TapTapTap! Hello? Is this thing on?

Well, I should exploon. "Exploon? Is that a word?" No, it's a tryping error, don't worry about it, I usually attempt to edit out the slips of my wayward typing finger, but, hey, I should trust you to figure out what I'm trying to say.

Which is more than I can usually do.

I am, as I've previously mentioned, living a rootless nomadic existence, between my own cluttered abode, and my mother's house.

Since she died, the rest of my siblings can't seem to get their arses into gear to sort out what bits of furniture, property, whatever, that they wish to keep.

Nor is the house yet on the market. And it needs to remain insured, but the insurers require that, if they're to cover the contents, the house must not be unoccupied. So here I am.

Unlike mine, it has heating, lashings of hot water, a garden, oh, and a kitchen you can actually cook in.. Sniff. See? Sniff again. Bread. By mine own fair hands, bread, in the oven. Mmmm!

So here I am. But there's no internet.

Well, not quite true,  I'm connected to "linksys"... but, there's no knowing when it might get unplugged, so i decided to try an offline blog composting utility, windows livewriter. I used to use it, back in the old days, but blogger got so good at regular saves and rarely crashing that I forgot about composing offline.

Hence yesterday's test posts, of which one is still up.

Livewriter is not quite as intuitive as it used to be a few years back, but I'll persevere. What was flummoxing me, because I'm a boy, and therefore don't read the destructions, was the business of picture-posting.  I wasn't sure whether it had uploaded, and if so, to where? To a windows photohosting space? or to blogger? or? where?

Or, more troubling, was it fooling me, as has happened before when posting via Picasa, and not uploaded it at all, but  just displayed an image from 'localhost', i.e., my own computer.

It seems it worked okay, and I thank all those who responded. A few questions as to what the picture was. Obviously, that's just OBVIOUS!, it was a riverside scene, and it was of elephants hauling brightly illuminated barges.

Oh? what?

No?

You didn't get that?

No, you wouldn't, because I don't have such a picture.

It was this one. Bronze dogs, as seat dividers on granite benches in the city centre. Each one is different, slightly. They morph, or mutate, or evolve, as you pass down the line.

I was going to take more pics, but then the busker started singing, and people stopped to listen, and in no time, the seats were filled.

This building warrants a closer  look. It had a quite effective re-modelling as a  fashion retail outfit, I like the way the windows have been rendered into three-dimensional 'pods'. However, the roof detail is its most interesting feature. That little central spire's surrounding spikes are, if we look more closely,

Leaden dog's-heads. Reminds me of the detail on old Norwegian churches.

Dang!, If I'd known I was going to mention that, I'd have taken a better picture.

 Always look up! That's what my old art tutor used to say about architecture, I did, way back, as a summer project, a photographic presentation of a walk through the city centre. Much has changed, much has gone since then. The building here has been messed-about at ground-floor level, just another boring glass frontage. But look up one floor to see the remnants of Edwardian elegance. Someone should get up there and strip the hundred years of accumulated paint from that woodwork, then set to, to restore the ground floor. Oh. And strip out that nasty, unsympathetic inner steel and glass barrier.

See what I mean? Over past years, the ground floors have been replaced with identikit cheap facades, and few of the passers-by ever notice the upper floors. I do, and get quite angry at the building owners who allow bushes to take root in the brickwork,  it's likely this building is part of a portfolio of 'investment properties', managed from another city, for owners who've never been there.

Last one: I sat outside this building, near to where I took this photo, for hours, way back in about 1973, and drew it in great detail. I've got the pic somewhere, still, I think.

Time for me to go swallow a headache remedy, to still the clanking in my skull.

Good day. This is my message for you. I am looking for stable relations.

That, I kid you not, was an email that today bypassed the usually excellent spam filter.
I love it.
I'm wondering if she'd care to clarify.
So far as I'm aware, most of my relatives could fairly be described as "stable", I could send her a few of those.
A couple are a bit wobbly.
Old age and hips in one, booze in another. Ooh yes... and the much older cousin who went loopy, and stayed loopy.

Or is she, perhaps, harbouring an unhealthily equine paraphilia?

My mystery spammer claims to be russian, yet goes by the name 'Maria Fox', and emails from a time zone closer to Ohio than Sverdlovsk.
Well, 'Maria', I wish you all the hay you can chomp

test 2

Can you see the picture?
Testing livewriter for offline post editing (as I have intermittent internet)

Piano Tuna

Seen today. Nice one, Piano Tuna bloke!

Have a free bit of internet publicity, for making  me smile today. 

Dolphin friendly, I trust?

