Business as usual

I see that Granny-Anne is having a go on her blog about the stupid complexity of modern living. Oh, don’t get me started or this will turn into an open-ended series of rants, a catalogue of depression-inducing experiences  – usually when attempting to deal with retailers or other “service” suppliers – which no longer induce anything other than a despairing mood of self-congratulation for anticipating the outcome and for not being stupid enough to expect better.
By way of a recent example, this week I sent an email to a manufacturer in Sweden, asking whether they would kindly tell me the weight of one of their workshop machines. I am selling one of these machines at the moment and a prospective buyer needs to know the weight so that he can arrange transport. At the same time, I sent an email to a British shoe manufacturer, asking for addresses of their stockists in Cardiff.
Within a couple of hours I had a more than adequate reply from Sweden. 
The next day, after waiting about 30 hours, I received a reply from the shoe manufacturer. It told me lots of things about their returns policy and other matters that were of little interest. It didn’t tell me anything about Cardiff stockists and its arrival was too late for a further exchange of emails on the same day.
So a Swedish manufacturer who had no reason to expect a sale by replying to me, did so within two hours. A British manufacturer, who had every reason to expect some business, replied late the next day and got it wrong even then.

Says it all really.

Motor insurance

I thought extortion was illegal! Wrong! It’s alive and well and actually thriving. It’s called motor insurance.

Yesterday I phoned my insurance brokers because my renewal was due in just five days time and I had yet to receive the annual reminder and request for the new renewal premium. Perhaps the delay was due to industrial action by postal workers. My insurers were proposing to charge me £237 Sterling, a substantial increase on previous years,  to renew the third party, fire and theft insurance on the basis of the following facts:

Car: 21 year old BMW 318, 1800cc, value £200 if I’m lucky.
Sole driver: Born 1940, full licence 47 years, no accidents, claims or convictions, never refused insurance.
Annual mileage under 600 (yes, less than 50 per month but this is essential mileage for which there is no alternative).

In view of my record I cannot see any justification for paying a premium higher than the value of the car and especially as there is also an excess of £120 (this is the amount of any claim that I would have to pay before the insurers contributed). Also, I have the maximum available no claims bonus. They asked me whether I wanted to include no claims bonus protection, at extra cost of course. This would enable me to keep my bonus in the event of a claim. I call it downright impertinence (I could put this more strongly but some of my readers are polite young ladies of a sensitive disposition). I pointed out that I have protected my no claims bonus perfectly adequately all by myself for 47 years without their paid-for assistance. 

There must be thousands of drivers with my sort of record. Isn’t it time that the insurance industry offered us a better deal, especially as we are the age group who are probably best placed to use our cars less and public transport more?

Yesterday, after discussing the above, I asked the lady on the phone whether there was anything I, or they, could do to reduce this premium. She offered to transfer me to the renewals department. I then got that irritating choice of options to be reached by pressing various buttons, all of which were for various parts of the CLAIMS department except for the last one “All other enquiries”. I had no choice but to press the last one and was then given several more options including the renewals department, which I duly chose. After a total silence of several seconds a recorded message informed me that the claims department had closed five minutes earlier, at 8pm. This was despite the fact that on the insurer’s paperwork it clearly stated that closing time for the renewals department was 9pm.

Suitably disgusted I hung up and phoned again today. I explained to the man who took my call what had happened the previous day and that that phone call had not resulted in an opportunity to review the proposed premium – but there wasn’t as much as a hint of an apology from him. Instead he asked whether I had sent my cheque! I  reminded him that I didn’t yet know what premium would apply since there had been no opportunity to see whether the stated premium of £237 could be reduced. I then asked him what effect it would have on my insurance if the postal strikes caused my cheque to arrive after the renewal date. He told me that I would be uninsured until they received my cheque and asked me again whether I had sent my cheque! I was getting fed up with this conversation by this point and asked him, quite sharply, whether he was listening to me or what? The conversation ended shortly afterwards.

