Mop Up & Tea Up

The problem with mopping the kitchen floor is that when it is completed you can’t make yourself a deserved cup of tea until the tiles dry out, but today I actually thought ahead for once and, before starting, boiled the kettle, filled the teapot and placed it along with my mug, milk and a biscuit on a tray near the door; by the time the floor was mopped the tea was brewed perfectly for consumption during the ensuing, necessary, sit-down.

Surplus to Requirements

Turned up for today’s athletics meet fully expecting to assist with officiating again but the first event set the tone for the day when eight of us convened at the long jump pit, overkill at the best of times, but with only one athlete competing it was in danger of becoming embarrassing, so I left them to it with a promise to return for our next event; this, the javelin, had more competitors but they were still outnumbered by judges, leaving me again surplus to requirements, so I decided to call it a day and settled into my canvas camping chair for the rest of the meeting, dividing my time between spectating and making serious inroads into the Harry Hole thriller on the kindle.

Prom Shop

The boy’s prom approaches so today it was off to the retail park for smart shoes and a purple tie (to match the date’s dress), a simple enough process but somewhat slowed by the intervention of the Marks & Spencer sale, which required my wife to tour women’s-wear, the boy and I in tow looking enviously at those menfolk who had already secured the sparse but well-valued ‘boyfriend seats’; we did however get a sit-down in Costa’s, along with welcome refreshments, before satisfactorily completing the prom purchases and returning home.

Surface Dressing (Friday 27/6/14)

Last week came the threatening letter, then yesterday some intimidating signs appeared, and today the heavy mob moved in, sealing off the village and unleashing their infernal machines – tarmac scrapers, tar layers, road-stone lorries, road rollers, sweepers and even a caravan – to put down the dreaded surface dressing; it was time to ship out or be penned in all day, so I spent the day driving a lap of Tees Valley picking off a few jobs, with leisurely breaks to top up on food, drink, petrol, reading matter and cash, so that by the time I returned they were gone leaving just a surfeit of loose chippings and an absence of white lines in their wake.

Tour-ready Reeth

Eight days to the Grand Depart so today I drove over to Reeth to combine a walk with a reconnaissance of potential places to park that can be reached despite road closures and yet still within reasonable walking distance of the race route as it goes through the village and heads up Grinton Moor; and I found Reeth well prepared for its day in the spotlight with pubs, cafes and shops around the Green bedecked with bunting and yellow bicycle silhouettes (in some cases actual bikes painted yellow) including the Ivy Cottage Tea Rooms where, after my six mile walk, I had an excellent bacon and cheese toasted sandwich washed down with a pot of Yorkshire tea.

Philadelphia

Not the US city, home of the Phillies baseball team and the Eagles of the NFL, nor the original Tyne and Wear village, but the soft cheese on the list for my supermarket shop today, which was crazily priced with 300g (£1.32) much cheaper than the 200g (£1.85); so the bigger tub went into the trolley and a cheesecake may be necessary to shift it all before it acquires its customary dusting of green mould.

16 - 61

The boy had to get out early this morning, which meant I stepped in to deliver the papers, and on the round I was musing on the significance of our transposed roles today – me with the paper round and him going off to work – which led me to notice that, now he is sixteen, his age and mine currently form a transposed pairing for the first (and last) time; and these two numbers do make a good pair, particularly useful to me as a point of conversion between temperature scales on the weather reports, with 16⁰ Celsius (meaningless) equivalent to 61⁰ Fahrenheit (pleasantly warm).

Wooden Legs

You know it’s been a quiet day when the only out of the ordinary thing done was drill a small hole in thirty outsize lollipop sticks destined to become pirates’ legs in a primary school craft project.

Berries

A second successive sunny day in the garden meant getting beyond mowing, edging and weeding to more constructive acts of cultivation that for my part involved some neglected berries: the loganberry I planted near the wall was making a break for freedom so it was pinned back to its wires; the gooseberry’s pot had been colonised by a giant weed (comfrey?) whose removal left a gaping void to be topped up with fresh compost; and a couple of brambles that had re-emerged from the undergrowth after a couple of years were persuaded by means of sticks and twine to lead a more ordered life around the base of the silver birch – hopefully all this care and attention will one day be rewarded with the appearance of some fruit.

