Could that have been any easier?

Nikki's been talking for a few weeks about what a good idea it would be to take some of our films with us when we go away, just in case (unlikely I know *cough*) the in-flight movies suck. I've been procrastinating, because all our media - both DVDs and BluRays - are ripped to MKV format and this won't play natively on the iPad, but with the trip imminent the time for procrastination ran out yesterday and I started doing some research. It didn't take me more than a minute or so to find GoodPlayer.

With a "best video player for iPhone" recommendation from Lifehacker, many positive forum postings and a price tag of only £1.99 it wasn't a hard purchasing decision. Little did I realise that the traditional simplicity of getting my hands on an app from the App Store was only the start of this easy ride.

I launched GoodPlayer and it instantly found two media sources. Well actually it's the same source but GoodPlayer supports a variety of access formats, so it gave me the option to connect to our film collection via SAMBA/CIFS or UPnP/DLNA (apologies to those of you who don't speak geek).

Clicking on the first took me to the file share list and I navigated quickly down through the folders - multimedia / video / movies - to our list of 400+ movies. Choosing one at random, GoodPlayer asks if I want to stream it, or download it. I chose stream (for now), and the movie started playing.

Just like that.

The whole process from finding the app to watching the movie took less than five minutes. Sometimes, computers and related technology get in your way. Sometimes they can even make you tear your hair out. Other times they *just work* and this was one of those times. Brilliant. Vibrant colours, crisp almost-high-def stream (from a standard definition movie file) and no buffering or streaming problems at all now that our downstairs network has been boosted by the TPLink Powerline adaptors.

It took Nikki less than five seconds to declare she wanted a copy too, and half an hour later we both had a download queue of 4 of 5 films which our NAS was happily serving up to the iPads at 3MB/sec (download time for an average film about half an hour) as well as delivering a film to the TV. Should help the flights pass more enjoyably :o)

Delivery

We bought a bed.

We do already have one, obviously, but we'll soon be moving up in the world and need a new one to complete the image of high living. So with mates entertainment planned for Easter weekend, we figured we may as well buy the bed early. As promised, the delivery driver called today to confirm that we're on his list for next week.

"You're down for the Tuesday morning delivery. We'll be there before 1."

I thanked him and rang off. When you're talking to a pedant of over forty years' standing, it pays to be careful. Strictly speaking, he's committed to delivering our bed between midnight and 1am next Tuesday morning. I'm sure he didn't realise what he'd said, but I've made a note of his mobile number and I'll be calling him at 2am next Tuesday to find out why he's an hour late.

So farewell then, 20 Ridgway

Don't know how to describe my feelings right now, if I'm honest, except "weird." The house I lived in for the first 21 years of my life (I officially moved out three days after my 21st birthday), which has been in my family since 1953, and which has always been there in my mind as a place of refuge in the bad times, solace in the sad times and celebration in the glad times, as of today belongs to someone else.

By the time we left it for the last time - last Saturday afternoon - it did feel more like "just a house" than it has ever felt. No longer a home. And truth be told it hasn't been my home for all of those 30+ years since I moved out, except in the sense of "going home" to visit Mum, as we often did. After 8 months of intermittent trips to throw away old things, collect treasured things and rearrange remaining things to present the house at its best for the purposes of sale, it looked and felt like an empty shell. Only faint echoes lingered of the happy times spent there. Lifetimes. I learned to walk there. I learned to ride a bike there. I learned to drive there. I read my 'O' and 'A' Level results over breakfast there. I found out I'd got into university there. I had my first sex there. And my first broken heart, stood by the sideboard reading that letter. My Dad died there. My Mum turned into an old lady there.

And now someone else will build memories there and put down roots - perhaps even 60 years deep like our family did. They'll put their own stamp on the place until almost every trace of the planning and saving and working and painting and tiling and building my Mum & Dad did is erased; replaced with something newer, bigger, brighter and not ours.

Well... not quite erased. It will still be there in my memory. My old family home. And that's why I'll never drive down to Ridgway Close again. Or at least, never intend to. I want that house - that home - to stay as it is in my memory. The happy, sunny, carefree home of my childhood.

Gardening with a crow bar

In preparation for new front windows and front door arriving any time soon, I've been waiting for a fine day to take down the pergola. We've always hated the damned thing - an ugly erection of tanalised timber beams with a stunted *something* growing up each side that puts out weedy flowers once year but otherwise just looks untidy. No idea what it is, but we've lived here more than five years and it's barely grown a foot in all that time. Not exactly the greenery of choice to rapidly cover a pergola in a shock of colour, it being neither rapid nor any colour more shocking that insipid white.

Fine day duly arrived, yesterday, so out I went armed with stepladder and screwdriver to disassemble, de-erect and knock down. Some of the screws were a bit rusted but through a combination of brute force and ignorance (my favourite tool) I got most of them out and the rest gave up when I pulled the beams about a bit. The main uprights posed a brief problem but I soon discovered that if I leaned my enormous bulk against them they'd snap off just below ground level.

So no probs with the pergola, but what was I to do with Mr & Mrs Weedy-Growth? At this time of year the shed door swells up to the point where locks are not required as a barrier to entry, and all gardening implements remained inaccessible behind that swollen edifice. I set to with the only tool (a) available and (b) strong enough to deal with weedy roots that were, as it turned out, anything but weedy. A few well-placed strokes and a bit of subterranean leverage and out they popped and straight into The Green Bin.

Mission accomplished. We are now growth- and pergola-free at the front and much nicer it looks too. It'll be even nicer when the old worn out drafty blue porch door is replaced with a stunning new one.

eApproval

This morning War of Nutrition finally received its approval for "Premium Distribution" at Smashwords.

This means that, in addition to Kindle where it's been available since last month, you'll soon be able to get it for Kobo, Sony eReader, the Apple iReader (from the iBookstore) and pretty much every other electronic reader platform there is, including regular PDF or HTML versions for reading on your PC.

Or, you can get it *right now* direct from Smashwords themselves! What are you waiting for :o)

The delay in approval is partly due to their enormous backlog, and partly my fault. I'd asked Nat for a very small change to the cover art, and then went and uploaded the raw picture file to Smashwords without reinstating the title and author text. Doh! So it could have been approved two weeks ago if I hadn't been such a numpty.

I've already had some great feedback from those who've finished reading it (or are still in the middle), including a review on Amazon from my mate Diane. Still anxiously waiting for that first review from someone who doesn't know me, but I guess it's only a matter of time O_O. Meanwhile I'm planning world domination through a combination of poetry, short stories and two other really cool ideas for novels that are currently stewing somewhere at the back of my brain while I keep my fingers busy writing sketches for this year's Chorlton Players Hotpot show.

The Long and Winding Road

The exact date I started writing War of Nutrition is lost in the mists of history, but it was a long time ago. The earliest date on the oldest file I have in my WoN folder is in the second half of 2000 - a first draft synopsis - but obviously that's the day it was last saved, not when I started it.

It's changed a lot since then. I finished the (final version of the) plot in 2001 and it took seven years (count 'em) to travel from there to the end of the first full draft. I've posted before about how I'm the antithesis of a writer who writes "because he must." Most of the time I feel compelled NOT to write. And then guilty about it.

But somehow, between the house moves and the decorating and the holidays and the day job (*spit*), the book what I wrote got writted. And edited for grammar correction. But of course, as writers the world over will tell you, writing a book is the easy part. So it was that I began the Age of Submissions, back in August 2008.

