Tag Archives: freezing outside

Saturday 17th December 2011 – NEXT TIME …

… that I do this crossing, I shall book a couchette.

I enjoyed the trip – easily one of the best crossings that I have ever had and I’ll be doing it again. But it’s so uncomfortable to curl up in a corner – there just aren’t any corners in which to curl up.

And when I discovered that a couchette would set me back a mere £20:00 if booked in advance (they were all sold out on this trip – I did check), well, it’s a foregone conclusion.

This journey saves me a couple of hours and about 10 litres of fuel over driving to Calais, and it puts me in a much better position for going up to the Midlands and the north, missing out all of London and the M25.

A couchette would more-than pay for itself, I reckon.

We were decanted into Le Havre at dawn and at a leisurely pace, took me less than 8 hours to reach home. The roads are excellent, as are most French roads, but these were comparatively quiet. I even managed to fit a little shopping in on the way home.

I beat the snow home – but only just. A huge pile of it had followed me all the way from the coast. And it was taters in here. Absolutely freezing in my attic, although the wood stove soon sorted that out.

And while I had been away the place had been ravaged by 75 kph winds. That generated a few amps of electricity, I can tell you.

So I’m not doing much now. A bit of food – curled up by the fire, and here I’m staying to catch up with my beauty sleep.

-3

Wednesday 14th December 2011 – HAVING SLEPT …

… in the warmth and comfort of a hotel room, I was up and about quite early and fit for almost anything – if this stinking head cold will let me.

So having gathered my wits which, let’s face it, doesn’t take as long as it might these days, I was off to Liverpool.

As you know, I’m spending a lot of time working on my house and even though I own half a scaffolding, I can never seem to be able to use it as it’s always out doing other stuff.

That’s a situation that is really getting me down so I made a decision a while back that I would buy two bays of scaffolding and keep them just for myself at my house, for use when I want to and at no other time.

And, of course, now that I’m no longer sleeping in Caliburn this trip, I can load him up.

But I had a stroke of luck on the way. Passing a Ford breaker’s down some dingy back street in Speke I noticed a Ford Transit being dismantled. Stopping for a look, it still had one wheel and tyre on it, and the tyre wasn’t too bad.

Not a major manufacturer, it has to be said, but not a remould either. But it wasn’t the tyre that I was really interested in anyway.

Regular readers of this rubbish will know that, being fed up of having to swap tyres over every Spring and Autumn, I’m trying to collect a spare set of wheels so that I can have winter tyres fitted permanently.

This wheel and tyre will do nicely for a spare, and the original spare wheel can come and be rotated onto the road. And so after much negotiation, folding stuff changed hands and there we were.

Even more skilled negotiations down at the Scaffolding place. We had a lengthy chat and I bought what I needed. But because I had my SIREN (French trade registration certificate) with me, I could buy it VAT-free for export. So that saved me a bundle.

Yes, having been lucky with my B&Q trade card when I was here earlier in the year, I brought my SIREN with me so that I could capitalise on whatever other opportunities come my way.

Surfing around on the internet a little later, I noticed that Macclesfield were playing Chelmsford City in an FA Cup replay. That’s not too far away and if I can put my skates on, I can make it. Years since I’ve been to Moss Rose.

So, just like Janet in Tam Lin, off I went, as fast as go can me.

I missed the first five minutes which was no real problem (finding a parking place was, however) but found a comfy seat in the stand behind the southern goal, chatting to a local kid.

But what a dreadful match it was. Macclesfield Town could have played with Stevie Wonder in goal and it would have made no difference because the Chelmsford City attack was woeful.

Chelmsford City had two players – Akurang and Modeste – who looked okay (so it goes without saying that they were both substituted) and Macclesfield had a full-back called Carl Tremarco who was easily the best player on the pitch (and he scored the goal).

As an aside, for anyone who might be interested in football trivialities, Macclesfield’s goalkeeper José Veiga is an International for the Cape Verde national side.

On the way back I found a chippy so had a huge helping of chips and beans to keep me going until breakfast.

And I’m glad that I’m not sleeping out in the van tonight. It’s absolute taters and I’m not well.

0

Saturday 10th December 2011 – SINCE WHEN …

… has one day’s blog started with a full account of what happened the next morning?

It’s not a very usual occurrence, I know, but it does happen to me now and again – usually because I don’t keep “normal” hours like everyone else. Years of working nights driving taxis and coaches means that I’m more “nocturnal” than “diurnal”.

