A long time ago I met a fellow in a field and took him into the woods. Let’s call him Ken, mainly because that’s his name. We were both walking our dogs [ dogging if you will ] and he didn’t realise that Jacobs wood was a public amenity so I showed him around a little. In that usual way that happens whereby once you meet somebody you keep randomly bumping into them I met him several times after. Warbreck garden centre, on the lane outside my house and eventually in the pub. It was on one occasion of meeting him in The Plough that he happened to start talking about one of his favourite wines, The Chocolate Block. After some investigation I found you could buy it at Majestic Wine Warehouse and added it to my list of crap to do to go and find this wine and try it out.
A while later I was shopping at Booths for a Burgundy so that I could create a venison bourguignon and was amazed to find a bottle of The Chocolate Block. So I bought it. Then drank it. It was pretty good. I haven’t bought one since so maybe not that amazing.
Crazy decanter – works fine for a while but the last bit of liquid comes flying out
A recipe came up on Facebook or something and I thought “baked pear, Stilton and honey – what’s not to like.
So off I went to the shops. Bought some pears, bought some Stilton, bought some honey just in case since I hadn’t bothered to check if we had any and didn’t worry about the walnuts since always have them in the house.
The end result was fantastic – how can you not like a baked pear stuffed with a mixture of melted Stilton and honey and walnuts all topped off with a pinch of cinnamon. It’s making my mouth water just writing about it.
My mother, uncle and I all headed into Manchester to witness a plea. Long story about why we had to do this which I’ll not go into. But along the way we came across the Paddington bench in Spinningfields and formed a happy memory, which makes it all worthwhile. Afterwards we had a little wine and tapas and made our way home.
When we remodelled the driveway there were some casualties. Namely several fence panels that had over the years been ravaged by the elements and by ground ivy. So rather than buying new fence panels at ridiculous post pandemic prices, I thought I’d make my own.
A few of the 1.8m rough sawn 100×18 softwood planks that will be making part of my fence panel
I took some measurements off one of the old weather damaged fence panels and set up my trusty mitre saw to do some cuts.
Chopped in half ready to have the top angle cut out.
When I first started building a panel I would chop all the planks in half. Then I’d set the angle on the mitre saw, then I’d chop individual planks one at a time always measuring and remeasuring the place where the cut is going to be.
By the time I’d got to my 5th fence panel I’d built a rudimentary jig to hold the planks and was cutting through them 3 or 4 at a time. It got a lot faster to build each panel!
The first ever fence panel. It’s not completely finished as I had three supports across the back and there’s only two in the picture above.
In a similar vein when it came to assembling the panel I was pretty slow for the first few, but after each panel I learned a new time saving trick and also got a bit more accurate so the later panels were much faster to put together and a lot straighter.
See that workbench the fence panel is resting on? I built that workbench and put castors on it and everything. Thing of beauty.
Finally I got around to digging some holes, buying some 75×75 fence posts and a few bags of postfix. I know hand mixing concrete apparently makes for a better, more secure fence post but you just can’t argue with the simplicity of “dig a hole, throw some water in, add your fence post, throw some postfix in and maybe a bit more water and you’re done”
The more or less finished job. I had to put a few more panels up off to the left of the picture above but you get the idea. The fence panel planks have been pressure treated to greater or lesser degrees which is why there is some colour variation but I suspect they’ll all fade to the same colour after a year or two. I don’t really mind though, quite like the multi coloured fence panels.
Quite a long time ago, before we went sailing in Croatia, I started painting the flat roof that the lazy bastard roofer couldn’t be bothered finishing. It began here
Well finally….finally….absolutely finally I got around to finishing it off. It was an enormous relief – something that had been preying on my mind for quite a while so I finally got myself together and did the final touch up under the roof-lights. It didn’t take long, not half as long as I thought it would, and it’s turned out quite well.
I sat on the roof with a can of Stella or two beneath a beautiful blue sky on a crisp autumnal day and I was truly happy.
Quite a while ago it popped up on the newsfeed on my phone that McDonalds were reintroducing the McRib for a limited time only. I got really quite excited. I put an entry into my calendar for the day that it was to be relaunched and I told everyone that i bumped into that it was coming back.
