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Cuthbert the Cucumelon

Cuthbert the Cucumelon

Cuthbert the Cucumelon

A few months ago, I read in the Sunday papers about a “new” plant that was being grown commercially in the UK for the first time, and would shortly be available from Waitrose. It sounded interesting  – a member of the cucumber/courgette family, with small sour fruit the size of a grape that look a bit like a watermelon. Hence the name, “Cucumelon”. So I kept my eyes peeled, and sure enough a few weeks later the Malvern Waitrose did indeed have a small stock of the plants in their garden section. At only £4 for a healthy-looking specimen about 20cm high, I thought it was worth trying. It looked very vine-like and was clearly a climber, so I put it in the porch with a small wigwam of bamboo sticks to give it some support.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t properly read the instructions. The words “pinch out the main growing shoot once it reaches 2.5m” should have given me cause to consider. It’s just as well I only repotted it into a medium-sized pot (rather than the large one recommended) as Cuthbert the Cucumelon clearly has designs on world domination! I’ve had to make a network of supports out of twine, strung across my porch, and Cuthbert is going for it. He’s more like a “Mile-a-Minute vine” in that you can practically see him growing! I check on him in the morning on my way to work, and by the time I come home he’s generally grown another couple of inches and sprouted another pair of leaves. There’s lots of tiny fruit on him, that look like mini-courgettes about a centimetre long with a small yellow flower on the end, but they’ve not yet ripened. I don’t really mind if I don’t get any edible fruit out of him – they’re apparently somewhat of an acquired taste to put it mildly – as it’s just been so much fun watching him grow and trying to curb his expansionist tendencies! I’ve certainly got far more than £4-worth of entertainment from him.

06 08 2016 Gillian garden
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Finally Finishing the Bedroom

Rob the decorator has been here for the last two weeks, finishing off the job started by the builders who replaced the bedroom windows. They had left the woodwork primed but unpainted, and had also made a right mess of the wallpaper around the window frames. Bedroom 1 was last decorated when Christopher and I moved in, which must be getting on for twenty years ago. So it was well overdue being refreshed. It was actually one of the first jobs that Rob did, working as an apprentice to his father, and I think he found it a bit odd to be stripping the wallpaper that he’d originally put up.

It’s been a pretty grim two weeks – my bedroom was completely uninhabitable, most of its contents were in the bathroom so I couldn’t use that either, and the smell of paint was so strong that I couldn’t even decamp to bedroom 2 which is immediately adjacent. Instead, I’ve been sleeping in the “guest room” in the extension over the garage, at the far end of the house. But he has done a very good job. The bedroom is much fresher and brighter, and actually looks bigger as a result.  He’s also painted the windows in bedroom 2, and patched up the damaged wallpaper with offcuts from a spare roll that I’d kept from when it was originally papered. I couldn’t afford to have both rooms completely redecorated in one go, so it was a case of just doing the minimum in bedroom 2 to make it look reasonable. The only problem is that the newly painted woodwork really shows up how yellow and faded the rest of the paintwork is – but I’ll just live with that.

There was one issue that I had to deal with though. I had the valves on my radiators upgraded a few weeks ago, and Rob had requested that the radiators in my bedroom be left disconnected so that he could paper behind them easily and paint them properly. But he’s clearly a painter not a plumber, as he couldn’t work out how to put the radiators back on again once he’d finished! He was a bit sheepish about that, but I didn’t want him to try to force pipework to fit if he didn’t know what he was doing, as I was worried there would be a leak! Fortunately, the heating maintenance people I use are very accommodating, and sent the plumbers back today to put the system back together again and check it was all working. 

It only took them about an hour, but for that time I really did feel that I was taking part in a competition to see how many tradesmen’s vans I could have on my drive at once! As well as Rob the decorator and the plumber, the gardener had also turned up somewhat unexpectedly so there were three vans hemming my little mini in. It was a good job I’d taken today off work, as I was clearly not going to be able to get the car out!

