The House Husband

I was at Talking Newspaper today. The last for 2011. Well, the last for 2011 for me at least. There’s a few more weeks yet. Actually I think it goes right up to Christmas week. But I am free until January.

As usual we had a jolly good laugh. Being close to Christmas, there was naturally quite a few stories featuring goats and a rather wonderful news story about a woman who suddenly gave birth in the back of her new car.

I had some great stories to read but one piece I didn’t get to read was my letter. The reason I didn’t get to read it was because time had run out by the time it was my time to read a letter. It was too good to ignore and so, as a sort of compensation, I’m going to include the gist of it here. I say ‘gist’…more like my reworking of someone else’s letter.

The letter came from someone called ‘S’ who lives in Castle Street. S wanted to tell the (local) world about a recent shopping experience. Here is the (reworked) story:

Last November S went to Elphick’s and purchased six four piece espresso cup and saucer sets. S liked the pattern and thought they’d make nice presents. Five of them did indeed make nice presents, the sixth set (for reasons I forget) did not get given away. S decided to put it away in the secret present store at the back of the house until a present was needed for some festivity or other when it could be called into play. A sort of reserve present, if you will.

It wasn’t used at all and so, S retrieved it in order to use it as a Christmas present, now a year later. Previously S hadn’t opened it (she had six identical sets so why should she?) and was astonished to discover that instead of the four cups and saucers there were only two. Oops. That’s a great way to ruin a four piece set.

S was now in a quandary. How could they be returned to Elphick’s? The receipt was long gone and who would believe this outrageous tale of woe. S decided to try; after all Elphick’s could, at worst, just laugh. S took the box into Elphick’s and started to explain the situation to a wide eyed shop assistant who was getting more confused by the second.

And then Sharon walked by. Sharon spotted the crockery and immediately sprung up, grabbing S and asking if a couple of cups and saucers were missing. S, shocked and surprised nodded. Sharon, a huge look of relief on her face told S to wait as she went and retrieved the missing items.

Apparently, Sharon had come across the odd items last year after S had purchased the sets. She couldn’t figure out who had bought them but assumed they’d be back. Sharon placed the cups and saucers in a secure part of the store room and left them there. And lo and behold, here was S, coming back for them.

Sharon wrapped the missing cups and saucers, packed them in the box with their long lost siblings and handed it all to S who was simply amazed at the wonderful Elphick’s service. S was so amazed that a letter to the local paper was immediately required and was duly written and despatched with all haste.

While I thought it was a wonderful letter with a very Christmas-like moral, it also told me something about Sharon. Not only the fact that she went out of her way for a complete stranger but also that she’s worked at Elphick’s for more than a year. I quite like the idea that we have a family department store in our town where the staff work there for periods measured in years rather than weeks.

Anyway, the rest of the recording went very well with many laughs at the expense of the Christmas goat stories (and Malcolm, the engineer’s story about carrying a sheep in a nativity when he was ten and worried it may relieve itself while in his arms) and various other weird and wonderful exploits one only gets in local newspapers. It was soon time to meander home and to a slowly improving Mirinda who is still in the grip of her cold.

It was a rubbish day, weatherwise, so Mirinda spent the day inside, keeping the dogs company and working. It also means I didn’t take any bird photos today. So here’s a green finch from the other day. He was hiding in the twisty tree but I managed to spot him.

I'm watching you, camera boy.

And, finally, something I spotted in Waitrose. For anyone who doesn’t know me…I ALWAYS make my own gravy. I think instant gravy granules are a crime against humanity. However, I know many people disagree with me and so they boil their water and pour it onto their Bisto (or Gravox in Australia) and make a very rich and (usually) quite thick pseudo gravy.

As far as I’m aware, this is a pretty fast way of making gravy. Possibly the fastest – though you do have to wait for the water to boil, I guess. However, it was with some surprise that I spotted these in Waitrose today.