Even though every word I read on the subject of querying agents unanimously warned it would be a long and heart-breaking process, I was convinced the first one I sent out would result in a deal. Probably for a million dollars. I'd crafted a knock-out query letter. No-one could resist. 50 query letters (and three revisions of the letter content) later I had to admit my experience was, well, long. I can't say it was heart-breaking. No-one had said the book was crap. Mainly because no-one had read it. I'd had no requests for full, or even partial, submissions. It was all "we're too busy" or "this isn't what we're looking for." So rather than being heartbroken I was just meh.

Until, almost a year later, I read the magic words: "Thank you for your query. We read it with some interest and would like to see the full manuscript." I hardly slept that night with excitement, daft bugger that I am. The 12-week reading period elapsed and when I heard nothing I followed up. They weren't still locked in thrall at the greatness of my prose. They'd simply not bothered to say no.

After another year I had a second request for a partial, followed (five months later) by a second rejection. It was at this point I decided radical surgery was needed. Two-and-a-half years of perspective allowed me to see what should have been clear much earlier: I had an 80,000-word novel hiding in a 100,000-word fat suit.

I rewrote. Hard.

And this time, even my inner self - the one who always tells the truth - was happy with the result. This version was The One. I sent out a few more queries, but everyone was still too busy. However there was a distinct change in the tone of the rejections. They were almost unanimous in declaring the novel a "strong project" or an "intriguing idea" and even went so far as to express regret that they had no space to take me on. That, combined with the experiences of one or two friends and the urging of a few more, led me to decide to abandon the traditional publishing route on whose door I had spent more than three years knocking, in favour of epublishing. And the full story of how I came to that decision, is a post for another day!

Twenty Twelve

2012. And I mean TWENTY twelve. Did you notice the turning point? It's almost like an unwritten, unspoken instruction has been sent around the world.

"This is the year we will all stop saying 'two thousand and something' and start saying 'twenty something'."

I can understand it with, say, the BBC. Apart from the occasional slip by the odd presenter, they've been wall-to-wall twenty twelve since January 1st. But that *could* be due to an internal, corporate decision. What's more surprising is the way the change has spread into the zeitgeist almost overnight. Are all your friends and acquaintances doing it? Mine are.

And once you've made the change, it's somehow more natural to refer to last year as twenty eleven too. And the year before that. Twenty ten. So what took us so long?

Yodelling would have been more productive

"Please call me to arrange redelivery of your parcel" read the message on the little green card I found on my return home yesterday. It was from Yodel. Never heard of them, but a quick Google reveals it's the new name for Home Delivery Network. Sod's law, really. I was only out of the house for an hour. I've been in all week.

I called the number as soon as they opened this morning. 8am. It went to voicemail.

Hello. This is the Yodel service centre at Ashton.

Well, let me stop you right there. Because surely to justify the title "service centre" you have to, you know, provide some service. And I've been calling that number all day and getting no reply, so I ain't seen much service to speak of.

All our operatives are busy dealing with other customers.

Maybe it's just because I've dialled the number over 100 times today, that I have a vision of "operatives" being just one overworked postal worker rushing between the office and the storage depot. The alternative vision jostling for ascendency in my mind's eye was of a depot full of operatives dressed in festive costume sitting around sipping sherry and eating mince pies, telling each other to "let it ring - it's Christmas!"

But if you leave a message and a contact number we'll get back to you as soon as possible.

Well, no you won't actually, because immediately after the conclusion of your message that nice lady from BT comes on to say

This mailbox is full. Please try later.

And close the call. The only option is to ring again. Which I did. Over and over.

Now I know what you're thinking. Maybe there was no-one there. But while the majority of calls went to voicemail after 30 seconds, just occasionally one would be diverted immediately, suggesting that someone was on the phone at that very minute. During the morning, such an event would spur me on to dial a few more times, thinking if there was someone at the desk right then, I stood more chance of getting through. In this case, more chance was equivalent to two or three times nothing. Still nothing.

While I ate lunch, I dialled the number constantly for over half an hour with no luck. Then, I got the engaged tone. Back came the nice BT lady to advise me (in case I didn't recognise the engaged tone which, you know, hasn't changed for at least fifty years):

The number you have dialled is busy. To use ring back, key 5 now.

Yes! Ring back! Great idea. I keyed 5.

Ring back is not available on this number.

Well why did you offer it to me then you utter arse?

In sheer frustration I Googled "yodel couriers". I had typed only half of "couriers" when the second suggestion in the list changed to "yodel couriers complaints". Oh dear - that doesn't look good. I followed the first link, to a review site.

First time I've ever known a company to have an average of 1 star (yes, out of 5) after 1203 reviews. That's a pretty impressive indictment. I'm surprised any online retailer still uses them.

My package turned up around 3pm. I never did get through to the "service" centre.

"Ah, Yodel!" I cried as the courier handed over his ruggedised tablet for me to sign. "I've been trying to call your depot all day."

He looked sheepish.

"Wasting your time there, mate."

Tell me about it.

Cat man do.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, our cat man promised to send loads more pictures of New Kitteh (name still being debated) between my first visit and the day he's ready to come home. Four weeks later and there hadn't been much evidence of promise fulfilment on the photo front. OK, no evidence. A prompting email provoked a blurry shot taken with a phone along with the promise of more pix "when I get home", a couple of days more nothing and then a brief whinge that emails "weren't getting through."

However eventually, this arrived:

and I think it's true to say he's even cuter now that he was when I first saw him.

Anyway, since we're fetching him home the day after tomorrow, it's suddenly become quite urgent to tidy up all the non-kitten-friendly parts of the house (i.e. ALL of it) and make sure all those tools, boxes, bags, screws, nails, pots of paint, piles of wall plugs, etc, etc, are either put away, thrown away, or behind a closed door.

Good job I finished all the wrapping yesterday!

Recommended just for you

Searching eBay to see whether or not the pile of old tat we've brought back from Mum's is worth selling has had a strange result on my emails:

"You recently searched for these things. Still interested? Grab them now!"
OR
"Based on what you looked at you may be interested in these.."

Things that have appeared in the list, and which I am DEFINITELY not interested in acquiring more of include:

• bakelite castors
• Elizabeth & Philip silver wedding coins
• vintage OWZTHAT cricket games
• mediaeval style "Jousting Knights" wall plaque

etc.

Of Bosuns, Bosons and Bozos

The hunt for the elusive Higgs Boson has been much in the news this last week, as the particle physicists at CERN pore over the latest outputs from the Large Hadron Collider and believe they may have seen tantalising hints of its existence.

Sticking with my recent theme of poor science coverage by the nation's media, this has largely been reported as a search for a totally different entity. Something apparently called a Higgs Bosun. Now I'm not overly familiar with the subject, but to me a bosun has always been something to do with sailing. The oldest rank in the Royal Navy, more properly rendered as boatswain, and the chappy who supervises the deck crew. He also, optionally, may have a locker. But he's got absolutely fuck all to do with particle physics.

Now I know it's an unfamiliar term, but you radio and TV Johnnies really mustn't use that as an excuse to fall back on something you ARE familiar with. It's a BosON. Phonetically: BOSE - as in the world-renowned purveyors of high quality audio equipment - and ON - as in the opposite of off.

I really don't see what the problem is. You never see or hear of people referring to protuns, or neutruns, or electruns. Surely even the densest of media hacks must have noticed by now that sub-atomic particles generally, with some notable exceptions, have names ending in -on. And that this not pronounced un.

I know I shouldn't really get so wound up about this stuff but, well, I do. It's just not proper.

Last day

It's my last working day of the year today. Hurrah! Even better than that, it will be foreshortened by having a Christmas "do" to attend at lunchtime, which will stretch comfortably into the afternoon. The only "work" that will be done after noon will be setting my Out of Office reply saying I won't be back until January 3rd next year.

