Category: Uncategorized

in the loft

We emptied the loft last night. perlmonger kept assuring me that there “wasn’t much up there”. He was mistaken. We emptied it into our bedroom, and the bathroom, and I became marooned in a wall of boxes; still, at least that made us sort it all before the evening was over – there’s yet another load in the car to go to the charity shop, and there’s another car’s worth for the tip.

Why did we have 15 assorted suitcases and bags? And six broken keyboards, a carpet neither of us have ever seen before, still more vinyl records, a box of clothes of mine in a size 12 (FFS).

Still, we found the boxes for all the monitors, the scanner, the laser printer, the slow cooker, the food mixer, the Remoksa, amongst others, which will make life a tiny bit easier in the next week. Every little helps.

outings

We hardly ever go out in the evenings here – we’re not far from Bristol, but we hate getting the car out at night, there’s never anywhere to park when we get home, and the bus service is very infrequent.

I note with some amazement that we have four outings booked already in Hull, and we’re not even there yet – the joys of urban living, where we can walk into the city in 20 minutes.

So we have:

  • a vampire production of Macbeth at the Hull Truck Theatre on 26 November, just 5 days after we arrive
  • Rob Brydon on 5 December. This is actually a bit of a cheat, as he’s on in Scarborough, but still …
  • The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain on 10/1/10, again at Hull Truck. I can’t tell you how much I am looking forward to this – they are utterly fab
  • and just now, from Hull Council’s Twitter feed, I find that Shami Chakrabati is giving the Wilberforce Lecture at the Guildhall in Hull on 14/1/10, and the tickets are free. And I have reserved two. She is followed on stage by our esteemed HomeSec, Alan Johnson, so rotten tomatoes may be in order.

Good, eh?

ticking the boxes

I have:

  • cancelled Virgin Media phone and broadband, and BT phone, and ADSL
  • done the change of address for British Gas (EDF can be done when we do the final reading)
  • cancelled the direct debit for the water rates (we owe them £17)
  • cancelled the Council Tax direct debit here (they owe us £75 – yay!) and informed Hull Council that we are moving in. £360 per year saving *there*, which is nice.
  • organised phone and broadband from Karoo (the only supplier in Hull) – £43 per month, as opposed to the £125 we’re paying now for comms, although it’ll only be one line. Still, it has a fixed IP, and a 75Gb allowance, and unmetered overnight, so that’ll do the backups from the web servers without impinging. Maddeningly, you cannot put your KC phone number *anywhere* as advertising (including our own web site) without paying the business rate, which I think is execrable.
  • Rented a big van for Monday, when we will take up as much stuff as we can – books, kitchen equipment, etc – and fit the catflaps, and so forth. Not bad – £70 from Enterprise for 2 days. And empty the self store unit, before they charge us another heap of money.
  • Organised the lorry – 3.5 tonne with tail lift. £75 per day, for 2 days. Also not bad.
  • Bought a dog cage for the junior cats to stay in while we pack and move, and for them to travel in. Iggy and Mustrum are booked into a cattery for 48 hours, as I suspect they’d simply leg it if they saw their life being packed into a lorry
  • Completed the forms for post redirection, which I will take up to the post office today, with all the sundry pieces of paper they need for ID

Now then – what have I *forgotten* ?

hairdressing

I had my hair permed last Thursday, and I’m really disappointed. It doesn’t seem to have taken at all on the top, which is very flat..

I suppose I must be brave and go and complain – anyone ever done this in a hair salon?

The situation is worsened by the fact that I’m moving 250 miles away on 21st, and have no time to let them sort it. Woe.

a day out

It was my birthday yesterday (pause for congratulations), and we skived an afternoon off.

Firstly we called over to the mechanic, where perlmonger had managed to leave the car boot cover after he’d cycled over to collect the car, then squeezed the bike into the boot, which was full of stuff for the tip. Then we went to the tip.

