Anniversary time

 Well, it's that time of year again - my birthday!  Which would quite rightly be of little interest to you, dear reader, if it were not also the anniversary of my retirement - the fourth anniversary to be precise.  It's also very close to the lovely Jackie's birthday, so (as Private Eye would doubtless put it) trebles all round!

This year, we decided to celebrate these marvellous events with an unprecedented display of wanton extravagance and buy actual champagne.  Specifically, Bollinger.  I don't know why it's happened, but the lovely Jackie's historic preference for Lanson has been cast aside for Ab. Fab's Patsy's slug of choice.  I can't even remember whether I've ever tasted Bollinger to be honest, let alone whether I like it better than Lanson, but no matter; this time, Bollinger it must be.  After all, one only becomes 64 once in a lifetime, eh?

All this is a long-winded way of getting round to the main theme of this post, which is something of an old standard of mine - being aghast at excess.  As you all know by now, I am not, by nature, an extravagant person.  Rather the opposite, in fact.  I generally want to have a go at things myself, instead of letting some mere professional, armed with the proper tools and a lifetime of experience, have a go on my behalf.  But if I do have to pay someone else to do something, I definitely don't want to feel ripped-off afterwards.

So, where does a bottle (or possibly a magnum?) of Bollinger fit into this spectrum?  Well, I recognise that champagne is definitely outside my production capabilities, so once the decision has been made, I'm actually OK with it, on a one-off, special occasion basis.  But for the avoidance of post-retail rip-off syndrome, I've had to go online and check out the options; and thus accidentally expose myself to the world of extreme champagne prices.

The bottom end of the champagne market starts at about £13 a bottle.  

For example: Comte de Senneval Champagne Brut (Lidl):  The tasting notes begin "Given the high cost of making Champagne, one would not expect it to be available at this price.  Indeed not.  Their in-house wine taster goes on to describe it, with admirable candour and restraint, as "Perfectly respectable".  Fair enough.

Then there's a popular lower-mid-range: for example, our old favourite Lanson at £35 from Waitrose: "Extra crisp, dry style with bountiful finesse".  Indeed so, but at £35 a bottle, it's already moved well into special occasion territory for me.  Surprisingly, the champagne market is so tight nowadays that you can buy Taittinger, which sounds to me as if it should be in the next category, for a mere £34 - and in a pretty box, at that.  

Next is the "standard premium" range, where everybody has heard of the names:  Moët & Chandon, Bollinger, Pol Roger, Krug, Veuve Cliquot etc.  These are typically yours for about £50 a bottle.  Of course, we're still talking about non-vintage blends here.  We haven't got anywhere near excess yet.

Like car manufacturers, some champagne houses have a "premium" brand - for example, Moët & Chandon's fancy-pants label is Dom Pérignon.  (The brand used to be owned by Champagne Mercier, but they gave it away to M&C as a wedding present - aaaw!).   DP is always vintage, so it's only produced in good years - which, oddly, turns out to be nearly every year.  A bottle of 2010 will set you back about £150, or roughly £35 a medium glassful, and a bottle of 2006 rosé will be about £285 (£70 the glassful, which is getting a bit extreme IMHO).  But if you can stretch to £325 for the bottle (just £10 a glass extra!), you can have exactly the same stuff, but with a label designed by rock legend Lenny Kravitz! 

At this point, the noise from my rip-off alarm is becoming rather overwhelming, and I need to take some time out with a glass of something Italian at about £5 a bottle to regain my sense of perspective.  But of course, we're not done yet.

Most of the quality stuff for day-to-day drinking by the extravagant is in the £150 - £200 range, and typically you're getting a fairly recent vintage, from a respectable house (as you'd expect for £40 a glass).  But after that it all gets a little more complicated - in the next price range (a mere £389, or possibly £495 - but who's counting?) for the bottle, let's call it £100 the glass, why not? hic! you find Moët & Chandon MCIII, which they describe as a "Multi Vintage Champagne".  Isn't that what everyone else would call a "non-vintage champagne"?  Hmmm...  Still, it's won lots of awards, so who cares?  I'll take a dozen cases.

The top end of hand-crafted, old vine champagne should really be appreciated by connoisseurs, but is probably only ever bought by extremely rich people who just want to show off how much money they've got.  We're talking stuff like the newly-released Krug Clos D'Ambonnay 2002, of which a bottle can be yours for just £2,500 (with free UK delivery!).  It's awfully special - they only made 4,743 bottles and 240 magnums from that particular year's crop, all from a tiny 0.68 hectares plot.  I make that a total street value of £13m!  At £7.7m/acre, you can see why they called 2002 a good year.

