Sorry for the lack of posts – I’ve just been far too busy to find time to blog. Every week recently I’ve had an all-day meeting in London, and it’s leaving me exhausted. One upside though is that, rather than getting a hideously early train from Malvern, I’ve gone down to London the night before […]
The weather has got colder and wetter, and so the mice have moved back into my attic – as they do every year. I’ve had to call out Martin, my friendly neighbourhood pest controller, to put more bait down in the loft. But it’s not an instantaneous solution, and things tend to get worse before […]
I’m inching forward with getting the shower fixed, though it’s still far from usable. Today, the plumber came back and re-tiled the area around the new shower (which was installed a few weeks ago; I’ve been waiting for the plaster to dry out as it got rather damp due to the old shower leaking behind the […]
I had something of a dilemma at the weekend. On the one hand, I’ve got a heavy cold that I just can’t shake, and was feeling really grotty, so I wanted to have a really quiet weekend and snuffle my way through it with strepsils, mugs of honey&lemon, and boxes of extra-soft tissues. On the […]
Our friend from work, Colin, was a regular commenter on this blog back when Christopher was still alive. He and Christopher used to meet in town for coffee, and their shared sense of humour lifted an otherwise rather bleak situation. For the last few years, however, Colin has been battling cancer himself – an inoperable […]
Before I left for the Isle of Wight, my father sent me a cutting from his history magazine which he knew I’d find interesting. I hadn’t even heard of Brading Roman Villa before, but I looked it up and it was an easily-manageable day trip from where I was staying. I got a bus from […]
The conference was very interesting, but extremely hard work. So I was very pleased that I’d had the foresight to book the following week off work on leave. The parents of a good friend of mine from university own a seaside holiday home which they let out commercially during the school holidays. But in low […]
The conference had some very long days – on the Monday, I was in conference sessions from 08:30 right through to 19:00, with only a short break for lunch. I joined some other delegates and we took a table for lunch at a very nice little French bistro directly opposite the conference centre. The fixed-price […]
I’ve had the plumber round to replace the built-in shower in the ensuite. As I feared, it’s not proved to be straightforward. I knew the old shower had been leaking down in front of the tiles. What’s clearly apparent now is that it’s also been leaking behind the tiles, and probably has been doing so […]
I’ve spent most of the week up in Edinburgh, at the main international conference in my particular technical field. It was held in a huge conference centre near Haymarket station, and even the thousand or so delegates didn’t completely fill it. What was nice is that it’s clearly the “right” conference for me – not […]
