Sunday, 21st July, 2024
A warm, Summer’s day but …. at home. All around us neighbours are away in Dubai, Parma, France, Spain. We are deserted. It is quite a little community here. This morning a girl 6 houses down who I have never actually spoken to before, put out an urgent request for help to weigh her suitcases because she didn’t know how to do it and they were rushing off to the airport. This went out on our Development’s social media page which flashed up on my watch and I jumped to the rescue with our luggage scale. Turned out to be a really nice girl with two, young children.
We heard from a friend from nearly 9 years ago this morning. In the days when we lived in Surrey, she was our next door neighbour. After all these years, their cat is still alive and their little lad is in the middle of his A Levels. Scary or what? We bought there when we were travelling to Sifnos each Summer and sold when we sold our Greek house. Nostalgia and loss ….
Filmed recently, this video of Sifnos, takes us back there immediately. We know every inch of ground, every house and shop, every island person. We even spotted ‘our house’ in the first few minutes. We were there for 40 years. We bought a 4 acre field above this bay and built our house in the foothills. It was home for 15 years.
Got your picture on my wall
and, maybe, you will get a call
From me, when I needed something …
So many things to go back to and touch again .. just one more time. Will there be time? There has to be time ….
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.T.S. Elliot: ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’
Forgive a sad, old man his musings. Sundays seem to do that to me. Outside, the only sound I hear is the gentle hum of the hedge trimmer wielded by my wife. I am gradually starting to nod off. Ah, perchance to dream.
I have thought a number of times of moving our investments into property with the hope of a better return. What has always put me off is the work involved unless I employed a letting agent which would eat into the returns. Well now, all my cash is earning above 3 x the rate of inflation and the property market is under threat particularly the second home market.
Very sensibly, Labour is addressing the housing crisis as a priority. They want to force Local Authorities to facilitate the building of thousands of new homes, affordable homes, council homes with new towns and stronger planning arrangements. This has to be the right thing to do for the have-nots struggling to get on the housing ladder but it will have downsides for the haves like me. The increase in property availability will tend to depress the current values of properties and the discouragement of owning more than one property will come by severely making people pay for the privilege. I agree with it all even though it limits me personally …. and this is the essence of democracy and the Labour Party. Country first. Party second.
Monday, 22nd July, 2024
A grey and overcast morning but very humid. I have become a dustman for the day. Today is all three bins day – Black (general), Green (recycle) and Brown (garden) – which happens every other week. I am responsible for the bins of 4 absent neighbours plus my own. Controlling 15 bins of different colours with different numbers on as three different bin lorries move them around is …. a nightmare! Still, even at my age, I’m up to it.
Chef is preparing for a Lunch Party and has been planning for a day or two. Today, we have to source the best, naturally reared chicken that we can find. Chef has decided that we are going to drive miles to a Speciality Butcher’s shop in Yapton. Let’s hope it’s worth it. An old favourite is being served – Coq au Vin. Haven’t eaten that for years.
Organic, corn-fed chicken legs, slowly cooked in a bottle of red wine with baby onions, mushrooms and garlic and served sprinkled with fresh parsley. To follow that Chef will make Tarte Citron and vanilla ice cream made with double cream in an ice cream maker that I bought her in Manchester in 1984. The trouble is, I’m supposed to be on a diet. I’ve got to lose weight. This isn’t going to help.
Yapton is a rather scruffy, agricultural community of linear, village development. It is not somewhere you would volunteer to visit if it were not for their excellent butcher’s shop.
I’m not sure which Kings are close or if there should be an apostrophe identifying one, particular king but I think he hasn’t visited for a long time in spite of the fine meat.
Tuesday, 23rd July, 2024
Is this really Summer? Fleeting hints of sunshine this morning. Our neighbours out in Spain and Greece have temperatures in the low 40C. Here, we’re barely above 20C. Chose the wrong year to stay at home.
Chef is pursuing her menu ingredients with tenacity and enthusiasm. After Breakfast, she was in the garden picking another Kilo of green beans and later she will be sourcing Jersey Royal Potatoes. We never nowadays eat potatoes but, if we did, it would be Jersey Royals. For those who don’t know, Jersey Royals are grown mulched in seaweed and that gives their wonderfully distinctive flavour.
Unfortunately, these potatoes have a very short season and we are coming towards the end. We can only source them in small, supermarket packs so that is what I will be sent to get – a lot of.
I grow old … I grow old …
T.S. Elliot: ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind?
Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
My friend in Leeds said to me the other day that he was suddenly feeling really old. He cycles out in the Yorkshire countryside two or three times a week and regularly swims. It chimed with what we had been saying to each other. We both exercise in the Gym but, getting up, I’m increasingly feeling creaky and stiff. I don’t like it. I’m not going to accept it. Admitting it is the start of a downward spiral.
Often for women more than men, bone density is a concern with age. A common but really dangerous problem is a fall which breaks the hip. A friend, a girl from school. I say a girl but she’s in her mid-60s and this week she’s broken her hip in two places having tripped over one of her dogs.
She’s had a terrible time in the past few years with her partner and her Mother both being diagnosed with dementia and having to go into specialist care. Isn’t getting old great, Dear Reader? I can see in myself how careful I’ve become compared with the devil-may-care younger man I was.
I was laughing at myself this morning and how over-cautious I am about backing up my digital material – files, photographs, vide clips, etc.. I have the original copy on my hard drive (which can fail) and a copy in the OneDrive cloud that comes with MS365 which is reassuring because I can access it from anywhere in the world although it costs me £80.00 per year. I have 2 legacy USB drives -E & F – which are transportable but can also fail. One failed this week and I went into panic mode. Only 2 backups left!!
I’ve ordered a portable Solid State Hard Drive to back up my backups. Should stop me worrying. It will be here tomorrow. Hope nothing goes down before then.
Wednesday, 24th July, 2024
A pleasant, bright morning but hardly Summer. Anyway, I’ve got my orders. Cleaning and tidying while Chef gets on with cooking.
Staycation in Britain? This was Brighton Beach yesterday in the last week of July! What is happening?
Growing up in Repton, our house had 5 bedrooms but always about 8 – 9 occupants at any one time. Consequently, I shared a bedroom with my brother, Bob, who was just 10 months younger than me. I wasn’t easy to live with, I’m sure and Bob and I had very different characters. Bob was technical, mechanical, dextrous. In those days, I showed very little intellectual prowess at all. I was physical, challenging, sporty, aggressive.
I would impatiently break things because I couldn’t get them to work. Bob would patiently repair and reconstruct things because that’s how his mind worked. It would be hard to say we got on. I passed my 11+ and went to Grammar School. Bob failed his and went to Secondary School. We just allowed ourselves to co-exist in different spheres. While I played Rugby and was Athletics captain I’m not even sure what Bob did although I have seen a picture of him in Basketball kit.
Where we clearly divided was in music. I was strongly into Pirate Radio of the 1960s – Radio Caroline and Radio London. When they were threatened by the government, I was involved in lobbying the minister for making them illegal. I was absolutely stunned by the Moody Blues – Go Now. Bob was into blues and rock. He tried to learn the mandolin and loved John Mayall’s Blues Breakers. Today, John Mayall died and I was transported back to the bedroom I haven’t been in for more than 50 years.
Bob lives in Maidenhead but is currently in Yorkshire. He sent me a photo of his wife this morning because he is shy.
Thursday, 25th July, 2024
Guess what? It’s raining. Horrible, low cloud fine rain that soaks you though the moment you go out. Guess where I’m going? Out. But not before a session of Home Chiropody from Chef. She does my feet and then her own. I’m not trusted with sharp things especially scissors and files. I have my feet checked and creamed every morning after Breakfast. All the walking we do can lead to drying and cracking of the soles.
Chef is going to pick a batch of Basil from the garden this afternoon while I’m in the Gym and she will make another batch of Pesto for the freezer using pine nuts, garlic, olive oil and salt. I absolutely love it especially with fish. It tastes like an entirely different thing compared with the rubbish sold in jars and it freezes so well.
Heard from some of my past pupils today. The pupils I last actually taught are now 46. I was quite a good teacher (I think) and was reasonably popular with pupils (I think). I like kids. I enjoyed the process of watching them learn and not just academic things but growing up things as well. Some of them contact me still about all sorts of relationship advice … because I am notoriously good at relationships. (Not). One of my girls (Old Ladies) asked this morning about what to do about the driving mirrors on her Audi because they wouldn’t fold back out when she turned on.
Another one posted a picture of her legs. Why do they do this? Is anybody improved with this sort of graffiti? I hate it. Her legs aren’t as nice as mine but they’re not that bad. They just have to do what every one else does and I spent all my teaching life telling them to think for themselves and not necessarily do what they’re told. Not good for discipline but fantastic for life and that is what’s important.
An Asian lad who I haven’t heard from since he left school in 1994 contacted me on Direct Messenger this morning asking how I was and I answered quite blandly that I was fine. His name is Amjad and he was affectionately known as JamJar in the 1990s. Wouldn’t be tolerated now but he loved it. It anglicised him and made him acceptable to other kids. He was a perfectly pleasant lad who wanted to do well as so many Asian kids did. He told me that there was a Whatsapp group from his year at School and I was regularly talked about. I didn’t like to ask in what way. He said he knew it was cheeky and I probably wouldn’t but could he have a couple of current photos to show the others. I surprised him by sending him a couple of current and couple from my College days which were long before he was born. His parting words were, Stay safe and healthy big man! He thinks I am his friend for life now.
Because Chef is making Pesto, I’m cooking Supper. It will be a simple Bruschetta of a Tomato and Shallot with Pesto and Parmigiano on toasted Olive Bread. Might need some wine with that. Got to get back on our diet!
Friday, 26th July, 2024
The sun is up; the sky is blue; the grass is green …. but where are you, Dear Reader? Hope the world looks good for you. My photo memory box threw up two evocative photos this morning. They are both from Greece 2010 in the grounds of our home.
There is nothing more evocative of the Mediterranean than the bright colours of a Bougainvillea in brilliant sunshine. The most common is a magenta colour. We had to be different.
I took this photo for the fly rather than the gorgeous colours of the flowers on the Pomegranate trees around our house. I don’t even like Pomegranates. I think the fly is probably dead now.
And then I found this photo from the Winter of 1982 on our route to work across the Pennines. You can see why I gravitated towards Greek Summers.
There must be something in the air at the moment because I was contacted out of the blue by another of my former students last night. He was a lovely, boisterous lad who was not particularly academic but definitely popular with the girls. Now, he is a mature – ish citizen with a lovely daughter who he dotes on and he promotes pop concerts or whatever you call them nowadays. He said:
It means a lot to speak you. I was always gutted when I felt I had let you down because you were always fair and looked out for my best interests.
His words to me were something of a shock because teachers rarely really know the effect they have. I am constantly humbled by news of kids who I had virtually written off but have become perfectly good family members and sensible citizens.
Saturday, 27th July, 2024
Lovely morning and we’ve got a run of great weather to look forward to now. Well, it is nearly August, for goodness sake. Haven’t seen the grass looking so lush and green at this time of year before. Anyway, I’m going to mow it today.
Last night, I kept getting Whatsapps from old friends about events in Paris. While I was was watching a Drama on C4, they were all watching the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games – all 5 hours of it. Even though I love French people, their history and culture, you’ve got to be desperate, haven’t you?
Over Breakfast this morning, I had it played on Catchup fast forward until Celine Dion sang and then it was played real time. I like Celine Dion’s voice with its emotional depth. It appeals to me.
Yesterday, when I was remembering Greece in photos, a video from Kamares last Summer came up and I was amused to see the Poison Dwarf featured. My goodness, she’s put on some weight – not good at her height.
Oh, it brings it all back – bit like a nasty medical condition.
We have been in our house 8 years now and all the white goods came with it. It was guaranteed for the first 5 years under the house warranty. Nothing has needed replacement …. until now. When we bought the house Off-Plan, we were offered two levels of completion – Basic and Upgraded. We knew we would be here for a while so we chose Upgraded. It cost about £30,000 more but it came with better quality fittings in the bathrooms and the kitchen particularly. The kitchen units were nicer and it included better dishwasher, double oven and large gas hob plus a built-in Wine Cooler.
When we had guests for Lunch recently, we suddenly realised that the white wine in the cooler wasn’t much cooled and we now realise the whole thing is not doing its job. It was turned down to 5C but, when we tested it, found it still measured 19C. I have immediately looked for a replacement. Can’t believe the price!
This is the immediately replacement cooler from the same company – Caple. What is there about a simple cooling mechanism that costs £832.00? It seems crazy. I’m going to see if I can get this one repaired first.