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IT meltdown

I’ve been having a very frustrating week with my IT. My iPad started it off – I was using it on Saturday evening, when suddenly the touch screen stopped working. I tried doing several hard reboots, but no joy. I then tried restoring it from iTunes on my laptop, but that required me to verify that I trusted the computer by responding to a prompt on my iPad. Which since the screen wouldn’t respond was very frustrating! I was completely stuck.

On Monday I took the iPad along to my local non-Apple-authorised mobile repair shop. (The closest Apple Store is in Birmingham, and I wasn’t about to take a day off work to go there.) They said they’d have a go at resetting it to factory settings, in case it was a software glitch, but that there would be no guarantee that it would fix things. And indeed it didn’t – it looks like the touch screen is well and truly broken, and annoyingly it’s just outside the warranty period. Worse, Apple touch screens for that particular model of iPad are extremely expensive – I could get a whole new device for not much more. And I use my iPad all the time – I really missed it when I didn’t have it.

So I’ve reluctantly invested in a brand new iPad. John Lewis do free delivery to local Waitrose stores, so I picked it up yesterday. I then spent a nerve-wracking evening trying to get it to work. Fortunately I had a fairly recent backup on iTunes so I could do a nearly full restore. But I still needed to try to set up passwords for various accounts – it wasn’t as straightforward as it had been last time I upgraded.

Then it was a case of making sure that everything was still working. Unfortunately the WordPress app that I sometimes use for blogging is one that isn’t – it seems to require Christopher’s password which I don’t know. But worse still, my entire blog was down! I just got a message saying that there was an error connecting to the database. I got the same error message on my laptop too, so it was clearly a problem at the far end, not something I was doing wrong on my iPad.

That meant a transatlantic phone call to the help desk of the company that Christopher picked to host the blog. I’ve found before that I get good results from them by playing the “widow card” – i.e. “My husband set it up, I don’t understand it as he never explained what he was doing, and now it’s broken but I can’t ask him as he’s dead!”. It turned out that they had “helpfully” moved the blog overnight onto another server, but the config file was still pointing in the wrong place. Fortunately the tech support guy took pity on me when I said that I didn’t have a clue about how it was set up, and he fixed it for me. And he also said that Christopher clearly had a logical mind as the config file was very clearly set out!

If you can read this, then it should all be ok. For now at least.  But he also gave me a talking to about updating the version of WordPress I’m running, and said he’d update the database at his end to enable that. I’ll grit my teeth and try that over the weekend, and hope that doesn’t break anything. I said that I really didn’t want to be forced into the arms of Facebook just to update my friends and family about how I’m getting on!

I’m also going to spend the weekend backing up absolutely everything…

07 12 2017 Gillian invective
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Studying The Hobbit

I’ve been spending my evenings for the last few weeks doing another online course on the FutureLearn MOOC platform. This one is from the University of Wollongong (no, me neither) and is studying The Hobbit. Not, in this case, Tolkien’s book of the same name. I was forced to read that by an over-enthusiastic English teacher in my second year at secondary school, and absolutely hated it. We had to read it all together as a class, with each of us taking it in turns to read aloud a paragraph at a time. In a mixed-ability comprehensive, with some students in the class who could barely read, that was extremely painful. My teacher managed not only to put me off all of Tolkien, but she butchered Charles Dickens the same way too, which is a real shame as I expect that I’d probably have quite enjoyed both authors if I’d discovered them in my own time and at my own speed. As it is, I actively avoid both of them.

This course that I’m doing is on the archaeology and paleo-anthropology of the hominid Homo Floresiensis. The academics leading the course were instrumental in digging up the fossilised skeleton of an extinct human species colloquially known as “the Hobbit” because it was only just over a metre tall, with a tiny head and proportionately over-big feet. I remember reading about it when the fossils were first discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores several years ago – there was a lot of controversy over the dating and whether it was, as the discoverers claimed, a completely new species of human, or just an anatomically modern person with microcephally or a congenital growth disorder. The course is doing a good job of explaining the new dating evidence, and pointing out the features which make it clear that this really was an archaic human species that most probably underwent a process of “island dwarfism” and shrunk in stature when in was isolated on an island with limited natural resources. It is probably only distantly related to us, but interestingly it was probably still living on Flores when anatomically-modern humans came through Indonesia on their way to colonising Australia.

I’m finding the course very interesting and I’m learning a lot about the human evolutionary tree. It’s a bit of a canter through years of painstaking multi-disciplinary research, but it’s well worth the investment of a couple of evenings a week.

29 11 2017 Gillian status Comments (2) Permalink

A Lightbulb Moment

It’s been a dull and rainy day today, and this is a dark house at the best of times. So this morning I walked into the living room and turned on the lights. There was a flash of light, a shower of red sparks and a very loud bang. All the lights at this end of the house tripped out, so I was plunged into darkness, and to cap it all, the blown lightbulb flew horizontally out of the wall fitting at great speed and hit me on the head! I’ve never had that happen to me before, and I have to admit it gave me quite a fright! 

