Meeting Bob

It's funny how things turn out.  I like to take a photo or two when I go out on my walks around the town but short of a pink shoe on a wall there wasn't anything that inspired me today.  I missed a turn off on my route which would make the walk shorter so deviated towards the end and headed home from a different direction than I intended. I'm so glad I did. 

There was an old chap at the top of the lane near our road who said hello and remarked on the view. We got chatting and he said he was born in Dronfield 74 years ago. I said he must have seen some changes in that time. What followed was a delightful local history lesson. 

He told me that the place we were standing used to be called Scrater's Lane, scrater's being an old word for 'at the bottom of the tree' as in 'very poor' and the lane is where the poorest people of Dronfield used to live.  Here's a picture of the lane now.  Behind the hedge to the left of the photo are a few large detached houses. It's quite a little secluded enclave and so very different to how Bob remembers it.

 

There's a house at the bottom end of the lane called The Monkey House and I have vivid memories of pushing the girls in their prams up there and stopping to look at the cage of monkeys they had in the garden. The house is under different ownership now, has been spruced up and the monkeys are long gone. People usually think we are making it up when we tell them about it, it was very strange thing to have in the middle of our small town.

Bob walked me to the top of the lane which is adjacent to the top of our street and told me that our road used to be a field with horses. Bob grew up with one of my neighbours Frank, and he remembers when one of the horses bit Frank on the chest when he was around 7 years old. Amazingly Frank now lives almost on the exact same spot so I guess he wasn't too traumatised by it.

 

There are two really old cottages at the top of our road that I must have passed a thousand times over the past 30 years. I knew one used to be a local shop as someone pointed out the thick glass windows in the wall which were serving windows. What I hadn't paid attention to was the boarded up window and door and the dilapidated shop sign which were still there. The sign said 'SMELTS', and if you get really close up to it you can still see the faint outline of the writing.I'd walked passed it so many times and just not seen it. I can only guess my focus was on the post box when going down the hill, and on looking forward to getting to the top of the steep hill when climbing up it! It just goes to show that looking at things from a different vantage point from normal can be quite revealing. Here's what is left of the shop now turned into two cottages. The cottages are privately owned and it's a wonder that the owners haven't bricked the old frontage up by now.  I'm really glad they haven't though and hope that future owners leave it too as a sign from an almost forgotten past.

I was such a pleasure to meet Bob, as much for it being unexpected as for the stories that he told me.   I learned a little more about my locality and  got my interesting photos in the end. 

Tempus Fugit!!

It flies, it flies

Can hardly believe how fast the past few weeks have gone.

I've been so busy.

Done some pottering on the house which is good. We have the electricians in today until the end of the week. Quite excited to get this bit done because then we can go almost full steam ahead on painting and creating and seeing some of the fruits of our labours.  Plasterer is booked for next week and he is going to do the rendering at the front of the house too, which is a relief as the first chap never got back to us.   

My very final Heritage assignment was submitted last week amidst much jubilation on my behalf.  Tomorrow I start revising for the exam my last hurdle to get over this year.  Then I can assign all of these lovely books to the bookcase where they shall sit and look pretty gathering dust.

I received a very thoughtful gift from Lily a few weeks ago that I had meant to post about. I saw the book when it first came out and meant to get around to buying it but like a lot of things it slipped my mind. So it was a delightful present to receive.  There are some great tips in there for would-be runners like myself, not just about running, but about nutrition and having the right mental attitude. A very useful gift indeed. 

The end of April saw two wonderful gigs. The first being Richmond Fontaine at the Greystones in Sheffield, which, despite being about 7 miles away from me,  is fast becoming my local in that it's the pub I've spent most time in this year.  All band related I quickly add.  I don't often go to gigs on my own but sometimes there is someone who I really don't want to miss so I bite the bullet.  It's times like these that mobile phones and social media come into their own, something to do in the interval when everyone else there seems to be in a group and there's no-one to chat to.  Anyway, back to the gig.  The support was Fernando, a stocky grey haired troubadour  originating from Argentina.  He played acoustic guitar backed up by Daniel Eccles on electric guitar. A worthy support with some great tunes and lots of interesting banter between songs.  Best part of the set was Fernando and Dan really digging into the music with an intense face to face play down.

Willy Vlautin

Dan then joined the line up of Richmond Fontaine for their set which consisted of 3/4 of the new album 'You can't go back if there's nothing to go back to' and some back catalogue tunes.  It was great to see Willy Vlautin, Sean Oldham and Freddy Trujillo who I'd seen in the same venue last year in their Delines incarnation.  Whilst Willy writes songs for both the bands, and his subject matter is the down and out and less than angelic there's a very different feel to each of the bands.  Willy is lead vocals for Richmond Fontaine, I love his voice, which has a  kind of southern, slow, adolescent vibe to it.  As well as the stories in the songs there are plenty of anecdotes in between to keep us smiling.  Rumour has it this was their penultimate tour, with a few last dates coming our way in October. I'm sad I only really just got going with them, although finding some consolation in the hope of some more Delines shows in the future and happy that Sheffield is one of their go back to places.

