Blue Witch

FOTCR™ minus 16

Has anyone seen any of those new Charles III coins?
Or any CIII stamps?

Actually, on peering closely at the 2 pictorial festive stamps that I have received to date, I note that the silhouette is just slightly more mail male than last year's.

I have several hundred EII stamps that I received from the Royal Mail swap-out (stamps being a better investment than banks for many years), and haven't received any letters with the new CIII stamps, so haven't seen any 'in the paper'.

We rarely go shopping and don't pay with cash, so haven't seen any of the new coins either. If indeed any are yet in circulation? Internet sources seem to be confused about the issue dates.

FOTCR™ minus 17

Mr BW took the opportunity of being South to meet up with his sister earlier this week, and they went together to see Mummy Mr BW's best friend, now in her late 80s. Despite being the illest of a group of friends who have known each other from the late 1950s when they all moved into a brand new housing estate as newly-weds at the same time, brought up their families together, and never moved, she is almost the last one standing. Which must be a very strange position to be in.

As the only person we now know who still has a daily paper, we are always glad to receive her old copies, as we need newspapers to line the hens' accommodation, and then enrich and speed up the compost heaps. We probably have 3 or 4 year's worth stocked up now, but what we will do when she is no longer with us, I don't know. There are only so many copies of Waitrose's weekly rag that one can stuff into one's bag, and they keep them under close control in the North. Plus we hardly ever go in Waitrose these days (they no longer send vouchers that make the stuff the same price as other supermarkets), and when we do it is often Not Free Paper Day.

Anyway, getting to the point of this story... the three of them were sitting having a cup of tea together, reminiscing about the old days, and bemoaning the decline in standards, the rise of consumerism, the increase in population, the ceaseless desecration of almost every green space by new housing, and our increasingly disposable society. Well, I am assuming that is what they were talking about as the script rarely varies during such encounters.

"I'm glad to pass on my old newspapers, and glad they will be useful to you!" said BFMBW. Everyone just throws everything away these days... for example, take darning socks, who darns socks now?"

Mr BW stretched out his besocked feet towards her... "Erm... us!" She peered closely and looked slightly amazed. I had told Mr BW to be sure to take socks without holes with him down south, but I forgot to specify, "socks without holes or darns".

I didn't used to darn socks, but times are hard, they don't recycle waste textiles up here, and Mr BW can make holes in any pair of socks in just a few days. Darning is quick, easy, and something useful I can do when I don't have the energy for anything else.

I suspect I am the only one here who is still darning socks, re-sewing underpants when they pull away from their elastic tops because they were so poorly made to start with, stitching buttons back on, and reworking unravelling hems or seams? But, I do have a separate "sewing room", where the sewing machine is always out and supplies are plentiful and easy to get to. If I didn't, I probably wouldn't, IYSWIM.

Just thinking, when Mr BW is able to mend household objects or appliances that break, fall apart or otherwise cease to function, most people would think that is great and admire his skills. When I mend textile things in similar state, I suspect that people are most likely to think that I am slightly eccentric. Why?

In similar vein, yesterday Little Mobile Library Van Man handed me the library books I had requested with a wry smile: 'Live your best life', 'Move to the middle of nowhere to thrive', 'Eat weeds', 'How to renovate your tumbledown animal barn into a house in a weekend', 'Resilience in the face of political madness and war', 'Brave Old World', 'Preparing for Armageddon', 'How to live on 50p a week' and 'How to be free'. Some of these may be made up.

"I've no idea why you need these, you could write them!"

I smirked back, "Yeah, but it's more fun seeing what others do, or suggest, and thinking what amateurs they are in comparison!" He shook his head. "You two are amazing, what you have achieved here..."

I showed him the recently finished kitchen, with built in poppadum rack (to fill an unused wasted space above the 'magic corner' unit), a full-length cup shelf made out of an offcut of kick-board, a built-in rack for rolls of foil and baking parchment, a beam over the Aga made from a piece of distressed timber rescued from the skip last year, and an edge strip at the back of the sink so washed chopping boards and trays can stand to drain behind the tap. All planned, designed, sourced and done by us.



"You're one of only two people besides us who has seen the transformation of this old house, over the past three and a half years, fortnight by fortnight, as it happened," I said. "And listened to all the trials and tribulations, so thank you for all your support, even the time when the front was out of the house and you said it was more of a bombsite than Afghanistan on your second tour!"

"There was one thing that always struck me," he said, "and that was however much was going wrong, however many of your trades were not turning up when they should, and however frustrated you were with all their excuses, all their shortcomings, all their claimed lack of materials, and all the times when you had no water, or orange water, or no electricity, and the constant mess everywhere, and the amount of perfectly good stuff the builders were wasting, or how many of your coffee mugs they were breaking or losing, you always kept the faith and always believed in the project and that it would be OK in the end."

And that's true.

"What's your secret?" he asked.

"What do you think?" I replied.

He looked thoughtful. "Honestly... I don't know."

"It's Mr BW!" I said.

(Talking of whom, he says he will post the number of bags of leaves he's collected in Wednesday's comments below just as soon as he's patched up the pipe on the old Dyson that has just fallen apart as he was cleaning up ready to leave tomorrow).

For comparison, here's a picture of the original kitchen (then 20 years old) 3 weeks and 3 van loads after we moved in:

You can't really see how battered and grotty it was. By the time we removed it in September, it was literally falling off the walls.

FOTCR™ minus 18

So, almost no-one (ie fewer than 1% of visitors here today) wants to guess how many bags of leaves Mr BW will collect. *nods down*. I guess times move on. Simple things no longer cut the mustard. Sorry I am so boring and uninspiring, but hey, that is the life we lead, and I wouldn't change it for anything.

It has been raining non-stop all day. Rain always nakes me feel soggy, even if I am not actually rained on by it.

Nice Nearest Neighbour came round for a tea and a whinge this afternoon. She arrived a quarter of an hour early, which had me stuffing my half-eaten lunch in a cupboard, to be polite, stayed two hours, and, 5 minutes after she had left, I then had ex-Hairdresser BW Sud (400% better than Hairdresser BW Nord) on the phone for 2 hours and 21 minutes, which left Mr BW unable to get through, sending me emergency texts, emails, and even ringing the landline (to which only one other living person knows the number and which we never use) in an attempt to see if I was OK .

So, I am now exhausted and all I have for you today is a link to a site that is alleged to be able to tell whether or not an image is AI generated.

I know not. What do you think?

If someone has a link to a site that can tell me whether content is AI generated, I shall be very pleased to receive it.

I do not like the way the world is going.

FOTCR™ minus 19

Today's post is rather later than planned, but blame the lemon curd that took aaages to be ready to jar. Note to self: making quantity plus a half because you have lots of lemons that need using up is not a good idea; two smaller batches would have been much quicker.

So, we're obviously not playing the 'How many boxes did BW sort today?" game then, because it is quite clear what the answer would be. Although I did spend lots of time sorting several bags of winter clothes and doing washing, and turning out and resorting the tea towel and kitchen cloth drawers, as well as putting away the grocery delivery, and defrosting the hens, which took a long time as all the water butts are frozen solid and all the taps and hoses are winterised (meaning unusable), so all water needs to be carried.

But, 300 miles south, Mr BW is very busy vacuuming leaves with a cordless vacuum, very cheap in 2020 from Aldi, but not really up to the job. The Echo ones we had when we lived down south died from overwork. Here's hoping this little one lives to return to the north where its work is much less onerus.

The leaves are very late in falling this year, but luckily the extreme cold of the past few days has hastened their demise and downward trajectory.

Here is some idea of the scale of the problem:

One advantage of now living on a windy ridge is that there is very little leaf sucking necessary. However, the perils of a large oak tree, lots of fruit trees and a tall hawthorn perimeter hedge, plus all the neighbouring trees, when the wind is in the wrong direction, are sadly still with us for another autumn as the local property market is still dead.

Here is an area, and the leaves collected from it on a blue tarpaulin. I think this counts as 2 black bags' worth.

So... how many standard black rubbish bag equivalents will Mr BW collect in total?

(I say 'equivalents' because he isn't collecting them in plastic bags, but it is an easy measure that he can count and you can guess.)

Oh... and, the gutters (cleared in late October) are also full, I am told, and they count too.

Faites vos jeux:

FOTCR™ minus 20

Now then, with all the festive stuff under control, and all the building and renovation works complete, what is left for me to do?

Oh dear, yes, a whole large double bedroom worth of boxes to sort out.

Plus a third of a conservatory full of boxes of old papers and documents to go through and burn, and some boxes in the living room too.

But, I can't sort documents until I can take them straight out to the field to burn, and I can't do that until it isn't raining. If they sit about I will change my mind and decide to keep them.

It's 4 years now since there was last order in my life...

It is all a bit overwhelming (or even a lot overwhelming), but I shall have to pretend to be Mr BW, Master of Getting Things Done, who unknowingly invented Pomodoro Technique before it had even become a thing, let alone a trendy thing. So, I must pick one thing and start somewhere. Now, which thing to pick?

FOTCR™ minus 21

On the fifth day, the snow disappeared, thanks to a 3 degree rise in temperature and some rain.

Which was lucky, because Mr BW went south again to collect leaves. A journey that can be done in 5 hours on a clear road with two drivers swopping over in laybys rather than service areas, took 7 hours. Despite the rain and traffic jams without obvious cause, he reported that people were all driving sensibly, for a change.

Perhaps it's the calming effect of premature lighting? We don't go out much, but FOTCR™ lights have been visible in some houses since the beginning of November, and the town in the far distance in the valley, which is usually invisible, is now glowing dimly when it is dark. I'm glad I'm not paying their electricity bills.

We never put decorations up until after my Witchday, and I usually don't wrap Mr BW's presents (bought when seen, throughout the year - only little things, nothing expensive) until the last minute because I hate wrapping presents so delay until it is unavoidable.

However... I am happy to report that they are all wrapped already. After Mr BW had departed as it was getting light, I cleared up the left-behind mess (getting pre-prepared food for the week out of the fridge and freezer and into insulated bags, and heating home-made soup and pasties for lunch in just the time it takes him to have a shower doesn't allow for clearing up as I go, as I usually do), then decided I hadn't much energy left, so settled on wrapping as the least demanding task on my long list.

We gave up buying gifts for other people years ago, although we do still send cards. Which all went out with the postman at lunchtime, even the ones going to Foreign, for which one can now buy postage online. They would have gone out on Saturday as they were all designed, written, printed, enveloped, stamped and addressed ready, but the postie failed to materialise. Our postie is still off sick having had an operation which no-one will name (the mind boggles), so deliveries are currently rather unpredictable as apparently there aren't enough relief staff to cover all the vacancies and all the absences every day.

I have also concluded the online grocery orders until the new year.

The mincemeat for the mince pies is made (a year ago - there seem to be enough jars for at least the next 4 years) and the food for both my Witchday and FOTCR™ Day is already safely in the freezer or growing in the garden and greenhouse.

All before the festive Radio Times has dropped through the letter box.

FOTCR™ minus 22

I've had at least 4 ideas for something to write today.

Hw many can I remember now?

None, of course.

Tell me what you want to hear about tomorrow.

I got very frustrated by the number of companies who sent out daily messages for the month before so-called 'Black Friday'. So much so that I unsubscribed from most of them. There is now a definite lack of email. I can't decide whether this is due to my actions, or whether we are in a marketing lull?

FOTCR™ minus 23

Looking back through photos, as I downloaded them from camera to portable hard drive, as I just was (yes, I am still that old fashioned), I am amazed at how quickly the weather has gone from 'late summer' to 'mid-winter'.

I am glad I take hundreds of photos, as it is the only way I have of keeping track of time these days. Such as lot has happened, and yet I have few external 'pegs' (reference points) to hang events from, as almost everything goes on within Coven and grounds.

Having had a bad b33 winter last year, I had already made each colony a sheep's fleece filled calico pillow, which went under the lid, to keep the warmth in, a few weeks ago.

Sheep's fleece is very breathable, and does not absorb water or go mouldy. And yes, for the fibre artists amongst you, the fleece was straight from my overly-large stash and most of it was my lovingingly hand-washed and hand-processed! People locally say that they use fleece straight from their sheep for this purpose, but given that almost all sheep are treated against unwanted insect infestations, it doesn't make any sense to me to run the risk of putting fleece with insecticide residue in a hive.

This year, for the first time in this country, b33keeping equipment manufacturers have started selling 'wraps' for the outside, for between £25 and £45 each. Presumably due to the colony losses almost everyone sustained in the very cold winter last year. We have our doubts about these as they claim to be waterproof, which, in our opinion, will stop condensation produced by the overwintering cluster from evaporating. We were always taught that it isn't cold that kills b33s but wet.

Plus, we don't have £450 to spend on commercial 'wraps'. But, the other day I saw some windscreen protectors in Lidl's made of the same sort of material for £2.99 each. For £30, rather than £450, it seemed worth a punt, and the fact that they are not fully 'fitted' just folded in half and secured with a bungee cord, means there is still space for the hive to breathe through the exposed wood. Plus, if we have a few nice days with higher temperatures than the current zero by day and minus 5 by night, they can be quickly and easily removed.

Let's hope they work.

And yes, you do see old cupboard doors removed during the renovations doing service as wind-breaks. Why throw things away if they can be useful?

FOTCR™ minus 24

The snow:

It was minus 3.3°C in a sheltered spot last night, and not much warmer today, although the sun has been out.

In the middle of that picture you will see a hawthorn tree, unintentionally framed by Mr BW's relocation of the climbing bean frame for next year. Here's a close up:

This is the view from the toilet in our bedroom ensuite.

I won't call it 'Hawthorn Gap' because some nutter might come and chop it down.

It's a lovely date today, isn't it? 011223

November is a going out

It snowed.
We received our first FOTCR™ card.
Neither of these things is normal.

A question of taste

Crumbs

And finally, Tim managed to guess the new addition to the household.

He is rewarded with a look at Mr BW's WitchDay cake:

Sorry it's only a look, but the last slice was consumed yesterday evening. That must be a record... 4 days it lasted, and that was with Nice Nearest Neighbour having a piece (medium) and me having 3 pieces (small). It was 10.5" in diameter and it was slathered in 900ml of whipped double cream (*shudders* but it is what he wanted).

Note the "9" candle that was cut and rewaxed from a "0" candle. I nearly kept it for next year, but realised that a used "0" and an unused "6" would look odd. So, 9 years on it got a second usage, and in another 10 it will reappear. Provided Mr BW hasn't thrown it out in the meantime when I'm not looking. He and NNN are plotting on that front.

Now, while most things are getting smaller (packs of butter and cheese, I am particularly looking at you) Cadbury's Buttons are getting bigger. They no longer fit nicely on a cream blob, so had to be stuck on the side. I deliberately didn't buy the 'giant' ones, but these standard sized ones are now too large to be useful. Good job I only buy them once a year.

All Saints Day

Yesterday we went out to collect a new member of the household.

We had the choice of collecting him from 30 miles north of here, or 30 miles south.

We chose the former, as we could then all visit the Ladybird Exhibition (due to close next week, but moving on to other places), the cheese shop, the potato farm, and our favourite seaside.

He sighed a bit when he saw how small the Blue Broom is (he is 2.4m tall), and sighed even more when we spilt home-made soup on his white attire at lunchtime. He had to breathe in at the potato farm when we plonked a sack of spuds on the seat next to him.

He enjoyed the autumn colours along the way, as the scenery reminded him of home:

He wasn't keen on the Ladybird Books, although we loved them.

The exhibition was much more about the writers and illustrators and had many more original documents than the one we saw back in 2015 at the De La Warr Pavillion. This critique of the draft of one of the history books made me laugh, largely because I could just imagine myself writing it:


He enjoyed the seasonal crochet atop the post box outside the cheese shop in Wooler:

He insisted on staying in the car at the seaside, because he said he'd get lost in the snow, which, on closer inspection turned out to be not snow at all but the likely evidence that one of the tankers visible on the horizon had been naughtily washing out their tanks with detergent.




He bucked up a bit after we got home, but this morning Mr BW told me he was rather cut up after his experiences yesterday. I went to see him, but, in reality, he is really rather stuck up.

Flying Tonight

What will you be doing?

Happy Witchday!

It's been raining hard for most of the night.
The garage hasn't leaked.

The mice in the wall behind the bed have 'gone'.

The kickboards are on in the kitchen.
We need 3 short bits of skirting board to finish off the kitchen, and there are definitely enough leftovers somewhere, but we still can't find where they are hiding.

But, that search can continue another day as it's a day off today as it's Mr BW's Witchday!

He gets a whole day off for good behaviour and working very hard.

In fact, he has a whole hour extra today.
I wondered how many times that had happened in his life, but I couldn't work it out.

This is a picture of us celebrating.
I've decided that my true role in life is that of a Soup Dragon rather than Mother Clanger.

I'm off now to make a chocolate cake... as it's a fat-less sponge (to make up for the pint of double cream in the filling and topping as it is to be a black forest gateau) it doesn't keep that well, so I decided to make it as late as possible.

Working hard

We have lost the skirting board.

We have not yet filled the new kitchen cabinets, but I have been trying hard for most of the week.

Almost all the kitchen-related boxes that have arrived here in dribs and drabs over the past 43 months have now been rehomed. Mr BW is not enjoying playing "guess where X is now" although it is all now in the most sensible place it will fit.

It's his Witchday Weekend.

We have promised ourselves that we are going to spend all day in bed on Sunday (the actual Day). Watching TV (mostly recorded, as the hard drive is now nearly full as we never have enough hours in the day to watch the TV we do record), of course, because we are old now, although I am forever 22 months older than him, so he is still just in his 6th decade.

We need a rest as we are exhausted.

I have apparently failed as I still have unplanted bulbs. I nearly managed it this afternoon, but rain stopped play. There is lots of rain currently, although the leaves on the trees are only just turning - another sign of climate change as when we came up here on holiday every year this week for 16 years prior to 4 years ago, all the leaves were long gone.

