A lazy weekend

17th & 18th November

With nothing much due to happen in the morning, we made a lazy start on Saturday. I’d recharged the hair trimmer the day before, and asked Sheila to give me a trim. Previously we’ve done this on the towpath, so that the trimmings just blow away on the breeze, but the weather was not encouraging of this solution this time.

So I sat on a footstool in the saloon, and had a number 6 all over. One thing was demonstrated by this – wood floors are such a good idea for our lifestyle. The hassle of cleaning up the hair from a carpeted floor just doesn’t bear thinking about.

Elanor turned up at about half six, after a good run up the M6. She’d spent the day in Burton shopping for bathrooms amongst other stuff, and brought us a stack of post, as well as my birthday present for last month, and Sheila’s ready for next month.

We had a pleasant family evening together, catching up from the last time we saw her.

This morning was another lazy start, although Elanor needed to get away in decent time as she’s going home via Lincoln to see Graeme, Cathy and Daniel, so it’ll be quite a trek.

My birthday present is a hilarious device, a light that goes on the underside of the loo lid. It shines green when the seat is down and red when it’s up. The idea is that it saves putting the bathroom light on in the middle of the night, and is typical of the kind of thing you can buy on the website I Want One of Those, or iwoot.com. I can heartily recommend it for those struggling with tricky Christmas presents right now – it specialises in “things you don’t need but really really want”.

The weather had been wild and windy overnight, and continued pretty disgusting all day – blowing, rain threatening to turn to hail, and gloomy with it. One thing – it demonstrates that Ian’s work on the prisms has been effective, as they are bone dry (well, bar the condensation, that is). Iain and Luisa must be regretting coming back from Spain.

Under these circumstances, there was nothing for it but to hole up in the boat with the stove well stoked. I did the routine IT housekeeping, and we read the papers and Sheila got on with her knitting. We’ve taken to buying the Observer rather than the Independent on Sunday. I did email the IoS to explain why I was giving up on them:

“1) Ever since the latest make over, I've felt much less at home with the IoS. I really liked the previous incarnation, but this one is just so monolithic. It feels like there's almost nothing in the magazine section I want to read, and great chunks of the main paper are not my thing, but I still have to wade past them in search of the bits I do like. I particularly miss ABC [the Arts Books Culture section].

2) It started before the makeover, but the campaigning has become more and more strident. Some of it, like the volte face on cannabis, I just don't agree with, but even things for which I have sympathy, like the military covenant (my son's in the Army), just go on and on and on and on. Seven pages counting the front on the "Remembrance Sunday Special Edition" - two or three fine, but seven?

3) The production quality, amazingly, is getting worse, and you should be ashamed to put it out on the streets. My copy last Sunday had four entire pages illegible - just a black inky smear over the whole print area. Other papers manage to avoid sending out such blatantly duff copies - why can't you? Similarly, both papers have a habit of screwing up the weather chart - this time, the highs and lows referred to in the text accompanying the synoptic chart were unlabelled, making interpretation a matter of guess work."

But they didn’t reply.