28 07 2016 Gillian house Comments (3) Permalink

Rail Chaos

I had a meeting in Oxford on Tuesday, at a joint industry/academia forum that I’m a member of. As a city, it’s actively hostile to cars, and the university has very limited parking to offer visitors, so the most sensible option was to go by rail. The train was spot on time on the way out, so I got to my meeting in good time. It was a different matter on the way home.

I got to Oxford station to find the platforms absolutely heaving with very disgruntled people. It was the hottest day of the year so far, and the rails around Reading were barely coping. Lots of trains had been cancelled, and draconian speed limits had been brought in to prevent the rails from buckling, with the result that all the remaining trains were running horribly late. There was no sign of the train I’d planned on catching, but the previous one was about to turn up – running at that point 53 minutes late. It got as far as Charlbury, in the middle of the Cotswolds, and then stopped for far longer than usual. According to the very helpful and increasingly apologetic guard, this was so that the driver could remove a tree that was blocking the line! We then set off again, now running over 70 minutes late, until we got to Evesham. At that point progress just ground to a halt. Apparently, a set of points had got stuck outside Worcester Shrub Hill, and the signaller couldn’t get them to budge in either direction. The line is single track between Evesham and Worcester, so we were being held at the station, on the last bit of double-track line, until a solution could be found.

I could see the guard standing on the platform on the phone, trying to get some sense out of Great Western’s control room. To give her credit, she really did do her best to keep us updated, saying what she knew, whom she was talking to next, and what time she’d get back to us with an update. Unfortunately, she had no new information to give us – the points were still stuck, they were still trying to shift them, and in the mean time we were staying put. The taxi drivers of Evesham had a bumper evening, as loads of passengers decided they couldn’t or wouldn’t wait. Lots more were phoning home and making arrangements to be picked up. I had a supply of food and drink, and a book to read, so decided that I’d just sit it out. 

Eventually, the guard announced that the signaller had managed to get the points to move and that we were about to be on our way. But by then I had information that she didn’t have, or at the very least wasn’t telling us. I had the live train-time website up on my phone and I could see that, according to that source, the journey was “disrupted” as they so euphemistically put it – i.e. the train was going to be terminated at Worcester Shrub Hill, and wasn’t going to continue on to Malvern. According to the guard, however, everything was just fine, as we set off from Evesham towards Worcester – and then ground to a halt again just outside Shrub Hill station. After five minutes of no information, the (by now extremely apologetic) guard came over the tannoy to say that the Bristol train was at our platform, we were now waiting for it to vacate the platform so that we could use it. Another five minutes and she came back on the tannoy, having apparently just been told what I’d found out twenty minutes previously, namely that once we finally made it into Shrub Hill, it would be All Change as the train was going no further. I’m not sure that she could have sounded any more apologetic – but she also said that Shrub Hill was in such chaos that she’d been unable to find out any information about connecting trains to tell us, so would we all please just keep our ears open for announcements once we got there.

After ten minutes hanging around at Shrub Hill, the next train from London turned up. This was the one from Oxford that I’d originally meant to catch. It was running late itself, but even so had managed to nearly catch us up. We all piled onto it, only for that train itself to be abruptly cancelled – it would go as far as Worcester Foregate Street but no further, so everyone for stations beyond Worcester was to get off and wait on the platform for further instructions. There was a little group of us who all recognised each other vaguely from work – colleagues, ex-colleagues and one of my customers – so we all banded together, sharing what little information we had. Eventually, another train did finally turn up, and we all got on, arriving in Malvern two and a half hours late. I was absolutely shattered by the time I got home!

I was so glad I’d had some food and water with me, as otherwise it would have been extremely unpleasant. As it was, it was merely annoying and tedious. It is rather shocking though, how much disruption can be caused by what was really a very minor heat-wave. I’m sure that trains in Spain and Italy have to cope with such temperatures on a very regular basis. 

