Home improvements
Time for a post that is not about horse racing. Because the gee-gees
continue to misbehave.
Good job I’ve got some Don’t-Do-It-Yourself projects to partially
distract me. The house has been in neglect for some while now and finally we’ve
decided to do something about it.
Starting with a new back door. A lovely new wooden framed
all-glass portal for the back of the house, manufactured with care and fitted
with precision by my mate GC. (All enquiries to http://www.compasstimber.co.uk)
I thought getting rid of the old one might be a little
tiresome. In fact the thing had about 40 watchers on E-bay and went for a tidy £40,
including pick up. The best result I’ve had since G-Force won the Sprint Cup in September. Seriously.
Arthur and Lisa from Wendover had bought to door. Lisa
texted me to say they would be over on Sunday morning to collect it. After a late night, screaming Toast Of
New York down the stretch in a sun drenched Santa Anita Breeders Cup Classic
(another taste of seconditis for me, but what a run, what a race…!), I flicked
open Sunday morning curtains to grizzly rain.
The phone jingled into life and Arthur was seeking last
moment directions in a thick Glaswegian accent. A few minutes later, his
neighbour’s blue Ford Mondeo pulled up with Welshman Pete at the wheel. Arthur
explained that they were hauling the PVCu half-glazed door and frame back home for
their new lean-to. A few moments late, under battleship-grey skies and siling
rain, Arthur and I were at either end of the reject door, blocking the pavement
at a rather jaunty 45 degrees, edging it towards the awaiting jalopy.
Pete was obliviously ensconced in his warm, snug driver’s
seat. Arthur raised his eyes heaven-ward. “Pete, Pete! For God’s sake! Open the
boot!”. He looked at me. “Just knock on the back window will you.” I did and
Pete appeared at leisure, a short and sprightly 83 year old. He lifted the boot
door to reveal a space ranged with useful (on other occasions, perhaps) car
maintenance equipment. I looked in despair at the back seats still upright, the
rear shelf in place and felt my arms lever from my shoulder sockets just a tad
more.
Arthur issued some instructions to the hapless Pete and said
to me “I don’t want to put the door down now I’ve paid for it. Don’t want to
break it. I’m a Scotsman you know.” “Ha!” I mustered some jollity. “Well, I’m a
Yorkshireman. You know what they say about us: Scotsmen with the generosity
squeezed out!”
He liked that. “I used to be a Redcoat at Butlins”, he
boasted. I felt my affable grin wane a little. I felt a Scotsman-Welshman-Yorkshireman
gag coming on. Not quite, though. “Do
you know how copper wire was invented?” Pete was rummaging around in the boot
and shifting seats around. “Go on?” I moved us carefully towards the yawning
saloon and glanced up at Arthur, his glasses slipping down his nose. “Two
Scotsman fighting over a dropped penny!” I chuckled and lodged the frame on the
lip of the boot. My muscles squealed with relief.
We pushed the door further in, scraping against plastic mouldings
and tearing at the seat covers. It came to a halt on the headrests with the
front seats pushed as far forward as they could go. “You’ll be sitting with
your knees up by your ears, Pete!”
The bottom of the door was sticking out of the back of car.
Arthur and Pete pulled down the hatch and wrestled with a couple of bungee wires
until the door was dubiously secure. Arthur was still on his red coat
re-enactment. “Did you hear about the Scotsman who was so tight-fisted he had
varicose veins in his knuckles? Ha!”
I waved them off clutching £40 in my own knuckles,
determined not too put too much of it on Eduard in the 3.45pm at Carlisle. This
proved to be a wise decision. Nicky Richards unexposed prospect mustered only 2nd,
unable to concede weight to the very fine Many Clouds under that one’s ideal
conditions.
The next part of our home improvement project was to the
replace the boiler. It was on its last legs two years ago when our plumber
shook his head in that way that tradesmen do, before coaxing a little more life
out of it. Alex the plumber, no mean looker, according to Mrs A, pitched up at
8am with a brace of lean, fit young men to do the job. I jumped out the door
and in to London thinking that at least Mrs A would enjoy an attractive
side-show as they ripped the kitchen apart.
The plan was for Mrs A to join me in London that night. We’d
booked a couple of preview tickets at a fringe theatre in south London close to
where I work that I’d been really keen to try. Of course it was bound to go
wrong. The boiler job took longer than expected and then the gas pressure was
inadequate, so we had chatty National Grid Man pay us a visit to crank up the
cubic metre-age, whilst asking Mrs A to complete the customer questionnaire so
he could get a certificate to show his kids.