My days usually finish when I go to bed, no matter what time that might be. And when there have been days when I haven’t gone to bed at all – which also happens very occasionally, I find a convenient break-point.

And so I hit the road tomorrow at 00:30 with still a long way to go before the day is ended.

Today though, I had a very desultory, leisurely day. Taking it easy due to the long night which I knew that I was going to have.

And my heart wasn’t really in the packing and I didn’t really do as much as I should. As a result, I set off on probably the most ill-prepared voyage that I have ever made. And I have made a few of those in my life as well, as you can probably imagine.

The road to Le Havre took me on a merry, mazy way via Bourges, Orleans and Chartres.

Parts of the road were really quick and I was able to make quite good time, whereas others were … err … not so quick, especially when it came to navigating my way through the cities with the endless strings of traffic lights.

caliburn overnight parking chartres franceFinally I found a service area about 20 or so miles beyond Chartres and that’s where I went to sleep.

And it was freezing as well – frost and ice everywhere – but I’m not that easily defeated.

A few years ago I stripped an old Volvo saloon and that had heated seat pads in it. And so I wired one of them up to one of these 12-volt powerpacks, and you’ve no idea how warm my feet were in bed.

That is – until the powerpack’s battery went flat.

0

Friday 21st October 2011 – TODAY WAS ….

… a quiet day or at least it should have been. But Terry and Rob came round to fix Lieneke’s barn and no-one can sleep through the kind of racket that those two are capable of producing.

But what about last night,hey? Temperature plummeted to -1.9°C. A minus temperature – winter is flaming well here, right enough. I’m even contemplating lighting a fire shortly if we don’t have an improvement

However, never mind that for a moment – three hours and more on the computer and my visit to Trois Rivieres is well-advanced.

Trois-Rivieres is on the north bank of the St Lawrence between Montreal and Quebec. It’s the oldest industrial site in North America and the newsprint capital of the world. In fact all of my visits to the area have been overwhelmed by the smell of wet paper from the pulp mills so I’ve always kept well clear. 

This year though I found myself in the town and my opinions of the place rapidly changed. The town seeps history from almost every pore and I’ve completely changed my opinion about the place.

This afternoon though I had to wait for Terry to move his van before I could get out to the post office and post that parcel. And I fell through the floor when I found out the price. I bet that it’s cheaper to fly to Canada and deliver it by hand. It makes excess baggage charges look a bargain

To the bank after that to sort out a few financial details, and then to Bill’s to fix his computer again.

This evening it’s POETS day of course and so I finished early – spending half an hour or so sorting some papers that date back to 2004. And there’s so many of them that it’s going to take a while.

Tomorrow it’s shopping and as I have so much to do it’s going to be a St Eloy les Mines quick half hour-type of shopping. And the washing is building up here and so I might visit the local launderette and sort it out.

>But I’m not really looking forward to tomorrow. I’ve finished all of my stock of Canadian vegan cheese slices and that is a catastrophe.

-2

Thursday 20th October 2011 – I THOUGHT …

repairing stone wall collapsed lean to les guis virlet puy de dome france… that you might like to see like to see a photo of inside the lean-to now that the wall is finished for now. As I have said before,I’m quite impressed with it.

The part that I have built up is the part that has been pointed. The unpointed part is what remained after it fell down, and that will be pointed in early course. It depends how the weather holds out after I finish the house wall (yes, that’s the next task).

In fact, it occurs to me that the best way to judge how much work that I’ve done on the wall is to look at this photo to see what it looked like last year before I started in earnest.

So this morning I started on the web site again but not for long as Terry came round. He’d been working at Lieneke’s. It’s nice to see good friends and have a good chat about this and that, for a change.

This afternoon, I packed up an export order of bits and pieces – yes folks, my first export order. How about that? We are making progress all the time, which is very nice to see, and very welcome too. and once that was dealt with, seeing as how the weather wasn’t so good, I’ve started breaking the concrete food trough in the ground floor of the lean-to, as that’s where the wall that will support the steps will be.

Mind you, the steps won’t be there for long as I have a cunning plan about that.

But the concrete is tough there – it’s reinforced and armour-plated by the looks of things. I’ve broken the shafts on two sledgehammers, flattened two batteries on the SDS drill, and chipped about a hatful off with the pick-axe. I’m on the lookout for some dynamite now.

