Author: Blue Witch Page 1 of 60

For those of you reading via RSS, at some point tomorrow, BW will be moving to httpS, and it is possible that you might need to resubscribe to this new URL on your RSS feed. This might also apply to blogrolls, bookmarks, and other links.
It has also transpired that in order to move to WordPress, I have to be moved onto a different server, because my legacy code currently rests on a legacy server. If it doesn’t all work, I might be moving back again very quickly. And crying.
In other news, this morning the washing machine went wrong. It’s not even 7 years old, and it is as pristine as it was when new as I am nice to it and do everything you should.
After investigation, Mr BW identified that it was the drain pump that has failed, but also, from the noise it has been making for some long time, we know the bearings are on their way out. While Mr BW could probably mend it (YouTube is his friend), the parts aren’t cheap, and experience tells us that once white goods get to that age, these days, there is no point at all in continuing to throw good money after bad, and be repeatedly inconvenienced every time another part fails. It does grieve me that a perfectly good shell will be scrapped because of parts that have no longevity.
Fortunately, there are loads of early black Friday offers around, plus I found a coupon code for another 10% off, and Samsung has an offer on currently (which only started yesterday!) whereby they will refund the VAT and upgrade you to a 5 year warranty for free. So, all in all, it’s costing about £150 more than we would have had to pay just for the parts, which may or may not have solved the problem. So that is £30 extra for each year of the 5 year warranty on a brand new machine. A no-brainer I think.
The new machine is arriving tomorrow. Although it isn’t much different to the last one (other than now taking 11kg rather than 9kg, and having different washing programmes), it is another new technology thingy for me to have to get used to. Oh dear.

Three seconds after the telephone box door is opened the phone now starts to ring.
It doesn’t stop if you pick up the receiver.
It is very convincing.
Now all we need is a CCTV in there to record people’s reactions (it is our designated place for deliveries when we are not here).
In other news, I have now finished wrapping all Mr BW’s FOTCR™ presents (all but one of which he has bought himself and donated to the cause to be wrapped). I hate wrapping anything, and often leave it to late on FOTCR™ Eve, which always feels hugely stressful. It feels good to be way ahead of the game.
I have also made the first batch of cranberry sauce today. And eaten some of it. It is nice with dinner (baked stuffed home-grown butternut squash) and with yoghurt and oats for breakfast. As ever, Morrisons’ supplier is in Wisconsin (to support Scoakat’s local economy).
I am clearly trying to vaccinate myself against that season.
In further news, we have today finished planting the tulips – the end of another 500 bulbs. I think the creatures around here manage to eat more than we plant every year though, so it’s a never-ending battle.
And I finished washing and sterilising all the seed trays, modules and plant pots we have used this year. I tried to do at least one session of pot washing every week to keep on top of it. That has worked too.
When will the BBC announce the new presenter(s) of Gardeners’ World? Monty’s last show is this Friday. I’d like Adam Frost, currently doing a good impersonation of the late great Geoff Hamilton. Who do you favour?

After last week’s unscheduled disappearance when the worldwide PHP issues hit and my almost 24 year old underskirts proved too old to hold me up any more, we are now trying to make me a new dress. This has been something that has not managed to ever get to the top of the (very long) ‘To Do’ list so far, in an ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ and ‘there’s not time for everything’ type way.
In doing so we are rediscovering many things that I thought I didn’t know how to access. And that I have many more of the site templates saved than I thought I had. Saved in 2022. So, I must have started making a new dress way back then, when the builders were at Peak Build. Probably why I don’t remember, given that I seem to have auto-erased all memories from that time, presumably for self-preservation.
It also means that, if we get it wrong, the blog may disappear again, like it did last week. And this time it may not be able to reappear until we have the new site ready, which won’t be for a few days, or more probably next week, as we have lots of other things we need to attend to as well.
Our idea is to make a sub-folder in my innards, install WordPress into it (Mr BW has done this before), get it all set up and working and then change where the URL points. Whether or not it is possible to transfer all the old content remains to be seen. Over 7,000 posts and 42,000 comments, currently within hand-crafted (in 2003) code on Movable Type, is a big ask. Well, I think that is what Mr BW said. Don’t laugh if you understand these things and that’s not quite right.
I’ve finally managed to make the BW email addresses work again too, so if the comments box has disappeared and you notice anything weird, or have any useful ideas to contribute, the address in the sidebar does now actually work now. Probably. It works for me anyway.
And I’ve also (re-)discovered that BW Blue is actually #0066ff. Appropriate, I thought.
Wish us luck… and thank you for your forbearance.

On Thursday, BBC Radio 4’s ‘In Our Time’ explored the complex role of T-cells and the biological mechanisms driving immune system ageing.
The discussion detailed how the thymus (a specialized organ of the immune system and endocrine system, located in the upper chest directly behind the breastbone and in front of the heart) that produces and trains T-cells (thymus-lymphocytes, which are white blood cells that help your body fight infections and diseases) shrinks post-puberty, leading to T-cell exhaustion, chronic “inflammageing,” and reduced vaccine efficacy in older adults.
You can listen to the discussion here. It is also repeated tonight (Sunday 1st) at 11pm.
The programme blurb says: “Every day, billions of specialised cells work to protect your body from harm. From the common cold and infections to cuts and scrapes or cancerous cells, our bodies deal with a range of potential threats and risks as we move through the world. The immune system is a complex and carefully orchestrated network connecting organs, tissues, and billions of specialised cells. Those cells have a variety of different roles as they respond to pathogens or harm, including engulfing microbes, identifying damage, or producing antibodies. Misha Glenny and his guests examine the different types of cells involved in an immune response, how they know what to respond to, and what happens when those cells aren’t working as they should. This In Our Time episode discusses why our immune cells are vital to life – both for us as individuals, and as a species. The discussion explores the interconnected nature of the immune system, and what we know actually affects the way our immune cells function.”
Because it was an information dense programme, there is no way that I could summarise what was said. So, for those who are interested, but don’t have an hour to listen, and for those not in the UK (who I don’t think will be able to listen), I asked Gemini (Google’s AI) to summarise (and its summary compared favourably with my recall of the programme):

“The BBC Radio 4 In Our Time panel highlighted several critical mechanisms regarding how our T-cells and broader immune systems change as we age:
1. The Shrinking of the Thymus (Thymic Involution)
• The Problem: The thymus is the specialised organ where T-cells mature and learn to identify pathogens.
• The Ageing Factor: The thymus begins to shrink and fatty tissue replaces its functional areas remarkably early in life, starting right after puberty.
• The Impact: By older age, the output of brand-new, untrained T-cells (naive T-cells) drops significantly. This leaves the body with a fixed, dwindling library of existing cells to fight off entirely new infections.
2. T-Cell Senescence and Exhaustion

• The Problem: T-cells have a limited lifespan and replicative capacity.
• The Ageing Factor: Decades of fighting off chronic, low-level viral infections (such as Cytomegalovirus, or CMV) force a massive portion of the T-cell pool to dedicate itself to these specific targets.
• The Impact: Over time, these constantly active T-cells become “exhausted” or senescent. They remain in the body but lose their ability to divide effectively, crowding out space for cells that could fight new threats like seasonal flus or novel viruses.
3. “Inflammageing”
• The Problem: Ageing shifts the immune system’s default state from responsive to chronically active.
• The Ageing Factor: The panel discussed “inflammageing”—a state of persistent, low-grade, sterile inflammation that develops as we get older.
• The Impact: This constant background noise confuses immune signalling. T-cells become less precise, occasionally leading to slower healing times, reduced vaccine efficacy, and an increased risk of autoimmune reactions where the body mistakenly attacks its own tissues.
4. Reduced Vaccine Response
• The Problem: Vaccines rely on T-cells and B-cells memory creation.
• The Ageing Factor: Because there are fewer naive T-cells available to learn from a vaccine, the immune system Struggles to build a strong memory profile against the injected antigen.
• The Impact: This explains why certain vaccines require higher doses or specific boosters for older demographics to achieve the same level of protection as younger individuals.“

Now that, I think, is a good use of AI. I thought it was a fascinating programme and I learnt a lot that I wanted to share but couldn’t otherwise have done (and if I ever use AI here to produce lumps of text that I post verbatim, without any significant editing, I will always say).
The usual “Lifestyle Strategies” are recommended to preserve t-cell function:
• Eat a balanced diet: Focus on fresh produce, lean proteins, and whole grains to provide essential vitamins and minerals like zinc, folic acid, and vitamins B6 and B12 that support immune cell replication and maturation.
• Exercise regularly: Engage in at least 150 minutes of moderate physical activity each week to help promote healthy immune system functioning.
• Get enough sleep: Aim for 7 to 8 hours of quality sleep every night to allow your body and immune cells to recover.
• Manage stress: Practice relaxation techniques like deep breathing, meditation, or yoga, because high stress can weaken overall immune responses.
• Avoid smoking and limit alcohol: Refrain from smoking or vaping, and keep alcohol consumption to a minimum to prevent immune suppression.
• Practice hygiene and protection: Wash your hands frequently with soap and water, and consider wearing a mask in crowded or poorly ventilated indoor spaces to avoid harmful germs.”

Busiest day of my Witchy year.

The kitchen staff at the place where Mr BW is woodcarving all week are using the innards of their sculpture for its proper purposes: spiced pumpkin soup for the guests tonight:

I always shudder to think of the amount of good food that goes to waste at this time of year. A reasonable pumpkin soup is about £3.50 for 400g (2 small portions) in the shops. Huge pumpkins are 99p in many places this year. People could make a gallon (at least) of gorgeous pumpkin soup from a 99p pumpkin, then save some seeds to roast as a snack, and some to grow their own pumpkins next year. Come Andy Burnham’s planned catastrophe they will have to…
Trick or treat if I drop by your way tonight?
What will you be doing?

I was driving along the other day and I spotted this on the road, which has recently been relined (please note, I was stationary when I took the photo, and it’s not lousy road positioning, I was holding the camera out of the car window):

Now, it is true to say that there are lots of owls around (I saw a barn owl fly the length of the garden around 10am one day last week), but, painting it as a warning on the road?
I think my brain might have become dyslexic in its old age. I guess that’s what a professional lifetime which included advising on and working with those with such challenges does for you.
Is it just me?

I hope you noticed that the word ‘FROGLET’ came up on Countdown this morning (good spell, eh?) 🙂

Well, that had us all worried didn’t it?
Although it’s well known that Witches float when attempts are made to drown them, I must say, I never thought I’d ever see this version of BW again… or, indeed, in the worst night hours, even be able to rescue any of my old entries or pictures… I honestly thought that almost 24 years of my life, chronicled over several thousand hours, had disappeared forever.
So, what happened?
Mid-week last week I remember half-hearing on the news that there were PHP problems worldwide.
Beyond “I think there’s some PHP in BW“, I didn’t really think very much of it until I got a text on Sunday from an ex-blogger friend asking how we were coping with Storm Boelo and what was up with my blog. At that time I couldn’t see the site (all I got was a blank page and a file with a short alphanumeric string attempting to download), but I could still get into the back-end and the CMS (posting page and comments management) and the RSS feed were still working.
I hoped that the situation might sort itself out overnight, but on Monday morning the front page was still disappeared and still trying instead to download a sinister-looking file.
I packed Mr BW off to his annual week-long residential woodcarving course and then emailed my hosting company, who I have hosted with for over 23 years and who Mr BW hosted with for 7, to ask for some help.
The first person was unsympathetic and told me it was my old code’s fault and, “Unfortunately we would not be able to fix this for you in this instance.” I emailed again and the second lady tried to help but actually made things worse as her interventions managed to lock me out from everything. I asked her to reverse what she had done, and she said she had, but nothing changed and I was still unable to access any part of my CMS, and the RSS reader feed disappeared too, with just a 403 appearing on all the pages I tried to load:
“Forbidden
You don’t have permission to access /mt/mt.cgi on this server.
Apache/2.2.15 (CentOS) Server at www.blue-witch.co.uk Port 80”
She then told me that my code was just too old to work with the new PHP patches and “As
the CMS is really outdated, we can’t offer any more support on the issue, I’m afraid.”
I replied to that and, late on Monday afternoon, I was lucky enough to chance on a third support person who said he’d try to get something loading. At this point I thought there might be just a tiny glimmer of hope that I might at least be able to get into the CMS to somehow salvage my entries and image files.
I replied and stressed that I understood how busy they must be due to the PHP issues and that there was no hurry as I couldn’t do anything to update the site to WordPress until MrBW gets back from his course at the weekend.
Late afternoon today my phone rang. I recognised the code as Manchester and almost didn’t answer as in the last couple of weeks I have been getting a lot of AI generated spam calls. I’m glad I did answer though as it was the lovely man from my hosting company who’d picked up my email late on Monday. He told me he had spent a lot of time today forensically going through my .htaccess file and ‘commenting out’ some bits and researching how to change other bits so that it will work with the new PHP.
So… big huge ginormous thanks to Senior Support Technician Dean at 34sp who has gone above and beyond in working out that the issues were with the deprecated ‘ereg’ needing to be changed to the new function ‘preg_match’. I am so grateful to him for taking the time and trouble to help when others of his colleagues didn’t.
And so I came back from the dead.
I honestly thought that I had lost nearly 24 years of my life history and that it was irrecoverable because the old code was simply collapsed by last week’s global PHP problems, making everything inaccessible forever.
I’ve known that day was coming for ages (and have spoken of it here many times), and Mr BW and I have frequently discussed installing WordPress and then attempting to transfer over 7,000 entries and 42,000 comments, but the task was just too scary to think about and then, after we moved North, we were so busy with builders and selling houses, that it never got to the top of the list. It has now! In the next couple of weeks I shall hopefully appear in a new dress, provided the code shop sells the appropriate shade of BW Blue and that we can get the dress to fit properly.
I might then be able to get back to posting more regularly again as, this year particularly, knowing that I was living on borrowed time, I haven’t been inclined to spend time putting together posts that I knew in my heart of hearts would all disappear in the not too distant future (in a “least time spent, least time wasted” sort of way).
And many many thanks to all of you who have answered my desperate pleas for assistance, offered practical help and advice, and soothing words over the last few days.

Just checking for problems with seeing the site from the main URL…

Mr BW writes:
Oh ye of little faith. Who said I couldn’t leave the ‘phone’ alone for a week for the paint to harden?
Well, If I am honest I had my own doubts, so I hid it in the living room on top of a unit where it was out of sight and in a cool environment. I then busied myself with the end-of summer clearance and cleaning down of the greenhouse.
It worked.
Yesterday I brought my payphone out of hibernation for finishing.
It didn’t need much, just a chrome strip around the ‘cash box’ line (as planned, this hid the join where I added a piece of wood to make the basic piece of Glulam joist the correct overall size). I found it on a car ‘decoration’ site, as apparently used on cars to bling them up, cost £6. Then the new handset cord was glued into its hole and all was ready to screw to the main kiosk’s backboard. After that it was just a case of hiding the screw holes with the fake cash box lock and the dial.
Comparing a period picture with mine, I am pleased with the result, especially as it started off as a piece of left over wooden joist and an assortment of bits and pieces.
This isn’t quite the version I copied, as mine is a bit of an amalgamation. There were also many subtle and some not-so subtle variations over the 70s and early 80s, but this is the best comparison I could find in colour:

This is my version:

This is how it looks as part of our completed interior:

With the project finished I have a total cost £187.90, against £2,500 for a purchased interior. But, as I have said, when I made enquiries about buying just a phone to refurbish myself no-one had a phone available anyway so the interior was on an ‘order and wait’ basis, even if I had the £2,500 to spend. More than all of that I have really enjoyed making my replica payphone, very satisfying.
As I said to BW, the thing that surprised me is that I have to bend down to see the numbers on the dial, but it is at exactly the height of the originals (according to my favourite website, which has every dimension down to 1/32 of an inch). As BW reminded me, I was probably a little shorter in the 70s…

Mr BW writes:
OK so I am stringing it out a little bit now, but there is a good reason.
The painting process has been an absolute pain. A couple of days ago I finally got the finish to where I want it, but there is now too much paint on the surface and it remains resolutely soft. Being solvent based it is as likely to bubble again as dry if I try to dry it quickly, so I am taking the softly softly approach and allowing it to dry out very slowly. This means that it is going to be another week before I am happy to bolt bits on and add the sticky chrome strap without worrying that it will pull the paint away.
But, good news, on the second attempt the correct Letraset arrived and was perfect. I have therefore been able to finish off the coin insert area. Here it is in all its finery (noting it is on a silver metal background, but the light is making the plate look white):

The dial is just resting in place as it hides the screws to attach it to the backboard so will be the last bit to finish.
I MUST now remain patient (not my strongest attribute), and not try to do anything more to it for a week…

No, the phone for the phonebox isn’t quite finished yet – don’t mention bubbles unexpectedly appearing overnight in previously near-perfect paint– so we had to find other rings.
The sky was quite clear around 9pm last night – just a few wispy clouds – and we finally managed to see Saturn in the east through The Big Telescope, which even managed to separate out the rings (which were tilting from 8 o’clock to 2 o’clock).
Amazing! Saturn is 886 million miles away. 4 moons were visible within the field of vision too, which I thought was good until I looked it up and found that Saturn has 293 confirmed natural satellites.
That’s a first for us here, although we have seen Saturn through a telescope before in Devon and in the Outback in Australia.

