Time is Not Money

I think my laptop has forgiven me now; at least it hasn’t thrown a wobbly yet, so fingers crossed. Yesterday we had a visit from a couple of highly enthusiastic auctioneers itching to get their hands on our house. It was interesting talking to them and we learned a lot, but we have decided not to go down that route – at least not initially – as they wanted to drop the price considerably. So we’ve decided on an estate agents and I’ll be contacting them later today. Onwards and upwards…

It’s a frustrating process because everywhere you turn there are more legal obstacles and processes and besides, selling a house in England can be a nightmare as it can be months between offer and completion. But hey, we remain optimistic that something can be sorted out soon. God knows we’ve waited long enough… The auction process is tempting in that regard because once it’s done there’s no going back; you have a date for the sale and assuming it meets the reserve price it’s all done and dusted within a month. So you know where you are. On the other hand the price they were suggesting represented such a drop that we couldn’t accept it. So in this respect time is very definitely not money; time is the opposite of money… *sigh*

My Laptop Hates Me

I have a very temperamental laptop; it doesn’t like any change in its routine and it doesn’t like being moved at all. Yesterday I had to put it on the floor as I made a fruitless attempt to link up the DVD player to a monitor,  and today it is sulking.  It either refuses to start or it lets you go through the whole startup process before doing the Dying Swan,  gasping that it is out of battery.  It will die, it will die. (You should be warned that from now on I shall be peppering my words with essence of petunia.  I mean, extracts of Withnail.) So thanks to that oaf throwing a hissy fit, I am forced to camp and to blog on my phone, and now I have completely forgotten what I was going to say.

The DVDs I wanted to watch were the entire 4 series of Ever Decreasing Circles,  which for reasons I can’t disclose,  I am studying. It’s been quite a while since I watched the early series and I have to say I’m enjoying them.

As far as the house goes we have seen several estate agents and are considering the possibility of an auction,  though that has yet to be decided. That’s all for now as my thumbs have gone weird.

Kirk out

A Holiday of Bank

What a bank holiday weekend that was! It started on Friday around lunchtime when, preparing for an evening at the Crow – I mean a night in with a discussion group on zoom – I noticed a little post on Facebook. ‘Is anyone interested in a free ticket to Withnail and I at Birmingham Rep tonight?’ it said. Was I interested? I bit the guy’s hand off, and two hours later I was on the train to Brum (you have to change at Leicester from here, which is a bit of a pain but there you go) arriving ‘into New Street’ as the announcers inexplicably say, where I paused to admire the Bull which had been a feature of the last Commonwealth Games (see pic below) before emerging onto a wet street ridged with tram lines. The trams are new since I was last there, and very impressive they are too, though I didn’t really have any use for one as I was just wandering around for an hour or two and hopefully finding a decent pub for a beer and a bite. Sadly it was cold and wet but I did indeed find a lovely little pub called the Sly Fox which had all the hallmarks of a traditional pub with some good grub and several real ales.

https://theslyoldfox.com/

I had a half of Butty Bach and a haloumi wrap, both gorgeous. After that I walked through the cold and drizzle to Birmingham Rep (I like walking through Birmingham; it’s a mixture of industry and grandeur and instead of trudging through the streets you get to walk through all the squares and admire the monuments). I arrived at the theatre and met the guy with the ticket. The performance was brilliant (see review below) though sadly I had to leave a little before the end to catch the last train or I’d have been stranded. I got home around midnight and of course didn’t sleep because I was so wired. Next morning we had a late breakfast at the pop-up vegan cafe in Fearon Hall (sausages, vegan bacon, beans, hash browns, tomatoes and mushrooms – gorgeous) and thence to the Singaround at its new venue in the church hall. I wasn’t too keen on the change of venue but there were beers available and I have to say it was a great afternoon. Then on Sunday after Meeting I went to Woodhouse Eaves Sustainability fair where I met a lot of people I knew and ate a vegan brownie before buying OH a Morsbag so that mine don’t go missing. Again. And yesterday we went to the May fair at Beacon Hill, run by Leicestershire Druids, where we got lost and ended up walking miles and missing the maypole dancing. After that the weekend caught up with me and I collapsed in a chair in the garden and didn’t move for several hours before the son came round with beers to revive me a little. And that was our Bank Holiday weekend. Hope yours was as good.

