In a thrilling, though rather one-sided match played out in the home stadium over the months of December and January, Airports United defeated Stations Wanderers, quite convincingly, by a massive margin. Airports United took the lead in early December through Gatwick and Heathrow scoring twice in the same week. Their early lead was extended a week later when Luton scored an unexpected third as a couple of players were off the field. The absentees soon returned, however, and, as they did, Stansted instantly put the ball in the back of the net for a fourth. It was just beginning to look like being a whitewash when Flitwick and M. Keynes combined forces and scored two in rapid succession for Station Wanderers as three visiting players from America and Scotland came to the end of their contracts and had to return home. That magnificent effort was soon made to look like a token, though, as Luton finished with a stunning hat trick in the final two weeks of play. What a game!

Yes, Carol was coming home from Edinburgh bringing the niece-sitting chapter to an end and restoring life, as we know it, at home. She was leaving on the (supposedly) 18:05 easyJet flight landing (again supposedly) at 19:20. The weather had other thoughts, though. Her welcome home dinner, Thai Green Curry, sat languishing in the kitchen while her aircraft sat languishing on the apron at Edinburgh airport. Here’s a new one on me: the winds up in the frozen north were gusting to 75mph and, apparently, the cargo door on the easyJet Airbus is rated only to 60mph – they couldn’t open the door to unload the baggage from the inbound flight. Interesting, eh? Eventually they did manage to find another, less exposed spot to park the plane that enabled normal service to be resumed and Carol returned to her glorious green curry and, more importantly, a couple of bottles of wine, about 90 minutes late.

Can I have a break from airports now, please, just for a little while?

Our friends and neighbours, Paul and Liz, were due back into good ol’ Luton airport today on easyJet flight 2224 from Alicante. You-know-who was off to pick them up and they had accepted my invitation to eat with me in the evening. Brave people, but you really don’t want to worry about shopping and cooking after a tiring journey home, do you?

So, after dragging myself out of the pit at Steve Rosemary’s following yesterday night’s revelry, and after two cups of Steve’s invigorating cappuccino, I drove home via Waitrose to get some supplies. Shopping there on a Sunday is quiet in a civilized sort of way. The downside is that the shelves are sometimes not well stocked. Such was the case today: no tarragon, no free range chickens, no substitute guinea-fowl – what’s a chap to do? At least there were some free range chicken legs so chicken tagine it is.

Quite how a two hour flight from Spain contrives to arrive 25 minutes early is completely beyond me but arrive 25 minutes early it did. Fortunately, I had checked the expected time online and managed to avoid any embarrassment. Paul phoned me when they had their bags and I left my handy-dandy nearby waiting spot to get them. What bedlam! True to form there was a terrible queue of traffic trying to get into the 10-minute drop-off and pick-up parking area. At least exiting was quick. I really don’t know why that nice idea proves so troublesome.

After the dawn patrol to Waitrose to buy a few essentials (I had completely exhausted my supply of Twinings Assam tea) , a sunny Saturday morning prompted me to walk along the Grand Union Canal canal into town to buy some hardware supplies from the dreaded Homebase. (Fear not, I didn’t buy anything with a Homebase brand name.) This was really just an excuse for the six mile walk, three there and three back. It was pleasant enough though I was a little disappointed at how little wildlife seemed to be around; I guess it is January, after all. There was a gaggle of Canada Geese calmly munching grass. Everything else seemed to be gathered outside Tesco waiting to be fed. The sun had brought out the fisherfolk, too.

Rosemary and Steve had very kindly invited me to supper for the evening, complete with a bed so I could drink. After a week in my own company, I was looking forward to seeing someone else for a good natter. I wiled away the afternoon by practicing upgrading my version of WordPress on my local development system so that I would know what I was doing before attacking my live system. Soon it was time to go so I packed my bags, including a little something or two from the fancy new booze store, and off went the Mazda, roof down, and I to play in the country lanes.

I had been so wrapped up in the booze store project that I had completely forgotten about Burn’s Night and the yearly excuse to eat some haggis. Fortunately (I’m fond of haggis), Rosemary had her wits about her and had remembered, so haggis it was for a starter. Follow that with a Hairy Bikers’ cardamom chicken dish rounded off with some good ol’ Stilton cheese, and a thoroughly good time was had by all.

Thank you both: great fun and enjoyable company.

Friday: time to put the freshly painted under-stairs cupboard (a.k.a. cellar) back together again. First job is put up some coat hooks to replace the rail that was removed along with the original shelf. Fortunately we have a set of six hooks on a wooden backboard unceremoniously holding up brooms in the garage. Remove hooks, rub down the backboard and freshen up with a nice new coat of quick-drying varnish. It fits a treat; so far so good.

