Recent stuff

Car

My darling little Ford Fiesta has been making a new noise for the last few months, but on taking it to J P Motors, one of the two Caversham garages I use, back in March, they claimed they couldn’t hear anything amiss, so I assumed everything was OK. However, during the second week in July when I had to do quite a bit of driving, it seemed to have got louder, so I’ve now booked it in with Reading Service Centre, my other garage of choice, for an inspection, though annoyingly they didn’t have an opening until 2 August so I’ve been limiting my driving for the past week or so. Keeping fingers crossed that RSC can actually diagnose the problem.

A quick Google suggests it’s most likely something to do with the exhaust. Our friend Helen recently traded her 10-year-old car in for salvage after being faced with a bill for an exhaust issue, so I’m hoping it’s not too big a job. The Fiesta is 17 years old, but I’ve been told previously by JP that Fiestas can go on for ever (which I don’t take as literal truth, but do take to mean that it may have a few years in it yet). A more significant issue than its age may be the fact that it’s now done in excess of 170,000 miles, most of that accrued under my watch (it was four years old when I got it). I have been relatively lucky with repairs to it – a replacement clutch in 2014 is so far the most expensive bill I’ve had. Aside from being a bit sentimental – though if the Fiesta develops serious mechanical problems the sentiment will probably evaporate quite quickly – I just don’t relish the thought of car shopping, though I realise people do do it. Maybe one day soon.

Derbyshire visit

The driving stint earlier in July was to go with Mum to Derbyshire to visit Mum’s older sister Anne, who is now in a nursing home up there (Anne is also, obviously, my aunt). My cousin Helen has lived in the Derbyshire Dales for many years now after moving there back in the nineties for a teaching job. A few years ago Anne and her late husband moved up there to be near Helen, their health having deteriorated to the point where they needed more organized care. Mum and I booked ourselves a night in the Premier Inn just outside Matlock, where we have now stayed I think three times. We drove up on a Wednesday morning and met Helen and Anne for lunch at the Grouse & Claret at Rowsley, just a short drive west along the A6 from Matlock, and then went back to Anne’s care home to see the place and her room (which Mum had seen before but I hadn’t).

After this we went to check in to the hotel and had a short pre-dinner stroll along a straight path running alongside the railway line just the other side of the A6 from the hotel. This turned out to involve quite a lot of bird and plant ID-ing, the latter using the PlantNet app, which I already had installed on my phone, and the former using the Merlin bird app, which I didn’t. Mum was particularly keen to identify the bird engaged in a concerted bout of tweeting in a tree by the path, so I was obliged to install Merlin while hoping that the bird would obligingly keep singing, which thankfully it did, and the app suggested that it was a song thrush, which was what Mum had already suspected.

The railway line

Plant ID

Since installing Merlin, it keeps telling me to take breaks and listen to birdsong.

We went back to see Anne again the following morning. During this visit I was offered a fig roll by one of the staff – don’t think I’d eaten one of those since the 1980s but I did always like them. Anne seemed to be in a mood to offload her books, and Mum and I were involved in a lot of pushing back and persuading her that she really ought to keep them. I did concede to taking two, one a book about William Morris, about whom I know almost nothing but the book contains some photographs of Arts and Crafts houses and other figures in the movement. It also includes this photograph, which I have seen in another book of Mum’s and love simply for bringing home to a modern audience how bloody tedious sitting for photographs in the 1870s must have been. The expression of the girl on the left says it all. The sitters are Morris and the artist Edward Burne-Jones, and their families.

The other book Anne gave me was Pigsties and Paradise by Liz Pitman, a collection of extracts from lady travellers to Wales in the first half of the nineteenth century. I'm only a couple of chapters in but it's quite interesting. I very much enjoyed this:

[Wales] was, until the eighteenth century, regarded as a wild, foreign place, with a mainly peasant population, who were said to eat toasted cheese because they couldn't afford meat.

