Early in the AM one bloke turned up to say he wasn’t coming – he was off with his wife choosing curtains.  The other polished his clubs, his shoes and a banana on his trousers and went off to play golf.  So with no one doing anything and unable to do the work I should be doing, I decided to be a bloke for a day.

First, what’s this?

When Ric assembled it, he opined that it wouldn’t look out of place in the Tate Modern and we agreed.

So today I had to tackle the cupboards.  One of the hazards of adapting a set of cupboards that are at least quarter of a century old is that someone has been there before you, inserting pipes, drains and numberless things requiring holes; so what you start with is this:

Standing outside on the drive in a monsoon hasn’t helped, either.

Some of the panels had square holes for a change and some were just ripped.  So I set to in the garage with some hardboard and a saw and salvaged as many shelves as I could from the heap.  Next I found my rubber gloves (spotted in yesterday’s pic) and every type of cleaning agent known.  Then I got the drill and dug out the stupid broken plastic shelf supports and inserted other, less broken ones and by teatime, when those of us had been playing golf and sitting in pubs exhausted, returned, I’d got up to here:

And then I varnished the bench edge and prepped all the surfaces to tile with dilute PVA, the second coat of which I shall do as soon as I’ve finished writing this.

And then, because I was being a bloke for a day, I scratched my head and farted.

JaneLaverick.com – tired.

Oh good, here it is:

Moreover, because I like you, here’s the other side.  Before I show you, I’d just like to point out that this bit of junk is utterly crucial to my life just now, in fact I can’t do without it.  What do you think it is?  (Answer at the foot of the column.)

There you go!  Have you ever seen one of these before?  Where was it?  What were you doing at the time you noticed it?  (How exciting is this?) (Not very.)

Meanwhile, whilst apologising profusely for the extreme randomness of postings lately, I’d like to offer some pictorial evidence.  What I will not show you are the cupboard doors.  It’s too depressing.

Entering upon the kitchen makeover, having been promised that it would all be over by the start of September, having explained my need for a kitchen in which to pour porcelain and outlined the importance of Miniatura and my desire to start the makeover afterwards if the time frame was impossible; I was assured confidently by the builder, the electricians, the plumber and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all that it would be done and dusted in plenty of time to stem the rise in blood pressure that attends the need for work coupled with the impossibility of doing it.

Well, the builder moved house in the middle of it.  I wondered why his wife was waiting on the drive while he finished the pointing on the front wall with a dustpan and brush; a trowel, apparently, being out of the question.  It was to knock off early so as to go and sign the papers.

Then the cupboards.  Because of a need for greenness, looking after the planet and rampant localised poverty, we are reusing the old bottom cupboards.  The only reason we are not also reusing the top cupboards is that we didn’t have any.

I can paint.  There are many things I can’t do but I can paint.  So when the other half had planed and sanded the doors I did a great job of the varnishing, even leaving the holes clear for the new handles we’d chosen that would cover the bleached area where the old handles had been.  Having carcased we were consulted as to whether we would prefer the excess door cut off at the top or the bottom.  We agreed upon the top whereupon the merry builder cheerfully sawed a suitable amount off each no-longer-made pine plank door and the other half made a router table for himself and bought an appropriate bit to make a fancy edge.  Triffic.  The doors hung and the merry builder upon his way, the beleaguered writer (me) noticed upon the eve what had been wrought in the busy, busy day. Subsequently, not the following day, for that was when the builder moved house, but the day after that, the B.W. (me) invited the builder to insert a door knob into the door knob hole. ‘Like this’ he said confidently, of the first door.  ‘Ah’ he said of the second and the third…………..  In some cases he had sawn the tops off and in some, excitingly, the bottom, leaving one handle hole at the top, the others, elsewhere.  They cannot be turned inside out because of the giant holes for the patent hinges, cleverly designed to be welded to the holes for all eternity but shatter at the touch of a damp cleaning cloth.

Whether my painting skills are up to the job of disguise, I shall discover this afternoon when I do them all again.  I would be priming the worktops for the tiles but……….

Are you ready for an uplifting picture?  Here is the view along the hall.

