Age

Lydbrook Valley, Gloucestershire looking north towards Courtfield

I left Lin asleep upstairs. With old Oscar I walked out of Rock Cottage, along the familiar path by the small iron gate of Plum House, which has a new resident. With my hazel stick and walking boots I clambered, sharp left, up the random stepping stones of a ladder-length gully to a familiar path that runs through the woods to a lych-gate opening onto a sheep mown pasture filling the foreground of the Lydbrook valley, coated on either slope with trees in wintry brown, yellow and fading green. At the head of the sloping meadow there’s a break between hanger woods leading via a steepening track to an edge. Along this runs a staked barbed wire fence with large mesh chicken wire, to keep in lambs. There's a stile. 

It’s a boundary that recurs in the paintings of our friend Steven Outram, who works in an old church hall on the opposite side of the valley. 

'It seems like forever' Steven Outram

Oscar and I climb slowly, pacing ourselves, towards the stile. Beyond it, the landscape opens to a panorama; nearly twenty miles away I can often see the grey outline of the Brecon Beacons; in the middle ground, the tower of English Bicknor church, amid fields of cattle and sheep. Earlier clouds had thinned. We had sun for our walk. Over the wet turf of Lydbrook’s small airfield, there are two runways mown flatter, surfaces fancied by Oscar who not so long ago would scout through deep tangled bracken and bramble. 

A family was walking the same field.  I heard the chatter of happy children. Oscar and I strolled slightly askance towards the same field gate, letting the band of ramblers and their dog advance and disappear. 

Herefordshire towards the Brecon Beacons

We descend from the larger landscape to the combe, edged by the road past Eastbach Court. I enjoy this Queen Anne house, slightly grudging the investment apparent in its excellent maintenance, walled garden, out-lying barns, stables, Dower House and steward’s cottage - each address indicated by push-bells next to a bright red post box with the initials VR - with the time of daily collection - embedded in the stonework of the modest gates. But here’s no local farming squire embroidered into the landscape and lives of an ageless community. We’ve walked Bell Hill over thirty years and seen this house change owners three times. 

The morning is beautiful. Occasional cars slow for us, as I walk upwards; Oscar on a lead until we’ve ascended to the forest’s plateau. What may have been Eastbach Court’s home farm marches beside a rough track back into the woods above Lydbrook. I follow it into the trees, bright sun beams sliced by tall spruce, signs of leaf mould turfed over by foraging wild boar. 

Passing Nigel Aston’s old car yard – hulks of many models rusting on a bulldozed track just above our path, we arrive on the steep path down Bell Hill between the beech wood above Rock Cottage, at one point sliding on my bottom over leaves, mast and twigs. 

The slope down Bell Hill through the slender beech

At home again. Lin has fed the wood stove more of our well seasoned ash, cut four years ago, sawn and split in the summer.

A day later the rest of the family arrived. Linda and I become 'Nan' and 'Grandpa', 'Mum' and 'Dad'. The cottage becomes turbulent. To let grown-ups stay in bed, I'm steward - for drinks, cereals, toast, getting dressed and resisting the spreading disorder of objects that accompanies the activities of children. 
"Right everyone, A walk! Coats and boots"
With the two dogs, Oscar and Cookie, and three children we set off up Bell Hill inventing the ten foot rabbit that lives here. 
"Keep your eyes peeled. Listen carefully. Be not afeard. Bell Hill and the woods are full of noises, " 
They know we're making things up. The sky is cloudless. 

Hannah, Oliver and Sophia on the way to Eastbach

"You know that on the other side of this hill there's an enormous bison"
We retrace the walk I made, walking along a sloping track beside heifers and a placid Black Angus bull, the dogs on leads. 
"There's the bison!" I show them a construction placed on a rise across a field.

"Do you want to see it close?"
"No, no, no!" in chorus. I knew we'd be trespassing.
Along the Eastbach road we troop north along Probert's Barn Lane, the narrow road - in places grass along its centre - that crosses back into the Lydbrook Valley.

Probert's Barn Lane

I'm trudging, glad of my stick. The children's energy is boundless. We've further to go. Back briefly to the cottage across a long sloping meadow, then down the path to the main road. Hannah and Oliver talk to one another through 100 feet of plumbing of the galvanised hand rail - mouth and ear; childish teasing back and forth along the pipe.

