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Solvent fumes

I am very impressed with the surgical precision of the drain re-lining operation. It really was reminiscent of keyhole surgery, up to and including an endoscope! However, there is one rather unpleasant side-effect, and that’s the fumes from the solvent used to harden the resin-impregnated liner. They’ve been escaping via the plug-holes and permeating the house. For some reason, the smell in my en-suite bathroom is the worst, though that is in fact the furthest from where the work was done.

I’ve had the windows open as much as I can bear to get a draught through the house to clear the fumes, so it’s annoying that the weather has suddenly turned bitterly cold again. I found the window in the en-suite had seized shut over the winter, and had to bash it hard with the rolling pin to get it to open! Then of course I had to bash it again when it was time to force it closed before going to work. Fortunately, I got the bathroom fan fixed a few weeks ago, so I can put that on to keep the air circulating.

I keep thinking the smell is gradually getting better, but that is at least partly due to my nose getting accustomed to it and ceasing to detect it. Coming back home from work this afternoon it hit me in the face as I opened the front door. I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no way I could ever become a glue-sniffer. I wouldn’t get high at all, but just would come down with a stinking headache!

16 03 2015 icyjumbo house Comments Off on Solvent fumes Permalink

Re-lining the main drain

As you’ve probably gathered, this house is anything but a “new-build”. It’s got way more character than a identikit modern box on an estate, but the down-side is that much of it is many, many decades old and therefore needs attention. The main foul drain leading to the septic tank is a case in point. It’s made of pottery segments, and was showing signs of damage from plant roots. Twice in the past few years, the drain has got blocked, and the last time that happened a CCTV inspection showed several cracks and displaced joints with roots creeping through. It wasn’t in imminent danger of collapse, but that was the inevitable outcome if I just let nature take its course. And you can bet, knowing my luck, that it would collapse catastrophically at the worst possible time – probably on a bank holiday with a foot of snow on the ground! And if it had got that far, the only option would have been to dig up the drive, completely replace the collapsed pipework, and relay the drive on top – we’re talking many, many thousands of pounds.

Much the more cost-effective option, it seemed to me, was to do some pre-emptive maintenance before things got really bad. Hopefully, it should also stop the issue I’ve been having with repeat blockages – which are really not very pleasant to deal with! The idea was to re-line the damaged segment of my main drain with what is effectively a resin-impregnated balloon. The new liner is put in place between two inspection hatches, then inflated with compressed air while it cures. It’s a non-invasive technique, so doesn’t need my drive to be dug up, and takes two men less than a day.

I therefore arranged to take today off and get the job over with before Spring really gets underway and the plant roots put on a growth spurt. Two vans full of equipment and chemicals turned up at 9am, and they were all packed away and gone by 2:30pm. The house has a faint whiff of solvent, which seems to be percolating up through the basins in the bathrooms – unsurprising I suppose, given that the liner won’t be fully cured for another 24 hours. In the mean time though I can use water as normal, including running the washing machine or having a hot shower. I’m just not allowed to used any harsh solvents (e.g. sink unblockers) until it’s fully cured. But after that, the new liner should last at least ten years, probably longer.

The job was done with a minimum of fuss, and according to the men went very smoothly and was a “textbook job”. I had a look at the CCTV imagery before they left, using a sort of endoscope along the new section of the drain, and it is all smooth and looking much better than before. The only minor issue from my point of view was that, while the new liner was curing, my main drain was effectively blocked by an inflated “balloon” which formed a watertight seal at the inspection hatches. That meant I couldn’t flush the toilets or use any significant amount of water for the three hours or more that the balloon was in place. That was somewhat tedious, but entirely manageable.

As I waved the men off this afternoon, I said to them “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I sincerely hope I never see either of you again!” They laughed and said that there was absolutely no reason why I should need to call them out again – at least for that 10m section of the drain.

That’s another job ticked off the to-do list. Roofers last week, drains this week. These things always seem to come in threes, so I’m expecting to have to deal with more workmen again in the near future…….

13 03 2015 icyjumbo house Comments Off on Re-lining the main drain Permalink

Spring Clean?

