Author Archives: Kevin Smith

Royal Cornwall

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The Royal Cornwall Show happens at the Royal Cornwall Showground on the edge of Wadebridge for three days at the beginning of June each year, and the royal attending this year was Princess Anne, who came on Thursday (6th). Being of the non-monarchist tendency, and having studied the weather forecasts, we decided to go on Friday. Judging by the traffic, we chose the least crowded day as well.

We can see the main road from our back windows and on Thursday morning the traffic was stationary at times and on Saturday it was moving slowly all morning, whereas on Friday it kept moving. Of course, the traffic on Saturday could have been worsened by misguided tourists not realising that the Royal Cornwall Show makes the A39 a road to avoid.

We walked up the hill to the showground at about ten o’clock, paid our £16.50 (each) admission fees at the east entrance and strolled into the throng. There were indeed lots of people there (over 118,000 for the three days, I later found out), but there were also lots of food kiosks, stands, stalls, tents, loos, displays, ice cream vans, arenas and entertainments to accommodate them all.

We walked round the flower show tent with professional displays and stalls, and flower arranging and schools competitions. We went through the Wadebridge Chamber of Commerce area (all stalls taken by local tradesmen, including our kitchen installer). We stopped off at the stand selling efficient electric heaters, for whom we were the ideal customers, having an old house and no wish to knock it about to run central heating pipes through. The heaters could even be controlled by an iPhone app. Terrific idea, but the heaters themselves were boxy and ugly, so we’ll try to find someone who has pretty ones.

We marvelled at the combine harvester titled at an angle, or perhaps that was just me. I was sure it was propped up on blocks to look more dramatic, but no – it had hydraulics to tilt itself, presumably to go over sloping ground more safely and efficiently. There was machinery I didn’t recognise (despite coming from a farming family) and tractors much larger than I used to drive. We passed the hospitality tent for farmers only and the Cornwall Young Farmers tent. There was a tent from Newquay Zoo. Our daughter Tris had asked whether there would be elephants and giraffes among the animals at the show, so this was the place to look. They had millipedes and tortoises and then: –

photoRight at the end was a lake. Well, they call it a lake. My mum has a bigger lake than that.

We came back via the animals. A large tent held sheep, which we didn’t look at, but we did go through the smaller tent with fleeces, shorn in competition the day before, and had a look at what makes a winner – not that I was much the wiser. A wire fence enclosed pig pens filled with pigs: old spot, landrace, large white, tamworth, saddleback – serious pigs for serious pork and bacon production.

We stopped off for lunch, a bacon roll and a roast pork baguette, with never a thought that we had looked upon our food’s cousins a few minutes earlier. (I was going so say ‘on the hoof’, but pigs have trotters and anyway they were lying down out of the sun.) I had a pint of cider – solely to make up for the lack of apple sauce with the roast pork, you understand – and we sat on the grass to eat. We had just about finished when a tanker lorry drew up opposite. There was nothing on the tanker to say what it was, just the company name and the slogan ‘50 years Service and Partnership’. When the driver connected a wide pipe to the loo block, I discerned the words ‘waste management’ (small, like that), which is a polite way of saying ‘pumping poo’. We finished our drinks and left.

We wandered by various motor car stands, looking closely at the Jaguars and BMWs we had no intention of buying. (Diana on the £80k Jaguar F-type, 0-60 in 4.5 seconds: “Where would we fit the surf boards?” Good question.) Diana found a robot lawn mower demonstrating its abilities by trundling around an area of grass the size of a snooker table. Tempting, but we have three small lawns with steps between, so a trundling robot isn’t much use. A robot vacuum cleaner for indoors, though? Very tempting.

We walked through the Radio Cornwall tent and the Cornish crafts tent and by this time we were back near the east entrance, so we headed for home and a cup of tea.

Yoga Lessons

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Diana went down to yoga last Friday, 10th May, only to find no one there, not even the teacher. She left a slightly aggrieved voicemail on the teacher’s phone asking why and got a text back explaining that it was the new moon. There are no lessons on the days of the new moon and full moon.