Kirk out

Free to Those That Can’t Afford it, Very Expensive to Those on Chesterfields

On Friday I was lucky enough to get a free ticket to see Withnail and I at the Rep in Birmingham.

https://www.birmingham-rep.co.uk/whats-on/withnail-and-i/

I’d seen this advertised and really wanted to go but I couldn’t afford it, so when a ticket was advertised on Facebook I went to see Uncle Monty and prepared to rejuvenate in Birmingham by mistake. It was brilliant to be in an audience made up exclusively of Withnail fans, and if the scenery wobbled a little that was entirely in keeping with the anarchic ethos of the play. We were in the front row apart from the very expensive Chesterfields in front of us, each with its own oaf. Steve and I were both anxious about whether they would do the film justice but we needn’t have worried; from the first moment I knew they’d hit it and from then on I didn’t stop laughing till the end. This has more than a little to do with the fact that Bruce Robinson wrote the script. Adonis Siddique’s Marwood was just as uptight and anxious as Paul McGann’s, though less good-looking: I’d have had him even if it had to be burglary – and Robert Sheehan’s Withnail more flamboyant and less enraged than Richard E Grant’s. I kind of missed the rage (how dare you?) but I went with it and thoroughly enjoyed the adaptation. If our main worry was whether they’d do it justice, I guess theirs would be that the audience would just sit and yell out all the lines. But they played it very cleverly, disrupting the script to keep us on our toes so we were never quite sure where the familiar lines would drop, though we laughed and cheered when they did. Monty was absolutely delicious – more restrained but just as camp; and nearly all the familiar scenes were there; the Mother Red Cap (they did the urinal scene beautifully) the squalid flat with ‘matter’ in the sink and coffee in bowls; Monty’s shack at Crow Crag and even the exterior scenes, all done with backdrops and clever lighting. The only bit missing was the bull though I made up for that by running at the bull in New Street station, shouting.

Withnail and I is a picaresque piece (what absolute twaddle) meaning that the same characters move through different scenes. It has become a cult partly because of its anarchic character (an unfortunate political decision) and partly because literally every line is quotable; there isn’t a duff or pedestrian line in the entire piece (and that’s what’s so essential isn’t it, the theatrical zeal in the veins.)

The piece de resistance, though, was the Jag in which Withnail and Marwood drive from London to Monty’s cottage in Crow Crag near Penrith (Penrith!) Somehow or other they managed to get the shell of a Jag onto the stage, sit the guys inside it and then project the motorway onto the surrounding screens. It was brilliant and got a well-deserved round of applause.

It was terrific to be in a theatre packed with Withnail fans as opposed to being at home with only one, and I wished OH could have been there but it was not to be. Friday was preview night, the first ever performance, and I felt very privileged to be a part of it. Unfortunately I had to leave just before the end causing half the front row to call me a terrible c**t, but I had to catch the last train or I’d have been forced to camp.

Thanks to Steve for the ticket.

Kirk out

Punctuated Equilibrium

I ought to know what the Punctuated Equilibrium is but it’s such a weird name for a geological era that I can never keep it in my head. I may look it up in a minute… but here at the moment our equilibrium is being punctuated on a daily basis by the arrival of estate agents. Most are in formal plumage, though yesterday’s was a little more ragged round the edges, but they usually sport bright ties, jackets and not necessarily matching trousers. They carry a tablet, though some are old-school and brandish a clip-board and pen, and they shower their clients with data, some verbal and some written. Yesterday’s arrival had no handouts at all but was a mine of information about the market and ways to sell, so that was interesting. So far Edward’s are the front-runners as they seem the most thorough and the least prone to bullshit, but we have one more to see next week and then we’ll make a decision. It’s a complicated business as we have to negotiate the Scottish system as well as the English one, but we’re trying to take it a step at a time.

The election results seem encouraging up to know and would seem to point to a landslide for Starmer. I’m not a huge fan of the man but it would be a massive relief to get the Tories out and for them to stay out for a long time to come. They’ve brought this upon themselves, as far as I’m concerned and their losses are richly deserved. I gather Sadiq Khan won comfortably which is good as his Tory opponent did seem like a bigot

Well, what are the odds? The punctuated equilibrium isn’t a geological era at all; it refers to a theory of evolution which states that change can happen rapidly as well as gradually. It makes sense and I know I’ve heard it before, but I’ll probably forget. So if I ask you again what it is, refer me to this blog post or whack me around the head with wikipedia. That’s all for now.

