weeks ago I researched and then bought a new small laptop. We've been using HP laptops and printers for many years up to now, but Mr BW has had issues with his last two needing to use a wireless plug-in module as their internal gubbins stopped working after a year or so, and mine - only 2 years old - has also been doing strange things making it unreliable and frustrating. So we decided to try Asus. Biiiig mistake.

Mr BW (bless him) spent 3 days on-and-off making it look and work exactly like my old one, which included taming Windows 11 and making it look and work exactly like Windows 10, loading all my transferred profile and favourites, loading my preferred mail, browser and anti-virus programs (I am very non-standard), and finding a new image manipulation program as my exisiting PhotoShop disk would not work under any parameters. Oh, and, making the right-hand scroll bars wide enough to use.

While my old HP would start up from lid closed in 3 seconds flat, this new one takes 40 seconds (we timed it) to get through all its start-up screens. Apparently this is a Windows 11 security thing, which I find hard to believe. Given that I probably open it 15 or 20 times a day, I do not have more than 10 minutes to waste each day waiting for a machine to wake up. 10 minutes a day is over 50 hours a year! It has also already black screened 3 times, the touchpad does not always work, it will not stay on the network reliably, and refuses to print wirelessly. It is supposed to have over 10 hours of battery life but it runs out in 3. Repeatedly reinstalling drivers and apps hasn't helped.

It is not fit for purpose and is going back.

It also does not do a page refresh on an 'F5' which is very annoying as I have never known any machine not do this. Oh, and, if you have the speakers muted (which I always do as extraneous noises drive me mad), every time you open the machine you have to re-mute them.

But... what is the best way to clear off all my personal information so that it cannot be retrieved by anyone?

On disposing of old computers I usually remove the hard drive and put a big magnet over it and then hammer it to pieces, but I obviously can't do this with an almost-new machine being returned to the retailer.

Help Please (Question 2)

Any ideas where to buy wine glasses?

When we first moved up in 2020 we sourced a few from charity shops, and I was of the belief that we had lots of decent ones still down south. But, it turns out we don't! Several have got broken recently, probably because they are constantly going thorugh the dishwasher, and we are tireder than normal, so clumsier than normal.

We have some large ones, but they don't fit in the dishwasher, and some crystal ones, but they soon go cloudy in the dishwasher, and life is too short for having to wash delicate glasses by hand.

I looked in Waitrose last time I was in there, but all they had was over-sized ones. I just want normal sized! I don't like super-cheap ones like those IKEA sell, and we have limited access to high street shops so they probably need to be able to be delivered.

Anyone seen any anywhere?

On arrival...

The Friday Question appears to have proved that we got it wrong.

We left a kitchen drawer full of 'important info' for our buyers, including all the (many) keys, as Mr BW had told them we would.

With solar panels (electricity), solar tubes (water heating), two incoming water supplies (one upstairs, one downstairs), an Aga, 2 wood burning stoves, an alarm system, and being 96 years old, Coven Sud is a little quirky and there are lots of light and control switches that you would never find or work out unless you'd been told.

Mr BW had already spent 3 hours at the house with our buyers when he was down south back in August, going through everything. Lady Buyer took notes, but we also distilled the essentials onto printed sheets, which we left together with all the instruction manuals and other helpful items. We also labelled every single switch that was not obvious. Oh, and left 'helpful post-it notes' on things too. That probably annoyed them, but we were attempting to be pre-emptive and to dissuade ongoing contact.

On the top of the pile in the drawer, right next to all the carefully-labelled keys (that would be needed to access anything except the front door - that key was provided to them by the estate agent once our solicitor received the pennies), was a pre-printed sheet with info about all the utility companies, a column for the final meter readings (which we filled in by hand just before we left), and a notes column.

In the 'notes' column against 'water' we had written that both mains stopcocks were off and needed to be turned on before running any water.

We assumed (wrongly, apparently, according to the results of The Friday Question) that the first thing anyone arriving at a new home would do would be to read the meters.

In order to read the meters, they would need to look in the drawer for all the keys, including the one to the electric meter cupboard, see the the meter readings sheet (right on top, covering the keys, with bright fluorescent yellow highlighted boxes) and read the note about the water stopcocks needing to be tured on.

Given that the new owners apparently didn't, it wasn't surprising that Mr BW received a text message shortly before 9pm on Thursday night, politely thanking us for the card and gifts we had left, and asking what the secret was to getting cold water out of the kitchen and utility taps.