The day eventually arrived and Amelia had a nail appointment in town so on a wet and rainy October afternoon I dropped her off to have her nails painted and headed to Maccys.
There was a sign outside announcing it was true and it really was back so in I went and made my order.
It was alright, at best. Like so many other write-ups I’ve read I too ended up absolutely covered in the sauce. Napkin after napkin was used to clean myself up and the patty seemed dry. It’s only after reading some other reviews I found out the problem. In the old days they used to dip the patty in the sauce so it got an even covering with not too much and not too little. It seems they changed the way they built this burger by pouring the sauce over the top of the patty and it’s not turned out for the better.
There are secateurs for your little bits of light chopping and pruning.
Then come the loppers for stuff that’s a bit meatier. Maybe branches that are 20mm or 30mm at the most.
After that my option used to be a chainsaw which is often a bit overkill for some of the stuff that I’d cut with it. But now I have a new option! The Ryobi reciprocating saw. Oh yes.
The first job for the saw was chopping through an ivy stem that was attacking one of my tress. Like a hot knife through butter! Yusssssss
I recently visited Jason down in Leicestershire. When I arrived he was busy shredding some garden clippings and adding them to his compost pile. His compost pile was fantastic. Rotting down nicely producing a rich earthy home made compost supplemented by liquid from his wormery. Him and Su really are the modern day Tom and Barbara. I got jealous.
When I got home I asked my neighbours if I could borrow their shredder to see how it would cope with the garden waste that I usually just set fire to.
My neighbours, being the lovely people that they are, naturally agreed. I’d borrowed this shredder in the past but me being me had forgotten just how big it is. Jason’s shredder is a little mains powered shredder. This one is a petrol engined four stroke beast of a shredder.
This thing mulched its way through hawthorn branches, ivy, brambles – absolutely everything that I threw at it. Produced a beautiful pile of mulch that I added to my compost heap which is now looking better. Absolutely nowhere near the standard of Tom and Barbara’s but I’m now thinking of a little mulcher for Xmas.
Pretty much every year for the past ummm I dunno, ten years maybe, the ex CCSS/Anglia Polytechnic/APU/Anglia Ruskin Software Engineering For Real Time Systems graduates get together. It’s mainly the people that were sponsored by Xerox and then we picked up a few great guys along the way.
Anyway, last year [ 2023 ] Aggy and I noticed that Voi had moved into Cambridge and we wanted to go for an e-scoot around town. The sign up process was pretty easy by just filling in a bit of a webform and uploading a photo of your driving license. Aggy had his with him. Annoyingly I didn’t. I got Oli or Emma to take a picture of my driving license and send it over to me but annoyingly Voi don’t let you upload an image of your license or allow you take a photo of a photo of your license. So in 2023 we were stymied.
As soon as I returned from Cambridge in 2023 I finished the registration when I had my license in my hand. Fast forward to 2024 and on a beautiful Saturday morning Aggy and I went speeding all over Cambridge. Absolutely excellent fun. Because of all the cycle lanes and public land and stuff it just made getting around to be so easy. Loved it
You may remember I built a workshop. Took me a while, I think it gave me a hernia, but I built it. When I finished I had some bricks left over which I fully intend to make use of in a future project, but haven’t done yet. Anyway, Paul and I took the bricks and stacked them into two piles at the edge of the garden near the workshop. The upshot of this is I couldn’t get my mower down the side. The brambles moved in, the hawthorn branches grew out, ground ivy started having a bit of a go at my beautiful workshop. It would all have to go.
This is another of those jobs that I procrastinated about for a while but one fine weather day I decided to crack on. In my tried and tested method of breaking a big job into small jobs and adding it to my todo list I ended up with a todo item that said:
move 50 bricks into workshop
So I did. Then added the same task again until I’d moved all of them. Armed with a pair of loppers, a pair of secateurs, a strimmer and a hedge cutter I went in for the kill. Took a surprisingly short amount of time to sort out, maybe an hour and a half. Finally a few runs down the side with Old Faithful [ yellow mower ] it was a thing of beauty.
So now whenever I mow the garden I can have a quick nip down the side of the workshop and keep all those weeds at bay. Fantastic
Nico was absolutely desperate to get some freshly made doughnuts from Blackpool so a trip to the Pleasure Beach was instigated.
