Pebbles in the Sea

Time

2012-01-30T10:06:00.000Z

It's a funny thing, time. It's possibly the thing shared out between mankind more equitably than any other. We all have exactly the same number of seconds in a minute, minutes in an hour and hours in a day. Doesn't matter how rich or how poor you are, you just can't alter the fact that you have 24 hours in a day and the poorest man in town has just as many as you.

Some of us are slaves to time. I like to think I'm not one of those poor saps, but I'm not entirely sure. I mean, I wear a wristwatch and it's not unknown for me to check the time as I leave the house in the morning to take the dog for a walk. At least I no longer have to feel tied to leaving the house at a set time in order to catch the train so as to be at my desk etc etc. But surely now that I am retired I don't need to get out of bed at the same time every morning? Now I'll admit it - I don't. I do use an alarm clock but it's one of those with a snooze button - and I make shameless use of said button!

(And there's something that strikes me as odd. That snooze button means that the alarm will sound again a little later. But why is the chosen interval nine minutes? It seems such a peculiar length of time. Why not ten minutes?)

I made a little too much use of it yesterday morning. Sunday mornings are special. I can lie in a little but I do like to have eaten breakfast and done the washing up in time to get out on the streets before most people are out and about. There's something special about being the only person on the street while the birds are still enjoying themselves with the fag end of the dawn chorus (it seems to go on for at least two hours) and the street lights are yawning themselves to sleep. "Out before the streets have been aired," as my old granny would have said. It also means that there are no cars being driven around. One downside is that as I come back home, somebody in one of the houses I pass is cooking bacon!

The there is a peculiar knack I have of being able to tell the time within about five minutes either way. It might have been hours since I last looked at a watch or clock, but I seem to be able to say something like, "It's about five and twenty past seven" and find that the time is indeed somewhere between twenty past and half past seven.

(Another little diversion. Did you notice I wrote "five and twenty past seven" just then? "Five and twenty" is an archaic way of saying "twenty-five" - in times past people would have said , for example, "four and thirty" - hence the nursery rhyme about four and twenty blackbirds. Nowadays the only time it is said is when talking of 25 minutes past or to the hour.)

One of my little foibles is that I hate to be late. If I am not five minutes early for an appointment, then I am late. It really doesn't matter what the appointment is or how firmly the time is arranged, I have to be at the appointed place five minutes before the appointed time. For instance, I might arrange with fellow Lions to meet at about ten o'clock to set up, say, the book fair. Now it really doesn't matter if people turn up ten minutes before ten or ten minutes after, as far as I am concerned the time is engraved on tablets of stone and I have to be there at five minutes before the hour arranged.

I am well aware that this is a foible I take to extreme lengths. We are due to go to France and are booked on a particular train through the tunnel. I know full well that if we arrive at the terminal a little late we will be switched to the next available train. I also know that if we are early we might, just might, be offered a slot on an earlier departure. But that is not something I am thinking about when I fix the time we should leave home. I know how long the drive is, and I add half an hour in case of a puncture or heavy traffic. I have never suffered either, but I console myself by saying there's bound to be a first time.

As I was saying earlier, we all of us, rich or poor, have the same amount of time at our disposal. What is important is what we do in that time. And what's important to me right now is that it's time for coffee.

Cheerio for now. I'll be back tomorrow.

Birdsong

2012-01-29T09:41:00.000Z

I don't think I shall ever know how I managed to remember enough of the plots and characters of Macbeth, Emma, Great Expectations, 12th Night and all those other books and plays that I studied in order to pass my English Lit 'O' level and English 'A' level - let alone all the poetry by Milton, Wordsworth, Keats et al. I suppose reading each one several times in quick succession, discussing them in class and writing essays about them dunned them into the soggy mass of my brain in just sufficient detail for me to be able to convince the examiners that I merited a pass mark. Nowadays I read a book, put it down and two weeks or even two days later I have forgotten what it is about. Just occasionally I come across a book that does manage to stay in my memory, even if only vaguely. Birdsong, by Sebastian Faulks, is one such. Although I have read it several times, I would have been hard pressed to describe the plot in anything other than broad brush strokes and could probably recall the names of none of the characters. All the same, I consider it to be one of the best books I have ever read and a copy rests on my bookshelf alongside some of my other "best" books. It was therefore of considerable interest to me to read that the BBC were to show a television adaptation of the book.

This, it transpired, would be in two 90-minute episodes, the first of which was last Sunday. We were unwilling to stay glued to the TV screen until 10.30pm so I recorded the programme. During the week the Old Bat and I were slightly concerned to read that the programme had been the subject of quite a few complaints. A few of these were about the main female actress appearing topless but most were about inaudible speech. We wondered just how much we would enjoy watching the programme, or even if we would manage to sit through it all. We agreed that we had to watch it before the second episode is broadcast this evening in order to decide if that will be worth recording.

So perhaps it was not really necessary for Clémence Poésy to bare as much as she did although to my mind those scenes demonstrated the intensity of the love between Isabelle and Stephen and I make no complaint. (The programme is, after all, screened after the 9.00pm watershed.) Nor have I any complaint about the volume of the diction. When the characters are speaking in whispers it adds to the realism of those scenes - and even I heard and understood 90% of the so-called muttering. No, I have no complaint about gratuitous nudity or inaudible diction. I did think the drama moved rather slowly at times with Stephen and Isabelle seeming to spend an inordinate amount of time gazing across crowded rooms at each other - well, maybe not really crowded rooms, but in places where other people were about. According to one critic, tonight's concluding episode speeds up dramatically. I shall look forward to watching it - and maybe I will take the book to France next week to read yet again.

Daphne and friends

2012-01-28T10:48:00.003Z

On our kitchen table sits a white jug, a small, white jug about three inches high. I think we found it in a junk shop and bought it for small change. It doesn't sit on the table all the time, only when there are a few flowers to go in it. It makes a very good flower vase for small posies. At present it is holding a few shoots I cut from the daphne in the garden. I'm told the scent hits you when you open the kitchen door, but I have to bury my nose in the flowers to appreciate the scent.

If my eyesight were as poor as my sense of smell I would be registered blind. This is not something that bothers me and I'm not looking for sympathy (I don't suppose I would get it anyway) - just stating a fact. Although this is something I have lived with all my life, many people assumed that smoking was the cause. I haven't smoked now for 6.. 7.. nearly 8 months and although there might have been just a small improvement it's certainly not as though I have thrown open the shutters and let the sunlight flood into the room! This olfactory shortcoming has both advantages and disadvantages. For instance, if the dog rolls in something obnoxious while we are out, I don't notice the horrible small in the car or at home. On the other hand, I only know the toast is burning when I see the smoke. My wife learned early in our relationship that her use of perfume had no effect on me.

Despite what I wrote in that last paragraph, there are some times when scents do get through to me. Occasionally, when we are going out for the evening I will catch a whiff of perfume in the car. Some scents are more likely than others to get through the blockage. Lavender is one of the best.

It could have been twenty years ago that I noticed a delightful scent coming from the border in front of the drawing room window at my cousin's farm. A small shrub was the source, a small shrub with rather plain, pink flowers. With four petals laid out like a miniature star, up to about a dozen of these small blooms clustered together in various places around the plant. This was daphne; daphne odora to be exact. We visit the farm each Easter and the shrub blooms in March so we were treated to the scent most years. After several years we decided to plant a daphne in our garden. None of our local garden centres were able to help but I eventually, by sheer chance, located a grower in Scotland and placed an order. The plant he despatched failed to arrive and a second was sent, wherupon two turned up. I asked the grower what he wanted me to do and he told me to plant both, which I did, in large tubs as we understood that these plants are not lovers of chalky soils like ours. That was a good few years ago now and although one of the plants has since died, the other is going strong. I cut a few pieces last weekend when the buds were still quite tight but the warmth of the house has them coming out fast.

After the daphne is over the small, white jug will be washed and put back in the cupboard until the lily of the valley is ready. We have a lot of that in the garden so I always pick a bunch to have in the kitchen even though I don't get the full benefit. The Old Bat likes it, though. Later, in the summer, the jug will be used again - for sweet peas.

And so this olfactorily-challenged, inadequate gardener tries to keep the kitchen smelling sweet through the spring and summer. I don't always succeed, but daphne never lets me down.

It sticks in my craw

2012-01-27T10:23:00.011Z

My waist expanded yesterday evening by an inch and a half. I know just how much because I ended up the evening undoing the top button of my trousers and it was then I observed that the button was that far from the button hole. At the start of the evening the two had been pretty much in alignment. It was going out for a meal that did it. I had for some time been intending to take the Old Bat out for a quiet meal on our own but somehow had never managed to find just the right time to suggest it. I'll skip over the reasons for that and simply say that this week I got it right. Madam chose the local Italian restaurant. We have eaten there before with much pleasure and yesterday was no exception.

The Old Bat elected to have garlic mushrooms from the starter menu accompanied by garlic bread. She opted to go without a "main" course so that she could have dessert. I skipped a starter and ordered tagliatelle amatriciana. When it came to ordering desserts, we decided we would each order a different one and swap over half way through. I ordered tiramisu - which they do particularly well - and the Old Bat plumped for pannacotta. After just one bite she informed me that there was no way I was getting any of it! Naturally, I gave way with good grace.

When the bill came I glanced at it quickly before handing over my credit card. I noticed that a 10% service charge had been added with no "by your leave" and with no real option to delete it. I suppose I could have done if I wanted, but I would have left a tip anyway so I didn't bother. As it happens, the cash tip would probably, certainly have been more. I also saw that the cost of my pasta was shown as two items, the sauce and the pasta. I thought that the price shown for the sauce was the price I had seen on the menu but assumed I was wrong. In any case, the charge for the tagliatelle was, as you can see, only 50p.

On the way out I picked up a copy of the menu which they provide for take-away business. I see from this that the price for amatriciana is £5.95 and there is no mention of an extra charge for the pasta. No don't get me wrong. I would have been quite happy to pay £6.45 for my meal, but it does stick in my craw to find that I am being charged extra for something which is an integral part of the meal , which extra charge is not mentioned anywhere but on the bill when it comes after the meal. That smacks to me of sharp practice.

But it's only 50p.

Now, we don't eat out all that often but we do like this restaurant. The food is good, it is conveniently placed and we can always park pretty much right outside. But as a matter of principal I do not like being taken for a mug. But, as I said, it is only 50p. If a supermarket tried to charge me 50p too much I would certainly argue about it. If it were, say, £1 I would almost certainly argue about it. But do I really want to make a fuss and possibly create a scene by quibbling over 50p when we eat there again? Or do I cross that restaurant off the list on the grounds that I don't like their business practices? This is going to take some thinking about. And all over 50p.

Mungy weather

2012-01-26T10:15:00.003Z

The weather today is distinctly mungy. It has been all week. But then, despite the evidence of snowdrops and crocuses in the garden (and daffodils elsewhere) we are still in January. Just. Although truth to tell, this has been a very mild January. I can count on the fingers of one hand - and that doesn't include the thumb - the number of days when I have looked out of the bedroom window to find that the lawn has turned white. And we have had none of that white stuff which descends like manna from the heavens.

Because of the general munginess of the weather I have been rather more ~~busy~~ distracted indoors than in the garden. What with the minutes of last week's meeting of Brighton Lions Club and the monthly newsletter, preparation of which I left much later than usual, I have found myself sitting at the computer longer than usual. I have also been distracted by finding several strands of relations in my family tree. It made me think when I discovered that one of my great aunts had died in the workhouse. Not that she was really just a great aunt: she was really 3 x great. Even in this backward country we had got rid of the workhouses before any of my 1 x great aunts would have needed them. I wrote "got rid of" but that's not entirely true. The Brighton workhouse still exists. It's a hospital now, and a pretty grim hospital at that.

Despite being so busy I have still found time to check out all the blogs I follow on a daily basis. I do find this taking longer now than it once did as I keep finding new blogs I want to follow! How on earth some people manage to follow what seem like two or three hundred blogs is quite beyond me. But I have been remiss - and I apologise to all involved. I have failed to respond to comments people have left on my blog, which is most rude of me. I am so sorry. I will respond - possible even before I have posted this!

Talking of comments reminds me. Some blogs have comments that are threaded. How come? What is it that I'm missing?

I rarely comment on other blogs. This is partly a time thing - I'm too anxious to get on to read the next blog - and partly a time thing - other people have got there before me and their comments are just what I would have written.

But those responses.

Buck said how lucky I am to live near to London and he would have liked to live there. You're welcome, Buck. I can't understand anybody wanting to live in a city the size of London - or anywhere near as big as that. Brighton, with it's 250,000 inhabitants, is really bigger than I would prefer.

Stephen's comment was that I live in a part of the world rich in culture and heritage. But so do you, Stephen. It's simply a matter of different cultures - and look at the terrific scenery you have!

And thanks to Buck (again!) and SP for your kind comments about my Roman Camp post the other day.

Responding to all those comments about Kodak and photo albums would have been a day's blogging in itself.

Oh, yes. Skip, what is that strange "SF" emblem that has appeared on your blog - in two different forms?

Now I must get on and read all those blogs I follow before I am taken to the butcher's to buy Sunday's joint.

Tantalising glimpses

2012-01-25T09:43:00.000Z

In my last job before retirement I had on occasion to visit other parts of the country. I was working for a newspaper and although I had no editorial input, it was considered that I should go along to the annual conference covered by the paper. This lasted four days (so it was necessary to stay in an hotel for the duration) and was a peripatetic affair. Newcastle, Scarborough, Leeds, Blackpool, Southport, Derby, Bristol, Bolton, Huddersfield, Cardiff . . . I've seen them all. It was following an unfortunate experience with the hotel at Cardiff that the editor and I decided we should change our system. Up till then the editor had selected the hotel, a little more scientifically than sticking a pin in a list, but without any real, personal knowledge. The Cardiff hotel was a definite let-down. After that, I went along to the conference town a few months ahead to check out the hotel we had chosen and to look at others if the first choice was unsatisfactory. Naturally, I made these trips alone.

Have you ever walked the streets of a strange town or city at dusk? Just at that time when it is dark enough for people indoors to switch on the lights but not dark enough to close the curtains? It's funny, I'm not a person to get homesick, but as I walked the streets of those towns to get a breath of air before dinner, I would feel a definite twinge. I missed my own town; I missed my wife even more - and I had only been away for little more than 24 hours! It was something to do with the time of day. I find even now I can get a sense of that feeling when I'm in France, have perhaps just driven to the supermarket and am on my way back. But I digress.

It is at that time - dusk, dark enough for the lights but not for the curtains - that one can get tantalising glimpses into strange houses, strange rooms, strange lives. (Strange as in other rather than as in peculiar.) One sees the wallpaper chosen by other people, the pictures and light fittings, sometimes the furniture. One is allowed a tantalising glimpse into another person's life.

That, for me, is part of the attraction of those blogs to be found under the umbrella of City Daily Photos. People post photos of their home towns, towns and cities I shall never visit as well as some I have been to. Avignon, Sydney, Funchal and scores of others. But what most of those photographer bloggers seem to overlook is that what to them is everyday can be exotic to others. They try to show the (to them) unusual and artistic. OK, there's nothing wrong with that, but what about showing something of everyday life in Bangkok or Melbourne, Dallas or Stockholm? The souk in Marrakesh might not seem interesting to somebody who lives there, but to me?

I joined this happy band of bloggers some time back, albeit with my tongue in my cheek. I rarely post photos of my city (Brighton) because I rarely go into the city proper. I live in the suburbs (ghastly thought but true) and spend more time walking the dog over the South Downs and in the local parks and woods, so that's where most of my pictures are taken. But then, I suppose I'm back where I started, aren't I? I'm allowing other people to have glimpses of my world. Just see my Stanmer photo blog if you are feeling nosey!

The romance of travel

2012-01-24T09:10:00.000Z

I have never subscribed to the theory that it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive. Granted, there have been occasions when I have been disappointed in my destination but they have been very few and far between, both in distance and time. There have, more frequently, been occasions when I have found some part of my destination failed to meet my expectations or anticipations. On the other hand, I have usually approached travel with an open mind, neither expecting anything spectacularly memorable nor being wary that all I would find would be dismal and drear. Perhaps, then, it is just as well that I have never managed to visit some of the places that I have always associated with magic and romance.

There are three places in the east that have names which have always thrilled me with the promise of I don't know what. Arabian nights, perhaps, even though they are not in Arabia? Baghdad was always well up on my list of places to see before I kick the bucket - until I saw it on the television news: now I'm not so sure. Likewise those two cities on the Silk Road, Tashkent and Samarkand. I have always thought they sound dreamy, mystical. Then I learned that Tashkent is one of the foulest industrial cities sprawling across that part of the world. I doubt Samarkand is any different.

The Shenandoah River has always exerted a magnetic pull since my schooldays when we sang the song in music lessons. Like Samarkand, Tashkent and Baghdad, there is something about the name. The words of the song help, of course. Then one year we spent a holiday in the Blue Mountains of Virginia. That magnetic pull exerted itself, naturally, and I saw the object of my dreams, the Shenandoah. For once I was not disappointed: it was everything I had always dreamed it to be.

Another place that didn't disappoint was Carson City. The name has always sounded to me as though the place should be the epitome of the wild west, even though I knew before we went there that there would be no dusty street lined by boardwalks and saloons with gun slingers crouched around every corner. But I still felt a sort of frontier town atmosphere even as I entered a distinctly 20th century casino with its slot machines.

There are still some places that I would love to visit and that I think - at least, I hope - would not disappoint me. The Norwegian fjords, for example. But I suspect that my long distance travelling days are past. There used to be something exciting about travelling by plane, but not now. I'm too old to enjoy long-haul travel crammed into those ridiculously cramped seats in economy and I can't afford anything better. Besides, the sheer tedium of going through all that rigmarole just to board a plane is enough to deter me. Then there are so many hoops one has to jump through if travelling to or through the USA that the mere thought is exhausting.

I have always liked the sea, but frankly I cannot stand the thought of cruising, locked into such a small place with all those other people whom I would probably detest and finding interesting stopovers crammed by the very people I am trying to avoid. I have thought of those merchant ships that carry a few passengers, but that sort of journey sounds boring.

No, future travel for me will be to places I can reach in a couple of days by car. It sounds terribly unadventurous but there are still so many places even here in England that are crying out to be explored: Northumberland and Shropshire for starters. And just across the Channel there is the vastness of France, plus Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria and parts of Germany and Italy. What more could I ask for?

Reflections on the Roman Camp

2012-01-23T09:50:00.000Z

I went for a walk round the Roman Camp over the weekend. The Roman Camp is situated on a high spot of the South Downs at the northern edge of the city of Brighton & Hove - but if you look for it on a map you will be disappointed. It's not on any map. Actually, that last statement is untrue; it is on many maps, but is always described as Hollingbury Hill Fort, not a Roman Camp. Hollingbury Hill Fort might be the official title but generation after generation of Brightonians have called it the Roman Camp. I don't suppose the Romans ever used the spot as a military outpost and there is no sign of a Roman villa. It's too draughty a spot for one thing. If the fort did date from Roman times it would be between 1,600 and 2,000 years old, but when the Romans were busy building their roads across England the Roman Camp was already ancient. It is not a mere sixteen hundred years old but a full three and a half thousand years so when the Romans were teaching the Celtic tribes about central heating and hot baths, this camp had already seen at least fifteen hundred winters.

The Camp is situated in the middle of a golf course and to reach it I prefer to drive towards Old Boat Corner and park at the edge of 39 Acre Field. This is a triangular field, possibly 39 acres in extent, which is owned by the Council and left as open grassland. It is mowed just once a year but dog walkers keep open a path right round the edge and one across the middle. In the summer one can see scabious and knapweed, cow parsley and sow thistle, Harebells, clover, vetches and daisies among other flowers. The song of the skylark can sometimes be heard overhead although they rarely nest in this field as it is too busy with humans and dogs.

I walk across the field and through a scrubby wood the top of the Wild Park before turning right to go uphill, round the back of the 7th (or 8th or whatever) hole of the golf course, and continue uphill to enter the Roman Camp by the eastern gateway. I know this is a gateway as archaeologists have marked the holes where the ancient gateposts stood by sinking iron pipes and filling them with concrete. This weekend I glanced back, as I usually do on entering the camp. I looked east across the modern housing estates of Moulsecoombe and the even newer buildings of the University of Brighton. As usual, I could quite easily see the white of the chalk pits outside Lewes but this time I could also make out the houses in the streets creeping up the slopes of Mount Caburn. Through the gap between Caburn and Castle Hill I could see the hills of the High Weald, perhaps forty miles away. The light was so good and the air so clear that those hills seemed closer than usual. Was it just my imagination that I caught a glimpse of pinpricks of light as the sun reflected on glass somewhere there?

As I walked the rampart round to the south the view opened up and I could see the Isle of Wight over fifty miles to the west. The island seemed to be floating on a bank of low cloud, something I have often read about but don't recall having seen before. That hump is St Catherine's Down and it might have been 59 years to the day since I had first walked over St Catherine's. It was in January 1953 that I was sent to school in Ventnor, a town huddling beneath St Catherine's Down. To the south-east was the grandstand of Brighton racecourse. Had it been a race day I could have watched the horses as they passed the winning post although the distance would have been too great for me to say which was the winner.

The ditch and rampart of the Iron Age (or is it Bronze Age?) fort are still there, even if the ditch has filled up a bit and the rampart shrunk since t was built all those years ago. As I walked the rampart I thought of those men digging that ditch to a depth of, what? Ten feet, perhaps. Not for them the ease of mechanical diggers of JCBs. It was the strength of their arms that used primitive picks and shovels to fling the earth up from the ditch to build the rampart so that attackers would have scale a steep incline twenty feet high, or more than the height of three men. There they would have been faced with an almost impenetrable wall of branches cut from thorn trees. In those days an army would have been only a couple of hundred men and battles would have been fought hand to hand, looking the enemy in the eye.

I did once try to calculate the area covered by the Camp. I came up with the answer of 48 acres but I think I must have made a mistake somewhere in my calculations as I'm sure it is not that big. But it's big enough. The centre should be typical downland but it seems more like moorland. The wild flowers growing here are different from those on 39 Acre Field. There are plenty of violets and wild thyme, orchids and other flowers I am unable to name and which I have seen nowhere else. I do recognise the gorse bushes which cover about a quarter of the Camp. These grow to a height of eight feet or more and, with the labyrinthine pathways threading through them, they make a natural maze.

The three graves in the Camp are never covered by the gorse. Indeed, little grows on them except grass. These are disc barrows, the grave sites of chieftains of the tribe who built the Camp. They are empty now, having been excavated in the middle of the 19th century. The grave goods are, I think, kept in the Brighton Museum.

No matter how still the day might be, there always seems to be a wind up here. The tang of the sea is on the breeze and if you lick your lips you will taste the salt. Herring gulls and black-headed gulls wheel overhead and just occasionally I might spot a green woodpecker as it flies between the stunted, wind-swept hawthorn trees. As I approach the northern side of the camp I can see across the rolling Downs to the Chattri, the site of the funeral pyres for Hindu soldiers who died in Brighton in the first World War, and, further on, there is a glimpse of Jack and Jill, the windmills at the top of Clayton Hill. Closer are the massed ranks of trees in Stanmer Great Wood. How many other people have, over the centuries, seen the same views, I wonder? What were their thoughts as they trod these ancient ramparts? How many were joyful, with something to celebrate? Or sad and mourning? Or, more likely, oblivious to it all?

But we have returned to the eastern gateway. It's time to descent the hill, walk back through the wood and across 39 Acres to the car. Fern has enjoyed the walk and the wind has certainly blown the cobwebs away. I shall enjoy that cup of coffee when I get home.

39 x 39 x 39

2012-01-22T09:02:00.000Z

Picture, if you will, a black, plastic sack. A black, plastic rubbish sack. A black sack full of rubbish with a draw string pulled tight and tied at the neck. OK, now just put that to one side for a moment.

Picture, if you will, a container with a capacity of one cubic metre. Need help? OK, it's a large box. The base is one metre wide and one metre long and the sides are one metre high.

(If you are metrically challenged and prefer imperial measurements, this little bit of doggerel might help:

A metre measures three foot three;
It's longer than a yard, you see.

If it's any help, you could always picture a container one yard by one yard by one yard. That would be a little smaller than a cubic metre but I don't suppose it would matter all that much.)

So, we now have a container with a capacity of one cubic metre (or one cubic yard) and a full, black, plastic rubbish sack. How many of those sacks do you think would fit into the container? No need to pummel and push and squeeze, just place the sacks in. How many? Four, quite easily, possibly five, maybe even six. For the sake of this exercise, let's accept four even though there will be room to spare.

So we have a container of one cubic metre capacity filled with four rubbish sacks. Now picture, if you will, a whole row of those containers, a row of 39 of them, each containing four rubbish sacks. That makes 39 cubic metres of rubbish.

In you mind's eye you now have 39 x 4 rubbish sacks. That's 156 sacks. Now it just so happens that 156 can be divided by 52, the answer being three. So if you filled three sacks of rubbish every week for a complete year, you would end up with 39 cubic metres of rubbish.

Do you know, I can hear the cogs in your mind going round and producing the tought, "What has happened? Has he finally fallen off his trolley?" But bear with me and all will become as dense as the old London pea-soupers.

