Christopher’s Tree this summer
Christopher’s stepfather, Peter, has recently sent me a photo of “Christopher’s Tree” at his local woodland trust. It’s looking very healthy. I’ve not been able to get down to see it myself, so it’s really good to have photographic evidence of how well it’s doing.
My new passport finally arrived back this week from the limbo that is the Passport Office. It took about five weeks, though at least they did text me occasionally through the process so that I knew I was “in the system”.
I’ve felt surprisingly uneasy about not having a passport. It’s not that I was desperate to get away and the lack of one was holding me back – I deliberately waited until a time when I didn’t have any holidays or work trips planned at all, so that the timing wasn’t crucial. Rather, it was the fact that I couldn’t escape, even if I wanted to, that was the problem. It’s the lack of options and choices that bothered me. I feel much more comfortable now that I know I can get away if I want too. Staycations are all very well, especially when the weather is sunny, but there’s so much more of the world yet to see.
They say that if you look like your passport photo, you’re too ill to travel, and that’s certainly the case with mine. These new biometric passports have such stringent requirements on the photo that they are extremely unflattering! However, at least that should be the job done for the next ten years.
After at least eight years, my cleaners have just given notice. I’ve seen it coming for a while, but it’s still unfortunate and inconvenient. They are two sisters, who work together as a team, but their elderly mother has become extremely frail and has moved in with one of them, who now has become virtually a full-time carer, and is finding it very difficult to juggle that with working. Their attendance has become increasingly erratic, as they try to fit their cleaning jobs around their mother’s many medical appointments. Finally, it’s all become too much and they have apologetically handed in their notice.
The agency that employs them appears to have taken the decision not to replace them, but to concentrate on their core business, that of providing home care to the elderly. Domestic cleaning was always a bit of a sideline for them, and one that they clearly don’t find lucrative enough to continue with. I’m a bit surprised at that – I’ve been hurriedly getting quotes from alternative suppliers, and am shocked at the prices I’ve been quoted. They’re significantly steeper than I’ve been used to paying. However, I’m determined to keep my quality of life as high as I can, and if that means using most of Christopher’s small pension to pay for a cleaner, then so be it.
The new cleaning agency starts this week, and at the prices they’re charging, I’m expecting miracles! I’m also deliberately leaving tell-tales on the floor and strategically placed around the house to see how thorough they are!
I tried out a new recipe on Saturday, for Passionfruit Curd. Passionfruit seem to be in season at the moment, or at least they are plentiful and relatively cheap in Waitrose. I synthesised a recipe from several I found online, scaling the quantities down to something I though was manageable. I’ve never made a curd before, but it was surprisingly easy!
65g caster sugar
2 passionfruit
1 egg
Pinch salt
35g softened butter, diced quite small
Put the sugar, egg, and salt in a pan. Cut the passionfruit in half – they had a surprisingly tough skin – and use a teaspoon to scoop the pulp and seeds into the saucepan. Whisk together over a low heat – I used a balloon whisk. Add the butter and continue to whisk until it is melted. Then turn the heat up and continue to whisk constantly until the curd thickens. Don’t let it boil. It should get to a consistency where it coats the back of a spoon. Mine took a few minutes to thicken satisfactorily. Decant into a sterilised airtight jar (I put mine through a hot wash in the dishwasher).
According to one of the online recipes, it should keep for up to three weeks in the fridge. That is clearly a lie! It’ll be lucky to last overnight – it was so delicious that I barely let the saucepan cool before I licked it clean! I used some of the curd to make a passionfruit Eton Mess (with whipped cream and broken meringues) and it was absolutely gorgeous! I’m sure that it can’t be good for me, with all that sugar, butter and cream, but it was the tastiest desert I’ve eaten all year.
Looks like I’ve successfully managed to update WordPress this time. Phew! Now I’ll have to wait and see if it is any more stable than the previous version.
I find these things surprisingly stressful. Possibly because this is actually Christopher’s blog, not mine. I feel like I’m the caretaker of it for him, and so it bothers me when it goes wrong more than it would if I were just doing it for me.
I’m going to have another go at updating WordPress this weekend. If it works, I’ll post to say so. If it all goes horribly wrong, I suggest you give me a couple of weeks to lick my wounds, then do a search for “icyjumbo blog new location” as I may well have to try something else…….
I’ve been having problems with my blog for ages – the appearance keeps resetting to the default blue background, and I have to keep on manually changing it back. I hoped that upgrading WordPress to the latest version would help, but that meant waiting for my web host to upgrade the underlying database engine. It’s now done so, so last night I attempted to upgrade WordPress.
Near disaster! It failed to update, got half way through the process then hung my computer, and I was very worried I’d lost the blog entirely. I do have backups, but don’t know how to set up a new blog from them. I’m now in a sort of half way house, where my console is half upgraded, looks completely different, and nothing is where I expect it. The public face seems to be ok though.
