HCPWCDNWITEOATF(EDTH)

February 15, 2016February 15, 2016 ~ kevinrevell ~ 1 Comment

If you’re any sort of a film fan, you’ll be familiar with the work of the Coen Brothers. And if you like the Coen brothers, then hopefully you’ll agree with me that ‘Raising Arizona’ is a two-hour treat that you’ll never, ever, regret. Who knows, you might even have your favourite quote from the film. For me, it’s this bit:

Edwina: “H.I., I’m barren.”

H.I. “At first, I didn’t believe it. That this woman who looked as fertile as the Tennessee Valley could not bear children. But the doctor explained that her insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase.”

Of course, if none of the above film buff conditions apply to you then this may all appear to be gibberish. But if you’ve seen the film, and you read or hear the word barren, you may find that you can’t do so without saying, in your head, “H.I., Aaaaaam baaaaren”.

In fact, while we’re here, if you’ve not seen Raising Arizona, here’s a taster…and if you have, here’s a reminder. Watch it when you can.

Anyway, here at Emu Towers, we’ve experienced our own little challenges with Luna the dog, or, to give her her full title, The Hungarian Crown Princess Who Can Do No Wrong In The Eyes Of All The Family (Except Django The Hamster). Truly, the insides of THCPWCDNWITEOATF(EDTH) are a rocky place where seed would find no purchase, but that’s largely because we had her neutered last year. We explained to her at the time that she would never hear the pitter patter of tiny Imperial Hungarian paws, but she took little heed, so Mrs E whisked her down to the vet and had that rocky place created. And that, to a large extent, was that. Game over, on the fertility front. Or possibly game ovary.

But before too long, we noticed a wistful, occasionally doleful look in the eyes of THCPWCDNWITEOATF(EDTH). Which was matched, rather predictably, by the look in the eyes of Mrs E. Sometimes, not even a dead chicken could cheer her up (THCPWCDNWITEOATF(EDTH), not Mrs E) :

“Luna’s never been a mother, and she needs a puppy to play with”, said Mrs E, using the informal form of address.

Apparently Luna was in full agreement, and being unable to produce a puppy herself, had agreed to adopt. Actually, these things being what they are (Q What sort of baby puppy would Luna like?; A One exactly the same size, colour and shape as her), it was more of an expensive surrogate birth at an approved provider than an adoption. It transpired that surrogate births in the canine world are just as challenging as in the human one, but with a bit more scrutiny from the donor.

But such a donor was found, a deal was struck, and an excited Mrs E put several hundred miles on the car by her weekly visits to the breeder. She even got involved in the naming process, which, for all the right reasons, was Bowie-themed. These names had to be submitted to the Kennel Club, and, as a result, our little brown ball of fun was officially called ‘Diamond’, as the Kennel Club rejected the name ‘Diamond Dog’, which apparently had the illegal word ‘Dog’ in it. Peculiar.

Anyway, the prospect of calling a dog ‘Diamond’, without sounding like a Ray Winstone/Leslie Grantham/Grant Mitchell hybrid was pretty unlikely, so we went into a family huddle over Christmas and collectively all agreed on a name. Which me and Mrs E completely overruled in the first week in January, naming the small ball Solomon. Because he looks like he’s full of wisdom, is pretty regal, and can share his name with one of the greatest soul singers of all time. (And there are already two dogs called Otis in the park). Here he is looking full of wisdom:

So, come the great day of bringing Solomon home, and we’d given THCPWCDNWITEOATF(EDTH) a bit of a heads up, what with there being an extra bed in the kitchen (and, for some reason, an extra bed in the living room, and a number of new items that Mrs E had been storing in what used to be called a ‘bottom drawer’).

You know those scenes when a childless mother is presented with her baby after years of upset? Here’s ours:

Apologies for the camera shaking, but the operator was laughing too much to concentrate.

Anyway, the first few hours were as entertaining as you would expect. Solomon snuggled up to Luna and tried unsuccessfully to latch on to her, which she found a little bit annoying. He played with her but after a while she‘d either walk away or bark at him to stop. He wee’d and poo’d on the kitchen floor and she sniffed it, shook her head and walked away. In fact, he behaved just like any other new baby would, and Luna’s behaviour was an uncanny reminder of Mrs E’s parenting skills.

But then they’d settle, and produced the sort of images that Solomon will be showing his own surrogate children in a few years’ time:

“Yes, this is me with THCPWCDNWITEOATF(EDTH) when I was a few weeks old. Gosh, can’t believe I was that little – where does the time go? Luckily I finally grew into my ears…”

Then, a couple of days after the big arrival, Luna got pretty ill. And being the giving sort of mother that she had already become, kindly passed an industrial dose of gastro-enteritis onto her new child. Solomon got ill, and for a few days he was in a really horrible state, and had to go on IV drugs and was kept overnight at the vets, and, again in a history of being parents sort of style, we felt awful and guilty but we didn’t know what we were feeling awful and guilty for, and so we felt even more awful and guilty.

And then he came out, with more enthusiasm then ever, slightly startling THCPWCDNWITEOATF(EDTH), but the main thing was that he was better.

As Mrs E pointed out on the way back from the vets, there’s nothing like your nearest & dearest being ill as a stark reminder of how much you love them, and I guess there’s a message in there for us all.

THCPWCDNWITEOATF(EDTH), remained relatively stoical. It’s probably all that royal breeding that maintains a brave face at all times. A bit like the stolen quote for Queenie in Blackadder: “I may have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a concrete elephant”.

And now, all is well. Mother and surrogate are fine. The Crown Princess Eyes have gone from doleful to doting. The new world order is restored. Everybody loves a happy ending, right?

Luna’s Ruff guide to living

December 13, 2015February 23, 2025 ~ kevinrevell ~ 2 Comments

We resisted having a dog in the family for years, many of which were populated by the kids pleading that only a puppy would make their lives complete. When we finally relented, it was as much as anything to substitute the outgoing child, which was a bit unfair on him, given that he’d led the lobbying committee for many years, but at least has meant that we still get home visits. With the trauma of #2’s departure still leaving something of a gap, Mrs E has already placed her order for dog 2, thereby creating a precedent that will mean four large animals cluttering up the place by the year 2020, and, by my current calculations, a need for me to stay in gainful employment for at least 5 more years than previously planned.

Go on then, ask me if I mind. Because I don’t. Having a dog about the place, even one who spends 20 hours of each 24 in a state of blissful snoozing, is an absolute delight.

One of my failed get-rich-quick schemes was to author a book on life lessons learned from running long distances. See here for a suitable diversion. Anyway, just in case others have cornered the market in the whole run/philosophy/life market (and they have), I’m developing a different idea in this blog, which we’ll ruffly entitle ‘Things That You Learn From Living With A Dog’. It also gives me a contrived opportunity to post a number of pictures of Luna, a dog so impossibly attractive that every photograph will just make you go aaaaahhh:

Always attractive, even before growing into her ears, paws and wrinkles

1. Clearing up is easy

One of the things that put me off any sort of dog ownership was the prospect of following the dog around the park, picking up the output of its bottom. In reality, it’s really straightforward. Luna waits until she’s in the park, squats down slightly awkwardly, and produces something that’s quite easy to bag up and put in a bin. And, she’ll politely wait for you to complete the process before continuing the walk. Sometimes, by making it easy for all parties concerned, the most unpleasant jobs become, well, a walk in the park.