https://biologydictionary.net/punctuated-equilibrium/#google_vignette

Kirk out

Agents of the (E)state

Estate agents are not the most highly regarded of professionals, being generally on a par with lawyers and politicians, but I have to say the one I met yesterday seemed pretty good. My expectations were not high; I had the irrational fear that they would take one look at the place, shake their head, suck their teeth and say, ‘Oh dear, I don’t think we can sell this place.’ I knew the fear was irrational, but you can’t reason these things away. Anyway, the time came and so did he, a stick-thin young man in a smart suit and shiny tie. He seemed friendly enough and we toured the house and garden he made little notes on his pad, giving off little sounds like great, lovely, fantastic. I assumed this was just estate agent-speak and when we got down to the nitty-gritty he’d tell us the house was worth even less than we hoped for and we’d be lucky to find a buyer. Not a bit of it: he showed me a page of comparisons with other local (very local) properties on sale with their prices and what they had sold for. Then the surprise; he valued ours at considerably more than we’d been expecting. That was very pleasant; and even taking into consideration what I told him about wanting a quick sale, we’ll still come off better than I thought. Assuming it sells, of course – but as he said, this is the right time of year to be selling. It also compares favourably with next door which is also on sale – not that I take pleasure in such competition, that’s just the way things are – but still. He was very thorough and went through every aspect of their service including all the charges. It seems good and they couldn’t be more local as they’re just down the road. They only have the one office which I also like – it means we can’t get passed on to someone who’s out of town, as we did with our probate solicitor. We have another estate agent coming today and there are two more booked in, so at the end of that process we shall make a decision. Onwards and upwards. So that’s all good.

This afternoon I shall be mostly… cutting the top of the hedge. That’s a job I hate as it’s very hard on the arms and you have to keep gathering up the bits and throwing them onto the ground. In fact I think I might leave that job till tomorrow – after all I did the side of the hedge yesterday…

Kirk out

Too Many Balls

We have an estate agents coming today to look over the house and give us a valuation; hopefully it won’t be too far off the price it was valued at 18 months ago for the purposes of probate, but we’ll get three or four quotes and then choose one. It’s disappointing not to have heard from either of the private buyers but I guess there’s still time. I just hope the selling process doesn’t drag on too long because we’re already fed up.

Yesterday the son came round to continue sorting out his bedroom; you can actually see the floor now, which is an advantage. I feel as if I’ve got so many balls in the air I don’t know what to do next; it makes me wish I were a nomad and could just pack up my tent and move to the next spot. But I guess you have to have it in the blood to be a nomad. Then again, one of my favourite films in recent years has been Nomadland. I’ve blogged about this before; it’s a very peaceful film following a group of boomers who lose everything in the 2008 crash and end up travelling round the Midwest in trailers finding work here and there to keep going.

Nomadland

Lately I’ve been dashing off a lot of comic poems. I guess with all that’s going on I don’t have the energy for serious writing, so in the last couple of months I’ve written a skit on Lewis Carroll’s The Mock Turtle Song https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mock_Turtle%27s_Song

which is very ecclesiastical and references PG Wodehouse as it’s called The Great Sermon Handicap. I’ve also written a farewell to the Plough pub where we did the singaround, based on Goodbye Yellow Brick Rd, as well as Nothing Rhymes with Orange, an audience-participation piece about how – well, nothing rhymes with orange. And now I’m embarking on one called the Thingummy. Loosely based on the song called The Marvellous Toy, it’s about a mysterious object with widgets and sprockets and how nobody knows what it is. I started this because there’s a shared lunch in a couple of weeks and we were asked to bring a mysterious object for people to talk about. I don’t have any mysterious objects and even if I did they’d be deep in a box somewhere, so I thought I’d write a poem about one instead.

Too cheer myself up when I feel overwhelmed I look at bikes, on which topic I’ve had a lot of recommendations from a Facebook biker group. Right now it’s a toss-up between a Yamaha and an AJS Cadwell. I think if I like the look of the AJS I’ll probably go with that as, no matter how reliable, you just can’t fall in love with a Yamaha. I mean, look at this and tell me you’re not drooling…if I had one of these I’d want to take it to bed every night.

image removed on request

Kirk out

Onwards and Upwards

We had a fairly uneventful weekend; on Saturday we walked across to Morrison’s for a late breakfast (very late; it was 12.30 by the time we arrived) but the place was so busy and short-staffed we had to wait about 45 minutes for our food. Then only one breakfast came and I had to go and ask for mine – and then there weren’t any knives so we had to eat sausages and hash browns with a spoon and fork. This is not so hard with veggie sausages as it would be with meat ones, and I enjoyed it all the more for having to wait. We didn’t complain because the staff were so nice and were clearly rushed off their feet; and besides the customers there are always friendly so it wasn’t the tense experience it might have been in Waitrose (LOL). I spent the afternoon finishing off the strimming in the freezing cold wind (it’s warmer today, thank god) and the garden now looks reasonably tidy.

