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.

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[kaberett]

there are so many things