… but we can see her waiting hopefully for our return, even if she can’t see us.
We have finally managed to catch her white sister (who has got rather wilder than she already was in the past 2 years with us not being down south much), so she will have feline company once again, once we get back tomorrow. The two never liked each other, despite Black Feline Familiar being White Feline Familiar’s grandmother or great aunt (we were never quite sure which), but after several years apart, and with BFF having no other feline company, hopefully things may go rather better.
After attending possibly the most depressing funeral ever, late morning, Mi1dred disappeared on the back of a trailer early afternoon, and we just have to hope that she will reappear at Coven Nord tomorrow afternoon.
It’s very cold down south. 10 or 12 degrees. Grey skies and almost every appliance is going, or has already gone, wrong. I was kept awake most of the night last night by a smoke alarm bleeping, which, when I eventually reluctantly woke Mr BW as I couldn’t track it down to remove its battery voicebox, turned out to be the smoke alarm on the solar PV system, which is hard-wired in to the electric supply. Why it should also have a battery, I have no idea. Is that normal?
Here’s hoping we have a better journey up tomorrow than we had down yesterday: the M11 was only one lane all the way from the top, then closed totally between 11 and 10, and lots more roads were shut cross-country from Saffron Walden than were on the Ride London map. Only Highways England could shut the M11 (and it was a planned closure) while half of North Essex was also shut for a load of overly-lycra-clad London cyclists.
Month: May 2022
We now have 6 weeks without builders before they start the final (and most complicated) phase, which involves taking out an outside wall of the house.
We hope that the electricity and water services behave themselves and, without such time robbers, we might actually be able to get stuff done and start making order out of all the van and trailer loads of stuff that have come up and got piled on top of each other over the last few months.
Once we get back from a funeral trip south, hopefully with Mi1dred being delivered at around the same time by a car transport service, we will celebrate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee.
By having a 4 day hire of a turf-removing machine to remove the grass to make fruit beds, allotment bed, cuttings bed, area to pave around the greenhouse etc etc. 4 days for the price of one as the hire company are closed from Wednesday 4pm to Monday 8am. We haven’t used one before, so if anyone has any tips, comment away.
Never a dull moment…
The Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) have crunched numbers and produced this response to the government cost of living support package announced yesterday.
Interesting reading.
Over 50 hours on the water finally came back yesterday lunchtime… as orange gunk. More orange than it has ever been, and more viscous, and full of air.
Mr BW has taken the ballcock off the sheep trough in the field behind so it can feed/overflow through there until it clears at the Estate’s expense and not through our platinum-priced meter or our nice clean new system in the house!
It is still not properly clear after 10 hours of running.
While the water company have now mended all the leaks on their part of the system, there is still a leak that is losing 5 cubic metres of water every day, in the middle of a remote field of OSR, that the estate farm manager says he cannot locate exactly enough to fix.
While we now have better water pressure than we have ever had, we suspect we will continue to get orange water while there is an opening (leak) in the system. I am wondering whether I should volunteer my dowsing services (I’m pretty sure I could find it), or whether that might earn me the nickname locally of “The Witch on the Ridge”. Then again, with the very high price predicted for OSR oil this year, they may be choosing not to try to fix it until after they have harvested, as they don’t want to lose the part of the crop above the leak where digging would need to take place to unearth the faulty pipe.
And still no-one has water this morning, despite successive teams of water company ‘lads’ having worked all night (well, we hope they did, that was the plan at 7pm last night when Mr BW went to see them). Nearly 48 hours now.
One joy of living amongst hill farmers is that they get up at 4am this time of year (they are silaging at the moment) so already have situations sussed out by the time we wake up.
At least it is cool and drizzly – so the water butts are refilling almost as fast as we are using the water – and not scorching hot.
Knowing the depth of reader expertise, I have three technical questions about water situations, the first two linked to things I have pondered here in the past, and the last of current high concern. I’m hoping someone might have some technical knowledge they could share:
1. Our water often has an orange hue, caused by high iron levels from the surrounding geology. Locals with boreholes have confirmed that their sand filtration systems do not completely remove this hue. My white washing has been coming out orange for ages. I had a hunch that it was not being helped by me sometimes using washing soda in with the powder to remove tough stains. I got some Vanish powder for whites, and used it instead, and the problem got a lot better. Would the iron in the water causing the orange discolouration be reacting with the washing soda to make a more orange salt than was originally in the water (or to fix it in some way onto the fabrics – as washing soda and salt are used as mordants in dyeing)?
