None of this is of interest to anyone but me, but I feel the need to set it down somewhere.
The diary highlights of Gatz, aged 57 1/4:
Saturday – A day out at Kensington Gardens and the V&A, a nice pasta and red wine dinner, then a jolly night at Richard Thompson’s 75th birthday shindig at the Royal Albert Hall (written about at length elsewhere).
Sunday – In 1975 every school child in Glasgow was issued with a mug commemorating the 800th anniversary of Glasgow’s borough charter. Mine got broken at a student party a decade later and I’ve been looking for one for 40 or so years, without wanting to pay twenty quid or so on eBay. I found two (that’s 2, twice as many as I had ever owned in my life) in, of all places, Oxfam in Brentwood #reem Had lunch in Rossi’s cafe too.
Monday – My flat has been on the market for a couple of weeks. I have had maybe 10 viewings and today I accepted an offer. It was a little under the asking price, but it’s a first time buyer which should move things along quickly. He seemed a nice chap too, and for an easy sale I wasn’t going to quibble over a relatively small amount of money.
Tuesday – A quiet day. Obviously my flat rebelled against being sold and I had to get a plumber in to sort out a couple of jobs. I know from experience that if the ball float in the water tank hadn’t been fixed it wouldn’t have been long before the people in the flat below noticed.
Wednesday – After lunch the Light messaged me from her work to ask if I had seen a house on Rightmove in our preferred area. I had not. It hadn’t been there when I looked a couple of hours earlier. I called and arranged a viewing.
Thursday – We hopped on a train to 20 miles from where we live now and go to see the house, which seemed ideal if overpriced (we’ve been watching properties in this area for a while, so we know the micro-market pretty well).
Friday – We make an offer well below asking price, but evidenced and not insulting, and after a little horse-trading it is accepted with an extra £5k for good will and to have the house taken off the market.
Thank you for indulging me if you have read this far. And yes, yes wine has been taken. How clever of you to guess.
Well, congratulations! That all seems jolly civilised.
I hope the wine was up to scratch. I had a rather lovely kebab (it’s healthy!!,) a couple of glasses of a southern French red and watched Germany tonk Scotland . Germany were good, possibly very good at times (though not quite as fantastic as some of the pundits thought..) while Scotland were very poor.
Meanwhile my youngest son is out on the town indulging in his latest substance alas . Horse Tranquilliser is the latest thing , don’t you know, and quite the worry for this old duffer.
Thank you @freddy-Steady . We (Scotland) were awful and can have no complaints about the result. I’m sorry to hear that your son has discovered K., which from my admittedly limited perspective seems like an awful waste of time.
Tranquilliser is a bit of a misnomer, if you are in fact referring to Ketamine. It’s a dissociative anaesthetic which means it gives you an out-of-body experience. In my veterinary days it was frequently used as part of a solution for quick feline anaesthesia. You could give it intra-muscular so didn’t have to faff about putting in an IV line, and it gave you just enough time for removing testicles/uteri etc. They would always stare at you wide-eyed as the deed was done.
Very handy for anaesthetising crashed bikers at the roadside, prior to helicopter transfer to ICU – does the job without dropping pressures?
Oh, I’ve heard him tell his mates about his out of body experiences. It’s very very obvious when he’s taken it though strangely he seems to deny it.
The problem is he supplied some K to one of his mates who has been on it for two years. Said mate had a hole in his septum, a face that has imploded and has been shipped overseas for rehab by his worried parents. This worried parent doesn’t really want that to happen to his little darling but seems to be helpless in his attempts to have a serious conversation about it. I worry how he finances it all too as his job isn’t the best paid though oddly he always has enough money to socialise and sometimes not enough for his keep.
Pip pip.
Ball float , I presume that is what was previously called a ball cock. I also presume that this term was just too Moosey for these times.
I’m guessing “ball float” refers to the sphere that lifts the lever to open the “cock”, or spigot, or tap, and that “ball cock” is still an acceptable term for the three components as a functional whole. And I’m probably wrong.
It’s the float part of the ball valve assembly.