Marvellous.

I love the feeling at this time of year. Even leaving aside Christmas (my favourite time of year in any case), the feeling of *completeness* - that work is over for the holidays - is somehow even more liberating than with a regular holiday. Because it's not just over for the time being, it's over for THE WHOLE YEAR.

Mind you, it would suit me if it was over for the rest of my life. Have I mentioned that I'm sick of it? It's at least controversial and this year has occasionally been suicidal (career-wise, for some high-profile bloggers) to diss one's employers in a public forum, so I won't go into detail, but yes, I've had more than enough. It's mainly that which was behind the Great Absence of blogging earlier this year, when I took a couple of months out to get my head straight. What I was really working on was a medium-term plan to get me out of the place for good.

I never expected to be in this place. Metaphorically. My Dad toiled for most of his working life at a job he loathed, just to do what we all have to do - put a roof over us, feed, clothe, etc. I admired that in a kind of disconnected, unempathic way, because at least in the early days I loved my job. I couldn't really comprehend why anyone would carry on doing something they hated just because of the money. That kind of comprehension only comes with experience. Well, now I have both. Experience and comprehension. And a job I hate. Full house. But at least, after 12pm today, I won't have to think about it until... next year.

Supermassive black hole collapses Radio 4

There's been a scientific discovery. One that deserves a modicum of awe, along with a pinch of excitement and a sprinkle of gravitas. Instead, the matter was subjected to the usual treatment on the Today programme this morning. That is, amused disdain and wilful missing of the point.

Oh, those scientists! What have they gone and done now? I don't know. Something about a large hole or whatnot.

Humphreys - and don't get me wrong, when he's up against a politician, that is to say firmly in the middle of his comfort zone, he can still deliver an illuminating interview along with the occasional barbed question or withering put down - is always totally out of his depth when attempting to cover science. In fact Radio 4 in general seems to have a schizoid approach to science in all its guises. Material World's guests have to fight with Quentin Cooper's attempts to squeeze a bad pun into every sentence, while in the same slot on a different day we have to endure, in The Infinite Monkey Cage, Brian Cox and some other equally populist drivel merchant trying to out-do one another to find the needle of comedy in the haystack of current science. Dumb, dumber and even dumber than that, science on Radio 4 is already a joke and recently it's been presented (it seems) by nothing but jokers.

But outside of the science programmes themselves, any current affairs reporting of matters scientific - especially by the channel's headline anchor men - is inevitably accompanied by an obvious embarrassment at their total lack of understanding, or even interest. So their stock compensation for that is to make fun of it, or make light of it. Faced with the news of the largest black hole ever discovered, we get the usual re-runs of guff like "we thought at one time the LHC was going to create a black hole, didn't we? Chortle, chortle." No, we didn't. "Do I remember reading that a teaspoonful of black hole material would be so dense that if you dropped it, it would fall right through the Earth?" Well... where to start. The teaspoon wouldn't be dense enough to pick the damned stuff up in the first place. Even if it could, it would be way too heavy for you to lift, so the idea of dropping it never arises. And so on. Pathetic.

One a related but different topic, the dinosaurs on the Today programme never did, as far as I'm aware, pick up on the story of Kepler-22b.

For the first time, astronomers have found a planet smack in the middle of the habitable zone of its sunlike star, where temperatures are good for life. We can't yet determine if the planet has a surface, but if it does it would have a temperature around 21°C. What we do know is that it's about 2.4 times the size of Earth, orbits its (smaller, cooler than our) sun every 290 days, and is unlike any planet in our solar system. Could be rocky, could be icy, might even have a global ocean. No idea. But at a distance of 600 light-years we won't be visiting any time soon.

How not to invest £6000

So*, we were at my Mum's** the other weekend and I decided to tackle the stair lift.

This'll be the stair lift she had installed in 2007, used approximately three times and then decided she'd move a bed downstairs and not bother going up there at all. We came across the bill for it shortly after she moved into the care home. £6000. I researched the company that installed it, hoping that they'd have a scheme for buying them back. Yep, you guessed it. A flock of pigs just flew past.

Worse than expected, not only did the company no longer exist, they'd been the subject of a BBC Watchdog investigation into the shady practice of selling stair lifts for way more than they were worth to vulnerable elderly people, often with dementia. Disgusting. As my Nan used to say: "their hands should drop off." Another brief stint of Internet research suggested she'd been overcharged roughly double what it should have been.

Back in June I was reluctant to write off such a massive amount of money. Surely someone could make use of what was effectively a brand new machine? OK four years old, but hardly used at all and still in perfect condition. Three mobility companies were advertising in the local paper. Two of them didn't return my calls, one said they were only interested if it was a straight staircase. Well, it isn't.

It turns right 180° at the bottom, and again 90° at the second kite wind further up. I found an Internet stair lift trading site, snappily titled stair lift trader dot com, and posted this photo there. I received two phishing replies within a couple of weeks, then nothing.

There was a brief flurry of excitement in September when someone telephoned to ask about the stair lift, but it was just one turn too short. The guy's upper landing was another three stairs and a final right turn away from Mum's, so no go.

By the time the end of November was upon us, I'd pretty much resigned myself to having to write-off the majority of the cost of this damned device. But getting rid of it was another conundrum altogether. Professionals would charge for removal which was like throwing good money after bad. I decided to do it myself, so this particular weekend we arrived in Nottingham armed with a set of Allen keys, an adjustable wrench, Mole wrench and anything else I could think of that might help get it apart.

I'll spare you the details. It took me about six hours to get it down, starting on Friday afternoon and finishing on Saturday morning. The tricky bits turned out to be the "hidden" Allen bolt that held the rail sections together (one more bolt that the other 5 that had visible heads), and working out how the heck the seat/battery pack/motor/gear assembly was connected to the rail. But eventually it was a pile of (very heavy) bits. Nikki wondered whether there was a local scrap merchant who might be interested. At least we'd make SOME money back. Good idea! One Google search, one phone call and one short drive later and we were unloading the bits into a skip.

Skip was duly weighed, and the scrap man handed over our dosh. 102kgs of mild steel at £100 a tonne: the princely sum of £10.20.

*All the best posts, and replies to questions, begin with "So" these days. Just ask the Today programme. They've debated the phenomenon several times already. Usually followed by a package in which the interviewee begins all his or her replies with "So." So I'm only keeping abreast of the trend, before you start. What's that? You weren't going to start. I'm sorry. It must be the way you're sitting.

**Strictly speaking it's not my Mum's any more, of course. It's mine. But it still feels disrespectful to even think of it that way, so I think it'll be "my Mum's" for a while yet. Probably until it's sold and we don't have to refer to it at all.

Happy Birthday!

It was my birthday last week, and I was amused to receive two greetings emails from forums I've signed up to in the past which have stored the date and programmatically fired off happy birthday wishes to me at the appointed hour.

One is from a writers' forum I've used extensively in the past (although shockingly I haven't been back there much at all this year, since writing - even blogging - has taken a seat at the back of the bus while we've been on our magical mystery tour of home improvements, illness, death and... er... no. No famine. Yet.

The other made me laugh out loud. Because although I recognised the *name* of the forum in the email, I absolutely couldn't remember the subject. Until I checked it out. It's an online home for various distributed computing projects (like protein folding and SETI@home) that I hooked up with back in the day when Nikki's Dad was recruiting spare CPU cycles to his protein folding team. An unexpected, but not altogether unwelcome, blast from the past for my birthday.

It's beginning to look a lot like...

