Well as much as someone this size can hide anywhere, let alone a corner, and not even with a lampshade on my house.
There has been more decorating, but we are getting to the end of the rainbow. The mural wallpaper went up, and it was a lot easier than it looked, and we’re really happy with that. Then there were the mismatched shelves. They are deliberately mismatched, for a change it isn’t poor DIY skills. The shelves are all still up, over a week later, though it may be more by luck than judgement. The drill bit snapped and embedded itself in the wall when drilling hole two of the afternoon. Some of the shelves aren’t necessarily straight, and personally I wouldn’t put too many heavy things on any of them. But they do look OK.
We had a day off from decorating and visited Ifield Watermill, I am thinking about writing up that separately, along with pictures, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.
It was a Bank Holiday weekend, so why wouldn’t the Monday be spent tidying up the garden? There was a lot of jigsaw action – none of which involved the sedate placing of pieces on a board, or the Jigsaw World app – no this was using a jigsaw to cut up massive pieces of wood into smaller pieces of wood. We’d bought a fire pit, one that doubled as a barbeque, and it would need feeding later after it had fed us.
By us, I mean the various people invited round for the evening.
It meant that Baker Lake needed emptying. After watering everything in sight and chucking twenty plus buckets of water over the back fence onto the (now sodden) path down the back in the pack, the lake didn’t look like it was going down. So, Helen pulled the plug and over the next hour the water flowed out, running down the slope and turning the bottom of the garden into the swamp it usually is during winter.
After getting the garden into a respectable state, it was time to start on feeding and watering the people coming around. There was a lot of food, which I’ll come back to. The fifty plus year olds were inside, and particularly the grumpy old men sat in the kitchen being miserable and listening to music. The twenty somethings were outside, and Helen was flitting around like a human dynamo, desperately awaiting the moment the barbeque could be converted to the fire pit and wood could be thrown on.
Some of the pieces were slats from a dismantled bed (too well dismantled as it would turn out a week later, the long side pieces were supposed to have been kept intact). It has to be said that it is the first time I have ever seen wood ‘melt’ as it burnt. It had a flame-retardant coating on, and so kept together but it shaped around other pieces of burning wood. A bit freaky really.
With it being a Bank Holiday Monday I was working the next day. In sharp contrast with my younger self I don’t like doing anything on a school night. So, from about nine there was a little voice inside my head saying, “isn’t it time you all went home?” Not very sociable I know, but the very thought of having to be sociable is giving me anxiety at the moment.
The fire pit was a bit smoky, probably a lot to do with the flame-retardant wood. So smoky that I kept expecting Burt Reynolds to pop up as the Bandit. I’m sure I could still smell smoke on myself days – and showers – later.
And back to the food. I said there was a lot. That may have been an understatement. There were a lot of leftovers. We were still having barbeque leftovers a week later and still some sits in the fridge. Even after sending a village in Mali enough to feed the whole village for a fortnight. Then there is the salsa. Not the dance, that would be easier to get through. No, it’s the homemade salsa dip. No one needs that much salsa, we have the first post Brexit non-EU salsa mountain.
Breakfast, lunch, dinner, and tea, and the tub doesn’t seem to get any emptier. It’s salsa with everything. Having cereals? You don’t need milk, tip some salsa on instead. Crumpets? Use salsa instead of butter. Salsa sandwiches for lunch. No tomato base for the Friday pizza, use salsa instead. How about a nice cup of salsa instead of Horlicks before bedtime?
Back at work, I’m in a different building. It took until lunchtime to get fully working IT kit. The desk I’d been given had an ergonomic mouse and keyboard on it, which of course means it completely unusable to anyone else apart from the person it was set up for. The monitor had the strangest connection, not resembling anything I’d seen before. It was almost a scart shape, but the size of a usb port or HDMI port.
Facilities stealthily announced that there would be a food truck turning up each morning outside the office for people to get breakfast / lunch/ snacks etc. There was no blanket e-mail, so it was a third hand forward e-mail that led to us knowing about it, and then on the second day an A4 piece of paper with details appeared on top of the fridge (so no use for short people). It is there in the car park for about ten minutes somewhere between 9:30 and 9:45. Which of course is the time I have a daily team call, and it’s gone by the time I get there, saving me from the despair of sausage and bacon.