Such a joy. Oh look! There are the rubber gloves I couldn’t find last Thursday.  A couple of nights ago, fed up with instant food and with a garden full of rapidly going-over cauliflowers I decided to have cauliflower cheese.  Having decaterpillared the caulis which didn’t leave much for me (I’m putting butterflies into the world, it’s a Good Thing) all I needed was the cheese, got it, and a grater.  Ah.  And some flour.  Hmmm.  So in the end I had cauliflower, and chopped cheese.  It was horrible.  The flour is in here, somewhere.

I would go to the charity shop with boxes of things but as BT have dug up the road in front of the house I can’t get out.  That’s a pity because some lucky charity shop is about to receive this:

It’s a block of resin with embedded Canadian coins.  Handy for anyone who wants one of those.

Now this:

is almost certainly a 1970s boiled egg lifter, though if you have another use for it, (nose wear? tennis ball handle? heel lifter for getting supermodels on to donkeys? apple bobbing implement for the fastidious?  school custard lump remover?) it will be in the children’s charity shop as soon as the telephone engineers have finished digging up the road.

I would scream and tear my hair out but it’s just a waste of energy.  Meanwhile the thing I most need, to tackle the film of mixed plaster and sawdust which coats every surface in the house, is the vacuum cleaner from which the wheel broke off this AM twice. 

Once before I had mended it with two part epoxy

and once after.

I would buy a new one but the other half has just bought the table saw we require, which would cost twice as much to hire, for turning the left over bits of cupboard into the pill drawers to accommodate the tranquilisers we’re going to take when we find the drinking glasses.

JaneLaverick.com – over the edge in a barrel with brackets and fancy glass knobs.

Yesterday I painted until half past night and I’m running out of Ibuprofen gel to put on my painting and varnishing arm.

Progress, however is being made.  Before the long Bank holiday weekend, which certainly wasn’t a holiday here, this is where we were:

and before yesterday we were here:

those cupboard doors have all been planed, sanded and given two coats of varnish.  Hopefully they will tone with the wall cupboards, if not match.

Since these pictures I’ve done three coats on the ceiling and one on the walls.  Some genius (me) re-sited the oven so you have to lie on the floor to clean it; it may be impossible get food in or out, that should be slimming.

Ahead of us seven square feet of tiling.

I have also, in between, just to stave off boredom, got two coats of varnish on the inside of the shed.  Today I’ll do the third coat on the floor and move in.  Finally, after several years of construction one bit of wood at a time, I’ll have a place to write in peace.

I shall end up with arms like Popeye but I won’t need to do any of this again (I sincerely hope) for twenty five years by which time I’ll have written a prize-winning novel in the shed and I can pay for someone else to do the lot or move into a very luxurious old folks home.

If there’s time I have an ambition to have a day off before I start work for Miniatura, about which, after this, I shall never complain again.

Later this week I may show you some of the extraordinary things I found in my drawers, so that’s something to look forward to.

JaneLaverick.com – the column with painter’s elbow.

It’s been like that round here.  Yesterday Ric, demolishing a bit of my wall to expose the toilet soil pipe, in the course of his investigations to discover the reason for all the silverfish I found when chiselling the carpet tiles off the floor, revealed that some previous kitchen improver had plastered over the damp proof course, causing wicking, like you do.  So he removed a lot of the wall, as you would.

The real cause for concern was that I couldn’t find the ladder last night to give the ceiling two coats before the electricians made holes for the down lighters this morning. How can you lose a ladder?  It was tricky looking in the garage which temporarily had no light, which I blithely had agreed to at teatime.  ‘You won’t be needing light in your garage over night will you?’ asserted the electrician.  ‘Well of course not’, I agreed cheerfully because by then I’d had enough anyway.

The having enough anyway had started early.  I’d got up at crack of dawn, thrown clothes on, opened the doors and done the early stuff, such as locating the kettle, then, when I went back to get changed to go  and give Thomas, who was 7, his present, for lo!  I had no floorboards.  Not that that was as much of a worry as not having transport to get there, as the insurers had decided to write off the car, so the courtesy car had to go back.  Then there was the thing about all the workers needing every door in the house left open, which is fine if you’re there, not so good if you’re ten miles away and they’ve gone off for lunch.

