Category Archives: Diary

General life events

Where’s the boathouse?

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For various reasons, Diana and I found ourselves wandering around Oxford a couple of weeks ago. We parked at Thornhill Park and Ride on the eastern edge of the city, finding a space even though there had been a sign saying that the car park was full and we should go round the ring road to the northern Park and Ride. We got off the bus in the High and immediately looked for coffee. We bypassed the High Street coffee shops and went to Brown’s in the covered market. I have fond memories of Brown’s, since that is where we used to go for breakfast after Orieladelphian dinners, in the days before we were allowed to stay in college for it. It did an immensely good greasy fry-up, just the thing for a hangover. It also allowed a ten o’clock breakfast, instead of an 8.30 one, just the thing for a hangover. Brown’s is still doing fry-ups, but it was too late for breakfast and too early for lunch, so a cup of filter coffee for a reasonable price was just right.

We went from the market to the Broad, looking for the Oxford Museum of the History of Science, and found it next door to the Sheldonian Theatre and opposite Blackwell’s book shop. It’s not a big museum, but does pack a lot in. There are globes and stellar globes, astrolabes, quadrants and all manner of delicate brass astronomical apparatus from unfeasibly early periods. There are clocks, early experiments on electricity and radio and some slide rules from the 17th and 18th centuries. I had used a slide rule at school and university (in the days before electronic calculators, my dear children) and had always assumed it was a relatively recent invention to avoid the use of log tables. I had always assumed wrong.

We had lunch at the restaurant in the University Church of St Mary the Virgin and then went for a walk through Christchurch Meadow, where we discovered that the price for entry into Christchurch College, through the Meadow Gate, was exorbitant. As a good Oriel man, whose idea of entry into Christchurch was a post-Bump Supper mass rampage in black tie, I was not going to pay. We walked down to the river (Isis in Oxford, Thames everywhere else) and along the river to a footbridge, which led to the college boathouses. This was the first time in several decades that I had been to this part of Oxford. When I was an undergraduate, and even for a year or two afterwards, the boathouses were the destination of a twice a year pilgrimage to watch the inter-collegiate rowing, known as Torpids and Eights. Oriel was a mighty rowing power. We went head of the river at Torpids in 1972 and held that position until I went down and beyond. The boathouses, at those times, thronged with spectators. It could take half an hour to fight your way up the stairs to the bar to buy a pint, and by the time you’d got back down to the riverside, you’d have drunk it and needed to go back for another. (That was the reason that one year I had to walk away with a pint glass; I just couldn’t get back up the stairs to return it.)

The thing was, returning after so long, I couldn’t remember which precisely the Oriel boathouse was. At first, it looked promising; there were college crests on the first half dozen boathouses, so I walked along looking for Oriel’s, but couldn’t see it. We got to the end boathouse and turned back. I was still looking, in case I’d missed it first time, but I hadn’t. Was it really one of the scruffy-looking ones without a crest?

We walked on round the Meadow, alongside the river Cherwell, with a clear view of Diana’s college, St Hilda’s. We emerged onto the High by the Botanical Gardens and stopped off at the Oxford Rendezvous for afternoon tea, tempted by the array of cakes in the window. From there, we crossed the centre of town to the Ashmolean museum and got lost looking for the modern art. And lost again, later, looking for the exit. And then we went home.

Town Square

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I went for a walk in Woking town centre on Monday. I was killing time between dropping Tris off for a hair appointment and collecting her at the end of it. I had one errand – getting a new key cut to replace one I had bent and almost snapped off in its lock – and that only took ten minutes or so. So I strolled out of the Peacocks shopping centre and into Town Square.

This used to be a fairly amorphous shape, not particularly well-defined and definitely not square. Now, well let’s say it’s in transition. Building works have raised the height of the Peacocks entrance and matched it with a new entrance to the old shopping centre. The library entrance is now a cafe and the library has been extended sideways with a new entrance no longer on the square. The space lost to the cafe has been compensated by moving library offices to a new floor and converting old office space to library usage (I nearly said ‘books’, but it could be computers and meeting areas as well – these new-fangled libraries). The Barclays Bank building and Christchurch remain as they were. The workmen were busy with new paving, so the walkways across the Square were narrow and fenced in, but it will look good when it’s done. The higher buildings for the shopping centres will give the Square a more closed-in feel, a more definite shape. But since the facades for the new buildings are curved glass, it’ll be even less a ‘Square’, and more of a circle. But I guess if you told your young children you were going to ‘Town Circus’ they’d be disappointed.

