Tag Archives: floor

Hard work and good meals

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A glimpse of the new floor in the study

A kind of order has been restored to 22 Aspland Road. The new floor is all down, and only one thing remains to be done – get  a carpenter (Gary) to reduce the oak post under my desk sufficiently to get it in the space now available. Not quite sure why Mark couldn’t do this. Apparently he didn’t have the right saw.

The filing cabinets presented the most difficulty, because they had to me emptied and filled again each time they were moved. The problem was exacerbated because I took the opportunity to do some resorting of files – mainly grouping them more rationally but in some cases doing some thinning out. Very tiring work, but I’m pleased with the result. Moving the actual cabinets wasn’t the problem we thought it might be, and we’ve also got the hall (Gemmell) bookcase back inside and full of books. Dot thinned out the dresser. Of course we now have stuff in the garage that needs to be disposed of – particularly our futon, for which there will not be room when our study has been converted into a two-person room. (Next stage. Gary again. Hopefully we will also get him to fix the catch on the attic trapdoor.)

At present my car is in the garage to be serviced and MOT tested at huge cost (“It’s the big one”). I’m hoping to get it back before I need to be at the surgery to discuss my blood pressure. but I also want them to do a proper job on the lights, which haven’t been working properly for some months. Pressure? No pressure. None at all. No, really.

Had a very pleasant few days to offset the hard work in the house. On Saturday went to the Greens with Judy for a lovely evening. The Veseys had also been invited, but someone had got the dates wrong. So it was just the five of us plus Anandi and her fiancé David, who are lovely. Saw some photos from Howard and Anna’s recent Ethiopian holiday, made fascinating by their comments and enthusiasm. Lovely meal too. Teetotal Judy gave us a lift, so were able to enjoy Howard’s excellent wine.

Last night’s Valentine Day meal at the Eagle on Newmarket Road was also superb. I had a smoked salmon terrine, followed by the best ribeye steak I’ve had for a long time, and we shared a meringue and fruit sweet. Setting very pleasant, a rose for Dot and service first-class. Could hardly have been better. We didn’t drink there because I was driving, but we came home and finished the evening with a couple of glasses of Prosecco.

Earlier in the day Vicky came round with Amy and George. Jared was away in Kent because his mother had died suddenly (though she had been unwell). Amy and George were pretty lively (respectively), and of course George had to climb the stairs. Lot of illness around: my aunt Josephine’s friend Joyce has recently died, and Josephine has moved (at least temporarily) into a home on Cecil Road. My nephew Joe is very concerned about numbness in different parts of his body (CT scan clear), and his brother Sam has dislocated his shoulder again. Saw Joe outside the Cathedral in the remaining snow on Saturday: he had just given a 2½-hour lecture. Had a chat with him and Birgit, who was waiting for him.

Last Friday I took the afternoon off to go to North Walsham while Mark finished the floor. We had a meeting of the group which will probably be known as Chronicle (Caroline, Rob and me) to discuss putting a Paston show together suitable for presenting at the Coast festival late this year, as well as at Dragon Hall next year or St Peter Hungate (some time). This last followed a meeting with a Hungate trustee on Friday which established that they would be keen for us to do stuff at the church, which is a prime Paston site as well as being significant in its own right. He bought tea and cake at the Briton Arms for Rob and myself – has to be a good sign. The three of us are now going to do some writing centring on Margaret Paston from Mautby.

I led the service on Sunday, and we followed that (after coffee) with a rehearsal of four songs aimed at the Seagull on the 26th. Went surprisingly well considering I was working on the tune of one of them till the last minute. They are Bernadette, Living on a Fault Line, I didn’t think it would come to this and Where you go I will follow (which is not a stalking song). The cold weather has been abating since then – probably not causal – and for the last couple of days it’s been damp , windy and a few degrees above freezing.

After our North Walsham meeting last Monday I called in to see Jessie and her new bathroom. Roger was there too. The bathroom looked really good, though disturbingly there were two metal tubes left over. She seemed in good form. Elsewhere in the county someone has been found to be stealing money rather systematically from another of Dot’s relatives. Who? Sub judice, I’m afraid.

Beeps and compressions

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First stages of the top layer go down – QPR fan Mark in the background

Day Five, and Mark is downstairs again, finishing off the kitchen. He laid most of the kitchen and hall floor yesterday, and I have to say it looks pretty good. Today he’s doing the edges, then the bit under the stairs; after which, he’ll start on the study. He assures me he will definitely finish on Monday. We’ve established he’s a QPR supporter who used to live in Acton, where I worked between 1969 and 1972 on the Acton Gazette.

