where art collides

A leisurely start to the day that was kicked off by giving a saxophonist a lift to the stayshun. Without the sax I should point out. He doesn’t take it everywhere. That would be most inconvenient. For one it would be very easy to accidentally leave said sax in a cafe or other such calling point that fill a Saturday. Presumably.

I have a track record of leaving things places. Typically hats in taxis. In fact mostly hats, in taxis. We were on holiday with friends in 2020 and he left his wallet and passport in the hotel safe. This was only discovered when we were a ninety minute drive away. He might be reading this 🙂

The harmony in our house is at present somewhat discordant as yesterday the men came to start the process of window replacement. Sofas have been pulled away from the windows and have curtains draped across them, pun intended. In consequence there are fewer places to sit. I have managed to find somewhere dinnae fret.

Sitting as I am in the curtainless living room it is only in their naked state that the size of the windows becomes apparent. The existing, solidly built window frames must weigh quite a bit. One of the jobs we had to get done was to insert a lintel above the big living room window. When our house was built in 1939 they didn’t bother with lintels because the window frames were solid enough to take the weight of the bricks above. 

With the new plastic windows this is not the case. The new windows do come with benefits that we took into consideration when deciding to spend the kids’ inheritance. The noise levels are already discernibly down in our bedroom which was the first to be done. Never again will I need to employ a decorator to periodically apply paint to the window frames. No doubt when finished the new windows will also do a better job of keeping the heat in than the (nice) old leaded single glazed 1930s originals.

We wave goodbye with fondness to the old but look forward to the new. Entropy changes and the world moves on.

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I’ve  been busy. Sanded down the tray that sits on top of Anne’s sewing box but which struggled to fit after it was painted. Took me ages and in the end had to dig out the orbital sander. Sorted now though which is good. Went through the box of old cables and chucked most of em. 

Finally lifted some beans and leeks for moving elsewhere and spread a bag of Mr Muck’s finest horse manure compost over the raised bed in readiness for the onions to go in tomorrow. Was going to do it this pm but it’s bloomin cold out so delayed until tomorrow but now had second thoughts and the onions are in. Got loads spare and will have a think where I can put them.

Also stuck some maps up in the shed including a reproduction 1st edition OS map of Lincoln and its surroundings for £2.50 inc p&p purchaysed from a kind soul on Facebook. There is also a map of Ireland picked up with a car hire sometime wayback when and the Scottish half of the map of Caravan and Motorhome Club sites. Finally a poster of Hornby model engines and a piece of correx from last year’s cancelled Beyond The Woods fest. All made possible having shifted a load of plastic storage containers to the store room in the house.

I have got an interesting Domesday map of Lincolnshire but it comes with the limited edition three volume set of the Lincolnshire bit of the Domesday book and I’ve decided to keep that in its box with the books.

There are a number of framed pictures and cigarette card collections that need to go up in the shed but the issue is weight. I don’t want to drill holes into the plasterboard and command hooks aren’t strong enough.

Everything seems to be under control ish. I do tend to wake up at around 2am but the sleep after that is usually deep and refreshing. 

Had a very busy weekend shifting and tidying. Our old converted garage which was built in 1939 and was only wide enough to take a car from that era has long since been turned into a store room. For historical reasons we call it the play room but it was rarely used as such other than perhaps for playing darts and is now a dumping ground. It is only single brick and not really usable for habitable purposes anyway.

So now it has been cleared out, tidied and has all the Beyond The Woods festival plastic boxes from the shed. When I built the shed the idea was that it would serve as a multipurpose facility that included being an office for the festival. It still is this but the storage boxes are better off in the play room leaving me with a large space to do something with andan expanse of wall that is screaming out for pictures, maps and other interesting things I deem suitable for hanging in the shed.

I still need to sort the garage out but the attic has mostly been done. I rarely go into the attic. It is used as a recording studio. A trip to the Lincoln recycling centre (ie tip) is in the offing.

In other news I’ve unplugged the landline. I rarely use it anyway. It’s purpose is solely for calling the bank or companies known to have a long wait. BA for example. Also the display is a source of light pollution overnight. It’s one of the few things visible in the shed from the house after dark. I’ve taken to switching off my monitors. I can’t see the switch and Raspberry Pi from the house so they are ok.

I pay £3 a month for the line. It’s for sentimental reasons really just to keep the number. It isn’t a landline as such. It’s a voip line and the yealink phone sits on the shed LAN powered by Ethernet.

Thought for the Day came on 4 mins early today on Radio 4 and completely threw our schedule. In consequence everything is 4 mins ahead of plan this morning. How am I going to cope with the opportunity to increase productivity? The thought itself did not register. The purpose of the thought for the day slot is I assume to prompt those who are still in bed to remove themselves from its comfortable attractions, swing out the legs and get on with the order of the day.