Its clearly very unhappy – writing this post on the new web interface crashed my iPad. And since this is Christopher’s blog in the first place, I don’t have full owner rights over it, so am limited to how much I can delve into the workings. Aaarrrgggghhhhh. I wish I hadn’t touched it!
It may take me a little while to work out whether it’s fixable from its current limbo state…….
The toilet in what was Christopher’s bathroom has had a persistent leak for months. I’ve had a plumber take a look at it three times now, but it was apparently unfixable. To be fair, it was a very old toilet, and I’m not particularly surprised the innards had corroded solid.
When we bought this cottage it needed refurbishing from top to bottom – new wiring, new plumbing, and redecorating throughout, not to mention taming the wilderness that was the garden. The only way we could afford something significantly bigger than our previous flat was to take on a “project” and do it up. But of course we didn’t have enough money to do as thorough a job as we wanted, so the bathroom got a lick of paint, the rusty iron pipes replaced with plastic, new taps, and nothing more. It’s been well overdue a revamp. In fact, the problem with gradually doing the rest of the house up, is that the bathroom has been looking more and more dated.
I’m not going to replace the bath or basin, as they’re perfectly acceptable. But I can see why Chinese water torture works – the persistently dripping cistern was winding me up to the point that I resolved to Get Something Done. So today I had my pleasant and surprisingly affordable plumber around to replace the toilet with a new model. Last time he was here, he took a photo of the old one, and got as close a match as he could. The cistern is a different size and shape, but the footprint is the same, so I won’t need to get new flooring. I have however asked Rob, my trusty decorator, to quote for retiling and repainting the walls, and he’ll be back in the autumn to do that. Together with the fancy towel rail and the extractor fan I’ve already had fitted, I’ll get a “facelift” for the fraction of the price of a whole new bathroom.
It’s harder work, both financially and emotionally, doing up the cottage on my own now that Christopher isn’t here to discuss and plan the improvements with. I do sometimes think that life would be much easier if I lived in a modern box with a ten-year house-builder’s guarantee! However, I am gradually making progress, and that is quite a satisfying feeling.
My sister gave kindly me some theatre vouchers for my birthday. Well, actually that’s not strictly true. She looked into it, and Malvern Theatres apparently don’t accept standard theatre vouchers. So what in fact I received were some folded notes in a card that said “Imagine this is a Theatre Voucher. To be spent only on Culture”. I decided that I would spend it on something that I wouldn’t otherwise necessarily go to see, and today I went to the matinée of Another Country, the play by Julian Mitchell.
It’s a play loosely based on the early life of the spy and traitor Guy Burgess, imagining what may have happened during his schooling to influence him and encourage him to betray his country. It’s set in the Sixth Form of a public school in the 1930’s where the Burgess character is an outsider due to his homosexuality, and makes close friends with the other outsider, a committed communist.
I have to say I found it pretty hard work. There were ten actors in all, all male, nine of whom were playing students. Apart from the two main characters, I found it very difficult to tell all the others apart, which made following the plot rather challenging. Some of the actors didn’t speak particularly loudly or clearly either, and gabbled their lines, and since I was about half way back in the stalls it was quite difficult to make out what was going on, at least until I “got my ear in”.
I’m not entirely sure what point the play was making. Possibly something about the hypocrisy and claustrophobia of a public school education fostering excessive loyalties to the “House” and school, and when those are betrayed there is only a small further step to betraying one’s country. I’m sure that Christopher would have had much more idea than I did about what the plot and sub-plots were on about, and I really wanted to be able to talk to him about it. As it was, my abiding impression was one of horror at how much the boys were left to govern themselves, with physical punishments including beatings handed out by prefects, and no sign of any teachers providing authority. I suppose that’s how public schools were in the ’30s, and probably much later too, but I’m sure that wouldn’t be acceptable these days.
It was a very interesting way of spending the afternoon. I’m still not sure whether or not I actually enjoyed it.
……And this time I swear they’re wearing hobnailed boots! After a weekend punctuated by extremely loud thumping from the loft, I phoned Martin, my very cheery pest controller, first thing this morning. He’s obviously got my number programmed into his phone, because he answered it with “Hello Gillian, I was just thinking that I’ve not heard from you recently!” I really can’t fault the service I get for my annual rolling contract – he came around this afternoon to put a load more poison down in the loft. Now it’s a case of waiting for it to take effect, so I’m expecting about a week of disturbed nights before it all goes quiet again. I don’t normally get much activity from the mice over the summer, but I suspect that the downpours we had at the end of last week encouraged them back inside. Oh well, it’s an occupational hazard of living out in the countryside……