Mr BW writes:
Finally, I am moving on to the painting stage.
It has been time consuming, on and off for a few days, as I am determined that the finish looks like the original ‘enamel on metal’, rather than having the wood grain of the original block of Glulam visible.
It wasn’t helped by the wonderful EVRI losing the second can of grey paint and the supplier being a little reluctant to send a replacement (preferring to delay and just wait to see if it ever turned up) until I threatened negative feedback for their customer service after a week of ‘we don’t know where it is’. Then EVRI lost the extra can of special lacquer (which we have now given up on despite EVRI asking for another 24 hours for the last 3 days) and now the Letraset has just arrived but is the wrong size (I ordered 5mm but they have sent 3mm). Someone up there doesn’t want me to finish this off.
I started with a coat of high build undercoat, which is typically used in car restorations to act as a thin partial filler. This was rubbed back as a guide coat, which, by design, reveals faults, dips etc that need further filling and rubbing back. A further coat of standard undercoat finished off this part of the process.
After a day of hardening, the top layer of paint was sprayed in 3 coats, with a day to dry between each. I used RAL7303 which is apparently closest to the original ‘Light French Grey’ used for the main body of this version of the phone. The GPO of course didn’t use any standard RAL colours, they were mixed specifically for them.
Finally, 2 coats of lacquer completed the enamel look I was after. It now needs to sit for a few more days to harden right through before I can start to add all the bits and pieces.
Here it is sitting in the sun on my anvil:

As to where I am up to cost wise, the high build primer was £9. Standard primer came from my stock, but probably £5 worth, 2 cans of 7303 grey paint was £22, and a can of lacquer £9. That’s £35 of paint. The Letraset was £5.95 and so my total is now £181.90 – against the £2,500 quoted for an interior, which then was not available..

Mr BW writes:
It’s starting to look a bit more like a 70s payphone
I worked out how to divert the money from the coin slots, down through the hole bored with my new Big Wood Drill Bit, and into the coin return tray. I just needed a ‘catcher’ to divert the coins out through the hole to the front of the ‘phone’. I used a scrap piece of aluminium, so no cost there.

The outline phone shape is now appearing from the block and has all the essential elements. I had to take a little artistic licence and move the dial slightly down within the body compared to the real phones, as its mechanism interferes with the cradle and I definitely want the dial to work. It only notices if you put the pictures side by side.
You can probably work out the elements for yourselves, but the large horizontal slot across the top will take the cradle and handset from the old phone I cut up. The bezel and dial with its mechanism will fit into the large round hole and the catcher and coin tray will insert into the cut out about half way down the right hand side. The money of course goes into the hole just below the dial and needs a metal cover with appropriate slots.
The same version phone had many updates for the money mechanisms as we went through decimalisation and inflation. We have decided to go for the version using 2p and 10p coins as this is the one we were familiar with back in the day.

I also had a spare lock in my box of useful things (but no key, so not that useful). With a suitable surround it will make a perfect mock locking mechanism for the phone’s cash box.
There has also been a slight update to the version I am making. I had thought that all the payphones had the armoured cord but this was a later feature. The cord on the domestic phone I bought was worn and kinked but is correct for the payphone. Surprisingly you can still buy replacements in the correct ‘elephant grey’, so another £7 to the cost and a running total of £130.95.
Now, there is one thing that I can’t locate that I need to finish off The Phone Box Project. After a lot of searching, BW found the exact thing, wrapped in a paper WHS 45rpm record bag, as she knew it was, but only in white, whereas black is needed. BW asked the only other person we know who might have this thing, but he does but doesn’t.
So… this thing… Letraset in black in 16 point (or even a smidge bigger) Arial/Helvetica or similar font (which seem to be the nearest to the original GPO font used). Ideally two each of the letters to make ’10p’ and ‘2p’ (to allow for trials of the effect of lacquer on dry transfer). Very long shot but does anyone still have any of this Letraset they would part with?

The red hot pokers have loved the summer weather this year.

There are lots of new varieties around, and the smaller ‘popsicle’ series have proved excellent, even if it is not easy to tell the mango from the lemon from the orange from the papaya from the banana. Despite originating from South Africa, they do seem to be winter hardy, even in the colder north.

Other than the decorative ones, for once we haven’t seen many slugs and snails this year.
That said, I suspect they are hiding deep down in the soil, lying in wait for wetter weather.
We have had very few wasps this year (the bees are relieved as an attack can kill a colony in a couple of days and we finally have strong colonies again), and there were weeks without small birds too, although some of them, especially the wagtails, seem to be returning now.
It’s also been a very strange year for biennials and annuals.
Teasels, sown last year, just sat as rosettes until a couple of weeks ago, and now have small teasels about 6″ off the ground, whereas normally they would be knee-high at least. Nicotiana too are stunted with small flowers. We haven’t had the extremes of heat or dryness experienced in the south, and nothing has suffered extreme stress, so I’m not sure what is going on there.
Still, as they say in The People’s Emergency Briefing, this year’s weather is the most stable it will ever be, so we’d best get used to it.

Mr BW writes:
Fun fact 2: don’t read this bit if you are eating.
Following on from an earlier comment from Delcatto about the ‘unique aroma’ of the public phone box in the 70s…
First of all I have to say that whilst I do admit that a roadside bush might have received the occasional highly alkaline feed, I never felt that a phone box was a place to use as a loo, just no, why would you?
However, others clearly did and this was much more than just a hygiene problem, which of course led to later design boxes being open at the bottom to allow them to be washed out by the rain etc.
One of the 1970s modification to increase security of the cash box under the phone added a low down lock and armoured sliding door mechanism, behind which hid the cash box. However, the propensity for the boxes to be used as public loos by inebriated lads on their way back from the local led to high levels of ammonia. The highly caustic and corrosive nature of which rusted the sliding mechanisms, so the sliding door could not be opened to retrieve the cash boxes…nice…
The next version removed the sliding door and is the one I am copying.

Mr BW writes:
It was now time for a bit of dismantling and destruction.
First, sorry, came the end of the old phone. I needed the handset, dial, dial bezel and cradle for my mock payphone, so, sadly the angle grinder had to come out. In my defence there are thousands of these phones around and there was really no other option, but yes I do still feel a little guilty at breaking up a bit of history. The result was the following bits for me to use:

I have also been playing with my newly purchased extra large 2 foot long 40mm diameter drill to make the hole to allow the money to drop down through the body of the wood.

It has added £29 to my costs so far and I can’t say I would have bought it other than for this.

I also tried to make the reject coin tray, but it just didn’t look right.
Whilst searching the web for ‘vending machine spares’ I glanced over at a drawer and had an idea, a ‘shell type’ drawer handle turned upside down looks exactly like a money tray. At £3.95 it was an easy choice.
The challenge now is joining up the hole with the money slot and accessing the hole from the front to divert the coins into the tray, rather than just falling out of the bottom. Some metalwork will be needed but I can see how it will come together.
All in I am now up to £123.95.

From a lady we have known for many years, now in her mid-70s, in the middle of a discussion about AI: “But I thought AI was just the voice?”
From a state pension age lady of modest means: “I’m going to write to Mr Burnham and tell him to stick his pension rise, I’m not going to pay tax, I’ll be a lot worse off than if we had no rise!” (and no amount of explaining by me could convince her that, in the worst case scenario, she would only lose 20% of the amount over £12,570, not 20% of her entire income – the media have a lot to answer for in the way they have headlined this story this week)
From another of the same group of 3 ladies over state pension age, when I pointed out that those receiving ‘state benefits’ (which they were discussing in a derogatory way) actually included all those people, such as themselves, receiving a state pension: “But there are only 4.1 million people getting state pension in the UK!” I then pointed out that that could not possibly be true as there are over 70 million people in the UK now, with a median age of around 40. No amount of explanation could convince her otherwise as she said she’d “heard it on the news”. Investigating on getting home, I discovered there are 13.2 million people receiving state pension overall, of whom (in the recent past) 4.1 million people were receiving the new (from 2016) state pension rates. Why common sense is so uncommon these days, and how people’s inability to think logically about numbers baffles me.
From me to Mr BW when he retorted to my comment that the t-shirt he was wearing was filthy and what would today’s delivery men think, by saying that at least he was dressed: I was still bimbling bout in my dressing gown: “But I’m not customer facing!”

Mr BW writes:
To keep the theme going whilst we are doing all those outdoor jobs before the weather closes in, here are a couple of fun facts from my favourite phone website.
There were quite a few variations in design of the 700 series public payphones through the 60s and 70s. As I have mentioned before, the one I am copying is from the early 70s and so the style BW and I remember using. It is this one, in grey:

One thing I did learn when we were buying the phone box last year is that some have had their rear panels replaced (the side with the phone etc attached) and so the maker’s foundry marks on the lower part are lost. I always assumed this was because the panel had simply rusted out. Not so. Apparently the very early 700 series phones were not terribly secure against theft of their cash boxes. I also have a 1970s railway station chocolate machine and am amazed that the only thing stopping you getting at the cash inside is a catch and a flimsy lock. A decent screwdriver as a lever to pop the top cover over the latch and you are in, no need to worry about the lock.
So to fun fact no. 1. In 1979 they upgraded security by producing a more secure cash box mechanism so you couldn’t prize it off the backboard or lever it open. Crim’s being ever more resourceful and in an attempt to make sure they got away before the Rozzers in their Granadas arrived, decided that if they couldn’t access the cash from inside the box then they would go around the back. So they began simply smashing their way through the rear telephone box panels with sledgehammers and just taking the whole assembly away to be cut open at their leisure. I guess this was the original inspiration for the 1990s ram raiding of cash machines. The result of course was a phone box needing a new rear panel etc.
Our local shops where I grew up had 4 phone boxes in a cube. This of course meant they were all effectively back to back which might be why I never witnessed this theft. Nor did I live in the middle of a city where I suspect it was more prevalent.
However, our box, with its replacement rear panel, has clearly been the victim of a brutal assault in its earlier life and is likely still suffering the effects from PTSD (Postbox Traumatic Sledgehammer Destruction). Poor thing.

Mr BW writes:
Regular readers will have already seen Part 1 of my exciting saga and will be excitedly waiting for Part 2.
(insert advert here for a random washing up liquid, if most other pages these days can do it then so can I)
As a recap, at the end of the last episode I had the black backboard, signs and shelving unit installed in the red telephone kiosk.
At this point I began the search for a grey/black 1970s pay phone for it.
I assumed that, with the tens/hundreds of thousands made, there must be loads knocking around.
Wrong.
They were taken out by BT and broken up for scrap. I have seen just one for sale in the last 2 years and it went for £800 plus auction charges and was a pile of junk needing complete restoration.
Time for a rethink.
In my (extensive) searches I saw one on a theatre prop rental site. It was made from wood, quoted as being fine for stage use.
That gave me an idea: I could make one.
I had a piece of Glulam, left over from our building works, that had been sitting in my workshop waiting for a purpose. Glulam is basically a wooden laminate joist that can be used instead of a steel joist. This leftover piece is a bit off the end of the joist holding up the gabled roof over our single-storey bedroom and craft room. We wouldn’t have chosen a Glulam joist, but, in 2021, in the middle of the Covid 19 pandemic, steels were not readily available so it was Glulam or delay building works by an unknown amount of time.
With a slice off the bottom rotated and stuck to the end it is the correct overall dimensions for a 1970s phone.

Then I bought an old not working BT 1970s domestic wall phone for £11. It s a type 711, full details from my now favourite website here.

The insides are a wonder of nuts, bolts, resistors and mechanical wizardry, Not a semiconductor in sight.

I feel a little guilty about breaking it up but, unlike the 705 phone box phones, they weren’t broken up for scrap, and so there are literally thousands of them out there, just search on your favourite auction site.
The plan is to put the wooden bit and the cannibalised phone together, with a few bits of scrap metal bent into shape for the money slot and coin reject tray. Again, thanks to my now favourite website, I have dimensions and the correct pantone for the grey paint, which is still readily available.
Money spent so far: with the 711 phone, I am now £91 in against a theoretical £2,500 to buy an interior.
One can only wonder who had the number Shepherdswell 830452, and why they had a wall phone (receiver sits on the top) rather than a table phone (receiver sits on the body of the phone).

Mr BW writes…


After our refurbished telephone box was installed early last year the hunt was on for a suitable 1970s interior as it came as a red cast shell with no insides.
And there the problems began.
I discovered that it is quite easy to buy a replica 1930s A/B interior with Bakelite phone for around £2,500 plus plus, as there are a few companies making them. Some advertise a 1970s dial phone interior, but the reality is they don’t actually have any phones available, even of you were comfortable with paying over £2,500 for it.
The problem with 1970s interiors is that they were scrapped by BT as they modernised phone boxes to what we see today, the polished metal push button phones.
if you can find one of those lovely old grey or black dial phones then they can go for £1000, but then they are falling apart. Even the red ones, which were used in guest houses or places like hospitals, start at £400, and that is just for the phone, excluding backboards or signage. But they just aren’t right.
So, what to do?
Well, the easy bit was the backboard and signage. I started at a wonderful website. It is a true geeks’ site, where you can learn everything you don’t even know you need to know about phones and phone boxes. It is from the 90s and difficult to navigate, but is simply superb and I applaud the writers for preserving such important social history. if you want to know the pack size of the screws issued to installing engineers in 1966 then it will tell you. If you want to know how much paint is needed to repaint your kiosk, then it tells you that too.
Using the dimensions and specifications from plans on the website I started to build my own interior. I was aiming for the London Provincial STD Area, Diagram EC 2086 from here as it was the style I and BW grew up with.
My search coincided with our local DIY store closing down and selling everything off. The backboard is a £25 piece of a big sheet of plywood. The frames are made from chrome effect bathroom tile edging pieces being sold at 50p a length, 5 lengths, so £2.50. The black paint was also £2.50. Meanwhile period correct hi-res posters were available to download for free from my now favourite website (thank you again), so I printed them up and laminated them. A couple of days work and £30 spent so far and I had the basic interior correct to the 1970s.

A shelving unit was next. In the stages of planning to make one to the designs on the website, up popped one on ebay for £50. It was a perfect 1970s one advertised with a ‘money tray’, which is actually a tray to rest your cigarette whilst chatting. Sold.

So I am now £80 in against a theoretical £2,500 to buy an interior and I have all I need, I think.
Part 2 moves on to the phone itself, and then there’s part 3, but it will be a while before I get to write it all up, as it’s a bad weather project, and right now there is a fruit harvest to bring in and metal labels to make for our fruit trees before the plastic ones disintegrate and we can’t tell our ‘Ellison’s Orange’ from our ‘Tydeman’s Late’.

