……Crash, thud, tinkle. Yes, I’ve got builders in again! Rob is still here painting the porch and the kitchen window. It’s been a slower job than he’d hoped because the weather has been so poor that he hasn’t been able to do as much of the exterior paintwork as he had planned. It’s dry today, […]
I’ve been getting a series of emails from Christopher over the past week, which has rather shaken me. Ok, they’re clearly not actually from him, but rather from a Google Calendar that he set up when he was first made redundant three years ago. “Empty septic tank”, “Sort out car insurance”, “Get boiler and central […]
Yesterday afternoon, after work, I met up with a friend and ex-colleague for coffee, a cake, and a good gossip at the Waitrose cafe. I got there a bit early, so did some shopping in town first, and got caught in an absolute downpour. I got soaked! But when I then went into Waitrose to […]
Well, the porch is definitely better than it was, but I’m not totally convinced it’s fixed. There was a definite dubious damp patch on Friday morning after the overnight rain. Trouble is, I’ve not actually been around to catch it dripping, so it’s hard to be positive about where the leak is occurring. I think […]
I know it’s a bit precious of me to be complaining about a leaking porch roof when there are people elsewhere in the country being flooded out of their homes by the first major storm of this autumn. But on the other hand I did try to pre-empt the issue by paying rather a lot […]
…..You must be joking! I had three burly workmen around earlier this week to install a new kitchen window. Admittedly, I probably wouldn’t have commissioned it if I had known that my chimney needs repointing and releading before winter, which is going to be a fairly big job next month. However, by the time I […]
Our friends Carol and Mark visited me for the day today, to implement the next tranche of Carol’s plan for a GroundForce-style makeover of my garden, though thankfully without the “water feature” which always seemed to be a compulsory feature of that programme! Chris and I had the water feature (a waterfall into a shallow […]
I had hoped that the leaking porch roof and blocked down pipe had been fixed the other week. But then a huge thunderstorm hit Malvern just before the Bank Holiday weekend, complete with torrential rain, and it became clear that I still had a problem. The two original leaks in the porch roof had indeed […]
The mice are back! I first noticed them last Wednesday night. When I say “noticed”, that is an understatement. They were partying hard directly above my bed every half an hour from midnight through to 4am. So just when I thought they’d finished and I was about to drop off to sleep, they would start […]
I get very few cold-callers coming to my door. Even the Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t bother coming this far out of town – too few souls to save to make it worth their while. There is the occasional lost tourist who wants pointing towards the pub, or a delivery-man looking for directions to one of my […]