We have nearly recovered from last weekend's flooding. Nearly.

Incursions and infestations

The towels used to soak up the rainwater that got into the garage during the storm are still drying around the house. Mr BW has constructed some 'edges' to the raised rubber strip that already runs across the floor at the base of the garage door. The gaps in the sides were only small, but it is amazing how much water got through them.

Rain very rarely comes from that direction, and even more rarely horizontally, but we live in uncertain climatic times, so no doubt this will be the first event of many, and better safe than sorry. A repeat of that experience I do not want ever again. We deliberately chose to live on the top of a ridge, but even that was not enough in these times!

The sheet materials that got wet have dried off in the adjacent craft room, and, give or take a few edges, are still usable. I have ordered a 'trolley' similar to those found in some DIY stores for handling sheet materials, which will keep them off the floor and out of danger in the future, and make them easily moveable around the garage/workshop. The Planners made us trim 2m off the originally proposed length of the garage which has made it rather cramped compared with how it should have been. In retrospect, we should have just had it built to how we wanted it, as no-one ever checked. It always amazes me that Building Control only ever check that things are built to Building Regulations, and not to the actual plans agreed by the Planning Department. I wonder what proportion of buildings are actually built to what is agreed?

A couple of weeks ago, when Mr BW was down South for the week, winterising the house, I was kept awake at nights by the unmistakable pitter patter of tiny feet and scratching in the wall behind my head.

All old houses suffer from mice, and we usually just set traps in the lofts. So that the mice die happy, we bait them with peanut butter, and we use very heavy duty traps that kill instantly, as you only need to have once seen a mouse suffering and not dead in a cheap flimsy trap to never use that sort again.

However, our new bedroom is in the single-storey part of the Longhouse that was originally the animal barn, and the walls are over 2 feet thick, and the ceiling is now vaulted, so there is no loft, and no access to anything.

The original walls are comprised of two separate walls of thick stone blocks, with the gap between filled with stone dust and rubble. To bring it up to modern regulations for insulation and energy efficiency, wooden battening was added, then a green plastic vapour membrane, and 4" thick foam board sheets backed with silver foil, which were then plasterboarded, then plaster skimmed.

The water pipes and electricity cables run through holes drilled in the wooden battening, and, as with all modern piping runs, they are plastic. Mice just love munching on plastic. It also sounded like they were having a jolly good munch on the insulation. There was no way that we could make big enough holes in the plasterboard and insulation materials to fit mouse traps. If we'd thought about it, we could have had some access holes built in just in case, but I'd never even heard of people having problems with mice in converted structures.

Anyway, we now have two holes bored in the plasterboard, with two rings of very tough wire with bait blocks threaded on inserted into them, and wire ends protruding out, so that the little devils can't carry the posion away to store (which they do with loose grain-based poison). They are very well sealed, and, as both holes are on my side of the bed, they also have an extra strip of tape so I can be ultra-sure that the meecies haven't escaped the void and come to visit.

I hate using poison, but there is absolutely no option in this situation. I have instructed The Black Familiar not to eat any mice for a while, but, having researched, secondary poisoning seems to be fairly rare, and her taste is more for rabbits (of which there are abundant warrens full at present) and Felix sachets anyway.

There has been fewer mice noises the last couple of nights and 3 bait blocks have already been munched. However, once mice have got in, my experience is that they continue forever. Now, how can I make two wire loops protruding from the wall look sexy?

Sogginess

I woke in the night and the wind and rain were still ferocious.

I went to inspect the garage floor and the many towels and old rags that we'd put against the garage door were too wet to absorb any more water, and the floor mats were also saturated.

Inspiration came to me and I realised we could use the old-fashioned tub spin dryer, that I use to spin water out of fleece and yarn when I dye, it to remove the water from the towels so they could be re-used. Towels dry best when they are very slightly damp after all. There followed an hour of trudging backwards and forwards to the spin dryer lugging cold wet soggy textiles. Just what I wanted to be doing at 1am.

This morning the dehumidifier has mostly dried out the wet-edged sheets of wood and plasterboard that we moved into the craft room from the adjacent garage. My huge store of corks (from bottles - I never throw them away) came in very useful in keeping the stacked vertically sheets of wood wedged apart to allow air to circulate. Some edges might need to be cut off, but at least the majority is salvageable, which is more than it would have been had we not moved it.

The wind has now dropped, and is supposed to spin round by early afternoon, and although there are intermittent sploshes of rain, without the wind, it is no longer hitting the garage door horizontally and running straight down and in, so bypassing the gridded drainage channel across the front. There is already a 2" rubber strip across the width of the garage door opening, so it's probably just a case of finding a way to shore up the two sides effectively. There is only a very small gap each side, but it is staggering how much water managed to get in, and how far it ran across the concrete floor.

At least it provides an opportunity to properly clean out and re-order the garage/workshop, and ensure that in future everything is on (leftover) concrete blocks, covered with (saved from packaging for repurposing) plastic sheeting, off the floor, in case of further future water incursions. A chance to logically sort a year's worth of stuff piled on top of stuff because we had no time to sort it properly with everything else that has gone on in that time.

I did buy some 'sandbag outers' when Lidls had them last year, but they would have been absolutely no use in these freak weather conditions.

Now to wash and get dry all the towels and mats. Probabaly 5 or 6 machine loads full.

A sobering experience, because we'd always believed that we'd be immune from flooding due to weather, being on top of a windy ridge.

Future imperfect

Well, the storm came from the NE and not the SE as the BBC weather forecast suggested. This is very unusual. Despite being on a ridge, on a slope, and not near any water courses, our drive and land slope NE to SW.

The power returned at lunch time, several hours before predicted, but we've left the generator out ready to go again as lights have been flickering ominously throughout the afternoon.

We have torrential rain as well as 50mph winds and some water is seeping into the garage. Despite there being a gridded drain right across the front of the electric door, rain is beating directly on the garage door and runing straight down, and in. Many old towels and cloths are nearly sufficient to absorb it, but we are going to have to work out a better solution for the future. And I have no idea how we are going to dry al the mats and towels that are now sopping wet.

I don't think it will breach the ledge into the main house from the garage, as I don't think it will get that bad, and there is a smoke resistant fire door between the garage and the living areas, which must surely also hold back water if it holds back smoke? If water does get in, it will be a total disaster, due to how the floor in the two adjoining rooms - the craft room and new ground floor bedroom - are constructed.

We currently have all the sheets of wood and plasterboard that were standing on the floor in the garage (mostly rescued from the skip during the building work, or leftover from previous projects, well over £1,000 worth at current prices) drying off in the house, and the 28 year old dehumidifier working, once again saving the day, as it did nearly 3 years ago when the Idiot First Plumber left us with floods (on three occasions).

In other news, we now have a fully functioning kitchen again. Worktops, sinks, and shelves in the cupboards, and knobs on the doors and drawers. And despite previously expresed fears (*nods down*) there is room under the sink for a full size bottle of Fairy!

Keep your fingers crossed that the rain stops soon, will you please?

And here's hoping it is less awful where you are.

Stormy times ahead

The worktops were fitted and finished in 3 hours yesterday. Cracking job, as they say in these parts.

Mr BW is now using his bumper bag of plastic plumbing bits to plumb in the 2 new sinks, the new filter tap, and neaten up the dishwasher plumbing. If I'm really lucky there may just be enough space left under the sink to put a bottle of Fairy, providing that it is a small size.

Mr BW managed to keep the old dishwasher running throughout the 7 weeks that Project Kitchen has been running, even if at times it was sat out in the middle of the floor with a huge stone block on top to counter-balance it (integrated dishwashers fall over when you open the door when they are no longer inbuilt, we discovered). I can cope without worktops or sinks, but not without a dishwasher.

The new dishwasher is wonderful. It's nice to have properly clean and properly dry items again. The very old, cheap-when-new, built-in and very noisy dishwasher we inherited was better than nothing, but I'm glad its time has passed.

The 'storm' has hit us. We are without power.

It went off somewhere around 7am, just as we were about to watch Countdown, and we were impressed to get a text message within 10 minutes from the electricity supply company telling us they knew there was a problem and they hoped to have it fixed by 9.15am. The hours I spent on the phone to the Head of Customer Relations during and after our 11 days without power during Storm Arwen two years ago, berating and bemoaning all their appalling communication and support shortcomings, seem to have paid off (and accepting that I wasn't the only one!).

However, half an hour later we received another text message saying the problem was more serious than they'd envisaged and restoration time is now 4pm. At least there are 290 houses affected this time (spread over probably 20 square miles), rather than just 11 as last time, so more effort is likely to be put into getting whatever has 'popped' fixed in a timely manner.

This storm is called Babet, apparently. Where do they get these names? At least it's not as cold as when Storm Arwen hit in November 2021 although the wind is in a similar SE direction, rather than the prevailing SW. Before reading this, I hadn't actually ever thought that,

"Impacts from the these gusts could be exacerbated by the fact the wind direction will be south-easterly. This is a less common wind direction for storms hitting the UK. The prevailing wind direction is a south-westerly so nature and infrastructure is built with this in mind. As a result, trees and some structures are more vulnerable in strong south-easterly winds. This is part of the reason why Storm Arwen in 2021 felled so many trees and brought a lot of disruption."

So, we are now using our generator plugged into the house via the generator port we had fitted as part of the building work. Great bit of future proofing BWs :) We only have a 2kW petrol generator currently, so can't run high-powered appliances like dishwashers, washing machines and vacuum cleaners, and we need to be careful not to run lots of low-power things concurrently, but at least we can charge things like head torches and phones, and run things like the heating system that depend on electricity to power pumps etc even though they are oil-powered.

One day, if we ever sell Coven Sud so have some money again (*deep sigh* the market is still comatose down there), we will buy a bigger diesel generator that will be powerful enough to run everything. That will also have the advantage that all farmers round here have agricultural diesel tanks, so we can pop round with cans, rather than have to do a 26 mile journey for petrol once a day.

Electric heating and electric cars in isolated rural parts where the power supply is so unstable in bad weather? No, I think not.

You cannot be serious

Trying to do one of the final 'changing address' jobs. Thwarted by HMG failing to run a 24 hour service on the internet. What's that about?

Today's the day when, after more than 7 weeks without worktops and 3 weeks without a kitchen sink, the new worktops are finally going to be fitted, after several false starts. Hopefully.

Outside it is blowing a gale with torrential rain. Because of the size of the worktop 'slabs' they may not be able to fit through the angles from the atrium down the passage and through the kitchen door. If that turns out to be the case, they will have to be carried right around the house to enter through the back door, which will be near-impossible in these meteorological conditions.

We have a decrepit old car with a puncture in the driveway: Little Garage Man swopped it for the Blue Broom yesterday morning, but the Blue Broom was not returned on his way back home as expected as it needs back brake discs and track rod end ball joints to pass the MOT and the parts supplier delivered the wrong parts. The decrepit car's wheel will need changing before it can be moved, which will be interesting in these meteorological conditions..

It's going to be a fun day. Not to mention expensive...

The world is an unsafer place tonight

I gave up on mainstream media news months ago.

I don't have any social media accounts, but I do read the 'whatever it is called today' feeds of several people I have known personally for a long time and trust to post intelligent and informed links and comment.

One such link, here (from where you can find the original source and follow-ons since) elicited later comments with which I totally concur: "I can't remember reading more sober or well-informed analysis of this conflict from a human perspective, ever" and "intelligent conversation on a very complex situation."

I started off reading wondering how many seconds it would be before I clicked away with a deep sigh, but I am very glad I stuck with it as it seems to present an informed explanation of the past and present, from all sides, and why no-one can win.

I particularly appreciated the way the ensuing dialogue was not allowed to degenerate into the usual SM style personally-directed diatribe, and how the writer was able to appreciate and respond proactively to others' views.

The author is Isaac Saul, who says, "I'm a politics reporter who grew up in Bucks County, PA - one of the most politically divided counties in America. I'm trying to fix the way we consume political news."

I may be the only one here who hadn't heard of him before, but, as I said at the beginning, I gave up on mainstream media news months ago and I don't have any social media accounts. If you read just one thing about the Israel-Palestine-Hamas situation, I'd suggest you make it this one.

In this world, if you don't laugh, you'd cry

Today it has been fabulously sunny after a beautiful sunset last night, a very clear night (lots of stars and the Milky Way, better than it's been since last winter) and a light touch of frost this morning, albeit rather too early in the year for my liking.

Mr BW says it has been rather wet and cold down south, where he has been all week doing maintenance and winterproofing things on Coven Sud.

I am definitely much less amused in my older age than I used to be.

Nevertheless, from time to time, amusing things arise that make me smile for hours, days, if not weeks, every time I think of them.

Instance 1: It is Mrs Good Friend BW's birthday today. Last week Mr GF BW let us know that they would be spending it 'glamping'.

Now, The GF BWs are lovely, and have quite similar lifestyles and world views to us most of the time, but they do have, let's put it politely, rather different holiday requirements to us.

Whereas we are happiest away from it all, self catering, using whatever we can glean from local markets, and mingling with the locals in deepest darkest wherever, they prefer 5 star luxury and book and spend for the best of everything. Hence why we have only ever spent one night away anywhere with them in the whole 27 years we have known them.

When we bought Bri@n to enable us to get away from the increasing madness of over-development and noise in the south to the middle of nowhere (the spring before we found Coven Nord while not looking), they expressed quite a lot of amusement at our choice.

Now, even we who can rough out anything, as evidenced by the past three and a half years of Challenging Renovations and Workmen Hell, wouldn't think that camping for the first time in 50 years in mid-October was a good idea. Even if the bell tent in the middle of a field does have 2 log burners and a wood-fired heated bath, the lavvy is still outside.

The thought of them in their field with just a sheet of canvas between them and the pouring rain really shouldn't amuse me as much as it has.

Instance 2: The library van calls every 2 weeks. The librarian and I share both a sense of humour and a belief in the way that things should/could be done, and neither of us suffer fools gladly. Both of us believe that there is more than one way to skin a rabbit, and that those in Administrative Power generally haven't a clue that there is a rabbit to be skinned anyway, so it's best just to get on with reinventing things for the best locally, without troubling to trouble their tiny brains.

Ongoing ridiculous local situations give us much to talk about, and he has commiserated throughout our various long-drawn-out build processes, usually with, "Looks pretty much like Afghanistan at the end of my last tour!" type comments (he is ex-military, obviously).

Today he declared that even The Black Familiar, who always appears for a fuss when my library books are delivered, now miaows with a Northern accent.

"Ah, but she still has Southern Ways!" I retorted. "She killed a hare that was much larger than her the other day, and filleted it, removing both sides from the backbone, rather than just scarfing it down! And this week the pest control service has comprised 4 little bunnies, all of which she politely laid next to the internal door between the garage and the craft room, as presents, ready for me to stand on when I go to the freezer, although she has accepted them back and cleared them all up, save for a few giblets, when they have been thrown in the general direction of her food bowl."

A Northern-sounding cat, whatever next? That one is going to amuse me for a long time.

Modern communication

I have a deep dislike of online chat and of 'business' emails from commercial organisations from people I don't know who start off with "I hope you are well?" and finish in a similar vacuous way, for example, "Have a lovely afternoon!"

I wish I could think of a suitable reply.

If they were writing a letter, I doubt they would be so intrusive and inappropriate. The laws of averages say that a goodly proportion of people in receipt of their unnecessary platitudes will not be well, or will be going through tough times.

Does anyone appreciate such expressions? And, if not, why are they used so widely?

Understanding

For over 30 years I spouted the mantra "behaviour is a manifestation of unmet needs" to every teacher who ever referred a child (or sometimes a parent) with "behaviour problems".

Identify which basic need(s) are not being met, and you can (begin to) understand behaviour. Meet those needs and you change behaviour.

I often had to run through some basics, like Maslov, or Glasser, but sometimes they understood that before anyone ever gets to know anyone else they know certain things about them: their innate needs. All humans have a predictable group of needs: rather like each person's own personal “factory setting”.

But, it's failing me, right now, that mantra, in any attempt to understand the world and those attempting to seize/claim power within it.

Today a new delivery driver brought my groceries. One bag of potatoes had a large tear in its plastic bag, and, it being obvious that some were missing, I fetched my scales and discovered that it weighed 1693g rather than 2500g. Rather than just knocking it off the bill and telling me to keep it, as most experienced drivers would have, he had to ring his store. After 12 minutes his manager was finally located and, his phone being on speaker, I was treated to the full version of her staff management skills, "Don't be such a f***ing moron, just let her keep what is left and take it off the f***ing bill!"

At this point, I gestured to the delivery driver to put his phone near to me, and I let her know that I had heard what she said and was not impressed by the way she was speaking to a member of her staff.

Her reaction - that I should not have been listening - was truly shocking. Hopefully she will spend the next few days waiting for the fall out of the report I said I'd make.

Given that the driver told me he was about to hand in his notice and go off to drive buses, and that the order was partly funded by a £10 voucher from my last complaint (which followed 70 minutes on hold before getting through to a very unhelpful CSA), I might, for once, just let this one drop.

But, we all have unmet needs that make us behave as we do. Don't we?

One can only wonder what those of our so-called world leaders are.

Future imperfect

Sounds like a US data company, Palantir, are about to get awarded lots of NHS contracts. Treatment by data algorithms. Probably by robots. Some of the striking doctors may wish they'd been rather less greedy....

Allowing a foreign company access to control over NHS patient data has huge implications. Why have mainstream media not been reporting this?

Strange happenings

I spent the afternoon on a Zoom call mini-conference hosted by an ex-colleague and friend. It was looking at ways of improving young people's mental health by immersing them in nature, with the hidden agenda of making them value natural and climatic resources more through this exposure. There was a lot more to it than that, but that was the gist.

Shortly before it started, I heard that an environmental vandal had been at work overnight quite close to here.

