I'm not sorry that's over

"That" being a job that crops up once a year round about this time, although if the experience of the past two or three years is repeated, I need not have done it for another three or four months.

When we bought our holiday home in France the intention was that we should let it out as a way of covering some of the standing expenses involved in owning a second home. As well as advertising in newspapers and magazines (which we have since stopped) and on one or another holiday cottage web sites, we also set up our own web site. I say "we" set it up but actually it was I who did it and it is I who maintains it. At some time during the years that we have owned Les Lavandes (the name of our French home) it occurred to me that many of our guests might prefer to pay by credit or debit card rather than posting cheques to us. Arranging that is basically quite simple, even for a technobabe like me. I signed up for a PayPal account and set up a page on the web site where people booking could pay the deposit for the week or weeks they were booking by clicking a button for each week. Then I had to produce another page for people to pay the balance. Every year those pages have to be copied and the dates amended for the following year. Sounds simple? Actually, it isn't difficult - but it does need concentration. Altering the dates of the weeks to be booked is quick enough and easy but altering the dates in the HTML code for PayPal is a much more finicky operation, and one that has to be done twice, first for the deposit and then for the balance. Then there are tweaks that need to be made in other places on the web site. It is quite usual for me to remember one I had overlooked some hours after I think I have finished the job - this week it was as I was cleaning my teeth before bed. I think it's done now.

I wrote at the start that I need not have done the job for several months. Way back when we started out, we were getting enquiries - and the occasional booking - during October and November for the following summer. That doesn't seem to be the case now. Indeed, this year we were getting enquiries only a couple of weeks before people wanted to go on holiday. Our experience is that people are leaving it until almost the last minute before booking holidays. Is this something to do with the precarious financial circumstances we all seem to be living in or could there be some other reason?

Anyway, if you are curious you can see what our holiday home is like by checking out the web site for Les Lavandes.

Indian summer

OK, so they were quite right, "they" being the weather forecasters who predicted the spell of very warm weather we are now experiencing. Yesterday, on the evening television news, we were shown pictures of people on beaches in Scarborough, Minehead and Brighton and we were told the temperature in each place. Brighton was, apparently, the coolest at just 21 (what's happened to the little o thingie for degrees?) but the thermometer in my car had recorded 27 during the afternoon. Of course, that was a couple of miles or more away from the beach and the cooling effect of the water but I don't know where the official thermometer is situated. It may well be that my car thermometer is inaccurate anyway.

Whatever. The short-sleeved shirts have come out of hibernation even if only for a few days.

The saga of the Old Bat's car continues. You may remember it failed the MOT because an indicator repeater light on the dashboard wasn't working. This was a job for a main dealer to rectify and it was duly taken away. The wiring cluster was sent away only to be returned with the light still inoperative. When it was returned next time the garage rang to say they would be delivering the car during the afternoon but then another fault was found. Eventually the car was returned just before we went to France on holiday. It passed the MOT a few days after our return. The Old Bat took it to go shopping the other day and was mindful of the need to refuel, but a glance at the gauge showed that the garage had kindly put in some petrol. Well, we assumed it was the garage since nobody else would have done. Then yesterday the low fuel light came on - but the gauge still shows 3/4 full! Looks like it will be going back to the garage as there is yet another fault in the wiring.

Peace and quiet

It was just over six months ago that I posted about a moment when, for me, time stood still and there was nothing but peace and calm in my world. I had taken a walk over the South Downs on a glorious spring afternoon - you can read about it here. I have done the same walk several times since without experiencing quite the same degree of solitude and quiet but I had high hopes yesterday. The weather was unseasonably warm, albeit not yet reaching the temperatures we are promised for the end of the week, and being a mid-week afternoon I figured most people would be at work.

Things started off reasonably well, even though there was a muted roar from the traffic on the main road half a mile or more away. The wind just happened to be in the wrong quarter. Then the engine of the police helicopter broke the almost silence. But that soon vanished, only to be replaced by the chug-chug of a tractor's engine as it refilled the fertilizer hopper on the back of another tractor.


Before we reached that, however, there was the distraction (for Fern, my springer spaniel) of three students sitting beside the path with a picnic lunch. I had no sooner managed to get Fern past them than she was nearly run over by a cyclist storming down the narrow path. Then she saw the farm hands beside the tractor a little way across the field and just had to go and say hello. When two of them came back across the field, over the footpath and into the next field where their Range Rover was parked, Fern followed, yelping sharply as she touched the electric fence. The farmer and his man climbed into the Range Rover and roared away across the field to check on the sheep. Meanwhile, the tractor engine was chugging more loudly as it made its way across the furrows.

