Skip to content

Widow’s Discount?

I was replanting my herb garden on Friday – the rosemary and sage had suffered over the winter, and I wanted some more thyme and chives. I filled up the watering can to give the plants a good watering-in, and realised I had a problem. The outside tap wouldn’t turn off! It felt like the thread was stripped – it would go from fully on to trickling, but if I kept turning it in the same direction, instead of shutting off, it went back to fully on. Drat! I tried turning it off at the valve under the sink, but that had seized open and was too stiff for me to turn. Double drat!

I tried phoning my usual plumber. On Good Friday. Some hope! He’d apparently gone away for the weekend. I tried my back-up plumber. No reply there either. With a heavy heart I got out the Yellow Pages and looked under “Emergency Plumbers”, knowing that if I wanted to call a plumber out over the Easter weekend then I should expect to get ripped off. I made it very clear that it was not a dire emergency, and that I really didn’t need anyone straight away, but that I could do with someone to replace the outside tap sooner rather than later. We agreed on Saturday morning, and with some trepidation I asked the price. It was high, but not as bad as it would have been if I’d wanted someone straight away. However, I was told that they do a 5% discount for OAPs, and asked whether I qualified! I laughed and said no, but did they offer the same discount for widows? I don’t think they’d been asked that before, but after some thought, the man said yes, that would be fine, and we agreed on the price.

I was told to expect the plumber at 10am this morning. At 10:30, when there was no sign of him, I phoned again and was told that he was on his way and would be about 30 minutes. At 11:15 I got a call from the plumber saying that he was eight miles away and heading in my direction. I then got a series of increasingly desperate calls from him, saying that he was lost, thought he was heading in the wrong direction, his satnav couldn’t find me, and where was I exactly? That’s another problem with using one of those “emergency plumbers” from out of the Yellow Pages – they cover such a huge catchment area that they simply don’t have the local knowledge of a Malvern-based plumber. I finally managed to talk him in to within half a mile of me, and ended up going out onto the main road and waving so that he’d be able to see me as he drove past!

I’m sure I was well and truly ripped off on price, even with the widow’s discount! But I do at least have an outside tap that works again. I don’t in general like playing the “grieving widow” card, but sometimes it’s worth swallowing my pride and seeing if it makes a difference. After all, if Christopher had been alive, he might have been able to turn the valve under the sink to isolate the tap, and the job could have waited until our usual (much cheaper!) plumber was back from his holidays.

19 04 2014 icyjumbo house
invective Comments Off on Widow’s Discount? Permalink

Comfy Bed

I’ve had the new bed, mattress, and memory foam mattress-topper several weeks now, and they definitely are making a difference. You can buy the mattress-toppers in a range of depths, typically from 1″ to 4″, and I chose 3″ deep as a compromise between comfort, weight and cost. Too thin, and my bony hips won’t get cushioned enough. Too deep, and the price goes up and I’d worry about it being too heavy for me to manoeuvre.

There is one minor problem, which is that the memory foam has a pretty strong chemical smell when first unpacked. It also arrived folded and rolled up very tightly, and took several hours to revert to its original shape and size. Once I’d prized it out of its wrapping and put it on the bed, I opened all the windows and aired it for half a day, which helped. The smell is clearly fading, and was bearable to sleep with that first night, though it still hasn’t entirely gone.

Apart from that, it’s all good news. The combination of a new lump-free mattress and topper really is supremely comfortable, and it certainly feels like I’m sleeping better. The bed frame is comfortable when I sit up in bed, and doesn’t dig into my back the way that some of the designs did. And the mattress, even with the topper on it, is just about light enough that I was able to turn it around top-to-bottom when I changed the sheets. I don’t say that it was easy, but it was manageable, and if it helps even out the wear in the mattress then it’s worth the effort.

Most of all, it’s really nice to be able to stretch out and sleep diagonally across the bed if I want to, without any lumps or dips subliminally forcing me back onto my own side!

15 04 2014 icyjumbo house Comments (1) Permalink

Another request for the Posthumous Photographer

I closed down and deleted most of Christopher’s social media accounts soon after he died. Twitter, and in particular Facebook, were just too intrusive, sending him emails to say that his friends hadn’t heard from him for a while – yes, well, there was a very good reason for that……  About the only account I didn’t delete was with the photo-sharing site, Flickr. That was partly because he was very keen on his photography, and enjoyed sharing his photos with the community, and mostly because they gave me very little hassle.

