… for much of the day today. Liz and Terry had things to do in St Gervais and Montlucon so they were gone long before 09:00, and I was left to my own devices.
Much of the time was spent trying to encourage the boiler. It’s a solid-fuel boiler burning wood and it’s one of those machines that if you know what you are doing and the thing is set up right, it burns away quite happily to itself. All you have to do is to load it up every hour or so. But if you don’t know what you are doing and the boiler is still a little on the cool side, it needs continual coaxing. And that was what was happening today – I had to be there for a considerable amount of time trying to make it warm up correctly.
Still, it’s all good experience.
Apart from that, I was doing something quite interesting. I’d been reading about one of the earliest “garden village” council estates in London, built at the turn of the 20th Century in Tooting. But doing some more research I came across the court case of the person why built it. He was borrowing money to finance the business (which was normal in those days) but the London County Council, not only “valued” the work four weeks in arrears, but then took another four weeks to pay up (which even the Prosecuting Counsel in the court case admitted was a “difficult way for anyone to do business”). It goes without saying that the builder fell into difficulties and the bank promptly pulled its financial backing, even though a distribution of his assets produced a surplus. He ended up adopting some rather questionable financial tactics to keep his business afloat and ended up with seven months imprisonment which, if you ask me, was quite outrageous. If they had left him alone, and had the Council paid up on time, he would have completed his contracts and made a decent profit for everyone concerned. But it does just go to show that aggressive banking and unsympathetic Official Receivers is far from being a modern phenomenon.
When Liz and Terry came back, they brought half the contents of the local chemist’s with them. It appears that the prescriptions that I had been given by the hospital are … errr … somewhat exaggerated. I’m going to end up with more stuff here than they will have in their stores.
We had a nice tea tonight – I had vegan lasagne with peas and chips – and then watched Chris Morris demolish the English bowling to win single-handedly the one – day cricket international. And now I’m off to bed for an early night.
And I need it too because I was off on my travels again. The first part was back in a hospital somewhere which had been invaded by an Arab fighting force. I’m not going to go into details because you are probably eating your tea or your breakfast or something and I’m trying to keep this site fit for human consumption and fun for all the family. But I was being chased around by a soldier and a nurse wielding a huge hypodermic syringe and I remember thinking to myself “just how am I going to get out of this?” – which I did by the simple expedient of waking up. And I remember saying that I wish that I had thought of that earlier.
From there I ended up back in Crewe, driving around the block formed by Middlewich Street, Badger Avenue, Broad Street and Coppenhull Lane. I needed to park up somewhere near the top of Middlewich Street to go into a shop to pick up something but there was nowhere to park. And so I cruised round and around the block hoping that something would free itself up. But nothing did. And then I noticed that at one certain moment, there was no-one behind me for miles so I would have had plenty of time to double-park to go into the shop, had I thought on. But a car pulled up and that was where my socks were, in the storage box between the front seats over the top of the handbrake. I nipped out of my car, pulled open the passenger door and dived in to retrieve my socks, and fell right over the passenger in the front seat – none other than the girl who has been on my travels with me on a few occasions now.
