Today's adventures

[kaberett]

• there is now 4G signal downstairs at the mouldering ancestral pile. Four bars of it! This is astonishing; for a long long time you could just about get half a bar of signal for making phone calls in a couple of spots in the attic if the weather was fine. So that's instantly added to the property value without us even having to do anything...
  
• abstracted from the m.a.p.: an icing-spreading implement, a hopefully-competent bread knife, an ice-cream scoop, a tiny fork, and two butter curlers. (One of them is steel-handled and larger and probably more usable; the other is smaller and wood-handled and very emphatically from West Germany.)
  
• after a quick triage (and unloading the Phormium tenax from the car, I now no longer have three clumps of P. tenax cluttering the place up, the car is Very Muddy but it's a hire car so that is FINE) we pottered off to Roskilly's for lunch and a little grockleism, via Goonhilly and an introduction to Arthur, because A had not been before. Apparently they're moving the Jersey herd onto a New Zealand-style once-a-day milking regime (rather than the standard British twice-a-day option) so we didn't get to see the milking (AND health-and-safety means you're no longer allowed on the dairy floor to cuddle the calves, boo) but we went up to the gallery anyway and showed A all the explanatory signs and pointed out the high-tech milking stations to him. (The once-a-day milking is from around 10 to around 11:30, so given that I'm intending to commandeer A for another visit to the Hepworth museum and sculpture garden at St Ive's, we might have another go at saying hi to the cows on our way out one day.) We DID, however, meet quails (smol round angry borbs!), and Long Ducks, and a guinea fowl, and some turkeys, and A Lot of chickens, and some very enthusiastic goats, and a Tamworth pig (which A bought food for -- 50p -- and then fed delightedly).
  
• In the course of my afternoon it became rapidly apparent that the Pile in the cellar, which I'd assumed was mostly empty cardboard boxes and disintegrating plastic bags and the leads cut off expired toasters... was, once upon a time, Papa's work area, such that underneath a thin veneer of soggy cardboard boxes and disintegrating plastic bags (and expired medication) is, in fact, an incomprehensible jumble of rusty pipe wrenches and even rustier tins of paint and brand-new still-in-packaging tools misc. from Coopers of Stortford (a curse upon their house). The thing is, it also contained Grandpa B's Billy Hooks (these are apparently A Thing) -- and at the back of the second cutlery drawer (do not, gentle reader, be fooled into believing that there are only two cutlery drawers) we also found some miscellaneous silver napkin rings and more importantly Grandpa B's service napkin ring (with his WWI ships and deployment dates engraved on it), and Papa's equivalent (off the Royal Engineers). The other thing is that we have house clearance people coming next week and we... really can't! just let them do their thing! without losing stuff like that! so we have to sort it ourselves anyway first.

... it is An Adventure.

Comments

[kaberett]

there was a SOLDERING IRON tossed GAILY into the VEGETABLE BASKET and I just Cannot

[batrachian]

This is reminding me VIVIDLY of k's grandfather's work space.v which took the family MONTHS to properly excavate.

...that's, err, probably not encouraging. Sorry?

[kaberett]

yeah we've been working on this in bursts for A Year Or So now, and... yeah. Ye-aaaaaaaaah. I am only just making the first foray into the cellar.

[alexwlchan]

how rude every good chef knows that solder is not a plant or a vegetable

it belongs in the MINERAL HAMPER

sounds like you’re having fun, if that’s the right word, digging through the pile. many interesting things!

[kaberett]

I more or less am! I'm a bit sad and missing-grandparents and wishing-they-were-better-people, and also going AUGH D: D: D: at a lot of the things I'm ending up handling, but it's broadly bittersweet-to-good.

[wolby]

This is an A++ sentence, thank you.

I got my first visit to my partner's dad's mouldering pseudoancestral pile yesterday and he spent the entire time trying to give us hideous antiques and telling us exactly how much they cost when he bought them in 1980. (No we don't need a cast iron bookend shaped like a prairie schooner. No, we don't want your cannon collection. No, giving in to one egyptology book with the rare drawings does not constitute agreement to the other 49 of them. No...)

[kaberett]

You are very welcome!

And HAHAHAHA YEAH. YEAH. WE HAVE TO WORK OUT WHAT TO DO WITH ALL THE MAHOGANY FURNITURE PAPA BOUGHT CHEAP AT AUCTION WHEN THE ESTATES OF HEREDITARY PEERS WERE BEING BROKEN UP. WE KNOW EXACTLY HOW MUCH THE SILVER SOUP LADLE COST. (And, obviously, that it was A Bargain.)

[rmc28]

Of course there was.

Mind you, entropy has had a bit too much of a hand on my own house this past few years. The "put away paperwork and declutter" task is one of the most-neglected on my Regularly instance ...

[kaberett]

ye-ah. I have grudgingly reinstated "tidy desk" as a weekly Regularly task, and possibly need to try adding "declutter the damn' sofa" in as well...

[rmc28]

Flat surfaces ... acquire things.

[worlds_of_smoke]

oh my god, service napkin rings! Congrats on finding those! :D

[kaberett]

there are so many things

[chiasmata]

Love it!

[kaberett]

<3

[lebannen]

Yay for animals and finding things! Good luck with the rest of it.... I've just got back from a month at my mum's house and despite my best intentions (and previous success!) repeatedly hit I Just Can't Even when venturing into the equivalent of your cellar. Other things were achieved (I am now better at drilling holes into granite! Some of them were even in the right place!) but the Pile remains. Hopefully I will go back before the clematis takes over.

If you should happen to find anything that looks like [this] (a garden tool rather like a long-handled fork, if the tines had been curved round to at least 90° from the handle) I will totally buy it off you if no-one else wants it. Where I come from this is called a crook, and it is very useful for a range of tasks from digging potatoes to clearing bundles of brambles or anything similar that you don't want to touch too much. 'Crook' is clearly an unhelpful name to search for, Spear & Jackson don't appear to make them by any name any more, and the one company I've found that might sell them in this country doesn't appear to have any useful information on their website.

[booksarelife]

Good luck with the cellar!! I'm glad you found those things before the people came!! My dad has been going through all the old family papers from his side of the family, so I feel you

[cesy]

Good luck with the remaining sorting!