Christmas 2005

41. Albion Street, Stratton,
Cirencester,
Gloucs.
GL7 2HT.

December 2005 (ish).

Hello to all you lovely folks out there!
The time is approximately winter, and ‘tis time to snuggle up to something woolly, though whether roaming the fields or the bottom of your drawer, I’ll leave to your proclivities! Even as we speak, woolly objects (baa! baa!) fill our attic ...... “Quiet up there, some of us are trying to hibernate!” ... and are walled up (?) in the ceiling of the hall ...... (cackle! cackle!) ..... bang! bang! (another nail) .... “for the love of God, Montresor!” ..... while the bat-sheep, Tulkinghorn, greets (!) visitors with a friendly graze .... (oops! oversucked again!) ... “next visitor, please, this one’s empty!”. The theme this year appears to be woolliness (?!!).

Life is hard ....sigh! (but I thought you said it was woolly!). Picture the scene, gentle readers : typing by the light of a guttering candle, with only the warmth of the laptop seeping through my fingerless gloves, wheezing as I cough and splutter germs over an unsuspecting crop of slugs, woodlice, silverfish, etc. roaming the wasteland of the sitting-room ..... “aaarrghh! not bird ‘flu - we’re off!” ...... mummified (what, already!) from head-to-toe in an elderly (creak! groan!) blanket, the teeth of a hungry gale ripping holes in my flesh and gnawing through to my bones .... “aaarrrggghhh!” ....(thump! ....falls to floor) ... “for the love of God, get me a plumber!!” ..... stiffens ..... what remains of feet waving in the air .......... “is it too late? quick! fetch a sheep!” .... oooh! warmth!! Hmmm!

By now, you may have guessed that (a) we’ve been watching Dickens, and (b) at the very least, the central heating is not working. That is, how shall we say, part of it (!). Conversations tend to veer towards : how many nude ducks would we have to eject into the cold, cold world after stuffing a duvet (oh, all right, they can live inside the duvet!), how many sheep could be herded into the attic / space below the floorboards ...... “first the ladder, then the world ... baaa!”, how many nights of oblivion would pass before the walls could be lined with corks .... “there’s an old mill by the stream” (hic!). Oh fickle certainty! - just when you thought you’d escaped the chilblain-filled shoes of your childhood - now your soft, cocooned, warm little (!) body is plunged into that alternative lifestyle (but not the one everyone talks about!) : the icicle-laden nose thawing out over that early morning mug of coffee ...... throb! drip! fsss! sniff! sniff! ...... racing to eat the mueslie before the ice-formation gets to be of Arctic proportions ...... chip! chip! sploosh! ... blackened frost-bitten toes in six million pairs of bed-socks resting on a luke-warm Rayburn .... fssss! steam! PONG! [An aside - sleeping in the nude was not common in the days before central heating!].

But now, let us re-wind back to September, for that is where the story begins, dear reader. Trying out the Rayburn, to see if the dear old thing would survive another winter, it promply entered its quiescent (?) old age, in that any excitement sent it into paroxysms of rage with the world, which translates as “If you turn that pump on again, I’m turning myself off, so there!”. This was not entirely unexpected, as it had a previous tendency to exhibit such sulky behaviour whenever it was windy (mind you, I, too, feel moody when the wind blows - ergo, I am a Rayburn (?)). No amount of pleading and gentle coaxing by the kindly heating engineer would change its mind, i.e., they don’t make gas valves for something this elderly anymore, and we had to consider the (gulp!) alternatives. Aha!, we thought, we’ll just scour the web for a refurbished, more modern version of Rayburn, this being the cheapest option for cash-strapped student households! We alighted on an appropriate one, believing our troubles to be over. However, we hadn’t reckoned with the fluid nature of gas regulations, which basically means that any gas appliance is illegal the moment you get it installed! All throughout October, gas engineers were (a) going on holiday, (b) attending courses, or (c) too busy, on account of the fact that everyone wants central heating NOW and it must be finished by Christmas. Upon finally taking a look at our current set-up, a dismal parade of engineers sucked their teeth .... “dead illegal, that, guv!” .... “never fit that in there, guv!” ... “needs at least 600 mm clearance and a new flexible flue up yer chimney, guv!” ... and bore heavyweight estimates for the alternative solution of gas condensing boiler and separate gas cooking range ... “gotta replace the valves, tank, pipes, guv!” ... the prospect of long cold days .... “can’t do anything till after Christmas, guv!” .... and even worse - NO COOKING FACILITIES AT CHRISTMAS - began to cast a pall over the previously over-optimistic brain cell. Trying out various hypothetical scenarios, a wood pellet burner briefly surfaced - the greenest thing on the market AND you can get a grant to install one. Alas, the Victorian designers (!?) of our little cottage weren’t concerned with how we were going to fit in a cooker AND a wood pellet burner AND have somewhere convenient to ‘blow in’ the pellets from the lorry ...... ho hum! back to fossil fuels .... we did try! Oh, the agonies of trying to be ‘green’!