21 07 2016 Gillian Day out
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Early morning excitement

My trip to Brighton necessitated an overnight stay, which turned out to be more of an issue than I had expected. I have to book hotels via work’s online travel agent, and usually that’s no problem. However, it was Conference Season in Brighton, and all the main hotels had either no online availability, or were asking outrageous prices, well above the nightly limit that the Company allows. I finally managed to book a room in a small hotel in a very good position on the sea front, just a few minutes from the town centre. Unfortunately, when I looked it up on TripAdvisor, the reviews were mixed to say the least, so I was rather concerned about what I’d landed myself with.

As it turned out, it wasn’t as bad as some of the reviews had suggested. It was two adjoining Georgian town houses knocked together to form a small hotel that was really more of a B&B, within very easy reach of lots of restaurants for dinner. The decor was very dated, and the whole place needed a good lick of paint and better maintenance, but it was clean and the owners were very pleasant and friendly. I had a large airy room on the top (third) floor, with a big bay window and a sea view.

The bed was very comfortable, and I was fast asleep when I was rudely awoken at 05:30 by a very loud siren. It was the hotel fire alarm. Drat! I’ve been in a hotel fire before and it was very unpleasant and not something to be taken lightly. So I threw some clothes on over my nightshirt, grabbed my boots, room key and phone, and went to the evacuation point outside the front of the hotel. Despite the fact that I was on the top floor, I was one of the first guests to get out. In fact, although the hotel had a “no vacancies” sign up, and I knew there were 24 rooms, only about a dozen people turned up at the evacuation point, which I thought was shocking. Yes, it was probably a false alarm (it often is I find), but I really don’t think it’s worth the gamble. Unfortunately, the other people who were also conspicuous by their absence were the hotel staff! It transpired that none of the staff actually “lived in” or stayed overnight, and the so-called night-porter was a mobile phone number that when we called it just went through to an answerphone.

In the absence of any hotel management, there was a great deal of dithering going on about what to do, and I really can’t be doing with dithering. So I took it upon myself to call 999 and summon the fire brigade. We couldn’t tell if it was a real fire or a false alarm, and with half of the hotel guests apparently remaining in their rooms, it could have got rather messy. Much better to call the professionals in, and get them to make an assessment. While we were waiting for the fire engine (and it was very quick – under five minutes) I saw another of the guests, in her dressing gown, standing on the banisters and trying to unscrew the smoke alarm to take out the battery! It appeared that the reason she hadn’t evacuated the hotel was because she’d been going round all the public areas trying to disable the alarms one by one! 

When the fire brigade arrived, they fairly quickly established that there wasn’t an actual fire. But the actions of that stupid woman meant that they couldn’t reset the alarm and let us all go back in, because the control panel had detected the tampering and wouldn’t reset. The fire brigade summoned the owner, and a senior “fire incident manager” from the brigade who was an expert in the control panel systems. It transpired that the alarm had first gone off in the room of the stupid woman (I strongly suspect, but can’t prove, that she had been smoking in bed) and she had then “disabled” the alarm in her room so throughly that she had smashed it completely. She’d then removed the batteries in so many of the other alarms that it was going to take an hour or more to get everything reset. The firemen were really unimpressed, and gave her a bit of a lecture, but she was so stupid that I’m not sure it sank in.  Fortunately the fire brigade agreed that, as long as the owners were there and in charge, it was safe for us to go back into the hotel even though there wasn’t a functioning fire alarm system. 

I was thoroughly unimpressed. The actions of that woman were really stupid and potentially highly dangerous; many of the other guests were courting danger by remaining in their rooms (and the alarm was so loud I really don’t think they could have slept through it); and the hotel management really ought to have a better fire action plan than relying on one of the guests to call the fire brigade! But at least no one was hurt and it all ended well. 