As you might therefore imagine I have  made it to the shed earlier than normal, not that there is a normal. For the record it is a fine frosty morning. Crisp enough for the proclamation of joyous existence.

There is not an order of the day per se. I have one 30 minute meeting at 10am and am otherwise progressing activities across a wide front. This includes a walk to the Arboretum with John writing some Anne’s Vans copy and converting a pile of paperwork overflowing from my “filing” tray for electronic storage using the marvellous ScanSnap machine.

I also need to plan the attack on my waistline. Part of throttling back from full time employment is to exercise more and lose weight. This is relatively straightforward when at home in Lincoln but a lot harder when travelling. It isn’t the travelling bit that makes it difficult it’s the what I’m doing when I get there.

I have two experiences to relate. The first is that I once did the Atkins diet whilst away for two weeks on business. The diet worked. I lost a stone and a half but was constantly thirsty and it didn’t feel right.

Then one year I did sober October with Steve Wildman and Rob Vashak. I had no problem with laying off the booze for the month. The issue was the boredom experienced when in Amsterdam at the RIPE conference for a week and then a separate week in Brussels. They were long days and in the evening everyone would go out on the lash whilst I consumed gallons of mineral water.

It was v boring and I determined afterwards that a wholly sober October was not for me unless I was spending the whole month at home.

Now I have a fairly active few weeks ahead. Somehow the word is back in travel mode and I have a number of trips planned. These include dinner in London on 27th Jan and 9th Feb, Brussels on 14th and 15th Feb, Antwerp on 16th Feb and Amsterdam on 17th. This is closely followed by London again on 8th and 9th March.

I’m just going to have to try and strike a balance innit. I am looking at the keto diet for a short time as some pals are doing it. It is the Atkins diet really although I guess it will have moved on in that some green veg is included. See how it goes. I might keep you posted, might not. See how I feel 🙂

In the shed I am insulated from the world. Inside is at a comfortable working temperature but I can see the frost on the lawn clearly suggesting otherwise out there. More than half the lawn facing side of the shed is north facing window and door. In that respect it would be a good artist’s studio. I view it as a multipurpose space and the fact that I have not yet produced any painting is neither here nor there. No sculptures either.

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Walked into town with the lad for a few games of pool at the Cube & Cue this morning. It used to be called Riley’s. I am a member. I was also a member at Rileys. I joined in between lockdowns to play snooker. I played once then it closed and phoenixed under the new name. I joined again. Only cost a fiver. So I am a member of a snooker club. We had a good time. Played 7 games in an hour. It went to the last second before the light automatically went off. 

It isn’t always about winning when you play with your kids but that doesn’t apply when they are twenty one years old. Whilst you are happy for the younger generation to take over you still wan to put off the day and show them who is boss. I’m crap at snooker so I can’t do it when playing that.

Took a while to get used to the table. Hit the ball too hard and it bounces out off the rubber at the back of the hole. Don’t hit it hard enough and it would roll true. Remembering some of the fantastic snooker recoveries at the Masters where someone would roll the cue ball off three cushions and leave it resting against a red at the end of the table. I tried it. Didn’t work.

Walked back up Lindum Hill. Not done that for some time and you could tell. I need to do more of it. Golf on Thursday.

I like it when there is no pressure to do anything. I have one job to finish off which is to fit spacers behind the “new” sewing desk to ensure solidity against the wall in the “new” sewing room. This is a dividend of the kids growing up and leaving home. There will still be a bed in there but sewing will be the room’s main purpose.

I am quite prepared to accept the concept that one day the shed might have to be used as temporary sleeping quarters, at Christmas perhaps but we are not there yet. It would need multiple offspring back with their own offspring to make that happen. There is no rush for this.

Quite a number of my pals now have grandchildren, including one or two people I was at school with. I am ok with this although for someone in my class at school to be a grandparent does bring it very close to home. With these people my memories are of us being in our teens. Parties and nights out with even the notion of being settled and having our own families being a distant concept.

You notice quite a change in someone who has become a grandparent. They get all dewy eyed when thinking about it. There is even a cohort amongst my pals, mostly “tough ex rugby playing types”,  who happily chat with each other about the joys of grandparenthood. I can understand it with the girls but not the blokes. I daresay my time will come. Like I said, no pressure kids.

The sewing room is moving down from the attic which is already a recording studio but will now be more so. Fortunately someone invented headphones so our reverie is only occasionally interrupted by loud music.