My first reaction to that was 'fake news spread by social media'; sadly, for once, this proved to not be the case. How a 16 year old can get to a place in the middle of nowhere, with a big chainsaw, then walk half a mile from the road to the famous site (the moon was quite bright last night, but the wind was 65mph and the rain was torrential), cut down a famous tree, and then go home is beyond me. It also tends to disprove the hypothesis of the mini-conference.

Why? "I don't like Wednesdays!" ?

Anyway, there were fewer than 30 people on the call, and one was someone that both my friend and I had worked with 30 years ago. In a senior role, he was a total sexual predator (particularly to trainees), who loved the sound of his own voice, didn't listen, talked over people, never arrived on time to any meeting (even if he'd called it) and always left early to some more important engagement. My friend, then at the start of her career, was the target of his unwanted advances (but bravely stood up to him and called him out), and he and I had words on several occasions about his unprofessional behaviour. Not someone I expected to ever see again, least of all at this sort of event.

The internet was running very slowly here today after the wild weather in recent times, so I was only using audio, and my name was my Zoom pseudonym. Luckily, in the circumstances. After this person turned up 20 minutes late, interrupted the person speaking to give his apologies, 3 times, and demand a recap of what he'd missed, I thought I was sending a personal message to my friend the meeting host, "He doesn't change, does he?" but oops, it appeared to everyone. I'm not sure that he saw it, unfortunately, and he left again after half an hour. A true Freudian technological slip, if such things exist.

All the best made plans

The new kitchen worktops can't be made for fitting next Monday as planned because apparently the colour is no longer a stock item so has to be sent from foreign where it is made. It was a stock item back in June when we had the utility and craft room worktops made, but not now. The material should arrive in "2-3 weeks." Who knows exactly when. Thank goodness we haven't taken the sink out yet (the sink side was due to be templated next Monday when the first side were fitted and then fitted Monday 9th).

The manufacturer claims that he wasn't informed of the new stocking policy by the only distributor in the UK. Just in time delivery has a lot to answer for, but there is absolutely nothing we can do. They won't order material until they have templated, and they couldn't template until yesterday.

Added to this, the tiler isn't now available until the end of October and wants to charge far too much. probably because he knows this is the last job we have for him. Mr BW has therefore decided that he will do the tiling himself. He's done small areas before, and indeed the whole of the utility down south with our own made tiles (almost the same as those we have now found) so no doubt will manage admirably. He will then have done the whole of the kitchen himself.

When the tiler visted to see the job, he did tell us exactly how he would approach it, which will be useful. He also said that the thin protective net-like membrane on the tiles needed to be washed off and the tiles dried off, becauses otherwise it gets in the grout and makes a mess of the finish.

I have failed totally to find what this very thin, almost invisible, mesh membrane is made of.

Apparently it is only found on expensive tiles (hence why we'd not seen it before) and is used to protect them in transit. This is a wodge I picked off the top of the sink full of hot water that I used to float/rub it off the first two boxes. Each piece is very very fine.

Some of it seems to dissolve in the water, but not all. I hope it is a corn starch type product, but I fear it may be plastic. Not wanting to unleash handfuls of microplastic into the local environment via the septic tank, I need to know.

Anyone happen to know, or have better Google-Fu than me?

A week to forget

It's 3 weeks off 15 years since I realised that eating wheat was causing me a lot of digestive and physiological problems.

There have been 3 occasions in the ensuing 15 years when I have inadvertently consumed something with wheat in it.

One of those was last Monday when, in extreme delight at having found some tiles that were exactly what we wanted for the kitchen (slightly smaller but almost exact versions of the ones we made ourselves last time we couldn't find the tiles we wanted, even down to the sort of clay they were made from), I drank 2 cups of hot chocolate from the tile shop's free vending machine. I am always suspicious of anything that I consume away from home, but I didn't check. I think it must have been the shock of the price. *whispers* £70 a square metre, but at least we got the 20% trade discount. They are very beautiful though, and, realistically, still only just over a pound a tile and undoubtedly still cheaper than making our own.

Eating wheat when you can't never ends well. The ensuing pain and digestive, excretory and bloatedness chaos have totally wiped me out all week.

The Army even sent 6 helicopters out on Monday night while Mr BW was at a meeting. Despite hedge hopping all around for half an hour, they still couldn't find me, and I couldn't get out of bed to make myself known to them.

Mr BW has been a star and has somehow still managed to get everything done that we needed to have done before they template the worktop for Phase 1 (LH side and peninsular) tomorrow afternoon.

Fortunately I feel a bit better today, but it is the first time I have ever had to make yoghurt, sundried tomato powder and Sunday dinner while a wall unit was fitted around me and water pipes hung over me.

Old units still visible in this picure.

And here:

Summation of the week: Knob Placement. It's not easy.

The joys of old houses

The kitchen is 4" off square. This has given us a problem. The wall units are OK as the wall is straighter up there and they are only 30cm deep. The base units are fitted to square, but we have lost too much space, so, middle-of-the-night thinking and looking tells us that they need to be moved and rejigged.

I cannot find any tiles I like. I only like square matt tiles, or, at a push, slightly shiny with multi-dimensional slight undulations. "Sorry madam, they are not fashionable!" I refuse to have what is fashionable: brick shaped tiles, laid brick-stylee, most of which are shiny and large, as they look like they should be in an institution. Public toilet, school kitchen, prison... No, just no.

I had an epiphany at 2am a couple of nights ago, and spent an hour cutting sheets of A4 in half, and then blutcaking them to the walls in an inspired-by-years-of-patchwork-designs pattern. I loved it at 3am. I was unsure at 9am. I hated it at 3pm.

[insert picture later]

Last time we couldn't find tiles we liked we made them. There is a big difference between making 2 square metres of tiles and making 7 square metres. Particularly when you now live in an area where you don't know anyone who has a big-enough kiln to fire them.

Day Off

Yesterday looked as if it would be the last nice day of summer, so we went for a perambulation in Perambulation.


Today it is raining.

Which is just as well as Mr BW has just booked for the worktop to be templated on Monday week. Back to work...

Fresh milk containers

The abolition of the differently coloured tops is very frustrating.

When in the freezer or on their side in the fridge it is impossible to tell which is which when you have more than one sort.

I re-use the empty bottles for all sorts of things: storing home-made soup in the freezer, storing dyestocks (red used to be for dyes for wool and blue used to be for dyes for cotton fabric), storing dry rice, pulses and beans (much lighter and easier to manage for dysfunctional hands than glass).

Even the labels look similar now, and (at least in Waitrose and Morrisons) the type of milk (skimmed/semi-skimmed/whole) seems to be in the smallest print - almost as if it is the most unimportant thing!

Progress

Gloriously sunny here again this morning - but it was only 6 degrees overnight. Very very dewy. The stars and the milky way were lovely though. Oh how I love living where there is no light pollution.

Back to the units now - and the mopping and wiping. Bits keep having to be chipped out of the not-square walls so the new units will line up. And hacking the wall means lots of dust, even using an industrial vacuum cleaner as we go. Yesterday was 11 cloths and 7 mop head covers. Let's hope today is less dusty.

Currently installed: top and bottom up to the soil pipe. I'm told that that Is the hardest bit as it involves the two corner units. The build quality and paint finsih is great - much the best we've seen anywhere we went (and we saw most of what is available in the 3 years we've been planning this!).

We ordered several units 'dry assembled' as we needed to be able to chop them about a bit to fit, so we can see much more of the construction than is normally visible. All the joints are dowelled and glued, and things like the adjustable legs are heavy duty and very easy to adjust when in place.

A question - how far (in mm) do your kitchen worktops overhang your units?

Monday end of day

I can remember showing you a picture of the external main water feed (blue pipe) suspended in mid air when the front was out of the house this time last year.

This time it's the kitchen water feeds (RHS).

This will enable us to still have water to the sink for as long as the sink is there.

Once the sink and its nasty old falling apart units and offensive black worktop have gone, all the plumbing behind the units, which came up from the floor, will be rerouted properly via the channel already chiselled vertically into the wall, from the new overhead pipes. But, for now, this is as good as it gets. As long as the dishwasher can still work, I am happy. We have other sinks, but I so hate washing up by hand that even one day of not having a dishwasher fills me with dread.

Meanwhile, work continues on fittting wall cupboards on the LHS around the soil pipe:


This task would have been easier had Mr BW's multi-tool not given up the ghost part-way through. A new one has been ordered for delivery on Tuesday, and as the original was only a cheap Aldi special and is at least 7 years old and in constant use, it owes us nothing.

£102.98 for a new multi-tool against the £5-7K that it would have cost us to hire in a plumber, a plasterer, an electrician, a joiner and a tiler is excellent value in my book. And we certainly couldn't have done it bit-by-bit and still been able to use the kitchen while it was being done.

The preparatory bits that take all the time are now completed, and putting in the base units and the rest of the wall units will be much quicker.

Incompetence

Well, that's a novel way of delivering a pallet of bagged mushroom compost!

And yes, you do have to pick it all up and get it to where we want it. Somehow.

Sunday

After a very hot and humid morning, it's been raining since about 2pm; a bit of very quiet thunder, but no lightning.

It's still hot and humd though, and getting dark.

The kitchen is coming along nicely.

And I got two heaped washing-up bowls of runner beans blanched and into the freezer. Cooking or processing while fitting a kitchen is jeopardise.

Summer may be over.

No rest for the wicked

The first wall unit is up. That, I am told, was the hardest one. I am glad about that because it was very very heavy and a real pain to get to clip onto its fittings (two on one wall and one on.another, and the corner of the room wasn't square, although that wasn't initially apparent and necessitated wrestling the unit off the wall again so the wall bracket could have a spacer inserted to bring it forward). The instructions say that unit can hold take 65kg. I will not be testing that out. The second unit is waiting patiently for its brackets to be positioned.

The rerouting of the plumbing from underfloor to overhead was completed without the need to take down any part of the ceiling. The two new pipes slid through alongside the joists on the third try. This is the first thing that has gone right for ages.

The ceiling got repainted in less time than it took me to dehead the spent flowers in the back garden. Washing out the roller and brushes took me more time than the painting.

In between we are trying to fit in all the normal end-of-summer tasks, as well as various visits to see other organic food producing enterprises, various village shows, and b33 events.

The b33s are back where they should be at this time of year, helped by the glorious weather this week, the hen with the bad foot is much better, and there is a lovely dewy spider's web on my old plough.

It is chaos.

We love it.

Seaside and dishwashers

Yesterday, as the weather was set to be the 7th day of the long-awaited summer (Indian Summer - is one even allowed to call it that these days?), we went to the coast an hour and a half north of here. A repeat trip to that 4 months ago on our wedding anniversary. A fabulous proper day out with beautiful scenery there and back and the beach (sand, scenery, pebbles, shells, fossils, trains, free parking, uncommercialised) is definitely now confirmed as my third favouritest beach in the world. I even found a cowrie (my favourite shell)!

Today in the kitchen Mr BW did electrics: lowering a socket and switch so we could put in a cup shelf and making the under-cupboard lighting safe, and even more plastering. Once again, still-live sockets were found behind units, although these were not quite as bad as the live socket found behind the plyboard in the upstairs shower.

And I spent the whole day - yes, the whole day - trying to work out which new dishwasher to buy. I thought I had it all worked out months ago, but the information derived from many sources proved to be out-of-date.

Why are there now no mainstream dishwasher manufacturers offering more than 2 year warranties as standard?

Even Miele, who claim that their appliances last 20 years, now only give 2 years as a standard. In the 1980s they gave 20 years, last time I looked it was 10 years, now it is only 2, the same as most other manufacturers. Put your guarantees where your claims are, manufacturers!

The purchase cost of a dishwasher is only a very small proportion of the long-term costs. Energy usage and water usage are, these days, much more significant than the initial price. Plus some manufacturers will not sell spare parts to competent individuals to effect repairs, so one is forever tied to high-price manufacturer servicing.

I finally settled on a Bosch, with a (claim after purchase) 5 year guarantee, even though it has all sorts of smart tech crap that we will never use (seriously Bosch, who needs a push-notification on one's phone that one only has 5 dishwasher tablets left?!), because the overall price per year of guarantee was less than that of any other machine.

Bought via John Lewis on a cashback credit card, with free removal of the old appliance (and it not being able to arrive for another 11 days, by which time hopefully we/the new kitchen will be ready for it), and with 3 months of free dishwashing 'product', it wasn't what I had expected to be purchasing.

In the past nearly 40 years I have had 3 Zanussi dishwashers, 2 Siemens and an inherited Whirlpool. The latter was old and smelly when we got here, and, three and a half years later, is still plodding on (albeit with the door held on with extra screws, and the top basket held together with Mi1dred's high temperature sealant) although it is very very noisy, doesn't provide as much space as it might and doesn't dry well. Zanussi don't make 'em like they did 40 years ago, and Siemens have been more than disappointing (the first lasting 5 years, the second 7), despite supposedly being a premium made-in-Germany product (I have just discovered that Bosch now own Siemens though, although the latter was once the premium product).

My requirements were: freestanding, very quiet, very energy-efficient, very low water usage, at least 5 years of guarantee, cutlery shelf rather than basket, delay button, ability to turn off all sounds. The one I found, having spent all day researching, seems to be the only one of the hundreds available that can offer all of those.

Which? say that the average lifespan of a dishwasher is 17 years. We'll see...

Perils

In case, at some point in the not too distant future, you find you can no longer view BW - and this problem will probably apply initially to those of you who keep everything totally up-to-date - there is a problem with the age of the security certificate for this website.

Thanks to Commentator Tim for bringing this to my attention and advising that the way round it is to add it as an exception to whatever browser plug-in is preventing access. Well... I think that is what he said he did, such technical things are beyond me these days.

This is the sort of thing you might see:

I have sought advice from the hosting company and the nice tech who picked up my pleas for help has pointed me to exactly what to do, but I am a bit too scared to do it until Mr BW can supervise (I think he had to do it for his own website), but I am unconvinced that my 20 year old lovingly hand-coded-by-Oddverse-Alan (who has long since left the building) template will cope with new-fangled add ins. And as to where I find the .htaccess file, well, I probably knew it once...

But... it may be a while before Mr BW can help as now that we have removed all the old kitchen units on the LHS, we have discovered that the water pipes that feed the sink and dishwasher that we believed ran between the ground floor ceiling and the first floor floorboards actually run down the wall and then underground. They run down the wall behind the lovely oh-so-clean (*shudders*) grey-coloured soil pipe in the centre of the picture.

Cheap 1970s copper pipes in nasty 1970s cement tend to corrode and leak, as we found to our great cost when we had to renew and re-route all the central heating pipes that originally ran through the same concrete floor when we first moved in. So, this problem must be fixed before we fit a brand new kitchen, or we risk having to pull out and re-replace the kitchen at some future point when the pipes leak. That 'we' being the royal 'we' of course, and, obviously, sourcing and re-routing pipework has to come above renewing blog security certificates.

Thank goodness for the many thousands of pictures we have taken at pertinent points in the renovation and building works. And thank goodness that Mr BW has them all stored and indexed so that he can find them when he needs them in a hurry. And that he has the correct tools and knows how to do the job, as that's another £1,000 in plumber costs saved. Thankfully, as the coffers are more than empty.

We've just seen this bird on the drystone wall:

Mr BW thought it was the yellow wagtail back again, but it is the wrong colour, and slightly larger than the last time we saw it. It was, however, doing a wagtail shimmy. Any ideas?

Vegetables and chocolate

Mr BW hates beetroot.

I have no idea why, as that he grows for me is delicious. In the past, I've tried hiding it in many dishes, but he always spots it.

The other day, having cooked up the latest batch in the pressure cooker, and found it to be particularly gorgeous, I persuaded him to try it again, hoping that maybe his taste has changed as he heads towards his next decade. While he didn't actually spit it out, he did pull a face.

"How can I make you like beetroot?" I asked.

"Maybe cover it in chocolate?" he suggested.

"But it will slip off!" I protested.

"Well, then, I can have the chocolate and you can have the beetroot!" he retorted.

Mr BW has no such problem with courgette. He will eat it raw, or cooked in many different ways.

His new favourite is in this very yummy Chocolate and Courgette Brownie (gluten free) recipe given to us by b33keeping friends last weekend. It was in cups, but I translated and tested in grammes.

"It wasn't me, it was a mouse!" he declared when I asked where the missing 3cm squares had gone.

It's meant to be made in a square 20cm/8" tin, but most of my tins are still lost in a box buried under the new kitchen units in the living room, or maybe in the conservatory, who knows, so I had Mr BW do a bit of mental maths and we decided that the best available alternative was the 26cm round tin (first used for the bottom tier of our wedding cake nearly 30 years ago) that was in a kitchen cupboard. I say was, as the contents of that cupboard are now (as of yesterday afternoon) also in boxes, buried, etc etc. This made it a bit thinner than it should have been, but that was no bad thing.

I cut it into 3cm squares to get it to just under a thousand calories a portion, and even the courgette, which probably counts as one of your five a day doesn't negate that.

Chocolate and Courgette Brownie:

300g courgette, finely grated
200g almond butter
1 large egg, beaten
2 level tablespoons cocounut oil, melted
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
85g h0ney
65g cocoa powder
1 level teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1/4 level teaspoon salt
100g chocolate chips or cacao nibs, or chopped nuts

1. Preheat oven to 175°C and line 20cm square tin with baking parchment.
2. Squeeze excess moisture from courgette (I squeezed it with clean hands into a sieve over a bowl; I then had 220g)
3. In a large bowl, stir together courgette, almond butter, egg, coconut oil and h0ney until smooth.
4. Add cocoa powder, bicarb, salt and choc chips/nuts.
5. Bake approx 25-35 minutes. It will still seem a bit 'soggy', and the top won't spring back when pushed like many cakes, but it should have shrunk slightly from the sides of the tin and the top may look slightly crispy. It's a brownie not a cake after all, so it's meant to be squidgy and decadent!

I had to have it with plain yoghurt as it is so rich, but Mr BW has no such problem. Creme fraiche would go well with it too, and a bit of torn mint sprinkled onto that would help cut through the gooeyness too I think.