As far as the house goes I have given up on the private buyers for now and spent much of Friday contacting estate agents and arranging visits. I don’t know how they’re going to take photos of our front room as it’s full of boxes but we can discuss all that when they come. Today we have a visit from Pickford’s to discuss removal costs – a little premature I know but we just want to get a few quotes so we know what we’re dealing with.

Yesterday I watched a film recommended by Beetleypete called A Hidden Life.

https://beetleypete.com/

I wouldn’t have bothered were it not for the recommendation as I hadn’t heard of it and it’s extremely long at nearly 3 hours. The film’s obscurity is perhaps appropriate as it celebrates the ‘hidden life’ of Franz Jagerstatter (I don’t now how to do umlauts on here but there should be some) a Nazi refusenik who when called up from his farming occupation, refuses to take the oath of allegiance to Hitler. The film begins with a lengthy, Heidi-like picture of their idyllic life on a farm in the Tyrol where they plant wheat, raise pigs and keep a cow for milking. The work is hard and goes from dawn to dusk but the landscape is beautiful and their three children scamper about like goats on the steep hillside. The hard work is mitigated by the mutual support and love not only between husband and wife but among the whole community, without whose help no family could survive. Into this idyll marches a detachment of soldiers with call-up papers. Franz is sent back to his farm at first as this is a reserved occupation, but as the war progresses he is called on again and attends a training camp. Here he refuses to take the oath and is imprisoned. He spends the rest of his life in prison, being by turns beaten and cajoled to take the oath. ‘What do you think you’re achieving? Do you think you’ll change the course of the war? Think of your wife and family?’ and so on: exactly the sort of things I can imagine people saying in those circumstances. In the end he is sentenced to death; his wife is allowed a visit but they are not permitted an embrace and her conversation is interrupted by constant badgering of him to take the oath. In the end he is guillotined and his wife goes home to continue managing the farm with her sister, although this time the community which ostracised her pitches in and helps.

I’m not sure I would have the courage to do as he did: I suspect in the end I’d take the oath with fingers crossed behind my back. Then again, as a yoga teacher of mine once said, in each moral dilemma you have to ask yourself, ‘is this the hill I want to die on?’ But he acted in accordance with his conscience, and that is the pith of the story.

A Hidden Life is a hypnotic film; the lush beauty of the Tyrolese landscape is frequently contrasted with the dull sunless prison environment (I thought of Oscar Wilde’s ‘little tent of blue’)

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45495/the-ballad-of-reading-gaol

and the laughing freedom of the children as the adults work. One interesting feature was that while the main characters spoke in English, the Nazis spoke German. I found it frustrating that the German wasn’t subtitled but I guess it brought home the idea that the Nazis did not represent the whole of Germany but are in a sense a race apart. There is also some chilling (actual) footage of Hitler. As far as the local village goes, every shade of collusion, collaboration, dissent and conformity is represented; the mayor struts around declaiming like a tin-pot Hitler while the priest and bishop hedge their bets, afraid to go against the state. Some of their neighbours are judgmental, others quietly supportive. At one point an artist in a church working on a sculpture of the crucifixion says ‘the people look up and imagine they would behave differently from the crowd.’ But would they? Ultimately the film is like the sculpture because it asks the same question of all of us: would we behave differently? What would we do? And the answer is silence.

A Hidden Life is available now on All4.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5827916/

Kirk out

PS Speaking of moral dilemmas, as we were leaving Morrison’s on Saturday we passed a cashpoint that was beeping because a card had been left in it. I was about to take it and hand it in but there was a couple behind us and the man snatched it from the slot. I could swear the woman said something like ‘take it home’ but she could have said ‘take it in,’ I guess. As we moved off I said sotto-voce to OH: ‘I wonder if they’re going to hand that in?’ I had a horrible feeling they weren’t, but I could be wrong…

Nye Then

I’ve been quite busy this week, as you can imagine, sorting out solicitors and estate agents and generally trying to make the garden look presentable, no mean feat as it’s very overgrown. I did a couple of days wrestling with blackberry canes and strimming the long grass (I feel bad about doing this as I’ve sent no end of beetles and ladybirds scurrying for shelter as I assault them with my loud whirring machine, but the better it looks, the better our chances for a quick sale.) The trellis is now visible which was hidden under brambles and ivy, and the grass is shorter at least. Sadly this time of year sees the first appearance of the – oh god, what’s it called? Not Japanese knotweed but close – nope, it’s gone. It’ll come back to me. They used to be trees in the coniferous period and they look very arboreal still, with a central stem and lots of little ferny branches. I kind of venerate them for being so old and yet persisting, but the trouble is, they are extremely invasive and impossible to dig up as the roots are soil coloured, highly frangible and can go down to a depth of five feet. There are always these tensions when living in a society like ours: you want to respect nature on the one hand, but on the other you want to sell your house quickly and move to Scotland.

