3 weeks in France plus time in Birmingham looking after Helen’s Parents and finally moving into the bungalow in Poole.
1st to 4th April Trying to make progress at the house ready to go to France to put up tents and organise the campsite ready for the season.
Friday 5th My plan for today is to try to get out to my boat during the morning as the tide is high. Ideally I need to put on my sticker and check the rainwater status but a bit of work on the fore-hatch, tabernacle and fairleads would also not go amiss.
There was a high tide at 8:04 and again at 20:34 so the plan was for me to try getting out to the boat and then go and do the errands in New Milton in the afternoon. I arrived at the sailing club around 10:00 to find there was a moderate wind causing fairly rough conditions so I went straight home again. No point struggling to row against that wind in a shallow draft inflatable dinghy so I went home again and spent the time packing the car ready for the ferry crossing to France. The permit apparently doesnt need to be on the boat until the end of April.
Sunday 7th April we were on the 08:30 ferry from Poole to Cherbourg. Arrived on time having had a much smoother journey than had been forecast. Fairly trouble free journey on the roads too although the satnav took a route after Nantes which was different from the one I remember and avoided Challans completely.
Monday – Friday I was working on the Chapiteau with Stuart. He is mainly a musician but knows enough about sound systems to be able to deal with that on his own. By Wednesday everything was coming together and we were putting in new lighting around the edge of the marquee.
Saturday 13th We planned to go to Noirmoutier today and that turned out to work well for one of the Dutch group as he wanted to go there to get some pottery for his wife. High tide today was around 9am with the low at 3:30 or thereabouts. We set off at a little before 11 and used the bridge to get there. Dropped Siem off at the parking just by the cafe so he could walk along the coastal path back towards the center of town while we sat on the beach, had our lunch and then Dawn & I walked along the beach to the lighthouses.
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Today was the start of the conference that we had been aiming to have the Chapiteau ready for. That all went well except for the unexpected failure of a couple of display screens.
Sunday 14th ‘Church’ today was done in the Chapiteau, in French and jointly between the conference and a local church. Stuart was there to start with but had to leave around 11 to get to the ferry on time. That left me as the ‘Sound engineer’ for the rest of their conference stay.
21st April Our first grandchild was safely delivered at Barnsley Hospital. Welcome to the family Rupert.
Thursday 25th April This evening Helen got a worrying text from her brother about her mother’s health (suggestions of a stroke!). Coupled with getting no reply to phone calls or texts to John or her parents, this caused us to start the process of changing our return to tomorrow.
Friday 26th By 10:00 we had confirmation that we were now booked on the 18:15 ferry so we set off to Cherbourg. Reasonable journey with no significant holdups or slowdowns so we were there around 2 ½ hours before departure to get our spot beside the lift. Actually nowhere near even half full on the car deck so there were empty spaces ahead of where we stopped.
Smooth journey to Poole followed by a rather long wait to clear the customs check where they were going through all of the camper vans and the occasional car. Partially unpacked and into bed before midnight.
Saturday 27th Helen’s Birthday was initially marked by a trip with Dawn to get Helen’s monthly prescription from the pharmacy and a coffee. This was followed by finishing our packing and setting off for Birmingham. The situation doesn’t seem quite as disastrous as Helen’s brother had implied but we both had to go into healthcare mode.
Monday 29th I very briefly saw a sleeping grandson before setting off to Doncaster to do a few days work on the house there.
Wednesday 1st May Helen has been having a bad night with her mum vomiting and more confused than usual – NHS111 call and an ambulance attendance led to a diagnosis of a probable infection and the decision to leave her at the house. There is a face to face dementia assessment scheduled for 11:00 today so there may be some progress with medication safety and care provision as a result.
Friday 3rd. The plan for today was to go to Birmingham to collect Helen then over to Norwich to see Grace and collect Lexie. Helen’s mum was at the doctors in the morning but was sent to medical assessment at the hospital. Helen is now no-longer going to Grace’s with but will stay to look after her if she is sent home.
Saturday 4th The journey back to New Milton with the dog took around an hour longer than predicted. Like yesterday there was congestion around on major roads as well as a big accident on one of the M25 slip roads.
May day bank holiday Monday Back to Birmingham then on to Doncaster with the dog.
Saturday 11th Back to Birmingham after a busy week working on the garden and painting.
