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Educating Rita

I’ve been feeling rather low recently so I decided that I’d better make an effort and do something positive  and proactive this weekend, rather than sitting around at home feeling sorry for myself. So I ate out for lunch and then went to the matinée performance of Educating Rita at the Malvern Theatres. I had seen the film a few years back, so  I was reassured that, however bleak the comedy might get at times, at least no one was going to die of cancer at the end of the first act!

I booked myself a table for one at my second-favourite local restaurant, the Fig Tree. It’s a very pleasant
Mediterranean-style restaurant which has the advantage over the Plough and Harrow of being right in the centre of Malvern and so within walking distance of the theatre – which meant that I could have a glass of wine with my lunch and not worry about driving. Christine was very welcoming, as always, and I really like the way that both she, and Juliet at the Plough, have adapted to my smaller-than-average appetite, and automatically offer me a small portion where it’s possible, even though it’s not necessarily on the menu as such.

Matthew Kelly and Claire Sweeney in Educating Rita

The play starred Matthew Kelly (whom I’m afraid I automatically think of as a partner-in-crime with Jeremy Beadle in Game for a Laugh – that dates me!) and Claire Sweeney whom I’d only vaguely heard of before as I never used to watch Brookside. Unlike the Michael Caine / Julie Walters film, it’s entirely a two-hander, set wholly within Frank’s book-lined university study. So the play totally depended on the chemistry between the two characters. In fact, they both turned out to be very accomplished actors, and made the characters of Frank and Rita entirely believable. Matthew Kelly was very good as Frank, an embittered and alcoholic English lecturer and failed poet, taking on Open University tuition after-hours to pay for his drink. Claire Sweeney was equally good as Rita, a hyper-keen working class woman wanting to better herself by learning “everything”. I found it very interesting seeing how the tables were gradually turned, as Rita gained the education she craved and out-grew Frank’s teaching, but in the process became estranged from her friends and husband. There were some real laugh-out-loud moments, which did me a lot of good.

19 05 2012 Gillian Day out Comments Off on Educating Rita Permalink

Surprising result from the insulation survey

Usually when I invite tradesmen around to provide a quote for doing work on the house, they are practically falling over themselves to suggest things that I could or should get done. So I was rather surprised yesterday when, for I think the first time ever, the chap said it wasn’t worth having any extra insulation at all! I know I wasn’t going to pay him anything, but someone is presumably footing the bill, and yet there he was saying the job was unnecessary!

He started off by having a good poke around in the loft, though only going into the most accessible loft-hatch, the one which has a built-in ladder. He then went out to his van to fetch a ladder to go into the other two hatches, but first phoned his boss for a long chat. The upshot of which was a decision that the very old-fashioned construction of my roof (the house was built in 1872) means that it needs a large volume of air circulating in the loft-space. If they added another deep layer of insulation it would reduce the volume of freely-circulating air too much, and I’d start getting problems with condensation. So he said that I should just stick with the amount of insulation I’ve already got, and not add more.

Then he had a look into whether cavity wall insulation was possible or desirable. As I thought, the main body of the house is unsuitable, as the walls are solid granite with no cavity. My bedroom is a later extension, and does have cavity walls. However, two of the three external walls are also made of granite, whilst the third (at the back of the house) is brick. Apparently, the way they do the cavity wall insulation is to drill through from the outside every metre and inject “stuff” into the gap. But they wouldn’t consider drilling through granite. So that meant that only one wall in one room in the whole house was suitable for cavity wall insulation, and he said that the benefits would be so marginal as not to be worth the fuss.

So in the end he recommended that I have nothing at all done!

16 05 2012 icyjumbo house Comments (3) Permalink

Ten tradesman-free days?

A friend asked me over lunch in the canteen yesterday whether I’d managed ten tradesman-free days. Well, the answer yesterday was “Yes”, but today it’s “Err, no!”.  I’m sitting at home waiting for a tradesman to turn up, though he’s phoned to say that he’ll be late, so I needn’t have come home early from work to meet him after all.

At work we’re having a load of refurbishment done on one of the buildings that dates from the late seventies. As part of that, the company that has won the contract seems to have done a deal with my employer to offer free cavity wall and loft insulation to all employees. A notice to that effect was put up on our intranet a few months ago, and I waited a while (not that I’m suspicious or paranoid!) to see if anyone posted in return that it was a scam. But it seems it is indeed a genuine offer, so I phoned them last week to find out more.