If I need to continue my motor insurance next year I will be arranging it some weeks in advance (especially if renewal falls due immediately after a holiday) and it won’t be the same insurers.  To support such appalling service is to encourage it – not a good idea in any context if it can be avoided.

Back from the Baltic

Just a swift note to inform my long-suffering readers that normal service will be resumed very shortly.  After a summer(?) in which I have been very busy with this and that and largely underperforming so far as this blog is concerned, we (Granny Anne and I) have just returned from a two-week cruise to some of the Baltic capitals. I will have more to say about that soon and probably some pictures to show as well. So please watch this space and I promise not to bore you rigid with posts about folding bicycles for a few weeks at least!

Another domestic project almost finished.

I have been quite busy lately though mainly with the sort of domestic activities that must be of minimal interest to anyone else, like mowing the lawn, putting up shelves and renovating the interior of our tiny garden shed plus, of course, my quota of the routine daily chores. It is amazing how fast a lawn grows when the weather is hot and interspersed with showers.
A better arrangement of shelves was needed in the garden shed and I decided to go further and repaint the interior while I was at it, thus brightening it up for the Head Gardener. She hadn’t said anything but I sensed that she was not as enthusiastic about her shed as I might have expected – and it wasn’t hard to see why. The ceiling in the shed comprised three roughly cut plywood panels nailed to the roof  joists.  Long stretches of the edges of these panels touched neither each other nor the walls. Thus, instead of isolating the main body of the shed from the roof space, the ceiling simply provided a nice dark shelter for a great variety of spiders and other multi-legged critters from which they could and did invade and colonise the shed itself. Though the shed roof is weatherproof it is not dustproof. What with the dust and the webs and the rest it was not an environment in which one would wish to sit for long.
So I emptied the shed, ripped out the old shelves and took a bit of time removing the old ceiling so as to preserve the main panels to be used again.  I have now reached the stage at which the new ceiling is in and sealed, and the ceiling and walls have had two coats of paint with one more to go. A couple of tubes of decorators filler have taken care of the larger holes and crevices in and between the  concrete blocks in the walls and a long gap between the window ledge and the wall beneath has been filled with mortar.  Eventually, all the shelves will be finished in brilliant white gloss paint.

Jobs of this sort can be very tedious but I have a great tool for overcoming that problem. It is the Sony MP4 player shown in the picture above. I don’t spend much time watching TV or listening to the radio, there is far too much rubbish being broadcast and I cannot be bothered to dredge through the Radio Times or other guides in search of the few gems that are worth seeing and/or hearing (though some of those gems are finding me now via Twitter but that is another story).  Instead, when free to choose I prefer to divide my time between glorious silence and listening to the sort of music that I mentioned a while ago in another post. My MP4 player has a memory of 8Gb of which about half is now occupied by my favourite music. The sound quality is remarkably good through the standard earphones and battery life is excellent. Though the Walkman/Ipod idea is far from new, it is amazing to me still that so much music can be stored and played in such a small player and is thus available just about anywhere – including when there is boring work to be done in the garden shed.
The musical activity has become even more varied recently – but more about that in the next post.

Dram’s story. Part 5

Dram was not destined to have a long life. He developed a small lump on his chest. It remained small for a long time and the vet said that it didn’t seem to be bothering him and if it wasn’t bothering us we could ignore it. In retrospect we concluded that this had been bad advice and that the lump should have been removed while it was small.  Eventually it began to grow. Basically the vets adopted a wait and see attitude and long after they could have sorted the problem they announced that its size and location made it too dangerous to operate – and there was no treatment.
In those final months Dram behaved perfectly normally almost to the very end. He had always approached life with enthusiasm, welcoming each new day energetically,  greeting us on our return from shopping trips etc. with boundless excitement and helping to cheer us when times were difficult. None of this changed and all I was concerned about was that, when the time came, his end would be swift and as painless as possible.
On a Sunday in December 1997 he ate only half of his breakfast and none of his evening meal. This was serious, even though in other respects he behaved normally, trotting across our front lawn at the end of his evening walk, tail up, as if without a care in the world. Later, though, he became restless and I stayed up with him all night, able to do little but keep him company and take him out when he seemed to need it.
By breakfast time the following day my duty to Dram was clear. To his credit the vet came very quickly and it was all over in no time.
Lots of dog owners will have had to make the same decision. It was awful and all the more so because it was December 9th, his ninth birthday.