The plan for the next week got another change due to John having to drop his wife off at Bromsgrove hospital with breathing difficulties and chest pain so he wouldn’t be able to care for George or even collect Helen from visiting her mum. After a consult with Bethany there is a new plan involving me collecting Helen from visiting at the hospital then staying in Birmingham to look after George, Beth will pick her up and take her to New Milton for her medical appointments tomorrow and on Monday. Beth will then bring her back to Birmingham after which the dog & I go back to Doncaster.
Sunday Most of the day taken up with preparing those and providing tea for George and myself. Another change of plan because Helen’s appointment in Southampton is on Tuesday morning rather than tomorrow. Beth will be bringing me the microwave and the mortgage documents from New Milton tomorrow morning and then returning to Hereford. Helen is trying to organise help getting to the hospital appointment in Southampton and will eventually be arriving back in Birmingham by train. I need to pick her up from the local station before heading north.
John visited Margaret at the hospital today and she seems to be doing a lot better this evening. We are not sure but it seems entirely possible that she might be sent home tomorrow or on Tuesday.
Monday 13th Today was a busy one with Beth bringing all the bits from Shenstone court that I need to live more sensibly at the house in Doncaster as well as the paperwork for the two mortgages which need signing.
Margaret came out of hospital around 3pm which involved me taking John there and then parking in a side street close by while he moved her to the drop-off area and then called me to come back and pick them up again. We ended up back at the house just before Beth arrived.
Tuesday The new plan now involved Helen taking the coach from Southampton to Birmingham and me collecting her from the coach station just after 4pm.
It turns out that we still have migraine clinics at Southampton and Poole doing Helen’s Botox injections. She got the Southampton injections today but also has a Poole appointment sometime next week.
This morning Margaret asked me if the ward should have removed the venous access device (Venflon) from her arm. She also had a cotton wool roll on the other arm from her most recent blood sample site but that was easy to remove at home. After George’s carers had been we went to the GP practice to get the Venflon removed. It turns out that they had also created a Warfarin dosing appointment for her so we had a 45 minute visit which solved all the issues – INR was 1.5 so the Warfarin dose needed increasing to 5mg from the 3 that the ward had been giving her.
Helen was successful in making it to the Southampton coach station in time for her journey to Birmingham and arrived only about 10 minutes after the schedule (due to delays on the Pershore road in Birmingham). We then went back to the house via the pharmacy at the medical centre as they still owed some items from George’s prescription and one of them is needed for tomorrow. Once that was sorted out I headed back to Doncaster.
Wednesday 15th During breakfast I discovered that you can download maps for OpenCPN via an app called SAS planet – it captures map tiles from Google maps, Navionics and Cmaps then allows you to copy them into OpenCPN on a tablet. I have down loaded it onto the laptop but it won’t open without internet so there is a bit more work to do on that aspect.
Saturday 18th Today should be a final return to New Milton with Helen finished with her carer duties as Birmingham returns to John & Margaret being reasonably able to cope.
Having spent the morning finishing as many decorating jobs as I could at the house in Doncaster, I set off for Birmingham at around 11 and arrived in time to have a share of lunch. Helen then loaded her stuff into the car and we set off around 3:00 despite John having not yet turned up at the house with the shopping. Reasonable journey home with no particular traffic problems.
Sunday Back to Doncaster to try to get the garden and decorating finished.
Monday. Today didn’t turn out anything like planned. I was woken at 6:30 by a phone call from Grace as her car wouldn’t start and she couldnt get to work. She has jump leads and sort of knows how to use them she needed a car with a good battery and there was nobody about. She tried the AA who are her breakdown supplier but they wouldn’t help as she doesn’t have the ‘home start’ level of cover. Hence I got dressed, grabbed breakfast and set off to see what I could do. With no traffic limitations the 137 miles can be done in just under 3 hours but today it took me from 7:00 to 11:30 to get there due to encountering 3 tractor delays during the journey.
To start with the engine was turning over but the battery dropped from 12.4V to start with to around 10V while cranking the engine. Both readings seem a little low to me so I connected up my battery with neither engine running and the engine still wouldn’t start to begin with. However it did start on the third try with a little more throttle than Grace usually uses. Once running it was putting out enough power to charge the battery OK (around 14 Volts). From there on the engine happily started without having mine connected so it is possible that I had put in some charge even without my engine running. We then decided to set off for Halfords in my car and get a jump start device so she will be able to boost her own car in future if there is nobody around to help.
