January’s been pretty quiet. Which is good, as I’ve had loads to do, one way or another.


On Friday 11th, we had dinner with the Moon’s which was excellent, with great company, and we managed to keep dive conversation to a minimum and Quarter Moon demonstrated the new Nintendo.

Sunday we had lunch at the Parentals, which was also excellent, with great company, and Chris and I learned how to play Whist. Like, with partners rather than knockout, which was fun.

Monday was my first outing, which started off something like this:

It was an overcast and, in parts, downright rainy day going to Earl’s Court. Forced, by virtue of the ticket office being on the wrong side of the barriers, to use the ticket machine, I attempted to follow the instructions. After much backtracking, swearing, and general scratching of heads, eventually the machine spat out my train tickets and several receipts.

The train was waiting especially for me, so I got on, sat down and found a foreign gentleman with a buffet trolley next to my seat asking if ‘lady want refreshingments? What you want lady?’ Had coffee and suddenly remembered why drinking coffee on or just before train journeys is a bad idea. Train loos. Just, no.

Dodgy looking Eastender type business man over the aisle threw coffee all over attractive young business woman. Woman handled it with good grace, and man was mortified. Had a couple of patchouli smelling hippy types sitting opposite. Mrs hippy had a medallion around her neck that looked straight out of Indiana Jones or Tomb Raider.
Arrived, acquired lanyard to put my press pass on and headed off to the Press Office. Found Lisa already there. Fab!

And if you want any more, you have to read Feb’s issue of the mag. Hee!

Got back just in time to shovel microwave meal down throat and jump in car to the club. Committee meeting came and went that evening.

Last weekend we spent with Annelies and Richard. It was an excellent weekend with good company, good food, lots of card games, and an affectionate Canada.

Monday evening I picked up my two new baby students. One teenager and one mature lady, both of whom are great fun and excellent.

Thursday involved a client taking us out to lunch at Tower 42. Aperitifs on Floor 42 with its fantastic views over London, with no vertigo in sight (other than the name of the bar), unless one thought about it too hard; which this one didn’t. Had lunch at Rhodes on floor 24, which was absolutely divine.

And this weekend, to top it all off, I have hamster-sitting.

Exciting life, ne?

Heaters, Holidays and Silly Macs

Some may recall from my last missive that car cabin heating wasn’t working. However, I’d worked out a temporary system of fleece throw, hot water bottle and gel heat packs to keep myself warm during the longer drives.


Monday 17 December was particularly cold, and after driving from Croydon to Chatham (via Rochester) I was looking forward to melting in the warmth of the dive club bar. However this particular evening was my first Committee Meeting as Treasurer. Which was held in a room that doubles as a freezer. Armed with my hot water bottle, I attempted to pay attention and sound intelligent. I’m not really certain I succeeded, although Chris’ Minutes afterwards made me sound like I knew what I was talking about. It was rather fun actually, apart from the cold part.

Tuesday, at work we had Xmas Lunch held at an Indian restaurant. Thing is with Croydon and such London type places is the sheer grottiness of the shopfronts, and this place looked like a real dive from the outside, but inside was comfortable, and the food was just wonderful.

Old computer decided not to work. *headdesk*

Copied some stuff to my laptop with the promise that Old computer would be fixed over holidays.

With no Haynes manual for the Puma (and I don’t care if the Haynes for the Fiesta almost fits), the usual method for lay persons car repair doesn’t work. If one doesn’t wish to fork over vast quantities of money to Ford, Peugeot, Vauxhall or whoever, one usually goes online and searches for the problem in the hopes of getting a clue. The result is usually something like ‘that problem sounds like the crank widget over compensating for the carburetor belt, which can be solved using page 463 of the Haynes Manual’. Not for the Haynes-less Puma though.