After a couple of weeks of freezing to death .... one day at work ..... BING! ..... light-bulb lights up in head! This, dear readers, does not happen often! What if we took the front off the Rayburn - with a bit of luck the sulky one should get enough air for its needs and we may yet survive Christmas! So far, fingers crossed, it works - phew! “I haven’t seen that!” exclaimed one heating engineer. Cooking with the oven is somewhat exciting (!) - nothing new there, then - and it’s like summer in the kitchen, but I think we can live with that!

After changing the position of the front door last year - we like to confuse people, but especially the evil ones (see first paragraph) roaming the darkness (cackle!) - our hall has now been transformed (into what, you’re wondering, puzzled looks on your faces!). Having resembled a tumble-down shack for the last decade, complete with rivulets gouged into the plaster from the time of the Great Roof Leakiness, which we’ve decided to commemorate with stencilled drips down the wall, but only in one area (yes, we realize this is bizarre!), it is now transformed into a playground for the woolly, and other, Creatures of the Night!! (shiver) ...... no, not the vampire woodlice!

But let me transport you back, gentle reader, to warmer times. Arrrr! zummer is icumen in ....... bzzzz hic! bzzz hic! thud! (drunken wasp in beer-glass) ..... cough! ... cough! .... splutter! .... (curse!) .......growl! ....... phut! phut! phut! phuuuuuuut! grrroooowwwllllll! ...... (the morning chorus of the common lawnmower heard usually every Sunday before 8 a.m.) ......... “Waaaa! Da-ad, Ben won’t give me my football back!” ..... kick! gouge! thump! ..... (the ritual attention-seeking of children at breakfast (!) barbeques) ..... miiiinnngggg ... clunk! ...miiinnnngg ....clunk! ...miiiinnnggg ...clunk! (speedy, sort of, Bob wood-cutting) ...... scrape-grind scrape-grind (thousands of times) .... (split!) (curse!) clunk! (eventually) .... (slow, traditional Joy wood-cutting) ... us putting up wooden ceiling and / or floor in hall ..... baaaa! baaaa! (insulation) (see opening paragraph) ..... ah! peace! thank heaven for winter! (where did autumn go in all this? And spring?).

Tamsin (who?) left these shores in August to infest the outer reaches of the known world (though I think she rid herself of the little beasties before she arrived in Reykjavik) for a semester at the Iceland College of Arts (no, I can’t write it in Icelandic!). She organized this through ERASMUS, which is a European-wide scheme for student exchanges. We exchanged her for a sheep (good insulation - see paragraphs 1 and 7), turning down the offer of a lump of molten lava (too expensive - eats its way through house and home) and regularly-spouting geyser (plumbing not up to standard - see paragraphs 4 and 5).