Yeah. Early exposure to Christmas has spilled out of the malls and department stores and infected commercial radio. Friday night we're listening to Smooth FM and here comes Bing bending our ears with his 1951 Christmas number, and it's still only November 26th.

It' s felt like a quiet couple of weeks but although at the time nothing seemed worthy of blogging, or I couldn't muster up the enthusiasm, looking back there's been quite a bit going on.

The big news is that Nikki decided she wanted livestock again this Christmas, after having plumped for tropical fish last year, so a week ago last Friday I took off for Yorkshire and left a deposit (in the nicest possible way) on this little guy.

He's about six weeks old here, and won't be ready to come "home" until a couple of days before Christmas, but we've been promised more photos between now and then, and the hunt is now on for a name. It's been a while since we last owned a cat, so his impending arrival prompted a trip to Pets At Home to stock up on supplies (a bed, scratching post, bowls, etc).

On the kitchen front, the news is that there's no news. No recurrence of the leak problem, granite guys haven't said when they'll be coming to fit that last short bit of upstand, electricians haven't said when they'll be coming to fix the intermittent fault on the lighting transformer. Only the flooring guy has come up smelling of roses, having said he'd pop round to add beading to those few places where we thought we were going to replace the skirting board but later decided it wouldn't look right, he DID pop round, exactly when he said he would, beaded as necessary and refused all payment. Top bloke.

Subtitles

Last week I was stuck in a hotel where BBC1 had been set to display subtitles without any apparent way to switch them off. This was annoying in the evening but the next morning on breakfast news it turned out to be hilarious.

One article about Russians doing a fake Mars walk ended with the presenter's comment "And all in the name of science!" which the subtitler translated into

"And all in the name of signs!"

Later, a package on the effects of bonfire night on pets included a comment by "some vets at one animal charity," which became mangled into

"Sunbeds at one animal charity..."

And in the same package when explaining that the nervous dog they wanted to "interview" was on his way into the studio but would be late on account of his owners' car having broke down, we got

"The owners kart broke down."

Being a big fan of Damn You Auto Correct I wondered whether there was a special site for subtitling howlers, but all I could find was a few blogs with examples - a bit like this one really :o) Digital Spy does have an interesting explanation about how they're done for live broadcast. An operator rereads the speech into voice recognition software, so that explains a lot!

Unwired

Virgin Trains, eh? It's been a while, but this week I had occasion to delight in their services again. Since I last travelled they've been plastered with WiFi stickers. HotSpot (they shout): fast, reliable, wireless internet. Log on now.

Love to mate. But not at £4 an hour. And not when you're already stiffing me (well, my company) £142.50 for a single ticket to London. Our local cafe, which charges £1.99 for a cup of coffee, can offer me free WiFi for as long as I continue drinking. The least you could do is match this with free WiFi as long as I'm travelling. I guess you don't get to be a millionaire by giving shit away, huh?

Leaky

When we arrived home, having taken a slight detour to Bolton en route, Nat was at work, so there was no-one available to explain the towel on the kitchen floor.

Dropped by accident? Left over from the last load of laundry? Who knew. Didn't take long to discover it was there to soak up the water seeping out from under the corner of the cupboard unit housing the oven. But where was it coming from? It continued to seep out slowly overnight, so the following morning we called Kitchen Guy. He was round within the hour. Removed the plinths, revealing evidence that the water had been there for some time. Wet footings under the tumble dryer and washing machine, but which was at fault?

And why had it taken so long to manifest, when neither machine had been used for a week?

He pulled out the dryer and sat it on a table protector to avoid damaging the floor. We ran a programme through the washer. Nothing. We dried a wet towel in the dryer. Nothing. We let the dishwasher run an empty cycle. Nothing. The mystery remained.

After an hour or so he had to leave, but we agreed it was sensible to leave the dryer out and see what transpired. The answer was... pretty much nothing. We'd brought a suitcase full of laundry back from the Lakes, so Nikki attended to all of that - three loads; washing and drying. No further leak. We loaded up the dishwasher with the Sunday pots. No leak.

The dryer sat in the middle of the kitchen through Monday, Tuesday, until on Wednesday morning Nikki discovered a small puddle on the dryer's mat. On closer inspection the puddle was larger than first thought, having seeped under the mat. I tilted the dryer to let Nikki wipe under the wet side, and more water pissed out on the other side. Where was it all coming from? The dryer hadn't been used since Sunday!

I checked the configuration of the drains and spotted what I thought was the problem. The dryer was connected to the same outflow pipe as the boiler condensate. I figured there was some siphon action going on when the boiler was pumping out. We called the plumber. He looked sheepish, and extended the home-grown standpipe he'd installed to take the dryer output, so that it had more than 1" of head above the condensate outflow. Sheesh.

For the time being, we've left the dryer out to prove the solution, and I'm left wondering if we'll ever have a job done in this house without something going wrong :(

R&R

Never have I been more ready to spend 7 days in the Lake District with our mates than this year. Two significant deaths in the family, two months off work with stress, three months major upheaval with kitchen fittings, an emergency trip to Canada. Exhausted doesn't even begin to describe it.

But a week spent looking at scenery like this...

...enjoying the company of good friends, excellent meals cooked in turn by each of us, or taken in the delightful ambience of local hostelries (of which The Strands Hotel in Nether Wasdale deserves special mention), taking the occasional stroll around a lake, or on a beach, was enough to scrub away the gloom and lift the spirits. It's been two years since we last did this, and we all agreed it will not be the last time. Hall Flat Farm is "our place", almost ideally suited to four couples relaxing together or separately and one in which we've created many special memories.

Christmas is coming

For a few years now - pretty much since our first Christmas in the last house - we've been decorating the Christmas dinner table with all sorts of gold sprinkly bits. We've gone through flying cherubs, "Merry Christmas" banners (which were a bit useless as they tended to get bent and clump together), snowflakes, etc, but the favourite by far are those little gold stars.

They're easy to spread about, and they tend to stick together when they're new, in clumps of between two and seven, so you can while away the time between cracker jokes separating the clumps.

Their only drawback is... they get EVERYWHERE. And it's a standing joke in our house the way they keep turning up throughout the year, in the most unexpected places.

But this year has to be a record. 1st November yesterday, and I found this one on the stairs. From last Christmas.

Sign of the times

I had an appointment in the city (Manchester, not that London) this morning at 9.30 to attend a "probate interview."

That was annoying enough in itself. To manage an estate you need a Grant of Probate. A certificate, effectively, that officially states to anyone who needs to know "this person is allowed to handle all the affairs of this other, dead, person."

There are two ways to get one of these. You can engage the services of a solicitor, who fills in the form for you and pays the fee, and everything goes through on the nod. Because solicitors are trustworthy people aren't they? And if they sign something, then it's right and proper and true. This alternative, you won't be surprised to hear, is expensive.

Alternatively you can fill the form in yourself. It's not complicated. Because you're not a solicitor you'll have to pay an inflated fee - roughly double what the solicitor would have paid (or, more accurately, what you would have paid through your solicitor) - but the really galling part is that you then have to attend a meeting with a representative of the Courts & Tribunals Service to make a formal declaration that what you put in the form is the truth. Because let's face it, since you're not a solicitor you can't be trusted and have probably made it all up. Despite having proven who you are, and being the person named IN THE WILL as the one the deceased chose to handle their affairs.

Still, all that is not what this post is about. I just got carried away a bit. Sorry.

Since the Probate Registry offices in Manchester are in the Civil Justice Centre (an imposing steel building in the Spinningfields area) I parked in one of the central car parks. One of those with a "pay before you leave" machine. Returning to the car after the brief meeting (I was in there a total of five minutes) I was urged by the machine to "Please insert your ticket."