2. Always wag your tail

Every time I see Luna, she wags her tail. And I think this is because she’s genuinely pleased to see me. I might be saying good morning to her at 5am, and she’ll wag her tail while keeping her eyes closed. I might be home from a couple of days away and off the back of a horrible train journey, and she’ll wag her tail while trying to wrestle me on the sofa. I might be back from a run and she’ll wag her tail while trying to lick all the sweat off my legs and neck (this is just as repulsive as it sounds, but also slightly moreish). And when anyone else meets her, the default tail position is wag. I guess the point is that she starts off pretty much every part of her life as happy, and very rarely is she disappointed. Do you know anyone like that in your life? I’ve just been thinking about it, and I reckon there are about two people who I’ve ever met who have been unrelentingly positive, and I really wish I’d managed to spend more time in their company.

photo (5) — You struggle to be anything but happy if a dog is gently kissing you on the ear. Highly recommended.

3. Say good morning

I have a friend who grew up in a small village in Norfolk, , and moved to the bright lights of Norwich when he was 18. He couldn’t understand why, when he walked along the street, no one ever replied to his cheery ‘Good Morning’. Luna’s lucky in this respect, in that her ‘Good Morning’ greetings are normally responded to a bit more enthusiastically. Most dogs say good morning right back, although she does find the French bulldogs and the Jack Russell’s a little, well, over-friendly; it’s never seemed right that the friendly barked hello is followed up by a rush to smell her bum, but you probably shouldn’t be too judgemental of other cultures. Anyway, she’ll never ignore you when she meets you, and that’s almost always a good thing.

4. Emotions don’t have to be complicated

Luna spends 95% of her life in a happy place. There isn’t much more to her emotion than that. The 5% that isn’t happy might be tired, or cross, or hungry, but not much more than that. There isn’t any deep analysis of this 5% to discover that she has a deep-rooted fear of cars, or a genetic disposition to obesity, or a reluctance to commit to happiness based on previous relationships. She’s just happy or she’s not, and when she’s not, she’s not for long.

photo (3) — A worry-free sleeping position

5. Eat when you’re hungry

Luna has two walks a day, and after each one she comes back and has a meal. There’s a fairly amusing bit between walk and meal when she outlines what she’d like to eat, how she’d like it presented, and exactly the level of hunger that she’s experiencing. At least, that’s what we assume, from the animated rrooorrr rrooorrr noises that come out from her when she gets in the door. Then she eats an unappetising mix of dry biscuits and water in about five seconds flat, has a sniff round the kitchen floor to see if there’s any pudding, and takes herself off to bed to sleep off the walk and the meal. And that’s it. No mid-meal snacks, other than the odd stick on a walk, no begging for food, no hunger pains, no munchies. Just eats the food she needs when she’s hungry, and looks pretty fit on it.

In the brief space of time between finishing a meal and sleeping it off

6. Play !

I read somewhere a while ago that dogs are the only animal that continue to play into their adulthood. Now that Luna is knocking on the door of 2 years old, she’s what’s called a ‘mature dog’, which makes her sound like a middle aged librarian. Unlike most of us middle aged librarian types, however, she’ll play with us, or other dogs, really naturally. And by naturally, I mean without any sense of self-consciousness, she’ll just boing into life, run around a bit with another dog or a puppy or a person, just for the sake of the play itself. Compare that next time you see an adult in your life trying a bit too hard to play with a child.

7. Her never changing moods

One of us might be late home, we might be a bit late with the food, we might ask her to go out for a wee in the garden when it’s raining, and Luna might not be overly impressed with this. Whatever happens, it doesn’t hang around festering for her to bear a grudge. She’s still pleased to see you the next morning. Life goes on, y’know.

8. Run properly

I really, really, want to be a good runner. I’ve realised that ‘good’ has actually started going in the wrong direction, and I wish I’d had Luna to instruct me when I first started out. My normal runs are: get changed, get out the door as quickly as possible, slog round until I’m exhausted, come home, whine a bit about feeling knackered, shower. I started running with Luna a few months ago and her approach is very different. Stretch, walk for a bit, then one mile easy trot, off lead for three miles, at which she’ll walk, run, run fast, sprint, and probably cover 5 to my 3. She’ll run at whatever pace suits her, unless there’s a squirrel involved in which case she’ll go for what us runners call VO2 max. And she’ll really enjoy it. Back onto a lead for a one mile cool down run home, before rroorr rrooorr conversation and food. She just does this naturally, and enjoys it, and for her training partner, it’s definitely the best run of the week.

2015-05-15_19.32.51 — Always stretch before your run

9. Be mindful

If you hang around psychologists, or cod-psychologists, or life coaches, or new age Chelsea Buddhists, you’ll be familiar with the concept of mindfulness. You can spend a lot of time and effort learning about this concept, and without belittling it too much (oops), it basically revolves around being ‘in the moment’. By understanding your current state, and the senses that allow you to exist in this state, you can appreciate more and be more prepared for the next part of your life. I’m a big fan of this myself, but through the eyes of a dog, it feels even simpler and more relevant. Luna spends almost no time worrying about her pension plan, where the next meal might be coming from, or the appalling state of the world around her. She gives hardly any thought, as far as I know, to the dog that recently dissed her in the park, or the fact that her mother might have kicked her in the head when she was trying to feed. If you watch her outside, with her ears lifted, sniffing the breeze, scanning the field for rabbits and squirrels, with one front leg up, desperately pretending to be a pointer, then she’s the absolute embodiment of being ‘in the moment’. You don’t need six weeks of mindfulness training, you see, you just need to go for a walk with a dog.

That’s the book, in a nutshell. Let me know if you want one for Christmas.

Adventures In Home Plumbing (part 4)

October 23, 2015 ~ kevinrevell ~ Leave a comment

We have a What’sapp group for me, Mrs E & the younger, yet taller little E’s. This allows the elder two to continue to take the mickey out of their parents and brothers whilst still maintaining a safe distance of several hundred miles. This., for those of you with a psych-techno bent, is pretty much a distillation of why any technology actually exists these days, but in fear of going off on a tangent in the second sentence of this blog, let’s not.

Instead, let me share with a posting from #4 to the group, with the caption ‘DIY with Dad today’:

This struck me as particularly ungrateful, given that it was a result of putting up a noticeboard in #4’s bedroom. This exercise needed four holes to be drilled in about the right places. The picture above shows what happened on hole number 2. Hole number 3 was reasonably successful, but was followed by hole number 4, which was delivered with matching plaster crater. Fortunately the full recovery plan was fully invoked by the time Mrs E arrived home. Even more fortunately, Mrs E was away for the week, thereby allowing a certain amount of contingency, including time to dry the recovery paint.

I made the mistake of complaining that I was feeling a bit put out by all these challenges. At least I’d never put any of them in danger through these antics, had I? Within a couple of hours, #3 had posted the photo below, with the caption ‘Dad says we need to help out more with household chores’:

In retrospect, balancing delicately on a 45 degree slope in sandals, with a 12 year old on your shoulders wielding a rusty pair of shears might have been seen as a bit irresponsible, but I don’t believe there were any lasting negative effects. He may have a recurring nightmare about giant barbers, I’ll have to ask.