I spent all together too much of this evening reading some of the public enquiry report from the “infected blood” investigation which was published today. As with a lot of previous high level reports the vast majority of the recommended actions relate to creating the right culture in the NHS including educating doctors and nurses about harm caused by healthcare errors at all levels. This one also goes very deep into the research ethics & Governance area too because of including a school which housed a significant number of haemophiliac children who were used as research subjects and many became infected and died as a consequence of high use of imported (US) blood products. I haven’t yet got to the bits that will potentially have the most impact on front line laboratories and blood banks but it is interesting to see high level criticism of exactly the same somewhat focussed / blinkered investigation approach that I often noticed in inquests and serious incident investigations. The same applies to the detailed transfusion consent problems which we routinely encountered when lab staff tried to encourage use of alternatives to transfusion and use of minimum necessary transfusion rather than multi unit infusions without monitoring effectiveness.
Tuesday Today will be a long day because I have several ceilings that need preparing and painting, I also need to get a statement signed by the current tenant at our house, take that and other papers to the solicitor and also get Matthew to check on the details of vetting the tenants. Then I also have to go back to Hampshire ready for the next few days (We have visitors plus Helen has a band concert & probably a Thursday rehearsal).
After a busy day painting at the house in Doncaster I set off for New Milton at around 6pm which meant I arrived at almost 11pm.
Wednesday 22nd Everyone was awake at 6am so I managed to be at LSC for 8:30. Unfortunately I didn’t bring my boat dues sticker with me or the drill driver so the two main jobs didn’t get done. I also gained another one for next time I am out because the tender sticker was in the post box.
I did manage to sort out the base of the flag pole so I can now varnish it with confidence that it will fit in the socket.
Also re-rigged the Genoa reefing line and tested the inboard engine.
The engine runs OK if a little noisily and smokey at present, probably because of the higher than normal oil ratio. There doesn’t seem to be much sign of cooling water in the exhaust but that might be due to the short time it was running for. There is definitely some rusty water in the cooling circuit but I probably should investigate further sometime.
I was back home in time to take Helen to her hair appointment at 12:00.
Chris and Jess arrived mid way through the afternoon in their camper van.
Thursday Chris and I tried to go sailing. High tide was about 10am so we were all up and ready really early. We arrived at the sailing club at 8:30 and the ladies set off on a walk to the coffee shop while Chris and I got the tender loaded up and rowed out to the boat. There were a couple of jobs needing to be done before we could set off but we only ended up hoisting the Genoa and attaching the sheets.
When we tried to roll the sail up I discovered we had been caught by the problem of the halyard rolling around the foil and couldn’t even reef down to as little as three quarters of the sail. Among all of the other work getting the boat organised I had completely forgotten to add the fixing point and ‘anti wrap’ line that I had proposed back in September 2016 – “This picture shows my idea with the red line being my new piece of cord and the black the original halyard.”
Forgetting that means I now have to take down the mast, attach a mounting point for a pulley and add a suitable line and cleat. At the same time I will be able to investigate why the wind speed system no-longer spins so there are two jobs to be done at the same time.
That meant we didn’t get as far as the second job which would have been to re-fit the rudder. We were back ashore around 12:00 somewhat to the amusement of the ladies who were relaxing in the sun on the sailing club balcony.
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Friday 24th Originally the plan was for us to exchange house contracts today as the culmination of four months of work towards mobilising funds from a buy to let mortgage on our original Doncaster residence, some more from mortgaging the final rental property and a residential mortgage on the property we are buying. However behind the scenes the solicitors didn’t seem to have everything sorted in time and it will happen tomorrow instead.
After we got home Chris and Jess set off to some friends near Oxford and we got started on some packing ready to move. Following a 5pm email from the solicitor, we have organised a 10:30 appointment to re-view the house tomorrow. I hope we can follow that with a trip to LSC taking the mast lowering ‘A’ frame and the stern support so I will be ready to do the mast work once the bits arrive.
Helen has an afternoon concert tomorrow at the quay in Wareham. Karl and Dawn have taken their boat over there today so we meet them there around the concert.
Saturday 25th May 9:00 tip appointment (Lymington) 10:30 final pre acceptance viewing of the house (Oak Dale) and a trip to the storage unit to formally book renting space for the stuff that wont fit in the new house until the extension is completed. After that we didn’t have time for the trip out to the boat taking the A frame and pushpit mast support but arrived at Wareham with around an hour spare before the start of the concert.