I have recently received a bill in connection with the house in France. I think it is a bill for rubbish collection. It is printed on pretty pink paper and it tells me to return the slip with my cheque. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be a tear-off slip - but that's just a minor inconvenience. I shall take a copy of the whole invoice and return that with my cheque. I say that I think this is a charge for rubbish collection, but what i can't work out is how it has been calculated. No, that's not quite accurate. I can work out how it is calculated - it says the charge is 39 cubic metres times 63 cents - but what puzzles me is the 39 cubic metres. Are 'they' suggesting that they have collected hree sacks of rubbish from our house every week for the past year? Never! I don't suppose there is a house in the village that ever puts out three sacks of rubbish in any one week let alone every week for a whole year. So it can't be that.

Last year's bill was for 37 cubic metres. In 2010 it was for 36 and in 2009, 30, while way back in 2008 it was 32.

You will appreciate that these bills are not exactly enormous and the Old Bat and I are quite happy that we should pay our way in the village. I'll do the same this year as every other year: just pay up.

Whistling dead bodies stopped by the police

2012-01-21T09:47:00.000Z

Just for once I wrote the blog before the title. Then I found myself stumped, hence the bit above which has no bearing, or maybe a little bit of bearing, on what follows.

I read in the paper of a chap who took his mother on an outing. She died while they were out so he took her back home on the bus. Yes, really! It helped that she was in a wheelchair. For some reason the thought of a guy pushing a wheelchair with a dead body onto a bus just creased me up.

It must be about five or six weeks now. I did mention around then that I had lost my whistle. I had gone to call the dog who had wandered off a bit and when I pursed my lips and blew, all that came out was a feeble "phoo" instead of a "shree". I had thought at one stage that my whistle had come back, but I regret having to report that I still can't emulate the guy who had a hit record of himself whistling. It is really quite embarrassing if I forget my inability and try to whistle while I happen to be with somebody else, dog walking in the park being the social activity that it is. "The Man Who Lost His Whistle": sounds like the title of a novel by Agatha Christie or Alexander McCall Smith, doesn't it?

Anyway, a man was stopped by the police at around 2.00am and was asked where he was going at that time of the night.

The man replied, ‘I'm on my way to a lecture about alcohol abuse and the effects it has on the human body, as well as smoking and staying out late.'

‘Really? Who is giving that lecture at this time of the night?' asked the officer.

‘That would be my wife.'

Kodak moments

2012-01-20T10:03:00.003Z

I first heard the phrase "a Kodak moment" just a few years ago, possibly something to do with me being out of touch with what is happening in the big world beyond the South Downs. But with the news this week that Kodak, or Eastman Kodak or whatever the company is really called, is close to going bust, perhaps that little phrase has but a limited life ahead of it. I suppose what has really put the skids under Kodak is the digital age. Time was when almost every household owned a Kodak Brownie camera and bought rolls of Kodak or Ilford film from the chemist, taking the exposed film back to the chemist to be processed. As a young teenager, ie when I was about thirteen, I owned just such a camera. I seem to recall it taking a size 127 film which allowed me to take ... was it 8 or 12 pictures? Oh, the anticipation while waiting to collect the prints two or three days after taking the exposed film to the chemist - and the excitement with which the cardboard folder was opened! Few, very few, of the resulting photographs were worth preserving but every one would be lovingly kept in a photograph album.

Remember those? They consisted of a number of sheets of thick, black paper which was considered best for displaying the black and white photographs (colour film might have been available but if it was it would have been prohibitively expensive). The photos were held in place by mounts, little triangular paper things which slipped over the corners of the photos and were either self-adhesive or needed licking to make them stick to the page - I don't remember which. Then the photos had to be captioned using special white ink and either a dip pen or, if you couldn't find one of those, a cocktail stick or similar.

The photos themselves were mostly just contact prints, hence the small number on a roll of film. I have a couple on my desk in front of me now and they measure 1 7/8" by 2¾", which is just about OK for a head and shoulders portrait (those on my desk are of my mother and father) but absolutely hopeless for landscape pictures. All the same, I used to take great care in arranging all my pictures - portraits and landscapes - on the pages in artistic fashions.

Now that almost all photography is digital, the majority of pictures are stored on computers or, increasingly it seems, on mobile phones. Albums are almost things of the dim and distant past, remembered only by dinosaurs like me. I know two people who still use them but they use the modern version, the sort which consists of pockets fronted by cellophane into which one slips the pictures. There are always two to a page and the pictures are always displayed in landscape format (one has to turn the album to look at a portrait-format picture). I think that the sheer mass of pictures presented at a view with no space between them distracts from them and I find it difficult to look through such an album. But I wonder if it is still possible to buy the old sort?

Perhaps the ultimate in photograph albums is the printed picture book available over the web from so many places. It might even be possible nowadays to get them from the local supermarket. I did have one made and I found it great fun selecting the pictures to include and arranging them on the pages in various sizes. This is a great reminder of the before, during and after of our holiday home in France.

But on the subject of Kodak moments, I burst out laughing when I saw this:

That is the lock on the shower-room door as it was when we bought our French house. Yes, the lock was on the outside, not the inside. I had visions of the Old Bat locked in. You know the song?

"Oh dear, what can the matter be?
One old lady locked in the lavatory."

I've changed it now.

To kill a duck

2012-01-19T09:10:00.000Z

At our Lions business meeting last night we received a report from David about the children's outing to the pantomime. This actually took place in December but he was absent from last month's meeting. Apparently it all went swimmingly.

We have been organising two outing a year for children. The one in the summer is to a reasonably near zoo and then it's a pantomime at Christmas. The original idea was that these should be for disadvantaged children, children who might otherwise not have an outing. At first, we relied on the social services people to provide a list of names and addresses. Unfortunately, it became apparent that many of these were the people who yelled the loudest and were not necessarily particularly needy or disadvantaged. We gave the matter some thought and decided that school teachers were probably the best people to provide names of needy children. But, of course, they wouldn't. The answer was to provide an outing for a whole class (or year group) thereby covering the disadvantaged even though it meant that some of the beneficiaries were not. But if we chose a school in the poorer part of town, there was a good chance that a large proportion of the children would be the ones we wanted to help.

Unfortunately, I think David has lost sight of the original idea. Certainly few of the children who were taken to the pantomime could be said to come from needy families. (I do have the advantage of inside knowledge as my granddaughter attends this school.) This was demonstrated when the school took up a collection at the Christmas concert and sent the Lions a cheque for over £300! Somehow we really must try to get David back on track.

This will be made even more difficult for me as he has provided a report to be published in Jungle Jottings, the club's newsletter which is edited by me. His report is crying out not just for editing but for rewriting completely. I could try to make a few minor changes - but if I start I will end up doing a full rewrite. It would make JJ look better but might not sit so well with David.

What the heck, publish as written: it will all be forgotten in a month's time anyway - and I should be looking to build up, not destroy.

To finish on a lighter note. Some years ago the summer outing was to a playground-cum-activity centre. One of the boys, only about 4' 6" tall but 10 years old, claimed he had been pushed into the pond by a duck. After consoling him, one of the Lions suggested he should sit in the sun for a while to dry off. No fear, he said. He was "going back to kill that b..... duck!"

Allez les bleus!

2012-01-18T09:21:00.000Z

If there is one thing the French do better than anyone else, it is bureaucracy. You might think you've come across some pretty good examples of the science of bureacracy but, believe me, if not come across it in France, you've yet to meet the world champions. They are masters of the art. I expect to have the pleasure of banging my head against the proverbial when we allerons en france next month. Of course, this will not be my first experience. I wouldn't say I'm an old hand at the game, but there have been a couple of bouts. (I first typed "skirmishes" but thought that would be mixing my metaphores so you've been let off.) The first time was when we exchanged contracts to buy our house (here) and then when we completed (here). The next occasion was not too long after we had bought our dream cottage.

In view of what I had heard about the bureaucratic French, I thought we should check we didn't need a permit of some sort to let the house as a holiday home. I duly presented myself at the village mairie on one of the mornings it was open. This is a building that seems far too large for a commune of just about three hundred souls; it is almost as big as the church and has a tower just as imposing as the church tower. I opened the nail-studded, oak door and crept into the enormous hallway. The last time I had seen an entrance hall this large was in one of the Loire châteaux. There was no sign of anybody, and there was no indication as to which, if any, of the many doors leading off the black and white tiled floor might provide access to a receptionist, or whether I would have to mount the magnificent flight of stairs. There was no ringing of telephones, noise of computer printers or even subdued murmuring to give me a clue. I decided to try the first door on my right and, if necessary, work my way round anti-clockwise. The first door was locked. The next door opened into a committee room where the plastic tables and chairs looked distinctly incongruous against the wood panelling of the walls. All the other doors were locked, until I came to the last. It would have been just the same if I had decided to go in a clockwise direction: the reception would still have been in the last room I tried.

An enquiry counter ran diagonally across the room. Well, it went from corner to corner, though not in a straight line, turning through ninety degrees every three feet or so to perform a zig-zag. On the desk behind the enquiry counter was a large ledger in which a lady was making entries with a ballpoint pen. From the look of the ledger and the lady's clothing, I assumed that she had only recently given up using a quill. Her grey hair was parted in the middle, pulled back hard from her forehead, and wound into two coils which were pinned one above each ear. She wore a grey blouse with a piecrust collar that buttoned tightly at the neck. Even her lips looked grey and, for the first time in my life, I saw somebody actually wearing pince-nez. I had to choke back a laugh as she reminded me of a Beatrix Potter illustration of a mouse. She looked at me timidly as I introduced myself as the new owner of old Madame Erlanger's house.

Suddenly, she became a model of business efficiency as she asked for my passport, which I just happened to have with me, and proceeded to photocopy every page that had anything on it. I decided not to ask why she needed a copy of the Maltese entry and exit stamps from a holiday three years before and just let her get on with it.

"Are you married?" she asked.

Blimey, I thought, she doesn't waste any time, but I replied in the affirmative.

"Is your wife with you?"

I looked around but could see nobody in the room apart from the mouse and me. Perhaps she thought Mrs S was very short and was hidden from her by the counter. "Err, not right at the moment," I replied.

A withering glance from the mouse, as if to say it was just typical of a man to leave his wife behind when it was obvious her presence would be needed and that I shouldn't be allowed out on my own. "She will need to come in with her passport."

I promised her, "Cross my heart and hope to die", that I would ensure Mrs S called at the mairie on the very first occasion she happened to be in the village with her passport at a time when the mairie was open. Then I dropped a bombshell. I explained to the mouse that we intended letting Les Lavandes as a holiday home and asked if we needed a permit for this. A look of utter terror came over her face as she told me that she didn't know and I would have to enquire at Angers, the large city that is the capital of the département. It was the way she said it that convinced me she didn't want me to make any enquiries that might stir up trouble from the big city and that it would be better just to leave them in ignorance while the village slumbered on in peace.

That time we opted for the quiet life.

All history is bunk

2012-01-17T10:38:00.003Z

I'm probably misquoting Henry Ford and I am certainly taking him out of context but there is no way I can agree with his point of view. Although perhaps he is right and I just like some of the bunk! I find life, or the little details of other people's lives, endlessly fascinating. It is, to me, good to read of the life of an English lady in rural France (strictly speaking not yet history, I suppose) or about growing up in San Francisco after the war and comparing that with my own experience of growing up in England after the war. That was a time of shortages, not that we children realised there were shortages: we thought that was just how things always were. Those were the days when we would find a few odd scraps of wood and some rusty nails and build ourselves a cart. If we found we needed another nail we would go to the hardware shop and buy a single nail - and be given a paper bag in which to carry it home!

I read recently that the past informs the present, although that, perhaps, is not really relevant to my next comment. As you might know, one of my distractions is studying my family history. Although it is only during the last 200 years that it has been possible to learn much about the occupations etc of one's ancestors, even in that time one can see the truth of that old saying, like father, like son. There are some things that travel through the generations (and I don't mean like red hair). I'm talking about character traits. My wife's 2 x great grandfather was a pharmacist. His son was a keen photographer, this being in the days when being a photographer meant dealing with chemicals. I don't know about my wife's grandfather, but her father also dabbled in photography, developing and printing his own films. Am I being perhaps a little fanciful in seeing a family trait here? Well, how about an ancestor of mine back in the 17th century. He was a guardian of the poor and a magistrate. In the 20th century, two of his descendants became local councillors (one ending as mayor) and another was a trades union shop steward.

A copy of the birth certificate of my late father-in-law's step-sister has just arrived. I see that her father, my f-i-l's step-father, was a pen manufacturer and further research shows that for a while he owned a company making steel pens. This reminded me of my early schooldays when we learned to write using wooden pens into which steel nibs were inserted. Our desks had small, china inkwells in holes at the top right corner and every morning the class ink monitor would have to go round the room topping up the ink. There would also be two milk monitors to a class. In those days every school child was given a bottle of milk at school, one third of a pint. These had cardboard tops with a small tab at the side to pull them off. The monitors would fetch a crate of bottles for the class. On really cold mornings the bottles would be put on hot water pipes running along the side of the classroom to warm the milk. It was bad enough drinking cold milk but the warm milk was horrible! There would also be a straw monitor whose job was to hand out the drinking straws, although the tough guys would drink straight from the bottle if they could get away with it.

Ah, memories. History. . .

A little knowledge is a worry.

2012-01-16T10:17:00.002Z

I know, I know, you don't have to tell me. The commonly quoted proverb is that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing - and it is, or can be. It can also be a worry.

Years and years ago, a neighbour and I went to evening classes to learn motor mechanics. This was back in the days when one went to night school not only to study for professional exams and qualifications (I did it for years before I managed to pass my banking exams and become an Associate Member of the Institute of Bankers or AIB) but also for cultural study such as conversational French, cookery or chess for beginners. Alan, for that was my neighbour's name, and I had become disenchanted with the prices charged by garages for servicing our cars and reckoned we could save money by doing the work ourselves. We became adept at changing brake pads, bleeding and adjusting brakes, adjusting tappets, dismantling carburretors and distributors - indeed, everything in the standard service and a bit more besides.

Nowadays it's a different story. For a start, I'm a lot less keen on standing in a cold wind on the drive fiddling around under the bonnet. In any case, it seemed a lot easier when there were two of us doing the job and Alan moved away years back. Anyway, with modern cars it's about all I can do to open the bonnet to check the oil and water. With my present car even changing a light bulb is a garage job. But despite this, I still read the question and answer column in the motoring supplement that comes with the Saturday edition of my daily paper. The questions asked cover a very wide range of motoring subjects and it is through reading these and, especially, the answers that I have learned what happens if a timing belt snaps and that there are such things as a dual mass flywheel, this latter being something that, apparently, can disintegrate without warning and do a great deal of expensive damage.

I had it at the back of my mind that later this year I should consider having the timing belt and associated pulleys etc changed in my car. I had the job done on my previous car - same make and model as this one - and it cost an arm and a leg. I also know that later this year I will have to spend quite a lot on a major service. With the worry of the dual mass flywheel at the back of my mind, I was thinking that maybe I should change the car for one that has a timing chain (doesn't need replacing) and does not have a dual mass flywheel (I don't actually know if mine does or not). That would also save the cost of the service and (maybe) a set of four tyres.

You see? Just enough knowledge to make life a worry.

I got Friday back

2012-01-15T09:39:00.001Z

Yep, that's right. Last week I got Friday back. Not all of Friday - just Friday morning. I hadn't lost the rest of the day. To tell the truth, I hadn't really lost Friday morning either, but last week Friday morning was back to what it used to be.

Friday is the day when the Dearly Beloved takes herself off to the MS Treatment Centre for an hour of breathing pure oxygen under pressure in a sort of land-based diving bell. She doesn't have MS but she does have a condition which, in many ways, is similar. It just has more letters - CBD - but not the pain of MS. All the same, the old love finds that her weekly high dosage oxygen treatment ameliorates her condition.

It was sometime in November that she developed a peculiar, well, what can I call it? Disease, condition, infection? We don't know what it was (nor does her GP) but it left her feeling light-headed and, as a consequence, unwilling to risk getting behind the wheel of a car. So on Friday mornings I drove her to Southwick, went on to Tesco's to do the shopping, and then had about 45 minutes before I had to collect madam. I used that time to explore parts of Shoreham that I didn't know and to take photographs. Many of them have already appeared on Stanmer and Around and I have more to come. But last week the old duck felt OK to drive and my services as chauffeur and personal shopper were no longer required. I had my Friday morning back.

Maybe it wasn't such a good thing. I got stuck into chasing down a few loose ends in my family tree and, as a result, spent far too much time at the computer. This is something I find almost impossible to stop once I get started. I find one new person and have to take it further. When were they born? Did they marry? If so, who? What about children? And so on. And then there are the puzzles that seem to be quite impossible to solve. They are rather like cryptic crossword puzzles where solving one clue can help with the next - but don't expect everything to fall into place at once! Take this little conundrum.

The Old Bat's great grandfather emigrated to Australia. In Melbourne he married an Irish girl and they had three children, one of whom died as an infant. The wife also died and the two children (my wife's grandfather and great aunt) were sent back to England to live with their grandparents. The boy, William Carstairs, grew up and married Helena Jones, a girl born in Liverpool to Irish immigrant parents. A son was born and was also named William but when he was only four, his father died. But he didn't die in London (where the son had been born) or in Brighton (where Helena had lived before her marriage, attending the same church as William's grandparents). He died in a small village on the borders of Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire and was buried there as there was no money to bring his body back down south.

Many years later, William junior and his wife (my wife's parents) were still very friendly with a family living in that little village - but nobody was able to explain how the connection had come about. Why did a young couple from Brighton visit a remote Midlands village? And how did a Liverpool girl come to be in Brighton in the first place?

As I implied earlier, I had traced Helena to Liverpool where she was born in 1878. Her parents and an older sister where living there at the time of the census in 1871 but there was no trace of the family in 1881 when the next census was taken. I eventually traced Helena's father and older sister to an address in London and saw that the father was described as a widower. There was no record, however, of the mother's death. Nor could I find any trace of Helena. I found her in Brighton in 1901, living with Mr and Mrs Hall. It was in 1902 that she married William Carstairs, their son was born in 1904 and William died in 1908.

How I wished there was a diary to tell me what had happened to Helena before her marriage. Eventually, I learned. An Internet contact told me she had been adopted by Mr & Mrs Hall after her mother's death. The Hall's lived in that little village, hence Helena's (and subsequently her son's) connection. The Hall's had moved from there, ending up in Brighton.

Helena had a tragic life. Not only had her mother died while she was very young, but her husband died after only six years of marriage. She did later remarry but her second husband mistreated her, attacking her with a knife on at least one occasion, and he committed suicide.

At least I did eventually learn about Helena. I'm still struggling with her step-daughter, Moira, who was last heard of in Paris just before the second World War and who is believed to have joined a nunnery but who I have been unable to find in any official records. I have found a record of Helena's step-daughter Johanna - of whom my wife had never heard. Was she Moira? I wonder if I shall ever find out.

Frustrating books and television

2012-01-14T10:10:00.003Z

Just recently two different writers for two different media have had me writhing, gritting my teeth and clenching my fists. The first is a well-known television presenter who has also written several novels. I borrowed his latest from the library on my last visit. It's not exactly a who-dun-it, although there is a mystery surrounding the death of a girl back in 1816, nor is it a romance, although the main male character does fall for the woman next door. This latter is in 2010, by the way. The book switches between 1816 and 2010 all the way through. The final outcome is irrelevant to my griping so I won't bother you with the details. Suffice it to say that the denouement depends on a scullery maid from 1816, a 15-year-old girl, being able to read well enough to read novels and a 16-year-old boy from the same year, a miller's son, being able to write and being sufficiently literate to write a daily diary. Sorry, Mr Author - that just doesn't gel with me as I know that well into the 19th century very, very few people of that class could read and write.

On Wednesday evening the Old Bat and I settled down to watch the latest episode of Midsomer Murders. I should explain that Midsomer is a fictional English county centred around the county town of Causton and that the villages of Midsomer Worthy, Midsomer Parva, Midsomer Magna et al are the murder capital of the country. They have, over the years, experienced more murders per 100 population than London, New York, Detroit or any where else you care to mention. Each and every one of those murders has, of course, been solved in the course of a two-hour television programme. For years, the successful detective was Tom Barnaby, played by John Nettles.

(Just going off on a bit of a tangent for a while. The Old Bat is, I think, quite keen on Mr Nettles. I think he frequently looks like my brother. When I mentioned this to him - my brother, that is, not Mr Nettles who I have never met - he told me that his daughter thinks the same. Now it happens that many people think my brother and I look alike. I don't, nor does the Old Bat, but could it be that she subconsciously sees me as the hero in those television programmes? No, don't answer that!)

One of the reasons why those programmes gave so much pleasure is/was the location shots. These were in beautiful Buckinghamshire villages full of cricket on the green, thatched cottages and low-beamed pubs. If the Old Bat liked John Nettles, I rather took to his screen wife, Jane Wymark. Mind you, she seemed to be involved in every organisation in every village, from bell ringing to civil war re-enactment, but that brought her into the plot in most episodes so I wasn't complaining as it gave her bigger parts. Tom Barnaby retired and his place was taken by his cousin, another Barnaby. The new Barnaby is not so much to the Old Bat's taste but his wife is quite a looker as well. She doesn't get such big parts as she teaches full-time so is not involved so much in village life. All that, though, is by the bye. It was this week's episode that got my goat.

I haven't quite decided if the scriptwriter was extracting the Michael or if he was really quite serious, but the story-line concerned the Midsomer in the March Ornithological Society and the sighting of a supposed rare bird, the blue crested hoopoe. Now I'm not an expert, but I suspect there is no such bird. If there is, I don't suppose it looks anything like the stuffed bird which was displayed as an example. This was an ordinary hoopoe with the tips of the feathers of its crest coloured blue. Quite ridiculous. Then two or three of the members of the society were in a hide watching birds which they identified as non-existent breeds. But the thing that really got me going was that one of the members was going out at the dead of night to record bird song. Bird song? At midnight? Of a meadow lark? Do me a favour!

Frankly, if scriptwriters can't be bothered to make their plots at least reasonably accurate in the detail, I don't think I can be bothered to watch the programmes.

But I do wish I could find a 19th century diary written by one of my ancestors. It might help me solve one or two riddles. I won't go into that any further just now - I've dribbled on long enough. I'll save that for tomorrow.

Frustrations

2012-01-13T10:02:00.004Z

I know some of us complain from time to time about our frustrations concerning Blogger and its glitches but let's be honest with ourselves, those are mere trivialities in life's rich tapestry. (Am I starting to mix metaphores yet?) Just think how much worse our lives would be if we were unable to get light at the flick of a switch or if we, like so many African people, had to walk miles to collect clean water. Yes, I know. That's a bit like when my mother used to tell me to think of all those starving African children when I refused to eat cabbage. I never could really see what good it would do those children if I did eat my cabbage or what harm would befall them if I didn't.

And those Blogger frustrations are as nothing compared to the frustration thrust upon me almost every day by my Internet service provider. My broadband Internet access is painfully slow - less than 2 mps - but I don't find that a problem. At least, not usually. I stream or download or whatever it is called films never and short videos only occasionally. Clips off YouTube are about my limit and a slow download speed is only a minor frustration then. Much more frustrating is the several times a day disconnection. Every now and then I will find a web site taking a long time to open and then I get the "unable to connect" message, or words to that effect. My broadband connection has become disconnected. This might last for just a few seconds or for several minutes. Either way, it is a cause of severe head-banging.

I called in at the Lions Housing Society office a week or two back and found they had a computer techie-type in doing some work to connect an extra PC to the web. I mentioned my frustrations with my IPC and he tried to tell me what the problem was. He talked about bandwidth and all sorts of other things I didn't understand. The upshot was that I should change my ISP.

I have, on numerous occasions, considered doing just that but every time I have considered doing so I have decided against it. It's not so much the little matter of changing my email address; that is not such a big deal. I already have two or three email addresses and all of them point to just one place. It would be a simple matter to switch the redirect from my personal domain and gradually notify people who have just the email address with my ISP. No, the reason for me not changing my supplier is simply that I am too miserly. My current supplier charges me comparatively little each month to cover phone line rental, unlimited broadband usage (when I'm not disconnected), a second phone number through my computer (which has been allocated to the 0845 number for Brighton Lions Club) and free phone calls 24 hours a day to all UK geographic numbers and 35 international destinations. For that, I'm prepared to put up with a little frustration.

Pets

2012-01-12T11:04:00.003Z

The Chubby Chatterbox and Uncle Skip have inspired me to cast my mind back in the search for memories of my first pet. I trawled back through a succession of dogs, oe cat, two rabbits and - for a short time - one lamb. Then, further back in the dim past, came the recollections of a budgerigar named Billy. He was a very smart, blue budgerigar and it had taken a great deal of persuasion before my mother agreed to admit a feathered creature into the house. It wasn't that she was particularly unfond of feathered creatures, or furry creatures either for tht matter. Her concern was for my brother and me. We boys were both quite severely asthmaticand our doctor had suggested that we would probably be allergic to fur and feather. As it transpired, Billy caused no problems. But he wasn't the first pet in our household. Before Billy came a succession of goldfish, fish carrying neither feather nor fur they were considered safe pets for us boys. Thinking about those fish has brought to mind the funny little shop in Canterbury Street where we acquired these creatures. I don't think it was a full-blown pet shop; in my mind's eye I can see only tanks of fish - tropical fish in the main part of the shop and cold water fish in a sort of passageway at the back and side of the shop. That was where the proprietor would lead us to gaze at the fish in the tanks as we decided which particular fish we wanted.