As for the frog that I told you about the other night, well thanks to Krys (and how nice it is to see you again), the frog now has steps in and out of the plant trough. He’ll probably fall in somewhere else now. 

And the temperature? 1.8°C at the moment. Winter is acumen in. Lhude sing Rudolph

-1

Friday 14th October 2011 – WINTER IS ON ITS WAY

geese fly south for winter les guis virlet puy de dome franceThis is just a small part of the huge flock of geese that assembled over my place this afternoon. They had been honking for about an hour and eventually they all put in an appearance right over me, coming in from every direction possible.

They circled around for a while, formed up in a huge echelon, and then departed hence. It wasn’t half impressive watching them do all of this and the noise was astonishing. But it is a fact that when they leave they take the sun with them, so I’ll be battening down the hatches and sorting out the firewood

And as as aside – why do birds fly south in winter?

Answer – “it takes too long to walk”.

And while we are on the subject of the weather, on the TV Monday night the weather forecaster promised us sun from Wednesday until next Monday. But I don’t know where it’s all gone too because we haven’t had it yet and the temperature has now plummeted.

fitting beam collapsed lean to repairing stone wall les guis virlet puy de dome franceToday was a momentous occasion outside on the wall of the lean-to because the beam is now in place where it ought to be. But it’s a bit of a disappointment because it’s about 0.5 inch too high in the vertical plane but about 0.5 inch too low under the chevrons. That means that the central beam is about 0.75 inch too high and the end where I’m working.

Ahh well.

Still, it’s progress I suppose. and from here on, the back-filling is pretty straightforward. It’s not going to take too long to finish off now and then I can plan my next step – always assuming that it doesn’t finish me off first.

But one thing is for sure – it won’t happen on Monday as I have a furniture removal to do – to Issoire.

0

Wednesday 19th January 2011 – Just by way of a change …

… I was awake before the alarm clock this morning. Surprising too, because it was after 03:00 when I went to bed – rather busy on the computer was I last night.

And this non-seasonal weather is still here – light cloudy skies and plenty of solar energy, and thus electrically-heated water too, but the temperature has dropped. At 21:00 it was -2°C and falling, so winter is still with us.

I’ve had another good day working on the bedroom roof and that is making progress. Slowly, it has to be said, but at least it’s one of those tasks where you can actually see how you are getting on. I’ve probably done about a third of it and it seems to be making something of a difference up here with all of the extra insulation and then the tongue-and-grooving on the bedroom ceiling, which is of course the floor in here.

But I think that I have made something of an error in that I started with the tongue-and-grooving by the window, which means that I am having to do all kinds of contortions around the framework of the fitted wardrobe. It would have been easier to start at the wall by the fitted wardrobe and then continued out to the window. However, where you start is much neater than where you finish and by finishing over the top of the wardrobe, no-one is going to see how it all ended up.

The days are lengthening too. It was 17:48 when I finished work in the bedroom due to fading light, and I went outside to do some more but the drop in temperature drove me in at 18:10 when it was still light . enough to carry on for a short while. Give it another month and I’ll be outside working at 19:00. I’ll need to be too, as I have this greenhouse to build and some new plots and raised beds to deal with. Wherever does the time go to?

And in other news, CREFAD – this Government-sponsored business networking thing that gives lectures and advice to small businesspeople in the Auvergne – rang me up. There’s a meeting on 1st March at St Gervais on the subject of auto-entrpreneurs – this new system of taxation for small informal businesses – and they need a speaker for it. would I be free by any chance that evening? Magali (the girl who runs it) clearly remembers me from 9 months ago when I did a talk on eco-construction.

As it happens I am free that evening and even if I wasn’t, I would be. There’s no payment or anything involved of course which is a shame, but it gives me a chance to meet some more potential clients and talk about my business. An opportunity not to be missed. And they must clearly be impressed with my command of the French language otherwise they wouldn’t keep on asking me to speak at these public meetings, and that is something that pleases me greatly.

-1

Thursday 6th January 2011 – I had a gorgeous tea tonight.

I finally managed to get my long-promised Bangers, mash and baked beans this evening. and it was gorgeous. The leftover vegan sausages from Christmas (and weren’t they nice?), a tin of baked beans, and I found a tin of spuds in the emergency supplies.

