Tragedy: the ice machine is broken. No more gins and tonic, no more Horse’s Necks, no more Pimms: not unless you like your drinks warm. This is truly a disaster. Well, we have had that ice machine for at least 15 years, so I suppose it has had a good innings. I could tell that there was something wrong with it when I noticed the rust among the ice cubes (just brushed it off without telling her – a little iron in one’s diet will do no harm). Later, I found a rusty mild steel bracket in there and I knew then that our loyal and trusty servant had coughed up its last ice cube. Out it went onto the pile of junk that awaits an opportunity to visit the recycling centre; into the freezer went the old-fashioned ice trays that you can never extract the ice cubes from. These are desperate times, and needs must. We have, of course, immediately ordered a new ice machine and it is due this week. Warm gin and tonic? I don’t think so – it could be the end of civilisation as we know it.
The ice is important because the warm sunny weather in England continues without a break (26C [79F] today). Jane is fretting over her garden because the ground is like concrete and her precious charges are gasping for water. The rainwater butts emptied yesterday, so all that rain that we collected over the long wet soggy winter has now gone. The hose has been rigged and it is only a matter of time before Jane asks for the sprinkler to be deployed; already, Horatio’s highly sophisticated Hozelock drip irrigation system for her pots and hanging baskets has been brought into operation, and soon that little gauge in the water meter will be spinning like a top. Before long, I dare say, a hosepipe ban will be brought in to add to the everyday restrictions of our lives.
All this lovely weather and we are still stuck at home, but there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon: outdoor markets, car showrooms and some schools will open on 1 June, and other ordinary shops will open two weeks after that. Predictably, a whole host of restrictive practices are being mooted to accompany the opening up process, such as shoes that have been tried on being quarantined for 24 hours, closed fitting rooms, and sofas in furniture shops being cleaned after anyone has sat on them. Paradoxically, Joe Public, who is apparently terrified of returning to work, is flooding the beauty spots, parks, beaches and promenades with no social distancing at all. I have come to the conclusion that people can be grouped into roughly three camps: those who are genuinely terrified of catching and dying from CV19 and never cross their threshold; those who think that the virus is little worse than influenza and think that restrictions should be lifted immediately; and those with an open mind on our vulnerability to the pandemic, but who are conforming broadly to the law for a quiet life. At one point early on I thought the three camps could be defined by their age group, with the older generation featuring high among the pragmatists; however, I have now come to the conclusion that the camps cannot be defined by age alone. It is all most curious and, when this is all over (as it will be), psychologists will have a field day analysing it all. As I write, the number of CV19 cases in hospital stands at just over 8,000, and daily deaths from CV19 in the UK stands at 134, both figures still falling. My own trend curve, based on regression of an exponential form and data since the peak at mid April, indicates that the daily total of deaths will fall to zero somewhere near the end of July, all things being equal.
Saints be praised, some other creature has stepped up to the line to replace me as Public Garden Enemy Number 1. Mr Pigeon now has the top slot in Jane’s mind. Mr Pigeon sits on Jane’s plants and squashes them. Mr Pigeon (and not I) is responsible for broken stalks and flowers. Mr Pigeon sits and poops in the bird bath and tries to steal seed from the bird feeder to the detriment of the little song birds. Mr Pigeon is hated and, if he is not careful, will soon be gracing our dinner plates as a dead pigeon. I tried to point out to Jane that Mr Pigeon is one of God’s creatures and is only looking for a home for himself and Mrs Pigeon, but the argument did not cut the mustard with the Head Gardener. That Pigeon has to go. She is already reaching for the air pistol.
I may not have mentioned before that I have other duties in the Shacklepin household as well as the onerous one of Executive Command. My secondary tasks can be summarised by the four Ds: Drinks, Decks, Dhobying and DIY. “Drinks” I have covered in an earlier blog and “Decks” (swabbing and vacuuming thereof) are self-explanatory. Dhobying, however, is worth an expansion as it brings with it so many credit points in the memsahib’s little black book: I do all the washing and all the ironing, tasks that she detests. I enjoy ironing because it enables me to don sound-reducing headphones and listen to audiobooks, radio plays or language courses in my own little world. Naturally, this state of self-imposed incommunicado drives Jane mad, for she hates me being outside her sphere of influence, rather like when the lunar module is detached from the mother ship to visit the far side of the moon. Of course, she dare not express her frustration overtly: to do so would risk her being landed with doing the washing and ironing herself. Instead, her annoyance manifests itself in her trying to talk to me when I am shut down (so to speak). She will wait until I have a complete incommunicado ironing operation under way with all its impedimenta, then she will direct a question at me. This I will be unable to hear because of the sound-reducing headphones and a man telling me how to conjugate verbs in French, but I will know that it is a question for me because of her body language in my sightline. A response requires me to stop ironing, grovel in my pocket for the iPod, drop it, pick it up, stop the programme, unhitch the headphones, and ask her to repeat the question. She will then apologise profusely for interrupting my listening session, state that the question was unimportant, and carry on with whatever she was doing before (with, I suspect, a secret smile to herself that she has re-established the pecking order of who has priority for my attention). This process carries on in a do-loop with a frequency period of about ten minutes and continues until the ironing is finished. It is for this reason that I have never been able to get beyond the past imperfect in French.