Because he does much more interesting things than me these days.
And he has more active hours in his day than me, so more time to write (after I am asleep, for example), so there might be more regular posts again. He has also managed to conquer Gimp for reducing photos in size, which I have not. I don’t like posts without photos, and as I can only resize photos on the upstairs desktop (with a very old version of Photoshop which won’t work on the laptops’ Windows11), which I don’t get to very often now, I am less inclined to write.
Mr BW closed down his old blog a couple of years ago when we finally sold Coven Sud and no longer had enough h0ney to sell online, but he misses writing about his crafty, creative and gardeny exploits. These days there are far too many people writing much more interesting things about their daily lives than I/he/we ever could but we do have some fairly unique USPs due to our location and lifestyle and love of keeping rural crafts alive.
So… watch this space…
And he saw a red kite the other day.

… best not live in a glass house:

Definitely autumnal here now. And definitely some weird things happening – crocosmia that have somehow grown to 7′ tall, but biennials like teasels that are in their second year but are still large rosettes with not a sign of seed heads. And runner beans very late – we have only 3 bags blanched and in the freezer (we only freeze when we have surplus over our immediate needs). No early frosts please or we won’t have enough to last through the winter.
The far distant landscape has gone from straw golden and/or parched to green again with just a week or so of intermittent light rain. Our lawn grass and the cut grass paths in the orchard/wildflower meadow never went brown in the heat as it’s ‘the right type of grass’ for extreme climate – aka ancient upland sheep pasture.

On the way:

We had a pleasant day out at the local Country Show, sadly minus sheep (usually half of the show) which were cancelled at the eleventh hour due to the advancing proximity of bluetongue (nowt to do with me guv, honest).
Over previous days the weather forecast had gone from showers to thunderstorms to cloud, so we packed brollies and wellies, but actually needed sun cream for most of the day and the showers never arrived.

We definitely had the most interest of all the old cars, which included, for some inexplicable reason, a 58 plate Volvo estate that the owner thought others might like to look at, so parked with the classic cars rather than in the car park with all the other ‘modern’ cars. I suspect it was all to do with getting a free entry ticket, and the new organiser of that section is a young female who (I was told) has little interest or knowledge of old vehicles, so failed to register that the car was only from 2008.

Many young children seemed to have never seen an old car before, and I enjoyed telling them, “She’s 93 you know!” and then watching their faces as their accompanying adults attempted to give them some context, “That’s even older than great granny!” “That’s three times older than me and 15 times older than you!” etc etc.
Early in the day some people came up and seemed to bend down and look across the roof line. Mr BW was talking to someone else at the time so couldn’t ask or see what they were looking at.
Later on an older couple seemed to be doing the exact same thing. Again they were bending down to the top of the door with their eye line straight over the roof. Mr BW suddenly realised what they were doing: they were sniffing through the gap left open at the top of the driver’s door.
Mr BW spoke to them and the man confided, “That is just how an old car should smell, it beings back memories of my old A7 from the 60s!” A long chat about 3 generations and 5 up in an A7 heading to the seaside for a week ensued. How I wish we’d written down all the tales of A7 ownership we’ve heard from visitors we’ve met at shows over the years.
It is said that memories are triggered by our senses and that smell is the strongest, but this was a first for us; strange that it should happen twice in one day in our 19th year of Mi1dred custodianship.

You don’t get timber felling displays ‘through the ages’ at most Country Shows.

UPDATE: Sunday 30.08.26 – I treated it like a cut flower: cut off the bottom inch of the stem and kept it in a bowl of cold water in a cool place. It has continued to grow. I have been nibbling the little florets as they have sprouted, but now that they have all been cut off, it is definitely a cauliflower.

Caulbrolli!

Today has been a glorious late summer day, full of beautiful sunlight, warm but not overly hot temperatures, and harvesting and preserving.
Tonight I am sleeping in Bri@n.
I would love to go somewhere in Bri@n for a couple of days, but there are far too many pesky tourists around. 8 more days and they should all be back at work and in school and we can venture out again. Last Tuesday it took me 40 minutes to get into the nearest small town because of weight of traffic. I blame Robson and Vera.
But, until then, I am sleeping in Bri@n, because, after all, our countryside is better than countryside polluted by tourists.
And I can use the facilities indoors.

If your energy distribution company set up a new service with a ridiculous name to support those customers (like us) who have frequent and prolonged power cuts, send out an email announcing the service containing nothing but buzzwords (eg “two‑way communication strategy” and “bridging a gap”) without explaining how and when they operate and what they will do or how their involvement will be monitored or evaluated, it’s fun and extremely time-saving to get your AI to battle their AI.
The difference being that you actually read what your AI suggests and get it to modify and refine its suggestions, rather than just sending the first thing that it suggests, even if it completely non-sensical and contains even more gobbledegook than the original message.
I’ve tried every other witch way to get them to listen already…

Make cucumber and gin sorbet.
100g of sugar is more than enough and no need to use the liquid glucose if you add 1tsp of glycerine. Actually, given the amount of gin, probably no need to add that either.
Utterly divine.
And a beautiful colour.

Monday 10th August, soon after midnight – Clear skies: Milky Way, 3 satellites, no Perseid meteors.
Tuesday 11th August, 2am – Crystal clear skies: Milky Way as good as we have ever seen, 9 satellites, no meteors.
Tuesday 11th August, 4.30am – Cloudy: couldn’t see the 6 planet alignment.
Wednesday 12th August, 1am – Clear skies: 3 satellites, 3 aeroplanes, 7 meteors in 5 minutes, including one that streaked right across the sky with a long tail and another very large and very bright.
Wednesday 12th August – Cloudy most of the day but 28°C: at 5pm we considered driving south as far as we could get but quickly decided against it (dinner and wine in the orchard watching the new children and the western horizon trumped lots of driving with no guarantees), then the skies cleared high up at 5.45pm, but were still cloudy lower down, obscuring the view as the Sun descended, and so it was cloudy for the The Crucial 15 Minutes around 7.00pm. The Big Telescope with Sun filter tracked the Sun, but refused to focus through the cloud, the eclipse glasses proved far too dark (they were made in the US where litigation is a big thing, rather than in China where it isn’t), so the rectangles of welding glass saved the day after all. It got noticeably cooler, and slightly darker, but the hens didn’t seem to notice and weren’t fooled into going to bed early. The Unspeakable started shooting the Inedible part way through (it is The Glorious Twelfth after all, although I doubt there are any grouse in those woods), and two combine harvesters clattered by on their way to harvest the wheat fields a couple of miles away. The Sun attempted to redeem itself by trying a nice sunset but the cloud intervened again. Nevertheless, we saw most of it and had a very pleasant evening.
What about you?

The other evening we were in bed watching TV. I can’t recall what we were watching, as there are so many mediocre detective/crime series these days that I can’t keep up with them all, and I choose not to use my few remaining braincells to remember their uninspiring titles or usually even their plots. Hence Mr BW records a whole 6 part series onto hard drive (yes, we are that old fashioned) so we can watch it, skipping over the adverts, over 3 mights of 2 episodes per night.
Anyway, all of a sudden there was a massive explosion right outside the house – it sounded like an extremely loud gunshot, which was instantly followed by the sound of breaking glass.
The man who shoots crows for the local farm manager hadn’t told us he would be around shooting, and he’d only shot 250 crows 10 days ago, so the remaining 2,000 were still too jumpy to venture back.
I thought that some miscreant must have been shooting something else with a shot gun, and had missed, sending the bullet through our very large arched window. I got to the hallway/atrium seconds before Mr BW, because my side of the bed is closer to it than his, thinking on the way that it was either the window that had exploded, or that the pendant light that hangs through the double-storey had fallen down.
That light was not put up by Mr BW, and hangs on very long metal strings, so I have absolutely no confidence that it is actually properly attached. I cannot remember if The Toon were playing on the evening the young electrician fitted it, but if they were, there is even more reason for my concern as he always rushed to get away so he could get to the match early.
Noting that the window was intact and the light was still dangling in its usual central place, I moved to the kitchen.
It was here that I saw what had exploded, and noted some sad victims – 3 sheep.
The previous evening I had put a plastic 2 litre bottle of Schweppes slimline lemonade in the big chest freezer in the garage to cool down quickly for a second glass of Pimms. In the eventuality, we didn’t have that second glass and the plastic bottle got left in. I found the bottle in the morning, full of white ice flakes.
I have forgotten about bottles placed in the freezer to cool rapidly before, but these have always been glass wine bottles with corks, and the ice has simply pushed the cork out. But, this time the bottle was intact, so I simply moved it to the larder fridge in the kitchen to defrost.
And there it had stayed, perfectly fine until the evening, when it exploded, causing the tall fridge door to burst open and three of our own fused glass sheep fridge magnets to fall of the side of the fridge. The magnets came off the back of the glass shapes, and two of the sheep are smashed. But, they can go back in the kiln to repair themselves next time we have it on.

You can see the force of the explosion from the tortured state of the plastic:

Luckily (and amazingly) nothing in the fridge was damaged, and it was easy to clean up the lemonade as it was still in white ice flakes.
I have a bit of a feeling that it could have been an accidentally auto-generated spell gone awry as I’d noted as I put the frozen bottle in that the lower fridge shelves needed a good clean.
Now we are off to get four more children.

We have spent most of the week electrifying our boundaries against unwanted intruders in varying colours and coats.
It’s hard work coping with the onslaughts of living in the middle of nowhere.
Unlike those in these parts defending against invaders in the past, at least we can order all the necessary supplies for delivery. And the AI can tell us how to defend in the best way.
I know several people who are vehemently against AI because, according to them, it uses huge amounts of energy unnecessarily. But, to do the amount of research that would have been involved in designing the system and sourcing the parts would have taken me hours on my computer. Several hours on my computer uses a lot more energy than 20 minutes researching and then cross-checking via AI.
A friend who was an early adopter of AI gave me some good advice months ago when AI started proliferating in early 2025: “Talk to it like you’d talk to a friend, tell it what level of knowledge you want it to give you (eg ‘a beginner’s guide’, ‘university professor level’, ‘information from published papers’, ‘information to present to a council meeting’, ‘information for a class of 8 year olds’), and if you don’t like the answers it gives you, tell it, and question it further on specifics and sources, then get it to cross-check its own assertions against other named sources you supply.”
I’ve added an extra bit – and then put what one AI has told you into another AI and ask the second AI to evaluate the first AI’s work, pointing out strengths and weaknesses.
Anyone else using AI for ‘serious’ purposes? Anyone got any other hints on how to get the best from it to share?
Far from feeling my brain is being dumbed-down by using AI for research, now that I am a ‘confident user’ I feel my critical thinking and questioning skills are given an excellent workout every time I use it. Which wasn’t at all what I expected.
I give the survival of most entry-level clerical/admin jobs about 5 years. What will all those people do for work then? Andy Burnham had better get on with his re-industrialisation programme….

Very autumnal here this morning – light and dew and temperature – for the first time.
Enough rain has fallen on and off this week to be useful, but the ground is still rock solid.

No £40.
The bloke to fit the new electricity meter turned up within the quoted 2 hour window – although he required a last 5 miles ‘talk in’ as apparently his satnav took him about 20 miles off his direct route and ran out 2 miles from here – and the new meter finally connected after 6 hours.
“This meter looks new!” he said. “Yeah, it’s only 4 years and 2 months old” I said. “No new wiring to do, a simple job, I’m happy!” he said.
Mind you, I booked a “8am – 12pm” slot and was given an 11.33am to 1.33pm slot and he turned up at 1.10pm and went at 2.05pm, so I have no idea how that works.
I’m told that we had an RF meter before, and apparently now the North is allowed 4G meters, we have one of those, which should be more reliable.
Rain showers off and on today. The water butts are pretty full. Yet another ‘garden dinner’ tonight. I’m happy.

Ah, rain. We’ve had rain on and off all night, and it continues now.
Long may it last. It won’t, but here’s hoping.
I think it’s the first serious rain here since a thunderstorm on Saturday 11th July. There was a dribble overnight on 25th/26th and 27th/28th, but nothing that made any difference. The paths cut into the wildflower meadow orchard are greening up again already, after just a few hours of moisture.
St Swithin got it wrong again. Thankfully.
It’s currently looking OK here for the partial eclipse next week. The UK’s biggest solar eclipse since 1999, and the next totality here isn’t until 7th October 2135, so I shan’t be around to see it. 90+% where we are. I know people who are off to Greenland, Iceland and Mallorca, hoping to see totality. I’m hoping they aren’t disappointed.
I don’t like peering at the sun through Mr BW’s rectangles of welding glass, so I finally got around to ordering a couple of pairs of eclipse glasses yesterday. I’m sure they are cheaper now than they were in 1999. Even if it’s cloudy on 12th, they will have 2 more potential outings in the next 18 months (August 2, 2027 and January 26, 2028).
August 12th is set to be a night of ‘astronomical wonders’: the eclipse occurs at New Moon, resulting in perfectly dark skies later that night – which is the peak of the Perseid meter shower. There is also a six-planet alignment before sunrise that morning. And Saturn (my favourite planet) is visible for the first time in ages.
Best dust off The Big Telescope then…

How long should an electricity smart meter last? More than just over 4 years I’d think.
Our meter, installed in 2022 during the final phase of the building work to replace the 40 year old one – with dials! – that came with the house, lost connectivity in the middle of July and has failed to reconnect itself.
I noticed as the daily readings on the online portal have been similar, even on days when we weren’t here. Unlike our last electricity supplier, the current supplier displays assumed daily usage when there is no transmitted usage, to keep the monthly usage total going, rather than just using a zero read. Luckily I had already discovered this a few weeks back during a 12 hour power cut on the hottest day of the year.
I got an email from our electricity supplier on Saturday (1st August) telling me that I needed to submit a manual reading this month as our meter was offline. This confirmed my suspicions, so yesterday I got Google’s AI to research the current regs regarding this and discovered that smart meters that have gone dumb now have to be fixed within 90 days, and I accepted its request to write a formal email for me to send to our supplier setting out my understanding of the situation and what I expected to be done to remedy it.
I copied and pasted this and sent it in reply to the supplier’s email requesting I submit a manual reading. I received an almost instant reply saying that they would wait until the end of August to see if the meter reconnected itself.
I asked the AI what it thought of that reply and it told me that this was the maximum time (6 weeks) that the supplier was allowed to wait, and suggested that I request that they “initiate a manual remote network reboot/refresh via the DCC user interface immediately, rather than waiting for the automated 6-week timeout loop to expire.”
I then got another prompt reply telling me that they would instead replace the meter but wanted to first wait another 2 days just to see if the meter would reconnect itself. I replied suggesting that they initiate the meter replacement immediately and that if the meter did miraculously reconnect itself, the replacement appointment could be cancelled. They agreed.
This morning I got a request to book the appointment and, expecting something weeks away, found I could have any day from tomorrow onward! Mr BW is out tomorrow and as I have already had two lifetime’s worth of BS and misogyny from northern workmen, I have booked it for Wednesday when ‘Shaun’ who will be attending can be dealt with by both of us if needed.
I’m impressed that this problem is being resolved by my supplier in 3 days (and it could have been 2), one of which was a Sunday I’m also impressed that, thanks to the AI, it took me all of 20 minutes to research my consumer rights and write my emails. Pre-AI (unbelievably just 14 months ago now) such a task would have taken several hours.
During this process I’ve discovered that around 10% of smart meters go dumb. Clearly they are not as smart as they should be.
Has anyone else had this problem? If so, how long did your supplier take to resolve it?

This sunflower is taller than me and is right outside the kitchen window.
I fear it is a cross-continent spell gone wrong.

This year’s word of the year seems likely to be ‘hydrate’.

Manchester is not The North.