Anyway, enough about booze.  For some unaccountable reason I found myself on a "fashion" site the other day.  Obviously, "designer" fashion is the poster child of ridiculous excess, but normally you get something that's at least distinctive for your money, like this "textured top", maybe:

distinctive...

Obviously, you could quibble about the £1,424 price tag, but at least you would be buying yourself some kind of attention, even if does turn out to be a bit uncomfortable getting settled into the Lambo.  And it is made by someone with a name - Charles Jeffrey Loverboy (whoever he is).

 But have a look at these:

knitted vest-top

That particular item (just the vest-top) will set you back a cool £1,177.00 from un-ironically named FarFetch.  Be careful though.  Remember it's dry-clean only.

Maybe you're thinking that's a bit too formal for you?  How about a simple tee-shirt?

tee-shirt, designer style

This time the irony button is stuck down, with that sprayed-over logo!  There's nothing on the back by the way.  But "With a New York logo print to the front, this T-shirt from Palm Angels is taking you on a journey through sleek casual style. All aboard."  So - are you ready to get on board for £140?  Oh, I nearly forgot - it's hand-wash only!

Of course, you can't just go out in a tee-shirt, so you'll need some trousers.  Maybe just jeans?  Maybe a pair of Levi's would do?  Well - yes and no.  Specifically, you'd need a pair that look like this:

"designer" Levis

"these straight-leg jeans from Valentino x Levi's have a loose, comfortable fit. Casual style never looked so good"

Well, as long as the scale of casual style goes infinitely negative, I suppose that's true.  I'm not sure exactly what Valentino has done to these once-genuine Levi's, but it will cost you £650 to buy a pair and find out.  At least your maid will be pleased this time.  They are machine-washable.

You get the idea.  Personally I think that these people are perfectly aware that they are taking the piss, big time, and they probably don't sell many of them - but at £650 a pop, you don't need to, do you?  Some poor sap out there thinks that because it's listed next to the Prada, Ballenciaga and Stella McCartney, it must be similarly valuable.  Stella McCartney, meanwhile, knows what really makes a designer tee-shirt.  This is the real thing:

the real thing...

The key difference is that this tee-shirt says "Stella McCartney 2001" on the front.  There's no mistaking  it for some piece of crap from the "everything £2" rail from your local street market.  It's clearly the work of a true design genius, and worth every penny of the £175 asking price.  Even if it is hand wash only - after all, your maid needs the work, doesn't she?

Perhaps the real selling point is the extraordinary "composition" of this garment: it's made from Cotton 100%, Polyamide 100%.  Neat, eh?

The upside of all this wailing, gnashing of teeth and general aghastness at the preposterous, prodigal profligacy of those encumbered by an excess of cash is that now, I'm actually surprisingly comfortable with the idea of lashing out on a bit of Bollinger at a mere £10 a glass or so, for a special occasion.  Actually, it almost seems like good value.

Just as long as it doesn't get to be a habit.

The trampoline and the toothbrush

Avid readers of the Infinite Weekend will recall the Sears trampoline, which once featured in a video on YouTube when I was an aspiring front-flipper.  Since then I've followed the wise advise of my friend Dr. Bannon by putting my front-flipping ambitions on one side, and I've never posted a second video; but my YouTube channel still occasionally attracts a new devotee, and currently boasts 85 subscribers, all presumably agog for my next instalment.  Even more amazingly, the video itself has has more than forty-two thousand views.  Wow!  

Anyway, the trampoline has a cover over the springs called the "safety pad", which has been gradually disintegrating to the point where it covers the mat with little white bits of plastic which make the trampoline look as if it is suffering from dandruff. And so I decided to replace it, for the sake of neatness, reduced plastic pollution, and little Layla's delicate sensibilities.

The trampoline is a fairly high-end one made by Plum, who naturally supply spare parts for their products.  Alas, the particular "safety pad" in question is now listed as discontinued.  That is possibly just as well because they do still list the price - a somewhat eye-watering £79.99!

Of course there are others available.  After a bit of research I plumped for a generic 12ft round one in a rather fetching royal blue, for £45 from Ebay, and it turned up very promptly in a big cardboard box, which the delivery driver amusingly wedged under the handle of the front door.  This made turning the door handle on the inside very difficult for a while - in fact right up until the lovely Jackie had succeeded in digging a large hole in the top of the box with the handle on the outside.  Fortunately, the contents were undamaged.

The old safety pad was just held on with elasticated tapes, but since this is a safety pad, I was pleased that the new one came with comprehensive fitting instructions.  One can't take chances with safety, after all.  The instructions in question consisted of a single sheet of A4, with the following three panels photocopied onto it.  The captions are the original ones.