It wasn’t easy to fix, either. The bulb had exploded at the point where the glass joins the screw fitting. The bulb had been ejected violently from the socket, leaving behind the screw cap still stuck in the housing. It needed a pair of pliers to prise the broken screw-end out, and of course it all had to be done up a ladder and by torchlight, as there was hardly any daylight, and all the lights were out as I’m not going anywhere near a potentially live electrical fitting with a set of metal pliers!

I know that in the grand scheme of things, it’s very much a first world problem. But I’ve got a bump on my head from a high-velocity light bulb, and I’m definitely not happy!

18 11 2017 Gillian house
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More messages from beyond the grave

It’s that time of year again when I get a stream of emails from Christopher, or rather from a Google Calendar that he set up before he died, giving me loads of reminders of things to do around the house. So far, he’s given me a ghostly nudge to:

  • Get the central heating serviced
  • Shop around for car and house insurance
  • Get the septic tank emptied
  • Put the car through its annual service and MOT.

I did the last one today, though unfortunately the car failed its MOT on the first time of asking. It just scraped through on a “re-sit” after some work, but will need some more work on the brakes to get it properly fit for the winter. Annoying, but given that it’s 14 years old I suppose it’s inevitable that it will need some effort to keep it roadworthy. And given that I live at the top of a very steep hill, I really do need to have fully operational brakes!

In a way it’s quite nice that Christopher is still helping out around the house, but I do wish I knew his google password so that I could be more selective about which reminders I get. Oh well.

14 11 2017 Gillian car
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Counted Cross Stitch

I’ve always enjoyed doing craft work as a hobby. Perhaps it comes from being an engineer and wanting to make things? I suppose these days my main craft hobby is pottery, but I also knit, sew and embroider amongst other things. But one thing I’d never done is counted cross stitch. Until, that is, I was given a kit of St Michael’s Mount as a birthday present.

I soon realised why I’d never attempted counted cross stitch before. You start with a blank piece of canvas with 14 holes to the inch (that’s an awful lot of stitches!), a printed out page of graph paper with a virtually indecipherable key on it, and a load of skeins of embroidery thread, in this case in twenty subtly different colours. I wasn’t sure whether my eyesight, patience, or manual dexterity was up to the job, or which one would give out first! But I thought I really ought to give it a go, since it was a present. I could only embroider for a few hours a day maximum, and only sitting in the window seat in the living room, where there was enough strong natural light to see by. And if the sun went behind a cloud I had to stop sewing!

It took all summer, but fortunately I finished it before the clocks went back. I took it to our local framers to be mounted, and I’m very pleased with how it’s turned out. I have to say I’m in no hurry to do another one though!

St Michael’s Mount

02 11 2017 Gillian art
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Nutter and Nuttette

A tit on the bird feeder – possibly a coal tit?


Back in the Spring, I bought some bird feeders for the garden and hung them in the corner between the two bedrooms. That used to be a very boring part of the garden – other than an acer tree turning vaguely pink in autumn,  nothing much ever happened there. But since I started regularly restocking the bird feeders with nuts, seeds and fat balls, that corner has become like an outdoor aviary. It’s a mass of activity, from first light until dusk, with well over a dozen birds regularly there at any one time. They’re mostly a mixture of different sorts of tits, and they generally get on pretty well. If the food stocks are getting low then there are some squabbles, which the great tits usually win, but most of the time they all feed happily on the same feeder, or wait in the adjacent bushes for their turn.

However, the undisputed king and queen of the bird feeder are a pair of nuthatches. They are both really hard birds, and bully all the others massively. Nutter and Nuttette will only tolerate each other on the feeder (and even then, they prefer to have one each). If any other bird has the temerity to approach the feeder while the nuthatches are there, they get headbutted viciously and driven away. In fact the male, Nutter the Nuthatch, has even been seen to do a kamikaze dive onto a squirrel that was trying to get into the peanut feeder! The squirrel was rapidly scared off and Nutter took its place on the feeder. It’s a very literal illustration of the term “pecking order”, with the nuthatches clearly right at the top!

It’s certainly added a huge amount of interest to that corner of the garden. Though now the Dawn Chorus is louder than ever, and directly outside my bedroom window, so there is something of a downside. 

22 10 2017 Gillian garden Comments (2) Permalink

Altercation with the Newsagent

For years, I’ve had newspapers delivered at the weekend by the closest newsagent, who is several miles away in the nearest village. It’s too far (and probably too dangerous, given how fast the main road is) for a regular paperboy/girl to do the round on their bike, so a chap drives out in his car to do the deliveries for me and my neighbours. He gets here too late to catch me in time for breakfast during the week, but I tend to have a lie in at the weekend, so it doesn’t matter so much if the paper’s not delivered before 09:30. I do pay through the nose for the convenience of getting the papers delivered though.

For a small company, the newsagents are surprisingly blasé about cash flow. They send me a bill monthly in arrears, I put a cheque in the post a day or so later, and then they don’t cash it for weeks. But three months ago, I put a cheque in the post as usual but they didn’t cash it at all. The following month, they sent me bill for two full months, assuming I hadn’t paid. I went to see them in person, and pointed out that I’d put a cheque in the post, showed them the counterfoil in my cheque book, and said I’d only pay the second month’s bill, since as far as I was concerned I was up to date. The chap said he hadn’t even got around to opening his post from the previous month, so my cheque was probably in a drawer somewhere!