On Thursday I have an altercation with a muppet who works on the same floor as me. He starts berating me for not wearing a mask in the toilet. I respond with typically poor grace telling him “at least I can effing read”. (He’d ignored the engaged slider on the door.) And a see you next Tuesday or two may well have slipped out as well. I wasn’t in my finest loquacious mood. If I had been, I would have called him a poor man’s (or scruffy) Richard Ayoade. The only things stopping me was first, I didn’t think of it until I was walking away, and secondly, I would have made a complete mess of trying to pronounce Ayoade anyway.
At weekends all I want to seem to do is sleep more and get up later. But I did work out why this weekend. It’s because I’m tall and therefore I need to lay longer in bed.
We didn’t get around to any decorating this weekend, instead spent a lot of time mooching about shops. There was a lunch out at the Bolney Stage (a wonderful Tudor building) on Friday, ice cream out in Horsham on Saturday, and Curry out on Sunday night, and even quicker than usual it was time to go back to work again.
Yes, I’m back and in full on misog mode. If you don’t like whining, then this isn’t the place for you. (If you don’t like wining, this isn’t the place for you either; but if you don’t like winning then this is probably the best place for you.)
One of the things about working at Hove is you can’t use your own face masks. You have to take yours off and use one of the provided style of mask. This is because the masks have been specially and scientifically designed to be of an excellent standard. Unfortunately, that excellence is only in terms of they are without a doubt the most uncomfortable, ill-fitting and pretty much useless pieces of sh1te I’ve had the misfortune to wear since lockdown first started over a year ago.
I left the site during the day for the first time since moving here last Thursday. It was a surprise to see the front car park of the office completely rammed full of cars. A surprise because when I get in in the morning, there’s only a couple of cars there, and when I leave in the evening, I’m usually the last car there.
I had a craving for a sausage and bacon roll, which was why I’d left the office during the day. I headed down to the Station Café, only to find it was closed and would be until the first of June. On my way there I’d noticed there was another café / sandwich shop nearby. I headed there only to find it was another of those effing poncey menu places. There was no way to get a simple sausage and bacon roll. They only did bratwurst for sausage, and as any long-time reader will know I’m not one for any type of sausage that isn’t cheap and nasty. Everything on their chalk boards (another bad sign) had lots of random salad and sauces on, and all fixed. I came away foodless and I won’t be going back in there again. I found out this week, if I’d carried on going and gone around the corner onto the main strip of shops there are plenty of places to feed my cheap meat addiction.
On a normal working day, I’m the only male in the building who doesn’t work for facilities (or their contractors). Yet, none of them can follow the signs and instructions up around the site. The ones they must have put up themselves. One way doesn’t seem to apply; inability to use the vacant/in use sliders on doors; no closing of lids; and use of aerosols (I’m assuming the last one, as it’s that or they bathed in some foul sweet smelling cr@p before using the facilities). All they need to complete the set is to throw chewing gum in the urinal.
We’ve only been in Portland East for three weeks, and they are kicking us out to go to West for a month as they are doing cabling works that will be noisy. And so, with the building going to be empty from next week for a month, they send a team of workmen in today to put up new branding decals all around the place. It’s fairly certain I won’t be asking them for help with my next brewery knees-up.
I spent what seemed an eternity decorating at the weekend. With that in mind it probably wasn’t my best idea to read the full version of “The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists” in the week before I started it. I kept expecting Nimrod (I love calling people that as a term of abuse, I’m not the only one it would appear) to turn up and tell me to call at the office at the end of the day to get my cards. Either for going too slowly or using too much paint. With the number of little bits that need touching up (appropriately of course), it would appear that perhaps I was born to skimp.
We also found time to go to the Crawley Museum on our Friday off, dodging rain showers, and also nipped into the Parkside (which I can’t say without doing it in the style of “Riverside” by Sidney Samson) café, and I got that sausage and bacon roll I’d been craving the day before.
To get through the drive to and from work (have I mentioned I don’t like driving?) I’m amusing myself with the various signs indicating turn offs for wonderfully named towns and villages. I have touched on some of these in previous works, but my journey passes the following places which trigger the same thoughts each time.
Handcross. It makes me think that perhaps somewhere there should be a village called Handhappy, or another one called Footcross perhaps.
Warninglid. Every time it’s always Warning! Lid! I wrote a drabble about this ages ago.
There I was, happily driving along, not a care in the world, when out of nowhere the hubby exclaims, “ooh, warning lid!”
I looked around expecting to see lots of lids flying towards us, but can’t see a thing.
“What the hell do you mean, warning lid? Is this a warning about a danger zone for lids popping off jars and flying at people, or did you mean warning, there was a manhole cover lid missing that I might drive into?”
