Bank Holiday silly season is now over! Went out as usual on Bank Holiday Monday, took a drive through the countryside and arrived at a Farm Shop and Country Store for lunch.
My wife and I have been there before and their lunches are good and a much better price than the Garden Centre a few miles up the road that we were planning on going to afterwards.
We had a wander round, had lunch, Mother in Law bought a few bits and we headed off up the road. It’s a nice enough garden centre, just that it’s food seemed a bit pricy, even for a garden centre. It’s just the other side of Gamlingay, into Cambridgeshire.
Again, we had a wander round, bought a couple of plants and this time I got a Cucumber plant! We stayed and had a cup of tea and a piece of cake and then made our way home.
The latest thing that we’re really getting into, is recycling with bags at large supermarkets. On many plastic bags, food wrappers and crisp packets it generally says something along the lines of,
‘Don’t recycle at home, recycle with bags at large supermarkets.’ So we now have a separate bag to keep these bags in, ready to take to the supermarket when we do our big weekly shop. It started with a couple of bags from sweets and since starting we are looking at all our plastic wrappers and bags and it’s surprising how many say it.
In just 3 or 4 weeks our weekly collection bag has grown considerably.
So get looking and get recycling with bags at large supermarkets!
So, we’ve had the Radio 1 Big weekend in Luton. With it came quite a bit of disruption, but then when you have 100,000 people descend on the town’s biggest park over three days, you would expect little else.
Road closures and residents parking zones seemed to be the biggest thing, but only affected a small area of the town and town centre. It was followed on the Bank holiday Monday with the Luton Carnival, which is generally one of the biggest on the country after Notting Hill and this always bring the same sort of disruption, so it was nothing new.
Headliners on the Friday were Chase and Status and it seemed that most of the acts were Dance based. Saturday was headed up by RAYE and had a better mix of acts on the main stage; both days were bathed in glorious sunshine, most unbecoming for a Bank Holiday. Obviously Sunday made up for it, the heavens opened less than an hour before the first acts came on.
My son and I went on the Sunday, so of course we got soaked and the first 2 bands that we watched were under cover so we missed out on the early sunshine. Fizz, fronted by Greta, whom my son had interviewed for his podcast (On Air With Ben), whilst at University, were followed by Sea Girls and we thoroughly enjoyed both of those.
We headed for the Main stage to see Declan McKenna and during his set noticed a group of YouTubers that my son follows, standing next to us! Caught the end of the Everything Everything set and they sounded good, will have to catch up with that on Iplayer, as well as Teddy Swims.
We wandered around, bumped into a couple of people that we knew, got something to eat, got soaked whilst he listened to Sabrina Carpenter, endured Olly Alexander so that we could get fairly near the front for Vampire Weekend, they were good and then the headliners Coldplay, superb even though they could only do an hour long set!
When it was all over we all (best part of 30,000 of us) walked back into town to get to the train station for the 4 minute train journey to our station. We had sensibly parked near to our nearest station and then walked from the main station to the park earlier in the day.
All in all, a very good day and evening was had by us and seemingly by most, so well done Radio 1, well done Luton and well done everyone for behaving, as I don’t think I saw any trouble; I saw quite a lot of people who had had quite a lot to drink, but no-one was over loud and no-one was causing any bother, even on the packed streets or packed railway station.
We’ve had a new boiler fitted. The old system finally gave up the ghost, first the timer stopped working, then the thermostat and then eventually the boiler wouldn’t work, even on its own.
Plumber came round to have a look, tried a few things and then said it was something in the boiler. The boiler was in the house when we moved in 30 years ago so new or replacement parts are no longer available.
He wandered round looking at this and that, ow you’ll have to have a new this and a new that, you’ll need a new pipe from here to here and I’ll need to get behind the kitchen cupboards; and oh yeah, the wiring will be really tricky. I’ll take your email address and send you a price.
3 days later his boss emailed with a boiler suggestion (completely unsuitable as we have a power shower) and a raft of questions and possible expensive scenarios depending on the answers. I just replied and said thanks, but I’ve got an alternative quote.
Alternative bloke came round, took pictures, asked a few questions, then said, right, this is what you need and this is how it will be done, bish bosh. New boiler, timer/thermostat, wiring, flue, system flush and a new hot water tank; gave us a delivery date and a start date.
Stuff was delivered and 3 days later guy turns up dead early and got on with it. End of day one the boiler was in, the tank was in, the flue was in and all the wiring was done. Day two, finished all the fitting, commissioned the boiler, flushed the system, tidied up, took away the rubbish, quick run through of the timer and was done by lunchtime.
All I’ve got to do now is pay for it!
Before the boiler stopped working, I had to change the taps on the Basin in the Bathroom, as the hot tap kept spinning round and took a few goes to turn off. The thread inside the tap had worn and that’s why just as it went tight it turned again.
Just to complicate things, when we had the bathroom done, the plumber had not fitted isolator valves on the tap feeds, so I had to turn the water off at the stop cock in the kitchen and the hot water in the airing cupboard. So as well as new taps I fitted isolator valves as well.
The week after that, the landline stopped ringing. My Mother in law rings most evenings, this is something that started during lockdown when we couldn’t see each other and has just continued ever since. She always rings at the same time, so after a couple of days and she hadn’t rung, my wife rang her.
She had apparently rung every day but it just rang and rang and no-one answered, so of course we tested it out with our mobiles and sure enough the phone never rang.
If you knew that someone was ringing you could pick it up and speak, you could ring out like normal.
It wasn’t the phone, we have two; it wasn’t the ringer switched off, we checked that on all extensions, so we rang and had the line checked. They could not work it out, so they sent an Engineer round, he tried a couple of his own phones and then headed off to the nearby exchange to try something; lo and behold, it now works fine.
This morning I had to change the batteries on the Smoke Detectors!
Quick update on ‘everything in the house is wearing out’, the extractor fan in the bathroom, which hasn’t extracted very well for years, has finally stopped extracting anything, so that now needs replacing, joy!