The second gig of the month saw the return of the much missed Milburn.  A local Sheffield band who parted company around 8 years ago.  Any subsequent gig that any ex-member of Milburn undertook would hear the crowd shouting 'Milburn, Milburn, so it was thrilling that they decided to do a four night residency at the 02 in Sheffield.  Becky and Rob went to all four shows, Simon made three, and despite me having tickets for two I decided to restrict it to just the one night. It was a great night too, so good to hear all the old songs and Sheffield celebrated so well. It was great to see the smiles on the lads faces too as they performed on stage, so obviously humbled and happy that the Milburn legacy has lasted so long.   

Milburn

Work has been extremely busy and tiring recently. We are way behind with letters, which means those of us who are fairly up to date have to help out other departments.  I don't mind helping, sometimes its a nice change to type about  people with  ailments other than arthritis. It's slower work  getting used to new voices and new terminology and consequently a lot more intense.  We barely come up for breath and I swear our little fingers have smoke coming from them some days. Perhaps not surprising I've not felt up to blogging much recently, sometimes the last thing you want to do when you get home is sit in front of a computer screen again. Still, tomorrow sees the end of this shift pattern although it will be straight into revision mode for the next lot of days off.

Just three more weeks though!!

And on the house front!

We have most of the prep work done on the house now.  I sanded down the woodwork in the living room at the weekend, and both me and Becky have done some painting.  The airing cupboard, under stairs cupboard and back porch are now brilliant white, making them a lot brighter than they were.  None of which were high priority jobs but much needed relief after all the wallpaper removal. 

We're close to appointing an electrician and have taken the decision to have the whole house rewired. I think this is wise on two fronts, firstly the house still has its original wiring and the house is as old as me  so that's an no brainer really. Secondly if we leave it a year down the line (which was an idea) we're causing ourselves more decorating work on top of what we will have just done.  Which will be disruptive for Becky and Rob if they stay there longer term.  If they decide they want to move on in a year or two and we decide to rent it out then by law we need a Part P Certificate and we might as well get that now rather than wait when we don't know what the situation will be in a couple of years time.  Financially we need to bite the bullet and just get it done.

We've also been talking to a guy about the rendering at the front of the house which has a gaping hole in it.  His unofficial quote is a lot less than we expected it to be but we will see what he comes back with when he's actually looked at the pictures we sent.

So there isn't too much that we can be doing at the moment until the re-wiring is done, hopefully that will be done and dusted in the next couple of weeks. Meanwhile we get a wee bit of time off from renovation work before we head into full scale decorating mode.  Which I'm really looking forward to. Seeing the house transformed into something livable will be really rewarding.

As an aside but kind of related, I've been thinking a lot about coincidences and synchronicity the past month or so.  On the day that we picked up the keys for the house, I bumped into my old landlady and friend Janet who I hadn't seen for  couple of years.  Turns out they had done exactly the same as us, bought a house to decorate and for their son in Leeds to rent, and picked their keys up the day before.  I need to start a book of these events.  Timing really is a strange and wonderful thing.

 

Between the heart and the head

Got my assignment mark and comments back this morning.   A middling 63% which is two points more than my previous assignment which is something I guess and another pass (pass is 40%).  I'm happy enough with that.  On this module I open the comments with one eye half closed and my body language screaming 'do I really have to read this?'.   This one was more positive insofar as I finally understand where I could be doing better.  I love the case studies that we are looking at and find them fascinating, and I will never view heritage sites in the same way again.   It's the theory behind it all that I'm struggling with.  The values attributed to why a particular monument, site, or community are considered worthy of heritage.  There are so many layers to it all!   I 'get it' on an instinctive level, but trying to translate that into a workable essay is where I find it really difficult.  Hopefully now that I realise that, it's something I can focus on for my last assignment and, more importantly, the revision for my exam.

Two more weeks left of reading to do, one assignment and then revision time.  One step closer to finishing this year though ... hurrah!

Freedom!

So I've have finally come to the end of my working week and I start my work week off. I can't remember the last time my time off didn't involve studying for assignments.  Whilst I have one week's reading to do for Uni, my next assignment isn't due in until the beginning of May and with the end of this course in sight, I have an increasing sense of freedom!!   That said, I have a list as long as my arm of things I need to/want to/could be doing.  

Must do's are sorting out the craft cupboard downstairs and finding another home for the bits I keep. Long overdue and will make Simon very, very happy!!