In common with most older houses in the UK, there is a system of cold water storage and header tanks which feed into the hot water systems and supply some cold water taps. Only one end of the house has a Megaflow hot water system (which won't allow water to be run without mains cold water pressure), but the main system has tanks that will enable toilets to be flushed and water to be run, at least until the tanks run out due to not being replenished when the mains stopcock is off.

Only 2 cold taps actually come directly off the mains (the kitchen and the utility, that they were enquiring about).

Now, I don't know about you, but if I was in that situation, in a new-to-me house, I would apply some logic and check that the mains stopcocks were fully on, just in case.

But, apparently, common sense is not that common.

The Friday Question

What is the first thing that you would do when you move into a house?

HURRAH!!!

The sale of Coven Sud finally completed at 12.57pm.

I have spent all afternoon feeling really really sick and shaking. I guess I've been running on adrenaline for about a month now, especially since Saturday. I think I also probably have PTSD, after all the dramas...

I hope we finally get a decent night's sleep tonight!

It's good to be the owners of just one house again, with one set of bills, one set of maintenance, and one set of concerns.

Just before we got the call to say it had all gone through OK, there was a flypast of jet fighters and then the grey sky turned sunny. A good omen!

And I have just discovered that the last remaining hen that we moved up with us in 2020 (a Black Minorca) who lays white eggs but hasn't done so for months, did one today. She must be about 7 now, which is geriatric for a hen. To do an egg at that age, at this time of year, when the light levels are falling so fast, is a minor miracle.

We're just about to open a bottle of bubbles - cheers!

Help Please (Question 1)

Now that we are (nearly) solvent again (roll on tomorrow lunchtime) there are a few things we need that we can finally afford to buy.

But, it is very hard to order some things just from online, and there is nowhere near here where we can go to look at all the choices on things side-by-side. Actually, I doubt if such places even exist any longer these days, but at least in a populated area, you can go to a few nearby shops to inspect before purchasing. Plus, online reviews are not as reliable as they once were, as there are 'professional review writers' who attempt to subvert the for-the-common-good process, and reviewers who write reviews before they have even got their new toy out of its box.

So, as I think of them over the next few days, I have some needed products about which I would appreciate any thoughts from the hive mind.

Q1: we've had 1GB fibre broadband for a couple of months now (thanks to rural subsidies and a lot of perseverance by a few stalwart campaigning locals), but there are a few 'dead spots' in our old longhouse with two foot thick stone walls externally and internally (it's 30 metres long but only 5m wide and the router is right in the middle, in the place where our previous 'less than 2MB copper from the cabinet 3.5 miles away' worked well) . This situation is not improved by the thick silver-foil-coated modern insulation installed in the new bits and the parts that have been renovated.

Surprisingly, given the rural area they serve, with lots of similar 'old properties with thick stone wall problems' the ISP do not provide their own fixes to this issue.

Our previous two plug-in system boosters have worked fine up until now, but were brought up from down south where they ably supported a 4MB connection and are at least 7 years old. Unsurprisingly, they simply do not do the job with the new 1GB system, especially in the converted single storey bit where our bedroom now is, which is where we most use our computers. This is only about 10m from the router, but not in line-of-signal-sight.

Mr BW has been reading reviews on system boosters, and keeps sending me links to ones recommeded by magazines, newspaper gadget guys, and Joe Bloggs who is being paid to promote, but every time I research them further, there are lots of one star reviews from people who seem to be techie and know what they are talking about who say 'not this one there are security/compatibility/splitting/reception/IP cloning/security/bridging/support/reliability etc etc etc problems!' It's very hard to understand the difference between mesh systems, signal boosters, things that cost £30 and things that cost £300.

What we need is a good product that will give us good coverage everywhere.

And because I am a security freak, I also need a VPN system as our new ISP only provides static IPs, but it needs to be not based in a country which can't access i-Player.

This is probably a separate issue, but I'm just wondering, having confused myself reading techie forums that are now way beyond my level of understanding (which was once OK), whether the 2 products might be able to be combined?

Any ideas or recommendations, on signal boosters or VPN setups, please?

A new chapter

We are at Coven Nord.

Up before 6am yesterday, got home at 9pm last night.

Didn't stop all day... totally successful, left with happy memories in the sun, and everyone did exactly what they were meant to, as agreed, and with good humour.

Let's hope this is the beginning of a more settled and less stress free time for us!

More later once the removal men have been to offload and some more of the 50 necessary loads of washing have been completed.