Author: Seb Palmer

Today I finished painting the downstairs lounge in Cupcake. I may do a bit more, and make the rear wall of the fireplace end of the room (just visible at left, behind the guitar, in the pic above) Cupcake as well, instead of the yellowy-orange we inherited from Clive. But, for now, this means all the walls and other bits and bobs that were in the rather too pale and cold off-white are in the new nicer, warmer colour.

I should’ve taken before and after pics of the under-stairs area, as I stripped out some horrible plasterboard, loaded with Artex, which had been slathered on in Van-Gogh-feeling-seasick impasto swirls. That went to the dump, and I’ve left the underneath of the stairs as raw wood for now, as you can see.

I have possible plans brewing in my noggin, re putting some under stair built-in cupboards here, possibly even with an area for stowing the MX5 hardtop. But for now I just rearranged the furniture a tiny bit, swapping the table and desk/cabinet around, and moving the shoe boxes/rack over to where Teresa keeps all her shoes, under the window, by the radiator.

I’ve moved the tatty studio-armchair (covered with a very dark brown throw in the pic above, to the right of the lamp) tight up against the red sofa, where before there was a gap. This has meant the lamp had to come forward a few inches, so the base cleared the feet of the chairs.

I also moved the clock-mounting screw higher up the wall, so the clock is now well clear of the top of the lamp, where formerly it was too low, and partially obscured. Now we just need to get the clock cleaned and up and running. It’s interesting how in the daylight Cupcake looks like clotted cream, whereas in the evenings it appears to take on a richer more custardy colour.

Teresa suggested we watch The Ladykillers tonight. I wanted to watch a fresh episode of Columbo – I’m working my way through the complete boxed set – but she got her way. And it has to be said, even though I’ve seen it several times, The Ladykillers really is superb.

Alec Guinness is great, as the creepy Prof. Marcus, leading his rag-tag band of ne’erdowells on a ‘stick up caper’. Katie Johnson is equally fab as the dotty old Mrs. Wilberforce, who lets a room to the gang.

The plot is great, but I won’t give it away here. Suffice it to say that Prof. Marcus’ team are working together for the first time, and masquerading as a group of enthusiastic amateur musicians. The prof’ plans to make use not just of Mrs Wilberforce’s home – which, like her, is a relic from a bygone era – but her, as the unwitting mule for the lolly.

But the prof’ hasn’t taken into account the unforeseen consequences of her well-meaning busy-body nature. From her wonky pictures, to General Gordon and her other parakeets, she is a law unto herself.

As the prof’s well laid plans unravel, the nature of their crimes assumes a darker hue, as they begin to plan to be rid of her. But she is a force to be reckoned with.

The ensemble cast is great. Herbert Lom and Peter Sellers meet pre-Clouseau, and, with Cecil Parker and Danny Green, form the gang. There are small but strong supporting supporting roles for such familiar faces as Jack ‘Dixon of Dock Green’ Warner (a cop, what else?), and Kenneth Connor (taxi driver) and Frankie Howard (barrow boy), the latter two perhaps most familiar from the later Carry On films.

The setting is also worthy of note. Like her home, Mrs Wilberforce is a relic of a bygone era, a holdover from the Victorian/Edwardian age, polite, moralistic, and heavily floral, lodged amidst terraced tenements and the industrial grime of a large railway terminus.

She embodies qualities that range from lightly quaint to deeply irritating, but is stoical, decent, and ultimately very sweet and hugely endearing. Her simple good naturedness is the nexus around which the grubbier workaday business of the contemporary world revolves, giving the whole film, in addition to its darkly comic side, a wistful romanticism.

A really terrific film.

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P.S. I did also get to watch Columbo, Grand Deceptions, which starts with – joy of joys – slow panning shots of an ACW (American Civil War) diorama. I’ll probably post a review of that at some future point on my mini-military blog.

We have friends coming for a Sunday roast later today. Getting the painting and decorating finished in time was reasonably hard work, as Teresa insisted I refresh the paint on the stairs, which were rather tatty.

Found a good spot for the mirror I took off the recent FC wardrobe, in the corner where I formerly had one of my sets of model display shelves.

Having the downstairs tidier is lovely. I’ve stuck the hard-top for my MX5, which currently lives in the lounge, on the car. I’m going to have to find some way to store it that doesn’t impinge on our living space. There’s a butler sink under the stairs, under the white sheet. Need to find somewhere to stash that as well!

The stairs certainly do look a lot nicer now. Only thing is, now the wear and tear to the paint on the handrail is more noticeable.

Teresa also insisted I pack away my little Gretsch Catalina Club Jazz kit, which I’ve had set up in the lounge. I haven’t put it away, but just taken it down and stacked it in the corner.

