A white Christmas

Our first Christmas here is going to be a white one.  Hooray.

The tree was quite a challenge to get home as it didn't quite fit in the boot of the car, but it was worth it.

We even have real angels at the top!

Merry Christmas from us.

And from him.

A plan of action

We have an architect coming to chat, examine, wander, wonder… how exciting.

It’s all rather fanciful as we can’t do any major work on the house just yet, but the idea is that we might have a more cohesive plan if we get an architect to help us to consolidate our ideas and hopefully come up with some good ones of his own.

I think I have a good sense of how things work.  How a household functions, how you need to move between rooms, that kind of thing.

Ian is best on detail, especially given a remit.  For example, in London I dictated that kitchen cupboard handles shouldn’t catch, should be easy to hold, and shouldn’t be shiny – then Ian went away and found great handles.  And he’s much better on space than I am… I could imagine a staircase would be best in that corner… Ian can work out if it could fit, and how.

However, we don’t always agree, so an architect would be a good referee.  We don’t know about local planning laws, and an architect will.  We don’t know about clever new ways to get light into a house or great new windows that would suit the house, and the architect should.  And some things we just can’t work out… like where to put the loo so it can be accessed from the pool easily without being in the middle of the kitchen.  And finally, it might help us to avoid costly errors… putting in underfloor heating then needing to dig half of it up.

We’ve had to postpone once already as Ian didn’t get back from Dubai in time (and didn’t want me to get my ideas in first?) but are hoping to meet him next week.  Hooray.

Spaghetti special

This is absolutely nothing to do with our house, but by special request, here is my revolting daughter doing revolting things with her spaghetti.  I am not sure I'm quite willing to believe that the two ends are attached, but if they're not she's certainly managed to shove a lot of pasta up that little nostril.  (Clever, huh?)

Someone out there's got a sense of humour

Our shower doesn't really get you wet.  I guess it could be said to be a shower ahead of its time.  Back in the 80s when the world was wanting everything to be bigger, better, faster… and showers to be wetter and more powerful, no-one was really thinking about the environment.  Except perhaps the person who designed our shower.  No water is wasted.  If you are washing or rinsing your arm, then your arm will be wet, but the rest of you will pretty much be dry. 

At the weekend Andrea told me that it’s not her personal trainer that attracts her to the gym, but the glorious, powerful, abundant showers.  Andrea’s shower is great.  I used to think my parents’ shower was pretty mediocre.  My parents’ shower is great.

You don’t really hang around in our shower.  You concentrate while you’re in there.   Concentrate on getting wet, then concentrate on the getting the soap off your body, no dawdling.  Then one day I the second light on the shower caught my eye – the first is to tell you the power’s turned on, but what does the second tell you?

The second light is labelled “low pressure”.  I laughed out loud.  So I’m not sure our shower was designed by an environmentalist ahead of his time.  I think it was designed by someone with a warped sense of humour.

Disco nights

It’s cold here.  I am reliably informed by those with thermometers on their cars (our car’s been reading -4° since its brief encounter with a hedge during the January snows) that it has been -10° today (though the BBC dissents).  For those who still work in “old money” that’s 14°F.

The cold has lead to several discoveries today.  The first was that we cannot get into the garages in cold weather.  We don’t keep the cars in there, but we do keep our Christmas boxes in there.  Our advent calendars are in the Christmas boxes.  One door is frozen shut; the other the lock is jammed, perhaps should we manage the lock we’d discover that the door too is frozen.  I think it’s just the ground in front has lost its usual give and the frozen mud needs a bit of clearing.  Guess where the shovel is?

My most recent discovery was that the bidet is very warm.  Well, not the bidet, we couldn’t get to the bidet behind the boxes even if the need for a quick wash were to strike during the cooking, but the bidet room.  I keep finding random heat pockets around the house and they’re all in the oddest places.  The guest room is incredibly warm too.

And the cold has also given us our very own outdoor disco.  We seem to have two choices with our security lights outside – to have them on full time or to have them on the security setting.  As they are 500W bulbs, we prefer to have them on as little as possible.  But the cold must be affecting them.  We have been treated to a disco all afternoon and evening – on, off, on, off – not even Oriana has been known to flick switches for as often or as long.  Perhaps the bulbs will burn out and peace will be restored.

Widow Twanky

I could fund our renovations by opening a laundry. 

We have two washing machines, one tumble dryer, and one washer-dryer – I’m all set. 

Except I’m not.

Old Norman’s washing machine has been driving me nuts.  It’s a small quibble, but when it’s finished it has to be turned off, then left for a minute, then you can open the door.  When the washing machine’s in an icy unappealing corner of the house, having to remember twice to deal with the laundry is a bit too much for me.

I initially thought that as well as my just hating Norman’s washing machine, it was also a shame to use it because it’s so uneconomical – no fuzzy logic, no great spin.. but now I’m not so sure.  I’m never tempted just to put a couple of items in the wash.  I wait until we’re desperate, till we have no pants, till Ruth’s got no school uniform left.  A full load every time – that has to be efficient.

