Roland is back. That is to say, Roland, his live-in partner, his mistress, his children, and his children’s children have decided that our home is a very desirable place to live (plenty of food and water, good schools, liberal policy towards down-trodden and much-maligned creatures, immediate accommodation with H&C etc). They have, therefore, moved in. No, Roland is not an immigrant or asylum seeker from the oppressive states of Wiltshire or Devonshire; Roland is a rat. We first noticed Roland and his kin when we were taking breakfast in the Garden Control Tower (aka the Breakfast Room) at Shacklepin Towers with our Australian friends Derek and Laura, who were over in Europe to see the Old Country. As we munched on our fresh fruit salad, Derek suddenly said,
“Stone me…a rat!”,
and pointed to the garden shed where a family of rodents were happily scuttling too and fro in a welcome dance for our antipodean visitors. Jane, of course, nearly had a fit. Roland – or rather, probably, Roland’s great grandfather had visited us before (Blog 98), but the meeting had been brief and he seemed to disappear after he took a particular liking to the rat poison that I put down. Now, here was his family, four years later, come to say hello and catch up on old times. It would be fair to say that they were not welcome. The breakfast discussion immediately moved on to the best way of ridding ourselves of Roland and his family without infringing their entitlements as dictated by the European Court of Rodent Rights (ECRR). In the years since the last infestation poison had been tried as a deterrent, but – clearly – it had become ineffective. Derek suggested laying traps, as these had proved successful in Victoria: you baited a cage with tasty food and, when the rat trod on a trigger inside, the cage closed, trapping it. The trapped rat was then given a swimming lesson in a convenient bucket or water butt, or transported humanely to Rwanda for release. I immediately ordered two traps from Mr Amazon and set them up the next day, using peanut butter as bait. In the days that followed, we caught six rats of various ages, two field mice, one traumatised hedgehog and one very irate robin. The non-rats were, of course, immediately released into the garden – the hedgehog, no doubt, vowing never to return. Despite the modest success of the traps, however, Roland and his family continued to disport themselves every morning, so Jane wanted more immediate and violent retribution. I immediately started research to identify the most powerful, yet legal and modestly priced, air pistol to arm The Great White Hunter. Surprisingly, there were few weapons deemed suitable for the job within the chosen criteria. A 0.22 calibre was reckoned to be the best sized round for a humane kill, and a rifle was more likely to be successful than a pistol. However, legal though it might have been, I did not want to be reported to the police for hanging out of an upstairs window with a 0.22 rifle fitted with a telescopic sight. I finally opted for a CO2 powered Webley pistol called, aptly enough, Nemesis. I used to be a member of my college shooting team when I was a Sub Lieutenant and I also came to be a reasonable shot with the Service issue 9mm Browning pistol (officer I/C HMS BARCHESTER landing party, Portlandia, 1970). The next problem was how to obtain the Webley. Unlike in, say, the US state of Montana where you can buy a gun with minimal paperwork in less than a day, Britain (thank heavens) has very strict controls on the sale of firearms. Even air guns or CO2 weapons below the threshold muzzle velocity that would require a licence cannot simply be ordered through the post. To my surprise, I found a gun shop about ten miles away, situated out of town on a country road, and Jane and I immediately set off to make the necessary purchase. Gosh, this was a whole new world to me. Despite the remoteness of the gun shop, there were about six other customers visiting on the weekday morning that we were there. Most seemed to be known to the staff and they spoke a private language of their own:
“Have you got any six-one-twos?”
“No, we’re out of them, but we’ve just had a delivery of five-three-eights.”
“Ah, right – I’ll take a box of those. Is Charlie in upstairs?”
“Yep. Away you go…”
Of course, although the UK has very strict gun laws, farmers and landowners can still buy shotguns or hunting rifles under licence to deal with vermin, cull deer, or bag their meal for the evening.