Last week however, I (or rather, Christopher) got an email via Flickr. An extract of the email reads as follows:

Subject: Question about usage of your photo

Hello

I am a PhD student in computer vision working with Prof. Narendra Ahuja in the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. We are working on the problem of image completion. That is, removing foreground object from images in a seamless way (similar to the Adobe Photoshop’s Content Aware Fill feature).
We were wondering whether we could include one of your photograph as one of the testing examples in our research work. The image will only be used for academic purposes.

We will surely provide credit citation by adding your name, the license of the image, and the link to the original source image on Flickr right below the image.

Thank you!

That took me aback rather, I must admit.The image in question looks like this:

Christopher’s image of Repetition

and was a photo he took back in 2006 on a photography course that he went on. It’s a very stark example of repetition and shadows, and I can see that it would bring major challenges for computer vision algorithms.

I couldn’t reply to the graduate student via Flickr, as that required Christopher’s user name and password, which of course I don’t have. However, I did some googling, tracked down the student’s email address at the university, and sent him the following response.

Hello

I’m afraid that Chris Booth died nearly four years ago, so is in no position to reply to your request. I am his widow, and I suppose that I have inherited his intellectual property rights.

As it happens, Chris was a research scientist who was active in computer vision, amongst other things – he did his Masters degree with Prof Sir Mike Brady in the robots lab at Oxford University. So I’m sure that he would have been very happy for you to use his photograph as part of your academic work.

I am happy to grant you a royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to use the image you refer to for academic purposes, provided that you acknowledge his copyright.

I’ve since had acknowledgement back from the student, saying

I am very sorry for your loss. Thank you for granting me to use Chris’s photograph for academic work. The copyright and the license will be acknowledged.

I think Christopher would have been very pleased to know that his photography was helping to further academic research, particularly in a subject that he had long been interested in. He would probably have got into a long, involved and technically detailed conversation with the grad student (and probably the Prof as well) about algorithms, computer vision and image processing!

09 04 2014 Gillian Photo Comments (2) Permalink

Madresfield Court

I had a very interesting and enjoyable afternoon yesterday. I’d applied to the Estates Office for an invitation to take a guided tour around Madresfield Court, the closest thing that Malvern has to a Stately Home. I was sent joining instructions, and told to be in the “playroom” in the Stable Block ten minutes before the tour started. My name was crossed off a list, and the group was given the ground rules – we’d be counted into and out of the house, accompanied everywhere by two guides to tell us about the house and contents (and also keep a close eye on us to check we weren’t light-fingered!), no photos were allowed in the house itself, and, above all, Don’t Touch Anything!

Madresfield Court is a moated manor house, with medieval origins, that has undergone several major rebuilds, first in the Tudor period, and then again in the 19th century when the Lygon family inherited some serious money and went on a major spending spree. The result is pretty much a High Victorian pastiche of an Elizabethan manor house. It’s still lived in by descendants of the original owners.

Madresfield Court

The inside was absolutely stunning. As well as spending a small fortune on extending the house, the family purchased an Earldom, and went on collecting trips all over Europe, buying up an eclectic mixture of “stuff” for the house – furniture, porcelain, paintings, stuffed animals, mismatching suits of armour (one with two left arms!), statues, books – you name it, they bought it! The entire family seem to be inveterate hoarders, and it looks like nothing has ever been thrown out – including a musket ball that injured one of the Lygon family at the battle of Waterloo! Wherever you looked, there was something of interest, and I could have spent an hour in each of the major rooms, just looking at the contents.

The 7th Earl Beauchamp was a devotee of the Arts and Crafts movement, and spent a fair chunk of his money on decorating the house in that style. One of the gatehouses was by Voysey, there are William Morris textiles all over the place, and the frescoes in the chapel are by Henry Payne. I think one of my favourite rooms was the Library, which had the Tree of Knowledge carved in low relief on the end of one of the bookcases.