Dram’s story. Part 4.

 

You couldn’t fool Dram, even when he was asleep. Judging by his expression here as he gazes towards the kitchen, my guess is that he was having a nap when someone opened “his” biscuit cupboard.  I  reckon he is about half a second away from galloping to the kitchen.
As he got older we allowed him more concessions. For example he was allowed to climb the step from the living room and view our eating habits from closer quarters in the breakfast room. He was always curious but also very careful. He seemed to have a golden rule of his own in that he never touched anything that was on a table or other piece of furniture but if an item of food was on the floor then that was his, no question. In fact it didn’t need to be on the floor; on the way to the floor was good enough for him - its chances of reaching the floor were almost negligible. Being curious though, meant that he would put the very ends of his paws on the edge of the table from time to time just to peer over the top and see what was there. This was not a problem as he only looked and never touched.
However, there was one very funny episode that got him into trouble with Jennie. We each had a small cake on a plate and my wife and I had taken ours to the living room. Jennie had left hers on the breakfast room table while she went into her bedroom for a moment. When she returned, the plate was in the same place but the cake had gone. By chance I witnessed what had happened. Dram had put his paws on the table for a closer look at the cake but had accidentally caught the edge of the plate with a claw. The plate tipped suddenly, propelling the cake into the air where it described a really neat arc about three feet above Dram’s head before falling behind him. As the plate settled back into place Dram turned like a flash and no part of that cake reached the carpet. He left no clues. It was the perfect crime.

 Dram could take any amount of fussing. If Granny Anne stopped tickling him under his chin he would simply nudge her arm to start again. If she was watching TV or reading a book, or otherwise ignoring him he would nudge her elbow until she paid attention. If this didn’t work he had other ways to atract her attention including launching into his party trick, which was to spin round suddenly in the middle of the floor, grab his tail in his mouth and take it to her, walking sideways but taking good care to look where he was going. Then he would bring it to me – and both of us would make a fuss and tell him how clever he was.

It is widely recognised by now that our canine friends have “powers”, for want of a better word, that we hardly understand. I am not thinking here so much about their ability to “read” our moods and feelings and behave accordingly, amazing though that is, but of something more mysterious. Dram gave us reason to think about these aspects a few times. For example, through much of his life I worked from home but went away to work once per fortnight. These trips involved being away from home for anything from 12 hours to around 60 hours, returning in the evening or early hours of the morning. There was no way of predicting exactly when I would arrive home. Despite this, 20 minutes before I arrived, Dram would move to the back door, even though his bed was only a couple of feet away,  and wait there for me. His accuracy was eerie. 
I am sure that Jennie and Granny Anne could tell you a lot more about Dram, but my version of his story is almost finished.

 

 

 

Dram’s story. Part 3.

Dram’s bed was near the back door so that it was nearby when he returned from a walk. The bed had a removable cover, plus a spare, and these were washed at regular intervals and he was always excited to be given a freshly washed bed cover.
The location of his bed also helped him to guard the door. On one occasion when I was away from home for a couple of days our neighbour called. On getting no response to her knocks she let herself  in, closed the door behind her and called for my wife who was at the other end of the house. Although our neighbour visited quite often and was known to Dram, he didn’t let her get any further, in my wife’s absence from the room. He was not at all threatening. He didn’t even bark. Instead, he leaned against her knees and held her against the door until my wife arrived.
Mind you, if anyone approached the house that he didn’t know, or didn’t like, the growl would start somewhere near his tail, a low resonant note gradually building in tone and volume as it worked its way forward, finally bursting forth as thunderous barking accompanied by a most intimidating display of large teeth. We knew that he probably wouldn’t harm anyone, other than to lick them to death but strangers didn’t know that.