Then we drove over to Bath, ate fabulous sausage baguettes from The Sausage Shop, and had a last wander round the shops, purchasing a small metal pail to hold food compost in the kitchen (helpfully labelled “compost”). We currently use a big plastic bowl for this, because Modo, our compost heap, is right at the end of the garden, but when we move it’ll be outside the back door, so a small receptacle is ideal, and will take up less worktop space.

We also picked up a funky purple knife complete with sheath, which will be useful for the picnic bag – we plan to be old badgers up there, and take a flask of tea and so forth when we go coast walking. Oh, and an xmyth ornament of a moose reindeer; we have a tradition of buying one a year. I’m very bah humbug about the commercialism of the festering season, but I do like to relax, eat well, see friends, and decorate the house.

After that we went to collect a wooden loft hatch/ladder combo, which I’d scored from eBay. These are usually frighteningly expensive (well, frightening to *me*), but this was a real bargain at 50 quid. Astonishingly, there is no loft access in the house in Hull, and thus there is no insulation either. That’s under organisation, and grants mean you can get it done for £75, but there needs to be access to the loft to do it, and we thought we might as well put in a decent ingress/egress method.

We came home via Ikea – we’ve been looking at second hand kitchens on eBay, but decided that we need to live in it for a while, and so we need to buy some bits and pieces to make it useable. We don’t *think* there are any drawers in the units, so we bought a couple of cutlery holders, and a plastic tray affair for holding utensils, and a silicon tray for making small heart-shaped cakes, and a pack of ten hooks, and a cooker hood. That lot came to £35 – I know Ikea can be a pain, but they’re fab for stuff like that, and how can anyone make and distribute a cooker hood for £29? Beats me.

Back home for 7, as someone was coming to collect the lawnmower, which was eBay’d, along with a load of other stuff. Then the guilty pleasure of fish’n’chips, some crap TV, and bed at 9.30. How I wish I could shake off the after effects of this bloody hamthrax …

an out in the rain

It was perlmonger‘s twelvtieth birthday yesterday – i asked him if there was anything he wanted to do, and he said “not really”. So we skived the day off to go National Trusting.

We started off going over Burrington Coombe (behind a horse box) to Cheddar, and thence down the gorge (behind a coach) to Glastonbury, where we had a mooch around all the fey shops, and a nice breakfast brunch at the bottom of the town. It was just starting to rain as we headed back to the car, to set off for Stourhead Manor, an NT property I’ve been meaning to visit for years. By the time we got there, it was *bucketing* down, but there is a lovely Palladian house there to view.

Except not on a Wednesday, or Thursday; it’s shut then. The gardens were reputed to be lovely, and as we are enthusiastic, if sporadic, walkers, we were equipped with waterproof jackets and hats, and I also had stout walking shoes and a trusty stick. So we ventured forth – we walked for a couple of hours, I guess, all the way down to, round and back up from the lake, after viewing the rather minimal exhibition in the basement of the house. It was actually quite enjoyable despite the moistness, although I did wonder if my thin leather gloves would ever be the same – they were so wet that the silk lining came out of the right one attached to my hand, but I managed to get it all back together properly this morning.

We dripped our way into the tearoom and had a cream tea, then popped into the Farm Shop on the estate for some cream and parsley. They had a tub of beautiful Guernsey cream for half price – £0.92 – and gave me the bunch of flat leaf parsley for free, which I thought rather kind.

We bore them home through the rain and mist, and added them to 2/3 of the sirloin I’d got out of the freezer that morning, concocting a beef stroganoff – it was extraordinarily nice, the best I’ve ever made, I think. That was followed by some mince pies made on Tuesday with some puff pastry that was lurking in the freezer, and the rest of the cream. A jolly nice birthday tea, we thought, and a jolly nice day out, despite the rain – which doesn’t impinge that much if you are properly clad. Which we were.

p.s. We’re going to fit in Clevedon Court, Tyntesfield and (on Saturday, when we go to Taunton to see Show of Hands) Montacute House. Got to get the value from this membership before we move! And got to visit them before the end of October, when all the houses shut.