Going past the library, you get to the Theatre and the Council Offices, and past them is a new pedestrian and cycle crossing over Victoria Way, to link the canal towpath cycle route with the town centre. There has been a pedestrian crossing there for ages, which all the cyclists used anyway, but the concept was to have a distinct cycle crossing. Work began, kerbs were excavated and lowered, work stopped. Some problem with the traffic lights, apparently. Thus it remained for many months, many many months. Until now! The crossing is complete, the tarmac looks shiny, and when the green crossing light comes on, there are two – one green man and one green bicycle, right next to each other. So that’s how you know it’s a cycle crossing as well.

Except, except… after waiting for so long, the crossing was completed just as the canal bridge was taken down and the towpath closed, due to the building works for the new WWF headquarters on Brewery Road. So now the crossing goes only to the Lightbox gallery, a worthy destination, but an anti-climax. I used the crossing anyway, and found the Lightbox closed too (as it is on Mondays, I realised), but it was worth it to halt all the traffic…

A Night Out

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Diana and I went to the cinema last Wednesday evening, showing extreme daring by choosing the evening performance, rather than our usual late afternoon one. In contrast to other recent films we saw (‘The Artist’, ‘The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’), the seats were almost all full, there were barely any people with grey hair (I counted two – Diana and myself) and there were more ads for acne treatments than preceded ‘Marigold’ (which I recommend, might I say). We were surrounded by teenage girls and the only other proper grown-ups had the excuse of being accompanied by their children.

What was the reason for all this? Why were we there, so obviously out of the intended demographic for the film?

The film we went to see was The Hunger Games, based on the first novel of the trilogy by Suzanne Collins, a book immensely popular with the younger people, which we both had read. What was perhaps a surprise is how much I enjoyed the film. The book is told relentlessly from the point of view, and in the voice, of the teenage protagonist. There is only so much first person present tense narrative I can take from a teenage girl – no, let me rephrase that. There is only so much first person present tense narrative I can take from anyone – but there was a verve to the story that carried me through the book. And the second. Also the third. Movies almost unavoidably stand you outside the characters, thank goodness, but even so, it would have been easy to make a rubbish film, full of the schmaltz and teenage angst present in good measure in the book.

The director avoided that and the story rattled along, a mixture of reality TV and gladiators (the Roman arena guys, that is, not the Nineties TV show): glitzy costumes and make-up and open wounds and gory deaths. What more can you ask? Worth seeing, I’d say.

Whither the weather?

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At the end of November last year, I fitted winter tyres on my car. I say “I fitted”. Actually, I took it to a local place, Bridge Tyre House, (local in Wadebridge, that is) and they swapped the wheels over, in exchange for a donation to charity. Come the end of March, after one of the mildest of winters, when the winter tyres came in handy precisely twice, I was in Wadebridge again, with the thermometer in the car reading 25C, and so took my summer wheels down to Bridge Tyre House and had them put back on the car.

Naturally, with my winter tyres in Wadebridge and me and my car in Woking, snow is currently featuring in the weather forecasts and we had some hail just now.

Sorry about that.

Snowdrops and Daffodil

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In Woking, the snowdrops around our apple trees have been out for some time.

Snowdrops

Snowdrops in Woking

In Wadebridge, there are snowdrops out, but also a daffodil.

Daffodil in Wadebridge

Only green shoots visible on the daffodils in Woking so far. Wadebridge thinks it’s Spring.

Ladders

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The solar panel people have been and there are now 20 solar PV panels neatly installed on our east-facing roof, with cables running down the side of the house and into the inverter hanging on the wall of our utility area.

