Once upon a time, from 1985 to 2020, all our insurances were due on the same day in the third week of August. This nicely concertinad insurance renewal into one day of admin time for 35 years.
Then came ‘The Great and Prolonged Move North’ and ‘The Building Projects’ plus the necessity to buy new cars, which have now resulted in 3 different renewal dates, thereby now kissing goodbye to 3 days of my available daily active hours every year.
If you carry out extensive building works, many insurance companies simply cancel your insurance once you notify them (as you legally have to), leaving you high and dry and scratching around for a new company that will cover you at short notice, for exorbitant rates. If you buy a new car, many insurance companies hugely inflate your premiums, or refuse to cover you at all (if your new car has a soft top), and all brokers have gigantic admin charges for alterations, so forcing you to look elsewhere.
And so it comes to pass that we now have one renewal date in February, one in August and one in December rather that just one date for all three in August.
So, I started the week looking around for insurance for Mr BW’s car. Current company wanted 55% more than I got it for eventually, with better cover, and the promise of a brand new car if it is ever more than 60% damaged in its first 2 years (who needs Gap insurance in these circumstances?). I could have got it for half the renewal price, but budget insurance (2.9/5 on Trustpilot) is too much potential hassle, and better safe than sorry.
On Monday I decided I’d had enough of paying Octopus 70p per day standing charge when we only use 7 or 8 units of electricity per day, and are sick of their inane ‘save money by cutting down on usage between x and y hours’ when you just eventually get 5p for having sat in the dark for 2 hours. Plus, our fixed tariff with them runs out in 8 weeks anyway. Some comparison site searching and then looking for reviews made us decide that changing was the best bet, and at midnight last night (just 30 hours after deciding) we moved electricty company, and they’ve already picked up our smart meter readings. No more waiting a month, or even a week, for changing. £148 per year saved. All good. I think that makes the 7th electricity company we have been with in just over 5 years here. One was the inherited company that we changed from immediately, 2 went bust, leaving us with the ‘supplier of last resort’, from whom we quickly moved, and the final one was a ‘once good, now too big for their own good’ company.
Today was spent agonising over where to move some ISA money – after MSE (and other more academic sources) suggested that their info was that the base rate would come down another 0.25% on Thursday week, I realised that the nice flexible ISA instant access I’d been watching an nurturing was dead and that I needed to move quite a lot of money elsewhere pronto. My transfer went without hitch and (amazingly) despite being told it would take up to 15 days, I’ve just had an email to say that my money is already with the new provider.
However, yet again, Mr BW’s auto-ID checks failed (how mine pass every time while his fail every time I have no idea), and depsite having (against my better judgment) to email in a photo of his photo ID (driving licence), the receiving company still have not confimed acceptance. Looking elsewhere found that the rates offered in the MSE email this morning are being pulled faster than a dodgy dentist (ie seemingly most of those in the north) pulls teeth, so a strongly worded email has been sent to the offending company demanding that the rates offered be honoured as the delays were entirely their fault. We’ll see…
I forgot to mention that all our technology is going wrong at the same time, yet again.
A set of new inks for our old HP printer is now £185, or £90 as compatibles. We swopped to remanufactured cartridges 3 years ago, and I’ve now had issues with 4 compatible cartridges. Despite the re-manfacturers giving a 12 month guarantee, they just ignore you if you email with evidence that cartridges have failed (so leaving you to the mercy of credit card company chargeback, and all the hassle that entails).
I was intending to get an Epson eco-tank printer, but, in researching it, found so many complaints that I then didn’t want to go that route. I also discovered that HP now do a tank machine, so managed to buy a new machine (originally £279) with (supposedly) 3 years ink included, for £169 (after manufacturer’s and Costco discounts). I don’t want to junk the old printer, which is perfectly fine, apart from the cost of the ink now, but I have no choice. What is the point of HP selling a brand new machine, with a 3 year guarantee, and 3 years of ink, for less than the price of one set of new inks (which last us about 8 months)?
I’m beginning to think that I am the only person who actually cares about this sort of thing any more. Am I?
Tomorrow’s post will no doubt contain moaning about being forced to get new laptops. Yet another time sink.
Month: July 2025
Mr BW has a badge, like those that McDonald’s employees sport.
One star for every demonstrated and perfected skill.
