This morning's post brought a book I had ordered (through Abebooks). It was wrapped in a black plastic bag.

On the bag was the encouraging information: "This bag is made from a minimum 30% post consumer waste plastic and can be recycled again if dispased of correctly."

But don't despair: there's a clue: more information at https://www.recyclenow.com/what-to-do-with-plastic-film. I muttered, naturally, because that's quite a lot to type, and it would be easy to make a mistake, but I copied it very carefully.

I got a 404, of course.

(The bag does have a triangle recycling symbol with a 4 in it, and the letters LDPE, which enabled me to search the website and find an assurance that I could take it to the supermarket with my other plastic bags. Good. But coldn't they just have said that?)

The scaffolders arrived yesterday, and removed the scaffolding from the front of the house.

This was the second attempt. They came on Tuesday, but when they took up the planks of the top level walkway, they found that some of the roofing slates underneath had been broken during the building work. So the builders came back and replaced the slates, and then the scaffolders came back again and - finally! - removed the scaffolding.

I'm really quite surprised how smart the house looks, with its new windows and panelling.

I dreamed last night that the builders were still here. They were stampeding up and down the stairs, and they wouldn't leave until they had completed some final task, but they kept dropping things, so there was more to be cleared up, and it was late and I wanted to go to bed, but I couldn't, because builders... How odd, not to have dreamed about them until they had, in fact, gone. They left on Tuesday, while we were out, and now we wait for the painter to fit us into his schedule: end of the month, he said, and that's getting closer.

We were out on Tuesday at the second in that series of history seminars, the one about Sam Green for which we contributed to the research. It's an odd experience, to hear yourself quoted in an academic lecture. But as well as tlking to other people who had known Sam, lecturer Richard Huzzey had found contemporary press coverage, including reports of City Council meetings (because in those days, children, local papers had reporters who attended local coucil meetings). I was charmed to learn that way back in the 1970s, Sam was already urging the Council not to let the University trample all over the City (this when the University was a fraction of its present size...). There were interesting reflections, too, on the place of local history in LGBT+ history, and what it means to be a 'first' if that first is forgotten: when Richard Bliss was elected to Newcastle council in 1988, Sam was not mentioned as a precursor. I'm conscious of how much we don't know about the remote past, but how many gaps are there in very recent history?

Tuesday was history, yesterday was literature: we went to the Lit & Phil for the launch of The Long Glass, a collection of Sean O'Brien's Phantoms stories. The book is dedicated to Sean's fellow-Phantom, Gail-Nina; it is published by our former client Red Squirrel Press: I was confident that this would be a highly sociable evening, worth missing the pub quiz for - and it surpassed all my expectations . The audience was full of former clients, which is not a bad thing: we have been trying to retire for some years now. And there were one or two current clients as well.

Lots of chat, and a seriously chilling story, what more could you ask? Well, this: one piece of unexpected information. Gail-Nina, still wearing green after Saint Patrick's day, explained that actually on March 17th she observed the feast day of Saint Gertrude of Nivelles, a seventh century Belgian nun who has been declared (on the authority of Etsy) to be the patron saint of cats. I was incredulous that cats had been without a patron saint until the 1980s, she confirmed it: "There are no cats in the Bible." It's true that you have to dig deep on the internet to find any candidate other than Gertrude, though Julian of Norwich has some claim...

Builders - about half a dozen of them, with three vans - arrived right on schedule, just before eight on Monday morning to replace our windows. It should have been quite a gentle start: we thought we were ready for them. They had visited in advance, declared the dormer window in my attic study to be sound and not affected, and had measured all the relevant windows. The scaffolding was in place, so there external access, and we had cleared space next to the affected windows indoors. All we now had to do was take down curtains at the last minute. Builders would be working in one room at a time, starting with the purely external task of replacing the downpipe and guttering.

( Such optimism! )

This is work that needed doing, and I'm glad it is being done. At least, I will be glad when it is done. I'm just not enjoying the disruption of it actually happening. I would be tempted to go out and leave them to it: but durham_rambler has a full schedule of online meetings this week. Also, from time to time the builders lock themselves out, and have to ring the doorbell for admission...