But even the goldfish weren't the first pets. I need to explain here that my mother's sister lived fairly close to us. She had three children - a boy a year older than me, another boy a year younger than me and a year older than my brother, and a girl another year younger than my brother. We sort of meshed agewise, but my boy cousins were allowed a great deal more freedom than were my brother and I. It was their back garden that was dug over in a series of trenches and encampments with a dug-out for a shelter. It was my cousins who were allowed to go off on their own and explore the chalk pits, the disused chalk quarries. Now I come to think of it, I don't even know where the chalk pits were (or are). It was through my cousins' chalk pit explorations that my brother and I acquired our very first pets - a couple of newts. Just how these unfortunate wild creatures ended up in our house I cannot say, but they did. Neither my brother nor I - nor, indeed, our mother - had the faintest idea of how to look after newts, what sort of habitat they needed and, even, what they ate. Given that I was probably about 8 at the time and my brother 6, our ignorance could, perhaps, be excused. Nowadays, of course, newts are protected by law and capturing any wild creature to keep as a pet is abhorrent to any right-thinking person. Things were different 60+ years ago when this all happened. Anyway, my mother found an enamel dish, about 9" x 6" and 2" deep, into which we put a few stones and an inch or so of water. We pulled up some weeds and grass from the garden and threw those in - and that was home for the newts. We must have put something over the top to stop them escaping but I can't remember what it might have been.

I suppose we had taken the dish into the garden to do something or other. That was when the newts escaped and dived down a drain. Goodbye newts.

If winter comes, can spring be far behind?

2012-01-11T10:32:00.002Z

I mentioned last week. . . At least, I think it was last week. Anyway, whenever it was, I mentioned that the blackbirds had joined the chorus of robins in the park in the mornings. Now the song thrushes have joined in as well and the small wood we walk through every day has become quite noisy. There are snowdrops growing in the woods in two places but although the shoots are well up, there is as yet no sign of the blooms themselves. Unlike Kay's snowdrops. Kay lived in a bungalow across and just down the road from us. She was a delightful lady who adored the cat we had then but both she and the cat have been dead for several years. All the same, we still refer to Kay's bungalow and, by extension, the snowdrops growing in a corner of the garden are Kay's snowdrops. They are of a variety which blooms early and have been in flower for a couple of weeks. Unlike Tony's wife's daffodils, which he says were in bloom before Christmas. Like Kay, Tony's wife died some years back. She had planted early-blooming daffodil bulbs in the triangle of grass at the road junction outside their house. Tony adds a few bulbs each year in her memory.

It doesn't matter what time of year it is, there will always be gorse in bloom - and indeed there is on the Roman Camp. Equally, marigolds can bloom at all times of the year and we have several of these bright orange flowers in the garden. We also have a few grape hyacinths trying bravely to bloom as well as the first pale mauve crocuses. I did see yellow crocuses in the verge as I drove down Ditchling Road yesterday although the great swathes of them planted by the council have still to come through.

It was about this time last year that we were under a foot or so of snow and I was unable to get the car out for a week. What a difference this year! Of course, the plant life wouldn't suffer much under a blanket of snow but I just hope we don't get any sharp frosts.

It is even noticeable that the mornings get light earlier now. Perhaps spring is on its way.

If music be the food of love. . .

2012-01-10T09:34:00.000Z

I suppose there might well be some clever clogs out there who are thinking I am a little late with this post which should, they are thinking, have appeared last Thursday but yah boo sucks to you and all that, this really has nothing to do with Twelfth Night. Mind you, the Old Bard knew a thing or two, didn't he? Whether or not music can induce love I really don't know - I don't recall it ever having that effect on me - but music certainly can affect one's mood. Look how some music will set your foot tapping no matter how down in the dumps you might be feeling to start with. Some music makes me want to laugh, while other music seems to bring about a serious mood. And I know it's not just me who can be affected by music.

Years ago I ran a scout troop and every year we went off for a week's camping in the summer. During the camp we always had two or three formal camp fires - sing-alongs. I say 'formal' because we did treat these camp fires as a sort of ceremony. The fire was always lit in a special camp fire circle which would ideally be a little distance from the tents etc and be furnished with logs for seats. The fire would be set during the afternoon and built with logs of appropriate size laid as a pyramid, bigger logs at the base, smaller at the top. The centre would be stuffed with small sticks and kindling and axle grease would be smeared onto the outer logs. We tried not to light the fire using magic fire water (paraffin) but didn't mind cheating with a bit of grease.

I had been taught by an expert how to run a camp fire and I think I had learned my lesson well. I always planned in advance what songs would be sung and made it a rule never to introduce a new song at camp. New songs would be learned during troop meetings. There were three basic groups of songs: starting songs that would get everybody singing along, songs for the middle section of the programme that were more complicated, and songs to wind down as the camp fire drew to a close. It was important that songs were used in the correct part of the programme; it would have been pointless introducing a quiet, thoughtful song near the start and foolish to get everybody jumping around and shouting at the end.

I ran many camp fires but there was just one occasion when I achieved near perfection. That year the camp fire circle was in a woodland glade, which helped with the ambiance. As the programme of songs went on I could feel the atmosphere becoming more and more electric. We built up in a crescendo just exactly the way I had hoped, and then gradually things calmed down. After the last song (only I knew it to be the last) there was silence. I eventually said just a couple of words - "Goodnight, lads" or something like that. Two dozen or so boys got up and went to bed in absolute silence, so affected were they by the atmosphere.

Just the once - and I shall never forget it.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

2012-01-09T09:36:00.000Z

I wish I could give an undisputed credit to the person who coined this phrase but, to my regret, there is no agreement about the author although it seems probable that it was the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. Actually, it matters not who said it originally, at least, it matters not as far as this particular post is concerned. The phrase is merely a useful title providing an introduction to what I am about to say.

(Pause for a triviality concerning the word "actually". Before the adjoining towns of Brighton and Hove were merged into one - known by the very unoriginal name of Brighton & Hove, which doesn't exactly slip off the tongue very easily - people who lived in Hove, the smaller and lesser-known of the two towns, would often say, when asked where they lived, "Brighton. Well, Hove, actually". Hove therefore became known not as plain Hove but as the double-barrelled Hove-Actually.)

But to get back to reality. I have been glancing, as one does from time to time when one has an idle moment or three or when one is vain enough to do so, at the statistics so kindly provided by Blogger. I don't place a great deal of faith in the absolute accuracy of those statistics, which quite often seem to differ from the stats provided by Flag Counter (and Flag Counter does provide those pretty little graphics in my side bar). All the same, according to Blogger, my post with the most views is the one from nearly two years ago, St David's Day. This post has received over seven times as many visits as the next most popular. I was left puzzling when I discovered this fact until I looked at the statistics page showing traffic sources. This revealed that many of the visitors to the St David's Day post had searched for pictures of daffodils - and my post had one. So all those people didn't really want to read my purple prose about the patron saint of Wales - they just wanted a picture of daffodils! Put me in my place good and proper.

And like others, I'm puzzled by the traffic coming from a weird Russian site.

I probably shouldn't write this

2012-01-08T09:14:00.001Z

But I'm going to do so anyway. It is possible that what I am about to write will cause offence in some quarters or to some people. I don't see why it should, but these days it seems ridiculously easy for people to take offence just because somebody disagrees with their religious views or convictions and says what they think. That is what I am about to do. If my words cause offence, I apologise. No offence is intended and I fully respect your right to hold views different from mine and to express your opinions both verbally and in written form.

I will start with a hypothetical situation. There is a very old building in town, possibly dating from Tudor times, a building which you admire greatly, a building you would wish to see preserved. Unfortunately, this building is owned and occupied by a right wing political organisation, a very right wing organisation. So far to the right that its policies are repugnant to you and most other people. This organisation doesn't have the funds to maintain the old building which is falling into disrepair. An appeal is made for funds to effect essential repairs to the building. You would be happy to contribute towards the cost of those repairs but are not happy that some of any money you donate might be used for political purposes and, in any case, you have no wish to provide this repugnant organisation with a headquarters building. What do you do? Do you make a donation so that the building can be preserved, hoping that it will become the property of somebody else or a different organisation in the near future? Or do you accept the risk of the building falling down because you don't want to risk giving a penny to that political party?

There is, of course, no wrong answer to those questions, just as there is no right one either. Nor is there a right or a wrong answer to the particular problem with which I have been wrestling over the past few days. All the same, I will be interested to hear what my readers have to say about it.

My family moved to Hove almost 55 years ago and almost immediately started worshipping at St Helen's church in Hangleton. This is the oldest building in the city of Brighton & Hove, parts of it being more than 900 years old. It is a beautiful example of an old church which, thankfully, escaped restoration in Victorian times. But the congregation is too small to be able to maintain the building and the diocese can no longer contribute towards the shortfall of some £600 a week. The church is faced with closure unless more money can be found.

My parents attended St Helen's until the end of their lives and my mother's ashes are buried in the churchyard. I am loathe to see the church closed. But I became aware that St Helen's, like so many other C of E churches, was lurching to the right and becoming more and more Roman. the 'Hail, Mary' was a feature of Sunday services and pilgrimages were organised to Walsingham. This is where my problem arises - and where I may cause offence. I do not hold with the Roman Catholic version of Christianity and would not want to contribute towards the salary of the clergy at the church because of the Catholic leanings. Any contribution I would make would be intended solely for the upkeep of the church building. But that is not possible as any donation would go into the general fund of the parish.

Another factor in the problem is that the church is a listed building, Grade II*. This, presumably, means that the owner is obliged to maintain it in status quo, so there is no danger of it being left to rot. But what if the owner can't afford to maintain the building?

I think I will probably end up by making a regular contribution just to ensure the church stays open. It is a beautiful building as you can see from these photographs.

The Travel List Challenge

2012-01-07T09:09:00.000Z

I have registered on Facebook although quite honestly I can't think why. I suppose it is of some slight interest to see what other people I know are up to, but frankly so many of them seem to post pointless things like,"On the train - at last" that I really start to worry about their sanity.

The apps are things that I usually steer clear of. Things like Farmville (is that right?) bother me as I worry that they could lead to somebody stealing (or maybe just borrowing) my identity. Yes, I know - I'm being a boring old worryguts and there really is nothing to get all worked up about.

Having said that, I recently took the Travel List Challenge. Have you seen it? The hook is that you are told the originators think that most people will have visited no more than 9 of the places on a list of 100 before they die. (I don't suppose they will get to visit many more after they die. . . ) So I was quite chuffed to discover that I had visited no fewer than 23 of the places. Then I saw that the average is actually 22, so that statement about people visiting no more than 9 is a tad misleading. Still and all, my 23 was just a few more than most people I know so I must be quite well-travelled. Don't suppose I will get the chance to cross off many more of those 100 places, though. Indeed, I don't actually want to visit several of them anyway.

French frolics

2012-01-06T09:16:00.000Z

For all the love the French have of bureaucracy, I always find it surprising that they manage to ignore so many rules, regulations and, especially, dictats from the Big Brother in Brussels, otherwise known as the European Parliament (or Commission, which is rather like an unelected parliament with the power to make its own laws). Take, by way of one example, the average French tractor. Yes, I know that many French farmers, courtesy of the European Common Agricultural Policy and the French government, which seems to think that farmers and fishermen have more rights than anyone else, there are many rich French farmers. But there are just as many who simply scratch a living. Certainly they are better off than peasant farmers in, say, Bosnia, but rich they are not. Their tractors are often twenty or more years old, which means they don't possess some of the modern safety features which are required by law in England - and probably in France as well. Many is the tractor one sees in the fields or lanes where there is no roll bar to protect the driver in the event of the tractor overturning.

Sometimes, however, the French seem to delight in going to the other extreme. When one sells a house in France, there are several reports the seller has to have prepared - at his expense. This is possibly because the French rarely have a survey done when buying a house; they rely heavily, it would seem, on these reports. Until quite recently there were three of them, covering lead paint, asbestos and termites. It doesn't matter if there are no termites withing a couple of hundred miles of the house you are selling, you still have to have the survey and report done. Now there is a fourth report if the house you are selling is not on mains drainage.

Our holiday home in France is not on mains drainage. I think our house and the one next door are the only ones in the village that don't enjoy this amenity. Sewers were installed along our road when two small developments were built, one each side of the road, way back, but for some reason the drains didn't get as far as our house. Maybe the elderly occupiers of the two houses decided they couldn't afford - or didn't want to pay for - the extension of the sewer to our house. It means, of course, that we have a fosse septique, a cess pit. It works quite adequately, but. . .

Back in 2004 new rules were introduced. All houses not on mains drainage were to be surveyed and, where necessary, the drainage systems had to be brought into line with the new requirements by the end of 2005. I am not aware that our house has ever been surveyed and we have certainly never been told officially that our drainage system is not up to standard - but I know it isn't. I also know that we have insufficient land for us to bring the system up to the required standard, which states that the whole system must be a minimum distance from passing traffic. We - the Old Bat and I - just assumed that, as in so many things, the French were being pragmatic and just shrugging their shoulders in a Gallic way. We should have known better. There is now a fourth survey and report required when selling a house, a report confirming that the drainage system is up to standard.

Quite how we shall overcome this problem I have no idea. Oh yes I do - we don't sell but leave the house to our children and they can have the problem!

On the subject of hotels

2012-01-05T16:01:00.003Z

~~I consider Skip a very good friend despite him being a Californian~~

My very good friend Skip posted pictures of the oldest hotel in California here and I made a cheeky comment. To rub even more salt in his wound, here is a picture of the White Hart Hotel in nearby Lewes.

You may be able to spot a blue plaque just to the left of the door. This is a close up shot of the plaque.

Thank you, Blogger - I don't think

2012-01-05T09:27:00.000Z

I suppose if I were to adopt an infuriatingly positive approach I would say Blogger is looking after my interests. On the other hand, I could accuse Blogger of being an infuriating Big Nanny. But the truth of the matter is that Blogger has developed in infuriating glitch. I wondered at first whether it was Blogger or my computer, although I think I should have realised from my usually futile efforts to correct matters that the problem lay with Blogger. The number of blogs I follow has been increasing almost alarmingly over the phttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifast few weeks and has reached a stage where it can take me half an hour or more just to catch up with them all. So, in an attempt to save me from myself, Blogger has very kindly developed a thingummy which blocks some of the blogs I follow from my dashboard. This, of course, means that I am completely unaware of any new posts on all such blocked blogs and it is not until I suddenly think, "why isn't so-and-so blogging these days?" and go to the blog that I discover what has happened.

(If you are another one of those who have been affected by this glitch, which has apparently featured quite strongly on Blogger's own forum without a remedy being made available, you might like to read the solution suggested by Perpetua on her blog here.)

(Another little Blogger glitch is to insert a piece of code - http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif - at a random place in the blog whenever I post a link, thereby producing the little bull's head you can see further up. And why, I wonder, did the insertion of that code by me not produce a graphic?)

(Which reminds me of an infuriating habit of one of the most senior - indeed, the most senior - TV newsreader who, when warning of horrific pictures to come, would announce, 'The following report contains graphic images'. Aren't all images graphic?)

So, Blogger is obviously aware that my life was in danger of shrinking to a screen 12" x 9" and took steps to rescue me. After all, it is important to connect with the real world, to feel the dampness of rain, the coolness of wind, the warmth of the sun, to hear robins sing, to see the buds swell on the trees in spring. . .

I was getting carried away there. Sorry about that.

But there is more to life than reading the minutiae of the daily life of other people. Although, when all is said and done, all blogging is, is the modern, electronic equivalent of two housewives gossiping over the garden fence while hanging out the washing or two old boys putting the world to rights over a couple of pints and a game of dominoes in the village pub.

So what have you been up to today?

Thanks, Nina

2012-01-04T09:18:00.000Z

Not really a claim to fame, but my cousin's son's wife is a BBC weather girl. She was on duty on Monday and can be seen here warning us of some pretty foul weather to come. And it has. Monday was bright and sunny - a gorgeous day, as you can see from the photo on my Stanmer blog today. (The photo was taken on Monday.) Yesterday I had difficulty in walking from the car to the side door with the shopping as the wind down the drive was gusting at about 60mph. Granted, it's not exactly hurricane weather, but neither is it quite what we are used to.

My cousin's son's wife. That makes him my first cousin once removed, so is Nina my first cousin-in-law once removed? Or just my cousin's daughter-in-law?

And does it matter?

But to get back to the weather. The wind and rain lasted all morning then, around about lunch time, some blue sky appeared. The wind eased off a little, the skies cleared, and I was able to take the dog for a walk across the Downs without getting soaking wet. I drove to the Clayton windmills and walked up from there, knowing that this is a stony track so Fern should not get too muddy. She enjoyed a paddle, though, as there was a substantial stream flowing down the edge of the track - and sometimes right across it.

It rained again later.

And there is a complete dearth of anything that piques my interest on the goggle box these days. Even the channel that shows repeats is repeating repeats it repeated only a few weeks ago.

I wonder if I used the correct word in that last sentence. Should I have written "the channel which" or was I right to use the word "that"? But since I assume everybody who reads that sentence will know exactly what I meant, does it really matter? Will the earth stop spinning if I used the wrong word?

Now I must get on the phone and chase up the company which (or that) owes me money - £370 no less.

Lists

2012-01-03T09:43:00.001Z

I may have mentioned this before. . . No, not "may have"; I'm pretty sure that I have actually mentioned this before. It's just that I can't find exactly where I mentioned it. I'm a list person. No, not Brahms and Liszt. That's Cockney rhyming slang for. . . Anyway, I'm the sort of chap who makes lists. If I had been on the Titanic I would probably have been making a list of how many deckchairs were floating off to sea or something just as idiotic. But I did find when I was working that a few minutes spent at the end of the working day drawing up a list of the important things to be done the next day paid off. Now I'm retired I still make lists. Lists like shopping lists. Even if I have only four or five things to buy, if I don't take my list with me I'm bound to come home without something vital. Before going to a Lions meeting, I make a list of the things I need (or want) to say. I don't always say everything on the list but at least I have thought things through. This train of thought comes courtesy of Skip, via Matt and Suldog, all of whom have posted lists on their blogs in recent days (or weeks or even months/years). Having seen their lists, I have felt the itch, the yearning, the burnig desire to create another list. But what should I list? My CDs? No, perhaps not. Books I plan to read in 2012? Hardly, since I never plan to read books, I just pick up those that look interesting. No, none of those. I'll make it a list that might, just might, be of interest or use to other people, other people who are travelling in Europe. Here are a few of the things that I have found in cities across Euro pe and that have delighted me. Whimsical, stunningly beautiful, just plain surprising: all, to my mind, well worth seeing.

Postman's Park, London. This is one of the many parks in London and is one of the smallest and least well-known. It gets its name from its situation, very close to what was at one time the General Post Office, which itself is close to St Paul's cathedral. It is this park that one finds a very moving memorial, the Watts Memorial, which has over 50 plaques made of Royal Doulton tiles, each commemorating somebody who died trying to save another life. Each is full of tragic detail, like that to David Selves, aged 12 of Woolwich who "supported his drowning playfellow and sank with him clasped in his arms".

Begijnhof, Amsterdam. I found this delightful little square when visiting Amsterdam with my family (wife and three children) and with my friend Chris and his family (wife and two children). It offered a peaceful spot for a picnic in a city with few green spots in the centre.

Sainte-Chapelle, Paris. Paris, like London, abounds in tourist attractions but, to my mind, this is the most magnificent and yet it is one of the least known. Situated on the Île de la Cité not far from Notre Dame and tucked away behind the Ministry of Justice. Another of those places I have found by accident,the first time I visited was a sunny morning. The stained glass around the upper chapel is absolutely stunning with the sun shining through. I have not found a picture to really do it justice but the rose window gives a taste of what is there.

Florence - the Baptistry. Forget the cathedral, the Ponte Vecchio, the statue of David and the art galleries. Facing the main west door of the cathedral is the Baptistry. The doors of this building consist of several metal panels - highly polished brass, I should think - on which are depicted biblical scenes such as the one on the left. Absolutely stunning.

Jeanneke Pis, Brussels. Possibly the best known attraction in Brussels is the Manneken Pis, a statue of a small boy urinating and thereby providing an amusing fountain. The original statue dated from the 14th century but was replaced in the 17th. However, in a nod to feminism, another statue was made in the 1980s - Jeanneke Pis. This is a little girl squatting and urinating. Tucked away in a narrow, dead-end alley, it is found by few tourists.

Figline in Val d'Arno, Italy. Greve-in-Chianti is noted for its triangular piazza but when I visited I found it unpleasantly crowded. A few miles away the little town of Figline also has an attractive, triangular piazza where it is possible to sit at a cafe terrace enjoying a coffee while locals go about their business without the hassle of umpteen tourists.

And, in my opinion, two well worth not visiting: the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen Harbour is too small to be worth bothering with and is poorly situated. You can't get close enought to the Mona Lisa to see the picture, which is behind thick glass anyway and always has a hundred or so people elbowing each other in an attempt to get closer.

Cheers!

2012-01-02T08:34:00.000Z

It couldn't happen nowadays - and even back then it was probably not that common. I don't remember when the traditional morning tot was abolished by the Andrew - and I have never found out just why the Royal Navy should have been given that nickname - but the story I am about to relate dates from the days when every matelot aged 18 and over was entitled to it. I had pretty much forgotten this little episode until I read a post by Stephen Hayes, aka the Chubby Catterbox, sorry, that should read Chatterbox. He describes (here) what Manhattans and a drink known as AMF have done to him in the past and goes on to ask what drinks do the same for others.

Perhaps before I go any further I will make it quite clear that these days I drink very little, certainly never enough to land me on my back. I take a regular glass of wine - purely for medicinal purposes, you understand - and have been known to drink the occasional Scotch and water. That's plain tap water, none of your fizzy soda water which just spoils a good drink. And definitely no ice.

Back in the days almost beyond recall I was under the impression (mistaken, as it happens) that my family on my father's side had been deep sea fishermen for generations until my grandfather joined the Royal Navy, in which he served for more than 20 years. Likewise my father. With the youthful enthusiasm which has long since left me, I really wanted to keep up the family tradition. Unfortunately, I had suffered with asthma all my life and there was no way that I could pass the medical for entry into the Andrew. However, we were living in Hove then and, as luck would have it, there was a division of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve with its headquarters on the seafront. One parade night I diffidently showed myself and, much to my surprise, was accepted for entry so long as it was into a sedentary rating and I eventually found myself in the uniform of a Writer, RNVR.

As well as attending weekly parades, all reservists had to undertake two week's training each year. For most, this involved going to sea on board HMS Curzon, the minesweeper allocated to the Sussex Division RNVR. There was no place for a writer on the Curzon so, after I had attended all the obligatory courses at Chatham barracks, I was sent to a proper ship or establishment for my training every year. One year I travelled to Devonport to join HMS Lynx. Almost as soon as I was aboard she sailed. We travelled westabout round England, Wales and Scotland, passing through the Pentland Firth in a force 8 gale soon after eating greasy pork chops. Not a pleasant experience, the Pentland Firth being one of the roughest sea areas around our coast. Our destination was Bremerhaven, Germany, where we were to make a "fly the flag" visit.

We arrived in the morning and shore leave was granted to the whole ship's company from 11.30 or thereabouts. Pretty well all the hands in my mess went ashore straight away, leaving just three or four of us who had decided to eat lunch on board before exploring the town. "Up spirits" was piped as usual at noon and the killick of the mess went to collect the tots for our mess. Naturally, no mention was made of the matelots already ashore who were, technically, not eligible to receive their tots that day. The rum was brought back to the mess and the four of us had our tots. It was not permissible to keep any rum, not even for an hour or so, and there was still rum in the fanny. We ended up drinking about three tots each that day - all on empty stomachs - and Navy rum was slightly stronger than the rum one usually buys in the supermarket. I have a feeling it was about 90% proof.

After lunch we went ashore and piled into the first bar we saw. We ordered a round of drinks (beer) but one of the locals insisted on paying. All the locals, one after the other, bought us a round of drinks until, after four or five beers, we staggered out and into town where we almost fell into a cellar wine bar.

I never did remember anything between the second bottle of wine and me staggering along a railway track at the harbour. Heaven alone knows how I got there! So to answer Stephen's question, it was - on that occasion - a mixture of rum, beer and wine that knocked me on my back.

Resolutions? Not me!

2012-01-01T08:46:00.002Z

I don't do resolutions at New Year or any other time. If I did, I might just adapt the old fourth Scout law (at least, I think it was the fourth):

A Scout is a friend to all and a brother to every other Scout no matter to what colour class or creed the other may belong.

There are words of wisdom in the Lions' code of ethics as well:To accept no profit or success at the price of my own self respect lost because of unfair advantage taken or because of questionable acts on my part.

Whenever a doubt arises to the right or ethics of my position or action towards my fellow men, to resolve such doubt against myself.
To hold friendship as an end and not a means. To hold that true friendship exists not on account of the service performed by one to another, but that true friendship demands nothing but accepts service in the spirit in which it is given.
To be careful with my criticisms and liberal with my praise; to build up and not destroy.

