Living with the Weather

In principle at least it was a good idea. We could get away from all the fun of the post-Christmas sales and have a few days of peace and quiet in France. Roaring log fires, a book or two, warmth and creature comforts including a bottle or two of wine, and a glass or two of port to accompany the remains of the Christmas stilton; even an invigorating cycle ride to the boulanger to collect the obligatory baguette each morning. Happiness!

At the cold and snowy Eurotunnel terminus on Thursday afternoon we realized that quite a number of people had the same sort of idea, and there was a delay while the inevitable backlog was cleared and cars with the letter “H” were allowed to embark.

There didn’t seem to be so much snow around when we eventually arrived in France, but as we neared our village we found that there was in fact sufficient snow and ice to make the surrounding hills (and the driveway to our “maison secondaire”) quite treacherous.

No matter we arrived safely. The house was still standing but quite chilly in the sub-zero temperatures. More so in that, during our four or five week’s absence the house had run out of central heating oil. The wife (particularly with her Scottish blood) and I are made of stern stuff and we knew that this presented only a small problem. You don’t have to have baths brimming with hot water, and steaming radiators in order to survive, and anyway we were able to negotiate a delivery of oil for the following morning.

Friday morning dawned with a furious red sky, enough to have the wife clamber out of bed to inspect it and say that she had never seen such a thing. Sure enough, we were in for quite a day of meteorological surprises. But first (and happily) the oil man arrived with a thousand litres of fioul. “Une heure” he told us to wait before we could restart the boiler. During that hour-long wait the wind started to howl and snow gusted down; I couldn’t get the laptop to work and we seemed to be losing TV reception because of the extreme conditions. Then, with ten minutes to go before restarting the boiler, we had a total power cut. So no heat (apart from one gas fire and one log fire), not enough natural daylight to read by, no hot water, and snow beginning to drift in our driveway. We had a torch or two, candles and plenty of food and drink, sufficient logs to last a few days before we started to burn the furniture, and the car didn’t look a good bet at all.

Three hours later we had electricity back and, after some anxious moments, a working boiler and a return (inside the house) to near normality. Soon afterwards the snow changed to rain, the main effect of which was to turn the graveled area outside our house into a skating rink. Last night enough rain poured down to melt most of the remaining snow and ice and we look forward to finding the area beset by flooding in the near future.

However as I sit typing away on a now-functioning laptop in a warm house, with the sun unexpectedly streaming through the window, it gives me a moment to reflect on the whimsical way our weather system works and, generally, how poorly equipped we are to deal with real periods of extreme weather. Certainly we had logs and candles, working gas cylinders and a good torch. But batteries run down (as do gas cylinders and food supplies). We had taken the precaution of bringing the car battery charger from England, but that is not much use if you have no mains electricity. I think I’ll review our stocks of logs, food and batteries, and maybe I’ll buy a generator on E-Bay which I’ll tow around behind my car wherever I go.

Temperance or Temperate?

It was Saturday; it was cold, but the sun shone brightly and nowhere more than at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. The wife and I were on a pre-Christmas outing with friends who were sensible enough to insist that we had a look at Dale Chihuly's extraordinary glass sculptures. There must be more than a thousand of them and they pervade every corner of the gardens and greenhouses, bringing great swathes of colour and brilliance to complement rather than detract from extraordinary plants and stunning architecture. Although the Chihuly exhibits have been in place since May, there is a Christmas feel to them with cascades of colourful glass balloons in the Temperate House, and an extraordinary "Sun" in the Princess of Wales Conservatory. I urge my readers to have a look before the exhibits are all removed in mid-January.


Chihuly is a prolific artist. Exhibitions of his glasswork fan out around the world from his home workshops in Seattle and Tacoma. Currently he is exhibiting at Kew and simultaneously (in similar vein) at the Fairchild Botanic Gardens, Coral Gables, Florida. There are further showings of his work right now in galleries in Toronto, Boca Raton, Bellevue, Orlando Florida, and Kalamazoo Michigan. His 2006 schedule includes more Botanic Gardens (in Missouri) and more galleries all over the USA. He is piratical in appearance (he lost an eye in a road accident when driving in the UK to visit the artist Peter Blake) and wears a black eyepatch.