I asked for the Webley Nemesis. The woman behind the counter said she had one in stock and came out with what seemed to be an enormous pistol, about 14” long, such as would be carried by Clint Eastwood in his campaign to clean up San Fransisco. Whoa, I thought, this looks like the biz. Best I get some ammunition at the same time. Some money changed hands, a photocopy of my driving licence was taken, and we were soon out in the Barsetshire sunshine toting (discreetly, in its box) Nemesis – the new Rat Killer. I tried it out when we got home: WACK! The power was impressive. But, do you know what? Ever since I reloaded the gun and placed it very carefully, half cocked, on the patio table, no rat has stayed still long enough for me to take aim on it. The family is still there, laughing at us. So, after all that, I have called in The Terminators from Barsetshire County Council to do a professional extermination job. £150 it has cost me (three visits at £50 each). I shall add the fee to the £130 for the gun and the £27 for the traps. These immigrants have cost me a fortune, but they are about to get their comeuppance. Anyone want to buy a powerful CO2 pistol? Or maybe, on second thoughts, I had better keep it in case Roland’s more distant relatives decide to move in after he is moved out.
“The clouds were afraid, one-ten in the shade, and the pavement was steaming”. So ran the lyrics of Summer (the First Time) by Bobby Goldsboro in 1973, and it seems particularly apt here at the moment. Well, not quite. Actually it has peaked at 97 in the shade (36 deg C) as I write, here in Melbury, which is plenty hot for us in a country not used to it. Not that I am complaining, for both Jane and I love the sun (she being Caribbean) and we have taken all the usual precautions to keep the house cool as the sun blazes down. We haven’t even needed to use a fan. This year has been tremendous for sunshine. It started in March and has shone almost continuously up to now – I think I heard on the news that we are into our third heat wave. The downside, of course, is that most of the country is in drought and the harvest this year will be a total failure. Parts of the UK have received relatively short deluges of rain, but we in Melbury have had very little and our garden is as hard as iron, the lawn cracked and brown. It cannot last, of course, but for now, at least two of us are revelling in the Summer.
The UK government, in its infinite wisdom, has declared that, in future, all interns recruited to the civil service, shall be ‘working class’. A worthy aim with good intentions, I dare say, but my reaction was to say, ‘define working class’. I was born in a terraced house on Tyneside which had an outside lavatory, a coal house and no bathroom (we washed in the kitchen sink in water boiled in the kettle). I bathed in a portable galvanised bath tub once a week every Friday. My mother wore a turban around her hair. Am I ‘working class’ then? Our socialist government is obsessed with anachronistic terms like this, as if we were still living in the 1930s. The other common theme of our current government is that it gives preference to ‘working people’ – a group that excludes retired folk like me, the disabled, the mentally unfit, the unemployed and the simply bone idle, but includes high earners such as stock brokers and CEOs of large corporations. It turns out that the government’s definition of ‘working class’ in this context is based on what your father was doing when you were 14. My father was an officer in the Merchant Navy when I was 14 so I guess that would have written me off for the intern job today. There is, apparently, a list of ‘working class’ jobs to aid the definition. ‘Working class’ jobs include labourers, clerical assistants, and shop workers as well as skilled trades such as plumbers, bricklayers, electricians, joiners and train drivers. The latter recently received a pay rise taking their salaries up to £70,000 a year, and plumbers can do very well, thank you but, no, they are still ‘working class’ it would seem, and their children will still get preference for an intern’s job over, say, the child of a vicar on £30,000 a year. Mind you, being an intern may not be all it is cracked out to be: a well-known BBC journalist and newscaster has just been accused of berating a BBC intern for not spreading the Marmite on the journalist’s toast properly (if I was that intern, the journalist would be wearing the Marmite).
Giving anyone preferential treatment for a job seems wrong to me, be it for reasons of colour, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual preference or background; the job ought to go to the best qualified person. Positive discrimination just causes resentment in a society that places high value on fairness. However, if the government must give bias to hoi polloi, perhaps they should base it on whether the candidate calls a lavatory a bog, or whether the family keeps whippets or pigeons. Better still, the test that a recent correspondent to The Times was given in the Officers’ Mess of his British Army regiment before meeting royalty might do: he was asked whether the family home had a number.
