More tales of travel, admin and water

Just before my year's entry ticket expired I managed to visit Hill Close Gardens in Warwick. It was the week when snowdrops are at their best, and it was really, really cold. Not much else was blooming so I didn't hang around, but I should go again when there's more to see and the wind is less biting. They are proud of their collections - not only snowdrops but chrysanthemums, sempervivums and 63 varieties of apple trees.

It's an interesting historical site too - in the 1840's when people living in towns didn't have gardens this site provided 'detached' gardens divided up into plots. Unlike allotments, people used them for pleasure, with lawns and summer houses as well as lots of fruit trees and flowers (although a few kept pigs too). Some of the plots were sold for housing in the 20th century, but just as all but one had fallen into dereliction and the diggers were on their way, local residents managed to get the site listed and it was saved for posterity. They then cleared it all up, and did lots of research into who had owned the plots and what they had looked like, restored some of the summer houses and then began opening for visitors.

My next outing was the annual Mr M & Lola II Film Festival, which I completely missed last year because I was ill. Not so this year, and the stand-out discovery was the French film "The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe", a slapstick comedy that had us all laughing. 

While I was in London I continued my efforts to link my Senior Railcard to my Oyster account. Mr M drew my attention to this possibility, but when I looked it up I found it needed to be done by a member of TfL staff in person, using an actual Oyster card - I've been simply using my contactless bank card for a long time. So I dug out my old Oyster card, but found I couldn't register it to the account unless it had been used in the last 8 weeks. So on this trip I used the card, after which I managed to register it to my online account. At West Ealing station they didn't have the right staff, but at Marylebone they were up for it - except that the card didn't show up as having been linked to the account. The saga continues.

The LTRP also continues, as it always will with such an old house, with a visit from Luke from Severn Trent Water to investigate the stain that has appeared in my front room. He confirmed that the meter is showing a small leak - he estimated 1 litre per hour, which doesn't seem particularly small to me. He's going to call in a team that will dig up the pavement around the meter and I'm hoping they will find the source of the leak, otherwise it will be another of those long-winded and potentially costly investigations.

Then my newest tradesman came to touch up the evidence of water staining and condensation in the porch, hall and kitchen. It was the same day that my new phone arrived, so I spent most of the day either entering passwords into apps or chatting to him about jobs he's done and the state of the world. The new phone keeps challenging me with passwords and connectivity and making unexpected noises and not having a 'back' button, but I'm sure it will all be sorted within a few weeks...

More GRUHI

Molecular model, Open University

I caught a cold last week which has more or less gone now, but it kept me away from my usual activities, and mostly indoors. So I spent some considerable time in front of the TV watching movies, but also in front of the laptop doing the heavy duty research and thinking that goes into choosing and buying a new phone when Mr MXF doesn't just give me one of his old phones. As well as that I carried on with the GRUHI project, with mixed results.

My current phone (an ex-Mr MXF model) is now definitely underpowered, its memory is full and it has started telling me that the latest version of apps will no longer run due to incompatibility with my old operating system. So my choices were between second hand phones of various ages, the cheapest of which was £100 and would last me a maximum of 2 years before it started complaining in just the same way. I'd get about 4 years out of a newer second hand phone at about £250, or there's something called the Fairphone at about £500 brand new, which is about the same cost as the sort of new Samsung phone I'd buy. Fairphone is an ethically produced product from the Netherlands, which is also repairable, and OS upgrades are guaranteed for about 8 years. I spent a lot of time balancing pros and cons, and went for Fairphone in the end.

A further GRUHI trawl around the house uncovered two old phones (as well as the one I'm currently using). Neither is worth anything in resale or trade-in terms, so I set off for my favourite charity shop with those along with more household stuff. On the way I was accosted by three lads who called out something to me about selling something to them for a penny. In London I would have blanked them, but this is Leamington, so I stopped for a chat. It turned out they were going to try the experiment of trading up items to see how much money they could make on an initial outlay of 1p, and I was on my way to a charity shop, so they were in luck. By the time I'd given them a silver cowboy hat and a rather nice metal water bottle one of them was starting to back off from this crazy lady, so I wished them luck and walked on.

It's surprising how on second look, things that I thought I needed to keep become very much less essential. I had a few things that I didn't think a charity shop could put out on shelves (an empty candle jar, a fairly grotty magnetic knife rack...) and a few more that were a bit too good to give away (two-way radios, Wi-Fi extender...) Now that I'm off Facebook there are still at least four platforms still available, so I'm using mostly Olio and Nextdoor, keeping Freegle and eBay in reserve. The molecular model set in the picture at the top went via Olio to someone whose friend home schools her children. I have my eye on Vinted if none of these work for the very few items of clothing that may be worth money (leather motorcycle jacket and trousers...) but I can't really get stuck in to the online selling until I have a new phone.