Last autumn Mr BW replaced the old fence that forms the top edge of our property. When he had finished, he scattered some surplus flower seeds we had collected from our garden plants over the past few years into the rough grass. Mostly poppies, but also some lupins, forget-me-nots and other assorted things that were unlabelled so will be a surprise if/when they appear.
This is how it looks now:


Replacing the old fence was a huge job as the uprights were in gigantic lumps of concrete, and many bits had rotted off at ground level, so it all had to be dug out with a kango hammer.
For once, we wanted to get someone in to do the job, but none of the local fencers would agree to replace the style we had, and they all wanted huuuuge money and would only agree to do the job with untreated all-wood, which would rot off again in a few years. We wanted metal uprights and concrete gravel boards, and galvanised anti-bunny mesh, which would last many years, and hopefully see us out, but they wanted to guarantee themselves work in perpetuity. We decided we didn’t need the upheaval or the expense every few years.
We considered a metal fence, but decided it looked too industrial, and out of keeping with the rural landscape, plus it was £13,000 and looked (from the sample in the salesman’s car) like the surface would scratch and the sections would rust through in about 3 years. Plus he wouldn’t guarantee that the workmen would keep out of my flowerbeds.
We considered making the fence into a drystone wall, and approached the company who put up the summerhouse/museum, but they wanted £17,000 for 22 metres, plus another couple for the top stones, which would have to be specially worked, and that was just silly.
These photos are from this time last year when the slate roof on the original two-storey part of the house was being replaced, and shows the old fence, propped up with supports made from the old roof removed and saved when the single-storey part of the old house was redeveloped. I might have given up writing words about our projects, but I will never give up taking pictures, and a picture is worth hundreds of words.


This is the fence part-way through Mr BW’s replacement:


Anyway, Mr BW did a fantastic job (much better than any workmen ever would), no trees or plants were harmed and no creatures got into the garden, and the whole area looks nice and natural now. While we agonised over the colour to paint the fence, the dark grey we eventually chose (which I was originally convinced would be too ‘trendy’ and/or ‘urban’) blends into the landscape and is a perfect foil to both the grasses and poppies outside, and the cottage garden plants inside:

Now, this autumn’s job is the back stretch. Fortunately, ‘out of sight out of mind’ currently, but double the length. We need to hire a bulldozer to shift around the soil, stone and rubble pile in the orchard that was left by the builders, and Mr BW has found a local company that hires ground hole boring attachments for bulldozers that will make digging the holes much easier.

And that’s how you get from a post that was going to be about bricks found on beaches, to replacement fences, when you alight on a photo that you just think, “Oh that can be the first photo.” Ah well, the bricks will keep for another time…

To punish me for gloating about cooler temperatures in the North, at ten to eight this morning our power went off.
It’s still off now.
It has been 32.5°C today, the hottest day so far, and all I can say is thank goodness for generators and changeover switches. It started as ‘restoration due between 9 and 10’, and now, by hour stages, is estimating 18:15. I’ll believe it when I see it.
No reason has been given or is apparent for the power outage, which is very localised – it was 73 properties, but is now down to 22, but those are spread over 20 square miles, so we’re not high priority. We’ve not had thunderstorms, and had 6 drops of rain at 8am and 106 drops half an hour ago.
As I said, thank goodness for generators, because we would potentially have lost a lot of fridge and freezer food today.
As it is, I’ve made lemon sorbet – if the generator is running, it costs little (if any) more to run the ice cream maker. It joins the other home-made flavours in the freezer: mango and lime sorbet, mint choc chip, ginger, apricot and pistachio, vanilla, rhubarb and orange and maybe a couple of others I’ve forgetten. All very low-sugar and with no nasty ingredients.
I didn’t tell you before, but on Wednesday we had no water for most of the day, having had very low water pressure since the previous Thursday. It is likely this was due to a demolish-and- rebuild project on the top of a hill a few miles away, but their workmen won’t admit to having gone through our water supply pipes while putting in a new septic tank. But, one of them has previous: he went through our telephone line while installing our gigabit broadband a couple of years ago. This was the water from our taps as it eventually returned:


Oh, the joys of rural living.

Our ‘in the shade’ thermometer tells us that the temperature has been:
Tuesday: 31.8°C
Wednesday: 31.9°C
Thursday: 32.1°C
The in-the-sun wall thermometer has been in the mid-40s, but unlike Mr BW, I pay no heed to that.
However, my daily records since we moved here show that these dates in 2021, 2022, and 2023 were within 2 degrees of these temperatures. Mind you, this time last year we had the main house roof off and it was ten degrees cooler and we were worried about impending rain.
The seventeenth and eighteenth century Northern farmers understood the climate. In these parts they built their houses of thick local stone on high ridges on a north/south axis. Prop open a front door, prop open a back door and even when there is no breeze, there is a cool current. Bliss.
I don’t watch the news on television, but occasionally we accidentally catch a few minutes while lining up programmes to watch that have been recorded. “What we need is to be looking at air conditioning!” declared one interviewee. Erm, no, what we need is to build every new home, social building, industrial building and warehouse with enough solar panels and grey water storage/recycling to meet its own needs, and to design houses to cope with the rising temperatures of a changing climate rather than just to build them as cheaply as possible. And we need to teach people how to use curtains and blinds and differentially open windows for temperature control.
Friends from down south sent an email saying it was too hot for them. These are the people who have taken 10 flights each in the last year. I can’t be bothered to reply to them.
I remember saying to Dave (he of the self-confessed-in-the-comments dubious habits) who lives about 30 miles east of us, but used to live in London, that the only thing that worried me about moving North was the cooler summer climate. He said to me that I would find it pleasant compared to the South. He wasn’t wrong.
We’ve been less hot than we often were in a ‘normal’ summer down south prior to 2020. But, we have planned for these conditions. We now have storage for 7.5 cubic metres of rainwater to use for watering our veggies (of which there is perhaps currently a half left). We have spray bottles of cold water (repurposed plastic bottles from cleaning products) to mist ourselves or greenhouse plants, bottles of tap water cooling in the fridge, and outdoor chairs in north-facing places to enable us to be outside but avoid the sun.
We haven’t had any rain for a couple of weeks and I expect the predicted thunderstorms over the next couple of days will avoid us. But, the forecast is for ten degrees less from next week.
And I remember the summer of 1976. In fact, we saw a programme about it recently.
How’s it been where you are?

Despite all banks repeatedly telling us as customers about being wary of unexpected calls, and not giving out personal information, I was dismayed to receive yet another phone call a couple of weeks ago from A Bank, who expected me to give out security information before they would say what the call was about, and refused to answer a question to enable me to be sure it was actually A Bank calling.
I had an identical problem with this type of out-of-the-blue call from them wanting my security details before they would tell me anything at all, maybe 8 or 9 years ago, and think I raised a complaint about it at the time, but was fobbed off with a ‘that’s our system and if you don’t like it, you can take your banking elsewhere’ type response. I have had an account with A Bank since they first started over 35 years ago now (although I do now have several other current accounts to keep my options open as I feel their service has deteriorated hugely over recent years).
The conversation went something like this:
Me (answering my ringing personal mobile phone): Hello?
Bank: Hello, this is Fliss from A Bank. I have some information for you, but I need to take you through security first.
Me: Hmmmm, yes, that’s what all scammers say. I’m not expecting your call, so I am not going to do that.
Bank: I quite understand. It’s OK, I’ll give you part of some information we have, and you can give me the rest. For instance, if I say your birth day is the 9th, you can give me the month and year…
Me: But don’t you understand that that is exactly what a scammer would do, to cross-check or complete partial information they have already obtained somewhere?! I’ve got a better idea, I’ll ask you a question that only my bank would know and you can give me the answer to reassure me it is actually you.
Bank: I wouldn’t be able to do that.
Me: Why?
Bank: Our systems won’t allow me to.
Me: OK, well tell me what the call is about or which department you are from. I’m concerned now.
Bank: I can’t do that until you have passed security.
Me: OK, I’m in front of my computer, please just send me a quick email with A Bank branding and your name and details, to the email address registered on my account and I’ll quickly check the properties to determine you are who you say you are.
Bank: I can’t do that.
Me: So, let me get this straight. You are calling me on my personal mobile phone, claiming to be from my bank, and I am not expecting your call. All you will give me is your first name, you won’t send me an email to confirm you are genuine, and you expect me to give you my security information before you will tell me anything else?
Bank: You have to pass security first.
Me: Ah, wait, I am registered for Voice ID, so not only are you calling me on my personal mobile phone, you can also get your system to identify my voice.
Bank: We don’t do that on outgoing calls.
Me: Why not?
Bank: It’s not something we do.
Me: So, you won’t talk to me because I won’t give you my security details because you banks always tell us customers not to give our details to people who ring out of the blue claiming to be a bank they bank with? Can you not see how stupid this is?
Bank: Well, I’ll leave notes on your account and you can ring back on a number you are comfortable with and the advisor will be be able to tell you what it was about.
Me: No, I’m not going to do that. The advisor will not know what it is about – I’ve had many past bad experience of this type of thing. You will have to write to me, or send me an email about whatever it is that you want to tell me.
Bank: I can’t do that.
Me: Do you know how stupid this sounds to me? Scammer. (put phone down)
Surely, in this day and age, banks should be doing better than this? What do you think?
I have, in the past, had similar calls from other financial institutions, but not recently – I thought they had all stopped this kind of silliness. I do think this call was probably from A Bank, but I’ve heard no more and I couldn’t be bothered to ring them to try to find out what they wanted to tell me.

Happy Solstice.
Happy Midsummer.
Happy Longest Day.

Six years ago today we were on the A1, travelling north, towing Bri@n, who contained a few basic things to get us through the first week. Sometime early afternoon we got a phone call, just as we were passing the Angel of the North, confirming that we were now the owners of a new home. A house in a beautiful position on a windy ridge that needed an awful lot of work before it was comfortably habitable and could be future-proofed to meet our needs for our retirement.
That was ten days before the first Covid lockdown. Nothing could have prepared us, newly returned from South Africa where we had spent a tense month on holiday, planned a year before, for what would follow.
It feels very similar now – no idea what the next few weeks and months will hold; the world in uncertainty.
But, this time, rather than being in the grip of a virus of unknown origin, potency or magnitude, where everyone seemed to be on the same side, this time we are being held ransom by our dependence on Gulf Oil and a load of foreign megalomaniac men who are playing “my dick’s bigger than your dick” with the future of humanity.
And then, if there is anything left once they have finished, the joy of a world controlled by out-of-control machines, who have been learning from their own misguided and misaligned information.
Honestly, I despair. There is so much that needs saying, but I honestly do not have the strength or stamina any more to say it.

Today Radio 4 and the government finally caught up with me on oil prices.
The owner of our nearest petrol station (13 miles away) told me on Saturday that he is expecting a litre of petrol to cost £1.74 by this coming weekend. It was then £1.379. That is $8.85 and $6.52 respectively per US gallon.
But, as Mr BW reminded me, 4 years ago, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the litre price was well over £2 a litre for several months. Now Russia are offering to help Europe out with supply of oil, providing the agreement is long-term. Well, that will be interesting…
No supplier will currently deliver heating oil in this area, at any price. Luckily we don’t need any urgently – with the central heating off now I think we are OK for about 30 weeks – but it might be a long time before this war is over, given that the population of Iran is around 93 million people (the 17th country globally in population and the sixth-largest country in Asia). The population is largely urbanized (over 73%) with a median age of around 32 years.
I always believed that our own North Sea oil was the ‘wrong kind’ of oil for most uses. I’m sure that is what we were told last century. Well, that is what I have written (from the blackboard) in my 3rd year geography exercise book. Miss Agnew must have got it wrong. Now it seems that the reason 80% of our own oil production is shipped abroad is simply because we don’t have the refinery capacity to process the raw product in the UK. Given that last November the UK government effectively banned new oil and gas exploration in the North Sea, our dependence on other countries for the power we need is very scary in these times.
Over the past few days, I’ve asked everyone I’ve encountered about the past history of oil and petrol shortages in this area, and have been told that panic buying and queues at petrol stations have never been seen – compared to what happens in the south east – but times are different now, so I shall be watching closely.

Heating oil price is up again to 142.20ppl today.
That is ridiculous given that petrol is 135.9ppl and a lot of that price is fuel duty and 20% VAT, whereas only 5% of the heating oil price is VAT.
Boiler Juice have answered the obvious question, Why doesn’t heating oil move in line with crude oil or petrol prices?
“Heating oil prices do not always rise or fall at the same rate as petrol, diesel, or crude oil. The delivered price of heating oil includes several additional factors, such as:
– Local availability of kerosene (a smaller and more regional market)
– Terminal, storage, and operational costs
– Haulage and delivery logistics
Because the heating oil market is more localised and less standardised than petrol, prices can move faster or appear more volatile.”
Yeah yeah, if you say so. We never buy from Boiler Juice (although it’s the easiest site for checking prices), not least because they charge a £12.99 service charge on every order, no matter what size. We are part of a local group who place an order on the last Friday of the month and generally get a better price than I, as an individual, can We did feel sorry for the new-to-the-area person who last month wondered aloud if he could place less than the minimum order of 500 litres because he didn’t have the money to pay for that amount. I guess he’s very cold right now.
We have discovered that, at this time of year, our now super-insulated house (well, as far as we can be in a property made of stone with its origins in the 17th century) can maintain a temperature of 17°C at this time of year, despite an outside temperature of 6°C maximum, given that the Aga is in the central part (that’s not going off), and provided we have the wood burner alight down the far end. That is more than acceptable.
After a few days of warm weather, including glorious sun and 18 degrees yesterday, it was around zero overnight with flurries of snow (which didn’t settle) this morning. We could see snow on the other (north) side of the valley (about 30 miles away), which is a hundred or so feet higher than us, until late afternoon.
First snowdrops appeared here on 21st January. First Iris Reticula soon after, first crocuses last week, and the first daffodils at the beginning of this week And, exactly a year after the first paths were cut in the orchard by Vroom Vroom, the (then) new ride-on lawn mower, I re-cut those paths yesterday. Let’s gloss over how I got VV stuck in the b33 enclosure, so that Mr BW had to remove the grass box and then lift it round so that I could get it back out. Oops. Luckily those b33s flying were in a good mood and didn’t give me any trouble.
Shep and I are having a competition to see who is most lacking in energy this week. I’m not sure who is winning.

Heating oil is 134.90 pence per litre this morning. Up from 57.00 pence per litre two weeks ago.
Right, the central heating is already off, but water heating now changes to electric for a while at The Coven. Thank goodness we have a huge wood pile (the old roof timbers) and are on a fixed price electric tariff until November.
We were planning to have a week in the Scottish Highlands at the end of the month. I think that’s getting cancelled now, as, even from here, it is a 500 mile round trip, and fuel stations are few and far between and may not have fuel by then. I wonder how delivery companies are going to cope?
We haven’t been out to know if petrol and diesel have gone up in price at the pumps. The internet says that petrol is averaging 132.9ppl, but that seems like last week’s price (plus much of the price of petrol is tax anyway). Maybe it’s just the heating oil suppliers who are profiteering?

Lovely and sunny and warm here today – which is just as well as the heating oil price has gone up from 57.0ppl a week ago to 61.0ppl last Friday to an unbelievable 102.18ppl today! Time to turn off the heating methinks.
Shep doesn’t have any interest in sheep, or rounding things up, unlike any collie I have ever met.

