Finding the Past

A packet arrived in the post.
My mother had discovered a collection of my old memorabilia, from before I left home for university, and had sent it to me. So far, it's too painful to examine, too difficult to remember how I used to be when a boy.

School music programmes, invitations, souvenir signatures, and letters. There were letters from pen-friends in Sweden & Finland and Australia, from friends in Stockton to me when I moved to Bristol, and others. It's a first glimpse into a life long-lost, that I'm unsure about examining too closely. I'll wait until some dull evening.

Freecycle

Our house is silting up.
We've lived here for twenty-five years, acquiring stuff and using it, then squirrelling it all away in the attics or spare room when we're bored with it, or when it's been outgrown.

So the attic and spare room are bulging at the seams, and we need to throw much of the redundant stuff away.
There's no market in old stuff, and most is of little value, so we have started to use Freecycle. It's wonderful: a website upon which one can advertise unwanted goods and have willing squirrels take it away.

This week, we have gotten rid of a jar of glass beads and some old ironmongery. Today we hope to give away some old toys of Tom's. Last year, we disposed of a windsurfer form 1983, and a shed-full of plant-pots, amongst other dross.
We're still advertising some more toys and empty files. That's the only problem, people who tell you that they want articles, but then don't arrive to cart it away.

Last week, we also made our first collection, a slow-cooker to decide whether this method of cooking will be of use for us as a household. The cooker is fully functional, but is obviously from the 1980s, judging by its decoration. So far, so good.

Ystradfellte

From about June to December, I didn't travel across the Bridge at all. In the last month, though, I have been four or five times.

On Saturday evening I opened an email from one my cycling mates, offering a space with a group going walking near Ystradfellte, near Merthyr on the following morning. After realising that a 7:30 start meant getting up at 6:30, I packed that night.

The terrain nearYstradfellte was soaked from the heavy rains we've been haing, and all the rivers were full and turbulent. The route that the four of us took included many waterfalls, three rivers, potholes, cliffs and woods. The picture shows Sgwd-yr-Eira in summer, but yesterday the flow was much greater, and the whole basin much wetter.

The walk necessitates walking behind the waterfall to cross the river, as there are no bridges for some miles in any direction. We were soaked through with icy spray, the back-draught sending drops of water up underneath clothing that was designed to resist normal rain falling downwards. We had sleet and hail during the rest of the walk, as well.

Six and a half hours of muddy plodging, through wonderful woods and valleys, made this a walk to repeat. In summer, I reckon, when it would be an absolute joy.

More slow stew

Our house seems to accumulate clutter; junk that arrives as a useful or desirable object, then decays into a waste of space through lack of use and time.

Last year, we discovered Freecycle, a website for advertising stuff that you don't want, and giving it away. We cleared loads of space from the attic and the shed, including a twenty-three year old windurfer with most of its bits. This week, we advertised a huge box containing many examples of a board game that Porklet had made for her Young Enterprise project. Surprisingly, we had lots of replies, and we managed to give everything away. This gives us more space for yet more clutter, I think.

And, for the first time, we gained something from Freecycle. Moonface had asked for a slow-cooker, to see if they were any good. So, I tried on a twenty-year-old Swan cooker, with genuine 1980's ('70's ?) beige flower designs on its shell. The results weren't bad.

First, I combined some leftover ham with puy lentils, veg, chorizo and the weekend's chicken stock to make a rich, farty stew. Moonface and I liked it, and the kids were tolerant. Then yesterday I made a beef daube with lots of onion. The beef wasn't as tender as I like it, but it ensured that the food was ready to eat earlier than would be possible with normal cooking. We'll give the slow-cooker another few tries, then decide whether to keep it or give it away again on Freecycle. My main gripe is that it's smaller than I would like: I prefer my cooking pots to be large when making stews.

More wind

The previous post was somewhat prophetic, since yesterday we had the strongest winds for nineteen years, with a dozen or so people being killed in the UK. There wasn't much damage around here, and all we lost (so far as I know) was a pane of glass from the greenhouse.

My rooflight survived well. I looked at it more carefully a few days ago, and saw that I had been more careful than I remembered, having provided the plastic with a protective flashing of lead to hold it in place; the lead in turn is nailed to the wooden frame of the skylight. There was a little leakage of water from the driven rain, but nothing that could not be mopped up.

Wind

I dislike strong winds when I'm at home: they scare me. Not scare, exactly, but worry.
There's a large roof-window set into the flat part of our roof, which provides light for our stair-well. It's about a meter square. About fifteen years ago, some cowboy roofers managed to drop a hammer onto the glass, so they had to replace it. Unknown to us, they replaced the glass with a pane that was about half an inch too small for the frame, so they bodged the new glass into place with mastic and putty.

Some years later, the huge lumps of putty which they used dried out, and cracked away from both the glass and frame. Consequently, the glass slipped and started to fall into the stair-well. Fortunately, I'd installed a secondary glazing panel of transparent plastic just after we moved into this house, flush with the ceiling below the rooflight. If it hadn't been for the extra layer of plastic (polystyrene, I think) we'd have had ten kilos of glass falling on our heads.

Anyway, I had to do something about it, quickly. Extracting the pane of glass and lowering it to the ground took quite an affort, and hoisting anything to replace up to our roof, wasn't easy. To keep the rain out, I replaced the undersized piece of thick 6mm glass with some thin, 2mm transparent acrylic we had lying in the shed. It has worked fine, for more than five years (I think) but the sheeting is really too thin.