Now in with the wine-rack-support-and-walking-boot-storage device. It fits beautifully. There’s one slight glitch: the floor isn’t level so the shelf sits tipping forward slightly. This will mean that the wine racks do not sit back against the wall (and if they do, they won’t sit on the wine-rack-support-and-walking-boot-storage device). Back to the garage to make a couple of 4mm wedges. Wonderful, we’re level now; on with the first wine rack.

For some reason, call it a sixth sense (aside: excellent film first time around, “Sixth Sense” with Mr. Willis – naff thereafter, though, once the surprise has gone), I grabbed a couple of wine bottles and sat them in the rack. Ah, my sneaky, painstakingly made wooden support device, which are actually butchered bits of old similar wine rack, do tend to get in the way of bottles a tad. Shame really, since bottles are the entire raison d’être of this 5-day venture. (Another aside: strange how decorating a measly space less than 1m x 1m takes as long in elapsed time as a 4m x 4m room, isn’t it? It’s the drying time that’s the problem.) I’d made six supports to go in between the two wine racks, three for the back and three for the front. The back ones do not allow room for the bottle to sit in the rack. The front ones are fine because bottles (most of them, anyway) neck down nicely at the, well, neck. (Black Tower bottles are a notable exception but we will absolutely never blow our street cred by admitting to having any!) Since everything is fixed to the wall with screws capable of holding up the Titanic, it’s really only the front supports that are necessary. So, dispense with the rear supports altogether and on with the plan. Second wine rack fixed above the first wine rack; glue in the painstakingly made front support legs. Wonderful, it all looks very good.

Time to load it all up, coats first and wine second. No more tacky cardboard cellar, this one looks like the real thing (or le vrai chose, as they’d say en France – not!) We can even see, using our made-in-China battery-powered light, whether we are picking up some red, white or rosé. Since it’s Friday and I’m home alone, I think I may just Christen it this evening. 🙂

Clever-dumb balance restored: bumped head four, yes four, times! 🙁

Thursday should be a breeze, really. Now I’d finished using sandpaper and making dust, I could get on with painting the woodwork: skirting board, door frame and my walking boot storage device (which I had cleverly remembered to primer yesterday).

That was soon done and I popped up to B&Q in MK to buy a battery-powered light for the cupboard so that we could make our booze selection even during a power cut. Contingency planning for the wine lake assault team. Being battery-powered, it’s not going to dazzle the neighbours with its brilliance but we should be able to tell whether we’re picking up a white, a red or a rosé.

Something wrong with the world: didn’t bump head!

Wednesday is woodwork day, is every body happy … etc. As luck would have it, the shelf I had removed from the cupboard was exactly the same width as the long side of the wine racks. How amazing is that? Not only that, but it was also twice as deep as the wine racks so I could build support legs out of it, too. Since the wine racks were now going to be placed in on their long side (courtesy of the ripped-out architrave), monsieur Hercule Poirot’s “little grey cells” deduce that they can be raised up on a support built of the aforementioned shelf creating a neat storage area beneath the wine for things like space-consuming walking boots, etc. Nice one, Hercule!

Into the garage, out with the workmate and circular saw, and on with constructing a rudimentary support shelf upon which the wine racks could sit. I also managed to butcher a piece of the original overflow storage, a rack system based on the same design, to fashion a few support legs to hold the second new wine rack above the first. Having broken my back a second time by assembling said second wine rack, I was pleasantly surprised to find that my supports worked so well, the two sat very firmly together even without fixing. Isn’t gravity wonderful?

Not working in the cupboard: no danger of bumping head.

Tuesday was paint-the-walls-and-ceiling day. First of all, I rubbed down yesterday’s filling efforts. Some of the filling promptly fell out. I knew I shouldn’t have been a skinflint by buying Homebase deep gap filler. I established JC’s first rule of decorating several years ago:

• never buy anything with a “Homebase” brand name – it’ll be crap.

Never mind, reinforcement is good for the soul, or so they say, I won’t do it again. Rummaging through my stock of paint remnants in the garage, I found some white emulsion for the ceiling and some “sumptuous silk” emulsion that would do nicely for the walls. Don’t people have a great job coming up with sexy names for paint colours? On with the emulsion. We’ll have the best-decorated under-stairs cupboard in the street.