Nothing is quite straightforward at Treforest. To get the inverter in the right position, I had to take down a little shelving unit that has been there for decades. It wasn’t very decorative – bare wood, with no paint, varnish or polish – so I wasn’t that sad to see it go. The interesting bit was how it had been fixed: the shelves were nailed to four wooden supports which in turn had been nailed on to the walls using 2-inch masonry nails. Whoever did that meant those shelves staying up. Whoever did that gave no thought whatsoever to how some poor sap might take them down.

A bit of brute force with a hammer lifted the shelves off the supports and a bit more work with the hammer and some pincers removed the nails from the shelves so you could handle them without piercing yourself.

Then came the supports. I tried hammering in a wedge and levering the supports away, but they wouldn’t budge. I did more damage to the wall than the support, I think. Next I chiselled into the supports, splitting them by the nails. The resulting fragments of wood were easy to remove. This left eight nails protruding from the wall by less than a centimetre, which meant 80% of each nail was still embedded in the masonry. My pincers were too small and weedy to get and maintain a grip. My hammer was not a claw hammer – good for hitting nails in, but not for pulling nails out. By now, the hardware shop in town was closed, so I decided to leave it until morning, when the electrician would be coming. He would be bound to have a claw hammer.

In fact he did, but it still took a mighty effort to heave out those nails, which brought off the surrounding plaster, leaving me with eight holes to fill, smooth and decorate. In fact, more than eight, because there were several holes revealed under the supports, where (I imagine) earlier attempts at nailing had failed. Take my advice: think about future generations, use screws. (My great-uncle Bill, a joiner in the family building firm, always used to hammer screws in, just giving them a turn at the end. “The slot’s for taking them out,” he said.)

The panel fitter (a former roofer) told me that some of my roof tiles were looking a bit dodgy round the roof lights. Since the roof lights had only gone in last November, this sounded alarming. “Let’s take a look,” he suggested. So we climbed up the ladder lashed to the scaffolding – a long ladder which even so only just reached the level of the planks, and a wobbly ladder because it was so long – and went to investigate.

Was this sensible, I hear you ask, to climb up a high, wobbly ladder? At my age? After all, the scaffolding planks must have been at seven metres, two and a half storeys, since the land slopes down outside the house.

The last time I went up high on ladders was shortly after I joined Shell. I was doing an audit of a plant shutdown at the Stanlow refinery. The manager handed me over to a plant supervisor to show me round. I was kitted out with boots, overall, gloves and helmet. The boots didn’t fit properly and rubbed, but they did have steel toecaps. The helmet was cool. I used to keep it visible on the parcel shelf in my car when driving round the refinery and it gave me much easier access through the various security gates. I have a photo of Eleanor aged about three wearing it, looking very cute. Anyway, the first thing the supervisor did was start climbing a sixty foot reactor column. I decided that this was some form of test  of the besuited office auditor chappie and went after him. We got to the top – great view over the Mersey – and came down again. Then he climbed another reactor column, and so did I. After that, things were OK. One thing, though: the ladders didn’t wobble.

Back to the solar panels. I climbed carefully and the ladder didn’t wobble much. We looked at the tiles, and he wasn’t talking about the tiles round the roof lights at all, but the ones along the valley, which have been in place for quite a few years, since the roof last leaked there, and where it hasn’t leaked in the intervening time. Also, the tiles weren’t that bad to my eye, just not up to his perfectionist standards. I don’t complain; he had replaced three or four broken tiles in areas of the roof not immediately connected with fitting the panels.

It’s a good view from up there, and it was good to see the panels up close, an opportunity that won’t come again.

The panel fitters went, leaving the electrician to finish his job. It’s always the electrician at the end.

The next morning, I got up and almost the first thing I did was check the display on the inverter. The panels were producing about 300 Watts, somewhat below the rated 3.9 kW. But it was early, the sun was low on the horizon and there was a layer of frost over the panels. Ninety minutes later it was up to 1.3 kW and rising. I am having to make determined efforts not to keep checking the thing – it’s addictive.

1.4kW…

Where’s my bonus?

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After all, I’ve been acting like a banker for the last few days – juggling funds between accounts, based on Excel cash forecasts, to keep earning interest until the last moment whilst putting just enough in the current account to pay the outgoings.

