News from Nowhere

Thanks to everyone who left such kind - and sensible and perceptive - messages in my previous post. durham_rambler has read them: he does not have his DW log-in on his new phone, but I have reminded him that it is possible to reply anonymously...

From which you may deduce that he continues to improve. He is still hooked up to the oxygen supply, but they are reducing the concentration; today he decided to get dressed. He is in touch with his e-mail, keeping an eye on the FB group of which he is one of the moderators, making notes of a work task he will not be able to do, and which I will need to tackle.

And it's good news, too, that he has a diagnosis: though it could be a better diagnosis. The left ventricle of his heart is under-performing, which is technically heart failure. He has been given a red pamphlet called something along the lines of 'What to do when you have been told you have heart failure'. Strangely, there wasn't room on the cover for the words DON'T PANIC, but that seems to be the tone of the text (he hasn't yet managed to get hold of another copy for me), and I am doing my best to obey that instruction.

He is in the right place: they are trying out different medication, and he is receiving lots of attention. Today he was thinking that they might send him home towards the end of next week, but I'll take one day at a time.

On Friday we attended our first funeral of the year: someone who was more than a neighbour, however long-standing, but not quite a friend. Long ago, we met him and his wife at the Sunday linch / bugget / wine tastings conducted by oir favourite restaurant (gone but not forgotten); more recently, he was the treasurer of our residents' association. We knew just enough of his life beyond this to know that when there was conflict between the schedules of the residents' group and the choir, his was one of the voices we could hear making music in the hall above our meeting room. So I wasn't surprised that the choir played a part in the funeral: but I had not known, for example, about the passion for trains...

On the way to the Farmers' Market in Sedgefield this morning, I saw the year's first rainbow: just a fuzzy stub of colour in a grey and drizzly sky, but welcome nonetheless.

First Farmers' Market of the year, too, and it too was just a promise of things to come - maybe hald the usual stalls, no baker (there are usually several), no cheesemaker... But it's worth the trip just for the winter veg. We supplemented this shopping with a visit to the Co-op: bananax, moustrap and - since they have a shelf of books on sale for a donation to charity - the first books: a biography of Kirsty MacColl, and Simon Hopkinson's Roast Chicken and Other Stories.

The lazy days of summer appear to be over, and we are suddenly busy once more: with work, with play and - annoyingly - with things not working. This is the executive summary (as we old folks used to call the tl;dr versuin):

• We revisited coarse, the restaurant where we enjoyed a joint birthday meal back in the spring. We wanted to take A. and D. out to lunch in Durham, and the options (once you have decided on eating out, rather than cleaning the house enough to invite people here) are few, and fewer than they were, Finbarrs having closed. We weren't sure coarse was a good choice for a relaxed, talkative lunch: would the demands of the tasting menu tend to upstage the social side of the meal? In fact it worked very well. A.'s thankyou may have been just a touch backhanded: the waiting staff gave lengthy explanations, but were softly spoken and on her deaf side, "so lots of tastes came as a great surprise to me as well as a delight." D., who is the serious cook of the household, was taking notes. The menu is seasonal, and I'm not sure I'd want to do it more than once a season. But I'd certainly be happy to see what they serve in winter.



• Our ISP has been transferring things to a new server. No doubt this was a good and useful thing to do, but it keeps knocking out our websites, and our e-mail. When durham_rambler logs a complaint, they reply that things are working as designed: the reason you can't find your e-mail on this server is that we have moved it to that server. You just have to change your settings. Oh, right. Thanks. Meanwhile, at least one high-profile client has tweeted to her followers that You'll find my forthcoming UK tour dates on my website... So here's hoping normal service resumes asap.



• There's also family stuff which I'm trying to arrange but which I don't feel like talking about just now...



