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A trip to the cinema

When I was tidying up recently I found a voucher entitling me to money off a ticket at the Malvern cinema. I’ve no idea how long I’ve had it, as I really don’t remember what I tore it out from. But it had no expiry date on it so I reckoned it would still be valid.

I was keen to do something over the weekend, as I really do not want to spend any more time sitting around thinking than is absolutely necessary right now. So I decided to cash in the voucher, by going to see the Sunday matinée showing of latest (and final) Harry Potter film which is currently playing in Malvern.

It was a good job I’d read the book, because the film started immediately after the last one left off – and I hadn’t seen Part I. Christopher and I did watch all the previous films in the series, but when Part I came to Malvern last November I wasn’t yet up to taking myself off to the cinema. So I would have been completely lost if I hadn’t known roughly what the plot outline was. I can’t say it was particularly enjoyable as such – it was very dark, and a bit heavy-handed on the messianic message in places. But I’m pleased I made the effort to go.

 

01 08 2011 Gillian Day out Comments Off on A trip to the cinema Permalink

Nearly a navy knitting wool moment

There is one summer holiday when I was  teenager which has gone down in family history as the year that the exhaust pipe fell off the car in the middle of nowhere in France. My parents made a frantic raid on our luggage to find something to tie it back on with until they could get to a garage, and my navy knitting wool was sacrificed to the greater good.

I nearly had another of those moments recently. I had no excuse really – I knew there was an issue because when I got the MOT done last autumn I was told that the exhaust was on its way out, but that it should last a few more months so wasn’t urgent. A few weeks later, there was a horrible metallic grinding noise whenever I reversed, and I went back to the garage in a panic – only to be told that the large piece of metal dangling from the exhaust system was “only cosmetic”. The mechanic simply ripped it off (and didn’t even charge me for doing so!) but reminded me that I would need a new exhaust in the near future.

Since then I totally ignored the problem. I’m not usually a head-in-the-sand person, as I generally prefer to confront problems face-on and fix them. But I’m still not used to having to worry about the car – that was always Christopher’s job, and I haven’t yet got into the habit of thinking about it. So I just ignored the increasingly loud rattles coming from the car whenever I cornered.

Then I had a day out on business at our Hampshire offices that ended pretty late, so my colleague (who was driving) dropped me off at home. He took one look at my little mini and told me that I needed a new exhaust immediately. It was hanging on by an absolute thread. He kicked it to show me what he meant, and I had to agree that it wobbled very alarmingly indeed. I was merely a few miles of potholed roads away from another “navy knitting wool moment”.

So I ended up spending most of an afternoon at the local “exhaust tyres and batteries” garage getting a new exhaust fitted. And I have to say that the car has rattled an awful lot less since.

30 07 2011 Gillian car Comments (1) Permalink

Yet more work on the roof

I admit that I’m struggling somewhat at the moment. It’s really hard to motivate myself to get out of bed in the morning, even though work is so busy right now. I am just so tired that all I want to do is curl up in bed and stay there. But that’s not an acceptable option, so I’m re-using the tried-and-tested method of making sure I get up in the morning, by arranging to have yet more work done on the house. That way I need to be up, and preferably washed & dressed, by the time the workmen get here.  I never thought I’d be grateful that this old house has so many things that need putting right! By the time I finally get through the anniversary of Christopher’s death, the house is going to be in better shape than it has been for decades!

Today I had the previous builder back to do more work on the roof. Last time he was here replacing some missing and badly shaled tiles on part of the roof, he pointed out that valley tiles on the left hand valley below the chimney were in very poor condition.  I’m not particularly trusting when it comes to statements like that from people who have something to gain, but when I had a look from the vantage point at the top of the garden, I could see clearly what he meant. Surprisingly, the tiles on the corresponding valley on the  right hand side were fine. Either something to do with the prevailing wind, or the previous owner had them replaced at some point, as I’m sure we haven’t. He couldn’t do anything about it at the time, as it needed specially-shaped tiles which (of course….) cost extra. But it was one of those jobs that is better done sooner rather than later, especially if we have another hard winter like the last two.

So we agreed a price and he came back today to replace 22 valley tiles with reclaimed ones. In fact, the job was easier than he had feared, and it didn’t take as long as he had planned, so he actually knocked some money off the job – it’s not often that a builder’s job comes in below the estimate!

