3.02.2026 Democracy for sale! Dirt cheap!

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  Tuesday 3rd 26F/-3.3C. Cloudy start becoming sunny later. Even more windy from the east. 10ms base. Gusting to 20m/s. 45mph! That's the equivalent of 6F/-14C with wind chill. 59F/15C in the room. 38F/3.3C in the greenhouse. 

 No thin logs or kindling to light the fire until I raid the trailer. Which is currently at the far end of the carport. Trapped behind the car. Without any lighting other than a hand held torch. I need a [much] better storage system! Or the motivation to empty the trailer before it becomes so critical. It is supposed to snow again tomorrow. So all the remaining firewood needs to be in the [lean-to] greenhouse! 

 Up at 6am after what felt like hours of wakefulness. My back hurts from yesterday's repeated struggles with the heavy mattress! 

 7.30 I sprinkled the still hot ashes in the stove. With the last of the small flakes, rubbish wood and bark in the bottoms of the log baskets. Then laid the smallest, but still oversized log on top. Five minutes later it ignited and the log is burning well! It needs maximum airflow to keep it going. I searched for more logs in the greenhouse and have enough for this morning. All larger than I would normally burn. 

 Now it is light enough outside I can see the trees and hedges are all rocking in the wind. It is roaring around the greenhouse. Which is unfortunate. Because the eastern door is the one I need for emptying the trailer. The wind continues tomorrow as well. Only slightly reduced from today's unpleasantness but with the added burden of snow. I think the best thing to do is to use the wheelbarrow as usual. To dump loads of logs onto the greenhouse floor. Get as much in as possible without leaving the doors open. I can fill a basket with some flakes for kindling.

 08.30 Still only 59F/15C in the room. Job done. Three well filled wheelbarrows full of mixed logs into the greenhouse. One basket stuffed with beech flakes for kindling. Cold and rather breathless. I fetched the recycling bins from the end of the drive while was out there. Both had blown over after being emptied. 

 The temporary roof covering on the stripped, thatch house is coming apart. It is being ripped wide open by the wind. The house was abandoned again months ago. With tons of debris, bathroom fittings and rubble from the house piled untidily, outside the house on the drive. 

 No visit to my friend today. No walk either.

 The day passed peacefully on YouTube. Where I learned that a brutal, child rapist is still treating the world as his own, personal toy. Evil can only exist. When other, evil men do nothing. Or praise the perp. To ensure their own gravy trains do not derail. Democracy is just another currency in many parts of the world. To be bought and sold to the highest bidder. 

 19.30 64F/17.8C in the room. Dinner was my very first, cheese omelette. It was excellent!

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2.02.2026 Bedding down!

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  Monday 2nd 19F/-7C. Overcast, colder and windier. Gusting to 15m/s. 59F/5C in the room. 33F/0.6C in the greenhouse. 

 Up at 4am as my recycled bed collapsed! The slatted mattress support they supplied was too narrow for the frame. So I had to insert slats either side. To keep it central on the battens at the edges. Unfortunately this failed at intervals. I should have bought bigger battens and glued and screwed them into place. Unfortunately the risk of collapse seemed low at first. The bed has only collapsed under me once. That was while I was sitting on the edge of the mattress and getting dressed.

  Last night the thin slats had slipped through the gap. I could hear creaking and then the mattress dropped.  So our hero was left with a non functioning bed in the dark. In the middle of the night. I attempted repairs by the light of the table lamp. However, the sheer weight of the massive sprung mattress was too much for me. Access to the lifting loops was  all but impossible within the wooden frame. 

 In the end I had to drag the furniture away and drop the mattress onto the floor. Followed by the bedding. I spent the following two hours dreaming about possible fixes. Most of my ideas were too vague to have been conscious.  

 Up at 7.30 after hours of clock watching. Made worse by my newly sunken viewpoint. The mattress is now too close to the stove to risk lighting it. Not good after the coldest night so far. It is not supposed to climb above -4C/25F all day.  I will have to drag the mattress away and get some warmth into the place. 

 A journey to the builder's merchant is on the cards. To find suitable battens to make the bed safe. The original side battens are really rather mean. For such an expensive bed at Danish retail prices. The bed is 91cm wide inside the veneered chipboard sides. The slatted base is only 88.5. That's a 25mm or 1" difference. If the sides should bow under load, or over time. Then the slatted base can drop between the puny battens. And, did! There are no cross ties between the bed sides. My guess is that the slatted bases were mixed up somehow. Between donation and joining the other beds at the charity shop.

 8.40. It has dropped to 58F/14C in the room since I lit the stove. I have dragged the mattress away to a safe position. There are very few logs left indoors. Half a trailer full out in the carport. Another trip to the log merchant is vital. 