But back in Kew it is not only the plants and glass sculpture that evoke Christmas. A temporary ice rink is in place and, viewed from the gallery of the Temperate House you catch a glimpse of Lowry-esque matchstick figures on skates.


And, particularly memorable, is the Thames skiff overflowing with a profusion of coloured glass, yet almost concealed from view in a quiet corner of the Palm House pond.


The only difficulty in an otherwise perfect day was that the Ranting Nappa had appointed himself "Nominated Driver" for the journey back to the distant South. Dinner isn't quite the same on a Saturday night when is behaving oneself from a temperance point-of-view. Still, next time I'll pilot a Thames skiff instead of driving a car!

Secondary Retailing; Ant and Dec

Okay, second things first. The Daily Telegraph really has taken over from The Times as the bastion of crusty-establishment Olde England. In keeping with their interest in all matters Tory the paper lauded Carol Thatcher on her victory on ITV’s I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here show. The Telegraph report by James Burleigh and Hugh Davies (it takes two to write up a world event of this magnitude) included the following piece of impenetrable journalistic pomposity:

“Speaking afterwards to the programme’s presenters, Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly, Thatcher described her ordeal ….”

I’m surprised that they didn’t refer to the presenters as Mister Anthony McPartlin and Mister Declan Donnelly.

It is interesting to hear that manufacturers are getting extremely uppity about secondary retailing (where one shopkeeper buys off another, rather than following his regular lines of supply). A recent survey has shown that nearly forty per cent of small traders buy part of their stock from supermarkets rather than the more traditional cash-and-carry outlets. At the insistence of their suppliers the supermarkets are promising to try and stop serving secondary retailers such as these.

But why, oh why, for Heaven’s sake? I, like most booksellers, have purchased multiple copies of Harry Potter books from Asda at their loss-leading prices in the past. I’ve then sold them on at a better margin than I would have if I had bought them from a wholesaler. Why not? It’s straightforward trading. If Sainsbury sell bottles of Baileys for four pounds below the cash-and-carry price, then good luck to them. But why should they have to refuse to sell them to the owner of the corner shop who can then sell them to the public at a more competitive price.

If manufacturers really want a Great Britain where the public are encouraged to purchase their goods exclusively from the four or five major supermarket chains, then fine. I’m off. Surely there must be some law to stop restrictive practices and discrimination in retailing. I can understand a sign in a supermarket saying “SPECIAL TODAY - 50% OFF - LIMITED TO ONE PER CUSTOMER ONLY”. But for trade associations to go and actively seek legislation to outlaw secondary retailing? Bah, humbug!

South Coast Pantomime Season

I have to agree with the BBCs Alan Hansen that “Pantomime season has started and there's none better than down on the South Coast”. With a cast of characters that includes Harry Redknapp, Dave “Harry” Bassett and Dennis Wise (playing Buttons), the Portsmouth-Southampton managership fiasco is as good as any TV soap opera ever gets.

We have Milan Mandaric and Rupert Lowe playing the Ugly Sisters (Mandaric’s gargoyle-like facial features require no additional make-up at all). There are also no less than two Cinderellas in Sir Clive Woodward (who better to bring a breath of fresh air to Southampton?) and Lawrie Sanchez (surely the obvious choice to manage poor old Portsmouth). Another of my favourite managers – Neil Warnock of Sheffield United – has already played his cameo role and returned home (what a sensible man).

Quite how Harry Redknapp got himself into such a muddle defies belief; and involving two clubs whose hatred of one another makes Arsenal-Spurs and Norwich-Ipswich rivalries look like mild spats amongst friends. Not even Liverpool-Everton, or the two Manchesters, or the two Sheffields can match the pure, passionate detestation that these teams feel for each other.

My guess is that by this time next year Mr Redknapp will be managing some team far, far away from the South Coast. Portsmouth will be relegated from the Premiership and will be scrapping with Southampton in the Championship relegation zone.