18 07 2016 Gillian Day out Comments Off on Early morning excitement Permalink

A Trip to Brighton 

My job seems to involve visiting a lot of universities at the moment – this week it was the University of Sussex at Brighton. The journey to Brighton from Malvern is an absolute pig – I’m not happy to drive that far at the moment, and there is no easy route by rail. The quickest way is in fact to start off by going in entirely the wrong direction, and catch a train to Birmingham, then change to a fast train to London, cross London on the tube to Victoria, and then get a Southern Train to Brighton. Three problems with that – 1. It’s very expensive, 2. It would involve crossing London in the rush hour, which I hate doing, and 3. Southern Trains is in absolute chaos at the moment, with industrial action and an emergency timetable (for which read hundreds of trains cancelled, and the remainder horribly overcrowded).

I did some digging around on-line, and found that a much cheaper, and not that much slower route was to go from Malvern to Reading, change there for the stopping service to Gatwick Airport avoiding central London, and then change again for Brighton. This had the advantage of only the last half hour from Gatwick to Brighton being on a Southern Train service, so overcrowding would be much less of an issue. And I wouldn’t have to cross London which was a bonus. I went to Malvern station late last week to buy my train ticket, and was explaining to the chap at the ticket office what I wanted. I heard a voice behind me in the ticket queue say “Hello Gillian. I see you’ve not changed. Still know your own mind and explain it clearly as always!”  It was a chap who used to work for me seven years ago, and apparently well remembers me giving him some clear directions……..

The trains were such that, whichever route I’d taken, I’d have had to catch a stupid o’clock train from Malvern to get to my meeting on time if I’d travelled the same day. So I travelled down the afternoon before, which was much more civilised. That had the further advantage that I had two hours free in Brighton the next morning before my meeting at the University. I’ve not been to Brighton for about 30 years – I have a vague recollection of going to a conference there when I was a student – so I wasn’t sure what I’d find to do for a couple of hours. But just five minutes walk from my hotel I found the Brighton Pavilion, which was an interesting (if horribly bad taste) way to spend a morning.

Brighton Pavilion

It was built on the orders of George IV when he was Prince Regent, and really is a triumph of money over good taste. On the outside it looks vaguely Indian, whereas the inside is over-the-top Chinoiserie. Or at least a nineteenth-century Englishman’s view of China, with Egyptian additions and lashings of gold leaf. Queen Victoria couldn’t stand it, and sold it to Brighton Council soon after she came to the throne. It narrowly escaped demolition, was used as a hospital for Indian troops in World War I, and has been under almost continuous renovation ever since. It’s certainly a very interesting building, and gives one a very good idea of just how lavish George IV was with his money – it’s absolutely no wonder he was usually deep in debt!

16 07 2016 Gillian Day out
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Just one tradesman-free day…..

The carpenter finally left on Tuesday, having fitted all four windows and repaired the rotten wood on the porch. He’s left all the woodwork primed, ready for Rob to paint. Wednesday was thankfully tradesman-free, but then the next lot were round on Thursday to upgrade the radiator controls. I had decided to take advantage of all the disruption to get thermostatic valves installed on the radiators in the old part of the house. They’re already fitted in the extension, and are very useful for controlling the level of heat in the lesser-used rooms. I suppose I should really have done this a few years ago, when the price of oil was much higher. But given the way that the pound is currently plummeting against the dollar, I expect the price of heating oil to go back up so I should  get my money back within a few years.

In order to fit the new valves, the central heating needed to be drained. Usually, the plumbers said, there’s a drain point at the lowest level of the pipe work, so that gravity just drains all the water out. Not so in this house. They found a drain point adjacent to the radiator in my living room. But it turned out not to be at the lowest point of the system. They were able to drain much of the water out using that, then had to jury-rig another hose from my bedroom all the way through the house to get more out. And there was a significant amount of emptying radiators using buckets and plastic drip trays, accompanied by the regular insertion of their fingers into the pipework as a temporary stopper – like the Little Dutch Boy in the legend……

One positive benefit of the upgrade is that I’ve finally been able to dispense with the grotty rag (once a J-Cloth) that’s been tied around the radiator valve in my bedroom for the last goodness-knows how many years, soaking up the intermittent leak there. I’m glad to see the back of it!

