But this week I got some post addressed to him which really irritated me. The story started just weeks after he was made redundant in 2009. He got cold-called by a financial adviser offering advice on investing his lump-sum redundancy payment, and agreed that they should send him some initial bumf on what they had to offer. I was unhappy though. We were, and indeed I still am, subscribed to the Telephone Preference Service, which is meant to stop all uk-based cold calls, with threats of heavy fines for transgressors. I firmly believe that reputable companies should abide by the TPS rules, and refuse to deal with anyone who doesn’t. And how did they know that Chris had a lump sum anyway? They claimed it was a complete coincidence, but I was suspicious. I did some searches on the Internet, and came up with pages and pages of people complaining about sharp practices from this particular firm. I strongly advised him to have nothing further to do with them. Anyway, his lump sum was far too small for us to need professional advice on how to deal with it.

Everything went quiet until this week, when he got a letter from a company I’d never heard of, Towry, inviting him to a seminar in Worcester on “Wealth Preservation in Taxing Times”. This included advice on inheritance tax planning, intestacy, wills, and powers of attorney. I did some digging, and it seems that Towry bought up the previous IFA company, and also have a load of people complaining about their sharp practices – including the Financial Services Authority who have fined them nearly half a million pounds for “providing incorrect information”. I saw red and scrawled over their invitation “It’s a bit bloody late for this. He’s DEAD. Remove his name from your mailing list forthwith”. I then took great delight in sending it back to them in their own reply-paid first class envelope. I sincerely hope that’s the last I hear from them.

So today I decided to give in to the nagging of several colleagues who think I’ve been overdoing it, by taking the day off in lieu of some of the additional hours I’ve been working. I had a lazy morning and didn’t set my alarm, though I did sneakily log on and check my email before lunch – and was caught doing so by one of the very colleagues who had told me firmly to take the day off. Drat!

There is a Noel Coward play on at Malvern Theatres at the moment, and I generally enjoy his plays. Private Lives and Design for Living are two of my favourites, but this was a new one to me – Star Quality. It’s his final play, and I hadn’t even heard of it before, so I wanted to see it. But while I’m this tired, I really don’t want to go out in the evenings, and I’m busy with friends and family this weekend so the Saturday matinée is out of the reckoning. So the only way I was going to see the play was by going to the mid-week matinée. That was an added incentive to take today off.

It wasn’t a classic Coward, and I could see why I’d not come across it before, as it isn’t performed as often as his earlier plays.  It’s definitely not in the same league as some of his other works, though the trademark Coward wit and repartee were still there. The plot was clearly drawn from his life, with him sticking firmly to subjects that he knew intimately. It was about an innocent young playwright who had written a brilliant new play, the very temperamental leading lady who was a highly demanding diva, the ruthless producer trying to pull it all together with the help of his outrageously camp boyfriend/assistant, and various sundry lesser actors/actresses all caught up in the battles between the three leading protagonists. Cue hissy fits all round.

The actors were all hamming it up – and sometimes it was difficult to tell when their character was acting hammily, and when they themselves were overcooking it.  They also stumbled over their lines a few times – and again sometimes that was deliberate but sometimes definitely not. It turns out that this is the first week of the company’s tour around the UK, but even so one does expect professional actors to be totally fluent with their lines from day one – or, in this case, day two. The scene-stealer was Lola, a small white dog who was carried around by the leading actress. She behaved impeccably, and was the only character on stage who could not be accused of over-acting!

I’m pleased I’ve seen the play, as my curiosity is now satisfied, though I don’t think I’ll bother going if I see it staged again. And it was good to have a day off as TOIL after the hard work of participating in the equipment trial. I did feel out of place though – weekday matinées are clearly the preserve of the retired – I must have been the youngest person in the audience by fifteen to twenty years!

I’m not too sure about the shade of green that he’s painted the woodwork. It’s definitely the colour I chose, and I deliberately went for a shade slightly brighter than the one that we had before, which I found a bit gloomy. But in large quantities it really is quite vibrant! However, I’m sure I’ll get used to it, eventually.