We stop to post a card the children have written to Sophia's dad...

... cross the dangerous road through the village, with tremendous care, and ascend the opposite hill on a narrow path to where the railway ran in and out of the Forest of Dean.
"There's a ghost train runs along here! Can you hear a train?"

Waiting for the ghost train that runs through the Lydbrook Valley

"What about the ten foot rabbit?"
"It's scared of the train. It lives over the way where we walked before"
"It's coming" shouts Oliver "Get on the train. Quick"
Safe on the train, we head toward the river. We descend by many steps to the Wye, collecting interesting fruit and seeds and leaves.

Beside the river there are ducks and a pair of swans scavenging, neck dipping for seconds at a time, by the opposite bank.
So home on the pavement up to the centre of the village, up the Bell Hill path.
"Have you seen the mess the wild boar have made of our lawn"
"It's the ten foot rabbit"
"No! Wild boar rooting"
Indoors the grown ups are about, well fuelled wood fire warming the room.

"Where are we going today?"
Making decisions about this will go on a while. I sit back with a mug of tea. The children lay out their samples, examining what they've collected.

*** *** ***
Εορτή Αγίου Ισιδώρου 

Παρά το δυνατό νοτιά, ο κόσμος γέμισε απόψε το εκκλησάκι του Αγίου Ισιδώρου πάνω από τη Βενετιά, για να παρακολουθήσει το Μεγάλο Εσπερινό, παραμονή της εορτής του Αγίου. Το ψαλτήρι, όπως πάντα πλήρες, με ανάμικτο «τοπικό» και «βυζαντινό» ιδίωμα, με τον Γεώργιο Κένταρχο και το Σπύρο Τσιριγώτη στο Ανάγνωσμα της «Σοφίας Σολομώντος». Αύριο, Δευτέρα 4 Φεβρουαρίου 2019, ανήμερα της εορτής του Αγίου Ισιδώρου του Πηλουσιώτου, στις 8.00 το πρωί θα ξεκινήσει η ακολουθία του Όρθρου και στην συνέχεια, κατά τις 9.00 η Πανηγυρική Θεία Λειτουργία, μετ’ αρτοκλασίας. Στις δε 5.30 το απόγευμα θα ψαλθεί η Ιερά Παράκλησις προς τον Άγιο. Above Ano Korakiana tonight, in spite of the strong south wind, people filled the little church of St. Isidoros of Pelousios above Venetià, in order to attend the Great Vespers service, on the eve, of the celebration of the Day of the Saint. As always, the list of  hymns and chants, was full of mixed local and Byzantine pieces. George Kentarhos and Spyros Tsirigotis read from the Wisdom of Solomon. (Part translation: Thanks to Maria Strani-Potts)

*** *** ***
Memo to myself re Birmingham City Council's plans to decommission Walsall Road Allotments - a petition. It was started by my friend Betty Farrugia, Secretary, for many years, of WRA - probably the best allotment site in the West Midlands. She it was who persuaded me to have an allotment myself, after we'd saved the Victoria Jubilee Allotments near my home in Birmingham. [By 21.00 on Tue 19th Feb 6.700 signatures had been attached to the petition: 8006 by 01.00 22/2/19]; 10274 signatures by 15.30 on 28th Feb 2019.

Walsall Road Allotments threatened by plans for Birmingham's 2022 Commonwealth Games

Work

Hannah and Oliver at our house

We have recovered wood turned out by householders when Handsworth Helping Hands (HHH) were doing a Skip-it Don't Tip-it day in Putney Avenue.

It was full of staples, bolts and nails but once cut up, and stacked, burned well. On eBay Lin discovered a palette manufacturer not far from us who regularly give away kiln dried off-cuts. A few days ago, a neighbour messaged me 'I'm having a dead tree removed. Collect?' Contractors loaded parts of her felled tree into the borrowed HHH van. I stacked them in front of the house.

This afternoon, just back from Gloucestershire, I began cutting up the lesser girths with an electric chain-saw.

