The debonair Basil Marigold's

What an evening. And here I still sit at just before 1am in the emergency ward waiting for blood tests and X-rays. I am beyond tired. My actual bones are tired 

...or so they so, whoever 'they' are. I have been through what can only be described as temporary, but at some points I really did think it would be permanent. It's been a pretty long time since I have been able to really, comfortably sit down and type, or in fact, sit down comfortably at all. Today is the day where I have actually felt pain free, all day. Oddly, it has taken 2 whole months to get to this point. On the 10th July I took my friend, Dexter the dog out for a walk. I remember it clearly now as it was a beautifully warm day. The sun was shining and we walked down into the dumbles. Dexter was having fun because the further into the dumbles, the more he could chase and leap at butterflies, and tiny flappy birds.  The following day, 11th July,I woke up and my neck was in absolute agony. I had trapped a nerve somehow and struggled with it all day to the point of swallowing some painkillers. It hadn't gone away by the time I started work on the Monday. By the 15th...

 It was Saturday when I started looking for our children's Mother's day card. I had been on point this year and bought all the cards a couple of weeks earlier, as I needed three. Two for Mother's day and a birthday card.  I had them all filled out and ready for despatch in my bureau. As I had multiple cards and another item for my mum I waited until the week before to gather them and pop them into a larger padded envelope. I then got my wife to take them to the post office to post. Job done. Brownie points to me, huzzah. And then on the day before as I went to get my wife's card it had disappeared from my bureau! It had completely evaporated.  Of course I did... This year my mum got two Mother's day cards. One from her son, and the other from her Grandchildren.  Still, every cloud. I can now pick the card back up from my mum and re-use it next year!

After what has seemed 16 and a half years the children have returned back to school. A somewhat staggered start for the two as one is in Primary and the other, Secondary. The return to secondary school has been a little later and has involved more hoops to jump through. However, we have managed to disperse them out and back into the world of education. How safe that world is, well, we just don't quite know. There are so many competing arguments that at the end of the day we can only do what we can.  And so, one returns with excitement in their mind. The other, a little less so. He has thoroughly enjoyed his time in homeschool. I think he has overly enjoyed the company of both parents and to be more honest, the company of having his transformers toys nearer to hand than he will do at his school desk! We are therefore now at the stage where we await what happens in the future and what, if anything, occurs.

 One of the children's presents this year required some effort! It also took a while to get to the bottom of it (you'll get the joke later!) It involved safety glasses and digging tools. Teeny-tiny digging tools. Before you stands the remains of Atlantis, no less!! As you can see, and much like Pompeii it was covered in Volcanic ash when it was destroyed. The drawback of this is that the material is now hardened and does require some effort to crack through the surface. As you can see there is certainly a temple in the landscape.  Both children approached it with gusto!! and after a good hour or so they had managed to extract all the hidden gems and artefacts hidden within the archaeological site. As you can see below a good haul was found and we have declared it treasure to the relevant authorities! We uncovered gem stones, an ancient Atlantan coin and a helmet to match. We even uncovered Poseidon's trident. We have yet to try and summon up a great island destroying wave. ...

  It is almost the end of 2020. By any metric devised it has been somewhat of a spectacular, and remarkable year. At the end of 2019 people assumed that 2020 could not be more of a mess than the preceding one. Turned out that this could happen. I haven't experienced a year like the one we have lived through. And, in fairness, that is an important point, we have got through it and hopefully we'll come out the other side by the end of the next year. There appear to be now easy or quick fixtures to the Covid pandemic. We must remember the 70,000 who didn't make it through with us. For context that is almost two of our hometowns passing away.  This has not been an event that you had the chance to watch from outside, every was involved. Some followed the rules and some, rather famously, decided that their position allowed them to not follow the rules. An interesting year for the current political philosophy of 'Do as I say, not as I do.' Too much of this is infiltrating ...

For many years now we have been storing firewood in our house. As you can see from the photograph below the poor chair begged for the cleansing power of a state of burning.  Grim, and unappealing it has sat displaying its ugliness to every room it has been in. The depressing covers and pattern having seen better days at the height of the Suez Crisis. However, my wife has a strange love of the chair and so for a bit of a treat it was decided that maybe fire wasn't the only recourse. Might it not be saved and loved again, as new! And so, after a few weeks of sweet parting the sad pile of firewood returns to the bosom of its family and boy, has it had a great new face lift! Ta-da Clearly unrecognisable! The once hidden wings, have been allowed out to fly again! Therefore the matches and the petrol have been put back!