They said that they could send a man around to do a survey of the house and recommend whether I would benefit from having additional insulation. If so, I could ask them to do the job, and it wouldn’t cost me a penny. I pressed that point quite hard with them, but they were adamant that there is no commitment or obligation on my side, and the service is completely free to me. I asked them who was paying them, and the woman on the phone wasn’t entirely sure. She checked with her boss and said that it was part of the deal they’d struck with my employer. I suspect that the energy companies might also be sharing the cost as part of their “Green Commitment”.

I do in fact have some insulation in the loft already, but I think it’s less than the currently recommended amount. I also have lots of Victorian insulation in the form of sawdust shoved under the roof tiles. The mice love using that to build their nests! So I expect the contractor will suggest topping up the loft insulation. Though they will have trouble getting access to the roof space above my bedroom as there are huge disused Edwardian water tanks in the way. When we had the house rewired when we first moved in, the electrician really struggled to get the wiring routed to the middle of the bedroom ceiling, where we wanted a light fitting, as the access was so difficult. I’ve never been up in the loft in that part of the house, and don’t intend to start now, though Christopher did venture up there occasionally when we had a leak.

I’m less convinced about the need for cavity wall insulation. The main body of the house is Victorian, built way before cavity walls were in the building code. The walls of the living room, dining room and study are all solid granite, with a thin skimming of horse-hair-reinforced plaster on top. Makes it a right nightmare if you want to bang in a picture hook! My bedroom I think does have cavity walls, as it’s a later addition. And the extension we had built at the other end of the house is already well up to the latest building code and I watched the cavity wall insulation being put in as they built it. So I will be interested to see whether the chap recommends going to all the trouble of cavity-wall insulation for what is effectively just one room.

 

15 05 2012 Gillian house Comments Off on Ten tradesman-free days? Permalink

Every Contact Leaves a Trace

I’m reading a very interesting novel at the moment, a murder mystery called “Every Contact Leaves a Trace” by Elanor Dymott. In fact it’s more of a psychological thriller than a standard police procedural whodunnit. A woman gets her head stoved in, in the first chapter, in the grounds of an Oxford College, where she and her recently-married husband had been dining at High Table with her old tutor. The story is told from the point of view of her widower, as he tries to unravel what happened.

I’m half way through the book now, and it’s already clear who the murderer must be, purely from a semantic dissection of the plot. But the interesting bit is why she was killed, and how her grieving husband is slowly having to come to terms with the fact that he never really knew or understood his wife.

The description of his grief is very realistic and, frankly, a bit much at times. I have to keep putting the book down as it gets rather too close to home on occasions. But I’ve spotted some errors in the author’s description of dealing with an estate. The main protagonist is having some difficulties cashing in his late wife’s life assurance policy, and I found myself thinking “No! That’s not how it works! What you need to do is………. And anyway, why have you left it six months after her death to sort it out? The life assurance was the very first thing I did once I’d got the Death Certificate!” I suppose it’s always the same – when one has specialist knowledge of something, one can almost invariably pick holes in a written description of that subject, whether it’s inaccuracies in a news story that one knows about first hand, or a technical subject that has been dumbed down for a general audience. I think in this case it’s not going to impact on the plot, so I’ll forgive the author.

13 05 2012 icyjumbo status Comments Off on Every Contact Leaves a Trace Permalink

A very wet drought

I understand all the arguments about the need to replenish ground water reserves after some anomalously dry winters (though it didn’t feel like that when I was snowed in!) but the fact remains that this has been the wettest drought I’ve ever known. Malvern seems to have had weeks of incessant rain. It’s actually a lovely sunny evening tonight, and for once I have a clear view of the Malvern Hills from my front window – and I actually live right up on top of them! The cloud base has been so low that for weeks I’ve barely been able to see the end of my garden, let alone the hills.

At least the rain seems to have driven away the mole in my garden – either he doesn’t like tunnelling through saturated soil or he’s drowned! If the former, I expect he’ll be back……

11 05 2012 icyjumbo garden
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The Sleeping Lady

Christopher’s Flickr photo-sharing site is the only one of his social media accounts I haven’t closed, mostly because I get very few nuisance emails from it. I haven’t kept up his subscription to the premium service, and it’s getting increasingly out-of-date, but it’s still there. This week he (or rather, I)  got a rare email from FlickrHQ saying that there was a new feature, “galleries” which “allows the curation of other members’ public photos” and, more to the point, that someone calling themselves Archaeoinaction had added one of Christopher’s photos to their gallery.

