Tag Archives: heating

Another Day Slips By

Stamford, Lincolnshire

I’m sitting at the computer with a hat and gloves on. The heating has gone off and it has become quite nippy indoors. We have a good heating system and adequate pensions, so don’t need to be cold, but old habits die hard. Personally, I would switch the bedroom radiator off completely as we should be warm enough under a mound of covers, but Julia has it set so that at 5.30 every morning I wake feeling too hot. She is often awake at that time too but seems oblivious to the possibility of turning the heating down.

I’ve watched quite a lot of TV, cooked, snoozed and written.

The writing is an article about a medallion. I failed to finish it. The cooking was a breakfast of festive bubble and squeak (using leftover sprouts, chestnuts and roast veg) with bacon and eggs). Tea was potato wedges with beans and cheese and onion pasties. It was a simple meal but still nice. We ate the last mince pies with a cup of coffee as our dessert. We seem to have missed lunch and not really noticed after the substantial breakfast.

Modern Eleanor Cross

Detail of the Cross

We will not be having a shopping delivery tomorrow as we have built up quite a surplus over the holidays and the veg is looking a bit jaded. It’s not going off, but it’s giving the impression that stage is not far off. I will be preparing a vegetable stew, a Chinese rice and a mushroom curry tomorrow while Julia is at the tearoom. We will eat one for tea, one tomorrow, and freeze the third. Soup will also be on the menu. Cauliflower and broccoli soup, then leek and potato. Some freezing will be involved.

Then I need to turn my attention to the growing pile of pizza bases and quiche cases. It seemed a good idea to buy some extra for holiday snacks but we didn’t, in the end, have to produce as many meals and snacks as my imagination suggested. I have been better at shopping over the last few years, but this year I did no plan quite so well.

And that was how I passed the third day of 2026.

Now I am waiting. WP tells me it can’t proceed to load photos as the connection has been lost. It hasn’t been lost from this end, so I assume the problem is (again) with the Internet or at WP’s end.

More Stamford.

When looking Stamford up on the internet and checking its use for filming I found it had hosted over 100 films and stars such as Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Elia Kazan, Sam Mendes, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, and Steven Seagal had been involved. This just goes to show the reach of the USA in its attacks on British culture. Not only do we have to put up with your spellings and, but you also try to steal our town names. Stamford Connecticut is, I’m sure, a lovely town but, having only been founded in 1640, lacks Mediaeval charm. Stamford, Lincolnshire, does have Mediaeval charm and has been the venue for Pride and Prejudice (2005), The Da Vinci Code (2006) and Middlemarch (1994). Pictures are from January 2018.

Reasons to Be Cheerful (Again)

11 Replies

For details. read the medallion – a masterpiece of simple design

I see WP have altered the “Posts” page. It’s probably an improvement, but I always wonder when they change things – it’s the same old story – The Overcrowded Bookshelf – you squeeze another book in and one drops off the end. I wonder what has been lost in the latest reorganisation. I’m guessing it’s not the cost. They always seem to get the billing done without any glitches.

I have written three previous posts with the title Reasons to be Cheerful – one, two, three, and one which is almost that.I am clearly not cursed by originality.

Two things are mentioned more than once in these posts – one is my chief reason for being cheerful – Julia and the second being Ian Dury. This is fair, as it was his song title before I started using it for blog posts. I looked up the lyrics because I always do when I think of the song (I can never remember any of them apart from yellow socks) and found there’s actually a site for translating Dury’s English into American English. This contains such gems as the fact that “cheddar cheese and pickle” is a “popular British sandwich”. There seems to be nothing you can’t write about on Wikipedia.

Medal George V and Queen Mary

Julia and I are enjoying a peaceful and relaxed start to the day. We have brought our dressing gowns from Nottingham and, with having heating, are able to wander about in the morning feeling very Noel Coward. The heating is set to 18° C (64° F), which is the recommendation from Age UK. To be fair, we aren’t letting the possession of a working heating system go to our heads, as we only run the heat about six hours a day. The rest of the time we wear our fleece ponchos. So far it’s working well.

So here I am again – cheerful, warm and domestic.