1

2

3

I know that it's frowned-upon to use actual language in instructions these days, but I do think number 3 requires a bit of explanation.  What has happened to the people from 1 and 2?  To be honest, the people in 1 were already looking a bit pissed off, as if they've been told to stand there and not move until they're ready to say sorry to each other.  Have they just had enough, and walked off the job?  If they had appeared in 3 in a kind of Ta-da! pose, arms extended, we'd have known it was all finished, and everything was alright; but just disappearing like that is a bit eerie.  

Also, I couldn't help noticing that the man from 2 (with the black tee-shirt) is not one of the men from 1 (who both have white tee-shirts).  Are they telling me it's a three-man job?  At least until the entire squad runs off to hijack a car, or whatever it is they are doing in 3?

I did my best, using my skill and judgement to put the new pad in place and tie it on with the elasticated straps provided, single-handed.   I think it'll probably be all right.  Fingers crossed.

The toothbrush has absolutely nothing to do with the trampoline, by the way.

A while ago, the lovely Jackie and I did some decorating in our bedroom, which involved painting behind a radiator.  In times gone by, one did this by fiddling around with miniature rollers and a tiny brush on a stick, but our recently-build house has handy flexible micro-bore plastic plumbing, so you can just lift the radiator off its brackets while it's still connected, and paint the wall normally.  When we did that, an electric toothbrush fell out.  Obviously one of the previous occupants had put it down on the radiator, whence it had fallen down behind, and got stuck on the pipes where they go into the wall.  And there it stayed, hidden from view, until now.

I threw out the actual brush part (obviously), but the electric handle was just like the ones we use (Braun/Oral B)  and it charged up quite happily and works OK, so I kept that.  The interesting thing about it is that it's yet another different model.  We have a cheapy one with no frills, and a slightly more expensive one which warns you if you are pressing too hard.  The "new" one is more expensive still, and it has modes.  These allow you to choose weird speed effects like slow, and pulsing, and wandering around as if deranged.  I can't for the life of me understand why anyone would want to use any of them.  Personally I just want the thing to work for as long as possible between charges.  But is has given me the opportunity to compare the various models; and I conclude that the cheapy one works just as well as the others; and that the only difference between the other two is that the expensive one has to go through all its modes to get from on to off, which means that you have to press the button four times instead of once.  Which, to my mind, is definitely not a feature worth paying more for.

You can still get toothbrushes from this range, but the top end of the market has moved on quite a bit.  You can now get a toothbrush which features Bluetooth connectivity, for some unaccountable reason.  Not to mention "enhanced A.I. and 3D Teeth tracking capabilities" which sounds ideal if you are, for some reason, unable to locate your teeth yourself.  The "interactive display" says good morning to you, and shows a little smiley face when you've finished (as long as you've done it properly).  I imagine it's comforting to win the approval of your toothbrush in much the same way as it was once comforting to be offered computing help by an uninvited animated paperclip - which is to say, not at all. 

All these features come at a cost though - around £200 actually.  If my review of stuff found down the back of the radiator is anything to go by, I say it's probably not very good value for money.

So there you have it.  I'd really like to know how sales of the £200 toothbrush range are going - I'd like to think not too well, because it's silly, but I suspect there are plenty of people who will buy the most expensive one just because it's the most expensive one.   Or maybe I'm just jumping to conclusions, and missing out on something truly marvellous without giving it a fair chance to prove itself.  Oh well.  I'll just have to wait until we move house again and hope to find one behind a radiator to find out.

Why has my comment turned into a unicorn?

One of the most annoying aspects of producing this blog is a "feature" of Blogger itself.  Blogger is the Google-provided, freely-hosted blog system through which all this mindless drivel boundless creativity finds its way to your eyeballs.  Blogger has been going gently along, being a convenient crutch all-in-one blog-writer's toolset for people like me, for nigh-on twenty years, which makes it almost inconceivably ancient in the fast-moving world of the internet.

Alas, internet misdeeds have moved on apace in the last twenty years, and so, consequently, have internet browsers.  Nowadays, it seems, it is necessary to block all sorts of once-useful things from one's browser to avoid being cloned in cyberspace, having one's personal history aired online like so much dirty washing, or having one's bank account unwittingly drained into a mysterious Bitcoin wallet somewhere in Russian cyberspace.  And one consequence of all that is that the way Blogger does comments doesn't work properly any more.

The reasons seem to be:

1. Blogger uses various cookies to find out whether you are logged into a Google account, and some modern browsers don't like them.  To a modern browser, they look like a cross-site tracking exploit, because of the external links they contain, and so the browser blocks them.  It is possible to re-enable their use by switching off cross-site protection, but obviously this exposes you to a whole raft of mysterious evil practices.  If the internet had any warranties, this would surely invalidate them.  Just as well it doesn't then!
   
