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.