To make a vegan version, substitute the h0ney with maple syrup and the egg with chick pea juice.

It's summer here again today! Which is of course typical as we are emptying food and crockery cupboards in the south-facing kitchen prior to ripping them out. That will leave just the side with the sink and dishwasher still as it was.

Luckily I managed to get 10 of the 64 litre plastic boxes emptied yesterday ready for re-use, and we have lots of plastic folding tables. We had three big built-in heavy-duty floor-to-ceiling deep double-doored wooden cupboards installed across one end of the long room back in 2021, so we are still able to function. We are also keeping the actual worktops temporarily so that they can rest back on top of the new base units once they are installed, pending templating and manufacture of the Corian tops and sinks (which might take the manufacturer a couple of weeks).

Today's task...

... is putting (at least some of) these 15 boxes of files, which came up with the removal men and have sat on the landing (on cardboard so as not to permanently dent the carpet) for a month now, back into the filing cabinets from whence they came on 17.7.22. Thank goodness for good labelling, and good pre-weeding, because they came out of 7, but have to go back into 4.

Meanwhile, Mr BW continues to work on the kitchen bit by bit, so that there is the minimum disruption to the usual mad frenzy of early autumn harvesting and preserving jobs.

The plastic boxes have to be emptied so that we can reuse them for temporary storage of the next tranche of kitchen cupboards to be removed. Mr BW can then get on with the next stage of electrics and the next bit of floor tiling.

Only Bodgit and Coverit (previous owners) could have managed to put in a brand new kitchen 22 years ago without tiling all the floor and filling the gaps beween the walls and the floor. 17th century floor (with later additions of loose concrete, which constantly sheds dust) is not what I want under my new kitchen units. Of course, one cannot now buy the tiles previously used (which we like much more than anything you can buy now), so we've had to get cheap generic grey, and ensure the new overall footprint covers the old. That will be where the masking tape is, all being well.

Now at the beginning of meteorological autumn, we had the first 'proper' day of summer yesterday. Warm from dawn to dusk (and all night), no wind, and we finally managed to sit outside to eat in the evening. There have been a handful of other warm and sunny days in July and August without rain, but they have always been marred by northerly or easterly winds, and too-cool evenings. That out-of-position jet stream has a lot to answer for.

A most disappointing summer, although the runner beans, mange tout and peas have loved it. Even taking into account the heat in June, I find it very hard to believe that it was the eighth warmest summer on record.

In summary:

" Met Office Senior Scientist Mike Kendon said: “The lion’s share of fine and settled weather in summer 2023 for the UK occurred in June, when high pressure was widely established bringing many dry days of warm summer sunshine. After that, however, the jet stream shifted much further to the south, with low-pressure systems often bringing rather wet and windy conditions to the UK through much of July and August.

“The characteristic variability of the UK’s climate has once again been illustrated by this summer: the season’s temperature figures are influenced by how significantly hot June was, but the result is that summer 2023 will go down as a warm and wet one for the UK, with plenty of rainfall in the second half of the season.” "

A question for those of you who grow fennel (herb fennel that is): are your plants lacking in foliage this year? Ours have plenty of flowers (the b33s are happy) and seeds (we and the birds will be happy) but almost no leaves. This is true of both the bronze and the green varieties. I noted on last week's GW that Monty Don's looked pretty similar. I'd have thought with all the rain there has been the foilage would be very lush.

Repurposing, and saving b33s

Occasionally one of you says something in the comments that reminds me of things I have mentioned before and then forgotten about. Yesterday it was Scoakat.

This is the place where the labyrinth was going to go. Until last summer.

Only we then had several roofs full of old slates that were beyond reuse to dispose of.

We had anticipated the slates being put back on the roofs they came off, but it became apparent that they were not best quality when they were first reused in 1974, and they were several different sizes. I'm pretty sure that the disappearing/disappointing roofers also dumped some they'd taken from elsewhere on the pile they left behind.

It was either pay for 2 skips (the better part of a thousand pounds) and for them to go to landfill, or come up with a plan.

So I came up with a plan. Make a slate garden out of them.

One day when Chief Builder wasn't here - or he'd undoubtedly have charged us extra - we got his lads to take the (many) piles of slate down to the bottom of the orchard and spread them over a flat area.

We then added the best old 'traditional' b33hive we have (salvaged from a field years ago and refurbished), and Mr BW put in a row of big stones from the demolished front of the house to stop the slate sliding down if there was torrential rain, and to make an edge to strim grass up to. I've been adding plants occasionally (not visible in the photo), mostly white, and eventually the area will have seats and a table, and be a nice place to sit. If we ever have time for sitting.

From time to time I go and jump on the slates, and, eventually, it will all be crushed. Perhaps we should have a pogo party to get it done more quickly?

This 'Lemon Popsicle' Kniphofia, just outside the kitchen door, came out a couple of days ago. The b33s are loving it, and the nearby chive flowers. The summer has not been good for any pollinators, as they can't fly when it is raining or too cold, and we've seen maybe a tenth of the butterflies we had last year, and about the same for bumble b33s. I've seen very few hover flies, and few solitary b33s.

With a few sunny days in the last week, our b33s are madly flying anywhere and everywhere, trying to gather enough pollen and nectar to raise the winter bees that will keep their colony alive until spring. Usually honeyb33s won't forage on 'complicated' flowers, because their tongues are relatively short (compared to bumbleb33s) and they can't reach into the flower corollas. Generally they just ignore anything that is not a 'single' or 'open' flower, but they are currently so desperate that they are exploring complex flowers they usually wouldn't go near. Here, a 'frizzy' poppy (which we didn't plant here but which must have come up from the south, where they just appeared and cross-bred over the years). Apologies for the poor photo (two b33s to the RHS are about to dive into the petals to see what they can find):

For the first time in the 28 years we have had buzzy familiars, we haven't taken any h0ney off at all. On August 11th, because of the poor weather in preceding weeks, when we opened the b33s on the first fine day, we found two colonies starving and had to emergency feed them with sugar syrup. There was no h0ney at all stored in the brood frames. Had we not opened them on that day, they might now be dead.

I am still very shocked and upset about that, but have to console myself that we did get there in time, and we couldn't have looked at them any sooner as it was too cold and too wet to open the hives.

In order to get them through the winter now, we will have to feed each colony around 20kg of sugar syrup, as they have been unable to collect enough nectar to store, and only just enough to keep themselves going through the summer. Luckily b33s aren't fussy about where their carbohydrate comes from, but Costco are limiting what they are allowing people to purchase, and it's currently around £1.17 a kilo in supermarkets (cf 60p a year ago and 48p in 2019), plus stirring 200kg of granulated sugar into boiling water (it takes about a litre of water to dissolve a kilo of sugar) to dissolve it into solution is a big and arm-exhausting task. It's going to cost £200 to hope to keep them alive over winter, with no income as there has no h0ney to harvest. The tax man is not going to be happy at the size of loss we will be declaring this year! We don't keep b33s to make money, but it is nice if we can break even, as well as do good through providing a pollination source to farmers.

Of greater concern is whether queen bumbleb33s (and other b33s where they do not persist as whole colonies over winter) will have been able to store enough body fat, before they go into hibernation, to survive the winter.

I don't know what sort of summer b33keepers have had in other parts of the country, but talking to others locally at the Show last weekend, it's the same story all over up here. This really has been the most challenging year in living memory. As I said to Mr BW, if this had been our first year, I don't think we'd have had a second.

And while we're having a catchup post, we have finally (nearly) finished the area around the vegetable beds in front of the greenhouse. We never rush into doing things until the ideas we have feel 'right', and this part has taken 3 years to finish off, although we have been growing in the raised beds since soon after the greenhouse was finished the first autumn we were here (2020).

The central 'feature' is another big lump of recycled house stone, topped by an old feeder (into which we will plant something when we decide what), and several objets: many old shoe lasts, and some triangular metal floor tiles from a closed foundary in the next village down south. All picked up over many years for not very much money at all, or given to us by people clearing out (on which subject, we have already gained a reputation locally as Rehoming Central and Nice Nearest Neighbour this week kindly gave us a beautiful 40" x 18" slab of granite left over from her kitchen refit 5 years ago, which will no doubt turn into a table or bench eventually - maybe even down in the slate garden pictured at the beginning as I've just realised the colours will be perfect together).

The small green lumps are creeping thyme (loved by b33s) which will hopefully cover the entire area around and between the stepping stones eventually. We bought two very large plants (for £4 each), split them into 8, and will propagate more by dividing them further as time goes on.

The seed said 'cucumber' on the packet...

... but it grew a snozcumber.

Unblogged Things

Tuesday 15th August: the new kitchen arrived, albeit not unitl 8.15pm, and after spending an hour offloading, they then had to fiddle the tacho to enable them to get back to Leeds by 1am ready to start work again at 7am the next day.

The overly-friendly and far too jolly Eastern European deliverers declared that in 10 years of delivering, they had never seen such a comprehensive scheme for marking off and labelling units as that I had devised.

The 22 units and 50+ other pieces completely filled the living room. This was OK as we have not used the living room since we stopped having to use it as a bedroom in December 2020.

Wednesday 30th August: the replacement parts for those damaged or missing on delivery finally arrived. After 15 days rather than the promised "5 to 7" and then only because we applied thumb screws, threats, and legalise. Not to mention spells.

I still do not understand how someone could have packed a corner unit with only one of the two doors attached, or how three oak coloured plinths could have been passed as correct when they were black.

Thursday 31st August: the third day of summer finally arrived, on the last day of meteorological summer. Must have been the full super blue moon or the concurrent first passage for ages of the ISS that hastened it.

How did we spend it?

We took out a lot of the kitchen. Peninsular, half the side base units, and put the drinks fridge on a dolly, wheeled it across the kitchen and plugged it back in.

The only thing that worries me is that the drinks fridge might fall off the dolly and break all the necessary cooling bottles.

Mr BW decided that he was scared and would rather do my jobs: ordering things, organising things, provisioning, freezing things, and finance. I pointed out that I had already ordered the groceries for next week, and various other required items (some of which he hasn't yet even realised will be needed), so that was hardly fair, and that I did assemble and fit an MFI kitchen (from flat pack) when I was 22 or 23, so could probably manage a fully assembled version at 60, and no, there would be no lessons in Financial Management and Coven Keeping to enable him to do my jobs, so he'd Just Better Get On With It.

Watch this space...

Gluts

Just running through with an idea for anyone who has a rhubarb forest from all the rain and a glut of basil:

Savoury rhubarb sauce.

I used h0ney (naturally) and made 4 times the quantity, with 2 heads of garlic (need to keep the werewolves away). I froze a few portions, but I'm sure it would be fine if bottled (hot) into sterilised screw-top jars. Delicious.

Another hint for rhubarb: cook it in (just a few tablespoonfuls) of orange or clementine juice. The citric acid somehow works to neutralise the rhubarb's oxalic acid and results in needing no (or reduced) sweetening.

Anyone got any other good recipes for rhubarb?

I have been given an excellent recipe for the gluten-free chocolate brownie made with courgettes that I sampled at the weekend. Coming soon...

What 5 Words

Saturday: Reds, Blue, Oranges, Silver, MUD.

Sunday: Exhausted, bumblefoot, soaking, washing, feeding.

Monday: Harvesting, gluts, preserving, freezing, chasing.

Tuesday: Harvesting, electricals, plastering, gardening, researching.

We finally have a few days of good weather. So much to do. Doing so much, but no energy left at the end of the day for blogging. More when it rains.

On Beeing BWs

Tomorrow Mr BW and I are doing something that we haven't done since pre-blog days.

Something we swore we'd never do again.

But something we have been talked into.

It last happened somewhere between the summer of 2000 and the summer of 2002, I can't now remember exactly when, although I'm sure that somewhere in Deep Box the answer still lies..

It is an all-day activity, and we have had to set our alarm clocks, and pack a picnic.

Not the main event, but points may yet mean prizes, who knows. But if his chain beats my sheep, or his corks beat my blouse basket, or his flower beats my borage, or his chilli my rowan, there will be spells, for sure.

I hope your plans for the Bank Holiday weekend are as exciting?

Canada Geese

13 of them, presumably enjoying the left over grains of barley.

One of them lives on a nearby pond, and the others fly by and pick him/her up en route to wherever they fly to every day, and drop him/her off when they return. Maybe they just all go for a communal fly about, who knows.

My favourite type of geese. I even still have a calico shoulder bag with an all-over design of BW blue lino-printed Canada geese that I designed and made at my 1960s progressive primary school when I was 9.

Walking on the beaches, looking at the...

...peaches.

Who said you can't grow peaches in England's most northern county?

Delicious.

Nearly got the craft room sorted. How is it that not everything that was in the plan chest will fit back in it now?!

Mr BW currently has the steering wheel off the car and the bit with the indicators on it on the kitchen table (luckily still the plastic one). He is trying to save £500 by cleaning the copper contacts that are stopping the right indicator working reliably, because it won't pass the MOT otherwise. 10 years of muck and many many weeks of being sat home alone and stationary on the drive down south have wrought their worst. Hopefully nothing that a cotton bud and some IPA can't fix.

Mission Accomplished

Mr BW has his Mum's old balloon pump. "Made in England" and still working as well as it did in the late 1950s or early 1960s when it was new.

He blew up 18 balloons (after I'd painstakingly emptied the gold metallic penny-sized discs out of the clear balloons as they are an environmental hazard when balloons pop - that sort of balloon should be banned) and we stuffed them into black bin liners, and just about got them all into the car.

We tied them in places all round the outside of Nice Nearest Neighbour's cottage, including on the plant arches and in her greenhouse.

The next morning we sent her a text message wishing her a 'Happy 70th Birthday!' She didn't reply, but it often takes her a while as she is often out walking or gardening. We got a bit worried when we hadn't heard anything by lunchtime, and hoped we hadn't offended her.

It was nearly 3 o'clock when she appeared at our gate in her car. She extracted a huge water butt from the boot and staggered down the drive with it. She plonked it outside the garage. We knew about this water butt as it had fallen off its stand by her greenhouse during torrential rain in the week and dented, and she doesn't like non-perfect things but we do, so she was donating it to us rather than take it to the tip.

"Present for you!" she said. "But it's your birthday" I replied. "Did you have a nice meal last night?" asked Mr BW.

"Ah, yes thanks. But when we got home last night, and it was nearly dark by then, my friend said, 'Look there's some balloons, were they there when we went out? How did they get there?'"

"Balloons?" said Mr BW innocently. "Where?"

"Everywhere! And a banner, and some flags, and this morning I even found some outside the back door and in the greenhouse?"

"Really!?" I said. "How very odd!"

"It must have taken someone ages to blow them all up!" she smiled.

"We have a balloon pump... but we admit nothing!" I said. "Je ne admit rien!" The banter continued for a while longer, with her never directly accusing us, and us denying everything. The closest we'll get to knowing she was pleased.

A couple of hours after NNN had gone home, they started harvesting the barley in the fields around us. Two combines, a tractor and big bailer, and a tractor and trailer (at least part of each is actually in that picture, but you have to look carefully!). Less than two hours later all that remained was a field of stubble and some bales. To think that 70 years ago that sort of task would have taken a dozen men and a team of horses and rudimentary harvesting machinery all week.

Don't mention the bales...

All piled up so they couldn't roll around and get up to mischief in the night. They know how to keep bales under control in the North.

By 8am the next morning the bales had all been collected too. Quickly, before it rained again.

It didn't rain until 8pm last night, and then only a bit of drizzle. Today is sunny, for the first time in weeks, but it's late September / early October light.

Plotting

I can't tell you the difference it makes having proper furniture again. A proper office chair to sit on instead of plastic, being able to sort the craft room boxes finally, and places to put other things. I didn't know how much boxes and plastic chairs were getting me down until this week.

3 hours to re-Briwax this dresser (in the garage, it was safer as I'm a bit messy with Briwax). It look so much better now. The top of the base has a lot of marks and needs the wax removing with fine steel wool and meths before it is re-waxed. Tomorrow's job.

With the arrival of the 1950s bed-settee that was previously in the Studio down south, the entrance is now bright and quilty, and not as cramped as this photo makes it look. Oh for a wide-angle lens. Eventually things will move round again - when the living room is clear of boxes and then boxed kitchen units, but for now this will do.

Earlier in the week I also polished up the old shop haberdashery unit and now that Mr BW is back he has refitted the mirrors and glass shelves to the 'display' side (not visible in the picture). The broken-in-transit mirror stuck together well with clear polytunnel mending tape, and doesn't really notice.

The plan chest will be refilled from its boxes tomorrow - Mr BW tells me that each drawer is in a box, and the drawer labels I thought I'd misplaced are actually in with each box. As Cleaner BW Nord said on Thursday as she attempted to clean around the boxes, we may have lots of boxes, but they are very well organised and labelled.

Then we have to remove half the length of a couple of shelves in the craft room (just out-of-shot on the RHS) to make space for another old wooden drawer unit (the one on the LHS) to go agins the wall, and all will fit in nicely. Reducing from a 7m x 7m Studio to a 5m x 5m, even though the sewing items from the original larger room are now in what was previously a bedroom, has presented logistical problems.

Nice Nearest Neighbour is 70 tomorrow and let slip last weekend when she was here helping out with supervising removal men that she is out for the evening with friends tonight, so we are just off to balloon and banner-bomb her cottage while she is absent. She has lived alone for nearly 25 years since her husband died, and pretends not to like fuss about birthdays and such things, but we're hoping she will be secretly delighted! If not we're in trouble...

Cereal serial

For those who wondered what the infamous hit-by-removal van-but-fortunately-survived-unscathed concrete tub with tree (Prunus Serrula, my favourite tree) in it looks like:

In the bottom of that picture you can see me taking the rubbish down the long track to the bins using the b33 trolley. Necessity being the mother of invention and all that. The bags were too heavy to carry down, and too smelly to wait until Mr BW got back so we could drop them off as we passed in the car.