Half a month into the year, the daylight lasts until teatime and the students are returning: but I feel as if nothing has happened yet. Alternatively, as if so much has happened that I will never manage to fit them all into this post - but all the things that have happened are tiny things, or things that should have happened but didn't.

Two things that didn't happen:

• The weekend weather was so icy that S. decided not to come to Durham for the meeting (she said she couldn't face the hill down from the station, and I can't blame her); so she didn't drop in for tea / coffee afterwards. The previous weekend we had missed her party because of the snow: I hope this is not going to be the pattern of the year.


• Despite the thaw, I am not at the pub quiz tonight: durham_rambler has gone without me. On Monday evening I started sneezing explosively, and blamed the pepper I had been grinding into the cheese sauce (pepper has that effect on me these days; it never used to). But I haven't stopped sneezing since, so I think it must be a cold. I don't feel terrible, but I don't want to share it with a crowded pub, so I am spending the evening at home. I feel a bit flat, missing yet another social occasion, but I have Dreamwidth and the glass of whisky I would have drunk at the pub (only better whisky), so things could be worse.

Administrative things:

• The builders came, and measured the windows; they also examined the dormer window in my study, and pronounced it basically sound (phew!) but promised to look at it from the outside once the scaffolding was up, because once you are paying for scaffolding, it's silly not to make use of it. durham_rambler's study looks great after all the work he did to free up access to the window: so light and spacious! The sitting room looks less great, because the boxes of books which were stacked under the window (and therefore behind the sofa) are now ranged in full view. But they have been vacuumed, and much dust removed.


• One item of my prescription had fallen down the gap between the doctor and the pharmacy: it took durham_rambler two visits and a phone call to the pharmacy to work this out. The good news is that it's nothing life-threatening, just some analgesic gel; the bad news is that I may now have squeezed the last drop out of the tube.


• I need to submit my Income Tax return before the end of the month: it shouldn't be a big job, but it's always the next thing I need to do after... I think I have cleared away the dayjob tasks, and it now really is the next thing I need to do.

Good things (in the kitchen):

• It was not my plan to bake the first loaf of the year on that icy cold Saturday, and I worried that it wouldn't rise (or wouldn't have time to rise). But I had rescued my sourdough starter from the freezer, and restarted it, which is the procedure that works for me if I need to take a break; and now it was demanding attention, and there was no bread in the house, so needs must. I made a rye loaf, which rose only minimally in the tin, but made up for that in the oven. It's still quite dense, but that's how I like my bread, chewy and full of flavour.
.

• Back in the autumn, our neighbour A. gave us two big bags of cooking apples from her tree: I have been working my way through them ever since. We have had apple crumbles, an apple pie, stewed apples, pork and apples and red cabbage slaw with an apple in it. It wasn't until there were only three apples left that I thought of baked apples. My childhood memories of these aren't great, fighting to scrape the sour flesh from the tough skin - but A.'s apples were quite sweet, so maybe if I cooked them for a long time, and was generous with the mincemeat to stuff the core (I will not tell you the 'best before' date on the jar of mincemeat I found in the cupboard, but I don't believe it anyway: surely mincemeat improves with keeping?)... This stategy proved entirely successful: the skin was crisp and slightly charred, the flesh fluffy and sweet. I am a convert.

Trivia, but my mind feels tidier for having put it in writing.

The snow finally fell in the early hours of this morning. It had been threatened every day for the last week, so we were lucky that it didn't come while D. and valydiarosada were on their way here from Ely to help us celebrate the New Year; or while they were here, and prevent us going out to lunch dates with J. (at her home) or with D.'s sister and brother-in-law (by the Tees barrage, on their way home from somewhere else); or while they were driving home again ... Two days of cold but brilliant sunshine, and we welcomed the New year in the way that suits us best, by completing the crossword and going to bed at our usual time.