It was glorious! The place was empty. It was the 4th September so all the schools were back [ apart from Oli ] – ok, so most of the schools were back. We barely queued up for any of the rides and because of that we’d pretty much done every big ride in the park by lunch.
Jason and I sat down and had a couple of beers whilst the boys went off and did the same rides again, and again. Jason vowed he was never going on the Big One again and I kinda agreed with him – I always come off that ride with a headache. However, given that the park was so empty we came up with the “cunning” plan of queuing for the front seat of the Big One.
It only took 5 or 10 minutes to get to the front seats and was an astonishing ride. Properly terrifying. Anyway, about half way through the ride I look at Jason and he’s got his head down scrabbling in the footwell. I was all confused and yelled “what are you doing?”. Jason didn’t hear me though – we were going very fast and it was very noisy. So when the ride came to an end a very ashen faced Jason looked at me and said “My phone flew out of my pocket”. Disaster. Proper disaster.
Jason reported it to the park authorities and they said they’d try and find it in the morning when they do the walk around the track. This was a bit rubbish though. I asked if Nico had a “Find My Phone” type thing setup so that he could see the locations of Jason’s phone. Turns out he did. Turns out the phone looked like it was outside the grounds of the Pleasure Beach and really close to the Big Blue Hotel. So off we went, to the Big Blue Hotel.
After wandering up and down the fence line going “we’re right on top of it” and “it must be here somewhere” we eventually caught a glimpse of the phone through the hole in the gate. Some cunning teamwork and a big stick meant that we were eventually able to retrieve Jason’s phone. It was an amazing bit of fortune. The people walking the track would never have found it as it wasn’t on the Pleasure Beach property. If the phone hadn’t landed next to the gate we would never have spotted it as we couldn’t see through the fence.
Jason was overjoyed
There were a few new scratches and dinks but it had survived a fall of about 20m at high speed.
When we arrived in the States and Jason picked us up he told us that he would soon be heading to the UK and would drop by to see us. So, that day eventually arrived and upon arrival they decided they wanted to go and see a football match [ well, they said “soccer match” but you know, Americans ]. I’m not a big football fan but they were guests so we sorted something out. Emma kindly drove me, Jason, Nico and Oli over to Burscough where Skelmersdale United were playing Euxton.
It was with a bit of a heavy heart that I approached the turnstile and paid our entrance fee. In my head drinking alcohol was banned in all football stadiums in the UK because of hooliganism and violence and stuff. So expecting a bit of a let down I tentatively asked if there was anywhere to get a drink in here. “Yep” came the reply, “up the stairs is the bar”. Well, this cheered me up no end. The boys sat in the stand at ground level and Jason and I headed up to the bar to check it out. It was fantastic. A full bar, a terrace overlooking the pitch, everything you could possibly want!
At half time the boys came up to the terrace to join us and Oli asked me if he could have a pint. How could I refuse? The result…
Not sure if the beer in front of him is his first one – but he had a few
I had a heavy bag of sand left over from some building work, I think it was probably for the brickwork for the workshop. Anyway, it had been sitting on my beautiful gravel driveway outside my garage for long enough and I decided to drag it down to behind my workshop. I dragged it, it didn’t move. I put my back into it – not an inch. I got the boy wonder out and the two of us managed to drag it over the gravel driveway with much effort. It was going to be tough to drag it all the way down the garden. Oli suggested the yellow tractor but I pooh-poohed it thinking the tractor didn’t have the pulling power. We gave it a go anyway.
We had to pump up the tyres on the tractor before we could accomplish the feat above.
That yellow tractor has never let me down – it nearly chopped my foot off but that was a long time ago and much water under the bridge since then.
After a pretty relaxing week up in Washington we took a flight down to Ontario, CA. We were going to fly into LAX but were advised a smaller more intimate airport would be better. It was. We got out of the airport quickly, picked up the hire car quickly and hit the freeways of LA to get to our apartment in downtown.
Turns out our downtown apartment really was very downtown! We went out for dinner at a Thai restaurant but managed to take a wrong turn on the way there and ended up on the road with all the stars in the pavement., Hollywood Boulevard.
