Tag Archives: samsung

Friday 16th March 2018 – AND SO, AFTER …

… all of my exertions, I was awake quite early this morning.

And although last night was still a tossy-turny affair, it wasn’t as bad as the previous one. And I was on my travels too – heading for home on the bus (the n°11 as it happened) from stoke on Trent, so work that one out. And I was going home to “sort out” a few things and a few people over my taxi business. There had been some considerable discussion about how inconvenient the buses were, but i’d insisted that they were more convenient than people think. As the bus turned from Ruskin Road into Gainsborough Road (good, these buses, aren’t they?) I saw TOTGA standing on the corner. I made a gesture indicating that I wanted her to follow on down, but she gave a blank look. Suddenly, it turned into a flash of recognition. The bus stopped right outside my front door (I’d explained to the driver where I had lived but he knew anyway) and the whole house was in darkness. That was weird for 19:30 on a Wednesday evening when we had the taxis and I’d certainly have words about this. But even with dropping me off at my front door I had a long walk home and it was a weary, tiring trudge, what with my illness, all down along Coppenhall Land towards The Playing Fields I was on the track through the woods and there hanging in the trees was a towel that looked very much like my old blue one, and as I followed the path I had to cross onto the road but someone had planted a hedge in the way and I had to climb over it. It took me two attempts too. But I was so tired and weary that I realised that I couldn’t go on and my business would have to go.

after the usual morning performance, I had a little … errr … relax on the armchair. I’m really not doing this, am I?

And it took me quite a while to come round as well. I must have been out. In fact it took me until about 11:00 before I was in any kind of state to leave the room.

Halfway down the road I realised that I had forgotten my prescriptions – so that meant that I would have to come out again this afternoon.

liptons iced tea ladeuzeplein leuven belgium mars march 2018My perambulations took me down and across the Ladeuzeplein, where my progress was arrested by these goings-on.

I’m not sure what it was that they were trying to do – except building a wall to presumably keep out illegal Mexicans, but they are using piles of crates that belong to that well-known manufacturer of iced tea, all of which had been brought to the Square by a large fleet of lorries.

So shrugging my shoulders, I continued on my way.

First stop was at Kruidvat, for a pile of gelatine-free sweets, and then to Wibra. I’d seen some good microwave steamers last time that I was here. Not very substantial and probably won’t last all that long. But that’s not going to be much of an issue because I probably won’t either.

But star of the show was in the FNAC. As you know, I’ve been having mobile phone issues since December and I ended up with a cheap Chinese import. And cheap was the appropriate word too. It does work but it was only ever going to be a stop-gap until I could find something better.

And so when they had some Samsung J3s on sale for a price less than I could have had one with a renewed contract, and when I negotiated another €20 off it too, I’ve now ended up with that. and the exciting thing about it is that with me having saved my settings on the old Samsung phone, this new phone simply downloaded everything as soon as I logged in, and it’s just like my old phone now.

Back here with a baguette and a tomato and some vegan cheese, I made myself some lunch. And then back out again.

And I was halfway down the road when I realised that I had forgotten my prescription yet again. I did a little wander around though, bought a tin of spicy beans from Delhaize for tea and then came back here.

Rounding up the prescription, I went back out and rounded up the medicaments.

Tea was baked spuds and spicy beans, and then I went for a little walk. And the temperature which had really been so nice today, had now plummeted. Snow is forecasted, but I might miss it.

Now it’s an early night. I have a train to catch back home in the morning.

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Saturday 17th June 2017 – THIS VACUUM CLEANER …

… that I bought yesterday isn’t half the genoux de l’abeille as they might say around here.

It might be only small, and it might be only cheap but it has the kind of suction for which a Conservative MP would pay good money in a back street massage parlour in Soho.

Yes, I’ve been cleaning and tidying up – well, sort-of_ish anyway. Because I had a brainwave. Self-motivation is not my strongest point, as you all know, and seeing as how Liz is on her own right now, Terry having gone back to The Land That Time Forgot to sort out the health issues of his mother and his daughter, I’ve invited her round for lunch tomorrow.

That means that I shall have to have the place looking at least presentable by the time that she comes round, and that’s not a bad idea at all. And so I made a sort-of start.

If I do another hour or two tomorrow morning it won’t be too bad I suppose. But I do like this vacuum cleaner. In fact, you can say that I’m almost as impressed with it as I am with my galvanised steel dustbin.

