Self-sacrificial slapstick and the art of giving the gift of weeping with hysterical laughter this Christmas

Posted on December 28, 2015 by nager

I must admit to being somewhat single minded in the past few months about the house-build. It’s been hard to think about anything else. I hope I didn’t let that cloud my judgement of what my entire family want for Christmas. Well it’s the combination of that, and a singular lack of money, brought about by the self-same house build.

Every member of my belovèd family will get an edited, formatted and hard-back-printed copy of my blog from the very beginning. I managed to get it down to 194 pages. I hope they like it but, since my parents are my blog’s number one (and perhaps only) fans, it’s sure to get a happy welcome there. I didn’t get one for the tween-agers you’ll be pleased to know – my judgement hasn’t slipped that far.

In addition to the house-build themed Christmas presents, we also had a house-build themed Christmas. Over four days we managed to transform the house into a livable space and transform it back into a building-site, every surface covered. We decorated, painted special slate worktop stuff on the surfaces, then tried to work out why it went all smeary and sticky. We put up the post box/name plate for the house, Cleared up enough dust to switch the MVHR (mechanical ventilation heat recovery) on and cleaned all the windows and frames of bits of plaster and stuff.

Christmas Eve was taken up with wholesome and thrifty pursuits like making plaid covers for the freebee Salvation Army cushions (granddaughter and grandmother) and upholstering the same plaid onto chairs I’d bought as an impulse Salvation Army purchase (grandpa without much input from other granddaughter).

Boxing Day was all about ridding the site of wood-based detritus. The waste stuff (water-logged chipboard, OSB and reams of cardboard) was thrown onto a pyre and sent in clouds of smoke into the ether. Farewell to the year. Farewell to a life totally taken up with this house build.

Wood that could be used in future as firewood or for other things had to be moved from the enormous wood-mountain I had allocated it to at the very start of the build.

I’d chosen that site specifically as the only place I could put it that I would never have to move it again. Ever. (Erm… So why are you moving it Kat?) Well you never can account for where people decided to put their water pipes in the historic past, and we discovered that one runs right under my wood-mountain and that it needs to be dug up. And we discovered it has a leak that has turned the back of the house into more of a mud bath than usual.

I made some of the wood mountain into a woodshed as husband moved the wood with the concentration of a someone playing a real-life game of Tetris. Each time making the journey across a no-man’s land of mud which became more icky, more squelchy and more sucky with each crossing, until it threatened to eat our wellies whole, and some of the rest of us too.

In the spirit of using the less pleasant experiences of the build for good, I’ve incorporated a memory-nemesis into that shed. Half of the dreaded partition wall that sat for months in the newly erected and sopping wet house without being fitted and then warping beyond use is now the shed roof. The OSB wasn’t in best condition which isn’t a surprise given it’s sat in the pouring rain since April but I patched it up with bits of the Mystery OSB which is lying around in the fully-built house that no one knows what it’s for.

“Don’t saw off the bit you’re standing on” I joked to myself as I sawed through a long bit of OSB hanging over the woodshed roof. Mum and dad had finished packing to leave and were hanging out of the upstairs bedroom window with husband watching progress on the woodshed roof.

It was only a few minutes later that I forgot my own advice to myself and found that progress was easier with a foot on either side of the saw and merrily sawed away until….. CRACK!!!

The saw made the final cut and I fell dramatically and theatrically into the mud-field we had created. It wasn’t quite headfirst. I am told by my audience that it would have been an award-winning bellyflop if I hadn’t landed too far over on my side. Both arms sunk up to the elbows in mud: face and hair was plastered: grit between my teeth.

It was one of the funniest things that I can remember and I was consumed by hysterics (as was my audience, augmented by the kids who ran to see what all the noise was about). It was a long time before I could regain my composure enough to finish what I needed to do, strip off my dirt-caked clothes, and make my way to Christen the beautiful shower with mud and grit. My only regret is that, although husband had taken some video of me making the shed roof, he switched off just at the moment it would have been useful to capture on film.

