Jottings

Just some Jottings

Bumbles New Home:

Winter 2006

If the males of the species visit the Waterdine, behind the gent’s loo door they will see a picture of  the local hunt gathering for a days hunting, the picture was taken I would guess some time around the late fifties  early sixties, in plain view is the old garage, which we belive was once the stables.

When mother in law decided to sell up and move in with us, it was only on the condition that she had her own little home. Our first thought was to convert the garage, there are several firms that specialise in this sort of work, but after visits from many builders and two architects it became apparent that this particular garage was beyond conversion. The only option then was to demolish the exiting garage and either build an entirely new bungalow or install a lodge.

Andrew and Sharon at Black Hall have recently built several log cabins, and a visit to their holiday park convinced me that this was the way forward for us. We therefore decided to demolish the garage level the site and put a log cabin on the site.

Unfortunately none of the work could commence until we had the money to pay for it, or rather until Pam (mother in law) gave us the money to pay for it. So with trepidation I phoned Rob Wood a local landscape (artist is really the only word to use for is expertise), to see if he could do a rush job for us. I was happy that Rob could in fact start such a big job at short notice and agreed that he would start work the following Wednesday.   

I think the sun shone on that day for at least two hours, when the rain started Rob quipped this was the only job he had all winter in the dry and he was about to demolish the only shelter available. Since then we, or rather Rob, has had to contend with just about everything the weather could throw at him, freezing rain, ice, snow, the lot, for days on end Rob struggled through the rain mud ice and snow to build a massive steel reinforced retaining wall (in some places the footings alone go down 6ft) and then he had to level the site build in drainage, build a concrete base which had to be exactly level, and also install the base for the lodge. Oh he also built a pathway halfway down the bank, scraped part of the car park on preparation for a new garage; put a new top on the old septic tank, put in new drains in preparation for the new sewage treatment plant.   

As the pre-set day for the arrival of the lodge grew nearer rob worked longer and longer, as gradually the site took shape. Considering Rob has worked almost on his own, it is a miracle that as I sit here tonight with the lodge on two massive lorries, the crane the fitters all arriving at eight o’clock in the morning, they will be greeted with a completely level and tidy site, all ready for them, with extra landing blocks for the lodge, a hardstand for the crane and a hardcore roadway to enable the lorries to reverse onto the site.

I have taken a photo of the site, it looks like nothing has happened except the garage has gone, but the simple photo belies all the hard work that has been done over the past month.

True to form the weather has yet again turned against us, with strong winds and rain, forecast for tomorrow, I can only hope that the crane operator the slings man and the fitters will be as prepared to work through adverse conditions as was Rob. I do not envy them their task, swinging 6 !/2 tons (the weight of each half of the lodge) in heavy winds can be all but impossible I just hope it is possible otherwise I can see the lodge heading back down the motor way, or being parked in some roadside lay-by.           

Rejected By Swallows:

It was only after we had begun to demolish the old garage that Isabel remembered the Swallows which always nested in the rafters. What are they going to do this year?  just imagine how disappointed they are going to be after flying all those thousands of miles only to find that their homes has been destroyed, she said, as she headed out the door to ask Rob to please take the nests down with care. The intention being to put the nests back on the side of the lodge in the hope that the swallows would be prepared to accept the alternative accommodation.

When the lodge was in place Isabel made it one of her first jobs to cement the nests on a little ledge under the eves, but unfortunately her thoughtfulness was to no avail, when the birds did return they obviously did not consider the offered accommodation was acceptable, Isabel was quite concerned for a few days until I spotted the two pairs flitting in and out of Roberts nice new five bedroomed house which is being built just next door and had just had a new slate roof put on, as Robert has almost single handed been building the house for the past eleven to twelve years we felt that there was plenty of time for them to raise their respective families without any immediate fear of eviction.   

All That Glitters is not Gold

What sort of birds do you find using you bird table? the lady guest inquired as I carried her bags through the sunroom which  overlooks the bird table. After running though the various types of tits, finches, bigamy birds, nut hatches hedge sparrows etc. I said my greatest disappointment is that we never get the goldfinch, although several pairs can often be seen like erratic sudden beams of sunlight glittering through the trees, they never visit the bird table. Oh she said airily we get them all the time, you need to put our Niger seeds for them. 