More instant than instant

Instant gravy in a tube? What the hell is that? It’s not stock…it’s gravy. I can see it now. The family at Sunday lunch. Granny asks for gravy. A grandchild hands her the tube of Bisto. She squirts it all over her Yorkshire pud with the congealed distaste of someone who once took the extra three minutes to boil a kettle of water.

Humanity has no hope if this is the result of evolution.

I think mum put the mockers on me. On the phone she was telling me about how her PC had died. Completely. A bit like Bob’s at Christmas but without the burst of electricity. And then, halfway through the day, my second internal hard drive decided to start sputtering and spitting and throwing up error messages. I tried all manner of IT things to fix it but to no avail. In the end it seemed that surgery was the only answer so I opened it up.

I did the usual thing of blowing all the dust out (with eyes closed) then, after washing my face, I took it all apart then put it all back together, making sure all the connections were good and firm. I turned it back on and, voila! it once more started working. I breathed a sigh of relief.

Not that I’d have lost anything because I have backups happening constantly but because it would have been a pain to get a new hard drive and then restore to it.

You see, I use the second hard drive for all my data (documents, temporary images, website files, etc) so it’s constantly in use. To lose it would be a pain.

But then, this morning, I started getting the messages again telling me it was for the boneyard. Sad, but true. I sighed with resignation.

A while back I purchased a 1 terabyte external drive which was going to be my new backup drive (the old one is only 500 gb and almost full) but hadn’t set it up yet. This was today’s job.

But not before I set off for town to shop and go to the bank. I set off nice and early so I could get back to my poor bleating computer but, lo and behold, the bank doesn’t open until 10 on a Wednesday. That’s annoying. I’d already been to Waitrose and Starbucks so was in for a three quarters of an hour wait. I decided the church yard would be a nice spot to read and wait.

On the way I passed Elphicks and suddenly remembered we needed new pasta bowls because of a strange mishap on the weekend. We use our pasta bowls for lots of meals and generally Mirinda is perfectly able to put it on the table after finishing dinner. Not this time. She missed by a good foot and it split into two all over the floor. Fortunately she HAD finished.

We saw some nice bowls the other day so figured I’d get two of them. The door to Elphicks refused to budge, no matter how hard I pushed. The sign plastered on the glass belligerently informed me that they didn’t open until 9:30. So, off to the churchyard it was.

After a lovely sit in the sun reading about early Chinese history, I wandered back to the shop, bought the bowls then headed for the bank just in time to hear the grating and screeching of the security shutter sliding inexorably up. I joined the queue for the general enquiries.

I had to pay some money into an Italian bank account (for our Como accommodation) and the tellers can’t do it at the normal windows. The guy in front of me was about 120 and desperately in need of assistance. Unfortunately, the guy in front of him was having a big problem with accessing his money and the one person on the desk was flitting back and forth helping him. He gave me a look that said sorry to which I replied that it didn’t matter.

The old guy in front of me did not agree at all. He huffled and shuffled from leg to leg, peeking at the tellers around the corner, debating whether he could get some sort of service if he left his place in the queue. Meanwhile, more people were joining the queue behind me. Eventually, worn out with waiting (it had been five minutes…literally…I was watching the clock directly in front of me) he made a beeline for the end teller. Pleased, I stepped forward.

Eventually another assistant came over and looked after me. No problem and it all took about ten minutes to move our money to Italy and I set off for home.

Meanwhile back at the computer, things were looking almost stable so I set up the new drive and began the laborious job of backing everything up on it. When you have five hard drives, this is a long job which, while being left alone for much of it, has to be checked regularly for errors or moving to the next drive. This has been going on all day.

This is a rather long winded way of explaining why there are no photographs on the blog today. I’m using my netbook and while I can upload from it, I cannot manipulate the images to the extent that I like.

It also explains why I haven’t embedded the new video of Molly singing.

Today was as gorgeous as yesterday was grim. Sun and blue skies, though bitterly cold, made for excellent photo ops. And, as Mirinda claims I do not include enough pictures of our lovely town in my blog, I aim to remedy that.

Here’s the castle as seen looking up Castle Street. As we approach winter, so the trees stop hiding the battlements.