Pity the players! Pity the fans!

Blog 101 – Big Brother is Watching

You never know who is reading ones blog output, but receiving emails to mark the one hundredth (see passim) means that there are people out there in the ether keeping an eye on events. And so onwards to the one hundred and first in the series. 101 is of course the first three figure number to be palindromic. England beat Australia in a one-day international at Edgbaston by 101 runs in June 1977 (J.K.Lever four wickets for 29 runs as the Australians slumped to 70 all out; not out batsman J.K.Lever 27). How we enjoyed that day!

Although I’ve watched the TV programme Room 101 on many occasions, the derivation of “Room 101” has eluded me. Had you asked me thirty or forty years ago I would have pinned it down instantly, but it has somehow fogged over in the mists of time. Disgraceful, really, for a person who has spent his life in bookselling and publishing, and who played a role in marketing at Penguin Books in the mid-eighties.

What better use of my one hundredth and first blog to put my mind straight and to recall Chapter 5 of George Orwell’s 1984:

'You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.'

The door opened again. A guard came in, carrying something made of wire, a box or basket of some kind. He set it down on the further table. Because of the position in which O'Brien was standing Winston could not see what the thing was.

Oh, rats, I’ve probably contravened every law of copyright in not asking the Orwell estate for permission to copy that. George Orwell in turn apparently got the notion for Room 101 from a conference room at Broadcasting House in which he sat through interminably boring meetings when he worked there in the early 1940s.

For the more scientific of my readers I would point out atomic number 101 - a radioactive transuranic element synthesized by bombarding einsteinium with alpha particles (seriously). The 101ers were a pub rock band in the 1970s (notable for giving Joe Strummer – later of The Clash – his first signing). The 101^st Airborne Division of the US Air Force (the Screaming Eagles) is currently serving in Iraq. At the time of the Normandy landings we could have done without the Schwere SS-Panzer-Abteilung 101 – the crack SS-Waffen armoured unit, and so on, and so on.

Premium Numbers

Of course no-one will admit responsibility but some outlandish charges have been showing up on our phone bill - charges for calls to “premium numbers” for TV programmes. Now, being a belligerent old curmudgeon, I don’t “do” premium numbers, not even the ones that connect you to charming young ladies for a bit of chat on suitably saucy subjects. The wife doesn’t “do” them either, nor the daughter nor her boyfriend, nor even the cat. So who and why?

Yesterday evening was a typical Saturday night for TV addicts like ourselves. An hour of Strictly Ballroom during which neither the wife or I had enough interest to phone our support for Darren Gough, or Colin Jackson, or anyone else. Had the daughter been in the house, she might have sent a surreptitious text message vote for “Goughy” via her own mobile, but she and her boyfriend were safely aboard a USA-bound flight to catch a little pre-Christmas skiing.

After Strictly Ballroom there was The X Factor. Now I was as pleased as the next man that the wonderful Brenda made it through to the next round, but I didn’t vote for her. The wife assures me that Journey South will win it, and she is sufficiently certain about it that she assures me there is no need to vote. Over two million people apparently did vote however.

The came I’m a Celebrity, Get me Out of Here. This was notable for Carol Thatcher’s effortless handling of snakes, rats and spiders, as much as for her nonchalant farting (I wonder if her mother released wind during her meetings with the French President?). But we weren’t going to phone support for Carol or anyone else. There was a dodgy moment when we lay in bed half watching the I’m a Celebrity Live follow-up programme which mostly consists of fly-on-the-wall camera shots of goings on in the camp. At the foot of the screen a phone-in “guess-the-number” game plays continuously and, alarmingly, the wife quickly worked out the correct answer. Even then she showed admirable restraint and left the phone alone.

Maybe we should have gone to France for the weekend to avoid all this phone-in nonsense. We would have been just in time for the French “Téléfon” charity appeal.

Footnote: For those readers who are interested this is the Ranting Nappa's one hundredth blog. They don't get any better do they?