Anyway, shortly after the apparent delivery of a top of the range noticeboard installation, I was invited to review the challenges of the downstairs cistern. Well, invited might have been the wrong word. As you might have gathered from parts 1-3 of these blogs, Mrs E is loath to invite me to do too much on the construction front, for fear of turning our house into a death trap. I think she fears that, in the style of Father Ted, that I might start off with a small dent to knock out:

…then, a couple of hours later, end up with something like this:

To be fair, she has many years of watching, listening and learning on her side. But with the cistern, I really felt that the time was right to take matters in hand.

The challenge had been building up for some time. If someone needs to visit the bathroom in our house, they go downstairs. So, at the best of times, there’s a certain amount of through traffic. Coupled with a cistern that was taking about 15 minutes to fill up, there have been some fairly embarrassing situations, say at parties, where someone has, let’s say, left something available for display that they’d rather not be witnessed, with no means of hiding it. So they stand outside the door looking embarrassed and blocking the way, or just inside the door, frantically waiting a few minutes, flushing to no effect and then finding that the cistern needs to fill up again from scratch.

Being the householder, and given that the majority of throughput these days is teenage traffic, I think it’s very grounding for them to be thoroughly embarrassed now and again, but sometimes it impacts me or Mrs E, and then Action Must Be Taken. I think the trigger point came a few Sundays ago, when my friend G came round and decided he needed to perform an evacuation procedure ahead of our long run together. Twenty minutes later we were still waiting indoors avoiding eye contact, keener by the moment to experience the fresh air outside.

Naturally, I embarked on the ‘ getting the cistern fixed’ task, later that day, almost to the minute of the advertised DIY store closing time.

“Are you sure that’s wise?” said Mrs E, which was code for “Please don’t do that, you hopeless cretin”

“Yes, I know what I’m doing”, I replied, which was code for “I am blatantly lying to my own wife”

Water off, cistern drained – check. Remove all fittings, check. Disassemble all parts, ensuring that none are lost – check. Understand how the cistern fills up and valve assembly works – check. Find a solid piece of pesky limescale that had been blocking the valve – result!

Everything reassembled and fully working, all within a couple of hours. Water back on, and very very little left on the floor.

“My work here is done”, I called out gleefully, which was code for “I’m not actually going to make a fuss about you clearly not trusting me to carry out these complex practical tasks. But if you poured me a large drink and showered kisses on my upturned face, that might not go amiss”

“Really?” she replied, which was code for “I’m not entirely sure I’d put too much store in what you’ve said, never mind what you’ve just thought”.

As the next few hours wore on, the overall feeling of suspicion dissipated. At no point in the evening had I had to call out an emergency plumber. There were no evident leaks in the bathroom. At around midnight, it was time to go to bed. Mrs E deals with the dog, I deal with the hamster, and I decide to have a celebratory pee, having had a pretty good and disaster free day.

Which is how the evening would have ended, had I not actually made the mistake of flushing. I’d noticed a slight vibration in the earlier commissioning test stage of the process, and not thought much of it. This noise that we got now though was not really in ‘ignoring’ territory. In fact, it wasn’t really noise, as such. The whole house was vibrating, and the noise that was being made was like the foghorn from something slightly larger than the Titanic. It was pretty awesome, as it happened, it was like the entire house had forgotten to change out of a high gear on a particularly long hill climb.

I spent a while marvelling at the wonders of what a very small amount of water could do to create a house that was managing to announce itself to a three mile radius. All that money that we spend on early warning systems – the government could just employ me to install some small bathroom cisterns in strategic locations.

I wasn’t alone with my thoughts for long. I looked upstairs and there were various members of the family, framed in a similar way to that iconic Beatles picture, looking down amusedly at the hapless twit below.

“Sounds like you’ve fixed the toilet, then”, said #2.

You’ll be pleased to know that after some mercy dashes to Screwfix, where I was treated with undeserved patience on all of my three visits, a new fully working cistern was installed within 24 hours. I wasn’t even phased by having a conversation involving a ‘bottom entry system’, avoiding both eye contact and the prospect of turning into a Rik Mayall character.

“All fixed”, I said, when my wife got home on Monday evening.

“Right”, said she, perhaps extending the ‘igh’ bit of the word a bit unduly.

Flushed with success (really, these jokes are just writing themselves), and needing to prove myself a little further on the DIY front, I noticed that there were some headphones that needed fixing; the little bits that go in the ear had worked loose. Finding the tube of superglue, I got them all fixed within a couple of minutes. There’s another story to tell about how superglue doesn’t actually dry instantly, and that you should be in too much of a hurry to test the dryness…but that’s too painful to tell now.

Until next time, be careful with those sharp tools.

Adventures in home plumbing (3)

October 13, 2015October 13, 2015 ~ kevinrevell ~ Leave a comment

I mentioned in the first of these confessions that our calamitous DIY odyssey had begun just after we’d got married and moved into our first proper house together. As a test of whether a marriage would last, it really was an excellent exercise. As an opportunity to show how man can compete against resistant materials, it was an unparalleled disaster. If it had happened 20 years later, we really wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Kevin McCloud mincing around in a hard hat and sensible sweater, talking one minute to us about our hopes and dreams for the future, then cutting to the second camera, with some helpful comment like:

“I see four main problems here. They’re over budget, they’re way over their deadline, they’re completely knackered. And they don’t have a clue what they’re doing”

And, of course, he’d be absolutely right. We really did do some stupid things. Like try to live in the house while we were gutting it. For a couple of months we rigged up a sink in the garden while we put a kitchen in place. Which was great until it rained. We cut corners in the wrong places too, like when we asked a plasterer to fully plaster the walls but just to skim what looked like a solid ceiling. It wasn’t, and a hundred years of soot and reeds came down on the plasterer. He’d gone into the room in a set of Persil-white overalls, and emerged like an exhausted miner, vowing never to come back to the house. Given that this was going to be the baby’s room (so we weren’t completely knackered, McCloud, you supercilious git), it was actually a blessing, as there was a fair bit of weight in that ceiling.

And one of my biggest mistakes was in trusting Simon. Simon was a lovely bloke who we’d met a few years before, when he’d been training to be an electrician. He’d got a bit disillusioned with the whole scary cabling lark, and decided to join the police force instead, but when I called him up and asked him to come round and help one Saturday, he couldn’t have been more helpful.

“No problem, I’ll pop in on my way to the football”

And so he did. What I needed help with was the fuse box. The house had been at various times, a student house, two flats, and before that, bedsits. And as a result, there were three fuseboxes in the hall. I’d tested them all out, and only one of them actually serviced the house, so, to tidy up, I wanted to remove the two redundant ones. And because electricity is nasty stuff in large quantities, I needed to test them to see that they were safe to remove. Hence Simon and his electrical expertise. Simon had got to us a bit late, and we’d chatted for a bit, so it’s fair to say that when he ran his tests he might have hurried them along a little. Anyway, he declared both of the boxes completely disabled, and waved a cheery goodbye, nipping off for a traditionally frustrating afternoon at the Barclay End.

You may well be ahead of me here. Kneeling down in front of the fuseboxes, I started to unscrew the first unit, and discovered quite dramatically that it really hadn’t been disabled at all. I’d only seen the next bit in cartoons – the force of the shock actually sent me backwards on my knees, like a rewind of a footballer’s celebration, or an annoying kid at a wedding, and I ended up about 6 feet back from where I’d started. It’s hard to describe a shock like that to someone who hasn’t had one. You feel it in your bones and your teeth for days and weeks afterwards. About the only thing going for the experience is that pretty much every drink you have afterwards tastes like champagne.