The builders finished the snagging list on our loft conversion on Tuesday and thus technically finished the conversion works. The architect issued the completion statement and the penultimate invoice, and so we have to pay them a chunk of cash. The good news is that the costs will be less than their initial quotation. ‘How can this be?’ you ask. ‘Do not builders always overrun on time and budget?’ In this case, they did not. They finished on time, apart from the snagging list, and they finished under budget because they did not need to use all the 10% contingency included in their original quote. Very professional. I mentioned in a previous blog that we were pleased with what they had done. We still are. Well done, G A Wildish of Bodmin!

The other thing I have to pay, which has been on the radar for ages, is the tax on my redundancy payment. The timing could hardly have been better. I left Shell on 31st March 2010. My redundancy payment came through in April 2010, i.e. in the 2010/11 tax year, the tax for which does not have to be paid until 31st January 2012. So we have had the tax earning interest (taxable) for 21 months until now, when the day of reckoning looms. Our healthy looking savings account suddenly doesn’t look so healthy any more.

That was OK, though, all planned for. The next thing is solar panels. After a competitive tender, the guy from WREN lost out to another company, Cornwall Solar, who can fit the panels next week. So I will be staying in Cornwall for a couple of extra days to enable that, though Diana will have to return home as planned because of meetings. But also, I had to move more funds around to pay them, sooner than I had expected. The savings account is now looking very weedy indeed.

After that comes carpets. We’ve had the new loft room, stairs and landing measured and chosen the carpet we want, from the hard wearing artificial fibre range (cheaper than wool), and they will be fitting it towards the end of February. More cost, more spending. I suspect the mighty credit card will be brought into action.

But, with amazing prescience, two fixed term cash ISAs mature this month and next, providing much needed liquidity at just the right time. What foresight! What expertise! What impeccable planning! What undeniable luck!

Just like a real banker…

Four Hours

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Been a busy week. Last Sunday, Jerry from Wadebridge Renewable Energy Network (WREN) came to our Cornish house to size up the roof for solar panels. Although the feed in tariff has been reduced, subject to challenge in the courts, the prices that suppliers are charging have also reduced, because they and the solar panel manufacturers want to keep business going. The effect has been that a 1.5kW installation would have cost £7500 before, but a 3 kW installation is now £8500, so the economics are almost back where they were for customers.

On Monday the architect came to check the snagging list – all the little things the builders hadn’t done first time and had to put right. There were still a few things not done, and a couple of extra ones not spotted first time round. On Tuesday morning, Mat from another solar panel supplier came to size up the roof. While doing that, we went into the loft space  – the part not converted into a room – and saw that the specified new insulation had not been put in – another item for the snagging list. On Tuesday afternoon we drove back to Woking.

On Wednesday I wrote a story for Woking Writers Circle. On Thursday I took apart Eleanor’s desk to ready it for transporting to Oxford, and went to the writers circle meeting. On Friday I packed the car with Eleanor’s desk and other furniture and belongings. On Saturday we drove to Oxford and delivered all the furniture and belongings, Diana dropped in on Tris in Wadham College, we went to Eleanor’s old flat, picked up bags of recycling and deposited them at the recycling centre, had lunch, saw round Eleanor and Joe’s new house with curtains and furniture all in, then drove to Cornwall again, arriving in time to get fish and chips for supper.

It took us about four hours to get to Wadebridge from Oxford. It always takes four hours and it doesn’t seem to matter where we start. From Woking to Wadebridge is four hours. From Bromyard to Wadebridge is four hours. I reckon it would be four hours from Edinburgh! (At least, once the direct flight from there to Newquay starts in March.)

New Year’s Day

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That was a December!

A few days after the SOGs lunch (see last posting) I drove to Herefordshire to see my mother and family at The Green and deliver Christmas presents, leaving Diana and Tris at home (Diana had Council meetings). After a few miles I realised I was wearing the wrong shoes – trainers rather than black leather. This was a problem not so much for the shoes themselves as for the orthotic insoles in them, which go in my other shoes as well (except trainers). So I did a turnabout, waiting for the next convenient roundabout rather than instantly blocking the A322 with an attempted U-ie, and greatly surprised Diana when I came back in through the door. As I put on the right shoes, she told me that my mother had phoned and the lane outside her house and the drive to the house were blocked by a tree that had just fallen down in high winds. It almost made the wasted half hour not a waste.