For those who wondered what a field of spring barley that was starved of water at a crucial time in its growth (May/early June) looks like:

The ears are absolutely flat, with almost no kernel.

This was sprayed with glysophate to dry it off a month ago (yes, really, a known carcinogen, but they are still using it to artifically 'ripen' cereal crops - no wonder there are so many people who react badly when eating cereals). Since then it has been too wet to cut. Interestingly, up here, the farmer told Mr BW, they always have to dry cereal crops after they are harvested, even in a good year, as the moisture content is always too high for storage. In East Anglia and the SW cereal crops only have to be dried in exceptionally bad years. The current energy cost to dry a failed crop must exceed its value.

Some of the winter wheat and barley has been harvested, and their yields are probably better as there wasn't a drought at the time they were at a critical stage of development. The bright light spot is harvested winter wheat, the brown above that is already ploughed harvested fields. They do love their ploughing up here: clearly no dig to preserve the soil structure hasn't reached these parts yet.

With small crops of cereals and lack of imported cereals from other places (eg Ukraine) I predict the price of flour and bread will rise a lot in the months to come. Supply and demand. Not to mention profiteering.

Which reminds me: I heard on the radio the other day that prices in supermarkets have gone up by 25% in the past 2 years, except for prices in Aldi and Lidl that have gone up by 35%. The majority of our groceries are delivered by Morrisons now (who wants to drive 26 miles to get food) and on the odd occasions that we are in town and go into Aldi, we are shocked that their prices are frequently more than Morrisons, on those things we buy (basic ingredients), and can't believe how their emphasis is now on ready meals and highly food processed items.

I shudder when I look at the ingredients in what those new evangelical vegans are buying thinking it is healthier and will save the planet. The fact that many of Aldi's buyers have changed since the new CEO took charge is also evident. Wine, DIY tools and products and gardening products are not what they were, and the centre aisles are now full of plastic tat and kitsch that only those of a consumeristic mindset would even think they need.

Gratuitous post box picture.

Yeah I know I should have got rid of the triangular plum moth pheromone trap, but that takes time and Mr BW is on his way back up after 11 days down south and there are a few more things I need to get done before he gets here: particularly as he said he was leaving at 9am and then managed to leave before 7.30am.

Those of you with long memories will know that the post box used to live outside the front door at Coven Sud. It is now in the back garden and, as almost all our windows face it, I am happy that I can now see this all the time, rather than just when I go out.

I love my post boxes. And my red telephone boxes. But that is a project for the future, maybe... if there are still any around to be had for a sensible price.

The beginning of August

It didn't rain at all today!

Yesterday the wind was from the east. Today it was from the north.

Rarely is the wind from the north or east in summer.

Today the swallows are massing - seemingly for their migration south for the winter. Weeks early.

Who can blame them?

Witchy's little helper

Without Mr BW here, I've had to do a few spells to get through the stuff he normally does.

This one, to keep the hedge trimmed, has been rather too successful, and it won't be long before the ewes have climbed right up the wooden fence on the field side of the hedge and are actually in the garden. This one is half way up already.

Anyone know when it is going to stop raining?

The Sequel

Mr BW has been down south (the first time in 6 weeks) for the last week to sort everything out: garden, re-painting, pond, hedge cutting - and overseeing the removal of everything left down there apart from a bed, a settee, 2 lounge chairs, a dining table, 4 wooden dining chairs, a few garden seats and some summerhouse furniture. Basically just enough to provide future prospective purchasers (chance would be a fine thing) with an idea of scale, but things that we won't miss up here. We have lived with plastic dining tables and chairs for three and a half years, so we can manage for a little longer!

The week before last we decided we were fed up with boxes everywhere here and no furniture to put the contents into. With a totally dead property market, so no timescale, we decided to just move almost everything else up.

Everything left Coven Sud at 1.15pm on Saturday in 2 Luton vans and arrived here safely on Sunday morning, although rather later than planned as the 2 removal men (company owner and his strongest worker) didn't understand that there is not a fuel station or a take-away food outlet on every corner up here, and came cross-country to avoid getting pulled into the weighbridge just off the A1 south of N'castle.

They were well overweight - who knew that you could only legally put just over a tonne in a Luton? We had asked for a 7.5T vehicle, but they assured us 2 Lutons would be OK, but they'd rather underestimated the weight of an old haberdashery unit, a plan chest, 7 x 4-drawer filing cabinets, a huge display cabinet, a dresser, a solid 1950s settee and about 100 boxes of stuff (that we just threw into crates in a hurry without having time to sort it properly) one weekend last September when we had a completion date but no time in the working week to be away from supervising builders taking out the front of the house up here. Oh, and I forgot the old plough from outside the front door that also went in.

Unloading it here:

One of the vans ran out of diesel en route (the route they went is easily 50 miles between fuel stations) on Saturday night and they'd had to borrow jerry cans from a farmer and arrived rather stressed on Sunday in just one van at 10.50am rather than the promised 9am. They did call at 9.40am and say they were half an hour away.

Nice Nearest Neighbour (who lives half a mile away) kindly offered to come round to lend 'moral support' as she put it, which was so helpful, particularly as she is excellent at jigsaw puzzles. She also pointed out that pubs round here that do B&B, like where they had stayed overnight, don't serve breakfast on a Sunday morning before 8.30am, so we had always expected them to be late.

After they had unloaded the first van, they went back to their hotel 30 miles away to put the jerry cans of fuel into Van 2 so that it could get to the fuel station to fill up, and then on to here to unload, before both driving straight back down South ready for a 7am start for a run to Wetherby yesterday. Oh to be 30 and to think that sort of thing is a good idea... or indeed to have the physical stamina to be able to do it.

As Remover's Mate reversed the retrieved (still full) Van 2 in at lunchtime, he hit the big concrete drain pipe tub with a tree in it that we had the builders place to protect the drystone wall up by the gate against builders' and merchants' vehicles during the building work. We must have had several thousand vans, delivery trucks, skips, cranes, bulldozers, large caravans etc etc through here since the tub was placed, and that was the first time it was needed. Even I managed to reverse a Luton through the gate without issue; the gateway is pretty wide!!!

The concrete pipe tub (and so the huge 400 year old stone pillar gatepost and the drystone wall) survived unscathed, but the van didn't

Luckily it was only the back nearside light cover and numberplate that were broken (the bulbs and electrics were OK) and Nice Nearest Neighbour (whose winter pastime is doing jigsaws with more pieces than I knew existed) managed to piece the 32 bits of red plastic back together and we stuck them together with polytunnel repair tape and gaffer taped the whole lot back on again so they could get home legally in the dark. I really hope they got home safely as they were both clearly exhausted when they left at 3pm.


2 hours 37 minutes to offload (in two tranches), 4 hours and 30 minutes to load.They did a fantastic job though, and were so helpful and pleasant. Couldn't have hoped for better service.

Mr BW is coming back up on Thursday (well that's the plan currently) so I have a few more days of peace and gentle unpacking before we start the heavy stuff. And we have to get it shifted/sorted quickly as the unsorted stuff (which mostly is ancient paperwork that mostly needs burning) is currently filling most of the lounge and we need the space as the new kitchen arrives, 22 units in boxes, fully assembled, plus all the panels, plinths, pelmets etc, in w/c 14th August.

Mr BW is going to fit it as if he can do oak stairs, he can certainly do a kitchen! And, thinking back, I put together and installed a flat-packed MFI kitchen in the first house I lived in when I left university. That was in the days before I lost my DIY skills and developed learned hoplessness (one stage beyond learned helplessness) as far as anything practical is concerned. When one is married to a highly skilled engineer with advanced skills in absolutely everything in every medium or material, there is no point in trying to compete. Or even necessity to try.

There are an awful lot of packages containing specialist resins and foot long bolts for fixing cupboards into crumbling old walls that have arrived since Mr BW was last here!

I forgot to say - the rain held off for all the time they were unloading, and the only thing that got drizzled on even slightly was one side of the metal plan chest that I simply wiped dry with a cloth. Given that the previous night and the night after (from about an hour after the removal men left) had torrential rain, and what was forecast, we were very lucky. Now, whichever dead relatives are up there watching over us and organising things, could you just arrange to get Coven Sud sold, and pronto, please?

(I'll add some photos later when I've dealt with the overnight slug problem in the b33hives - anyone know if slugs eat polysterene as we have some very expensive new mini-nuc boxes that slugs seem to swarming over?)

Deliver us from evil

It could be worse... until last night it was forecasting 70+% chance of heavy rain all day.

This morning, after a night of torrential rain and strong winds (Biblical proportions), it is windy and overcast with rays of occasional sun, and the forecast is now saying "gusty winds and thundery showers".

Now, can Nice Nearest Neighbour (half a mile away) and I keep up with wiping the rain off incoming items?

Live Blogging: Moving Day

07:27 Mr BW moves the cars to next door.

08:12 Mr BW puts wood and cardboard over the balcony and ladder. He has already removed a pane of glass from the balcony. What went up that way can come down that way.

08:34 The CCTV down South malfunctions. This could be my entertainment / long-distance monitoring for the morning ruined.

08:36 It returns. I breath again.

08:41 The first of the two vans is in the drive. I note the company's livery is BW Blue: vans, blankets and shirts. I note that it is not raining, even a bit sunny. I hope this lasts.

08:42 Boss is inside - I guess Mr BW is showing him what is going and sharing his Big Plan. This is to put all the stuff going in through the garage entrance in one van, and all the stuff going in through the front entrance in the other, in the order they need to come off. This is because serious rain is forecast in the North for tomorrow morning.

Mate is playing on his phone by the van outside, poking around in the hawthorn hedge (why?) and yawning. I hope he won't fall asleep on the A1 later with a sixth of our worldy goods on board (we have already moved half, and another third is moving, split between 2 Luton vans, which was cheaper than one bigger van, due to driving hours, fuel costs and mpg). He looks strong and I am pleased to see he is wearing trainers and not boots. This will be better for our nice new oak stairs tomorrow.

09:00 First box comes out, followed by a lot more small things. These disappear into the Luton top box over the cab.

09:03 Mr BW rings and tells me Boss doesn't like The Big Plan because of the likely weight distribution. There are 3 weighbridges on the A1 and "We get pulled on almost every trip!" I remember how many times (6? Or 7? Can't remember now) we have driven extremely heavily laden rental Lutons up the A1 and thank the universe that we've never been challenged. How much weight are you allowed in a Luton anyway?

09:07 First filing cabinet comes out.

09:09 Second filing cabinet comes out. Bloody hell, they're not hanging around are they?

09:11 Third filing cabinet comes out. Boss clearly likes riding up and down on the tail lift as much as I do.

09:12 First large crate comes out. Meanwhile Mr BW is wandering up and down by the pond out the back looking like a spare part. I suspect he thinks he can load the van better than they can. Based on my observations of what he's fitted in on our past trips, he's probably not wrong.

09:14 CCTV has frozen. It's obviously a Bad Broadband Day up here. Just for a change.

09:22 Ah, it's back. 5 filing cabinets are now out. And some more boxes. Number 6 arrives. Oi, watch what you are doing with that when you turn it round, I don't want dents or gravel marks in it!

09:32 The last filing cabinet is out. I am supposed to keep all my official papers and individual files for 25 years since I last added to them. To date I have. Once the barley in the field adjoining Coven Nord is cut, there is going to be one hell of a bonfire. I'm probably the only one who has been following this rule anyway.

09:39 I could have told you that sack trucks on gravel wasn't the best of ideas.

09:40 Blimey, those boxes must have been buried in Deep Loft. I haven't seen them for... 28 years... This is what happens when there is no possiblilty to sort stuff before it has to be moved.

09:45 Mr BW provides tea. And maybe biscuits? Can't quite see. I didn't order biscuits on the shopping that was delivered (fail, but we found with the builders that young lads don't seem to eat biscuits these days, only Greggs pies and McDs, so I didn't think about it), so if he's found them in a cupboard I fear they might be over a year old (maybe evevn two) and rather stale. He sits them on top of the wheelie rubbish bin. I might not have done that.

09:47 Yes, if you carry red plastic boxes with lids on their side, then things will fall out. It would have been fine had you carried it normally! Yes, pick it all up.

09:49 Time for a sit down on the van back and 5 minutes scrolling phones. They've only been here an hour! I wonder what lads used to do before the advent of phones? No wonder productivity in the UK is so bad.

10:10 Make that 20 minutes scrolling phones. Glad we're paying by the job not by the hour, and that one of them is the Boss.

10:25 I go to make a cup of tea. I return to discover lots more boxes have appeared. I had no idea there were still so many boxes down there. I can see lots of fire in my future. I may remove that last sentence later, in case Mr BW is copy and pasting.

10:37 Stuff seems to be happening on the balcony. I wonder what will slide down the ladder first?

10:38 It has BW Blue soft covering, so I'm guessing it is the settee. Wow, that was clever. Mr BW seems to have been enlisted to help. He's doing my usual job - steadying.

10:43 Next on the slide is the antique haberdashery unit, minus drawers, mirrors and glass. One is holding it with his arms and head while the other runs downstairs to help at the bottom. Mr BW is at the top, fighting with cardboard, to stop it damaging the balcony surface as it goes over the edge. I don't remember it being quite so hard to get it up there, and it was 2 blokes in their 50s, rather than 2 lads in their 20s, who did it.

10:47 Safely loaded. *sigh of relief* Only the plan chest to come down now. Ssssh, don't tell them, but I realised the other night that it won't go through the fire door between the garage and the craft room up here without the door coming off. I have charged the batteries to the screwdriver, but I am not trained in using it, so I hope they are. It's only 1/2 cm too narrow, 71.5 cm whereas the plan chest is 72cm. That's a surprise for tomorrow. And gosh, can I look surprised when I need to!

10:53: Oh, what are those large flat things? Ah, they are the drawers to the plan chest. Bringing them down the stairs, not the ladder. Propping them up by the garage door. Bloody good job it's not raining!

10:55 Mr BW sends me a photo showing a dent in the bottom drawer of the plan chest and that the top is slightly bowed. Presumably so I don't go ape at the removal men tomorrow when I notice. I reply, "Yeah I know!" in true Little Britain stylee. The only reason we could afford it in 2006 when we got it to store art papers flat was because it was damaged. I idly wonder why my brain stores such things but not others that would be so much mroe useful. Like - where on earth I put the labels of contents that came out of the drawer fronts when I packed them ready to move last September.

11:07 Oh, an ironing board appears. I'd forgotten that was down there. We haven't used one of those for three and a half years. Give or take ironing hems and turning over tops when making curtains. My latest contribution to saving the planet: wearing crinkled clothes. I still miss ironed tea towels and pillow cases, but that is all I yearn for. Strangely, the less you iron, the less things are creased when they are worn again after washing. Odd.

11:10 The body of the plan chest appears, ready to slide down the ladder. Oh dear, it won't fit through the gap left by the removed pane of glass. It has to go over the top of the balcony rail... I think it must have gone up before the balcony was finished when we did the extension back in 2006. It's a good job they don't yet know the continuing problems it will be causing when it is offloaded tomorrow... 2 at the bottom, Mr BW on his tummy on the balcony at the top... Glad I'm not there.

11:23 I imagined you'd put the drawers back in the plan chest to transport it? I missed whether you put the 30-odd drawers back in the haberdashery unit before you sheeted it. Perhaps those are going in Van 2 as part of the 'distribute weight carefully' plan?

11:33 OH NO!!! You cannot pile the empty drawers on top of the empty body, the structural integrity of the frame just won't take that! Quick phone call to Mr BW to go and cast an eye and prevent a disaster... I knew there was a reason I was supervising from 300 miles away!

11:47 Please be careful with that, it's Mr BW's Nan's very old mirror and we are very fond of it!

11:50 Yes, I'll allow you another phone scrolling time, that must have been very heavy work, well done. And, oh look, the sun has come out properly. I'm amazed that no nosey neighbours have just happened to walk by to see what it going on.

11:52 Van 1 is officially closed up. That's the hard bit done. Now to swap it with Van 2 that has been patiently waiting in the road outside. Just 2 dressers (neither of which was originally moving today), some garage stuff, a big plant pot, the remaining drawers and (I suspect) some more boxes, to go. Oh, and the very old plough that lived outside the front door. I wonder if that will be the oddest thing they have ever moved?

12:07 That's the big dresser/display cabinet safely in. Luckily it is in two parts. We have had its contents sitting in boxes on a tarpaulin on the living room floor up here for nearly 3 years. I will be pleased to see them again, even if I cannot do so until after Mr BW has put the unit back together when he returns at the end of next week (lots of painting to do down there first to cover walls where things that have not moved for ages have been removed).

12:18 That's the dining room dresser safely in. And even more boxes. Now we seem to be rearranging the positioning of the display cabinet top. Mind the glass, and here's hoping you don't have to brake suddenly because you don't seem to have any of those helpful metal load-restraining bars that come in rental vans. I'm not at all convinced that there is going to be room for the plough.

12.47 It is amazing how many outdoor jobs Mr BW has found to do in places where he can keep a surreptitious eye on proceedings. I think that must be nearly it now as that is the last of the 16 Really Useful Boxes (64 litres) that contain the filing cabinet contents. Handy hint to anyone thinking of moving: don't buy RUBs when they are offer as they are pretty much the same price as strong cardboard moving boxes, but much sturdier, and much more safely stackable in transit, and they can be used again or sold on afterwards. The 64 litre ones will take suspension files, or A4 ring binders too.

12:55 Plan chest drawers finally going in. No way is the plough going to fit in.

13:02 Aaaahhhh... I didn't realise you hadn't got the bottom of the dining room dresser in yet. And... wait... Mr BW seems to be doing something near the plough... perhaps it is going to fit in? Really? Or perhaps he's going to tow it back up behind the car when he comes?


13:06 HMOG, it IS going in... It's taking 3 of them, plus a trolley, to move it...

13:07 Oh dear. It seems to be too wide for the van and the hole there is left.