Isn’t is amazing how coincidences mingle to make a fool of you, it was the very next morning whilst serving breakfast to the same lady, that I casually remarked on a bird pecking merrily away at the peanuts. I have not seen one of those before, do you know what it is? Oh yes she said airily it’s a gold finch! Honestly in the six years we have been here I have never known the gold finch to use the bird table, but since that morning we get them all the time now and you do not need Niger seeds, peanuts will do, but just in case I am of to the pet shop tomorrow to get in a small store of the goldfinches favourite.

We Wuz er Fust me Old China

Two years ago a lovely little river warbler used the swallows nest in the garage to rear its two chicks, luckily they fledged on exactly the same day that the swallows returned, so no harm came to them,  but there was a bit of a karpuffle initially as the swallows realised that they had a squatter. That was nothing compared to the argument that ensued last week when the House Martins returned to find that their nest had been taken over by a family of House Sparrows, what and noise the Martins made but it would seem the Sparrows hung on in there, because the Martins started building just round the corner of the house.    

Pam Nicks the best Birds

Whilst Pam’s lodge is being prepared she has moved in  the house with us, she has also commandeered the large cherry tree which is now festooned with her various bird feeders,, We have two sorts of woodpecker in the vicinity and it is the Greater Spotted Woodpecker which  has been visiting her feeders, but ignoring ours. It’s a very wary bird and always approaches the feeder by an indirect route, landing initially on one part of the cherry tree it gradually makes its approach by climbing along the back of the branches with occasional quick little peeks around until it is finally ready to commit its self.

Flying a Kite

The Red Kite is becoming quite a common bird nowadays, but it is still a rare pleasure to see one right over the house, we think it is because they a using the up draught from edge of the cliff  that they seem to hover just over the house before drifting off on the light breeze. We do not know for certain but suspect the at least one pair has taken up residence in the nearby woods, we have certainly been seeing the more often in the last year or so.

The Tardis an octopus and the Bluebell

I am sure that the local people must have thought Dr Who had arrived in Llanfair and parked his time machine at the Waterdine. None of us had seen anything like it before, Rob who had seen several of its type, thought that it had possibly been made in Russia. I must say its photo did not do it credit, it was certainly a lot bigger in the flesh than any of us had imagined, probably because at the last moment I had opted for the bigger version, not realising exactly how much bigger it was going to turn out to be. Its my age you see, when someone speaks to me in metric, although on one level I understand that a metre is a little bigger than a yard, that information does translate into a meaningful picture in my mind.

I am going on about our brand spanking new biological sewage treatment plant, our old system being on its last legs, we had decided to install this system to save Isabel the time she spends rodding out the drains, a chore which she was always called upon to do at the most inconvenient times. Isabel and I have a sort of life agreement, she likes gardening and I do not, so we agreed early on that if we bought houses with gardens that would be her domain, somehow this has translated to anything outside the front or back door is down to her, not that I will not help but for some reason my assistance is seldom called upon.

When it arrived it was about as big as large family MPV and was taller than Pam’s Lodge, which is all well and good except it was going to need a hole about twice as big. Rob who has been doing all the work, so far, scratched his head and told me that he did not think his little digger was man enough for the job at hand, which is a bit odd as he always calls it “her or she”, but never mind the ever resourceful Rob knew a man who would loan him a bigger digger. The only problem was that he could not get hold of it until next week, so the treatment plant had to stand in full view for nearly a whole week before the job of burying it could commence. It was Isabel who first called it the Tardis, as word spread (presumably that Dr Who was in residence) it became increasingly clear that most of the locals and some from further a field were making the trip inspect this strange object, the traffic flow increased quite substantially over the next few days, I counted as many as 15 vehicles in one day alone. 

The day arrived when “Big Dig” was set to arrive and Rob got strait on with the job of creating a very deep hole to bury the Tardis, it was all over in a relatively short time, the hole was dug the cement base poured in and allowed to set overnight, the next day the Tardis was set in place and surrounded with a thick skin of concrete, all that now remained was for the existing drains to be connected and we would be up and running.

I say all! Thank goodness Rob who had foreseen the possible implications had previously installed a temporary pipe to allow us to continue to operate whilst the work was being undertaken, because when he came to connecting the existing pipes he found not just the one or two we expected,  but pipes coming from all direction, as over the years a variety of different plumbers and non- plumbers had added various bit and pieces to the system,  even as he thought he had found the last one he discovered another and so on  until eventually rob had created a weird looking octopus of a drainage system, in all it took another three days to compleate the work.

But now we have a brand new sewage treatment plant in place and operating we have joined the green brigade, because we have to be careful not to upset the little enzymes on which the system depends, we cannot use ordinary washing up liquid, cleaners or bleach, luckily Isabel has found that Tuffins our local supermarket stock a compleate range of eco friendly cleaning fluids.

Oh yes the bluebell! When Rob was measuring for the hole, in a light hearted frame of mind I pointed to a single bluebell which was soon to be perched precariously on what was to become the very edge of the hole, knowing how much earth was going to be taken out, I jokingly asked Rob to make sure that he did not disturb the flower. It is either a testament to his skill with a digger or an act of god because after all the work had been completed the little bluebell was still in place, still proudly swaying in the breeze and next year perhaps hopefully we will have a little blue patch of its offspring heralding the onset of spring.   

champagne MICE AND ALARMS

In the catering industry, as you know we sometimes get weeks when Murphy’s law comes very much to the fore,  if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong, and usually at the most inconvenient times.

This has been just such a week, our problems really started last Sunday when we noticed that the drains were blocked, so that was a pleasant job for Isabel to accomplish, whilst I sorted out my work for Monday.

This week I had to finish the accounts for the dreaded VAT, which had to be in the VAT office by Friday. Well finish is perhaps too strong a word; start would better describe my indolence on the accounts front over the past three months. Of course, I had forgotten that before I could finish the accounts and produce the VAT return, I would also have to do the year-end accounts, which this time falls between the vat periods.

As my printer has been making a general nuisance of itself recently, I decided to splash out sixty-five quid, on a brand new model that would have the benefit of actually feeding the paper into the printing heads. Unfortunately, when I brought my brand new possession home plugged it in and installed the driver; I was dismayed to find that Sage, my accounts package, did not recognize the importance of the new printing device for its reports. The first P&L report was just a blank grey page. Knowing I did not have time to sort out this glitch; I rescued the old printer from the rubbish bin and plugged that in as well. Is it not strange when you have just purchased something commputerish the old thing which caused the purchases then starts to work perfectly?

I am not a great family man although I do own to two children, I do not see much of them, and have left their upbringing in the capable hands of my former wife. On Wednesday evening just as the first customers were arriving for what was going to be a busy night, James my assistant discovered that he had used all the cream!  I was just shooting out the door on a four-mile dash to the nearest open shop, when my daughter arrived in the company of her new boyfriend and dog. Of course, I did not want to be rude and abandon them all so soon after their arrival, so I piled them all into the car with me for the cream run. It all worked out in the end, as we waved them off at midnight, we did wonder what else could go wrong this week, of course I still had about two thirds of the accounts to wade through on Thursday.

On Thursday, everything went swimmingly; we have two very, very, good customers staying with us for the week, they are very good because, they are very nice, and  are very considerate, and very easy to get on with

Everything went swimmingly, until that is, the other room booked for the evening turned up, now these were not of the same type of customer. These are the more demanding type, so we are running up and down stairs with trays of coffee then back up with milk instead of cream, and oh! would you mind my husband prefers a feather pillow, and by the way you do not have a different room do you because I have this problem of getting into bed. We do aim to please and do not mind accommodating those extra little wishes that differing customer bring.

I then returned to the accounts for an hour or so before I wrote the menu and started to organize for dinner, there being no James this evening I was flying single-handed and the phone has just gone with a further table of four.

No problem, got it all sorted, was just having a quick cup of coffee whilst waiting for the first order to arrive in the kitchen, at which point the combined burglar and fire alarm decided to go off with a resounding deafening siren.

Now this is an inherited system, I do not know how many have inherited it from how many, whom they were , or who originally had it installed, but it sort of gives us a discount on the insurance so it is worth being there, although we never use it as a burglar preventative system.

When it does go off, of course the first thing to do is to check that it has got a reason for going off, and is not just expressing its rights as an inanimate object to remind you of its existence. So we all rushed around the property looking for the fire which of course we did not find, next job turn the noise off, keyed in the turn off number… no response… by this time the smoke alarm in the hallway upstairs was adding its own high pitched voice to the general cacophony. It took us all including Our longer term guest complete with toilet tissue hanging out of his ears, twenty five minutes to stop the alarms sounding, this was accompanies with lots of rushing up and down stairs and fetching of ladders and screwdrivers even then we had really no idea how managed this accomplish this welcome feat of silence.