Like any sensible dog Dram loved to be the centre of attention and of course I spoiled him. Who wouldn’t? When he was very small I would sit him on my knee as I sat on the sofa. A bit later he found that he could jump up on to my knee – so long as I caught him so that he didn’t fall down again. This became part of the routine and it never really stopped – even when he had grown to around 80 lb in weight!  Otherwise he never jumped on to furniture but eventually we allowed him one exception to this rule – he was allowed, for a short time each day, to occupy the righthand end of the sofa as you can see in the picture above.  It was a great place for a nap! It was also a great vantage point from which to see whether anything interesting was happening in the kitchen.

Dram’s story. Part 2.

In the picture above Dram is 18 weeks old, weighs 50 lb and can pull himself up and lean on the side of his pen quite easily. At this age he barked only in his sleep. It was at about this time that he learnt to escape from his pen by shaking the side of it until the catch fell open. However, in his entire life he did hardly any damage inside or outside the house and soon we were sufficiently confident in him to discard the pen and buy him a luxurious bed, which was very much to his liking.
From the large living/dining room in which Dram spent his early months there was a step up to the rest of the house. This was a sufficient obstacle in itself in the early days and when he showed signs of climbing that step we trained him not to do it. So, three times a day you would find him stretched out on the living room floor, with his chin on that step, noting every scrap of food that we consumed at our mealtimes. He was always fed first – a hangover from my farming days – but he would still stare at us as if he hadn’t been fed for a week!
Another of Dram’s traits, and one that surprised me, was his devotion to cleanliness. It was almost feline. He was brushed and combed regularly and loved all that attention but it was inevitable that he would get muddy from time to time. On coming back to the house he would go straight to his bed and stay there, happily preening himself, until clean and dry.

“Me and my dog”. Jennie was about 10 years old here. Dram would walk miles and we devised a routine which included taking him out six times daily, mostly around our own large garden but also around the local country lanes.
His meals and their timing evolved as he grew. There were several wall cupboards in the kitchen which looked the same and (to us) sounded the same when their doors were opened and closed. One of them housed Dram’s biscuits. Even if he was 30 feet away in a different room it was simply not possible to open that particular cupboard without him noticing and arriving at your feet almost instantly. This happened only when “his” cupboard was opened, never with the others. When he had grown out of the puppy diet most of his meals consisted of mixer, topped with Pedigree Chum of one sort of another and followed by Shapes biscuits and a Bonio. At least once a week we would vary his diet by sharing our roast meal. The beef or chicken took the place of the Chum and he also enjoyed the roast potatoes, peas and gravy, all of which was topped off artistically with a Yorkshire pudding. Granny Anne made little round Yorkshire puddings, about three inches in diameter. There was always one for each of us including Dram. He would pick his off the top of the food in his dish and close his mouth aroumd it with both cheeks bulging. Then he would look at us as if to say “What do I do now?” If we had sausages, we cooked an extra one for Dram. If we opened those plastic yoghurt pots with the peel-off foil lids, Dram would lick the yoghurt off the underside of the lids for us. He was always obliging like that. “News at Ten” on the TV was the signal for Dram’s supper, just a light snack of three Shapes and a Bonio. Wherever he was in the house, as soon as the music started to introduce the news he would trot around, gazing at each one of us in turn to see whether anyone had noticed what time it was.

Dram’s story. Part 1.

This is the story of our dog, much abbreviated to make a series of five posts at 48-hour intervals.