Yes, a tin of spuds, for all of mine have ended up in the compost. I know that you are supposed to keep them in a frost-free room but nothing round here is frost-free when the temperature reaches -13.5°C outside, and the whole crop had gone.

In the bedroom, the wiring is almost finished and I’ll soon be able to do the boarding. And I’ve been having tremendous fun with it all. There’s conduit and trunking and wires all over the place and it’s like 3 plates of spaghetti. Of course I don’t have a clue what I’m doing but that’s not anything that has ever bothered me in the past. The proof of the pudding will be in the eating and that’s when we will see if the place catches fire or not.

All last night and today we had a howling gale. It’s blown in one of the panes of glass in the bedroom window to match the other one that a rock fell through. I can’t board this one up as there won’t be any light getting into the room and there’s no point replacing the glass so I’m going to be freezing to death in there while I’m working.

But what I did do today was to dismantle the dump load from the electrical set-up in the barn and use the charge controller to measure the current being produced by the big wind turbine. And there was that much wind that at times there was quite a charge being registered. I’m going to have to get a decent charge controller with data facilities for the wind turbine that I’ll be mounting on the house. Stuck on a short pole attached to the fence that was going around like the clappers too in this wind.

This evening I was outside working until 18:10 before it went black outside. I’m using this final half-hour of my working day to have some sort of desultory tidying-up of the outside of the house and barn. Heaven knows it needs it, with the place having been covered in scaffolding for the last two summers. But for some reason that I don’t quite understand, I’ve been feeling quite enthusiastic today, the best I’ve been for quite a while. I think that I’m making some kind of rapid progress, which is cheering me up.

I’m not used to this.

-1

Tuesday 4th January 2011 – It was Terry’s turn …

… to ring up this morning.

“Are you doing much?”
“Not really” (I was chopping wood, as it happens)
“Fancy coming round here to give me a hand with the scaffolding?”
“You need to say the Magic Words”
“Liz is baking bread”

Round at Terry’s we put up the scaffolding on the end of the house wall and attacked the satellite dish. Although Terry and Liz can pick up the Hotbird satellite, Astra 2, which is the British satellite, remains quite elusive. After a few hours at the adjustment we managed to find a couple more satellites, but still no Astra 2. Careful research showed us that the Astra 2 satellite is 4° lower in the sky than the others and so this involved tilting down the dish, but then it was pointing straight into the barn of the house across the road.

Next job therefore was to raise up the dish as high as we could get it so that the antenna would clear the barn. So we built the scaffolding up to 8.5 metres and refitted the brackets and pole so that the dish would be at the highest point possible. Next problem was that the cable wasn’t long enough to reach the dish in its new position but that will have to wait until tomorrow as it was 18:01 (I made a note of that) and we lost the light. And isn’t that a far cry from just about two weeks ago when the light went at 17:20?

centre ornithologique st gervais auvergne puy de dome franceToday though was lovely and the drive down at Liz and Terry’s was magnificent. It was a beautiful Alpine morning with a few scattered clouds here and there.

Not so good here at my house though as I could only manage a mere 158 amp-hours, in contrast with the 195 (for that was what it was) of yesterday. But “only” 158 amp-hours – that’s more than I received in a week just a short while ago.

But it’s freezing again tonight and we may well have a lower temperature than last night’s -8.2°C but tomorrow they are talking about a rise in temperature and rain clouds.But for me I’d much rather have the freezing temperatures and the bright sunshine – my batteries would welcome the juice.

-1

Saturday 25th December 2010 – I WAS WOKEN UP THIS MORNING …

… by Enoch Powell singing “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas”. And if ever his dreams were to come true it was today as we have indeed had a White Christmas. And no wonder I didn’t really want to get out of bed.

And when I did get out of bed eventually – well I’ve done nothing at all today. Nothing at all. In fact the most strenuous thing that I have done is to make a butty for lunch.

So why no tea? I hear you ask. That’s because I froze to death making my lunch and when I went downstairs at 21:00 to make tea it was -6.5°C IN THE VERANDAH – and -10.2°C outside. And I was not going to hang around in those conditions.

I came back up here and nibbled on a few things, played my Christmas CDs, and watched my Christmas DVDs

But I did have a phone call from a friend of mine. He went out to a party last night and then spent three hours digging himself out of the ditch he had slid into on the way home.
“What? After all those years and all that experience you have had driving on ice?”
“Yes, but as it wasn’t so bad I suppose I was over-confident. Feeling a little cocky I suppose”
“Well you shouldn’t be doing that while you are driving. And anyway it will make you go blind”

-4

Friday 3rd December 2014 – IT’S STILL SNOWING.