13:09 Lots of gesticulating later, it HAS gone in. Here's hoping they don't get pulled on the A1 because Van 2 now has a lot more weight than Van 1.

13:12 In goes their bag of blankets (not many used). The plough seems rather near the dresser base...

13:14 Tail gate closed. Mr BW giving them last minute instructions. Don't mention the fire door dear, leave that as a surprise for tomorrow morning.

13:18 And off they go... Au revoir, hopefully, tomorrow morning when I wil be able to have the reverse experience first hand. Can't wait.

Pop Ups

They are driving me mad.

Every time I click on a webpage they are thrust onto my screen. Why should I have to hit more than one button to get rid of them? Why is it made so hard if I don't want to accept cookies? It's probably fewer than 1 in 20 that have just two buttons, one for 'accept cookies' and one for 'reject cookies'. I frequently close pages without bothering to confirm my choices if it's clear that multiple clicks will be required. Sites of newspapers in the 'Reach' group always come into that category. There should be a way of permanently declining all cookies, but if there is, I've not found it.

Once upon a time in the long-ago happy era of dial-up and broadband speeds measured in kB rather than GB, I used to clear my cookies religiously, but now there are so many passwords required to do even the simplest thing that I rarely do, or the whole shebang is unworkable. Does anyone actually clear cookies these days? Perhaps I should go back to it: just 'allow all' cookies then clear them each day.

The only pop-ups that should be allowed are toasters, as per John Cooper Clark. Play loud.

Dinosaurs

Sometimes I wonder what the dinosaurs did 65.5 million years ago to bring about the last Mass Extinction.

Experts might want us to believe that it was a natural phonomenon, but suppose it wasn't? Suppose the dinosaurs were not what we think they were?

New modelling suggests that the Gulf Stream is collapsing.

With temperatures so low for late July across the UK, it seems likely that anyone with a heating system contolled by temperature rather than time (most modern systems now) will find it clicking on, thereby adding to global warming (or cooling, as seems increasingly likely for the UK). To avoid this, perhaps turn it completely off at the controller, and put on a(nother) jumper? It was only 9.1°C here the night before last. This is somewhere between 4 and 7 degrees cooler than it has been at this time in the past 4 years.

There is so much confusing information around. It is hard to know what to do or think, or what not to do, particularly when there is no central lead, direction or funding. But I guess that's what happens when you effectively have two rich accountants in the top roles: they know the price of everything but not the value, and are manifestly failing to appreciate the cost of their inactions on vital issues for the future.

It's a small world

"Are you South African? Do you live in South Africa?" I asked the man on the phone, to make conversation, but also to discover where insurance companies are diverting my enquiries.

"Yes ma'am!" he sounded pleased, "How do you know?" "We've spent a lot of happy holidays there," I said, "whereabouts do you live?"

He gave the name of the small township on the outskirts of Noordhoek, the village that is always our first stop on arriving in Cape Town. "Ah, I know it! We always stay in the same place there, [name], which is a quaint arty place with a wonderful garden, run by a lovely lady."

"Is that [name]? I know her, I do gardening work for her!" he said.

An amazing coincidence. It didn't get me a cheaper price on my insurance though.

Insurance, of all kinds, seems to have risen at several times the rate of inflation this year.

Given that we are low risk, no claim, retired people, who live on a hill in a geologically stable area, in a low risk northern rural place, I foresee lots more uninsured homes and vehicles in other more risky, more populated, areas in the near future, simply because people won't be able to afford the premiums being demanded.

Anyone else been shocked by insurance renewal prices recently?

This week we have:

- Survived the non-seasonal torrential rain, cold, and grey. The rest of Europe swelters and burns while we in the NE sog and shiver, with northerly winds. We have our heating set to 18°C in winter, which never feels particularly warm (but I am frugal, environmentally conscious, and have plenty of warm clothes), yet when it is 18°C in summer, it feels warmer than the same temperature in winter. Why?

- Finished designing, and then ordered, the new kitchen. Painted oak and some natural oak fronts, direct from the manufacturer. This is costing 30% of what an MDF 'wrapped' kitchen from Homebase costs (and also less, but less less than a local builders' merchant, Howdens, Travis Perkins, Wren, or B&Q - yes, we've done our homework over the past 3 years), and we are getting exactly what we want rather than what they think we want (because most companies don't do a wide selection of unit sizes and configurations). Mr BW has yet to pluck up the courage to tell the nice man from there that we won't be buying from him, despite having picked his brains and learnt to use the design software by watching him. I only feel a little bit guilty.

- Ordered the worktops and integrated sinks for the new kitchen. We are using the same company who made the work surfaces for the craft room and utility room a few weeks ago, as they did a good job (and didn't require any advance payment). These cost 60% of what they would have cost had we bought via the nice man (and also considerably less than the 3 other suppliers we approached to quote). How prices for a product can vary so much between manufacturers is beyond me, as they all buy the basic material from the same UK supplier.

- Ordered lots of really really long screwy things to install the kitchen into less-than-perfect walls, and lots of under-cupboard lights, and plumby bits. Mr BW is going to be busy.

- Defrosted and reorganised the freezer. That is the only positive to a cold July as it is not a job that can normally be done at this time of year.

- Arranged to move all the upstairs furntiure (out over/through the balcony as it won't go down the stairs - what goes up that way can come down that way, we hope), the large display cabinet, and all the remaining boxes, from Coven Sud to Coven Nord next weekend, using a recommended small removal company that has quoted much less than those we have previously approached. The weather forecast says it will rain. Mr BW will oversee loading South, and I will oversee offloading North while Mr BW stays down there for a few days to repair and paint anything necessary. Mr BW has prepared a Project Pack of exactly what is going where, and in what order. I doubt they will ever have experienced such efficiency. It is company boss, plus one, who will be doing the work, over 2 days (load and drive up on Saturday and offload and drive home on Sunday). As it is 28 years since we last moved, I have no idea what today's etiquette is for tipping removal men. Any guidance welcomed (noting that one of them is the company owner, and that, all being well, we hope to use them again to move the final large furniture up, if/when we ever sell Coven Sud).

- There is also a new 200 page A4 lined paper pad of lists. We always have lists. But, I have never seen so many lists. I will need to order (a) more paper, and (b) more Pilot G7 pens as Mr BW is left-handed and presses so hard that I am unable to use the pens afterwards as the balls stick and the tip blots.

Hope your week has been less busy?

Fire, Eyes, and God

Wild fires and sweltering heat ravage much of Europe. Meanwhile it is pouring with rain, grey, and 14°C here, with a low overnight last night of 10 point something. I had to put on socks and a fleece to keep warm. This time last year today was 33.8°C by day and 20°C by night.

Why the differential?

Oh wait, must be due to Brexit. Of course, silly me.

After 4 visits to the optician in 3 weeks, and 7 visits in the past 8 months, and a lot of persistence and insistence on my part, they may now have nearly resolved my vision problems, as much as they can now be solved. My advice: never trust a locum opthamologist, and never be afraid to repeatedly tell them things don't seem right, even if they sigh as you do so. And always take and keep notes on every visit, and produce them with authority, together with your verdict on what they have been doing wrong, and what you want done to ameliorate the situation.

We got home to a letter on the mat addressed to just 'House Name'. I was suspicious. It seems that the Jehova's Witnesses attack you by mail in remote parts. I got rid of the last lot down south by telling the door knocker that it was my birthday, I was about to go and give blood, then I'd be wrapping my FOTCR™ presents, so was too busy to speak to them. Seems it won't be so easy in these parts to deter them. Still, at least the leaflets, letter and envelopes can be shredded and put in the compost bins, and the stamp put in the charity bag. Now, if only I could find a charity somewhere that wants used stamps these days. Come back Blue Peter Appeals, all is forgiven.

Food inflation

Good grief, what is Google serving me in my bottom bar today?!

I had to peer over the top of my glasses to be sure. My vision is getting worse, and 3" from the screen, with no glasses on or contact lenses in, is my best view. I refuse to believe that this was not totally deliberate. Not in the best taste.

Talking of food products, when we went down to visit the kitchen showroom on Wednesday, we dropped into the RHS Garden at Harlow Carr as we hadn't been there for probably a decade and it was almost on our way home. As normal, we'd taken our own lunch and drinks with us as it is near impossible to get wheat and meat free meals in quiet uncrowded locations without bright lights, background muzac or misbehaving children.

But, as Betty's Tea Room has to be walked past to get to the entrance, I cast my Frugal Witchy Eye over the menu displayed outside.

Pot of tea for one, £4.95, or £5.85 for anything other than builders' (although they call it 'Betty's Blend'), and piece of cake £5.25. That would be £21.30 for the two of us for a piece of cake and a cup of tea each. That's almost as much as I spend on food shopping for the week at this time of year when most of it coes out of the garden. Given that the fundamental cost of a tea bag, milk and a bit of washing up can't be much more than 15p, charging nearly six quid is one hell of a mark up.

Which reminds me... a few weekends ago we went to an Open Gardens in a small Cumbrian village about 30 miles away. Rather further than we'd like to have to travel for an afternoon of nosing round others' gardens in search of reassurance/inspiration, but there is a definite lack of open gardens events in our county, probably because churches in the small villages seem to be handed out money from their parish councils and rich benefactors, so don't need to fund-raise themselves.

As these events are all for charity, we do try to buy plants, books, bric-a-brac, teas, whatever they have available, to support them. The teas are sometimes wonderful and sometimes dire, depending on the baking skills of those involved in producing them. More and more in recent years we've noticed them selling cakes purchased from supermarkets rather than home-made. It seems people watch The Great British Bake Off for entertainment rather than education. Or perhaps it is because they are spending time watching GBBO rather than actually baking themslves.

While Mr BW is generally well catered for (there is usually chocolate cake), only occasionally is there anything wheat-free for me. When there is, it is usually because one of the organisers is either gluten-free themselves, or has a family member or friend who is. On the recent occasion being described, there were gluten-free choices, albethey from Morrisons rather than home-baked. At least someone had put in a some thought and effort, how nice, I thought.

A choice of four packs was proferred to me; only one was open, with one portion missing. I don't ever buy gluten-free cakes (and only bake one if someone is coming to stay), but I do know Morrisons gluten-free range by sight as it appears on my screen every time I search gluten-free products when I make choices for my weekly Morrisons online order.

I'm not keen on coconut in cakes, so didn't go for the open packet, instead picking the raspberry macaroon slices. There were 4 in a packet, and I knew (because I'd seen them online and my brain works like that) that a packet costs £1.75. So, 43.75p each. They were charging £1 for a cup of tea (with a free refill, the refill being much less stewed than the first cup), and £1.50 for a piece of cake. All for charity, so quite acceptable.

And then, as I turned away, juggling cup, map/guide, bag, the server putting the cake on my plate, which Mr BW who had a spare hand was waiting to pick up, did something unforgiveable. She cut the slice of cake in half! There was only half an hour until the tea hall closed, and there were four packets minus 2 portions left, so no risk of running out, so there was no sensible reason for this.

Anyone who has ever eaten gluten-free shop-bought cake will know that the portions are anyway very small, so a half portion was tiny, even for me who isn't the world's most joyous consumer of highly processed carbohydrate. We were both so flabbergasted that we were speechless so didn't remonstrate.

When I got home I checked the weight of the item online (I'm old-fashioned and don't have a smart phone). I found that 4 slices weighed 160g, so 40g each. The price was given as £1.09 per 100g, so £10.90 a kg. Half a slice there weighed 20g, so cost 21.8p. At their sales price 20g cost £1.50, so £7.50 for 100g. Or £75 for 1kg.

And that is only £4.99 per kilo less than the £79.99 per kilo for fresh scallops that nearly caused us to faint when we saw it at a fisherman's shop over on the coast. Mind you, even the ladies in front of us in the queue (tweeds, pearls, brogues), who arrived in a top-of-the-range Range Rover (cost, somewhere north of £150K) with a one-letter, two-number registration plate (minimum value, £40K), were shocked at the price and decided that they'd buy, "Just three, just one each for a little taste with something else."

How much is too much to pay for a cup of tea or coffee when you are out?

Ready to roll

We are working really hard on designing our new kitchen. Well, Mr BW is, I am just providing helpful hints (design changes as inspiration strikes) at inopportune moments which result in even more hours sat at the laptop fighting the design software. The one good thing that came out of spending two 2-hour sessions with a kitchen designer in Homebase last week (which did not and could not produce what we wanted, but at least it was free and did give us some new ideas) was that we did pick up how to use the design tools, and what they could (and couldn't) do.

We went to Doncaster to the manufacturer's yesterday (very impressed, miles better construction and finishing than anywhere except completely bespoke and they have oddles more options than any of the others), and then to the RHS Garden at Harlow Carr, which has developed magnificently since we last went 10 or so years ago. It was a veeeery long day, with rain on and off throughout. Doncaster sounds as if it should be just down the road, rather than two and a half hours away, which shows that my cognitive mapping is still centred 300 miles south of here, and I fear that it might now prove impossible to reset it.

Today the sun is shining and, according to the weather forecast, there is zero percent chance of rain all day - the only day in the 10-day forecast. Which is lucky as...

Mi1dred was born in Longbridge 90 years ago today. We are taking her over to our nearest NT house and garden this afternoon in her birthday garb (lots of balloons and a banner). How is it 10 years since her 10th birthday party?

The heat of the kitchen

Apparently it has been the hottest week in the world's recorded history.

All I can say is that it hasn't been here. Grey, drizzly, windy, occasional sunshine, but, really, nothing that amazing, and certainly no thunder and no overnight temperatures above 15°C.

The b33s are revolting. 4 colonies are currently queenless and so in a very bad mood. Who knows why. Maybe the bats are eating the virign queens as they go out to mate? I have no idea, but it's not friendly. One errant member stung me on the forehead yesterday and I consequently had such a bad headache that I was awake half the night. Now, an occasional sting on the hand I don't mind as the venom displaces my usual aches and pains for a few days, but anywhere else is not so funny. Citronella is currently being applied in many sprays before venturing outside.

We have decided to revisit The Kitchen Project we started over 2 years ago.

With the housing market down south absolutely dead, and prices/inflation rising at a combined 20% or so a year, it just makes sense to repalce our kitchen now, rather than wait until we sell (which sadly seems as if it could be several years away). Spending what is our protected 'emergency fund' on the kitchen and then borrowing if we then have need of it seems to make more sense and will (in the long term) hopefully be cheaper than waiting. Plus, I can't keep living with the awful existing completely knackered 25 year old (and cheap then) kitchen that we inherited that is literally now falling off the walls.

We now have a 'produced-this-week' suggested commercial plan, a '2-years ago plan' from a local Builders' Merchant (which looks less awful now than it did then), a Mr BW produced plan against DIY Kitchens, plus about 300 pages of 'ideas printed from the internet'.

Wood, painted wood, wrapped MDF, painted MDF, drawers, cupboards, pull out this, pull out that, honestly, i have no idea what is best, or what will outlast us (and given the 20 year guarantees, we're hoping to not have to do it again).

We've decided that we cannnot tolerate any more crap from so-called professional tradespeople, so Mr BW will fit it.

All I know is that, 2 years on from our first forays into this kitchen snake pit, it all seems to cost more than twice what it threatened to then.

Any thoughts/ideas/recommedations on kitchens, anyone?

Contrasts

Some bright spark in the County Highways Department thought that the best time to carry out major works in the nearest town centre was during Peak Tourist (ie now, and for the next 30 weeks). This has effectively made a one-way system of a usually two-way main route through the town, and is causing major traffic jams and delays. I'm not sure that the town has ever experienced this amount of traffic chaos.

By luck, we can take a completely different route home, which adds several miles to our journey, but avoids the congested direction, and probably saves an hour of queueing and injured snail's pace progress at peak times.

However, even on this alternative route we encountered a traffic jam this afternoon.

This was the tail end, after 10 minutes sat waiting. I doubt I have ever seen a better demonstration of the 'following like sheep' expression. The front sheep went into the field and the other hundreds filed on neatly behind. No sheep dog required. It looked like they'd been for their annual haircuts.

It amused me that behind the farmer on his quad bike (or "ATV" as they call them in these parts) at the back of the convoy was a large John Lewis delivery van. I can't think of anyone who lives around here who might have been having a delivery from them.

After a whole month of hot and sunny weather without any rain in late May and June, it is now grey, windy and cold most days with enough rain that we're not needing to water and often have to resort to drying laundry inside. There is even an autumnal feeling in the air. It's been so cold that we haven't been able to look at the b33s as much as we need to, so they have been up to all kinds of mischief. In truth, if we were new b33keepers, rather than being in our 27th year, I suspect we would have given up by now.

Still no tomatoes: I'm blaming the extreme heat in June, and I'm unconvinced they will recover (although their leaves look fine it's clearly affected their desire to flower), but mange tout, chard, lettuce, rocket, radishes, cucumbers and courgettes, as well as soft fruits, are all doing deliciously well. I love this time of year when almost everything we eat can come from the garden.

The fields of spring-sown barley and wheat around us are ripening a month before they should, but there is little to no grain in their ears as it was too dry at a crucual point in their development. Similalry, the fields of ancient hay meadows with their ripening native wildflower species are at least 3 weeks ahead, and these out-of-phase nature events will have dire effects on both the farmers' finances and on the wildlife who rely on seasonal food within slim time-frames to sustain them. Food chains are fragile pyramids and can easily collapse in times of unusual seasonal shift.

To our amazement, some of our garden plants that seemed to have been killed by the extremely cold weather at the end of November and in early December have just, in the past couple of weeks, started throwing out new shoots from either their dead wood that we had cut back, or from their bases. Citruses, lavatera, hardy fuchsias, wisteria, grasses have all come back to life. Also, many perennials that we thought weren't coming back are just much later in reappearing than normal. Moral: never get rid of seemingly dead plants too soon.

How are weather and garden things where you are?

Recommended

I don't listen to Radio 4 very much these days. I don't like the (comparatively) young presenters on Woman's Hour (or many of the subjects now discussed), and am tired of depressing plays on whatever the 'thème du jour/mois' currently is.