This timber, though from a poplar already dead, is too young to split. In a year it may be ready.
Earlier in the - around 8.00 this morning - Lin and I were in bed in Rock Cottage, in Lydbrook. The phone rang. Dot, her mum, was calling from her kitchen floor in Cannock.
"I've fallen in the kitchen, and I can't wake Arthur"
Lin dialled 999
"I'm 100 miles away in Gloucestershire" she told the operator.
"Is your mother bleeding?"
"I don't know I'm a hundred miles..."
"How does she look?"
The ambulance was on its way to Cannock in 15 minutes. Lin rang Wilf, next door, to unlock the front door, so the crew wouldn't have to break in. Then Arthur was awake. Lin was patched to the ambulance dispatcher.

Lin on the phone to her mum, waiting at her home for an ambulance

"Mum may have broken her wrist or her arm. It's badly bruised. I'm going to collect dad and take him to the hospital. Mum doesn't half pick her times. I'll bring them home."
We'd been working on tidying up Rock Cottage. Enjoying seeing Lydbrook again. Making the place ready for the family to enjoy again after Martin and Sandra and their son Adam have done so much restoration since August 2014.

Traveller's Joy on the path up to Rock Cottage - looking over towards Courtfield

In an hour we were packed up, tidying and heading back to the Midlands, Oscar in the back, We ate a picnic in the car, mackerel pâté sandwiches from a brown bloomer; wedges of pork pie.
*** *** ***
Handsworth Helping Hands has slightly changed direction.  Gaelle Finley included my thoughts on the futility of doing the same thing over and over....

RUBBISH? A BIG LOCAL ISSUE
What’s abandoned and not abandoned tells much about local and global economies. Once upon a time it was worth it for sellers of bottled drinks to pay people (often children) to return empty bottles. It meant fewer soft drinks containers littering the streets. One of the things that strikes anyone collecting street waste is the sheer amount of alcohol being consumed in the area – not beer but liquors of every kind.
Right now far less discarded metal is collected from the street. Why all these fridges? Disposing of them is no longer free to householders. The manufacturers encourage consumers to change fridges more frequently. There’s money to be made from the metal innards of fridges, especially the copper coil in the motor. Now, that’s less likely to be the case, and though people are still dumping fridges, we find fewer ‘gutted’ ones. Why do we see far fewer discarded ovens or washing machines? Because suppliers at point of sale are throwing in disposal-of-your-old-model in return for delivery and installation, which entails plumbing for washers and wiring in direct for all but very small stoves. Fridges and freezers are just plugged in.
Why so many clothes and other soft materials left lying around clothes recycling bins? There’s a market for old clothes often discarded in good condition, and people just want free clothes for themselves and their families. Going through discarded clothes, people select what they want and leave the rest on the pavement.
In our area, not many people want wood. I have delivered wood cut by Railtrack maintenance workers to a wood-stove owner in Handsworth. I use such wood for our wood stove, but there are not many wood stoves around – getting ones efficient enough for accreditation in a smokeless zone tend to make gas cheaper.
We wonder at how much expensive baby equipment is either dumped or given to Handsworth Helping Hands (HHH) as donations. This stuff is not cheap, but even less well-off people like to pay for new things for a baby. We got second hand push chairs for our children but we met friends who are shocked we did this.
Birmingham City Council Fleet and Waste managers attribute the volume of dumped furniture – sofas, armchairs, beds, shelves, sideboards, wardrobes and other items made of chipboard and MDF – to the high turnover of tenancies and the tendency to buy furniture that doesn’t last long. When a new tenant arrives they also want to clear out everything in close contact with previous tenants. A lot of that ends up on pavements. We know that more of this should be paid for by landlords, but it’s an extra too many seek to avoid.
Rarer items thrown in the street, which HHH has encountered, are the big polystyrene blocks that cannabis growers have used to insulate their growing spaces, serving also to hide their activities from the heat sensor in the police helicopter.
Very large accumulations of black bags – a familiar sight in the whole inner ring of the city – suggest the waste disposal methods of tenants a landlord doesn’t wish to be recorded for tax, so that their premises get no, or far too few, wheelie bins.
Add to these issues the vast messiness of trade waste and the low attention given to regulating trade waste licences in our area and you have another major source of rubbish.
We can no longer expect to leave out metal to be collected by the scrap men who roam around HHH street cleaning events – quote from an article in the Guardian last November ‘the bottom dropped out of the recyclable materials market. The global economic downturn means that the global response to “any old UK iron?” is a big fat “no” as scrap metal reputedly plummets from £175 a tonne to a mere £25, plastic prices falling by a reputed £100 a tonne and copper by a huge £1,500 a tonne’. 