• Went to a gig in Middlesbrough last night. The venue, Toft House, was new to us: it describes itself as "the home of unpopular music" which makes it a perfect setting for Pete Atkin, who titles his website "Smash Flops" (and who I have heard recommending that his records be filed under "uneasy listening"). It was the first time in years we've seen him live, and I wasn't sure what to expect, but it turned out to be 'an evening without Clive James'. That's not just because it was all about the songs they wrote together, which are surely the best work Clive James ever did, but but also because Pete talked a lot about Clive, and their process of writing songs together. There were one or two songs I didn't recognise, but mostly they were old friends, and it was a pleasure to hear them. One or two stumbles, but mostly an excellent performance, which seemed to gain in power in the second half. A chilling, dramatic I see the joker, and one last delightful surprise. Apparently taken by surprise by the demand for an encore, Pete hesitated about what to sing: he seemed to be leaning towards Laughing Boy, which is fine by me, when a voice from behind me demanded Master of the Revels - perfect choice, perfectly delivered.



• This afternoon was scheduled for a neighbourhood tea party, rained off from the Coronation weekend. After days of blazing heat and sunshine, at three o' clock, as the party was supposed to start, the sky darkened. Was that thunder I heard? It was indeed. Within half an hour the WhatsApp group had swung into action, and we relocated the number 17. I am not a sociable person, and hadn't been looking forward to the event, but it was fun - I chatted to someone who had holidayed in Orkney at the end of May, and been taken by surprise in so many ways...

A warning to be careful what you wish for: yesterday I complained that I couldn't find anywhere to plug my computer in; this evening I spotted a possible extension lead in the kitchen, settled down to make use of it and the internet took advantage of my attention to deliver some bad news. Family, and not immediate family, entirely expected, but sad nonetheless.

That aside, it's been a good day. Starting with the view from our bedroom window:



We spent much of the day at Kellie Castle, which we first visited in 2014, with Bears. While we were there we received a message from a friend, a former member of the pub quiz team who is nearing the end of his job at St Andrews, inviting us to tea (and scones) with him and a visiting American at his house in Cellardyke. We drove there along the coast road, via the farm shop. So all that was excellent.

So it goes.

...to bring you the news that we have a car. Delivered this morning on a low-loader from the garage in Hull; driven to the parking shop this afternoon and equipped with a resident's parking permit. It is very similar to our previous car: a little older, a little fancier (sun roof!), same colour (black). I had confused it with another car that we ended up not buying, and was expecting it to be blue, but no. I'm only a little disappointed about this.

I haven't been inside it yet, but we will drive it down to this evening's residents' association meeting.

We knew this was going to be a busy week. Ten days ago we compared our diaries, and said How odd! A quiet week with nothing written in it, and then a week of all the meetings, and a visitor at the end of it... And then it just got busier, and more complicated. Until finally the week got so packed that things began to cancel themselves out.

Let's see. I think the first thing was a message from H. saying "I have sent you an invitation to my birthday party on Saturday, haven't I?" Ah, no, not exactly. We had the long-distance warning that a party was being planned, but not the when and where... Never mind, D. will have left for his Wake (Lyke Wake club dinner) which is also on Saturday, so we can do that.

Then came the notification that builders would start work on Monday (this) morning, repairing the damage to the front of the house, expect them to be here all week. This is good news, and we can cope with this: I hope we can still keep our Friday lunch date in Romaldkirk, but if we can't, we can't. We spent some (but not much) time over the weekend clearing an access route through the house for them, while hoping they wouldn't need to use it, or not much. That's about the case: having removed the bent railings, they have put a ladder down from the street into the area. I don't regard the clearing as wasted effort, though: boxes of wine have been re-arranged into drinking order, piles of books have been shifted and admired, and a few Folio Society editions have even been shelved.

durham_rambler has had poorly ears for about the last week: I think this has been going on for more than a week, he thinks less, but inevitably by the time he accepted that he should seek medical help, it was Sunday. The duty pharmacist at Boots advised getting a doctor to prescribe antibiotics, so we spent much of Sunday afternoon on the phone to 111 - and when I say 'we', I mean 'I', of course. I don't love the phone the way durham_rambler does, but his current deafer-than-usualness has caused a cooling between them. 111 were very healpful: they weren't, it seems, allowed to make an appointment with our GP, but they could and did make us an appointment that evening with an out of hours service based in a Portakabin in the car park of the local hospital. The doctor there prescribed an antibiotic spray, and durham_rambler collected it from Boots this morning. Meanwhile, on the doctor's advice, he isn't wearing his hearing aids, so he has pulled out of several of those meetings, which should make the week a bit easier.