Nevertheless, the memory of myself wallowing in mud after my cartoon-esque schoolboy error will stand me in good stead if I need cheering up in future. And, as some psychologists at Cornell University have found, giving memories rather than material presents at Christmas gives a more lasting pleasure. So perhaps Im glad that, at a time when every available penny is being spent on the house build, I’ve given such an unique, entertaining and enduring present to my whole family.

Ps. Some photos in the immediate aftermath of the mud-dive exist, but I am afraid that they will remain classified for evermore. I’ll leave it up to imagination

Cancelling Christmas

Posted on December 27, 2015 by nager

I’d thought about cancelling Christmas a couple of times. The first was with 11 days to go to the big day, as I returned from a weather-swept stomp to a bothy in the Borders where I was celebrating a friend’s 100th bothy with a large party of bobble-hat-wearing revellers. I managed to catch up with Tom, a university friend who made who the kitchen, and discovered that the units were in at an angle, not merely set out further from the wall.

I sat and despaired a little in a layby in the sleet and wondered whether to put back the worktops and cancel Christmas while I was at it.

The second followed the next day, with 10 days to go, when Stephen the stonemason came to fit the worktops and we discovered that all my fears were founded and we’d need to move the fridge plug then move the kitchen then get the stone-mason back again.

But it’s really quite hard for me to accept that anything is hopeless or impossible. If I’ve said I’ll do something, I do like to do it.

Plan the day and dae the plan.

A phrase coined by a friend of mine (it works much better when he says it having a Scottish accent…)

Planned to camp on a beach on a West coast island but the weekend weather forecast looks pish?

Plan the Day and Dae the Plan.

You’ll have a brilliant time even if it rains and if the sun peeks out you’ll only regret staying at home as you imagine what it would have been like swimming in gaspingly cold water or collecting mussels and roasting them in a camp-fire.

Planned to do a couple of Munros but you’re feeling a bit tired and think you might just get to the next rise and head to the pub?

Plan the Day and Dae the Plan.

The mountain will still be calling you from the pub and imagine how brilliant it will feel to have done the whole walk.

Planned to have Christmas at a house that is highly unlikely to be fully habitable.

PLAN THE DAY AND DAE THE PLAN.

No one ever enjoyed having an easy life. …. Erm. Hold on.

It wasn’t a good moment when I realised I’d lost the tap for the kitchen sink and that there wouldn’t be time to get the tap to the house and for the plumber to fit it before Christmas. But that didn’t really worry me, we’d have a hose through the window from the outside tap (well that was before I realised that the drainage for the sink wasn’t plumbed). And anyway we have a dishwasher (which turned out not to be plumbed either….)

No, the low-point came with 2 days to go, as I arrived at the house in my rented van full of a sofa and a sofa bed and chairs and boxes of stuff to a dark dark house and realised how much I had to do to make it habitable for Christmas.

Tom had moved the kitchen into the right place that day and the worktops were due in the next. But I had a van full of stuff which I’d hoped to Tom would help me unload, and a bottle of wine I’d hoped Tom would help me drink, but he was done unexpectedly early and was away down to the road to let the dogs out.

The joiners still had at least a week of work and one of the bedrooms was entirely taken up with skirting boards. The cooker hood and washing machine were still sitting in the lounge and everywhere was dust and dust sheets and bits and pieces and no furniture or food or crockery or cutlery or saucepans or decorations or even drying-up-cloths. I went out to deliver Christmas cards and invites to a Boxing Day party (Christmas evidently not being enough challenge of its own…) round to all the neighbours and that’s when I got a view of what Christmas could be like if we’d just go to my parents like we usually do.

A neighbour’s house was decorated beautifully with greenery and berries and perfect lighting. They opened the door and Christmassy scents of cooking and bonhomie wafted towards me. Their grown-up sons back for Christmas came downstairs to say hello and showed me photos of the whole happy family eating fondue in their alpine-style garden shed exquisitely decorated for Christmas. I left weeping quietly, hugging the spirit level I’d borrowed for the stone-mason, for comfort. Is it too late to cancel Christmas and go to mum and dad’s if they have already started packing to come to Cuil?