Mrs A pretty much manhandled Alex (any excuse) out of the
door at 6pm, and somehow we made it to the bohemian Union Theatre bar by
7.20pm. A couple of stiff Rioja rojos and she was back on an even keel. The
theatre was a 55-seat off-West End gem built into the arches of the viaduct
carrying the Waterloo East line to Kent. We were invited into the auditorium,
clutching our drinks, in batches of 10 to sit where we chose. Dry ice and moody
lighting gave a whiff of Dio-period Black Sabbath gigs. Maybe it was expecting
too much to hope the score of this Howard Goodall-penned fringe-musical would
pack the same doomy punch.
Girlfriends was
hugely enjoyable though. And not just because there was a surprising amount of
shagging. The narrative was a little deliberate and a fraction naïve in its
portrayal of WRAF girls on a
bomber base during WWII. Nevertheless, the performances were excellent and the
production innovatively suited to the small space: because there was no sense
of division between stage and seating, the audience was drawn right into the
heart of the play. Although not into the shagging. Obviously. Everything else
was going on all around us. I think we were both more intrigued by the staging
than the musical itself. A perfect antidote to Rhythm Star being unsighted in
the 1.20 novice hurdle at Uttoxeter.
By calling in to check on the girls, we contrived to walk
past the best restaurants in Union Street and ended up eating the worst Thai
ensemble I’ve ever tasted. I was up half the night gargling water to dilute a
caking of salt and garlic in my throat deposited like a layer of basalt from
the alleged ‘green curry’. But I don’t like to moan about a tiny blemish on an
otherwise top evening.
Such Metropolitans. We were back in town for Fiona’s
birthday brunch bash a mere few hours later. Penkull & Barnes is in
Shoreditch which remains resolutely upwardly mobile. You can tell by the number
of eateries and bars that pretend they are in cooler-still Hoxton the other
side of Old Street by liberally misappropriating the word ‘Hoxton’ in their names.
Good afternoon though. Top class Bloody Marys and scrambled eggs til 5pm.
Nothing wrong with my system after that lot. I know how our radiators felt
after Alex the plumber’s power flush the day before...
Next on our home improvement checklist is a new patio. The
existing one was dug out and placed there by me about 10 years ago. The cracks
between the broken slabs are now so wide that they could be mistaken for the
holes in my punting strategy. We are starting to lose small children (and,
worse, crisps and olives) to their cavernous clutches.
James came round to price up a replacement. He seemed to spin a convincing yarn
about what needed to be done, but I was so entranced by his Rasputin-like beard
that he could have pitched for a house extension and I’d have tamely nodded.
Our neighbours have had some building work done at the back. From our kitchen window, where we previously gazed on fields, trees, wide
sunsets and small herds of impala, we are instead confronted by a brick wall.
To be fair, it is a lot better than I feared when I first saw the plans. James
the Beard ran his landscaping hands over the brickwork and nodded
appreciatively. “Nice job. Good pointing”.
He said it would be great to complete the edging of my new
patio with matching bricks if there were any spare. So I asked the builders
next door and they said they’d just chucked half a pallet in the skip out the
front. James left and I spent the next hour digging into the skip to retrieve
80 reclaimed house bricks and stacked them neatly behind my shed. The power of
the beard. Just waiting for the quote now.
We’ve had a long term plan to put a wood burner in our
dining room’s empty fireplace. After abandoning ambitious plans to link one
with a new boiler and create an eco scheme that would dwarf the Eden Project,
we settled on a nice model from a supplier in Chipperfield. The sales woman was
quiet, low pressure, informative and just very nice really. She booked us an
appointment with the installer, her husband Kev.
Kev arrived one Saturday morning and you would have never
put the two together. He bounced in, flexing wide, tattooed biceps and a wider,
tombstone grin. He didn’t stop talking for half an hour. Loud, quickfire,
repetitive stuff about the width of the fireplace, the length of the flue and
the size of his family. Entertaining. He was a man’s man and spent twice as
long talking to me directly as he did Mrs A. I found myself involuntarily
imitating his style. “WELL YEAH, WE THOUGHT THE JOB COULD BE DONE, EASY LIKE.
NO PROBS. BUT THAT AIN’T ‘ALF A SMALL OPENING. SMALL HOUSES THESE VICTORIAN
TERRACE JOBS, YEAH.” Going with the flow, I could even feel my shoulders start
to roll.
So we await the builder later today to tell us the extent
and price of the fireplace widening. Potential for this to be the death knell
of another project. Is nothing easy? Hope he arrives after the 2.15 from
Exeter. Haldon Gold Cup. Special race. I wouldn’t want to miss another loser.
We also want some outside lighting for the expansive new
patio that beardy James has probably sold me. Can I get an electrician to look
at a job that’s less than a full house re-wiring? No. Anyone know a decent
sparky?
One with a few racing tips would be especially welcome.
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