Nick, Mike (Chair), Flea (cat) and Lin (Treasurer) ~ HHH committee (photo: Simon, Secretary)

Members of our voluntary group – Handsworth Helping Hands – enjoy what they do. We live in Handsworth. We care about Handsworth. We work hard and we work as a team. We are even used to thinking that we, our partners and residents, are having a real impact in the area. But more and more we’ve had to recognise that we find ourselves doing the same street clean-ups over and over. We are vexed at how many people seem impervious to change; at how our neighbourhood seems stuck in a rut, remaining an obstinate and notorious mess.  For example, HHH carries out one of its regular ‘Skip-it Don’t Tip-it Days’ in one road, with partners and residents. Afterwards things looks great – for a while. We’re all very pleased – for a while. A job well done – for a while. A few days later, we find the same street that looked briefly as a street ought to look, is again as bad as before people got stuck in cleaning it up.

Picking up Bogan's 12m³ skip - hire charge £240 paid for by Neighbourhood Funds 

The same fly-tipping and littering has occurred again, in the same places we picked it up a few days before. We are a small group – 7 of us. We take pride in our local reputation, but we aren’t regulators. We have no authority. We see the same rubbish reappearing and we collect some if it. We resort to the repetitive and often futile labour of reporting it to an overloaded local council.  Knowing all this, experiencing it over three years, the HHH committee decided a few weeks ago to experiment with a shift in approach. We won a grant of £2140 from Birmingham Community Safety Partnership ‘Mobilising Communities Small Grants Fund’.  We selected four avenues – Putney, Brackley, Poplar and Crompton, each with fewer than 20 households, and have named it the ‘4 Avenues Project’. We will strive to engage people in these small places.
We continue to involve our Neighbourhood Office, Birchfield Residents’ Action Group, Midland Heart and Fleet & Waste, .....

Fleet & Waste bring sweeper and compactor truck to Putney Avenue

...but want to do things WITH rather than TO or FOR people. We are learning. So are residents. So, maybe, is everyone involved; learning together about the same intractable challenges that exist in longer streets, in larger areas, but with – just perhaps – a greater chance of doing something about them.
We would really like to balance the disproportionate emphasis on blaming feckless neighbours. There are such people, but just as with crime and health there is more to it. We need to continue to be hard on littering but harder on its causes.

Fish and chips break in Putney Avenue - Nick, Ruth, Oscar, Lin, John and Jimoh 

*** *** *** ***
Last week I donated blood for the 119th time. As a long term donor I'm allowed to continue after age 70, and as a volunteer for the Intervals Study, I'm giving blood more frequently. This time my appointment was 8 in the morning, dawn breaking ...

Cycling down Constitution Hill into Birmingham city centre

65 New Street - Blood donor centre is on the second floor

..On the way home on Constitution Hill I passed a clothes mannequins shop, including a dog mannequin - Tradelines. These give me an idea for a scarecrow on the allotment, especially as the shop has second hand models

** ** ** ** **
I offered to child-mind Oliver, instead of waiting for Amy to ask us as a favour. Oliver is just at the stage that ought to go on forever, where he's always asking "Why?" about things and I just love inventing the answers I don't know. We were strolling with Oscar down Gibson Road. The old car has been slowly bio-degrading for as long as we've lived nearby.

Gibson Road ~ Oscar and Oliver walking in Handsworth

Looking at this venerable Vauxhall Cresta Oscar asked "Why?"
"It is owned by the man in that house. Fifty years ago when he was a young man, about your age, he was given that car by his mum who had bought it second hand from the Queen. He was so excited he decided to drive it round the world via America, Russia, South America, China, across Greece to England where the engine exploded, so he bought a house and parked his beloved car in the drive..." "Why?"
"Because he'd driven so far and the car had looked after him he loved it. He could not even think of getting rid of it. So there it's stood for near 60 years!"
"Why?"
We walk on. Later I met up with Amy and Liz and Henry James and Hannah at One Stop. We had a meal at Wetherspoons.

Oliver, Liz with Henry James, Amy and Hannah at The Arthur Robertson (JD Wetherspoon), Perry Barr

...after which Oliver and I took a train from Perry Barr into New Street where I had a coffee and Oliver a choc ice-cream cone...