So Ian agreed to switch over to one of the other washing machines.  Pretty straightforward, just pull the machine forward and switch over the pipes – but no.  The machine’s so old that there’s a hot and cold pipe… and they’re both stuck.  WD40 made no difference.  We’re going to have to get a plumber. 

Meanwhile, clambering through to the washing machines and tumble dryers to do any laundry now is like making your way through the jumble of furniture at an antique market to examine the forgotten commode in the corner, except that you have to do it with a basket of smelly washing under your arm.  Laundry has become so much fun.

The timer on the boiler’s also stuck, but fixing the timer that means we have to have the heating on full time doesn’t seem so urgent.

Locksmith

When we bought the house we were given two keys, both for the same door, and a set of keys to the garage padlocks.  Amazing.  This whole house could be secured with just one key.  Secured? 

A bag of keys appeared.  A whole bag.  One key, by luck the first I tried, worked for the only other external door for the main house.  So why all the others?  We think they’re all for internal doors.  Why would you want to be able to lock all of your rooms?

The swimming pool door could easily be opened from the outside, even when locked, so not surprisingly its key was hanging by the door. 

The utility room door barely latches; we would often pull it closed behind us then find it was open a few hours later – usually after noticing the fresher quality of the chill pervading the house.

Ian has been heroic.  He’s secured the swimming pool doors with real bolts and a lock that works.  It was cold and laborious but he got it done.

He’s been less fortunate, but no less heroic, with the utility room door.  We can now lock ourselves in, but we can’t unlock the door from the outside.  Half way there.

When you realise how long the little jobs take, the big ones suddenly look really daunting.

Things that go scrabble in the night

Sometimes there is a strange sound up on the roof.  Or is it in the roof?  It’s a scraping sound, almost like something falling down the chimney, but it’s high up.  Sometimes the scrabbling sound intensifies.  Often it sounds like it’s coming from the top of the wall.  The top of the living room walls are dusty unvisited places with the yellow concrete straw tiles sloping over them, hiding goodness knows what.  But often goodness knows what sounds like it’s alive.  We found a lot of rodent and bird corpses and don’t doubt that their relatives are still alive and well and living here too.  We just haven’t met them yet.

We are pretty sure that the curious sound that scratches and scrapes and occasionally tumbles down the roof is actually outside the house, but we don’t know that it is, and we don’t know what it is.  I could almost swear it’s the branches tapping on the roof, but there is no tree above that roof.

But much, much worse is the sound in the bedroom.  That too has a scraping sound, but it’s more intensive.  And the bedroom ceiling isn’t so far away; I can almost touch it.  And the bedroom has a false ceiling so there is definitely plenty of space for a colony of creepy things to be very well settled up there.  And the absolutely worst thing about our nocturnal visitors is that they come at around 5am.  We are woken by the sound, mesmerised and unable to relax till it stops.  I don’t know how we’d find out what’s up there, but I’m not sure I quite want to know either.

We need a cat!

Dom’s big idea

Dom has decided we must get the sundial working.  Now most sundials just work… at least they work if the sun shines.  Ours does not.  Ours does not have the upright that casts the shadow to tell you the time so we would need to replace that.

There’s another catch.  Our sundial doesn’t get much sun.  It’s indoors, on the sitting room wall. 

So Dom’s idea is that we install some clever lighting to cast the shadow at just the right time to tell the time on our sundial. 

To add to the complications, Dom doesn’t want anyone to know how the sundial works.  So he doesn’t want a simple track with the light moving along it casting appropriate shadows.  He wants clever spot lights strategically placed to cast the right shadows without anyone realising it.  No problem.

When Melanie comes and works out our lighting for us, we have a new challenge ready.  Melanie says it’s all about layers of light.  I’m trusting her layers will provide everything from crisp midsummer shadows to hazy shadows for overcast days, all telling the correct time, of course.

Now there’s a project to blow the budget on. 

At the end of us we should have the only 24-hour sundial in the country.

Disco cook

Our kitchen floor is nasty.

Everyone has seen the kind of carpet tiles, very thin cord, about two foot square, laid out like a chequerboard.  In our case the tiles are in chocolate brown and a muddier brown.  At least they were 30 odd years ago.

At the edges, away from the units, they are just ugly.  You can even see the original colours.

But as you get closer to the middle of the room and over to the units, they get thinner, and darker, and shinier, and stickier.  If you go to the sink in your socks, you stick.  You pick up your feet as you walk and your socks take that extra split second to follow.  Woe betide anyone who needs to kneel down to find something in the cupboard under the sink.

I told a mum at swimming.  She grinned broadly: “Like a nightclub floor!”  Then she was lost in a moment’s reverie.  I doubt she’s been to a nightclub this century, but she remembered, and she was right.

Maybe we should hang the glitter ball in the kitchen.

We're wellie here

Ian bought wellies.

OK so they were on sale along side bike equipment, but he did it.  Somehow that feels more like a commitment than shelling out all that cash and moving our stuff in.

He's barely been in the garden since we arrived, but now, at least, he can.