Another observation this morning is that there are some radio programs that won’t let me play them on Sonos. The Sunday Service on BBC Radio 4 is such a programme. Yesterday it was another BBC job though I can’t quite remember what it was. Feels a bit odd but maybe the Beeb has stopped Sonos playing anything. Digging into it it’s TuneIn Radio that can’t broadcast it. The Beeb must be forcing everyone onto BBC Sounds. That’s all well and good but no use if they don’t let me stream over Sonos. Spotify does. Rewind. Sorted. Ignore this paragraph 🙂

Sitting here in the TV room I have just noticed a bag of knitting.

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Sewing room desk complete and also shower door adjusted to close gap that opened up after a while.

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We have a good size family house. When all four kids are home it is big enough to give everyone their own space. You don’t feel on top of each other. One downside is that I’m the only person who sits in the sitting room (living room/front room/lounge/call it what you will) and this is where the open fire resides. This means that we rarely light the fire although when in full flow it does provide a good glow to the whole house.

The conservatory hardly ever gets used. I might take a cuppa in there after breakfast on a sunny day and it very occasionally plays host to a lunch or dinner. We rarely have people round for dinner. Before kids it was commonplace but became too much effort, and cost. Now we are out of the habit and our pals are all such raving party animals that we would need to psych ourselves up for the undoubted session ahead. When the kids are home the conservatory is more of a conservatoire as the piano is there and it does get played.

The TV room is the warmest room. It’s a v cosy family den. The TV itself, being thicker than a matchstick feels a little outdated and doesn’t have all the connectivity we (I assume we do) all expect these days aka the shed telly. It only has one HDMI port and I do occasionally plonk myself down in front of it to watch something on the Chromecast only to find that someone has unhooked it and plugged in a playstation instead. Annoying eh? The shed telly has something like 12 HDMI ports (well at least 8, I haven’t really counted) as it is connected via an external amp.

The kitchen is the best room in our house. It’s a bigun and the room that is used the most. There is a pew running along the end farthest from the window. We bought it when the church was selling them off to make a more flexible pace. Their loss, our gain. It’s by far the most popular place to sit at the kitchen table. We are lucky that the kitchen is big enough to take it. 

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The last job, for the moment, has been finished. I straightened the wonky fencepost put in only a few weeks ago and affixed some horizontal wires for the purpose of espaliering the plum tree. I am now sitting down to a well earned cuppa and will soon get going on my new book “Spies of the Airways” by Hugh Skillen. It’s part of a trilogy that includes “Knowledge Strengthens the Arm” and one on the Enigma whose name escapes me. I’ve separately ordered all three. 

Ciao amigos

I woke up this morning and knocked my specs off the bedside table, oh yea. It made me consider my situation. Had I lived in the stone age would I even be alive. I am not only half blind without my specs but have an appalling sense of smell and my hearing ain’t what it used to be. If my name were Ugg, address The Cave, I could well have been eaten by a sabre tooth tiger by now. Hiding up that tree probs, or behind a rock.

If my name were Ugg I probably wouldn’t be thinking about buying a new alarm clock radio. Ours gains approximately a second a month and one of the LEDs is on the blink, pun intended. 

I Googled “bluetooth alarm clock radio”. This was a mistake at this time of the morning. I was bombarded with options, none of which seemed particularly cheap. Doesn’t feel to me as if a clock radio needs to be expensive. I retreated and ditched the word bluetooth from the search. 

This uncovered some what might be termed traditional clock radios at the lower end of the price spectrum but also gave me the classic dilemma of buyers everywhere and that is spec creep. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a clock radio, TV or a car it’s the temptation to add bells and whistles. Shouldn’t it have bluetooth anyway?

Let’s face it all I need a clock radio for is to tell the time and play BBC Radio 4. I rarely use it as an alarm. I use the dog and bone for that. I quite like the idea of being able to charge my phone wirelessly but then that would mean having the phone about 18 inches from my head at night. 

It would be quite useful to integrate the clock radio with my sonos speakers. It seems simple enough to use a Sonos as an alarm but we want to be able to see the time and also set a snooze time on the radio when going to bed at night. I guess the answer is a simple alarm clock radio and if we really want a Sonos in the bedroom to have a separate speaker.

No rush. This one will run and run. I still haven’t bought a new toaster after pontificating about it a couple or three years ago. Meanwhile there is snooker on the box. It’s nil nil with no points on the board and the best of 11.

Tis a cauld old morning of it and the sun is low in a seemingly cloudless sky. Still very much deep midwinter without the snow effects. No creaking of trees either as the frosty wind blesses them with its presence. Perhaps that sound effect is reserved for night time.

The lack of snow in winter hereabouts makes it harder to produce evocative descriptions. I can’t really hark back to my childhood as I’m fairly sure that snowbound winters were few and far between then, even when living in North Wales. Certainly not in the Isle of Man which is centrally heated by the gulf stream.