Oliver in Grand Central, Birmingham

...after which I cycled and walked  - Oliver sat on my cycle rack, Oscar in the handlebar basket - down to Fazeley Street where we slipped down an alleyway onto the Grand Union Canal...

 ...we headed through dark tunnels, under bridges and up locks to the junction at Aston Top Lock with the Birmingham & Fazeley. We followed that all the way to Spaghetti Junction where the canal turned east towards Minworth and Amy's home

Just east of Spaghetti Junction on the Birmingham & Fazeley Canal

...Oliver rode, walked and sometimes ran up and down the slopes of locks and hump bridges where a siding canal joins the main, keeping up a running conversation. We stopped at the KFC on Kingsbury Road backing onto the towpath - orange juice and a chicken leg for Oliver and corn-on-the-cob for me - then on in the gathering dusk to where after Minworth locks the towpath deteriorates and we were picking our way through puddles and mud until we came to Minworth Green Bridge hardly a 100 yards from Oliver's home on Summer Lane.
"You realise we've covered nearly 8 miles. All the way from the city centre to your house!"
We were hardly a minute waiting outside the house when Liz turned up, and soon after that Guy and Amy and, a good bit later. Linda. We had an Indian take-away.

****** ******
Dora Metallinos, on the Ano Korakiana website, praises the city of Corfu, το Πόλη - which seems so far away at the moment....

Πόλη, Κέρκυρα 
Γράφει ο/η Δώρα Μεταλληνού   01.02.16

Κάτω απ' αυτό το κομμάτι ουρανού είδα το πρώτο φως!Μέσα σε χρώματα,ευωδιέςκαι μνήμες!Τύχη μεγάλη το θεωρώ! Ευωδιάζει η ομορφιά εδώ και καθρεφτίζαται παντού. Μέσα στα σοκάκια περπάτησα τους πρώτους εφηβικούς έρωτες, Με μπλε ποδιά και άσπρο γιακαδάκι αγνάντευα κομμάτια σύννεφου...Οσο μου επέτρεπε το κενό ανάμεσα στα στενά σοκάκια. Πάνω στους υγρούς τοίχους,μουσκεμένα αποτυπώματαοι ολοφυρμοί ανθρώπων που γνώρισαν τη βία των κατακτητών. Κι ήταν πολλόι....Σε κάθε γωνιά οι σφραγίδες τους πάνω στα μνημεία. Αναμφίβολα υψιλής αισθητικής.  Ρούχα να κρέμονται σαν σε ικρίωμα, από τη μια μεριά στην άλλη στα καντούνια ,να περιμένουν να στεγνώσουν κάτω από όσες αχτίδες μπορούσαν να τρυπωσουν. Και εμείς να γελάμε με τα κρεμασμένα εσώρουχα των κυράδων. Σκάλες ξύλινες ατέλειωτες να οδηγούν μέσα στα σύννεφα! Ετριζαν καθώς τις ανεβοκατεβαίναμε κι έκαναν τη φαντασία μου να οργιάζει. Κυράδες με κρινολίνα και ομπρελίνα, κύριοι με ''μπαουλίνα'' και καπέλο ,να κοσμούν τους δρόμους.Κι εκεί σε κάποια τραπεζάκια του "Λιστόν"  η διανόηση να συσκέπτεται με αγωνία για τη γλώσσα και την ελευθερία. Και οι χωριάτες στη λαική ,εικόνα κι αυτή ,στου νου μου τα κιτάπια, να κάνει εμφανή την κοινωνική διαφορά. Να φαντάζομαι πάντα την αδικία του να μη μπορούν να σεριανίσουν στο δρόμο των ''ευγενών''. Και οι δυο κορφές της πόλης να αγκαλιάζουν σα δυο μεγάλες φτερούγες τους κατοίκους και τα σπίτια. Αιώνες ζωής πέρασαν από πάνω της...Η υγρασία, η αδιαφορία, η έκπτωση των αξιών,η αλλάγή προτεραιοτήτων, μόνιμο επίχρεισμα, έφερε τη φθορά στους τοίχους, στα μνημεία, στους ανθρώπους...  Οξειδώθηκαν όλα....Μόνο μια παρηκμασμένη αρχοντιά έμεινε..Μια εκπνοή μεγαλείου.... Η περηφάνεια των κτηρίων μόνο,που στέκουν περήφανα,ευθυτενή.....μα τραυματισμένα....  On the Liston on my Brompton (photo: Linda Baddeley)