We recently had to replace the toilet seat. I bought one on amazon and as with most manufactured product it was flown directly from the orient. As with these things they come with a plethora of instructions. I do not expect the instruction sheet for a toilet to be overly arduous. However, there were a few oddities that I struggled to entirely get to grips with. Clearly it is important to have a neat toilet seat. My main worry here is over the taste of the surface. I am not one to encourage the licking of toilet seats to ascertain the flavour of the seat. My children have so far refused this experiment.  One of the reasons the children have refused to lick the toilet seat is clearly demonstrated in a further section about safety. Children should not be allowed to play with the toilet seat. This can result in hurting fingers, and 'other' accident. I do not know what the other accident might be but if you look close enough to the tiny child who is not to scale does utter the words...

 For many years now we have had a tiny mirror that we bought with us when we moved. We put it up in the hallway of our new house. The hallway swamped it, and I was the only one who could see in it, because that was were the hook went. We have been in the house for nearly two years. I found myself in B&Q this week. I have been on annual leave and we have been doing some DIY. Before I went I mentioned to my wife that I'll have a look at mirrors while I remember! And I did remember! There wasn't a huge selection available in all fairness and after I thought long and hard I found one which seemed really good.  Here, therefore is the start and the finish. I can now safely say that my entire can fit within the mirror. Indeed, according to my wife, most of the street would fit in! And I quote my wife here with the following quote, 'Do you think we would have bought a mirror that big if I had been with you?' hahahahaha Here is the old mirror sat underneath the new hallway m...

 I had forgotten to mention that a few weeks ago we required some plumbing work to be done outside. A pipe had been caught by a piece of falling masonry and seemed to have got cracked, when another piece of pipe was sliced through. Hadn't noticed the crack until we experienced a smell in the bathroom. We then discovered that there was a u-bend on the end of the pipe outside. When taken off and cleaned out the pipe cracked some more and then began to leak. The issue was the pipe was just a fraction to high for me with our current step ladders. We bought them when we moved in. They have been useful, but they were never the tallest stepladders. In the end we bit the bullet and looked at buying some more practical ladders that would allow us to go higher if needed. I found ladders of the telescopic variety. They are lightweight and push down to a smaller size than even the step ladders we own!  Like the vast majority of items that are physically made nowadays they arrived from Chi...

Yesterday, the nightmare scenario happened to my wife. She went to turn on the heating and...Nothing. It was dead. The thermostat wouldn't communicate to the boiler. We had water, we just had a sullen, non-responsive white box refusing to 'engage'. Her poor little face. Within 5 hours she'd been out the house to see a friend. Clearly leaving me to cope in sub-arctic conditions while she sat in a warm house. When she returned home, a portable, three bar heater was in her possession, like some artful dodger! It helped, but the drawback of an open plan living and dining room is the difficulty to heat that kind of space with a portable heater. It is, however, better than nothing.  Fortunately the plumber came out fairly quickly and fixed the transmission issue between the thermostat and the boiler. Hey, Presto! we have normal heating back and the joy of having the warm under floor heating in the kitchen was wonderful. All for the bargain price of £40. At some point we'l...

 Friday afternoon, after work we were surprised to discover an ambulance parked outside of our home. Right outside. W e couldn't figure out why, or for whom it had been called. It remained here for a good 20 to 3o minutes. A mystery to us all. We looked out of ground floor and upper floor windows to get a better view, or to try and figure out what was going on! All to no avail, sadly.  However, my wife was due to return relatively soon. This was noticed by one of my children who used their ingenuity and suggested that what I should do is go and lie down, prostrate on the drive when we spotted my wife's car in the distance. On her arrival past the ambulance she will then immediately see me lying on the ground. We put this to a vote and agreed that this was a brilliant idea! One of our very best in fact!  Sadly things went wrong; 1) The ambulance drove away about 10 minutes before my wife arrived  We thought this a shame as we felt this would have been an amazing prank...

 I think with my poor mental calendar my daughter, the first born, has been in secondary school for 5 weeks now. Maybe 4 full weeks and a couple of days. It is the beginning of the most crucial period of her growth as a human being. 11-20 is quite a time of fundamental change. From child to adult. For most that is. I have stretched mine out a bit longer than that, some would argue. Here she stands on this monumental threshold, the shadow she casts now is very small and not so far into the distance, but it will grow and then stretch further as she becomes a woman. It's a brand new start for her. I think she is currently enjoying it. I think, personally, that this current pandemic has helped her by keeping the older children away. The school will be less of a bear pit than they inevitably are, or can be if you are in someway timid, weak, or daft. Teenage children can have a proclivity towards being hurtful. You kind of want to keep them safe and protected from it all, don't you? ...

This evening my wife and I went out for a walk in Brixham. We reached a T junction where we would normally turn left and head along to Berry Head and the Napoleonic forts. This year we took the right hand path. This is also part of the south west coastal path that circumnavigates Devon and Cornwall. From Brixham it takes you towards St Mary’s bay, and Mansands and the next beach along, the nudist beach,Scabbacombe beach.  Most of the pathway follows the coastline quite rightly, but here was the initial pathway along towards the first beach of St Mary’s. From this point onwards you get pretty close to the headlands and cliff edges. This walk from St Mary’s to Kingswear (approximately 7 miles) can at points be fear inducing from the narrowness of the path to the fact that a metre lunge to your left and you have 200ft to meet your maker. However the very necessity of taking your life into your hands leads you along the path to Mansands and the views of my hometown go from pretty nice ...