“I didn’t say anything about a warning, I said Warninglid, it’s the name of the village we’re driving through.”
Bolney. Not the name itself, but I finally went there after passing signs for so long and it’s a lovely village. Another blog post was written about that as well. https://onetruekev.co.uk/Mutterings/2018/08/13/bolney/
Cowfold. In much the same vein as Staplefield. How do you fold a cow? Why? And many more ridiculous questions.
Ricebridge. Why would anyone make a bridge out of rice? You wouldn’t trust it enough to actually use it. Plus it would expand when it rained and it got wet.
Then there is the place where no one has bare feet as the entire population Has socks!
Albourne sounds like he’s Jason Bourne’s younger, less interesting brother.
Then most of the signs seem to mention the place where all those smug self-satisfied people end up living where they can B-right-on!
Finally, on a sign where you might blink and miss it – Portslade, which just makes me think of hundreds of bottles of different Ports laid out ready to drink.
Having disavowed Tottenham after their actions were caught and captured, I’ve gone for a complete step change, and have bought Crawley Town season tickets for Helen and me for the 2021-22 season. It will be something different for us to do. Always assuming we don’t move into lockdown forty-seven.
In a first for me – even though I’m pretty obsessive about this – I cleared my e-mail inbox. At work. My home one leaves a lot to be desired. So many people I’ve not gotten around to responding to (and certainly a lot of missed deadlines), and that I owe apologies to. Need to tweak that work life balance a bit I think.
It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything more than a sad sack Facebook status update. Over fifty days in fact. It isn’t as if we haven’t been doing anything, there has been lots going on, off over and under during that time. But, when it comes to putting pen to paper, or typing into Word, I just haven’t been able to do it, and the notepad has been closed unblemished, and Word has the X in the top right-hand corner clicked on firmly.
The last time I wrote anything was after going out (but not out out) for Helen’s birthday. We dropped the cat off for teeth cleaning and spent a day wandering around looking at old buildings in East Grinstead, Forest Row and Hartfield. I started a write up but didn’t get as far as lunchtime and hadn’t added any of the photos before it was closed to sit in My Documents. Possibly never to be finished.
During this time, I have managed to put two issues of Flanagan’s Running Club out, but with those it’s just collation of things I’ve borrowed or items I’ve written before. I had a good backlog of stuff this time last year, with writing group every fortnight it was getting added to on a regular basis, but the flow has dried up. If there isn’t some sort of normality resumed by the end of the year next year’s issues may be few and far between.
I’ve had a rubbish idea for a short story about a bloke called Justin Thyme, but that may never see the light of day either. I’ve had thoughts on a poem paraphrasing The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again”, along the lines of meet the new car, same as the old car, but that deserves not to see the light of day.
Blog posts is pretty much all I’ve written in the last year, the various works in progress for the novels haven’t been touched, and then over the last couple of months even the blog posts have dried up.
Besides the Sussex wanderings on Helen’s birthday (a far cry from previous years where we’ve been to Brussels, Toulouse, Barcelona, Berlin, and New Hampshire), there has been a few Crawley walks, finding old buildings and more street signs in Bewbush. An afternoon in Shoreham, which happily involved ice cream and a couple of mooches about looking for cars.
With the office closing I got a lump sum for excess travel for six years, with which we used to buy a new car, as the old Venga was becoming a bit of a repair pit, so it’s been given to Nathan. We looked at quite a lot of cars, all that had external measurements that suggested they were larger than the Venga. But whereas the Venga is a bit of a Tardis inside, most of the others we saw were the opposite. The Peugeot 2008 was laughable, I couldn’t even get in the thing properly without losing hair and skin. The Citroen C3 was uncomfortable and had a teeny tiny little toy steering wheel. There were others, but none of these bigger cars had the space we had already, or the adjustability we need when one of us is five foot nothing and the other six feet two. So, we got another Venga, a couple of years old, but with a whole host of mod con updates to the one we had. Sat-nav, panoramic sunroof, heated seats and steering wheel, reverse camera. It may be boring to get the same car again, but it is right for us.
Anyway, back to road sign,
With three roads in Broadfield named after cricketers, I was eight short of a team, so set out to find them in other parts of Crawley from other themes to come up with a team for the ages. I did so and was then left with trying to find the best batting order for them, as there were seven in the team that were opening batsmen at some point. I eventually came up with this order.