It’s a bit large now, and a bit cumbersome, so it is very heavy, and he can’t actually wear it any more.
I think that The Black Familiar looks after it, as well as Mi1dred, in the workshop/garage.
This week it gained another 2 stars: the recycling star – awarded for cutting off useful cables and plugs before taking something to the tip, without being reminded; for asking people offloading many useful things – obviously from a house clearance – from a hired van at the tip, if we could have some items (spirit levels and metal supports); and for bringing back some shredded cardboard (that I had absent-mindedly put in the kitchen recyling bin) for b33 smoker fuel rather than putting it in the recycling bin at the end of the drive.
And the slating star, for reusing large quantities of slates, and wood from previous building phases.
Here are some photos of the stages of the wood store construction, which includes a slated roof, made from the leftover slates we made the roofers leave behind (there were 200 of them, they told us they cost £2 each, and £400 wasn’t coming off the bill if they took them away as they were planning, so they stayed here, after I noticed and Mr BW intervened). It has been constructed on the east wall of the house, between the chimney pillar and the edge nearest the revamped conservatory.
Before:
With the (Mr BW made) steel supports and roofing support timbers:
Roof starting:
Roof continuing:
Dividers:
Reusing the forged gate – that Mr BW made for the field gate at Coven Sud, that we moved North – as a camouflaging rose support:
Now we just have to fill the wood store with all the timber (largely trees that we chopped down as they were in the way of the various building projects) from the collapsing former wood shed (once a dog kennel), and with the rest of the yet-to-be-chopped-up remaining old roof timbers.
Strangely, today our chosen episode of Johnnie Walker’s SOTS, Ghost Edition, was from 3 years ago, weeks before The Proper Queen died, and featured pre-amble from when the England Women footballers won the last trophy.
There seems to be an outbreak of ‘forest bathing’ being promoted in our locality.
This seem to involve sitting or lying quietly in a field or wood and breathing and listening.
A two hour session is just £38.62.
And then there is the other latest craze: ‘sound bathing’. This seems to involve sitting or lying on a mat in a field listening to gongs and metal bowls being banged while emptying your mind. It’s ‘transformative’ apparently, for your mind, body, and spirit. At around £20 a 40 minute session in a group of 6, in my opinion the thing most transformed is likely to be the organiser’s bank balance.
And then there are the ‘Digital Detox Days’ held at various venues within the county. You pay to have your gadgets put safely away in a locker for a day, while you do other more exciting things.
Well, no thanks to paying for any of the above. Every day encompasses most of those things around here. I am saddened that anyone feels it necessary to pay someone else to take them for a walk or sit in nature to listen and notice their surroundings. Or to relieve them of their gadgets as they are too addicted to pass a few hours without them.
It’s great to be eating almost entirely from the garden, and satisfying to have almost all the materials we need to do almost everything we want – many of them salvaged from past building works.
This week Mr BW has been building and slating a log store, and we have been designing another fused glass top for an outdoor table – this time with a strelitzia design.
I just wish we could get rid of all the wasps… never have we seen so many, and they are a big threat to the b33s.
There is a huge murder of crows that flies menacingly around the local area. It mostly settles in some trees a few hundred yards away, but just recently a few bold members have started alighting on the summerhouse roof. Banging a pair of flip flops outside the front door usually dispatches all of them for the rest of that day, but there are several hundred of them, and in full flight it is scarily like a scene from Hitchcock’s The Birds. Once the wheat crop is harvested, I expect the farmer will send the crow murderer out again, like he did last year, and the murder of crows will end up murdered. Here’s hoping it doesn’t start at 5.30am like last time, as we woke thinking WW3 had started right overhead.
There is also a flock of goldfinches, maybe 50 or 60 of them, who flitter about, and often alight in our old plum tree sometime around 5am. I didn’t know that goldfinches flew in groups, or, until just now, that the collective noun for goldfinches is a charm.
Mr BW rescued a tiny bird from the greenhouse the other day.
At first I thought it was a greenfinch, then I thought it might be a juvenille goldfinch that had somehow got separated from the charm. It wasn’t singing, so we couldn’t use Merlin to be sure.
Having now looked at images online, the beak doesn’t seem correct for a goldfinch.