So I'd call it an entirely satisfactory visit, if it weren't for the flush of the upstairs toilet deciding to malfunction, spraying water in all directions every time it is used. This is an inconvenience rather than a disaster: when I say "water" I do mean "water", and it's easy enough to fill a bucket from the bath and avoid using the flush, and the downstairs toilet is fine... But it's not something you'd choose to put up with, let alone inflict on guests, even guests who know you as well as D. and valydiarosada know us. The plumber has agreed to come next Friday, and to replace the dripping tap in the kitchen while he is here, so there's a silver lining, but not yet.

"Not yet" covers the rest of the news, too. The snow has come just as the year was re-starting, and cancelled all our plans for today. Being the first Sunday of the month, it should have been Farmers' Market in Sedgefield: the market was putting out mixed messages about whether they would go ahead (and eventually cancelled, but too late to stop the vegetable farmers turning up) but there was no way we would risk driving down our road. Likewise for S.'s Christmas leftovers party this afternoon: we stayed home, and will eat our own leftovers, such as they are. F. had already cancelled our tentative plans for a Twelfth Night dinner tomorrow: initially we turned her down, hoping to go to the Phantoms ghost story event that evening, but when Phantoms was fixed for a different date (which we could not make, dammit) we reconsidered. Negotiations were complicated by our landline being out of order (durham_rambler had accidentally unplugged it, needing the socket and thinking he was unplugging the printer) - well, whatever we all wanted to do, it's unlikely we'll be able to go out tomorrow.

Habitually, I think of Twelfth Night as the end of Christmas: we celebrate the New Year on the first of January, but really Christmas isn't over until the sixth. So what I think of it so far is that we aren't there yet.

It's now three weeks since thw new cooker was installed by the man who came to service the boiler. This might have been an opportunity to switch to cooking with electricity, but it would have involved major building and rewiring to bring an adequate electrical supply to the cooker, so we didn't. So I am still cooking with gas (except for the grill, which is electric: I don't know why. So the transition is from like to like, which ought to make it easier...

It doesn't, of course, but I am beginning to learn its funny little ways. There are four burners on the hob, one large, ine small and two medium. You have some contril over how figh the flame burns, but only maximum and minimum settings are eary to find, so instead of choosing which ring to use and adjusting the heat, I find myseld starting everything on the fast ring and then moving to a slower one: which doesn't feel natural, but I can do it. I would probably use the mefium rings more if they weren't the ones at the back.

I am gradually getting the hang of the oven settings. The dials have numbers (not temperatures) on them, but the numbers are not the same as the old 'gas marks'. Luckily the manual gives temperature equivalents, which are much higher than I am used to (and not - quite - the same for both ovens). It's good to have two ovens again. The old cooker started out with two, but the upper, smaller one stopped working, so I used it mainly as a plate warmer. I like being able to choose the smaller over, even though it does mean condtantly transferring the grill pan from top over (doubles as grill) to bottom oven.

I am not, though, reconciled to the loss of my eye-level grill.

As I anticipated, I can't just glance at the grill in passing to see how my toast is progressing. Even with the door open, it's hard to see. And D., whi is here for the weekend, points out that the manual contains a warning (WARNING) not to use the grill with the door open. So I have to keep stopping to open it up, and use the oven glove to pull the tray out far enough to see the toast. Perhaps eventually I will learn how long it takes. The grill being electric takes a while to heat up, but once hot is very hot, so the toasting process speeds up disconcertingly. This morning I burned the toast. Would it be worth buying a toaster? I would have to learn to slice my load more evenly, but even so, it might be easier.

File this catalogue of complaints not under 'First World problems' but under 'Twentieth Century problems': things that only afflict those whose expectations were shaped in the olden days.

Not one but two gas engineers turned up yesterday at lunchtime. They took readings, isolated things, took more readings, and announced that in fact there was nothing wrong with our pipes, and nothing wrong with the boiler, and these could be reconnected. Which they did, so we now have heating and, better still, hot water.