I'm still around

But...  Sort of camping out at my mother's house, until we get it ready to sell, I've been gardening, mending things, patching plaster and paint, she'd laugh at me.... After all she's said before "You'll finish that when I'm dead!", and now she's proved right.
So far, I've not been haunted, unless the flowers leaping out of the vase at the funeral was a spot of poltergeistery.
One of the jobs I'm doing involves dealing with all the companies who are reluctant to believe she doesn't need to pay them any more money. Oh my. How difficult it is to  fight through level after level of simpletons, explaining the same thing over and over again, only to be told "I'll have to put you through to my supervisor", followed by an age on hold listening to elevator music.
Oh and "Your call is important to us. We are experiencing unusually high numbers of calls at the moment, All our operators are busy, thank you for holding........" Then, I either get cut off, and just like a character who's just been killed in a video-game, I have to start all over at level one, with no ammo-packs or medi-kits.
The final level boss usually expresses surprise that I've had such a hard journey, and been shot down so many times on the way to their door.
It's getting easier as I learn their ways.

Next up? I have to write a letter to a bishop in London, to get permission for interment of my mother's ashes in an officially closed churchyard.

So, I've not been wandering the blogosphere much for a while. There's no internet here.... unless someone leaves an open wireless connection up for a while. Hm. Well, there are about nine secured networks up right now and one open.
I'll assume, shall I, that the owner's just charitably offering to share a little bandwidth? (rather than just not having the sense to password his or her network?), So. It may disappear at any time.
Ave et vale, friends, with a swirl of my cape, I'm gone again.

I'll be back.

Ho Hum!

Back to a sort of normal on monday. It seems surreal. Early morning phone call, a tenant's premises flooded, fire sprinkler pipe high up holed. only a pinhole, but a lot of pressure and a weekend make a small problem a bigger one. I get a ladder, prop it against the pipe, a somewhat wobbly perch, getting very wet, so I don a makeshift rainsuit, made out of a polythene trash bag.
A piece of rubber clamped firmly over the hole will hold it until the sprinkler guys can get here with a scaffold tower and replace the pipe section. I drive a few miles to another site, load up a wet-vac and the numpty labourer, who, as usual, is griping about being expected to actually work. "Why should I have to do it?", he whines, like an eight year old.
I set the old misery-guts to work clearing up pools of water and picking rolls of furnishing fabric out of the pale, slightly rust-tinged flood.
He brightens up when i tell him I'm leaving him there all day. Sweep the roadway,  empty the bins, clean around all the fire-doors... A default activity that to him means "find a quiet corner out of sight of the cctv cameras and light up a cig".

Me? back to our main site to investigate a long term leak. The roofers and the steeplejacks have messed around up there many a time, they were ordered to scrape off  all the old repairs, get right to the root of the problem and fix it.

But it's not fixed, the tenant below has water seeping out of his wall. And the tenant below him had a window-ledge full of wet, too.
Time to get a ladder again. My verdict is that there's something I can't see going on behind the parapet wall, and the only way to find out is to dismantle a yard or so of parapet, which requires a lot of full-on hefty bashing with a big hammer, and quite frankly? I'm feeling a bit destructive.

Bashing a thick brick wall from a wobbly standpoint on a ladder would be stupidly ineffective, so it's time to wake the green machine and have a platform to stand on.

Having dismantled the wall, we find that the contractors have been less than diligent, and just pasted new goo over old goo, because it's not the gutter-joint that's failed, oh no, that's still as firmly bolted as it was on day-one, a hundred years ago. Oh no, it's just past that, where the cast iron, close-on an inch thick, has cracked right through, leaving a gap almost an inch wide all around. This annoys me. you pay someone to locate and fix a problem, only to find out months later that they took the easy way, and charged handsomely for not even finding out what the problem was.

The gutter's a hundred feet long, so, given the extremes between summer and winter, the expansion and contraction must lead to fearsome forces. And it sits atop a wall that's over two feet thick, so any leak goes right into the wall.

These days there are very good flexible sealants, able to accommodate 40% or more movement, and that's what I've repaired it with. Time will tell. 

My boss said "Can't it be welded?"

He doesn't know that cast iron needs to be heated almost to red heat before welding, and if we wanted to do that up there we'd need to take the roof off. I have another plan, if this one fails, always have a back-up plan...

So there we are. Right back to normal. 

Graveyard Humour

As my regular readers will recall, my mother died, a short while ago. We (I and my sister, brothers, sister and brother-in-law) have been very busy in the intervening time, so much to do, so many people to contact, official forms to fill, appointments.