Plan the day and Dae the plan.

At least if I don’t have anyone else to unload the van, I can go back and petition the neighbour’s sons to help. So long as they don’t tell me how lovely and relaxing and stress free it is going home to ones parents for Christmas.

In the end Stephen the stonemason and his assistant insisted on helping me unload. Being used to shifting huge slabs of stone around, they made light work of the contents of the van and headed back to Glasgow well before dark.

By evening I had a livable sitting room at least – two sofas and a coffee table made from the cooker hood topped by the slab of ash, intended as the seat at the bottom of the stairs. And the next day I’d be returning with the family and food and many hands to make light work of the rest of the house.

I’ve been thinking about a line of poetry to carve into the edge of the wooden worktop in the kitchen. Something to reflect the landscape of Scotland and people’s connection with the landscape. Been thinking Norman McCaig or Kathleen Jamie but now I’ve got a plan.

PLAN THE DAY AND DAE THE PLAN

That has got to be carved somewhere in the house – but it needs to be near the door. On the way out to adventures. How about on the ash bench? I’ll be sitting on there getting my boots on ready to set forth into the rain (And inevitably yelling blue murder at the kids trying to get them out of the house and off their electronic devices which, I’ll tell you, needs the utmost in unshakable resolve.)

A short career change

Posted on December 24, 2015 by nager

I suppose it’s not that surprising that I’ve decided against becoming a white van driver.

Recently I’ve felt rather desirous of a white van to put all the vast quantities of stuff I find myself shifting about these days. My functional and (before I owned it) well-kept family car is now a total tip, scarred with the detritus I have taken away from the building site. It has got to the stage that, rather than having derogatory thoughts about white van drivers (from long experiences of cycle commuting) when one passes by, my heart goes all a flutter.

Well today I hired one. A van of my own. And I couldn’t stop smiling as I drove it away (until I stalled almost immediately, right in front of a cyclist on Dunbarton Road). It’s not white though, it’s a charming shade of red to match the kitchen.

I collected a sofa bed from the Salvation Army (my last-minute solution to the twin problems of nothing to sit on at Christmas and nothing for the agèd parents to sleep on at Christmas).

And while I was there bought another leather sofa (£50!) and four gorgeous chairs (£40!) simply because I CAN. Because I now have a VAN. And you simply never know when you will next have a van to transport your Salvation Army bargains about in. And that was when I got the parking ticket.
Then I went to collect the bed and other charity-shop furniture that I have been stockpiling. Looking back at the blog I can see that I have had that bed stacked against the window of our bedroom since March 2013 (that’s 2 years and 9 months). In 2013 I must have had a rather unrealistic idea of how long it actually takes to build a house. With the bed packed into the van, life is transformed with space to walk round to my side of the bed AND a view out of the window (and I found a few long lost items as a bonus).

It’s a good job that it is really nice bed, or it would have been rather irritating to have it clogging up our life for so long.

And then the van was full and all the other stuff needed for a Christmas at the house had to be somehow levered into tiny spaces and crammed into the front seats.

I eventually set off after 8pm from Glasgow and made good progress through torrential rain. I managed to find Radio 4 (are transit drivers allowed to listen to Radio 4?) and was just about to turn off at Tarbert when I came across a police roadblock. There’s often a roadblock there and they’ve never stopped me but this time they waved me over.

They looked at the huge pile of bags and crockery and glasses and presents on the front seats and I said “it looks similar in the back”. “I think we’d better have a look through it then” said one of them, which was swiftly clarified as a joke when they saw my alarmed face. They let me go after letting me know one of the head-lights was out on the van.

All was well until ballachulish where I passed another police car parked at the side of the road. About 5 minutes later I saw blindingly bright flashing lights behind me. It was then I learnt what the speed limit for a van is and, was sent on my way, contrite and grateful for understanding and charming policemen, this time driving like a tourist in a rented camper taking in the scenery and searching for a likely lay-by.