I was sat outside the library in the town I was essentially brought up in until I departed in 2001. I was waiting for my daughter to come out as we’d been in to get some books for her. My son was in urgent need to not wait for her, so we’d headed outside to wait where he could regale me about something. He is afraid of silence.  A lady in a nurses uniform walked past and looked straight at me. ‘Hello, Tony.’ She said as she carried on past. In the proceeding 28 years I, to my shame, had misplaced her name in my head. I recognised her, but the name is somewhere between the lips and the abyss. It was so strange that she said this as she carried on as it was delivered like we had seen each other a couple of days ago in a pub or a cafe. As opposed to having last seen her when we’d left school in 1992.  Have I not physically changed enough in these last 28 years so old he could literally pick me out by walking past a bench in 2020? It would seem not.  I don’t know why it made ...

We’ve wondered down to a little out of the way cove while on holiday. It’s called Churston cove and is on the south west coastal path just past Brixham and before Goodrington. When I was a teenager we used to come here in the evenings for barbecues and beers, the odd swim. I was never a huge swimmer. Actually, I was technically, I was a huge swimmer in the physical sense.  It’s a pretty little cove. It reminds me of Greece, this little part of Devon, carved out of solid rock millions of years ago.  Today I had a bit of a dip with my son who has discovered that if he uses me as a taxi he can go further out to sea than on his own. Fortunately he’s quite buoyant! He seemed to enjoy the experience of being in deep water. I enjoyed my little swim too. It has probably been a couple of decades since I’ve swum in the sea. Swimming with a tidal mass is hard work.  As you can see it is pretty calm around here and fairly well shaded compared to some of the more touristy beaches you ...

So, it has finally happened. It seems only five weeks ago that our daughter began her journey through Primary school. Yet, now, somehow, rather unexpectedly she has come to the end of her first school journey and will be heading into secondary school this coming September.  How quickly time has flown in these years. It is beyond comprehension just how fast it has been, and how fast, she, too, has grown from a toddler to to a child. Now to make the step from Primary to secondary school. A huge jump in a life experience at such an early age. They can be tough times from 11 to 15. I guess we’ll find out how well she copes with all the changes. 

On Monday our daughter returns to schooling. It will not be the schooling she is used to and I can't bring myself to use the horrible phrase that's being used at work, and on the media of the 'new normal.' She was given the choice herself whether to go back or not. She is mature enough to know her own mind and has probably had enough of being at home for the last three months. The class sizes seem to be very small, in single figures. It'll be like experiencing a private eduction.  She'll be missed though. I doubt she'll miss us once she is in the swing of it. Her brother will miss her the most of course. He's like that. I am sure once he's used to it he'll cope with her being at school and him not. We'll go from a 2 person school to a single attendee on Monday. He'll be our sole focus...Poor thing. Hopefully in the last three months she has kept up enough for when she gets back. She's bright enough I'm sure, and apart from some ge...

Easy to say, but I am fairly sure that my daughter was only born, at best, 2 years ago. I can clearly remember driving her out of the local hospital in the back of the new car we'd bought just before because we knew we'd need more space. It had only been 7 months or so since I'd learnt to drive. Everything felt new at that point, but no more than driving her home that day. Like I said this was, at most 2 years ago. However, it seems that she somehow celebrated her 11th Birthday a few days ago. How this happened I have no idea! Definitely 2 years. I am convinced of it. Who's wrong? How has eleven years passed so fast? I have found children do have some way of accelerating time. She has grown up so much; She's almost as tall as her mother! Amazing really. How you can be given a baby by a nurse and then told it's time to head home and away you go! They don't give you any advice, or in fact, any formalised instruction manual. Nothing. And we haven't ...

Ever since we have entered this period of extended lockdown the ability to exercise has also been somewhat reduced too. We now have a daily allowance to provide exercise (Though of course that in the strictest sense is also open for debate, as is the entire government advice). We have therefore kept ourselves to a once a day approach. We are also fortunate in where we live as although we are in a fairly urbanised environment beyond this area there is quite a large expanse of reasonably well connected walks to be had. You can, for instance walk a few minutes from our house and wander into countryside. Of course, if you lived here maybe 60 or 70 years ago you'd not see this as what was there before was coal mines in full production. What we are now walking in is a healed landscape. The scars of this industry such as pit tips and railway lines have removed, ripped up, etc. Nature has reclaimed so many areas of Ashfield. We are able to take advantage of this on our daily exercise. It...