I do try to remember those words every day, not just on 1st January. It isn't always easy, but who promised that life would always be easy?.

2011 was a pretty tumultuous year in several ways, what with the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, unrest in Bahrain and continuing problems in Syria. Then there have been the deaths of Osama bin Laden, Muammar Gadaffi, Kim Jong-wotsit and the former Czech President Havel. Closer to home we had the excitement (for some) of William and Kate becoming the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the further excitement of riots in various cities in August for no apparent reason. Even closer, I was introduced to my Macmillan nurse one Tuesday and had almost come to terms with the fact that I had lung cancer when ten days later I was told it wasn't: I just had a lump of mucus in my lung. I wish I could say that every day since then has seemed like an extra one, but they haven't. I think I was reasonably certain in my mind that I was going to beat that bugger - but then I didn't have to anyway, which was a great relief.

I am not going to do an Old Moore and gaze into a crystal ball so we shall just have to wait and see what this new year holds in store. Whoever and wherever you are, I hope 2012 treats you at least as kindly as it treats me.

The most satisfying

2011-12-31T09:20:00.003Z

Or, the end of the ego trip.

The pictures I have shown over the past five days have been among the ones I have taken this year which have given me the most satisfaction. Those I have posted so far have been in completely random order, but this is the one which has given me the most satisfaction.

My inspiration was a man who is perhaps Brighton's favourite local artist, Philip Dunn. Back in the summer I had an appointment at the hospital. I took advantage of the need to go into town to take a few photographs and I wandered down onto the seafront. There I happened to spot these deckchairs with their contrasting vibrant colours almost exactly framing the remains of the seaward end of the West Pier. It is the sort of shot I had been looking for for years.

Given that at this time of the year there is a better than usual chance of somebody playing silly buggers with my credit card, I thought to check the account online. For some reason, I was unable to access my account. According to the message on the screen, I had made more than the permitted number of attempts to log in and failed each time. It was suggested I should telephone. I rang the number and a very pleasant automated female voice asked me to explain in a few words what it was I wanted. I said I was unable to access my account on-line and, after a short pause, the automated lady replied, 'You are having difficulty logging in. Is that correct?' I assured her she had me bang to rights, whereupon she asked for my card number. After I had given it there was another short pause before she repeated it and I confirmed she had it right. She then told me that there was an unusually high volume of calls and the current wait time was eight minutes. However, she kindly pointed out that i could access my account on-line at www... It was tempting to do so, but I did refrain from shouting at her. And why is it that every time I have to telephone they are experiencing an unusually high volume of calls? I decided to suggest to the "specialist" who eventually (after 11 minutes) sorted the problem that the message be changed so that people ringing becuase of logging-in problems should not be advised to go on-line. But I forgot. Again. Maybe next time it happens.

So here we are once again at the end of a year. Despite the evidence of the previous paragraph, I'm not really a grumpy old man - at least, not yet grumpy though I may be old - but spending the night drinking and generally carousing is no longer my style so I fully expect to be in bed and asleep before the New Year is ushered in to the noise of fireworks and the hooters of the ships in the harbour (which we can hear if the wind is in the south-west as it mostly is). So I will wish each of my readers a very happy New Year and retire gracefully.

The end . . .

2011-12-30T12:00:00.002Z

. . . of the Christmas turkey - in a turkey, ham and egg pie.

Up on the Downs

2011-12-30T08:57:00.002Z

To continue with the six pictures taken this year that have given me the most satisfaction.

When attempting landscape pictures on the Downs I usually go for two-thirds sky to one-third earth (as with the picture of the signpost earlier this week) in an attempt to stress the openness and distances. So why this one should give me so much satisfaction was at first something of a puzzle. Then it dawned on me that it has many features of the South Downs in it, more than I realised at first glance. There is the old flint wall right in the foreground with hedges and copses further in the distance. And although the Downs run from east to west, there are valleys and ridges running north-south and this picture shows four ridges. The Chattri memorial is hardly a common feature of Downland views, but somehow it adds something to this picture. And if you enlarge the picture sufficiently, you will see sheep in the field above the Chattri and a seagull in the air!

I did say I might tell the story of Minty the Lamb but I have realised that I did that 18 months ago. For those who missed it (or have forgotten all about it) you can find it right here.

To continue the ego trip . . .

2011-12-29T09:35:00.002Z

. . . we return to Brighton. I go down into the town as infrequently as I can get away with - too many crowds and too much hustle and bustle for me - but on one Sunday in the summer Brighton Lions have a fund-raising fair in the gardens of the Royal Pavilion and I feel I have to attend. This year I sneaked off for a while to take some pictures, including this one of a corner of the Royal Pavilion. This really is a fantastic building in the true sense of the word but the usual pictures of it (showing the back of the building) are terribly clichéed. I wanted something that captured the essence of the building while being fresh. I think I succeeded pretty well, even to the extent of having a seagull in the picture! That, of course, was pure serendipity.

Still amazingly mild out. There are plenty of green shoots showing in the garden - crocuses and grape hyacinths in the main - but that is not particularly unusual for this time of the year. I was surprised by the number of birds singing in the park, though. Robins aplenty, but they sing all winter, but there were great tits and wood pigeons as well (although neither of them can really be described as singing. Calling is more accurate.) and even one lone blackbird.

Still in Pouancé.

2011-12-28T09:24:00.001Z

I have driven along this road dozens, even scores and possibly hundreds of time, without noticing this almost tumbledown cottage tucked away in a corner. While over there earlier this month I did spot it out of the corner of my eye so turned back to take a picture. I love the colour the doors and window have been painted and the way it blends with the stone and the roof tiles. I like the way plaster is falling off the wall to display the stone beneath, and somehow it all seems to gel beautifully. And to think I hadn't noticed it for all those years!

So that's the Christmas holiday over - for some people, anyway. With Christmas Day falling on a Sunday this year, many people have had a four-day break and by taking just three days' holiday many will have stretched the break to ten days. I have always felt sorry for folks in other countries who have a holiday of just one day at Christmas compared to our normal two days. But I was always happy to go back to work the day after Boxing Day! This was partly to get away from the noise of the children and partly because the end of the year was always my businest time at work, both in the bank and with the newspaper, so I needed as much time in the office as I could get away with between Christmas and New Year.

And that's something I have never understood. Why do Americans call New Year, New Years? And is that New Years (plural) or New Year's (possessive)? Neither seems to me to make any sense. But I suppose I really shouldn't expect . . . No, I won't go there in case I spoil the "special relationship"!

Over in France

2011-12-27T09:17:00.000Z

This is the medieval gateway affording entrance to the old town of Pouancé, just a few miles up the road from our holiday cottage. I took this picture on a whim - no tripod, just leaning against a wall or post - and was astonished how well it came out. I think it looks warm and romantic - but that is despite knowing that the lighted window just through the arch is a grotty kebab shop!

Satisfaction

2011-12-26T09:57:00.002Z

Or ego trip.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was looking through all the photographs I had taken this year with a view to picking out the best. What I have actually done so far is to short-list the six photographs that have given me the most satisfaction, which does not mean they are the best I have taken. They may or may not be technically spot-on, the composition or the lighting could perhaps be improved upon, but there are sound reasons - which I shall try to explain - why these pictures are so satisfying to me. First up is this picture of a signpost on the South Downs behind Brighton.

Many of the pictures I have taken this year have been on the Downs while walking the dog. In them I have tried to capture the feeling of space, the wide, open skies and the way the Downs roll away as far as one can see. I rarely succeeded as well as I would have liked but somehow this signpost, pointing slightly up and into nothing, suggests that space to me.

Yesterday passed fairly quietly. The Old Bat and I joined our elder son, his partner and her parents, sister and daughter for a late lunch. Today both sons and all three grandchildren will be joining us for a late lunch so it will be somewhat noisier today than yesterday. Fern will love having the children around and will probably want to help unwrap the presents. (For those who have yet to meet her, Fern is our springer spaniel, pictured today on my other blog.)

Happy Christmas

2011-12-25T07:36:00.003Z

When I was a child, a few days before Christmas every year the BBC broadcast Handel's Messiah sung by the Huddersfield Choral Society. It was a family tradition that we listened each year, and here is the chorus "For Unto Us a Child is Born". Enjoy.

What a glorious walk Fern and I had yesterday afternoon. It was a fine day, crisp might describe it well. Not too cold - about 8 or 9 Celsius - but a fairly stiff breeze from the south-west. I drove out beyond Falmer and we walked up across the Downs until we reached the spot where there is a distant view of Seaford Head and the English Channel. Then we described a loop over Balmer Down before heading back down to Falmer. There were typical Downland views of sheep and more sheep and the wind blowing past my ears almost blocked the faint hum of the traffic on the main road. An hour of that certainly blew the cobwebs away!

Prince Philip

2011-12-24T15:45:00.002Z

It is good to learn that the Duke of Edinburgh is recovering well after the scare of him being admitted to hospital last night. He's not everybody's cup of tea but I like him, although I have only met him the once. He speaks his mind and his occasional gaffes when he cracks a joke without thinking about it are most amusing as he never intends to hurt. I would love to have him as a dinner guest.

Banking memories

2011-12-24T09:20:00.002Z

I must, I regret, disappoint Skip. He posted a comment after I told the (probably) apocryphal story of the bank officer who bought a calf at market and kept it in the bank strongroom until he went home that night saying that he (Skip) wanted to hear more about the calf. Maybe one day I'll tell you about the lamb we kept in our garden shed, but meanwhile, a few memories from my days in banking - which were long before bankers were looked upon with opprobrium. And I promise that we will end up with a seasonal tale!

My banking career started in 1960 and ended in 1985 so you will gather that these snippets are really matters of ancient history and are never likely to be repeated in the modern world. In those days probably less than half the population had bank accounts. Many people were paid weekly, in cash, and it would be a few years before there was a concerted effort to persuade workers to have their pay paid monthly straight into a bank account. The branch at which I started work was at one end of a busy shopping street and the cashiers were kept busy taking in the shops takings and exchanging notes for small coins. This meant we had to bring in change. A branch across town received more coin than it knew what to do with as the local bus company banked there so it seemed sensible to move coin from that branch to mine. This was done about once a month, using an open-sided, flat-bed lorry. Two of us would ride across town and spend about half an hour humping bags of coin from the other branch's strongroom onto the lorry, then I, as junior, would get to ride back sitting on this stack of coin on the back of the lorry. Then we would spend another half hour transferring it to our strongroom.

We received a surplus of notes. What we didn't need would be parcelled up in stiff paper wrappers sealed with wax. A bundle of these smaller packets would be wrapped together in brown paper to make a larger parcel and, again about once a month, we would call a taxi and take these parcels round to the Post Office for delivery to our head office in London. There could easily be upwards of £25,000 in one delivery, so we did have a police escort for this. Nowadays, of course, security is a bit tighter.

It was a similar story at my second branch. This was a small, country branch but on two mornings each week I ran a sub-branch in an even smaller village down the road. Just me and a retired man as my guard. We caught the bus each way and, if I needed money at the sub-branch or had a surplus to bring back to the main branch, I carried it in a brief case. At least, that was the idea. I decided that if I was robbed I would just let go of the briefcase so, if the £2,000 of notes was lost, well, hard luck. But if I had the notes in my pocket... But I was never robbed so I never did get away with that one.

My guard and I had a very good relationship with the village bobby and he would sometimes appear with a brown paper bag. We let him in behind the screen and thoroughly enjoyed the bottles of beer he had brought with him.

It was at that main branch that we had a customer who was... mentally challenged? She would quite often poke her head round the door, thumb her nose at the cashier, and go away again. One time, though, she didn't go away. She took an inkpot off the counter, placed it on the floor, lifted her skirt and pulled down her knickers and... Well, it was me who ended up wielding the bucket and mop.

I can't remember if it was at this branch or another where a lady customer came in and asked what her balance was. On being told, she took her cheque book and wrote a cheque for the exact amount, payable to cash. The cashier queried this but she was adamant. She took her entire balance in cash across the banking hall to a table and checked it carefully. Then she came and handed it back to the cashier.

"That's right," she said. "You can have it back now. I just wanted to make sure you still had it."

Which reminds me of the customer who complained that the notes he received when he cashed a cheque were not his. He wanted the ones he had paid in the previous week.

As with most businesses, the staff enjoyed going out for a meal at Christmas. To reach my last branch I had to drive 20-odd miles each way, picking up two other staff en route. Our journey took us past a country restaurant and one Christmas we decided to try a meal there. A suitable booking was made. We did think it a little odd that we were checked out through a spyhole before the door was opened for us but it was not until several weeks later that we discovered the restaurant was a front for the main business. I must be one of the very few men who has taken his wife to a brothel.

Promises

2011-12-23T08:44:00.000Z

People who know me know that I find it difficult to sit back and say nothing. I don't mean that I witter on with small talk: small talk I don't do. Land me at a party with a lot of people I don't know, or don't know particularly well, and I find it difficult to maintain a conversation. But if there is a discussion going on and I have an opinion, I'm in there with my big mouth. It lands in all sorts of odd - and sometimes awkward - situations. Like the time I ended up preaching a sermon.

I was then heavily involved in the church, certainly on the parochial church council and either as a sidesman or churchwarden. As in so many churches, there was a monthly church parade for the scouts, guides, cubs and brownies at one of the regular Sunday communion services. The vicar did have a tendency to spend rather longer in the pulpit than was comfortable for the younger ones and, me being me, I plucked up the courage to tell him so. It didn't, I pointed out, encourage the youngsters to attend church if they found it boring. I accepted his challenge to do better and so it was that a month or two later I found myself due to speak on Sunday morning. It wasn't until I arrived at church that I discovered not only was it a church parade, but there was also an infant baptism to take place during the service. Luckily, what I had in mind to say was easily adapted to cover a baptism.

I spoke about promises, reminding the youngsters that they had each made a promise when they were invested in their pack or troop, and saying that God would be making a promise to the baby who was to be baptised, a promise that He would always be there, a promise that He had made to each of them as well.

Then I told them about a ceremony that used to be held by North American Indians in the forests of what is now Canada. When a boy reached the age of 12 he was considered to have reached manhood but to prove it, he had to spend a night alone in the forest. One boy was led away from the village by his father deep into the forest, farther away from the village than he had ever been before. He was told that he had to spend the night in the clearing and make his way back to the village the following day. Knowing that there were wild animals such as bears in the forest, the boy hunted around for twigs to make a fire. He kept it burning all night as he sat there, watching the firelight reflected in the eyes of the wild beasts that had smelled man and came to investigate, but the fire kept them away from the boy. In the morning he made his way back to the village without mishap.

What the boy didn't know was that his father had been on the edge of the clearing all night, watching over him. The boy couldn't see his father, but that didn't mean he wasn't there. We can't see God, our Father, I told them, but that doesn't mean He isn't there watching over us, just as He has promised.

A December miscellany

2011-12-22T10:39:00.002Z

Reading Buck's various musings like this one here and two things jumped out at me. One, perhaps, should not have surprised me. Come to that, I suppose neither should have. I'm talking here about differences in attitude and way of life on either side of the Big Pond. Buck mentioned that he was eating dinner at 1715. Dinner at a quarter past five? I thought. No, that's uncivilised. Five o'clock is tea time; dinner is at eight o'clock. (Actually, we eat at about a quarter to seven when we are at home. If we eat out it is at about 7.30 or 8.00) Then I remembered a trip we made to the States some years back. We were due to land at Dulles, Washington, and drive into Maryland to spend a night with Lion friends. They had promised to take us out for a meal at the best restaurant in the area. We duly landed at about 4.00pm, eventually picked up our hire car and set off to follow the directions I had been given by Kent. Unfortunately, there was one place where he had not been very clear and we ended up getting lost. However, it was still quite early so I wasn't too bothered and I thought nothing of it when we arrived at about 7.30. Our hosts, however, were getting frantic and had already rung the restaurant to cancel the reservation - which was probably for about 6.30. We, being accustomed to English habits, had expected to eat at about 8.00 and hadn't appreciated that Americans eat so much earlier than us.

This is something I have come across in other respects. Social activities in England, such as club meetings, usually start at 8.00pm, sometimes 7.30, but that is really considered a bit early. It came as a shock when I discovered that Lions Clubs in America can meet as early as 6.30.

The other thing that struck me when reading Buck's post was the difference in ur attitudes to driving, in particular, the distance one drives. Buck implied that a drive of an hour or two was no big deal. In England, an hour's drive is a long way - and two hours! My word, that's an expedition, not just a short drive.

A couple of weeks ago the paper reported a reservoir near here as being 12% full. They made no mention of what would be considered the normal percentage for this time of the year, but implicit in the report was that 12% is very low. I gathered that (I'm pretty quick on the uptake) as the article was talking about how dry this autumn has been and how water shortages and drought measures are forecast for next spring and summer. Yes, I know there has not been the usual amount of rain as I have seldom come home wet from walking the dog. But why are the paths in the woods so muddy if we have had so little rain? And why is the vegetable patch too wet for me to dig?

The wetness of the soil is but one excuse for not digging. The other is closer to home. There have been remarkably few days these last several months when I have not had twinges of arthritis either threatening to start or causing pain and/or stiffness in one joint or another. Arthritis, or rheumatoid arthritis, is something I have had for many years. When it was first diagnosed I was given a prescription for an anti-inflammatory drug and told to take two capsules a day. I did for a while but gradually left off and in the end only took the medication when I felt it necessary. This way, the usual one month's supply often lasted me a year and, one time, even eighteen months. Instead of drugs, I took - and still do take - cod liver oil capsules and the Old Bat ensured that our diet contained a good mixture, especially with suitably oily fish. Then I developed this allergy and, in the summer, was prescribed a drug I take with an inhaler. Since then the arthritis has been much worse. Coincidence, or can the inhaler be the cause? When I think the allergy is better under control, I will leave off the inhaler and see if the arthritis is easier.

I followed my usual habit of writing the title first and now I can't remember why I included the word 'December'. Oh well, I don't suppose it really matters. But to get back to December, I'm off shortly to fetch the turkey.

In response to readers' demands

2011-12-21T09:55:00.000Z

What is the fascination with food? Well, OK, I can understand being fascinated by food: I am. But being interested in what other people have eaten? When there is no chance - or very little chance - that you will ever eat at that particular restaurant? If that's what floats your boat or, to coin a phrase, if that's how you like it cooked...

Oh, I found the Bovril. I had expected it to be next door to the Marmite, which is just along from the Heinz Sandwich Spread, which is alongside the jam. But it wasn't there. I found it with the Bisto and Oxo cubes.

So, what did I eat. Let me start by explaining something about French restaurants. At least, something about restaurants in France. It's not universal: you are unlikely to find this in creperies, for instance, and only in some pizzerias. As well as a la carte, restaurants in France usually offer one or more fixed price menus where the choice is restricted to three or four dishes for each course. These can offer extremely good value for money, especially the lunchtime menus ouvriers, or workmen's menus. These often offer a three course meal, sometimes with wine included, for about 10 euros, which - with the current exchange rate - is less than £10.

Au Vieux Castel is no different. We always opt for the cheapest menu there, but that offers a choice of about half a dozen starters, half a dozen meat dishes and two fish dishes, and four or so desserts. The dishes offered are changed from time to time but several have remained constant in all the years we have eaten there.

For my starter, I usually opt for either the crab tartare or the goat's cheese salad, while the Old Bat will choose either one of these or the ham tartare or (her favourite) scallop terrine with lobster sauce. (I have chosen the snails but this menu allows for only half a dozen and at a different restaurant I get a full dozen.)

The main course is always something we dither over. Should it be the piece of beef, or the steak with shallots, or maybe the turkey escalope. Beef in France can be very indifferent - they butcher it differently to we Brits - but the meat here is consistently good. Whichever we choose, it will be served with the vegetable of the day (always fresh and in season) along with a portion of chips (French fries) and a baked potato. This is one of the "signature dishes" of Michel, the chef, and neither we nor anybody else we have taken to the restaurant has been able to work out what is done to the potato. It is cooked in its jacket but the inside has been mixed with herbs or some sort and we can't tell what they are! I can tell you that it is extremely tasty and I'm getting hungry just writing about it.

Dessert could be a very pleasant creme caramel or sometimes rum baba is available. Last week there was a delightfully light chocolate sponge cake covered with chocolate which was served with creme anglaise, the French version of custard.

This will, of course, be followed by proper French coffee and was washed down with a pichet of merlot.

I have never tried it, but this is the only restaurant I have found where Chateaubriand steak is offered, which I find rather surprising in its home town! The reason I have not tried it is cost. The menu gourmand on which it appears costs five euros more than my usual menu and offer only two courses.

Christmas trees and cribs

2011-12-20T09:30:00.001Z

My Californian buddy, Skip, proclaimed that everybody has a Christmas tree story and went on to tell how he did the many thing and went into the forest to cut one down. You can read his story here. Well, there's no way I can top that but I do have just a weeny tale of a weeny tree.

It was when I was working in a bank at a branch in rural Sussex. The Number 2 on the staff lived on a smallholding where he allowed people to park their caravans over winter in a large barn and where he had a small Christmas tree plantation. He was quite a character, was Bill Hemmings. Totally unsuited to banking, really. There was a story how, when working at another branch, he had gone out to the market, bought a calf and put it in the bank strongroom until he was ready to load it into the back of his car and take it home! Possibly apocryphal; indeed, probably apocryphal but just the sort of thing I could see him doing.

But to get back to the real story. The Old Bat and I went out to Bill's one weekend and dug up a tiny tree, roots and all. After Christmas I planted it in the garden where it thrived. I dug it up and brought it indoors for several years after that but it eventually grew too tall and straggly for that and, in the end, it died. So it's back to buying a tree each year. I bought one last Friday and on Sunday afternoon the Old Bat decorated it.

She also put out one of our oldest Christmas decorations - a crib scene I bought in Holland many years ago. I had gone over with a party of Scouts to meet up with Dutch Scouts with whom we had established a sort of twinning arrangement. Looking round the shops in the Hague I saw this and it proved a big hit when I got it home.

I'm not sure that Joseph should really be holding a crook, but there you are.

It is reported in this morning's paper that the Norway fir, long the country's first choice as a Christmas tree, has rivals. The Canaan fir and Jacobs fir are, it seems, preferred by many as they are slimmer. (Our Norway fir stans about four feet tall and three feet wide.) Both the Canaan and the Jacobs are natives of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. Some years ago, the Old Bat and I spent a holiday in Virginia (with side trips to Maryland, Washington DC and West Virginia) especially to travel the Skyline Drive. I was disappointed that it wasn't until we had turned back towards the airport and our return flight that I found, printed on a table place mat in a diner, a map showing the Trail of the Lonesome Pine which I would have liked to visit.

Our favourite restaurant

2011-12-19T09:44:00.001Z

We always enjoy a meal at a Châteaubriant restaurant known as Au Vieux Castel (At the Old Castle - castel really being a small castle or manor).

This restaurant has a distinctly dismal appearance from the outside, a sort of downcast look which is not helped by its situation at possibly the busiest crossroads, next to one of only three sets of traffic lights in town. One opens the door and is immediately pitched headlong down three steep steps into the bar. French bars are completely different from English pubs. There is no warm, welcoming feeling to them; they are plasticy and usually have rectangular, formica-topped tables lined up in neat rows, with hard chairs to sit on. Granted, this bar is not quite as bad as that, but an English country pub it is not.

The restaurant is through a narrow arch and down another step. Once in the restaurant, one could be forgiven for thinking that one had passed through a time warp and was back in the 1970s – or even the 1950s. At first glance, the floor appears to be tiled, but it is actually covered in lino. The bottom half of the walls is covered in wainscotting stained a deep brown, the upper half of the walls having been painted in what is now a rather dirty-looking cream. Or is it magnolia? The window frames and a door into the street are painted dark brown. (That door, by the way, is permanently locked and duct tape has been placed over the edges to prevent draughts coming through.) The windows have net curtains at the bottom half, and I'm not at all sure those curtains have been washed in the six years or so that I have been eating there. The ceiling has beams – also stained a dark brown. Hanging from the walls and some of the beams is a collection of ancient woodworking tools and, somewhat incongruously, a wooden coffee grinder. Also decorating the walls are a number of pictures, including a rather dark landscape, an old photo of somebody's great grandparents, a pin-and-cotton spider's web on black felt and a mock horse's collar complete with plastic flowers. There are pots of artificial flowers on each windowsill and a five-foot tall artificial laburnum in full flower. Goodness knows how they all get dusted – or even if they ever do. Standing against one wall is an ornate upright piano, complete with candles, and just beside the entrance is a large charcoal grill on which the meat and fish is cooked.

The restaurant is owned and run by two very nice gentlemen who would be quite at home in Brighton. One is in charge of the front of house, while the other is in charge of the kitchen and cooks the meat. They both greet us effusively when we arrive, with kisses for Mrs S and handshakes for me. The first time the kisses started I backed up against a handy pillar, but I needn't have worried: I'm obviously not their type. All joking aside, they are always very pleasant and we usually manage to crack a feeble joke somewhere in the conversation. It has to be a feeble joke as neither of them speak as much English as I do French, which is little enough. Mrs S is always helped solicitously down the step from the bar into the restaurant where we have a regular table beside a heater - very pleasant in the winter.