2. If water flowing through a water meter contains a lot of air, will it be producing an inflated meter reading? (ie have we been paying for air for months, or does the meter measure just the water volume and not the volume of the water plus air passing through it)?
3. If an initially pumped water system, that then relies on gravity (that serves 10 properties on hilly terrain over maybe 3 miles), is completely empty of water, how are the airlocks created (that will naturally rise to the highest point in the supply chain) removed?
… and still no water either.
36 hours on now.
Luckily properties at less height than us have now also run out, as has the Estate farm manager’s property and all his animal troughs, so there may be some hope that the problem is cured sometime before the end of the year.
Several excursions to the back of beyond by Mr BW have yielded the information that two water company lads (‘lads’ being a term seemingly applied locally to anyone below senior manager level in a company, and unrelated to age) were at the pump-in-the-middle-of-nowhere 3 miles down the road (that also draws from the big natural spring to fill a big reservoir a few miles away) at 4.30am and changed the ‘valves’ that might have been faulty so contributing to the problem, a series of ‘gulley clearing vehicles’ (‘septic tank emptiers’ to me, ‘poo suckers’ to Mr BW) attended during the day to draw water from the area around the ‘leak known about locally for weeks but unreported’ so that the split plastic pipes could be excavated and repaired, and the system turned back on (around 6pm).
As we still have no water, it could be due to other leaks, properties lower down needing a long while to refill their storage before water will climb the hill to us, or a big airlock that may or may not be fixable in the short to medium term.
Mr BW has gone off to do his civic duty as a local councillor this evening and will be pushing the message, “You need an Emergency Plan, you really do, these problems of ageing infrastructure not properly maintained, and climate change and drought, are becoming more frequent and you really need to ensure you have ways of supporting the local people affected each time, including knowing who to call to get official emergency supplies and services.” Can you imagine living in the South and not being provided with emergency water supplies after 36 hours of a water supply failure? Trust me, I’ve lived there all my life, in many different locations, and it would never happen. Up here it is just accepted that that is the way it is and there is no expectation that it shoudl be any different.
It was around the time this blog started (2003) that Parish Sud created their Emergency Plan and it was decreed that no sandwiches could be served in times of crisis unless I was present as I was the only one in the WI who had an Essential Food Hygiene Certificate, so was legally allowed to oversee the provision of refreshments in emergency situations. Things have moved on since then, and now half of evacuated London is catered for, if/when The Time Comes.
Since we have been here we have been stranded at home by snow for 6 weeks, had no electricity for 11 days, and had no water for [heaven knows how long eventually], and been regularly buffetted by strong winds. Everyone locally that we talk to just laughs and says, “It hasn’t happend before in living memory!” but it really isn’t funny. An elderly neighbour (who lives a mile away) who we’ve befriended as he walks by with his dog regularly, rang me earlier to ask if I knew anything about the water problem. I explained the situation and bemoaned the litany of disasters we’ve suffered in the last 26 months.. “They never happened before you moved in, are you sure you’re not a witch?” Out of the mouths of babes and the elderly…
Tonight we have no water at all. Not a single drop.
This morning we had an intermittent trickle of orange tinted, very frothy and spurty, but water nonetheless. I managed a 30 second shower, by turning off the water for several minutes in between each trickle. Three times.
It is unclear what is happening, or, indeed, if we will ever have water again.
Our supply comes off a Country Estate’s supply, which now emanates from the county water company’s, because private supplies were taken over by county water companies in an enforced acquisition a few years ago. They seem to have forgotten to include all properties drawing from the acquired points, so in very rural parts, a lot of people like us are left in a perilous position if their supply fails, with no-one legally responsible for having to restore it, the water companies washing their hands of responsibility, and landowners not being inclined to spend any money they don’t have to.
After being notified this morning by the Estate’s Farm Manager of the leak he’d spotted a month ago, the water company mended the leak on their side around lunchtime, but there was some problem with the valve to our side not working when they turned it back on again. But, we seem to be the only one of the 10 properties supplied on that line who does not have water.
Because we (and the sheep’s troughs) are the highest point from the supply point (a natural spring), we may apparently be suffering an airlock.
No-one knows how to solve this, and, because we are not the direct customer of the water company, no-one has to, and no-one has to provide us with an emergency water supply, or indeed any information, assistance or support.