10 07 2016 Gillian house Comments Off on Just one tradesman-free day….. Permalink

Windows Update

No, not that annoying message from Microsoft trying to force you to upgrade to Windows 10. Rather, an update on the ongoing saga of getting my bedroom windows replaced. In previous years, when I have had my kitchen, utility room and bathroom windows replaced by the same company, it’s always gone very smoothly with minimum fuss or mess. So I was expecting the bedroom windows to be more of the same. With hindsight, that was hopelessly optimistic. If I had realised how much work it would be, I would probably have confined myself to replacing the windows in just one bedroom, rather than getting both done at once.

The noise, fuss, mess and dust has all been excessive. However, after six days of having between two and four workmen here constantly, the new windows in both bedrooms are now in place at last. Unfortunately, there is some damage to the wallpaper around the windowsills. That’s not an issue in the main bedroom, as I was expecting it and had already planned to get that repapered. In fact, I’ve just spoken to Rob my regular decorator, and he’s still on track to come here in two weeks time to make a start. But I was assured that bedroom 2 would be much easier, so it’s annoying that the wallpaper’s been rather badly torn around the windowsills there too – and even more so that the Dangerous Brothers tried to avoid responsibility for it and said it must have been like that when they arrived! I certainly didn’t accept that statement at face value! But I do have a spare half a roll of the relevant wallpaper, and I shall ask Rob to patch it to make good when he’s here.

The new double glazing is definitely quieter and less draughty. And it’s a novel feeling being able to open the windows in bedroom 2. Before, the only way to open the side window was to take out the secondary double glazing, and opening the front window involved precariously balancing with one foot on the bedside table and the other on a desk! Now both windows unlock and open easily without any special contortions. I think once Rob’s painted the windows inside and out, it’s all going to look very good. 

I’ve taken advantage of having the builders around for so long to get them to do a couple of other fixes while they were here. There were some decidedly rotten parts to my porch which I’ve had replaced – the postman didn’t really need to use the letterbox, he could pretty much have put any letters straight through the woodwork it was so rotten. So I’m having new bits of wood spliced in to replace the rotten stuff. Plus, I wasn’t entirely happy with the outcome of getting my path repaved last year. It looks really good, but there are still problems with drainage and it has a tendency to turn into a paddling pool when it rains. Since the main point of getting it repaved in the first place was to get rid of the puddle, I was cross that it hadn’t worked. Fortunately, the chief builder turned up to quote for the new windows immediately after a heavy rainstorm, and had to wade through the paddling pool in his highly polished shoes! He immediately agreed that it needed to be fixed at their expense. So today a chap drilled number of holes at the side of the path to try to drain the excess water into the flower bed. I’ll see if that’s worked – given the amount of rain we’re having this summer, I don’t expect to have to wait long to find out!

04 07 2016 Gillian house Comments (1) Permalink

Windows chaos

I’m gradually trying to drag my Victorian cottage at least into the 20th century, if not the 21st. The latest episode in the ongoing saga of renovation is getting new windows in the bedrooms. The current ones have very leaky secondary double glazing, and are draughty and have lots of condensation. As a result, the bedrooms are cold pretty much all year round – possibly an advantage in the height of summer, but a definite problem in the depths of winter! I’ve therefore decided that my major renovation efforts this year will go towards getting the windows in both bedrooms replaced with modern double-glazed units.

Unfortunately, nothing is ever straightforward in a property as old as this one, and so it’s been proved with the windows. Each bedroom is dual-aspect, with windows onto the front and side. So that makes four in total to be replaced. But they’re a very non-standard shape (a sort of squared-off arch) and they are all slightly different sizes. So no off-the-peg solutions here! They’ve each had to be hand-made by a joiner, and it’s taken ages to make them – not helped by the fact that the subcontractor who made the double-glazed glass panes got the size and shape wrong and had to redo the work. Fortunately at his expense, not mine!

