Back to work ...

It was a pretty achey, miserable return to work after my holiday. My leg was still quite sore and I had to join the slow lane on the Underground (standing on the escalator and staying behind the fatties waddling along the passages like ducks). King's Cross station has been refurbished and the makeover is almost complete which means, for some reason, the usual entrance to the Tube was closed and, having walked down there, I had to walk all the way back and then to the north ticket hall.


It is staggering how slowly some people walk (and not just the fat ones or even the old ones). Even with a limp, I was passing people quite quickly. They move along like browsing cattle; it almost makes you feel as if you want to get behind the and give them a shove - come on, hurry up, there's lots of interesting things going on and you're missing them.


I was in Howden on Tuesday for a visit by Radio Times and had a pretty full day of meetings. It's always nice to see my old work colleagues and I'm made to feel really welcome. Vicky had baked a cake - orange and ginger - which was lovely and had also brought in some extra tea-bags. Makes me miss everyone up there. I heard later that Vicky had to go into hospital for a 24-hour ECG to monitor her heart rhythm. Apparently, she's been having some palpitations, which has been a little scary. I hope that it's nothing serious, she's a lovely girl and only just turned 30.


Max called as I was getting ready to leave to say that Inna was on a skiing holiday with her parents and he was at a bit of a loose end if I wanted to stay over, so I went to see him on Wednesday evening. We had a couple of pints in the Bedford and then went to the Italian restaurant just up Bedford Hill Road for pizza and a bottle of red. That place is a gold mine - on a Wednesday night it was really busy and they had to do some quick calculations to work out if they had a table for us.


Max is in good form. He has just been made head of year 8 for the next academic year, which is brilliant considering that he only started teaching in September, and he's also going to be acting head of department for geography when the current head goes on maternity leave in the summer. He's going to have a very busy year. The head teacher had sat down with him last week and said that they hoped he was going to stay at the school for a few years and make his career there. I think they must find it hard to attract and keep really high calibre people. Max is tall and strong, with a good presence. He's a natural leader, but also very enthusiastic about teaching and about his subject. He's starting a climbing club at the school and will take boys to a climbing wall at a nearby school (they're considering installing a climbing wall at his school) and he's also helped out with some cricket nets. Max's day starts pretty early. He doesn't like to bring work home, so he gets up at 5am and sets off for school at about 5.40. He normally walks the 2.5 miles and gets in around 6.15am. He has some breakfast at school and then does his lesson preparation, admin and marking. School starts earlier than we did, but finishes at 2.30pm and, after school, Max will have some supervision duties, parent liaison and marking. I think he's home around 5.30 to 6pm. On Friday, all the teachers go to the pub and get drunk!


On Friday, I made a list of all the things I need to do that day, I'd got a bit behind having been off the week before, and it ran to about 15 things. I was quite pleased to manage to cross 10 or so off by the end of the day.


The weekend was to have been spent helping Tom and Hannah to wallpaper their second bedroom. The walls had been painted and there was a crack in an interior wall that was looking a bit unsightly. Hannah is very nervous about cracks in the house; she's concerned that they're a sign of subsidence. I guess because I've lived in older houses, I have a complete tolerance of cracks and, anyway, these are superficial. The wall is an interior wall that had been put up when the house was converted into apartments. Nowadays, you'd put up a stud wall, but this appears to be block or brick and then plastered. The house was quite damp when they moved in. I don't think it was a problem of rising damp, just that the people in there before let the plumbing deteriorate, so there were leaks, also they never opened windows and dried washing inside. Since Tom and Hannah have been in those faults have been fixed and I think the place is warmer and drier than it's been for years. Consequently a few drying cracks have appeared. Tom filled those and we were going to paper the walls.


It's a while since I've done any papering and I thought we'd get it done in a day, so I also accepted an invitation from Sam to do a mother's day lunch for Margaret thinking I could do Saturday at Tom's and Sunday at Sam's. As it happened, the wallpapering took much longer than anticipated. It's a surprisingly big room and very high. The picture rail also meant that we had to paper above and below with a different type of paper above. T&H had chosen a light brown textured vinyl for the top, which looked a little like the light hessian papers that were all the rage back in the 1970s. It went on OK, but left a lot of air bubbles and creases almost immediately and then the paste showed through as damp patches. It looked pretty awful to be honest, but I knew it would dry differently and we stuck with it. True enough, next morning, it looked really nice, so that was a mighty relief.


The other paper was a Laura Ashley print - a very big pattern which meant there was a lot of waste unless you cut the sheet very carefully. At £37 per roll, you wanted as little waste as possible. The paper was good and heavy and very nice to put up. I'd done the first couple of sheets at the top, then gave Tom a quick lesson and handed over to him, so he did the bulk of the hanging while I measured, cut, pasted and offered bits of advice. Tom is very good with his hands and he was a natural paper hanger. It took me back to childhood when my mum used to hang wallpaper for people along Manchester Road. She did it for extra money, along with a bit of dressmaking, and I'd help her by scraping off the old paper and doing some pasting and cutting. The smell is very nostalgic and (to my nose) quite pleasant. Tom and I worked until about 7pm, then started next day before 8am and finished just after 1pm. It was a really nice job and there was a roll of wallpaper left over, which he can take back to the shop.

The finished room

Poor Margaret had to get the train down to Sam's and, to make matters worse, the main line was closed for engineering work, which meant she had to get a different train via Cambridge. She actually got there in good time and was sitting with Sam and Lucy drinking red wine when I arrived about 2pm. Sam had done a nice roast beef dinner with rice pudding for pudding. I was starving. We left just after 6 and were home for around 8pm. I took the new route through Crouch End and Muswell Hill to the North Circular. That seems to work quite well - much better than the Seven Sisters Road and Archway.


Back in London again today (it seems I'm never away from the place!) and the big news was the new King's Cross station. It's still getting the finishing touches with work going on here and there, but the old entrance/exit is now just an exit and you come in through a new entrance hall at the side. It's quite nice, although modern stations seem more like shopping centres. This isn't as bad as St Pancras, but there are lots of shops. We were held up at the barriers in the morning when lots of people seemed to have the wrong tickets, so it was a bit of a crush. I'll get in the first carriage tomorrow so I can get to the barriers good and early.