This, said Diana, explains a number of things. It explains why the dates of new and full moon are printed on the back of the yoga calendar. It explains the vaguely new age chanting with which each lesson begins, which Diana avoids in the same way as hymns at church weddings and funerals and for much the same reasons (allowing for the fact that reason does not have a lot to do with new age chanting or church services.)

Strangely, it leaves unexplained why new and full moons prevent lessons. The explanation is therefore left, as the saying goes, as an exercise for the reader. Clearly there is one outstanding answer. The ‘new moon’ part is a diversion to draw attention away from the ‘full moon’. And what has problems with full moons, as any fule, or viewer of Being Human, kno?

The yoga teacher is a werewolf.

Settling In

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The day after the Woking Writers party Diana and I headed down to Cornwall. We decided that this was the time to take the second car down (as well as the first). Since one car is a large old Mercedes and the other a tiny Toyota Aygo which have very different driving characteristics, especially going uphill, we didn’t drive in convoy. Instead, we arranged to rendezvous at Cartgate picnic area, which is pretty much halfway. Diana set off first in the Aygo. She stopped for petrol, I bought buns to eat at Cartgate. I caught her up at the M3 and went sailing by.

Just short of Stonehenge, I pulled into a layby for a rest. My shoulder and neck start to ache if I drive too long. Six minutes later, Diana went past (yes, I was timing it). I passed her back on a stretch of dual carriageway. At Cartgate I stopped and got out of the car for a stretch and walk around while waiting.

After ten minutes I started to think Diana should have arrived. After fifteen I was thinking she should definitely have arrived and started thinking about invoking the emergency phone call procedure. We had agreed that, since you can’t answer a phone while driving, we should call the other three times, so that they could stop and call back. But then Diana called me. “I think I’ve overshot,” she said. “So do I,” I said. “I’m in the Blackdown Hills,” she said. “You’ve overshot,” I said.

We decided that I should eat my bun and have a cup of coffee from the picnic case, while she stopped at the Little Chef near Honiton for something similar. I drank my coffee in a leisurely way and set off. I thought I might call in at the Little Chef to see if she was still there and as I pulled in I saw through the shrubs a little red car moving off. It was Diana, so I drove through the car park and followed her out onto the road, overtaking on the dual carriageway.

West of Exeter I stopped again (shoulder) and Diana went by again. I overtook, again, and after three hours and fifty minutes of driving time (nearer five hours elapsed) reached Wadebridge. I just had time to drive into the garage door before Diana arrived.

Monday we spent doing very little and on Tuesday we went to the doctor for our initial appointments. This was where, as new patients, we had to explain our current ailments and set up repeat prescriptions. This took some time. With age come ailments. By the time I’d finished explaining what there was, the doctor said I should book another appointment – “In fact, make it a double” – in two weeks to go through a couple of things in full detail.

(Even as I write this first draft, the “with age come ailments” principle is playing itself out in the Mercedes, which has just failed its MOT on the grounds of corroded rear brake pipes, and has a couple of advisory actions on items which are wearing out, but not yet significantly. Maybe it’s time to replace it, an option available on a car but not necessarily on a person.)

Diana started cutting plants back in the herb bed and accumulated a sackful of dead twigs, so we investigated Cornwall Council’s garden waste scheme and ordered a brown bin and a permit up to September. She also went down to yoga class in the town hall.

On Thursday we went to Polzeath. There was little cloud and though the breeze was cool, it was the sunniest day on the beach we had had for a year or two. We strolled across the beach and into the Waterfront bar for lunch. The Waterfront is not quite on the waterfront, except on the very highest tides when the sea floods the road, but it is up stairs so you get a good view across the beach to the sea and cliffs. After lunch we followed the tide out. The water running down the sand from the streams was surprisingly warm, which we surmised came from being shallow and spread out under the sun. Most of the pools left behind by the tide had also warmed, but the sea itself – no. Ten Celsius according to weather websites, which I can quite believe. There weren’t many people in the water; the waves were too low for decent surfing. But three had taken long-handle paddles and were standing on their boards paddling away, and occasionally catching a wave for a few feet.