I do, however, like More or Less, The Dead People Programme, Money Box (sometimes), Thinking Allowed, Desert Island Discs, The Life Scientific, Inside Science, Gardeners' Question Tiime, The Food Programme, The Kitchen Cabinet, and some other scientific and factual programmes. I'd listen to Farming Today if I woke up earlier.

At the beginning of the millennium, on days when I was at home, I used to put the radio on in the morning and leave it on all day, but now the on/off button gets used a lot. With internet that only runs unreliably and at around 2MB and a so-called Smart TV that doesn't seem to want to be clever and connect to the internet, there aren't many other options.

Radio 2 no longer has presenters I can tolerate, and while Greatest Hits Radio now has most of those I do like, the adverts are too much of a turn-off, and it can't be listened to in the car. I don't like poor sound quality, so don't listen to much on a computer (and indeed don't even have speakers attached to my desktop).

I tend to avoid news and political programmes these days, because they insult almost everyone's intelligence and/or sense of propriety, and I get a sore throat shouting at the radio. That said, because I was slow hitting the off button on Friday evening, I did hear Nick Robinson interviewing Danny Finkelstein on Political Thinking. If you have 39 minutes to spare, and like intelligent dissection of current issues and how the hell things got to the mess they are in, by someone of long pedigree in this area, do listen to "The Conservative peer, journalist and adviser on the fate of 'moderation' in politics." It won't be what you expect. If you don't want to listen and would rather read, there is an article here that covers some of the same sort of issues.

If you have too much spinach or swiss chard growing in your garden, I'd like to recommend a good recipe to use it up. I wouldn't recommend 12 layers of pasta (3 or 4 is plenty) unless you need to carb-load ahead of running a marathon, dry lasagne works fine, Philadelphia cheese is a good substitute for ricotta, and any sort of cheese you have in the fridge will works well, and in much smaller quantities than they advise The spinach sauce (which I made with 2 washing up bowls full of swiss chard) would be a good sauce for lots of things, not just this spinach lasagne. Shorter recipe-only version here. A good recipe to feed a crowd, which is vegetarian and can be made gluten-free very easily. The amazing thing is it doesn't taste like spinach or chard at all, despite the quantities used!

Canny

When you have 18 water butts all around your house, which is 30 metres long (but only 5 metres wide), you need more than 8 watering cans. We did have 10, but Mr BW took one to the tip (as it had winter frost damage) before I could repurpose it, and one has disappeared, probably with the plasterers, who seemed to find it useful.

Now, I have a small(ish) collection of old galvanised watering cans, but these are strictly not for use as most of them leak or their handles have corroded to the point where carrying water in them would lead to catastrophic and irreperable collapse.

I don't have enough energy to do a 100 metre walk around the house to find a couple of watering cans each time I want to water something, so I've been looking to acquire some more watering cans, at a sensible price, and made in the UK. I finally found them in Wilkos for £5.75 each, so ordered 8. In most other places they are well over £10, and either bright colours, or not in stock at this time of year. It took me a long time to unbox them, then remove the labels and sellotape, but I got there eventually:

One can even came with an 'Inside the Factory' type clue as to how they are made:

Now, all we need is some rain so that the water butts can refill. Until then we have to use gold-plated water from the tap to fill them. It is totally impossible to judge correct watering when using a hose.

Later, I looked out of the window and they were definitely plotting something:

And so was she:

Plumbing

"BW I don't think I've got the hoses I need..."

"BW, I don't think I've got the U-bend I need..."

Saving the best until last

In the late 80s, the year I did my Masters, I drove 28,000 'business miles', almost all of it between the hours of 6pm and 9am. Luckily it was all paid by my sponsoring Local Authority, who would pay me mileage to travel daily between home and university and home and placements, but not lodging allowances, which would have worked out at a quarter of the cost to them, but, that's Local Authorities for you. It was undoubtedly the most frantic and stressful year of my life, and I know I didn't get anywhere near the number of hours of sleep I have always needed.

A recently released album of the time by Steve Earle was frequently my CD of choice for belting out, rattling the side panels of the car, to keep me awake during my long journeys up and down the motorways and A-roads of the South-West and Midlands, in the wee small hours. I always loved the relief (or was it incredulity?) in his voice at the end of "Snake Oil" when he decreed, "I always knew there was a first taker on this album somewhere!"

Well, today, I finally had my own "I knew there was a first taker in this project somewhere!" moment. A few weeks ago we decided to procure the sinks and worktops for the new utility and the new craft room, despite not really being able to sensibly afford it in our current 'two houses but little cash' sad but impossible predicament.

Despite being the cheapest quote, for once, a job very well done, with no issues. It looks great (but we knew it would as it is the same surface, in the same colourway, and with the same inbuilt sinks that we put in down south in 2011). At last, I knew there had to be a 'first taker' in our renovation/extension project somewhere, but I wasn't expecting it to be the very last part!

I know the plumber will be OK, because it's Mr BW, and there is still the kitchen to do (at some point in the future, if/when we ever sell Coven Sud), but I think I've now found somewhere to source the units, that Mr BW can fit. He can fit stairs, so a kitchen will be a breeze! No more need for workmen, hoorah!

It was 30.9°C yesterday and 32.5°C here today. Thank goodness for late afternoon cooling breezes on our ridge. We had 15 minutes of drizzle on Sunday morning, but, aside of that, nothing since an overnight drizzle on 18th May (and, before that, similar on 9th May). The ground is parched and it is a full-time job getting enough water to our food crops to keep them alive.

Good Friday

After 3 weeks of summer, it has been grey and cold this week, give or take a couple of hours of slightly warmer sun from mid-afternoon once the grey disappeared.

Tonight saw the 20,000th episode of The Archers, and I wondered how many of them I had heard. I started listening sometime in the early 1980s, when lunchtime in many farming households was set to coincide with its lunchtime broadcast, and, living amongst them in the south-west, I had little choice but to listen in silence or be hushed. In those days the farming stories predominated and were only slightly less interesting than local scandals (not all of them occasioned by me). I strayed for a few years from 1991 to 1997, but listened again from then. These days there is much less emphasis on farming, and the ongoing stories seem to go into a tombola drum to be pulled out again from time to time; nowadays much less interesting than watching the very rural farming community within which I am now again living. And they still haven't killed off Robert Snell who died 7 months ago now (and what an amazing life he had, outside of Ambridge).

I haven't written much of late. Lots of things have been troubling me in this world, not least of which is the mindless and futile but relentless pursuit of 'economic growth' alongside uncontrolled population growth. Utterly unsustainable, and it is beyond time to conisder what post-capitalism looks like. Otherwise the whole workforce will burn out, or feel the need to change gender. At least, as of today, puberty-blocking drugs are now banned in the UK.

Ah, but... there are conferences, held on EU premises, with great academic minds attending, to consider such things. But eco-politics are deemed too dirty, they get no media coverage at all, because, apparently, the media are too scared to publicise details of the proceedings. And bugger, I've lost the beautiful link - it seems to have auto-closed and I can't find it in my history! Don't mention conspiracy theories...

I am disgusted, although unsurprised, by Johnson's gongs. Why was he trying to get one for his dad? Services to the Marigold Hotel? As I write, it is announced that Johnson has resigned as an MP with immediate effect. Oh Sushi, you really should have held onto that list for a few more hours. Yet another mis-judgement on his part. But, all this does rather make one wonder what else is to come out of the Standards Committee enquiry. And how long this bunch of jokers can hang on before they give in and call an election.

And as for Nellie (76) and his recent antics... he'll get re-elected, for sure.

Coven records

First green courgette (outside), Sunday June 4th.

We have peaches on the potted peach tree (over an inch in size already), but that is now permanently in the greenhouse rather than on a balcony as previously.

It was 50.2°C in the conservatory while we weren't here over the weekend. It says on the thermometer that it only measures to 50°C. It was lying.

After a wet and cold start to the year, it hasn't rained a drop since an overnight drizzle on May 18th, and before that, similar on May 9th. It’s been into the 20s every day for well over two weeks, with the exception of last Thursday, when it was grey and only 14. We have already used all the 4 cubic metres of water butt rainwater that we had stored to water vegetables and pots. There is no rain in the 10 day forecast. It's going to be an expensive summer, water-wise.

Today was due to be the day that we finally got worktops and sinks in the utility and craft room. Unfortunately the colour of sinks that we wanted (to replicate those we had down south) is out of stock at the manufacturers for several more weeks. The boss from the fabrication company made a 2 hour return journey to bring us 2" samples of the other whites available that would be in stock sooner. We've chosen a slightly whiter white, which might be better for those rooms anyway, given how white the walls are. All will now be made this week and fitted next week. Hopefully.

A clue...

... as to what we are doing this weekend:

Look closely and the subjects in question have already given their verdict on proceedings:

Weekend

This weekend we are doing something we haven't done since the early summer of 1999, although then it was over several evenings rather than a weekend, if memory serves (which it doesn't always these days).

I could really do to not be doing it this weekend, as we've had a very busy week. Firstly getting the garden 'finished' to Chelsea Standards (well, planted out and titivated at least), and then we had Mr BW's sister and her husband staying on their way to Scotland, and I am very very tired.

But, needs must, and it's free, which it might not be the next time.

Progress

Finally, after unsuccessfully sowing expensive commercial seed in 2021, and a huge amount of locally harvested (by us) seed on three separate occasions in the last year (to give it the best chance), yellow rattle has just appeared in the orchard. It wasn't there last week, but it is there, in bud, this week.

This makes me very happy as it means we are well on the way to creating the habitat we want.

Busy busy

We've been putting glass shelves into the long window for (some of) our collection of coloured glass (some made by us and some collected on our travels). This involved Mr BW making some horizontal supporting brackets from angle iron, and a very long ladder.

We've been finishing off the raised bed veg garden, half of which has been a large pile of earth excavated from the greenhouse foundations during our first summer here. This involved lots of sifting of soil in the magic rotating machine, lots of shifting of gravel for paths, and lots of swearing that the manufacturers had changed the colour of the raised bed material since we bought the last batch 2 years ago (without putting that fact on their website, or updating their pictures).

We've been constructing frameworks for worktops in the craft room and utility. It will be good to get sinks and worksurfaces in at last. How the quotes for these could vary by over 100%, for exactly the same product, I have no idea, but the cheapest one doesn't require us to pay a penny until we are "totally satisfied", and provided good answers to all our questions (we knew what to ask as the surfaces and sinks are identical to those we put in down south), so we went with them. They are templating on Friday and fitting 10 days after.

We've been enjoying beautiful warm and sunny summer weather this week.

Last night we had a major disaster.

We found we had no lemonade for the First Pimms of Summer. Four bottles of Pimms (well, one of Pimms and three of Ausin's, Aldi's better-than-Pimms own brand), but no lemonade.

Actually, we found we did have 3 bottles forgotten in the back of an inaccessible corner cupboard, but one was half empty, one was totally flat despite still being sealed and tasted strange, and the third was just slightly better-than-nothing but had a best before date of January 2021. It was also Morrison's own brand which was all we could get in 2020.

Situation matters

We redesigned the interior layouts of the extensions to Coven Nord as our ideas were much better and more practical than Not An Architect the Architect's. We told him exactly what we wanted and he managed to not provide it - largely because he didn't take any notes while we were briefing him. Or perhaps because he thought he knew better than us what we wanted. Baaad error.

I'm very pleased we did all the rejigging as I'd never have been happy with a cloakroom in the middle of the house, as drawn (it needs to be near the front door, accessed off a door mat), and a utility room along one wall of the craft room (wet washing and paint/dye really do not mix).

Having a utility room in the middle of the house now is perfect: it means that dirty washing doesn't have to go to the washing machine through the kitchen as it did down south (although Mr BW can no longer remove his dirty work clothes just inside the back door in the utility and put them straight in the wash). Mind you, the washing machine did have four previous locations before it got there - two different locations in the garage, one in the cloakroom (it was just possible to squeeze/shimmy round it and shut the door) and one in the craft room (just about OK, while its permanent position was being built).

I've always thought that the British way of having a washing machine located in the kitchen (in houses with no separate utility room) was highly unsavoury. I remember going on a French exchange visit at the age of 15 and being surprised that the washing machine was incorporated into the bathrrom of the flat of my exchange partner's family. In turn, she was horrified that ours was in the kitchen. "Ce n'est pas très hygiénique!" elle a dit. In other countries I've seen washing machines in basements, airing cupboards, cloakrooms, on landings, in garages, in outbuildings - in fact, anywhere but in kitchens.

I wonder why British washing machines frequently live in kitchens?

Today

I made yoghurt, soap, we went to a plant sale on our way to a b33keeping meeting (and were very well behaved as we didn't tell them what they were doing wrong), rejoiced in 4 Bruce tracks played by JW this afteroon when we got home.

Perhaps we are rather too far down the rural living the self-sufficient-dream line?

Caroline said,

"The tomato plants must be like living net curtains."

More like vertical blinds I think!

Mr BW has the greenhouse all prepared, but I have nurtured them for so long that I am finding it hard to let them go. I have refused to let them out of the house as it is meant to be 3°C tonight, and it's not possible to cover the amazing support structure with fleece. Next week...

The chilli and basil plants on the RHS are now planted out, but covered in fleece.

Sumer is icumen in

Despite the weather forecasters, today has been the shiniest day of the year. Beautiful spring weather, the garden is a picture of verdant and floral abundance, bright yellow fields of oil seed rape punctuate every horizon, and 4 loads of washing have been able to be dried outside.

Late afternoon, the swallows finally arrived.

We saw them over on the coast, up near the Scottish border, 13 days ago.

The heavy duvet of winter has been exchanged for the light version for summer.

The grass won't stop growing. One mower has died (a couple of months after its 3 year warranty ran out, impossible to repair, so Mr BW salvaged its useful parts and it went to Mower Heaven aka the local tip, such a waste), and we have had to procure a new one. Battery back to petrol... Reliability and durability over the environment. We're likely to need to buy a new car in the next few months (at nearly 10, things are going wrong by the week), and we have a similar hard decison to make there. When you live in the middle of rural nowhere there are no charging points other than home. The places we want to visit - rural Scotland - have similar issues.

Tomorrow the tomatoes, now a metre tall and some in flower, can finally leave the bedroom windowsill where I have been nurturing them, and go out into the greenhouse, which Mr BW has been busily clearing, sterilising and preparing.

Down south, where 1 in 23 houses in our Parish are now for sale (ten times more than in usual times), with 1 in 16 being 'for sale' or still 'in process', it has been raining all day. To change an area from the Sunday Times' most desirable village in that part of the world to seemingly the least desirable takes just a few greedy uncaring developers, a few hundred nasty new identikit-to-everywhere-else-in-the-country houses, and the resultant influx of the nouveau riche. Such a headache, and with the bank base rate up to 4.5% today, a sale seems even further off than ever.

Tonight the light is beautiful, the shadows are exquisite, and fortunately the future promise of summer looms tantalisingly large.

Thoughts of yesterday

The rest of the watching world had their view of Britain as a grey and rainy place with excellent pageantry and faultless organisation confirmed.

Kingy looked utterly bemused and devoid of emotion for most of the day.
I think this shot from the TV of the balcony appearance after the service probably sums it all up:

If only Peny Mordaunt had been chosen as PM at the end of last summer.

Someone should tell Liz Truss that orange doesn't suit her any more than being PM did. How she has the front to turn up at such events after trashing the economy in 44 days is beyond me.

Sarah Brown looked like her dress came out of the back of her wardrobe/a charity shop.

Mr BW's niece was partly responsible for cutting/sewing/embroidering at least 4 of the posh frocks/coats on view. Including fitting two of them onto their wearers on royal premises. It was a rather late decision that all female senior royals should wear white. As a result, at least one of them ended up with an off-the-peg number rather than a made-to-measure creation. You'd never have known.

The singing daffodil in the Abbey was very, erm, yellow and amusing, but you had to be up early for that.

Why was the covered walkway into the Abbey such a last-minute addition?

It was sunny and warm all day in The North. At least until 10 minutes after the evening beacon lighting in the nearest village (3.5 miles away) when the rain that had dampened southern proceedings all day down south finally reached here (which we could see closing in as we left home):


Luckily we had taken waterproof coats with hoods and a big brolly. We passed 2 Union Flags on our way there. Both being flown upside down. The refreshments (not a quiche in sight, or indeed anything other than meat and wheat-based products - I wasn't surprised) and the crowd (60 people someone said) were straight out of the 1960s.



As was the grand/parent-controlled behaviour of the small children: "You can go and look, but you've had your cake," which was so refreshing.

All over in 40 minutes. Other villages opened their village halls, put on the TVs, and told people to bring their own food and drink. They know how to party in The North.

The Coronation celebration in our village down south was cancelled weeks ago as no volunteers would step forward and the organising committee feared for the weather at the beginning of May. They weren't wrong.

The BBC's proceedings managed to avoid any mention or coverage of the 'protests' or of the toilet or refreshment facilities for the attending public and the parading services and 'guests'. At least between 6.30am and 3pm, while we were watching. A 'behind the scenes / dealing with the practicalities' type programme would make interesting viewing.


The BBC's 'educate' brief was in short supply yesterday. The most interesting interview of the day - that between Kirsty Young and a female expert in the crowns and other regalia, was cut short (before getting to the history of the spoon, which is the only piece to have survived Cromwell) by the pressing need to move on to another interview - with Sebastian Coe who had absolutely nothing useful to say, as usual. Clare Balding's 'facts' had to be corrected on several occasions by whoever was co-presenting with her at the time.

The part of the ceremony after the crowning was very very tedious.

I was suprised at how prominently Camilla's mates featured (the two ladies in white with no capes) - in the Abbey, but particularly in the balcony scene, where they were closer to the King and Queen than any of the other adults present - and as for poor Princess Anne, she was tucked away at left back and barely visible.