My allusion to credit points in the last paragraph refers, of course, to the relevant section of The Book. Regular readers will recall from Blog 43 that The Book is Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps by psychologists Allan and Barbara Pease, and it explains the differences in how men and women think. In The Book, the authors postulate that women keep a subconscious record of plus and minus points tallied against their husband’s behaviour. Naturally, they will deny this because it is a subconscious act, but it does happen apparently. As an experiment, the authors asked couples to keep separate written tallies of credit points against items of male behaviour ie the wife recorded her tally, and the husband recorded his own assessment of his own actions. At the end of a month they compared the two assessments. On one occasion, the husband had spent an entire Saturday helping his son assemble a model of a B17 Flying Fortress, and duly awarded himself ten points. When he compared this task to his wife’s score for the same event, he found she had awarded him just three points. He was baffled: he had missed an important football match to do that bonding session with his son. Why so low a score? She replied that she had only given him three points because, despite the task taking up a whole day, he had enjoyed doing it. Yet, bafflingly for him, she had awarded him nine points in her own record for presenting her with a posy of wild flowers, something he had awarded himself only two points for. The reason? Because he had taken the trouble to pick the flowers himself. Yes, that dhobying and ironing is worth so many credits points. Let’s face it, I have a lot of demerits to make up for.
Well, the new car is going well. Or as well as I can judge from the few times that I have been able to use it. We only bought the mighty machine (a new Nissan Leaf) on 5 March and lockdown descended on us on 23 March, so we have hardly driven anywhere other than the supermarkets. Being all electric, it excels at short trips and I derive immense smug satisfaction from my green credentials. Actually, that is not the reason why I bought it (heaven forbid): I just feel, as an engineer, that one should have as efficient a system or machine as is possible and I love the way the car regenerates energy when braking. I hate wasted energy (hence my aversion to sport). Our previous car, a Volvo with a petrol engine, barely reached operating temperature on our shopping trips and – consequently – rarely achieved better than 30 mpg on short journeys; with this new vehicle, of course, the distance covered is unrelated to its efficiency. The other great thing about the car is that you can pre-condition it before going out: you can tell it what temperature you want the interior to be before departure and it will duly deliver, hot or cold, using power from the grid. On sunny days we charge the car for free because we have photovoltaic panels on our roof; on dull days we charge the car off-peak during the wee small hours. Driving the electric car takes a little getting used to at first. You have the option to select ‘Eco,’ which limits the acceleration to the benefit of battery range; or ‘E Pedal’, which maximises regenerative braking; or both. With ‘E Pedal’ selected you can drive the car solely using the accelerator pedal: lift your foot off and the car comes to a stop, like a Dodgem car at the fair; you rarely need to use the brake pedal except in an emergency. Of course, the whole set up is geared towards the driver minimising all energy losses and driving economically. Deselect the ‘Eco’ switch and the ‘E Pedal’ switch, however, and the car takes off like a dingbat when you accelerate. I cannot recall the precise figure, but I seem to recall that she will do 0 – 60 mph in about 7 seconds; it certainly feels pretty fast to me. Range is probably the main concern with electric cars. This varies with the ambient temperature, how you drive the car, and the number of accessories (including heater and air conditioning) that you have running. With heating and air conditioning shut off, the present indicated range of my car at 23C is 172 miles; take seven miles off that if you switch on the climate control. I have yet to put it to the test. Charge time on a fast charger, such as is found in motorway service areas or public carparks, is 45 minutes to bring the battery up to 80% charge. Again, I have yet to put it to the test. Watch this space.
You can put away your tin hat and re-emerge from that earthquake shelter. Assume Third Degree of Readiness. Jane’s passport application (Blog 46) has been approved. Hallelujah.
We had quite a scare on one of our walks the other day, when I was convinced that I was coming down with the virus. It was shortly after the government formally recognised the loss of taste as a symptom of the illness and we had just completed an arduous climb. The memsahib had recourse to break out the emergency ration of boiled sweets in order to restore our blood sugar and, to my horror, I could not taste a thing. I tried to keep calm as I drew Jane’s attention to the problem, not wishing to alarm her (the loss of her Chief Dhoby Wallah and Shirt Presser Boy would have been a serious blow to her horticultural ambitions).
She was puzzled, as her sweet tasted fine.
“You did take off the clingfilm I presume?”
“Oh”
It seems she had wrapped the sweets individually before our departure in order to avoid the sweets picking up fluff and other detritus from her trouser pocket. Well how was I to know? I had not been properly briefed. This was very poor, I expostulated. She just rolled her eyes: dumb insolence. What her poor father must have had to put up with.
The boiled sweet, sans clingfilm, was very nice – thank you for asking.
I leave you with a prayer:
“Please God, after you have made me more tolerant of my fellow creatures (or maybe before that if at all possible), please send these noisy little beggars back to school. Please”.
28 May 2020
"A Very Vintage Chap..." 