Just Saying

B and Q (wish they'd cure this ampersand problem) oak veneered interior doors, £100 each or two for £150 on special offer - we need three, so £250. Benchworx oak veneered interior doors, three of, £179. Just saying.

However, £5k for a Benchworx kitchen (with cooker and cooker hood) seems a tad over the top for a pokey corner. Major rethink and the stripping of £2.5k off the cost is called for. I don't think the hand-built kitchen in the house cost that much!

Doesn't look like much has happened since the last update, but a lot of stuff has been going on inside. Electrics, insulation, etc. External cladding arrived yesterday (the covered pile on the right), but the storms and rain predicted for today will preclude its installation. Plenty to get on with inside though with more insulation and the plasterboard.

Missing HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\.html

Perseids, my foot! Spent half an hour at one o'clock in the morning looking for the buggers with nary a one spotted.

They say you're getting old when policemen start to look like kids; well that happened decades ago. I'm starting to look with an expression of mild bemusement when the names of Slebs come up on TV and I haven't a clue as to who they are or what they're allegedly famous for. I've finally started to lose contact with popular culture at the relatively young age of 60.

I recently initiated the free upgrade to Windows 10, but completely lost the ability to launch email or web hyperlinks in Outlook. Searched high and low for a solution, but as Windows 10 is so new there wasn't anything I trusted, as it all referred to previous versions of Windows and ancient versions of Outlook (I'm on 365). Very nearly gave up and rolled back to Windows 7 in disgust.

I finally clicked that the registry entry HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\.html was completely missing. Creating it in regedit and populating it with "htmlfile" resolved the issue.

Now whether this was an issue with the original installation of Win10 or a subsequent change made by AVG PC-Tuneup remains to be seen.

Still getting used to Windows 10 - have deleted half the stuff it clutters my screen with as useless nonsense. It makes the most simple tasks to do with changing user permissions, etc. almost impossible.

Say Cheese & Milk

Saw an advert for a McDonald's BBQ Smokehouse Burger on TV the other night. At one point they were at pains to point out that it contains matured cheddar cheese, backing this up by showing some aged rounds of real cheddar, but then quickly switching to the above named burger, resplendently garnished with limp slices of some orange lipid which in no way could be described as mature cheddar cheese. Couldn't even be describer as cheese.

Milk prices. Apparently the cause of the farmers' problem with pricing is world oversupply combined with our spat with Russia, meaning poor export markets for British milk, The law of supply and demand dictates that if there's oversupply then prices must fall as a consequence. Sad, but that's the law of the market - except of course when it comes to the CAP. I'm not sure what effect the CAP has on milk these days, but we were all against the CAP a short while ago, especially when it favoured inefficient French farmers.

I'm not generally in favour of artificially inflating prices for items in contravention of the laws of supply and demand. If there are too many dairy farmers, then perhaps we should let the market take its course. Under-supply will increase the price, but perhaps concentrate production into the large mega-dairies with massive benefits of scale, which also has its downside. When the market for ships left the UK for Korea and Japan and the market for steel moved to India, no-one guaranteed to buy ships or steel at inflated prices to keep shipyard or steel workers employed. Should dairy farmers be treated any different?

The usual response to falling prices is to add value and charge for the added value - in this case cheese, butter and other milk products (blessed are the cheese makers) and some are doing that and keeping their heads above water. Butchers have been doing it for decades by selling ready-marinaded or prepared meats that you pay through the nose for but (allegedly) save you a lot of effort.

Imagine feeling sorry for every producer or manufacturer in a market suffering a glut. Good idea to protect jobs (perhaps in the short term) or false economy in the long run? Answers in the usual position.

Book Club Floyd

Can't decide whether this is David Beckham showing good musical taste, or a designer retro look.

Hay is a member of a book club. Sounds excruciating to me to have to read a book I have no interest in whatsoever, purely for the dubious pleasure of criticising it within a group. Anyway, they meet once a month at each other's houses in turn and to date we've managed to evade the honour for one reason or another. However, it's our turn in October and I'm wracking my brain to find a way of dissuading them from wanting to meet at our house ever again, as they start about 7 and don't finish till around 11pm. The current strategy centres around sitting at my laptop and making the odd tutting sound, while occasionally turning round and glaring at one or other of them. Any additional ideas are welcome.

The Invisible Man on the Avon Milk Run

Wasn't there a vote for a new LibDem leader not so long ago? Anyone know who won? Whoever it was, he's been remarkably silent of late.

Talking of politics, hundreds of thousands of people are flocking to join the Labour party to undermine the election of their new leader. Seems to me the only way to prevent this is to have the MPs elect their leader - at least the MPs have been vetted by their local constituency party and an MP elected leader will have more support from his MPs than one foisted on them.

Seems Muller now has it in for our dairy farmers, which actually translates to the consumer, if the consumer continues to buy Muller products. Anyone know of a website which lists the retailers who give diary farmers above the cost of production? Supermarket milk prices alone won't suffice, as a high price doesn't guarantee that the extra is passed up the chain.

Another sojourn on the Avon in the kayaks yesterday; this time between Bradford on Avon and Limpley Stoke. A tad busy around Bradford on Avon with scullers - the marine equivalent of earnest blokes in Lycra peddling expensive bikes furiously on canal towpaths - but one of the most beautiful stretches of the Avon. Came back via the Kennett and Avon canal.