Bonfire night

There goes the village's combustibles and the beginnings of our claiming the garden as our own.

 

I'm not sure that this picture does justice to the bonfire.  Even as we left it had really only burnt one side.  Magnificent.

You say tomato and I say...

I have just googled the Indian bean tree and discovered that it's native to America.  I had assumed it was a tree from the Indian subcontinent... introduced to Britain by a colonial district commissioner who'd thought the tree would add interest to his garden back home in Surrey.  Wrong Indians.  Ruth never used to be able to understand the British Indians she would meet here were nothing to do with the American Indians she would learn about from her grandfather in Connecticut.  And here I now am muddling my assumptions too.  But my little American children have an American tree in their garden... it's like Norman knew we were coming.  Thank you, Norman.

Remember, remember, the fifth of November

Since learning that villagers can contribute their garden waste to the village bonfire, I’ve been feeling pretty obsessive about taking advantage of it to clear the garden a little.  An acre and a half of overgrowth (if such a thing exists) is a little much to put into a green bin for fortnightly collection.

I am not the only one.  The village gardens have been humming with activity this week and every other house has a tree company van outside.

OK, so I am the only one.  Whereas every other garden’s had a short back and sides with a chainsaw, I have been working with a little hand saw. 

I started at the gate.  There was no reason other than that I’d had a little advice from Dougie: cut all that back, the somethingorothers and the roses, it’ll all grow back.  And he also warned that the security light would be responding to the warmth of the plant growing round it, and security lights have 500 Watt bulbs.  Blimey.

So I slaved.  Shh, shh, shh went my saw.  Clip, clip, clip.  All with the backing band of the neighbourhood chainsaws. 

Then a nice man from the council turned up.  This is a conservation area so we can’t do any tree work without permission (not that I can really believe that all those branches of the village bonfire come with the full 6 weeks’ notice planning permission).  A sycamore that lost a branch over the summer and there’s an ash that the tree man thought should go so he applied for planning permission to take them down.  The ash is at the very back of the garden, hanging over Tim’s rather tidy garden and the broken down fence.  Ian had assumed the worst of the fence, children taking over the garden and we’d shoo them away and be cursed by the Selfish Giant.  But no, the fence is down because it was Tim’s shortcut to Norman whom he cared for in later years.  Tim looks like he’s well into his 70s himself, layered in cardigans and good cheer, and it’s hard to imagine him as a nursemaid.  It turns out the King Charles spaniel we met over the summer is Tim’s – come to share Norman’s chocolate biscuits but Norman and his biscuits are no more.

The niceness is, I assume, a characteristic of tree men rather than council workers.  They are like mountain air.  Their love of nature and ability to name everything they see is somehow energizing.  He told me that we have an Indian bean tree.  You can’t eat the beans.

The nice man gave more advice on how far back to cut the climbing plum.. did I imagine that name?  I cut it back some more, but my heart was no longer in it.  It was the nice man’s fault.  My long walk to the ash left me feeling I was in the throes of the gardening equivalent of fiddling while Rome burns.

That was Tuesday.  Wednesday was swallowed up in taking Oriana to view her new nursery.  They were impressed how well she settled, but of course really it was some kind of sick social experiment in which I deprived her for a fortnight of the company of anyone unrelated then watched her desperate quest for attention. 

To my great relief, ladies’ night in the pub is but once a month.  Well after midnight various of my fellow drinkers started to bow out, apologising that they were party poopers.  I accepted an offer for a nightcap at someone’s house – in for a penny, in for a pound – and got home at 2.  But Ian could not be persuaded to do the school run.

Time to clear the cobwebs.  I opted this time for branches large enough that they’d be pain to get to the tip.  The ailing sycamore I was told is hardwood and would make great firewood.  Perhaps so, but it was so brittle that I could snap off even quite large branches.  We had several bonfire-trips’ worth of branches.  Ian was suitably unimpressed.

The fallen sycamore branch

A nude branch and its debris

And ready to go

Well, perhaps the gardening was a waste of time, but it did blow the cobwebs away... and anyway, you've to to start somewhere.

And the stills

Perhaps a little easier on the eye that my dreadful filming - I might not know what the right career choice would have been, but it seems I was right not to go into movie making.

From the house

Signs of life

Rear part of the main garden

From the same place, west

I love these gates - pity they don't work very well

Looking under the grape vine to the gates

A spot of work needed

The granny annex

The way through the woods

Same view, same angle

We're going on a bear hunt...

I love this picture - worth turning sideways to see it

Not tomatoes, swimmers

Speechless

So this is it.  The tour complete, depending where it starts.  The vines grow on old electricity poles balanced across pillars taken from a former church.

A big old garden

So this is it.  The main garden.  It looks a little grey but that's because of the big mow following its months of neglect.

This is taken from towards that back of the main garden (near the trees) and then heading over towards the garages.  They are sound, but no longer have electricity (presumably the supply when when the main house was sold off circa '83).  It was mainly empty when we moved in ,but did contain a non-functioning freezer and a couple of Christmas puddings that had disintegrated to powder wtth a few nuts and raisins lost at bottom.