The whole floor process is painstaking. After laying marine ply with great precision, he covered the floor with some wet sticky stuff which had to be left to dry, then planed down to be even flatter than it looked already. Then a section of the floor was glued, and the strips of Spacia laid – again very, very precisely, starting with a long strip down the centre.

Yesterday I visited the surgery to get a blood pressure monitor attached to me by Mrs Minter (making it a Minter monitor). She said her parents knew the people who built our house before emigrating to Australia. Apparently their name was Nash. Doesn’t ring a bell, but the facts fitted. The blood pressure monitor is an extremely irritating device which reminds me of what mobile phones used to look like (and weigh like) before they became usable. Every half hour it beeps and then compresses my arm to get a reading. Frequently it doesn’t work, so it repeats the process. At night it doesn’t beep but does do the rest every two hours. I wasn’t aware of the compression, but it must have woken me around 6am, and I didn’t get back to sleep after that. Pretty annoying, and it’s also uncomfortable and makes doing certain things difficult. I estimate it’s put my blood pressure up about 30% which, considering I was told it was very high when Mrs Minter took it at the surgery, has probably resulted in an increase of about 40% over the last 24 hours. I reckon the only way you can get an accurate blood pressure reading is to take it without the victim knowing. I’m doomed.

Amid all the beeping and compressing I went to the inaugural meeting of the St Augustine’s Poetry Group last night, while Dot attended Developing Consciousness, which I guess is roughly the same thing without the rhythm. There were three of us at the poetry group: Stuart (whose baby it is), Nic Golding and myself. Surprisingly, it went quite well. Stuart and I read a few poems; Nic hadn’t brought any because of “printer problems”. We’re meeting again next month.

Trapped by a wet floor

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Gary checks the hole in the kitchen floor, shortly to be covered up permanently

Third day of the Great Floor Replacement Experience. We have just spent about four hours trapped upstairs because the floor is drying in the kitchen. Dot devised an ingenious method of getting the front door locked, which involved a very long piece of string and an open window, plus the co-operation of the floor-layer; then we watched several episodes of Battlestar Galactica (none of them particularly good) and waited. We’ve just been down to put the dinner on: Dot observed that I was walking where it was wet; so I was sent up again. We’re both feeling quite hungry, and I don’t like the way she’s looking at me.

The GFRE started on Monday when the assistant pastor at Surrey Chapel, who happens to be (rather appropriately) a carpenter, came and took up the carpet, then screwed down the chipboard, some of which was squeaking. Unfortunately he also cut the alarm wire, so we had rather a lot of noise for a while. I wasn’t sure it was going to stop; so I rang the company rather frantically and eventually an engineer arrived – but not before the noise had stopped of its own accord. Anyway, he fixed the problem, and all seemed to be well – until we went to bed, when I tried to set the alarm on its part setting, but it failed to do what it should.

So I rang again yesterday morning, and towards mid-afternoon another engineer arrived, puzzled a bit and eventually put it right. I brilliantly left him alone with the floor-laying guy (from John Lewis), who persuaded him to tidy up some cable to facilitate the laying of his marine ply, so it was clearly not as ill a wind as I’d thought. The JL guy is about halfway through, I guess, with most of the marine ply down, and some sticky stuff over the top in the hall and kitchen which had to be left to dry. He hasn’t really started in the study yet. Eventually we will have a wood-simulated top layer which I believe is called Spacia, or something, and has a very good reputation as looking good and lasting a long time. This sounds very good to me. The longer the better.

In the midst of all this I went to Dragon Hall yesterday to see Sarah Power about fixing a date for a Paston event there in 2013. Getting into Dragon Hall is a bit of a challenge. Both Sarah’s phones were off, but I eventually made someone inside hear, which was a bit of a result.

Moving furniture and poems

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This morning at 22 Aspland Road

Seem to have been working quite hard, which is not like me. On Friday, while Dot was out and about, I listened to the King Street interviews and wrote five poems, four of which I’ve sent off a few minutes ago to the person in charge of the project. Most of my time, however, has been spent moving furniture in preparation for the grand floor-change enterprise, which will take up most of this coming week.

Some of the furniture has gone in the garage, some upstairs. The big filing cabinet is in the downstairs loo (all the files were removed and then replaced), and the smaller one in the utility room with the fridge. Smaller things are upstairs or (again) in the garage. We tried to move the big table into the garage, but it was beyond us. We may be able to manage it tomorrow, when Gary comes to take up the carpet and screw down the chipboard. He is a carpenter, so he should be able to move tables.