As we approached the steps up to the cliff, a Kelly’s ice cream van came across from the car park to the foot of the steps to get the custom of the people who had based themselves there. He succeeded, and I came away with my first ’99’ of the year.

On Sunday morning Wadebridge Bowling Club was holding an open morning. I had been talking about joining a bowls club for a while, so this was my opportunity. (Bowls is genetic. My grandma and grandpa Smith played, my father played, my brother plays – all at county level – and my nephew is an under-25 international.) Wadebridge Bowling Club has an interesting website, which I suspect has been developed by its younger members and hasn’t been looked at by its traditionalists. Any club claiming to have been founded a few years prior to the Black Death is worth a try, I thought. (Check it out here.)

Diana came with me, to watch, and we parked in the free-on-Sundays little car park next to the bowling green. Several people were already there. Bowls club members could be identified by white jackets and grey trousers, the rest of by varieties of clothing and colour. A member came up and found me a rink to join and a set of woods. We bowled a few ends, learning a few basic rules and getting an approximate feel for how hard and how wide you have to deliver the woods. One lady was having trouble sending the woods far enough and in trying to put in more effort, kept delivering them off to the left. The other lady proved extremely accurate, hitting the jack several times, but usually with too much weight. I tended to over-adjust between too long and too short. But we all “won” some ends and then the coach called time. I decided to sign up, filled in the form and paid my £10 affiliation fee. The club gives free membership for the first year, apart from this fee, so that new members can use the cash to buy the necessary kit.

I sent off for mid-grey trousers the next day, from an internet bowls supplier. They arrived a couple of days later – not stylish (I haven’t owned a pair of trousers that colour since school uniform), but they fit, with a bit of room for expansion (which I intend not to need), and are teflon-coated to make them water and stain resistant. If you think of them as sports kit rather than clothing there’s no problem. My first club night was Friday, but rain prevented play.

On Monday bank holiday, in a complete change from bowls, Diana and I put on wetsuits and headed for Polzeath with our body boards, which we discovered fit nicely in the little car. The sun was out and the walk across the beach was great. The main risk was overheating. My feet realised first that we had reached the sea. Cold. Coldcoldcold. I waded out, nervously anticipating the first wave to hit the crotch. Having got that over with, it was down to catching waves. As usual, Diana was judging it well and caught a few good ones right into the shallows where the board grounds. I managed a few shorter rides, but never that exhilarating rush all the way. We didn’t stay in long. It was more the principle of the thing. Still in wetsuits, we drank coffee on the rocks (sitting on the rocks, that is, not with ice) while the tide reached its highest point and turned just below us.

On Tuesday I took the car for its MOT, which it failed (see above) but it was then repaired and passed. In the afternoon we went to Trelawney’s Garden Centre and found that they don’t have lawnmowers, but do have a loyalty card. Then we stopped off at the local library to join it.

On Wednesday it rained and we stayed in and read the books from the library. At various times I wrote and re-drafted this blog, which is getting entirely too recursive…

So Long, It’s Been Good To Know You.

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Saturday 27th April was a significant day for Diana and me. It was the occasion of a party given by the Woking Writers Circle, and hosted by Amanda, to mark our moving to Cornwall and thus ceasing to be active members after seven years for Diana and five for me, the last two and a bit as Chair. It was a fun evening with Peter and Rosie, Dermot, Greg, Keith, Simon, Dave and our hosts Amanda and Rick, and we were very moved by the poems written for us. Thanks to all, and also to Liz, not able to be there, but sending her own card and poetical best wishes.

For a fuller write-up, see the Woking Writers website here and for photos here.

We thoroughly enjoyed being members, not only for the help it gave our writing, nor just for the help we were able to give others, not even for the way every meeting ended in the pub, but for the people who became friends. We shall miss it and them all. We don’t intend to lose touch, though imaginative ideas about skyping in to meetings every third Thursday will probably come to nought.

We haven’t discovered an equivalent group in Wadebridge or the locality yet, but we’ll look some more, and if we don’t succeed maybe we’ll have to found one ourselves, based on the WWC model.