Pool side

Down the little steps by the swimming pool.

 And behind the pool (that's the building that looks like a cold frame).  This is where we should grow vegetables.  Easy ones that promise to grow despite our black thumbs (though I've manged to avoid showing the bit that would be good for planting).

It's a bit dark in the wood

Filmed on the older camera and quite late in the evening... but it gives the illusion of a small wood rather than an overblown hedge.  It's all a bit Blair Witch Project.  Then out to the light.

These are for Hilary

As promised.  A garden tour.  Starting with the orchard (orchard in the loosest sense... a few fruit trees offering an excuse not to mow every week.

 

Unpacking the unnecessaries

The kitchen’s pretty much unpacked. Files are well, files. But we have boxes and boxes filling the sitting room marked “Ornaments – Fragile”. I thought this would be pretty straightforward. Two big display/bookshelves have been stored in the garage for a year, too tall for our rental house. I gave my sister a display cabinet when she moved house so a bit of space was lost there, but not as much as we’d gained. Or so I thought.

I have been unwrapping for what seems like hours.

I love the tall Chinese bookshelves because though the footprint of each is only like that of a bedside table, they stand about 8 foot tall and have five shelves each. Five different styles of art and pottery can be displayed near but not next to each other. I love them. Actually, they don’t look so good with the stone walls, but they won’t last forever. I still love the bookshelves.

But I have been struggling. As I’ve unpacked, it has slowly begun to dawn on me that for the past two years we’ve had cheap Ikea shelving tucked underneath our windows. In each of the last two places we’ve lived, it has fit perfectly (tall Ikea bathroom cabinets turned on their sides and only ever meant to be temporary) and as been home to the bits and bobs of our ornaments. Photographs have gathered there. Tots cannot damage the wedding bangles and bells from Cambodia so they can rest within reach of eager hands. But most of all, my mother-in-law’s pottery production over the past two or three years has become more prolific and more beautiful, no longer the tiny wobbly bowls that served as handy ashtrays for that rare breed of visitor The Smoker, but perfect pieces that you want to pick up to enjoy their shapes and textures. We have yard after Ikea yard of them and suddenly they have no place to go.

To date I have been gently cursing the packers when I find that “hall coats” contains my clothes that I’d rather have preferred near my bedroom than under the stairs or that “playroom books” contains files that now need to be hefted upstairs. But this late in the day, the mislabelling can be a godsend. The “living room ornaments” tag has me scouring the shelves wondering where on earth they will all go, but opening the box to find a waste paper basket and a lamp is cause to rejoice.

Finding the pair to a set of candleholders or recognising and ornament by its shape even among the wrapped wrapping gives me great pleasure.

Finding our wedding photo in a padded envelope marked “screws and fixtures” made me laugh. Is that how the moving men saw our marriage?

I’m nearly there. I think.

A gardening deadline

Everybody who knows anything about gardens tells us something we ought to be doing.  In fact, everybody tells us.  I’m just guessing they know something.  Well some of it’s obvious.  Even I know that bushes should not grow out of the guttering.  But I didn’t know that the heat from plants can be enough to set off the security lights, though it is obvious that those particular plants need cutting back.  Well of course the roses up that wall need cutting back, they say.  Are those roses, I think.  We’re not allowed to cut trees over 3.5 metres (or thereabouts) without planning consent, but how to know which of the trees are actually bushes that have got out of hand?  Even Ian is getting into the swing of the talk (not the action): We can’t compost sycamore or horse chestnut leaves.  Where the hell did he learn that?

So, I don’t know what I should be working on in the garden, but I can make a pretty good guess at a lot of it.  I don’t know how to bring happiness to our elderly fruit trees, but I can see that releasing them from the ivy's embrace would be a start.  And I can see that a lot of stuff just needs a good trim.  So then my next dilemma.   Where does it go?  We can bag it and load it into the car and take it to the tip.  We can compost some of it (but what?)  We can burn some of it, I assume.  But I really don’t know what, when or how.

But today I went for a little wander with the girls.  I hadn’t wanted to deliver thank you notes for the flowers and rock cakes till I could speak again, just in case I bumped into any of our welcoming new neighbours and could only whisper to them.  Now I am with voice (in a croaky cackly Hallowe’eny kind of way) so the overdue thank yous could be delivered.  (Of course we met no-one.)  On the green there is the beginnings of a very large bonfire.  “No Fly Tipping” it says, village waste only.  We can dump all our garden waste and contribute to the village bonfire.  Perfect.

So now I have a gardening deadline.  Guy Fawkes' night.  Ruth’s not had a haircut since we left Singapore and Oriana’s never had one – I am not good about trimming anything… but now I have a deadline.  The boxes can wait.  It’s time to have a go at the garden.

Calling Hollywood

As this blog is being read in Hollywood (nowhere else, but that's beside the point), and as we all know every good story gets turned into a film these days, I feel I should add that the film of the great swim story told below has already been made.  Sorry, Jonathan, but you'll just have to get your next screenplay from somewhere else.