Jack Hobbs (all-time leader for runs and centuries)
Alastair Cook (Most runs and caps for England)
John Edrich (Just edged his cousin Bill out)
Ken Barrington (Best England batting average for a player scoring over 5,000 test runs)
W.G. Grace (Top five all time for runs, wickets, and catches)
Wally Hammond (Over 50k runs and 2nd most triple centuries)
Wilfred Rhodes (Most ever 1st class appearances and most wickets ever)
Fred Titmus (One of three in this team to score more than 20k runs and take 2,500 wickets)
Jack Russell (5th leading wicket keeping dismissals)
Derek Shackleton (Most post war wickets taken)
Jimmy Anderson (England’s leading wicket taker)
Looking in the A-Z I did find address for (Peter) May House and (Jim) Laker Court, but there were no road signs, just plaques on the wall of the building, so they missed out, as did (Ben) Stokes Close. I also found an appropriate team manager – (Keith) Fletcher Close.
I’ll mention work briefly. It’s fucking chaos. No other words for it. It’s difficult to explain just how busy it is. I need to be back in the office, anything to break up doing twelve-hour days and still not getting everything done. If it’s not all getting done there’s no point in doing so much over normal hours. Even with three days weekends there doesn’t feel like there’s a break.
Plus working at home recently has been somewhat entertaining. We’ve had a new boiler. The company that were doing the fitting sent Laurel and Hardy the first day. After much scratching of heads and arses they said it would have to go in the loft and a couple of hundred miles of copper piping would need installing. And then on the way out they took some sun cream. They didn’t come back. When their boss did a few days later, the boiler was put in the kitchen, and there was very little new piping on display. And the electricians came and wired it in to the mains and it was job’s a good un.
Well until it was time to do the kitchen. We’d been and planned a new kitchen back in October. Yet it was after easter by the time it got fitted. The deliveries came in three parts, but the final bulk part came at half seven in the morning, and I wasn’t even dressed, and then they rushed all the stuff in, entombing the kitchen table in some kind of Ikea cardboard fort. This was over a week before it was due to be fitted. The table had to be moved out and squeezed into the living room. Not ideal for a nosy bastard when I’m looking out the front window at everything passing by.
The new boiler had caused another leak because all the water now comes from the mains, and the pressure was too much for the kitchen tap, which had to be capped off, so upstairs water for three weeks. Then the hot tap on the bath started leaking. A plumber came, said the taps needed replacing and left it in a worse state than it was before. We were resorting to turning the water off at the main tap in the hall. Only that hadn’t been used in decades, and so after steady use for a few days it sprung a leak of its own.
Normality was finally resumed on the water front as the kitchen was being fitted.
Of course, before you can fit a kitchen, you need to get rid of the old one. The actual ripping it out didn’t take that long. We had some help, and all the units were stripped out and dismantled in a couple of hours. However, the removal of tiles and wallpaper brought problems. Along with about half the plaster down. Part of which I missed to get my first AZ jab – something that would catch up with me later. We also found the electrician from the boiler install had done a quick and dirty (if not downright dangerous) fitting, putting wires between piping and drilling through the tile in part and sticking the junction box to another tile.
Now, it’s well known my DIY skills only fall under the category of destroy it yourself, so fortunately Simon was on hand to help with (well, do) the plastering. And it must be said, he could turn pro, he did an amazing job. Though it wasn’t dry enough to think about starting the wallpapering.
Which as it turned out was a blessing in disguise. The electrician for the kitchen fit came and drilled out troughs for wiring that would have been right through where the wallpaper would have been. The kitchen fitters were less than impressed by the new piping the boiler fitter had put in as it was all mid wall and meant they would have to cut holes around it all to install the units. Then when the units were fitted it also meant there was a lot less to wallpaper. The kitchen still isn’t fully fitted, there was a wrong door delivered, and we’ve had to resort to going to Ikea to get it ourselves as promises of delivery have been and gone for two weeks. Additionally, the shelf for the unit was missing. Only it wasn’t, I’d put it down the side of the fridge as a safe place to store it, only to find it after the fitters had finished for the week.
Then came wallpapering, which I wasn’t anywhere near as bad at as I had been in the past or expected to be this time. We nearly got it all done on one day, but invites to the bar next door brought an end to proceedings at about eight pm. It got finished on the Sunday, and over a week later it’s still all in place.