The tidying up involved putting away a pile of papers too (and there’s still more to go) and also sorting out my Canadian travel bag. For those of you who are not regular readers of this rubbish, I have a small bag with all of my 120-volt equipment in it – such as an AA – AAA battery charger, a couple of leads for electrical appliances, and all of the ‘phone stuff.

And it’s a good job that I did too because the data/charging cable for the North American phone doesn’t work (I remember that I had this problem last year) and I broke the car charger. And so I am in difficulty here. I shall have to think of a cunning plan.

Another thing that Bane of Britain seems to have done is to mix up the clean clothes that he washed the other day with the dirty clothes that he’s been wearing ever since. And that’s fraught with danger, isn’t it?

We had another struggle to leave the stinking pit this morning, although I was early down at the magasin de presse for my baguette. And with the boss not being there, I ended up with a rather miserable baguette too.

Lunchtime saw me up on the cliff above the harbour with my butties and book. It was another beautiful afternoon. I was up there for quite a while too in the glorious weather, but was eventually burnt out of my position so I came back here instead.

Tea was more of the curry stuff, but I’ve also prepared a tofu marinade. Tofu is pretty tasteless so it needs to be soaked in stuff. Mine was cooked with garlic, onions, pepper and curry powder (I wish that I had remembered to buy some sage and rosemary) and it’ll sit in that until tomorrow evening. I’ll cook a handful of lentils in the slow cooker too tomorrow morning and that will be the filling for the pie that I’m going to make. I’ll be having the oven on for the pizza, and so I can bake the pie at the same time.

I hope that it will be nice.

Ohhh – and Rhys – talking of cunning plans, if you are on your trips around the Dollar Stores, keep your eyes open for a data cable and a car charger for a Samsung T746.

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Tuesday 14th March 2017 – YOU MIGHT …

… or, more likely, might not … be wondering where I’ve been for the last few days. Well, almost a week in fact.

The truth is that I have had a very (un)pleasant stay amid the local facilities of the town of Verdun.

No, not the Nick, Rhys, the local hospital.

I was rushed in there on Wednesday night/Thursday morning after the landlady of the Hotel du Tigre found me flaked out in my bed having had the most serious relapse to date. She promptly called for an ambulance.

There was no internet in the hospital and somehow my telephone had become damaged so I was out of touch.

Anyway, they threw me out this morning and a taxi took me back to the hotel.

I’m still not 100% fit – far from it, in fact – so I had a slow, steady drive southwards and ended up at Bar-le-Duc where I bought a baguette and made myself a butty.

On my way through the town I’d seen an “Orange” boutique and so when it opened after lunch I trotted off round there to see what they could do about my phone. I’d managed to clean it up and dry it out but the keyboard wasn’t working, so I hoped that they could do something about it.

Nothing that they could do on the spot so repair would involve sending it away, and the hourly charge was something rather ludicrous. However, my contract has only one month to go before renewal and on renewal I would be entitled to a new telephone at a discount price. One or two deft keystrokes and I suddenly found myself the owner of a brand-new Samsung Smartphone, for all of €44:00. About half the price of the postage and minimum repair charge.

Later on, I was back on the road and had a gentle drive across the northern Burgundy mountains as far as Auxerre. This is where the new telephone came in handy because a quick search on the internet told me where the Première Class Hotel was situated – it’s quite a way out of the city.

Hopefully I’ll have a good sleep and a decent breakfast and make myself ready for the next stage of my journey.

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Tuesday 18th October 2016 – THIS IS LOOKING OMINOUS AND I DON’T LIKE IT AT ALL

Here in my little room at the head of the stairs, I was just dropping off to sleep round about midnight when a couple of people came in. They said goodnight to each other in a tone of voice that could have been heard all over the city, but just as I was about to go out and tell them to shut up, they went their separate ways.

But that wasn’t all.

About 15 minutes after the girl in 1204 had gone to bed, she was up and in the bathroom. In fact, she was in there twice. And now the whole toilet area in the first-floor bathroom is plastered in vomit and the smell is disgusting. Anyway, I’m not tolerating this for a moment and first thing this morning I was on the telephone to the owner to complain.

It’s not his fault of course and I went to great lengths to explain that to him. he can’t be held responsible for that, but he ought to know about it and to come round and apply his foot to the nether regions of the people responsible.

So much for my early night and my good sleep. I was tossing and turning for hours after that.