   
2. Apple.
   As we all know, Apple products are - different.  And they don't play nicely with arch-rival Google's nasty old blogging system.  Apparently this applies to their entire iOS operating system, not just the Safari browser.  You can use an Apple product to look at my blog, but you can't post a comment with it!

I must admit that finding this out has come as a bit of a shock.  I don't know all that many "Apple people" (unless they're hiding it - oh, no; that's a bit like meeting someone from Yorkshire and having to ask them where they are from - doesn't happen) but I'm dismayed that none of them has complained that they can't post a comment.  Maybe they are above that sort of thing.  Or maybe they tried to, but their comment disappeared...

SO...  if you are an Android, or Windows, or Linux user and your have been frustrated by my blog's irritating habit of "disappearing" your carefully curated comments before your very eyes, there MAY be a solution for you, which would be to use Chrome.  Chrome is Google's very own modern browser, and works very well, but of course it does let all those naughty Google bits through, so everything works just fine.  The otherwise admirable Brave (which I use myself), on the other hand, is a complete non-starter, and Firefox is too, unless you are prepared to deliberately expose yourself, so to speak.  Others I can't speak for.

For Apple people, it seems there is currently no hope.  Please email me instead - you all know me personally anyway (or know someone who does).  

Clearly this situation is no good, going forward, so I have been experimenting with a Wordpress site hosted on a virtual server I already use.  Alas, the reliability of that setup is not proving to be so great - this morning it went down, taking the estimable DrBannonsBlog (newly moved to my server to solve just these problems) with it.  It appeared for a moment, but it's gone again right now.  Not really good enough.

So one way or another, it's all go, in the hectic world of blogging technical support.  If anyone knows a supplier of really reliable Linux hosting (preferably with cPanel), I'd love to hear about it, so please let me know in the comments.  Oh, hang on...

This has turned out to be one of those boring technical posts which doesn't naturally have any pictures in it.  Having been brought up on Alice in Wonderland etc, I know that a blog post without pictures is like a screwdriver with no handle, so I offer in consolation the following conversational exchange, which took place this morning, complete with illustrations.  Layla (who is now four years old) was talking to the lovely Jackie about unicorns, and the idea that they are magical creatures because they don't really exist.

Jackie: Are there any animals with a horn in the middle of their head?

A unicorn

Me: Rhinocerous?

A rhinocerous

Layla:  Triceratopses?

Two triceratops(es)

Yes indeed.  Plurals can certainly be tricky; but you've got to admire her breadth and accuracy of knowledge.

Virtual Reality

 Lockdown has had strange effects, there can be no doubt.

In the relative affluence of the house of Sears, I'm pleased to be able to say that the idea of spending a few hundred quid on something special every now and then doesn't seem like a catastrophic dent on capital, really.  On the other hand, a few thousand quid for some sort of flying machine does seem like quite a lot. And have you seen the price of gyrocopters recently!  Gyrocopters used to be the last bastion of "I built it myself out of random bits of metal and pop rivets (and it looks like it!)" aviation,

single seat gyrocopter - may swap for kayak or similar

 but they have gone super-fancy in the last few years, and prices have gone fancy too - £50k for this 15 year-old Calidus two-seater, for example. 

two seat gyrocopter - may part ex. Lamborghini

Which is definitely not going to happen in the house of Sears.  

And by this inescapable logic, it came to pass that I shelled out four hundred of the aformentioned UK dollars on an Oculus Quest 2 Virtual Reality headset, as a kind of not-so-much mid-life as nearly-end-of-life substitute for proper aeronautical toys.

Which is really quite good.  It's completely stand-alone, unconnected to anything except by wifi, and the experience it provides can be quite enveloping - "immersive" is the VR buzzword, and rightly so.  At its best, the optical performance is exciting; viewed soberly, it is, undeniably, blurry round the edges.  Nevertheless, it is perfectly possible to play a convincing game of table tennis against your Quest-equipped next-door neighbour, in real time, via the internet.  Which, actually, is a kind of "wow"-moment for me.  Believable virtual table tennis in real time?  For £400? ( or even £300, if you can tolerate only 64GB of memory - nah, 256GB will be better in the long run, trust me) Yes, indeed.

Anyway, for me the whole point of VR is simulation, so I got the nearest thing in the Oculus store to a flight simulator, which is called Ultrawings.

Ultrawings is a flying game, where you take control of different aircraft and take on "tasks" to generate income with which to progress - you can buy a different plane, or an office in a new location with the proceeds of your efforts.  Each task has Bronze, Silver and Gold achievement levels, according to your best performance.  You can crash, or fail, without penalty.  You start with an ultralight:

ultralight - easy

which is very slow and easy to fly (but still has flaps!).  The next plane is (somewhat strangely) a rocket-powered glider.  

rocket powered glider - somewhat strange

It has similar performance to a glider (very low sink rate at 50kt, but slippery in a dive), but it has a rocket motor, which provides an arbitrary period of considerable thrust (above the centre of drag!).  You usually get a few goes on the rocket in each flight.  The flaps allow near-vertical approaches at 55kt.