Anyway, after lots more disasters, we pretty much got to the end of two years, and declared the project complete. The crowning glory to all of the hard work, was to have carpets fitted – we’d not had anything on the floors for two years, and this was the final ‘post painting’ touch.

The carpets were ordered for the Saturday. We knew we had to clear up a couple of rooms before they could be fitted, and got round to this at about 9pm on the Friday night. I went upstairs to fix all the floorboards back in place. Mrs E stayed downstairs to paint a couple of walls. After about an hour, she called up:

“The paint’s not sticking to the wall, it’s just falling off”

I went downstairs to have a look, and sure enough, as fast as she was putting it on, it was sliding down the wall. It was almost as if there was a film of water coming down the wall. It was almost as if that wall was directly underneath a bathroom pipe. It was almost as if that pipe was underneath a floorboard that had recently been nailed down.

“Uh-oh” I said, neatly summing up the situation, and nipping upstairs to confront my demons.

I took up the last floorboard in the bathroom, and as I did, the nail came out of the pipe, gushing scalding water all over my face. So at least the boiler was working. You know when you’re little, and you put your hands over your eyes because you think that people can’t see you? Well, it was pretty much the same with the floorboard – it was put back sharpish with the nail in place – that way I wouldn’t have to see the disaster in front of me.

After the 30 year old equivalent of putting my hands in front of my eyes and pretending to be somewhere else was over, I realised that I wasn’t going to be fixing this one by myself. So I managed to switch all the water off. Then I phoned a friend.

This particular friend had put most of the plumbing into the house, he’d put a new boiler in, had most of the radiators off the wall and I was pretty sure the last exchange we’d had was along the lines of “Give us a call anytime if you need anything”. Well, this situation seemed to fit the ‘anything, anytime’ side of things. The voice that answered the phone was, shall we say, discombobulated. We established who was who and, it being about 11pm, that this wasn’t time for an idle gossip. I told him what had happened, in a way that I hoped wouldn’t land me with too much grief and retribution.

“Thing is”, said he, gently slurring, “I’d like to help, but I’m currently stoned off my head”.

Which kind of left us in a predicament. We talked a bit backwards and forwards, and I wasn’t absolutely sure where we’d left the situation when I hung up.

My friend lived about a 15 minute drive away. About 10 minutes after I’d put the phone down, there was a screeching of tyres outside the house, and his white van executed a perfect parallel parking manoeuvre without stopping.

We were very pleased to see him. We surveyed the damage, and the pipe, and the hole, and he looked on in a slightly distant manner, slowly shaking his head and smiling.

“I’ll get my tools” he said, possibly the sweetest four words I’d heard that week.

There were a few dodgy moments where I held the (very hot) replacement pipe in place while he welded it in place, and his hands were shaking so much that I had to stop the floorboards from burning by damping them down with a towel. But after a while, he pronounced his work done.

“Christ”, he muttered, “I didn’t think I’d be able to do that”.

Which were ten words that I was glad to hear, after a successful mission, rather than before.

We said our farewells, fondly. We dried down the offending wall, and painted it. I very carefully nailed down the remaining floorboards. We got to bed far too late, giggling like relieved idiots, which of course we were. We woke up pretty early the next morning to welcome in some nice men carrying rolls of carpet, went out for the day, chucking our knackered boiler suits in the ever present skip as we did.

And when we came home, the house was done. For an hour or so we actually rolled around on the carpets like toddlers, because we could. We went out that night to a friend’s wedding, and got blind drunk, because we could, and woke up the next morning not really having anything to do. No trips to the tip, no rush to the DIY shop, no last minute painting or plumbing or wiring. Naturally this blissful laziness lasted all of about two weeks, before we started noticing things that needed fixing. But as two weeks go, it was something else.

Next time, bent drills, exploding cisterns and Fun With Superglue. Things that need fixing can be quite entertaining too.

Adventures in home plumbing (part 2)

September 29, 2015October 2, 2015 ~ kevinrevell ~ Leave a comment

After part one of this blog went up, I had a conversation with #4.

“I’ve just put a blog up. It’s about DIY disasters. I used to have loads of them, but you probably haven’t seen many, have you?”

He looked at me a bit like Clint Eastwood, in ‘A Fistful Of Dollars’, staring into the sun and with a cheroot burning smoke into his eyes.

“Have you forgotten that time in France when you had to change the light bulb?”, he said, eyes narrowing to tiny slits.

Well I had, and he obviously hadn’t, and it didn’t escape me that it was an experience that he’d rather wished he hadn’t had. And even thinking about it, never mind writing it down now, makes me wish I hadn’t either.

You don’t need to know the full background, but imagine, if you will, a family holiday in France. It’s raining, and my wife is out for a run, leaving me to entertain the four children. Imagine a room with a 30 foot ceiling, lit by a solitary and broken bulb, and therefore rendered a bit useless outside daylight hours. Then, for the sake of argument, imagine a ladder that would extend to about 20 feet, and with nothing in the room to lean it against. However, help is at hand, as there is a wooden balcony overlooking the room, at about the same height as the light. Opposite the balcony, on the other side of the light fitting, there’s a large beam. Naturally, anyone with a sense of DIY adventure would wedge the ladder between the balcony and beam, in order to gain access to the light.

“Isn’t that dangerous?” said one of the boys, watching their responsible parent struggling to get the ladder into position.

“Don’t you think we ought to wait for Mum to get back?” said another.

“Yes, ‘cos she’s a nurse”, said the youngest, putting logic where logic should go.

I was keen to complete the operation before my loved one returned. I reckon it was because there’s something about this DIY lark that’s like an alpha-male version of ‘Show & Tell’. In the evolution of the sexes, our male ancestors would return to the cave showing off their hunting trophies. Only two generations ago in my family, my Grandfather would come home with a joint of meat that he’d cut off an animal that he’d slaughtered himself. To be fair, he was a butcher, and that sort of behaviour might have been frowned upon if he hadn’t been, but there was something pretty impressive about someone who ate his meals without them ever really getting cold. So, as a non-meat eating, woolly liberal bloke, DIY fills the ‘impress your partner’ need quite nicely. My wife can do almost everything I can to a slightly better standard, but thus far, the domain of ‘hammer vs screw setting’ on the electric drill, or the correct way to remove an inner tube has not interested her in the slightest. So I can strut about the place having successfully fixed yet another bicycle puncture, and she’ll thank me by looking in some awe at my expertise with a tyre lever. Then, she’ll crush me like a small insect by saying something like ‘does it normally take two new inner tubes and two hours to fix a puncture’, and the moment has gone. But fleetingly, I am Fred Dibnah, Handy Andy and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, all rolled into one lovable 5’ 10”package:

builders — How I would imagine my wife sees me

Fleetingly is about right:

darwin — The likely reality of how my wife sees me

Anyway, back to the light bulb, and my enthusiasm for completing the job in hand before the return of my doting spouse.

“Don’t worry, boys”, I confidently said, “I’m going to rig up a safety harness”

And so it was, that, suspended 20 ft above a concrete floor, I crawled across a horizontal ladder, with #1 son gently playing out a length of rope, which was secured to me by two bungee hooks. You know, the sort of hooks that you use to secure a roofbox to a car. Incidentally, they were needed on our roofbox because on a previous holiday, after a 10 hour journey with three kids and a 4 week old baby, we’d arrived at our destination finding that all the coats, baby food and nappies were locked safely away in the roofbox, and the keys had been left at home. Fortunately, there was a DIY enthusiast on hand.