There was lots of dark wooden panelling everywhere, which I remembered from my previous visit as a child, but overall it was a lot less shabby and much warmer than I had recalled. I think I must have visited at the time of the last Countess Beauchamp, and it seems that when her niece, Lady Morrison, inherited the estate she did a lot of work refurbishing the house. She has now retired to live elsewhere on the estate, and her daughter took over as the chatelaine about three years ago. Apparently, one of the first things she did was to install a new biomass boiler, with the result that the house is surprisingly warm with remarkably effective central heating. The guides were very grateful – they said that Countess Beauchamp and Lady Morrison were clearly immune to the cold, but the guides definitely weren’t!

My own private Daffodil Saturday

One of the reasons I’d chosen yesterday from the list of dates I’d been given, was that I hoped that the daffodils in the grounds would still be flowering. And indeed they were. After the tour finished, we were able to wander round the grounds on our own, but everyone else passed up the opportunity, so I had the grounds completely to myself. I hadn’t seen any advertising in the local paper about Daffodil Sunday, the annual event when the grounds are thrown open to the populace of Malvern, and the guides said that it wasn’t being held this year. It wasn’t held last year either, and they suspect that it’s one of the old traditions that the new chatelaine will just quietly drop – possibly in favour of a summer open day instead. So I had my own private Daffodil Saturday.

Overall, it was an absolutely fascinating afternoon. It’s a shame that there is such a rigmarole about visiting – but it’s still a family home, and they clearly have a very ambivalent attitude towards tourists. There is absolutely no advertising, but if you are keen enough to work out how to apply for a ticket, then they’ll take your money and show you round – but strictly on their terms. Fair enough I suppose!

06 04 2014 Gillian Day out
Photo Comments Off on Madresfield Court Permalink

New Bed

Since even my boss has asked me for an update on the Bed Saga, I’m pleased to be able to announce that the new, new bed was delivered on Tuesday. That’s the replacement for the original new bed, which never seemed to be any closer than three weeks away. I took Tuesday morning off to wait in for the delivery, and a lorry turned up just after half past nine. Two burly men made light work of disassembling and taking away my original bed and lumpy mattress, and I then nipped in with the vacuum cleaner, since I don’t think that under the bed had seen the light of day for many years. It was certainly very dusty!

I also spotted that there was more wallpaper peeling off the walls, which was a bit annoying, as Rob had assured me he’d stuck all the loose bits back down. He’d clearly only done the bits that were plainly visible and hadn’t moved either the bed or the chest of drawers. Fortunately, he was still in the house, painting the ceiling of the spare room, so I was able to show him the bits he’d missed, and he’s subsequently fixed them.

The delivery men then unloaded and assembled my new bed, and manoeuvred a king sized mattress through the narrow hallway to finish the job. I thought the deal was cash on delivery, but when I suggested paying them, they looked absolutely horrified, said that they didn’t deal with money, and asked me to phone the shop instead with my credit card. I did so – but the shop couldn’t find my order forms, so didn’t have clue as to how much I owed! Fortunately, I had all of the paperwork in front of me, so I told the salesman how much I thought I had left to pay and how I’d calculated it, and he accepted my word.

The bed looks good in the room. It’s only a few centimetres smaller than the previous one, but it’s much less heavy in looks, so the whole room feels bigger. That was a surprise. The mattress is quite different to what I’ve been used to – much firmer, and without a massive dent and lumps in it! I found it quite hard to get to sleep on Tuesday night, as although it’s pretty comfortable, the firmness was strange. But today I took delivery of a memory foam mattress-topper which I think is going to make all the difference. I had one on the previous bed, and it made lying on my side much more comfortable – my bony hips get cushioned by the foam rather than fighting against the mattress springs. So I’m hoping that the combination of comfortable, firm mattress and memory foam topper will lead to much better nights sleep.

03 04 2014 icyjumbo house Comments Off on New Bed Permalink

The workmen are back – and so are the mice

The end of the financial year has been so manic that there was no way I could take time off to deal with the various issues of maintaining an old cottage. But today was the last day of the fiscal year, all my milestones were submitted on time last Friday, and I could take a deep breath and get on with things at home that have been stacking up.