And the second language the machine gave this prompt in?

Polish.

A Kitchen with Knobs On

Although it felt like ages, it was less than two weeks between completion of the main kitchen fit and the final arrival of our knobs. Since we elected to retain our AEG fridge and freezer (the only appliances left from the original kitchen), we also chose the Franke "silk steel" sink and tap, and decided therefore to continue this theme in the knobs and cup handles, which are all brushed steel.

It's hard to take an impressive photo of the kitchen from any angle, with it being so long and narrow. I've been wondering whether it would be possible to get hold of some "photo stitching" software and take a row of pics at 90deg to the units, ending up with a long photo of each side, but I've experimented with PhotoSynth and the results are patchy at best. It doesn't cope well with panoramas in small spaces, apparently, so these will have to do.

So this final stage was completed on Thursday 20 October, the day before we left for the Lakes. Apart from the small section of granite upstand under the boiler cupboard, some short lengths of oak beading around those bits of wall not covered with cupboards (which we'd intended to fit skirting board to, but changed our minds), and fitting a proper door stop to replace the lump of wood that's behind the door right now, it's... ALL DONE! :o)

Leave to take Leave

On the morning I was due to return to work - Monday 17 October - I logged in to find a reply from my manager to my urgent email informing him of our emergency visit to Toronto and that I'd be off for the rest of the week. Company guidelines in the event of the death of a close relative allow five days compassionate leave, but in view of everything that's happened in recent months, he had replied that if I needed longer I should just take it.

This falls into the category of "things I don't need to be told twice." I replied with thanks, reset my Out of Office message, and logged off for the rest of the week. And since we were due to spend all of the week after THAT on holiday in the Lakes, I'll have been off for three weeks by the time I go back. Sadly, Nikki's firm aren't quite so generous when it comes to compassionate leave.

Shirley Margaret Fletcher

I've been thinking (worrying) about this post since before we flew to Toronto. Knowing I should write something, knowing that it would be hard. That it could be upsetting, both to write and to read. The best I can do - ALL I can do - is to relate how she appeared to me. I knew her for a little over ten years. We first met in 2000 when I visited Toronto. Meeting your partner's parents for the first time is never easy, no matter how old and experienced you are. But in this case the circumstances were perhaps even less auspicious than normal, there being the unspoken possibility that I would be spiriting her daughter off to live with me in England. It came back to me later that Shirley had said something like "I wanted to hate him, but I couldn't. He's such a nice guy."

So the first thing I learned about Shirley was that she was a very astute judge of character ;o)

Some people are an open book, others more guarded. Shirley could appear quite abrasive, but if I were to continue with the book analogy I'd say she was like a book that was bound in cactus, but turned out to be a heartwarming story of infinite warmth and humanity when you eventually read it. Whether on this side of the Atlantic or that she was always pleased to see us, always generous to a tee (paying for the overwhelming majority of our meals out no matter where we were, and brooking no argument on the subject), and always made sure we had a full supply of breakfast bagels and coffee when we went there, and that she brought a good supply of Riceroni and pumpkin pie mix when she came here. And marmalade. Oh that homemade marmalade! There's nothing like it on Earth, and the frighteningly meagre supply now sitting in our fridge is the last there will ever be. I hardly dare spread it on a single slice of toast, but when I do - and for as many times as I do - I'll offer up a silent prayer of thanks. I tried many times without success to persuade Nikki to make it while Shirley was still with us. Now I just have to hope that the recipe is one of those that "just works" without her magic touch. What are the chances?

My Inbox is considerably less busy these days too. Shirley was well-connected, email-wise, and the constant stream of jokes, funny photos, or inspiring PowerPoint slide decks that flowed from her was a regular and welcome source of laughs, gasps and awwwwws.

But inevitably our opportunities to get better acquainted were limited by both time and distance. Listening to Nikki, Paul and Stewart relate tales of their childhood in her house, reading the emails of condolence from her widespread friends and acquaintances met on her many cruises, seeing the effect of her passing on everyone we came into contact with on our visit, brought it home just how much she was loved by everyone who knew her, or whose lives she touched.

"It's a great life, John, if you don't weaken," she regularly said to me. And until the very end, she never did. A remarkable woman in every way.

Should Not Have Got On This Flight Tonight

Not being one to like a lot of fuss, Shirley had always said she didn't want Nikki to fly over in "emergency mode" whenever she shuffled off the mortal coil. Since she wasn't here to argue, we went anyway. The first flight we could book, Tuesday 11 October, arrived at Toronto Pearson mid-afternoon. A few seconds of Neil's reaction to Nikki's arrival would have been enough to convince anyone we'd done the right thing going over. We stayed 5 days, flying back Saturday night on the red-eye and arriving back in Manchester on Sunday morning.

The trip was a surreal mix of doing the things we would have done on a normal visit, only without Shirley, and in the midst of dealing with our grief as best we could, trying to help in any small way to organise lawyers, Neil's long-term care, Shirley's possessions, and comply with her last wishes. One of the most unusual of these was to donate her body to medical research. She'd been inspired to do this by a friend who passed before her, and although not having the closure of a formal funeral service proved a little hard for Neil to deal with, everyone was very glad that Shirley's final generous gesture was accepted by the University of Toronto medical research centre (not all are).

In my experience people often talk, or joke, about "donating their body to science" but very few have the courage or conviction to really do it.

Ups and Downs

I'm in danger of writing more apologies for hiatuses (and possibly apologies for incorrect plurals of 'hiatus') on here than 'real' blog posts this year. It's been a year for interruptions. Or to put it another way, a shit year. One with the usual ups and downs, but where the downs have tended to overshadow the ups. Which only underlines the seriousness of the downs, because the ups - especially where our house is concerned - have been huge. First the shed (whose saga fell in the middle of the Great Blogging Hiatus and hence has never been told) and now the kitchen.

So when we left the kitchen, we were knobless but otherwise to all intents and purposes complete. The appliances plumbed in and working; cooker and hob connected and working; fridge and freezer back where they belong; lights all shining brightly. All that remained was to empty the contents of the dozen or so plastic crates piled up in the dining room which comprised the totality of The Kitchen Before (crockery, dry & tinned goods, etc), decide where it would live in the new scheme, and follow it up with everything else we own that could possibly, legitimately, live in a kitchen (glasses, decanters, bottles of booze, candle supplies, the old Kenwood chef - hardly ever used - that has been languishing in a forgotten cupboard since we moved in, ...) thus freeing up space in the last ground floor room to be given The Treatment.

And that's how we spent our time for the whole weekend following completion. In between cooking on The New Hob, we washed and dusted, carried and discussed and packed away, opened and closed the cupboards and drawers with their temporary handles (wood screws covered with masking tape) until by Sunday afternoon the dining room was looking much more like a dining room than it has for the last three months, and everything was put away. Not that I could find anything, but it WAS all put away.

Inevitably there was some jousting for position. No, we can't put the bean-to-cup coffee machine under there because we can't get to the reservoir to fill it with water. No, we can't put in on that side either, because the water level indicator is against the wall and we can't see how full it is. And so on.

That was an Up, that weekend. We got a lot done, felt very happy with it all, and excited about the new kitchen. The following morning, Monday 10 October, just after I'd returned from ferrying Nikki to work I took a phone call from Paul to say their Mum had passed away. Downs don't get much bigger, or come much quicker, than that.

Kitchen fit: Day 14

A day of surprises. A day that, I thought, would be wall-to-wall painting, but which turned out to be hardly any painting at all and other much more exciting things like downdraught extractors, induction hobs and putting the fridge and freezer back into place.

