Somewhat disturbed

This has been a bit of a disturbing weekend, with 3 separate instances of me giving into the latest internet fads. Recently a friend moved and I don’t yet have their new details. So I ended up having to resort to contacting them on facebook. I only joined facebook because people kept sending me friend requests – I was never going to actually use it. I find the whole concept a bit fake and smacking of the rubbishy side of our culture (say Paris Hilton compared to Dame Judi Dench).

Also this weekend, I set up a youtube account. Now that’s just the ultimate time waster if you’re not careful. And there’s a lot of absolute rubbish. But the truly disturbing bit is that I set it up to save videos of contestants from talent shows that people sent me – hang on, I DESPISE those shows!! What’s going on?

But after clicking through a few of the contestants that people hadn’t sent me, I realised suddenly the value of the youtube. I’d say that if you took the average 60 of a television show, there would be maybe 3 minutes of good stuff (excluding your favourite fiction series). This is why I never bothered to get a TV in England. But now you can get that 3 minutes distilled down into a single video for you. It’s not a time waster, it’s a time saver! (But only if you limit yourself solely to the good clips that other people find and point out to you).

And then there is Twitter. This is just weird – who wants to know every single random thought of anyone, if it is your favourite celebrity? I’m telling you now – nobody would ever want all my random thoughts. And anyway, how on earth do these people find time to tweet so much? I “follow” Lance Armstrong because the best cycling news website (usefully named cyclingnews.com) kept referring to his tweets as a source in a breaking news story, or his thoughts on something in lieu of an actual interview. But he twitters things like “having dinner with X, Y and Z”. Well if I was X, Y or Z I’d be getting a bit snitty that this person was sending messages with his blackberry at the table. Still, he does recommend excellent youtube videos!

I took this photo from my office window not long before I went to Australia in March. As you can see, it was snowing. But not anymore, after an extremely cold winter (very pretty with all the snow, but you just had to avoid saying that to anyone who’d been trying to drive in it), they’re forecasting a half decent summer. I’ve been frequently told that the two “summers” that I’ve had here in England have been really unusual. I am reserving judgement…

The trip to Australia was of course for Mum’s 70th birthday party. It was lovely to catch up with so many people, and because they all came to the same place on the same day I even had time to do some Tassie sightseeing, which you can see from the waterfall shot above. And I had real sausages! Lots of them, they were even better cold the day after the barbie. Over here the sausage known as normal is short, fat and made of pork. Ours are long, skinny, and much to the horror of the English for whom a steak is an expensive luxury, made of beef. They just taste better, at least to me. Hmmm, this might be a shorter blog than planned because I’m getting hungry just thinking about them.

The last blog before going to oz was about my insurance claim. Here for the first time, over the hastily made bed, is a photo of some of the damage. The only reason I am posting this now is because finally it’s not too depressing to even think about.

Some event, now forever to be speculated about because the contractors didn’t take photos like they were supposed to, did something (again with the speculation) to my gutter/roof on the railway side of the house. This meant that water from the never ending rain was streaming down the wall instead of off to the drain pipe. Despite the fact that my walls are fully 2 feet of solid stone, this water was seeping through the (not so solid) cracks between the stones to my interior walls. The photo shows the area where the yellow wallpaper has peeled off, and you can see darker patches where the plaster has decayed back to dirt and eventually stone. The dark patches on the yellow wallpaper is where the mould came through before I finally ripped off the rotting wallpaper.

But now, although I still don’t have anything in writing from the loss adjustor, the claims handling company, the insurance company or the mysterious underwriters, I have some hope that they will pay the claim. In addition, the contractor fixed the gutters while I was away, and I came back to a completely dry wall! Plus Rico stayed with me for 10 days over Easter and fixed all sorts of little things for me. So now, despite the ongoing water debacle (don’t ask) things aren’t quite such a disaster in this house.

Such relief is only very recent. This photo does a poor job of representing what happened when I first got home. The shower was almost completely blocked (or the bath – the idea of separate baths and showers hasn’t made it to England yet), and one day I walked downstairs while it was still draining. Turns out I was having a secondary shower outside my back door. This thing is called a hopper, and for some reason the water from the bathroom comes from inside into the hopper, down a pipe and then into the drain (just the shower and sink thank goodness!!). Water was coming out of the hopper like one of those fancy mushroom fountains. New disaster!

Turned out that the gutter guys had knocked loose a lot of little pebbles which had got bound up in my hair. After a whole bottle of sulphuric acid, followed by another of caustic (just for fun!) the skinny pipe passed its giant kidney stone and now there was only one shower per shower, if you get my drift.

One thing I can definitively answer now though – a shower definitely uses less water than a bath.

The photo above was from our trip to Liverpool on the easter weekend. It was absolutely amazing weather, only marginally more amazing than a certain piece of artwork. Walking down a completely innocuous side street full of rundown buildings, we noticed that one of the rundown buildings was moving. They’d cut a chunk of wall out, attached it to some big mechanical arm and rotated. Absolutely bizarre. About once a minute it would return to a normal position for a wall before setting off again. Here is the youtube video… (you see what a slippery path this whole internet thing is? - now I'm embedding my own videos - don't worry though, I won't be posting them anytime soon).



Finally, a picture of the Mersey that I swear has not been doctored in any way shape or form… It truly was this brilliant a day (not the next unfortunately).