Colliery band

Prior to the trip Anne had sent me some emails relating to the Lewis Merthyr Band, apparently the oldest brass band in the Rhondda Valleys. Because of Anne’s interest in genealogy, I had assumed that there was some family connection but she had been a bit vague about what it actually was, unless she’d told me before and I didn’t pay proper attention (not impossible). Thankfully Mum managed to clarify it for me:

Basically my Mum's mother's father was called Richard Martyn and came from Cornwall in the late nineteenth century with his young family to work in the mines in South Wales. He was your great great grandfather. He was very musical and became bandmaster of the then called Cymmer brass band. His brother George succeeded him as bandmaster as well.

The band website’s ‘Historical Images’ page has a photograph dated 1898 featuring Richard Martyn as conductor sitting front and centre (at least, I assume that’s him with the baton), and a further photo dated 1910, apparently showing George F Martyn as conductor. A little harder in this one to make out, but I assume he’s the chap in front behind the drum, to the left of the chap with the massive beard. The images on the page also include several of a visit of King George V and Queen Mary to the Lewis Merthyr Colliery in 1912. The Queen was evidently pulled around the colliery on a purpose-built cart drawn by a pit pony. Hope she enjoyed herself.

The internet tells me that the Lewis Merthyr Colliery was situated in the village of Trehafod, about 18 miles from Cardiff, and that the site of the former colliery now hosts the Rhondda Heritage Park.

New vet

We have a family holiday booked later in August, largely in honour of Mum and Dad’s upcoming 60th wedding anniversary. As I seem to have persuaded Ruth to come with me, if only for the first half of the week, we have been obliged to get our rabbits (still two – Chloe lives on) up to date with their vaccinations, as Reggie’s Retreat won’t take them otherwise. Ever since Ruth moved in we have been taking rabbits to the ‘Active Vetcare’ vets on Oakley Road, as it’s reasonably close to the house, but Ruth has become increasingly miffed at quite substantial increases in their prices. A new veterinary practice opened in May this year at Gallowstree Common, a village (or poss hamlet) a few miles north of Reading, run by a vet we’ve seen a few times at Oakley Road and who has impressed Ruth as good with rabbits. We went on a recce a couple of Saturdays back to locate it, incorporating a bus ride and circular walk from Sonning Common (the nearest bus stop).

Cherry Orchard Vets

Walk back to Sonning Common across fields

A week or so later we took Cassius and Chloe there to have their vaccinations. I think Ruth’s impressions of the practice are more or less favourable, though it may take more exposure. We didn’t get to see Sarah Moffat, instead getting a younger colleague, but the consultation seemed to go OK; a minor annoyance was that the vet had some difficulty examining Cassius’ teeth, which is common but I tend to think vets should have mastered a technique for it. Ruth was also a bit perturbed that the scales used for weighing animals was across the room from the examining table, necessitating the vet carrying the animal across the room, and did not appear to have a non-slip surface. (This sort of thing matters much more with rabbits than with, say, cats, who can leap off things from some height and land gracefully on their springy paws; rabbits can break their backs jumping off things in a panic.) Also, the waiting room had separate areas for cats vs. dogs, which is a nice gesture but a bit bloody pointless if they're still in the same room - the ideal would be a whole separate entrance for dogs so that their barking doesn't frighten other animals. I appreciate space is a consideration, but they could wait in their owners' cars and then just come in via the back door. Problem solved.

Cherry Orchard Vets is occupying the former Reformation pub, which closed in 2019 despite some community action to attempt to save it. I don't remember ever going there, though it's possible I did at some point. The new veterinary practice has a piece in our latest issue of Round & About.

Marrow

Ray came for dinner a couple of Fridays ago bringing some selected produce from his employer's vegetable garden (taken with permission of owner, not stolen in manner of Peter Rabbit). Two onions, two cucumbers and two alleged courgettes though one was a sizeable enough specimen to be classed as a marrow in my eyes. I used about a third of it in this recipe a couple of nights later, before having to consign the rest to the food waste bucket.

The recipe is one Mum used to cook us occasionally as kids. I think I typed it out from a Korean cookbook.