All Change

I left off the last rambling tale with furniture arriving. This was followed up by going out to buy more stuff. A rug for under the new dining table, which matched one of the wallpapers in the kitchen (and subsequently an online order for a second as the first wasn’t quite big enough for the chairs when the table is extending – that’s been here over a week and is still in its wrapper). Also, some new jars for sugar and tea, which meant converting the existing sugar jar into a coffee one. For the first week after that, I was close every day to putting coffee on my cereals instead of sugar.

We were asked on the Saturday if we could be witnesses at a civil partnership ceremony on the Tuesday for Simon and Linda. Tom and Terri were going to do it originally, but Simon had gotten the days mixed up and had told them it was going to be on the Thursday, so when it turned out it would be the Tuesday, they were already booked onto a call to renew their child security checks. So, we were asked to step in. Being asked on the Saturday, with it being a Bank Holiday weekend meant that we said yes and would have to hope we had no meetings at 11 on the Tuesday morning so we could take an early lunch.

It wasn’t only the witnesses that Simon had given the wrong date to. He had told Linda that it was on the 5th (Wednesday), and not the 4th. Therefore, she had booked the wrong day off work, and because they were so short staffed, she felt she couldn’t change the day, and instead made up an emergency dental appointment to get the time off to go to her own civil partnership ceremony.

I thought it would be a fairly formal occasion, and so dressed appropriately, I put shoes on, a shirt and even dusted the suit off (I still didn’t bust a tie out though). Helen was equally (if not more) glam, and we headed off.

When we got to Crawley registry office, the original witnesses to be – Tom and Terri, were stood outside. Their renewal call hadn’t lasted as long as expected, but because names had been given before, we were still going to be witnesses. Then Simon and Linda turned up. In jeans and jumpers. Leaving us feeling slightly overdressed. Apparently, Terri had asked Linda what she was going to wear some time ago, and been told jeans and jumper, only to reply, no seriously, what are you wearing? Jeans and jumper came the reply. Possible information that would have been useful to us before getting ready.

I’d taken my camera to get photos of the event, but my shutter speed couldn’t keep up. We were in and out of the building in 9 minutes. The registrar was “interesting”, I couldn’t pinpoint her age, but it was definitely older than us, and she had a deep gravelly voice that suggested she may smoke somewhere in the region of 300 fags a day. And when it came time for Simon and Linda to sign the register, it was clear I was seated in a position where I couldn’t take photos of them signing it, because the registrar was bent over in front of me in a too tight and too short skirt (which she kept trying to pull down), and so the only picture I might have got would have been one of her breakfast.

Back to work, and it was to be my last full week working from home, as I’d arranged to be back in the new (to me) Hove office Tuesday to Thursday each week. It would be just Monday’s working at home. Something to look forward to. In that last week at home, electricians were supposed to be turning up on the Tuesday to install a load of new sockets all around the house, only for them to not have anyone due to illness, and so that got put back to Thursday to start the two-day job. Wednesday saw the charity shop come and pick up a load of the old furniture sat in the garden.

On our Friday off, not content with the electrician gouging big grooves in the walls, and the other new furniture and decoration in place, we headed into Crawley and bought and old gramophone cabinet for the dining room. We also ordered an old-style stereo to go in it which would be picked up Saturday. We rolled this into the house and went straight back out to Hayward’s Heath to look in the second-hand furniture shop there. Where we found a new sofa and armchair to out liking. With the works at home, we declined the same day delivery option, and they would ring us to arrange delivery during the week.

It took a while to clean up all the plaster dust after the electrician had gone, and it was well into Saturday night before all the furniture was back in the places it came from. It was goof to not do anything on the Sunday.

I was just gearing up to log off Monday night and load the rucksack to take stuff to the office Tuesday morning when the second-hand furniture store rang and said they would be delivering Tuesday, but they would need some help as it was only a driver on the delivery route. Seriously? What kind of cowboy unit charges you £25 for stuff to be delivered, but then you have to help offload it all yourself? I had to scrap plans for office working on Tuesday and stay to help offload the new sofa.

It also meant we had to get the old one out. I’m not sure how they got it in initially, but to get it out we had to move the rest of the living room furniture and the stuff from the hall, and clear half of the bin area outside, and even then, it was a struggle.

The new sofa hadn’t even arrived before someone was knocking on the door asking to take away the old one. Great I thought, until he said it would be £30. I’d have said no outright, cheeky bastard. But Helen said we’d pay £20, he countered with £25, and I said no. He knocked five minutes later to say he’d made some money from a neighbour and so would take it for £20 after all. And so, he did, and not even five hours after it had been dumped on the front it was gone. It seems to be the way of things in Crawley, put random rubbish out and someone will turn up and take it away.

Wednesday morning saw the first commute to Hove, and the first long drive in the new car for me. It’s going to take some getting used to, after mainly having only really driven diesel cars, driving a petrol one leads inevitably to me stalling. A lot. Plus, on the first day, I wasn’t actually sure of where I was going. I’d been to this office a few times but had only ever gone on the train. So, it was sat-nav on. And even then, I nearly missed the indicated turn off of the A27, and then lined up in the wrong lane for the roundabout. But as I crested a hill on the sweep down towards Portslade, you get the view over the continuous buildings along the coast and across the very blue looking sea and sky. It would have made a great picture, but it’s a bit difficult to stop there with constant traffic around and no pull in places available.

Once in the office it’s a bit of a trek from parking out front to my allocated desk. It’s s similar distance than if I’d have been walking from the station to the office. The screens are a lot smaller than the ones we have been using at home, and that were in the old office, and none of the desks had keyboards or mice. Fortunately, I’d got my wireless mouse with me, and after a bit of digging I’d found a keyboard.

I need to find a slightly different route home. There was a five-minute hold at the level crossing next to Portslade station, and then the hill starts at the traffic lights just beyond saw me stall numerous times and miss the lights more than once.

I did take a different route last night, but it wasn’t really intentional. I was supposed to be going round to Liam’s. He’d given me the address, and I recognised the road name from when I’d looked at the map earlier in the day, but I was being hassled to leave the building at six, and so never got a chance to look at the map again. I hadn’t brought my phone with me, and the sat nav in the car didn’t want to recognise his street name, instead only wanted to send me to a similar street name in Worthing.

So, I headed off to where I thought it was and spent the next half an hour driving slowly around, up, and down trying to find his street. I had no joy, and he’d suggested parking north of Aldrington station, only for me not to be able to find that either, or after fifteen minutes even remember what it was called. I stopped to ask a couple of people for directions but must have grown a couple of extra ugly heads as they just looked at me bug eyed and scurried off. I ended up thoroughly lost. Looking at the map this morning, I drove right around his street, going parallel with it on both sides, and crossing over it at least once. Quite frustrating.

Have I mentioned recently that I don’t like driving?

And so, it’s Friday again and the weekly day off. Which means that it’s another Ikea trip. Wish me luck.

Long Time No Write

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.