We managed to see Neptune Uranus and the Orion Nebula through The Big Telescope on Saturday night. Unfortunately the 4 planets meant to be visible in alignment on the western horizon proved invisible behind the only cloud – a low band.
Today we had to take Mr BW’s Broom (one year and one day old) for its first service. “Do you like it?” asked the service desk woman. “No, I hate it, it’s too bossy in its on-screen messaging, you can’t turn the so-called lane assist off permanently, and if you play with the radio’s tuning from the passenger seat it tells you to keep your eyes on the road and locks the radio until you stop, turn off the engine, get out, lock it, wait 5 minutes, then get back in again.”
I suspect that all modern cars are as bad though. Thank goodness for the simpler cars of yesteryear. Mi1dred is 93 in a few months’ time. We’ve just bought her 5 new tyres as the ones she has on are about 40 years old. Fitting those will keep Mr BW occupied for a few days. Given that he has 10 tonnes of 20mm gravel (or ‘stone’ as they call it in these parts) delivered last week, to move, by the wheelbarrow, round to behind the Big Greenhouse (to tidy that area up), he probably isn’t short of things to do.
We went to a couple of seasides on our way to the service garage. We are slowly discovering all the lovely small beaches that most people never find. Luckily we didn’t take Shep (as he was feeling quite fragile) as we might have felt the need to put him in the new doggy launderette. Do watch the short video in that link. It is hilarious – and probably not for the intended reasons.
Nine quid for a 10 minute DIY dog hosedown on the seafront. Sheesh. Mind you, I can see stag parties finding this a fun thing to do.

I have been hibernating.
Not since 2011 has the winter seemed so long, so bleak, so grey, so wet, and so dismal.
From 2012 to 2020 we spent an increasing amount of time during The Dark Weeks in South Africa, then we were busy doing renovations and extensions up north, and finally (in autumn 2024) finishing relocating, so this is the first year for 13 years that we have had nothing major going on at this time of year to distract us. I did not enjoy it.
We have occasionally ventured out to collect glass (beautiful remnants of the north’s industrial past), on beaches, from junk shops and from auctions. And we’ve been making our own marbles to make up for the lost ones.
Mr BW is currently outside triangulating his new all-singing all-dancing auto-finding, auto-tracking telescope – which arrived on 18th January – to see tonight’s planetary alignment. This is only the third night in the last 6 weeks that the skies have been clear enough to see anything.
The amaryllis (*nods down*) has only just finished flowering. 5 blooms on one stalk and one on another. 2 months. Must be a record.
We have also adopted a dog. An old collie, that I found sadly abandoned in a cardboard box in a big shed. Mr BW has named it Shep.

Last year we had the most amazing double red amaryllis that flowered and flowered with multiple heads on multiple flower spikes for weeks and weeks.
Mr BW decided to see if he could feed it up and get it to return this year. We’ve half-heartedly tried in the past, but never succeeded, whereas my Grandmother somehow always managed to make them flower year after year.
Today it proved that enough nurturing can pay dividends:

It being 1st January, it was time to take Mi1dred out for a run. This was a traditional pastime down South, and old habits die hard.

It was very cold (3 or 4°C), but no frost, and the roads were dry and hadn’t been gritted for a while, so probably the best conditions available for the foreseeable, judging by the weather forecast, which is for it getting colder, snowier and rainier.
We wrapped up warmly and headed for the river, because it is too far for Mi1dred to go to the sea in wintertime. I wanted to take a photo of my latest blanket – this time in my ‘Beach’ colourway – for use in the not-a-conservatory in colder weather. Well, everyone else takes that sort of picture these days, so why shouldn’t I? The river had to do when the real by-the-coast-beach was too far.

Mr BW scrambled down the bank to stage it, and, as Mi1dred definitely can’t go as fast as the river, was ready to jump in after it if the wind carried it away. Well, he probably wasn’t, but where’s the story in that?
Mi1dred posed on the bridge:

That isn’t a pond on the right in the picture below, it’s a big puddle, caused by lots of rain in the first 3 weeks of December. The puddle is also visible on the left, but not, for once, on the road.

Home to mulled wine – because we had an awful bottle of undrinkable Californian red that needed to be used for something. Once a year is enough – I don’t think we had any at all last year. There are definitely other festive foods that I no longer like: mince pies and brandy butter, so I didn’t make any, just as I no longer make festive cake or festive pudding. I actually think we eat and drink less in the last week of December than we do the rest of the time.

Talking of time, I have no idea where the days between 25th and today went. I went to sleep soon after George got beaten up last night (although it wasn’t clear to us at the time that that was what had happened, particularly after the way it was trailed in the Radio Times, despite listening to it twice), but I did wake up at 11pm and then at 11.57pm last night. And then went straight back to sleep.
We watched ‘Love Actually‘ for the first time in ages yesterday afternoon. Actually, probably only for the second time ever. I thought that we originally saw it on a plane, but I doubt they could have cleaned up the language enough for that, so maybe not.
Do they even make sweet films like that any more? If you know of any, do tell. I just can’t cope with the murders and violence that seem to pervade screens these days.
We wish you all a Happy New Year, and thank you for reading and commenting, even if I don’t post as frequently as I used to.

We (that is the Royal ‘We’) record interesting TV programmes to watch at times of the year when we are less busy. Now, for instance.
We’ve been watching a fascinating 4-part series about the space programme – both from an American and from a Russian perspective. Of course, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the perspectives are quite different.
If you like space and human stories and have a spare 4 hours, I can highly recommend this mini-series. It was first shown at the end of October 2025 and is a joint production between the BBC and the Open University.
But hurry, it’s only on i-Player for another 6 days – although in another place it says it’s available for 9 months…
It doesn’t seem to be available outside the UK yet, but as it’s a BBC production, it might soon be bought by commercial networks around the world. But, for now, the accompanying booklet produced by the OU is available here (although that doesn’t bear a lot of resemblance to the series!),

There is a trailer wheel in my craft room.

Next thing there will be a Mi1dred engine in my kitchen.

I spent an hour before dinner digging thistles out of the orchard.

This is a job that has to be done while all the grass is short (so, only in winter, as the rest of the year it is uncut wildflower meadow with paths), while the ground is wet but not frozen, while the thistles are still relatively small, and which had been at the top of my ‘To Do’ list for weeks.

There was 5kg, or over 20 litres worth, in total. It’s a pity I don’t have any good recipes for them.
Mr BW was concerned that the brussels sprouts weren’t up to much, but the unseasonably warm weather in the past month brought on just enough for our festive dinner.

As an experiment, he also planted some mange tout in the greenhouse in September, and there were some of those ready too, and a couple of dozen more flowers, so promise of more to come. Who’d have thought that you could grow mange tout for December in England’s most northern county?
Having picked lots of thistles, I considered that I deserved some South African Klein Constantia Estate Red 2017 (“a sophisticated Bordeaux-style blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Petit Verdot and, Malbec, known for dark fruit, spice, and oak notes”), probably my favouritest wine still in production, and one of three bottles remaining from those we brought back from our last trip to SA in early 2020. But, I have just discovered it can now be bought in the UK, which is of great joy as previously it could only be sourced via Germany, which made it ‘ridiculously expensive’ rather than just ‘jolly expensive’. However, I note that they currently seem to only have the 2018, which is nowhere near as good as the 2017, and will probably never be, but is still a better red than most of what you can buy in the UK these days.

Because I failed to find the recipe for the nut roast that we enjoyed on 25th December last year (we only eat nut roast once a year), and because it wasn’t in my recipe file, my recipe box, or any of my hundreds of cookery books, or linked in the BW archive from earlier years either, for posterity, the one we had this year was this one (but using fennel rather than celery as Mr BW claims not to like celery, and using brazil and raw cashew nuts).
All the veg were from the garden, including the onions for the onion gravy, except the potatoes, although they could have been, as we do still have some of our own in store, but ours are nice enough to boil rather than roast.

And yes, as we have no-one to please but ourselves, we do eat off 30 year old tin trays, on our laps, in the comfy armchairs that used to belong to Mummy Mr BW, that we saved from the tip as a stopgap and will probably now never change. If you look carefully to the LHS of the photo, on the floor you will see the ‘beach’ coloured blanket that I am currently making.

That is a very strange evening-time picture out of the window of the once-a-conservatory, which should probably now be known as the ‘garden room’ as it now has a solid roof and insulation, but we’ll never remember to call it that.
What did you do on FOTCR™ day?

The telephone box, from inside, with lights:

And, from outside, Mr BW working on his latest wood carving, ‘The Enduring Present’, late this afternoon:

It’s 33 years today since we met. The Enduring Present.
Now, why is it that we have lots and lots and lots of festive lights, almost all of them running in a more environmentally friendly way on rechargeable batteries, but we discover this afternoon that the battery charger (4 years old) is dead, and Amazon Prime (another free 30 day trial offered on my Witchday last Wednesday, which is already in the diary to cancel after 29 days) apparently cannot get anything here until Saturday now.
Never mind, we still have plenty of ‘proper’ batteries. But why oh why is nothing made to last these days?

Finally, 14 days on I am emerged from Ill Land. It has been a long haul.
For the past couple of weeks we have had crazy warmth for the time of year (often 18°C by day and 10°C by night) – the Atlantic-passaged end of Hurricane Melissa. On Friday morning we were outside gardening in t-shirts and my face got sunburnt!

On Wednesday evening we sat at the top of a hill in the car to watch the localish school fireworks – the same ones we have been to almost every year for the past 20 years as this last week – the week after the schools’ autumn half term – was the week we always came north for an autumn break. We used to go into the school field to watch, but now the kids running around waving light sabres and screaming (which they never used to do) drives me nuts, so we now have our own quieter viewing from above.
We therefore have a mental 20 year history of exactly the usual weather and temperatures for this week – something that no other local residents can have. It certainly has never before been 14.5°C at 7pm on 5th November. Even 10 years ago we often had to scrape the ice off the car windscreen before we could go out to the fireworks.
Yesterday we were taken back (or maybe that should be aback) 27 years by an account of what we were doing on 8th November 1997. That made me feel really old – how could that have been almost half a lifetime ago (well, give or take 4 years)?

Originally, the weather forecast for this weekend and next week was zero overnight. But, that time has now moved a week further forward. However, Mr BW was working to the original date, and so most everything that needs protecting over winter is now safely tucked up in the greenhouse, in the cold frames or inside. He has also managed to get the ‘allotment’ (what we call the subsidiary veg plot in the orchard field) cleared and covered ready for the winter.

There are small violas in the tops of the pots of bulbs that we have planted as hope for the spring. We find violas much hardier than pansies.

There were queen bumble bees supping from them on Friday – presumably stocking themselves up before digging in somewhere to hibernate for the winter. Not quite as good as the hummingbird hawk moth we saw a couple of times a couple of weeks ago, but, who’d have thought this is England’s northernmost county.

I’m delighted by the cornus (dogwood) stems visible from the conservatory window. Actually, I’m delighted by how the whole garden looks. Mr BW has worked so hard to make my vision become reality. I can design, pick a colour pallette, choose and order plants, and direct, but I don’t have the energy or balance these days to do the manual work required to plant and maintain. Thank goodness he still does.

I can’t bring myself to cut down perennial flowers that are still blooming yet, so hope the frost hurries up and kill off the tops as it will be good to get it done. All the seedheads will remain until the birds have eaten them all and they look a dishevelled mess.

In addition to fireworks, our week has also been full of unexpected grenades.
Regular readers will recall how part of why we moved north was to get away from the need to be constantly fighting planning applications for new towns, airport expansions, and inappropriate developments in the countryside. Well… this week has felt like back to the future.
What is proposed by one greedy person (probably financially backed by one of the 10 ‘big players’) won’t affect us directly – we are too far away – but, if approved, it will undoubtedly be followed by tens and eventually hundreds of further applications which could potentially affect the whole county’s landscape and challenge tourism and the livelihoods of many others who have chosen sustainable diversification and worked incredibly hard to make their schemes work. Some serious brainwork, research, investigation, writing, and networking has been required to develop appropriate responses. I’ve been madly loading bullets for others to fire, but it will be months, maybe years, before it is decided.
Apologies for being cryptic, but I don’t want to say things that can be picked up on searches. All I will say – and I never thought I’d be saying this – is that Google’s AI has made the task so much easier. Once one has learnt how to tame it by asking the right questions, and then to interrogate it thoroughly to check sources, it is so helpful to quickly gather and sift vast quantities of information. Who’d have thought it was only May this year when it started appearing at the top of search results in a very basic form?
I don’t see myself ever allowing AI to write things for me, but for identifying and then crunching information, it’s been a godsend. Thanks to those of you reading who live in areas already blighted who have found an unexpected email from me in their inboxes and who have kindly shared their thoughts.
There was a very interesting programme on Radio 4’s the Bottom Line a couple of weeks ago about how AI can be used to boost productivity in the UK. Worth a listen, if you haven’t already heard it.

I couldn’t believe the carrots Mr BW pulled for tonight’s dinner.
How I miss Johnnie Walker and SOTS on a Sunday afternoon… it’s just over a year since his last programme now.

Here’s Mr BW in his workshop:

Except that he’s not in his workshop here today, he’s a couple of hours away across the Pennines on a week-long wood carving course.
Woodwork for pleasure rather than wordwork for necessity, as is usually the case round here.
He is making himself a present, and some bottles. I am sure that pictures will appear in due course.
Meanwhile, I had all sorts of sorting-out things planned for while he is away, but have been struck down by a nasty cold/flu bug which has so far confined me to bed for 2 days with every fibre of me aching. I rarely get ill, and it is nearly two years since I last had a bug. It’s a good job that there is nothing I have to do as I doubt I could do it. I managed to brave the strong winds yesterday to check the hens, and take a couple of photos, but that was as much as I could do. This was sunrise yesterday:

Hope you have a lovely birthday Mr BW (it’s a prime number!), even if you say you are not going to tell anyone that it is your special day.

I have discovered that Ghost Zebedee is impossible to photograph. I thought the bad picture before was just Mr BW’s phone camera, but it must actually be because GZ is a ghost. Here he is in jaunty mode:

This is the old building (left) and the new building (right), showing how well the latter is already weathering down. In 20 years time, I suspect the difference between the two sandstones will be invisible. In the middle of the shot is one of the many climbing iceberg roses that we have planted in various places on all different elevations. It is an amazing rose – flowers non-stop pretty much all year round, is almost thornless, keeps within 6 or 8 feet in height, but is easily managed with a little pruning, and is a beautiful white white, with a tiny hint of pink when in bud.

First thing this morning everything was shrouded in mist. By lunchtime it was bright sunshine, but with mist still hovering around all the trees.

The nights have been remarkably warm for the time of year up to now: only a few below 10°C and only 2 below 4°C. According the the weather forecast, this is all set to change this coming weekend, with forecast temperatures at night down to zero. I don’t know whether the Met Office have yet taken over the BBC weather forecasting again, but it seems less accurate than ever recently. Non-stop rain was forecast for the past few days; only a few odd showers have arrived.

Anyway, to be on the safe side, almost all the tender plants are now either inside or in the cold frames or greenhouse. All the pots of new bulbs are now planted, and there are just a few species crocuses and miscellaneous bulbs left to go into the newly enlarged border by the revitalised conservatory, once the frost finishes off the flowers on the perennials so they can be cut down. I can’t bring myself to cut them down while they still have useful nectar and pollen for the many bees and butterflies that are still flying.

Does anyone know what this moth is? Is it a hummingbird hawk moth?

We’ve added another 1,000+ bulbs to the garden this year. Here they are all laid out ready for allocation to their various pots and beds:

How large estates and public gardens manage their bulb plantings I have no idea as this enterprise has taken almost all my brain power.
I bought bulbs from several different places this year. By far the best (largest, most solid, best packed – in breathable and compostable brown paper bags with lots of helpful written information) were from Farmer Gracy. Closely followed by those form Morrisons, then those from a local garden centre, then those from B&M, and finally, tied in last place, those from J Parker (they took 24 days to arrive, were small bulbs and sweaty in plastic bags with too small holes and insufficent information) and those from Costco (large but many with mould on them, due, I suspect, to them being incorrectly stored indoors in a heated environment). The Costco ones will be going back for a refund, whereas this time is absolutely the last time I will buy from JP. And I know I’ve said that before, but they have had one chance too many now.
We might even have to put the heating on for the first time tomorrow as it is just starting to get a bit too chilly in the early mornings.

