I was back at Eastnor Pottery on Sunday. The clocks had gone forward, and it was a real struggle to get out of bed – I was still fast asleep when my alarm went off. The weather outside was pretty unpleasant – very strong winds and heavy rain, which wasn’t conducive to leaving my nice […]
I’ve been getting increasingly fed up with the state of the path leading from the drive to the front door, and finally decided that Enough was Enough, and I’d get something done about it. It was made of square concrete slabs, probably about 40cm on a side, and was anything but flat and level. There […]
My sister and brother-in-law have been staying for the weekend. Since I owed them at least a year’s worth of Christmas and birthday presents, I decided to take them out for dinner to Malvern’s best restaurant. The Terrace on the Hill is a brunch / light-lunch / afternoon-tea-and-cakes place during the week, but on Friday […]
I am very impressed with the surgical precision of the drain re-lining operation. It really was reminiscent of keyhole surgery, up to and including an endoscope! However, there is one rather unpleasant side-effect, and that’s the fumes from the solvent used to harden the resin-impregnated liner. They’ve been escaping via the plug-holes and permeating the […]
As you’ve probably gathered, this house is anything but a “new-build”. It’s got way more character than a identikit modern box on an estate, but the down-side is that much of it is many, many decades old and therefore needs attention. The main foul drain leading to the septic tank is a case in point. […]
I was queuing at the checkouts in Waitrose the other day. Right by the tills, where they generally keep an “impulse purchase” range of cakes and biscuits, was a large box with bunches of daffodils. The woman in front of me in the queue picked one up to add to her trolley. I caught her […]
There was absolutely no hope of a Saturday-morning lie-in today. At ten to nine, three burly men arrived in a van with some long ladders, and have been up on the roof ever since (with regular tea-breaks, naturally!). The noise they make clumping about up there will really give the mice in the loft something […]
When Christopher and I bought this house, over fifteen years ago, we knew that taking on a rather run-down Victorian cottage was going to be something of a “project”. Over the years, we’ve had it rewired, re-decorated, re-carpeted, and extended, yet there is a seemingly endless list of things that need doing. There is always […]
There was a rather amusing article in the local paper recently. One of Malvern’s more avant garde residents had gone to the local theatre box office to ask when the cinema would be showing 50 Shades of Grey. He was told that there were no plans to schedule it because “Malvern isn’t ready for that […]