Our nearest neighbour (half a mile away) has a borehole. We have begged 50 litres from her. “There’s something wrong with it!” she proclaimed, “It tastes really metallic at the moment.” Heavy metal is better than no water at all. And we had plenty of practice living on 25 litres per person per day in Cape Town during their bad drought a few years back.
We have a few water butts with some water left in them – perhaps 350 litres in total. We have a rechargeable portable shower spray unit from Bri@n the mini-caravan, so we are currently pretending we are on a caravan safari in South Africa. Without the good weather, obviously, but with more facilities. I think the novelty may soon wear off though.
There may be some reason events have conspired such that we have not yet been able to get Coven Sud on the market…
Well, after a week drying off, the phone dipped in tea has come back to life and lives on, which is good as its younger cousin replacement proved to have too many bells and (especially) whistles that could not be switched off. What happens when it finally dies of old age is of concern.
I don’t know about you, but I’m beginning to feel that I am totally uninterested in anything outside of my own back yard as there is nothing that I can do that will make the slightest bit of difference anyway. Something that I have often noticed in older people, but never thought would happen to me. Ho hum.
Did the tarmac people turn up to fill in the 20m trench across the dirve as promised (which should have been done by the end of last Thursday)? What do you think?
The powergrid project manager is back from his holidays and has been chasing.
Guess when they are coming?
Wednesday. Apparently. And that is after intervention from both high levels in the regional grid company and senior levels of their national sub-contractor. Just 12 days on from opening the trench. “You are not important!” is the strong message from them. I do hope they understand our message, “And you will not be getting paid!” We had to pay the largest part up front, but the payment of this part is dependent on our signing off a paper document. Will we be signing it? I don’t think so.
Why does it always have to be this difficult?
For the past week or so we have had very bad water pressure, with the water often running out mid-shower, mid-teeth cleaning, mid-washing machine load or mid-anything in fact, and is constantly frothy, spitty, and orange. Early this morning we took a walk down to the lower field (which looks very close from the top of our ridge but is probably half a mile away), and discovered an overflowing sheep water trough, due to a malfunctioning ball cock. We rang the estate manager. “Oh yes, that might be part of it, but there is also a 5 cubic metres a day leak somewhere below you!” “Right, OK, when might that be fixed?” Oh, right, you don’t know, fine, absolutely, why not leave us without reliable water supply indefinitely?
Frustrated, moi?
I would value your opinion on this:
A customer employs an architect to draw up plans, and the architect provides a fixed fee quote for doing the job.
The architect needs structural calculations as it is a complex project and recommends a ‘preferred’ structural engineer. The architect gets a fee quote from his preferred structural engineer and the customer pays the structural engineer directly, although the architect has all the contact with the structural engineer to procure the information he requires.
When pricing the work, a builder asks 4 manufactuers to quote for the structural steel framework. 3 say that it is not possible to bend the steel to the drawings supplied by the architect, who was advised by the structural engineer. The 4th fails to reply to the builder.
The builder speaks to the architect and to the structural engineer, and explains the situation: what has been drawn and calculated between them is impossible to construct.
The builder explains the situation to the customer and suggests that the customer asks the architect to speak with the structural engineer and sort out their error between them.
The architect then produces a slight variation on the design, which the steel fabricators are then able to make.
Should the architect (who was working to a fixed fee) charge for this, and if so, who should pay?
“What’s that little bee doing in the Google box today?” I thought.
“The United Nations officially declared 20 May as World Bee Day to honour the birthday of Slovenian beekeeping pioneer Anton Janša (1734–1773). In Slovenia, one in every 200 people is a beekeeper, most of them amateurs. The Beekeeping Academy of Slovenia says the hobby teaches ‘responsibility, perseverance, modesty, hard work, love of nature and homeland’.
More info about that here. And a rather different attitude from their government towards the importance of bees to what we get from ours here…
2 rough-looking blokes built like brick shithouses arrived at 8.15am.
It’s probably not politically or socially correct to say that these days but,
(a) We live in the North now and no-one round here gives a toss about ‘woke concepts’, and
(b) It’s true.
“Would have been here an hour ago if we hadn’t done 50 miles round the countryside looking for a way in for our wagon!” they said. And it was gigantic, with a mammoth scoop.
They started work almost before the lorry had stopped. No sitting in the cab for half an hour before slowly starting as is generally seen from workmen in these parts. We reckon they probably normally do fill-in behind rolling roadblocks on motorways, when there has been a suddden collapse in surface, and things have to be done pronto.