Weekend on Bell Hill

Rock Cottage on Bell Hill

We return to Greece in just over a month, but Rock Cottage in Lydbrook weighs on us even there, the place we found in 1981 and bought in days.
Long ago, so it feels, Lin and I went to a wedding in south Wales and on the A40, the dual carriageway that extends the M50 into Wales, we glimpsed Ross-on-Wye on the side of a rise above the river, its distinctive church sat as a town almost without sprawl inside Gloucestershire hills.
"That's a nice place"
"Lovely"

It could hardly have been a fortnight later, a weekend in June or July was it? An estate agent sent us descriptions of three places. We visited two. The second was up a narrow rough path far from the road. Lin stood in the waist high meadow grass of the small piece of ground,  attached to the house, on the side of the hill, looking over to a frieze off trees across the valley. There were butterflies and bees.
"What do you think?"
"I love it" she said
We bought it on Monday.
It was a mess, empty for a good two years, encroached upon by the forest, full of inept furnishing, cold in winter, mouldy in summer. We bought it in the year of the birth of our son Richard.
It became a place we went for days and weekends and whole weeks over twenty five years. Lin's dad rewired it. We put in central heating; but did most of the improvements ourselves, until we found a builder to add an extension that enlarged the sitting room,

Then the children grew up.  It was trickier for Lin's parents to climb the barrow's-width path curving 200 steep paces up Bell Hill, where the cottage had been built at the end of the 19th century on a ledge cut of the hillside. No house could be built there now. Regulations require some direct sunlight on a residence all year round. The tall beech trees on its crest and Bell Hill itself takes away direct sun from Rock Cottage six months of the year.
It's in a wonderful place. Walk out the back and into the Forest of Dean; climb, even clamber up, the deep shaded path up the hill and arrive at a view that on a clear winter's day shows the Brecon Beacons, sometimes snow capped.
From the windows of Rock Cottage you can gaze down the narrow Lydbrook Valley to Courtfield on a hill above a bend of the River Wye.

Sunrise in Lydbrook

We seem to be isolated amid every kind of greenery from the tall trees, oak, beech and ash especially, but proliferating ash and hazel and mounds of brambles, nettles and myriad wild flowers, and meadow grass. Yet just down the path we have a village shop, bus stop and the rest of the village of Lydbrook strung out on the road from the edge of the Wye to the Gloucester-Monmouth road a mile and half up onto the forest plateau - with short journeys into the forest to Cinderford and Coleford.
For years our family, Amy and Richard and my parents-in-law, Dorothy and Arthur, Lin and I were won't to pack the car in Handsworth and head 75 miles down the M5, passing the Malvern Hills to our south, then west then north as at Strensham Junction we turned west on the M50 and headed for Ross-on-Wye...

...then bypass the town and take the narrow turn into Goodrich, cross Kerne Bridge...

Kerne Bridge

...and wind three miles beside the river to the T-junction at lower Lydbrook. Except last weekend, as for the weekend a fortnight ago when we gone down to inspect...

...the weather was dire; Lin's car was overheating; and we were rowing. I'd even thought that perhaps we should just put the place up for auction. Get it off our backs. Lin wouldn't hear of it but both of us dreaded taking on the task of recovering the cottage from five years of expensive neglect. I pay full rates. It didn't help that the builder we thought we trusted had left the central heating on at the start of last year and cost me £700, and worse had done work for which we'd paid that turns out not to have solved the problem of 'water ingress' that keeps one of the bedroom ceilings and end walls crumbling. Our builder - seemingly a decent man - working on the cottage between others jobs in ways that seemed to suit him and us - finally placed the straw on the camel's back by installing new windows that were entirely against Lin's most detailed specification - ones that half opened when we wanted them fully opening and didn't fit anyway suggesting he'd off-loaded a job lot.
"Lost in translation" was his excuse.
We parted company after he had removed all the bathroom plumbing adding the final touch of complete uninhabitability to the beloved place.
This last year I did something about the encroaching trees, paying Dave Kenworthy of Evolution Trees, - after Lin and I had spent an August weekend doing some clearing with scythe, saw and loppers - to remove tall ash trees too risky for us to fell, threatening the power line to the house, and cut it up as firewood.  Dave is good; instant phone and email communication; transmitting photos of his work; easy to pay; transparent, professional and conscientious. He also found us another builder who checked over the cottage.
There are troubles continued; not through incompetence or dishonesty but cost. Shaun, Dave's builder, said the cottage roof needed entirely relining and parts replacing. The cost of going up and down Bell Hill, along with scaffolding, gave us a bill that, on top of what we'd already paid the previous builder, was depressing. I phoned Shaun. I apologised for his trouble. I said we were thinking of washing our hands of the place and going to auction. He returned our keys.
Last hope. It's always unfair and probably unwise to lean on friends for favours but we shared our worries about Rock Cottage with Martin, and family, Sandra and Adam...