Music, feasting and revelry

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Tris had been quite keen to come to this year’s Orieladelphians Friends and Family dinner, but decided (sensibly) that with Important Exams imminent (like, starting the following Wednesday) she didn’t want to interrupt her routine with late night carousing in the Oriel SCR. So, like last year, the Smith contingent comprised me, Diana and Eleanor… Williams.

Diana was already in Oxford so I drove up by myself. The M25, according to the Traffic England website, was congested and had had traffic crawling along for practically the whole day, so I decided to go the alternative route via M4 and A34. This worked well until I reach the Oxford ring road. In fact it worked well round the ring road, until a couple of miles from Headington, when I ran into traffic whilst trying to get to the Thornhill park and ride. But I was in plenty of time and caught the bus, riding up top right at the front so as to peer down into people’s gardens on the way into town.

In Oriel Street, I ran into Patricia, Gaye and Malcolm, who were on their way to tea somewhere. I checked in at the Lodge, found our room (O’Brien Quad, 2 flights of stairs) and arranged to meet Diana at the end of Catte Street by the High. While waiting there, I saw Ashley and Rosie walk by on the other side of the High, but my call went unheard. Diana arrived and we met Ranulph and Thomas, who had been looking at clocks and were by now hurrying to avoid their teas/coffees getting cold.

We changed into party frocks and DJs (who wore what is left as an exercise for the reader) and ambled through to Third Quad and the Music Room for champagne and entertainment. People assembled quite rapidly, a smaller group this year than last, with the sadly unavoidable absence of Edward (see posting of 1st April) and the arbitrary absence of a few friends and family. Beverley was displaying a ring covered in about a month’s output from Kimberley. Neil had proposed and they are to be married later this year. Good news – and I was exaggerating about the “month’s output”. (Or I think I was. Actually, I have no idea what a month’s output from Kimberley looks like.)

Thomas (clarinet) and Malcolm (piano) played a duet. Eleanor arrived at the same time as John (Paul’s friend), waiting for the pause in the music to come in. Thomas and Malcolm played some more and Gaye sang. When they finished, Ranulph disappeared to bring in surprise flowers for Gaye and bottles of champagne for Thomas and Malcolm, only for the call for an encore – the hardy perennial ‘Suite from The Victorian Kitchen Garden’ by Paul Reade – to interrupt his plans. They still got their flowers and champagne, but it wasn’t quite such a surprise.

Diana was perturbed to discover from the programme that the first piece was “for Clarinet and Piano (or Harp)” and the fourth by a 19th century harpist written for “harp and piano duets” with a piano/clarinet version as played here. Was Thomas trying to drop a hint that she should bring her harp to the next dinner?

There was time for more champagne afterwards, one bottle of which turned out to have a nasty taste, and then we went across to the SCR for dinner. Ranulph had chosen an interesting and tasty menu: asparagus spears and quail egg, champagne sorbet, sea bass, the essential meat course – fillet of beef – at its centre (does anyone recall that time we had a large piece of fish instead of meat at an Orieladelphians dinner? No, of course not) and finishing with a blueberry compote. We had the by-now-traditional “men move on after every course” and for this purpose, due to the imbalance of men and women and where he happened to have chosen to sit, Thomas was elected honorary woman. Which he seemed to enjoy.

In the small SCR, to which we moved after dinner, there seemed only spirits to drink, which may account for a lot of things…

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Orieladelphians, friends and family in Small SCR (note imperceptible insertion of the author into this picture)

Round midnight, that old jazz classic, Eleanor and Diana took their leave. We escorted Diana back to the O’Brien Quad (the geography of the underpass can be a bit confusing – and, no, it wasn’t the drink: Diana is off booze and has been for a while) and then tried to find an exit from the college for Ellie, but neither of the side gates opened on my key fob (which they had done earlier in the day) and we had to go the long way round via the Lodge. This I blame for Ellie’s missing her bus by seconds and having to get a taxi instead. She texted later to say she was home okay.

I returned to the small SCR and the brandy, until Beverley recommended the bourbon. Conversation was vociferous and vivid – so vivid, in fact, that it obliterated neurons on its way through my brain and I remember nothing of it. Every time, it seems, something gets in the way of my remembering the conversation at Orieladelphian dinners and it is always something different. Inexplicable.