We hung out in LA for a couple of days and did our best to avoid the major touristy stuff. Scouse offered us some tickets to go to Disney but it was just sooooooo hot that we didn’t fancy standing in a queue for 1hr for a 1 minute ride. We saw the Brae tar pits, Griffith Observatory, shopped for trainers in West Hollywood, ate at Chick Fil A amongst other places, took a long walk down Hollwood Boulevard looking at the stars in the pavement. It was a pretty cool place to be.
After a couple of days in our apartment in LA we decided to head out to the beach and so rented a hotel near Venice Beach. It only took about an hour to get there and was a pretty cool place. The big revelation was the constant smell of weed. I don’t mind a bit of weed, used to quite like the smell – but after days of being constantly bombarded by it – well, it got a little much really. Maybe the UK should decriminalise rather than legalise, but ho hum, I digress.
We rented a bike each from the beach and headed north towards Santa Monica Pier along the Venice Beach cycle path. We had an excellent time. Cruising along with other people on skateboards, e-bikes, scooters. Was truly epic. Then the day took a turn for the worse. After we handed the bikes back we were wandering in the general direction of our hotel looking for somewhere to eat lunch, and drink some beer, when out of nowhere appeared a muscle bound psychopath. Emma and Oli saw him stomping down the road with no shirt, fists clenched, a look of anger on his face yelling stuff and gave the dude a wide berth. Unfortunately I was in a bit of a world of my own and only saw him at the last second. I swerved to avoid him but he took a sidestep in my direction and full on shoulder checked me. He then spun around and started hurling racial abuse. “Show some fucking respect white boy. I’m gonna punch those curly blonde hairs out of your fucking head” – stuff along those lines. Was pretty scary really. I kept walking expecting a punch to the back of the head at some point but he moved on to harass somebody else, and we drank quite a few calming beers. On the bright side at least I now have a crazy story of some big black dude harassing me in LA.
The next morning we were heading to Monterey which despite looking like a teeny tiny distance on the map actually took us hours. Many fun bits to this road trip but one particularly memorable bit was the pit-stop in Paso Robles. Whilst we were in America it was hot. Seriously hot. Unseasonably hot. As we got out of the car in Paso Robles to visit Jack-in-the-box [ they actually give you the food in a box ] the temperature was 109F. It was unbearably hot and made my skin tingle just standing in it. Fortunately by the time we arrived in Monterey it was 20deg cooler.
Food – in a box!
Many fun bits in Monterrey. Me messing up the uber and getting us dropped off in the middle of nowhere and having to hike the rails to trails route into town. Oli getting asked for his number by some girl at the bowling alley. All of us being there at the same time as the Monterrey Car Festival with people slowly driving through The Cannery in old American cars with the suspension bouncing up and down. It was pretty epic…but a little too touristy for me.
Emma and Oli in Monterrey
After two nights in Monterrey we continued our journey north to meet up with Tommy and Pat in Russian River. Driving over the Golden Gate bridge was a little disappointing as the top was hidden by mist. Our planned stop at Muir Woods to see the Redwoods had to be abandoned since it seems it’s turned into a proper tourist attraction since Emma and I last visited twenty years ago and now you have to reserve a parking space! However, it was great to arrive in the middle of nowhere [ but surrounded by Redwoods which was cool ] at Tommy’s rented cabin in the woods. We kayaked on the river, we drank beer, we played darts and generally caught up with T and P whom we hadn’t seen for far too long.
Oli, me [ in my new t-shirt ], Tommy, Pat, EmI do own more than one t-shirt – honestly
After two nights of sleeping on Tommy’s mezzanine with the ceiling inches from my face causing me to bang my head every time I moved in the night, we headed off to Vallejo to borrow Pat’s house for a bit. Before setting off though we went for a walk in Armstrong Woods near Russian River. Just as beautiful as Muir but without all the tourists.
The deal was we look after Pat’s house, cats and plants and in return we have a place to stay rent free. Which was a bargain. When we arrived we could only find one of the cats which was OK as Pat had said the other was very skittish. However as we were exploring the gardens Emma made the rather grizzly discovery of a dead cat that had been partly eaten by something – we think Raccoons. After a bit of a delicate conversation with Pat we were advised to check the dead cats chin since there is a cat similar to Pats that lives in the area but apparently has a hairier chin. So Oliver and I were out in the baking California sunshine using a stick to lift the decaying dead cats head up so we could see its chin. At this point I compared the markings on the dead cat with the markings on a picture of the cat that P had sent me. They were two very different cats.