The Play That Went Wrong

Anything that could go wrong did go wrong at tonight’s production at the Darlington Civic Theatre, but that was fine as “The Play That Goes Wrong” depicts an amateur performance of a murder mystery, with the cast and the crew struggling with their characters, lines, costumes, sound effects, and most of all the props and the set to genuinely hilarious effect; great credit to the cast who convincingly and expertly fluff lines and suffer physical mishaps but carry on regardless of the set (and the plot) slowly falling apart, so by the final curtain they had brought the house down in both senses, with the audience, despite being weak with laughter applauding loud and long.

Flora

Back on the Teesdale Way after three months and whereas fauna was the highlight of the last leg (the Dinsdale Deer) now, in flaming June, flora took centre stage with meadow flowers - red poppies, yellow wort (possibly St John’s), little pink ones and spindly purple orchid-like ones – chest high in places; all very pretty but also rampant were the nettles, thistles and giant hogweed, the latter warranting notices that helpfully warn of the dire consequences of contact but less helpfully say nothing about the smaller versions – are they not giant (and so harmless) or giant but not fully grown (and so still dangerous), we will never know unless tomorrow my nettle stings are supplemented by hogweed blisters.

Red, White and Blue

Tonight I wore my red England shirt in the hope it would bring more luck than wearing the white one did last Saturday (it was also a safer option when eating curry from a plate on my lap with eyes glued to the TV) but the result was the same 2-1 defeat to a team wearing blue; so barring an unlikely combination of scores in the remaining group games, England are out of the World Cup very early, leaving their fans feeling, what you could call, blue.

Yarm

A day of peace, calm and tranquillity began with my daughter setting off early for Scotland, and with the boy still doing work experience in the wilds of Upper Teesdale, my wife and I were left to our own devices which included a sunny afternoon in the up-market market town of Yarm where after a helpful tutorial on the new parking charges from a local, we had a coffee and scone before going our separate ways (her the hairdressers, me the library), reconvening an hour or so later for an early, very tasty, tea at Cena, a new (to us) Italian trattoria.

Baltic

A periodic visit to the Baltic Gallery of Modern Art in Gateshead is useful to put the world into perspective, the reality outside seeming to make more sense after seeing the bonkers stuff on show inside, with the highlight of the visit being the Chicken Caesar Salad (not an exhibit  - my lunch), consisting crisp cos lettuce, perfect croutons, salty anchovies, shavings of Parmesan cheese, the surprise addition of a soft boiled egg, and the surprise omission of any chicken, the latter quickly addressed by the friendly staff; as for as the art: thought provoking videos (gold sprayed afro-haired dancers, chess players and jazz pianists), enigmatically sequenced photos (black and white naturally), some coloured lighting tubes (no idea) and, most baffling of all, a green unravelled sock in a frame – come back reality all is forgiven.

Scatter Cat

The cats have got used to having the run of the house during the day, as I am often around, and as a result are now reluctant, when I’m going out, to be shut into their night-time quarters (despite these having a variety of sleeping places – basket, chairs & window ledge – as well as the necessities of water bowls and litter trays) and this morning the black cat refused to cooperate, instigating a search of bedrooms, but as soon as he was flushed out from under one bed he shot off under another, making me increasingly late for setting off to work and increasingly frantic in my attempts to corral him; by the time I had him cornered in a bedroom cupboard I had dragged so much stuff from beneath beds that it looked like each room had been ransacked, and even as I hauled him from his final hiding place he completed the effect by clinging on to three or four shoes and scattering them around the floor.