Rob my trusty decorator came around this morning, and is spending several days this week doing some small but much-needed redecorating jobs. The wall paper is peeling off the walls in my bedroom, particularly around the window. I neither want, nor can afford, to have the whole room re-papered, but I do have half a roll of the original paper left that I found at the back of a cupboard, which is enough for running repairs. In the spare room, I’ve got a nasty stain on the ceiling from the most recent leaking-roof incident. I had a roofer around a month or so ago to repair the leak, so Rob is now repainting the ceiling. It’s annoying that the whole ceiling needs redoing for a stain that is 10cm across at most, but I don’t have any of the original paint left, so the only sensible option is to paint the whole lot. Since he has to be here to wait for the paint to dry between coats, I’ve also got Rob repainting the ceiling in the shower room. That’s been peeling pretty badly, and I want a more moisture-resistant finish.

The drawback to having a decorator in is that he spent his lunch break walking around the outside of the house, noting all the external woodwork which is peeling / flaking / decidedly dodgy. When I got home this afternoon I was taken on a guided tour of all the dubious bits, and have agreed that they do indeed need doing over the summer, when the weather is more clement. So he’ll be back in a few months’ time…..

I’ve had a surfeit of tradesmen around today, as I also had to call in Martin, the brother-in-law of Tim, my pest-controller. The pair of them are on an annual rolling contract to deal with the mice in my loft, and last week I started hearing noises again. The ultrasonic repellers seem to have deterred the mice for a while, but clearly aren’t a panacea. I’m sure the creatures are scrabbling up the cavity wall directly behind the head of by bed – at 23:00 on the dot. Except that they clearly aren’t affected by the change to Summertime, so it was midnight last night, just as I was trying to get to sleep. Grrr! I’m hoping that the poison will do its job and that the noises should stop in a week or so. Martin gave me a cheery “Goodbye – see you in a couple on months!” as he left, and I expect he’s right……

31 03 2014 icyjumbo house Comments Off on The workmen are back – and so are the mice Permalink

The Grand Budapest Hotel

I walked by Malvern Theatres yesterday, and my eye was caught by the poster advertising the current movie – The Grand Budapest Hotel. It’s had some pretty good reviews, so I thought I’d give it a whirl and bought myself a ticket for this afternoon’s matinée.

The cinema was only very sparsely populated, and they had only opened the seating in the stalls. I prefer sitting in the circle, but they only open that for the more popular films. It wasn’t quite like having a private view, but not far off. However, the film itself was a lot of fun. It starred Ralph Fiennes as the concierge at a grand East European hotel in between the wars, caught up in a murky plot of murder, art theft and skulduggery. It had cameos from all sorts of top actors including Tilda Swinton as an ageing aristocrat, and Bill Murray as the concierge at a rival hotel. The cinematography was quite unusual – it was almost like a live action comic or cartoon. Fiennes was clearly having a ball, hamming it up outrageously, and there were stereotypical baddies, some in Nazi uniform and some like James Bond thugs/villains. All it all, it was a very odd film, but it kept me gripped this afternoon.

29 03 2014 icyjumbo Day out Comments (1) Permalink

Applying to the Housekeeper

Madresfield Court, the ancestral home of the Lygon family, is a rather interesting stately home on the outskirts of Malvern. It’s not in the care of the National Trust or English Heritage, but seems to be under the control of a family trust. Once a year in Spring it opens its gardens for “Daffodil Sunday”, when it feels like half of Malvern turns out to walk in the woods, get lost in the maze, eat ice creams on the lawns, and generally see how the Other Half live. Christopher used to really enjoy visiting there, and spent hours photographing the daffodils, crocuses and fritillaries carpeting the grounds. However, the doors of the house itself were always firmly barred against the Great Unwashed. I have visited there before, a long time ago when I was a child growing up in Worcestershire, and have a vague recollection of lots of dark wooden panelling and slightly shabby furnishings.

When I was away for the Pudding Club weekend last month, there was a copy of Cotswold Life in my room. That’s a very posh, aspirational lifestyle magazine that I would never buy, and probably wouldn’t even bother looking at in a dentist’s waiting room. In fact, come to think of it, neither my doctor nor my dentist is that up-market! But since it was the only reading matter apart from a Gideon Bible, I flicked through it. My eye was caught by an illustrated article on Madresfield Court. Apparently, Evelyn Waugh was close friends of the Lygon family, and the house and family served as the original model for Brideshead Revisited. Also, it seems that the Court was earmarked as a refuge for the royal family during World War II should London become too dangerous. I found the article so gripping, that I lost track of the time and was interrupted in reading it by a phone call from the Hotel Reception, saying that my friends were all in the bar and wondered where I’d got to! Oops!