Had a trip out to Louth today. I bought a few second hand books from a stall in the market and a 2kg bag of bird seed and then nipped over to see the Lincolnshire Wolds Railway. We last visited the railway perhaps fifteen years ago or more and it doesn’t appear to have changed at all. Still the same fund raiser appeal to extend the line nearly to Louth.

On the way back from the railway we picked up a couple of free bags of horse manure compost left at the side of the road. The things you do!

Louth itself is of another era. As the car moves through the winter countryside the nearer Louth you get the further back in time it feels you are. Should be twinned with nearby Woodhall Spa which stopped in the 1940s.

Back in the shed I’m listening to a webinar on the EU Regulatory Framework for Communications Providers. Yawn. Hadn’t realised it was going to be such a basic “Dummies Guide”. I’m in now so I will sit it out. Fortunately the snooker is on the box. On mute.

Somewhat amazing night last night. I rarely watch game shows but this one was different as it had Will and Kathryn Ward in it. We went to their wedding! Can’t remember the name but it was a new gig with Ant and Dec who are well known TV celebrities. The point is they won half a million quid. Will and Kathryn that is, not Ant and Dec. Fantastic. I’ll not watch any more of the shows. Not my thang and I’ve seen all I need to see.

Kansas City Chiefs also won. Edged it in the fourth quarter. I am newly a Chiefs fan, for reasons you will have to scroll back through my timeline to discover. The game was on past my bedtime but I might see if it available on catchup. Cmon the Chiefs. Innit.

Treated myself to a lie in this morning and a proper wet shave once I’d made it out of bed. Outside the sky is cloudless and the weather looks perfect for a stroll to the Bail.

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Just back from dropping a member of the congregation at St Peter in Eastgate Church. As I drove past the Lindum Cricket Club it occurred to me that I didn’t go along to watch a single match last summer which will need sorting this year. The real point though is that I am going to far fewer places than I used to. 

This sitch will hopefully change as the world resumes normal service, if it ever does. For everyone’s sake.

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Back from a late morning walk with our John. 5k. Steps that is. Need to up the game on the walking.  The plan is walking, swimming and cycling. Bit of yoga maybs.

I had a dream. There I was driving along in a campervan when I saw an old geezer collapse on the pavement and some other a little less old bearded chap had stopped to see if he was ok. I pulled to a halt and asked if they needed any help. The bearded guy told me to call for an ambulance which I did.

After a while on hold whilst the 999 person was trying to sort an ambulance we realised that the old geezer was just inebriated and didn’t really need an ambulance and a good kip would sort him. I killed the call and in the meantime realised that someone had nicked my campervan. Bar steward.

Now I don’t normally remember dreams but this one obviously stuck. I’ll leave it to you to interpret.

Breakfasted well and strolled, hood up, to the shed. It is raining ish but the forecast is for heavier rain. I may get stranded. The shed was unusually cold. Something tripped the power in the house yesterday and I forgot to turn the heater in the shed back on. Good job we don’t live in Alaska. I do quite like the idea of going to Alaska though. Wilderness adventure. I’d need to find someone to come with me.

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A bit damp now as walked to Waitrose with John for a few supplies. Steady rain all the way back and my specs steamed up so could hardly see. Good job I knew the way. Jeans were totes soaked by the time I got home. Hey… Good job I had a spare pair innit.

Now sat enjoying a cup of tea in the TV room. No TV on. I’m pondering subscribing to the Disney+ channel later today as we want to watch Get Back, the Beatles series of the making of the album. I suspect that once we have watched it I will cancel the subscription. Worth eight quid though.

Good breakfast. Stroll to shed. A time for relaxation. Ease into the day. Easement would have been a good word for this but it has already been bagged and has connotations inconsistent with the sentiment.

Ahead, a day of meditation, spiritual and bodily improvement. By this I mean I’m going to pluck some partridges, fix the loft ladder and then go for a swim 🙂 .

Interesting to consider that like many repetitive exercises swimming has a strong element of meditation. Detached focus on the job in hand. I may occasionally think of things when swimming but mostly I think of nothing. 

I do occasionally look up and check the pool clock. This is not as straightforward as you might think because I’m pretty blind without my specs and although I have prescription swimming goggles they are so scratched to be almost non functional as such. They still keep water out of my eyes.

The shed is a perfect place for mediation. In the deepest days of lockdown, with the circling covid horde baying for victims, the shed was not only a workplace but also somewhere to throw down your yoga mat. In the shed you could be at one with the world around you.

Those days are long gone. The freedoms that came with the summer and shed doors wide open to the garden disappeared when freezing temperatures forced closed those doors.

We should not keep looking over our shoulders. Look ahead. Heads up and eyes on the horizon. Just writing that brought a smile to my face. The power of positive thinking. Wow.