I was queuing at the checkouts in Waitrose the other day. Right by the tills, where they generally keep an “impulse purchase” range of cakes and biscuits, was a large box with bunches of daffodils. The woman in front of me in the queue picked one up to add to her trolley. I caught her eye and said “That’s a good idea!”. She replied that she wanted to bring a bit of Spring into her living room to cheer herself up, and a bunch of daffs was so much easier than a Spring Clean! I had agree, and promptly added a bunch of the flowers to my own trolley. They’re looking very spring-like in a vase on my dining room table, without any of that tedious messing around with cleaning products!

10 03 2015 icyjumbo house Comments Off on Spring Clean? Permalink

Three Men on the Roof

There was absolutely no hope of a Saturday-morning lie-in today. At ten to nine, three burly men arrived in a van with some long ladders, and have been up on the roof ever since (with regular tea-breaks, naturally!). The noise they make clumping about up there will really give the mice in the loft something to aspire too.

They’ve replaced some slipped and shaled/perished tiles, and regrouted the ridge to discourage the next lot from coming loose. They’ve also done some considerable gardening up there, removing what looks like cubic metres of leaf-mould and moss from the numerous valleys. This house has been extended and adapted so many times over the past 140 years that the roof is a very odd shape, with lots of vegetation-traps. One of the men was standing on the roof earlier, sweeping it with a broom to clear it out!

I did take advantage of having access to men and ladders to ask one of them to change the bulb on one of my outside lights. It blew a few weeks ago, and is a right fiddle to change if you don’t have a long enough ladder. I’ve done it once before, balancing precariously on a step-ladder whilst trying to undo some seized wing-nuts on the light fixture, and really felt uncomfortable. I’ve put off repeating the experience, but it’s a light I use fairly regularly and it was annoying me that it wasn’t working. One of the men did the job in just a few minutes, so that was a bonus. As a somewhat strident feminist, I don’t really like asking a man to help with something I could do myself, but sometimes a touch of pragmatism is the most sensible way forward!

07 03 2015 icyjumbo house Comments Off on Three Men on the Roof Permalink

It’s Spring and the builders emerge from hibernation

When Christopher and I bought this house, over fifteen years ago, we knew that taking on a rather run-down Victorian cottage was going to be something of a “project”. Over the years, we’ve had it rewired, re-decorated, re-carpeted, and extended, yet there is a seemingly endless list of things that need doing. There is always something that is falling off, or leaking, or threatening to do so. That’s all maintenance stuff that has to be done, to keep the house standing and watertight. Plus, when finances allow, I’m still working through the long list of improvements and renovations that we’d wanted to do.

It’s recently been the First Day of Spring, and I can already hear the mating call of the builders, as they emerge blinking from hibernation and start writing quotations. I’m going to have to get a section of my main sewer re-lined, before it collapses completely. That was meant to be done last week, but the drain specialists phoned to postpone it for a few weeks. And today I’ve had my regular builders around to quote for fixing the slipped tiles on my roof, plus a long shopping list of additional options for less urgent work, that I shall work down until I run out of budget.

The roof doesn’t seem to be leaking at the moment, or at least I haven’t spotted any stains on the ceiling yet. But it’s only a matter of time if I don’t get the wonky tiles fixed. One of the advantages of having a bungalow and a terraced garden is that the first terrace is at about the same height as the roof, so it’s quite easy to inspect it from above without needing ladders. I walked around the house last Friday and spotted a few slipped tiles, and my eagle-eyed builder spotted several more this afternoon. So my regular roofer is going to fit me in on Saturday to get them fixed – that’s pretty good service, and gives me peace of mind. The other stuff is more cosmetic, including relaying the path to get rid of a huge puddle that keeps forming in a dip, filling some potholes in the drive, and fixing down a loose paving slab on my patio. Nothing as critical as fixing the roof, but still useful to get sorted. It’s annoying having to circumnavigate a huge and deep puddle on the path every time it rains! And it is pretty lethal if it the freezes and forms a sheet of black ice – I’ve had a few near misses slipping on it this winter.

03 03 2015 icyjumbo house Comments (2) Permalink

The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

There was a rather amusing article in the local paper recently. One of Malvern’s more avant garde residents had gone to the local theatre box office to ask when the cinema would be showing 50 Shades of Grey. He was told that there were no plans to schedule it because “Malvern isn’t ready for that kind of thing yet”! I chuckled to myself, and had a look to see what the theatre was planning on showing instead, that might be more in tune with Malvern’s demographics.