However, I must have gone off to sleep at some point because I went off on my travels. I was with a large group of people, refugees, heading somewhere or other. We camped for the night in a park, setting up our camps in little family groups. I of course was on my own but there was a small, young family quite close to me and I had to pass them to go down to the lake for water. There was something going on with three young cats too, but I’m not very sure as to where they all fitted in to this story.

And how nice it is to be back in my little room (disgusting neighbours notwithstanding). The alarm went off at 07:00, followed almost immediately by the morning cacophony from the church across the road. It’s good to be back. And so I managed an early breakfast.

Now, I don’t know if you have been paying much attention to what I’ve been writing here and there about the Muskrat Falls in Labrador – the new hydro-electric plant that they are building that I visited in 2014, and how it has been claimed that a German U-boat has been discovered at the foot of the falls.

It seems that there is some kind of progress being made in this direction, and someone has tentatively identified it as U-851, a U-boat that disappeared off Newfoundland on or after 27th March 1944. She was a long-range cruising U-boat and was on her way to join the Monsoon wolf-pack operating in the Indian Ocean when she vanished.

After breakfast I did some work on my website for a few hours and although I updated some of it, my heart wasn’t in it. I was too tired after last night, I reckon.

And so instead I went out to Caliburn to sort out a big IKEA shopping bag. With that, I went off to the Carrefour near the footy ground to do some shopping. I’d run out of hummus and the salad mix that I like. A nice, steady walk that will do me good.

Back at Caliburn, I picked up a couple of books (I’m running out of reading material here) and a couple of other bits and pieces that I need, and then I walked back here.

Having sorted myself out, next stop was to fill the IKEA bag (you knew that there had to be a reason, didn’t you?) with all of the dirty washing, including some stuff that I didn’t have time to wash in Canada, and nipped off to the launderette and did the lot. Now I have all clean clothes so I can have a good shower and a change of clothes tomorrow. And quite right too.

Meanwhile, I’ve had a minor disaster here. Being stranded from my camera on a few occasions in Canada, I’d taken some photos on my Canadian phone. This afternoon, having rescued he phone from my suitcase in Caliburn earlier, I extracted the memory card from the phone but … the photos aren’t on it. They seem to be on the phone’s internal memory.

And, you might remember from about two months ago, the data cable isn’t working so transferring them over isn’t an option that’s available to me.

I could transfer them onto another phone of course, but it’s my Canadian phone, tied to the Bell telephone network, so there’s no network access over here.

All in all, it’s a bit of a disaster right now. Amber is going to have to wait a good while for her tractor-pulling videos with Perdy in the Pink at Millinocket, Maine the other week..

But I couldn’t keep it up for long this afternoon. All of the difficulties of the night, plus my exertions of Sunday and my walk today have worn me out and I crashed out for three hours while a rainstorm raged outside.

Crashed out properly too, so much so that I was off on my travels. In Canada too, in Strider as it happens. I’d come down a steep bank to a junction with a main road which passed over a bow-girder bridge over a railway line. There were several trains about, so I make a complicated manoeuvre … "PERSONoeuvre" – ed … to park up right by the bridge to photograph them. There was something else interesting down there next to the railway line – something like a holiday camp or a park – so I went to look at it. I struggled to find a place to park and ended up parked with the rear end of Strider hanging over the steps down to the place. I walked down with the crowds of people to a gift shop which doubled as the kiosk for entry into the place, but when I saw that the entry fee was $7:50 I changed my mind and walked back.

So now I’m awake and I’ve just had a really good chat with my friend Liz. I’m not in the least bit tired now so I can see me having another bad night’s sleep.

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Saturday 30th August 2014 ! WELL, I’LL BE …!

Yes, in some surprising development, I’ve had some customer service in Montreal that could rival the best that you have ever had in Brussels. It was totally astonishing.

To set the scene, I have a Canadian mobile phone with a Canadian number, supplied by Bell Telephones as they have the best coverage in the wilderness. And, as an aside, after this experience, I’ll be calling them “Hell Telephones” for ever onwards because the customer service is the closest thing to Hell that you would ever wish to find.

To cut a long story short … "hooray" – ed … my credit card expired and so I had a new one, but I forgot to upgrade the card with Bell Telephones and so my service was disconnected.

No complaints with that – it’s my own fault although one would have thought that with 50 years of expiry dates of credit cards, companies would have caught up with this kind of thing – so off to find a Bell Telephone shop.

First place that I found was one of these stands in a shopping centre. The staff there were totally uninterested but they did give me a number to call customer service. THis was when I discovered that the battery in the ‘phone was flat.

