Posts

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Moley moley

We’ve always been somewhat plagued with moles. They overran the front garden for quite a long time but I think I got them all. Quite recently the back garden has been absolutely wrecked by them. I think it’s because houses are being built all around us and they’re all being disturbed and driven to my garden. I was getting quite depressed about – they really were popping up everywhere and I was having no luck catching them.

I bought some new mole traps and watched a couple of YouTube videos and one was quite a different approach from what I’d previously tried. So I thought I’d give it a go

First time!

On my very first try of the new technique I bagged one.

I then cleared all the molehills aand waited with baited breath to see if anymore appeared. They did. Traps went down again and I bagged two more. No more mole hills have appeared since so I think I’m mole free – for now.

In case you’re wondering about the new technique…simply clear the mole hill, find out where the hole comes to the surface and determine the direction of the run, peel the turf back and get your duffus trap in there. Check back 12 hrs later.

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I’m in for a whupping

Every few years JC and I have a game of chess. We must have done it using computers or something last time because we didn’t have quite so much confusion at the start of a game in the past, but now that we’re using chat and doing proper chess notation like Qe2 and all that we’re making a right pigs ear of it.

Several phone calls have taken place along the lines of “oi, the bloody queen can’t do that – it’s not a horse you know” and such.

Anyway, we’re off and running – Jason usually beats me – so we’ll see.

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Where did my little girl go?

About eighteen years ago my little girl appeared in the world. A little bundle of joy that we drove back from the hospital at about ten miles an hour and then the reality of what we’d done set in.

Much fun over the years – many trials and tribulations and so much happening that there’s even a dedicated blog for her, and her brother.

But now, somehow, unbelievably, she’ll be turning 18.

Sob

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Bang bang chicken

Quite a long time ago I left Facebook. Totally had enough of seeing people complain about pretty much anything. Then my office chair broke after 20 years of faithful service. I decided I wanted to get myself a Herman Miller Aeron chair like I always used to sit on at Sky. This proved pretty tricky since there were very few on eBay and they were all quite expensive. Emma kept showing me Aeron chairs on Facebook Marketplace and so eventually I gave in and set up another Facebook account. Everyone I messaged seemed to “ignore” me until I realised the messages weren’t being sent because I had no FB friends. So then I had to start adding friends again and getting sucked back in. But, eventually, I bought my Herman Miller Aeron chair and all was well [ ish , turns out it isn’t as comfortable as I remember] with the world.

“Alright Darren, that’s all fascinating but what about the Bang bang chicken” I hear you all cry. Well, in the process of accruing friends on Facebook I must have started following some recipe writing people. They posted a link to Bang bang chicken and I thought “Oi, oi, let’s give this a go”. Desiccated coconut, chicken, flour, Sriracha, sweet chilli sauce and spicy mayo – and voila

Bang tidy – as Keith Lemon would say
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Creamy Tarragon Chicken

I enjoy cooking up a bit of chicken in some home made sauce and then serving it with a ramekin of rice and maybe some soy cooked green beans with a sesame seed finish. I’ve recently started experimenting with coating the chicken in self raising flour before pan frying it and adding it into the sauce. Turns out, as far as the kids are concerned, that this is a proper winner winner chicken dinner. They declared it to be the best one yet – and who am I to argue with that?

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Proud Uncle

It was with a heavy heart that I had to contact my friends in London and tell them I wouldn’t be able to make it down for a visit. An even heavier heart [ if that were possible ] became apparent when I had to tell my Cambridge friends that I wouldn’t be able to attend the Aussie Pink Floyd gig at the Royal Albert Hall [ The ROYAL ALBERT HALL god damnit ] and all because BIM decided to have the graduation ceremony on the same random Tuesday in November.

Nothing. Ever. Happens. On. Tuesdays. Ever!

Anyway – it was all worth it to watch my beloved nephew spend about ten seconds walking across a stage to collect a graduation tie pin. Seriously. A tie pin.

Proud Grandad, proud Nephew, proud Auntie, proud Girlfriend.

After the graduation we went for some wonderful Tapas down a back street of Manchester near some bins and then drank the night away at Afflecks and Brown. The next day Emma and I had a mooch around Manchester. I bought my traditional sausage selection from the Xmas market along with a bag of Macaroons and it was with much shame that I bought two pairs of gloves from Primark for £3. Seriously – how can they make two pairs of gloves for £3.

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Onion Soup a la Greggs

I was once of the opinion that you simply couldn’t get a better bowl of soup than some home made French Onion soup cooked slowly for several hours to really bring out the sugars and flavours in the onion.

Turns out I was wrong.

With the addition of a humble Greggs sausage roll it just takes it to the next level of culinary sophistication.

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The Chocolate Block

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

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Baked Pear

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.

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Foggy Morning

I took the dog for an early morning walk and thought the fog on the fields was fantastic.

I sent it in to BBC Weather Watchers but the bunch of bastards never put it on TV.

Hrumph

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Bitter Sweet

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.

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Fence Building

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.

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The mammoth roof paint finishes

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

https://junglefreedomfighters.com/?p=2433

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.

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McRubbish

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.

I wont be going back for another one.

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Reciprocating Saw

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

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Shredding

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.

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Voi Scooters

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

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Operation fit the mower down the side of the workshop

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

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The Big One

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.

Absolutely incredible.

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First Pint

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