The 20m long, 75cm deep trench was filled in in with Type 1 and sand in less than an hour, with a protective metal barrier being laid over the electric cable and our ducting for the (mythical, maybe one day) fibre-optic cable put in too, and the huge pile of spoil dug out a week ago scooped away into the lorry. A veritable whirlwind! Did more work in that hour than our builders do in 3 days!!!
I’ve never seen blokes carry 2 of those big heavy protective barriers at once, one in each arm!
Still not being tarmaced until Monday though, despite Mr BW’s best efforts.
After probably 20 phone calls and emails, we discovered that apparently the trench fillers are not coming until today.
Because we are not a trench in a public highway any other work takes priority over us, despite the job having been contracted to be finished “by 20th”. Yes, but it would have been nice to have been TOLD there were delays and not have wasted half the day chasing you, and half the week waiting around for you to appear.
And they won’t do the rest of the work at the weekend, so not until Monday for tarmac and clearing up, which totally wrecks our plans for a visit south from today until midweek next week, just for a change.
Why do these people have such a lack of respect for the fact that other people have lives, commitments and plans? Because of deliveries, workmen, visitors due here Wednesday to Saturday next week, we now won’t be able to get south for another 10 days, which is the day half the roads around Coven Sud are closed for Ride London.
GRRRRRRRRR.
The new meter fitting man arrived at 8.07am yesterday, having left home at 6am to make sure he wouldn’t keep us off supply any longer than he had to. Mr BW had rung the meter fitting company contracted by the supplier twice, once when we made the appointment a couple of months ago, and once last Friday to ensure that there was a note on the job sheet that it wasn’t just a standard meter swop, but a meter onto a new supply line and we would have had no power for 24 hours, so would be grateful if we could be first job in the 8-12 allocated slot.
The builder’s electrician was also asked to arrive at 8am and eventually turned up just after 9am, just as the efficient meter man was leaving, having spent half of his hour here admiring our view down the valley. We keep telling Chief Builder that the electrical company is the weakest link in his tradesmen, but he says there is only one company better (and a lot worse) and the joiner he works with all the time fell out with the better electricians 20 years ago, so “boys’ loyalty” means he can’t work with them now.
The tails were attached into the new meter, an earth spike was added, the cables from everything (a bundle as thick as my leg) going into the new fuse box were taken out of the interim staging post in the old system, and supply was eventually restored just before 11am, so 26 hours off.
We had the generator on for a couple of hours in the afternoon to keep the fridges and freezers cold, and again in the evening to power the router as Mr BW had a Zoom meeting. We then left it running to use up the remaining petrol in the tank (easier that emptying it), and, amazingly it lasted until breakfast time. Given the amount of petrol it used in a day during Storm Arwen, one can only conclude that the temperature around it outside, and running all the pumps and other electrical components in the heating and hot water systems, makes a big difference to consumption (sorry NiC!).
Talking of consumption… I noted with dismay that the ‘readout unit’ that comes with the smart meter uses 2.5W an hour. That may not sound a lot, but that is 22kWh per year, or nearly £7 currently, and probably £11 come the next energy price rise October. So much for being a money saving item… Needless to say, once it is operational (which apparently takes up to 2 weeks while all the info is fed from installer to supply company) I shall be turning it off and returning to my trusty regular pen-and-paper reading of the meter. I’ll bet there aren’t many of you who know exactly how many kWh your home uses in a day: having had solar power with battery storage down south and being determined to use most of it ourselves rather than let it go into the grid (on the old FiT payments, the amount you didn’t use made no difference to the microgeneration payment received) made me ultra-aware of usage.
I’m horrified to read the new plans for protecting the profits of the energy companies (the price cap on energy will change every 3 months rather than every 6 months) and ensuring that never again are there cheap tariffs for people to switch to (a new ‘market stabilisation’ charge payable to the losing supplier by the receiving supplier when people switch to a better tariff).
Now, will the crews supposedly tuning up to fill in the trench, reinstate the tarmac surface, clean up and remove the barriers and signage actually turn up today? Not yet…
Tonight we no longer have an overhead power cable from the pole just outside our boundary to the house. We do however have an undergound cable, supposedly live.
We also no longer have any power, but hopefully that should be resolved in the morning when electricians and supply company (hopefully) turn up to put on a new meter. We should also then also have a new ‘generator port’ which will allow us to pipe petrol-generated output through the house wiring safely and without us needing to run extension leads to plug everything in to the generator. Provided that ‘TT’ supply has been put on rather that another sort that won’t do.
