Christmas 1995

Hello Folks,

How are you all? ‘Tis the season to be jolly, tra la la la la, etc., and time to put pen to paper again - or should that be inkjet to printer paper these days!

The Irving family abode is still a tip - 16 months after moving in! Speedy is definitely NOT our middle name - INERTIA would be a truthful substitute! We do, however, have a bathroom door now: for one of the bathrooms only. This place is rather more open plan than is normally desirable in a home! The wardrobe, which covers one wall of our bedroom, is of an individual style?!? - probably known in old estate agent-ese as having much character. It is extremely character forming leaning on the doors to enable one to shut them after extracting one’s clothes from it daily!

Bob’s other major project has been quite successful. On either side of the fireplace are two large alcoves where in ‘the ˇold days’ cupboards used to be. We (yes, I also managed a minor contribution! ) have managed to build, on one side, a large cupboard at the bottom with bookshelves all the way to the ceiling above. A moratorium is now in place on all further construction projects in the sitting room until we have done something about the gloom and murk therein - i.e., the decorating. Even as I type (if that’s what one can call it! ) Bob is scrubbing the walls in preparation for the paint which is to come (sorry! old ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide’ speak! ).
Other major projects (not done by us, I hasten to add ) include: installation of a radiator and old reclaimed Victorian fireplace in the sitting room. The previous occupants of the house had ripped out whatever was there before and built THE MOST GHASTLY fireplace you ever could imagine!!! We (actually me this time! ) then laid a tiled hearth with reproduced Victorian tiles to match those in the fireplace. Oh! the agony! cutting VERY THICK tiles into odd shapes by hand. Never again!..........well until the next time!

That was most definitely not the end of things. Installation of a damp-proof course proved an interesting experience. We were running out of money (again) so we decided to only deal with the dampness in the sitting room. This was just as well since I don’t think I could have coped with total mess, dust and chaos that would have resulted from the WHOLE of the ground floor being dealt with. All the EXTRA initial dampness resulting from the process has seen an explosion in the biodiversity of invertebrates roaming the sitting room in dead of night : slugs, snails, woodlice, etc.... Glad there isn’t anything bigger......gulp!! Almost placing one’s bare foot on a slug does tend to send shudders up one’s spine.

In February we received a missive from the Guild of Master Craftsmen in response to our enquiry for a carpenter who could do a decent job of making an internal sliding sash window. Why? Well, the previous occupants (who appear to have been yer classic cowboy builders guv ) had built an extension on to the front of the house, presumably to create a hall. This involved blocking off the old front door and knocking out the old window to make an archway through to the sitting room. Unfortunately, this had the twin effect of making the sitting room dark (thus adding condensation to the rising damp and creating interesting mould patterns on the already disgusting wallpaper ) and draughty due to the lack of a door between the ‘hall’ and the sitting room. The only solution to this interesting conundrum, short of knocking down the extension, was to recreate the room as it used to be - hence our need for a carpenter.

We now have a beautiful new window where the old window used to be, and that is a mini tale in itself. Mr. Boote came to evaluate the problem in February, sent the estimate in April, and started work in May (well, what’s a few month’s wait anyway ). When the plaster was stripped away from the archway, it came as no surprise to find that the brick Victorian window arch had been left in an unsafe condition, i.e. the old bricks wobbled when you touched them!! The mind boggles as to what could have happened - the phrase ‘using a sledge hammer to crack a nut’ springs to mind. After urgent cries of ‘Help! I’m holding the house up on my own!’ and other interesting comments, the new lintel was finally eased into position, phew!

Having had the old front doorway unblocked last winter, increasing the aforementioned draughts, we have now ALMOST got a new half glazed panelled door to fill the gap. I say almost, because whilst Mr. Boote came in August to look into our hole, the estimate did not actually appear until (you’ve guessed it! ) the end of October. We may, if we’re REALLY lucky, get the door by Christmas. At least he gives us a chance to save up for it! I’m looking forward to getting it : it will have a mixture of Victorian cobalt blue stained glass, clear glass and a middle panel of patterned frosted glass. This should be a reasonable compromise between letting in enough light and privacy, since one of the windows in the hall is directly in front of the proposed door, though we do have a front garden also.

We have a few patches of back garden as well! Before there was just a vast expanse of boring slabs, which I believe are glorified with the name ‘patio’. Then...I (Bob) rented this thing called a stone saw, which is a small motorcycle without a front wheel and with a cutting wheel where the back one was. Sometimes you can start it up with a cord and it makes a filthy row and covers the whole of everything with a fine layer of cement dust when you cut slabs with it. Of course, cutting up the slabs (blinded by goggles, choked with a face -mask) was the easy bit! Underneath was a layer of hardcore which had to be broken up and extracted from the soil, a long, tedious process which ended in the creation of three small flower beds and a immense mound of rocks. At last! thought the plants which had been straining at pots for weeks after their arrival from the garden centre.......... We have watched the plants with deep concern ever since, wondering whether they are bashing their delicate little roots against the stones that I didn’t get out or frying in the tropical sun of Gloucestershire. They certainly seem to have lost their sense of time as the clematis produced two large blue flowers in November. Perhaps they will settle down next year, before the molluscs of 41 Albion St (see above) discover them too thoroughly.