I’ve had two carpenters here since Monday morning, and so far they’ve managed to nearly finish the two windows in the main bedroom. But they’ve not found it at all easy – there’s been an awful lot of swearing going on. It appears that when my bedroom was built (it seems to be an addition to the original house, but built several decades ago) the builders actually built the window frames into the brickwork, and then plastered over about half of the wooden frame to make a neat join. So in order to get the old windows out, the builders have had to cut them into sections and chip away the plaster around them. The amount of dust has to be seen to be believed!

At one stage yesterday morning I really wasn’t convinced that the two chippies were on top of the job. They are apparently both fairly new to the building firm I use, and aren’t as all over it as the main guys, who are impressively competent. The Dangerous Brothers, in contrast, hadn’t grasped that all the windows were different sizes – and therefore that they had to be really confident that they knew which one went where. They also showed an alarming propensity to knock all the windows out of bedroom one before starting to think about fitting the new ones. They had to be firmly instructed to finish one window before starting the next one, and that it would not be acceptable to leave me overnight with a hole in the wall and no window! However a phone call to the builder’s head office soon sorted them out. I’m a good customer, and the boss has high hopes of persuading me to let him completely replace my roof in the next few years, so they really don’t want to upset me. Within half an hour, both a senior carpenter and the extremely competent foreman had turned up to see what was going on, give the Dangerous Brothers a good bollocking, and oversee the work for the rest of the day.

Today they nearly but not quite finished the second window in the main bedroom. The walls still need to be replastered around the windows, and some extra non-functional wooden panels added around the top of the arches. Then they can make a start on bedroom 2, which still has its original Victorian windows. They’re hoping that those should be easier to remove – I certainly hope so too!

28 06 2016 Gillian house Comments (1) Permalink

Letting slip what they really think?

It’s Referendum Day today. I did my civic duty this morning and voted on my way in to work. For the first time that I can remember, there was quite a long queue at the Polling Station at the village hall. I’ve always walked straight in before, but not this time. Which I suppose could indicate that the turn-out should be decent this time.

Most of the newspapers have been shameless about nailing their colours to the mast and telling people how to vote – or rather, trying to frighten them into voting one way or the other by printing very biased stories. The i has been refreshingly different – it has been scrupulous about presenting both sides of the debate, and telling its readers that they need to decide for themselves. But I suspect today it may have let slip what it really thought – clue 1 across on the little cryptic crossword today had the answer “REMAIN”….. I wonder how that escaped the eagle eyes of the sub-editor?

23 06 2016 Gillian status Comments (1) Permalink

A brief trip to York

I seem to be doing a tour of Northern universities at the moment. Three weeks ago it was the Engineering Department at Durham; this week I’ve been visiting the Physics department at York University. I really wasn’t comfortable with going all the way there and back in a day, as it would have been a really long day, and I didn’t want to have to hurry the meeting to get a set train home. So I decided it was more sensible to stay overnight, and get a midday train home the next day.

It’s a very long time since I last went to York. I went there for my first proper holiday on my own – when I was working as a sponsored student engineer in my pre-university “gap year”, I spent my very first bonus on a weekend break in York, and thoroughly enjoyed myself. A good few years later, Christopher and I had a short break there the year after we were married, but I’ve not been back since.


I didn’t have a great deal of time to spend sight-seeing this time. After all, it was predominately a work trip, and that had to take priority. But I did manage a whistle-stop tour of Clifford’s Tower and York Castle Museum, both of which were just a few minutes walk from my hotel.  They were both interesting – the tower is a mediaeval ruin sitting on top of a Norman mound, clearly once part of a motte and bailey castle.  The castle next door is a mix of styles and ages, and was used as a prison for many years. One of the more interesting exhibits, which I remembered well from my previous visit, is a reconstructed street of Victorian shops.

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I then walked to the railway station along the top of the city walls, which are still remarkably intact. The mound that they are built on is apparently Roman, outlining the city of Eboracum. The stone structure is mediaeval. As you can see in the photo above, there is quite a sharp drop on the inside of the walls, and no guard rail, which rather surprised me in today’s health and safety conscious world. You can also see York Minster in the background. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to get there – I had a train to catch. Maybe next time.

15 06 2016 Gillian status Comments (2) Permalink