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It has been a strange and eventful month and it’s also the start of Chapter 14.  We start a new chapter in the story of our lives to coincide with the start of a new season’s travelling.  Regular readers will know that we originally set off for a six month trip of a lifetime back in October 2008 and that as our circumstances and outlook on life completely changed, we continued our nomadic alternative lifestyle for the next 12 years.  We spent the summer touring the UK in our caravan and set off for adventures overseas when the weather turned cold and the nights started to draw in. 

We knew that taking on the renovation project on the house would mean a disruption to the pattern we had become used to.  However, no one could predict the events of the last couple of years living through the pandemic.  This now feels like a tentative return to normal life whilst keeping an eye on the current high number of daily cases and slowly rising hospital admissions. 

We have certainly been busy and have had some good times but October has been a chaotic time of unexpected work, stress, long journeys and sadness.

The month started with our first volunteering for The Tramway on The Story Tram.  These are for children under 4 and involve story telling & nursery rhymes on the Tram ride and more stories, songs and activities at the station in Colyton.  It’s not our favourite event as most of the children are very young and tend to have an attention span shorter than Neil’s.  However, we’re doing our bit for the community and helping to keep up the profile of The Tramway which goes on to assist with the funding they get.

We’ve started to eat out a little more often now, perhaps getting a little bit blasé about Covid despite the soaring number of cases.  First up was Ragini with Diane and Glyn for a curry to celebrate Diane finally getting the proceeds of her inheritance after nearly a year of hard work.  The fizzy was on her!

Flu jabs followed a few days later at the same time that Bill & Sue arrived for the weekend.  It was great to have them back as they were our first visitors before all the renovations took place.  We ate out quite a bit, The Shed for one evening and several lunches out following visits to Seatown and Lyme Regis.  

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We also had the welcome return of our favourite builder, Stacy. Readers may recall that in March he carried out some remedial work to the chimney stack which was causing the damp patch in bedroom 2. He planned to return to carry out the same work to the stack on the other side when he had a suitable gap between major jobs. However, his building firm is in great demand so we have had to be patient, and on the bright side this also gave us time to put together a small list of other jobs for him to do. Stacy started by going into the loft to check his previous repair was holding out……….there was silence…….followed by cursing and then a grim faced Stacy. ‘Right’ he said, ‘now it’s personal!’.

He was back up the long ladders which could be used to reach the chimney on the loggia side and back at work. Repairs to the other chimney required a scaffold tower in the drive and that was booked in for the following week. He also tiled the base of the fireplace in the study to cover over the mess of broken tile and concrete which was exposed when we replaced the old log burner with a smaller one last year. We will post some pics of the final result next month when the fire is refitted.

Bill & Sue left on Sunday morning and we were expecting the arrival that afternoon of Alison and Paul, friends we met one season in Goa.  They have spent most of the summer travelling the UK in their motorhome and we invited them to stay if they were planning to be nearby.  Setting up the date of the visit had been straightforward as they always answered emails quickly.  Our last exchanges were to ask what time they would arrive as it was on the day Bill & Sue were due to depart and suddenly there was no response.  Oh well we thought, they’ll contact us when they can, especially as they didn’t have our address!  No response and they didn’t show up.  We thought we must have upset them in our emails but really couldn’t see how.

Then it was back to hard graft for us decorating and managing the upgrade of one of the properties in Bristol.  We thought we’d finished with doing all this ourselves as we had used tradies for the last few refurbs on the rentals, but another outcome of Covid times is that with everyone wanting to improve their homes you can’t get a tradie for love nor money.  So we just had to roll up our sleeves and get on with it.  Like all tradies, plumbers were in short supply and with a bit of pleading Matt who did the plumbing in our house during lockdown agreed to make the 1.5hr journey from Exmouth and back to fit a new bathroom suite. 

Matt could only spare one day so we called on our old plumber in Bristol to spare an hour on the Friday  we arrived in the flat to take the shower off the wall, remove the sink & take out the toilet cistern.  Flushing with a bucket is no problem for a couple of days we thought. Our Carpet supplier arrived to measure and was booked to fit carpets and bathroom vinyl as soon as the plumbing was all complete. 

However, the precision planning on delivery of the new suite on Saturday was the first thing to go wrong. With no suite, there was no point Matt arriving on Monday.  A few calls later the Bathroom was set to arrive Wednesday, Carpets rescheduled to the following week and Matt was rescheduled for Thursday.  Luckily for us there have been a number of delivery issues which affected Matt’s other customers. 

We started the decorating, sanding, prepping & painting all whilst trying to maintain a clean space for the bed and our belongings in the tiny one bedroom flat.  Wednesday morning the suite arrived – yay! Then we howled with misery after Victoria Plumb delivered a smashed up bath and toilet pan…..arrrrgh!  More time wasted yelling at Vic Plumb and frantic calls to Matt.  Thursday morning and full undamaged suite arrived, old damaged stuff collected and Matt rebooked for Friday.  Phew! 

In the middle of all this we also travelled up to Sheffield to attend Sandra’s funeral.  We stopped off with Leanne and young Neil on the way up and then travelled to Sheffield next day.  If you can ever say you ‘enjoyed a funeral’ then this is one that we did.  There was standing room only by the time we arrived and the whole service, which was a celebration of her life was both emotional and uplifting.  We went to the wake afterwards and decided to stay on for the evening to have dinner with some people from Goa who were also staying overnight.  We had a lovely evening with what were really just acquaintances but now we consider them friends and look forward to seeing them again on the beach in Benaulim only this time without their clothes on!

It was then back to Bristol for the finishing touches to the flat before heading home for The Twinning Association cheese and wine evening.  There was a quiz and our quickly scrambled together team of 4 came a handsome second place.  It was a fun evening and a chance to relax after the stress of the previous two weeks.

The crazy year in the garden continues.  We picked tomatoes and peppers in the garden and greenhouse plus courgettes, apples, squash and pumpkins from the garden.  It’s mad to be so far into the year and still harvesting. 

Then it was a weekend of more volunteering on Saturday and Sunday, this time on The Halloween Tram.  Great fun after we dressed up, Cheryl as Countess Dracula and Neil as Uncle Fester.  The kids had a good time with craft items to make, colouring in and quizzes.  The parents and grandparents also gave us a few giggles with their reaction to two very strange looking people stalking them on the station platform.

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Then we had some devastating news.  Neil was passing one of the many picture galleries that we have hung all over the house.  He noticed a picture of Alison and Paul who should have visited us on October 10^th.  Curiosity got him thinking so he went to the computer and put their names into google.  What he found shook him to the core.  They had been killed on September 7^th in a tragic accident with a motorcycle as they walked along a road in Herefordshire.  They had died 3hrs after their last email to us confirming their visit.

We are ‘glass half full’ people and have found a positive or two.  They came to visit us in Brecon a few years ago when we were in the caravan.  We had a really good day and that’s where we took the selfie of us all.  They too loved the lifestyle and were always getting away in their motorhome.  In fact, they loved it so much that they spent more time in it than they did in their house.  In a way they were lucky, if you can be in a situation like this, they died together, pretty much instantaneously and doing what they loved, walking with their dog and exploring new places.  RIP you two, you are on our picture wall along with the Welsh Love Spoon in the kitchen that you gave us in Brecon– and that’s where you will stay.

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