I could still hear the tractor when we met a group - about 20 or so - of youngsters making their noisy way down the path. Why were they not in school or college, I wondered, instead of adding to the disturbance of my afternoon. By the time the noise of their chatter had died away the peace was being shattered by an overhead jet - Easyjet, I think, since I could see the bright orange tail livery.

Then Fern saw something in the stunted hawthorns growing in the field we were passing. Taking shelter from the heat of the sun was a herd of cattle. Now Fern doesn't "do" cattle and I had quite a job persuading her not to run back to the car but to come on a little further. And it was only a little further before I gave in and turned for home, only to be met by that group of 20 or so youngsters who had also turned round.

I have once before seen a helicopter on the lawn beside St Mary's Farm cottage and there was one there yesterday. As I glanced across the valley I saw the rotor blades start to turn. Sure enough, the sound of the engine soon filled the air. Eventually the pilot took off and chased his shadow along the valley in an easterly direction. It was a few minutes before the noise of that engine died almost to nothing, but by then a biplane had appeared just to the south and the pilot of that machine started practising aerobatics, looping the loop in particular. By the time he had looped half a dozen loops, the St Mary's farm helicopter had completed a wide sweep to the east and was heading back towards me in a westerly direction. The biplane moved north out of the way and then flew off altogether.

Chasing his shadow.

As the helicopter disappeared over Stanmer woods, we approached the lunching students. They had actually finished their lunch by then - but that didn't stop Fern going to see if there was anything left for her. Then the traffic noise impinged on the peace of the afternoon once more, complete with the two-tone horns of a police car or ambulance.


Not the most peaceful walk I have ever had across the loveliness of the South Downs.

Town mice or country yokels?

Family Investments, a children's savings provider, recently undertook a survey to find the best place in the United Kingdom in which to raise a family. In top place was a Devon village -Winkleigh. To me, it sounds more like a small town that a village with a butcher, baker, fishmonger, school, doctor, vet, two pubs and a sports centre.

I am a townie. I was born and bred in a town and have never lived anywhere but towns, although my mother would take my brother and I for country walks whenever possible. My wife is also a townie but she did have family friends in a small village in the Midlands and spent much of the school holidays with them. There was a time when my wife and I briefly considered a move to a country location. At the time I was working for a bank. One of the advantages of that employment was the low interest rate and comparatively high loan-to-salary ratio available to staff. The interest rate was a fixed 2½% - not tied to bank rate - and the mortgage could be up to four times annual salary. This was a time when mortgages were generally limited to three times salary. Another perk - but one which didn't come round all that often - was that the bank would sometimes agree to meet all the costs associated with moving to a new house - estate agent's fees, solicitor's fees, removal expenses, the lot - when one was transferred from one branch to another. Admittedly, this was only the case if the new branch was considered (by the bank) to be too far for convenient daily travel. Some of my colleagues used this scheme to move up a notch every few years. For me, there was only one occasion when the bank offered to pay removal costs. I was sent to a branch in an unprepossessing town and it was suggested to me that I should move to that town. We briefly considered a move to a village a few miles outside the town, but we decided to stay put as our eldest son had only just changed school and had settled nicely. We had no wish to disrupt the children's education.

But, I wonder, is the received wisdom that it is better to raise children in the country really correct? In the town we have always lived within walking distance of the children's schools and, from a fairly early age, they (the children, not the schools) would make the walk on their own. Could they have done that in the country? In many places the narrow lanes with no pavements or verges are just too dangerous to allow children to walk or cycle to school (if the school is with walking or cycling distance anyway) so the parents drive them. And what about those out-of-school activities like Scouts? Are they available in small villages or is it necessary to drive several miles each way?

Eventually, every child will end up in a town. At least our town mice were street-wise at much younger ages than many country yokels would have been - and in less danger because of that. There is a lot to be said for a country upbringing. But the converse is also true.

The subject

After leaving school I found a job with one of the country's High Street banks. I'm not entirely sure that my career choice was the best, but hey ho, it's too late to do anything about that now. I stuck at it for 25 years so maybe it wasn't too bad a choice after all. I only left because the powers that were kept moving the goalposts. Well, that's my story; the then board of directors or whomever they left to make the decisions might have a different point of view.

Every now and again I was sent on a course at one or other of the bank's schools. The first course I attended lasted four weeks and was supposed to give the "students" an insight into the world of banking as seen by our particular bank and knowledge of how to operate the accounting machines that were installed in most branches. That was of little use to me as not too long after I returned from that course I was transferred to a different branch. This was in a small village just the other side of the Downs and the machine in that branch was completely different from the one I had been taught to use. When the manager sat me at the machine, I searched everywhere for the on/off switch but eventually had to ask where it was located. It transpired that this machine was not operated by electricity but was a sort of cross between a manual typewriter and an adding machine. But that's all by the bye.