The last swim(s) of the year

Yesterday Ian decided he had to take the plunge.  We've owned this house for nearly a month and he hadn't yet had a swim.  Since the girls first took their dip (which they declared to be coooold at 68 degrees) the temperature has dropped substantially.  But, hey, Ian's tough and it was no colder than the waters of San Francisco when he did the Alcatraz swim.

Jump in, a quick jog to the far end and honour is satisfied...

So there we have it.  Ian has had what is probably going to be the last swim of the year.  Cheered on by Oriana.  As cold as Alcatraz.

But wait...

We have an Alcatraz hopeful up for a bit of late-night skinny dipping.

A bit too chilly for skinny dipping after all.  But put on a threadbare swimsuit and a hat at a jaunty angle and then a swim is well and truly on the cards.

Dad, you've been pipped at the post.  The Last Swimmer of the Year (so far) is definitely Ruth.  (We did have some video evidence, but as it was so late at night the video is just black with some shrieks and commentary.)

And as I've totally veered off the subject of the house and its progress, I should add that Ruth got her 800m badge today.  Alcatraz here she comes!

Oh, and I should also add, because it's actually about house progress, that while Ruth and I were at swimming then doing the very tedious task of getting the old house clean (nothing more depressing than looking backwards when forwards has so much to offer), Ian was getting the washing machine running, actually doing some much-needed laundry and pruning the tree which is currently preventing the washing line from turning.  Clean pants, anyone?

Reality check

OK, so I was just kidding in the last post.  We have a little way to go.

Quite literally a long way to go.  I can guarantee that every item in each of those boxes is not in the right room.

Did I mention the moving guy said he had never, ever moved so many pictures.  I daren't ask him if he'd ever done gallery moves as I feared the affirmative.

All upacked?

It's looking pretty good... if you look closely enough.


Definitely time to relax.

 

Read a little maybe.

Whichever way takes your fancy.

Put your feet up, Ian.

Wait a minute, are those cozy toes the same ones I see relaxing behind all those boxes that are still waiting to be unpacked?

He doesn't get out much

I found the widget so time to play visual catchup on the move so far..

This is what Ian gets up to when the girls go to bed.

The problem with packing

We found the duvets… eventually.

We found the car keys, which were needed after Ian locked the main set in the car.

We found the shelves for the oak bookcase.

We have found all sorts of things.

But we have not found the Nokia phone charger, the widget to transfer pictures to the computer, or even my pyjamas.

As a result, my visual record of this house, this move, has rather dried up.  It’s a shame.  The transformation of the garden is amazing. And Ian’s been shooting rockets to the ceiling, and to Jesus’ head.  But the video evidence is sealed away… for now.

We’re alive

The alarm woke us first.  Too early, it was the alarm set for weekdays, but not holidays.  Then the alarm to say the heating engineer would arrive soon.  Too cold.  Better to snooze.  Then Ruth arrived, cheerful and chatty.  I reached out to touch Ian who I’d last been aware of many hours ago in my dreams as I curled away from his cold touch.  He was fully clothed but for the jeans.  He’d been too cold to shed any clothing last night.

He was right.  There was a heavy frost this morning.  The cold had not been only in our imaginations.

I chose my woolliest socks.  Oriana chose a short sleeved dress.  Ruth chose shorts.   Are we related?

But back to the house, which is supposed to be the subject of this blog. 

The boiler took a while to service.  Norman probably hadn’t used the timer for several years and it’s seized up.  We will have to set the time to fit his settings, rather than set the time and adjust the settings.  The boiler is at least big enough for the house – a US gallon per hour.  As Ian put it, Who needs a mortgage when you have a heating bill?  There are two valves by the boiler; one leads to the radiators, the other to the pool, should we wish to heat it.  A further valve half way along the sitting room releases the water to the other end of the house, ie the bedrooms, bathrooms and playroom, which Norman didn’t choose to heat in later years.  The radiators have fans to blow the heat into the room, which isn’t a bad solution to a room with high ceilings that would suck up the warmth.  Some of them even work.  The hot water works off immersion heaters.  We could have washed last night.

Just as the heating guy was packing up, Dougie and Dean arrived to cut the grass.  I showed them around.  The grass has been knocked down by the rain, but back in August it was tall enough to hide Oriana completely and Ruth had only to duck to be hidden too.  Since then it’s been lying thick on the ground: a bed of hay, just like in the stories.  This morning we crunched through the frosty thickness.  You can’t cut grass like that with a normal mower, even if you have one.

By the time I came in from showing Dougie around, Ian had pans at the end of the sitting room catching the drips.  It was getting rather musical.  I got buckets.  We only had two so I had to supplement them with the liner from a pedal bin.  Ping, ping, ping.  We turned off the heat, at least to that end of the house.  Hey, at least the sun had come out.

Our next visit came from the nurses from the vaccine trial Oriana’s involved in.  Only blood tests today, but Oriana hates them so hid under the table for a while, ran away to the loo, and was miserable while they took her blood samples and then gave her the pre-school boosters that she’d have had to have regardless of the trial.