I have just agreed the subject for my 2026 talk at the Numismatic Society – Royal Visits to Nottingham (with particular reference to the medallions of the 19th and early 20th Centuries), so I have something to keep me busy.

Royal visit to Nottingham 1914

Spam, Spam, Spam . . .

17 Replies

Sorry, I seem to have become an unreliable WordPresser recently – not much reading and some very erratic writing. I won’t promise to try harder because, believe it or not, I am trying harder. I’m just not very good at it.

It’s partly the fault of the Russians. They invaded Ukraine, gas supplies went up in price and we all decided to economise. That means I spend more time in the living room and less in the dining room. That is where I do my writing, on a junk covered table that has been used as a desk far longer than it was ever used as a dining table (and was actually a second-hand office table I was given about forty years ago). Conjure with that mental picture for a while, it’s hard to imagine why I’ve never been featured in a glossy magazine spread on elegant living, isn’t it?

We have, so far, only had the heating on for one day. It’s a mild autumn, which is lucky. The living room is a slightly warmer room than the dining room, which opens onto the kitchen and faces north. The living room has thicker carpets and is smaller and less draughty. We sit there with blankets on our knees talking about the good old days and saving money on gas so we can spend it on cake and my collection.

I could write in the living room, but I don’t write well when I balance a laptop on my knee, and it seems anti-social. I could use a pad and pen, but these days it’s harder to write when TV is on – I no longer have that youthful capacity to work and listen to TV. Sometimes I even find it hard to converse while TV is on.

So there you go – Russians, cold, WP and my mental decline, all in one post.

So, why the title? It’s because I was researching some South African medals on a family history website. Ancestry, my normal site, doesn’t cover South Africa, so I tried some others. One of them seems to have triggered an avalanche of spam. First of all I got adverts for anti-virus software and then threats about harmful viruses on my computer. I’ve had them before, but have ignored them and they have faded away.This time, though they came to nothing, they did leave me with an annoying number of pop-ups. I’ve downloaded a free pop-up blocker. So far this morning it has blocked 62 pop-ups – that’s about one every twenty seconds. It’s hard work using a computer when a third of the screen is constantly choked with spam. I am, to say the least, frustrated and annoyed, and wishing I’d not bothered with the South African family research.

The picture? Fund-raising flags for Serbia, from around 1914. We bought them in with some junk a few weeks ago. The problem with the Balkans are still with us, as are our problems with the Russian Bear and jingoism.

Third Post of the Day

11 Replies

Well, I wrote one post, then I wrote another. At that point I decided I needed a third post to link to the previous two. Really I ought to write a sequel to parts one and two of the burger story, but that can wait until tomorrow. My life is so crammed with trivia that it’s hard to fit it all in.

I notice that the clock is nearing midnight, and if I don’t post soon the title will be incorrect.

We were going to have fish pie and roasted ratatouille tonight but it was so cold I changed that to sausages and roasted root veg with cumin and paprika. We put the heating back on on Friday night, which is something we don’t normally do. I also don’t normally need to use successive “ons” in a sentence. It’s always good to do something new.

Whilst seasoning the veg I made two discoveries.

One, the new pot of smoked Spanish paprika is considerably hotter than the old one.

Two, in a kitchen, in the twilight, with aging eyes, cinnamon and cumin don’t look all that different when you are reading spice jar labels. I will put the light on next time.

For desert we had fig rolls and Battenberg cake. Must do better with planning my menus.

The lack of photos may show you how little progress I am making towards my targets in food photography.

Wood chip woes

5 Replies

Three degrees centigrade when we arrived this morning. It’s now past 11 am as I write this and it’s still only four degrees so it looks like winter might have started. Despite all the newspaper reports this shouldn’t be a surprise, as we often have our worst weather in February or March.

The heat exchangers on the front of the building have been working hard and are covered in ice.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Meanwhile it’s 20 degrees inside, as long as people keep the door closed. Unfortunately, shutting doors seems to be a bit of a lost art.

Meanwhile the biomass boiler has been giving problems because we have used a new source of wood. First of all it needed recalibrating to deal with willow, and now the ash removal mechanism keeps clogging. When you have four homes relying on the system this isn’t good. Though we all know biomass is one of the ways forward, it’s easy to see why people stick to the more traditional methods of heating.