“What’s that noise?”, said one of the boys to his mother, as they huddled together inside a freezing cold house, with the baby breaking new sonic records.

“Oh, that’s Daddy with the power drill, trying to open the roof box”

“And what’s that noise?”

“Oh that’s daddy, he seems to have given up on the drill and moved on to the screwdriver and hammer technique”

“And what are those noises?”

“Well, darling, I think Daddy might have missed the screwdriver, hit his thumb, and fallen off the chair shortly afterwards”

So after that, bungee hooks were a must-have when packing for holidays. In fact, the only time we forgot them, we ended up strewing the entire family winter wardrobe across the A11. But that’s another story.

Anyway, those bungee hooks really are very adaptable, and, you’d hope, would take a reasonable weight, although, given that we were in a hurry, we didn’t feel the need to test. I got across to the light fitting, and removed the new bulb from my pocket. At that point I had whatever the opposite of a Eureka! moment is. You see, I’m not terribly keen on heights at the best of times, and I realised that in order to fit the bulb, I’d have to hold the fitting with my left hand, and take out the old one and replace it with my right hand. This, of course, necessitated kneeling on a shaky ladder, 20ft above a very hard surface, and being supported by the only one of the children who was still roughly interested in the rope in his hands. By now, I was sweating and shaking like, perhaps, a Bullingdon piglet.

Naturally, this was also the point at which my wife entered the room. Years later, we were to watch a TV detective series together, where an eager young cop was advised to ‘always look up at a crime scene’, and she instinctively did just that. Keenly, she asked what the f*** I might be doing. I suggested that now was not the time to engage in any sort of lengthy discussion, and that she might like to take herself and remaining children, who were now daring each other to stand under the ladder, away for the moment.

Somehow, and I can’t remember exactly how, I changed the bulb, put the old one back in my pocket, and crawled backwards along the ladder. Again, I’ve no idea how I managed to do this, and I must have also managed a 180 turn at the end to grab onto the balcony. I asked my young assistant to switch the light on, and to both of our surprise, it worked.

We quickly dismantled the ladder, ropes, bungees and wiped down the floor, which was lightly shining in the lamplight, where pools of my sweat had dripped down from the ladder. I called out to my wife and the rest of the kids, and switched the light with the same sort of panache that I imagine Dale Winton might put into switching on the Blackpool illuminations. I might even have said “Tadaah”. My wife didn’t really join in with the celebrations. I think she muttered two words under her breath, in the clever way that she has, so that the kids can’t hear her but I can. The first was two syllables and started with F. The second one began with the letter T and rhymed with ‘flat’. But really deep down, I still reckon she was quite proud of my DIY ways.

Until next time, when I’ll tell you about an evening of non-stick paint, stoned plumbers, and why you should never trust an electrician in a hurry.

Adventures in home plumbing (part one)

September 27, 2015September 28, 2015 ~ kevinrevell ~ Leave a comment

If you too, gentle reader, are of a certain age, you’ll look back on your early and wild years and have the occasional palpitation. What on earth was I doing, you’ll say to yourself, with that haircut? Why was I listening to, dancing to, or, worse yet, playing, that bloody awful music? Why on earth did I think it was a good idea to go ‘once across the optics’ in that pub?

I have most of the above regrets, and more, and some of them probably ought to feature on future blogs in a cathartic and catholic outpouring of guilt before I drift into the forgetfulness that will make me shake my head at the younger generation, what with their ridiculous beards, terribly derivative music and binge drinking….but in the meantime, the things that wake me up from a cold regretful sleep most often, are the dreadful memories of when DIY went wrong.

Like most blokes in their twenties, I guess I expected to be able to do most things, reasonably competently. This arrogance was partly based on seeing people who didn’t seem to have any real skills fleece me for what seemed like straightforward joining together of cables or pipes or bricks or plasterboard. So when the opportunity presented itself to sort out DIY type activities myself – well, how hard could it possibly be?

To set the scene, me and Mrs E got married in May 1990, and we were soon looking for our dream cottage. Personally I based the specification on the middle eight part of Fats Waller’s ‘My Very Good Friend’, and I pretty much skipped around from estate agent to estate agent singing along:

My very good friend the milkman says
That I’ve been losing too much sleep
He doesn’t like the hours I keep
He suggests that you should marry me.

My very good friend the mailman says
That it would make his burden less
If we could share the same address
And he suggests that you should marry me.

Then there’s a very friendly fellow,
Who prints all the latest real estate news,
And every day he sends me blueprints,
Of cottages with country views.

My very good friends and neighbours too
They’ve been watching little things I do
And they believe that I love you
So I suggest that you should marry me.

I genuinely did go round humming that tune, and this may have diverted my attention away from some of the Madchester nonsense that was flying around at the time, but I don’t think that was necessarily a bad thing in the long term. And so, eventually, a very friendly fellow sent on a blueprint of a cottage with a country view, which we decided was perfect. It was perfect in a hundred ways, and we looked forward to growing up a bit in the country. At which point the story would ideally have a quick and happy ending, had we not got to the point where we sold up, put everything into boxes, booked the removal lorry, and promptly got gazumped. Younger readers may not be familiar with this term, but in the early 90’s it was all the rage. You’d find a property, make an offer, have it accepted, stick the ‘sold’ sign up, get the solicitors to talk to each other briefly, then just as you’d loaded up the van, some toerag would come along, and offer a bit more money, and the deal was off. Remember this was very early on in our marriage, and I discovered quite quickly that the woman I had married had something of a temper on her, which she was able to accompany with the sort of language which would make a docker blush.

Anyway, we had to buy a house, pretty quickly, and so we had to tour several more friendly fellows, with properties for sale that were a bit less ‘country views’ and a bit more ‘available now’. I found something fairly quickly one lunch hour, and had to convince my foul-mouthed partner. (It took her about 18 months to calm down, and 25 years later, if you’re ever interested in provoking a real life Pavlovian response, just ask and I’ll write down the name of our original vendor. Read it out to her, and you’ll hear the c-word repeated at increased volume for several minutes.)

“It’s in the city, not the country. And it’s a bit of a mess, it’s had students living in it. And there’s no parking. But it’s empty, quite cheap, and I reckon I could do it up in a couple of months.”

I think I may have caught her off guard (she was on long nursing shifts, and was probably struggling with outbursts of Tourette’s syndrome), but she said yes. So we moved in, and the prospect of a few months of mild discomfort went into implementation mode. Except of course, it wasn’t going to be a couple of months after all. The whole place needed gutting. The roof had to come off. The ceilings came down, and when we didn’t think they needed to come down, they collapsed anyway. All the plaster had to come off the walls, and we had to rip out the kitchen, bathroom, heating and electrics. Every bit of cash we had went into rebuilding, and every bit of spare time we spent in very fetching boiler suits, filling skips up with crap, digging out floors, sealing walls, clearing up…you know the sort of thing. It kind of lost its novelty after the first week, and unfortunately we got to about 12 months in and we were about half way done. I can remember my wife coming home from a shift on Christmas day, seeing my legs sticking out from under the kitchen sink while trying to perform a very tricky plumbing manoeuvre, and bursting into tears. Try writing a comic verse about that one, Waller.

