autumn leaves – Page 8 – derrickjknight

IKEA 3 (R18)

On this clear, cold, and sunny morning I took yesterday’s walk in reverse. Smoking chimneys enlivened the line of the horizon. Distant cattle lowed; cocks crowed; steam rose from one sunlit ditch whilst a blackbird spuddled in another; the occasional cyclist whirred, and the occasional car sped, past. Otherwise it was just me and the ponies.

Walking back through London Minstead, I was greeted by another Father Christmas (see yesterday’s post). The word must have got around.

Later in the morning we decided to assemble our IKEA bed. Extracting the headboard, Jackie realised it was too wide to fit our carefully measured space. Too wide by 17cm. I got out all the paperwork and checked the identification numbers on the boxes against the measurements given on both our Self Service Picking List and the Sales Receipt. Consistently shown on each docket and on each box are the measurements 140 x 200; thus the three bed frame items are marked BED FRM 140 x 200. Our bedstead was 157cm wide.

Now, as my readers know, I will always find the humorous side of any situation. If it is possible. We were not amused. Not in the least. I reached for my phone and dialled customer services. A machine warned me that there was a waiting time for calls being answered from between 20 and 30 minutes. After being notified for the second time that I was number 13 in the queue, I blew a gasket and was all for going straight back to IKEA there and then. In the meantime, Jackie had consulted a 2013 catalogue which she had picked up on departure from the store. She found the bed frames listed as 157 x 211cm. These were to take a 140 x 200 mattress. If that were so, then why are the boxes and documentation for the frames given as 140 x 200? And why didn’t our extremely helpful shop assistant not make this clear? Did she know any more than we did? I was no calmer. They could have the whole lot back and refund all the money including delivery charge.

Jackie, however, remained calm and thought again about the layout of the room. If we moved a portable cupboard and brought the bed up to the large French windows we could just about make it feasible. We could squeeze past the bed to open the windows when necessary. What we couldn’t have was a bedhead jutting into the doorway. So far, so good. All we have to do now is put it all together. Tomorrow.

After lunch we drove to Totton for a vast Lidl shop. In the process we found a very good quality double airbed for 10% of the cost of the IKEA bed. So we bought one. There is plenty of room in the sitting room for this, which means we can now accomodate two couples. We had momentarily considered that we should have had an airbed for the spare room and still sent the IKEA one back. Then we remembered nights in Louisa and Errol’s spare single room on a double air mattress on the floor with no way of heaving ourselves up because there was no space around the bed, and thought better of it. Have you ever tried to prise yourself up from the middle of an airbed whilst in intense pain from a hip requiring replacement?

Before dinner I made a few amendments to my next Independent crossword puzzle scheduled for 27th. We then ate spare ribs in barbecue sauce with vegetable rice followed by baklavas. Jackie, having taken the entire contents of Lidl shelves, drank Hoegaarden, and I consumed Cono Sur reserva 2010, an excellent wine of which, unfortunately, we cannot remember the source.

IKEA 2 (18)

Yesterday evening Holly’s baby girl was born, after a long labour and eventual Caesarian section. All is well, but we await further news once the little family have recovered.

Fog beset the forest today, lending a sense of the Gothic to Castle Malwood Lodge. Moisture dripping from the boughs plipped and plopped onto their plentiful plumage carpeting the ground.

I took Seamans Lane to London Minstead, turned right into Bull Lane, and right again at a junction which took me back to Minstead. Having left by ‘lower’ drive, I returned in the direction of ‘upper’, turning right just before I arrived there. This led me to our nearest neighbours in Hollybrae. I then trudged into the woods following the line of our drive, eventually recognising our garden shrubbery. I couldn’t just walk into the garden which was surrounded by a wire fence. I continued until I reached the road leading to ‘lower’ drive. There were no footpaths, so this wasn’t exactly straightforward. Beautiful as is a carpet of autumn leaves, you cannot tell what is underneath them. In some places the answer was ‘not much’. So I got a bit soggy. My wellies and walking shoes being at The Firs, my suit trousers got a bit damp.

This afternoon we returned to IKEA. Yes, we went back for more. We’ve got the journey sussed and now knew where we’d gone wrong in parking. We also knew that beds were on level 4. We had measured the space and realised the IKEA doubles would just fit into the spare room. The one we preferred would not, we realised, do. This is because one side would have to go against a wall. This means whoever sleeps on that side, if needing to, as Chaucer put it ‘rise for a piss’, having in any case to bottom-slide down the bed to get out, would have come up against an ornate bed-end. I thought about that in the middle of the night. There had to be no bed-end.

Driving to level 4 was, in itself, an experience. Imagine driving one way up a helter-skelter or a spiral staircase. Steering was scary, and when we got to the top it was best not to look down over the railings separating us from the streets below and Southampton harbour. Not if you have my head for heights.