But on that night, shocked by what had just occurred, my brother and I left the hospital in the early hours, going to bed seemed.... inappropriate, so we walked, walked, and walked in the dark. It seemed a good time to go visit Dad's grave. The churchyard was locked. low walls though. I'm not sure which one of us said "Let's split up and go through the graveyard", but it's a good line, usually spoken in horror movies just before the flashlight batteries fail. In our case there was no flashlight anyway.

The old man had nothing to say. He did not materialise and say  "Why aren't you boys in bed?"  (On the night he died we walked too, until dawn).

Anyway, I took a pic of the church and the moon.

But I tried to post it and it was a tiny white spot in a black rectangle. My night vision must be better than the computer's.

I think the reasoning in the picture above is a little flawed. The graveyard in question is officially closed. Nobody maintains it any more. Monuments topple, history fades. But there are several generations of my forebears in there. None, so far as I know, was killed by a gravestone.

She's Gone.

 My Mother,  29th October 1921-24th March 2011.

My childhood memories all have the sound of my mother in them, singing. -I suppose I was exposed to arias for all of the nine months before I was born. She sang. As she cooked, oh the scent of baking is Puccini...as she ironed, fed a baby, she sang. It was her default position in life, sing whilst you're happy, sing when you're sad.

She'd planned a life as a singer, soprano, and then Hitler intervened and bombed her. repeatedly. her career was derailed. She'd worked, she told me, on the edge of a ragged hole, on the fourth floor of Swansea's Telephone House. Telephones were vital, in wartime, so she, her boss, and one other girl had to work, despite the bomb that had come through the roof, tearing down the ceiling, and crashing down floor after floor until it ran out of floors and stopped, fins uppermost in the basement.

Bomb disposals men were down there with it, working gingerly, trying not to set off the detonator tumblers, the timers, the vibration sensors. My  mother was tapped on the shoulder by the sergeant. "Please, miss, stop singing, you'll wake it up!"

In recent weeks, the blog's seen little of me as I was attending to more important matters.  She was diagnosed with a while back Hodgkin's Lymphoma, and the early phases of Alzheimer's. The last year or so has been difficult, the last couple of months made the last year look easy.

On wednesday, we had to travel to the hospital to see her consultant. We knew there'd be results of a biopsy. Those results were no surprise. We knew there'd be bad news. Emergency radiotherapy was planned, but she, who'd lost already the sight in her left eye, might become blind, and maybe deaf. And that was just to relieve a few symptoms, the longer term? there was no longer term; -two to three months, maybe.

She was, overall, in good spirits as my brother and I wheeled her through the hospital. She selected a cream-cake at the cafe, joking that at least she didn't need to worry about her figure any more. On the way home she was joking about having to wear an eye-patch, said we should get her a parrot for her shoulder. I suggested we saw her leg off, and replace it with a table leg.  "Sheraton, no less!" she demanded. 

So the pirate was in good spirits.

Something in the medication, or perhaps that evil malignant intruder, was making her crave sweet things, cakes, and we'd had to instigate a "No cake after eight" rule, as sugar too late would keep her hyperactive and awake, and night-time was the time for falls. 

I'd gone home, but my brother, temporarily living with her as a carer, heard the fridge door open, and caught her, cream-handed, sneaking an illicit piece of cake. He thought he'd hidden it well, behind a lettuce. 

She laughed at him, told him it was too late, she'd eaten the evidence.

He sent her off to bed, told her he'd bring her a hot milk drink, and she went, still chuckling.

A few minutes later he tapped on her door, she said "wait a minute, I'm putting on my nightie". Minutes later he heard a bump, a faint cry for help. she was on the floor, struggling to breathe. He lifted her to the bed, her fall alarm did what it's supposed to do, and the alarm centre came on line, and called a paramedic ambulance. he called me, and I broke a few speed limits and was there in a little over five minutes. no pulse. no breath. cold hands...

Paramedics, half an hour after she stopped breathing had shocked her heart into beating, raggedly, and insisted on taking her to the hospital. She hadn't wanted that, but they would not listen. The hospital, however, couldn't bring her back. And that's it. What she wanted, to go quickly, at home.

She's spared the worsening stages, the indignities and pain that had been forecast. She was ready to go, and had made her goodbyes. For me too, it's a relief. It's been hard to see her struggle with this sickness, the chemotherapy, the loss of balance, loss of sight, loss of dignity, loss of hearing, the frustration of not being able to read, listen to music, sing. 

A longer life is only of value if you're able to live it, on your own terms. 

My brother and I left the hospital at after two in the morning. Then we walked. In the dark, through the woods, around the lake, walked, and walked, until the birds started to sing, until the black sky was shading to blue, the sun starting to rise, on a world, that, for the first time ever in our lives, no longer had our mother in it.

A song, gone.

.