Sandra and Adam at  relative's wedding in Henley on Thames

Simon, Adam and Martin on Summer Song the first time the family visited us in Greece

We've all known each other for the greater part of our grown-up lives, and seen each other's children grow up.

Sandra and Lin at 'the pub' in Ano Korakiana

Two weekends ago Sandra got to the pub bar before me, and paid for a lunch for us all at the Courtfield Arms in Lydbrook. We'd promised to take them for lunch as part of 'a conference on the cottage'. It was grey and wet. The cottage was wet and messy inside and out, smelling of neglect. Yet a sun came out on our apprehensions. Sandra and Martin know the things that Lin and I row about, and Rock Cottage can be a particular focus of strife between us.  Laying a figurative had on our shoulders, Martin was terse; decisive.
"Clear the ground floor so we can get the kitchen and bathroom back to work. Hire a skip and clear the pile of rubbish in the garden and anything you want rid of in the cottage"
The windows could be sealed but left for the moment, ditto the problems with the roof "but it must be sorted if possible before the winter. Adam will help with lads to load the skip"
We agreed that work start on Saturday 2nd August. Lin and I would go down beforehand to start the process of deciding what should be kept and what discarded. She and I were there by midday last Wednesday - arguing most of the time. I wanted to take stuff and skip it, a total cleansing; clean break; tabula rasa. Lin doesn't think that way. We worked carting, carrying, cleaning, folding, wrapping, bagging - barely on speaking terms, as yet another load of smelly bedding material was bagged for me to carry down Bell Hill to put in Lin's car to go home for washing.
"Yes we may end up taking some of it to the charity shop but lots of this is good bedding!"
"If you say so"
A middle sized skip was hired - £198 - for the weekend from Bell Waste, permission given by Phil at Central Stores to place it, on Friday, just where we wanted at the foot of the path up the hill.
We rose early on Saturday to be in Lydbrook by 9.00am as agreed. It was forecast to pour, in the Midlands and worse in Gloucestershire. It did.
But on getting to the car park in Lydbrook a patch of blue appeared. Then Martin and, in a works van, Adam and his friend and co-worker Jack. They set to filling the skip. Martin went up to get the WC working and check the kitchen plumbing so the lads could stay overnight. Lin and I, talking carefully to one another, went up the hill to continue the work we were arguing about on Wednesday.

Rock Cottage on Saturday

"What's got to go upstairs" Starting the sort

The rubble in the garden

Adam and Jack with our skip beginning to fill

On Sunday morning Ln and I drove down again. The lads made us bacon sarnies -  brown sauce to add, which we ate upstairs, before continuing the sorting and tidying the garden including lopping a couple of branches Dave had missed, one lot already reaching towards our power cable. I laid in with my scythe, eating juicy blackberries from the bramble mounds.

Sealing round the windows

Note from Lin after the w/e:

Hi Martin, Thought you might like to see how hard Adam and Jack worked at the cottage - see photo proof attached. Seriously though, they were fantastic and worked really hard. I was so depressed by the last cottage visit and was dreading going down on Saturday, but we actually had a good time and made a lot of progress, so I'm feeling much more positive now. We're going down again next Saturday. Thanks so much for getting Adam to do this. Please will you give the boys an extra £10 each for a drink in addition to the £x each. Love Lin x

By Sunday late afternoon we were all tired. The skip was full and Adam and Jack are coming down next weekend and Lin and I are on speaking terms.