We had a pasting through the night again so the first job this morning was to stick my head out of the skylights and brush it off the solar panels.

Mind you, I needn’t have bothered – I had just over 1 amp-hour of solar energy today. Thick grey clouds and the odd heavy snowfall was the order of the day, and I’m still snowed in.

Freezing cold as well – it stayed negative all day, even in the verandah and that’s no surprise – the huge layer of snow on the roof is keeping any kind of heat away from the inside.

So I’ve tidied up a little more in the bedroom and fitted some temporary shelves in the wardrobe for putting the tools and so on. And then I fitted some more studding to one of the walls ready for some more insulation. I need to get a move on.

I’ve also started to take out the old slate. It’s going to take ages but it will take even longer if I don’t do it. I’ve decided to take two bucket loads with me each time I go downstairs – that’ll be a good plan.

When it was dark I went into the barn and did some more stuff in there until 18:00 and then I came in. I wasn’t going to hang around in that cold weather. 5.1°C it was up here but an hour of the little stove going full pelt soon put that right.

But when will it ever end?

-1

Thursday 2nd December 2010 – WELL THERE’S COLD …

… and there’s very cold, and then there’s .. errrr … -8.9°C. That’s what the temperature dropped to last night. No wonder it went cold in here all of a sudden at about 00:30, and why it was only 9.1°C in here this morning when I woke up.

First job this morning before I could cut my wood was to look at the batteries. Last night I noticed that the charge had suddenly dropped to about 11.8 volts and there was a smell of gas lingering around.

overheated battery burst les guis virlet puy de dome franceSo this morning a quick touch test showed that one of them was overheating and on a closer examination you can see that this battery has burst. I don’t know why either. Since I’ve had my water heater wired in as a dump load, there shouldn’t be any possibility of any overcharge, and this battery isn’t one of those that handle the input.

But changing the battery for another restored the current and then I went and chopped another huge load of wood – I had a feeling that I’ll be going to need it.

The postie came by this morning with a registered letter. Not very unusual, you might think, but she walked down from the end of the lane as I’m snowed in right now. I was impressed with her devotion to duty anyway.

Later I carried on with the wardrobe and it’s finished as far as I can do it. I’ve none of the wood for the sides and the shelves and so on. That’ll have to wait until I can get in to Montlucon, whenever that might be. But I also did a little clearing up in the bedroom too, so that I can make some more space for working.

I also managed to do some more in the barn as well.

Up here after knocking off work it was a mere 5.6°C. Not surprising because with all of the snow on the windows in the roof, no heat is getting in from outside. But this little heater is doing a very valiant job and I’m impressed that it can cope with these temperatures with just burning old scrap offcuts of wood.

Tea though is difficult right now. I cook in the verandah right now and the temperatures are impossible. I can’t cook myself a decent meal when I’m having to work in temperatures like -3°C. So it’s a handful or two of pasta, a tin of beans and some veg out of a tin. That’s the best I can do.

I just can’t believe this weather.

-1

Wednesday 1st December 2010 – THIS WEATHER DIDN’T IMPROVE ANY TODAY.

heavy snowfall les guis virlet puy de dome franceI woke up to find snow everywhere – a good 6 inches must have fallen through the night and the temperature stayed below zero all day.

I was getting low on water in the verandah so I had to hammer my way through the ice in the water butts – the tap was frozen solid. Definitely a good idea it was to fasten the top onto the butts with wing nuts rather than screws.

wardrobe bedroom les guis virlet puy de dome franceAfter the customary chopping of a bucket load of wood to replenish the stocks up here I carried on with the wardrobe.

And I’m definitely sick of Brico Depot wood. The horizontals I made out of the left-over demi-chevrons from the roof – those that I bought from the sawmill – but the Brico Depot demi-chevrons I was using for the uprights – they just split and collapsed. It’s the sawmill in future for me for my wood.

Much of the wardrobe is done but I ran out of light and so I went into the barn and carried on tidying up the wood that used to be the laths off the barn roof. The long bits or those with decent ends I’m saving at the moment but there are also tons of short bits or broken-off bits. I moved a few bucket-loads of those down to the lean-to where I’m keeping the wood that I’m burning. I’ll cut those up tomorrow morning and add them to the pile.

