The debonair Basil Marigold's

It has taken a few long evenings, but I have now mostly caught up with the DVDs of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. I have found them very interesting. If you were to just watch the films and never read the books (but, why would you do that?) then you would probably enjoy them too. You would however be witnessing things that never happened in the books and these aren't merely minor things either they can be enormous plot changes. They have removed an entire ending plot from the book that involves Saruman. As the wizard who turns to the darkness of Sauron, Saruman is defeated by Treebeard and the Ents and his tower is taken. Treebeard takes pity on him and releases him into middle earth. At the end of the book when Sauron is defeated and the hobbits return to the shire to see it has been ravaged by a man called Sharkey. This turns out to be Saruman. The Hobbits revolt and finally defeat Saruman. You don't see this in the films because Saruman is killed by his henchman and...

So, after many years I have been, finally, persuaded to watch two sets of films. They are the Hobbit & the Lord of the Rings. Oddly, as a single book, the hobbit has been transformed into three films. The LOTR was a set of three books converted into three films as well. However, the LOTR is a vastly larger book and had the film been produced last (the Hobbit was made last as a film, but it is set about 60yrs before the events in the LOTR), it would have been about nine films, or maybe more in fact! Considering all films are approximately 3 hrs long it’ll take me eighteen hours to watch them all: it is quite a challenge! I have loved these stories since I first read them when I was about 13 years old. I first bought an omnibus of the LOTR in a bookshop in Brixham called, the book warren. It cost me £5. It must have taken about a year to go through the entire book! It is long, it is complicated, and as Tolkien created a whole new language, some of the words were virtually unpronounce...

I drive through a snowstorm to get home tonight. It’s odd, but I assume geographical that there can be greenfields from the M69 to Junction 22 of the M1, but whenever you go from 22 to 23 (what I think of as the Coalville/shepshed area) it had already become a winter wonderland of white snow. And of course, once past Junction 23 the green fields returned! It’s like a band running across northwest Leicestershire that gets the bad weather.  This always gets me every time. How it can be so localised.

It turned out to be a rather eventual last 6 months of 2018. We moved house in November, but the initial process began wat back in July, at the height of what was a lovely, hot summer. When we moved in, finally, it was dark and cold.  The most immediate benefit of this was having a substantially larger property to live in. With more bedrooms, a garage and a larger garden you could say we have space to burn and by any stretch of the imagination I have begun to utilise this space. To my hearts delight I have been able to move my books, my precious books, from the loft and now, into a place of prominence: where books deserve to be.  In this case, to hide some especially unappealing wallpaper the decision was taken to cover this with bookshelves.  So, after a trip to ikea and much lugging about with heavy packages and then, the obligatory, faffing about with flat packs the shelves were ready to be secured to the wall. The wallpaper began to disappear as they went up. It took ...

Recently, we have had an issue with our main car. The issue was its inability to pass its own MOT. For cars, this is not good. It is, very bad. It can mark the death of the car. And boy, this car is virtually indestructible! However, there were quite a few major fails! It essentially boils down to the fact that the car is now thirteen years old, which, in car years is thirteen years. this makes it an older car. The plus to this is that it drives a lot of miles each year that helps keep the engine tip top. The drawback is that the car drives a lot of miles each year which that means every thing is fatiguing. In this case it was the brake pipes throughout the car. This is a big job, using garage parlance, and big correlates with expensive! But, it has now passed its MOT as the work has been done. This means thought that the warning signs are there and it is time to get a car where each repair cost more than the car. Currently valued by WeBuyAnyCar at £215!! So, with children in h...

You can spell ‘Contractor’ but not Plumber!!! 

At work we have a fully fitted kitchen for staff to make drinks, use the microwave and fridges etc. It has two sinks and an instant boil tap. I love the instant boil tap. Every house should have one! We also have some taps for our sinks. They have been there since I have been there and they are used very heavily every day and so, at some point, they will fail. The tap failed last week. Fortunately facilities swung into action and put up an out of service sign and rang through to get it fixed. I can only assume they had tried to call, Christopher Plummer...oh dear.