But they also detected a drop in pressure - they didn't call it a leak, though surely that's what it is - at the gas cooker. It's not a very big drop: they told us that it is within permitted tolerances, and if it had simply been detected in the normal run of events, we'd be allowed to carry on. But because the process started with someone smelling gas, even though that was nowhere near the cooker, and the faulty pipe had been replaced, the cooker has been condemned.

So there is some serious shopping in my future. I had thought this would be the time we would give up on cooking with gas, and buy an electric cooker, but durham_rambler tells me that we can't simply buy an electric cooker and plug it in, it requires a supply of electricity which would demand extensive re-wiring. Even replacing like for like, we need to find a cooker which will fit into the space vacated by the old one, which is now smaller than the common size. So that's going to be fun.

In better news, the electrician had a cancellation and arrived this morning to complete the installation of our EV charger. This was not as simple as it should have been, because the charge point that had been installed turned out to befaulty, and it took the electrician quite a while to conince the supplier of this. But he succeeded, and durham_rambler has charged the car at our own kerbside.

It turns out, too, that I was mistaken in thinking D. planned to visit us this weekend, arriving today. That visit is in a month's time - and it's in my diary for both sets of dates. I hesitate to call it good news - it's always good to see him. But it takes some pressure off right now, and makes for a more comfortable visit when it does happen. Meanwhile, the wine racks, which were moved out of the cellar to give access to the electrician, can be reinstated.

So it's progress, overall.

Wednesday was a splendid day out: the Bears allowed us to share their trip to York, to lunch with J&J. In another world, this post would be all about that: a walk through historic York, tapas at Ambiente on Fossgate, good food and good company, and the spectacle of J. enjoying a flight of palo cortado; some deep thoughts about Clifford's Tower, its history as the site of an appalling event and how the recent restoration by English Heritage deals with this and with the fabric of the building; home in time to find the pub quiz team back on song after a disappointing score last week ...

I could have said more, much more about all of those things. Instead, here's a picture of the newly accessible view from the top of Clifford's Tower:



Yesterday morning the electrician arrived for what should have been the final stage of fitting a charge point for our electric car. But at a certain point, working in the coal cellar at the exterior of the house, he announced that he could small gas. THis meant he was unable to complete the connection. We called Northern Gas, who sent someone round with a properly calibrated sniffing device, and promptly turned off our gas supply. The pipe on our side of the meter was corroded, appaeently, and needed to be replaced. To our surprise, our insurers took this on (as an emergency, I think) and after a false start sent an engineer, who arrived at six o' clock that evening and promptly went away again. So there was unscheduled Chinese takeaway for dinner last night.

The water was still hot enough for washing this morning, and the kettle is electric, but there was no toast for breakfast. A further engineer arrived at two o'clock this afternoon, replaced the pipe and discovered that there was still a drop in pressure, which meant that gas was still going astray somewhere in the system, but he couldn't tell where. He could not, therefore, reconnect us. He would report to his office, and our options were likely to be to dig out all the gas piping from under the floors and behind the walls, or to lash up a bypass system...

In the short term, we have a kettle, an electric shower, and the promised loan of a microwave (tomorrow). In the long term, it looks as of this is where we say goodbye to gas (this is a pain, but not financially a disaster for us; I know there are many people for whom it would be. We are lucky). The medium term, though, that's a mystery to me...

On Tuesday and Wednesday we had a builder reinstating the railings which had been knocked out by the accident at the end of January; on Thursday and yesterday the painter arrived to paint them. They look pretty good: obviously, just removing the Council's security barriers would be a massive improvement, but the railings do look good (and we've had at least one message from neighbours to say so).

So once the Council has collected its barriers (and we've asked them to do that), has Achilles caught the tortoise?

Not quite. There used to be a strut between the railings and the bay window, to give a bit of extra support to the railings. The force of the impact drove that slightly into the bay window, and the woodwork under the window is damaged: you wouldn't notice it straight away, but it is definitely there, and it's on the schedule of works to be done. We had expected the builder who installed the railings to take care of this, but instead of adding a reinforcing strut, he used some stronger uprights so that it wasn't necessary. And he's right, this looks better.

And we have an appointment next week with the person who will assess the repair to the woodwork.