Saltburn to Skinningrove

Took a traditional (if two years can constitute a tradition) Fathers’ Day walk, this year with the elder daughter, along the Cleveland Way from the Victorian resort of Saltburn via the high cliffs, littered with reminders of the nineteenth century industrial inroads to the landscape with minerals extracted without sympathy to the environment, to the more prosaic, almost defunct, little fishing village of Skinningrove, overshadowed by the ironstone spoil dumped thereabout; the twin heritage of fishing and mining being commemorated by an impressive artwork en route consisting a selection of cast ironwork images suspended within a winding wheel - the completion of our seven mile walk was commemorated with ice creams back at Saltburn.

Money Laundering

After a busy week I took advantage of an empty house to catch up on some admin including dealing with a bit of mail, updating timesheets and emptying my wallet of accumulated receipts, during which I idly totted up the cash on hand and felt it was a bit short considering the wedge I had extracted from the ATM a few days previous; the financial brain took over and quickly established a fiver unaccounted for, triggering a vague recollection of tucking one (part of change from a cash purchase) into the breast pocket of my shirt, in fact the one currently swirling around in the washing machine, and so I mentally wrote it off - debit stupidity, credit cash - however after the spin cycle it emerged damp but discernable, requiring only an hour on the airer to crisp up and enable a reversing entry – debit cash credit fortune.

Working Week

Retirement took a back seat this week with today’s driving of the minibus taking me out for a third time following outings on Tuesday and Wednesday; Monday saw what turned out to be a final session tutoring maths to disengaged youth, after which I was disengaged (due to insufficient numbers in the class) with few regrets on my part as I had been shaking my head since being asked by one girl why I was “teaching them something they didn’t know”; but as one door slams in your face another opens and on Thursday I was back in Middlesbrough putting in a full day as a part time accountant.

Kick Off

Day 1 of twenty-six, game 1 of 64, the World Cup kicked off with a lively game and a win for the hosts, courtesy of a dodgy penalty and indifferent Croatian goalkeeping; but it’s a marathon not a sprint and I need to pace myself to last the distance so the plan is to pick the game of the day to watch live and pick up highlights of the rest. 

Worries (Wednesday 11/6/14)

My wife woke this morning with a head full of worries including the boy’s GCSE exams, his imminent work experience, her imminent school residential, and feeding a vegetarian on said trip, but when I enquired if she had shared them with her Guatemalan Worry Dolls (which I gave her for Christmas) it only created a new worry as they were nowhere to be found; an initial search under pillows, bed, and chest of drawers proved fruitless indicating they may have packed up their own troubles and moved to less worrisome climes, but then they were located down the back of the mattress and so will be on duty tonight to hopefully do their stuff.

Unmistaken Identity

A none too common chat on the phone with younger daughter centred on the other story from her sister’s arrival yesterday, so here it is – I’ve driven 125 miles to Manchester Airport, killed an hour in a French themed bistro and am stood at International Arrivals waiting for my elder daughter to appear when I glance to my right and see her name written on a cardboard box lid held aloft by a random stranger stood next to me; several hypotheses, all equally unlikely, flash through my mind before tentative enquiries establish we are definitely meeting the same person, but that I have the advantages of (a) parenthood and (b) knowing what she looks like, however his explanation seemed plausible in that he was actually there to meet not so much my daughter as something she was bringing back for a mutual friend, a suitcase that sure enough appeared in tow when she finally emerged.

Long Way Home

Set off at three in the afternoon for Manchester Airport to collect the elder daughter on her return from Mongolia, and having allowed for traffic hold-ups there of course were none and I arrived nice and early, racking up additional parking costs (the £4.80 an hour presumably reflects the privileged view of incoming planes from the top deck of the multi-storey); the connecting flight from Paris was only 20 minutes late (during the wait I met a young man holding some cardboard with my daughter’s name on, but that’s another story that would take more than even one of my sentences to relate) so we were back on the road by eight o’clock only to be persuaded by my ditzy satnav to abandon the direct route back and follow her scenic, admittedly traffic-free, long way home via the Woodhead Pass and Barnsley, the extra half hour taking my daughter’s total journey time past the 24 hour mark - definitely a long way home from Ulaan Baatar.