We set the alarm for this morning, so we were eating breakfast when the first builder arrived at 7.30 am. He has promised that it won't be so early tomorrow - which means eight o' clock, I think.

Since the building repairs are now happening, durham_rambler e-mailed the vehicle replacement department, to ask how they were getting on. Recent communications from them have insisted on providing a like-for-like replacement for our car; that is, they won't allow us to accept the smaller model which the garage actually has in stock; nor will they settle for a nearly-new demonstrator. It has to be a brand new, identical model (though we can have any colour we like). The problem is that there is a nine month waiting list for these.

Ahem.

Today they have finally told us that they aren't going to be able to replace the car, and will we accept a cash payment? We have to go back to the insurers to find out how much that payment will be, but it means we can buy a car. So that's something to deal with tomorrow.

- the builder came to call. He examined the damage to the house and was duly impressed. He took lots of photos. Now he goes away and reports to the insurance company. Then, he says, they will arrange for us to be visited by a glazier, a stonemason and a railings specialist. He didn't mention a bricklayer, but I expect there may be one of those as well...

When I described the multi-car pile-up outside our house, I didn't dwell on the damage to our own car. It didn't seem as worthy of note as the spectacular movements of the cars on the icy road surface, and the number of them involved. Nonetheless, it didn't escape unscathed:



The damage was serious enough that it could not be driven - the body of the car was pressing on the tyre - but not so dramatic, I thought, that it couldn't be repaired. We had, after all, done serious damage to a very much older car (on a rising bollard in Spain) and not only had it lashed up enough for us to drive it home, but had a permanent repair done at the insurers' expense when we got home.

Times have changed. The insurance company has now confirmed what their mechanics were telling us, that the damage can not be repaired and the car will be written off. If I've got this right, the outer shell of the car is put on in one piece, so you can't just replace a damaged panel, you have to replace the whole thing. There may be a good reason for this, but I'm old enough and grouchy enough to complain about a world in which nothing is repaired, everything is discarded and replaced - because resources are inexhaustible, aren't they? This is not why we chose an electric car.

The marginally better news is that the insurers don't propose simply to hand us the cash and tell us to get on with it, they will replace the car: "new for old" they say, which is not quite how I'd describe a car we have had since September (I've barely learned its registration number). But they seem confident they can find a replacement without trouble: they are asking questions about preferred colour, which I will believe when I see it...

Meanwhile, someone is coming next week to look at the damage to the raiings in front of the house. Someone else has already done this, but it seems she was just agreeing the claim as valid: the next person will assess the work to be done. Fortunately, damage to buildings doesn't risk getting the house written off.

This morning the low-loader arrived to take our damaged car to the workshop, to await attention. The workshop initially pleaded that they were too busy to deal with our var immediately, so we were quite pleased to talk them round even this far: less pleased when the low-loader got the car on board and promptly broke down, but you can't win them all...

It has also been conceded that we are entitled to a courtesy car as soon as the rental company at the top of the hill has one available. The garage originally offered us a car as soon as they had time to look at the damage and agree it was repairable, so this is better, and we are hopeful of having something in the next day or so. We were both a bit disconcerted by the possibility that the car might be written off, and can't work out whether this is just garages being non-committal or a real possibility, so we look forward to the workshop giving us a more definite assessment.

Our house insurance will send an assessor on Thursday morning.

We - and that's more durham_rambler than me - spent a fair amoint of the weekend talking to neighbours, which is probably a good thing in a general sort of way. So we have been visited by the student from two doors down, whose car was hit, though no-one seems to know which of the two out-of-control cars hit it; we learn that the man across the road whose people carrier was hit saw the whole thing (his professional opinion, apparently, is that anti-skid road surfacing is available and the council should use it); a visit from driver number one reveals that he lives at the top of the hill, so this was not a story of someone unfamiliar with the road using it as a short cut; also that having been taken to hospital in an ambulance, he returned with a number of stitches in his face - and that the police have revised their position from "no further action because it was damage to property only" to "no further action because no-one was to blame."