At one point this morning we had 6 blokes, 3 large vans, 2 cherry pickers (1 small, 1 large) and a boss’s car here. Most of their time was spent watching each other work.
I can guarantee that we could have found a more efficient way for the job to be done.
We are now waiting for the fill in crew to fill in the trench, the tarmac crew to restore the surface, the clean up crew to sweep up, the barrier crew to collect the plastic protective bits (that fell over in the wind the first night), and the sign off man who wants a signature to say we are happy.
Honestly, you could not make this stuff up.
After a cold and windy week last week, The Buzzy Familiars decided that Unexpecedly Warm and Sunny Saturday was the ideal day to leave home without permission. Ungrateful insects.
Luckily Mr BW was outside at the same time, and noticed, so we were able to successfully recover one lot from a nearby hawthorn tree and another from the surrounding hexagonal hedge struture we are growing around their hives.
Totally our fault, of course, as we had failed to find a day that we were here when it was warm enough (above 13°C), with no wind (or it will chill – so kill – the brood), to look at them. Usually they need looking at every week to 10 days from early in April, but there had not been a single suitable day when we were here.
I have only ever seen b33s in such a state a couple of times before: and certainly never ours!
They have built up much faster than we could possibly ever have imagined – probably as fast as in an average year down south, which is amazing given the cool weather we have had this spring. It appears that b33keeping in the NE isn’t going to be as difficult as we thought! Given the unexpectedly large harvest we might now predict, we may need to look for some new outlets as we lose our regular ‘passing trade’ as soon as we sell Coven Sud.
The disorder is all remedied now: we split some colonies, and gave others new frames to give them more space, but it took 4 hours. I’m just glad we are now in our 26th year because it took every bit of knowledge we have gained along the way to work out what was going on and come up with ways to stay one step ahead of them.
There are probably around half a million b33s in the orchard currently.
We have a river flowing up to our house now. Strange that, given that we live on top of a ridge, but the 75cm deep trench for the new underground electric supply cable left open across the sloping tarmac drive since Friday has filled with water with the rain overnight and earlier today.
The electricity goes off at 9am tomorrow, until sometime on Wednesday morning. After what happened when we had no electricity for 11 days last November/December, every scrap of washing and washing up is done, every last appliance is charged (plus all the battery packs we have), and we have the generators ready to be switched on to keep the fridges, freezers and the hens’ protective electric netting running, and lots of petrol. Luckily it is now light from 4am to 9.40pm, so there is no need for lighting or heating, and the Aga can run on manual, so we are OK for cooking too.
Fingers and toes crossed that all goes to plan and everyone turns up when they should…
One question – after all the rain, we seem to have a billion, if not a trillion, slugs. Nematodes have been ordered to attempt to control them. I am not a violent person, and I have been vegetarian for more than 50 years, but I make an exception for slugs. I pick an appropriate piece of stone that might be a prehistoric or Roman tool or axe head and chop slugs into several pieces. If I leave those pieces of decapitated slime out, will the eggs inside any that have eggs hatch into more slugs?
Well, the digger blokes were brilliant and could not have been more helpful.
We now know exactly where all our services run underground (they managed to avoid them all), and they even put in the ducting we’d bought for fibre optic cable installation (at some point in the long-off future, it’s all community projects here, dig-it-yourself from your boundary, so we are 17 metres ahead of the game now for if and when it ever happens; in the meantime we trundle on not really being able to access the modern world with copper broadband that runs at 1 point something MB on a good day).
Tuesday is when the next fun happens (unless a delivery driver falls in the open 75cm deep trench in the meantime): electricity off, overhead cable taken out, underground cable connected in and new fuse and new pole transformer. Then no electricity until Wednesday when the supply company put on the new meter (supposedly first call at 8am but we’ll see) and the builder’s electricians connect it all up indoors. Those generators from Storm Arwen days will be getting another outing.
Contrary to expectations, the power distribution company have not directly caused any issues so far.
But indirectly… probably as a result of everyone’s feedback about their poor communicaitons during and after the various storms last winter, they keep phoning us and sending emails and text messages ‘reminding’ us of the planned power cut on Tuesday.
I don’t usually get text messages at 8am on a Saturday, and we were watching Beechgrove while drinking tea in bed (a much better gardening programme than Gardeners’ World these days, and great to finally see it on BBC2 this year), so when the phone buzzed and I read yet another message from them, I sighed, and put the phone back on the bedside table.