Horsetail! That’s what it’s called.

By way of a break from all this, I went with a friend to see Nye in Leicester. This was one of those Stage on Screen productions which the National Theatre do, where they livestream a play to cinemas all over the country on specific dates. Nye is of course the story of Nye Bevan, the miners’ champion and the architect of the NHS. I really wanted to see this ever since I read about it, and I wasn’t disappointed. It blew me away. The story is told in flashback with Nye dying in a hospital bed in one of the NHS wards he created. The scenes change quite rapidly with a set of beds and curtains changing around in a highly imaginative way to represent various scenes such as Nye’s home, the green benches in the House of Commons and the Commons tea room. Michael Sheen plays the bull-headed, passionate and womanising Bevan, and the production doesn’t skate over the price paid by his wife and family for the creation of his vision: his wife says at one point that she sacrificed her career for him (she too was an MP, one of only five women at that time). Churchill is the villain here, along with the rest of the Tories fighting the NHS tooth and nail (and all other body parts too) while Bevan’s father lies dying of black lung, ironically neglected by his son as he fights for the health service that would have saved him. The PM Clement Atlee is played by a woman, an interesting bit of cross-casting which shows him as a somewhat Machiavellian figure whose heart is not in the radical reforms his government oversaw. The play is a blistering attack on the Tories as well as the privileged doctors who opposed the NHS every step of the way (they are portrayed in video as detached talking heads floating above the stage), and while it is a celebration of Nye it doesn’t skate over his flaws; his intransigence, his womanising and the neglect of his family.

There have been criticisms of the production, that a bio told in flashback is a cliche, and that it doesn’t spend long enough on the establishment of the welfare state, and I guess I can see those arguments but I was blown away by it. I’m so glad I got the opportunity to see it; and it’s a timely reminder that if we want the NHS we must be prepared to fight for it in every generation.

https://nye.ntlive.com

Kirk out.

I’ve Got a Silver Machine

Spoiler alert: it’s not a motorbike. I wish it was – a motorbike is on my list of things to get When I Have the Money – but it’s a useful machine if you want to make clothes or mend things or, as I did the other day, turn a couple of scraps of fabric into a cloth bag for shopping since OH lost my favourite Morsbag (don’t get me started on that.) My machine is a Brother LS14S sewing machine and it can do more or less everything except overlocking and probably make you a cup of tea if you find the right function, but I think I was happier with my old Singer. It only had forward and reverse gears but it was solid, dependable and very placid. This one, although it will do any stitch apart from overlocking, is quite temperamental. It took exception to a particular style of cotton reel I used and snarled up the thread, and if you don’t get the tension exactly right it throws a wobbly. I don’t want to sound ungrateful because I had no machine at all and it was a present; I’m really happy to have it but I just wish things were simpler. Why is everything so complicated?

I am given to understand that buying a car is not simple either. We’ll be swapping ours for an electric car on that mythical date When We Get the Money, and whilst I guess buying second hand is not the lottery it used to be, I’m hearing that lots of companies don’t actually want to sell you a car outright but lease it. This might be a good idea in some ways but I’ve heard you end up paying them all sorts of ongoing charges rather than just a one-off payment – so I don’t want that. Clearly I’m going to have to look into it. I’m supposed to be doing a spreadsheet this week listing things we want to do after the move (like solar panels etc) and the costs (t’s just a list really but spreadsheet sounds much more professional.) So much of this week is going to be spent in research of that kind. The trouble is, I find it very hard to concentrate on reading things online; I have a tendency to scroll and skim which is not helpful if you’re looking for precise information.

We’re also looking at houses online and trying to find one which ticks all the boxes. The good thing about buying in Scotland is that all the survey information is available online, and when we found one we loved I looked up the info. There are no major issues but at the bottom it says that although the property has never flooded there’s a flood risk in the future. So that’s out, and on we go. It’s hard to think about anything else at the moment.

Speaking of motorbikes, we were on the M1 on Saturday when we saw a massive convoy of Hell’s Angels. I’m no fan of Hell’s Angels but I couldn’t help admiring the fleet of sleek silver machines as they throbbed past me.

At the weekend we went to visit our grandson who was one on Saturday. We took him a card and a tub of bricks which he loved. He seemed to like the card almost as much as the bricks, even though I’d bought one for a 3-year-old by mistake thinking it just had a frog doing contortions on the front…

Kirk out