Bristling with more technology than the American embassy, she rattled and clunked her way into the departure lounge never to be seen again, having first taken advantage of the cabin hand-luggage allowance to encompass the statutary bag, plus handbag, camera, laptop and heavy winter coat, deliberately chosen for the extra big deep pockets which were all crammed with as many extra leads, battery chargers, hard-drives, CDs, transformers, etc., not to mention odd bits of spare underwear dotted about her person in case of luggage loss. The keyboard, unfortunately, didn’t seem to be covered by the regulations, and so she avoided the ignominy of the busker-look and wrapped this in whatever clothes would fit into her suitcase and still weigh 20 kg! ...... I omitted to mention the wearing of two of everything .......! ..... and in August too! (hmmm! an eclectic vision of a diminutive figure with pink and yellow dreadlocks, fluorescent yellow council workman’s coat with bits and pieces of technology hanging out of everywhere, large scarf ... Rumplestiltskin crossed with Dr. Who, Tom Baker style (?) .... so where was K9? .... shhh! in the suitcase!). In between bouts of evil bug outbreaks, she has been recording strange noises (see exchange items above) and setting them to pictures ever since ...... bleak volcanic landscapes ...... blub! blub! fssss! (bubbling, steaming mud-pools) ...... blub! fsss! whooosshhh! (geysers) ..... and the eerie sights and sounds of the Aurora Borealis ....so close you feel you could almost touch ......

Thanks to her first landlady, Elisabet, she has become to the only winter cyclist in Reykjavik - if you haven’t got nails on your boots, it’s easier to cycle on ice, apart from the glass all over the pavements after Friday and Saturday late-night drinking orgies ..... mending the odd flat tyre is a small inconvenience compared to being mown down on the roads by the ubiquitous SUV! Due to the high cost of living in Iceland, and thanks to a chance meeting with some dam protesters, who sensed a fellow traveller ..... “Are you English?” (is eccentricity an English trait?) .... she is now pretty adept at scavenging from supermarket skips! Amongst the latest of her college performance art pieces, she drew attention to the amount of inexcusable waste that supermarkets throw away by using sounds that she’d recorded from the skip (!), together with images of same, and preparing and cooking a meal using all the ingredients so scavenged. She has just informed us that it was very noticeable that all the foreigners in the audience ate her food, but the Icelanders just picked at it!! No-one’s ever going to come to any harm with the ‘fridge-like conditions in Iceland especially at this time of year, and the excessive packaging and shrink-wrapping of fruit and vegetables. I wonder if the supermarkets have noticed that the level of food destined for landfill has been drastically reduced recently, with all these foreigners scabbing everything!! Free drinks at art gallery first nights are THE only way to make the common student pastime of getting drunk a remote possibility - are there really that many? Just thought I’d do a spot of name-dropping at this point - Tamsin has stood next to Bjørk at a night club and actually KNOWS the violinist from Sigur Rós!

Rupert is now in 5 different bands .... sleeping is now an option! He just can’t say no! Rupe is now three drummers and two bass guitarists - depending on the day of the week - though occasionally he’s a sound technician at the college and / or a hospital cleaner depending on the day / week .......! It’s possible that Rupe doesn’t care for routine! “Hi, Mum, Dad, just off to Birmingham” ... “Essex” .... “Bristol” ......thump! drag! grind! scratch! curse! (expletive deleted!) .... more paint / varnish removed from bannister / door frame / wooden floor ...... yet another amp / cymbal / guitar / drum makes its way down from the upper echelons to the waiting van and long-suffering roadie.

This year Rupert nobly put the cause of opera before financial gain, as unfortunately, the opera season clashes with college term-time, and if Rupe isn’t there, then Rupe isn’t paid (not that the college worried unduly - they’re almost as broke as he is!). This entailed commuting between London and Longborough, sleeping on people’s floors and getting paid enough by the opera company to occasionally eat and, more importantly, pay his mobile ‘phone bill - devotion to the cause, eh? Bob went to the dress rehearsal of ‘The Magic Flute’ to see him strutting his stuff in the role of half of Priest 2! - Rupe did the acting and minor singing whilst someone else sang the major solo. Priest 2 bosses the comic lead around, cracking a whip, but since his costume had been created for someone twice Rupe’s girth, he was more of a mis-shapen bundle tied up with a belt than an authoritarian figure, and his robes didn’t stop moving when he did!....... flap! flap! flap! .... Tulkinghorn in disguise! cackle! (see paragraph 1) ...... “no, get him off! ...... this is ‘The Magic Flute’ not ‘Die Fledermaus’!”. Alas, he was still only in the chorus for ‘La Bohème’ (Rupert, not Tulkinghorn!). Our hero featured again in a post-opera-season concert at Longborough, organized by his singing teacher Maria, having a ball mincing around the stage wearing his brightest-coloured flares and girlie top (you know Rupe!), delicately spreading flowers around the stage from a basket, in a wonderfully camp version of ‘Where e’er you walk’, only to reappear in the second half as a slightly-more-butch (?) sailor in ‘Dido and Aeneas’. He’s now over-compensating by going to the gym to build up his muscles for drumming.........