So, I declare my glorious, and extremely short-lived career as a white van driver officially over, having had more scrapes with authority in a three hour period than in the past three years put together. But, as the annoying saying goes, where one door shuts another will open, and at my day-job I’ve been working on a project on that fabulous, rare and internationally important habitat, the western Atlantic woodlands. It’s those damp, dripping, mossy, lichenous broadleaf woodlands you get in this part of the world. They have more species of mosses, bryophyte and lichens than the rainforests and they positively drip with atmosphere and life.

While creating a map for the project area I couldn’t help but notice that Cuil Bay happens to be roughly in the middle of the area (funny that), surrounded by some lovely examples of woodland. In fact the cycle route Ballachullish to Oban takes you though some particularly lovely examples of woodland, and pulling out baby rhododendrons has provided some surprisingly good therapy to me while on difficult phone calls regarding the house. So it is certainly a great project to be working on and one which I plan to stay involved with in the future. We’ll see where that leads.

The review of the year

Posted on December 20, 2015 by nager

Since every newspaper, magazine, TV show and media outlet is doing its Highlights of 2015, I thought we should have a review of significant moments from the Cuil Bay blog in the past year.

It certainly has been a significant year- we’ve gone from foundations to an almost entirely finished house. So here are some key blogs from the last year – not the highlights, as many class as barrel-scraping, hair-tearing lowlights. But I hope you enjoy them nonetheless.

Number 1: 2015’s most popular blog

By about a million miles, the letter I wrote to the CEO of Openreach while trying desperately to aquire a phone line, has been the most popular post on my blog. It resulted in me getting my own personal customer service assistant who called me daily to check how I was, and a phone line at the end of a few weeks, so it had the desired effect.

Number 2: Highest High

Written in a moment of madness when I was feeling overly happy. It didn’t last long, but it was worth recording for posterity. The agonys and the ecstasies

Number 3: Lowest Low (well this is one of very many of them)

…and this is why the ecstasy didn’t last long. Discovering two pieces of metalwork that presumably should be in your house does that. The mystery of the missing metalwork

Number 4: Survival skills and escapism

It’s been stressful building a house, and having a busy job, and having a family to keep in some kind of semi-organised harmony, so I’ve needed some strategies for survival. There’s certainly loud music, runs in wild places, swims in wild seas, and dancing at my personal silent disco. In fact rediscovering some CDs of 90s rave music has seen me through the very worst of it. There’s also the sofa, wine, iplayer, and an extremely understanding husband. Sometimes writing the blog helps, but one thing I’ve done quite a bit of this year, and have wanted to do for ages, is spend time sleeping out in the mountains again.

Up in the mountains and in the woods. It puts the rest of life into perspective. Here’s a blog from a sleep in the woods where I discovered that, unlike sleeping on top of a hill, the deep dark wood in a storm is a simply terrifying place.

Number 5: Discovering a good pun is almost as good as a sleep up a mountain in a storm to make you feel better.

If I hadn’t had a sense of humour about all the horrors then life would really have been irretrievably miserable. Here is something that made me laugh for a week (I don’t think you’ll find it that funny though….) EPC Difficulties

Number 6: A vlogging debut

I struggled long and hard deciding whether to post here any of the video-blogs that I did during the build when the awfulness of the situation had crippled my ability to write. But, no matter how toe curling they are, and no matter how un-cool my hat, I felt I should represent one of them here. So I hope you enjoy this blog: Weather nightmares, Articulated lorry nightmares, Crane nightmares and Sartorial head-wear nightmares.

Number 7: Builders

Here’s another blog that is slightly toe curling for me to read, one of a series I did on builders. To quote from the blog …

It’s difficult to reflect on the house build in this blog without sounding, even to myself, like a hopelessly trusting naïf. Sometimes, in the cold light cast back by retrospection, my decision-making seems verging on the self-sabotaging.

And I certainly have made my mistakes, but I have been fortunate to find a builder that has managed to sort out a lot of problems. This blog about the windows was only one of those mistakes. There were others, even bigger.