Oh it all makes work for the working man to do.  I realised that the ladder may have been moved by Roger, subcontracted by Ric when he realised that he had no idea where the water was going, hence the war zone scenario I photographed on Wednesday.  Roger had moved everything in the garage in order to take two water pipes out into the garage and back in again.  Everything that isn’t piled on top of my kilns, such as the oven, was piled on top of the other half’s golf clubs, though some is piled on the make-your-own-arcade-games- machine abandoned by the web manager when he got a proper job. And, to be fair, some of the piles are piled on pre existing piles of other stuff, as it is a garage.

I looked at the bank account balance online today.  If you’re inclined to visit the shop and buy a doll I may deliver the package personally and kiss you.  If you’ve got fifty friends I’ll do the same for them, possibly, after I’ve finished the painting.  And the tiling.  And the cupboard doors.  We’re re-using the cupboards, for reasons of greenness and poverty.  I’d be happier if the cupboards hadn’t been standing on the drive in the storms for five days, you never think of cupboards as absorbent but they are.

I keep trying to remember that it will all be better when it’s done.  It’s always better to know what’s in your house and who has perpetrated what and where.

I found the ladder with a torch.  It was behind the third pile I had to climb over to see where it was.  So then I got two coats of paint on the ceiling and fell into bed, which was why I had to get dressed in a rush to let Steamy in to do the window this morning.

Here he is considering how to remove the lethal ancient glass:

While the younger electrician installs the ceiling lights:

Oh I am so tired.  It would be better if I wasn’t looking after next door’s budgie as well.

It would be better if I was sleeping and not jumping out of bed with crash flashbacks.

It would be better if I didn’t have to start working when they stopped.

It would be better if it wasn’t running. leaping and cavorting away with so much money.

It would be better if this, being Friday, wasn’t the day they’ll all knock off early when I’ve paid them, so that I’ll have to start painting earlier.

It would be better if the other half hadn’t buzzed off to golf leaving me to deal with it all.  Though if he goes off to the pub tonight early, I can crack on with the third coat and start painting the walls, if we have some by then.

It would be better if I was doing all this not on painkillers.

It would be better if it wasn’t only six weeks to Miniatura and it would be better if I could be doing some work for it.

Will it all get better?

Tune in next week to see where we’re up to, if we are. (I’ll be interested to know myself.)

JaneLaverick.com – thrilling reports from the edge.  And the corner.  And half an inch above the DPC.  Plumber ho!

Lovely.

Have I got that?

No.  Have a look at this:

if it had three paratroopers crouching in the corner with their fingers in their ears, it would resemble some of the choicer bits of war-torn anywhere on the news, you name it.  Where do you think it is?  Here’s another view:

I’d like to draw your attention to the far corner:

please note the attractive way the pipe coming down from what’s left of the ceiling is dribbling into the strategically placed bucket, to the right (referring you back to the previous picture) of the random electrical cable.

So where do you think this is then?  An unreconstructed bit of Bosnia?  An interesting area of war-torn Afghanistan?  The back lot of Stargate SG1?

No, it’s my kitchen.

Currently it neatly matches the rest of the house, which I would show you except the electricians have turned all the lighting circuits off while they do the rewiring.  They’re managing quite well. considering they are having to step round all the groceries and kitchen contents in dozens of supermarket banana boxes, salvaged from the wet supermarket yard so the whole house smelled of wet bananas until someone found the mouse droppings this morning.  We would go and sit in the web manager’s bedroom but it’s full literally to the ceiling with ten year’s worth of the residue of living in flats.

The dining table, where I should be working, is currently the kitchen.  Conditions have actually improved. Yesterday, I took advice from the doctor on dealing with the problems caused by the car crash, on a borrowed mobile that cut out three times because of the thunderstorm.  To one side, hard-of-hearing husband listening to the telly at full blast, though not watching much because of the drops they’d put in his eyes for his diabetic retinopathy. At the other side of me the workman’s radio and people banging nails into plasterboard.  At my feet the storm-soaked clothes off the washing line. The doctor may have advised me to slit my wrists before retiring for the night, it was certainly what I felt like doing, or he may have suggested running away to sea on a tramp steamer, that would have been a nice change too; as I couldn’t hear, I shall never know.  Later, as I walked around next door shouting ‘yoo hoo’ to the possible burglars that may have caused the open side door, I reflected, in between jumping into rooms going ‘ha!’ that when the neighbours come back from their holiday and reclaim their budgie that has yelled to every bird it can see, every two minutes in my bird infested garden, as opposed to its own, which has children, that things will be a bit quieter then and I won’t feel quite so suicidal.  Also, I may start sleeping again, any night now and I won’t always have to get up at crack of dawn to let the electricians in to turn off the power.