Some time in the 1980s my daughter, Jennie, told me that she wanted a dog. At the time neither our environment nor our lifestyle was conducive to ownership of a dog, at least, not what I call a proper dog, so I told her that when we lived in a suitable place we would have a dog.
Well, we moved. From a conventional suburban semi-detached house and gardens we relocated to a large, single-storey rural property with more than an acre of garden adjacent to farmland. Now we could have a dog.
When I was about eight years old, I, too, wanted a dog. It was not to be. But I did have a rather nice book illustrating the best-known dog breeds and after due research the number one breed on my short list was the Golden Retriever.  It was the right sort of size. It was, and is still, in my eyes the most handsome of dogs and it had a reputation for its excellent temperament.  I had a feeling that any dog that was going to live with us would need both patience and a sense of humour. With a young daughter in the house the temperament mattered.
At the end of 1988 we made enquiries and discovered that a friend of a friend had a goldie that had presented her with a lively litter of eight pups on December 9th. Unbeknown to us, this date was to become even more significant. Arrangements were made to view the said litter. As we entered the owner’s kitchen the pups paid no attention at all to us for the very good reason that all eight of them were arranged around the perimeter of a very large dish and were tucking into their evening meal, heads down and tails wagging furiously.
Having cleaned the dish completely, they all set off in different directions to explore the kitchen and play and we didn’t choose any of them. Instead, we were chosen. He wasn’t that much bigger than some of the others but he was inquisitive and clearly a personality. According to the owner he was the King of the Litter and as if to say “Choose me!”, he nibbled my shoe. So we chose him and collected him when he was eight weeks old, in February 1997,  so that he was at home before Jennie arrived from school. 

Quite by chance we had acquired an aristocratic Golden Retriever whose not very distant ancestors included such renowned champions as Camrose Cabus Christopher and Stolford Happy Lad. We gave him a suitable name, following in the somewhat alcoholic tradition started by his mother and to this we added the name of our house making the whole thing look distinctly impressive in the Kennel Club’s records. For the purposes of this blog I will refer to him as Dram (another, albeit unofficial, alcoholic measure).
After a slightly nervous start Dram quickly proved to be happy with us. Our large living/dining room at that time had a parquet floor but we had not yet carpeted it, having been there for a fairly short time. In the picture above he is about 10 weeks old - a mischievous bundle of fur but trying hard to be good. To accomodate him safely, at those times when we couldn’t be in the room with him, I built a wooden pen from the remains of a cupboard that I had dismantled previously. Inside the pen the floor was covered with umpteen layers of newspaper and his food and water bowls were in there with him. I will not attempt to describe the state of the newspaper each morning for the first couple of weeks. Suffice it to say that I would scoop it all up and shove it into the solid fuel boiler (complete with the little white sterilised bones that he used to enjoy) and then start again with fresh paper and freshly washed bowls. By 11 weeks he was house trained. At 14 weeks he weighed 35 lb and liked nothing better than digging molehills while looking sad, yet enjoying himself hugely. By this age he would sit, stay, go to bed and do other things(!) more or less to order.

Another painting

 As regular visitors to this blog will have discovered by now, I do not finish a painting very often. This one was painted a few years ago and I came across it recently while unpacking yet another box in our garage. At present I am writing a rather long post, which is likely to be published here in two or three parts, telling the story of the Golden Retriever who was an amazing addition to our family some years ago. So I decided to show this painting by way of an introduction to that story.

The picture was painted on oil painting paper (7 x 9 in.) using Winsor and Newton Artisan water-mixable oils, my favourite medium. After some months it had been varnished with Rowney Acrylic soluble gloss varnish. When I unpacked it the other day it seemed very grubby but, thanks to the varnish,  it was easy to clean it without causing damage. The varnish is soluble in white spirit but not in water. So I quickly wetted the whole painting with plain water, using a two-inch paint brush, then wiped the whole thing with folded kitchen tissues, easily removing both dirt and most of the water leaving the painting as good as new.