Numbers 8 and 9: The rest of my life

But it’s not all been about house-building this year. I’ve had my job to do and I’ve had a lot of fun to plan and excecute. I’ve managed a few blogs on that stuff too.
Work and fun coincided on a trip to Ailsa Craig and this blog finds me on a shingle beach at midnight sitting by a loudspeaker blaring out the most extraordinary sounds: A night of Storm Petrels

And of course there’s always skiing adventures to be had when the nights start drawing in and the gales drift the snow enough to venture up a hill. I share my pontifications on that peculiar sport here Six skills for Scottish Skiing

Number 10: Kat’s final house blog

But the build isn’t over yet. It might seem very neat that it is the end of a year and the (nearly) end of a year of building the house. But my number 10 blog hasn’t been written yet.

It’s going to be the blog where the house is done and I have a house-warming resembling the parties at the end of Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s River Cottage series, with an aspirational community gathering around a giant bonfire where I roast home grown food and everyone is having interesting and highly intellectual chat about how to save the seas, or school dinners, or something like that. Or it will be like the end of one of Nigella’s programmes where she whips a bowl of cream between her bossoms and serves choux pastry to her family and friends in a fairy-light strewn garden and everyone is charming and beautiful. There will be a mild, hazy light, flowers on gently rolling banks, trestle tables laden with edible goodies and everywhere happy friends, happy neighbours and happy builders architects, plumbers, electricians, joiners, and the rest. There will definitely be loud music and it will be loud very very late.

But, that blog is still in my head, and I have to hold it there until everything is actually done. And that is the hard bit.

The Twelve Months of Building

Posted on December 20, 2015 by nager

A wee Christmassy take on the past 12 months on the building site now the agony is (mainly) over, the waiting is nearly finished and the joy is starting to seep in.

In the first month of building, my project gave to me:

A form with a building warrant fee

In the second month of building, my project gave to me:

Two long delays ….

In the third month of building, my project gave to me:

Three feet of water ….

In the fourth month of building, my project gave to me:

Four walls of silver ….

In the fifth month of building, my project gave to me:

Five weeks of gales …

In the sixth month of building, my project gave to me:

Men to move the windows …

In the seventh month of building, my project gave to me:

Holes through the beam … (it’s not supposed to look like that)

In the eighth month of building, my project gave to me:

JOY! The cladding’s finished

In the ninth month of building, my project gave to me:

NO SODDING PROGRESS ….

In the tenth month of building, my project gave to me: Time to sack a builder ….

(not them, they’re just building a shed)

In the eleven (and twelfth) months of building, my project gave to me:

Two plumbers plumbing

Three electricians wiring

One taper taping

Ronnie’s digger digging

Three floorers flooring

One tiler tiling

Loads of joiners joining

DRIVE UP THE ROAD!

Four weeks til Christmas,

Got an EPC,

What’s a schedule one?

pause for effect ….

And a kitchen and a loo to do a wee!

Tom of corriewoodworking.com

Kitchen in. Kitchen out. Shake it all about.

Posted on December 16, 2015 by nager

At last. AT LAST. The kitchen is nearly done. I say nearly because it should have all been done and it isn’t, because nothing ever goes to plan.

I knew that something was going to go wrong with installing the worktops on Sunday, but it was too late to rearrange Stephen the stonemason who has been crafting a pile of old snooker tables into smooth shiny worktops.

I had to arrange the kitchen around the maximum size of a piece of snooker table slate, which took a bit of changing things around with the original plan. But I thought slate would be nice – the house being near Ballachullish and all, and I nearly died when I saw how much a proper slate worktop costs. So I went to my local salvage yard, did a deal on five bits of snooker-table and then set about finding someone who could make them into worktops.

While I phoned round every stone mason in Glasgow, my worktops sat in the salvage yard, waiting to be fetched.

After most had said no, I spoke to Steven who said he hadn’t worked in slate before but he thought he’d quite like the challenge of something new. (Or at least that’s what I assumed he’d said as I had a bit of trouble understanding him, despite my long long apprenticeship in Glaswegian, and despite two daughters who regularly tell me I can’t pronounce the letter “R” and try and get me to speak like them)

In fact, in the end, I had to arrange to go and meet him somewhere in town one lunchtime so I could speak to him face to face to make sure we were understanding each other. He said he was down at the Spiritualist church quite often (which rather freaked me out), but in the interests of the slate worktops I arranged to meet him there and, to my great relief, found him up some scaffolding pointing at bits of sandstone and covered in stone dust.