 9.00 60F/15.6C indoors. It is 51F/10.6C upstairs. This is following closure of the open stairwell with curtains. The sky is breaking up to blue and weak sunshine. I don't think I need a walk. I have already had enough exercise!

 9.50 The sun is bright now but it feels bitterly cold out in the wind. I brought in a 2m straight edge. To confirm the sides of the bed are bowed outwards. By at least 10mm each side. So there lies the catastrophic clearance. I don't have any battens long enough for the bed sides. [2m] So I shall have to go to the builder's merchant. I'll fit a cross piece too. To keep the sides from bowing. It's a nuisance. I was in the same village shopping yesterday. [Sunday closed] Now I'll have to make the same journey again.

 11.00 64F/17.8C. Back from the builder's merchant. Noisy wind shrieking in the car. Blinding sunshine dead ahead. The roads are weirdly white from all the salt. It is invisible when the asphalt is wet. Over £40 equivalent for a few meters of 15x40mm softwood batten.     

 I have fetched one on my 1m clamps. To pull in the bowed sides of the bed. I have plenty of batten to make two crossbars. I need to decide how best to fix them. Without making dismantling the bed impossible or unnecessarily difficult. The side battens aren't stiff enough to pull the bed sides in.

12.30 66F/19C. Greenhouse at 57F/14C! No crossbars were necessary. The width of the new side battens. Is more than enough to ensure the slatted base could not escape. I used enough screws to hold the new, wider battens onto the originals. The mattress is now 15mm higher. Slightly more than half an inch. Which is meaningless.

 14.45 Constant sunshine. 69F/20.6C in the greenhouse. I let the stove go out.

 15.20 I had a timed nap. To catch up on missing sleep in the night. The bed feels very solid and quiet now. Which it never was in the past.

 Dinner was sausage, brown mushrooms and mashed potato. All organic. Plus Bisto gravy. Plate warmed to 100C. I was feeling inspired. It was excellent.

 

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1st Februrary 2026 Don't tell anyone, but..

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  Sunday 1st 20F/-7C. Overcast, cold and windy. Not expected to rise above -5C/23F all day. SE winds expected to gust to 13m/s all day. 60F/15.6C in the room. Greenhouse 31F/0C. The pond thermometer has stopped working. Probably a flat battery in the cold. It was showing 36F/2C yesterday.

 Got up at 7.50 after a difficult night. I felt I was awake from 1-3am. Staying in bed seemed like the best thing to do. I had dreampt I was searching for my wife. She was in the shed for some reason but had changed into somebody I didn't recognize. Nor would she talk to me. She just walked off behind the shed. Which upset me. When I finally got back to sleep I was having more, weird dreams. 

8.15 Stove lit. Brought in more logs from the greenhouse. I shall have to unload the trailer into the greenhouse soon. Which will make me breathless. My chest is still bunged up after my recent bout of Man cold/flu/Covid. I am getting breathless even on my walks. It seems like ages since I had a ride.

 9.30 64F/18C in the room. Back from my walk. Cold, but no worse than yesterday. I wore my Ventile jacket over the pile lined fleece. This was much more windproof than the Patagonia, down sweater. Worn over the same, fleece jacket. 

 I was going to make sausage rolls. Just for a change. However, the ready-made pastry, which my wife used to use. Was not always readily available. I was always having to ask the staff if they had the correct make. The variety most often seen in the supermarket freezers was sugar laden and tasted strongly of vanilla. Now I can't remember which was the correct one. It must be five years since I last bought it. I know I will be disappointed. If I buy the inferior crap. Which is obviously aimed at the low hanging fruit market.  

15.30  24F/-4.4C. 66F/19C in the room. Back from the shops in the next shopping village to the north. Catching up on shortages. From my last grocery shopping spree in the village. I can no longer trust some supermarkets to have stock of the most ordinary items. I bought some flaky pastry. Fingers crossed. A horribly cold wind in the car parks. 

 19.00 My first sausage rolls are in the oven. Nearly ready. I washed up while they cooked. And filled and dragged two recycling, wheelie bins along the drive. In the freezing cold and a headwind. My wife reminded me regularly that I couldn't multi-task. 

 I had nothing to go with sausage rolls. Google suggested chips and beans. I've had two days of baked beans already. They are supposed to be monitoring my blog. So they should have known better. 

 20.00 I have a confession. I had taken two slices of pastry out of the box. One half of the sausages made six pieces. Two slices made four wraps. I would have had to add another slice of pastry but I was too mean and impatient. Having already given the pastry half an hour to thaw. So I glued some short lengths of pastry strips together with beaten egg. A cosmetic failure but I shan't tell if you don't. 

 

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