Mainly snow and water

Lake Tueda, Meribel Mottaret, February 2026

The skiing holiday was another good one, affected only slightly by one of our party (P) falling on the third day. Sitting on the piste, he was in immense pain around the left shoulder and thought it was dislocated; the paramedic on skis (Damien) thought it probably wasn't. Damien called an ambulance which arrived very promptly and delivered the patient to the local medical centre, where an X-ray confirmed a break right through the humerus just below the shoulder. P came back in a brace along with industrial strength French painkillers, including opium powder. We all hoped he would start wearing a smoking jacket and writing romantic poetry, but no, he just winced and went a bit grey and silent whenever the shoulder was disturbed. There followed some discussion with the insurance company, who finally came up with a plan to fly him home, accompanied by his wife, on the same day that the rest of us came home by train.

Aside from that notable event, the rest of the holiday went very well. In advance it had looked as though the weather would be very bad, but actually the clouds came in and it started to snow only on the last day. I went out with JW anyway despite the difficult conditions, and enjoyed his graceful dives into a couple of soft snow drifts. It started to snow again when it was lunchtime and we were just next to a restaurant; when we were ready to carry on the snow had stopped, so that was perfect.

One afternoon I decided to stay out a bit longer than my companions, and confirmed the fact that I have absolutely no sense of direction or navigational skills. I planned a route that would definitely not take me into an adjacent valley, only to find myself in the adjacent valley on a slope that was challenging to say the least. I managed to get myself back, but skied for about an hour longer than was sensible.

Back home I had to return to all the aspects of life that disappear on holiday. I took mum for a CT scan, which she found very helpful and I found very interesting. My main role was translating and transmitting whatever the various clinicians say to mum because they a) mumble and/or speak very fast b) use jargon c) have strong accents and d) don't look at her when they talk. 

At Lola Towers there is still water penetrating through my front wall. Glf (current favourite of all my tradesmen) came and had a look and we have a plan that includes contacting Severn Trent Water to see if it might be a leak around the water meter. The third estate agent visited; his estimate comes somewhere between the first and the second. Before I put it on the market I have decided to get the front painted, if it ever stops raining. I'm still waiting for a decorator to give me a date before the end of February to do some of the interior painting that's needed, and if we get on OK I'll ask if he'll do the outside work too. If not, estate agent 2 gave me a possible lead.

What I've been reading

Guilty Creatures: a menagerie of mysteries
by Martin Edwards (editor)

"Animals of all kinds have played a memorable part in countless mysteries, and in a variety of roles: the perpetrator, the key witness, the sleuth’s trusted companion."

A selection of short stories mostly by authors I don't know, with mysteries and detection of the kind that I very much enjoy. Just a random pick from the library that was good fun to read.

The Pickwick Papers
by Charles Dickens

"The irrepressible Mr. Pickwick and his fellow Pickwick Club members travel around the English countryside getting into all kinds of scrapes and adventures."

It's a very long book and started by introducing too many characters for me to follow, but once I got into it and began to remember who was who it improved. I reckon it would be an excellent choice for an audio book, particularly to hear Sam Weller and his father's voices.

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
by Carlo Rovelli

"These seven short lessons guide us, with simplicity and clarity, through Einstein's theory of general relativity, quantum mechanics, black holes, the complex architecture of the universe, elementary particles, gravity, and the nature of the mind."

Such a good book that I had to tell the person I was sitting next to going to France on the Eurostar train about it. Just seven short chapters but so magical, explaining concepts of physics so that you can't help but understand them. Skiing companion JD read it on the way back, and then passed it on to other skiing companion JW. What's more, I'll probably read it again when I get it back.

How Late It Was, How Late

by James Kelman

"One Sunday morning in Glasgow, Sammy awakens in an alley, wearing another man's shoes and trying to remember his two-day drinking binge. He gets in a scrap and wakes up in a jail cell, badly beaten and, he slowly discovers, completely blind."

This is written in Glasgow vernacular from the point of view of Sammy, a wrong 'un who has been trying to straighten out his life when he has a big unspecified row with his girlfriend, goes on a bender, loses his memory, gets beaten up by the police and wakes up blind. And that's all in the first few pages. What he does next is what the rest of the book is about, and despite having absolutely no common experiences to draw upon, I found it engrossing and extraordinary. It ends with him leaving his home to go south, and I for one want to find out what happens next. I hope he's all right.

Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity
by Carlo Rovelli

"Our understanding of reality has changed throughout centuries, from Democritus to loop quantum gravity. On a wondrous journey we are invited us to imagine a whole new world where black holes are waiting to explode, spacetime is made up of grains, and infinity does not exist."

My second time through this book, and I'm absolutely sure I can grasp some of the concepts if I give it another two or three goes. Given the truly mind blowing material, he explains it so well that for a minute or two I really thought I understood the ideas behind quantum gravity. Wonderful stuff.