At around three o’clock, things seemed to be winding down and I left for my bed. Imagine my surprise, at breakfast, to discover that things had not, in fact, wound down until much later. There was activity up to at least five thirty, and fallings over, and blood. It seems that I had missed most of the excitement, and trained blog journo that I am, I totally failed to ask any penetrating follow-up questions. This will remain forever an undocumented mystery, though if anyone wants to contribute eye-witness accounts, they are naturally free to add comments to this blog…

The real surprise of course was that, after all this, anyone had made it to breakfast!

Let’s SOGs Again, Like We Did Last Summer

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Tuesday (9th) was another SOGs lunch in Shell Centre. Since Diana was out, I had to catch the bus to the station, rather than blagging a lift. (I never drive to the station on a SOGs day, since this would mean driving back again in the afternoon, which is not really on after a few pints.) Catching a bus means paying a bus fare, which in turn means having the cash.

Strictly, this is not true, as my “future of money” friend, the “cashless guru” Dave Birch, would be quick to point out. Arriva (the bus company) has an iPhone app which enables you to buy your ticket in advance and show it to the driver on your phone screen as you get on. But that requires some set-up – getting PINs and stuff – which didn’t seem feasible in the hour before I wanted to catch the bus.

So that meant really I had to have the cash, which in my case I had not got. We had exhausted our cash reserves buying fish and chips in Wadebridge last Saturday and paying for parking in Oxford last Sunday, whilst unloading Tris at uni, and not got round to replenishing them. I had 13p in my pocket, and I haven’t seen a bus fare that small since I was at school.

So it was round to Waitrose to use the cash machine there, which refused my debit card on the spurious grounds that the chip was damaged. I had to use the household account debit card instead. Then I had to break into one of the tenners because they don’t like large denomination notes on the bus, and also I fancied a bar of chocolate.

I caught the bus and the fare turned out to be £3.80. With a price that high, I needn’t have worried about breaking a tenner. At the station I went to the ticket machines a few yards away from the ticket office, where there was no queue at all. I used to have a debate with myself over whether to get an extra-super-cheapo day return (valid for journeys starting after 11.00 am with the return before 4.00 pm) because I was never sure whether we would finish at the pub in time. South West Trains have very kindly and thoughtfully removed this dilemma for me by making the starting condition “trains arriving after 12.00 noon”. I got a bit worried when someone came and stood behind me, in line for the machine, when there were two other perfectly good and working machines next to me, but this potential ticket-mugger turned out to be a railway employee wanting to extract cash from my machine. There were some train delays which South West Trains automatically apologised for, but at Woking this means that you wait five minutes for the train delayed by 23 minutes, rather than wait five minutes for the train that is on time.

When I arrived at Shell Centre, a few people were already there. I got a text from Alun saying he wouldn’t be coming for lunch after all. Some furniture that he had been waiting for for four weeks had decided to be delivered exactly this lunchtime. And Mike pleaded that work had got in the way again – this work stuff sounds inconvenient, I don’t know why people put up with it. Nigel and Gill also sent last day apologies.

But there was a good crowd: Keith, Keith, David, Geoff, Paul, Malcolm, Gerry, Jeremy and me. One person was missing – Adam. This was a problem, because Adam needed one of us to sign him in as a guest, rather than being an SPA member in his own right, so we couldn’t really go up to lunch before he arrived. Paul reminded me of the train delays, which I realised would have affected Adam as well. He arrived just after 12.00, muttering about 25 minute delays, and up we went to lunch.

After my brilliant success in spending exactly six pounds last time, I tried for it again. My chili con carne was £4.15. I found a fruit juice for 75p, leaving £1.10 for a pudding. Easy, I thought. I found the puddings: £1.16. Poo! I put the fruit juice back and, dispirited, let the 69p go.

Several people that we knew went by and said hello. Dave Durling, clutching a sandwich, stopped as if stunned by the sight of ten old familiar faces, then said he couldn’t stop and chat. He had to run because he had a phone call in six minutes, which is not much time to eat a sandwich, even if he were to start munching in the lift. Work – damned inconvenient, shouldn’t be allowed.