They do say that an optimist describes his beer glass as half full, while a pessimist would say that his glass is half empty. I am a pessimistic sort of chap, myself, having been around on this earth for long enough to know that, if things can go wrong, they usually will. It is with some surprise and delight, therefore, that I can report that our impromptu stay at the voco Oxford-Thames Hotel in July (Blog 142) for my birthday proved to be very good indeed. The hotel is located on the banks of the River Thames, about six miles south of Oxford and adjacent to Sandford Lock. The establishment seems to have been developed from an ancient manor house with its adjacent stone outbuildings, but all are now linked internally. There are large grounds and a well laid out garden, including a parterre. The staff were welcoming, friendly and efficient; the fabric of the buildings was in excellent shape; dinner (included in our package) was delightful; our room was large and comfortable, air conditioned, and had a balcony overlooking the parterre and the Thames beyond. It was all so good that I started wondering what the snag was, but, no, there were no snags (unless you counted having to pay for parking) and we had a very enjoyable stay. The only incongruity we encountered was that the breakfast did not match the quality of the dinner of the previous night. It was most odd, for the buffet breakfast was really no better than one would receive in a Premier Inn or similar budget hotel. The range of food available was quite good and seemed to cater for all international tastes, as one would expect, but the fruit was disappointing. For example, there were wedges of melon, but they were offered whole, so you had to eat them with a knife and fork; there were bowls of whole fruit such as apples, oranges and bananas, but pears and grapefruit were tinned so a fresh fruit cocktail would be difficult to concoct or would disappoint. The sausage and bacon were filling, but of poor quality. The irksome things for me were the self-service tea and coffee from the machine (“Get your own bloody coffee”) and one of those dreadful self-service conveyer belt machines that warms up bread and calls it toast, while your coffee is getting cold. Bearing in mind that the breakfast would have cost us over £20 each if it had not been included in our package, the meal was poor value for money and rather let down the general image of the hotel.
We made good use of our time at Sandford, walking the Thames Path south to Abingdon (ten miles) on Day 2, then following the Thames Path north to Oxford (six miles) on Day 3. Both days were very hot and we caught buses back to the hotel on each day (let’s not be silly about this). Very unusually for us, we actually swam in the hotel pool after we returned from Oxford, and were the only people using it. We passed on using the sauna – we were quite hot enough after six miles under a blazing sun, thank you. Oxford city, by the way, was dreadful: very hot, very crowded and full of buses. We were glad to get out of there. All in all, a very pleasant hotel and recommended, though one should bear in mind that it is large, corporate, hosts several conferences, and is a wedding venue (for which it would be ideal).
It might be worth saying a little more about the Thames Path for the benefit of those who like a good country walk. The Thames Path is designated a National Trail and it runs from the source of the River Thames near Kemble in Gloucestershire all the way down to the Thames Barrier in London. It is axiomatic that it follows the River Thames the whole way and so navigation is easy and it is on level easy ground the whole way. The Path is roughly 184 miles long, so best taken in small batches. There are 45 locks on the non-tidal Thames between Lechlade in Gloucestershire and Teddington in Outer London, and these offer useful Wells-Fargo-like staging posts on the route, where you can obtain water, rest on a bench or just chat with the lock keeper. Alas, you cannot change horses there, but they are usually very peaceful places if you just want to look at the water pouring over the adjacent weir or watch the boats pass through. Jane and I kept two boats on the non-tidal Thames at different times and so we got to know the waterway very well. The rural parts of the Thames Path are the best bits and we have walked several stretches on the Upper Thames, mostly upstream of Oxford where the going is particularly quiet and remote. Recommended for those who like walking in the countryside without the extra strain of climbing hills, fording streams or falling into bogs.
Tell me, why are people so scruffily dressed these days? On two nights at the hotel we were served dinner on a mezzanine floor above the bar because, for some reason, the restaurant was closed. Our vantage point overlooking the bar was perfect for people-watching and we gazed down at our fellow guests like Greek gods looking down from Mount Olympus. We were astonished by what people thought was suitable attire in a top hotel for the evening: shorts, grubby tee shirts or vests, flip flops on their feet – not one person in that bar had made any effort. Jane and I were hardly dressed in black tie, but at least she wore a dress with matching shoes, jewellery and lipstick. I had ditched the tie and wore chinos, penny loafers and a lightweight linen jacket. Our fellow diners were mostly similarly casually dressed like us, but the bar clientele, balancing their food on their laps or on low coffee tables, were just complete slobs. Someone should have told them that they were in a decent hotel in the evening in England, not lounging on the beach in Benidorm. Have a sense of dignity, decorum and self respect for heaven’s sake.