Neff induction hob, with de Dietrich extractor (in "deployed" mode). Ooooh. Finally, after all the waiting we can... er... boil a pan of water. But! Never was boiling a pan of water *quite* so similar to being on the bridge of the USS Enterprise. Touch sensitive surfaces and a whizzy little dial thing that is held in place with a magnet and taps and spins to control the hotplates.

The extractor raises itself out of the depths with the touch of a finger and sinks back down again when it's finished sucking.

All this more than satisfies my life-long fascination with knobs and buttons.

Nice to have the fridge and freezer back in the kitchen too, even if it does mean that for the next three or four days we'll be performing a reversed version of the dance we first started back in July. Now the usable cooking facilities are in the dining room and all the food is in the kitchen. Back then it was t'other way round. Not for long though.

Well, I SAY not for long, but as we discovered today it'll be slightly longer than expected. Here's a photo that gives you a bit of a clue, even though the main reason for including it is to give you another perspective on the lovely new hob (purr, purr)...

See the problem? Yes, that's right. No knobs. No, I mean on the cupboards and drawers. The hob is supposed to be knobless. The drawers aren't. Slight delay in delivery. Slight as in "the week after next."

Well, we can't wait THAT long to get into our new kitchen, so the fitter's going to come up with some Heath Robinsonesque solution involving screws and masking tape apparently. Lovely.

Kitchen fit: Day 13

Plumbers returned again today. After yesterday's gorgeous tapness, today we were being treated to a radiator.

This radiator, to be precise. We thought it looked good in the brochure but it looks even better on the wall. And what's more, it gets warm. When the heating's on. In't central heating brilliant? (TM)

Meanwhile, back in the rest of the kitchen, there was painting. There will, apparently, be painting again tomorrow too. And with all other significant installations either complete, or not happening until Friday, I might have to find something else to blog about.

Kitchen fit: Day 12 - at last a tap

When you've been filling your kettle, via a large plastic jug, from a wash basin under the stairs no bigger than a loaf of bread, for a month (almost to the day - the last time we had a kitchen sink was way back here), and also using that basin to slop out the coffee maker, and empty the fish tests, and pretty much everything else vaguely sinkish apart from washing up, then this picture is like a vision of heaven.

Yes. We have a tap. Awesome isn't it?

The rest of the day's progress was limited to more painting and, as I may have already mentioned, putting a second coat of cream onto cream-painted units makes little visible impression, there are no "progress" photos to share today. Apart from the awesome tap, of course.

Kitchen fit: Day 11 - the granite men

After the templating activities of ten days ago we had been awaiting the delivery of the granite worktops with eager anticipation. From template to cut normally takes a week. In our case the extra time was down to the complexity of the cuts and the need to radius several of the corners to match the curve of the units.

Today, the wait was over. The granite men arrived just before 10am and within an hour more than half of the worktops were in place.

This is the small worktop to the left of where the hob will be - at the south end of the kitchen on the right. There used to be a tall built-in cupboard here. The finish we've chosen is called "riverwash" - neither the most common highly polished version (fingermark hell) or the slightly less common but still not uncommon matt (greasy fingermark hell), this has an etched surface that is slightly rippled. Still relatively rare (only the second one these particular granite guys had fitted and something the plumber hadn't ever seen). The colour is "absoluto" - the darkest kind of black.

And here's the new sink. There's been a small miscommunication about what's happening under the boiler. Granite men assumed a small box around the pipe work; we wanted a completely flat surface under the cupboard so the boxing in will eventually stretch along most of the wall, meaning the upstand had to be recut and left loose until the box is complete.

They took it all in their stride though.

Beyond ridiculous

Even as I start to write this I can't believe I'm (a) wasting my time with it and (b) sufficiently annoyed with what is essentially a vacuous pile of herd-fodder to bother devoting a post to it, but we just got through watching this year's X Factor "Judges' Houses" round, and I'm dumbfounded at the depths they've plumbed for the inevitable "twist."

I can't remember when it first happened and I certainly can't be bothered to look it up, but by now regular viewers of X Factor are very familiar with the concept of Manufactured Groups at boot camp.

It started one year when the number of groups being put through was pitifully low. Suddenly someone had an "idea." Let's take all these soloists that haven't quite made the grade individually, put them together and pretend they're a group! I swear one year two out of the three groups that made it through to the final rounds hadn't existed at the start of auditions (I *have* checked this, and it was series 4 - 2007 - the culprits being "Hope" and "Futureproof". I'm sure you remember them).

So we've been used to this for at least the past four years and the number of groups going through from initial auditions has continued to be... on the low side. Is anyone surprised? Why would you audition as a group when there's a very public history of the producers making groups up on the spot and giving them - effectively - a free pass to the later rounds at the expense of people who have been singing and practising together for more than a week.

Well you may have thought that was ridiculous, but here's where the title of this post comes from. Because THIS year's shenanigans have taken that level of ridiculousness and multiplied it not once, but twice.

First of all, the groups that were manufactured at boot camp were still not good enough, so right at the end, a few members from a handful of groups were given "a life line." Formed into a new stratum of meta-manufactured group made entirely from left over pieces of worn out manufactured group, these groups were then given tickets to Judges Houses. Or judge's house, in fact, since there's just the one for the groups.

With stupefying surrealism, when THOSE groups weren't good enough either, another random selection of members from two groups were given another "life line" (these really are 'cats' - and they haven't yet run out of lives) and made into a third level of uber-meta-manufactured group who then (surely not?) made it through to the final.

Like I said: beyond ridiculous.

iBeer

Here I am in the living room, with an iBeer, doing an iBlog on my new iPad. Crikey. Saturday nights will never be the same.

(Back on the old - well, new - desktop now). We went out shopping today. Nikki wanted to change our pillows. So... four pillows. That's what we needed. We came back with seven movies, Kasabian's new album (it was playing while we were in HMV and we both quite liked it), a funky clever folding chopping board (Chop2Pot by Joseph Joseph) and a set of ice cube trays, two bags of food from M&S for a "picky tea", a 32GB iPad, an Apple TV box, black leather smartcase, camera connection kit, and... four pillows.

These may well be the most expensive pillows I've ever slept on.

Lovin' the iPad though :o)

Kitchen fit: Day 9

While the electricians busied themselves finding the source of yesterday's black, quiet fell on the works. The quiet of a solitary, painting man.

Priming and sanding yesterday, and a start on the first coat today. No photos for the time being. The colour we've chosen (Gardenia by name, but cream to you and me. A kind of creamy ivory, to be precise) is virtually indistinguishable from the colour of the primer that the units came with, so yesterday's, today's and even tomorrow's look remains largely unchanged apart from a subliminal increase in richness and lack of blemish.

The only change that impinges on the senses is the faint smell of paint, and as Blogger doesn't yet support smellyvision I can't convey that :o)

The lights are going out all over Britain

Well... all over the house anyway. Well, the ground floor.

Nat stepped into the hall around 9pm last night. Dusk had fallen and darkness lit the hall with a soul-sapping lack of light blacker than the black pit of the blackest black thing anyone ever went back to, when they were trying to go back to black. She turned the light on and it didn't. She did the only sensible thing.

"Dad? The lights aren't working."

The trip had tripped. I noticed in passing that it was now a blue trip, where before it had been... black. Black thoughts clouded my mind as I returned to the dark hall and tried the lights again. They did. But flicking a switch in the newly wired kitchen brought the black back. I tripped it twice more, just to prove I had the knack for a black attack in the shack.

Kitchen fitter phoned the sparky this morning. "What's the crack, Jack? We've got black, you'd better track back."