Someone from the heating family returned to give us warmth without rain (though now we’ve tried the shower we realise we might have been better with the hot water dripping through the ceiling than the so-called shower in the bathroom).  Apparently it was frost damage, nothing major.

Just as Ian conjured up a very late lunch the King family turned up for a reccie.  They always seem so competent about everything.  Farming and military childhoods – a very practical combination.  The kids played.  I showed them round.  We drank tea.  More boxes not unpacked.

When all had left, I raked the grass.  I didn’t manage the whole garden, but there are mounds of hay around the place.  Now we just need somewhere to put them, something to carry them in… before the girls spot them and make sport.

The girls have bathed.  Ian has showered.  I am the last of the smellies.

Deep freeze

It’s a long time since I’ve been as cold as I was last night.  By the time I went to bed the chill had cloaked me.  I daren’t move for fear of disturbing the air pockets in my clothes.  My fears were well founded.  The bedroom far colder than my space by the fire.  I stripped slowly, exchanging socks and trousers for some big woolly socks knitted by Ian’s mother.  I didn’t take off my shirt at all, just peeled my bra out from underneath and put my nightshirt on over the top, cursing gently the movers whose for no apparent reason chose to move my pyjama bottoms which had been conveniently located in my bedside drawer.  I forced myself to wash my face, my fingers webbing with icicles.  When were my fingers last so cold that I couldn’t hold my book, couldn’t bear to be out of the covers to read?

The first day of the rest of our lives

We’re really here.  It sounds rather idyllic, on the sofa in front of the wood burner in the sitting room, with my husband on the other cushion, just and arm’s length away, and my gorgeous daughter who couldn’t sleep curled up between us snoring gently.  The reality is a little different. 

I’m sitting forward to type, which means that soon Ian will be too cold to type any longer.  The Omani power station will probably have some rather erratic financial objectives thanks to his numb fingers.  Ruth’s toes are so cold I can still feel their mark on my thigh 20 minutes after she’s wriggled away.  The fender is in front of the hearth, but a few feet to the left of the fire, perfectly placed to bruise ankles.  Bookshelves in the middle of the room.  Boxes everywhere.  A lampshade on the mantel that glistens with cobwebs.  The umbrellas warming themselves by the stove.  Oriana’s activities abandoned around us.  It’s really, really cold.  We don’t drink hot tea here; it doesn’t exist.  The room is vast; it will never be warm.

But it’s great. 

I cannot believe we could swap our standard London terrace for all this space.  It takes 47 paces from the bookshelf in the guest room to the bookshelf in the study.  I am getting fit just moving books.

We’ve been moving in since Wednesday and now we’re finally here.  Two guys packed all day on Wednesday, filling the house with boxes.  Mum thought the girls would be bored and might prefer television.  They weren’t bored.  They were climbing over and tunneling through the assault course of boxes that filled the ground floor.

On Thursday the boxes started arriving here.  And flowers did too, from our new neighbours.  The kindness brought tears to my eyes.

The movers left.  Ian and Ruth turned up.  Ruth euphoric with her new uniform.  Leaping around the sofas in blue and gold, thrilled with her new school.  By the time the new uniform made it back to show Granny and Oriana it was rather furry. 

Friday.  A school trip, packed lunches, and one last day dressed in red.  I unpacked all day, leaving Ian supervising the final boxes, the contents of the garage, the stuff from Mum and Dad’s.  I had just finished the final kitchen box, when they arrived with more.  More of everything arrived, even more for the kitchen.  The cupboards are a little shallower and shorter than modern ones.  Bottles are too tall, plates too wide.  The mugs are miles from the tea, the wooden spoons from the stove and the serving bowls don’t yet have a home at all, but we are making progress.  We will get there.

Another neighbour bearing gifts – rock cakes.  I devoured almost all of them.  What did she make of me, whispering my introductions?  Could she hear me at all?  Will word spread that the new lady cannot speak?  Will my voice come back soon?  It’s been a week already. 

Our first post-furniture guests.  They didn’t take their coats off.  Very wise.  But Melanie was here at the very beginning.  We were staying with her when the frantic messages started arriving saying we must cut our bank holiday short to see this house.  She looked at those first internet images with us.  It feels right she should have been the first to see us in-situ.

The beds are made.  I am yawning.  I cannot hide from the cold forever.  If Ian could swim Alcatraz in skin, then I can run the race to my bed and go skin… at least long enough to replace my clothes with a few layers of pyjamas and socks.

The first load arrives

I dare not look

It is twenty to three in the morning.  I am just at the end of almost sort-of kind-of getting the downstairs ready for the packers tomorrow.  They are arriving at 8.30, which is the exact time that I am usually hustling the girls out of the house, five minutes late for school.  Upstairs isn’t doing too badly, apart from our room.  I have piled it high with the girls’ clothes for the next few days and have done nothing about packing for us. (Ian opted to abandon his UK packing – ie to leave it to me – in favour of making his flight suitably equipped and dressed to meet clients.)