After a leisurely lunch, occupying a full lunch hour, we selected a pub to which to adjourn proceedings, the well-regarded Camel and Artichoke. Three of us arrived, the others vanishing off into the office to look for old colleagues, and one (Geoff) stopping by a bookshop on the corner of Lower Marsh to procure a TARDIS and Dr Who novel, sellotaped together. (A model TARDIS, that is, not a real one.)

We first three selected the largest available space, an area with arm chairs and a low table, to sit with our pints or coffee and waited for the others. A few more arrived and filled the remaining armchairs. When the rest came, they had to sit across the gangway, at a table recently vacated by a family having lunch. They immediately dubbed it ‘High Table’ and looked down upon us.

Keith S’s partner, whose wrist was damaged in a car accident just before the last meeting, is only now beginning to recover. That was some nasty accident. We hope the improvement continues. Paul continues his Citizens Advice Bureau volunteering one day a week. He caught himself thinking about how to do more and move up the ladder and realised that that was how you thought at work, which he wasn’t at any more, and one day a week was right fine, thank you very much.

I was asked if I would still be coming to these lunches in future. I certainly hoped so, I said, although I would have to catch the 06.57 from Bodmin Parkway to Paddington to get there in time. Reflecting on that as a departure time, and allowing for getting to the station, it starts to seem like catching an early flight to the Netherlands did, which is very much too much like work, and more than inconvenient. But I will find a way, with a little help from my friends.

There remained the question of who would take over as organising secretary and with very little prompting Dave was nominated, seconded and put in position, bypassing the need for him to accept. He took the remaining kitty, though.

Edward Green

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I was all set to knock out one of my usual trivial pieces, this time about going on the beach barefoot yesterday (after all, it couldn’t be that cold. Yes, it could) when I got an email from Neil with the sad news that one of our fellow Orieladelphians, Edward, had died suddenly on 22nd March. He’d not long reached 60, which is no age to be dying.

We’re not sure what the cause was – Neil guessed heart attack, which is as good a guess as any at the moment. Immediate reactions from other on-line members included “bloody hell!”, “dreadful shock”, “dismayed”. Diana, when I told her, said she’d miss his conversation at the annual Friends & Family dinner. The next one of those is in less than two weeks, so I imagine it will be a bit subdued – although I’m less sure that Edward would want that.

Edward and I were assigned to share rooms in our first year at Oriel in 1971 and we’ve been friends ever since, despite his becoming a monk of the Order of St. Benedict and my veering away from the C of E to become an atheist.

I shall miss him, too.

Good Friday

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Just been listening to Argus by Wishbone Ash. It began as something to listen to whilst peeling potatoes, the idea of listening to something while peeling potatoes prompted by the sight of Diana’s headphones lying unattended on the window sill and the weight of my iPhone in my pocket. I don’t usually think to listen to something whilst peeling potatoes. It just never occurs to me.

While there is a fair bit of umpty-tumpty-tum in Argus – the rock equivalent of an oompa band, you might say – there are several good tracks. Diana’s favourite is ‘Worrier’ because of the line “I’d have to be a worrier…”, though the album sleeve persists in misprinting it as ‘Warrior’…

Album sleeve, did I say? Yes, I did. How did I come to be listening to an album with a sleeve on headphones whilst peeling potatoes? Do I have a portable turntable that I can just cart into the kitchen and plug in next to the kettle? I do not. I already said (or heavily implied, at any rate) that it was on my iPhone. It’s just that the original is an LP, a disc of vinyl in a cardboard sleeve in my study, but through the magic of a turntable with a USB cable and a piece of free software called Audacity I have converted it into an MP3 file and loaded it into iTunes on my iPhone – for personal use only, I hasten to add. This has the merit (ahem!) of reproducing the crackles and blips familiar from much playing in the old days.

I bought Argus many years ago whilst at university, largely because my friend Allan had it and we used to listen to it at his place, and also because it has a picture of a dark ages soldier with a spear looking into a sky containing a tiny flying saucer. It was the type of thing that was really meaningful back then.