The car, by the way, has been written off and therefore the courtesy car has been reclaimed, so if there’s anything you want me to fetch for you, it would have to be on foot.

And it’s raining again.  Would you like me to show you the slugs on my lawn or the caterpillars all over the cauliflowers?  Nah, let’s not, I’ll save that for another day.  You don’t want all the treats at once, do you?  Incidentally if you want any jars opening, I could probably do it with the teeth I’ve ground down to razors, quite easily.

I am hoping that when it all comes down again, it will land sunny side up.  But then, I’m an optimist, still.  Or, stupid, as it’s sometimes pronounced.

You’ll have to excuse me, the phone has been ringing pointlessly every three minutes for the last half hour.  I just need to go and dunk it in a bucket of plaster.

JaneLaverick.com – plumber ho.!

We should all hope to look as good at 91.

The other painting you couldn’t see was the start of Mardol, a street in Shrewsbury.  This is how it looked then:

I’ve now finished it, removed the traffic and added some people.

I could have done with seeing it on a brighter day, it was quite damp but not wet enough to make shiny streets.  As you may recall, Shrewsbury is one of the Mercian towns founded by Ethelfleda, as part of her defensive strategy against Viking raiders.  Although she gets merely a footnote in history books, Ethelfleda is well remembered in the towns she founded.  She did so for the protection of the people.  The most basic started as an earthwork in a strategic position, enclosed by a wooden fence but she selected so well that nearly all of them are still in use twelve hundred years later. 

You might wonder why a town would go out of use or why all old towns are still not lived in, or, if you watch a lot of television programmes featuring archaeologists on distant and windswept moors, why any places are continually inhabited at all.  There are many reasons, of which the principle ones are geography and money, which are sometimes the same thing in town planning.  Geographically, the very reasons that may lead to settlement in an area, such as fertile soil, for example, can also lead to abandonment of a site, if the resources are exhausted or cut off.  A potent example of this is Pompeii, the Roman town that grew to exploit the fertile volcanic soil on top of what the ancient Romans thought was just a an exceptionally well blessed hill with lovely rich well-drained soil you could grow anything in, especially grapes.  There are preserved pictures of the hill on walls in Pompeii, it is shown covered in vines, in frames of flower garlands.  If you go to visit the town from Sorrento you can take the Circumvesuvio railway and watch from the train windows as market gardeners use the same soil from the volcano’s flood plain, all along the track.  Even today, the financial advantages outweigh the dangers of living on an active volcano.

Natural disasters can also lead to complete abandonment of a site.  This happened all over Europe during the Black Death, when there were simply not enough people left alive to make the villages work.  There are examples near to Warwick in the Burton Dasset hills where the villages were never used again and survive as seven hundred year old ruins, left to crumble into the countryside.

So it is in every country as people exploit the riches of the earth.  Just occasionally, a place that has proved good to live in is still so useful and well loved that it remains, unaltered, for twelve hundred years.  There is a good example in the Saxon road at the Saxon Mill at Warwick.  The watermill exploits the natural course of the River Avon, which has gently carved the hill surrounded by a natural moat, which Ethelfleda found so suitable for the purposes of founding a town.  A mile or so outside of the town the Saxon road now leads under the tunnel of trees, across a small wooden bridge into the sunny fields, leading to an old church in the far distance.

