Going live

Maternal Manor, May 2026

My estate agent's representative, whom I'm going to call Mr Celery (because he's tall, thin, and very Seller-y) told me that he appreciates that I am not in a tearing hurry, that I now need a solicitor, and that I won't regret placing the sale with his company. The sales board is up outside the house and we went through the brochure together to eliminate the spelling mistakes, so we were ready for going live on Friday. People keep asking how I feel. At the moment it's still just a project I'm working on, and I'm not looking forward to the time when it sinks in and I become very sad indeed to be leaving.

One issue that still needs addressing is a broken electrical socket in the bedroom. "I can deal with this," I thought, as I identified the fuse in the fuse box, turned off the power to the sockets, unscrewed the wires from the front plate and took the broken back box off the wall. After trips to B&Q, Wickes and the wonderful Action 21 I could only find replacement boxes that had screws in a different place, and I hate it when I experience this sort of helpless incompetence. Luckily, Nameless Man is happy to help out, although our combined busy timetables mean he can't get started until later this week.

My last session with the Diabetes Prevention Programme coach has taken place, although she says I can ask my GP to be re-referred if I think it will help. I may just do that. Due to some relaxation of my willpower during the volunteering in the retreat kitchen I now have to take my eating habits a bit more seriously, and have laid down a couple of new intentions for the next few weeks. I can safely say that this will be No Fun At All.

Mr Celery has already found me two people who want an early viewing before the date that we had set for the main house viewing event. I finished all the weeding, mowed the lawn again, and the main thing remaining is to clean a few windows to make it look that bit more attractive. That was the last day before the massive heatwave that we're experiencing arrived, so I'm glad I managed to get nearly everything done before we all melted.

Then I headed south to see mum and to supervise the transition from copper wire internet and POTS (plain old telephone system) to fibre broadband. There was an engineer who came into the house and another who climbed the telephone pole and strung the new wire to the house. But my suspicions were raised when the engineer said he couldn't set up two wired phones on the new router. He left an extra telephone box and advised me to contact the company to activate the second phone, and told me many things that turned out not to be true. So I had a very difficult conversation with the company which has left me regretting my choice of supplier despite the very competitive price, because we can't have two wired phones on the new system after all, despite having been assured that we could.

Mum has been very flexible and adaptable, and has accepted stoically the loss of her usual phone number for about two weeks (I really hope that the company hasn't misled me about this too). She has one landline phone with a new (hopefully temporary) number and is carrying her mobile phone around with her. Lola II and I are working on getting her a couple of digital cordless phones that are relatively easy to use, and we'll see how things go.

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.

Now I am 60

Then I was 8

My significant birthday has been and gone with very little fuss. It was hot, I went for a walk but spent the day mostly at home. The next day I went to visit mum to get some more of the admin done, but first we had to get her to a clinic appointment and then took advantage of the proximity to Lidl to give her the opportunity to do some shopping in person. As dad had acquired lactose intolerance in the last few years, mum has been enjoying the opportunity to indulge in dairy produce again and we came home with three kinds of cheese.

The admin seems to grow each time I look at it. Unfortunately, as I pick up the different strands we seem to uncover conflict each time - in addition to the fight with Thames Water about their overcharging for the period when we had a leak, we're in conflict with an investment company and now possibly also the Burial Society that arranged dad's funeral. Then there's the routine stuff that just comes around every year - household insurance, a new gas and electricity contract, broadband, servicing the stairlift, the Lifeline pendant for communicating in an emergency, and on and on. I am starting to recognise where I need to pass things over where before I imagined I would be doing it all.

After visiting mum I went on to pick up Lola II and Mr M and bring them to Leamington for a few days. Mr M had to work for some of the time, but he joined us for meals. Lola II and I went for a lovely walk with friends, and then an organ concert in the local church with a student organist who looked much too young to be out on his own. Then I had to get home for a couple of phone calls, one of which was with Mr MXF who has kindly passed on one of his old phones but needed to help me to unlock it.

I needed a newer phone because various apps had started telling me that they would no longer run on my old one. The transfer process wasn't too bad except that at one point I lost concentration and all of my past WhatsApp messages disappeared. Luckily this isn't a disaster, in fact it's barely an inconvenience. Given the state of the old phone's screen protector, an early priority is to get similar protection for the new one.

At the weekend, the Art in the Park festival was taking place in town. I'm sure this event has happened for many years, but somehow I've never been - it's huge, and full of all kinds of artistry from photography to an art-producing bicycle via jewellery, spray paint, oil, watercolour, collage and almost everything you can think of. We saw about half of it, and I was going to go back for the second day but had too much to do at home.

One of the reasons for Lola II's visit was to help me get some jobs done that are difficult to start on my own - they just need a bit of encouragement, or go easier with two of us working together. We started with my old iPod, which used to mean more to me than it does now - it has become redundant since Audible discontinued the app that allowed me to download podcasts onto it.* It will eventually go onto ebay but I need a period of 10 days when I'm at home so I can manage bids and postage and that isn't happening until September. While I was grappling with that, Lola II cleaned my windows!

[* Since then I've started using Spotify for both podcasts and books and cancelled my Audible subscription altogether, so who's the loser?]

And finally I had a non-birthday treat which ended up feeling like a birthday treat because sisters and friends came with me for lunch at my favourite Café Soya in Birmingham followed by a performance of the musical 'Hamilton'. It was quite a spectacle, which was lucky because there are a lot of words and it was quite difficult to follow the plot. Some of our party had seen it before and others had done some homework, but I now feel the need to go and listen while reading the lyrics to catch up on the bits I might have missed.