An Aussie Korean Blogger by Any Another Name

Aldi Carino shampoo. Looks like Aussie shampoo, smells like Aussie shampoo, comes from Australia - I'm damned certain it is Aussia shampoo targeted at those not willing to pay the price for Aussie branded shampoo. Try it - it's very good.

North Korea has changed from GMT+9 to GMT+8.5. Rather immaterial., however, as North Korea is still 50 years behind the rest of the world.

Yet another atheist blogger has been hacked to death by adherents of a barbaric, backward, medieval and totalitarian form of religion having no truck with the basic western tenet of freedom of conscience or human rights - fundamentalist Islam. Mind you, fundamentalist Judaism and Christianity are equally backward and antithetical to freedom of conscience, but perhaps not quite as barbaric.

Exterior doors and windows fitted. Roof tiles and cladding next week:

Duke's Migrant Hot Tub

I'm currently re-reading a biography of the Duke of Wellington. He was described by a contemporary as 'very abstemious, consuming just five or 6 glasses of wine with dinner and a pint of claret afterwards'. If that's abstemious, then the Georgians and Victorians must have been a cirrhotic lot!

Noticed how illegal immigrants are now being called 'undocumented immigrants'? I believe this term has been imported from the USA and I heard it used by the BBC the other night, but I'm at a loss as to understand why. If procedures for gaining admission to a country are not followed and you choose to smuggle yourself in through use of a lorry or walking through the Channel Tunnel, it follows that you are gaining illegal entry and are therefore an illegal immigrant. Are illegal drugs now to be termed undocumented drugs?

The current narrative from the aid agencies is that the illegals coming to Europe are so desperate that they are prepared to 'risk their lives', not that they are duped by unscrupulous traffickers and don't have an inking they are going to be loaded (or are aware of the dangers involved in being loaded) onto overcrowded, unseaworthy tubs.

This morning's sheds for beds update - it's going up like a mushroom. Windows are arriving today, but it's a moot point as to whether they or the roof tiles will get precedence. In any case, windows and roof will be on by the end of next week.

Thought we might put a hot tub in outside - we'll get two old baths, strap them together and link them to the hot tap in the cabin, or if we can get some cast iron jobs, then make a space underneath where we can light a log fire. Failing that, a couple of empty steel drums - there's no need to spend money needlessly...

Tattoos on the Throne

Mrs Queen has beaten Queen Victoria for time spent on the throne. Hay says no-one can beat the amount of time I spend on it.

No.2 Daughter is yearning to have a tattoo and I'm trying my best to dissuade her from disfiguring herself for life. Tattoos are generally unacceptable to my generation due to associations with caste and pugilism (tat wearers of my generation were genuinely rebellious individuals - or pissed when they got them - and not fashion victims), but if they must be worn, then only on an able seaman, and even then I have strong reservations.

I've mentioned this before, but had a tattoo when 20 and in a drunken stupor after a stag night in Tilbury, where I was standing by a few ships as 3rd Mate just before my wedding. The purchase of 2 crates of Tennants Thistle cans contributed heavily to my condition, and I wish to hell I'd been stone, cold sober. 

As it transpired, I ended up with a somewhat traditional maritime theme of a sailing ship under full sail with the logo HOMEWARD BOUND. Not so many years later the writing was indecipherable and could have been anything. The once bright and majestic sailing ship looks like a faded cartoon and the sun in the tattoo set many decades ago. It's a hideous, disfiguring splodge. I was so ashamed of it (officers just didn't have tattoos) that I never wore short sleeved shirts ever again in the presence of my father. I just thanked God it wasn't something more lurid.

I find tattoos on women frightening, as in my younger day it was only low caste ladies and ladies of the night who sported them - and of course ladies belonging to certain tribes in the Naga Hills of Burma. To me they're not attractive, but that's purely a generational thing. I think I wouldn't mind so much if they were individualistic, but they are usually all on a similar theme, as if the tat artists share the same Ladybird Book of Tattoos.

Ones with foreign script are especially dangerous - what you think are ancient words of deep wisdom turn out to be adverts for the local Chinese chippy or some Arabian swear words.

One of the sailors on a ship I served in as a cadet in the early 70s had a wonderful tattoo of a huge bunch of yellow roses on his chest, which was fairly artistic. There's the apocryphal tattoo, which I've never actually seen, of a hunt scene on a sailor's back that stretches down to his bum, where the fox is darting into it's foxhole (all you can see is his tail) - you can guess what the foxhole was. And then there's the usual LOVE and HAT across the knuckles.

That said, I do find this one acceptable as it has functionality - the hiding of mastectomy scars.

You could wear that on the beach and no-one would be the wiser that it wasn't in fact a bikini top.

More Cabin Progress

Visible progress will start to slow down once the roof and cladding are on, as the skim coat on the interior plasterboard take time to dry.

Sourced from Miles Away

On Saturday, after our morning of kayaking, we had lunch at The Old Mill at Bathampton. The menu showed the provenance of the supplies used to make the various meals and I noticed that something was from Somerset, something else was from Yorkshire, yet another ingredient was from Lincolnshire - in fact the complete antithesis of the usual statement going on about how all the ingredients are sourced locally from within a 5 metre radius.

It struck me that locally sourced ingredients must be restrictive by definition and it makes sense to search further afield for the best. Which is better - to expend food miles to source the finest the whole country can offer, or limit yourself to what are possibly inferior, locally-sourced ingredients?

Given the rampant penchant for companies protecting their produce with Protected Designation of Origin of Protected Geographical Indication, it won't be long before restaurants will have no choice but to source their ingredients from far and wide.

Cabin update: