Monthly Archives: October 2024

Adventures in Blunderland

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Green Woodpecker

I just spent a day ordering furniture online, then cancelling it again.The first was a two-seater settee and armchair.  I had wanted an ottoman to put with the settee to act as a footstool. It was going to be a nice matching set. Unfortunately, although you can order the chair and settee for delivery on a specified day, the ottoman comes with a note “Delivered on X, or earlier.” This is clearly no good if you aren’t actually living in the new place. It’s not, to be honest, much good if you are living in it either, as it’s a bit vague and is effectively putting you under house arrest.

Even the two pieces that I did order come with a very vague delivery window – from 07.00 to 18.00 on the specified day. We will have to set off from Nottingham around 5 am to get to Peterborough on time. I expect we will then spend all day waiting.

Grantham Gingerbread

However, it’s an academic point, as the online order form filled in the delivery address for me, using my billing address, and I had ordered delivery to the wrong address before I realised. You can’t change the delivery address after ordering in case of fraud. So I had to cancel it. What a palaver! Anyway, it’s done now.

Unfortunately, I was so flustered when I ordered a new microwave and freezer that I didn’t notice the autofill option had put my current postcode on the end of my new address. Nor did I realise, after specifying a certain day, that they were having trouble with their system and may not be able to deliver on that day. They only tell you that after you pay. Same again – couldn’t alter the details even though it was a small point, so had to go through the rigmarole of cancellation. The difference between the two companies is that I will have a refund in 3-5 days for the furniture, whereas the refund on the electrical good is likely to be two weeks. Two weeks of them using my money – not a bad racket. However, where I reordered the furniture immediately, I will be waiting until I get the refund for the electrical goods, and may reorder them from another company. It will be good if I can reflect my view of their service by voting with my wallet.

Gingerbread Men

Did I say I reordered the furniture? Well, after doing that I noticed that the confirmation shows delivery as being a different day to the one I specified. Worse than that, it’s a day when we are doing something and can’t be in Peterborough. It seems the actual day will be the one I requested, though they didn’t seem overly concerned they were showing two different dates.

It may seem like we are buying a lot of new stuff, but the old furniture was second hand when we got it twenty tears ago and needs recovering, which will probably cost as much as buying new. I will recycle it. The old freezer is shabby, broken and inefficient, so we could soldier on, but I decided enough was enough. The microwave broke a few years ago – we have been waiting to move before buying another. They new one will be a combination oven with air fryer so it will be more efficient and more healthy. It’s not that we’ve suddenly become big consumers, just an admission we have spent the last few years living frugally, and in some cases, inconveniently.

New scone recipe with home made microwave blackberry jam

Pictures from November 2016. many of those books have now gone. The biscuits have all gone.

Serenity Lost

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Sunset over Basford, Nottingham

We had a good afternoon yesterday, eating chocolate brownies in our new kitchen and chatting with my sister as I looked out of the window and watched a red kite overhead. I’m still amazed by this. They were almost extinct in Wales when I was a kid, and non-existent in England and Scotland. We also saw magpies. They are less amazing – you never saw them in the eastern counties when I was a kid, but there were plenty in Lancashire when we went north to see family. The same was true of buzzards. Over the last twenty or thirty years both species have managed to spread into parts of the UK where you never used to see them.

In some ways, this is good to see. They are both interesting species and the expansion of the buzzard suggests that nature is restoring itself after the insecticide problems of the 1960s. On the other hand, the magpies are one of the factors in the reduction in garden bird species. Having said that, there are a lot of other reasons for the problems with garden birds, including garden chemicals and viruses. Cats have been blamed too, but we always had plenty of garden birds despite having two cats.

Sunset over Sherwood

It used to be nice to go north. First the magpies would start, then possibly a buzzard, and finally, as we got onto the moors, they cry of the curlew.  Now magpies and buzzards are commonplace, there is no longer any excitement about seeing them, and there is real sadness that the curlew is hardly ever heard these days. Kites, on the other hand, having been reintroduced in parts of Yorkshire, are very common on part of the journey.

Unfortunately, the mood didn’t last. Today I had an email from the solicitor. I had emailed them a few days ago to give them a gentle nudge and was not impressed by the contents of their reply. They now require sight of certified copies of two documents relating the the deaths of my parents. They must have seen these several times already in the work they have done for us (but then they still needed to see ID for me despite having seen it on numerous occasions over the last few years. They had not, at any time, asked to see these documents when we started the transfer, so I’m not sure why they have suddenly become necessary. They also want to see copies of my bank statements. But they have already seen copies of my bank statements, and didn’t query them at the time.

Strange how a feeling of serene well-being can be so abruptly and completely brought to nothing by something as simple as a few words and an injection of high-priced inefficiency.

Sunset over Screveton

Christmas Stamps

I Grow Old . . .

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I don’t have long because the soup maker is on and the timer is running. I don’t have long and it’s difficult to type with my fingers crossed. (I haven’t used the soup maker for around seven years – doesn’t time fly – and I’m not sure that I have done it right. However, the die is cast and we will just have to see what it turns out like. Tomatoes, water, onions, red peppers, celery, garlic, cumin and chilli. What could possibly go wrong?

I was in trouble earlier this afternoon, as I went to visit the shop and Julia was expecting me back at twelve. I don’t know why, I only mentioned it vaguely in passing. It was an aspiration in my mind that became written in stone in hers. That seems to happen a lot these days. What do I say? Three men in a  shop, several customers passing by, talk of coins, and the time just flies by.

Edward Lear Stamps (1988)

Ooops, I have to go now, the soup maker is bleeping at me. No, it’s stopped, so I will finish this before serving soup. I didn’t include lentils because I wasn’t sure they would cook properly in 21 minutes. I will have to look it up, or experiment. The trouble is that you have to make at least a litre at a time, which is a lot of soup. It’s three cans Or about two pints. It’s easier, despite my attachment to the weights and measures of my youth just to go with the flow. I drink beer from bottles these days so a pint means nothing to me, and the soup maker is marked in litres so that’s whay I use now. Except for milk. I still do that in pints too. and fuel. Sold in litres, converted to pints in my head, at which point I sigh heavily and remember the days I could fill the tank of a Ford Escort for £4. Of course, I forget that I only earned £15 a week after tax. Times change but the ramblings of old men plough  a familiar furrow. I remember once saying that if I ever started talking about prices of today relative to the prices of my youth I would like to be put down.

A first class stamp is now £1.35. You could have a night out for that when I was young. Three pints of bitter, a packet of cigarettes nd some chips on the way home. I was a simple soul . . .

Stamps, stamps, stamps…

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Contact, Complaints and Compliments

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Another day moving junk. We stopped part way down to drop off several boxes at a charity shop with convenient parking. Last week when we tried it was closed for a week according to the notice in the window. Today it had a notice up telling us it wasn’t accepting donations. We are giving it up as a bad job and will find somewhere else. I’ve also communicated my concern to the relevant organisation.  It’s not a complaint, just a heads up that their management team might be letting the side down.

I have just had an automatic response telling me that if my message isn’t on the list of subjects they deal with they won’t answer.  Add arrogance to unreliability in the list of faults. There are plenty of other charity shops, albeit slightly less convenient for unloading, so we aren’t stuck for places to go.  They need to remember that they exist in a competitive environment, just like any other shop. We could also put it all in a skip. It will cost us, but it’s much more convenient that cleaning things and sorting them and packing them and then taking them to a shop which doesn’t want them.

Tea at Stoke on Trent

It took me several key strokes to get through to the page to leave a message, and that’s what you get in return. Makes you wonder if it’s worth the effort.

Meanwhile, having decided to leave the hospital a message I got lost in their contact section. Apart from a broken link and a needlessly complex system, there is a mass of self-congratulatory text to go through, tinged with more than a hint of arrogance. It came close to me not leaving a message, but it’s not the fault of the people in Rheumatology that the admin system is run by people who can only be adequately described by words that are probably best not written in a family blog.

They should perhaps clone the staff from the Treatment Centre and Rheumatology Department and use them to bring the rest of the staff up to standard.

Nice cup of tea

What Links my Covid Vaccine with a Tree?

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Two days since my last post? I’m getting lazy.

Today I have had my Covid vaccination. The young lady in the pharmacy was disappointed to hear we have already had our flu jabs, as she could have given them both. In return I was disappointed that our GP Surgery hadn’t been able to give us Covid at the same time as the flu. On the tram on Wednesday a woman was telling her friend that he GP had  given her both at the same time. It strikes me that a bit of joined up thinking could have streamline the whole process.

Trees at Clumber park

Look at it in terms of time and traffic. It took us 25 minutes to get there, ten minutes to be done and, probably 15 minutes on the way back because there was less congestion. That’s six miles, 50 minutes and who knows how much carbon dioxide. Multiply that by four hundred (a conservative number of people vaccinated  based on the number there while we were) and halve it as not everyone would have travelled as far or used a car for their Covid jab. I need the car because I can’t walk far and I need that particular pharmacy as it has reliable parking nearby.

That works out at 1,200 car miles used, 166 hours wasted and 240,000 grams (24 kg) of carbon dioxide.

I just had an email to thank me for sponsoring a tree planting  in the Ribble valley.  When my tree is fully grown it will absorb about 25 kg of carbon dioxide a year. I promise you it’s a coincidence that the amount produced in my calculation is so close to what a tree will absorb, but it’s a sobering thought that a little inefficiency means a whole tree is needed.

Backlit Sumac Tree in the MENCAP garden

Complaints, Compliments and Corn

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I checked my emails this morning and found I have a “badge” on Tripadvisor. I am now, after giving five restaurant reviews in three years, a man who deserves a badge for reviewing restaurants. It doesn’t seem fair, as I only go on there to complain. The companies in question never reply to complaints any more, assuming they will even let you find their skillfully concealed contact details, so I started going on review sites. They don’t want to hear my (normally) useful advice on faults in service? Well they can see it on a website along with the other 1,000 people who have read my reviews.

I am just putting my finishing touches to the letter telling the hospital that I was very happy with the way things went on Wednesday, and am also very happy with my treatment in Rheumatology over the last five years. I do that sometimes, you know. I think you should do if you are going to tell them when they are bad. I’m not sure how much good it does, but it’s what I do.

Two sizes of wheatsheaf loaf

The spellchecker just hit a new low. I thought haibun/halibut was bad, but their suggestion for Rheumatology is Hematology. Not only a useless suggestion, but a completely different medical speciality and has the added bonus of a possible medical malpractice suit thrown in. Of course, it doesn’t like speciality either, but as it spells Haemarology incorrectly, what would you expect?

I was checking on the diversity of English spelling earlier in the week and the American writing the article sought to justify his argument by citing the spelling of Shakespeare. I think we all know that he’s not a great guide to orthography. Fifty years after Shakespeare someone (I can’t find the exact reference) was still making the point that it was boring to spell words i exactly the same way all the way through a book. The words of William Shakespeare, mellifluous as they may be, are spelt all sorts of ways There are six known and authenticated signatures of Shakespeare, and his surname is spelt, by the man himself, in five different ways. None of them, incidentally, is Shakespeare.  Strangely, in highlighting spelt, it has revealed it knows little about spelt, the ancient wheat species. It doesn’t recognise  emmer either. Talking of which, the corn in the title is British corn – cereal. Not maize, which is called corn in America. It’s very difficult being bilingual in two sorts of English.

Poppies in wheat field

Time, Decluttering, Fish and Chips

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Sorry, time slips by and it’s soon a couple of day since I wrote anything or read anything. I do try to keep up with my comments but that’s all I’ve done, in a blogging sense, for the last few days. I have been to a few charity shops to dispose of various bits of clutter (I can’t believe some of the things we’ve accumulated), we’ve also been down to Peterborough (mainly to see a builder) and today we dropped off at another charity shop, visited Julia’s old base (to drop off craft supplies we don’t need) and spent nearly an hour doing a twenty minute journey to \IKEA, where we once again couldn’t park within a distance I couldn’t walk. I really am going to have to get a Blue Badge.

Yesterday we spent £32 on two lunches at the garden centre nearest to the new bungalow.  It was a fact finding mission and the main fact I found was that I won’t be eating there again. It was fish and chips, which is no longer cheap food for the working classes. The fish, I admit, was very good – nice thick, fresh fillets in crispy batter. The tartare sauce was good. The peas were mediocre, which isn’t good enough for £16. And the chips were excellent, Thick, golden, well cooked – everything you would want from a chip. However, there weren’t many of them. I don’t like it when chip shops pile the chips on to make it look like you are getting plenty for your money, but I like it even less when you get a small portion. I don’t expect to pay £16 and leave the table feeling hungry.

Once we move we will be reviewing more food, so we might go back to check it out again. |On the other hand there are plenty of garden centres in Peterborough with better food and better plants, so we might not.

Pictures are going to be pictures of other fish and chips we have had. I seem to have a lot of fish and chip photos.

Haddock Special at the Dolphin Fish Bar, Sutton on Sea

Ten out of Ten

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Farm Shop

What’s something you would attempt if you were guaranteed not to fail?

That’s today’s writing prompt. What they seem to have failed to grasp is that if you re guaranteed not to fail you are going to succeed. Therefore you can’t make an attempt because attempt means to make an effort to do something difficult, or to try to do something or, in the case of  crime, to try to commit it, but fail, whilst still incurring for your unsuccessful efforts. In all of these definitions I believe that failure is an essential part of the attempt.

I’m prepared to be corrected on this point, so feel free to write nd tell me if you think I’m wrong.

White tailed Bumble Bee 

A lot of the day was taken up with a hospital appointment. I was a bit annoyed about it because I originally had a 9.00 appointment on Friday. That would have allowed me to go down early, miss the traffic, find a convenient parking space and have a leisurely time. 2.00 on Wednesday is a different kettle of fish. There is no parking at 2.00 unless it is at the far ends of the site, and I can’t walk that far. I can’t use a bus as the bus stops are too far away from the building I need. So that leaves an expensive taxi or the tram.

Julia offered to come down with me, because she has no confidence in my ability to cope with the ticket machines and the choice of trams. As you may remember from previous posts, her low opinion of me is justified, as I did get lost once by getting on the wrong tram. Bearing in mind we only have two routes, that took some doing.

Biscuits

There were several young men on the journey who automatically draw my ire. One of them had pierced ears with spacers in. Now, I have seen rural Zulus with pierced ears that they carry their snuff boxes in. I don’t mind that. It’s practical for a man with no pockets. But in Nottingham? Another had a man bun. They are an abomination in my view, and a definite sign of snowflakery. The third, who was around 40 was dressed in leather, with chins and an unhealthy pallor.

And you know what? The pierced ear guy offered me his seat as soon as I got on the  tram. The chain man offered me his seat on the way back. And the man bun man offered his seat to another doddery old man (there are always plenty of us on the hospital run.

Michaelmas Daisies

It was a lesson in tolerance, humility and hope, that I needed at the time. i’m starting to get very intolerant these days. I’m going to remain intolerant of politicians, inefficiency and American spellings, but I’m going to be more tolerant of appearances.

My appointment? Well, we arrived nearly half an hour early. I sat for five minutes, ws taken through and weighed and had my blood pressure taken – neither figure reflects much credit on me. I was then taken through to the waiting room and, as I reached a seat, was called through for my consultation. That was useful. I’m going to have injectable  methotrexate, which will cut out the digestive problems and the fiddling with small pills, we have worked out a plan for transferring me to another Health Authority and I have been left with an overwhelming feeling of being happy, which is unusual after dealings with hospitals.

Poppy Brooch – beads and safety pins

All in all, it’s ten out of ten for the NHS today, and the same for the passengers on the tram.

It has been a good day. Pictures are of different Octobers.

 

 

New Experience

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Tea in Stoke on Trent

I really don’t like lawyers. This stems from a number of causes but I will cite one that I find irksome before I go on to discuss the main topic. In the coin trade, you usually run into lawyers when they are getting valuations for probate. At hat point they want you to use your years of experience to put a value on things for them. They will be charging their client approximately £200 an hour for doing this and they want to pay us nothing. I have said many times that we should either charge or refuse top do the work but the owner always takes the view we might be able to buy the stuff later. However, we could probably still do that, and don’t need to sell ourselves cheap.

My solicitor, passed on by my sister, is charging me over £1,000 to do the conveyancing. I know someone who did conveyancing for a solicitor when he was a 16-year-old school leaver. It’s not difficult, but the mystique that surrounds the legal profession means we gladly pay them huge amounts of money for simple jobs, then thank them for making our eyes water with their scale of fees. When looking up average fees I find they suggest my job should cost £400-800. Someone else is advertising low cost conveyancing for £199. That will really be about £249 as they are probably quoting without the VAT.

Mooring ring

I note from the email sent to me today that the solicitor I thought was my solicitor is being supervised by someone else, but has, in any case, just passed me on to a new member of staff , who only works part time. They may not even be a solicitor. This feels a little like going into an operating theatre and watching one of the catering staff sharpen a big knife while reading “Brain Surgery for Dummies“.

Anyway, today we had the big identity kerfuffle. Having already provided six months bank statements and answered a number of intrusive questions about my finances, then filled in a form to say I was not corrupt and various other bits and pieces, I now have to prove I am who I say I am. Bear in mind I’m buying half a house off my sister. We were executors (for which we had to prove our identity) and we were residuary legatees, for which we had to prove our identities. This was all with the same solicitor so they know who I am, but they still (they claim) need to charge me for checking again.

A Pensioner

And that was how I had the novel experience of downloading an “app”. They all the rage these days, though they are anathema to a man like me who believes that the easiest way of avoiding internet fraud is to avoid doing financial and identity related things on the internet. However, we are anxious to get the sale completed so I went ahead with it.

If you leave out the discussion of why I have to prove my identity again, why I’m not allowed to spend my own money without restriction (remember that it has all gone through a bank account where I had to go through all this nonsense just to be able to give a bank my money to look after), the system was still ludicrous – three examples – it couldn’t “see” my driving license photo, it offered a bank statement as an example of acceptable documentation (but didn’t have it as a category later in the process) and some of the drop-down menus obscured things I needed to see. To make it worse, it also manages to adopt a patronising tone, and I don’t believe that these measures would defeat anyone but the stupidest of criminals. I could very easily have two bank accounts and, by just using one, pass all their tests. I could also run a nail bar or barber’s shop, as these are both popular ways to launder money, I’m told.

Vine Leaves in October

As usual, criminals prosper and honest citizens are made to suffer. A bit like Government Tax Policy – multi-nationals escape paying taxes, rich people employ expensive lawyers to avoid tax, politicians take gifts with an embarrassing lack of dignity. Meanwhile, pensioners have had their winter fuel allowance scrapped, which is actually more cunning than it sounds. Cut the heating, kill the pensioner. That way you save on paying pensions and financing care for the elderly too.

Photos for today are just pot luck – I was going to search for pictures of leeches, vampires an grave robbers but in the end I have done 750 words and I need to get on.

Whitby graveyard OK, it’s a vampire reference – I couldn’t resist.

Tripadvisor 1916

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War Memorial – Cliheroe Castle

I was just saying to Paol Soren that I wondered if we have the resilience to live through another world war, when it struck me that history could be approached in a new way these days, by comparing Tripadvisor reviews.

Picture it. My grandfather sitting in the bottom of a trench. It is dark and it is raining. It didn’t always rain in France, but it sometimes seems like it when you read the histories. It could be quite dusty at times, particularly in the chalky areas. One of the few things he ever said about his time in the war was that he had once spent days in a flooded gun pit building up the parapet with dead bodies. As a result of his immersion in filthy water he suffered from skin complaints for over forty years.

They didn’t have snowflakes in 1916, you had to get on with it. While I have recently written a review of a carvery decrying the dried out vegetables, my grandfather was compelled to eat the infamous Maconochie’s stew from a can. This is an icon of the Great War, a tinned stew composed of “sliced turnips, carrots, potatoes, onions, haricot beans, and beef in a thin broth”. It appears in many memoirs and produced a flatulence that is also mentioned several times. When you think of the miasma of death and chemicals that must have hovered over the battlefields it is remarkable that flatulence even rated a mention. It must have been formidable stuff.

As for noisy neighbours, I sometimes get a bit irritated by loud TV from one side and a yapping dog from the other.  The Germans were undoubtedly noisier than any of my neighbours and, to be fair, my neighbours have never tried to kill me. and think of all those package tours where people complain of the Germans getting up early to put their towels on sun loungers. Towels really don’t compare to the poison gas and flamethrowers that were used on the Western Front.

Pot holes are another thing we complain about today. There was a news item about them last night again. I can’r begin to imagine what the roads were like near the front lines, but I do know we had to build 2,000 miles of light railway to transport supplies to the trenches, as the roads were impassable to wheeled transport.

Yes, it’s a shame we don’t have Tripadvisor reviews from WW1 to make us appreciate how lucky we are.

The header picture is the Clitheroe War Memorial. The second is the identical statue used on the war memorial at Slaidburn. It was undergoing restoration the day we visited.  Unlike Knowlton in a previous post, they were neither thankful or brave just two places linked by similar statues and my family history, as members of my family appear on both. On a more cheerful note, my family tree also includes one of the landlords at the Hark to Bounty pub that is pictured on the Slaidburn link.

I will leave the last word to my reimagined grandfather. “I am giving this War one star, not because I think it deserves it, but because there is no option to give it no stars.”

Slaidburn War Memorial