February 14th, 2022

Victoria has returned to Twickenham with Reggie and Badger, and I will have a quiet week ahead of me. Steps will be down, although I am due to play golf on Sunday weather permitting, no doubt hours of sleep will go up, I’m guessing by at least one hour a night.

I’ve played bridge three times this week, Monday and then Tuesday online, both with Alan, and Thursday with Carol. The online was good we came second East-West with 65%, the other two at Roundswell Community Centre were below 50% and only 43.75% with Carol, that was a surprise, the margins are thin, and less opportunity if you are not being dealt the cards and having nothing much to defend with.

Alan and I did get together at his on Friday evening to go through a card together. I’ll need to work out a couple of new conventions he plays and remind myself of others that I have documented but may not be so fixed in memory to be recalled when under pressure. Anyway, it is good to be playing again after nothing much in the last year apart from a few weeks. I didn’t play when masks were mandated and all the windows and doors were left open, as I understand, it was cold.

I’ve been doing daily Zoom calls with Tadas this week and recording them. At the weekend I spent time analysing the recordings and I wrote an article for the Podcasting community called My First Zoom Calls which I will publish next week. The impressions you have of yourself are not always the impressions which other people have of you, and I tend to think negatively about my verbal skills. I was not displeased with the impression I received from my own analysis and these unprepared calls provide me a benchmark of my natural voice, which has a tenor quality, with some range, and not the monotone that I expected. Next week I need to spend 15 minutes preparing for each call to see what difference that will make.

At work I was really getting going with the articles on Linear Assets at the beginning of the week and then a curved ball came my way with two requests from Danny, one to review some tables that had entered a bid very late to see where it differed from the words we had written which was what the estimate was based on, and a second request to look at some features around Customer Billing and Tax. So, not a great week at work and a sudden realisation that if my podcast was going to be based on my Maximo week, then I would not have had much that I could have said this week. This has thrown me into some doubts as to whether the theme behind my podcast is the right one. 

However, on the bright side I have been documenting “My Podcast Journey” each day, rather than trying to remember what had happened during the week at the weekend. This has resulted in a longer article, which shouldn’t have been a surprise. I have now published 6 weeks of my podcast journey, and Richard’s comment was “This is a podcast in itself”, for which I replied, “Now there’s a thought”. I’ll see how long this podcasting journey lasts for and whether it has a happy ending, and you never know, I might be able to do a podcast about creating a podcast and all the doubts and change of tack that occur along the way.

At long last Rod from Glowing Grates arrived to assess the potential for a new marble fireplace, which will be the first step in this year’s internal project, to redecorate the playroom and kitchen. I’ll have to stop calling it a playroom as the children are now in their 20s. It is the room we use the most, with our doors onto the slate patio and the lawns beyond. Anyway, straight forward evidently, and it sounds as if he has been working with English Fireplaces for some time. The smaller William IV will fit perfectly, and we’ll add a Brazilian slate floor and slate slip.

I did make it into the living room and lit the fire on Wednesday evening and did my podcast hour while listening to Led Zeppelin. It is a lovely room, which we hardly use, and warmer since we replaced the old single-glazed bow fronted window and door onto the formal garden. This was one of the window projects from 18 months ago, which got completed with its step last year. It has the same footprint but probably half as much wood and consequently a greater amount of light, and the step is slate instead of concrete. I call this the Hugh Gurney room as his oils are the only pictures, countryside scenes from around North Devon, of no great value, but I love them. 

It’s so easy to get into the habit of not using a room, the front parlour in the traditional sense, and I’m making a conscious effort to at least use it twice a month. It has the piano, which has fallen out of favour for the last few years. Getting back to playing the piano is on my list of New Year’s resolutions, but in the winter, I need to light the fire first. So, after my podcasting hour there was 30 minutes trying to learn the piece that will hopefully become my intro music to the podcast.

I spotted the first bloom on the red Camellia this week, hidden away inside the leaves and not at all exposed. The first signs of Iris Reticulata are appearing in the area by the tree house, I’m not optimistic though as there doesn’t look to be too many other shoots yet. The Russian Snowdrops (Puschkinia Libanotica) are out already, and I thought last year the Iris had appeared first. 

This is the second year for the 2,000 bulbs planted in the area we cleared during the first lockdown project. This was an area with a few old shrubs that had been effectively killed off by the ivy creeping out of the hedge and which the only surviving plant seemed to be the mass of wild garlic that was creeping further and further into the lawn underneath our large Copper Beach tree.

The crocus planted along the new path in our lockdown project last year are beginning to bloom and the areas of snowdrops around the garden are now opening, but not quite at their peak yet. Spring is beginning to show but no daffodils have opened, I wonder what the display of primroses will be like this year, last year it was the best we had ever seen. 

The new path connects down to the greenhouse which consumed a lot of time during its installation last year and which houses our orange and lemon trees, the fruit of which are now getting close to being picked. I’ll have to research a few suitable cocktails where a few slices can be used as a garnish, no doubt a Wicked Wolf G&T for the lemon.

It was unusual to play golf on a Saturday, a bit windy, but Sunday looked as if it would be wiped out by the weather, and it was. Some of the holes going into the southerly wind on the East were not reachable in two, but I had a stormer of a round, a clear 7 or 8 strokes better than the 90-92 range I would count as being a solid round, anything better than 90 I consider as being good and the event would be marked down in my diary. An 83, with 7 pars and a birdie on the 18th, where unusually there were no observers on the terrace or at the windows, three double bogeys and nothing worse, I can’t remember the last time that happened. I think I have discovered a technique which made the irons fly straighter and a tad longer, just moving the ball a fraction further to my left heel in my stance. Now I can’t wait to get out again and see whether any of the gold dust is still around, but I’ll need to wait at least two weeks, as next weekend I’ll be in Twickenham.