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.
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.
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.
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.