This morning I finished painting the downstairs hall and stairs area, which looked lovely in the early morning sunlight. I’m painting purely with brushes, which is more work (than rollers), but also more fun.

The ‘party wall’, which we share with our immediate neighbours, in the older cooler off-white colour, mid-way through clearing the area for painting. Still no real idea what to do about those pesky exposed light fittings. One thought is to install some of those inverted conical uplighter doodads.

Mid-way through painting the longest wall section. This gives a good indication of the degree of difference in colour and atmosphere. It’s so much nicer, warmer and cosier. Really need to change the main light fitting! The three part ‘chandelier’ is what we inherited from the previous owner, and not to our tastes – well, mine, at any rate – at all.

I also painted a fair bit of the old chocolate brown woodwork, in the lovely Permoglaze glossy white. This stuff stinks, and is oil-based, requiring cleaning and thinning etc with White Spirit. It also required two coats. I’m going to need more, to do all the skirting boards, and other wooden bits and bobs.

I now have to wait for the painted woodwork to dry out fairly fully before I can rehang the last of the three curtains at that end of the room. But I have to say that the dining room end of our long through lounge ground floor now looks quite lovely!

Teresa and I love a game of Scrabble. We haven’t found the time to play in ages.

Today she was off work for a medical check-up, and I’ve stopped teaching at my Thursday school, on account of it being too far away – Bishops Stortford – to remain viable.

So we got out the Scrabble. And here’s how the board looked at end of play.

One thing I enjoy about our games is that, unlike the old-timers who once thrashed us at Scrabble Club we made the mistake of venturing into, we aren’t hell-bent on winning via as many two-letter combinations as are humanly possible. Certainly for me it’s a game that’s just about the fun of thinking of words.

Cooking pumpkin pie, having had pumpkin soup for a starter, and a meaty rice dish for mains. The fireplace looks nice!

We’re watching an old BBC adaptation of M. R. James’ The Stalls of Barchester. It’s perfect Halloween viewing! Dripping Victorian stuffiness and academic/cloistered mustiness, with just the right touch of creeping horror. Really great!

The Stalls of Barchester has finished, and we’re now into A Warning To The Curious, which is set in Norfolk, and filled with places we know and love.

As Peter Vaughan digs into the sandy soil at Holkham Bay, to find one of the lost crowns of Olde England, defying the ghost of William Ager, spooky music – the music/soundtrack is utterly superb (poss using some Ligeti?) – wiffles away, and our pumpkin pies are ready:

Last time I made the pastry base as well. But on this occasion, with no time and bring very tired from my first day back at work, we opted to use ready made pastry bases. And they are very good. But the filling is completely home made.

God, these M. R. James things are good! They’re the perfect mix of pagan weirdness and Victorian Christo-academic spookiness, all filmed with height-of-the-BBC’s early ’70s greatness… classic!

A while back we decided to repaint the dining room end of the lounge a slightly warmer colour. It was red when we moved in, and I’d already painted it a pale off-white. But it was too cool, verging on cold.

Teresa demanded something more yellow, warmer. And she was right! We chose ‘cupcake’, from B&Q’s Valspar range. I made a small start quite a while back, just with a sample pot. I finally got a proper pot full a while later, and today I painted the bookshelf alcove.

I also went to work upgrading the bookshelves themselves. There are four, each of which is a different depth (well, two of them are the same). Originally they were just rough planks, resting on little wooden brackets.   They still are, but I wanted to put a nice decorative face on each of the shelves, so I bought some trim from B&Q, cut it in to four pieces, cut them to size, and then tacked them on.

I took the trouble to prep the painting area with Frog tape, at each stage. Whilst doing so I noticed how nice the shelves and trim look, with their contrasting colours/grains (even though both are pine). So I took a pic, as I was about to paint them white.

The gloss white paint, from Permoglaze, is absolutely fab. One of the best domestic paints I’ve ever had the pleasure of using. Sadly it seems the once massive Permoglaze range is currently being run down. I’ve put one coat on so far. I’ll do another tomorrow. The contrast between white gloss and the new matt yellow-ish colour, ‘cupcake’, is really nice. Just what we wanted!

Later the same night:

Got to be patient. Second coat of white gloss won’t be thoroughly dry till tomorrow, 10 a.m. Then I’ll be able to load up the books. Have to say I’m very pleased. The ‘cupcake’ colour is exactly right, warm, soft, cosy. And the gloss white woodwork, with the nice ogee facing, really sets it off.

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The next day…

Mostly filled with art books at present, plus some miscellaneous and the omnipresent military/Napoleonic stuff! We may put a curtain rail and curtain across the aclove, so we can shut it off as and when we want to, to de-clutter the view.