So, I approached The Green from the other end of the lane and parked in the farmyard. Mum was out so I collected the key from my sister-in-law Ann next door and unloaded the car. Ann said that the local council had in fact cleared the tree so the lane was now open. Remarkable alacrity from the council. I stayed a few days, put up the heavy curtains over the front door (effective draft proofing), helped with shopping and left the presents and a Christmas cake. Nice to see the family.

Then I headed to Cornwall for a site meeting at Treforest. Since the beginning of October, the upstairs at Treforest has been pulled apart and reconfigured to put in a loft room and proper stairs. The work was approaching its end and I wanted to be there when the decorators started work, to answer any questions and avoid things like the yellow paint of the hall being used in the bedroom.

It rained pretty much the whole time I was there. It was raining on Sunday afternoon as I arrived and called into Tesco to stock with milk and food and stuff. It slackened off a little on Monday morning when I walked around town and bought some Christmas presents and failed to buy others. It rained the rest of Monday, such that I didn’t even fancy going out for fish and chips. It rained on Tuesday and eased by the evening when I did go out for fish and chips. It rained on Wednesday morning and I packed the car between showers. It rained most of the way home.

The next day was the Woking Writers Circle Christmas Dinner. We have not gone for real Christmassy dinners the last few years (2009 and 2010 were Chinese) and 2011 was no exception. We went to the Greek Olive, a Green restaurant – pardon me, the Green Olive, a Greek restaurant in Chobham and had a pleasant mezze with lots of different tastes and some nice wine. Dermot had created a multiple choice quiz, which caused some controversy. One question asked which two animals were crossed to make a quagga, and I picked the right answer, according to Dermot. However, there was a vociferous school of thought which claimed the quagga as a species in its own right. Technically they were correct, but since the ‘umpire is always right’, I scored the point and won the quiz. No prizes, just smug satisfaction.

At the weekend Diana and I both went to Cornwall again, for the final week of works. The new doors were all fitted, though not all of them had handles yet – we had to be careful not to trap ourselves in the sitting room – some lengths of skirting board were missing (still being made to match by the carpenter) and decorating not yet finished, but generally it looked about done. We showed our neighbours, who have the almost mirror image house next door, what we had been up to.

On Tuesday we went to see Sherlock Holmes 2 at the Regal, Wadebridge’s two-screen cinema. Lots of action and disguises, but not much plot, and what plot there was pulled out of a hat.

On Wednesday we went round the house looking at everything with a critical eye, this time spotting all the little blemishes and writing them down, in preparation for the final site meeting on Thursday when we went round again with the architect and building manager. This resulted in the official ‘snagging list’ which the builders and their sub-contractors have to fix before the job is complete. We’ll be down again in January to see how it’s turned out and start planning the next step – carpets.

On Friday we packed ourselves up (except for my phone charger, as it happened), called in at Tesco to buy sandwiches for the journey (preferable to Little Chefs and motorway services, we’ve decided) and a turkey, and went home. On Saturday it was the final pre-Christmas shop in Waitrose (not too harrowing), putting up the tree (a synthetic one with fibre optic branches and glowing branch tips – dead easy!), final present wrapping and the discovery of the missing phone charger. Fortunately, I can borrow Diana’s cable, when she doesn’t need it.

Christmas was the three of us. So was Boxing Day. Grateful not to be driving anywhere.

On 27th, Ellie and Joe came for a few days, brought by Joe’s parents Chez and Richard, who stayed for a very pleasant lunch. After they had left, Ellie launched into bedroom clearance. She and Joe now own a house in Oxford, with space for books and stuff – and believe me she has plenty of both in her old bedroom. Or rather, she had plenty. Most of it is now in Oxford, quite a bit in our waste and recycling bins and some at the hospice shop. We drove them up on Thursday with the back loaded high enough to obscure but not obliterate the rear view. There will be another trip, though, with the back seats folded flat to give enough space for the (disassembled) desk, telescope and other large objects.

Last night was New Year’s Eve. Tris went out with friends. Diana and I stayed in, trying not to estimate the carbon footprint of the fireworks display around Westminster and the London Eye.

Happy 2012!