When we arrived earlier this year we were surprised to find that the restaurant had been given a make-over. The brown wainscotting had been painted white with crimson trim and the tablecloths were white with crimson check. Although it is now very smart, I think I preferred the old look which I found much more characterful. This is how it used to be:

The best laid plans etc

2011-12-18T09:07:00.001Z

Well, Dear Reader, I have to say that this past week has not been at all what I had expected. It started off more or less as planned but went downhill quite rapidly. It has become the practice of the Old Bat and I to spend a few days at our house in the Loire (for the geographically challenged - like my daughter - that's in France) just before Christmas. This gives us a chance of a few days away from the mayhem, the hustle and bustle, and the awful television adverts. It also gives us the opportunity to stock up on all those goodies which are either cheaper in France or not even obtainable in England. We're talking wine (obviously) and even the Christmas tree, as we have found these to be generally about two-thirds of the price of the trees in England and sometimes even less.

So last weekend we set off early - well, earlyish - on Saturday morning and arrived at our house at about 9.30 or so in the evening. The journey is 435 miles door to door if we don't miss a turning and takes just over 8 hours driving time. We generally stop every couple of hours or so for a coffee and to change driver. This time, however, the Old Bat was still feeling a little under the weather - she hadn't really been 100% for about three weeks - and I did all the driving.

Sunday was fine and I spent much of the day outside, clearing up leaves and pruning the jasmine. We ate that evening at our favourite restaurant (more tomorrow). On Monday morning, the Old Bat felt lousy and she spent most of the day in bed. I bought the ingredients and cooked myself a meal that evening. The Old Bat felt really rotten and said she would prefer to come back to Brighton on Tuesday instead of spending the rest of the week there. So on Tuesday I drove the 435 miles back again.

On Wednesday the Old Bat rang the doctor's surgery and was told that the blood tests they had done had shown nothing wrong. We saw the GP in the afternoon and she seems puzzled and quite at a loss as to just what the matter can be. She did prescribe a drug which I personally think will have little or no effect and said to go back if that is indeed the case. I think we shall be back in the New Year.

It had been our intention to leave the French house very early yesterday so that we could be back in time for the annual Evening of Christmas organised by our friends Chris and Mrs Chris. Mrs Chris plays the piano and two friends join her, one to play the double bass and the other to alternate between the flute and the guitar. They play and we sing Christmas carols and songs, ranging from Silent Night to Frosty the Snowman. In between, we keep our energy levels up with mince pies and mulled wine. For me, it's the true start of the Christmas season even if it is a week before Christmas.

Back to the gates

2011-12-17T09:03:00.000Z

Having at last managed to remove the hinges from the old gates, I carefully measured where they should be attached to the new, five-bar gates. "Measure twice, cut once," I told myself, although in this case it would be drill once. I had even thought to buy new nuts and bolts to avoid having to re-use the old, rusty ones. I offered up the right-hand gate. Perfect! I offered up the left-hand gate. Oh, oh, a snag. I had fixed the lower hinge an inch too high and it was taking no weight on the bracket fixed to the gatepost. So much for measuring twice. The gate was too heavy for the top hinge to take all the weight, so something had to be done. I was reluctant to drill more holes - in fact, there would have been no point as I had already fixed the hinge about as low as it would go. So it was back to Mr Bricolage, where the staff had almost come to accept me as a permanent resident. I spent half an hour searching the shelves and found nothing that would help, but a nearby agricultural merchant had just the thing - a metal cylinder about an inch long with a screw thread at one end – not that I needed the screw thread. It was probably a part for a tractor, although goodness knows what part.

It had taken me a day and a half to hang those gates, a job which I had expected to take me no more than a couple of hours. There was no time on this trip to complete the next major job, which was constructing a pergola to provide a shady nook for meals alfresco, so I pottered around for a couple of days. One thing I did was measure the rooms (with extreme care) so that I could buy the wallpaper, although hanging it would have to wait until Emmanuel had finished the rewiring.

That green paint

2011-12-16T09:00:00.000Z

I digressed somewhat in the last post, so back to the subject in hand - that green paint.

I had carried the closed tin of paint across the bedroom and placed it on a thick pile of newspaper before opening it. It stayed on the newspaper until it had been tightly closed once again after I had finished the painting. The used brush had been removed from the room wrapped in newspaper. There was no way paint could have got anywhere other than where it was intended to go - on the shutters. So how was it that I later found a blob of that green paint on the floor on the opposite side of the room? That's what I meant by the paint having a malignant quality. No matter how careful I or anyone else was, green paint always ended up where it should not have been. We have found it on a rug in the downstairs bedroom, a rug in the living room, the kitchen door - even in the middle of my friend Chris's back! The gates are a case in point. I had painted them in the garage in England and they had been left three weeks before I took them to France. Most people would think that three weeks is long enough for paint to dry, but when I removed the gates from the car I noticed there were green smears on the carpet in the boot. They were still there when I sold the car two years later.

Being a contortionist would help

2011-12-15T08:58:00.000Z

I had discovered, on my previous trip, that the paint we had chosen for the external woodwork had a peculiar quality that was almost malignant. I had taken advantage of some reasonable weather to paint the shutters on the bedroom windows. It was easy enough to reach the shutters on the downstairs window, but the upstairs bedroom was a bit trickier. It didn't help that the ladder left by the previous owners was too short for the job - not that I like climbing ladders anyway as I have no head for heights. The only way for me to do the job was from inside the bedroom. This involved placing a step-stool on the floor beneath the window, a spot which just happened to be the most uneven in the whole room. Hard as I tried, I could not get all four feet of the stool to touch the ground at the same time. So I balanced precariously on the stool, pulled the right-hand shutter towards me and held it closed with my left hand while wielding a paintbrush in my right. Every time I climbed off the stool to recharge the paintbrush, the wretched shutter swung open and I had to lean out of the window to pull it back again.

There is no way that I can use a paintbrush in my left hand, so when it came to painting the other, left-hand shutter, I had to hold it in place with my left hand and reach across myself underneath my left arm to bring the brush into contact with the shutter. As before, the shutter swung open every time I recharged the brush.

Painting the other side of those shutters proved even more precarious. Another hand would have been a blessing as I had to stand with one foot on the wobbling stool and one on the window ledge with most of my body outside. I needed one hand to hold the shutter, one for the paintbrush - and another one to hang on for grim death!

I have now purchased a longer ladder.

That's better

2011-12-14T09:56:00.000Z

We decided to paint the window shutters, the gates and the outbuilding doors a deep, rich green and the new gates were duly painted before being transported to France. Naturally, all this took some time as it had to be fitted in between my weekly perambulations, but eventually the gates were taken out to France.

Removing the old gates was no problem - it was simply a case of lifting them off the brackets: removing the hinges for re-use on the new gates was a different matter. The nuts had rusted onto the bolts and gave every indication that they had been attached with something stronger than the strongest superglue I have ever come across. I made a trip to Mr Bricolage to buy what I hoped was penetrating oil, I visited the supermarket and bought some best butter, I even thought of asking the old lady next door to boil some olive oil for me. But the penetrating oil must have worked more slowly than I expected. As the sun sank through a glorious sky, the first nut started to move. Later, sipping a glass of wine as I waited for my escargots to be served, I couldn't help but feel a rather smug self-satisfaction - even if I was half a day behind schedule.

Gated

2011-12-13T09:30:00.000Z

I have always envied those people who have the ability to use their hands to play a musical instrument or to carve whistles and toys from odd pieces of wood. When I hold a tool I know what I want it to do and I am certain that I send the correct instructions down to my fingers. But somehow the instructions always seem to change subtly along the way. It's a bit like that old Chinese whisper game where the first child is told to repeat the message "Send reinforcements, we're going to advance", only to find that by the time the message has reached the end of the line it has changed to "Send three and fourpence, we're going to a dance". I've just realised that anyone aged under about forty-five will be quite unfamiliar with the old pounds, shillings and pence so perhaps in these days of decimal currency the message should be "Send thirty-four pence…".

But enough of this hilarity. I blame it on the fact that I did metalwork at school, woodwork not being an option. Woodwork would have been much more useful – I might even have learned how to use a saw to make a straight cut, something I can never manage. How often does one want to make a toast rack or a garden hoe, which is all I learned to make? Come to that, how many people have the equipment needed to heat metal sufficiently to make it workable?

I needed to replace the prison gates at Les Lavandes and all my attempts to buy ready-made five-bar gates had come to naught. The French don't make them. They do make a wide variety of plastic gates that would fit, but none of the designs suited Mrs S, and none of the prices suited me. It didn't take me long to discover that, in England, five-bar gates come in standard sizes, all of them in imperial measurements. Our gateway was a standard size - for France. It was a metric size. No gate that could be bought off the shelf in England would fit: I would have to design and make my own.

So I made a pair of wooden, five-bar gates to fit a three metre gateway. I even allowed for the hinge brackets that reduced the width of the gateway slightly. I was very proud of those gates. Indeed, they were such beautiful gates that I thought of offering them to the Design Centre to be put on exhibition. After all, most of the supposed right angles were pretty much ninety degrees and most of the saw cuts were nearly straight.

Napoleon said...

2011-12-12T09:11:00.000Z

Now the French always seem to me to be terribly blasé about their electrical wiring. Just look at the way it is strung between poles along the side of the street. Along country lanes I have seen the poles broken and bent with the electrical cable lying in a water-filled ditch. It is not unusual to see a single power point in a room with adaptors plugged into it and each other apparently at random with a maze of leads running round and across the room to power standard and table lights, television, radio, music centre and grandma's foot-warmer. The wiring in our house must have dated from a period even before blasé came into fashion. Cables from the main fuse board (we did at least have one of those, archaic though it was) were stuck to the walls with a substance remarkably similar to hair gel. These led to an occasional dodgy-looking power point and to fizzing light switches. Attention was required.

The owner of the restaurant in the village had given me the name and telephone number of the electrician he uses and I had arranged for Emmanuel to come and quote for the job of rewiring the house. Mrs S and I marked the walls where we wanted power points using a very gay pink-coloured masking tape.

Emmanuel arrived at exactly the time agreed and raced around the house in two and a half minutes flat. I explained that we had marked the walls where we wanted power points, to which Emmanuel replied that he had seen that.

"Would it be possible," I asked in what was probably execrable French, "to bury the wires in the walls?"

"Napoleon," he replied haughtily, "said that nothing is impossible."

"And if I accept your quote, when could you do the work? And how long would it take?"

"It would take four days, and I could possibly fit it in sometime around July."

Bear in mind this was in February. It had been October when we exchanged contracts to buy our French dream house. Even allowing for a three-month delay before completion of the purchase, we decided there would be plenty of time to undertake the fairly minimal restoration work needed – well, minimal compared with what we had seen in other houses – before we could start recouping what we had laid out by letting the house as a holiday home during the summer. We had placed advertisements and our first guests were due to arrive in mid-June. If the rewiring could not be done before then we had a problem on our hands. But Napoleon had said nothing is impossible!

I managed to stop myself quoting Napoleon back to Emmanuel but explained the predicament.

"OK," he said, smiling broadly. "17th April. I'll be here at nine o' clock."

I was so relieved that I agreed the date and time without even thinking. It was only later that I had reservations. So much later, that I was just getting into bed the following day when I realised we had apparently accepted a quotation we had not yet received. I lay awake worrying about the budget. Mrs S never seems to be bothered very much by minor matters like budgets and slept seraphically while I tossed and turned.

Although not exactly unconcerned about Emmanuel's quote, I had become resigned to the situation by the time we were back in England. It was a considerable relief a day or two later to see that his quote was nowhere near as high as I had thought it might be. That meant I could give my full attention to another matter.

Floored!

2011-12-11T09:06:00.001Z

My heart sank as I lifted the second layer of lino. It was clear that the floor underneath was comprised of terra cotta tiles and, as in the bedroom downstairs, these had been screeded over. And this room was almost half as big again as the downstairs bedroom. What's more, this screeding was anything up to an inch and a half thick. In fact it proved much easier to clear than the downstairs screeding. It seemed to be a different composition and it was a matter of digging it off with a shovel in same places and merely prising it off others. All the same, there were a few stubborn spots that needed scraping. Mrs S and I filled thirteen rubbish sacks, all of which had to be carried downstairs and dumped in the so-called garage along with the lino, the carpet and the wallpaper I had already scraped off the living room wall.

By this time the garage was getting quite full and I had not yet managed to locate a tip. While driving around I had deliberately taken a variety of routes, partly to see a bit more of the local area and partly in an effort to track down a décharge publique. Once I had bought a decent dictionary I discovered that I had been looking for the wrong thing all along. What I needed was a déchetterie, and I had seen three of those sign-posted!

This, however, was a minor problem compared to the floor of the upstairs bedroom. This was distinctly uneven with ridges and valleys up to three inches deep running from the front of the house to the back. That was not what concerned us – it added a bit of character, we told ourselves. Far more worrying was the hole right where people getting out of bed would put their feet. I must confess to a little exaggeration there. It was not really a hole, just three or four badly broken tiles, but the sand on which they were laid had mysteriously disappeared leaving the broken pieces considerably below the level of the whole tiles around them. A little thinking time was called for so I sat on the doorstep in the weak sunshine and smoked a cigarette. Two cups of coffee later, I was still without inspiration. I wandered back upstairs and gazed disconsolately at the hole. I think I might have been hoping that it was not really as bad as I had previously thought. I sighed and looked round the room. It was then I realised that the surface area of each tile was not much different from that of two house bricks laid side by side. All I had to do was bring over a sack of sand and a few bricks and my problem would be solved. By now my brain had shifted into overdrive and I quickly dug out some whole tiles from the corner of the room nearest the attic stairs, scooped out some sand with my mouse-removal trowel, and set to work to relay the damaged section of floor. Needless to say, it took me several attempts to get the level of sand right, but eventually I had effected a passable repair.

A few bricks in the corner did the trick nicely on a later trip, and we placed a chest of drawers over of the patch of bricks to obscure them from view.

The story continues

2011-12-10T09:42:00.000Z

"What story?" you ask. It's the story of Les Lavandes, the house we bought in France. I started the story here when it ran every day for about a week, then again here for another week, and again here. The last episode appeared here. For those who can't be bothered to turn back the pages (and it's not compulsory) or if you just want a quick recap, I had commuted my pension on retirement and we bought an old farmhouse on the edge of a small French village. It was basically sound but needed freshening up.

Two weeks later I was back in France, accompanied this time by Mrs S as our trip had coincided with the half-term holiday. No camping out for me this time; it would be a hotel or nothing for Mrs S until the renovation was much closer to completion and blow the budget, which is exactly what we did. But credit where credit's due, she did buckle down to scraping the floor tiles so that by the time we returned home the downstairs bedroom floor was perhaps ninety per cent cleared.

The floor of the upstairs bedroom was covered in a somewhat unhealthy looking linoleum. Even through a couple of centimetres of dust it looked a bit gruesome. It would have to go, all sixteen feet by twenty feet of it. For someone whose regular hard labour is pushing a pen, rolling up a twenty foot length of lino is not particularly easy. Picking it up is even worse. It took me three attempts to roll it in an almost reasonable fashion, but there was no way I could lift it to heave it out of the window. I went in search of my trusty old Stanley knife to cut it into smaller, more manageable pieces.

Maybe it is just something that happens to me, but no matter what I am looking for in my toolbox, it has worked its way underneath everything else and I have to empty the entire contents of the box before I find the tool I am looking for. This time was no exception, but at least I did manage to find the knife. Unfortunately, I did not find any blades. I could have sworn there were still two left in the packet and that the packet was in the tool box, but there was no sign of it.

I returned the tools to the box, except for the knife, and made the first of many trips to Mr Bricolage, the DIY store in Châteaubriant some twelve miles away. Back ‘home' again I put the Stanley knife back in the tool box and unwrapped the new one. Blades for my trusty old friend were not to be bought in any of the three large DIY stores in Châteaubriant and I had been forced to buy a new knife. But it did a superb job of cutting up the lino. Both layers. Did I mention that the floor was covered with a double layer of lino?

A holy conundrum

2011-12-09T09:36:00.000Z

It has, somehow, never seemed quite right to me that I should have to pay to go into a cathedral. It grates that I can't gaze in wonder at what has been built to the glory of God and offer my own humble prayer of praise and thanksgiving without having to pay several pounds for the privilege.

I was at one time a member of the Parochial Church Council and even a churchwarden so I do have some idea of where the cathedral powers-that-be are coming from and some considerable sympathy with their dilemma. Just like so many other countries, England is blessed with magnificent cathedrals (and some that are, frankly, less than magnificent). Some of the most glorious cathedrals are in small cities - Canterbury, Salisbury, Lincoln, Durham for example - and, indeed, in some cases they almost are the city. Somehow the city just would not seem right without them. But these buildings are old and require maintenance. The regular users - the congregations - are too small to be able to pay for the work needed. Ensuring a spire or tower stays up and doesn't fall through thr roof is not cheap. Even stopping gargoyles falling on the heads of passers-by costs a lot of money. And that is where the dilemma comes in.

The great cathedrals have become not the destinations of pilgrimages but tourist attractions. People visit Canterbury and Salisbury to see the cathedrals. Many, if not most of the visitors to these buildings see them as works of art, like Old Master paintings but on a larger scale. Those people don't see the cathedrals as offerings to the glory of a deity in which they don't believe anyway. So, why should they not contribute towards the upkeep of the buildings? The last cathedral I entered made no charge - Lichfield. There were boxes for donations and I did make a donation. However, that system has been tried and found wanting in other cities so turnstiles and tickets have become the order of the day.

Unfortunately, so great is the cost of maintaining these buildings that the entrance fees alone are insufficient. Go into many cathedrals now and the building almost resembles a covered market. There is a large book and souvenir shop offering not just devotional books but tea towels and mugs, postcards and pens. Even, in some cases, plastic Virgin Marys. There might be a tea shop in another corner. And if the visitor would like to climb the tower or descent into the crypt, that will be another pound please. Cathedrals have become big business.

But does the Church, be it Anglican or Roman Catholic or one of the Orthodox Churches, really need these buildings? Cannot God be worshipped in humbler surroundings? Granted, these buildings were erected to the glory of God, but I suspect they were also erected to the glory of some bishop or other long since dead and buried. Should the Church be looking to dispose of these religious stately homes, thereby saving themselves the cost of maintenance and allowing them to use funds to the benefit of people?

I suppose the big problem that would arise if there were any thought of selling such a building would be finding a buyer. The chances of any businessman being able to use the building for anything that would cover its costs and provide a profit are so slim as to be non-existent. So we fall back on the state or a cultural body such as the National Trust. But would the state want to take on the responsibility of caring for these medieval heirlooms, and could any body such as the National Trust afford to do so?

It will take a better brain than mine to sort out this problem.

Changing times

2011-12-08T09:30:00.000Z

Language is an ever evolving thing with words coming and going or just changing their meaning. Sometimes things happen overnight, or so it seems, and sometimes there is a gradual change. There are now many words in the dictionary that are described as being archaic and in my blog yesterday I used one that is on the way to being archaic. It is a word that many young English people would fail to understand so how ~~foreigners~~ non-English people Would cope is a matter of conjecture. The word concerned is half-crown.

Up until about 40 years ago the word was in common parlance, in everyday speech. As were tanner, bob and (to a lesser extent) florin. Then "they" went and changed our currency. Overnight those old, well-known friends became no more. Finished. On the scrap heap.

Well, not quite overnight. We had two days to effect the change from pounds, shillings and pence to pounds and pence. Even then the old coins must have remained in circulation for a while and the names remained in use. But now those words are going the way of the groat - and who nowadays knows what that was, apart from it being an ancient English coin. Of course, even before the switch to decimal we had lost the farthing.

Back in the old days, there were twelve pence in a shilling and twenty shillings in a pound. The penny had been divided into four farthings but, as I said, the farthing had been done in, put to death, some years before we went decimal. The halfpenny still existed, although it was never called a half penny: it was a hape knee - and was sometimes written ha'penny. The next coin was the penny, then there was the threepenny bit (or joey). Of course, this being England we are talking about, threepenny was never pronounced as it is written. It might have been thrupny or threpny or, more commonly, throopny ("oo" short as in foot not long as in loot). The next coin was a silver one, the tanner or sixpence piece. Then came the shilling, or bob. The two shilling coin was a florin. There was no coin for the crown (five shillings) except for special occasions such as the 1951 Festival of Britain or the coronation in 1953, but there was the half-crown, worth two shillings and sixpence (note that sixpence is/was one word, not two as six pence). The pound came as folding, paper money, as did the ten shilling note and the five pound note. There was also something called a guinea. This was a completely unofficial denomination worth twenty-one shillings (one pound one shilling) and it could be divided into two with half a guinea being ten shillings and sixpence (10/6).

And that - 10/6 - is how sums of money consisting of only shillings and pence would often be written in numeral form. There was also a semi-numeral form - 10s 6d. Throw pounds into the mix and and the numeral form changed and the stroke became a full stop - £6.18.3 or, in the semi-numeral form - £6 18s 3d.

I suppose it is simpler now in so many ways, but back then the pound could be divided in so many ways. Of course, inflation over the years has meant that we don't need to split the pound quite so much now. But I wonder just how much longer people will understand just how precious was that half-crown Pop used to slip into my hand.

Happy days

2011-12-07T10:55:00.004Z

Shopping for Christmas presents for grandchildren made me consider not only my relationship with them but also my relationship with my grandparents. And - quite obviously - by relationship I don't mean kinship: I'm talking about how we reacted with each other.

When I was but a weeny-bopper we lived next door to my maternal grandparents. Someone, probably my grandfather as my father had no DIY abilities and - like me - couldn't even knock a nail in straight, had made a gate between the two back gardens close up to the back-to-back coal sheds. That grandfather died when I was 9 and my memories of him are very limited. So limited indeed that I really have but one or two memories. Back in those days there was a paddle steamer called the Medway Queen (a Dunkirk veteran, I believe) which plied from the Sun Pier, Chatham, down the Medway and across the Thames estuary to Southend and back. One day, my grandfather (I don't even remember what we (my brother and I) called him: Grandad, Grandpa or whatever) took me on that trip. We must have caught a bus to Chatham High Street to reach the pier but I have no recollection of that. I do remember that my brother was not included on that trip, possibly considered too young.

[I have just been looking at a Google map pf Chatham. Grief, how it's changed! Mind you, it's probably 30 years or more since I even drive through the town and definitely over 50 years since I was actually in the town so it's not surprising that the roads I remember are not there any longer.]

The road I was looking for was where the old livestock market used to be held: The Brook. Our grandfather did take my brother and me there on several occasions and I can still remember the squealing of the pigs as their ears were nicked or pierced, presumably for identification purposes.

Having written that I'm having second thoughts about the location of the market. Was it in Chatham or Rochester? Not that it matters for the sake of this post.

And that, sadly, is all I remember about my paternal grandfather. His wife, Gran, is far easier to recall. She was a small lady (though not as short as my other grandmother) and wore a pinafore over her dress. She seemed always to be baking - rock cakes or buns - and many a warm delicacy was consumed in her kitchen. Every day she would wash the glass in the front door and polish the letter box, knocker and door step. She would spend hours playing board games with my brother and me - usually ludo but sometimes snakes and ladders. One corner of the living room contained a built-in cabinet. This has a cupboard at the bottom with two drawers side by side above. The cupboard above that was set back a bit to provide a narrow shelf. It was one drawer in particular that I found fascinating and would spend, it seemed to me, hours happily turning it out and rummaging through the contents. This was Gran's "bits" drawer where she kept bits of string, paper clips, the adhesive paper from the sides of stamps - anything which might come in useful one day and was small enough to be stowed away in this mini Aladdin's cave.

My maternal grandparents lived not far from the school my brother and I attended until we were 11. I have no doubt that in those years my grandfather, who was a shipwright, was still working in what was then His Majesty's Dockyard - this was a naval town. I know Pop was there at least sometimes when we visited because as we went out of the back gate (we never used the front door), he would surreptitiously slip a half-crown into my hand and another to my brother. My brother and I thought this was a secret on a par with state secrets, although we always told Mum later, but, of course, both Mum and Nan both knew very well what was going on.

Well, they were happy enough, those days, but I don't think I would really want to go back in time and live through them again. Life in the upper 60s isn't too bad.

It's six months today.

Lucky me

2011-12-06T15:44:00.002Z

Wowee! What an exciting day! Breakfast, wash up, walk the dog, coffee, check email, take the Old Bat to the butcher, the supermarket and two other shops for Christmas shopping (that involved fighting through the roadworks which seem to be paralysing Brighton at the moment), lunch, take the Old Bat to the surgery for the nurse to do the vampire act and take blood, walk the dog, coffee and - at last - I get a few minutes to read other blogs (and maybe write a few words on mine) before my meeting with the Housing Society general manager, after which I'd better iron those shirts that went through the wash this morning... Who says a woman's work is never done?

And there was no Bovril in the supermarket, but the whole world and his wife was!

I wonder if I will have any deep, philosphical thoughts tomorrow?

Nature notes

2011-12-05T09:11:00.001Z

Our next-door neighbour has a bird feeder hanging from the plum tree not far from either house and I take great pleasure in watching the various birds that come to visit. There are house sparrows, chaffinches, goldfinches, greenfinches and blue tits regularly on the feeder while robins, wrens, great tits, blackbirds and song thrushes hang around close by. A little farther away are the wood pigeons, magpies, jackdaws, rooks and herring gulls.