When Jackie picked up a trolley on our way in I was a wee bit alarmed. ‘I might want to buy something’ was her explanation. We chose our bed fairly quickly and went through the process of identifying the various parts. For anyone having the good fortune to be ignorant of the IKEA process, it is as follows. You are given identifying codes and numbers which tell you where, in rows of aisles on the ground floor, to find your purchases. Apparently collecting your purchases is known as ‘picking’. We know that because, had we wanted someone to do the ‘picking’ of the bed for us we could have paid a bit extra for it. Which might have been a wise move. In the event.

Before we got to that, we, of course, had to follow the IKEA maze, which meant passing other potential purchases, like door-stops, plates, duvets, pillows, sheets, duvet covers, coat hooks, and rugs. Well, I guess you know by now why Jackie wanted her trolley.

‘Picking’ the bed for our guest bedroom was an experience. I do hope those of you who will try it out will appreciate the effort involved. What you do when you ‘pick’ is go to level 1 where, if you very carefully follow the arrows, you will find numbered aisles. Rather like most of our street numbering, evens are on one side and odds on the other, so if, as in our case, one bit of your bed was in aisle 16 and the next bit in aisle 17, you would have to shove a heavily loaded trolley across the road, which was in fact filled with other goods. Actually we only bought one bed, but the bits were in three different aisles. And the first bit was in three differently numbered boxes. And we couldn’t find these at first because they were buried under heavy mirrors in containers which had fallen over from the next ‘location’. I should have said that in each of these aisles there are 30+ locations. Our mattress, for example, was in location 32, that is at the furthest end of the aisle. Loading that onto the trolley, on wheels, but with no brakes, was no mean feat.

During the two hours we spent in, with the possible exception of Carlsberg, Scandinavia’s most popular export, I realised that one of the most energy-sapping aspects of this store is the tropical, airless, atmosphere. How the staff manage, I do not know. Given the temperatures in Sweden, you may think this rather surprising.

Having ‘picked’ and paid for our bed we wheeled the various parts on the trolley to the Home Delivery and Assembly desk. Now, we already had a large supermarket type trolley loaded with the items mentioned above. And the flat trolley containing mattress, bed-head, and all the other pieces which make up a double bed, extended too much for me to push on my own. This meant that we each took a handle of that trolley and Jackie pushed the other with her other hand. A number of people coming towards us tried to walk past without making way. This was rather difficult.

The thought that IKEA would actually assemble our piece of furniture was very exciting. Anyone who has assembled such items themself will understand why. It was one thing to build something out of Meccano for fun, quite another to attempt to follow instructions to put a bed together. So. It was a great disappointment to be told by the young lady on the home delivery desk that they didn’t do it any more. I pointed out the sign behind her, suggesting that if they didn’t do it they should take down that sign and all the much larger, upper case, signs which had led us to her. This rather discombobulated the young woman who felt the need to go off and check her facts. She returned, somewhat embarrassed, and confirmed that she was right. The small print in the sign states that it is their partners who do the assembling and she could give me the number to ring. But, as I said, the heading claims they do it themselves and is misleading. And needs removing. And she should tell someone that she had a customer complaining. And I don’t suppose she will. As Jackie says, it gives a whole other meaning to the phrase ‘we’ve made up a bed for you’.

This evening we dined on fillet steak purchased in the Lyndhurst butchers, which was much more successful than his only half-cooked pork pie. Dessert and wines were the same as yesterday.

Silence

I hate banks. Between them, two have wasted my morning.

First, I received a phone call from Barclays in France. I was €200 overdrawn. How was that when I had transferred plenty by Urgent on-line Transfer on 4th? My conversation with the caller led us to the realisation that Barclays France had changed BIC and IBAN numbers without telling me.

Why did this not surprise me? This would not be the first time they had made changes without notifying me. One example was transferring my account from Bergerac to Paris. There have been other issues. NatWest don’t operate in France. So I was stuck with Barclays.

When I had finished with the Frenchman, I checked my on-line statement. Sure enough the payment appeared on it. This meant a call to NatWest who were experiencing more than usual demand. This meant listening to music and robotic apologies for ages. Eventually I heard the voice of a real person. He was very helpful, but he had to liaise with another department several times. More music. And more music. Although the payment request had been received it didn’t work with the older BIC and IBAN, so it was in the hands of an investigative department. The advisor took the new details.

Because this last conversation had taken so long I received three timing out prompts on the computer. Each time I took the ‘stay on line’ option.

At the end of the call I found I couldn’t obtain any response from NatWest on line banking.

I telephoned once more. More music; more warnings about heavy demand; suggestions that I might like to try the on-line service. Eventually I was answered by someone in another department who tried various options to unravel the problem. This time liaising with his on-line colleagues. More music, each time; more apologies, etc., etc. Finally he told me they were experiencing technical problems affecting lots of customers. This, of course, was why there was so much demand. He advised me to try again later in the day.

Just as we made our farewells. My helper received a prompt advising him to try to interest me in an ISA. He was not able to.

Leaden skies have made for a very dull day on which the sun never opened its oppressive grey drapes.