However, the same thing happened again last month. Again, my bill hadn’t been made up to date. I really don’t like being told I’m delinquent in my payments, when I know that I pay my bills regularly. I’ve had enough. So I’ve gone to my bank to cancel the outstanding cheque, paid the newsagent’s bill in full and closed my account. It’s a bit of a case of cutting off my nose to spite my face, as now I don’t get a paper delivered at the weekend. If it was an isolated case, I’d be inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and consider that the cheque might have got lost in the post. But it strongly smells of bad organisation at their end, and I’m not prepared to put up with bad service – I’d rather do without. 

There doesn’t appear to be any other newsagent that will deliver this far out of town, so they’ve got a monopoly situation. My choices are either to drive into town, spend a token amount at Waitrose and pick a free paper up from there as part of the MyWaitrose benefits, or consider a digital subscription on my iPad. I suspect I might go for the latter and see how it works out.

15 10 2017 Gillian invective Comments (1) Permalink

Family Visitation

I had my sister and brother-in-law staying here over the weekend. We have all been so busy this year that I don’t think we’ve actually seen each other since the New Year, and they certainly haven’t stayed here for over three years. It’s shocking how time flies by! I sometimes stay overnight with my sister if I’ve got an early meeting in London, but she’s been travelling so much for work lately that she’s not actually been around when I’ve needed to go to Town, so that’s not worked out. But they had been having a week’s holiday in North Wales, and Malvern is sufficiently on the way back to London that there was really no excuse not to call in. 

It was really good to catch up with them properly. They admired the new porch – which looks virtually identical to the old porch, just slightly more upright – and rifled through my collection of Agatha Christies, borrowing most of the Poirot mysteries. In return though, they did leave me six months’ worth of National Geographic magazines, which will keep me amused for ages. 

10 10 2017 Gillian status Comments Off on Family Visitation Permalink

How the Other Half Loves

After a disappointingly barren summer,  Malvern Theatres has had a couple of interesting things on in quick succession. This week’s offering was How the Othe Half Loves, the 1969 Alan Acykbourn classic. Apparently, it had a prolonged and critically acclaimed run in London last year,and is now on tour around the country – although with only one of the original actors from the West End run. I had seen the play before, years ago, and enjoyed it, so thought I’d use my Standby Club membership to go to the Saturday matinée. The theatre was quite full, but I still managed to get a very good seat in the stalls.

As you would expect from an Ayckbourn, it’s a black comedy looking at unhappy marriages – three of them in this case. Frank and Fiona Foster are well off with a pleasant, comfortable house and lifestyle, but she is clearly bored with him, and is having an affair with Bob Phillips, one of Frank’s employees. Bob is the office lothario, despite being married with a young baby. His wife, Theresa, is barely coping, and their flat is untidy and chaotic. As Bob and Fiona try to cover up their affair from their increasingly suspicious spouses, they embroil the third couple, William and Mary Featherstone, as unknowing alibis. William is very controlling, and Mary is shy and naive. In their own ways, both Bob and William are domestic bullies, whilst Fiona is an entitled bitch. So plenty of material there for Ayckbourn to dissect and make us laugh at.

It’s very ingeniously staged. The Foster’s house and the Phillips’ flat are both depicted on stage at the same time, with action taking place in both of them simultaneously. The funniest bit was when the Fosters and the Phillips both invite the Featherstones to dinner on successive nights, and the two disastrous dinner parties are staged side by side with the Featherstones swivelling between an avocado starter and packet soup with added air freshener courtesy of the unseen uncontrolled baby.

The play, or at least this staging of it, was less subtle and more in-your-face than I had remembered. However, it was played for laughs and was undoubtedly very funny. When I wasn’t cringing, I was laughing out loud, which has to be a good thing on a damp autumnal Saturday afternoon. 

01 10 2017 Gillian Day out
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Tap dancing rodents

The attic has been blessedly quiet over the summer, but the change in weather over the past few weeks seems to have driven the local mice to find some shelter. At any rate, I’ve started hearing the occasional pitter-patter of tiny feet above my chair in the living room, and the other night it sounded as if there were rodent tap-dancing lessons being held directly above my bed! It was clearly time to contact Martin, the mouse-man, to deal with them. I have to say that he is very prompt and reliable – I texted him last night to request a visit, and he was here at 08:10 this morning with his tubs of bait. He said there had indeed been a fair amount of rodent “activity” in the loft, so he has replenished all the bait and I now just have to wait for it to take effect.

The same thing happens every autumn, so I’m pretty much used to it by now. It’s one of the penalties of living out in the country. I enjoy watching the wildlife in the garden (this year I’ve had everything from hedgehogs and rabbits to foxes and muntjac deer). But I’m not so keen on wildlife in the house, whether that be a blue tit under the bath or mice in the attic. 

27 09 2017 Gillian house Comments (1) Permalink