So, today I have taken the girls to school, packed a load more kitchen stuff to take to the house (trying to make Friday a bit more tolerable), met with another builder, cleaned a lot more and come home to a coffee and a flapjack for lunch before starting the tidying that precedes the packing.  Of course, I’ve done this tidying several times already this week, but this time it’s serious.

I collected the girls, packed some more, waved Ian off to Frankfurt, packed some more, got soaked going to borrow caster sugar (I hadn’t anticipated baking when I moved the kitchen contents), listened more attentively than usual to Ruth read as she’s made it to a new level, picked up pens while Oriana made cards for her teachers and showed her the letters for all the words she wanted, made biscuits with the girls for Oriana’s class, burnt sausages, unloaded, reloaded and run the dishwasher, completely lost my temper at poor little Ruth, washed the girls and done bedtime stories, done three loads of laundry – the washing and the ironing part – got the downstairs ready for packing “to stay”, “ready to pack” “please leave” “pack Thursday” etc, loaded the car with second-hand uniform, junk modeling boxes, biscuits, school bags, Easter eggs to give away, a cardigan that isn’t ours, and….. and then I crashed the car.

Complete idiocy.  Now the other car’s gone to the airport I wanted to put the loaded one in front of the garage so I wouldn’t be parked in by the moving truck.  I swung round, went crunch and ripped off half the front.  It made a single clunk and has peeled away like a snagged fingernail, leaving a crescent shaped bit hanging off.  I daren’t look too closely.  I have no idea what to do about it, but need a plan before the school run in less than six hours.

It was probably the most expensive journey, all five yards of it, that I will ever make in my life.

I had envisaged musing upon cleaning and pointing and woodworm and underfloor heating and ceiling tiles, but that will be another day now.

We’re off

We spent rather too long this morning on odd jobs at home.  Sheets leapt off the beds begging to be washed.  Eager agents called to sell us a fabulous holiday for Mum’s 70^th (oh, the wanderlust… the cruelty of my having to plan an exotic holiday when the most exotic place we’ll be going in the next decade is a Thai takeaway).  A long chat with Dougie about how we’re ever going to transform the huge bed of hay we’ve inherited into a lawn.  And a glimpse again into Norman’s life through the eyes of the swimming pool man.  He obviously enjoyed his occasional visits to get the pool ready so that the elderly Norman could enjoy one his increasingly infrequent swims.

As a result we were only able to manage a few short hours of cleaning.  I am still working my way round the kitchen.  I swear the units are breeding.  The kitchen’s such an important room to be able to unpack when you move in that I have to get it done.  I just don’t know how.  I’m not sure if it was the grease that was getting me down or that my happy little helper had abandoned me, preferring to leap around the living room in her tutu.

And they days are filling up.  Parents’ meetings with the girls’ current teachers and going to get Ruth’s new uniform clash with Ian going to Frankfurt.  What do you do to say goodbye at school when you’ve actually already kind of said goodbye in July?  Now we have an address and a phone number so we should organise our change of address cards.  I almost forgot to cancel our current phone line today.

And on top of that, I have just committed to bring our move forward by nearly a week.  It will be better, we’ll have the whole of half term week at the new address… but I must be mad.  We start packing on Wednesday (when Ian's in Germany) and move on Friday.  A week to go and we’ll be gone.

Ra ra roomba

Exciting stuff.  I set our new roomba to work today.  Funny the things you don’t notice when you buy a house: there’s no door between the guest room and the sitting room (agent’s naming) and I’d never realised  I’m not sure how that will work if we have guests, but I’m also not sure that any guests will actually stay in the house.  I can see the excuses now, urgent messages causing them to race back to civilization before unpacking their pyjamas.  I bet those that do stay opt not to wash and I wonder if any will dare to place their bare feet on the worn bottle green carpet or the flock carpeting in the guest bathroom.  Courtney has already observed the comedy of the bathroom “mirror” that is a window straight through to the bedroom and beyond to the garden.

Oriana and I picked up stray wires, closed the doors we could, and set the roomba to work and pressed the big button in the middle.  Off it went.  Round and round in a spiral, then it shot off to the other room; we didn’t have batteries for the beacon that prevents the roomba from roaming.  We watched, fascinated.  It cleaned away – leaving all the dirt behind.  So, full marks for performance, zero for effectiveness.  Time to read the manual.

Days that are gone

It’s confirmed.  What fun.  There were lots of clues.  A lot of bidets.  Every bedroom has a private shower.  The garden is planted with a huge number of screening leylandii giving privacy to even distant corners of the garden. 

Norman apparently held wild pool parties back in the 70s and 80s.  Lots of gold lame*.  Our house and garden was the scene of fantastic debauchery. 

I’m sorry it will all be a bit tame from now on.  Garden nakedness will be under 10s, the tutus spinning through the curtains on the gallery will be on little girls and late night dinner conversations as likely to be domestic as esoteric.  

But what fun that our house has history.  And what fun that Norman's private life was so different from his radio persona.

(* Oh dear, how do you do accents on a blog?)