I found that they’ve dedicated two full weeks to The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, the recently-released sequel to the original film about a retirement home in India, which I had seen and enjoyed a few years ago. I booked myself a ticket to Saturday’s matinee, and was not at all surprised to note that the theatre management know their audience demographics very well. The cinema was practically full, there were taxi people-carriers dropping off small parties of elderly friends, and I must have been one of the youngest people there. Certainly the number of walking sticks made negotiating the steep rake of the circle seating a somewhat hazardous endeavour!

The film picks up a few months on from the original. Most of the original characters (played by Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Celia Imrie, Bill Nighy (whom I think is gorgeous), and Ronald Pickup) are still there, and are integrating into the local environment, finding jobs and mixing much more with the locals. They are joined by Richard Gere, in a somewhat cynical but highly effective move to increase the eye-candy quotient for the female members of the audience. The plot is a bit weak, with parts of it stolen wholesale from Fawlty Towers (is Richard Gere an undercover hotel inspector?), but the acting is of course, as you would expect, first-rate. It’s a rather cozy ensemble piece, with moments of laugh-out-loud humour, and some asides about growing old that had the distinctly elderly audience wincing in recognition and sympathy.

I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was undemanding, amusing entertainment, much more Malvern’s sort of thing than BDSM!

01 03 2015 icyjumbo Day out Comments Off on The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel Permalink

Sense & Sensibility

While I was having my annual bout of Retail Therapy / Recreational Shopping in Stratford the other weekend, I spent an age browsing in the bookshop, coming away with Sense & Sensibility. Note the ampersand – this isn’t the Jane Austen classic, which I’ve known and loved for years. Instead, it’s by Joanna Trollope, Queen of the Aga Sagas, and is the first book in The Austen Project, where modern best-selling authors bring the classic novels up to date.

It’s set in 2013, but has all the same characters and pretty much the same plot as the original. Trollope clearly had to update some aspects, as the “gentry” that she wrote about don’t really exist in the same way these days, and have to have a believable means of support on the fringes of the Tatler-reading world. The Dashwood family are evicted from their home Norland on the death of the father because the parents weren’t married, so the estate goes to the legitimate son and his exceedingly bitchy wife. The mother and three daughters, Ellie, M and Mags (the characters previously known as Elinor, Marianne and Margaret) move to live in a new-build cottage on the estate of their cousin who is a Johnny Boden-esque country clothing mogul. Ellie, the sensible one, is an architecture student; M suffers from severe asthma, is toying with the idea of becoming a professional musician, but is too much of a dreamer to get down to serious application; and Mags is a rather bratty school-girl, addicted to her iPod and much given to saying “Whatevs”.

Love interest Willoughby is as much of a cad in 2013 as he was in 1811, but with a very contemporary drug habit to boot. Solid Colonel Brandon was much affected by his service in Bosnia during the Balkan wars, and has set up a Help for Heroes style treatment centre for PTSD suffers. And drippy Edward wants to be a social worker (rather than a vicar, as in the original) but is bullied massively by his mother who holds the purse strings.

All in all, I think it worked surprisingly well. The characters’ motivations translated well from 200 years ago – I suppose that people themselves don’t change that much. Certainly, I found it gripping. It’s a long time since I’ve read a novel from cover to cover in one sitting. I found it fascinating seeing a plot and characters that I know so well relocate lock, stock and barrel to a contemporary setting. I shall look out with interest for other books in The Austen Project to see if they are make as successful a transition.

22 02 2015 icyjumbo book Comments (2) Permalink

Getting home from Cyprus – part two

When we finally arrived at Larnaca airport, stressed Heathrow-woman dashed off to check in, just in time, whilst the rest of us queued to check in to the BA flight to Gatwick. We were told that it was running 10 minutes late, due to a delayed departure from London. Well, that’s hardly an issue. We all made our way through to the Departures lounge and gathered by the gate. On the other side of the concourse, the EasyJet flight to Gatwick, which was due to take-off at much the same time as our slightly delayed plane, was already boarding.

Then a rather diffident, but terribly English, voice came over the PA. “Good evening. This is your BA captain speaking. I’m not used to using this PA system, but I really thought I ought to talk to you in person.” Uh-oh! This clearly can’t be good news! He went on to say that a Virgin Atlantic plane [subtext: NOT a BA plane!] had landed very heavily at Gatwick, the undercarriage had collapsed and it was stuck on the runway! As a result, Gatwick was closed to take-offs and landings, and all incoming flights were being held, where possible, at their originating airports until there was a clear way forward. He didn’t want to board us, and leave us sitting on the plane for an indeterminate length of time, but thought we’d be more comfortable in the Departures lounge with access to the airport facilities. Would we please not go too far from the gate, and listen for further announcements.