I’ve got another builder lined up to do a small job on Thursday, when I have a meeting about the major ongoing bid that I absolutely mustn’t miss. So that ought to ensure that I actually get out of bed that day……

26 07 2011 Gillian house Comments Off on Yet more work on the roof Permalink

A crazy week

Work has just gotten crazy this past fortnight. I’m in the middle of a major bid which is taking up a huge amount of everyone’s time and energy, not just mine. On the one hand, that’s a very good thing right now – it gives me something concrete to focus on and keep me busy. I don’t want to have time to dwell on the upcoming anniversary of Christopher’s death. On the other hand, it’s perhaps unfortunate that this is a bid for a follow-on piece of work to that which I was bidding at exactly this time last year – same customer, same contributing team, and building on the same work. So I am reminded daily of this time last year, when I was dashing into work to fight a few fires / answer difficult questions / craft a bid for a technically challenging yet deliverable programme of work, grabbing a bite to eat, and then dashing home (or, latterly, to the hospice) to spend some time with Chris.

Fortunately, because it is the same team as last year, they are all very aware of the situation and are keeping a close eye on me. They’re a very supportive bunch, and aren’t adverse to ordering me home when they think I’m overdoing it. I’ve been coming home, having a cup of tea, and going to bed for an hour before getting up again to cook myself dinner.  It’s been a very long week, and I’m very pleased indeed that it’s the weekend at last, to give me a chance to relax a bit before the madness starts again on Monday. At least it will only last a few weeks – the bid has to be signed, sealed and delivered by the middle of August, when I shall take some time off to catch my breath.

22 07 2011 Gillian status Comments (1) Permalink

Death by Fatal Murder

I’ve been feeling pretty miserable recently. It’s nearly a year ago that things went from very serious to critical with Christopher, and I’m really not looking forward to the anniversary of his death. So I thought I would attempt to forcibly cheer myself up by going to the allegedly extremely funny spoof murder mystery that’s on at the theatre. I bought myself a ticket to the Saturday matinée, as I’m still too tired to go out much in the evenings.

When it came to cheering myself up, it wasn’t as successful as I had hoped. It was perhaps unfortunate that Death by Fatal Murder is a sequel to Murdered to Death, which was on at the Malvern Theatres this time last year, and was the last trip out that Christopher and I managed together before he died.  So I couldn’t escape from the painful memories. And the play itself was not particularly good (but then, neither was last years’), though there were some very funny bits and I did laugh out loud on occasion.

It was a spoof of the standard 1940’s country house murder mystery plot. There was an incompetent police inspector, a beautiful widow (or was she?) with a secret, a highly dodgy Italian refugee with an accent dodgier than his past, a completely bonkers Welsh medium, and Miss Joan Maple, an elderly woman with a gift for solving murders. To make it even sillier, throw in a squadron leader believed missing in action but in fact very much alive, a posh land girl with an extremely annoying neigh-like laugh and a junior constable trying to keep his hapless and accident-prone boss in order.

The cast were clearly enjoying themselves. They were hamming it up like mad and on a couple of occasions corpsed it so badly that they couldn’t get their lines out for trying to stifle the giggles. In fact those were two of the genuinely funniest moments in the play.

It really wasn’t particularly good – certainly I wouldn’t expect to see it storming the West End any time soon.  However, it got me out of the house and was better than sitting around feeling sorry for myself, so I was glad I’d made the effort to go.

17 07 2011 Gillian Day out Comments (2) Permalink

Planning Permission

I got a letter from the local council yesterday, informing me that my application for planning permission for the garden has been granted, with no additional conditions. I now have three years to get the work done – though obviously I’m not expecting it to take nearly that long.

Now I “just” have to find a builder I trust to do the work at a price I can afford. I had a chap around last week who came highly recommended by a colleague. He promised to send me a quote this week, so when he didn’t I was a bit concerned that he’d marked it down as “too difficult” and had decided not to quote at all. So I phoned him yesterday and he assures me that he’s working on a quote, but is finding it quite hard just to get an estimate together! He says he’s now got prices for the I-beams and sleepers, and will spend the weekend pricing up the labour. So I hope to hear next week. Then I’ll have to have a long think about whether it’s affordable.

16 07 2011 Gillian garden
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Like painting the Forth Bridge

I’ve got Rob the painter here yet again all week, painting yet more of the outside of the house. This time he is concentrating on the woodwork at the back of the house, where I had a new utility-room window installed, the large stretch of replacement barge-boards and soffits where I had work done on the roof a few months ago, plus the back door and kitchen windowsill which also need attention.

However, Rob is also painting the barge-boards on the garage extension, where the paint is just peeling off, and I’m rather annoyed about the need for that. The extension is only a few years old, and there is no way it should need repainting for several years yet. Indeed, the window frames on the extension are all still in good condition and don’t need any work at all yet. And, oddly, the soffits (i.e. the horizontal wooden panels underneath the vertical barge boards) are largely in reasonable nick. It is just the barge boards, which it seems have been badly primed, so that the paint hasn’t properly bonded to the wood underneath. Rob suspects that my builder used pre-primed timber for those lengths of wood rather than “doing it properly”.

