March and April have been busy times, though looking back, it’s hard to see what I was doing. Writing, yes; doing all the peripheral jobs for Himself as he worked on replacing the shower; taking the first batch of seedlings from the propagator and setting them up in pots in the unheated greenhouse (and then worrying every time the temperature dropped overnight). There’s two whole shelves of seedlings coping with temperatures between plus one degree and the mid-thirties Centigrade in the greenhouse and a new electric shower up and running, as proof that we have been achieving something.
Getting the new shower into place was made easier and tougher by the house itself. The house is old with 20th century extensions, and the shower room is in one of those extensions, backing onto the kitchen. We discovered that there is a gap between the two walls, wide enough to accommodate the old gravity-fed shower mechanism and as much cabling and piping as we want. Whoever installed the old shower tiled over the gap afterwards and cut access points in the tile for the controls and water outlet, so we cut out the damaged tiles and found a way to replace them, as best we could. The only sensible way to get the old shower out was to cut a hole in the kitchen wall and reach in from the back to unbolt it and yank it out. He ran the new pipes and cables from the new source (mains fed) and removed the old piping that ran in interesting configurations from the tank in the loft. Yes, we still have a tank in the loft. We’ve had to explain that to a few people who have never lived in a house with a water tank.
Aside from the shower project, there was the trip to Scotland to the Scottish Association of Writers’ Conference. I had to return the Largs Shield for the next lucky winner to pick up, so I had to go – no hardship, as I did enjoy the weekend last year. I took the Shield down from the wall and had a think about what was to go up there now, though the day after I packed the Shield into my luggage I got an email to say that I was in the top three for this year’s Largs…
… and Laws of Sod applied. I ended up dragging the only male writer in our group up to the front of the conference to read the part of Tim Peake while I was pretending to be a not-very-focussed call handler in a Texan car hire company. The good news is that however much I am tempted to enter this contest next year, I can’t. The rules state that anyone winning a particular contest twice in a row is banned from entering that contest for the next two years. Next year, I will be sitting in the audience cheering for a different winner.
The conference was fun, and I think it deserves a blog post of its own. Drama and comedy, and that’s before the winners began to read out their entries.
Julia Chalkley 