So we dug a hole, stuck the dead cat in it and filled it over again. Welcome to Vallejo!
From Vallejo the best way to get to San Francisco is to take the ferry from Vallejo Harbour straight into the Port of San Francisco. So we did. We rode the trolley cars, we jumped on buses, we climbed Coit Tower…all 13 floors since the elevator was broken, we walked down Lombard Street and we ate some food in China Town. The thing we didn’t do however, which was a big thing on my bucket list for this trip, was ride in a self driving Waymo taxi. I had the app, I’d been invited to use the taxi system but when I came to put in my credit card details it demanded a zip code with numbers in it. 90210 – that sort of thing. No matter what I tried I couldn’t authenticate my card for the app. So it was with a heavy heart [ after some racial abuse from a homeless black guy! ] that we boarded the ferry and left SF.
I however was not to be deterred. I messaged Jason and asked him to send me his credit card details so that I could book a Waymo. He didn’t believe me at first. Thought I was having a bit of a laugh. But eventually he relented and sent me the details over. I popped them into the Waymo app and with great delight saw the message “Where do you want to go”.
So the next day we caught the ferry back into San Francisco. We hopped on to the cable car from the ferry port that took us, well, frankly we didn’t care where it took us since we planned to get a Waymo at the end, and made sure we sat/stood on the outside of the cable car
Hanging off the side of the cable car taking a photo was a bit dicey
We jumped off the cable car at the last stop. Got shouted at by some crazy white guy wandering the streets of SF, ate some Vietnamese food, and summoned a Waymo.
It was absolutely fantastic. No driver, just a steering wheel moving around with signs all over saying “Don’t touch the wheel”. It drove us for about 25 minutes up to Haight-Ashbury and we wandered around the hippy district looking at cool clothes and shoes. But I don’t think anybody bought anything.
Back to Pats. Ate food, drank wine, slept and then surprisingly Tommy popped in as we were leaving for Oakland Airport to head back to Seattle/Tacoma.
We had a week back in the UK after our trip and then we [ minus Amelia who stayed home to have some alone time, and look after the dog ] headed for the West Coast of the US of A.
We flew via Dublin and thought it would be wiser to have a pint of Guinness rather than crossing into US territory immediately. This was a huge mistake! After our pint of Guinness we headed for US security to see an enormous queue, followed by a second huge queue followed up by a third ridiculously long queue. We had to do a VISA check, followed by security and then passport control. By the time we got through all three phases of checks our flight was showing as being closed. Absolutely convinced we’d missed our flight we ran through the terminal to the very final gate and found people still queuing to get on. We’d made it. Just.
We flew into SeaTac and Jason came to pick us up.
We went out on Kerry’s boat on the Puget Sound. Emma and Nicole had a drink ir two in the sunshine,
Jason and Kerry’s boat…with a can of Stella
The gang with Kerry
A few days after the outing on Kerry’s boat we found ourselves on Clear Lake, WA at the Stoner’s lakeside cabin. We’re beginning to think all American’s have a boat, except Jason – but that’s a whole different tale. This is where Oli learned to wakeboard and wakesurf or something. Jason and I learned how to drink beers and wave a flag when somebody is in the water. Emma and Nicole learned how to sit on a paddleboard with a glass of wine. It’s safe to say we all learned a lot.
In the background is Mount Raneer. A really rather large mountain!
We did lots, lots more whilst we were in the PNW but after a week of hanging out with the Coope’s it was time for us to go walkabout to California.
The entire Corralejo trip was fantastic and there are many more highlights that I haven’t written about [ e-scooters and e-foil spring immediately to mind ] but we wrapped up the trip with a swanky meal at a harbour side fish restaurant where I paid Oli £10 to eat some barbecued squid. It was actually pretty good.
My major takeaway from the whole trip is that despite a nine year combined Spanish learning time of Mum, Amelia and Oli – they can’t speak Spanish for shit.
Another of the things that Oli and I wanted to do whilst in Fuerteventura was take an ATV up into the hills. Whilst on this very dusty ride we stopped and got the picture below which is one of my favourite ever photos.
If I ever do this again I’m wearing a pair of swimming goggles. Sooooo much sand/dust