Since then, I’ve had Rob back here on numerous occasions, and each time he’s asked whether I want him to do the kitchen – even offering to honour the original quote which is now over 18 months out of date. My answer was always the same – I really wanted to have it done, but I couldn’t cope with living through the actual doing. The most recent occasion was before Christmas, when he was repainting the hall ceiling after the incident with the leaking hot water system.  But then I had  sudden brainwave. I was at the time bidding at work for a project which would require me to participate in some equipment trials at our Hampshire offices, which would mean staying at a hotel down there for at least a week and a half at the end of January.  I said to Rob that if (i) I won the bid and got on contract, (ii) his diary was free over the dates of the trial, (iii) he was prepared to do absolutely everything himself – I was intending to keep right out of the way, so he’d have to clear the kitchen and put it back the way he’d found it, and (iv) I would be unable to take calls during the day as I’d be with my customers, so he’d have to use his own judgement on any issues he came across and just update me over the phone in the evenings if necessary – then we would have a deal. He agreed to those terms, and we pencilled the dates in subject to final confirmation if and when I won the contract.

The contract did come through in time, so for the last week and a bit I’ve been living out of a suitcase in Hampshire. Meanwhile, Rob has had a key to the house and has been getting on with the kitchen. It’s not quite finished – he thinks there’s about two days left doing the woodwork – but it’s looking good so far.  And I’ve escaped almost all of the disruption! I will be so pleased when it is done – another thing to cross off the to-do list.

The upshot of all this is that, for the past few years the kitchen has four different colours of skirting board (dark green, light green, white and brown), two different colour walls (cream and magnolia), two different colours on the ceiling (cream and white), the doors are either dark green or white, and I absolutely loathe the tiles on the splash-back! Plus the walls and ceiling are covered in two different patterns of wood-chip paper, both hideous. The rest of the house is so much better, and the kitchen really does look grotty in comparison.  I’ve had a number of quotes over the past ten years to do the work, which is actually surprisingly affordable as I don’t want to change the kitchen cabinets or work-surfaces. But I still can’t face the disruption of not having a usable kitchen for nearly two weeks – which is what Rob my trusty decorator has estimated it will take.

I have however recently come up with a cunning plan, so I hope that I may be able to square the circle and get it done with minimum disruption.

It tells me how often pages are viewed (about 30-40 page views per day, over the past month, on average, and even on Christmas Day about a dozen of you checked up on me, which was nice of you!), and who the top referrers are (Frosty Intervals by a wide margin, but also Kevin/Joan’s and Ryan’s blogs usually feature). One stat which I found interesting this week is the record of the top-five search terms that people use to find the blog:  “icyjumbo blog” and “A mammoth undertaking Chris Booth” are both fairly obvious ones which I would expect. But this week a new search term has appeared on the top five list – “icyjumbo pillows” which is leading people to this post about a way of arranging pillows that my Gran learned as a trainee nurse before the second world war.

There was clearly a story behind this spike in interest in an obscure blog page written over 18 months ago. It turns out that my sister has a colleague whose husband is recovering from a fairly significant operation.  He slept pretty badly in hospital, as he couldn’t get comfortable even with the fully-adjustable hospital bed, and his wife was concerned about how he would cope back home in an ordinary bed. So my sister told her about our family’s way of arranging pillows, and said that I’d blogged about it with detailed photographic instructions when Chris had a bad back. She did a search for “icyjumbo pillows”, found the photos, and printed off the page for her colleague. It was subsequently reported back that the colleague’s husband had slept so much better using “the pillows” than he had in hospital, and was really pleased to learn the method. It looks to me as if he’s been recommending it onwards, possibly to other patients at the outpatients clinic, and telling them how to search for it.

That’s really nice to know – that complete strangers are getting a better night’s sleep as a result of a throw-away blog post which has taken on a life of its own since I posted it. My mother is rather annoyed though – she says that if she’d known I was going to post the photos, she’d have ironed the sheets first!

Anyway, I was in work earlier than usual, logged on to my computer and looked at my on-line calendar to see what meetings people had booked for me while I was off. It was then that I made the horrid discovery. I had booked Tuesday off as annual leave and forgotten all about it! With all the stress of meetings and milestones before Christmas, I had forgotten to synchronise my work and home diaries, and the booked leave hadn’t made it into my 2012 diary.  There was no point in going home at that stage – since I was in work I might as well make the most of it and do something useful. Oh I was cross with myself!

Ta Prohm - hard to tell which is temple tower and which is tree trunk

You can see the damage that the tree roots are doing – the walls are just collapsing under the relentless weight and pressure of the trees.

Ta Prohm doorway

This picture was taken about 5 seconds after a large party of Koreans finally moved out of the way. I love the way the tree roots are framing the doorway.

Banteay Kdei emerging from the undergrowth

Finally, this is the neighbouring temple of Banteay Kdei. This one is smaller and less visited than the previous ones, and my guide and I virtually had it to ourselves. You can see how quickly it would be swallowed up again by the jungle if the authorities stop trying to maintain it.