We all glanced at each other with resigned looks, and I decided I’d eat the sandwich I’d bought and had been saving for the flight. In the meantime, the EasyJet flight to Gatwick was on its Last Call, and we wondered what they knew that we didn’t! However, the delay didn’t seem to be too bad, as within half an hour we got the instruction to start boarding. Once we were all on board, the captain came back on the PA: “Gatwick was meant to reopen about now, but the other airline’s plane is still stuck on the runway so it is still closed. [subtext: It very definitely is NOT a BA plane!] There is however a second, parallel runway which is used when they’re resurfacing the main one, and it’s quite possible that we’ll be told to use that. If so, don’t worry, we’re all quite used to it. I thought you’d all also like to know that I have filled the plane with lots of extra fuel, so that if we have to divert to another airport or circle in a stack for a while, there will be absolutely no problem – we’ve got enough fuel for at least an extra hour’s flight [subtext: Unlike other airlines I could mention that are heavily rumoured to cut corners.]”

We then took off, and about half an hour into the flight we got another update. “This is your captain speaking again. The other airline’s plane [subtext: I did mention it’s not a BA plane, didn’t I?] is well and truly stuck on the runway. They have been unable to shift it. So they’ve called on us – British Airways – for help. Our heavy lifting equipment is making its way around the M25 from Heathrow to Gatwick as we speak, and I have every confidence that will do the job. [subtext: BA riding to the rescue of Virgin Atlantic! Let us all thoroughly savour this moment…]”

A further hour later we got another announcement: “Well, ladies and gentlemen, I’m pleased to announce that our heavy lifting equipment did the trick, and Gatwick is now fully open. By the way, some of you may have been interested, as I was, to know what was going on with the EasyJet flight which was boarding before us. So I made some enquiries. Those of you on the left hand side of the aircraft may have seen it sitting on the apron at Larnaca as we taxied past to take off. It is currently about ten minutes behind us and is scheduled to land after us. [subtext: How smug am I that I didn’t keep you hanging about on the apron!]”

We finally landed less than an hour late, which wasn’t bad considering that flights all over Europe had been disrupted. My taxi driver was there to collect me and take me to my parents’ house – I’d given him my flight details so he hadn’t even set off until my flight had a scheduled arrival time confirmed. He said that one of the other drivers from the same taxi company had been much less fortunate – the flight he was meeting had been diverted to Southampton, and sat on the runway there for several hours before allowed to fly on to the newly-reopened Gatwick.

16 02 2015 icyjumbo Day out Comments Off on Getting home from Cyprus – part two Permalink

Getting home from Cyprus – part one

When I was away last weekend with my friends at the Pudding Club, they were asking me about my holiday to Cyprus over Christmas. And that made me remember that, although I’d alluded on this blog to the fact that I’d had trouble getting back home, I’d never actually written down the whole story.

We had an evening flight home, which was good as it gave us all pretty much an extra full day in Kyrenia. We were told to be at the hotel at 16:00 for our pick-up back to the airport, and that we’d be travelling in a convoy of two people-carriers, as the streets in the Old Town are too small for anything bigger. All bar one of us was getting the evening flight back to Gatwick, but there was one woman who hadn’t taken the group flights, but had booked her own ticket back to Heathrow. Strictly speaking, she should have made her own arrangements to get to the airport, but since her flight was only 30 minutes before that of the group, she decided to save herself the taxi fare and come along with us.

She started getting twitchy when the taxis were late to meet us at the hotel, and her comfortable checking in-time started getting eaten in to. She then got increasingly more stressed throughout the drive to the airport. We were flying from Larnaca, which is on the south (Greek) side of the island, so we had to cross the international border through one of only a few official crossing points. On the way out, we’d breezed through a checkpoint somewhere around the back of Nicosia, which was pretty much on the direct route between Larnaca airport and our hotel in Kyrenia. So naturally, we assumed that we’d be going back the same way, and were quite surprised when we headed off to the East, clearly going away from Nicosia and in fact heading towards Ercan airport in the north of the country. Our driver spoke very little English, and none of us spoke Turkish, so we really struggled to establish the fact that he was indeed taking us to Larnaca (and thankfully not Ercan), but was avoiding the border crossing in Nicosia as it would be very busy at rush hour. Instead we were going to use the other crossing, near Famagusta, which would be much less busy.