Icyjumbo's photo of the Sleeping Lady of Malta

I did some digging of course, and it seems that Archaeoinaction are an archaeological service who do “Content Syndication and News Feeds about Mediterranean Archaeological Heritage”. They’ve clearly been asked to put together a set of pictures about the National Museum of Archaeology in Valetta, Malta, so have searched Flickr for suitably tagged photos and pulled them all together onto one page. And one of Christopher’s pictures, taken when we were on holiday in Malta in 2006,  is one of them. The gallery is on Flickr here. I may be biased, but I think that Christopher’s photo of the 4500-year old “Sleeping Lady” is one of the better photos!  They seem to think so as well, as they have also linked to Christopher’s photo on their own webpage.

At least if you click through the Archaeoinaction links it does eventually take you to Christopher’s Flickr page, so they are crediting him. Which is the correct thing to do, as he states that he has licensed it under Creative Commons, which means that authorship must be acknowledged. I think he would be pleased that his photograph has got wider distribution and recognition.

06 05 2012 Gillian art
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Update on “Pulling Handles”

Waiting to be fired

Jon Williams from Eastnor Pottery has put up on his blog a picture of the jugs I made on Sunday. So I have shamelessly swiped a copy to show you what I was talking about. The light greeny-turquoise slip will go a slightly lighter colour once they’re fired, and the inside will turn a rich terracotta colour. It’s difficult to get a sense of scale from this shot. The biggest jug, on the far right, is about as tall as a standard mug, though it will probably  shrink up to 10% as it dries.

The big question is whether any of them will actually pour straight. It’s very difficult to check before they’re fired – you don’t want to put water into a damp pot, or it will soak in and possibly make the pot soften so much it disintegrates. So you have to cross your fingers and hope that the jug won’t dribble too much – which is why I’ve made some matching saucers (not shown) to catch the drips.

03 05 2012 Gillian Day out Comments (3) Permalink

Trying to limit the spam

As I mentioned a few days ago, an upgrade to my spam filter in WordPress has gone horribly wrong, leaving me without any spam protection at all. And I’m now getting dozens of spam comments per day, filling up my in-box and taking more time and effort to deal with than I want to expend. Many of the spam comments are on very old blog posts. For some reason “A day out at Croft Castle”  from over two years ago seems to be a favourite target for the spammers! Goodness alone knows why.

Anyway, in an attempt to limit the amount of spam I get (another three just while I’ve been typing this post!) I’m going to try automatically closing my blog posts to comments after 14 days. That shouldn’t inconvenience any of my regular commentators, as you all post comments within a few days of a post going up. Please don’t stop commenting, as I do enjoy reading real comments – just not spam!  I’ll see if this measure gets the spam levels down to something that’s more manageable. If not, I’ll have to think again.

02 05 2012 Gillian invective Comments (1) Permalink

Pulling Handles

I spent most of today at Eastnor Pottery, working on a set of jugs and matching saucers. Last time I was there, about two months ago, I threw a number of jug bodies and saucers, more than I actually need, to allow for wastage. Jon the Potter let them dry out overnight to a “leather-hard” consistency, then wrapped them in plastic bags. They can stay in that state pretty much indefinitely, if they’re well-wrapped, waiting until the next time I go back.

The first job of the day was to make some handles for the jugs, and leave them to dry out for a few hours in front of the fire until they too were of the same leather-hard consistency as the jug bodies. Clay shrinks as it dries, so if you attach a wet handle to a half-dry jug, the ensemble will tear itself apart as it dries. The two components have to be of the same consistency to avoid disaster. There are lots of ways to make handles, such as rolling out a ribbon of clay with a rolling-pin, or making a twisted coil or a plain sausage. But I’m a traditionalist and prefer the look of a proper pulled handle. Unfortunately, pulling the handles is an activity quite unsuited to being done in a mixed group! It is very nearly obscene, with obvious and completely unavoidable connotations! If I say that one holds a knob of clay in one hand, and uses the other to stroke and pull it gradually into an elongated shape, I’m sure you’ll get the picture……. I sat in the corner and tried to avoid catching anyone’s eye, as I knew I would get a very juvenile fit of the giggles if anyone clocked what I was doing! Fortunately the other people were beginners and were avidly watching Jon’s tutorial on throwing, so I got away with it.