Except that rather than going onto the surface, I accidentally dipped the phone in the cup of tea. We turned it off and took the battery out quickly and it is currently in an airtight contianer of rice in the sun.
I have been meaning to write a blog post about those pesky one-time-passwords that almost every retailer, service provider and bank insists on sending to your phone before they let you use their services these days. “What happens if you lose your phone or it stops working?” was going to be one of my major points.
I’m about to find out….
Except that, fortuitously, I do have a new spare phone. As I don’t have a smartphone (as my fingers don’t work screens), it was a sensible use of £20 back in 2020 when we moved up here. Although the same brand of dumbphone, and the same ‘basic’ model, annoyingly it’s much larger than the last one, but at least it seems to work and is now charging. Now, how to turn off all those pesky sounds and irritating features I hate…
Anyone know the percentage chance of the old phone drying out and still working? It was only the top inch that had a quick unwelcome drink (but unfortunately that inch has the charging hole and the headphone hole). The tea was quite cool and we did get it turned it off, patted dry on a tissue, and the battery out quite quickly.
Digger blokes here bulldozing across the tarmac drive to make the new route for the electric cable we are being made to put underground as we need to move the entry point of the supply into the house ready for the last building phase.
So far they have managed to avoid the phone/broadband line but there is still the water pipe for them to find and then to dig under the drystone wall (400 years old, no foundations) to get the new cable to the existing pole.
It’s Friday 13th.
Just discovered the powergrid project engineer is going to the the Scottish Islands on holiday next week (he was meant to be here supervising the overhead to underground switchover and the replacement of the original 1974 transformer on the pole on Tuesday) and our builder is also away on holiday next week.
Never a dull moment here…
Down south we have been alarmed that our 90 year old oak tree and our 20 year old silver birch tree have really tiny leaves this year. The oak’s leaves are perhaps a third of their normal size, but there is good coverage, and they seem to be the usual pale green for this time of year.
They are not near each other, and the only thing we can think of that might be causing this is ‘drought’. The whole garden is absolutely parched, without us there constantly watering. Having to struggle so much to keep plants alive is something we will not miss.
Has anyone else noticed this phenomenon, or have any other theories about what is happening here?
As light sleepers, with far too many complicated projects currently proceeding in parallel to worry about in the wee small hours, and ageing such that night visits become more frequent of necessity (which wakes us up even when we – occasionally – have all the project plates spinning nicely), we often need to resort to hot chocolate to send us back to sleep.
We’ve always bought Green & Black’s Organic Hot Chocolate since it started in the early 1990s, and make it up with skimmed organic milk. In recent months I think the manufacturers (G&B was bought out by Cadbury’s in 2005, and then by Kraft in 2010) must have changed the recipe as it is now overwhelmingly sweet. Far, far too sweet for me, even made up with a fraction of the recommended dose of powder in a mug. Mr BW, a sweet-toothed chocoholic, still loves it, but I’m sure his teeth and blood sugar spikes don’t.
Mr BW noticed that the texture of the dry product in the tub has changed from small granules to a fine powder. I noticed that the design on the cardboard tub has changed 3 or 4 times in recent years; not hugely, and it is still basically rich brown and gold, but the positioning and size of the lettering and the overall layout is subtly different.
In times when manufacturers are being officially asked to reduce the sugar (and salt) content of maufactured products, this does not make any kind of sense.
The ingredients, as given on the Sainsbury’s online shopping website (which seems to be pulled directly from the G&B website, where they are cleverly hidden behind a ‘+’ a long way down the page), are extremely unclear, but, adding up the given percentages, and accepting that ingredients lists legally have to be written in descending weights of constituent parts, a significant proportion of the product would now seem to be sugar in various forms:
Ingredients
Icing Sugar # (Sugar #, Tapioca Starch #), Fat-Reduced Cocoa Powder # (31 %) (Fat-Reduced Cocoa Powder #, Acidity Regulator (Potassium Carbonates)), Chocolate # (11%) (Cocoa Mass #, Cane Sugar #, Cocoa Powder #, Vanilla Extract #, Emulsifier (Soya Lecithins #)), # = Certified Organic, Organic Chocolate: Minimum Cocoa Solids 60 %, Fairtrade Sugar, Cocoa and Vanilla may be mixed with non-certified Sugar, Cocoa and Vanilla on a mass balance basis, total 96 %
but elsewhere the ingredients are given as:
Ingredients:
Organic raw cane sugar, organic cocoa powder(28.6%), organic dark chocolate (16.3%) (organic cocoa mass, organic raw cane sugar, organic cocoa butter, emulsifier: soya lecithin, organic vanilla.
