sbodecott

Went round YSP with The Oldies today to get a bit of culture. There was a mix of cool stuff with some pretentious crap, and got caught out in the rain, otherwise a nice day out.

Fun and quirky little thing – someone in Hull is knitting little hats for postboxes!

Am getting around Hull on my visit taking photos of interesting artworks and murals, including a cool tribute to those that died working the trawlers.

I was originally planning on heading over to the UK late in the year to celebrate Dad’s 80th birthday. However given the contracting market in NZ won’t pick up for a few weeks yet, and feeling like I need a bit of an adventure, The Duchess very kindly put out the idea of going over now, which got me thinking. She’s currently in decent health and the weather’s pretty stable right now.

On Saturday I checked availability and prices and things looked good, so within an hour I had booked flights, the train to Hull, travel insurance and even bagged a ticket for Kaiser Chiefs while I’m over there! Within 4 days of considering it I’ll be on my way! I’ve even got a shiny new Bri’ish passport to flash on my way in to avoid the need for ETAs .

On the upside I’ll be packing mostly T-shirts, jumpers and fleeces so I can take the rucksack to avoid dragging a suitcase across London (So. Many. Stairs!)

On the downside I’ll will be swapping 20+ degrees of sunny weather for this :

Best make the most of Sat 14th then ….

On a trip to the coast today I reet fancied a chip butty so went into the local chippy and said to the lady behind the counter “could I please have a chip butty?”

As soon as I saw the perplexed look on the poor girl’s face that I sounded

a) incredibly Yorkshire

b) a complete nutter

I then tried to explain the concept of a chip butty to someone that has never heard of such a thing.

“Bread cake? Bread roll? Chips in a sandwich”

Thankfully we bridged the Kiwi-Yorkshire language barrier and they provided me with two boxes, one containing some chips and another with a warm, buttered bread cake from which I could construct – under the watchful eyes of a hundred seagulls – my desired Chip Butteh. (No chip spice or vinegar so not quite perfect but good enough).

By Brian Bilston, one of my favourite Kiwi poets.

I can concur with all of this apart from perhaps driving and relationships.

Annoyingly I missed out on 222222 while it was at the garage, but still satisfying. #numbernerd

After a full year of constant tweaking by The Duchess she is FINALLY satisfied her that her Garden Room is complete and we can actually relax and just use it!

Through 2025 we :

put up a wind shade (then swiftly took it back down, reinforced it with duct table and put it back up again)
purchased several batches of pebbles to fill in the gaps between the decking and the retaining walls, then collected them up again, applied “rock glue” — which apparently is a thing — and put them back down again so they stick together
put up a bunch of Temu stuff – shelving unit, several wall-mounted planters, tool organizer and bird repelling hangy-things
jetwashed the deck half a dozen times to clear out bird poo
restained the outside of the pergola
hacked away at most of the greenery outside the pergola that kept wanting to come in

Now we have to wait for the odd day when it’s not blowing a gale and can sit outside and enjoy it…