As far as the children are concerned this has been the YEAR OF THE OPPOSITE SEX. Somehow I suppose you would expect that Rupert, at the grand old age of 15, would be dabbling at this sort of thing by now. Oh! but the angst! the hours spent on the telephone sorting out their own and all their friends’ love lives to the exclusion of everything else. Trying to get him to concentrate on school work is like fighting a losing battle : you can lead a horse to water, etc. If he doesn’t sort out his priorities soon, I dread to think what his GCSE results will be like. I suppose I should be glad he still confides in me - sometimes! There is not a lot of point in being too confrontational : one then loses them altogether. The one abiding interest that seems to have survived all this is music - perhaps he may actually get a decent grade for music! He does have guitar and drum lessons at school and seems to be really keen to compose music for these two instruments. Also he is still in the Parish Church choir as an alto, though at school he sings soprano! This is because he likes singing in a falsetto voice. If he sings in his normal voice he is a bass. At this time of year, therefore, Hannah (his girlfriend ) has some competition!

Tamsin, being only 11, does not take her boyfriends so seriously. She must have had about four or five in the last year, and tends to think of them as just friends or useful dancing partners at discos. Of course, being at boarding school, they are reasonably closely supervised anyway, so the opposite sex are never taken that seriously by the children except as friends. Therefore, Tamsin is doing very well at school and was moved up this academic year : now being in the second class from the top out of ten classes. She still plays the trumpet in the Swing Band at school, having now been promoted to first trumpet! (Perhaps all the other trumpeters have left! - no I shouldn’t be that unkind! ). Next term she wants to have drum lessons also, being motivated by the fact that nobody can play drums that well in the School Orchestra and Tamsin feels she could do better! I have a wonderful vision of Tamsin rushing around like a pea on a drum, as happened once before when she was in the Choir briefly. Tamsin is what you might call a fair weather chorister - she only joins if they are singing something interesting! Thus she had a brief stint doing ‘African Sanctus’, which she had heard so often at home, and then she left! Sportwise, Tamsin is very into trampolining which she does on four occasions every week. Other than this, I think she quite likes hockey, as does Rupert, but that’s about it.

Not feeling awfully rich this year (in fact, positively broke! ), we didn’t have a proper holiday. We only managed to take the trailer tent out for a long weekend once : to the Warwick Folk Festival. This was quite good fun but we felt that the organisers had been a little less than inspired with their choice of singers this year, so it may be that we choose another Folk Music Festival next time. The extraordinary heat certainly kept ME off the dance floor in the ceilidh - wild horses etc...............! There were some intrepid souls, Tamsin and Bob included, who actually made it to the end of a dance, dripping sweat, muttering ‘never again............gasp!’ before finally collapsing heapwise into the nearest chair, never to move again - well at least until a cold beer was proffered! The song ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’ springs to mind at this point.

Life for both of us this year has revolved around the seemingly never-ending task of ‘doing up the house’, and I think this will be so next year too. But at least I finally feel that my job at the Oxford University Museum is giving me the satisfaction and responsibility that I desire. There are still all the usual routine tasks to do as in any job, but I have started trying to arrest the ultimate decomposition (by pyrite decay ) of some of our Jurassic fossils by treating them with ammonia (gasp! gasp! cough! wheeze! aaargghh! thump! die! - slight exaggeration there, but the fume cupboard has been shut down by the Health and Safety Executive! They obviously haven’t noticed the irony of the situation!). I shall start on our collection of pyritic minerals this next year (shall I survive through ‘till next Christmas?!! gulp! ). You should see me in my goggles! I also do a lot of identification of minerals using lots of equipment with grand sounding names: SEM (Scanning Electron Microscope), FTIR (Fourier Transform InfraRed spectrometer ) and XRD ( X-Ray Diffraction unit ), most of which is over in the Earth Sciences Dept. of the University next door............we have this understanding.......... ssshhhhh!! Then of course there are curatorial tasks which can be challenging, to put it mildly. I think I shall soon be reasonably adept at deciphering illegible handwriting in old nineteenth century field notebooks and trying to decide what these old buffers were trying to say about the specimens they had collected. This usually involves a reasonable amount of literature research as well - but old scientific papers make surprisingly interesting reading (something akin almost to what the scenery was like, conversations with quarry managers, philosophical musings, and always written in the first person so you get to know your man! ).

What I have discovered in these papers are lots of references to well-educated (in enlightened European Universities, of course ) women geologists. If a woman wanted to have a paper read at a learned society she would have to get a male member to read it for her as she was not allowed to be a member herself. Before women obtained the vote, they were not considered to be proper people, and if you were not a proper person then you could not be a member according to the rules. Hardly surprising that men appear to have dominated science - there were women around but they had so many obstacles placed in their paths. It would be easy for an unscrupulous male under these circumstances to say that a woman’s paper was his, especially since this has been shown to have happened with musical compositions, etc. Sorry for the little moan, but I get so angry at the injustices done to my sex.

I, Bob, spent the last year in keeping what is called in polite circles a legacy system just about on the road, while around me the composition of the team (those polite circles again) varied greatly in number and competency. I am promised new software next year which will allow us (whoever we are) to create a new and flexible replacement system in a miraculously short time, such a short time that my enthusiasm for it is curbed by a suspicion that it may put me out of a job.....Fittingly, the software is called Magic!!! I still make pots, though not many. If I make more, I have to put up more shelves to put pots on. My current project is a bird-bath. That can go outside!! I’m still involved with Friends of the Earth, though my crusading zeal against The Car is blunted by driving 80 miles every day.

Well, I feel that I must finish here and wish you all a traditional Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, as I must hurry and get ready for the Deer Park School’s Carol Concert tonight - yes, I am singing in the choir again (well, attempting to! ), as is Rupert (soprano again!! ). Next year, we hope to persuade?!? Bob to join.

Lots of love and peace to you all
from
Joy, Bob, Rupert and Tamsin. x x x x x x x x x