I don’t have an old tub of G&B’s hot chocolate to hand, so can’t compare the ingredients lists, but my taste buds tell me the sugar content has gone up significantly.
I dislike the taste of hot milk (or cold milk, come to that, probably as a result of being forced to drink quarter pints of the tepid stuff at school breaktimes as a small child), so, looking round for alternatives, re-found Ovaltine, which I used to love as a child, and ordered some with this week’s grocery delivery.
And guess what? That has changed its taste too!
Although less sweet than the G&B hot chocolate, it no longer has the distinctive malty taste that it used to, and is now totally nondescript. I’m pretty sure it is not my palate that has changed, as these tastes are ‘once tasted never forgotten’ type substances.
Either I am going to have to take up brewing-up home-grown herbal leaf concoctions, in true Witch stylee, or mixing up spice blends to add to hot milk with honey for my nocturnal slumber-inducing beverages.
Why does nothing good ever stay the same?
We have two identical HP all-in-one (print/scan/copy) OfficeJet printers, one Nord and one currently Sud. This is for historical reasons – we bought one as a spare when there was an incredibly good offer on somewhere about 5 years ago and HP were doing £50 cashback, which made the second one about a tenner. The second one (still in its box) was brought north hastily when we bought Coven Nord just before the first lockdown, and has been indispensable.
My netbook will print wirelessly on the Sud one, but for the past few weeks has been giving an ‘error printing’ message whenever I try to print on the Nord one. There isn’t a printer cable port on the netbook, so I can’t connect directly to print that way. Nothing that I can think of changed between when I could print and when I couldn’t. Mr BW can still print from his laptop and I can still print from the desktop.
Switching both printer and netbook off and on again (in various permutations), reloading the printer driver and threatening the printer with a trip through the window have all failed to solve the problem.
If anyone has any ideas on how to restore printing functionality, I would be very happy to hear them.
As with all HP printers, the ink cartridges for these ones have gone up in price enormously after about year 2 (a set of 4 XL cartridges that were around £60 five years ago are now £150, and rarely on offer anywhere), presumably to force owners to buy new printers. This is the third time that this has happened, and consequently, although I love the quality of print and (initial) good value printing, I shall not be buying HP printers again.
I’m wondering whether an Epson Ecotank model (again, an all-in-one print/scan/copy, must be wifi) might be my next purchase? In some places, the base model printer, with inks, is cheaper than a new set of HP cartridges! Does anyone have any experience of those? I need to get away from the high cost – financial and environmental – of inkjet cartridges.
On our last trip south the M11 was closed between junctions 10 and 11 (just south of Cambridge) so we had to find an alternative route. Knowing the area well after so many years, we took a cross-country route, and were horrified to see how many new ‘identikit’ housing developments have been thrown up in in the last 2 years in what was previously open countryside in Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire and Essex.
I say ‘thrown up’ advisedly, as I often get chatting to our workmen about new developments they work on (over near the NE coast) and am regaled by tales of the very low standards attained or expected, despite all the supposed exacting building regulations these days.
Perhaps because of these southern developments, or perhaps because Coven Sud was on the Tour de France route in 2014, so becoming general knowledge as a rat-run, together with a general increase in journeys by car as there is absolutley no public transport to support all this development (sustainability, in planning terms having been repeatedly ignored), there has been a huge increase in vehicle traffic past Coven Sud.
What was, 27 years ago when we moved there, a country lane with a few vehicles passing every day, now has a regular stream of vehicles at all times of day, and enough traffic at night to repeatedly wake me when I am down there (I am a very light sleeper). Depending on the wind direction, there is also sometimes traffic noise from Small Local Town by-pass built 20 years ago, and the noise of overflying planes from where airport flight paths were re-routed in 2016 on an historic technicality not requiring a formal consultation process.
After two years of living in near-silence in clean air, the atmosphere down there just seems ‘heavy’. Breathing is noticeably harder.
I stumbled across a website the other day that will calculate the air pollution at every address.
Coven Sud has 53% air pollution.
Where I lived from 0 to 5 (then a rural area of Berkshire) now has 92%.
Where I lived from age 5 to age 16 (then a very rural area of Buckinghamshire) now has 79%.