We’re convinced a previous guest of ours – a friend who stays with us regularly – wandered off with our spare key last time he stayed over. He says he doesn’t have it. We reckon he just hasn’t bothered checking properly! Still, we may be wrong, and it may turn up here at some point.

Anyway, I got some new keys cut today, for our AirB&B guests. I decided I wanted to make them less easy to lose, and that key-fobs might be the way. None of the ones at the key-cutting shop were suitable/nice enough. So I resolved to make some wooden ones.

They’ll be big ‘n’ chunky, in a nice dark hardwood I wish I knew the name of, and I’ll be putting the AirB&B logo on them. To that end I printed logos, and glued them to the wood.

As many have observed before me, the current AirB&B logo resembles female genitalia more than the various concepts it supposedly embodies. Maybe that’s why I don’t mind breaking my usual embargo on ‘brand’ labels?

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Some time later… Hmmm, well, as can be seen below, that didn’t work! The one on the left I carved using some mini-chisels I bought via Amazon, for model making. They cut through styrene fine. But they wandered all over the place in this hard wood.

I painted in the carved area, and then sanded back. The idea is sound, but it just didn’t work here. The grain of the wood has all these fissures, so even if I had carved the logo superbly, the paint would have bled into the fissures, and never looked as crisp and neat as I wanted.

For the one on the right, I traced a dotted line through the centre of the line described by the logo, in the manner of a renaissance painter transferring their design from paper to a painting surface, with pin-pricks. I then carved as light and accurate a line as I could, following the pricks (sounds a bit rude!).

I wish I’d photographed that stage, as it actually looked pretty good. I then tried to manually move the wood underneath a dill bit, in the drill-press, to ‘draw’ a bevelled channel in the groove I’d carved out. Once again, however, wobble and wandering ruined the design.

So I’ve opted instead to just stick a large plain wooden doodad in the key ring, and keep it ultra-simple. Disappointing. Especially given how much time I wasted on trying to make it work.

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* College, Cambridge, the ‘Gate of Honour’. My dad had a pot labelled Caius, in which he kept old, random, spare keys…

Teresa asked me to carve the pumpkin today. I scooped out the seeds, and most of the sticky, stringy innards, before using an ice-cream scoop to get the flesh out. Looking forward to pumpkin pie, and pumpkin soup!

I prefer to go for old-fashioned simple designs. This is my most trad/goofy so far. I’ve kept the seeds for planting, and the flesh for eating. Wooo, ooo-woooh-oooh… ha, ha, ha, ha…

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Of course I did some work in my shed. I got the heater I had off Freecycle a while back working, and I cut down my home-made laminated top for the ‘tool chest’.

I was hoping to do some trim for the shelves in the lounge, but I’ve kind of run out of steam now. I might still do it, later this evening. But at present I feel exhausted. Tired enough I could easily go to sleep here and now; it’s only 5.30 pm! I felt a bit off colour today, probably on account of the flu jab I had (as did Teresa) at the weekend.

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Here are pics of the pumpkin flesh – still quite a bit – even after using half, or thereabouts, to make the soup. Which, though I say it myself, is delicious!

We, or rather I, have a fairly vast book collection. In our previous home (skipping over our short stay in a Grade II listed Georgian property)  I built a set of shelves covering one entire wall of our lounge. Whilst this didn’t accommodate all our books, it dealt with the lion’s share. So a few other areas of shelving around the place held the rest.

Since moving to March we’ve never yet had enough shelving. So many books have remained either in storage, or simply messily piled in various places. We’ve acquired several sets of shelves, some really quite nice, off Freecycle. One is fully laden in our guest room, another is over-filled on the landing. And their are several in the box room, also full to overflowing.

As is my way, I also like to build my own shelves. There are now several around the house: in the lounge some are built into an alcove (I plan to work on these today), and in our master bedroom there are two, both made from rough scrap wood, one pretty shoddy, and the other actually quite decent. A third larger set, made from poor quality timber, fell apart under the strain. The cleat for hanging the latter remains on the wall.

I’ve also made several sets of mini-shelves, one as a paint rack, for my Vallejo model paints, and two for displaying my models on. Then there are three very rough boxes, recycled from the broken bookshelf mentioned earlier, in which I store what remains of my vinyl LP collection.*

And we also have need of other types of storage, such as hooks for hanging guitars. I’ve put up four so far, two in the lounge and two in the guest room. I think there should also be at least one in the master bedroom – prob above the recently restored chest o’drawers/Philips record-player? This last one I hope to make and install today.

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* I sold about half my records at boot sales over the summer. Kind of wish I hadn’t. But we needed the money.