Maybe it’s a wagtail? The beak is more wagtail-y, but the tail feathers don’t seem long or slender enough.
Anyone got any thoughts?
Kippy (in the comments) and Mark Twain (allegedly) are correct: house guests are like fish; they are only good for three days.
The OFBW left on Tuesday morning after 7 days and 6 nights. We did not invite them for this amount of time, they chose it.
In advance of their visit we had emailed them a long list of suggested places to visit, with links, so that they could do some research before they arrived, and I gave them my box file of maps and leaflets of interesting day trips when they arrived.
We suggested two joint outings and assumed that they intended to go out on their own the rest of the time. However… it soon transpired that they intended to stay around the house and grounds for most of the time, taking photos and sending them to all their WhatsApp groups, and then telling us what their various family members, friends and acquaintances thought of our house/garden/plants/bees and butterflies etc.
Now, I am a lot more tolerant than I used to be these days (largely because the middle of nowhere with the nearest neighbour half a mile away has little to annoy anyone), but I do not see why I should put up with other people sitting at our table, playing on their gadgets, with their phones pinging multiple notifications every minute.
I also object to photos of our lives and surroundings (that will be geotagged because most people have no idea this happens, let alone how to turn it off) being sent to all and sundry, with no control over where they end up. AI is advancing fast and will soon be building information grids which are as yet unimaginable in terms of sourcing, complexity and usage. Because I couldn’t think of a polite way of telling them that we didn’t want them to do this, Mr BW had a quiet word with them on the second day, when I wasn’t around. I know the undesired behaviour continued, but at least it was more subtle.
I also object to a guest going through the contents of my fridge (and passing comment on the desirability or otherwise of items), and helping themself to my alcohol (in one case before noon), including (after drinking everything else) a can of stout that I had intended to use to make a cake, even if they later replace it and then ask, “When are you making that cake?” at every opportunity. Needless to say, I didn’t. And even yesterday I found a half-empty bottle of white wine in the drinks fridge that I certainly didn’t open.
I now have a new definition of ‘hypocrisy’ – wearing t-shirts “made of sustainable bamboo” and evangelising about it, with no idea/interest that bamboo isn’t actually that sustainable, with slogans like, “Because there is no Plan B”, when each of them drives a car that does fewer than 35mpg, and takes at least 8 flights a year, half long-haul, and one of them still drinks water out of single-use plastic bottles.
For them, every outing has to have at least one visit to a coffee shop. For us, who waste neither time nor money on such fripperies, and anyway don’t drink coffee, that is very frustrating.
We also had to sit through endless tales of other people’s lives, and complaints about the hospitality they’d been provided from various of their other family and friends. I pondered aloud, in a sarcastic tone, “I wonder what they say about us when we’re not there?” which did at least elicit a long pause and then a change of subject. Interestingly, it emerged that they had fallen out with two sets of friends and a sibling and his wife during stays with them. In hindsight, I should have said, “Are you surprised?” but, I was brought up to be better mannered than that, and was, at the time, dumb-struck by their complete lack of self-awareness.
On Saturday I took these bottles to the bottle bank on my way to therapy (AKA (fleece) spinning group). Yes, there are 21 of them, and there were another 7 beer bottles, of which Mr BW and I only consumed one each, with a curry.
Probably half of the contents of the bottles was drunk by Mr OFBW, who is now undoubtedly exhibiting signs of alcoholism (hiding a bottle under the table and sneekily topping up, filling a glass to the very top them gulping half and then refilling when he thought no-one was looking – after a professional lifetime of observing in classrooms and four and a half years of overseeing builders, if I am in the vicinity, I miss nothing – etc etc). The very long-suffering Mrs OFBW is clearly aware of the problem, which might actually be longer-standing than I think.
I could not have ventured out of the house before yesterday, such was my level of exhaustion after they had gone.
It was the third heatwave of the year in these northern parts, and I spent the week loading and unloading the dishwasher, cooking, and repeatedly walking the length of the longhouse from the ice cube maker or freezer to the kitchen to keep certain people supplied with ice. As a reward, I now have a sharp pain in the heel of my right foot when weight-bearing (I think from walking bare-footed on our hard tiled floors much more than usual). I have also now ordered an insulated, lidded, ice bucket.
How we used double the amount of electricity we usually use, I have no idea.