Most of the birds that use the feeder sit there on the perch and take what food they want before flying into the plum tree. The house sparrows, in particular, are messy eaters, always dropping crumbs. The blue tits act differently. They never try to get on the feeder while other birds are there, sitting in the tree patiently waiting their turn. When they do get on the feeder, they take a piece of food and carry it onto a branch of the tree. There they hold down the food with a claw while they eat it before going back for more. There's one in the plum tree as seen from my bedroom window.

A couple of days ago I mentioned a series of television programmes, Frozen Planet. I should have realised that there would be clips on Youtube and indeed there are, like this one:

Shopping list

2011-12-04T09:44:00.000Z

It seems ages since I last enjoyed Bovril on toast. Heck, it doesn't just seem ages - it is ages! It's probably even longer since I last enjoyed a hot Bovril drink.

Perhaps I'll buy a jar when I do the shopping this week.

Odd man out

2011-12-03T09:00:00.001Z

There are times when I feel a bit like that black sheep on one of my favourite ties. I'm most certainly not a black sheep in the usual sense of the term, the reprobate member of the family. Nor would I describe myself as a maverick. Not even particularly unconventional. On the other hand, I'm not exactly the spitting image of what many people from other countries would regard as the typical conventional Englishman. Let's just say that there are times when I like to stand out from the crowd.

It really only started when I was about 17. Back in those days it was the accepted thing for a boy to dress reasonably smartly to take a girl out, even if it was just for a coffee followed by the pictures. I had a Harris Tweed sports coat in a palish greenish colour and I would wear this with grey trousers and a white shirt. And a tie, always a tie. I had a range of woollen ties in plain colours - yellow, pale blue, light green, brown. These ties were, in those days, a little avant garde and wearing them was my way of expressing my individuality, of standing out from the crowd.

All through my working life I have tended to wear ties just a little brighter than most. Not gaudy, just different. Like the one in the picture.

That was part of the reasoning behind my growing a beard. I was working in a bank in those days and a bearded bank official (we were encouraged to describe ourselves as bank officials rather than bank clerks) was a distinct novelty, definitely "not quite the done thing". It was several years before I met another banker willing to look different.

I still have the beard but nowadays I rarely wear a tie. There must be 30 or more in the wardrobe and I really should chuck some of them out or send them to a charity shop - although many of them are unlikely to find buyers at a charity shop or even a jumble sale. Those ties are symptomatic of so much of my life. It really needs a good clearing out but somehow I just never seem to have to time. There's always something more important or urgent clamouring for my attention. One of these days...

But this is the first Saturday of the month and I must get myself off to the Lions book fair.

Some recent pleasures

2011-12-02T09:45:00.000Z

A documentary shown on one of our television channels the other evening proved fascinating. It covered a team of archeologists as they searched the remains of Stalag Luft III for the tunnels dug by POWs. Remember The Great Escape? This was where it took place and tunnels Dick and George were what the archeologists were hoping to find. Dick was the tunnel used in the escape and George was dug later but never completed. The team found George and the remains of some of the escape equipment but, sadly, Harry eluded them.

Good old Auntie Beeb comes in for a fair bit of stick but, to give her her due, she does make superb natural history programmes. David Attenborough's Frozen Plant has been running for several weeks - there is just one more episode next week - and has not disappointed. Magnificent scenic photography and wonderful close-ups, the penguin who turned to crime being especially memorable. The series is likely to be sold around the world so do watch it if you get the chance.

I seem to have taken less pleasure of late in my reading. Somehow the majority of the books I have borrowed from the library have not proved un-put-downable and it has been taking me over a week to read just one. Some have stretched out over a fortnight. However, there have been exceptions. Months ago I bought, with vouchers given as birthday presents, secondhand copies of John Master's trilogy, Loss of Eden. This is an epic work which, in my opinion, deserved much greater recognition than it received. It covers the lives of families of different classes caught up in the madness that was the First World War, the action being in both England and France. I have re-read the first of the volumes with much pleasure and am looking forward to enjoying the second and third, perhaps when we are in France ourselves in a couple of week's time.

More recently I have read books by two authors new to me. Andrea Badenoch's Loving Geordie is set in Newcastle in 1960. It describes the demolition of the slums and brings to vivid life some of the occupants of those slums: the Jew who escaped from Vienna, the war widow who turns to drugs and is an inadequate mother to her two sons, one of whom (Geordie) is autistic and loved and cared for by his elder brother.

I have not yet finished The First Casualty by Ben Elton. I had always thought of Elton as a stand-up comedian and had not realised he has written several books. If this one is typical, I shall be looking for more.

A word miscellany

2011-12-01T10:52:00.003Z

I usually enter the title of the post first and then try to keep to the point. OK, I know I sometimes - even frequently - drift off but I do try to get back again. Usually. Oh heck! I'm doing it again!

So I had thought to use the word "wordplay" as the subject of today's ramblings. I was just about to type it in the title space - indeed, I had got as far as "Wor" - when I had second thoughts. Now I'm beginning to wonder if I was right in the first place as what I think I'm going to write is a miscellany of thoughts about words. There are a couple of things that prompted these thoughts. And there's another thought just popped into my head. I typed "there are a couple". That sounds correct, but as "couple" is singular (even though it refers to more than one!) should I have typed "there is a couple"?

I told you this would be a miscellany, so don't expect anything like a smooth transition from one thought (paragraph) to another. The only thing that links any of this is that it is all about words. Or most of it is about words.

One of my pet irritations is people who should know better, such as television news reporters, using the word "less" when they mean "fewer".

Damn! The word I want has gone right out of my head! I'm sure it starts with a "p" - "para"-something or some such. It means a word that is spelt the same backwards as forwards, like "refer" or "tenet". They have long amused me (little things etc) but my favourite has always been the one some wag attributed to Napoleon: able was I ere I saw Elba.

Plurals provide us with some confusing oddities. Given that the general rule is to add an "s" to the singular, except when the singular ends in "y" when the "y" is knocked off and "ies" is added, why is the plural of sheep, sheep? And why does (do) fish sometimes becomes fishes and other times stay as fish? If the plural of house is houses, why are more than one mouse, mice? And the bird grouse stays as grouse when there are several, but when it mean a complaint, it becomes grouses. It's all just too confusing to explain in anything like a logical or reasoned way.

Talking of confusion,

"Palindrome". That's the word!

Back to confusion. I especially like those mnemonics we use to remind us of things. You know - "Richard of York gave battle in vain" for the colours of the rainbow. I tend to make them up myself to remember car numbers, and in that case, the whackier the better. For example, Climbing Mountains, 54 foolish men tumbled equates to CM54 FTM. That's not the number of a car I or anyone I know has ever owned but just something I made up as an example. It may exist - it's in the correct form - or it may not. Another I remember from way back is cows much straw: many cows abstain. This is a reminder of how to deal with magnetic variation when dealing with compass bearings and maps. When transferring a bearing from Compass to Map, Subtract the variation. From Map to Compass, Add the variation.

Now I suppose I had better try to think of a title.

Haggis Day

2011-11-30T08:59:00.001Z

OK, so I spoke too soon. Or, rather, I wrote too soon. I mentioned the other day that I had not experienced outages in my Internet (Why does that word start with a capital letter?) connection. You've guessed it. To add insult to injury, I have also been having trouble accessing my email contacts and I have an email to send to the members of Brighton Lions Club!

I share a peeve with Buck who was complaining about call centres being located on the Indian sub-continent. I, too, frequently have trouble understanding what I am told because of the accent. Indeed, a friend of mine asked for so many repeats that she was told by the operator that if she was hard of hearing he could increase the volume. Many British companies - well, some - are bringing their call centres back to the UK. I just hope they don't staff them with Glaswegians or Geordies. We'll be no better off if they do! I did hear somewhere that one can ask to be transferred back to an English office is a call to a help line ends up in India but I can't speak from experience.

About this time of the year I like to review the photographs I have taken during the year and select my favourite, a task which is much easier some years than others. This looks like being a difficult year. I have a short list of five (so far) but I still have more to look through.

Now that my American friends have Thanksgiving done and dusted for this year and we in the season of Advent, I feel safe in mentioning the next major holiday, Christmas. I have already made a start on the shopping having bought presents for two of the three grandchildren and one of the three children.

I asked my granddaughter (4 1/2) what she wanted for Christmas, expecting a torrent. I was astonished to hear her reply: "Nothing".

Reverting to the matter of peeves, I'm sure there are many who find it irritating to phone a company and be given a long, automated list of options. What really gets my goat is the fact that when I have pressed the button for my chosen option, the computerised mandroid starts telling me the next list before I have got the phone back to my ear! Eventually, if one is very lucky, one reaches an option which promises to find the only human in the company offices. That human, however, is trying to deal with a hundred or so calls and I, meantime, am being kept in a queue listening to Vivaldi and another irritating computer assuring me at regular intervals that my call is important but that all their agents are busy dealing with other customers. I sometimes wonder if the intention is to drive callers away. I quite often end up replacing the phone but there are days when I feel so liverish that I hang on until somebody is forced to listen to my complaint. It doesn't often do me any good. Indeed, it often just increases my frustration.

We should be eating haggis today. It's St Andrew's Day.

Musings on the BLT

2011-11-29T09:15:00.000Z

One of the other blogs I frequent is Exile in Portales where, the other day, Buck rhapsodised on the BLT, even going so far as to make that for his dinner. Reading that post - or, rather, looking at the pictures as there was very little text to be read - prompted a number of thoughts. I'm not entirely sure now just which was the first thought to enter what passes for my cerebral grey matter, but that, I suspect, is of little interest to my reader. Heck, it's of no interest to me either! So, random thoughts on the BLT - and possibly on sandwiches in general.

[No, I will not be commenting on the Earl of Sandwich (A pleasant little town in Kent, famous for its golf course - or maybe its golf links. I've never known the difference.) slapping a lump of meat between two slices of bread as he was in a hurry and had no time to sit down to a three-course meal.]

I first stumbled upon the BLT as the result of a train strike. At the time, I was living in Brighton and commuting daily to an office in London, heavily reliant on whatever the successor to British Rail was called. My job was general manager of a small newspaper company, which was run more or less as a partnership by the editor and me although we were answerable to a board of non-executive directors. Coincidentally, the editor lived in Hove, known to many as the posh part of Brighton although that's a downright calumny. The employees of the various rail transport companies decided on strike action just at a time when it was important for both the editor and me to be in the office. We decided to stay the night in London. The following lunch time we both went out to a pub and my colleague ordered a BLT. Now the editor was a real stick-in-the-mud when it came to food, although I don't think this was anything to do with him being a Lancastrian, and to hear him order something by what appeared to be a code name, something of which I had never heard, came as quite a shock. (As an aside, I had introduced him to spaghetti the previous evening, which just shows how conservative were his eating habits.)

But a BLT for dinner? That is another of those myriad little differences between us and the US. There may be fewer families sitting at the table to eat together these days, but very, very few English people would consider any sandwich sufficient for the main meal of the day. A sandwich is a lunch-time snack or would be served in a completely different guise for afternoon tea. Little triangles with the crusts cut orf, cucumber or egg and cress as the filling.

Talking of dinner, the Old Bat had, as I might have mentioned elsewhere, taken to her bed last Sunday. Our daughter was with us overnight and expected to be fed in the middle of the day before travelling back to her home in the Midlands. I managed to rustle up roast gammon, roast potatoes, French beans and broccoli followed by fresh pineapple. I'm not sure who was the more surprised - my daughter or me!

I've drifted and need to get back to the good old BLT. Bacon, yep, great. Preferably cooked crispy and preferably back bacon rather than streaky. Lettuce, mmm, OK. I'm not a great fan of salads, but will eat lettuce reasonably happily. But I much prefer my tomatoes cooked. I will eat them raw - if I have to or if they are served that way in a goat's cheese salad among other dishes - but I much prefer them grilled or even fried. And to eat a tomato with a cheese sandwich! Horrible!

One of the best sandwich fillings I have ever come across is bacon and avocado. Now that in itself is surprising as I don't like avocado, but while I was working for the newspaper company I ended up on the council of the Newspaper Society and sandwiches were served after one council meeting for a reason I don't recall. Among the fillings was this bacon and avocado. It wasn't only me who thought it great. Those sandwiches disappeared quicker than a snowflake in the Sahara.

And to think all that drivel was inspired by a picture of a BLT.

In vino etc

2011-11-28T09:38:00.000Z

I like a glass of wine with a meal (or, quite often, without a meal) both at home and when I dine in a restaurant. When I eat in a restaurant, I don't look at the wine list and order the second most expensive wine. I am reliably informed that people who know nothing about wine will often do that. They think that you get what you pay for and, therefore, the more expensive the wine, the better it is. So why, in that case, don't they just order the most expensive? But that would be showing off and is something that only the nouveau riche would do in order to impress their friends and acquaintances. So the second most expensive it is as they would hate to be seen as nouveau riche.

On the other hand, I don't plump for the second cheapest either. That, I am told, would show to the sommelier that I'm a cheapskate, but a cheapskate who doesn't want to be seen as one as I would be if I ordered the cheapest wine.

In fact, in a restaurant I very often do order the cheapest wine - the house wine. I reckon that the restaurateur has selected this wine as providing good value for money. He will not have selected a wine that will reflect badly on his taste.

It's much the same when I buy wine in a supermarket. I did at one time use a wine merchant but now buy nearly all my wine at French supermarkets. One thing I have found is that the supermarket wine buyers generally know what they are doing and, as a result, the supermarkets' own label wines are very often as good as if not better than other labels at twice the price.

Some years ago our local Asda held wine-tasting evenings. The price was very modest - a couple of pounds or so - because quite obviously the company hoped to increase the sale of wine, especially their own label wine! We met in the cafeteria where the visiting "expert" started by enthusing about wine in general before getting down to the serious stuff and opening a few bottles. That was when it started, all that talk about being able to smell gooseberries or the garrigue, taste lemon grass or wild cherry. Frankly, those tasting notes on the back of the bottles are just so much... Well, I'm not sure exactly what they are so much of, but they always seem to me to be a little precious or snobby. It might have something to do with my palate being insufficiently fine-tuned to be able to taste red berries or spices. But I don't care. I either like the wine or I don't. What some expert thinks about it is of little interest to me. After all, it's me who will be drinking it.

I suppose all this is just a long way of saying one man's meat is another man's poison, but it was nice to think about wine for a while.

This is drifty

2011-11-27T09:22:00.001Z

A child hit by a car travelling at 30mph stands an 80% chance of living. A child hit by a car travelling at 40mph stands an 80% chance of dying.

I sometimes think the world is passing me by. Just lately there have been references to the Russell Group of universities. Now, I have - until these recent references - never heard of such a group. Who? What? When? Having resorted to Mr W Ikipedia I find that this group comprises 20 of the UK's leading universities, but when and why it was established is still a mystery to me.

I'm probably tempting providence by mentioning the improvement I have noticed in my Internet access over the last few days. It was back in July that my ISP undertook "improvements" to its service and since then I have experienced intermittent loss of access, sometimes for just a minute or so, sometimes for several minutes. For a few days now there has been no interruption. I'm not holding my breath.

I said yesterday that I was supposed to have been on bingo duty for the Lions during the week. This is a service activity for Brighton Lions. Four times a month we send Lions into local retirement complexes to run an evening's bingo session. I say an evening but the bingo generally lasts only a little over an hour. We charge the participants 50p for a book of five tickets. For those five games we pay the magnificent sum of £3 for a line and £6 for a full house. Then we give another ticket to each player and for this game we use all the money the players have paid, one third for the line and two thirds for the house. We get up to about 20 players each evening and they very often stay behind for a chat - and maybe a glass of wine - afterwards to make a social evening of it.

As well as eating foods such as stews, casseroles and puddings, now it's getting colder we have switched to more solid, chewy wines. No longer the lighter reds such as Saumur Champigny or Cotes du Ventoux, now it's Fitou, Cahors, Cotes du Rhone.

That was the week that was

2011-11-26T10:25:00.004Z

There's a blast from the past! My title is the title of a satirical television show from many years ago - the early 60s, in fact - on which the young David Frost made his name. I didn't start out intending to write about ancient history and I could just as easily have misquoted Ronnie Barker's well-known line, "It's been a funny sort of day", as he closed up at the end of each episode of Open All Hours, a British sit-com.

Yes, it's been a funny sort of week.

(I'm posting this on the laptop while I back up my photographs from the desktop PC to a stand-alone hard drive. It says there are another eight and half hours to go!)

Anyway, back to the funny sort of week. The Old Bat felt unwell on Tuesday and stayed in bed, just coming downstairs for a couple of hours in the evening. Same again Wednesday, but on Thursday she forced herself out of bed in the morning although still not really feeling up to it. This is a strange sort of illness and, as she has had similar attacks at least twice already this year, I have persuaded her to see a doctor. She has an appointment next Wednesday, the first day her doctor of choice will be in the surgery. It's difficult to put a finger on just what is wrong: general listlessness and feeling unwell, lack of appetite etc. At the same time, I have noticed a sudden, sharp deterioration in her condition re walking etc. I was not aware that CBD could go in leaps and bounds with periods of stability in between in the same way that MS does, but that seems to be the case.

(Less than three hours left to back up the photos now.)

I'm no great shakes in the kitchen although if really pushed and up against it, I can manage to fry a couple of rashers. Anyway, I decided on Tuesday to treat myself to fish and chips. I particularly like fish and chips (but leave out the mushy peas, thank you very much) and have not had the dish for many months, maybe even years! We have a chippy quite close to us which was for many years owned by a Chinese lady. Nobody knew her real name and she was called Wendy by all her customers. She sold the best fish and chips in town - then one day she wasn't there. The new proprietors of the chippy didn't have Wendy's touch and the standard fell. When I went into the shop on Tuesday evening I saw that it had changed hands once again. The food seemed OK although still nowhere near as good as Wendy's, but it played havoc with my digestive system on Wednesday and I just had to take a chance to walk the dog. I was supposed to be calling bingo for the old folks in the evening but I didn't dare and had to arrange a stand-in. Wednesday's dinner was two slices of toast!

But come Thursday I was fine. I drove the OB to a village the other side of the Downs because we like the meat at the butcher's shop there and because she wanted to order the Christmas turkey. In the afternoon my younger son brought our granddaughter round after school. She was in splendid form. I don't really remember much of our own children at that age (she is 4 and a half) and it is wonderful to see her develop. Every grandparent thinks his/her grandchildren are the best in the world, naturally, but I am amazed at the extent of her vocabulary. Her reading is also very good and her mental arithmetic astonished me. I am so lucky to have all three of my grandchildren living so close and to be able to see them as often as I do.

Yesterday also had its interesting moments. The OB didn't feel like driving to Southwick for her regular seesion at the MS Centre so I took her. After I had done the shopping I drove to Old Shoreham. First stop was at the old church, St Nicolas, which is a Grade 1 listed building dating, in parts, from the 10th century. There are some interesting Norman arches in the tower and I was surprised by the number of war graves in the graveyard, both first and second wars, including one rarity, the war grave of a woman.

Then on to Mill Hill, out on the Downs, for a chance to photograph Lancing College across the River Adur. I have known for many years that there is a road out across Mill Hill to Truleigh Hill but I have never ever been there. The photos will eventually end up on the Stanmer photo blog.

History

2011-11-25T09:32:00.000Z

An American professor was recently reported as lambasting the way history is taught in Britain. One's first reaction was, "What's it got to do with him anyway?" but he is a professor of English history so maybe he does just about have an interest. He also has a point. I studied history through the O level GCE exam at 15 and on to the A level at 18 (in which I scraped a pass). But nowadays pretty much all I can remember is short list of dates - or partial dates as in many cases I can remember only the year in which the event occurred.

1066 - Battle of Hastings, a date most English people can remember as this was the last time anybody successfully invaded England.
1215 - Magna Carta. It's only in the last 12 months or so that this year has become embedded in my memory.
1605 or thereabouts - Gunpowder Plot. I can't remember the actual year but I know this was in the first 10 years of the 17th century.
1805 - Battle of Trafalgar. To my shame, I remember only that the battle was in October of that year.
1815 - Battle of Waterloo. June?
1837 - accession of Queen Victoria.
1914-18 - First World War.
1939-45 - Second World War.
1941 - Pearl Harbor attacked. November?
1952 - Queen Elizabeth II succeeded King George VI in February.

So much for the history of my country - and the world! I do remember having it drummed into us that the study of history - or, more specifically, the causes behind major historical events - could enable us to avoid similar tragedies. But I have no recollection of what lay behind the Peasant Revolt (I can't even remember when it was but Watt Tyler was one of the leaders) although I do have vague understandings of the causes of the Napoleonic wars and both world wars. I even know what caused the American War of Independence. At least, I think I do. Mind you, the chances of me ever being in a position to see the causes of World War I being repeated and also being in a position where I could say, "Whoa! We're heading straight for World War III: let's just take a minute to rethink" are about as good as my chances of winning £10 million on the Eurolottery. And that's nil as I have never bought a ticket and never will.

I suppose when we think of history we automatically think of those big events - Agincourt, the Civil War (English or American), the Battle of the Somme and the like. One of the most interesting history lessons I can remember - indeed, the only one I can remember - was about Nelson's tactics in the battle of Trafalgar. It was the minutiae, the nitty-gritty, rather than the great sweep of world affairs - and it was this that was, to me, so interesting.

This fact - that the small, everyday matters are more interesting than the so-called important happenings - was brought home to me one year during a holiday on the island of Jersey. The Old Bat and I had visited a place called Hamptonne Farm. Hamptonne Farm was a country life museum (it still is) brought to life with characters from the island's past. A bit like a small Old Sturbridge or Strawberry Hill. When we visited there was a wonderful woman in the kitchen who claimed to be the housekeeper/cook. She really played her part extremely well and had the children in the audienc rapt. The adults were pretty interested as well.

And that really illustrates what I am trying to say. History is not just the story of world leaders; it is also the day-to-day story of you and I. The trouble is that so much of that fascinating story is lost to us. Or if not lost completely, it is devilish hard to find. We pour, entranced, over a ledger detailing household expenditure in the 18th century, but what are the chances of anybody keeping such detailed records now? What games children played, how food was prepared, how a heavy sleeper was woken before alarm clocks were available to farm labourers: all this is what people want to know even if they don't know that they want to know it. That is why it is so important that we attempt to record at least some of our daily lives for our children's children to read. Skip's post earlier this week does the job superbly.

I almost forgot...

2011-11-24T11:24:00.000Z

...to wish my American readers a happy Thanksgiving.

Whistle down the wind

2011-11-24T08:25:00.000Z

Oh deary me indeed. I've lost my whistle. I lost it about a week ago. There I was, walking through the woods in the park when I wanted to call the dog who had wandered off through the trees to investigate some foul smell or other. I pursed my lips prettily, as one does when one wants to whistle, and blew. And what came out? A feeble little peep, a piccolo compared to the trombone blast I generally manage. So feeble was it that Fern didn't even hear it, and she has very sharp hearing (when she wants - it is somewhat selective). I didn't worry about it; after all, when one reaches my advanced age various things don't always work quite as well as they once did. There had been previous occasions when my whistle had failed and within a few minutes things had returned to normal. But it's been a week this time. Will I be destined to go through the autumn and winter of my days without the ability to whistle? Will I have to relearn the art?

One doesn't hear whistling very often these days. There was a time when delivery boys, milkmen, postmen at el would whistle as they walked the streets. Of course, there aren't the delivery people walking or cycling the streets now that there were some sixty years ago when I remember the baker passing regularly with his horse-drawn van, the milkman with his electric float (I think), the postman and the paper boy. I don't even hear people whistling their dogs very often now; they shout, or use some strange type of castanets or clappers.

Whistling used definitely to be discouraged on board ship, if not entirely banned. Sailors were a very superstitious crowd (they may still be so for all I know) and it was thought that whistling on board ship was unlucky. Or so the story goes. I think it was frowned on because it could have been confused with the bosun's call. But didn't sailors caught in the doldrums whistle in the hope of calling the wind? Or am I just getting confused as normal?

I don't know if it is the same in other navies, but in our Royal Navy the bosun's call is still used, both to preface an announcement of the tannoy and as a greeting to important visitors to the ship.

When we acquired our present dog, I determined that I was not going to walk through woods and parks shouting at her to come. She would learn to respond to a dog whistle, one of those high-pitched instruments that dogs can hear but that are inaudible to humans. Having bought one, we were uncertain if it really did produce a note when blown. We couldn't hear anything, and Fern was taking no notice of it. I discovered that it could be adjusted so that the tone was audible - just - to the human ear. This adjustment was achieved by unscrewing slightly the two halves of the whistle. But this left the two halves susceptible to falling apart completely - and that is indeed what happened. Somewhere under the autumn leaves of Stanmer a half dog whistle may some day be found. I bought another but we very soon gave up even bothering to take it with us when walking the dog. I can't remember why that was, but I then started pursing my lips instead of calling the dog by mechanical means. Now I've lost my whistle perhaps I should go back to carrying the one hanging on a length of string beside Fern's lead.

Versatility in action

2011-11-23T09:43:00.000Z

In the way-back, someone was ~~fool enough~~ kind enough to bestow an award upon us, an award which proclaimed us a versatile blogger. We suspect that we were selected just to make up the numbers, but we were touched and honoured all the same.