The potatoes, to get back to the subject (I think), were for dinner on Good Friday, after a walk on the beach. We have been in Cornwall this time for about two weeks and this was our first trip to the beach. Partly it has been too wet and cold and partly it is the result of starting to think of ourselves as living here. As visitors, we just had to go to the beach as soon as possible, but as residents we can take it or leave it, like living in London and not bothering to visit the Tower, because it’s always right there.

Tris and I came down about two weeks ago, with a car load of her stuff from uni, and a few things of mine and Diana’s. Diana stayed in Woking so as to attend her final Surrey County Council Meeting on the Tuesday and came down by train straight after that. And in the fortnight before coming down we got the Woking house ready to go on sale.

A professional decorated Ellie’s old room (too complicated for us) and our bedroom (too big), while I painted the walls and woodwork in the kitchen and dining room. Then there was much cleaning and arranging of the decluttered furniture. Finally we got a couple of estate agents to look at it and tell us what price it should be. We chose one and they took the measurements and photographs and before the end of last week it was on the market. Several people came to view it, and one made an offer, which we accepted. Just like that. There’s many a slip ’twixt cup and lip, as the old saying has it, but so far so good.

This not-living-in-Woking concept is getting very concrete.

Another reason for going to the beach was that Tris’ friend Luke is visiting us over Easter, and as a visitor he just had to go to the beach as soon as possible. Luke and Tris can go striding off over the beach and cliffs at a pace that Diana and I no longer manage. There were quite a few surfers in the water, some of them so far out it seemed the waves would never break in time for them to catch, but clearly they were waiting for the one big one. It is still too cold for us to join them.

Argus has segued into Tales from Topographic Oceans (by Yes) on the basis of alphabetical order of artist. Before it in my list is White Light/White Heat by the Velvet Underground, another university days acquisition. To be accurate, it was a gift. It was bought by a friend who had heard it at a party in Cambridge and thought it was terrific. She went out and bought it and played it to us, extolling its virtues, but it seemed I was the only one who liked it. And as time went by (not much time, to be honest), she became less enamoured of it, veering towards dislike, and concluded that it was one of those “you had to be there” things and she wasn’t there any more, so she gave it to me.

A lot of my music stems from university, which coincided with the prog rock era, a music which suited the university ambience of long hair and beards. That doesn’t explain the Altered Images and Siouxsie and the Banshees albums, I confess. And how I came across the Blue Nile I’ll never know. Travel east to Egypt and turn right? Don’t be a smart aleck…

In case you were still wondering, the potatoes have been eaten, except for the ones that weren’t.

Spring Cleaning

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I’ve been spring cleaning my study in the last week or two. I packed up all the books into boxes, blowing the dust off, and took apart all the bookshelves to move them away from the walls. Similarly, I packed up the files and shifted the cupboards. I took the desk apart so it could be moved as well.

This might sound a little drastic just to do a little spring cleaning, even when I tell you that the shelves and cupboards had been in place for over a decade. The next step will sound even more drastic: reassembly in a new room 225 miles away.

I’ll come clean. This wasn’t just about spring cleaning. We are actually starting our move from Surrey to Cornwall. Diana’s study and Tris’ study were also packed up, plus the books, DVDs and shelves from the sitting room, and the dining room furniture. And a few other items. (But not everything.) Removal men put it all into two vans and I headed for Cornwall to get to the house ahead of them.

The idea was for the smaller van to unload in the late afternoon and return home the same day, and for the larger van to unload some things and finish off the following morning. Then they would take a couple of items to Eleanor in Oxford and three beds back to Woking, where Diana awaited them. (I’ll explain that later.) All went according to plan, until the larger van was a street away from the Cornwall house and its rear wheel all but fell off. The guys were kind of glad it hadn’t happened earlier, such as at 60 mph on the A303. Fortunately, the garage up the hill was right dealership for the van (Ford) and a man came down to effect sufficient repairs to enable the van to park outside the house overnight. They finished unloading in the morning, then took the van up the hill for a full repair. This took most of the day, apparently, and so the delivery to Oxford had to be delayed until the following Tuesday, though they did get back to Diana on Friday morning.