Meanwhile..... I, Bob, have completed the teaching bits of my course up in Wales, doing battle with computer-simulated buildings and mocked-up roofs covered in sedum and it was all quite jolly fun. Apart from the accommodation. And the rain. And the midges. Starting the dissertation was another matter... I got bogged down in trying to find ways through the bureaucracy of the Thames Gateway and came to a grinding halt in a blaze of indifference. So I’ve taken on some computer work to pay for the odd bit of heating equipment (see paragraphs 3 and 4), and hope to re-start the process in the ranks of Oxford Brookes, where they have a better set-up for research. Keep getting the urge to go on and do a PhD, anything to avoid going back to work.......... “huh! we’ll soon see about that!” (evil taskmaster ....er ....person).

I, Joy, (as opposed to Claudius), am only the humble bread-winner .... scrape! grovel! .... driving hours every day, working my fingers to the bone, slaving over a hot microscope / computer / mineral specimen / fossil, just to earn an honest crust, guv ...... “Oh do stop wingeing, woman!” “Don’t I give you a penny a week to fritter away on mere fripparies!” (mock Scottish accent) ..... “Who knows, in a hundred years you might have enough for a nice pair o’ socks, if ye’re [sic] lucky!”.

To try to lessen my impact upon the environment, since I drive further to work than any sane person should, we decided to try to locate a source of bio-diesel, to make me almost carbon-neutral (well, not me personally, you understand - a girl’s gotta (hushed tones) f**t! - you know, what cows are always quoted as doing!). All throughout the summer, this worked well, with us filling up the car at the garage once a month and stashing the rest of the bio-diesel in the shed (it being off our usual beaten track - the garage, that is, not the shed). Bob became a martyr to the green cause by risking a mouthful of bio-diesel (“oh yummy!” thinks Bob) to fill me up (!) weekly by means of a siphon. This worked fine until about three weeks ago when we had a very hard frost ....and then ..... whirrr ... whirrr ..... cough! cough! chug! chug! chug! .... whirr ....... whirr .... (engine refusing to acknowledge the presence of fuel) ...er .... what did they forget to tell us? ....that bio-diesel becomes a gel in freezing conditions ......ooops! ETA man (equivalent of AA or RAC man) couldn’t work out what was wrong, the car was towed to the garage, whereupon it gradually thawed out and behaved itself - long after I had sailed off to work in a crotchety old courtesy (?) car ........ it even demanded the sacrifice of a credit card for de-icing purposes that evening ...peeve .... peeve ...... perhaps virgins freeze up before finishing the job! The garage wrote “Remove fuel filter and examine fuel. EcoDiesel waxed up. Refill fuel filter with Diesel and start engine. Service Recommendations / Attention Required : EcoDiesel waxes up in cold weather!” .....ho hum! So back to using evil old fossil fuel, at least for the duration of the winter, but at least it can be a 50 : 50 mix .... and back to the bio-diesel mouthwash, then .... “oh goody!” (Bob). We’re now sharing the house permanently with a 25 litre container of bio-diesel .... but so far it’s reasonably friendly .... it doesn’t appear to have eaten its way through the floor yet! Personally, I think it’s just a ploy to get out of a nasty cold shed, just like those crafty sheep in the hall.....baaa! .... was that the bio-diesel? ....aaarrrgh!

Seeing as how we haven’t been away this year, you’re spared the gory details of sheep-molestation in North Wales ..... the Pyrenées ...... Italy ...... Cornwall .... arrr! the nights are long and cold (West country accent)....... (!) ....... “ ’ere! what’ve you got against west-country folk, then!”

Seasonal Greetings to One and All, from all us slugs, snails, woodlice, spiders, moulds, bacteria, bat-sheep, nice friendly sheep, etc. ........ oh! and the human (?) occupants of 41 Albion Street ....

Joy, Bob, Rupert and Tamsin (in absentia again).
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (a whole lot of love and kisses!!!)