Where I lived for 2 years as a student in central London in the early 1980s now has 99%.
Where I spent a post-grad year in Cambridge in the mid 1980s now has 57%.
Where I lived in the south west in the late 1980s now has 21%.
Coven Nord has 1%.
What is the air pollution where you live?
That website has some great incredibly accurate location photos of each property you enter, so if you want to easily find what somewhere you once lived now looks like, that’s your site!
Mr BW has just informed me that we probably won’t have electricity today or tonight as it is a 2-day job for 2 electricians to re-route all the cables into a new consumer unit in a new location and then put in a temporary cable back to the old meter/main fuse position. Nice to have been given warning…
At least we have 2 generators, which is the only good thing to have come out of Storm Arwen. Although whether we have enough fresh petrol for them is another matter.
We’ve always been very frugal with electricity, never leaving things on standby, always switching unnecessary lights off, and always buying the lowest energy appliances available. Therefore, none of the ‘energy saving hints’ being trotted out by the media are going to help us in the current energy pricing ‘crisis’.
One thing that we have found (quite by accident) recently that I’ve not seen mentioned anywhere is that if you are using an electrically pumped gas, oil, or LPG boiler to heat hot water which is then stored in a tank, you may be using more energy than you need.
If you have a hot water tank with an immersion heater, using it, on a timer, to directly heat water might work out cheaper than using your boiler, if your boiler has electric pumps. Electric pumps use a lot of energy as they do a lot of work, and the electricity they use, plus the oil/gas/LPG, might work out considerably more expensive than just using an immersion heater.
We live in a 30m long house, as I’ve said before, and our oil boiler is downstairs at one end and our hot water tank is upstairs in the middle. There was no way to modify this arrangement when we renewed them last year, and no greener heating/water heating source that could provide the output we need, so we rely on electric system pumps to move water about, and our set-up is probably as extreme as it gets in a domestic situation.
Nevertheless, when we turned off the oil boiler a few weeks back as we refused to pay what the oil companies are demanding per litre (over 4 times the usual price at this time of year), and started using the immersion heater to directly heat water, I was amazed that the daily electric consumption rate did not noticeably increase. Probably a saving over using oil of at least £20 a week, at current prices.
We do have a brand new hot water tank that has no perceptible heat loss, so the perfect system for directly heating water with an immersion heater, but it might just be worth considering if you want/need to save money and use a boiler and have stored hot water.
We have 3 lapwings swooping and calling (shrill and wailing, like part of a dial-up modem’s sound) across the fields, with their fat rounded black wings and white flashes.
It took us a while to work out what they were, but now, once seen, never forgotten. Impossible to photograph though.
Do you know what a group of lapwings is called?
We came north again on Sunday, leaving at 7.30am and there was much less on the roads, for once. Maybe because it was the middle of a bank holiday weekend, or maybe because of the price of fuel. Brent crude oil is back up again, to $110 a barrel (but nowhere near its $139 high), and heating oil was 93.5ppl this weekend, so heating and hot water continue to be off. Diesel on the A1 is still roughly the same price as it was 3 weeks ago Most expensive 196.9ppl, ‘cheapest’, 167.5ppl. Why is diesel 14 to 18 pence per litre more than petrol?
We got a lot done last week: Mr BW’s Mum’s house, where she lived for 64 years, is now (almost) empty, spic and span, and ready for the estate agent to market from tomorrow, with a bookings-only Open Day 10 days after. Note to anyone reading who has chidren: please move from the house your children grew up in before dying; it will be much less emotionally draining for them eventually.
We now have another van load ready to come up (largely in the workshop), so will be going down for a quick van loading weekend within the next 3 weeks, as soon as building work here allows. We then have to go down again at the end of the month for Mr BW’s Aunt’s funeral, and for Mi1dred to be collected for her journey north (we finally found somewhere who could do it for a reasonable price).
Hopefully we’ll get Coven Sud on the market by the end of June. Hopefully. Unless something else crops up in the meantime…
Coven Nord is now all masked/sheeted up ready for two big bits of ceiling to come down today so that the internal wiring can be re-routed in preparation for the officially-required moving underground of the electricity supply from the pole outside our boundary to the house.
This is happening in stages over the next 3 weeks, and involves the builder, the power grid company, the sub-contractor trenching company, the electricity supply company and the electricians, all of whom have to be here in the right combinations at exactly the right times. What could possibly go wrong? 😉