So Stephen said he’d pick up the snooker tables and do the necessary. I checked with the salvage yard a few weeks later. They were still there. And a few weeks after that.

Eventually, at the moment I was about to despair, he fetched them to his yard where I met him again with some sketches (this time he showed up in a shiny suit and pointy shoes and a 90s shiny, pointy car, all of which rather surprised me)

From then on I would contact him from time to time to tell him things had been pushed back. And he was always intensely relaxed about all the date shuffling and uncertainty (which at least is something to be grateful for).

But this time I didn’t call to push the worktops back again, although perhaps I should have done when I found out that there was a problem with the kitchen.

Cue another aside about the kitchen …. Tom, who made the kitchen, is a good friend from University, who after a high-flying degree and a stint trying not to climb the greasy pole in London, decided to retrain as a cabinet maker and move to a wet, isolated and be-forested part of Stirlingshire to make kitchens and furniture in a shed.

He has built me an absolutely beautiful kitchen. I gave him the sizes things needed to be and chose the colours (‘can I have some of it red like that barn outside?’) but he decided on most other things, which cut down the number of decisions I needed to make. (Though I think I suggested the bookcase on the end and the tall-slidey door).

He incorporated a sink that has been sitting in my front garden since I found it abandoned on the street about ten years ago. Over that period it has been a pond, at request of husband, and then, once declared a wildlife deathtrap, it became an algae-growing garden ‘ornament’. When I visited the house to see progress on the kitchen it still had the algae and the distinct smell of pond water.

I also wanted Tom to incorporate an ex-lab bench I fished out of a skip at the university and took home in a black cab when I was doing my PhD about 16 years ago. This lab-bench became an enormous coffee table when we sawed the legs off it to get it into the cab and has taken up most of the room in two sitting rooms since then. It wouldn’t be for the whole kitchen – the rest is slate. However since it would cost the same to have an oak worktop on that bit instead, due to the labour needed, I went with that. The lab-bench will be my dining room table (once we stick some bits of wood on again to lengthen the legs).

So the kitchen is beautiful, and I did so love it when I saw it. But it’s in all skew. One wall is warped and goes in in the middle. I probably did a blog about that ruddy wall which caused me so much grief to get in in the first place….

However fortunately that run has the stove in the middle of it and so the units on each side tilt inwards (but parallel with the wall) and Stephen simply left the worktops a little long and cut them on the angle alongside the stove sides.

The more serious problem was that Tom put the kitchen on the other side on an angle all the way along and not parallel with the wall. This is what I found out the day before the worktops were due to arrive. It was all due to a socket being right behind the fridge which, when the plug was in, pushed the fridge outwards which meant that the whole run of units came outwards. But, since a drawer had to come out and run past the handles on a unit at right angles, he put the whole kitchen on a tilt so that it would work.

This meant it was simply impossible to fit the worktops, they overhung by a completely different amount on each side of the kitchen and also from one end to the other of the units on one side.

We decided we needed to get the whole kitchen moved and so Stephen and his team left for the long drive back to Glasgow.

The first woman working on the house!

It’s now getting rather close to Christmas (which we are going to spend at the house even if it involves eating sandwiches off a piece of plywood propped up on boxes). So the plan is the electrcian comes in this week to finish off, Tom comes to move kitchen on Tuesday and Stephen returns to finish with the worktops. The only thing outstanding then will be the tap for the kitchen sink which I seem to have lost.

Don’t they look lovely? Snooker tables do scrub up well – especially when you have little inclusions of fools gold in them. Hoping they’ll be less liable to scratching once they are treated.

Swiss Survival Guide: Surviving St. Moritz

Posted on December 12, 2015 by nager

The advantage of skiing in Switzerland is that noone would possibly know that you bought your ski jacket and salopettes in Lidl.