And I haven’t even told you about what happened when we had one of the usual spluttering orange water problems on the Friday, or the toddler tantrum when Mr OFBW discovered that Mr BW had inadvertently used his bottle of sparkling water that he had put in the drinks fridge, to make tempura batter…
Yes, I don’t think they will be coming to stay again any time soon, and I doubt we will ever go to stay with them in Suffolk as I still have a panic attack every time we get to the big roundabout on the outskirts of N’Castle which proclaims that the turning to the right is for “A1 – The South”. I really really don’t want to go back down there.
As far as I am concerned, in the case of the male of the species, the ‘O’ in ‘OFBW’ might now stand for ‘Once’ rather than ‘Old’… 29 years after meeting, and once with a lot in common, after that visitation, it is clear that we are now walking very different paths, with very different interests, expectations, understandings and conceptions of the world.
The great thing about having people to stay for a week is that you get round to doing all those deep-clean household chores that you wouldn’t dream of asking your cleaner to do, but that you never quite get round to yourself the rest of the time. Those jobs that you don’t need to do when people are only coming for the day or even for a night or two, because they won’t have the time or the opportunity to notice.
And so we now have clean Aga lid and oven door insides (I think this is only the second time they have been done in 5 years since the Aga was installed), clean fridge, clean drinks fridge, debugged ceiling light covers, de-crumbed kitchen drawer corners, and de-fluffed bathroom cabinet drawers. We also have ironed tea-towels and pillow cases and new toilet brushes – the first renewed set since we moved in. Maybe that is too much information? There are probably other things too, but I can’t remember them now I am trying.
The farmer took the sheep from the field behind us off this morning and they returned what seemed like ten minutes later, but was probably two hours, minus their coats. At least they look clean again, and given how hot it is predicted to be again by the weekend, they will be grateful.
I have written on a piece of card that I shall keep close to hand (but hidden away), “Mr Old Friend BW can get very annoying after a couple of days. Remember he will be going home soon.”
He probably has a similar card with a similar message about me.
We love him dearly, having known him for nearly 30 years, but he is not the best of house guests, and not very good at helping out. Fortunately Mrs Old Friend BW usually makes up for his short-comings.
Mr BW and I are betting on how many days we are going to have to endure him going on and on about the Black Sabbath goodbye gig that he went to last weekend, and whether or not he will turn up wearing That t-shirt.
I took the glass recycling to the bottle bank in the nearest village yesterday on my way to somewhere. There is still no glass kerbside recycling in these rural parts, which frustrates me greatly as the county council provide that service in the towns (where there are of course numerous bottle banks in supermarket car parks) but not in the isolated areas where it is really needed.
Our glass bin is a standard size swing bin and holds probably 25 empty bottles. I am wondering how many bottles will not fit into the bin by the time they go home next week. Faites vox jeux.
You need to know that Mr OFBW used to work in the drinks industry and knows his wine. One memorable night, way way back last century, when they lived next door but one to us down south, and Mr OFBW still had lots of free sample bottles, we polished off 10 bottles between the 4 of us. Actually, Mrs OFBW probably dropped out at Bottle 6 (she has always been a lightweight, or more sensible, depending on your point of view), and I probably dropped asleep before Bottle 8, but Mr OFBW and Mr BW were still drinking when Mr OFBW insisted on opening Bottle 10, proudly proclaiming that it had a list price of over £80. 10 bottles between 4 when you are in your early 30s would have been just about OK, except that a taxi was picking them up to take them to the airport to go on holiday very early the next morning. How they woke up on time I still don’t know to this day.
We are certainly in for an action packed week…
Where we used to live, it was 35°C today. Here, it was 16°C maximum, and 14°C and drizzly for most of the afternoon.
We know because The Old Friends BW are coming to stay in a week’s time – the first time we have seen them face-to-face for nearly 4 years – and we were emailing to confirm the arrangements.
Never before have we seen a 19°C difference in temperature between two places in England that are 300 miles apart.
We went into town: everyone else was wearing winter coats. We had on summer attire.
It occurred to me that if it were winter and 14 degrees, we would be wearing many layers and turning up the thermostat. In winter I would feel cold at that temperature: in summer somehow it just seems different; refreshingly cool.
We are drowning in berries. They are ripening faster than we can pick them. Delicious.