While a dozen or so handles were drying out in front of the fire, I “turned” all the jug bodies and the saucers. This involves putting the pot upside-down on the potter’s wheel, positioning it so that it is perfectly centred (difficult with a jug, which is deliberately not circularly symmetric in the first place; easier with a plate or saucer which one hopes is circular), fixing it to the wheel head with coils of soft clay (while avoiding knocking it off-centre as you do so) and then using a loop of wire to pare away excess clay from the bottom of the pot. It’s not dissimilar to wood-turning or metal-turning, and when you get it right long ribbons of clay come peeling off the pot, which is very satisfying. I pay for my finished pots by weight, so it’s worth getting rid of as much excess clay as I can. Not only does the finished pot look and feel better for being less bottom-heavy, it costs me less too. I did go too far though on two of the jugs today, and made the bases so thin that when I signed my name on the bottom I poked holes right the way through! Those two went into the wastes bin, along with all the parings from the turning. Jon will subsequently reclaim all that clay, add water to break it down, and recycle it into material which can be thrown with again. The clay is in fact infinitely recyclable up until it is fired, when it changes state chemically and cannot be subsequently reused.

After lunch I set about matching handles to jugs, picking the best size and shape handles from the dozen I’d made by holding each in turn against a jug body and seeing which fitted best. I then attached the handles to the jug bodies as neatly as I could. Then it was a case of decorating the pots. This is some people’s favourite part, and you can really spend ages painting and decorating the finished shape. However, I’m not at all artistic, and try to keep my decorating as simple as possible. I like to let the underlying shape of the pot dominate the finished effect, rather than have a complex painted design. So today I simply painted the outside of the jugs in a light greeny-turquoise colour, accentuated with a rather wobbly row of white dots, and decorated the saucers to match. Jon will now allow them to dry out completely before firing, then glazing and re-firing them. If they are not totally dry, the remaining water will turn to steam in the kiln and the pot will explode, potentially taking others with it!

After finishing four jug-and-saucer sets, it was 15:30 and I was exhausted. Although turning and decorating is nowhere near as physically-demanding as throwing, I had been concentrating hard since 10am. I decided to call it a day, wrapped up the remaining unfinished pots, and asked Jon to store them until I go back next time. It’s odd how, whether it’s for work or a hobby, I still can’t easily manage a full day of concentration yet, but crash out after 5-6 hours. I’ll know I’m finally better when I can manage a full week at work and a full day at the pottery. But I’m not there yet.

29 04 2012 icyjumbo Day out Comments Off on Pulling Handles Permalink

Nearly lost the blog!

Christopher initially set this blog up using WordPress. As he started getting sicker and I started writing more status updates on his behalf, he changed the permissions on the blog to allow me to do so. But he didn’t give me full “ownership” access, or tell me his password, nor did he show me how to configure the blog. I don’t think that was due to lack of trust on his part, he just didn’t think ahead to when I would need to do it myself. And when things got very bad, they did do extremely quickly, and taking full ownership of A Mammoth Undertaking was hardly a priority! Since then, I’ve kept it ticking over, doing automatic updates of some of the plugins, and I take monthly backups in case of disasters. But I have to say that I don’t really know what I’m doing, I don’t have access to all the pages and settings I need to run it properly, and if anything goes wrong I am likely to be unable to fix it.

Today I had a major panic. The blog dashboard wanted me to upgrade one of the plugins, Aksimet, which handles spam (of which I get a lot). In the past that has been a simple task of clicking the “automatic update” link. So I did so, though I did out of paranoia take a back-up first. All hell then broke loose once I upgraded the plugin. I got a load of warning messages about missing arguments referring to a configuration page I’ve never seen and don’t appear to have access to. The error messages appeared not only on the dashboard page, which I could just about live with, but also on the main blog page. Worse, when I tried to log back in to the admin page to try to do something about it, I just got a page of errors and warnings, and no means of doing anything about it! Nor would it let me add a new post, approve comments, or indeed do anything at all! My heart sank, though at least I knew I had an up-to-date backup if I couldn’t fix it.

I think I’ve managed to bodge it by logging in from the home page rather than via a short-cut, and forcibly deactivating the Aksimet widget. Now I at least seem to have a blog again, but I don’t have any spam protection. Grrrrr! Not happy!

27 04 2012 icyjumbo invective Comments Off on Nearly lost the blog! Permalink