And all the time, things kept going wrong, and a pattern emerged that has stood me well for the following years, and is best described by the following graph:

Let us consider this graph with the example of a simple DIY task. It’s Sunday afternoon, all of your other weekend tasks are neatly ticked off and there is a brief window of opportunity before the evening’s first gin. Your wife mentions that it might be helpful to hang up the picture of the dog that she’s wanted on the wall for a couple of months now. Briefly, you might think it was a bit daft to need to be reminded of a what a dog on a walk looks like when it’s witnessed fully live at least twice a day, but in the interest of harmony, you decide not to go down that route. A spot on the wall not otherwise occupied by pictures of the dog on former walks is selected. You size up the situation and conclude that a hole must be drilled. This decision point takes us to stage one.

Out to the shed, and retrieve the necessary tools – drill, extension cable, masonry bit, pencil, rawlplug, screw, plus spare screw to replace the first one, which will be lost, and screwdriver. You enlist an unwilling young assistant to hold a dustpan underneath the drilling site. Starting to drill takes us to stage two of the delivery. Partway through the drilling procedure, the calamity happens. In drilling holes, this may be a massive amount of plaster flying off for no apparent reason. It might be hitting a comedy brick, made out of vulcanite, which causes the drill to glow red with heat, or it may be a completion of a hole, then a pushing in of the rawlplug, only to find that it won’t actually go all the way in, and is cleverly designed so it won’t come out either.

Whatever happens, there will be a calamity, and this is where you have a choice. Option one is to seek professional help, in the form of Someone Who Knows What They’re Doing, or Someone Who Can Sell You A Solution. This is an absolute must if you’ve screwed up a plumbing or electrical task. Unfortunately you didn’t think this through when you started your work on Sunday afternoon. Option two is to bodge. The art of bodging is particularly useful on a Sunday afternoon, especially if you are planning to reach the gin bottle before 10pm. So, returning to the task in hand, you choose another nearby spot to drill, and having successfully managed to get a fixing in place, survey the collateral damage. This is stage three. Getting to stage four, in which your enthusiasm for the task in hand drops yet lower, requires you to nip out to the shed again, locate the polyfilla, undergo what builders call the process of ‘making good’, sand down, find some paint to cover your tracks, put all your stuff away and clear up, swear your unwilling young assistant to secrecy, and hang the picture, thus also hiding the bodged calamity.

In part two of this blog I’ll give you some real life examples of slightly more significant DIY calamities, which still wake me up of a night. Until then, be careful out there with the hammer x

Many Happy Returns

August 17, 2015August 17, 2015 ~ kevinrevell ~ Leave a comment

As I write this note, my two eldest sons are both flying across the Atlantic Ocean, headed west from Rio de Janeiro to London. They’ll have travelled through some of the world’s poorest places, got into a steel tube with 350 other souls, each holding their own story and looking backwards and forwards to old and new adventures, shot off across a vast body of water, and will land amongst the riches of Western Europe some time tomorrow morning.

Due to some complex plans driven by each of the six of us having all manner of separate lives, they’ll return home to a fairly empty house, and then meet me, their mother, their two younger brothers and the dog at an airport in France at around 17:08 on Thursday. I mention the date and the time because it’s been foremost in all of our minds and many of our conversations for weeks and months now. You know that expression about all your Christmases coming at once? Well, it’s absolutely likely that; there is a delicious anticipation about all being back together again.

To understand this as a big deal, we have to rewind a few weeks and years, because a lot of this is about #2 son. I have an element of bias here, but if you can show me a wittier, more self-contained and downright charming 19 year old I’d be surprised. He’s pretty much always been all of those things, other than the 19 year old bit – when he was a lot younger he was the dream younger brother who idolised #1, then he grew up a bit and became a brilliant elder brother, especially to the youngest mini-me, then he discovered music and became almost impossibly cool. But all the time he was being kind and calm at home – he made a couple of appearances where he was, quite frankly, out of his skull, but we parents tend to skilfully ignore those sort of incidents and concentrate on his fabulous smile when skipping around our thoughts of n & dearest.

After something that, for the sake of my current mood, we’ll refer to as a ‘clerical error’, he deferred going to university for a year. I asked him what he thought he’d do, adding fairly gently that hanging around the house drinking my beer wasn’t really an option. He said he was going to get a job, then do a bit of travelling. And he did, and then he did. He worked his nuts off at a couple of jobs, and saved up enough to go away for about five months, and planned his trip to South America. That’s right, South America, where they still enjoy kidnapping tourists, and running drug cartels.

“Should I worry?”

“No Dad, I can look after myself. I’ve been going to the gym.”

Ahh, that’s alright then.

Because he was travelling about, he packed everything he needed for five months into a really small rucksack, and we drove him down to Heathrow one Saturday morning. We had to get there for 4am, we were early and we quietly drank coffee in a huge deserted departures lounge. The security gates were shut, and when they opened, we all kind of shrugged and said our goodbyes, or at least any of those that we hadn’t said in the car on the way down, or the day before, or the week before.

He walked through the gates to security, and just as they started to close we craned our necks and could just see him turning and waving goodbye. And he looked like he was about ten years old again, with his school bag on his back and I remember thinking what a gawdawful mistake we’d made – how could we let this child go out into the world so young and so unprepared?

And, of course, because this story has several happy endings, all was well. He’s had a few scrapes along the way, and he started off with negligible Spanish and less Portuguese, but I bet his smile worked a treat. The wonders of technology have meant that he’s been able to Whatsapp and Skype us fairly regularly, and he’s managed to book hostels ahead, depending on where each particular bus journey is going to land. He’s travelled through Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, before meeting up with his brother about a month ago, to travel up the coast of Brazil to Rio. They Skyped us a couple of days after they’d met up, and there was that grin again. He didn’t really seem any different, still nicely self contained, still in control, still thoughtful, still happy, still very naughty.

In the scheme of things, taking yourself off round the world by yourself is only a big deal in a certain context. There are plenty of kids who have been through more, achieved more, suffered more, by the time they get to the ripe old age of 19. They’ve been orphaned, gone to war, been shot at, been married, had kids, several careers, and much more. But I’m not sure that’s the point, this post is more about something pretty cool, that someone pretty cool has done with his life for the last few months.

I’ve been reading a bit of Garrison Keillor recently, and, should you want for a bit of homegrown insight as to what this whole life thing is actually about, I can enthusiastically recommend his book ‘We Are Still Married’. About halfway through, there’s a couple of pages about his son coming back from travelling in Europe. It ends with this sentence:

‘The night when your child returns with dust on his shoes from a country you’ve never seen is a night you would gladly prolong into a week’.

And that’s why we can’t wait for Thursday…three more sleeps!

Speckled Jill (and Jim!) – part two

August 6, 2015August 6, 2015 ~ kevinrevell ~ Leave a comment

We’re sitting at the kitchen table, me and my friends S & G, after another unpleasant 45 minutes in each other’s company. Every Saturday we do this, putting ourselves through yet another bike session that feels so tough that by the end, you can’t manage another pedal stroke, and have to be physically peeled off the bike. This, my friends, is what we do for leisure around these parts.