Next stall that I found, the guy there was extremely helpful and if things had carried on like this, I wouldn’t be seething out of my back teeth. Anyway, he actually put me in touch with a human at Customer Service (we did have a 20-minute queue) who told me to buy a new SIM card, put it in my phone, and call up the connection service (she gave me the number) an I’ll be back on the air.

Simple?

Not if you are anything like me it isn’t.

With the battery in my Bell phone being flat I put the SIM card in my European open-access phone and tried to call the number but several attempts gave me the “not registered on network” error message and nothing that I can do would fix it. Consequently I found another Bell telephone place – the shop in rue St Catherine to be precise.

Some girl in there who clezrly knew even less than I did checked my European phone with her data scanner. “It’s not a Bell telephone” she said, as if she were telling me something. She took me to the door, pointed across the road to the shopping mall and told me where the Rogers and the Fido stalls were. “You need to go and ask them”.
“How will they help me activate a Bell Telephone SIM card?”
“I don’t know” she replied.

Yes, you can’t make up a story like that.

But I will tell you something for nothing – and that is that we would never have reached this particular point had Samsung, the mobile phone maker, had its act together. I have three Samsung phones all told, and they all have different batteries and they all have different charging inputs. What is this all about? A standard-sized battery and a standard charging input would have saved all of this nonsense. Swapping a battery from one phone to another is the work of seconds. This thing about different chargers and different batteries (and we are talking millimetres difference in size, not anything substantial) is total rubbish.

As for the rest of the day, I’ve been on the prowl again. I found Montreal’s biggest second-hand car sales places, to find that it closes at weekends and what’s that all about too?

canadian pacific railway station montreal windsor canadaI did find the old headquarters of the Canadian Pacific Railway, at the abandoned Windsor Station. Canadian Pacific was another in the long line of companies that moved away from Montreal following the francophonie policies of the Quebec Provincial Government. “Cutting your nose off to spite your face” is what springs to my mind – it accounts for much of the decline in fortunes of the Province but the attitude is that the Quebeckers would rather be a very big fish in a very small pool rather than an influential subsiduary player on a multi-national stage.

The station (said he, leaving the politics aside) is a beautiful building and was only narrowly saved from demolition when Canadian Pacific pulled out. It’s now a listed building.

old packhard montreal canadaThis is an interesting car that I encountered on my perambulations. It’s a 1939 Packhard doing a wedding at the Christ Church Cathedral in Saint Catherine Street.

The colour of the car is white-over-rust, which you can clearly see even from this distance. I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen a “professional” car looking as bad as this one, with the rust bubbling up on the bottom of the doors and on the rear wings underneath the paint.

The paint job isn’t bad at all even if the masking off was poor, but there’s more to a restoration project than just three coats of paint.

latin quarter rue st denis montreal canadaI also came across the Latin quarter of Montreal in the rue St Denis. What took me completely by surprise was that all of the signs here were in French. I wasn’t expecting that in the Latin quarter. “Puer amat mensam” say I.

But it isn’t half chic and trendy here. I couldn’t do with any more than five minutes of this kind of place.

At the Tourist Information desk I found not only the information that I wanted about the Richelieu Valley but also a booklet on the route to James Bay – another one of my projects. But there was nothing about the Lower North Shore. Not a surprise, seeing as how the communities down there are English, not French-speaking.

The “Forgotten Coast” indeed.

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Wednesday 29th January 2014 – I’VE STARTED …

… to put the second piece of plasterboard onto the wall today, but it’s probably going to have to come off again, which is a pain. I was doing it in the dark and, unfortunately, it doesn’t look as if it’s on correctly.

Ahhh well.

But given that, you might be wondering what on earth I’ve been doing all day. The answer to that is that the day wasn’t all that I had hoped it to be.

This new mobile ‘phone isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. Here 8 was, complaining about the 3-day battery life on the ancient Nokia. On the brand-new Samsung, it’s … errrr … 38 hours. I thought that it didn’t sound right when I first let it run down and so I timed it after that, and here we are.

The alarm function isn’t up to much either. The cock-crow is too strident and so I’ve been turning it off instead of letting it snooze me slowly awake. That might explain why my morning didn’t occur until … errr … 09:20 – almost two hours late.

But then I filled in the sheet of plasterboard I fitted yesterday – all of the screwholes and the edges and the like. After that, I had to cut the two shelves that I’ll be fitting. There’s a lot of work to cut them too and that took a while. Luckily with the reasonable weather that we had, I didn’t feel inhibited about using the mains circular saw to do some of that.

