Tuesday 27 May 2008

Tiger Tiger, burning bright

The happiest news story, on what turned out to be a dismal bank holiday weekend, was that of Hull City Football Club winning promotion to the Premier League for the first time in their 104 year history. I was particularly pleased by this news as Hull is my home town. As a teenager I spent many Saturday afternoons cheering the Tigers on from the terraces of the old Boothferry Park stadium, with my home knitted black and amber striped scarf wound round my neck. I have not seen the relatively new KC Stadium but it is amazing to think that the likes of Steven Gerard, Frank Lampard and Wayne Rooney will be playing there next season and that the Tigers themselves will be playing at Anfield, Old Trafford and Stamford Bridge. The neighbours round here all support Manchester United, Liverpool or Everton. So I have supported Chelsea just to be different but now I have my own premier league team to support.

I doubt that Hull has ever seen scenes like those that were witnessed in the city centre yesterday afternoon.

Congratulations Tigers!

Tuesday 20 May 2008

Run rabbit run

As I opened the bedroom curtains this morning I saw a rabbit sprinting down the lawn and well might he run if he knew what we have in store for him. He/she or one of his friends seems to have found a way around the ultra sonic animal repellent that we purchased last month at a cost of £39.99 plus batteries. The flowerbed that is covered by the ultra sonic animal repellent has been dug up and I have had to resort to putting more bricks into it. Another flowerbed that the rabbits have taken a fancy to we have covered with a mesh which has so far been a success as far as we are concerned, but it is only a small flowerbed. I reckon that we need another four ultra sonic animal repellents to cover our garden. Not because we have an enormous garden but because we have an irregular shaped house and the ultra sonic animal repellent works by detecting motion through a 180 degree radius. The neighbours are also having problems with these rabbits. One of the neighbours has a gun and the current plan is to shoot them. It may seem like drastic action. I would be prepared to buy more ultra sonic animal repellents if they were guaranteed to work, but they obviously are not as we have found out. The rabbits are not particularly attractive and I can not have a soft spot for any creature which damages our garden and neither would anybody else if they knew how much work and effort has gone into our garden so far. When we moved here four years ago the garden was just a lawn, trees and some over grown flowerbeds. Now it looks quite colourful, even if I say so myself.

Thursday 15 May 2008

Another Place



Last week my husband had the week off work with the intention that we would go away for a few days but we had not got around to booking anything. I felt that there were too many things that could get in the way and mean that we might have to cancel. When you have an 89 year old mother, a nearly 89 year old mother-in-law, a nephew undergoing chemotherapy and a decorator on a go slow making too many rigid plans can be risky. As it happened the decorator finished in time for us to go away if we wanted but my mother-in-law has been in hospital for ten days now and my husband currently has a cough. So staying at home and going out for the day seemed like a good idea. On Thursday we decided to go to see Antony Gormley's Another Place. I left it to my husband to work out where we were going and he programmed the sat nav for Cambridge Road, Crosby which on the face of things seemed reasonable as Another Place is on Crosby beach. Cambridge Road, Crosby is a road of bland houses with no sign of any beach. On looking at the map we should have gone to Cambridge Road, Seaforth - about two miles away. So we were in another place. Not as bad as going to Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire when you intended to go to Stamford Bridge football ground.

Crosby beach is about a ten minute walk from the nearest car park so you can not actually see Another Place until you get to the beach. There are 100 iron men, cast in the mould of Antony Gormley spread along three kilometres of the beach. I was a bit disappointed as the men are not particularly big and I thought that they were too far apart to have the impact that I felt would have done the idea justice. Still it is very novel and we had some fresh air or even, sea air and exercise.

Friday 2 May 2008

Problog

I started this blog to chronicle the trials and tribulations of renovating the Victorian cottage that we bought shortly after relocating to Cheshire from Surrey. At the time nothing was going right and I could never have imagined the problems that we were to experience during the course of last year. As a result the work on the cottage, that we were doing ourselves, and my part time job as a locum pharmacist took up far more time than I expected which left me very little time to keep the blog up to date. I wanted the blog to tell a story and felt that if I only managed to post blogs now and again I would not achieve what I wanted.

Now I have managed to get the blog up to date and ironically most of the work on the cottage is completed but inevitably our experience of life, in what to us is a foreign part of England, has become intertwined with our progress on the cottage and has become part of the blog. My locum work has dried up for the moment, for which I am grateful as I am behind with nearly everything. At some point, work which involves covering for sick leave and holidays had to dry up. Currently no one is sick and no one is on holiday in the pharmacies where I work. My problem now is to decide what, of the not done jobs, really needs doing and what does not. If a job has not been done since the builder left two and a half years ago does it really need to be done or can it be left forever?