I looked up the heating problem (as in, there wasn’t any) on the Puma Drivers website, and found it to be a known problem. Which was excellent news, as with no Haynes in existence, step by step instructions on fixing these things are readily available on the web. Headed by the cheerful note from whoever put the instruction up, announcing that the entire exercise would take approximately four minutes to complete, I printed off the entire seventeen pages (including diagrams and bar charts) and with a big smile and a large Baileys, handed them to Chris.

Before commencing with exercise, we needed one new part, a heater control valve. The parts centre at Ford wasn’t open on a Saturday. Or Christmas Eve. So after watching the pretty Halfords adverts on the telly depicting intelligent auto-knowledgeable persons who know exactly what is wanted, and can cross reference on their sparkly new computers to find the exact part number, sub part number etc, we thought we’d stop by on the off-chance.

At the parts desk we found one bloke pored over a license plate maker struggling in his attempts to spell out NU55MTY for the frustrated looking couple in front of us. And a second employee who was no older than eighteen and was lucky if he had that many IQ points.

We would like a heater control valve for a Puma, would you have one?
Whats a Puma?
A Ford.
Never heard of it, are you sure?
Um, yes. It’s a bit like a Fiesta, try looking up the heater control valve for a Fiesta.
I can’t. Computers crashed. Give us a couple of minutes.
Okay, no problem.
Computers still not working. ‘Ere, Gavin, do we do heating bits for Fiesta Pumas?
What’s a Fiesta Puma?
See? Gavin doesn’t know what a Puma is either, you sure you got that right?
Ford Puma.
Yeah, well, if Gavin doesn’t know what a Fiesta Puma is, then we probably don’t do bits for it.
Huh. Yeah. Going now.

Christmas and New Year were wonderful, with quiet, relaxing visits to friends and relations. Christmas Day and Boxing Day was a relaxed with parentals, enjoying good food, good company and a four way fight to the death by way of dominoes.

27 Dec, we went to Chris’ parents and had a lovely afternoon there in good company as always.
Then Chris and I went our separate ways for couple of days, with Chris going to see his son, and nan, while I had the girls down. I for one certainly had a fab time! Xmas tree and decos came down, and loot was stashed.

Went to Ford, and nice man there knew exactly what we wanted (we took it out of the box to make sure it looked like the picture on page one of the instruction), and let us have it for the princely sum of twenty quid.

After half an hour of swearing, comparing notes with the neighbours, and providing entertainment for those of us snuggled up in the warmth of indoors, Chris managed to replace the heater control valve and Ghostie is now nice and toastie warm inside.

30 December we had a Chinese meal with the Dive Club, and speculated on the idea of the New Years Day dive, which both Chris and I had agreed to take part in.

New Years Eve was a quiet affair with Chris cooking rather scrummy ten course meal that we ate over the evening as we watched a couple of movies and Jools Holland. Debated New Years day dive as sniffly cold seemed to be attempting to arrive.

New Years Day snotty cold arrived, so Chris and I joined the spectators on the bank, watching and laughing, er, I mean supporting the five ‘Ard divers what jumped in the lake. The part that was particularly amusing was when one of the divers (Branch Twat) discovered a fishermans domed green tent (with torch still attached) in the lake and decided to rescue it. This might have been easy if the tent was neatly packed away, but it wasn’t. In fact not only was it fully assembled, but it’s front door was zipped closed, which made the physics of water weight versus gravity in lifting the thing highly amusing for the spectators right up until someone found the zip. At which point things got really smelly as all that stagnant water poured out.

02 Jan, back at work. Old computer still not working due to relevant CDs not arriving from supplier. Apparently Next Day delivery isn’t guaranteed over the holiday period. Now having my own laptop armed with work specific software, I have been happily using that.

04 Jan. CD still not arrived. Huh.

Saturday we very productively did not a lot. Apart from Chris buying himself a beard trimmer, which since doesn’t have a beard we will not ask questions about.

Today, we are going to explore Leybourne Lakes where we have spent many a happy, murky hour diving, but never actually walked around.