Making Hay

A dry day now, hereabouts, brings the tractors out into the fields to make hay while the sun shines and today I joined them, mowing enough grass off the back lawn to make a sizeable haystack of my own, and with my wife doing the borders and trimming the shrubs we had the garden back to tidy by mid-afternoon; it was pleasant then just to sit out with a cold drink and a good book for an hour or so, less literally making hay while the sun shone.

Downpours

The plan for today, cutting the lengthening grass at the back, was aborted when the predicted rain came early, necessitating a switch to indoor chores, in my case a couple of hours ironing, and indoor recreation in the form of a good televised rugby league cup match (Castleford beating Wigan), but eventually I had to brave the elements, taking Dads taxi out through the ponding puddles to pick up both the boy and some supermarket supplies; by the return journey the sun was peeking out and the downpours were over, however the tide was coming in off the fields and gave the new Juke a taste of what to expect whatever the time of year. 

Ship Ahoy

We decided to try the re-launched Ship Inn in Redmarshall for tea and despite the menu being somewhat over-themed with Galley Starters, First Mate’s Platters, Crew Grills, Steward’s Sandwiches, Bosun’s Sides and even a Cadet’s Menu for would-be cabin boys and girls, the actual dishes offered were a good selection from which I chose a tasty dish of pork fillets in cider cream sauce with mustard mash, washed down with a glass of cask ale (what no grog!); the service, while not quick, was fine, the surroundings clean and bright, and the price reasonable, so no reason not to climb on board again sometime soon.

Parts

I spent the larger part of the day finishing my learner workbook on ratios, fractions, decimals and percentages, trying to show how these helpfully connect while being subtly and unhelpfully different; I did take a break to mow just the front lawn, but with the area of grass at the front and at the back being in the ratio of 1:7 that means I cut only ⅛, or 0.125 or 12½% (take your pick) of the total grounds – on reflection maybe I should have spent longer mowing and less time on the workbook.

Perspiring Pencils

I like to do a killer Sudoku, with no starting numbers but subtotals of random shapes, it seems a purer puzzle than its more straightforward cousin, and my current booklet helpfully indicates the degree of difficulty of each puzzle with a sweating pencil point, ranging from mild (no sweat) through medium (one bead of sweat), tricky, and extreme to deadly (four beads); as I’ve had this booklet for several months all I have left are four-beaders and today I had the rare satisfaction of completing one (that I started and gave up on last Sunday), but despite this encouragement I shall still be buying a new edition asap to access fresh puzzles with less perspiring pencils.

Tooth Talk

The inevitable anxiety that precedes a visit to the dentist was quickly dissipated when my man, after no more than a cursory poke about, pronounced my teeth fit to continue unaided for another eight months, although we did have the usual conversation about how implants would improve my bite “but at your age probably isn’t worth the trouble” (nor the expense methinks) and how I need to look after my one crown; I said I never bit anything harder than a ginger nut, but as this perturbed rather than reassured him, I speedily confirmed that even then I always dunked. 

Adaptable

I consider myself pretty adaptable but today was a bit testing as my day’s work unfolded in a series of small but persistent surprises that began with my class being moved to another (better) room to make way for a mums and baby exercise session (that at least provided a soothing soundtrack to our learning); then  after lunch three new learners were pitched into the maths class, and two of them even stayed; later I turned up for some staff development only to find it had just finished (that one was my fault) but then being unexpectedly available on site I was immediately drafted in to support another maths class – I guess living on the edge is what being a maths tutor is all about.

Measuring at Monkton

The first day of June started sunny and warm promising, for a change, a pleasant day’s athletics at Monkton Stadium in Jarrow, where I again helped officiate some field events, and this being my second time I was trusted with the business end of the tape measure for the shot and the discus, and for the latter even graduated to recording the distances on the official scorecard; so a successful meeting for me and not bad for the boy who got a couple of third places in the well-contested sprints before grabbing a first in the javelin, which being the last event, in a rapidly cooling early evening, was somewhat less competitive.