Obviously you get a cockpit-based view, and the cockpits are nicely sharp and detailed, even if the scenery is - well - basic.  But it's always a lovely bright day in Ultrawings, with some puffy cumulus in a blue sky, which is nice.  Alas, in Ultrawings, the air never moves.  No wind, and no lift (or sink).  Shame. 

The game has "arcade" and "simulator" modes - naturally I only play in "simulator" mode, because I really wanted a proper flight simulator, and I'm a bit embarrassed to be just playing a video game, if the truth be told.  And it's fairly realistic in some ways, but as usual, the rudder is a bit wrong.  I only discovered recently that you can change the direction of flight using rudder alone, while the wings stay level.  Gah!  The only saving grace is that flying it this way does induce unpleasant motion sickness, whereas flying it properly doesn't.  

The third plane (an absolute bargain at $20k (virtual dollars)) is a sporty aerobatic jobby that flies quite well upside down, and can fly knife-edge, but oddly still doesn't have much of a climb rate.  It crashes with a disarming ease, not least because it's incredibly difficult to grab the throttle lever in flight, which is rather necessary for a successful landing.  You have to look down to see if your little virtual glove has actually closed around the throttle lever (which, bizarrely, is still no indication that you will be able to move the damned thing).  Obviously if you do this for too long,  you are pretty much doomed.  At the moment I'm experimenting with cutting the magneto to land instead, as if I were flying a Sopwith Camel.  Not having all that much success though.

another fatal accident about to happen

The rudder suffers quite a lot from being controlled by a switch - a little thumb-stick on the left hand controller - so you can't hold part rudder continuously.  You have to give it little kicks at a suitable rate, which is very unnatural.   And it's easy to accidentally select full rudder while you're trying to grab the throttle, and thus not looking where you're going, which is (of course) usually fatal.  

The last plane (I haven't got there yet) is the so-called Gee-racer, which is really quite silly.

a really silly aeroplane

It's heavily based on the 1932 Granville Gee Bee Model R Super Sportster:

a real, silly aeroplane

which was not only real, but a serious racer in its time, and won races, not least by having the biggest available engine (22 litres and about 800hp) in an airframe about the size of a car. It also briefly held the world land plane speed record, although Supermarine et al were going quite a bit faster with seaplanes.  According to Wikipedia, it wasn't that bad to fly, although there were, inevitably, a few accidents, not least because of its unusually high stall speed of about 100mph.  After a couple of rebuilds and various  changes, including the addition of bigger (302 US gallon!) fuel tanks, and fancy flaps which brought the landing speed down to a more manageable 65mph, the company went bust and sold the thing to a chap who fitted an auxiliary fuel tank in the tail.  The company's (ex-)chief engineer warned him never to fill it, or the plane would be so tail-heavy that it wouldn't fly, but our man thought it would be OK.  He crashed on take off and died.  

So, interesting to fly then. I'm hoping for savage torque-steer effects, at least.  Might have to settle for the obvious snag of zero visibility when landing, and a few little quirks the games people have put in, like the "you can't see the instruments when facing the sun" feature you get with the sport plane.  There are quite a few deliberate quirks in the game, and overall I think they do add something to the appeal of finding out how to succeed, even if they can be - er,  extremely frustrating!

Meanwhile, I bash on with the tasks.  I have to say, this game is not a training aid.  It positively encourages some flying habits I've previously been very much encouraged to avoid, like flying extremely close to, and under, and through things, and shooting at balloons which are hidden amongst houses, and squeaking it in against the clock to land like a 1920s airshow ace, rather than flying a sedate and well planned circuit.  In other words, it's flying just as you would want it to be.

The VR experience in general has some unexpected quirks. Ultrawings cleverly figures out where you are in your real-life room - sort of - so sometimes you can restart the game and find yourself under the table, or behind the chair, or just outside the office wall.  Once I managed to fly the aeroplane from just outside the cockpit for a while, although not being able to reach most of the controls is, er, somewhat limiting.  But everything is still rendered properly, wherever you find yourself.  Just don't try to lean on that all-too-convincing table tennis table!

Obviously, I'm now sold on the whole VR flying thing on the strength of Ultrawings alone, but I'm already looking ahead.  The next step would be to improve the VR performance (and increase the number of simulators and games you can choose from enormously) by running the software on a fast PC with a decent graphics card, and connecting it to the VR headset using a superfast wifi network.  Unfortunately, all those bits would need to be bought, and the cost would be not inconsiderable - definitely a few grand, I'm afraid.  But still not in the price bracket of a real aeroplane, even a microlight, let alone a fancy gyroplane.  And don't forget, the running costs would be extremely low!