(Pause for going off at a tangent. "Touched": I had to write "honoured" as well just to make sure no reader thought I meant round the bend because "touched" can mean that as well as overcome by emotion.)

We do try to offer a variety of subjects in our miserable scribblings but today we intend to go farther than we have ever gone before. To do so we will travel by bus. Not the great six-wheeler, diesel-engined monarch of the road beloved by Messrs Flanders and Swann, the London Transport omnibus, but a similar object. Ours, however, is dressed in a red and cream livery rather than the plain red overcoat as worn in London. I refer to the vehicles in the fleet of Brighton & Hove Bus and Coach Company Limited.

Every bus in their fleet is named. And I don't mean names like Bluebell, Daisy or Skylark. Nor names of famous landmarks such as Arundel Castle. Our buses have human names - real human names like Virginia Woolf, Dusty Springfield and Rudyard Kipling. And how are the names chosen? According to the bus company's web site:

...since 1999, every new bus that has entered the fleet has been named. The main criterion for inclusion is that the deceased person made a significant contribution to the area or had a strong connection during their lifetime. As more contemporary names have been suggested another criteria is that the person has been deceased for at least a year.

The names are painted on the fronts of the buses so they can be something of a danger, presenting an opportunity for on-coming drivers to try to read the names and ponder on what the named person did for Brighton, or even just who the person was. Many a name means nothing to me. A book has been published listing all these so-called prominent people - or one can simply check out the bus company's web site which carries a list of the names and the numbers of the buses to which they have been allocated. Each name also provides a link to another page giving a potted biography of the person concerned.

Sauce for the goose - or the hoki

2011-11-22T09:30:00.001Z

We here in England (and that might be a regal "we" - which means "me". No, it means "I".) Anyway, I always think of boiled potatoes as a rather boring part of a meal. Granted, yes, they are necessary to bulk out the more interesting food... No, we could have rice or pasta. But mashed potatoes always seem to have more flavour. probably because they have butter, milk and a little pepper mixed in. Well, they do in our house. If I'm making them they are just as likely to have some chopped garlic as well. Actually, we don't have plain boiled spuds very often. We might have potato wedges, or something I call hatchback (I think the proper name is something like hasselbad) or even potatoes in their jackets. With roast meat it is always roast potatoes.

I once asked an American friend why he waxed so lyrical about mashed potatoes served with his roast turkey at Thanksgiving. It just seemed wrong to me. Roast turkey and mashed potatoes? No, the flavours don't blend as well as they would were the potatoes to be roasted as well. His reply was that the mashed potatoes soak up the gravy better. Granted, there's no arguing with that. But I still prefer the idea of roast potatoes - partly, perhaps, because I never take gravy with a roast dinner. In fact, I rarely take gravy at all, unless it be with plain boiled potatoes!

I have never been offered gravy in France, where I eat in restaurants every night while we are there. The French are likely to serve any meal with sauce of some description. Indeed, it used to be the belief of every right-thinking Englishman that the French had to smother their meat in sauce because the meat was so bad. Actually, their beef is generally pretty awful but I have found one restaurant where it is good. But sauces are used a lot more in France than here in England. A favourite meal in one particular restaurant is turkey escalope. This used to be served with a delicious mushroom sauce (escalope de dinde Normande) but earlier this year the dish was described differently on the menu (escalope de dinde Vallée d'Auge). The sauce was even better and I asked what it was based on. Cider, I was told.

Florence, the cooking half of the couple who run the village restaurant, produces wonderful sauces. I often have the fish when we eat here. It's described on the menu as what was bought in the market, ie pot luck, but as it's nearly always hoki, a New Zealand fish, I doubt if it has ever seen the local market! But never mind, I like hoki which has a firm, flaky flesh not unlike cod. Florence used to serve it in a buttery sauce (one of our guests described this sauce as "to die for"), now it's a sauce Provençal, but in between she made a sorrel sauce.

Now the Old Bat was very taken with that sauce in particular and decided she would like to make it herself. We searched French supermarkets, English supermarkets and greengrocers for sorrel. There was none to be bought. We searched garden centres for plants, but there were none. However, while looking for something else last spring, I came across sorrel plants in a French garden centre. We bought a pot. That plant is still on the patio in the pot it came in and we have still not had a sorrel sauce. Maybe one day.

My reward

2011-11-21T09:48:00.000Z

Have you noticed the difference? I finally finished the minutes yesterday by promising myself a few minutes (sorry - the pun is not intentional!) playtime. The result is the new look blog. I had been thinking that the bright blue sea I was using as a background courtesy of Blogger was not really right. Here in England we rarely see the sea that shade of blue. It's mostly grey - as in the picture above which I took on Brighton beach earlier this year. We would need much bluer skies than we usually have to have the sea a true blue. Mind you, I seem to remember that the day I took that photo was a sunny one.

Interesting that a few words about food - in particular, mention of specific dishes - drew a few comments from the woodwork. This links in with a reference Skip made to a forum on which he and I 'met' electronically way back when. That was in the days before all these social networking sites. This particular forum was intended for discussions of matters concerning Lions Clubs but it quickly degenerated into covering this, that and the other. The threads that gathered the most posts always seemed to be about food.

If it hadn't been for that forum, this would never have happened in Maryland in 2002:

Followed by this in Detroit in 2004:

And this in San Francisco in 2006:

This Interthingy truly is wonderful, but it needed the finishing touch of the Lions Clubs to bring it all about.

Just a minute

2011-11-20T09:19:00.000Z

I have a feeling that today's post would be very suitably titled "Drifty", but since I am going to start off by moaning about minutes, perhaps what I have typed up there won't be too far from the theme, or the main theme if I do drift away.

In my last employment one of my jobs as company secretary was to produce the minutes of board meetings. Those meetings were invariably held in the morning and I liked to get the minutes written up that afternoon. At the latest, the job had to be done the following morning. There was no particular reason for such promptitude; I just preferred it that way. Besides, for some strange reason, the longer the job was left undone, the greater was my reluctance to start it. That might have been the thinking behind my action the one time I wrote the minutes before the meeting. All I had to do was ensure that the chairman steered things the way they had been written. It worked pretty well and there was little that need re-writing.

I am currently minute secretary for Brighton Lions Club. Our monthly meeting was held last Wednesday evening and in the usual way I would have written the minutes on Thursday morning. But on Thursday morning I had to take part in the annual staff appraisals for the Housing Society. That took all morning. After lunch I had to walk the dog, then the Old Bat and I had to go out to buy a birthday present for the grandson who was 5 yesterday. I did make a start after that - I got as far as listing those present and the apologies - but then No 2 Son and granddaughter came through the kitchen door. Oh well, I thought, Friday morning will do. But on Friday, the Old Bat wanted a lift to the MS Centre and for me to do the shopping. Friday morning gone. Walk the dog, fire up the computer, with just enough time to write a little more before taking the Old Bat to the doctor. Bang went the rest of Friday afternoon - and I was blowed if I was going to write minutes in the evening. Anyway, that would not have gone down too well with She Who Must Be Obeyed.

Saturday dawned and there was just the dog to walk, library books to change and a hot water bottle to buy. (That latter was the doctor's prescription for curing the Old Bat of her painful back. He did also provide a prescription for painkillers but finished by saying that time is a great healer. In other words, there wasn't really a lot he could do.) In between, I managed to write a bit more. But now it's boring, a real chore rather than just one more thing to be done - if you know what I mean. If you don't, well, don't let it worry you.

So here we are. It's Sunday morning and I still have those wretched minutes to write. Once that's done I have the notes of the staff appraisals to write up, letters to be sent to all staff as three-quarters of them (that's three out of four staff) are changing their hours and all have salary changes.

Then there's... You don't want to know what else is on the list. I'm trying to forget it as well.

Hey, I've just realised. I haven't drifted!

Food - at last!

2011-11-19T09:09:00.000Z

Well, I have been reading blog after blog full of memories of Thanksgiving Days past and they seem to concentrate on the food. There are usually mentions of getting together with family members, but food seems to be the main priority.

(Before you all start bombarding me with comments I'll confess to having written that bit with my tongue planted firmly in my cheek.)

I might have said that pumpkin pie is unobtainable in England were it not for the fact that when I was shopping yesterday (the Old Bat's back was playing up so I had to toddle off to Tesco) I spotted this delicacy in the delicatessan. Not that I consider pumpkin pie a delicacy: I don't like it. Does that count as sacrilege to my American friends and acquaintances?

And there have been various references to what sounds to me like a most peculiar concoction. A jelly with nuts and vegetables in it? Now I know that jelly is another of those words that means something different each side of the Atlantic. Come to that, it means two different things in England - if not three! As foodstuff goes, the first thing most English people think of is a fruit-flavoured dessert made by melting a cube of rubbery-stuff in boiling water, pouring the resulting mixture into a mould and cooling it before turning out onto a plate. Perhaps the simplest way of describing this is to post a picture.

Then there is a type of jam - bramble jelly, for example. This is basically a jam that has been strained to make a preserve very similar in appearance to the fruit jelly above. But you knew all that, didn't you?

Jelly and blancmange were always the centre pieces of birthday party teas when I was a child. My grandchildrens' birthday party teas seem much more likely to feature sausages, crisps and other savouries than the sweet things of my youth.

What I had really intended monologuing about was winter warmers. And I don't mean long johns or woollen underwear. With the colder days now only just around the corner (they should be here already but it still seems unusually mild) we will be looking for those heavier, more solid meals. Out with the rabbit food and salads, in with the steak and kidney puddings, beef wellington and hearty stews.

Puddings. There is such a variety. My mother used to make a ginger pudding that the Old Bat, superb cook though she is, has never managed to copy. It was a suet pudding of some sort, I think, and was (of course) served with custard. Jam rolypoly (again, with custard) is another great British traditional pudding, and spotted dick. Our friend Wendy lives in France and for some time she had a stall at various markets where she sold chocolate puddings she had made (along with jars of marmalade) and the French eventually came to appreciate at least one British culinary favourite. They have recently started serving apple crumble but theirs is cooked in a pastry case as a tart and is served with ice cream instead of custard.

Of course, the French don't do custard. They think they do - they call it crème anglaise - but it's thin and watery and served cold.

Anyway, back to Thanksgiving. We don't have it over here in England, as you know, but it won't be long till Christmas (he he he! That should wind Suldog up!) when we can enjoy roast turkey with roast potatos, Brussel sprouts, pigs in blankets, etc etc followed by Christmas pudding, mince pies and brandy butter. Then there's Christmas cake to come...

Fireworks

2011-11-18T12:38:00.002Z

I mentioned - nearly two weeks ago - that the Brighton Lions fireworks display went off very satisfactorilly. The display lasted about 45 minutes. Unlike the display at Oban, Scotland. This was supposed to be a 30-minutes display but a technical hitch set all the fireworks off in less than a minute.

Food

2011-11-17T09:19:00.000Z

I started off the other day intending to chat about food but I got sort of side-tracked, tangented. That's a good word, isn't it? It's one of my own invention and means sent off on a tangent. That's one thing that is done quite a lot in our house. Inventing words, I mean. My wife (otherwise known as the Old Bat, She Who Must be Obeyed, 'Er Indoors and various other terms of endearment) has probably invented more words than William Shakespear himself. (The name - Shakespear - had got a twiddly red line under it but I'm sure it is one of the permitted variations of the Bard's name. Even he used different spellings from time to time. A bit like my 7 x great grandfather - and his son and grandson - who had several different ways of spelling Waldegrave. It was sometimes Waldgrave, sometimes Walgrave, or Walgrove, or Woldgrave etc etc.) Now, where were we? Oh yes, the Old Bat's propensity for inventing words.

Actually, that's not right. She doesn't really invent words, she uses existing words in new ways. It's usually a matter of turning a noun into a verb. For example, whereas you or I might well put garden rubbish into a black sack, the Old Bat would say, 'I'll black sack it'. See? She's turned "black sack" into a verb. Ok, split hairs if you must. I did say she uses nouns as verbs and there she has used both a noun and an adjective - but the principle remains the same.

Talking of being tangented, have you noticed that Blogger has changed the colours of the "new post" screen? Anyway, food.

In my abortive post about food, I mentioned that here in Brighton we have a lot of restaurants. I don't actually eat in restaurants very often here in England so I can't be too dogmatic about the way English people act when they go to restaurants. There is one quirk I have noticed about French people. You get a party of, say, four or six - or it could be 24, it really doesn't matter - shown to a table in a restaurant and handed copies of the menu. Each of them immediately puts down the menu without opening it and starts to talk. Some minutes later, the waiter (or waitress, there's no sexism involved) comes by to take their order. At that point, the party realise they were supposed to have looked at the menu and, as one, they pick them up - and proceed to read every word on every page. With the à la carte as well as several fixed-price menus, this could easily involve half a dozen pages. Every word will be read, including the lunch-time only menu - despite the fact that it is now 8.15pm. Then each member of the party will need to discuss a different dish with the waiter (or waitress - there's still no sexism involved).

A party of English people are shown to their table and handed the menu. They immediately open said menus, quickly glance down the à la carte section and turn to the cheapest fixed-price menu available. It just so happens that there is one dish in each course that is particularly well-liked. Decision made, the menus are put down and the party chats until the waiter (or - well you know) arrives to take the order.

We still haven't really got around to food and now I've got to go out to do staff appraisals for the Lions Housing Society. Perhaps we will get round to food tomorrow.

Another difference

2011-11-16T09:51:00.000Z

I may well be misquoting him, but I think it was Winston Churchill who said the Britain and America are two nations separated by a common language. Or something like that. Actually, our "common language" can lead to some humerous misunderstandings, although I'm blowed if I can think of any right now. I suspect that all who read this know that the car boot is the same as the trunk and bonnet = hood (in terms automobilic). Sidewalk = pavement and pavement = road. Chips = crisps and fries as well. Confusing, isn't it?

Far more confusing the a Brit who dares to drive in the States are the different rules of the road, in particular the rule about overtaking and which lane to drive in. In Europe (not just the UK) the rule is that on a multi-lane road one keeps to the nearside except when overtaking. In England that means keeping to the left. In the rest of Europe, to the right - as it would be in the States. None of this cruising along in the second lane when the first is empty. Stay in the right-hand lane, pull out to overtake (pass) a slower vehicle, then move back. (In France they tend to start moving back even before they have completely passed one - which is highly disconcerting.)

It follows from the above that one does not pass another vehicle on the other driver's nearside. In Europe, I mean. Driving on a motorway/autoroute/autobahn/freeway in the States, I found it strange that I was expected to stay in the same lane regardless of whether lanes to my right were empty or not and that other vehicles were as likely to pass on my right as my left.

I even got worried just watching that video on Skip's blog the other day!

Food

2011-11-15T09:58:00.000Z

It seems a long time since we mentioned food in our morning conversations. Well, alright - I mentioned crème brûlée yesterday but that wasn't really the subject of the conversation. Conversation? Hardly. Monologue would perhaps be a more accurate description. So, it seems a long time since one of my morning posts was about food. Is that better? Are my pernickety readers satisfied now? Hah! Did you notice? I referred to readers (plural). Ever the optimist.

Well now, dear reader, if you were to visit Brighton and I were to take you to a different restaurant for dinner every day of your stay, you could stay for over a year and still not visit a restaurant twice. Throw in all the pubs that serve food (as opposed to pork pies, salt and vinegar crisps and small packets of peanuts) and you could extend your stay to two years. Brighton - or, more specifically, the city of Brighton & Hove - is supposed to have more restaurants per thousand inhabitants than any other town or city in Britain, except for London. And I reckon we give London a run for its money.

Not only is there a wide range of establishments for dining, there is also a very wide range of cuisines. We have French restaurants and Italian, Chinese and Indian, Thai and Mongolian, Turkish and Greek, Spanish, Japanese, American. And English, of course. Actually, that "of course" is extraneous; there is no "of course" about it. Well, perhaps there is now, but twenty years ago there wasn't. We had a young Frenchman staying with us for the better part of a year. I think he was about 21 at the time. He was a typically French charmer but had come to England expecting it to rain every day and actually dreading the food. He got sunburnt on our beach and quickly decided that English food and cooking was far, far better than he had been told. He wanted to visit a restaurant where the food was traditional English but we had great difficulty in finding such a thing. Nowadays there are carveries where one can eat a roast dinner (traditionally English) every day - and sometimes for silly prices that are almost less than it would cost to provide the same meal at home.

We also seem to have quite a wide range of nationalities owning our restaurants. At one time they were mainly Greek Cypriot - and they are still around - but of course we also have Chinese and Indian/Pakistani although a lot now are Iranian. Our local Italian restaurant is staffed by Albanians.

Well, somehow I haven't really mentioned food today either, apart from a glancing blow. There's always tomorrow!

Then the gas ran out

2011-11-14T08:51:00.000Z

Our French house is centrally heated by gas but we are not connected to the main, or town gas as they call it over there. We have a big tank in the courtyard and a gas tanker comes round every so often to fill the tank if necessary. It's great - I don't even have to call the supplier, although should we run short between the gas man's visits I can phone and a tanker calls round the next day. What is not so great is the price. To fill the tank can cost 900 euros, which generally translates into £750-£800. That tends to last about a year, depending on how often there are people in the house during the winter and how cold the winter happens to be. Actually, the current tankful seems likely to last for two years. Here in England, however, our house is connected to the gas main. But that doesn't power the Old Bat's gas gun.

She (the Old Bat) only uses the gun when she makes crème brûlée, which she did yesterday. Unfortunately, when she went to burn the sugar, the gas ran out. Finishing a crème brûlée under the grill of an electric oven just doesn't work properly so I promised to call in at B & Q on my way home after walking the dog. There in the plumbing supplies section I found a suitable bottle of gas. Back home, I changed the gas bottle and the OB lit the gun to brûlée the crème. Well, she tried to light the gun. With the gas turned up quite a long way, it lit, but as soon as the lighter was removed, the flame went out and the gas merely hissed out of the bottle. Perhaps, we thought, the butane/propane mix was not right given that the bottle of gas was from a different manufacturer.

I charged down to an independent hardware store in the village, arriving only a few minutes before they shut. I didn't have time to fiddle about finding a proper parking spot and took a chance, parking on the bus stop. The lady in the hardware store knew immediately what I wanted when I explained that the OB was making a crème brûlée and I was soon on my way back home.

Would you believe it? This canister behaved in exactly the same way as the other. Or almost exactly. The flame stayed alight until the volume control was touched, when it was immediately extinguished. The problem must, we decided, lie with the gas gun and not the gas.

It was too late to attempt to buy a gas gun so we had an unbrûléed crème brûlée. But we do now have a spare gas canister so if one runs out when the Old Bat is making crème brûlée on a Sunday afternoon we can just swap it over.

We will remember

2011-11-13T08:50:00.001Z

The official Remembrance Day in England is today, the second Sunday in November, and has been for a good many years. I always think it a shame that we no longer stop the country at 11.00 on 11 November, although there is a growing movement to return to that tradition. The move to a Sunday for the services of remembrance means that the Royal British Legion's Festival of Remembrance is always held on the eve of Remembrance Day. This takes the form of a small military tattoo in the Royal Albert Hall in London followed by a service of remembrance during which there is a two-minute silence while poppy petals are dropped from the roof of the hall - one for each serviceman killed in action since 1914. Before the entertainment part, squads representing the various branches of the armed forces march into the arena and take their seats. I always find the entrance of the war widows especially moving and it always leads me to think of Nell.

I was still living with my parents when Nell, her mother and her son moved into the house next door. Nell and her mother were Londoners. Not Cockneys - they came from the wrong side of the Thames, from Bermondsey. They could just as easily have been Cockneys, demonstrating the same joie de vivre and loving a good knees-up with a crate of stout. Nell had two sisters, one of whom lived just a couple of miles away across the valley and the other of whom (together with her husband) later bought a bungalow down our road. Oddly, whereas Nell was always cheerful, Charlotte - the one who bought the bungalow - seemed permanently miserable.

Nell and Charlotte (Lottie) had married brothers and Lottie's husband owned a garage in Hove. Lottie was the manageress of a supermarket and it was she who gave me a job to get me off my paper round. But that's another story.

Nell's husband was a Second Lieutenant in the Durham Light Infantry and was killed in North Africa in 1942: he never saw his son, Alan, who was the same age as me. Nell never remarried and raised Alan on her own, working as a barmaid to earn a living.

Alan went on to attend university and landed a good job with IBM. He was transferred to the USA so Nell saw her two grandchildren only infrequently - and even less frequently after Alan's marriage broke down. Alan was transferred again, this time to Japan. It was in Tokyo that he died of alcohol poisoning.

Despite the loss of her son and the death of her mother, Nell remained unfailingly cheerful, although Parkinson's disease was by now making life uncomfortable and difficult. It was always a pleasure, whenever I visited my mother, to call in to spend a few minutes with Nell.

Nell would have been horrified at any suggestion that she should take part in anything like the Festival of Remembrance which would entail a public display. To her, grieving was something done in private. Nell's life was not an easy one but she showed many of us how to face up to problems and defeat them. I have no picture to commemorate Nell but the following is taken from the web site of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

In Memory of

Second Lieutenant ALEXANDER STEPHEN GAZE
214646, 8th Bn., Durham Light Infantry

who died
age 28

on 12 June 1942

Son of Alexander Christopher and Frances Maude Gaze, of Bermondsey, London; husband of Emily Eleanor Gaze, of Portslade-by-Sea. Sussex.

Remembered with honour

KNIGHTSBRIDGE WAR CEMETERY, ACROMA

Commemorated in perpetuity by
the Commonwealth War Graves Commission

Titles

2011-11-12T09:09:00.000Z

Our heir to the throne rejoices in many tiles: Prince of Wales, Earl of Chester, Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles and Prince and Great Steward of Scotland.

In Vanuatu he is known as "Nambawan pikinini blong Missus Kwin".

On a tour of various regions of Africa this week he was given another. The Masai have crowned him "Oloishiru Ingishu", "he whom the cows love so much that they call for him when they are in times of distress".

My old granny used to say that she didn't mind what she was called as long as it wasn't late for her dinner. I hope Prince Charles feels the same.

In case you didn't get it, that Vanuatu title is pidgin for "Number one piccaninny belonging to Mrs Queen".

In Memoriam

2011-11-11T01:01:00.000Z

The Menin Gate stands in the Belgian city of Ieper (Ypres), at the point where many British and Commonwealth soldiers left the city to march to the front line in World War I. The gate was built to commemorate the many thousands of those soldiers who never returned and who have no known grave. (Much more information here.)

The Menin Gate stands over a major road in the city, but every night since 1929 (except while the city was occupied by German troops in World War II) the road is closed at 8.00 and buglers from the Belgian fire brigade play the Last Post. Sometimes there are just a handful of spectators, sometimes as many as two or three hundred - people from all European countries, from Australia and New Zealand, South Africa and Canada. The ceremony lasts just a few minutes but is an immensely moving tribute.

We Shall Keep the Faith

by Moina Michael, November 1918

Oh! you who sleep in Flanders Fields,
Sleep sweet - to rise anew!
We caught the torch you threw
And holding high, we keep the Faith
With All who died.

We cherish, too, the poppy red
That grows on fields where valour led;
It seems to signal to the skies
That blood of heroes never dies,
But lends a lustre to the red
Of the flower that blooms above the dead
In Flanders Fields.

And now the Torch and Poppy Red
We wear in honour of our dead.
Fear not that ye have died for naught;
We'll teach the lesson that ye wrought
In Flanders Fields.

Ther are many videos of the Menin Gate Last Post on YouTube - this is just one of them.

Nature notes

2011-11-10T09:42:00.001Z

My neighbour has a bird feeder hanging from a tree not far from the house. Although we can't see the feeder from our downstairs windows, it is in full view from our bedroom and I always look towards it when I open the curtains in the morning. I generally go to the window and watch for a few minutes whenever I go into the bedroom during the day. Until recently, our resident squirrel was often to be seen hanging upside down as he helped himself to whatever had been put out for the birds but Evelyn now has a thin like a small parrot cage in which the feeder hangs. The cage has gaps between the bars which are big enough for the smaller birds but through which the squirrel just cannot squeeze himself. As one would expect, the feeder attracts quite a number of birds, both in quantity and in variety. We regularly see house sparrows, blue tits, great tits, chaffinches, greenfinches and goldfinches at the feeder while robins, hedge sparrows, wrens and blackbirds are not far away, along with the larger wood pigeons, jackdaws, magpies and herring gulls.

House sparrows are supposed to be in decline with numbers falling quite dramatically. I find it difficult to say whether our numbers have dropped, but we still have a good many around. What we are missing these days are starlings. A few years ago they were one of the most numerous birds in the garden but I can now go days on end without seeing one, either here or in the local park when walking the dog. The number of blue tits, on the other hand, seems to have swelled and we now get flocks of anything up to a dozen or so. I think them the most amusing of our garden birds as well as one of the most attractive. It's interesting to see their behaviour at the bird feeder. Whereas all the other small birds (although I'm not sure about the great tits) sit on the perch and feed until they have eaten enough, the blue tits take a piece of whatever is in the feeder and fly to the nearby tree. Here they hold the food down with a claw while the peck at whatever it is they have taken. Once they have finished, they return to the feeder for another piece.