Anyway, conversation turns to Speckled Jill. “What do you know about incubation times for pigeon eggs?” I asked S & G, in the same off hand manner that you might use to ask about the weather, or Norwich’s chances in the premier league.
“Nothing”, responds S, and that, a few years ago would be the end of the conversation. But nowadays, with everything connected to the internet, it isn’t, and before the coffee is cold, we know more about pigeons than is strictly healthy.

For example:

1. Pigeons are very intelligent, can recognise themselves in the mirror, and can distinguish between humans in photographs.

2. Both male and female pigeons take care in incubating and looking after their young. They change places in the morning and the evening; one web site told us that the female sits on the egg overnight, and the male takes over ‘at 10am’. The young pigeon (known as a squab, fact fans) stays in the nest until it’s fully grown, which is probably why you very rarely see a baby pigeon. The egg takes 15-19 days to hatch.

3. Both parents feed the squab using ‘pigeon milk’ which both male and females can produce.

4. Pigeons mate for life and usually raise two chicks at the same time.

5. As we know from last week’s stories of the National Flying Club, they’re pretty good at navigating. They the sun as a guide and have an internal ‘magnetic compass’. They’ll also use landmarks as signposts and will travel above roads and motorways, and will change direction at junctions.

Armed specifically with facts from point #2 above, the smallest child in the house was immediately despatched to our bedroom to keep watch. This being about 0950, he was also told to keep an eye on the time, and sure enough, just after 1000 he came downstairs to tell us that the swap had taken place, and that a new bird (who obviously had an internal watch as well as a compass) was now on the egg. So, we are now home to both Speckled Jill AND Speckled Jim – and we have an unparalleled level of excitement on the pigeon front.

It would be nice if they had a little chat as they changed over. This being Norfolk, I’d be disappointed if they didn’t have some sort of an accent (for those of you unfortunate enough not to live in Norfolk, I’ve provided a translation).

Jim : “Arr y’oroight that Jill-gel?”

(Are you feeling well, Jill?)

Jill: “I fare badly terday, I dew, an’ orll; tha’s this hoddy doddy egg hare, an thas nest is on the huff”

(I don’t feel terribly well, on account of this small egg, also the nest is sloping to one side.)

Jim; “Co ter heck, yew’ll meke me blar an’orl. Eff that come on ter rain; haint yer got a ruff on gel?”

(Crikey, you’ll start me crying at this rate. If it starts to rain, at least you have a roof.)

Jill says nothing. She is sulking, as only a pigeon mother-to-be can.

Jim, in recalcitrant mood: “Are yew garn up th’city there?”

(Will you be going into the city later?)

Jill, relenting slightly: “Arr, Ahm garn up Primark to squit on a furriner or mebbe a yellowbelly”

(Yes, I shall be flying over the Haymarket area to crap on a tourist, or possibly someone from the Fens)

Anyway, that’s what I think they’ll be saying. It’s kind of a sixth sense with us pigeon men.

I’ve just got home from being away for work, and scoot up to the bedroom. There’s nothing happened, according to Mrs E, but, because I’m a bloke, I need to see for myself. And, standing on the bed on tiptoes, you can just make out the shape of a small feathery thing at the bottom of the nest, no doubt taking on a bit of that wholesome pigeon milk. There he/she is, lil’ Pride Of The East 2. Meanwhile, Speckled Jim has a look somewhere between pride and worry, that reminds me of a long time ago, in a maternity ward, far far away…

Speckled Jill and the Mother’s Refuge

July 29, 2015July 31, 2015 ~ kevinrevell ~ Leave a comment

At the edge of our garden, just outside our bedroom window, is a tree. When we first moved into the house, about ten years ago, I had a chat with our new neighbour, who kindly pointed out Things That Needed To Be Done On A Regular Basis, and one of these Things was pollarding the trees. I’d never pollarded a tree before, but this sounded like ten types of fun, so for a few of the following summers we arranged aday, lined up ladders on both sides of the tree and clipped the new branches back, while having manly chats about work, families, and, very possibly, football.

I discovered in this process that a) I didn’t really care for the whole tree surgery lark, and that this was related to b) I absolutely hated going up ladders, particularly if at the top of the ladder you had to use both hands to operate garden tools. Anyway, after the first few years, our conversation over the fence dwindled to ‘we must get round to sorting that tree out’ and the, in the last few years, petered out altogether.

And so it was, that one bright summer morning last month, I pointed out to my friend G that there was absolutely no light coming into our garden. And that it was all the fault of this bloody tree.

‘I shall phone a tree surgeon’, I said, and did.

A couple of fruitless calls later (for some reason, tree surgeons are really busy in the summer, not to mention a tad pricey, but I don’t suppose they get much indoor work in the winter), I contacted G.

‘I would like to borrow your ladders’, I said, I like to think with the air of someone who knows one end of a ladder from another.

‘Ok’ he replied, with the air of someone who has known me long enough to know that I simply do not KOEOALFA, ‘but you’ll probably break your neck’.

I don’t know whether Mrs E quietly intervened at this point, but it’s quite possible, as I know she thinks I have a couple of years of earning potential in me yet. Anyhow, I got a text a couple of days later from G:

‘I’ve got a day free on Friday – I’ll come and sort that tree out – it will keep you out of A&E. I have a chainsaw as well’

Nicely stating, in a single text, his position as alpha male in our relationship. Then restating, with particular reference to power tools.

And so he did. On Friday morning, we had no light. And on Saturday morning, after having carted about two tons of timber and leaves to the end of the garden, there was light. And this is what the tree looked like:

There was only one problem, and if you zoom in to the top part of the tree, you’ll be able to see for yourself.

‘There’s a nest with an egg at the top of the tree’, said G, and just as he was speaking, a large pigeon flew in and landed on the nest.

Large, and to all intents and purposes, quite grumpy. I know it’s easy to impose human values on animals, but this one was an absolute cert. I’ve never seen an animal looking so, well, out of sorts and cross with their lot, and in many ways, she had a look about her that reminded us all of Feathers McGraw, from The Wrong Trousers:

To be fair, up and till now, she’d had a reasonably comfortable life, surrounded by leafy greenery, just popping out now and then for a quick worm before coming back to sit on her egg, then some bloke in a checked shirt had shinned up a long ladder with a chainsaw, and hacked away every half inch of protection.

To make it worse, it started to rain. It rained, on and off for about a week, before Mrs E finally snapped.

Mrs E is a patient and tolerant woman, and like many of the p&t of this world, has a snapping point, which is audible across multiple parishes. Certain activities are guaranteed to create this snapping point, including inappropriate use of the public highway, online payment systems, and leaving the toilet seat up.

And, apparently, water damage to pigeons.

‘It’s just so cruel’, she sobbed, looking up mournfully and dabbing her eyes with an Edwardian handkerchief (for those of you who have met my wife, you’ll realise I’m making some of this up), ‘she’s getting so…wet. All she wants to do is sit on her egg. You’ll have to do something’.

And do something I did, but first, a contextual tangent….

After a few days of the pigeon being exposed to the elements, the two younger kids had named her ‘Speckled Jill’, in homage to Colonel Melchett’s ‘Speckled Jim’, in ‘Blackadder Goes Forth’.

As with many of the naming ceremonies in our household, I wasn’t allowed a look in, and she was Speckled Jill before I had any sort of a chance to submit my request to the naming committee. Had I not missed my slot, I would have definitely put forward a case for her to be called ‘Pride Of The East 2’.