Looking up Castle Street

Next we have the Lion and Lamb. Starbucks is through the left arch and Waitrose is the other side of the arches. I note with horror that the Christmas decorations have already started to appear.

The Lion & Lamb

And speaking of Christmas decorations, the front page of our local paper last week featured, as it’s main front page photograph, the Elphicks Christmas window. Elphicks is our own department store (I’m pretty sure there’s only one). So I thought I’d better include it. It looks as though Santa has dumped the sleigh for this year.

Elphicks Christmas window

Our beautiful church (St Andrew’s) taken from the car park opposite the Maltings. While it looks better from the church yard, the sun wasn’t in the right place and I thought this looked lovely with the other buildings around it.

St Andrew's church

And, finally, Gostrey Meadow with the beautiful willow tree. In the middle of the day, when the weather’s nice, this place is swarming with people and the swings and roundabouts, teeming with toddlers. It’s a favourite with Rafi.

Gostrey Meadow

Tomorrow is supposed to be wet and dreary again so this might be it!

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I finished building the auricula theatre today (it took me most of the day). It’s assembled and painted and presently residing in the shed. Now all I have to do is fix it to the fence. Here’s what it looked like. I used the obelisk to prop it up while I painted.

The auricula theatre - painted but not hung

After many days of sun and blue sky and temperatures hovering around the 30 mark, it rained today. When I rang Mirinda for her wake up call I told her it was supposed to rain at 4pm. After I hung up, I walked into the kitchen and it was raining. It was clearly a long time before 4pm. Not that it was particularly heavy rain. A sort of faint sprinkling of the garden. By the time I’d spoken to mum and dad, had some breakfast, dressed and left to go shopping, the sun was out again and the ground was dry.

The sun remained, hot and beaming, all day except for a brief moment as the clock approached 4pm when this massive black cloud, resembling the mother ship in Independence Day, started to move over the house, coming from the south. It was big and thick and laden with…well, nothing really. It just kept moving. We had no more rain.

Interesting, I was in Elphick’s today, buying Mirinda an eye mask (it’s very sunny at the flat and the blinds don’t block much light) and the woman who served me said I’d reminded her she needed to buy some because of thunderstorms.

I thought this was odd as well, thinking perhaps she actually meant earplugs but, no, she explained that the thunder didn’t wake her up, it was the lightening. I can’t remember the last time we actually had a thunderstorm so I’m not sure how much sleep she loses due to them.

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Oh, and Carmen had an FSI in the park today. And no Nicktor this week as he’s currently in Spain watching Spain v Portugal on his Grand Tour of Europe.

Woke up bright and early this morning then waited for Nicktor to rise from the dead. It’s half term over here so he’s taken the week off to spend with his family. Yesterday he watched his boys play 20-20 cricket (they won one game and lost the other) and had a great day. Anyway, it means he’s not at work so he didn’t have to leave at his usual early hour. I had the Talking Newspaper this morning so he dropped me off on his way through.

Today I was back to reading the Farnham Herald and it all went pretty smoothly except for poor Charlotte who lost her voice near the end. It was very odd because it just vanished. But we managed to get around it and just left her out the reading circle for the last few items.

I had a few funny stories today as well as a big reference to the pig racing at the Surrey Show. My favourite was the 80 year old Farnham woman whose grandson emailed her entry off to appear in The Times fashion supplement last Wednesday. She had quite a shock when they said yes and whisked her off to Kensington for a photo shoot. She shops at Elphicks and made sure she mentioned how we have so many wonderful independent shops in Farnham. Oh, I just love this place.

The weather has been fantastic the last few days and the park has been very busy as a consequence. It’s also because of half term. Lots of men without t-shirts and women in barely anything, lying down on the grass giving Day-z something to sniff and lick.

I’m forever on my guard anyway but today, especially as she had an FSI. I could just see it. Someone says “Ooo, what a cute poodle,” and gives her a big hug, pulls a face and jumps up splattering when they realise they’re now covered in fox poo! But we managed to get through the park without any incidents other than the FSI.