Anyway, the shelves are cut and now varnished, and they can be screwed in place tomorrow.

The insulation and counter-battening comes up about 8mm short of the upright beams that I fitted in 2009. I was trying to find some 10mm insulation to make up the gap but no luck there, so I’ve been today adding another layer of this space-blanket insulation. That will go hard-up to the plasterboard on the outside wall of the stairwell. As I have said before … "and you’ll say again" – ed … no money spent on insulation is ever wasted.

The final job was to insulate the false ceiling at the top of the stairs. I don’t know why I didn’t do this years ago and I wonder how much heat from out of my little attic room has been wasted out of there.

And then, I started to cut and shape the second piece of plasterboard.

So you see that I’ve not been idle at all today, even though there might not be a lot to show for it yet.

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Saturday 25th January 2014 – OUCH!

Yes, “ouch!” indeed. I’ve just sat down and added up everything that I’ve spent today.

Yes, I’ve been to Montlucon today to do my shopping and I seem to have been considerably sidetracked. Mind you, I’m not quite sure what took me to go there because I was, once again, quite late in leaving my stinking pit. Despite having the woodstove going flat-out last night, itwas cold in here this morning.

And dark too. Not the weather for leaping brightly out of bed.I thought at first that we had had some heavy snow bit in fact we were having another one of the local Auvergnat weather phenomena – a hanging cloud drifting up the valley – and it stayed parked up on the top of the mountain all day, apparently.

Anyway, I grabbed a mug of coffee and hit the road. First stop was LIDL where I dropped a jar of tomato sauce all over the floor. Start as you mean to go on, Eric.

Surprisingly, I didn’t spend very much at LIDL, and neither did I at Amaranthe, the Health Food Shop – not the least of the reasons being that they didn’t have any of the buckwheat tablets that I like. So no breakfast for me.

It all started to go wrong at the Carrefour. I haven’t changed the gas in the kitchen for 18 months – it’s amazing what cooking on the woodstove can do – but nevertheless I’m sure it must be nearly empty by now. There was an empty propane cylinder around here so I took it with me to swap for a full one to have ready, and that set me back a massive €30:25.

When I was running the bottled gas heater, I was getting through a bottle every two weeks – that’s about €2:20 or so per day. Bearing in mind that my wood here costs me nothing, the €279 that I spent to buy this woodstove means that it’s paid for itself in just 125 days or thereabouts (and that’s not including the gas-cooking either). That’s about a year’s worth of heating and this is the third winter that I’ve been using it. You can see that it’s been a splendid investment.

Noz was another place where I spent a pile of money. Nothing of any significance, but it’s always a useful place to go for DVDs, cheap tins of food and the like. It’s always worth stocking up at Noz. And stepping out of Caliburn, I bumped right into one of Marianne’s friends, François Legay.

However it was at Vima where I really took a battering.

My old hair cutter is on its last legs and about to shuffle off this mortal coil. And there in the sales was another one, exactly the same.

Not only that, I’ve had my eye on a rechargeable LED worklight for quite some time. They charge up off the mains or off 12 volt DC, are quite large and powerful, and sit on the floor and chuck out an enormous amount of light. They were quite expensive but in the sales they were reduced by 50% and they had two left – didn’t that give me ideas?

But what was the final nail in my coffin was the mobile phone. The ‘phone that I bought in a hurry 5 years ago was the cheapest I coud find – a Nokia but a bi-band so no use in North America. I replaced that a couple of years ago with an ancient Nokia tri-band that I bought in an internet auction. The price was correct but the battery wasn’t at all and even with a new battery it’s not lasting for more that 3 days at most. And of course, it’s no use for surfing the internet at all (not that I want to but my phone plan gives me a free allowance of data and as I always run out of the time period rather than run out of credit, it’s a shame to waste it).

Anyway, to cut a long story short … "thank you" – ed … there in the sale was a Samsung Galaxy 3, the little brother to my Canada phone which is absolutely superb. Does everything that I need and even includes a 4GB micro-SD card so that I can use it as a music player. And the camera has a greater resolution than the digital camera that I took with me to North America in 2002 and in 2005. Quadri-band too, with bluetooth, and open to all networks.

And the cost? Just €75:00. I don’t suppose that I can complain too much.