To spend a little more time constructively, I decided to go for assembling one of the wine racks. Interesting job: 36 metal bars, 63 pine wooden thingies (bottle supports, I guess) and 63 nails. “Interesting” turned out to be a euphemism for “back-breaking”.

Low doorway to the cupboard: bumped head twice!

Monday was time for the mouse to get on with project number one. Since we moved into this house 20 years ago, our wine store has hitherto successfully been made up of good ol’ cardboard wine boxes on their sides and stacked, one on top of the other, five high in the under-stairs cupboard. Admittedly, there were a few overflow storage devices on a shelf; I mean, five cases is not enough for a pair of dedicated wine-lake assault members now, is it? Every now and then one of the box’s sides would become a little weakened and start sagging (no comments about reflecting the owner, please) and I would replace it but, all in all, it worked well. I guess “bins ain’t what they used to be”, however, because, a month or so ago, my beloved cardboard cellar suffered a collapse which I was unable to rectify. Time for a better solution.

Some dedicated research had found Argos selling pine 7 x 8 bottle wine racks for £20 apiece. I thought I might devise a way of stacking them such that they’d fit in the under-stairs cupboard, one way round or the other. So I’d bought two and found they were packed in boxes very much smaller than I’d expected. God bless self-assembly.

Monday was spent emptying the cupboard having first removed the door to facilitate unencumbered access, ripping out the old shelf and its supports which had been cut-nailed to the wall, and filling the resultant holes in preparation for a lick of paint. Judicious use of the tape measure revealed that, were I to remove the architrave from inside the cupboard door frame, I could actually get the wine racks in on their 8-bottle side, saving some height which I might put to good use. (Who on Earth needs architrave on the inside of an under-stairs cupboard door frame, anyway?) Off it came. More filling ensued. To quote the irritating football commentators, “result!”

Sunday was to be my last day with company for about one and a half weeks as, in the evening, Carol was off up to Edinburgh to look after her niece, Vanessa. Normally, Vanessa is perfectly capable of looking after herself, you understand, but now, at a tender young age (mustn’t ask about ladies’ ages), she was in hospital having an operation on her hip. Since Vanessa and her partner, Francesco, run two shops in Edinburgh and live upstairs in a flat (not above either of the shops), Carol had offered some tender loving care while Vanessa began the recovery process on crutches when she was kicked out (sorry, discharged) on Monday.

So, at 6:30 PM on Sunday evening, after an unusually early dinner, guess where I was off to? Yes, good ol’ Luton airport again to drop Carol off for her easyJet flight up to Edinburgh. I’m getting quite used to airport runs but this one was a relative dream, if anything concerning Luton can be said to be dreamlike (nightmare is the term that usually springs to mind); the roads were very quiet so the trip was straightforward. Even the usual queues and confusion to get into and out of Luton airport’s 10-minute drop-off area were notable by their absence.

For all Luton’s faults, the airport has a very useful facility that I have yet to see anywhere else (and recently I’ve been becoming pretty familiar with airport facilities): a drop-off area which is free for 10 minutes. This is wonderful, or should be, because it avoids the need for paying extortionate fees in short-term parking areas when simply kicking some poor, unfortunate traveller out with a bag or two. Other airports take note! This facility is barrier-controlled both in and out and spits out a presumably timed ticket (I’ve never actually read one) on entry to be be used in the barrier on exit. Automatic, simple, or so you’d think. Apparently not. The confusion this causes normally rational human beings leads to fearsome queues which cause you to fear exceeding your 10 minute time limit, whereupon swingeing penalties kick in (£5 over 10 minutes). Perhaps this is why there is always some poor, hapless attendant, wrapped in arctic-grade clothing against the howling winds and lashing rain (the airport is atop a hill and quite exposed to any passing elements), taking the motorists tickets and inserting them into the exit barrier on their behalf. This process seems to slow proceedings down somewhat and causes the queues to be worse than they otherwise might. Sometimes, the attendant can even been seen helping motorists take their ticket on the way in. Amazing! I suspect the trouble is that there is a deterrent penalty for out-staying your 10 minute welcome but no suitable way of levying the charge. Hence the need for Scott-of-the-Antarctic at the exit barrier. They might at least build a weather-proof booth for the poor devils. Better yet, how about a machine that swaps your entry ticket for an exit ticket and makes you pay if you stay too long? I’m sure I’ve seen those used in all similar situations.

Duty done, it was back home to get used to the idea of drinking alone for 10 days, or so. Curiously, I had something of a honey-do list to keep me occupied during the cat’s absence. Little chance of the mouse playing, methinks.