Mr BW, Ghost Zebedee’s creator, writes:

With a final flourish of assembly, and recycling by way of old horseshoes for his moustache and blunt chainsaw blades for hair, Zebedee is now securely bolted down to a large old sandstone quoin left over from when we remodelled the front of the house.

I was expecting him to be quite solid, but at over 1m tall and quite top heavy he sways gently in the breeze. I’m not sure how this will work in a gale but time will tell.
Happy 60th Birthday Zebedee!
Happy memories… which was your favourite character?

Continuing the series of guest posts from Mr BW…
Stage 2 is where everything started to get hot, with the forge coming into service.

The flat steel pieces were formed into tubes and seam welded. Spanners collected at various junk sales were added for hands.

Three of the tubes were welded together to form the body and arms.
Then the spring was attached via a long rod to the large round ball (the only bit that had to be bought as a finished item as it is impossible to form football shaped balls of steel without some very large press tools).

The nose was made from a smaller ball added to the larger ball via an extra small cone shaped piece of steel.
To be continued…

It all started with a spring from an old lorry, saved as it was about to be thrown into a skip:

The remaining ingredients were: a used circular saw blade, a couple of blunt chainsaw blades, some old horseshoes, some flat steel, and a football sized steel ball.


A few weeks later, some forge work and quite a lot of welding, it has all come together, in time for a coincidental anniversary.
Can you guess what has been created?

I fell badly stepping out of the greenhouse yesterday evening, and ended up flat on my front on the ground, with arms stretched up. Since then I have been feet raised with intermittent icepacks (in between mixing up sugar syrup for the bees – it’s that time of year – and making drinks and energy-full snacks for Mr BW who has been in full fence mode all week).
I still can’t work out exactly how I ended up in the position I did. I know I caught my toe as my second leg stepped over the ‘unwanted intruder mesh barrier’ across the greenhouse door, but the rest is a mystery. I was very tired and should have lifted the barrier aside, rather than attempt the manoeuvre, but I had a washing-up bowl of freshly picked potatoes and tomatoes for dinner in my hands.
The pain was so bad that at first I thought I’d broken something around my kneecap, but I can (painfully) bend it and just about stand on it, so probably not. Far too much Covid around these parts again to risk going to the urgent care unit at the not-so-local hospital for an X-ray, so I’ll see how it goes.
It could have been so much worse… particularly if I’d had my glasses on rather than my contact lenses in, or if Mr BW hadn’t been within shouting range. But, it does shake you up falling like that, doesn’t it?
I fall over a lot, especially when I am tired, but not usually like this – mostly because I am sensible enough to use a special walking stick when I am out to mitigate any stumbles or trips. Having 3 ‘feet’ the stick is also excellent for balancing on when standing still, or for support when bending down to read low down labels (why do art galleries and museums always put labels so low?). So, I’m calling this my first ‘proper’ fall, which didn’t happen until my 63rd year. It is, of course, now all downhill from here, but thankfully (hopefully?) we future-proofed The Coven as we renovated.
This week’s Friday Question is, have you ever had a fall that scared you, how did it happen, and how old were you at the time?

I have devised a new test for the question ‘do I really want to do this activity?’
Basically, if I had a year to live, would I choose to spend time doing that? If not, then don’t do it now, because I don’t know (ie no-one knows) if I have only a year to live. Could be less, more, or much more.
It’s just too easy to get drawn into things and keep doing them for spurious reasons, including habit, or not wanting to let other people down.

Well, we didn’t get the 3pm emergency warning sound.
I never would as 2G doesn’t, but nor did Mr BW, and nor did he last time, which means that my cloaking spell is working, and HMG has no idea where we are, until they want more tax money from us, in which case they somehow always know where we are. Important enough to tax; unimportant enough to save.
Sadly we will also not be getting a view of the bloody lunar eclipse this early evening, as we have been shrouded in cloud all day.

Time and tides wait for no man, as Chaucer said, and I still haven’t conquered my fear of new photo processing software, or indeed tried to play with it at all. In my defence, I haven’t been feeling great recently, and I hate this time of year too, and am always surprised that I am surprised by how quickly ‘light when I go to sleep and light when I wake up’ turns into ‘dark at both ends of my day’ (my waking hours being considerably shorter than most people’s anyway).
I’m still frustrated by new cars not having CD players as digital radio coverage when travelling is absolutely rubbish across the north, even on major roads, and despite having FM tunings for radio stations programmed in as well, the car simply ignores them, immediately reverting to the non-functioning DAB version of any FM station that you attempt to manually choose.
I have always disliked digital versions of music as they don’t sound ‘right’ to me, and we still both have not only all our original vinyl (LPs and singles), CDs and (in Mr BW’s case), tapes, but the the means to play them as well. Hardware from the olden days (Sony and Technics), so that our music still sounds as good as it ever did, especially in rooms with wooden floors. And yes, I know that CDs are, strictly speaking, ‘digital’, but they don’t sound as ‘digital’ as MP3 digital. I once knew why this was, but I don’t any more and I CBATG.
I am on my third or fourth version of a few favourite CDs though – Steve Earle (Copperhead Road), Joan Armatrading (the very best of), Bruce Springsteen (The River), Tracy Chapman (Greatest Hits), Eagles (Hotel California) – and I can confirm that the new ones definitely don’t last as long as the original ones.
I still only have one digital track, TMBG’s ‘Birdhouse in your soul’, but only because someone once sent it to me by email.
Amazon used to let you have a digital version of anything you’d ever bought as a hard copy this millennium, but they don’t seem to do this any more unless you pay £11.99 a month for Amazon Music. Rufus told me that they do, but then gave me a link to a ‘page not found’. AI might be useful one day, but that day is definitely not yet. At least they now put disclaimers at the bottom of most AI summaries (although I’d wager that most people won’t ever see or read that, let alone take any notice of it).
I have some USB sticks that I use for audiobooks, and suspect that there must be an easy way to get CDs into digital form that I could then put onto them to play in the car when the DAB is playing up? I used to have a piece of software (on CD) to rip music tracks, but I never used it, and, as it was for Windows 95, I doubt it would work these days. We do still have an external DVD/CD drive that I can plug into my desktop PC, should anyone have any ideas of appropriate software?
I am happy to be the dinosauriest blogger in the village, and suspect that most of you probably have thousands of digital tracks on your smartphones that you can send (or is that ‘cast’?) to your in-car entertainment panels, but for this week’s Friday Question, I would like to know if anyone else still has their original physical format music, and original hardware to play it on?

Every new replacement gadget we are forced to buy seems to have brighter LEDs than the last, and most no longer have any discoverable way to turn the lights off.
Who needs nightlights when you have gadgets?
Unhappily, the nights are drawing in rapidly, and walking around the house last night I noted the following unnecessary lights on gadgets that run off mains electricity:
Craft Room: boiler controller, smoke detector
Our Bedroom/ensuite: smoke detector, TV, HD recorder, my laptop, my old laptop, Mr BW’s laptop, wifi extender (that new last week gadget has lights bright enough to see to read a book)
Atrium: broadband router (when this was installed I asked how to turn off the 5 bright green lights and was told to use a piece of gaffer tape), smoke detector
Cloakroom: nothing
Utility: nothing
Kitchen: Plug in USB sockets (while we have USB sockets built into most of our plug sockets, this outlet needs a triple socket and we couldn’t find one with USB chargers built in)
Library (this was the lounge but we don’t ever sit in there, so it’s now the library as about half our books are in there): new printer, HD recorder
Conservatory: nothing, which is just as well as any light would likely be visible for tens of miles
Upstairs Landing: wifi extender built into plug socket, smoke detector, smoke detector
Guest Bedroom/ensuite: extension plug board (as can’t currently get to the wall socket), electric shower pull-cord (should have been turned off at the distribution board)
Office: extension plug board (all other gadgets including the old printer have ways to turn off their lights)
Main Bathroom: nothing
Sewing Room: plug extension board (this should have been off; at the wall; it usually is)
Store Rooms: 4 on various security devices
And I didn’t dare go in Mr BW’s Workshop as it might have been like that festive time of year that will appear in the shops anytime soon – I have already had 3 emails about it, and promptly unsubscribed from the sending companies. But, smoke detector, freezer, Mi1dred’s battery trickle charger, other battery chargers (not all in use, I know, I know, I have repeatedly told him, it’s a safety hazard as well as a waste of energy/money…), other things that I have no idea what they are let alone what they do, so let’s say 5 altogether.
There are also a couple of smoke and carbon monoxide detectors in various places that flash brightly occasionally, but they don’t run off mains electricity.
We don’t use an in-house smart meter monitor for electricity usage as we turn off things we don’t need on (and don’t leave things on standby), and, when it was new 4 years ago, I worked out that, if plugged in, it used £11 worth of electricity per year. More recent ones are only allowed to consume 0.6W per hour, but that is still over £2 per year.
Altogether, we have somewhere around 30 unwanted LED lights on gadgets.
If the lights on each gadget uses £2 of electricity per year (and some undoubtedly use much more, some less), that is around £60 of wasted electricity per year, and sixty bright one pound coins down the drain.
Multiply this up by every household, every office, every factory, every shop in the country, and that is millions and millions of pounds worth of wasted energy and wasted money per year.
How many LEDs glow in your house in the dark?
Do you find them unnecessary and annoying?

Oh, wait, it’s not a new broom, it’s a new computer. And this is its first post.
Mr BW has now got it to look almost the same as the last one – although (on our rural community broadband Gb connection, which is giving 300Mb/s up and down on a wifi connection via an extender) a thousand times faster (well, actually only five faster times in reality – although these things probably aren’t linear?), and things open and close apparently on a whim, which is not good for my ageing digits or brain.
I have managed to turn off the annoying backlights on the keyboard, and to dim the screen to non migraine inducing levels, but the F5 key (used to dim the screen) doesn’t seem to work to refresh a browser page, even if pressed with the Ctrl key at the same time, as the manufacturer suggests. We also can’t currently get it to talk to either the old printer (upstairs, kept until it runs out of ink), or the new printer (downstairs).
But, all things considered, and compared to the many tens of hours it used to take to set up a new machine to look like the replaced machine even 10 years ago, it’s a small miracle.
I usually use my laptop in what I like to think of as a “Wordsworth way”: that is, “And oft, when on my couch I lay / In vacant or in pensive mood,” so, resting lying on the bed, with the head end raised and the computer resting on my tummy. I was concerned that the increased weight of the new machine would quickly turn me into Flat Stanley, but it hasn’t yet. I love that book – in 1986 when I spent a year teaching top infants (Y2 as it is now) I based a whole half term’s work on it (those were the days, when teachers could be creative and follow their own and their pupils’ interests) – why I’ve never had a copy of my own I have no idea.
Yet more technology failed over the weekend. On the way home from the weekend classic car rally on Sunday evening, the powerbank that Mr BW uses in Mi1dred to power the satnav (Mi1dred being 92 and 6V) decided that its USB ports were too old and wobbly. Which does not bode well for a long future for any new computer that is now powered by a USB C input rather than a small round prong that slides into a hole. Come to think of it, our latest electric blinds also have USB charging sockets, rather than the easier-to-use round push in prongs, so they won’t last as long as they could either. I strongly suspect that decisions on such things are made by 20 year olds who have no idea of the effects of their decisions on those of advancing years, or those with reduced manual dexterity and less-than-perfect eyesight.
Anyway, fortunately I am thoroughly trained in ‘convoy rules’ through many years of classic car club runs, and I managed to safely lead Mi1dred and Mr BW home, which was lucky as they might otherwise have got lost without a functioning satnav and ended up on an A road which would have been scary. Given that when towing Bri@n it is only possible to see a following small car when peering in the the mirrors when going round a corner, and given that the tarmac roads were only three feet wider than Bri@n, and the fenced-in cattle grids only two feet, this made for a lot of breath holding and finger crossing.
Mr BW said that I deserve my caravan towing badge. Fortunately the only vehicles we met in the 30-odd miles of lanes between here and the coast were encountered in places where there was room to pass, as it is unlikely that Bri@n would enjoy being reversed by me.
The Photoshop disc that I have been using for the past 20 years sadly won’t work with Windows 11, so I now have to master the free (except for the odd annoying pop-up message to encourage purchase of the full version) PhotoPad (NCH Software) which Mr BW assures me is easy to use. Given that all I ever do is crop and resize photos to post here, that shouldn’t be too hard. Should it?

I finally have a new laptop, so there is hope that BW may improve its schedule (and ability to include pictures) sometime soon, once Mr BW has finished setting it up and making it look nearly the same as my old one which has limped on for at least 18 months past its sell-by date.
I have a theory that Microsoft have been filling up the hard drives of any machines still running Windows 10 with pointless and bloaty updates, to force people to buy new equipment. I did get a new one some months ago, but it refused to connect to the wifi and was doing lots of silly things that weren’t right, so it went back.
This time I have the small cousin of Mr BW’s new laptop, so hopefully he will know how to do anything that stumps me; there is method in my madness. Plus it was £300 off at Costco, who give an extra year’s warranty with every purchase. But why my lovely old little netbook could have an 11.5 inch screen and weigh just 1090g when this new one weighs half as much again and has a 14 inch screen I have no idea. Progress, eh?
So that makes a new printer, a new wifi extender, and two new laptops that have had to be purchased in the last month. Ouch.
The week before last we went away for three nights, and we’re going away again for two nights to a classic car rally over on the coast. We will be staying on the site (in a country park on the coast) in Bri@n – who has not been towed, other than around the block, for over 5 years. Mr BW has now added ‘caravan servicing’ to his skill-set, thanks to YouTube. When you live in the middle of nowhere, and the nearest place that might be able to service your caravan is over 60 miles away, it is senseless to tow your needs-looking-at-to-ensure-safety pod that far, so the only option is DIY.
As I don’t drive Mi1dred, I have to drive Mr BW’s car, towing Bri@n. I have only driven Mr BW’s car 3 times before, as I hate all the unnecessary electronic gadgets that can’t be turned off. What could possibly go wrong? 😉
I realised that in the past 5.5 years since we moved here, I have only (so far) had 7 nights away from homes. 3 plus 2 days last year, and 3 days this year. I had maybe 20 nights at Coven Sud and Mr BW had probably 150 more than that down south, but those don’t count as they were still in a house we owned.
7 nights away from home in five and a half years. That’s certainly a record for us. But, as I always say to people, as we moved to a place where we holidayed happily for 15 years, every day still seems like a holiday.
How many nights have you spent away from home since March 2020?

If you happen to be awake around dawn any time in the next few days, can I recommend going outside and looking east, about 45° up?
Venus and Saturn, the two brightest planets visible from Earth, are currently within a degree or so of each other – a conjunction. They are closest on Tuesday early morning, and with the 4th heatwave of the year building, I would think that the early mornings are likely to be clear.
I picked up a copy of Waitrose Weekend when popping in for some milk on the way back from my textile group yesterday afternoon. They rarely have any of these free papers left by Saturday afternoon, and I rarely read it (we use it for the hens), but, at the bottom of page 4, this phenomenon was described.
I happened to wake up soon after 4.30am this morning, and it was visible for nearly an hour: Saturn on the left and Venus on the right. The full moon was 180° from it, at around the same height. Truly magical. I’ll add a picture tomorrow.
It almost makes up for the full moon spoiling the Perseids this year.