I have often marvelled at the strength of the small birds, especially the strength of their legs and claws. Just look how a bird will cling to a branch which is waving wildly in a strong wind, or how a bird will hold onto an upright twig, leaning away from its perch for minutes at a time. I don't know if there has been any research into the strength:weight ratio but I wouldn't mind betting that birds would come out pretty high in the list.

The resident squirrel - in fact, there might be more than one: they all look the same but we rarely see more than one at a time - is an amusing little character even if he/she is a bit of a pest. He is bold enough to sit on the wall outside the kitchen window and watch the humans inside. The other day he was on the corner of the garage roof watching me. When I fetched my camera he insisted on washing his face before posing for his portrait. It's a pity that he will dig up the bulbs planted in pots, take a bite and then throw the bulb away. The other day I saw him digging in a pot - and coming up with a peanut he must have buried there earlier. He has one habit I have never before seen in a squirrel: he wags his tail like a dog.

We do see foxes in the garden - all too frequently - but have never seen a badger. Neither do we yet suffer from damage caused by deer, although there have recently been reports that their numbers have grown so much that they are starting to venture into towns. Talking of deer, I saw one on Tuesday evening. I was driving to a village which lies off the beaten track when there in the middle of the lane was a small deer, a roe deer, in my headlights. It moved to the side of the lane but the hedges were too high for it to jump so it trotted along the lane in front of the car for a quarter of a mile or so until it was able to move off the road. I know that deer are supposed to be very numerous, but it's not often that a townie like me sees one - and when I do, it's a special treat.

This and that

2011-11-09T11:00:00.003Z

When uploading today's picture on the Stanmer blog, I noticed that I am using 43% of my space. What, I wonder, do I do when I have used 100%? Will I be able to "borrow" somebody else's? Not every blogger uploads pictures so they don't all need that space. Will I just have to register again with Blogger under a different name and then start a new Stanmer blog? When will it happen, anyway? I reckon I must have another three or four years-worth of picture blogging before the crunch comes so maybe I won't have to worry.

I was, as I said, uploading a picture and I commented that it seemed appropriate. I had quite a tussle deciding just which adjective to use. Then it dawned on me that fit, apt, appropriate, meet, right, proper, correct and suitable are all synonymous - or very nearly so. Is there, I wondered, a larger collection of synonyms?

The annual extravagance

2011-11-08T09:02:00.000Z

Six years ago the Old Bat and I went a little mad. Only on the financial front, you understand. On other fronts we have both been a little mad for donkeys' years. This particular madness took a form of extravagance, an extravagance that has been repeated every year since at about this time. We have a calendar printed. This is a bespoke calendar that is hung in the kitchen to remind both of us of activities that are taking place and forthcoming engagements. OK, so there is nothing especially extravagant about a wall calendar - or there wouldn't be if we did not, as I said, have ours printed. By this I mean that we have a calendar printed especially for us. Just the one copy. There is a page for each month and each month is illustrated with a photograph I have taken during the past year. The calendar therefore serves as a souvenir of our holidays and other trips. I always produce a shortlist of potential pictures and generally leave the final selection to Her Ladyship. (Don't men usually do that? It tends to lead to a quieter life but I do get into trouble - or I did, until I learned better - when I suggest that the Old Bat goes on her own to choose curtains, cushions or whatever. She thinks I should show more interest. Nowadays I just tag along bored stiff, knowing full well that what we buy will be what she wants.)

This year excelled myself: the shortlist ran to 70+ pictures. I wasn't surprised when this one of deckchairs on Brighton beach (that's the remains of the West Pier in the background) was selected:

This one, however, did surprise me. I like it very much (for reasons I just can't explain) but I didn't expect it to meet with such approbation from SWMBO. It's a door of the church in Orcival, a town we visited while on holiday in the Auvergne, France.

My moment as a hero

2011-11-07T09:23:00.001Z

It is, I suppose, possible that I have related this tale before. If I have, then I have forgotten when it was. If I have and you read it the first time round, you are hereby forgiven if you just click on the "next blog" link up the page or wander off to put the kettle on or even prepare the Sunday lunch. (Yes, I know it's Monday. So what?) Either way, you are going to get the story. Again - or for the first time.

It all happened on a Saturday morning about 30 years ago. That's right - 30. It might have been only 27 or, on the other hand, it might even have been 33 years, but that is completely irrelevant. It was certainly a Saturday. I know that because I was still working ... No, hang on. I suppose it could have happened on a weekday if I was on holiday at the time ... Oh well, never mind. It might have happened on a Saturday and it might have happened about 30 years ago, but it definitely happened.

I wanted a new pair of shoes so I went into Brighton to see what I could find. I can't for the life of me remember if I drove into town or caught a bus but I know I started at the Clock Tower and made my way along Western Road towards Hove, looking in every shoe shop that I passed. Just before I reached the end of the bigger shops a police car passed me at high speed. It stopped outside the Argus store - a catalogue store with a jewellery counter - on the opposite side of the road. I assumed the police had been called to an attempted robbery and carried on. I reached the next road junction and turned back. I had gone only a couple of yards when I saw a youth dash out of the Argus shop, pursued by two policemen. The youth darted into the road and was heading straight for me.

From then on, time slowed down. I actually managed to think about what I could and should do. It was axiomatic that I should attempt to apprehend this (probably) highly dangerous villain, but how to do it? (Actually, it didn't cross my mind that he might be dangerous; I just knew I should try to stop him.) My first thought was that I should just stand in his way with my arms spread wide, but I quickly dismissed that idea as impractical. Then I decided that a rugby tackle would probably see me sprawled on the pavement while the escapee simply side-stepped. By now it was very nearly time for me to take some form of action if I was ever going to, so I just stuck out my leg and tripped him up. The youth fell on his face. A passing driver leapt out of his van and sat on him until the police arrived.

Although time had slowed sufficiently for me to think of - and reject - a couple of ways of stopping the escapee, and even a third way which proved remarkably successful, there had not been enough time for me to think through the full likely outcome of sticking my leg out. Sure, it worked in that the youth tripped and was caught. But what I had overlooked - or not had time to think of - was the fact that by sticking out my leg, I would be putting myself off-balance. Or rather, balanced on just one foot. What happened was that the force of my right leg being struck by the youth caused me to fall. As I did so, I instinctively put out my hands to break my fall. I landed awkwardly on my right hand, hurting the wrist badly. The pursuing policeman inadvertently trod on my left hand, as a result of which the thumb was extremely painful.

Fortunately, I knew somebody who lived in one of the side streets not too far away and I made my way there, hoping somebody would be at home. She was, and she persuaded me that I should have a hospital check-up. She rang my wife, who drove me to the accident and emergency department where it was confirmed that I had broken my right wrist as I landed - and the copper had broken my thumb when he trod on it!

So much for being a hero!

There is, however, a postscript to this story. It was a week or ten days later that I happened to be speaking on the phone to my brother, not a particularly common occurrence in those days although it happens quite frequently now. Brother was then a serving police officer in another county.

'Have you sent off the forms to the Criminal Injuries Board?' he asked.

'Do what?' I replied.

It transpired that the local police should have informed me of my right to lodge a claim with said Board. They had not done so, possibly in an attempt to save themselves some work - or maybe because they simply hadn't bothered to check that I was OK. Anyway, I duly obtained the forms and sent them off. In the fulness of time I received a cheque for no less than £500!

As I said, so much for being a hero!

Yesterday once more

2011-11-06T10:48:00.002Z

It was one of those Lions days, the sort of day when Lions activities take up most of the time. Being the first Saturday of the month, we had our regular book fair when we sell second-hand books in the community room at Lions Dene, one of the blocks of flats owned by Brighton Lions Housing Society.

This is Lions Dene, a block of 37 flats with a community room used as a meeting place by Brighton Lions Club.

Selling books at 50p each means that we don't take an awful lot of money as a rule: £45 is probably about average for the two hours the fair lasts. Yesterday, however, we took £73. The monthly book fair does tend to be treated almost as a social occasion for the Lions. Yesterday, no fewer than 30% of our members turned up to do a little work, drink a cup or two of coffee and chat.

Meanwhile, a good proportion of the other members of the club were preparing for the evening's fireworks display ("remember, remember the 5th of November etc"). Whichever deities are responsible for the weather pulled out all the stops for us and we had a dry day (which is almost as important as a dry evening) and evening with the wind neither too strong not from the wrong quarter for safety. Despite stiff competition, there was a good crowd and we took slightly more cash at the gate than we did last year. Advance ticket sales are believed to be up on last year and there is a good chance that the total income will be in the region of £60,000. If so, the profit to be shared between the Lions and the Sussex County Cricket Club should be in the region of £40,000.

From about 3.30 in the afternoon until the display started at 7.30 I was manning a ticket sales booth and it was noticeable once again just what a friendly, good-humoured atmosphere surrounds this event. All the teenagers who came to buy tickets were well-spoken and good-mannered; the adults were, almost without exception, cheerful and smiling. Tony (who shared the booth with me) and I thoroughly enjoyed the banter.

One of the odd things about Lions Club activities is how there is always something humorous or enjoyable about them. What might seem at the outset to be a boring job but one that needs doing, always turns out differently, either because of the banter between a group of friends or because of interaction with others. Whatever, this is definitely one of the benefits I get from being a member of the local Lions Club.

Two other events this weekend - one of them a major event - are taking place in Brighton. Neither has anything to do with Lions. Yesterday there was a car rally in which cars of the future, ie low emission cars, were driven from Brighton to London. Today sees the annual London to Brighton veteran car run. Think Genevieve, if your cinema memories go back that far. The run started many years ago when the speed limit was raised from 4mph and the need to have a man with a red flag walking in front of the horseless carriage was deemed unnecessary. In celebration of these twin events, a number of motorists drove from London to Brighton and the event has been a hardy annual ever since (although I suspect it didn't take place during the war). Cars taking part have to have been made before 1921 and it's quite a sight to see them trundling along the road into Brighton.

Dog days

2011-11-05T08:51:00.000Z

The Old Bat and I have owned dogs since just a year after we were married. We have never owned more than one dog at a time, and there have on occasion been gaps of several months when we have been without a canine companion. Owning a dog is not something that should be undertaken lightly or without due consideration: as one of the country's leading dog welfare charities says, a dog is for life - not just Christmas. Dogs are demanding pets. They need feeding, naturally, and regular visits to the vet for innoculations - and these don't come on the National Health. What's more, dogs need regular exercise.

For me, that last is one of the benefits of dog ownership. Before I retired, I walked the dog only at the weekends - or occasionally during summer evenings. After I retired, the Old Bat and I shared the pleasure of walking our golden retriever. She (the dog) was getting old by then, blind and suffering from arthritis - but she still wanted her walk every day. We now have a springer spaniel which we acquired as a pup. Officially she is my wife's dog, but Fern doesn't realise that and is happy to accept that she belongs to both of us. She would prefer to belong to my daughter, who lives more than 100 miles away so is seen by Fern only infrequently, who is worshipped by the dog for reasons none of us have managed to work out.

Anyway, Fern joined our household after I retired but while my wife was still working, albeit mornings only. As a pup, the dog needed more exercise that our old dog and we fell into the habit of walking her twice a day. I took her in the mornings and, on three days a week, my wife took her in the afternoon. We have never broken the habit of twice-daily walks but the Old Bat can no longer manage them so both walks are down to me. The morning walk is just to our local park but in the afternoons I vary our route and head for the South Downs which lie just behind our house. I really enjoy those walks in the glorious Sussex countryside, walks I would never bother to take were it not for the dog.

I stumbled across a blogging community calling itself City Daily Photographers or some such - the idea being that each should post a picture of their city or town on a daily basis. I decided to join in, mostly with pictures of the local countryside but occasional shots of Brighton appear. Since I started doing this I have found myself seeing things I was only looking at before (if you see what I mean). Anyway, the pics are over here at Stanmer & Around.

Those were the days

2011-11-04T09:13:00.001Z

I very much doubt that any reader of this blog will recall the dark days of the early months of 1974. I call those days dark because that is what they were for hours at a stretch. The coal miners had been working to rule and, as a result, the generation of electricity was severely limited. To conserve power, commercial users of electricity were limited to three specified days' consumption each week. In addition, power was cut for all users during certain hours. Back then I was in the habit of using an electric shaver so, as my effort to assist the country, I resolved to stop shaving for the duration. I never did bother to start again so my daughter (who was born a couple of years later) has never seen me clean-shaven.

Although we did have advance notice of when power would be cut, the cuts caused considerable inconvenience. We had two children aged three and one and getting them dressed and breakfasted on days when we had morning power cuts was quite an effort. Not that I had much to do with that side of things. I left my better half to deal with the children after I had gone to work.

Of course, offices and shops were also subject to power cuts. I was working in a bank and recall that when we lost power in the afternoons we had to resort to portable lamps of all descriptions. We also had to make alternative arrangements for doing the book-keeping as the accounting machines ran on electricity.

I seem to remember that the general population as a whole took all the inconvenience pretty well - but maybe those rose-tinted spectacles have something to do with that! Actually, it all reminds me of that old Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times.

Talking of interesting times, tomorrow sees the annual Brighton Lions fireworks display which commemorates the failed attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament back in 1605. We are anxiously watching the weather forecasts. A few days ago - indeed, even last night - the forecast for tomorrow evening was intersting if not downright iffy. It's amazing that in my 25 years as a member of Brighton Lions the event has been cancelled only once because of inclement weather. This is our biggest fund-raiser of the year and we have £10,000-worth of fireworks ready to go so we are hoping for the best.

I can't ride a bike

2011-11-03T09:27:00.000Z

They (whosoever "they" might be) say that many actions are like riding a bike: once learned, never forgotten. But I never learned. That is, at root, down to the fact that I never had a bike. I don't know why that should have been. I don't think it was a lack of money as my parents always seemed to have sufficient for other things. I did have a tricycle.

It was only about two years after the end of the war that my father took me to Maidstone by bus one afternoon. (That sentence alone contains four pieces of information that would benefit from further illumination. This parenthetic note could stretch to several paragraphs. To start with, I should explain that to many people of my generation - and my parents' generation - "the" war was the Second World War. Why other conflicts such as the Korean War and the First World War are relegated to "other" wars is something I don't understand and am therefore unable to explain. You'll just have to accept that the war means World War II.

It must have been two years after the end of the war that this momentous bus ride took place because my father served in the Royal Navy and, in 1945, was in the Far East. It was not until 1947 that his ship returned to England.

Maidstone was - and still is - about eight or nine miles from where we were living in Gillingham. To get there involved a walk of about half a mile to catch a bus at the Jezreels. This took us to the bus station in Nelson Road where we would change for a bus to Maidstone.

Oh dear. Now I need to explain Jezreels. But I'm not going to give you chapter and verse as might be found any where on the web. Instead, I'll tell you what my mother told me. The Jezreelites where members of a religious sect who established their world headquarters in Gillingham. Here they bought a piece of land on which to build a great temple where many of the members could live. The aim was to build this temple high enough to reach Heaven so that they would have a stairway they and they alone could climb. Unfortunately, they were unable to finish their tower for reasons my mother either could not or would not explain (and I probably never asked) and the remains stood there. A nearby road junction became known as Jezreels, after the tower. And I think we can close these parentheses and get back to the original story now.)

So we caught the bus to Maidstone. It must have been in the afternoon because I distinctly remember it being dark when we came back home, so it was probably fairly late in the year as well - about this time of year, maybe. The reason for this expedition - and it was an expedition rather than a mere journey or trip - was to buy a tricycle. Presumably there was no tricycle to be bought in any of the shops in Gillingham, Chatham, Rochester or Strood - three adjoining towns and a city making up the conurbation known as the Medway Towns. This was, after all, only a couple of years after the war and there were still shortages of many things in England - even rationing of various foodstuffs was still in force. Anyway, that was presumably why the trek had to be made to Maidstone.

Bringing the tricycle - it was blue - back from Maidstone was something of a challenge. Like the outward journey, the return was made by bus and I have a feeling that the bus was pretty crowded. My father made the journey on the platform as the trike wouldn't fit in the luggage space under the stairs.

(More explanation. In those days buses in England were mounted at the rear. On double-decker buses there was no door, just an open platform from which there was a step up onto the lower deck and a winding staircase to the upper deck. Luggage could be stowed under the staircase. Standing was allowed on the lower deck if all seats were taken but passengers were not allowed to stand on the upper deck or ride on the platform or the stairs. Smoking was allowed upstairs only.)

And you can blame Skip for this trip down memory lane as he was recently waxing nostalgic about his bicycles.

Busy day

2011-11-02T08:07:00.000Z

I have a seriously busy day ahead of me so I will just copy an old post complete with pictures of our French house as it was when we bought it.

Open the front door, and this was the view of the hall, except that I had brought in pots of paint before taking the picture. The ladder had been left by the previous owners.

Turn sharp right and we enter the downstairs bedroom. Blue and pink? Note the plastic sheet covering the radiator.

Back across the hall we come to the living room. There was a sliding glass hatch between this room and the kitchen, but it was almost at ceiling height.

Another view of the living room. The dark door leads out to the courtyard and the partly open door into the kitchen.

And on into the kitchen.

From the hall, there was a steep, winding staircase...

...leading to the upstairs bedroom.

Complete with a dodgy bit of floor under the lino.

Time

2011-11-01T09:13:00.000Z

That's enough of this tomfoolery. Pictures, indeed. Let's get onto something more serious.

We came home on Friday so the first newspaper I had seen for a week was delivered on Saturday morning. The verdict in a murder trial was splashed on the front page, a murder that had aroused a lot of interest across the country. The Commonwealth countries had all agreed to the ending of male primogeniture in the Royal Family. More problems, or rather more of the same problems in Europe. But what really grabbed my attention was a small piece at the foot of the page. It was just a couple of paragraphs, continued on page 4 or 6 or soemwhere towards the middle of the paper. The Prime Minister had said he was happy for the Government to consider changing the clocks so that we are in line with the rest of western Europe. Now this, oddly enough, is something about which I feel quite strongly.

What it basically means is that we would put our clocks forward one hour - permanently. During the winter months we would be running on Greenwich Mean Time plus one hour and in the summer it would be GMT plus 2 hours. This would mean that dawn would be an hour later than it is now - and sunset would also be an hour later (obviously). So what are the pros and cons?

Well, it would stay light later in the evenings. During mid-summer weeks, it would still be light at 10 o'clock in the evening. I'm not sure just how that would be of a great benefit other than for keen gardeners who would have longer to spend in their gardens after coming home from work. The main benefit would be in the winter months when children would be coming home from school in the light so there should be fewer accidents. On the other hand, they would be going to school in the dark.

I don't remember it personally, but there was a trial some 30 or so years ago which is being referred to in the arguments/discussions about this proposal. It would seem that the number of road accidents fell during the trial, a trial which was abandoned after complaints from people living in Scotland and the north of England who were more affected than people living in the southern parts of the country. That fall in the number of accidents is one of the main arguments used by those in favour of the proposal.

Another so-called pro is that businessmen in England would be on the same time as those in, say, Paris and Frankfurt. But that seems to me to be a particularly puerile argument. If a businessman who deals with people in Paris can't adjust his time mentally, there's not a lot of hope for him, in my opinion. After all, what about New York, Tokyo, Sydney?

I do have personal experience of putting the clocks forward permanently - other, that is, than the trial I can't remember. Our house in France is actually further west than Our English home, although by not a lot. The clocks there are an hour ahead of the English clocks so I know what would be the effect of permanently changing the time. And I like it not.

While we were in France last week I watched the sun creep over the horizon several mornings. At about 8.30. I do not like getting up in the dark and having twilight until 9.30 - or even 10.00 on really dull days. No, I think we should stick with GMT, plus an hour in the summer. It has served us well for centuries and it ain't broke so why try to fix it?

This is the "after" picture.

2011-10-31T09:11:00.000Z

They want pictures?

2011-10-30T08:42:00.000Z

Here I am, back from a week's contemplation of all the finer things in life and full of things I need to get off my chest by posting here, and what do I find? Comments asking for pictures! I used to want pictures with my stories when I was a small child but now I'm grown up and I am quite happy to read books with no pictures in them. Of course, when I was growing up the old wireless was our general form of entertainment and, just as with books sans illustrations, our imaginations came into play. We formed our own pictures back then in the days before television. And don't you find that when a book you have read is adapted for television, the screen version is nothing like what you had pictured?

I suppose I really ought to confess... no, not confess: that indicates I have done something wrong. Well, I will tell you that all those posts about our French retreat are re-posts. The originals are all on my original blog about Les Lavandes - as are pictures. However, to save you trawling through myriads of holiday snaps taken in other parts of France on our travels through that lovely country. I will, just from time to time, post an occasional picture here.

This was 'Les Lavandes' as we first saw it on a grey morning in October.

The two-storey part on the right was the original house, built in 1840, while the single-storey part on the left would have been cattle sheds or similar, with a hay barn over. The gas tank can be seen at the right-hand edge of the picture. On the left, the shutters are to the kitchen window. Then there is a door into the living room and the living room window. The main front door into the hall is in the two-storey part and the windows in this part are to the bedrooms.

How we were expected to get a car through that door into the 'garage' is still a mystery.

This picture shows the sheds which run down one side of the courtyard between the kitchen wall and the well. Just look at that ugly breeze block wall!

The shutters at the front door were held closed by a breeze block and the drain pipe discharged just in front of the door. The cover of the septic tank is pretty close as well.

Yippee! Terra cotta tiles

2011-10-29T09:15:00.000+01:00

As I had expected, Mrs S was over the moon when I told her about the tiles beneath the carpet, although I did try to warn her that clearing the screeding might be an impossible job. This was confirmed by a builder friend who, true to form, sucked air in through his teeth when I explained the problem. I had asked him what was the best substance to use to remove the screeding, to which he responded by telling me that it would prove impossible. The latex used in the self-levelling screeding would cling to the tiles tighter than a barnacle to a bilge and nothing, but nothing, could remove it. When I relayed this conversation to Mrs S she was, not surprisingly, disappointed to say the least – so much so that I promised to see what could be done. I should have listened to Bill the Builder.

On my next trip to France I took with me a wallpaper steamer, cement remover and hydrochloric acid – along with flat-packs containing three 1000mm kitchen base units, two 1000mm kitchen wall units, a sink top, all the relevant doors and drawers and the work top. The poor old car was beginning to learn what was in store for it. Along with all the tools etc I took a camp bed and sleeping bag having decided that our budget wouldn't stretch to a hotel. I think Mrs S also had the idea this would mean I could work longer hours. I did, however, draw he line at self-catering, apart from breakfast and lunch, which gave me an opportunity to check out some of the local restaurants.

Neither the wallpaper steamer, the cement remover nor the hydrochloric acid had any effect whatsoever on the screeding. As a result, I spent one day putting together the kitchen units, removing the wainscotting in the kitchen and stripping most of the wallpaper in the living room. The other three and a half days were spent on my knees with a wallpaper scraper removing the screeding in the downstairs bedroom. With one four-inch-square tile sometimes taking an hour to clear, I had uncovered perhaps two-thirds of the tiles by the time I left Les Lavandes for the drive to Cherbourg and the Portsmouth ferry.

Please excuse the mess

2011-10-28T10:12:00.000+01:00

Rolling the carpet up was not too difficult a job, but by this time my brain must have become more addled than it usually is. It was an impossible struggle to manouevre the carpet out of the bedroom door and immediately through a right-angle turn to go out of the front door. After three attempts I gave up, dropped the carpet back on the floor and stood by the window while I caught my breath. Why had I not thought of it immediately? It was a simple job to push the roll of carpet out of the window and then carry it into the so-called garage to be taken to the tip when I eventually found out if such a facility existed in France and, if so, where it was.

The plaster screed was thin, paper thin over much of the floor. Just kicking at it separated much of it from the tiles beneath and I was confident that clearing it would not present much of a challenge. I changed my mind when I realised that where the screed was a little thicker, it clung tighter to the tiles. This might not be such an easy job after all. I decided to leave it until my next visit, and wandered into the living room. Some of the wallpaper was peeling away from the wall so I gave it a little help. Very soon I was standing ankle deep in a sea of overblown yellow roses and the better part of one wall was back to bare plaster. I realised I had not thought to bring any rubbish sacks with me, so the mess would just have to wait until my next visit.

The body in the attic

2011-10-27T09:11:00.000+01:00

It was only after Monsieur Ebert had left that it occurred to me I had not climbed up into the attic. The door from the upstairs bedroom to the attic stairs was locked but I did finally find the key on the bunch and opened the door. There on the bottom stair lay a mouse, a dead mouse. Indeed, a very dead mouse. I couldn't remember having seen it when we had inspected the house the previous October, but it did look as though it had dropped dead almost as soon as my back had been turned.

Call me squeamish if you like, but I cannot bring myself to pick up putrefying mice with my bare hands. Actually, I can't do it with gloved hands either. What was needed was a quick trip to the local supermarket and the purchase of a trowel. I just hoped, as I flung the corpse into the field next door, that this was not the first of many.

After all this excitement I still had some time in hand so I decided to lift the grubby carpet in the ground floor bedroom. As I pulled back one corner, I realised that there was no underlay. What was breaking up underneath the carpet was a thin screed of plaster laid on top of the original terra cotta tiles. I dropped the carpet and went for the mobile phone to call Mrs S with the news which I knew would cause her great excitement. I was about to press the ‘ring' button when I changed my mind. Better just check, I thought.