We shall see.

Let there be light

Well, I haven't managed to increase my shaving frequency much, despite the ongoing loveliness of the waterfall tap.  But I have kind of completed a project that's been lurking ever since we had the extension built - which was getting on for two years ago.  Here's the blog post celebrating that event, which actually mentions the project in question: "the multi-coloured LED recessed uplighting around the inside of the lantern".

The idea of making this thing out of edge-lit perspex rather died following the experience of making the wall lights, because the effect we'd originally imagined getting from the perspex doesn't really happen in practice; and with that, my enthusiasm to experiment with different ideas declined to a level below that associated with some scrambled eggs on toast, or a nice cup of tea.  Obviously, that meant it never rose to the top of the priority pile for very long at all.  I did go so far as to order some bits - a nice radio controlled LED controller and 5m of LED light strip, and a sheet of 6mm MDF, but then when I thought about it a bit harder I concluded that one sheet wouldn't actually be enough, so that was a dampener.  Then I discovered aluminium alloy angle section (up to 5m x 101mm x 101mm x 3mm) which seemed like a better idea anyway, but then again, it's pretty expensive, especially when you include the cost of  shipping; so I went back to the scrambled eggs for a while.  

Then I bought a nice super-fine 80 tooth blade for my table saw (they usually come with a rather rugged 40 tooth blade for quick cutting).  Obviously this made it necessary to saw something up, by way of a test, so I decided to have a go with the MDF, and make a prototype to test out the light idea.  Maybe just make one end, since I didn't have enough MDF for the whole thing.

However... When I though about it even harder, I found that I could get all the pieces out of one sheet if I moderated the size just a smidgen, so I set up the saw, donned my dust mask and cut it up. And this went so well, with lovely straight cuts and such nice edges that I was inspired to cut all the bevels (on the rough old chop saw with a coarse blade), just to see what happened.  And this went so well that I was inspired to stick it all together with glue (and some bits of metal to reinforce the corners).  The bench isn't really big enough to accommodate the thing, but fortunately some of the bed slats from the bed I built for the spare room at the old house were on hand to extend it (surprisingly straight, too), so no problem really.  

surprisingly straight

By this time I was firing on quite a few cylinders, so putting a few coats of primer and paint on it just followed on fairly naturally.  Then a big fillet of builder's caulk all the way round in the inside corner, for the LED strip to sit on, and it's almost done.  Shock and dismay when, after a whole night in the garage, the caulk still had the consistency of soft ice-cream, but a day in the nice warm house facing the sun sorted it out, and it went off as if nothing had happened. 

The electrician had provided a handy space for the 12V power supply behind a light switch in in the dining room wall, but he'd only installed a bit of three-core mains wire from there up to the ceiling lantern (where it has been sticking out of the plaster for 18 months like a sad, partially exposed archaeological find).  Since the LED strip needs five wires to connect it to the controller, I couldn't hide the controller down with the power supply - it would have to be hidden somewhere up in the lantern.  No problem, because I know that all the way round the lantern there are triple joists behind the plasterboard.  So I simply drilled a big hole using a 62mm hole saw I happen to have already - except that the saw isn't as deep as a joist is thick, so I had to stop and violently chisel the waste away a few times to get deep enough.  And, rather unexpectedly, I hit a nail at one point, so I had to grind that out of the way.  Overall, it wasn't anything like as simple as I had anticipated, and there was a lot of bashing and graunching to go with the expected squeaking, whining and squealing; but no matter - I got there in the end.  And it can be quite a rewarding experience to overcome adversity by the use of noisy power tools; especially up a ladder.

Although the hole now accommodates the controller quite happily, it's still just a hole in the wall, which isn't really a good look.  So I fabricated a circular cover out of a bit of sheet aluminium with some perspex glued on the back (actually one of the waste pieces from cutting 62mm holes in perspex for the wall lights).  The original idea was to hold this in place using a large flat washer and a screw, out of sight behind the MDF - but I realised that I wouldn't be able to assemble it, because I couldn't hide all the bits away without the MDF covering the screw.  So I had to add a spring between the screw head and the washer - now the screw can be done up with the cover off, and the cover itself sneaked into place after everything else has been fitted. Pleasingly, this actually works!

And so it came to pass - light comes out in all directions, in a variety of colours and intensities.  The radio controller (rather than the more common infra-red sort) doesn't mind where you are or what you're pointing at, which is good. There's a lighting effect that we didn't anticipate, too, which occurs in the corners of the lantern - the upward washes of light from each vertical face meet to give a sort of art deco wedge-shaped column of brightness, which is rather cool IMHO.  Here it is in a groovy lilac mood:

groovy lilac

and here in funky blue (complete with wall lights):

funky blue

Overall, I'm very pleased with it. And so, I am delighted to say, is the lovely Jackie. 