Rain rain rain from the early hours and wind wind wind from 10am. 50mph wind.
Storm Floris.
Not what one would expect for the time of year.
We’d battened down the hatches in readiness, but with trees in full leaf and some in full fruit, and vulnerable bean poles, there were always going to be casualties. Flattened flowers can just be cut back and will probably have another flush of flowers once they have recovered.
We’ll have to sort it all out in the morning as the wind is forecast to be strong through to the early hours. Just what we didn’t need to do as we are going away for a few days, and having already spent much of today dealing with an idiot building society who managed to transfer the whole of an ISA into one new bank rather than send one third to one place, one third to another, and retain the last third. Of course, we are now left to ensure repayment is made, and then to reapply for all the new ISAs again, and fight the bungling one for loss of interest and compensation for maladministration (including the person who made the error attempting to cover up their bungling by lying). Bang goes another day. If not two. Or three if we have to involve the Ombudsman.
All this around trying to pack and leave everything watered and fed enough to leave for a few days, and Mr BW also having to set up his new laptop that arrived this morning just as we were going out to Nice Nearest Neighbour’s to deliver her birthday card and present.
We thought that after we waved goodbye to the final workmen, back at the end of June, life would be simpler and our time would be our own again. Fat chance.
I don’t know if we are just very very unlucky with all the appalling service we receive, or whether most people don’t have time to notice, let alone sort out all the mistakes that companies make.
The Bank of England’s Base Rate (so interest rates in general) are predicted to come down 0.25% to 4% on Thusday, when their Monetary Policy Committee meet.
Food inflation is predicted to rise to 6% by the end of the year.
And the government’s emergency warning system is being tested again on Sunday September 7th at 3pm.
The end of the world could be coming…

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.

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.

1.25pm, Thursday 26th June, 2025 – the roofers exit stage left:

The renovations, extensions, remodelling, and general future proofing are all done, all finished, 5 years, 3 months, 13 days since we moved in, just before the first Covid lockdown, and 8 months, 16 days since we eventually sold Coven Sud (so finally had enough pennies to finish all we wanted to do).

There’s definitely another post coming soon about the re-roofing just completed, including how I had to peel some stickers off their star chart on Tuesday (something I spent all my working life telling teachers, parents and others never to do) due to my raised blood pressure, but how all ended happily with an excellent job that exceeded our hopes, the area around the house cleaner than it was before they started, and everything now uncovered, stowed and ship-shape. And nothing broken by either roofers or scaffolders!
But, for now, we are celebrating.
Almost immediately they left, with home-made strawberry ice cream (with added chocolate drops on top for Mr BW) and a bottle of Cava:

And very soon with a very early night with no need to wake up at 6am to be ready for workmen before 8am.
And breathe…

No matter how long I live in the NE, I will never get used to light between 3.15am and 11.15pm, at this time of year. Even the four hours of ‘darkness’ aren’t really dark.
it’s very discombobulating, because if you go to sleep before dark, and wake up, you never know whrther it is still light from the day you fell asleep, or from the next day’s dawn.
It’s strange, because the nights in the winter in the NE never seem that much longer or darker, although I know they are as we had four and a half years of being able to compare the weather and day lengths of the two locations through remotely viewing the CCTV security cameras at Coven Sud.
The series finale week of Countdown is sadly marred by the guest being Not Johnnie Walker, Whispering Bob ‘The Teeth’ Harris. At least Colin Murray is taking the piss out of his bragging this time around.

It’s been quite a week.
2 four letter words in the same set of Countdown letters on Monday/Tuesday, amazing temperatures (day and night) at the end of the working week, Paul Heaton and Rianne Downey on the Isle of White today. And The Orange One doing what any thinking person has worried about.
But, closer to at home…

This middle section in the picture is the only bit of the original house roof still not replaced, just a week on. The back, including replacing a Velux (no, they don’t pop out and in as easily as the manufacturers claim) and 4 dormer tops, as well as the slates and the decayed woodwork, was done by Thursday lunchtime.
I drove back down the track yesterday afternoon around 5pm after attending my spinning guild meeting and looked with concern at the LHS front. There had been intermittent rain showers all day and the overnight forecast was for torrential rain. Despite the roofers saying that all was watertight after the slates and old tarred felt were stripped on Friday morning, and the new breathable membrane and battens installed, I was worried.

I woke up soon after midnight last night: there was lightning and thunder from the SE (Cumbria) and from the north (Scotland), of a continual, prolonged, spectacular type I last saw over 31 years ago on a little island in the Bahamas where we got married – although then we were under it, rather than watching it from tens of miles away. But, Mr BW (having been supervising and assisting the roofers, and coping with all arising eventualities, all week) snored through it all, and it, amazingly, didn’t hit us. As promised, all was still dry this morning.
The roofers have been amazing.
Despite living over an hour to the south, the two company owners have been here every day from 7.45am. Over 100 hours of work this week, plus travelling. Because the unnaturally high temperatures (28.5°C in the shade) meant that they had to go home early afternoon on Thursday and Friday, at the point of heat exhaustion, despite wearing hats, shirts and sunscreen (unknown in ones less than 30), one of them was back with us at 20 to 8 this morning (Sunday), and worked through 5 downpours (refusing a towel to dry off as, “I’d never live it down!”) to finish the front LHS slating.

I have never seen tradesmen work as they do.
They turn up when they say they will, work non-stop, irrespective of weather (with no phone scrolling), until they leave, use the bins provided rather than just drop wrappings, sweep up every night and check for stray nails in the drive, don’t swear continually, ask if their radio is too loud, and remember to say please and thank you for refreshments provided. They communicate well, reply to messages promptly and helpfully, and say goodbye and ask if we are happy at the end of every day before they leave. They even sent a text message apologising for accidentally having gone home with our tray and empty cups in their van on Thursday! Plus, they have offered to clean the external top windows and UPVC edges/windowsills when they have finished, before the scaffolding comes down. Best of all, they take their power tool batteries home to charge each night, rather than plug every gadget they own (irrespective of whether they are using it here) into our electricity, as most previous workers have.
At last, 5 years on, the perfect workmen. They do exist!
Fom the outset they have insisted we only pay anything at the end, when we are completely satisfied. Today, after a discussion about the plan for the next week, we offered to pay an amount now, so that we could be sure the roofers could pay the scaffolders, to be sure the scaffolding would be taken down on Friday, before the roofers go on their holidays next weekend, but he wouldn’t hear of it. It is lovely that he is so trusting, but I do fear for his future as his work expands.
The end of the 5 year renovation/refurbishment/extension project is in sight…
To celebrate, and as a reward for the ice-cream loving Mr BW’s hard work, I have bought an ice cream/gelato/sorbet/frozen yoghurt making machine. A proper one, with a compressor, not just the £20 freeze-the-bowl for 2 days before each use version I bought (and later junked) a few years back. So far we have pineapple frozen yoghurt, and frozen (commercial) smoothie versions (both yummie, made in less than an hour from start to finish). I have chocolate, and rum and raisin, planned for tomorrow. Only good ingredients, no additives or fillers, and no added sugar, as the ingredients in the products available in the shops just leave me cold.
Anyone have experience of such machines and any sources of good recipes?

The roofers arrived at 07:50am this morning. Considering that they live over an hour away, we were impressed. “No time to talk or drink tea!” they declared when offered a cuppa first thing.
Within an hour they had the stone ridge cappings off, and had already stripped the slate off one quarter of the back of the roof.

The lad (who looked like the younger brother of one of the two roofers) did a good job in getting the slates down and stacked into the back of our trailer. Because, if you have a new car, just 15 weeks old, why not use it rally stylee to move your old roof down the sheep field the other side of your fence so the slates can be easily thrown over the fence to be nearer their final resting place – under the hedge as ‘mulch’ to stop the weeds, and on the slate garden that we are in the process of creating? Beats hours of back-breaking wheelbarrowing.

One of the other firms who quoted for the work thought he would re-use the existing slate. Looking at it, it’s third hand at least already, chipped, discoloured and generally disintegrating, so it was a good job we didn’t choose him. And, despite not using new slates, he was £7K + VAT more than the ones we chose!

The nasty old Velux in the upstairs bathroom came out with a bit of brute force:

We didn’t imagine that they would get that far today, so had only 10 minutes to get the bathroom cleared, the electric mirror cling-wrapped and the bath protected with big sheets of cardboard and a tarpaulin. It’s a good job we can think and work fast!

By 2pm, the three of them had stripped all the old slates, felt and battens off, and installed new breathable membrane and new battens.
Apparently it is now weathertight, and this will be tested tomorrow as it is meant to drizzle all of the working day. There is no other rain at all in the forecast until Wednesday week, and if today is anything to go by, they will be long gone by then.
Now, if only all our workmen could have been this good… I guess it’s called saving the best til last.

For the next 2 weeks, we will be replacing the roof of the original house, the Velux window in the upstairs bathroom, and the flat tops of the dormer windows on the back of the house.
The roof was very tired (having been done in 1974 to the cheapest possible specification), but not leaking; it could probably have waited a few more years, but we wanted to do it now, while we were doing it on our terms, rather than on ’emergency’ terms. Future proofing is all.
The salesman who sold me my car back in December recommeded the roofers. The roofers recommended the scaffolders, who were excellent. After 3 sets of bad scaffolders on past phases, it was great to find some good ones. And they even said thank you for the refreshments we provided!


Yellow wagtail site foreman on the ridge:

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

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

The roofers start on Monday.
Wish us luck…

Customer disservice goes from strength to strength.
We have 4 or 5 ongoing unresolved issues with goods and services we have purchased. None of them trivial, all of them things that could and should have been resolved straight away, and all of them utter time-sinks.
Companies no longer seem to bother to respond to emails in a timely manner (if at all), and issues are handled by a succession of people who rarely leave the previous email chain intact, so it is never clear to the next person who picks up the issue what has been happening (or not happening), or, in most cases, even what the issue is.
Emails seem to be answered in foreign countries by people who have a very limited command of English. Plus they seem to use a random selection of cut-and-paste phrases which together are absolute nonsense.
Take this example reply to the 4th email I sent to a company regarding missing parts (and this is not an isolated incident, and the only thing I have changed is the writer’s name at the end):
“Good Afternoon,
We extend our sincerest apologies for any inconvenience this situation may have caused.
We are disheartened to learn about the issue concerning your order. It has come to our attention that the parts have not yet arrived. We consistently strive to provide exceptional service, and we greatly value your feedback. We would be grateful for the opportunity to rectify this situation, as you are a valued customer, and we do not wish to disappoint you. We have been in communication with the production unit, which has informed us that the parts are currently out of stock. We sincerely apologize for this and assure you that once they are restocked, we will ensure prompt dispatch.
We truly regret the inconvenience this has caused you. Should you have any further inquiries regarding this matter or any other concerns, please do not hesitate to reach out to us. Our operating hours are from 9:00 AM to 5:30 PM every day.
Best Regards,
CustomerServices”
There are lots of companies who now supply goods under more than one brand name, and so many items that you cannot now buy from anyone other than these huge conglomerates. Once small independents who used to provide excellent quality and service have now been bought up and swallowed by huge conglomerates who keep the once-reliable brand name but increase prices and put customer service offshore or into call centres who handle problems for multiple organisations – only you don’t find this out until you have an issue and start investigating online, or until your email is eventually (accidentally) answered from another company’s email address.
The other day I was e-chatting to an English friend who has lived in the US for many years now and mentioned how appalling customer service was these days. “Ah, good old Blighty has finally caught up with the US in that regard!” he said.
Progress, eh?

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

“Ooooh!” I thought as I looked at the display. “We made that!”
A great feeling of achievement, finally back to where we were down south about 10 years ago (when we were at Peak Garden, before local development aorund there took the joy out of everything).

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

To further our future-proofing plans, after a lot of research, we have bought a ride-on mower for the orchard/meadow. Last summer it was taking me 4 hours every week to cut just the paths with a powered petrol mower, and Mr BW 4 knackering days (on and off) to cut the lot down with a petrol strimmer and then remove the strimmings in late summer (as you need to do with a meadow). I can’t manage to mow for 4 hours every week any more, and there are plenty of other things Mr BW can do with 4 days.
Plus, Vroom Vroom can do the job much better than I ever did, in 28 minutes flat, including getting out and putting away (and I’m getting quicker every time). Mr BW is not allowed to use Vroom Vroom as it is far too much fun.
Vroom Vroom can’t access the garden lawn, so we bought a Goat.
However, it proved impossible to train it or keep it under control, so it went back to The Long River. Let’s not even mention the saga that became, but it did involve a Section 75 intervention.
As the technology clearly isn’t quite there for our upper lawn needs yet, I decided that we would reduce the garden lawn area. This is the third time this border has been extended (it’s never been quite right anyway), and, given the grow-through of what was once sheep-proof grass from when we originally made the border in 2020, and extended it two years later, we reluctantly decided that we needed to kill the grass with weedkiller before we started.
Mr BW sprayed in late evening, after our Buzzers, and other beneficial insects, were home for the night. We garden organically, using permaculture principles, and it grieves me very much to have to resort to chemicals. But, I guess it is all relative, given the horrors that the local farmers constantly spray on their food crops, by date rather than need.

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

The weather at yesterday’s show turned out OK – just a couple of short light showers, but those who go regularly say that there were far fewer attendees. For a one-day agricultural show, with a usual attendance of around 20,000, this could be disasterous.
I spun up 420g of fleece in the day, which is a huge amount (the carded prepared batts filled a 42 litre trug), and talked to what seemed like hundreds of people (one of the stated aims of the group is public education), but could have been more or less. I just know that we got home at 5.23pm and I was fast asleep an hour later.

There were supposed to be 8 of us demonstrating, but one pulled out the day before due to her husband being unwell, so another also couldn’t attend as she couldn’t then get a lift. This left 6 of us, and, unbelievably, only two of us had brought anything to display, or indeed our traditional wooden sp1nning wheel5.
Only two of us were there demonstrating all day: the others seemed to spend their time wandering around and returning with carb-laden sauce-dripping handfuls of unnecessary calories that made me feel unwell just looking at them. As soon as one ‘snack’ was finished, they seemed to go off in search of the next. Each of them must have spent at least £40 in the day on over-priced and unhealthy food and drinks. Mind you, there seems to be a large plateful of some chocolate-based confection with green lumps (smarties?) in it, attempting to hide in the fridge, and I did not make it or indeed put it there.
This is what happens when events are just left to happen rather than be properly organised. I must sit on my hands and keep my mouth shut or I know I will end up with the show organiser role.
The pigs were in the next but one marquee. This isn’t a pig county, so there weren’t many, but there was a Middle White: my second favourite breed. I always think they resemmble a Large White that has had an argument with a wall:

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

Forgive me Blogland for I have sinned. It has been 15 days since my last post.
My life is in shreds and I have been dyeing.
The Shreds
When the conservatory was redone, the 40+ bankers’ boxes of suspension files and paper files that had been waiting in there – some since since September 2022 and others since October 2024 – to be gone through and shredded were moved next door into the lounge.
The lounge is now designated as The Library as it is doubful we will ever again use it as a lounge: the new room, with its solid insulated roof and solar-powered Velux windows with roof blinds, and powered window blinds (yes, we are future-proofing), is 20 degrees cooler by day and 10 degrees warmer at night than it ever was when it was made completely of glass, so should be able to be used all year round. Plus I have bought a Dyson hot and cold non-fan fan. So, these boxes of solid paper have finally been getting processed. Most people would do this sort of stuff before they move house, but our move wan’t like that, plus I didn’t want to get rid of stuff pertaining to Coven Sud until we no longer owned it. You never know what will come in useful.
Having already killed two and a half normal paper shredders in the last 5 years, I invested in a semi-industrial shredder and have done 40 giant thick black bags so far. As the local council will not take shredded paper for recycling, and as there is far too much to compost at once, Mr BW has been burning it so that we can use the ash on the fruit trees and bushes. It seems only right.

The papers were about half and half, work case files (quick to do) and old financial etc documents (slower as there are some things that need to be extracted). How things have changed in the banking game over the past 30 years! I have kept some gems that I might eventually get round to posting.
The dyeing
We’ve now had 66 days without rain here – well, a tiny bit of drizzle in mid-April on the day they finished off the new what-was-the-conservatory (which is wonderful now) and 20 minutes one Thursday late afternoon about a month ago when it poured for 23 minutes, but otherwise none at all. Drier than down south! Unheard of up here. All our water butts are empty and have been for weeks – and we have 19 of them, all huge, totalling 7 cubic metres (being a Longhouse 30 metres long – we have a lot of roof to catch water so we might as well store it for use in the garden).
But… it is due to break tomorrow. Rain all day. Guess who is demonstrating spinning of f1eece at the Annual County Show – now in the rain – tomorrow? I must be mad, but I was asked, so I didn’t like to say no…
So, I spent most of 2 days this week dyeing then drum carding the fleece I will be using. I like to confuse young visitors by suggesting they go and find the blue sheep and then come back and tell me where they found it.