At the end of the article was a short statement saying that the house was open By Appointment Only between April and July, and gave an address to write to for further information. I scribbled it down on a scrap of paper and then went to the bar to join my friends. I forgot all about it until I went to the pottery last weekend, when I found the note at the bottom of my handbag, and decided to do something about it. It felt very reminiscent of a Jane Austen novel – in Pride & Prejudice, Lizzie Bennett and her aunt and uncle applied to the housekeeper to be shown around Pemberley. This was the Estate Office rather than the housekeeper, and in a slight concession to the 21st century, I was able to find an email address rather than writing a letter, but nonetheless it felt very feudal!

It turns out that there is indeed an established process for applying for admission to the Court. There are a set number of days per year when the house is open to visitors, for groups of up to 50 people at a time. You have to apply (and pay!) well in advance – they won’t accommodate people who just turn up on spec. They cater both for groups and for singles/couples, though the latter might get added onto a pre-existing larger group, up to the overall limit of 50 people. I’ve been in negotiation with the Estates Office, and selected a first and second choice of dates. My application has been accepted, my cheque’s in the post, and I’m looking forward to having a good nose around the house next month.

27 03 2014 icyjumbo Day out Comments (3) Permalink

Back at the pottery again

I find that one of the best ways of coping with end-of-year, work-related stress is to spend a day at Eastnor Pottery. Throwing, turning and decorating pots are all very absorbing activities, and leave no room left to think about work. I spent the day there yesterday, initially working on half-a-dozen or so vases that I threw last time I was there. There was only one I wanted to keep, so after I’d turned the others, I cut them all in half with a cheese wire to look at the profile. That always feels like an act of wanton destruction, but it’s a very good way of understanding how accurate your throwing is. I was able to see that I’m still leaving a significant amount of clay at the bottom of my pots, so they’re quite heavy-bottomed. That makes them pretty stable, but I could still make them taller and thinner from the same size starting lump of clay.

After that, I concentrated on throwing some ramekins, a commission from my mother who wants one made to a particular size. That’s always tricky, as the clay shrinks around 10% or more between throwing and firing, so you have too make them too big to allow for an indeterminate amount of shrinkage. I ended up throwing nine pots, all pretty much the same shape (flat-bottomed, nearly straight sides) but slightly different diameters. The lumps of clay were much smaller that I usually throw with, as I’m most comfortable with lumps between 500g and 1kg. Smaller lumps are very fiddly, and larger ones take too much strength to centre, and exacerbate the RSI in my wrists. The smaller lumps though were the same size as the three beginners in the workshop were learning with. I did feel a bit guilty as I churned out pot after pot, all clearly repeatable variations on a theme, while they struggled to get the hang of throwing something bigger than an egg cup! But they all seemed to be having a lot of fun, which is the main thing, and by the time I called it a day and left mid-afternoon, they were all making good progress and throwing some nicely symmetrical pots.

In the evening, I continued with the pottery theme, and cooked a duck tagine using the terracotta tagine I made last year. It felt very satisfying to cook and serve myself dinner using my own pots, plates, serving bowls and drinking vessels. I’m very careful when using the tagine on the hob to heat it up slowly and gently to avoid thermal shock, as I don’t want it to explode on me! I made it with a deliberately thick base and walls to retain the heat, with the result that it took ages to heat up, but the stew was still simmering away gently when I put it on the table. And it tasted good too.

23 03 2014 icyjumbo Day out Comments Off on Back at the pottery again Permalink

End of year madness

It’s coming up to the end of the Financial Year for both my company and our primary customer, and the usual end-of-year madness is in full swing. I’ve had a two-day meeting this week with my main customer to finalise the architectural design for an equipment trial we’re planning for next year. I’m covering for a colleague, who is off sick, on a second project which has a big report and presentation due at the end of next week. I’ve got yet another bid due to be delivered next Wednesday. And on top of all that I need to review and approve milestones from other projects for which I am the technical release authority.

There’s no way I can fit all that into the nominal three days per week equivalent that I’m contracted to work. In fact I was on overtime this week from the moment I got into work this morning, and it’s only Thursday. I think that my colleagues sometimes forget that I only work part-time! I shall be glad when it’s the first of April and things calm down a bit…

20 03 2014 icyjumbo status Comments Off on End of year madness Permalink