You see, me and pigeons go back through generations, and I like to think I have the same sort of reflected fame in pigeon racing circles as, say, George Stevenson’s great great grandson might have to trainspotters. Because, in 1929, my Great Uncle Bill won the National Flying Club trophy (presented by the King, no less) for the annual race from San Sebastian to England. Or, more to the point, his pigeon, ‘Pride Of The East’ did. To put this in an athletic context, this involved POTE knocking out an average speed of 1024 yards per minute, over 629 miles, until he fluttered gratefully and gracefully over the garden in Wickham Market and was bundled into the timing box. I make this about 35 miles per hour, over about 18 hours – Usain Bolt does about 27 mph, tops, and I really doubt he could keep going for 18 hours.

POTE beat 1915 other birds, and Great Uncle Bill received not only a silver cup, but also a cheque for £120. That might not sound that much, but in 1929 you’d have to go some to earn that in a year.

The National Flying Club is still going, although the halcyon days of international pigeon racing have declined a bit over the decades. But I’ve mentioned POTE to a couple of pigeon fanciers over the last few years and they’ve gone a bit misty eyed on me…’you mean…you’ve got the actual 1929 trophy?’, they say, and I puff my chest out (probably very much like POTE) and reply that I not only have the trophy, but the framed certificate AND a cigarette card from Ogden’s cigarettes showing POTE, no 32 in their series ‘Famous Racing Pigeons’:

So, me and pigeons, we go back, right?

And when Great Uncle Bill’s legacy and my wife’s desperate calls for a mother to be protected are combined, there is nothing for it, but for the Emu to spring into action.

And S into A I certainly did,with the help of #4, and we soon had a roof made up, painted, and ready for inspection. I was pretty proud of this construction, as far as my DIY skills were concerned, and spend a while in the garage admiring it from various angles, before remembering that a) most bird houses these days are made by people with learning disabilities, so it wasn’t perhaps such an impressive construction and b) that I would still need to find a way of being fixed over the head of Speckled Jill, still resident and grumpy at c25ft above ground.

Using all of the courage I could muster, I made my way up the ladder, balancing roof, support, nails, and hammer, and remembering to point out to my children where I’d filed my life insurance policy. Somehow, despite Speckled Jill’s lively protestations, the roof was duly put into place. I descended with a huge sigh of relief.

‘Splendid’, said my wife, which kind of made the whole exercise worthwhile, although there was a bit of an undertone of ‘thanks goodness I don’t have to take him to hospital this evening’.

I’m working away from home this week, and, having established myself as the pigeon protector capable of working at heights, I look forward to returning to a discussion about further mother-to-be support needs, such as hot and cold running water, and a plentiful supply of clean towels. Until then, Jill will just have to make do with a roof over her head:

And now we wait. Speckled Jill looks every inch the expectant mother; her angry scowl has turned into a beatific gaze, as she no doubt thinks about the life ahead for her little one. All those hopes and dreams, eh?

And, assuming all goes well, I’m putting in my request right now for the sprog to be called ‘Pride Of The East 2’. I think that’s been suitably earned.

I’ve never seen a baby pigeon before. According to G, they’re pig ugly, and look like little dinosaurs. Also, apparently, they make a stupidly loud racket, all the time, and, remember, both mother and child will be neatly positioned just outside our bedroom window.

But at least we’ll all be dry.

Good Technology

July 16, 2015July 16, 2015 ~ kevinrevell ~ Leave a comment

(For the article on ‘Whatever happened to the Red Guitars’, check back later. They’ll be filed next to ‘Kissing The Pink’ in an article on ‘Why The 1980s Was Actually Quite A Good Time For One Hit Wonders Now I Think About It’. Or something like that….)

I’ve worked in technology, or somewhere near it, for pretty much all of my adult life. And, insofar that you can love something that’s essentially a terribly complex twist of cable and metal and silicon, I absolutely love it.

My first job involved coding on mainframes, and my finest hour was the completion of a project that delivered two green screens to process car insurance changes for Foreign Use. Without a trace of irony, the screens were called FU1 and FU2. It was really neat because we produced something that automated a really painful process, and the process of pulling these screens together was considered something of a dark art, which made us feel pretty special.

Later on I progressed to networks (computers could talk to one another – awesome!), then applications like word processors (no more Tipp-Ex!) and email systems (which, on reflection, may have been where it all went wrong). More of this another time, but, suffice to say, it was a fabulous period in technology, and some of us were lucky enough to be riding a pretty big wave.

Or so we thought, until a really big wave came along and we found ourselves talking about third generation languages, relational databases and smart ways of delivering business solutions. Suddenly we could start plugging in technology that looked and felt cool and didn’t have to take two years to deliver. What a wave!, we thought, as we tried to ride it.

Then another couple of really big waves came along, one called personal computing, and another called the Internet. And suddenly technology was everybody’s friend, and it was ok to come out of the closet and say that you loved this stuff, without sounding like too much of a nerd.

Then we got apps that everyone could write, complete interconnection, cloud services, mobile applications, (relatively) safe payment systems, online music and a glorious jumble of technologies that made you excited and proud to line up with. Technology is now both good and cool.

But, you’re no doubt be asking, is the coolest and best use of technology that the Emu has ever seen during this glorious 30 year relationship. Well, I’ll tell you…

Last weekend included a Saturday night that neither Mrs E nor myself were particularly looking forward to. We had given in to Jr Emu#3’s longstanding request for a 17th birthday party, and, worse even, had conceded that there’d be no better place to hold it than at our house. Frankly, Mrs E and I both needed our heads examined.

Anyway, it wasn’t toooo bad. They were all lovely kids when they arrived, and even after a couple of illicit hooches they were all quite charming, with a couple of notable exceptions. I (& I hope #3) will remember for some time his parents unblocking a vomit filled sink with one of the guests permanently attached to the toilet. Delightfully, when one of the more sober party goers asked if our guest was ill because he hadn’t had anything to eat, Mrs E was able to describe his last meal in some detail, including specifics on both pasta and sauce type.

But I haven’t told you the best bit. I’d asked #3 to pull together a Spotify playlist on his phone, which he did, and I’d provide the amplification, which I did. And we plugged in for a quick trial and all was well. His tunes were, as the youngsters say these days, bangin’. All was well, albeit a little annoying when his chums found the volume button, as the party ramped up.

Meanwhile, #3’s two older brothers, currently 6,500 miles away, almost on the other side of the world, were enjoying a quiet coffee in a cafe in Buenos Aires, as you do. And this cafe had wifi. Did I mention that we all use the same Spotify account? Well, we do. And because we do, and because it did and because they were, they were able to not only see what was playing, but to take over the phone and play their own choice of, well perhaps, less bangin’ tunes.

And so it was, with the party in full swing and some sort of ridiculous dubstep/trance/ rap nonsense making its noisy way down to our kitchen (where Mrs E and I were sat, largely occupied with directing pissed up 17 year olds to the toilet), that we heard the unmistakeable first few bars of ‘Fun Fun Fun’, certainly one of the high points of ‘The Cat In The Hat’ film soundtrack.

Separated by hemisphere and ocean and connected by unknown servers, satellites, undersea cabling and networking applications that are too cool to even describe, four of us are cracking up like you wouldn’t believe. Admittedly, it’s a return to a low form to basically point and laugh at #3 on his birthday party, but, all the same, it made us very very happy. Good technology? I should cocoa.

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