And (one must remember) it's only a prototype. 

Taps and beards

 If I were alone in the world (by which I mean, somehow - heaven forbid! - deprived of the company of the lovely Jackie), I would certainly grow a beard.  For me, the relaxed living style which accompanies getting up in the morning and not even thinking about shaving is worth much more than "keeping up appearances" - by which I mean, worrying about what other people think of one's appearance.  But, the lovely Jackie has a dog in this particular race too, because her comfort is affected when she snuggles up against my cheek, and she declares a full beard to be too prickly.

So I am caught in a slight dilemma - I'd prefer not to think about shaving (except possibly on special occasions) and Jackie would prefer my cheeks to be beautifully smooth.

Actually I think if I did grow a proper beard, it would eventually be perfectly snuggly, in a fur coat sort of way.  Whereas, my current "occasional" shaving habit results, on average, in a cheek texture similar to part-worn 40-grit sandpaper.  Or at least a small, stiff brush.  Possibly the worst possible compromise, on the snuggling front. Oh dear.

Meanwhile, regular readers will remember my disdain for the Roca sanitary ware that came with our house from a previous post.  But there's another thing that has always been a slight niggle about the process of lavation chez Sears: the taps provided (Ideal Standard - which are neither ideal nor standard of course, that's just the name of the shop, love) are essentially just sink fillers.  They stick out over the sink and deliver their watery load vertically downwards, from a point about half an inch back from the front end.

just a sink filler

This works fine for the purpose of filling the sink, but that's about all.  If you should want to get your face under the flowing water to rinse off your shaving gloop, it's not really possible.  You can put your hands underneath and collect some water, but you have to manoeuvre your cupped hands round the tap before you can use it.  The tap sticks out into the sink enough to get in the way when you are washing, but still delivers water right at the back of the bowl, which makes it difficult to swill running water around when you're cleaning it.    None of this is actually, really a serious problem, I must admit.  Many people would be, quite rightly, just very grateful for the copious hot water and general functional adequacy of the whole kaboodle.  But I know better.

Our friends Mike and Belinda redid their bathroom a while ago with a rather unusual but exceptionally pleasing Moroccan vibe to the whole thing.  And in the hand basin they fitted a waterfall tap.

This marvellous device solves all the problems mentioned above by projecting water out in front of itself into the middle of the basin from an open-topped spout.  It doesn't sound like much of a change, but really makes a difference!  The first time I used their one, I was genuinely delighted by the experience. 

So, with nothing much going on these days, I decided to splash out, (ha!) follow their lead, and fit one in our family bathroom. I even went to the trouble of finding out the exact model they had, to avoid the disappointment of accidentally choosing something inferior.

Then the complications began.  Even though Mike and Belinda's tap has a a remote waste system just like ours (you can see the little chrome knob behind the tap in the picture above), I was completely unable to source that tap (or, indeed ANY waterfall tap) with such a feature on the internet.  It seems that today's trendy solution is the so-called "click-clack" waste, which has a mechanism like a retractable ballpoint pen in the pipe, so you just push the chrome lid to make it go up and down.  Ah, but there's a problem.  The mechanism, together with its supports, partly fill the pipe, and the remaining little spaces get clogged with hairs and the usual drain gunge.  On most of these click-clacks, you can unscrew the top, but then you have to poke around in the drain to get the gunk out - not very nice.  I actually like the system we have at the moment better; you can lift the plug right out and clean it up, and the drain itself is almost clear of obstructions.

Fortunately, somebody at tap-mongers Vellamo has though of a solution, and developed a click-clack waste which can be bodily removed from the pipe.  They also make a fairly similar looking waterfall tap, which comes with a spectacular ten year guarantee.  These two features convinced me to buy their offering - even though their tap comes bundled with a "free" click-clack waste system which isn't the one you want! You have to buy that separately, and then you end up with a redundant waste thingy, even though you never even wanted to change the waste in the first place.  Grrr!

And so to plumbing.  All modern taps come complete with flexible "tails", so it should be pretty trivial to swap them over, right?  Not quite - the old tap has tails with a female 10mm connector at the tap end, and a 15mm compression fitting at the other end.  The new ones have a male 10mm at the tap end, and a female end-face thing with a flat washer at the other end.  Sigh.  

tap with tails

Incidentally, there seems to be no proper way to tighten the tails into the tap - there's no room in there for any kind of tool, as far as I can see.  Hmmm... Fortunately they don't need to be very tight for the little O-ring seal to work.

no room in the tap

Also fortunately, Screwfix are still open to supply a solution to the tails compatibility issue, in the shape of pair of little isolating valves which have a compression fitting to connect to the house, and will accept the flat washer fitting thingy at the other end, even though they weren't really designed for it.  So no real problems there.