“Valve”? Oh dear.
“2 part ball valve kit” is how it’s described in the invoice. The hard water around here meant the existing parts were caked in limescale and had stopped moving freely.
Congratulations on the sale of your flat and the purchase of your new home, Gatz.
That sounds like a wonderfully successful week.
And with Richard Thompson’s Birthday Bash as icing on the cake.
Good for you!
That all sounds far too exciting for me. Moving house is the single-most stressful thing I’ve ever done, which is why I’ve only done it once.
Offspring the Younger came home on the train last Friday to celebrate her 21st at home (with a Chinese takeaway and a massive cake). I’m taking her back up to Lincoln later this morning with a car full of carboard boxes to start bringing her clobber back from her digs. Having finished her course (no exams, just written submissions), the assessment results are in and it looks like she’s on for a 2:1. She had three interviews this week and was offered a job yesterday.
I finished digging up the dead Box hedge which had been attacked by caterpillars and a kindly neighbour let me put the bits which I couldn’t fit in my recycling bin in hers. Everybody needs good neighbours.
The new Samsung washing machine continues to work, and I’m beginning to suffer from plinky-plonky Franz Schubert as an earworm. When I went to register the five year warranty, I had to enter the serial number on an online form. It was on a label affixed to the back of the machine, so I had to pull it out of its hole and take a photo of the label with my – get this – portable telephone. Whatever next?
At dance class this week we did Waltz Whisk and Chasse, which goes from 3/4 into 7/6 time. Prog dance, perhaps?
“Prog dance”, eh? I think this is the one you need, Mr F…clear the kitchen!
And let us know how you get on!
Blimey Steve, your daughter’s uni course seems to have gone quick, I remember you saying you were taking her up to start. Congrats on the job, it took my son a few months to find anything decent. We’ve got another 2 years for my daughter, animation at Bournemouth. She has spent the last year drawing for old school 2D animation on paper and watching Road Runner and Buggs Bunny cartoons. She could have done that in her bedroom here!
Yeah, it really has. No more day-trip-to-Lincoln-every-five weeks, think of all the extra time I’ll have for playing records, although Mrs F probably doesn’t see it like that. I made my probably penultimate visit to the record shop in Lincoln today (two first-press Stranglers LPs).
The job’s not great, a carer for someone with fairly severe learning difficulties, but it’ll be good groundwork for a later career in clincal diagnosis. Hopefully more rewarding than working in the laundry round the corner.
Lucky your daughter’s already on her course, or the (current) PM would have it cancelled.
Well, this week Mrs F has gone to a work’s summer party at a museum, where the food options are definitely not Crohn’s-friendly, and I’m not great at small talk at these things anyhow. So I went to the dance class on my own, and spent an hour dancing the Waltz with the nice Ukranian lady who always goes by herself.
It was nice to lead someone who didn’t also want to lead me – I’m afraid Ballroom is not an equal opportunity sport – for non-dancing AWers, think a guitar duo where one plays lead and the other plays rhythm. That’s what it is supposed to be like, anyhow.
I had a lovely time, and I now feel slightly dirty.
Well, I’m sitting in the watery sun after a drive to Bastia, from Oletta, each in in Haut-Corse, Corsica, day 6 of a post retirement celebration jolly. Corsica is mountainous, the tail end of the alps, on an island. We are in the foothills, near the west coast of the upstretched middle finger of the islands fist, Bastia on the east. A short but shocking drive, a EC Les pantalons brunes. Wine is now pinking up my knuckles.
I too have had a good week in grown up terms.
Paid off my mortgage at the age of 58 and wrote a will.
I am not ill!
All good stuff! Welcome to the mysterious concept of ‘disposable income’.
We wrote wills, simple documents which I think cost £15 for a twin-pack from Amazon, when The Light came into an inheritance and my mortgage was paid off. We’re not planning on going anywhere for a few decades, but suddenly we had assets we would want to go to the other if either one of us went under a bus tomorrow.
Same here. Not married after over 30 years together with two teenage kids. A will seemed necessary!