After I had attended several courses - by now quite well into my 25-year career - I applied for a posting as an instructor at the bank's school. Instructors were employed in branches of the bank to carry out normal banking work but were called into the school several times a year for a week or two. Do I need to add that there was extra remuneration? Anyway, my application was successful in that I was selected to attend a training course for potential instructors. This was perhaps the most enjoyable and most interesting of all the courses I attended and was the one that had the least to do with banking per se. It was on this course that I first came across the torture of having to talk for two minutes on the subject of a word or phrase that was only revealed when one was standing in front of the class. It might be "roast beef" or "trees" or "baseball". Of course, the quicker-witted among us (which did not include me) were able to use the word as an introduction to something they had prepared and memorised earlier. So, for example, somebody told to talk for two minutes on baseball might start by describing baseball as a team sport played with a ball and then go on to say that they played no sport themselves but found stamp collecting satisfying. Anyway, that's cheating so a goody-two-shoes like me would never dream of committing such an atrocity.

In some respects, typing a load of drivel on a blog can sometimes be a bit like having to talk for two minutes on whatever - except that in this case it's write 500 words on the subject.

(According to my word processor, there are 546 words up to the end of the previous sentence so I can sit down now.)

Hold very tight, please.

It's not very often that I catch a bus. No, I don't miss them - well, not all of them - I just don't set out to catch them. The route that runs nearest to our house has a bus once an hour in each direction. That is, once an hour between about 8.00am and 6.00pm. I think they run less frequently on Saturdays and I know they don't run at all on Sundays. On weekdays the timetable seems to be pretty flexible. I know that the bus is due at or close to the hour going up the hill and a few minutes later going down, but it is quite often that I see people waiting at the stop 15 or 20 minutes after the bus should have come.

On those few occasions when I do want to take the bus I start with a brisk 5-minute walk downhill through the twittens to get to a different route where the buses run every 10 minutes. That's the advertised timetable. The reality is that I usually have to wait for at least 15 minutes and I have waited more than 20. But however long I wait, I never ever look to see what the bus is called. Yes, you did read that correctly - what the bus is called. You see, way back in 1999 every bus was given a name and the practice has continued. Those names are nothing like Skylark or Tess but are the names of real people.

"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," it says on the company's web site. I know that somewhere it is possible to see all the names in use and to find out to which bus each has been allocated along with short biographical details. Frankly, I can't be bothered, although I do sometimes see a name and wonder who or what and why.

As far as I know, the company that runs buses through our village in France hasn't got round to naming them. I say 'as far as I know' because I have never actually seen a bus in the village - except the school bus. I believe such vehicles might be spotted occasionally - there is a bus shelter and a timetable is affixed to the bus stop (which is not at the bus shelter - but let's not go into that!). I have tried to make sense of the timetable but it has proved somewhat difficult. It would seem to me that there are two buses running through the village every day (except some days either during the school term or during the school holiday, I'm unsure which). The problem seems to be that the bus from the village to the nearest town runs after the bus from the nearest town to the village - which makes a shopping trip a tad awkward. But at least there is a bus both ways.

Which is more than the residents of a Wiltshire village can say. They used to have a bus to Andover and a bus back, but the service was heavily subsidised by the county council. The council, because of financial hardship, was forced to cut the subsidy by half. Consequently, the bus company now runs the bus from the village to Andover - but not the return journey! That's what I call sensible.

The last days of summer

It seems scarcely possible that only two weeks ago we were driving through France with the temperature steadily climbing to 38 Celsius - just 100 in old money. While in France for a week we didn't experience those dizzy heights again but it was pleasantly warm with temperatures up to 26 or 27 most days (80-ish). Since coming home, however, we have been lucky to see 20 (68). The short-sleeved shirts are washed and hanging in the cupboard, not to be seen again until next year, and the leaves are falling from the trees. Oddly, several plants in the garden that had finished blooming and been cut back, have burst into flower again, albeit it with only limited numbers of blooms. I have been picking plenty of raspberries in the garden. It is very pleasant to have a bowl of freshly-picked raspberries and cream for desert when it is starting to feel like autumn but that is the benefit of the autumn-fruiting varieties. Than this morning the news on the front of the paper caught my eye. "Dust off the barbecues," read the headline. The forecast is that we shall have the best Indian summer for decades with temperatures rising during the second half of the coming week to the mid 20's. I'll believe it when I feel it.

I am very pleased to see that Blogger has reinstated the picture control allowing enlargement by clicking on them. (Uncle Skip knows what I mean even if you don't! It's the second comment down if you follow that link.)