The guys unloading had a tough job. My study and Diana’s are at opposite extremes of the house – mine two floors up in the attic conversion and hers through to the back and down a level. The guys had a lot of going up and down stairs. On the few occasions where I could say “that goes in the dining room” or “that’s for the breakfast room”, they seemed very happy.

At the end, my study was full of boxes and pieces of furniture (by which I mean ‘furniture in pieces’), with barely enough space to squeeze between them. It was a matter of putting shelves up, unloading some books onto them and taking the empty boxes out of the room in order to open enough space to put the cupboards up and unload some files into them, and remove some more boxes. Finally I could put the desk together. There was more room to move in Diana’s study, so I was able to put up shelves and cupboards before she joined me, by train, on Saturday. On Sunday I moved one set of shelves to a more satisfactory place.

Then the work began.

I had to amalgamate the shelves and books from my study and the sitting room (since we won’t have many books in the Cornish sitting room) so there was a lot of sorting into order and deciding what went where. Also, taking out duplicates which we hadn’t managed to find in nearly thirty years of marriage. And, to free up space, taking out books I am not too bothered about keeping. This included a string of naval warfare novels set in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, bought when I ran out of new Hornblower stories and didn’t want to go cold turkey. At length I had all the books in various types of order. Then Diana found some more in a box so I had to go through again to find some more ‘disposables’, which of course were not in the same part of the alphabet as the newly discovered ones, so much shuffling of books along and between shelves was necessary.

Then the real work began.

I had several boxes of stuff collected over the years – memorabilia, things related to my career, old diaries and notebooks, photographs. These all had to be looked through to see if I really wanted to keep them. Most of the diaries just had work appointments and I really couldn’t see myself wanting to know which audit client I went to see on which day in 1980, when I worked for Ernst & Whinney. If I ever write an autobiography (highly unlikely), it won’t contain details of audit clients. So out went the diaries. Then there were my notebooks from my last ten years at Shell. (I didn’t have any paper diaries from this period, since we were all electronic by then.) The note books are chronological and contain interview notes, task lists, drafts of documents, rough plans, mind maps, records of meetings and other stuff. They are full of initials and acronyms which I had to struggle to understand, though it was common parlance at the time. It’s amazing what three years (nearly) can do to the memory.

Anyway, I should say, “the notebooks were…” because they too went into the recycling bin.

In this way, I emptied three boxes about the size of a case of wine (actually, they were exactly the size of a case of wine, that having been the contents prior to superfluous notebooks and memorabilia). Still got two left though, sitting on the floor in a corner of the room, sneering at me and saying “What are you going to do about us, then?” If they don’t shut up, it’ll be the garage for them. The old one, with the ivy growing through the roof.

I found other stuff, carefully hoarded, just in case, such as sheets of Letraset, once upon a time used for headings and titles in the camera copy for amateur magazines. I think I am safe in chucking them out. If we reach a state where laptops and the internet and electronic publishing all cease to work, 32 point Cooper Black transferrable lettering will be pretty far down my list of priorities. (The same reasoning might be applied to the vinyl LPs – but it won’t. I’m keeping them.)

Study1

The next thing I need to worry about is the CDs. They aren’t in the right place at the moment, but there is nowhere better to put them, and nothing better to put them in. I need to look out for a CD rack, preferably a cheap one in a second hand shop. I have a strong suspicion, however, that they will just sit where they are, annoying me mildly, for the next several years.

Study2

So now my study is useable, and Diana has sorted hers into shape too. The house is growing into the amalgam of both houses that we had envisaged. The collection of unwanted furniture in the (top) garage grows. Which brings me to the furniture going back east. Eleanor has long had her eye on the sofa bed and we were happy to let her have it, along with the dishwasher that became surplus to requirements when we had a new kitchen fitted in 2011. We’ve been trying for a year to find a way to get them to her that didn’t cost more for transport than buying new ones, and finally succeeded. As for the beds, well the Surrey house has three rooms that need to look like bedrooms again when it comes to selling, and we had excess beds in Cornwall from its holiday letting days. QED (or something like that).

The plan now is to be in Cornwall more than in Surrey, until we sell the Surrey house, at which time we will be in Cornwall very much more than in Surrey.