Scotland’s acclaimed novelist, James Kennaway died in a car crash, believed to have been brought on by a heart attack, in 1968. He was 40 years old. His visceral, nightmarish, novella, ‘Silence’, was published in 1972 through the administrations of his widow, Susan. I read the final pages this afternoon. It is perhaps fortuitous that I picked it off my shelves after having finished reading ‘Schindler’s Ark’. Both deal with extremes of humanity’s violence; Kennaway sets his work of fiction in times of racial tension in America during the 1960s; Keneally’s style is far more factual. In the novella two races are equally violent; in the faction one is hell bent on destroying the other. Fifty years on we are beset by news of racial hatred and the atrocities it promotes, and the euphemism ‘ethnic cleansing’ has come into world languages. I have scanned both covers of my 1977 Penguin edition. Accessing the gallery with a click should, if necessary, make the blurbs easier to read. The portrait was made by Harri Peccinotti.

This evening we dined on Jackie’s colourful sausage casserole, crisp carrots and broccoli, and creamy mashed potato and swede. She drank Hoegaarden and I drank more of the Camino Nuevo.

Autumn

This morning I walked back to Lyndhurst, and in the process discovered where I had gone wrong yesterday. In the gloom of evening I had not seen a road sign. Jackie and I rendezvoused in the car park and completed the mail redirection process in the Post Office. We then had a wander around the town, making a few purchases, including a fine pair of leather gloves in the Age UK shop.

Ponies and cattle possessed the road, as nonchalently chomping away and wandering down the street through Minstead, as usual. At one point I helped out the driver of a small white van patiently waiting for a gap to open between a cow and calf so that he could squeeze through. It just wasn’t going to happen until I walked towards the pair prompting the calf to set off down the road. The adult, its head in a hedge, took no notice.

By the time we returned to Castle Malwood, what had begun as a rather murky day had metamorphosed into a gloriously clear, bright, seasonal one. We have learned that the two drives off the forest roads leading to our building are called ‘upper’ and ‘lower’. As we straddled the bars of the cattle grid at the ‘upper’ entrance we were both entranced by the leaf-carpeted bank beside it. I reflected, as I have done many times this week, that we are so fortunate to be arriving, in the autumn of our years, at such a picturesque area in such a spectacular season.

After another afternoon sorting out our new home we dined on a fabulous beef stew Jackie made. I was a little disappointed because I had seen her buy a blackberry and apple pie in Lyndhurst and thought that would be for our pud. It wasn’t, because we had no custard or cream. This was not really a problem. I just had another helping of stew. Jackie drank Hoegaarden and I imbibed Marques de Montino rioja reserva 2007.

Nobby Bates

The hot water problem resolved itself. We had hot water in the morning, and the Dimplex radiators we had not managed to get to come on, did function in the small hours. We are apparently on Economy 7 which I have heard about but never investigated. Through this system electricity is drawn at night and stored for the day.

Throughout the morning, as we continued unpacking and sorting out our home, we watched, through our immense windows, a gardener blowing leaves, using a kind of reverse vacuum cleaner. As fast as the poor man cleared a patch, more foliage fluttered down from the trees.

This afternoon I walked through Minstead and along Lyndurst Road, then right along the A337 to Lyndhurst to collect postal redirection forms. Postal redirection is a service offered by the Post Office whereby any post sent to your old address is intercepted and diverted to your new one. On the way I received a call from Lynne Bailey of KLS, the landlords of Links Avenue. One of the matters she called about was the return of the keys to number 40. This was handy because I could post them there and then from the Lyndhurst Post Office.

Ponies grazed alongside the minor roads, or lolloped or loitered on the tarmac, all traffic respectfully ceding passage. Wire fences and cattle grids protect the animals from straying onto the A337, where the fast-flowing streams of traffic render the road dangerous for them. Lacking a footpath, it is not too safe for humans either. On my way back I must have turned off this major road a bit too soon, for I wound up in Emery Down, and had to call Jackie to come and rescue me. Well, I suppose it was bound to happen. As it was well after dusk when this occured, I learned that, on the minor roads, it must be far safer in the dark for the protected New Forest fauna than for stray septuagenarians.

On the children’s recent visit I explained to Jessica the purpose of cattle grids. I had thought I was speaking to both the girls who were in the back of the car, but it transpired that I was talking to the top of Imogen’s head, because, seconds after getting into the car she had slumped forward in slumber, prevented only by her seatbelt from taking a nosedive. Jessica, however, knew all about cattle grids and hedgehogs falling down them and having to be rescued. Rather amazed, I asked her how she knew this. She said she had read it in a book. I still didn’t twig until I mentioned this to Louisa, who explained that she read to the girls ‘Operation Hedgehog’ by Margaret Lane, just as I and her mother had read the book, which I had bought, to her when she was little. It had been one of Louisa’s favourites and was now loved by her own daughters. This was the tale of Nobby Bates, who lived in a cottage in The New Forest and devised an escape route for hedgehogs who had fallen down the cattle grids.

This evening we drove to Ringwood in search of an Indian restaurant we had discovered eighteen months ago. Settling on India Cottage we had some debate about whether it had been that establishment. It was good enough, but only when returning to the car and passing the earlier eating place were we sure that we had been in the wrong one. We both drank Kingfisher.