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If anyone needs a very talented builder that mostly turns up, drinks tea and eats biscuits….and then leaves again without actually doing any building work then I’ve got just the fella…

Emma was wandering down the Aldi middle aisle and saw a magnetic thing for sticking tools on. Being the wonderful wife that she is – she bought it for me. It sat around in the living room for a couple of months but I finally got around to installing it in my garage and sticking some tools to it. Absolute genius!

Shhh, don’t tell Oli but the Z4 is going up for sale. Oli absolutely insists that I mustn’t sell it, but I want a Tesla…and some space on my drive. It’s got a bit of a dink on the side where I dropped a table frame on it about a week after buying the car – because I’m a dick like that – but other than that it’s in fine working order. It’ll be a shame to see it go but ho hum

When we took down the old rat infested stinky utility room we pulled out a bit of work-surface which was in pretty good condition. I thought we could re-purpose it for something in the future. Turns out it’s going to make a pretty good desk for Oli’s ‘new’ room.

So we sanded it down and we had to borrow Mark’s drill to put the holes in for the desk grommet for the cables.

Next came the time to give it a light varnish so I let Oli take the lead on this bit.

It has a few dinks in it as you can see from the picture above but I think that gives it character and helps us remember where it came from. Plus, he’ll probably just stick a mouse mat over them or something.

Next step – attaching it to his bedroom wall. Eeeek

My old college friend Andy died recently. Terrible news. Far too young and leaving behind a wife and kids. Terribly upsetting.

A few of us travelled down for his funeral.

Then we went out for a curry and beer, it’s what he would have wanted

Phil was also at the funeral but he didn’t come for a curry.

Gordon had covid in this picture – fortunately he didn’t pass it on to everyone which shows that immunisations are good m’kay

A swanky new restaurant opened nearby called Solo. In a similar vein to L’Enclume and Moor Hall. So Emma and I just had to have a visit to celebrate her birthday.

It was a little pricey, probably about £250 for a 5 course taster lunch for two, but then we did also drink two bottles of English Wine which accounted for about £100.

Expensive as it may be – definitely… definitely worth it.

We’ll be returning.

I had to drop my car off in Wigan to get the roof fixed and Daisy needed some hoooman company. So I googled whether or not dogs are welcome on trains [ they are ] and then off we went.

We had a bit of time to kill in Wigan waiting for the train to Parbold so I got a sausage roll for the walk home and a sausage butty to eat then. Daisy, with her constant stare that just bores into your soul had the lions share of the butty.

Then onto the train to Parbold

and then a nice long walk across the fields and back home. We were both properly tired when we got home. Daisy was mostly tired from carrying sticks

After a few days of hanging out with Charlie and James in Manchester the last job before heading home was to add a lick of paint to the skirting boards in the practice room/recording studio.

Picked up this bad boy during a trip to Afflecks Palace with Charlie. I got a belt and he got two piercings then we went to the pub. All in all quite an epic trip. I even managed to fit in a Chicken Jalfrezi and garlic naan from ‘spoons.

Sweet potato fritters with lashings of smoked paprika. Pretty damned good if you ask me

My Mum bought me this wheelbarrow a few years ago. I wanted this one because it had a non puncturable wheel and with the number of Hawthorn bushes we have it’s pretty important. Anyway, after carrying around tonnes upon tonnes of stone, paving slabs, wood and all sorts of other crap – it kinda started falling apart.

The bolts holding the lifting arms to the bucket had worn through the bucket and so it was a bit wobbly.

A quick trip to the local hardware store for some big ass washers for the princely sum of £0.60 [ it would have been less but I bought 4 washers rather than the 2 I needed in case the the 2 I needed didn’t work out…complex stuff ] the wheelbarrow is back to being a thing of beauty.

I used to regularly do yearly or indeed quarterly challenges, but I don’t think I’ve done one for a while. So this year I opted to buy a new belt each month. Mainly because I just had the standard boring brown and black belts with the hoopy toothy thing. You know, like a normal belt! Anyway…here is the January belt – bought off eBay because I couldn’t find one in proper shops that I liked

This challenge will of course have the unfortunate side effect of the internet getting a close up of my crotch – but we all have our crosses to bear.

Playing with my new oven

We didn’t go too far this day. We just did our standard loop around the fields and sit on the bench. It was just nice to blow away some cobwebs after a late NYE!

The extension is still missing the utility room/larder, skirting boards, some doors and a few other bits and pieces…but it’s definitely getting closer

The tiles were laid during a mammoth red wine drinking session – so we may have to do a few touch ups.

To celebrate some ridiculously long marriage of Madeline and Cliff [ 65 years or something – they actually had a letter from the Queen! ] we went out for lunch at The Barn just off the East Lancs. Charlie and I drank wine and I then became a superhero.

We’ve finally got around to building the extension to our house that we’ve always talked about. This extension must be about 12 years in coming. The back of the house was always a mess with quite a pokey kitchen, a rather terrible leaky conservatory and as it happens a rat corpse and faeces infested utility room.

The bit where the pink wall is was the utility room. I was in the garage when I heard a bunch of burly builders screaming like girls and gagging. Turns out there were a couple of rat corpses in the roof space and loads and loads of rat poo. It was pretty disgusting. It always did smell a bit funky in that room now that I think of it.

So now the Steele family must eat their dinner in the garage, or on the living room floor. It’s only temporary…it’s only temporary…it’s only temporary.

Because the kitchen has been wrecked we’ve had to move essential stuff into the wooden floor room. The fridge and microwave are in there. We still have a tiny bit of kitchen left so we still kind of have a cooker and dishwasher and a washing machine. But that’ll be gone soon too…then it will definitely be takeaways!

To cheer ourselves up [ well, me and Oli anyway ] we bought a drone to play with…ahem to document the progress of the build.

So we’ve now got the drains in, poured the concrete, built some walls and got some steel in.

Hopefully this week some more steel will go in and the roof beams will be put in. Weather permitting we may even have a roof on this week!

I’ve been able to solve the Rubik’s Cube for quite a few years and do it every now and then to keep the formula/algorithm/moves/whatever fresh in my head. But recently I happened to be in the room when Emma and Oli were watching Arrow and Felicity Smoak talked about a cube within a cube and then did it on the TV. It was pretty cool. So I looked it up and …

Can’t remember how to do it without looking it up – but I’ll get there

I did it – I finally did it. I solved a Sudoku. I was up early on a Sunday morning. The house was quiet and the news was looping so I decided to have a crack at solving the Sudoku. I tried a few in the past and just got frustrated/stuck/bored but this time I persevered.

So now I can do them quite regularly. Still takes me ages though – even with Emma helping. So now we regularly solve the Guardian crossword, 9 letter word and Sudoku. Getting old!

No idea if I’m spelling names correctly – but we went to Manchester to celebrate the birthday of our ummmmm second cousin once removed, or something.

The Thai food was amazing. My Thai, John Dalton St. Well worth a visit