Slow life

  Monday 17 October 2022 Today I fixed a 400 year old elm and oak Jacobean refectory table for my friend Justin. The table had been acquired by his parents when they purchased Bookerhill farmhouse near High Wycombe. The table was too large to remove from the farmhouse so the vendors had simply left it behind. When Justin’s parents moved to Gaunts Earthcott Manor House his mother got a carpenter to cut 2 inches off the legs so she could get it out of the farm. She also had to remove the stretchers to get it into the new manor house. Once in its new location the stretchers were reattached and leg off-cuts put in a box of assorted bits of wood where they remained for the next 70 years. Justin’s parents have now died, the Manor house has been sold and I helped him to move the table to his new house in Lydney. We had to remove the stretchers again to get it out of the manor house. This was about a year ago. Today I was refixing the stretchers and fixing the original off-cuts to the bott...

  My friend has a new electric car. I was visiting to help with some DIY jobs around his house when we needed some fixings. “Not a problem,'' he said, “we can run down to the local hardware store, 10 min round trip max”. We both jumped in his car. When he attempted to start the car it flashed up the message “Please unplug the charging cable before attempting to start the car”. Good point, the car obviously has a safety feature to prevent you wrenching the charging point off the wall. My friend got out of the car to unplug the charger. After a few moments he lets out an expletive. “What’s the matter?” I enquired. “The car app on my phone wants my password and I can’t remember it. I need the app to tell the car to stop charging.” I no longer have a mobile phone and have been compiling a mental list of all the everyday activities that are now denied to me. For example, I can't hire a bicycle or park my car without a mobile phone, but not being able to use an electric car was a...

Our house has a good sized garden but over the years I have converted the lawns to vegetable beds and car parking until we now only have a single lawn about 15m square. The lawn is where my daughter’s pet rabbits live, at least in summer. By moving their pen around the lawn I hope to keep the grass down but now it is growing too fast even for them. Returning from holiday (the rabbits also had a holiday at a local rabbit hotel) I found the grass had grown so lush and long that we didn’t dare put the rabbits on it for fear they would eat themselves sick or worse. Reluctantly I got out our flymo and started to laboriously cut the grass. The flymo doesn’t pick up and as I struggled through the cut mulch I suddenly had an idea. My daughter spends a fortune on little bags of hay from the local pet shop, so why don’t we cut our own hay from the lawn. I don’t own a scythe but I got out my sickle and quickly cut a barrow full of grass that I dried on the roof of the rabbit run. The success of t...

  The 4 bin system and how I finally solved the compost problem. Many years ago we started composting with one plastic bin, the type with a lid but no bottom which simply stood on the bare ground. It was just somewhere we could chuck and forget kitchen waste and feel we were green at the same time. Eventually the day came when the bin was full.  The top of the bin was full of fresh potato peelings but I harboured hope that underneath would be some wonderful friable compost. To reach this I had to put aside the top of the bin to find some semi-rotted slimy muck which I couldn’t persuade anyone to use and my wife promptly popped over to the garden centre to buy a couple of bags of beautifully graded and friable compost that was a joy to run through your fingers. I should mention at this point that I am not a gardener and never have been. I do the composting and a bit of weeding but my wife and son do all the planting and make all the decisions. I realised that our compost would ...

We purchased Harvey, a Lakeland terrier, from a farm near Southam. “He’s been bred as a working dog rather than a show dog” said the farmer’s daughter and admitted he wasn’t going to be a looker. At only a few weeks old his shaggy rough coat was already apparent and he had outgrown his two more attractive sisters who had already been reserved. The children were not going home empty handed. “What work?” I enquired. “He’s a ratter” she said and I can vouch that he’s lived up to his breeding. He will often spend hours digging under the rabbit hutch when he smells a rat and he once caught a rat in the house. He found the rat in my daughter’s bedroom despite the fact that he is not allowed upstairs. It was an unusual rat because it didn’t have a tail and the crafty rodent had taken refuge in a wire cage. But Harvey, true to his calling, was not deterred by such a minor obstacle and shook the cage until the rat fell out and he killed it on the carpet. My daughter found the bloody corpse and ...

My dad was called Bob and he dug the garden and he carried the potatoes in his jumper.  Mum got very cross but I had a jumper just like his. My dad called me New because I was the newest of all his children. My Dad built a canoe. We went canoeing in Wales. We went canoeing in Scotland. We went canoeing in Ireland. We went canoeing in Germany. When the tent blew down my dad saved the bottle of wine. My dad walked from John O’Groats to Lands End, and again and again. My dad cycled from John O’Groats to Lands End, and again and again. My dad rode a motorbike from John O’Groats to Lands End  but the motorbike wasn’t as tough as my dad. My dad would fill the holes in my teeth. My friends didn’t have dads who could fill the holes in their teeth. When my dad had a bad tooth he pulled it out himself  in front of the bathroom mirror. He never took out any of my teeth. I went to visit my dad when he was ill. He didn’t complain,  he didn’t speak. I told him I was proud he was m...