If the stones of the road could talk, they could tell you of twelve centuries of travellers by foot and horse, coming across the fields to what became the county town.  Initially  Anglo Saxons seeking refuge, over the years the travellers would change to local people paying Norman taxes, plaintiffs for justice in the county court, visitors to the castle of the Earl of Warwick, clergy to the churches, the retinue of the Earl of Leicester between here and Kenilworth Castle, where he lived and entertained Elizabeth the First, soldiers on manoeuvres during the Protectorate, eighteenth century sightseers staying in the Castle, people in search of a quiet day out in the country during two World wars and modern tourists thrilled to see you can walk on the same road, on the very same stones, as the daughter of Alfred the Great.

JaneLaverick.com – besotted by history.

JaneLaverick.com – still here, just.

Do take advantage of the gismo that alerts you to postings, it says feeds just to the right of these words; I will post but not on the regular-ish Monday, Wednesday, Friday slots.

Meanwhile, I’ve been painting.  Here’s my father, who will be 91 tomorrow

I am also half way through Mardol, a street in Shrewsbury.  Shrewsbury, which, for the benefit of non-UK readers, is a town on the Welsh borders, has a long and interesting history.  Like Warwick, where I live, it is one of the Anglo-Saxon burhs, defensive townships, invented by Alfred the Great as part of his battle strategy against Viking raiders.  The burhs in the Midlands, old Mercia, were founded by his daughter Ethelfleda.  She carried on her father’s fight singlehandedly after her husband died and was not only every bit as formidable as Mrs Thatcher in her day, she was loved by the people and called the Lady of the Mercians.  She founded the towns, as did her father, in locations with natural advantages.  Either they were former Roman towns with good supply routes, or previous Neolithic hill forts with ready-built defensive earthworks or they were places with fantastic geographical advantages.  Typically, as at Shrewsbury and Warwick, these were places on a hill surrounded by the loop of a river.  Ethelfleda must have had very good scouts; there is hardly a location surrounding the Midlands with such a river and hill that has been missed.

Having chosen the location and enclosed it with a wooden fence and gates, many of which survive in later building as stone gates to mediaeval towns, she established a cross roads at the centre, frequently the location of the later or contemporary stone cross and market square.  The town plan spread out from the centre in a grid of roads, though in many cases the grid pattern breaks at the edges to follow the geographical contours.  Mardol is such a street, curving picturesquely down a hill.  It has a wonderful selection of buildings from all eras.  As with nearly all the burhs, these places were so loved and lived-in for over a thousand years they have rarely suffered subsequently from wholescale town planning but have been adapted and amended over the years and often only crumbling buildings have been removed or roads enlarged that would otherwise only accommodate an ox cart.  Consequently they are living shrines to the history of British architecture; down Mardol you can spot red brick Victorian buildings, whitened Georgian facades with their large regular windows and mediaeval timber frames with their jutting upper stories, a consequence of timber jointing technology that knew how to stagger the joint of the lower wall, the cross floor timber and the upper wall, for strength.  All this variety surmounts a wonderful selection box of shop fascias from the forties to the present.  I found a cracking fabric shop there, unsurprisingly; Shrewsbury having historically been the market place for textiles derived from the wool of all the Welsh hill sheep.

Lack of space in this crowded isle has been a gift to history students, anywhere with more room would have seen abandoned towns, as people moved on, anywhere with less would have caused more demolition.  It would appear that here we have just the right amount of not enough space to cause ingenuity and thrift to come into play with very edifying consequences.  I only hope the same will hold true for the kitchen makeover.  Like Mardol, time will tell.

JaneLaverick.com – a bit of a walk through history.

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Well that was a bit tricky; are you all right?

Yeff.

What a thing to happen!

I couldn’t helf it.

Nobody’s saying it was your fault. I didn’t say it was your fault.

Yeff but you’re finking it.

Stop talking, you’ll make it worse.

It hurtf like anyfing. If it bleeding?  It doefn’t tafte nife.

Well if it doesn’t taste nice it isn’t bleeding is it?  Just sit down and I’ll ring the dentist.

It hurtf when I poke it.

Then don’t poke it.  It’s ringing.  Oh for goodness’ sake!

What?

‘You are in a queue, your call is important to us, if the surgery is closed….’ they only do it to annoy you.

Juft ftay cool..