A word about my husband

While I’ve been melodramatic about finding the compost bucket under the sink and scrubbing off the remains of a dozen missed potato peels, Ian has been labouring away at the nastiest of jobs.

Having moved all the salvaged wood from the tree cutting to the pool room, he turned his energies to cleaning out the utility room.  The cobwebs there are like a layer of webbing across the roof.  You don’t see them.  They just change the dimensions of the roof. 

He dealt with them all.  Sadly, even my dead spider Norman has been dealt with, but for his heroic work I can forgive him the loss of Norman.  And now he’s sprayed for woodworm.  And he has plans for spraying for wet rot. 

And he even got the wood burner going.  It works.  We know where we will all be huddling this winter.

Splash

“Are we going to the house today?” asked Ruth.  I expected my reply to elicit a groan of complaint as she’d just popped down to show Granny her tooth, now in her hand after a morning of grotesque twisting, and returned with two brand new books.  She grinned, “Can we swim?”

I told the girls to wear old suits.  The ones they usually wear are thicker fabric and despite it being a bright and sunny day might not dry in time for their lessons, or worse, might get left behind.  Coats and wellies are forever in the wrong house now.

The next thing I knew the girls weren’t packing swim suits, but wearing their threadbare favourites, long since banned from public outings.

After all the excitement of getting ready, they showed no interest in swimming once we arrived, but instead scooted and biked round and round outside.  Oriana shouting crossly that Ruth was in front of her.  Mum cobbled together some lunch and we basked in the sunshine.  But then they remembered the pool.  Open the doors and the pungent sweetness of the horse chestnut hits you.

It was about 68 degrees in old money (20º celcius) so not as cold as we might have feared, but the girls thought it was freezing.  Ruth leapt in and out with shrieks of delight.  An audience preferred.  Oriana couldn’t quite bring herself to go all the way in, but got up to her middle.  Perhaps I should have left the cleaning for another day and joined them… next time.

First guests and Naaarnia

Our first visitors.  So exciting.  I baked a cake in their honour, but was unfortunately distracted discussing Mum’s 70^th with Dad.  Instead of coming downstairs fresh from my shower 45 minutes later to slide a fabulous Guinness cake out of the oven before going out to dine with friends (eat your heart out, Nigella) I found the cake all over the bottom of the oven and not even a crumb to try (laugh your socks off, Nigella).  The cake has topped my Disastrous Cake League – worse even than using self-raising flour with baking powder consoled only by my mother’s helpful comment “well at least you have tall ceilings, dear” as Ian’s birthday cake rose, collapsed over the side of the tin, rose again, and collapsed again.  At least that time the cake did cake – until it collapsed.  This time there was no cake at all.

I digress, except to say there was no cake to celebrate our first visitors, only flapjack and sausage rolls from the oven and the usual ham, cheese, cucumber kind of suspects from the fridge .  I am not yet quite ready to try and cook on our inherited hob.

But they liked it, I think.  The house that is, not the lunch.

Perhaps the highlight of their visit for all the girls was the discovery of a Secret Passage.  It was Henrietta and Oriana that made the discovery, if that’s what it should be called.  Oriana described her fabulous find with uncharacteristic modesty, “I found the hole in the wall.  I just leant on it and it fell in.”

The girls were inside the fitted cupboard in the end bedroom and the passage runs from the side of the cupboard right along the end wall, behind the bathtub.  I gather it turns the corner at the end too, but there were so many little girls crowding in that I haven’t yet been to investigate yet myself, assuming that my bum would permit me to do so.

Courtney texted to say that Henrietta and Florence now want to live with us, or at least near us.  Hooray.  Time to tell Bob to hold off on the swanky London house purchase and busy some wellies.  Let’s hope so.

On the way home I asked the girls more about the room.  “Did you find yourself in Narnia, Oriana?”  Not a fair question as Oriana hasn’t read the Narnia Chronicles.  Ruth stepped in to put me straight, “She didn’t find herself in Naaarnia, she found herself behind the wall.”

Friday fun

Friday was fun.  I took Oriana to the house to clean and her enthusiasm for the sport is infectious.  We had a daunting task: the kitchen. 

It’s not that the kitchen is particularly disgusting, it’s just that it’s someone else’s kitchen.  Norman died a year ago so any stains and sticky bits are at best 2009 vintage.  But most of all, the kitchen is a gloomy room right now.  There’s nothing to endear it.  The walls are dark yellow.  The floor tiles, thin in their prime, are shiny with wear and wet beneath the sink and just plain ugly in the unwalked corners.  The textured cabinets unbecoming even in the 70s.

So Oriana and I filled the sink with soapy water and set to work.  I didn’t ask her to help, she just came in, saw what I was up to, asked that the music be transferred to the kitchen from the sitting room, grabbed a sponge and soaked the place.  Sometimes she squeezed out the sponge, generally she forgot.  But every scrub was with a wonderful wiggly dance.  We didn’t get far, but it was so much fun.

I wish, I wish we could do the kitchen soon, but for now, this is how it looks.