Sparky came. The problem was the blue trip. Rated at 30mA, it was no match for 5x78mA bulbs in the hall light (from cold), or six 12mA spots in the kitchen. "These RCD trips are the bane of any sparky's life."

So, rather spookily, the solution was to change the blue trip back to black.

Kitchen fit: Day 7

A very noisy day in the house today as the fitters were filling and sanding the joints in the cornice all day. Electricians returned to complete their installation, with a tail for the possible later addition of a kick space heater (after we've lived through a winter and decided whether a single radiator is enough), hob lights, connecting up the new ring main, cooker and hob feeds to the board and completing all tests.

So today I was able to set the time on the cooker. Never thought I'd be able to say I enjoyed THAT chore!

Kitchen fit: Day 6

Another leap forward in visible progress today as the electricians returned to start second fit.

All the lights went in (with the exception of the two over the hob space), light switches, socket covers (still not powered up) and power supplies to the appliances and appliance spaces (i.e. the hole for the fridge and freezer). A very full day's work.

On the "units" front, the kitchen fitters stayed out of the way of the sparkies and concentrated on cutting and fitting the plinths.

But the most obvious, and in many ways most exciting change, was the installation of the oven. The phrase dog's bollocks comes immediately to mind. The wiring still has to be tested so there's no power to the (double) oven as yet, but a kitchen never looks quite like a kitchen until there's an oven, and now there is.

Hare today

Having taxied back to Chesterfield from Friday's nuptials, yesterday morning was largely taken up with breakfasting and then heading off in one car to pick up the other two (the logistics of which are fairly simple compared to some of the stunts we've pulled in the Lakes).

Neither vehicle had come to any harm during their enforced stay in the pub car park, and duly retrieved, we set off for an afternoon's amble around Chatsworth gardens, taking in the general ambience and enjoying some of the unusual sculptures that adorn the gardens at the moment as part of their "Beyond Limits" exhibition.

I christened this one "Hare On My Bell End" - for obvious reasons. Never did find out what it's really called, and as it's not mentioned over here or on the "sculpture map" I'm still none the wiser. Maybe it's a permanent feature.

Anyway having indulged in more ice cream and pasties than were entirely good for us, we returned to P&V's place (via the Robin Hood for a quick quaff) to refresh before wandering over to the Market Pub for a couple of extra pints in advance of dinner at The Old Post. And WHAT a dinner. Superb.

All too soon the evening, and this morning's breakfast, with such charming and erudite companions was over and we returned home to examine what progress had been made, kitchen-wise in our absence on Friday afternoon, which was - as I'm sure you'll realise if you've been following - "Kitchen fit: Day 5".

The answer was "not a lot" - certainly nothing that would be visible in a photo. The guys had been concentrating on completing the essential and fiddly bits that aren't especially noticeable, while staying out of the way of the granite men. Expect more obvious progress tomorrow.

Wedding of the Year

Can't be many happier occasions than witnessing two of your best friends getting spliced, and that's exactly where we were yesterday afternoon, in the company of most of the rest of our best friends, their friends, family and a bunch of very energetic small people. The kind that make weddings... um... loud. No, fun. That's it. Fun.

Starting as we meant to go on with a glass of bubbly at Phil & Vicky's (excellent hosts as always), we wended our slightly circuitous way (on account of an overturned lorry on the A617) to Mansfield Registry office for the ceremony and then, with the day's official business out of the way, we settled down to the more important business of celebrating the nuptials with further champagne, and related (and unrelated) beverages, relieved on occasion by the odd sausage roll (really nice ones, as it happened) and dollop of coleslaw.

Called upon - owing to my acclaimed position as "resident wordsmith" - to pen something in the wedding book on behalf of the mates, I can't help feeling I disgraced myself somewhat, on account of the evening's overindulgences and the ebullient flavour of the day, but what's done is done, and whatever I wrote it was written from the heart, with feeling, and with relatively little time for reflection or composition, so f**k it. As long as it's not the last thing I write in a public place, I'll be alright. I think.

Anyway many, many congratulations to Ritchie & Helena (or Helena and Ritchie as they are in the above photo). May your days be long and your troubles few, your friendship strong and your love stay true, and if things go wrong and the air turns blue, just bite your tongue and have a damn good screw.

E.J.Thribb has got nothing on me.

Kitchen fit: Day 4

After the "excitement" of the previous night, the first order of business yesterday morning was to ask the fitters to shove some spare bubble wrap into the ducting hole to prevent a repeat visit from kitteh.

Luckily, one of them remembered just as they were leaving at 4pm!

The rest of the day was taken up with de-boxing and positioning three of the appliances - washing machine, drier and dishwasher - packing the bases and fitting the tops that will carry the granite worktops, in preparation for the granite "templating" that was scheduled for today.

Once this was done, the guys filled in their time with detailed work like filling the gaps at the sides of the cupboard with carefully scribed panel sections to match the carcases.

The "granite men" arrived today and for some reason I was expecting the templating procedure to be very hi-tech and involve laser measuring equipment and computerised drafting of the worktop areas.

No.

Strips of 4mm MDF, cut to size and glued together to form a kind of latticework representation of the surface area. I kid you not. I guess, although it LOOKS a bit Heath Robinson, it's actually the quickest, cheapest and most accurate way of representing a space, when that representation has to be millimetre-perfect to avoid a very expensive mistake.

Anyway, we didn't hang around to see the finished article as we had a wedding to get to, so here's how the kitchen looked at close of play yesterday (Day 4). You'll have to wait for Friday's progress until we're back from our keenly anticipated weekend in the company of friends.

The cat burglar

1.18am, and I become vaguely aware of a house alarm blaring away in the distance.

Nikki: "Is that our alarm?"
I listen more carefully, in my sleep-befuddled state.
Me: "Don't think so. It *is* close though."
I get out of bed and plod over to the window. When I pull back the curtain I can see our alarm box flashing its blue light angrily.
Me: "Fuck! It IS ours!"
As I open the bedroom door and the internal alarm becomes clearly audible, several thoughts crowd my still-not-fully-awake mind.
Should I go back and get my baseball bat?
Should I turn the alarm off BEFORE I check downstairs, alerting any intruder to the fact there's someone awake?
Has someone noticed the appliances being delivered and decided it's a good time to go on the rob, while they're all still in boxes?
I quickly decide plenty of light and an aggressive demeanour is the best approach to scare the intruder away. I cancel the alarm, turn the lights on and start downstairs.
Halfway down, I hear a noise in the kitchen. Bloody hell. How have they got in without making a noise?
I reach the hall, turn all the downstairs lights on and march boldly into the kitchen with a no-nonsense face on and the most don't-mess-with-me posture I can muster. I come face to face with the intruder.

A young tortie-and-white kitten, cowering at the other end of the kitchen.

She utters a frightened miaow and scuttles under the nearest cupboard unit.

Then I remember the fitters have just the day before completed coring out a 15cm hole in the wall for the ducting. A hole that presumably, from the outside, looks like a cat flap.

I retrieve the keys for the patio door, prop the kitchen door in the doorway to prevent the kitten escaping into the rest of the house, open the outside door and persuade her to go and burgle someone else, by which time Nikki has come down to check that I'm alright. With around 16 gallons of adrenaline pumping around inside me, I decide going back to bed isn't an option, so we set the coffee maker going and settle down in the lounge for some (very) early morning telly.

Kitchen fit: Day 3

Appliance day! Well, the delivery of them anyway. And suddenly once again the house became an obstacle course with boxes everywhere.