Under other circumstances, I would probably be putting in a complaint to the original builder and insisting that he “makes good”.  But I really don’t think it’s going to be worth it. Last time I saw Brian, the chap who built the extension, was about 13 months ago. He was sitting in the chair next to Christopher in the oncology department of Worcester hospital having chemotherapy for lung cancer, and looked seriously ill. I’ve checked the online obituaries in the local paper, and someone with the same name, of approximately the right age, died of cancer a few months ago – so I’m pretty sure it’s him. Even if it’s not, I reckon that he would be far too sick to go up a ladder with a paintbrush. So I’ll just have to put up with the shoddy paint job and get Rob to do it properly.

12 07 2011 Gillian cancer
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Unsubscribing from mailing lists

It was relatively easy to get Christopher’s name removed from the junk mail / catalogues etc that seem to form a major part of my post. The pack that one gets from the Registrar when one registers a death has a form in it to send off to some mail-order clearing-house, and fairly soon the junk mail stops coming. I suppose that makes business sense – it costs retailers money to send out mailshots, and they don’t want to waste money on customers who are physically incapable of buying from them!

It’s a different matter with email mailing lists, and it’s been a major headache getting Chris unsubscribed from some of those, and the various electronic fora / socail media groups he was subscribed to. Of course, the fundamental reason is that it doesn’t cost anything to send out email, so there is no incentive on the senders to keep their mailing lists pruned and their databases up to date.  Some of the mailing lists I can simply unsubscribe him from, but others demand a user name and password which I don’t have. I’ve got rid of most of the unwanted emails now, and think I will just have to update my spam filters to reject rest.

I blogged a few weeks ago about trying to get his Facebook page deleted. I’ve had similar issues recently with Twitter.  There is an established method to getting a Twitter account deleted – a search on their website brings up a page on “how to contact Twitter about a deceased user”.  Rather than a physical death certificate, they want confirmation of death through “a link to a public obituary or news article”.  I sent them a link to the death notice I put in the Malvern Gazette and to the blog post from the day he died.  I suppose they need to be sure that they are not being spoofed or tricked, but it was still upsetting to have to dig out those links.  However, I have now had confirmation that the account has been deleted, so that should be one fewer source of unwanted emails.

It seems to me that the on-line world is much harder to get sorted out after a death than the “real life” equivalents. All these dratted usernames, passwords and email addresses make things very tricky – and there is rarely anyone you can actually phone up and talk to. But I’m getting there, albeit slowly.

10 07 2011 Gillian status Comments (1) Permalink

More on giveacar

After Christopher died I scrapped our old Polo via giveacar.co.uk and was very impressed with the service. I got rid of an old and virtually worthless car with virtually no effort on my part, it was disposed of legally, and a charity of my choice, St Richard’s Hospice, got a donation. In my view it was a true “win-win” situation.

My mother mentioned the story to some of her colleagues at work. And they told their friends and neighbours, who passed it on to their friends and so on.  I heard last week that as a direct result of that word-of-mouth, at least ten people so far have scrapped their old bangers through giveacar, and in each case they donated the proceeds to their local hospice. So hospices right across Kent (where my parents live) and the south of England, as far afield as Brighton I’m told, have benefited financially from the scrapped cars.

I was very pleased when I heard that. It’s not often one hears feedback like that, and I find it really encouraging and helpful to know that some good is coming of this whole ghastly situation.

09 07 2011 Gillian status Comments (1) Permalink

An Inspector Calls

I was just about to leave for work this morning, when I saw a car pull up into my drive. For once, I wasn’t  expecting any tradesmen to call today, so I was rather surprised. I went outside and  greeted the chap with a somewhat stern  “Who are you? And what do you want?”. “Errm, I’m Mr So-and-So from the Council” – he was a planning inspector from Hereford come to look at my garden and check the planning application.  So of course I gave him the run of the garden to take pictures and compare the drawings with the current state of things.

I was surprised that he’d turned up without notice.  It seemed a bit discourteous.  I had a local chap from the parish council here a few weeks ago, and he phoned first to agree a time and let me know he was coming. Anyway, I think I’ve passed the surprise inspection, as today’s chap said that he didn’t see any problems and that I should hear within a week. Which is good as I’ve got someone coming to on Thursday to give me a quote…….

05 07 2011 Gillian garden Comments (1) Permalink