Easy for you to say, annoying is what they do best, and then they dare to publish statistics about the incidence of incidents at surgeries.  I’m not surprised the patients get violent, if they stopped playing you Vivaldi on a Stylophone Ringtone there would be a lot less violence generally.  Now I am number two in a queue.  Well at least it means the surgery is open.  How are you feeling now?

Been better.

Oh you poor old thing.

Leff of the old, if you don’t mind.  Don’t make me talk, it hurtff.

Well don’t, ah!  Ah, hello.  Yes. I need an emergency appointment for my husband please.  Yes it is an emergency.  That’s between him and the dentist.  Why do you have to assess it?  Really?  Well we never used to have to do this.                                  Well I don’t think it’s an improvement.

Whatff the problem?

It’s a new system, we have to tell the receptionist what’s wrong and she assesses us.

Affeffeff uff?

Assesses you then.

Affeffeff me?

Do stop repeating me.  No not you, him.  Yes he can talk and it is that bad.  He’s broken a fang.  No, right off.  Yes.  Half an hour ago.   Well we had to fly home before we could report it.  Incident report!  Wouldn’t it just be quicker to give us an appointment?  Sorry, when I say us I mean him.  Yes, I know an appointment is for one person only.  It is only him.  Yes.

What if fee faying?

Asking questions, no not you, him. Yes I know you are too. I’ll ask. We have to complete the questionnaire, can you answer some questions? 

I’ve fractured a fang!  It’f fnapped off!  It hurtff!  Tell her it hurtff!

I’ll tell her, sit down! 

It hurtff.  Lotff.

Yes, he is.  Eighth June, eighteen forty three.  Yes.  Yes.  Fifteen years.  No.  Yes.  No.  We’re not claiming any pensions, we don’t even have a bus pass.  Yes.  I don’t know.  I’ll ask.  When did you last see the dentist?  Hang on he’s looking on the calendar, it was only about three months I think.  Yes, that’s right, no, it’s ok she’s found you on the system.  Yes well, we were in a perfectly ordinary bedroom and he tried to bite this woman and it turns out she was wearing some invisible strap thing.  Well I don’t know, underwired  microfibre or something.  You know how it is, the pressure to look perfect all day every day even when you’re asleep.  It is, it’s ridiculous.  Oh it is, it’s these celebrity thin women with perfect cleavage and stick-thin thighs right after having babies.  I know.  I know.  Yes.  Anyway, he bit into this invisible strap thing, she turned over in her sleep and that was it.  You could hear the crack as the fang snapped.  She wasn’t even old and bony.  Oh quite.  Oh too right, I don’t think there’s been any virgins since before the war.  Oh no, virgin in a cotton nightdress, not going to happen.  No.  They won’t do the ironing.  It’s all easy care and invisible straps.  No it’s awful.         Did she?  Really?   Well, fancy that.  Really?            Oh I know, we’ve got a niece the same.  Oh don’t they?  Don’t they just.  Couldn’t agree more.  Could you?  Brilliant thank you.  Great.  Yes we’ll bring it.  It’s still stuck to this strap, he had to cut it off with his penknife.  That’s kind of you to say so but it wouldn’t have happened to him if he’d put his glasses on.             Yes.  Well he stopped after he lost the second pair of glasses tangled up in somebody’s curlers, all these straight-haired normals, I don’t know….                      Yes, yes.         Oh can you?  Fantastic!    Thanks, great, thank you so much, we really do appreciate it.  Bye.

Well?

Put your coat back on, it was the fat receptionist with the frizzy hair, she’s fitted us in at the end of the surgery.  We might have to wait half an hour or so but you will get seen tonight and she might even fit us in in the dentist’s iron break.

I hope he can do fomefing clever.  I do hope it ifn’t going to mean a denture.  I can’t fee myfelf wiff a denture. Not one fang in a glaff by the bed.

That was years ago, they don’t do that now.

What do they do?  Whatever it if I hope there’s lotff of anafetic.  If there time to get a quick fnack?  I’m ftarving. I waffn’t hungry at all but I’m ftarving now.

That’ll be the shock.  I’ll pop a bag of O neg in my pocket for after.  Come on, let’s get you sorted out, then have a good day’s sleep, you’ll be good as new.

I wiff.

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JaneLaverick.com ageing good graciously.