Dishwasher, double oven, hob, sink, taps and fixings in the hall; washing machine and tumble drier in the kitchen, and the downdraft extractor already unpacked and stood in place so the fitters could marry up the outflow fitting with the position of the ducting (coring for which was completed, with much cursing and swearing at the quality of Victorian stop brick, this morning).

The rest of the day was taken up with cutting the cupboard to fit around our wall-mounted combi boiler. The cupboard went up and down more times than a fairground pony, largely due to the shape of the wall, which kept distorting the carcase during fitting. In the end drastic measures were necessary, in the form of a diagonal cut across one corner of the cupboard to relieve the stress. This will be invisible after painting, but it did make me wonder how the joiner would have coped with the problem if we'd chosen solid wood cabinets.

Kitchen fit: Day 2

Today was mainly about positioning the remaining cupboards and starting to hang the wall units.

Even without doors, the wall units took the kitchen another huge leap towards "looking right" and their consequential absence from the dining room meant a step away from it being such an obstacle course, since they were no longer blocking access to the kettle station and the cutlery drawer.

Visible progress was somewhat hampered by having to core out two walls to take the ducting for the downdraft extractor, which proved a slow and noisy task. So slow that our fitters decided to abandon the second hole halfway through, to give the drill time to cool down! Even so by clocking off time the kitchen, although still full of tools, ladders and boxes of fittings, was definitely taking shape.

Kitchen fit: Day 1

And so finally, we come to the start of the actual fitting of the actual kitchen (actually). The project we started on July 9 and which has had more than its fair share of ups and downs already, is (hopefully) on its final up. Finally.

The two fitters - Mr Kitchen Guy himself and his mate - turned up at 9am as promised and got started right away. The units were delivered almost coincident with their arrival and pretty soon the kitchen was a storm of bubble wrap and tape as the wrappings came off and things started to move into place.

But it wasn't just the kitchen. Oh no. We had plastic-wrapped cupboards in the dining room, in the hall, and "cheeks" (the shaped side panels that fit alongside each cupboard) propped up against just about every wall.


Walking around the house suddenly became a bit of an obstacle course. Trip hazards, too, with coving and other long sections lying on the floor in front of the dining room door.

By close of play (4pm, without a lunch break - a solid day's work) we were beginning to get the merest hint of what the finished article will look like.

Insurers have a laugh

Coincidentally I've just received renewal notices for the buildings and contents insurance on our place AND on my Mum's house, which is currently in the process of being emptied ready for sale, but isn't quite empty yet (by several tons).

Our monthly premium has crept up by a few pounds every year, which I put down to inflation, and increased charges owing to the scrotes who regularly scam money off the insurers, but this time round I noticed that - compared to my Mum's quote - our people don't show an annual charge. So I worked it out, and had to pick my jaw off the desk. Suddenly 5 years after we've moved here, we're paying over a thousand pounds a year for combined buildings and contents insurance.

Hang on, that can't be right. The bill for Mum's place is less than 400. OK, it's a smaller place and Nottingham isn't *quite* so bad for crime as Manchester, but even so that looks a bit ridiculous. Let's do a quick check on confused.com. See if they can redress the balance of all those irritating adverts they've subjected me to over the years. Hey look! They can!!

Five minutes on the Internet and I've saved us about £600 a year. Love it.

I'm sure you'll be able to predict what the original insurers said when I phoned to cancel. "Well, we could look at the underwriting - I'm sure we'll be able to do it cheaper." Yeah. Thanks. Maybe you should have thought of that before assuming I'd carry on letting you rip us off.

A-building we will go

But first, a-shopping. To somewhere I didn't even know existed: the Northern Computer Markets held at Bowlers every Saturday. How, you might ask, can any self-respecting geek live in Manchester for ten years and not know that was there? And you might ask. I don't have an answer. But I know it's there now :o)

Wandering round trying to stop the drool from soaking into my beard was hard enough. Then we smelled the bacon and egg baps. Then we looked around a bit more, worked out a buying strategy and started spending. A Gigabyte 3DMars case, power supply, a 22" LG LED monitor (just the one for now), a 2TB hard drive (Western Digital of course) 8GB of Kingston memory, BD rewriter, Gigabyte motherboard, i5 processor, Nvidia graphics card, card reader, wireless card, new keyboard and mouse (why not?) and we were done.

Back home on the double to start assembling and by about 4pm the machine was assembled, booted first time, and I was busy reinstalling software. Bloody brilliant.

The old machine, stripped of its disks (the 1TB to keep, the 250GB installed just long enough to suck its data off) is over there, pretending to be a door stop.

No.1 Chinky Buffy

Diane's been in town unexpectedly this week, so tonight we headed into town for an almost ad-hoc get-together at Manchester's renowned No.1 Oriental Buffet. Or at least it was renowned last time I looked (2-3 years ago maybe). On this particular occasion, although the company was as usual excellent, the meal was a little under par. A bit predictable in choices and some of it not as hot as it could be. Maybe that's what gave me a gippy tummy the next day. Anyway fun was had, drink was quaffed and faces were stuffed.

Then later Annie came back with us and we sat for an hour or two speccing up a replacement for the deceased beased. The death of the old war horse was distinctly to be treated as an opportunity to be grasped, rather than a tragedy to be mourned. Truth be told there had been more grinding of teeth, muttering and swearing in its general direction in recent months (years) than praise and soft words. Slow, error-prone, noisy, slow, many of its application exhibiting less than normal behaviour, and slow.

So one requirement for its replacement stood out from the crowd: Not Slow.

I think an Intel Core i5 and 8GB of memory should be fast enough :o)

Wake up, time to die

The line, for those who don't recognise it (are there any? lol) is from my favourite movie: Blade Runner.

It's posted in honour of my dear old Fujitsu-Siemens PC, which I've had since December 2004 and which didn't wake up this morning. Since I've used it pretty much every day, apart from holidays spent away from home, in almost seven years, its "not waking up" had happened before.

Usually it means a crash has occurred overnight for some reason, prior to the sleep kicking in. This time a warm reboot didn't fix the problem, and neither did a cold reboot, which is usually enough to clear down any hardware registers that have got their knickers in a knot. No, this was more than just a "not waking up." This was the Big Sleep.

Fingers crossed it's just something like the video card, and not a hard disk crash and the loss of all that lovely data. That lovely, unbacked up, data. Who'd have thought I'm a 33-year computer industry veteran who doesn't back up? There must be thousands of us.

Corporate bollockspeak

A quiet week on the kitchen front (silent, actually), so I thought I'd share some examples of talking bollocks that I found buried in a comments thread on one of the sites I read regularly.

Phrases that those attempting to climb the greasy pole litter their conversations with, in an attempt to sound knowledgeable, when in fact all they achieve is a demonstration of their scroteworthiness.

"Quantum leap"
Bandied about to mean a fundamental, radical change, but in reality an inconceivably small distance.

"Critical mass"
Clever manager types use this to mean the gathering together of sufficient resources (er, people) to complete a task in the optimum time. It's original meaning is the minimum quantity of something that is guaranteed to make it fly apart catastrophically.

All for now. Feel free to contribute.

The New Floor

Well, it might be totally devoid of anything remotely resembling a kitchen unit, but the new floor received its last two coats of sealer yesterday, and now has a deep, rich, satin sheen and a colour that - remarkably - is an almost perfect match for the oak staircase we had fitted back in March, as you can see:

Now we wait for a week, while the kitchen manufacturer catches up with the order, and the kitchen echoes loudly with every small noise inside or outside the house. We just know it's going to feel a LOT smaller once the units are in. We've had the whole space to ourselves since the beginning of July, but it'll be good to finally move out of the dining room!