In high winds, it flutters. It goes brrrrrrrrr when the wind is in the wrong direction, and I worry. What if it breaks, and flies away in the night? Every time the wind rises, I have difficuly sleeping, and I wake at the sight noises of the plastic bending. I ought to replace it with something thicker; say 5 or 7mm, but it will be lots of effort. Or we could buy a prefabricated rooflight, but that would cost loads of money and almost as much effort to organise. So instead, I worry when the wind is high.

Slow stew

It's good to be appreciated sometimes. The kids liked this.

500g chuck or stewing steak.
700g onions
1 large red pepper
2 parsnips
500ml passata or ragout
herbs, seasoning

In a 22-25cm stewpot:
Chop the onions & fry until soft & transparent.
Chop the meat into 2cm cubes, & brown with the onions.
Add the red pepper, diced.
Add the parsnips, also diced.
Add the passata & herbs
(Add a dash of soya sauce or chili paste for taste)
Bring to the simmer, then place in an oven for 2hrs at 150C.

Serve with baked potatoes (>1hr at 150C)

It keeps warm, well, for stop-out wives arriving late home from work (that's what she says)

"Our place in France"

Another friend has fallen, & bought a house in rural France.
Middle-age, middle-class Brits.
Why do they do it?
Just because they can buy a beautiful shell of a house in France for the price of a wrecked garage in the south of England?

This time it's my long-time confidante and childhood sweetheart, who is purchasing a semi-ruin in a tiny hamlet in the Correze, miles from anywhere useful. It's "only" one hour and three-quarters drive from Limoges airport, she says. Some people I can understand, if they are intensely private with few friends and a restricted social life in the UK, but what's the gain for an average Brit of middle years? Better weather, yes. Better food, possibly. Only if you have access to a city and aren't living in a rural area which closes for winter. A better way of life? Well, if you slowed down you'd have more time and more friends in the UK.

We had a discussion about this subject a month or so ago. Once the excitement and industry of converting & renovating your new home is over, what are you left with? A country pile, with few local facilities, where you have little understanding of the way of life, little appreciation of the local community, and no-one to talk with, not really closely. What's the point?

To be fair, Fiona may be an exception. Her French is better than average, and she has at least lived near Tulle as a potter and nursing help for several months. And her family in the UK has grown up and her daughter lives many miles away. But, she's not rich at all.

There are similar numbers of French living in Britain and Brits in France, but they are different populations. We send over the near-retirees with cash to buy their rural beauty. The French send their young energetic singletons, who find it difficult to get work back home, or who want to explore a little before settling down. They live in our cities, and blend into our life seamlessly. And frequently they settle; my best mate from school married a French woman who came over here in her mid-twenties.

Bellevue

I had to check on the progress on some building work today.

It's the first time for several years that I have had to climb up narrow ladders & scaffolding. It was harder than expected; not because of the climbing itself, but because of the narrow gaps in the scaffold tower floors. I'm broader than I used to be, mainly at the shoulders. I found the same problem when crawling under a floor a couple of years ago, when sliding through holes that I had made in my twenties became a problem. I was skinny, then.

However, in spite of the wind, the climb was worthwhile. I needed to check what was being done to the high wall and the coping stones, and the views were fantastic. Now I'm faced with all the admin work.

Welcome

Welcome to this world for Thomas Joseph James Brynfield , born this morning and weighing 10lb 9oz.
That's huge, but he's healthy.
My first girlfriend's third grandchild, Abi's second child, a brother for Amy.

The Held (i)

We went to Wales for a few days over the New Year, with a group of about twenty friends and families. We stayed in a bunkhouse converted from a farm barn, at The Held near Brecon.

http://www.heldbunkhouse.co.uk/

It rained while we there. It rainsed so much that the surrounding fields were sheets of water, and on our first morning, we woke to find that our bedrooms had a couple of inches of water in them. I do mean a couple of inches, enough to cover our bare feet and soak rucksacks. The level went down over the morning, and was sucked dry by noon, but some of our party were very unhappy for a while.

We didn't do much walking because of the wet weather, so we had to spend our time talking and eating and drinking. Such hardship! Nevertheless, our short walks into the hills were fun in a masochistic fashion. We weren't cold and The Held is comfortable, so it was a good long weekend.

Mixed News

Should we be happy that someone is now settling down with a partner after being on her own for most of her life, or should we be sad at all those wasted years?

We've known "Big C", a tall beautiful athletic woman, for over twenty-five years. We used to see her frequently but much less so since she moved first to Australia, and then to London. In all that time, we've never seen her in a relationship. We understood it at first, because in those days, she was a Christian member of a church that strongly disapproved of any extra-marital sex at all. But over recent years, we wondered. She's fun to be with, good company, and (as I said, good-looking) We wondered if she was gay. When asked, C vehemently denied it, explaining that she just didn't feel want relationships with either sex, and that she also felt disgusted by the idea of sex with a woman.

But times change.

We recently learned that C has moved back to Australia again, and is seeking citizenship as a person in a same-sex relationship. We're really happy for her. It's a very mixed feeling, because the implication is that for very many years she has been unable to admit to being gay, nor to her long-time relationship with the woman she loves. And that inability to admit herself to the world is very sad. Nevertheless, both Moonface and I are so pleased for C, and wish her all the best in her new life, and in becoming an Australian.