One of the other residents expressed the hope that the alarm would not go off in the middle of the night and the comment if it did we should chuck it in a bucket of water. I patently explained that as it was attached to the ceiling and also the mains it would be a very foolhardy thing to attempt.

 All this time, Laura our young part- time waitress (full time Catherine is on holiday this week) has been steadily taking orders for food, from people who obviously seemed totally nonchalant about preparing to dine in a restaurant, which to all intents and purposes was in the processes of burning to the ground around them. There now`t so queer as folk!

The fire/burglar alarm is one of those, which has safety batteries built in and anti-tamper thingies, to stop the uninitiated disconnecting it. Therefore, although we had stopped it making a noise, we had not actually stopped it operating,

This salient fact, I was to discovery at twenty minutes to three in the morning, when I leapt out of bed to the resounding clamour of the fire alarm again, dreading the worst I quickly keyed in the wrong code to stop the damn thing before we were all doused with a bucket of water, I realised my mistake and keyed in the correct code and thankfully it stopped. In the ensuing silence and with my heart pounding in my head  I was then too nervous to go back to bed, so I sat on the stairs all night in the dark with my finger on the keypad ready to instantly respond should the need re-arise.

The good news is that as dawn lightened the surrounding gloom, I was in the perfect position to notice the water seeping out from under the kitchen door, of course someone had forgotten to turn off the tap to the dishwasher, which ordinarily would not matter, except in this case the inlet valve was leaking, and letting the water flow silently to add to the flood in the kitchen.

It was with great trepidation that we waited the arrival of our other guests, for breakfast, would we as we would normally, sing out a cherry “good morning I hoped you slept well”, thus leaving ourselves open to the expected onslaught of complaint about being woken in the night by the alarm, or should we fade into the background hope to evade any outburst.

In the event, they apparently slept though the nighttime commotion and were quite happy after a good nights sleep. Of course, the tiny rodent running around in the Breakfast, room did cause a bit of a stir for a moment, until a guest correctly identified it as a baby vole. The vole had apparently wandered in through the open garden door sniffed around a bit and then wandered out again. 

So Friday started with a mopping operation and a vole masquerading as a mouse, after breakfast I returned to the already behind schedule accounts and finally completed the job in time to catch the last post, so when the VAT inspector opens his mail on Monday I hope on finding our cheque he will give us the benefit of the doubt.

The alarm repair man did arrive on Friday at about ten thirty pm, and did a passable imitation of a plumber when he saw the antiquated alarm system, with a quick sucking of a of air through his teeth, almost like a reverse sigh, he said “goodness me I haven’t seen one of these since I did my training” to which my equally quick response was “well should know how to fix the Bl **dy thing then” Of course he was not to know that I had been up most of the night nursing the thing, but I was extremely grateful that he had added this late night visit to his already extended day to sort out our problem for us.

He did fix it…. well disconnected it anyway and promised to return with some antiquated electrics after his holiday and do a proper job. Until then we will rely on the separate smoke alarms, and the two dogs are becoming quite adept at sorting out customers, who are allowed, from deliverymen and hopefully burglars who apparently are not.

On Saturday, we had decided to allow James his first Saturday night in charge of the kitchen, and I would be first, second and third commis and washer upper.

Isabel taken the dogs for a walk and had told me to take a bottle of Champagne up to Our long stay guests room, as a thank you for being such very good guests and their help with the alarm on Thursday.  James and I were just discussing his menu for the evening when the guests arrived back, I asked James to keep them occupied so that I would have chance to run upstairs with their Champagne. Which all worked out well, although the guests  were perhaps a little surprised by James leaning out of the kitchen window to ask them how their day had gone and where had they been!

Later, Isabel said “you did take the Champagne to the correct room didn’t you”?

 “What no or Chr*st"!  I had of course not taken it to the correct room! I had taken it to anther guest’s room; these people were staying for just one night, for their wedding anniversary. They must have thought each other had ordered it, or that we give expensive bottles of Champagne to all our guest’s or worse still trying to increases our takings by adding un asked for Champagne to their bill.

Opps must go Isabel has just come in to tell me that a rabbit is in the garden eating the lettuce, unusual the contrary to beliefs they do not go for lettuce if there is plenty of other choice.  

Just before I do go, James told me a customer at lunch had ordered a Lemon Turd Cart for pudding!