I killed one of our 4 old microwaves in the process (the LH one). RIP and that’s another glass turntable for my collection. Always useful. As we no longer use microwaves for cooking food, I don’t know what I will do when the remaining ones die.
This is the dyed fleece drying in the once-conservatory in what I have called ‘a woman’s work is never done‘ corner. My collection of old flat irons:

And then I have been helping a young friend (who I actually taught to read when she was a failing reader at age 9) ‘proof read’ her latest two 4,000 word end-of-module essays for the MA in English Literature that she is doing at a Russell Group University. The ‘proof reading’ she requested turned into needing to be ‘heavy editing’ and ‘teaching how to write an essay’. How anyone can have an A* at GCSE, an A at A Level, a 2:1 BA, and still not know how to write an academic essay is totally beyond me. That has taken up probably 30 or 40 hours since the beginning of the year. I appear to have agreed to similar input into a 15,000 word dissertation. Do I get half an MA if she eventually passes? One can only wonder how many advanced qualifications only succeed because the writer has a learned friend, or pays for an editing service. Having reviewed the papers from when I did my Masters 36 years ago now, during my shredding process, all I will say is that qualifications definitely aren’t what they used to be.
There aren’t any groups of retired men round here who meet up to do anything other than drink, and talk about the price of sheep, and most of the retired are 80+ anyway, if not 90+ (farmers don’t like to retire) so Mr BW has to make his own entertainment. The ‘M3ns’ Shed’ in the nearest town (12 miles away) consists of 2 very elderly ex-engineers and about a dozen care-in-the-community or learning disabled younger men. We went to their open day last summer. The 2 leaders were very keen for Mr BW to join them. Mr BW was very un-keen to join them. They wouldn’t let us go until they had his phone number so they could keep in touch with him, and, I am ashamed to say, it was easier to give them a false number than to explain why it wasn’t going to happen.
But, finally, to fill the void, Mr BW is, unexpectedly, and slightly unwillingly, after the recent local elections, now Administrative Lord of the Manor. He knows more about official governance and procedural matters than anyone else for miles around (due to him having been trained down south, where they actually bother to train people to fulfil voluntary community roles, as well as a lifetime of professional business experience and knowledge), although he lacks the network of local contacts, not having lived here for 20 generations. Given that he will never have lived here for 20 generations, and has been doing most of the development work for the past 4 years anyway, it’s probably going to be OK. At least it will get him to meet a few more local people, even if it is mostly the ones who are annoying the locals and contravening local sensibilities.
So, that’s (most of) our news: how about yours?

I am not religious.
I do not condone or understand war.
I am unimpressed that the Catholic Church have chosen to detract from VE80 today by announcing the new Pope.
Am I the only one who finds this very distasteful?

The Ballerinas and Princess Irenes are at their best:


The meat factory in the field behind us grows daily:

This scares me:

But not because of the rise of a Trump-like mentality in the UK, or that Mrs Badenough (our previous MP) has suffered a crushing defeat (which she fully deserved – we have first-hand experience that, as media commentators have said, it’s true that she is uninformed, arrogant, and could start a fight in an empty room), but because many of the new councillors will have no idea of how ‘officialdom’ works, what can and can’t be done, and will require so much hand-holding and education by council Officers that costs will rise and efficiencies will decrease.
We are now living under a hung council (although fortunately our county councillor in this area might be in a minority, but has not changed colour):

What scares me more than the state of the political world is that we have had no rain since mid-March, aside of a drizzle on the day the conservatory revamp was completed in the first week of April and a few spots last night.
The northernmost county is not supposed to be the driest place in the UK, but, from conversations with old friends down south, they have had much more rain than us in the last 8 weeks. The water butts are empty and the reservoirs are so low one would think it was the end of the summer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and the larger items and machines outside:


The retiring farmer asked Mr BW what had caught his eye, and when Mr BW told him, and said that he wanted to use it for its proper purpose, rather than a decorative piece, he seemed pleased.
All the locals who work the land were there, nothing like a farm sale to bring them together, most of them built like the proverbial ‘brick shit houses’ and in clothes, and with dogs, that haven’t seen a wash this year:

All’s well that ends well:

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

Mindnumbingly slow and mindnumbingly boring. It’s relieved me of 6 hours of my life so far.
Mr BW has just realised that when we take off the plug sockets to paint under them, it is highly likely that some flakes of vermiculite will cascade out as there are holes in the back boxes (that the fronts screw into) to allow for different cable entries. I’ve just realised that if the back boxes are metal it is highly likely they will have rusted (like the pins in the carpet gripper) and will need replacing with plastic ones. It’s never-ending this project… except that our parts need to have ended by Monday evening as the carpet is being laid first thing on Tuesday.

What are you doing this weekend?
Easter Bunny Count: Mr BW 9, The Black Familiar 12. She has the battle scars to prove it, and the sawdust to prove she’s been supervising Mr BW cutting pieces of windowsill:

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

We’d noticed that some panes of the new conservatory glass had stickers on the outside, and some on the inside. Well – the glue from the stickers, as the labels themselves had been scraped off. Fortunately I’d taken a photo of the glass when it was on the pallet, because, well, you never know when photos will come in useful.
The information on the stickers themselves made absolutely no sense:

Now, what would you think (the bottom line of) that meant?
When we asked the roof boss man about this 10 days ago, he said it didn’t matter which side faced out, but we were unconvinced, so, when Mr BW got back from his week away, he sent an email to the window manufacturing company.
And so it came to pass that a window man turned up this morning to turn 6 panes around to be the same way as the other panes. And all was well. Well, we hope so.
The roof men have now finished. Almost all is now good, and Mr BW can polish the bits that aren’t. As well as do all the other jobs that need doing before the carpet is laid on Tuesday.
However, as one workman job finishes, another re-opens… some of the composite ‘slates’ on the summerhouse/museum roof have changed colour in the 15 weeks since they were installed.
Apparently there were some rogue batches that didn’t have UV stabiliser put in. Why, oh why, are we always the ones to get the rogues?

The plasterer who failed to attend the weekend before last arrived at 7.17am yesterday. He took one look at the amount of boarding and plastering work to do and phoned a friend who turned up at 11am.
They finished here at 3pm, and were then off to another job. I strongly suspect it was a ‘put aside your other work and do this as first job when you get back from your week’s holiday or lose our work’ directive from the roof installation company. Previous issues aside, they did an excellent job on what is a very difficult ‘P’ shaped roof with two huge Velux windows.
As it is now:

As it was on Sunday:

As it was 2 weks ago:

This pair made the least mess of any of the 5 different sets of plasterers who have worked here.
I have now finally (on almost out last project that needs workmen) deduced how you work out how tidily tradesmen will work and how well they will clean up. It’s so obvious once you’ve clicked. I have no idea why it has taken me so long.
It does not involve looking at online reviews, or asking other people they’ve worked for.
You simply look at their vans, and their clothes.
The ones here yesterday had pristine vans: clean and polished outside and neat and orderly inside. The worst set of plasterers (the local ones who were our only option in the middle of the first covid lockdown when we were first here) drive around in a filthy rusting van, which is a huge, grubby mess inside, everything thrown in together, not cleared out for at least the last ten years, and even on a Monday morning they wear dirty (non-washed) clothes.
Fortunately, I have a day’s peace today, with only Mr BW working here – cutting, fitting and painting the new skirting boards and windowsills, levelling the concrete floor and painting the ceiling. The latter two jobs not for a while as the plaster needs to dry first. The good thing about Mr BW as workman is that if I don’t like how something is looking, I can just say, whereas with workmen, it’s almost impossible to say anything negative without being in fear of them walking away. Not that that’s ever happened, but only because when I can see that things are going really badly I get Mr BW to tell them and hide.
We have now discovered another big issue that will have to be rectified by the window company while the roof finishing crew are here tomorrow, but more of that another time.
It drizzled a bit last night – the first rain in nearly a month. Tomorrow, finishing off day (ie sticking on all the internal and external cover strips and soffits, and cleaning all the plastic and glass), it is forecast to rain all day.
Given that the new carpet is being fitted on Tuesday, and Mr BW still has a lot fo do before then, and it’s chocolate eggcess weekend, there is no room for further delay caused by workmen. Hmmmm.

“Will you come round in the morning and witness my latest will?” asked Nice Nearest Neighbour.
Given that she has witnessed umpteen documents for us, including several at ten feet with her own pen during covid times when we first moved in and were signing off various covenants, I couldn’t say no, even though she wanted me to appear at a time I would rather still have been in bed.
She employs a will writer. This profession is not regulated. This is not the first time she has used this woman, who, I discovered, is very middle-aged and very personable. Think Sarah Raven crossed with Kitsty Allsopp and you’ll have the right image.
She appeared at NNN’s front door, just after I had (and I was ten minutes early), with a brown A4 envelope and a stapled bundle of maybe 8 sheets of paper.
With little pre-chat, but lots of podgy-faced smiles, she informed NNN that the brown envelope contained a copy of what she was about to sign, together with her invoice (“which I’m afraid has a little uplift due to the number of new beneficiaries you’ve added this year”), instructed NNN to initial in the bottom right hand of each page and then sign and date on the last page.
I shuddered inwardly. NNN is lovely, but she is a widow in her 70s, with no children, and has lived alone for many years. No she doesn’t have cats. Over the 5 and a half years that we’ve known her we’ve learnt that she needs to feel that any ideas are her own and that she is making all the decisions, so it is often hard to offer advice.
“Erm… do you think it might be a good idea to read everything through before you sign?” I ventured. “Oh, it’s OK,” she said with gay abandon, mid-initial, “I’ve already checked it online.” “Even so….” I said, “Do you know, Mr BW still always reads through every last word before he signs anything even if he’s read it before. It’s very easy for the electronic draft versions to get muddled up in the printing…”
Mrs Will Writer snorted. NNN laughed, “Oh, we’re OK BW, we’ve worked together before, I trust Mrs Will Writer implicitly!”
I know when to admit defeat, and dutifully signed and dated on the dotted line where instructed.
Mrs Will Writer left, telling NNN that the will would be deposited with the National Will Register, and the £30 annual fee plus handlig for that would be invoiced as normal.
After she’d left, NNN opened the brown envelope. The ‘invoice’ was for £350 plus VAT. For adding a couple of beneficiaries on this ‘annual review’. Yes, she comes to see NNN at home every year to review her wishes, and visits again if any changes are required. But £350? And £30 annual fee plus ‘handling’ and VAT for will storage?
NNN seemed a bit put out by the amount. “It was only a couple of small changes!” she said. I saw my opportunity.
“Yes, but, more importantly, how do you know that what you signed is the same as the copy of your new will in the envelope?” I asked. “I always check documents side-by side, and then take a photocopy or photos of each page of the final signed and witnessed document.” NNN looked at me as if I was mad. “Oh, I’ve known Mrs WIll Writer for a few years now, all is always in order!”
I chose not to ask how she knew that, if she’d never checked.
I have no reason to suspect that Mrs Will Writer is disreputable, or is taking NNN for a ride, although I do feel that a (chargeable) annual review of a will for a widow with no direct family, leaving the bulk of her estate to charity, is rather excessive. I also wonder how someone working alone in a non-profession service can be VAT registered (ie have a turnover in excess of £90,000). And I do think that anyone who doesn’t insist that their elderly client reads a document before signing it is encouraging an attitude that is far far too trusting in this day and age.
Am I just over-cautious and cynical?
Do you read documents before signing?

It is magic because it flew in having journeyed from Lincolnshire via High Wycombe (my home town) and The Borders (which is one hell of a roundabout route), because it was on a mixed load which included enormous control panels for a gigantic – let’s say – weed factory which is being set up and run by the government.
I Googled and it really does exist, and we know exactly how far it is from The Coven in miles, although not the exact location. Mind you, the new conservatory workmen think we have such a facility of our own, as the first-floor bedroom just above the new roof has a windowsill currently covered in tomato plants which are now nearly 2 foot tall. I saw them looking up and laughing, and I don’t think they believed me when I pointed out that they are tomato and not weed plants. Mind you, it’s a thought…
Our postie has a knack of turning up at interesting points in many of our projects.
Fortunately, he is a man of few words and keeps his own counsel.

I call this image ‘GPO: The Good Old Days’.
Now, if anyone knows where there is a grey 1970s c0in p@yph0ne for sale, please tell.

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

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

Being quite high up, they lamb comparatively late in these parts, so the first ones are just beginning to pop out.
The temperatures by day are high teens, and it’s been very sunny with blue skies for well over a week now, but by night it’s still getting down to zero, with hard frosts most mornings. It hasn’t rained since the 18th of March, and then not much, so it is scarily dry everywhere already.
In such nice weather, many farmers leave all but the first-time mums out in the fields to get on with it, and spend their days touring their fields to check all is well and provide supplementary feeding (sheep nuts and hay).
Clearly out-of-touch with what happens in the most rural parts of the county, the council have chosen now to sequentially close the roads to do yet more ineffective and short-lasting patching. To get round the need to apply for road closure permits weeks ahead, they are claiming that all the repairs are ’emergency repairs’ so they can cause havoc to the poor farmers trying to get from field to field to provide maternity services. What would normally be 2 mile circular trips are turning into 10 mile trips.
While little lambs are cute, I can’t get away from the ‘meat factory’ aspect. I am hatching a cunning plan.

We always had a plan to retire at 50.
No kids, no dependents, good fiscal management, living within our means, frugal outgoings, overpayments into pensions, serious saving, all on track… and then Goldfish Brown changed the rules, meaning that private pensions couldn’t be accessed until 55. Grrrrr.
Then, unexpected company takeovers and restructurings meant that Mr BW was still able to exit the corporate world at 50, with a beyond good redundancy deal, which enabled us to have 5 careful years before pension began.
Mr BW’s last day of corporate world work was 10 years ago today.
Yes, 2 days into the new tax year, on a day chosen by us, to get maximum tax benefit.
5 years down south, during which Mr BW continued to do some self-employed work as a speaker and a teacher of courses on traditional crafts, to enable us to survive. And then 5 years up here, renovating and supervising renovators, with a big side of regular journeys to the south to keep Coven Sud going until it eventually sold, which is, unbelievably, now 6 months ago.
The Conservatory revamp should have been finished last Friday, but of course wasn’t. The plasterer should have been here Friday, then Saturday, then Sunday, then, at 7pm on Saturday night, we got a message to say he wasn’t coming on Sunday – no reasons given. We told the boss that the finishing crew were not to turn up today as planned as there was no point until the plastering of the new internal roof was finished (too much dust and mess that they, not us, should clear up).
So guess who turned up at 8.50 am today? Boss man plus foreman, with the rest of the lads loitering at the bottom of the (400m) drive in another van. We sent them on their way with their tails between their legs, but very apologetic, and acknowledging and understanding their failures, and totally on the back foot and wanting to make things right and meet our requirements.
Nothing is happening this week now as Mr BW is away and I am not prepared to supervise workmen on my own – I am totally exhausted after last week and have had enough of that! Workmen in the North – even the young ones – are beyond sexist and they give me the creeps. Next week, when Mr BW is back, hopefully, it will all be finished off.
In other news… Clem Burke of Blondie fame has died at 70. Saddened, but I was always touched by your presence dear.
That sort of thing – plus the experience of my recent brush with premature impending death – just makes me more and more convinced that we made the right choice in retiring early. Almost everyone we know has chosen to retire before state pension age None of us know what the future holds. Why wait?