But to change the waste, you need to remove the pedestal from underneath the basin.  This necessitates  jacking the basin up, so you need to loosen the connectors on the waste pipe first.  The connectors are meant to be hand-tightened, but dear old Roca, in their very limited wisdom, decided to make the inside of the pedestal so narrow that you simply can't get your fingers in there.  So I had to make this special tool out of a bit of scrap aluminium:

another special tool (yawn)

...which did the job very nicely, thank you.

And so, eventually, it all got done, including white sealant round the edges and everything, and I'm very happy with the result.

I know it doesn't look much, but it is so much more joyous to use than the old one that I find myself washing my face much more often than I used to.  

I'm even thinking I might be able to increase my frequency of shaving to something more than once a month...

Raspberries

In the midst of all this lockdown gloom, I'm afraid I've become a pretty poor retirement role model - at least if you were hoping for the fulfillment of lifelong dreams.  Other people have been doing much better at that.  Of course it would help if one actually had a dream - alas, my dreams are mostly the stuff of vague anxiety or frustration, occasionally with an unexpected twist.  Last night's was about being unable to find the children's bicycle section in a department store designed like a malicious, multi-story IKEA, which included one-way tunnels full of overlapping doors so that you can't go back, which climb between floors whilst narrowing, ominously.  Hmmm... Perhaps I should see someone about that.

On the other hand, if your dream were to be, say, designing and building from scratch,  singlehanded, a semi-monocoque car that looks quite like a Ferrari Dino and does 200mph, I would recommend starting at the Jarvie Arete project .  Totally mind-bogglingly bonkers stuff.  There are quite a few episodes - I think about 63 so far - and there's still quite a lot left to do IMHO.  But if you like seeing other people doing things, it's very watchable.  And he certainly achieves a lot.

Back on planet earth, I've pretty much been reduced to the occasional crossword, drinking too much and watching the telly in the daytime.  I do have one tiny little project I can report on though - moving the raspberries; or, at least, preparing the raspberries' new home.

There is, in the mind of the lovely Jackie, a half-formed plan to build a garden shed, or summerhouse, or garden room, or studio, or something whose real purpose in life hasn't really been fully defined, in the area of garden once occupied by a vegetable garden, and which is now occupied by an assortment of rubbish, including bits of left-over garage roof (see Garage Roof Post Script) from our last house, and some pallets.   And the raspberries, which until recently lived in a narrow bed and were supported at height by a bodged-up pair of rotting wooden gibbets with a piece of hang-glider tube between them, together with a load of wires and some bamboo canes.  Altogether a bit rubbish, really.

A bit rubbish, really

So, to move the raspberries, and I made a new somewhat-raised bed for them out of bits of the old wooden retaining wall (removed for terrace-building, see Patio Exercises), and a new frame out of welded rebar.

welded rebar (inverted)

Here's what it looks like in situ:

convenient raspberry-picking access!

I know you're all dying to know what my rebar welding looks like, so here you go:

Good enough for garden work

Not the most beautiful ever, but adequate for the job in hand, I hope you'll agree.  

The amazing thing about unpainted welded rebar is how long it lasts in the garden.  It just rusts gently, and takes on a natural-looking garden-brown rust tinge, and sits there, apparently forever.  I made some tall obelisks for roses to grow on in our old house using the same technology.

Not that it's cheap, mind you.  That raspberry frame cost the better part of £100 in materials!  Obviously, it's been worth it, in the light of the impending thingy project.  No stone shall be left unturned, in the quest for whatever it turns out to be, eventually.

Speaking of the cost of things, I came across a picture of something we found in a garden centre during the Italian trip.  We stopped to buy some presents for the Italians we were visiting, and ventured outside to see if they had any interesting pots there.  Well - they did have some impressively large ones.  Like this:

impressively large ones...

...with spectacular features

But the really spectacular feature was the price, seen here in close up:

Yup, that's €731.00 each, or a bargain €1,462.00 for the pair!

For grandiose earthenware enthusiasts on a more modest budget, they did offer the same thing without the decorative garland of grapes, for a mere €561.00 each.  If only we could have fitted a couple into the van and driven them all the way home...

Flower pots aren't the only thing that comes in oversized doses in Italy.  Here's another one:

not melting

And finally, one which would fit into the van, and did come home with us:

Flagon of wine, anyone?

That's a 5 litre bottle of Montepulciano.  I think the price was about €13.  We'd already stocked up of wine to bring home, but it seemed churlish to ignore this fine offer.

 Isn't Italy great?