We'll be spending the weekend at Crispin Drive, moving onto the next stage, which is sanding down the ceiling and woodwork.  I hope to spend a bit of time there before then if possible to strip the wallpaper off the walls in the  hall, we will see. One whole side of the wall is artexed, and after reading up on the best way to remove it discovered that pre-1980's artex was made with asbestos.  As we have no idea how long the artex has been there (it looks pretty old though), we've decided the best option is to get a plasterer in to skim the lot.  A few of the ceilings in the house are artexed too, not my choice of covering I must say, but Becky doesn't mind it, so we will just paint them. The asbestos is harmless so long as it's not disturbed by scraping so a lick of paint should suffice.

On Monday night we acquired another piece of furniture for the house, or rather three!!  Freecycle came up trumps this time and Becky found a nest of tables, free to a good home, in Chesterfield so I dutifully picked them up for her on the way home from work.  The chap who gave them to us said his father had brought them over from India many, many years ago. It's nice to know they have a little bit of history.  They need a little bit of attention and I suspect they will end up painted over some trendy colour, but I love the shape of them, especially the legs.

Bodgy the Builder

Simon and Becky went to do a couple of hours work at Crispin Drive tonight.  One of the fittings on the towel radiator in the bathroom was loose so Simon decided to investigate why.  Like in many semi-detached houses of its age, it turns out that the toilet and bathroom had once been separate rooms and someone, somewhere along the line had knocked them into one.  Except this is how they tackled the hole where the toilet door use to be.

Yes, they left the door in situ, tiled over it  on one side, the stuck some blocks  on it to attach the radiator screws to on the other.  They boarded the whole thing up with a sheet of plyboard and wallpapered over it. Typical of the DIY efforts that we keep finding in the house.  Looks like Simon's wall building skills will be put to use again soon.  We're gonna have to source some tiles the same as those already in the bathroom, which was one of the rooms we weren't intending doing much too, but I guess we could have found worse DIY disasters.  We still might!

Arctic Chills

I expected to wake up full of aches and pains after the walk we did yesterday, and after intending to have a long lie in, actually woke up at 7.30.

Left Becky and Rob to sleep whilst I did a bit of housework, which I'd been neglecting due to all the other stuff that has gone off this week.

Spent the afternoon at the new house. Took the paint steamer this time wow, it make much lighter work of getting rid of all that wallpaper.  So now we have 3 bedrooms and a living room stripped and ready to sand down and poly-filler.

When we finished, I was just about to get into the car when I noticed this unusual daisy on the grass verge. Never seen anything like it before and none of the other daisies around it had the same marking on it. At first I thought it was a little ladybird snuggling into the flower, so took this pic.  It was only when I zoomed in on it later on that I realised that it was part of the flower.

Went for some tea with Becky and Rob before dropping them off home - delicious pizzas with really unusual toppings. Highly recommended:

There we were, sat minding our own business when Becky spied an Arctic Monkey out of the window.  There he was!  Casually going to the corner shop for a pint of milk!  Well, we just had to didn't we? Rob and me legged it out of the restaurant and laid in wait for him to come out.  Rob (and Becky) are HUGE Arctic Monkey fans, and whilst Becky has met some of them already, Rob hadn't so we couldn't let the opportunity pass.  Not sure what Nick thought about being accosted outside of his local convenience store but he was very gracious about it all.

Brilliant end to a really great weekend.

Super Saturday

Had  fab day out walking with friends.  The weather was glorious - sunny but not too warm - perfect walking weather.

We did just short of 7 miles of easy terrain as one of the lads had a bad knees, so we didn't want too many inclines.

 We saw some lovely Derbyshire scenery

And Monty came too!!

We stopped for a pint at The Grouse at Froggatt and sat in their lovely beer garden

Then finished the walk and drove to The Travellers Rest at Bradwell for a well earned lunch/tea. I'd definitely recommend it for somewhere to eat if you are out in the Peak District.  Great food and great value.  And lots of wine :-)

How crazy is our English weather though?  After that wonderful sunshine we'd had all day, it started to hail on the way home!  Madness.


Another great day out with our walking, talking, drinking pals.

Fooked Friday

Another day at work and I was knackered by the time I got home.  Friday night consisted of binge watching Nashville (I am so far behind) and drinking wine.  In bed.

I have to say, I can totally see what Raynor sees in Deacon.

Shocked at the complete cliff hanger ending to Series 3 though.

Thrifty Thursday

Was intending going for my run once I got home from work but we had an appointment with a roofer at the new house at 5.30 so that didn't happen. I consoled myself that doing a couple more hours of wallpaper stripping still counted as exercise so that'll do for today.

Roofer gave us a good quote for sorting the ridge tiles, some of which you can see daylight through, and he should be able to do it in the next couple of weeks so that's a goer.

Finished stripping the front room whilst Rob tackled the spare bedroom and Simon and Becky went off to pick up a second hand IKEA bed frame from Hillsborough for £20.

Its similar to this one, only the slats on the bedhead are higher up and it's white. It needs a coat of white spray paint, but is sound as a pound otherwise.