They do actually have Lidl in Switzerland, it’s just that nobody goes, or at least they would never admit it. And you can be doubly confident that none of the Bogner/Mongler/Cartier ski suit wearing punters in St Moritz shop in Lidl (yes apparently Cartier make ski-wear….)

If you say something like ‘Wow Lidl costs a third of that duopoly coop/migro that has such a grip on the shopping habits of your nation’ then you are likely to be excommunicated from your Swiss in-laws. But at least a small bag of shopping doesn’t cost £150.

Now there seems to have been some excitement in the financial markets the past few days which, if I’ve got this right, means that overnight our visits to Switzerland will now, not just be a bit more expensive, but 40% more expensive.

And that got me thinking what kind of things don’t cost the earth in Switzerland? As specifically, how to not spend too much money when you happen to be in the play-ground of Oligarchs and winter habitat of the English toff, St Moritz.

I started with food and here’s the blog of a week of Swiss recepies based on a theme of starch and cheese which may be light on the pocket but are certainly rather heavy on the stomach.

But there’s also lots of things to do that won’t break the bank and here’s a list:

1. Watch the races on the Olympia Bob:

The world’s only natural ice bob run (there is no concrete underneath). They practice every day in the season but if you are there for a race it is even better.

You can walk down a really good footpath from the top near the Kulm Hotel all the way to Celerina and get the bus or train back. Stop at the bar on the amazing horseshoe bend to watch the action.

2. Relaxing Sledging:

Top day out. Take the train to Preda, and head down the old road, that is shut in winter, to Berguns by sledge. It is 6km long and really picturesque as it winds over and under the World Heritage Site railway line. When you get there, lots of Gluwein stalls await and the train back up to do it again.

(It’s not such a bargain day out of you have to hire a sledge though)

3. Oligarch Watching:

It is really rather good entertainment to spot outrageous bling all over the place. Lots of furs and lots of diamonds and lots of ridiculously oversized dark glasses. Walk down the main street passing every high end luxury brand you can think of. Look out for heated car-park spaces so they are kept clear of ice. There is a whole road that has under-tarmac heating to keep it ice free between the Palace Hotel and Casa Veliga. Be horrified at how the planet is going to hell in a handcart. And how the world’s elite live. Then wander into Hotel Kulm in your walking boots for a cocktail.

4. Ursli path:

A lovely walking path themed around the fantiastic children’s book ‘A Bell for Ursli’ taking you up to Salastrains. Take a sledge and kids can sledge down (it’s not officially a sledging route so be prepared to be frowned at by Swiss people).

The path finishes at the Salastrains nursery slope where the hut that was used to film the original Heidi TV series now lives. Go in. Be Heidi and Geiserpeter.

…. and read “A Bell for Ursli” before you go.

5. The Cresta Run:

The last bastion of the English toff at St Moritz, now that Russian Ologarchs have taken over. You can hear the plummy voices from miles away as the announcer calls out their double barrelled names ‘Number four. Lord Thisleton-Lumley’ as they throw themselves headfirst in plus-fours and vintage leather shoes.

No women allowed. Which makes them look even more ridiulous if you just head over to the Olympia Bob and see the amazing women from the Swiss skeleton team who would burn them all off in an instant.

Ode to my portaloo

Posted on December 2, 2015 by nager

O portaloo. O portaloo.
It’s sad to see the back of you

Your inky depths of lurid blue

I hold so dear

O portaloo. O portaloo.

I’ll never do another poo

And try in vain to flush it through

To leave it clear

In the house I have, brand new,

A bathroom; shower, sink and loo,

I have no further use for you,

Or you for I, I fear.

It’s been a week of much action. Lights are on, showers in, Loos went in eventually, wood floor in. Access ramp being built, visit from building control officer, visit from Ronnie digger driver to plan the landscaping, doors going in. Slate tiles on floor finished.

It’s actually been quite fun building a house this week. And it’s only Wednesday. We are back up at the weekend to see how progress is rest of the week.