That sounded sensible, but really stressed out Heathrow-woman, as Famagusta is over on the east coast, and it was a very long detour to avoid Nicosia. She got even more stressed when our taxi pulled over in the middle of nowhere and waited for several minutes to let the second car in the convoy catch up with us. But that was nothing to her stress levels when we finally reached the border crossing. A very bored Turkish-Cypriot guard let us out of the north with minimal formalities, and we crossed the Zone of Separation to be met by a very officious Greek Cypriot customs officer defending the borders of the EU. He asked us lots of questions about what we had bought, whether we had been given anything to carry with us, and where we were going next. At which point she exploded “I’ve got a plane to catch in less than an hour!”. He then took pity on us and waved us on our way – but the other car in the convoy was less fortunate. We passed them pulled over in an inspection bay having all their luggage removed for searching! It turned out that one of the men had confessed to buying several hundred cigarettes, thinking that since he was flying home from one EU country to another that would be fine. He hadn’t taken into account that he had actually bought them outside the EU, and was therefore importing illegal quantities of duty-free cigarettes across the EU border!

There are two clear lessons there. Firstly, if you’re not getting the group flights, you take a severe risk with your stress levels if you don’t take charge of your own transfer arrangements. And secondly, make sure you know where the EU border is, and what the duty free limits are when crossing it!

We all made it to Larnaca airport on time, with even stressed Heathrow-woman managing to get to the check-in before it closed. But that was not the end of the complications…..

14 02 2015 icyjumbo Day out Comments Off on Getting home from Cyprus – part one Permalink

Built-in Obsolescence

There’s been a lot of fuss in the papers recently about Apple becoming the most profitable company ever. There’s so much hype about their products that, if you’ve got an iPhone, you get sweet-talked into upgrading it every year when the next generation product is brought out. After all, what self-respecting tech geek is going to be caught with only an iPhone 4 when the iPhone 6 was launched weeks ago?

Worse than the peer pressure, which is ignorable, is the built-in obsolescence which means that the older devices stop being supported so that you have no choice but to upgrade. Christopher’s iPad is a case in point. He was a dyed-in-the-wool Apple fanboy, and pre-ordered a first generation iPad as soon as it was announced. In fact, his must have been one of the first in the country, as I remember him taking delivery of it on the day that it appeared in the shops. That was nearly five years ago, and I adopted it when he died and have used it literally daily since then.

The hardware is still as good as new. The battery life is fine, the screen’s not scratched or damaged in any way, and the touch screen still works perfectly. But it’s slowly getting less and less useful. The biggest problem is the operating system. It’s fully updated, but the latest version that is compatible with a first generation iPad is iOS 5. I think that the latest phones are on iOS 8, and almost all the apps available in the App Store require at least iOS 6. One by one my apps demand a compulsory upgrade to an iOS I can’t support, and then stop working. I’ve lost the catch-up on-demand tv apps for itv, Channel 4 and Channel 5. So far the BBC iPlayer tv still works, but I’ve lost the iPlayer radio.

It’s not just apps that stop working either. More and more news websites crash my browser. For some reason the problem seems to be largely limited to newspaper sites rather than general web browsing. The Independent regularly crashes when I try to read the news on-line, and just this week the Guardian moved to a new web platform and I now can’t even open the front page without it crashing the browser. The Daily Mail is a little more stable (and I never thought I’d say that!) provided that I go directly to the news pages, avoid the front page and don’t even think about opening a video. I can’t even circumvent the problem by using the newspaper-provided apps rather than the browser, since they all require a later iOS than I’ve got.

So currently, I can read the BBC news, do some general light web browsing, catch up BBC tv on iPlayer, and play solitaire. That’s about it. It’s getting more and more frustrating that things I want to do are just no longer possible on this tablet – I get particularly annoyed at compulsory upgrades that then completely break a previously working app. I suppose I’m going to have to bite the bullet and upgrade to a newer and more powerful iPad, but I massively resent effectively being strong-armed into an upgrade that I don’t really want.

11 02 2015 icyjumbo invective Comments (1) Permalink