I finally got my own piece of locally-branded royal commemorative memorabilia, having never forgiven my school for diddling me out of a Silver Jubilee Mug in 1977. Mr BW used his official sources to secretly secure one for me, and served up my mid-morning cuppa in it. That was a lovely surprise, and may end up being my overarching memory of the day:

In between the Patriotism, Mr BW spent the day drawing up the plans for the new worktops for the utility and craft room. Whether or not we can currently afford them remains to be seen.

And you?

Royal Matters

If you are planning to watch the coronation tomorrow, and are interested in (a) crafts, (b) keeping traditional skills alive, (c) keeping people in this country in work and small businesses alive, then please watch the BBC2 programme, "Coronation Tailors: Fit for a King" - on iPlayer here - before the 'festivities' tomorrow. Patrick Grant kicks Gregg Wallace's "Inside the Factory" into touch. Highly recommended by BWs.

It's not English, English...

If I hear any phrase including the term 'coronated', used as a verb, again, I shall not be responsible for my actions...

My best guess is that it's yet another nasty Americanism (like 'deplaning'), maybe used for homecoming queens?

It's 'crowned' dear media, dear media.

Powders

Last year we planted a metre square raised bed (that we salvaged from Mr BW's Mum's garden before the house was sold) with 9 asparagus crowns. We'd never had much luck with asparagus down south, but it came up well and we left it alone (as you are meant to the first year), merely watering it well frequently and mulching it with wood chip in the autumn. After the wood chip kept being dug over (not sure by what), we also protected the surface with some metal grids salvaged from some long-dead mini-greenhouse or oven or something similar. Never throw such things away when you have a large garden as they will always come in useful.

As this spring has been so cold, nothing had come up and we were beginning to think that asparagus hated us. And then. a few warmer days and nights last week, and, presto, up popped some spears. They are well-camouflaged:

The variety was Millennium Guelph. Although, on the label the first word was mis-spelt.

You're not supposed to pick many spears in the second year, so we had just two each, and they were absolutely delicious. From growing to mouth in 2 minutes, and zero food miles.

They didn't have hard stalk ends, but, if they had, I'd have dried them, then ground them finely in a coffee grinder, and stored in a small air-tight jar. Asparagus powder is absolutely delicious: just sprinkle half a teaspoon on almost anything to add a certain je ne sais quoi.

I've made powders out of several other things too: rosemary leaves (salvaged from the compost bucket after Mr BW pruned the rosemary bushes); mushrooms that were well beyond normal eating; lemon skins (the pith and zest left over after squeezing); tomatoes/chillis that I'd been drying but left in the low oven for too long (the burnt outsides add just a smokiness to the flavour when ground).

I'm sure other things would work as powders too. Just don't try to use a mini food processor to grind them... because you will burn it out. I'm speaking from experience there, ahem.

After I'd 'invented' my way of using hard asparagus stalks that would otherwise be composted, I started noticing posey chefs serving 'powders' with lots of things. I hadn't looked it up until today. Some more ideas here.

Time passages

We went out five times last week. That is probably more times than I've been out for the whole of the rest of this year.

Once to a plant sale on a local village green in aid of their church. All the plants are grown by locals, and all are donated. It amuses me that round here if such a sale is publicised as starting at, say, 10am, people turn up from 10.10am onwards, whereas as a seasoned bargain hunter from the south, I turn up at 9.45am to seek out and buy the best specimens before most people even arrive. The same thing happened when we went along to our first meeting of the local b33keepers' association. The meeting was scheduled to start at 7.30pm, so we turned up at 7.10pm to find the chairs just about to be put out. By 7.30pm two other couples and a single had arrived, all southerners. The locals rocked up the customary 5-10 minutes late.

Our second outing was to visit England's most northerly town, which - surprisingly - is almost due east of Glasgow, albeit 100 miles away. We'd never been there before, and it was just as scruffy and run down, with just as many empty shops, as all the Scottish towns just over the border that we have visited. Down south the local council are currently offering small shops and businesses (non-repayable) grants of up to £3,000 to spruce up their facades. No such luck in these parts, where £3,000 is probably more than their entire year's profit. Takings, even.

Berwick also has the most underwhelming 'pier' I have ever seen. I'd call it a 'sea wall with a lighthouse', but, north/south divide strikes again I think. While up there, we also tried to find some of the hidden beaches we had researched and knew existed on that coast, but we failed to find the best as we didn't have an OS map of that area (now remedied), but we did find some:


Don't ask me where they are, as I can't remember. Next time...

Mr BW was happy though because he found a rock shop:

Rock shops scare me as they are in league with dentists who are in very short supply in these parts. One I managed to find that I am not totally convinced by (having only been once) charge £75 for an 'emergency' appointment (ie within 3 days of ringing), plus the cost of whatever they do (which seems to start at four times that amount, yikes).

Our third outing was to Costco, B&Q and a pretty 3-acre garden (2for1 entry with the card from May's Gardeners' World magazine, which I only buy once a year for this purpose; good job as it is now £8.50, although that at least includes 6 packets of 'free' seeds), and our fourth and fifth outings were to the local town to purchase gardening supplies: Lidl had a great range of gardening 'consumables' such as string, netting, fleece, plastic covered metal poles, and medium-sized plastic raised planters on legs with hard opaque covers (perfect for pepper and chilli plants in the greenhouse), and the cheap garden centre had reasonably-priced large gro-bags for the greenhouse tomatoes (£4.99 rather than £7.50 elsewhere) and 3 large Betula Jacquemonti (silver birch) trees for creating a focal point at the bottom of the orchard as the 'grove' of silver birches we planted as dead-looking twigs two years ago are taking far too long to get going: I am impatient and life is short.

I wasn't going to write all that, but I feel a bit guilty that I have been a bit quiet of late as I have been running out of energy well before I run out of things to do in a day, and blogging has to be low priority compared to raising food.

Today I have been catching up on admin. I usually eschew 'chat' functions on websites as I prefer talking to real people, and most call centres are now in the UK. But, faced with a "we are very busy today, your waiting time will be approximately 40 minutes" I aquiesced and started typing from within the internet bank website.

The resulting 'conversation' (which took 20 minutes, although I managed to do two other jobs, including a phone call, concurrently) lived down to all my expectations. See what you think:

Me: I have a 0% offer on my credit card with you that expires on Wednesday 3rd May. I intend to pay it off in full from my current account with you. Bearing in mind that Monday May 1st is a bank holiday, what date do I have to pay it on to ensure that I avoid paying interest? Thanks.

Agent: As long as it is paid by the 3rd May then you wouldn't get any late payment fee's or interest etc.

Me: So does that mean I need to pay it on Tuesday 2nd?

Agent: As long as you pay it by the 3rd then this is fine, so if you pay it on the 2nd it will still go through and this is the same for if you paid it on the 1st, it would go through the next day which is the 2nd May.

Here is some info on Credit Card Fee's and Charges (link)

Me: Thanks, as per your advice I will pay it on the 2nd then. Also - how do I put my direct debit back to collect the full amount due every month please?

Agent: Your welcome, you can set up a new direct debit with our Credit Card team by calling us on [number given]. You’ll need the account number and sort code of the bank account you are paying from your 16-digit credit card number.

Me: No, I don't want to change the account that the direct debit comes from. As I said, I just want to change the payment amount from 'collect minimum due' to 'collect statement balance'. Can I do this myself somewhere or do I need to ring?

Agent: You may be able to change it via [this link]. If your registered for the Internet Bank you can change your Direct Debit online.

Me: Yes, I'm talking to you from within the internet bank. I am asking how I can change my direct debit amount?

Agent: Log in to the Internet Bank Select your credit card Choose Other account services from the options on the left hand side Select Amend Direct Debit within Account services Follow the on-screen instructions

Or you can call for the team to look into this for you as well.
Or if your not able to call or are not able to do it via your Internet Banking I can also look at doing this for you.

Clearly one doesn't need to pass either English comprehension, spelling, or common sense selection procedures to be a chat-agent at that bank.

After that I needed a cat picture to recover:

It's true...

... we get nothing in the North. Nothing.

Not even the emergency warning signal test.

I wasn't expecting to, given that I only have a 2G phone as my fingers don't work screens, and, honestly, I don't want an always on/always potentially controllable life.

But, there is a 4G signal here. Mr BW has a rugged smartphone. With the active life he has, he would kill any normal phone within 10 minutes. And he didn't get anything, early, on time, or late. Most disappointing.

Do we get a tax rebate?

Once in a lifetime...

... and I missed it!

Yesterday was 15.04.23.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

What do you think?

Back in the early days of blogging, there were always lots of personality-type quizzes around, of greater or lesser credibility.

Here is what I consider to be a well-constructed modern-day version.

The blurb says: "This test is based on a variety of studies from cognitive science and behavioral economics, with a particular emphasis on cognitive biases. Cognitive biases are known human tendencies that can lead to bad judgment, self-defeating decisions, and irrational beliefs. Fortunately, you can learn to make better decisions by honing your skills. At the end of this report we'll point you to free resources that can help you improve your decision-making weaknesses and expand upon your strengths.

Please note: rationality and IQ are not the same. Even people of exceptionally high IQ are routinely affected by cognitive biases, and fall for common decision-making traps."

It does take at least 10 minutes to complete, but it doesn't time out. You don't have to give them your email address to see the results either. But if you give them one (I always use 'throwaway' ones for this type of stuff) what they send is interesting and enlightening.

Their results told me that:

Your reasoning style is:

Detective

Detectives are tough cookies. They're often caught up entirely in their immediate pursuits, which they attack with vigor and determination. Detectives are highly adept at seeing through nonsense, whether it be verbal, mathematical, or psychological. They are excellent problem-solvers and dogged seekers of the truth. Approximately 5% of the populace are Detectives.

You are Reflective: You dislike jumping to conclusions quickly. You’re adept at reflecting on your own thoughts. When it looks like your intuitions might be leading you astray, you don’t have a problem overriding them — instead, you take the time to re-evaluate the situation and figure out the wisest course of action.

You are Quantitative: You’re good at working with numbers. Not in a schoolbook way, necessarily — you’re adept at putting this skill to use while solving problems in all manner of real-world situations.

You are Carefree: You tend to live in the moment. You don’t waste a lot of emotional energy fretting about the future. Instead, you focus on getting the most out of life right now.

You are Skeptical: You treat new information and ideas with caution and skepticism. Spurious arguments rarely fool or confuse you, and your beliefs are based on foundations of hard logic. You possess a fine-tuned BS detector.

There is a lot more to the report they send, and I've had a look at a couple of the (also free) tools they've constructed to help develop the different aspects of people's thinking/rational decision making skills that they have developed and was quite impressed.

ClearerThinking.org say that they have a mission to make free tools that help the world make better decisions.

Now, how to encourage politicians, and those who believe everything fed to them by their social-media echo-chambers to participate?

Which of the 16 types are you?

When I were a lass

It's been niggling in the back of my mind, what that chocolate I mentioned the other day was called. The one with bits of biscuit and raisins, of which I was reminded mightily by the current Cadbury's Hot Cross Bun chocolate.

I finally gave up trying to remember and asked Google. Apparently it was 'Country Style', which I do vaguely remember, on looking at the red gingham wrapper. But, I think there was another more recent one, but I can find no trace of that.

For someone who thought she ate very little confectionery as a child, I remember rather too many of the wrappers in that link.

And I had at least one pair of the late 60s/early 70s pictured Clark's children's sensible sandals. Although how they appear as image 3 in a link about chocolate bars I have no idea.

For those who don't want to click the link:

I remember them particularly because my feet grew faster than my parents' budget for shoes, and, at the beginning of one summer holidays, when I was complaining that my toes were already at the end of the sandals bought only a few weeks before, my Dad cut the ends out of them over the toe area, so that I could get some wear out of them during the holidays before getting some new ones just before school re-started. It bothered me the whole summer, not because of what he had done, but because he had cut straight across, and I thought he should have done something rather more squiggly and creative, in keeping with the pattern punched into the shoes.

I don't remember other kids having shoes with the toes cut out, but I do jealously remember other kids having what my mother always called "unsuitable footwear" which to her was anything sparkly, shiny, brightly coloured, flip-floppy, heely, fun, or indeed anything that came from anywhere other than a Clark's shop, where you could only purchase once you had been properly 'measured' in all directions on their grey foot gauge with a slider and tiny measuring tape.

Anyone else have any shoe stories from long ago?

Dodging the weather

The thermometer in the conservatory tells me it has been 45.5°C maximum and 1.7°C minimum in there (with no ventilation) in the last week. It doesn't measure precipitation (few thermomenters do) but the water butts (now totalling nearly 6 cubic meters of stored water) are now all full and I had a sleepless night with the rain hammering on the skylights and the wind whistling around.

We've managed to fit in some gardening in the brief sunny interludes, and Mr BW has finished off all the jobs on our Chocolate Bank Holiday list, and I managed to get the lawn grass cut for the first time this year, and this year's paths cut into the field.

Finally the stone edging on the quince border at the top of the garden is complete. This border was 6 inches wide when we moved in and is now 6 foot. Some of the strawberries need relocating and there are some new fruit canes and bushes to put in.

The quince tree is the medium-sized fruit tree that we dug up and relocated from Garden Sud this time last year. It is never a good idea to attempt to relocate such a large established tree, but I am very fond of it, and any new owner woudl likely chop it down anyway, so there was nothing to lose. Several times in the heat and drought of last summer we thought we had lost it, as the leaves withered and it all looked very droopy; so much so that I even permitted some gold-plated tap water to be run onto it from a hose for several hours on a couple of occasions. It fell over in some high winds in the autumn, but Mr BW propped it up with a couple of tree stakes, and it is currently budding nicely. I love that tree, it has a perfect shape, and it has the best tasting quinces I've ever eaten.

With the night temperatures now high enough to allow cement to be made again, Mr BW also finished off the last metre of the retaining wall outside the new entrance. He was able to reuse a lot of the old stone water tables, quoins and lintels from the original porch 'blob' that was demolished. There is a little shelf now, to the right of the steps, on which I shall sit some small pots of something when I've decided what will survive there. Alternatively, it could be a seat, but only for a very thin person who enjoys sitting on the north side of a building, so not me.

Mr BW started making his cairn. What he has laid out must be 8 feet in diameter! Yes we do have a lot of stone to 'lose', but that is ridiculous and will be visible from the Space Station. I pointed out that he had plonked it on the last flat piece of land there currently is in the sloping leased field (other bits being temporarily covered in excavated soil, clay, salvaged wood and demolished or leftover stone), and vetoed its site. It is always an error for him to begin any project without consultation, but he forgets, even after 30 years.

Luckily a sensible site for it (or at least a scaled-down version of it), Vole Mound, is just a few feet away, to the right.

I have been dismayed at the plant and b33 lossses this winter, but gardening programmes and friends' experience tells me that it is all over the UK, not just up here in the wilds of the north.

Gone are two phormiums, a pittosporum (inherited, should have been taken out before, but I felt sorry for it as it's not its fault that I'm not fond of them, and we were told that it was planted over a long-dead dog's ashes), a ceanothus (ditto, except that the flowers are excellent bee-magnets and ceanothus never live long anyway so it previously had a stay of execution), all the crocuses except those planted this year, some supposedly hardy grasses, and a couple of roses, plus a hardy climbing fuchsia (Lady Boothby) and a wisteria (the latter two were against a south wall and protected from wind by other plants around) that we moved up that were fine the last couple of years. I do have plenty of over-wintering cuttings and small plantlets that have been growing on, but sssshhhh, don't tell Mr BW, as there is a local plant sale next weekend, and my new hairdresser has kindly told me about some hidden nursery gems she had previously failed to mention.

I think the fact that the freeze and snow at the beginning of December was so early in the winter finished off plants that would have survived equally cold weather later in the season.

Have you lost any plants?

Theatrically speaking

Repainted:

Rehung:

Refilled:

And looking better than it ever looked at Coven Sud, because it is in a better, more visible, position. The auriculas happily survived the winter in a cold frame, and, while bone dry, were blooming. Such sweet little faces.

Happy Easter/Passover/Ramadan/whatever else you care to celebrate

For the second year in a row, the three major world religions are celebrating their respective major festivals during the same weekend. An event that usually only happens once every 33 years. It seems that even religious events are in turmoil. Although this co-occurrence was entirely predictable, given that timings are based on calendars and lunar cycles.

I guess one could argue that all the other turmoil in the world was entirely predictable too.

For those of you concerned that Mr BW may not have been provided with enough hot cross buns or chocolate eggs:

He even has a(nother) bar of the offspring of the two - Peter Wabbit chocolate:

Now, I'm not particularly partial to chocolate, but this hot cross bun chocolate is delicious, and a chocolate with inclusions that I can eat as it does not contain wheat. It reminds me of a chocolate from long ago, but I can't remember what it was called.

Sadly The Black Feline Familiar caught the Easter Bunny who delivered the goodies on its way out.

Every day we have entrails and leftover legs and ears in the garage. Every single day. I dread to think how much more chewed and burrowed we would be were it not for her skills. How a cat can eat so much - she eats biscuits and wet food as well - and stay so skinny I have no idea. I wish I had her genes.

Having had breakfast in bed:

today we are planting, sowing, painting a theatre, and finishing off a retaining wall. And maybe doing some stone retaining edges and pogoing on a slate bed to break it up.

We also need to work out how to recover the orchard vegetable patch which has flooded repeatedly this winter, for the first time since we've been here. How it is flooded when it is half way down a hill and it is not wet either above or below it is a mystery, although there was an old 4" underground pipe we discovered that we thought was redundant that may have something to do with it.

I hope your day will be more relaxing...

Marching on to April

It is 8 years today since Mr BW 'retired'.

17 years before the government said he could. Viva La France.

I have no idea where the time has gone.

Except for the past 3 years.

I think I might finally have come to terms with 3 years of builders. It's taken a while. As almost everything I hold dear was challenged.

I think it might finally be spring.

It was a beautiful full moon last night.

We slept with the blinds open. And I watched the moon traverse.

And we were able to cut the grass for the first time today.