As a follow-on to the last grumble, why does no-one wear shoes any more? Jane and I attended a matinee at the theatre in The Big City last week and baled out, as we sometimes do, during the interval. The performance was lacklustre and amateurish in parts and we saw no point in suffering through the second half as well as having paid for it (besides, Jane fell asleep part way through Act 1). Finding ourselves, then, at a loose end before attending our pre-booked early supper in the city, we decided to behave totally out of character and just sit outside a nearby wine bar, sipping cool glasses of wine and watching folk pass by. We decided to conduct an impromptu survey on footwear and concluded that about 99.9% of the men, and maybe 90% of the women all wore dirty white gym shoes or “trainers” as I believe they are called. I did not see a single pair of Oxfords or decent brogues on the men; the 0.1% not wearing “trainers” wore pointed black leather shoes that I would call winkle-pickers in the 1960s, and I immediately classified the men as probably estate agents. Of the women, few wore pretty sandals as appropriate for the hot weather; some wore hideous clumpy platform-soled things and the odd one or two wore Doc Marten or knee-length boots (it was 30 deg C in the shade). I gather these “trainers” are very comfortable and offer good support to the feet, but a properly fitted pair of men’s leather shoes can be just as comfortable and supportive. If properly cared for, they will last a lifetime. I have a pair of brown Barker Oxford shoes that I have had for well over a thirty years and they have only just been returned to the shoemakers in Northamptonshire for a full refurbishment and refit using the original last used to make them. They will be returned in an ‘as new’ condition and I reckon they will see me out. I still wear my navy-issue black uniform shoes occasionally too – stout Oxfords with years of life left in them, and fine examples of the English cordwainer’s craft. “Trainers”, oh dear – save them for the running track.
Suffering from withdrawal symptoms of our old friends Marjorie and Benjamin in Plymouth, we invited ourselves down for a night to reminisce and partake of the excellent fare that Marjorie invariably provides. She did not disappoint, and we dined and breakfasted off beautiful china plates laid out in style in the large dining room. We felt like the King and Queen of Barsetshire who had popped down to Plymouth for a state visit. On the way home we called in to our old marina in Kingswear, near Dartmouth to see how the hotel and apartment development was progressing and to chat to the marina staff with whom we had become very friendly. Crikey. We were shocked by the state of the marina site, which seemed to be in a worse state than when we left it last December. Builders’ rubble was everywhere and we had to park the car outside as the access road was blocked by lorries. Even the pedestrian route into the marina involved us negotiating a deep trench then stumbling across rubble and stones as if picking our way through a bombed site. The hotel did not seem to have progressed very far in eight months. It was still windowless but we did notice that it now had a roof so perhaps things were happening inside. Apparently it should be finished in October but it is not intended to open it until early in 2026 when the adjacent apartment block is finished – the guests would otherwise be afforded a view of the aforementioned bombed site. The apartment block (note, ‘apartments’ not ‘flats’) was well up but, like the hotel, still windowless and – in our opinion – brash, dominating and totally out of keeping with Devonshire or the River Dart. There are waterside chalets on piles and houses yet to be built on the site – heaven knows what price they will attract. See for yourself at www. nossondart.com/ – it is a lovely part of Devonshire but Jane and I left wondering if, when it is all finished, it will be a mini village: overcrowded, noisy and unaffordable. Maybe we left at the right time. As to the marina itself, the staff were still lovely and the facilities for boats and berth holders superb – but they still hadn’t fitted a security gate to the access bridge so anyone could just stroll onto the marina and down onto the pontoons, unchallenged. An odd set of priorities there.
Have you ever wondered what you would spend your money on if you won the National Lottery? Well, I have just the answer. Thorne Island, off the Pembrokeshire coast in Wales, is up for sale. The private island and its former Victorian fort have been totally refurbished to modern standards and the fort now includes five bedrooms, double-glazed windows, electrical power, underfloor heating using a heat pump, a reverse osmosis plant for fresh water, a sewage treatment plant, a helipad, and a crane for boats. That will do me nicely: no noisy neighbours, no gratuitous hifi music, no dogs, no children…a snip at at offers over £3m. You can be my first guests if I win the lottery – only four at a time please and let me know if you have any allergies.
12 August 2025
"A Very Vintage Chap..." 
You muppett 🥰
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