Coming out of Vima, I bumped slap bank into Laurent Dumas, the President of the Canton of Pionsat (you saw him on this blog a few weeks ago). Just the man I want to see, as it happens. There are proposals to change the arrangement of cantons in the Puy de Dome. It’s something very controversial and so we want to do a radio programme on it. As it happens, M Dumas is very much parti-pris whereas Mme Daffix-Ray (who you also saw on here), the Vice-President (they cater for all sorts here) of the Departement, is very much parti-pris in the other camp. My idea is to ask them both to let me have a statement of why they have chosen their sides, so that we can present a balanced radio programme.

I didn’t spend very much in Brico Depot either. I had written out a list of stuff that I needed and then, totlly true to form, I had forgotten to bring it with me so no tongue-and-grooving for the ceiling. But they did have that “space-blanket” insulation on special offer so I bought a roll seeing as how I don’t know whether I have enough here to finish what I’m doing.

The French have a saying “jamais deux sans trois” and so while I didn’t spend too much money there, I did bump into someone from Pionsat – Marianne’s son Pascal. I can’t move anywhere these days without my movements being observed.

Anyone who thinks that I intended to go for a swim on the way home had another think coming. I came straight home and locked myself in. Winter seems to be back now.

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Thursday 27th September 2012 – TODAY WAS A DAY …

… of finding things.

We started off, quite dramatically, by finding the missing mobile phone.

The good news is that the SIM card might actually still work.

The bad news is that the phone won’t, which is hardly surprising seeing as it’s been outside in the rain for the last 6 weeks and I found it in a puddle right where a load of water would regularly drop on it.

What’s surprising about this is that it was just outside the barn door, right where I walk at least twice every day without fail, and how I haven’t seen it before today is a total mystery.

Even more surprising is that if I heard it “bleep” 5 weeks ago up here in the attic – which I’m sure that I did – then there’s nothing wrong with my hearing, I’ll say.

Back in 2006 my dear departed friend Liz gave me an old Nokia ‘phone. It never worked properly and despite buying a couple of new batteries, the battery life worked out to be about 18 hours on stand-by.

For that reason I never really used it, and went to all kinds of lengths to replace it.

However I did lose count of the number of times it’s been pressed into service in an emergency and as I found it in Caliburn the other day when I was a-hunting the dictaphone, it’s now currently back in service.

At least until the new phone arrives.

I wanted an unblocked Samsung (so I just have one set of leads) tri-band (to use in North America) with bluetooth (for the hands-free kit in Caliburn), camera (so I don’t have to keep carrying the Nikon on odd little trips out) and memory slot (so I can use it as a walkman).

But I quickly abandoned that idea. The prices are unbelievable.

In the end I settled for another Nokia – a factory-refurbished 6230 for just £22 seeing as there are no chargers with it – and I have all of that anyway.

So in the mood for finding things, I then found the missing timer switch off the tabletop washing machine – just as I was fitting the machine with a plug with a built-in switch, of course.

The plug off there I fitted on the chop-saw that I bought ages ago and that works a treat too.

I also uncovered three battery chargers – two of them being the 7-Day Shop ones that I use for charging up AA and AAA batteries. And not just the chargers either – a further mega-search turned up some power cables for them.

So they are now fitted with North American 110-volt plugs – I use them for my 12-volt DC domestic circuit because they can handle high amperage and they are sufficiently different not to be confused with 230 volt stuff – and they are ready for action.

The third battery charger that I found is also for AA and AAA batteries, and why this is so interesting is that it has screw-holes on the back so that you can fix it to the wall.

This is quite an ancient machine too and I was pleased to see because I have a cunning plan for it. It was that I intended to screw it into the back of Caliburn and wire it into the ignition system so that there will always be some batteries on charge there.

No power cable, though.

But seeing as I was in the mood I turned out the barn and actually managed to find it, which astonished me.

While I had the ignition system dismantled, I took the opportunity of dismantling the power lead for the coolbox that I installed in Caliburn. I threw away the cigarette lighter plug (I hate those) and wired that directly into the ignition circuit.

And so we’ll have cold drinks wherever we go too.

I also unearthed a pile of connectors that I’d been looking for for ages, and a few other exciting bits and pieces as well. And I did a few other things, but I can’t rightly remember now what they were.

But I shan’t know myself at this rate, will I?

On the subject of finding things, by the way, I know that this might not be relevant but Heather came round this afternoon.

She has just come back from the UK and had brought me my order of porridge oats as well as some Rich Tea biscuits for Rosemary.

It’s the first time that Heather has been round, so she had to call at the doctor’s on the way for the Yellow Fever and Plague vaccinations before she arrived.

But at least I can now make some more muesli.

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