Anyway, next door’s bar. They’ve been working on it since the back end of last year, and it officially opened the weekend lockdown eased. We’d been elsewhere for a barbeque the day it did ease – anything to get out, but the bar opening will be remembered for how monumentally pissed I got. Stick any drink in front of me and I’ll drink it, which won’t help. What finishes it off is the kilo or so of vodka jelly that I was popping into my mouth in bite sized (well, not sure any biting was involved) chunks at five second intervals. The drinks after wallpapering were a lot less frantic.
When the pub gardens opened, we took the kitchen helpers to the Downsman for curry and drinks and then back to burn random pieces of wood in our garden. The winter covers had been taken off all the garden furniture and cushions retrieved from the loft, but the paddling pool masquerading as Baker Lake is still there and full of water, and no matter how much it is used to water plants and the garden in general, the level doesn’t seem to go down. It might just about be emptied in time for it to be used in anger.
It’s not getting used to its full potential though as we have another leak. This time the kitchen waste pipe has snapped outside the kitchen window and so fills a bucket on a regular basis as well as keeping half the patio damp.
Then there was the Tottenham debacle. I’ve been moaning since Mourinho was hired that they should sack him, but then they trump that and join the ESL. This prompted me to have a sweary rant denouncing the team as I’m sick of them, and football in general.
That’s it, I’m done.
I’ve been a Tottenham fan for over 40 years, but no more.
Being realistic, I know a lot of our fan base have delusions of adequacy. We have not been a big club for a long while. A top four place is the best to hope for. So being one of 6 English clubs said to be setting up a European super league (of only 12 clubs) is more than just a piss take. It’s a fucking disgrace.
But it’s typical of the cynical money first nature of Levy, who rides roughshod over decent fans (which, granted, there aren’t too many of). The man who hired two managers that publicly stated they hated the club, George Graham and the current incumbent fuckwit. I’ve been saying #MourinhoOut since day one, but with this latest development, keep the twat, you deserve each other.
In the 90s we regularly put out the worst back 4 in top flight history (Austin, Nethercott, Doherty, Edinburgh – find worse, I’ll wait), and now, with a new stadium, we’ve got things like arm sponsorship by Cinch, and Dulux as an official paint partner, and despite all this lunacy they still want more.
They want to destroy football, its history, its fans, and its soul for a few (granted millions) dollars more. I will not be a part of it. So, fuck you Levy, fuck you Tottenham, and fuck the other 5 mercenary English clubs.
Even if a super league doesn’t come to fruition, the fact Tottenham were willing to jump in means they deserve to be hoisted by their own petard, and deserve every criticism and punishment that comes their way.
Within an hour of me posting that, they sacked Mourinho. Then they withdrew from the ESL a couple of days later, but I’m not going back, and all my Tottenham gear went in the charity clothes bag that was collected Wednesday morning. At least I know it’s not been me jinxing them all this time. Even after disowning them, they still managed to lose a final.
The main source of entertainment is however the cat. He’s only just about gotten used to eating on the floor in the kitchen after years of being up on the counter to avoid the dog snaffling all his food. Yet over the last few months the landscape of the house and garden has been changing on an almost daily basis, and so each time he comes in there is a sense of bewilderment as he tries to orientate himself to furniture moves, deliveries, cardboard boxes everywhere, drips of water, workmen, noise dust, missing furniture, and his bowl in a different place every five minutes. He’s adapted by turning his volume up and being on for longer.
He’s been up on the table at the front window, watching people go by and doing a low purr / rumble / growl at them, he really is beginning to think he is the dog of the house. You look up and suddenly there he is licking your plate. Most of the time it is empty, but he also seems to like trying to lick the garlic and herb dip that turns up with pizza Friday.
And finally, he now thinks he’s part of mealtime.
You know the meme, the one with the screaming/crying woman being held back by her friend and the cat sat at the table in front of food making a sarcastic response. Well Sniffles can now be making his own. I’m fairly sure I’m the one shouting “get out of my seat you cheeky fucker”, and Sniffles responding, “It’s not yours anymore bitch.”
And we refurnished much of the dining room today, the table and chairs we’d got from the charity shop turned up, and against the odds and looks of disbelief we got a six-foot-long sideboard in the car (I had mentioned earlier it has a lot of space). The old sideboard and Welsh Dresser are out in the garden covered by tarpaulin, and the random shelves are emptied and in the garden for future firewood. The new (well for us, another charity shop buy) sturdy TV stand turned up as well, so there is a lot of furniture to sell / offload. So, if anyone needs a sturdy kitchen table with six chairs, a wobbly coffee table, a Welsh dresser, or an art deco-esque sideboard, let me know.