Yes, tomorrow. I can’t see me going anywhere tomorrow. I’m properly snowed in here and there’s no sign of a snow plough.  

-1

Tuesday 30th November 2010 – WELL, I WAS RIGHT …

… about the weather last night. We touched rock bottom at -6.2°C – the lowest November temperature that I have ever recorded, and that by a country mile as well.

And as if to rub salt into the wounds, the temperature struggled up today to the dizzy heights of an astonishing November temperature of -1.2°C, the first negative maximum temperature that I have ever recorded in November.

heavy snow fall les guis virlet puy de dome franceAnd that wasn’t all either – at about 12:00 or thereabouts the heavens opened and cascaded down a ton of snow and that stuff kept on coming for the whole afternoon.

The high winds that came with it, blowing in from the east, whipped the stuff about in a mini-blizzard and as a by-product had both of the wind turbines going round.

As for me, I spent the day working in the bedroom downstairs building my fitted wardrobe. It was impossible to work outside. I’ve done the three main cross bars for the front and the two central uprights. All the joints are cut and shaped.

Tomorrow, if the weather is still nasty I’ll be screwing it all into position. I need then to run some electric cable for a light over where the drawers and the mirror will be and then I can fit the last side wall inside the wardrobe. Once that’s all done I can carry on with the plasterboarding around the walls.

I knocked off at 18:00 as usual and made a coffee for bringing up here. And up here we had a balmy 6.7°C. But despite its faults, such as needing filling every 15 minutes, this little pot-bellied stove is doing the business up here. It’s really tiny as you might remember but it burns the offcuts of wood from joinery projects, old flooring, scrap wood that I scavenged, the old broken laths off the roofs that we did, old paper, cardboard and everything and brought the room up to a pleasant 18°C at a total cost of nothing for the fuel.

The stove itself of course cost just £85 new so that’s probably one of the best investments that I’ve made around the farm and I certainly appreciate it in this weather.

The long-term aim for the stove is to buy one of those Gobain stoves – wood-burners that also have a built-in oven and a back-boiler that heats the water. With the back-boiler I can heat an indirect hot water tank and run a little central-heating system with a radiator in the bedroom, another small one in the bathroom and a small one in the lean-to where I used to live.

With there being an indirect cylinder I can also use solar heat to heat the indirect water circuit in the summer so that’s the best of both worlds, and the surplus electrical energy can be used to power a small electric oven for cooking.

But summer is a long way off and the way things are around here just now I don’t think that we are ever going to have another summer. It’s permanent winter from now on.  

-3

Monday 29th November 2010 – I’VE BEEN GARDENING THIS AFTERNOON

With the weather having warmed up today, I’ve covered over the beds of spuds and carrots with some of the black plastic sheeting that I used to cover them just after I dug the beds out. This will hopefully trap the “heat” (after all, 6 degrees is “heat” after what we have been having just now and help them to thaw out, as well as protecting them from the frost until I can get to dig them up.

I also wanted to put my herb beds under cover too so firstly I grubbed out everything in the mega-cloche  and then moved the strawberry plants from the smaller cloche and planted them into the mega-cloche.

6 plants went into that cloche last spring, and 21 came out. I was impressed with that. They should do well in the mega-cloche and I might even have a decent crop this coming year.

The smaller cloche wasn’t big enough to take all of the herb beds so I had to tidy up the greenhouse and put the other herb bed in there. All of the stuff that didn’t grow was consigned to the new compost heap and now for once there is plenty of room in it.

But the plastic covering of the greenhouse has decayed and so I need to turn my attention to building the new greenhouse out of the windows that Simon gave me. Last year I made a space to put that, and the space where the plastic greenhouse is, I’ll build a garden shed there.

I’ve also given the inside of the back of Caliburn a bit of a clean-out too, and then I spent a pleasant hour or so crushing tin cans – I had a load of them lying around and so I’ve flattened some of them ready to take to the recycling. Plenty more to go, too, and I’ll spend some more time on that.

But this evening the temperature has plunged dramatically. When I went downstairs it was -3.3 and there was a really heavy frost. Seems like the temperature is in freefall tonight and we could well be on our way to the coldest night of the winter. And winter hasn’t started yet – it’s still November around here.

-2