This morning, after about three or four inches of overnight snow, we decided to walk to church. Quite pleasant too, except that I arrived home absolutely exhausted. I don’t know why, because we’d had a meal at church. Admittedly, walking in snow is tiring, but we’d had no problem in the Peak District. Maybe moving furniture took more out of me than I thought. We bade farewell to Matthew at church today. He is off to London this week. However, more things are now happening at church, and I’m optimistic about it.

Last Friday we had an evening meal with the Kibbles. Rod is a nice guy who goes into things in great depth. I try to keep up. Next day (yesterday) Dot got a ticket from Jonathan to watch Norwich beat Bolton 2-0. Lucy is out of hospital, but far from well.

Sometimes the sacrifices work

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A rather bad picture of Amy having a larger-than-life experience in the Cathedral

Dot’s dizziness persists, and after trying fewer tablets with poor results, she made a late decision to go to the doctor’s this morning. By chance she got a woman doctor who was very thorough and knew exactly what was going on – apparently. Now Dot is going back on Thursday for the doctor to do a manoeuvre  with her neck which should shift some crystals that are causing the problem.

After this encouraging news we went up to the garage to get a quote on fixing some scratches on the car, apparently caused deliberately by some merry passer-by. We decided on the cheaper option, which will be accomplished next Tuesday. I’ve also booked the car in for a service, which will not be cheap.

Yesterday I met with Caroline and Rob at Fakenham to discuss forming a new PHS offshoot (us) to arrange arts-related events.  We’re concentrating on the COAST festival at the end of the year, but hope to fix up some lesser performances before that. Rob is drawing up a structure, but the performance will include readings, narrative, possibly monologues and hopefully yet-to-be-written songs. Quite exciting, and it might enable us to sell some of the recently published books.

After this I drove to Aylsham to return a book of vinyl samples, since we had decided to go with John Lewis on the grounds that it’s much more expensive. No, that can’t be right. It’s on the grounds that they’re very thorough and have a much wider range of possibilities. While I was out, a JL man came and measured the space with a tape measure. I mention this because it seems so low-tech. We had earlier (on Saturday) borrowed two vinyl samples in order to decide between them – this proved unexpectedly difficult, but we eventually made a choice. The man (another man) came to pick them up on his way home and, having seen the house, immediately plumped for the one we’d decided on. Needless to say, it was not the one that was on special offer.

My sermon on Sunday seemed to go down well, though I had a lot of trouble preparing it. Surprising how often that happens. In other news we attended the opening of Harriet’s brother’s shop last Friday, which was amazing in the sense that no effort at all had been made to make it look appealing. The shop front was just empty. One or two people were mooching around, and there was good wine and Sri Lankan food on offer (we bought some for the freezer), but although H’s brother Francis was charming, it was hard to see how it was all going to come together. Maybe it will become a cult food shop and go nationwide. And maybe not.

I’m making some progress with Amy’s story but am not entirely sure where it’s going. I have turned the last Little story into a booklet, ready to be posted to Oliver, but I’d like to finish Amy’s story first. Must try harder. Have made no progress at all on the five poems I have to write for Ian Fosten, and a couple of CDs have arrived from the King Street project that I’m supposed to listen to and be inspired by. Have read a Kate Atkinson book I was given for Christmas and started on the second. Not bad.

Last night I was called in as an emergency reserve for my chess team (I am having a chess sabbatical, but they were desperate), and while Dot was at a Norwich Youth for Christ meeting, resigning as a trustee, I managed a presentable win against Jim McAvoy featuring a rather nice sacrificial attack. Sometimes they work; sometimes they don’t. Here it is (for chess lovers):

1 c4 f5 2 g3 Nf6 3 Nf3 e6 4 Bg2 c6 5 0-0 d5 6 d3 Bd6 7 Nc3 0-0 8 e4 d4 9 Nxd4 Bxg3 10 hg Qxd4 11 Be3 Qd7 12 Bc5 Rd8 13 Qb3 b6 14 Be3 Ng4 15 Bg5 Re8 16 ef Qxd3 17 Be4 Qd7 18 fe Qxe6 19 Rae1 Qf7 20 Nb5!? Qh5 21 Bh4 g5 22 Nc7 gh 23 c5+ Kf8 24 Bg6(!) Qxg6 25 Rxe8+ Qxe8 26 Nxe8 Kxe8 27 Qg8+ 1-0