Dawn & Karl were on a shopping trip at the time so we went to the other side of the river and Helen started to eat her lunch there as the early arrivers among the band were organising chairs and music stands. Lexie and I went on the boat as soon as they arrived back and Helen followed shortly after that.
After the duck race and concert Helen came back across to the boat and we had drinks and nibbles before doing a trip to the chippy up the road to get supper.
Back home around 8pm to do a little more sorting out ready for the move.
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Sunday I woke up early so was on my way north at a reasonable time and should have arrived just after 10. That didn’t happen though as there were several heavy rain showers during the drive and one seems to have caused a heavy vehicle to hit the Armco in the central reservation of the A34 a few hundred yards after the last bridge of the junction with the M4. That meant the north bound traffic was stationary for almost an hour and I didn’t arrive in Doncaster until 11:20.
Tuesday 28th May The newest plan is to exchange contracts today. Also my latest boat purchases should arrive however I won’t be doing the mast drop, fit them and re-hoist the mast for a few days as there is the small issue of a house move to accomplish first.
Wednesday 29th Karl is coming over to help move items from New Milton to the storage unit using his van and trailer. Hopefully we can get quite a lot moved into storage today
Thursday We should be collecting the rented van at 2:30 so we can move more stuff into the storage unit and load up some of the stuff that will be going to the house tomorrow.
I left the car on Karl & Dawn’s drive and started to occupy the storage at around 9:00 with the overnight van load. The second load included assembling some of the shelves and a little re-organising to make use of the better stacking. Karl & I eventually finished unloading at around 3:00 but still hadn’t had any lunch.
Big problem with the van rental as Enterprise insist you pay on a credit card under the driver’s name. This didn’t work as I don’t have any credit cards which I know the PIN number of.
We ended up renting a proper truck from a different company for about the same cost as the Luton van. This was much larger capacity but had no satnav and problems with a couple of the gears. My phone is useless as a satnav because of needing data and not normally reading out the instructions. Also the van was a nightmare to drive on country lanes as it bounced all over the place when empty. It didn’t help that I was tired, hungry and got lost while trying to get from Ringwood to New Milton – On the first attempt I took a left turn to a place that I recognised and ended up full circle on the edge of Ringwood with signs for Christchurch. On the second time round I took the right turn and ended up at home after a challenging refuel at the Tesco store.
We loaded up a fair amount of the stuff from the house so by the time we were feeding the team fish & chips most of the furniture was on the truck – Fridge, Freezer from the garage, washing machine and the mattress were the only big items left.
Friday 31st May I started off by loading all the remaining white goods and various boxes, shopping bags and loose items as Helen tried to clear out the kitchen. We then took down curtains and tried to clean the kitchen, bathroom etc as best we could. Lexie and Remmy are happily pretending to run the truck while we finish off loading stuff – Keeps them out from under everyone’s feet.
Karl and Andy are meeting at the storage this morning to try to make some space and then unload the stuff from Karl’s van. Going by the photos they have made progress but I will have to move stuff into the corridor before I can do much more shelf building.
Completion of the purchase seemed to take an age with the solicitor checking we wanted to go ahead sometime before 9:00 and being able to collect keys at quarter past 12. As it is about a half hour journey, the latter meant a bit of a rush to Oakdale with Helen in Karl’s van and me following some distance behind in the truck (I had hoped to use her phone or have her read instructions from mine). Fortunately I knew most of the two different routes offered by Google earth and had at least driven the different bits of the route Karl had said he was taking. I managed to muddle through the same route although it took some time as there were road works and a bit of major congestion as we got close to the house. Plenty of hill start & slow traffic practice for driving the truck.
Helen collected the keys with no problem. Fortunately we had found the sandwiches and other lunch so today was a bit more organised.
Karl was on ‘racing rescue boat’ duty this evening so had to leave about 4 for that – Actually left earlier but he was hampered by having to act as my pilot vehicle so I could find the rental agency and return the truck. I did make him a little time pressured but he arrived on time.
Meanwhile I went back to the new house in the car and we did a little more unpacking before setting off to LSC to partake of the chilli cooked for those in this evenings races. I ended up outside looking after the dogs but it was reasonable weather. LSC is now 10 minutes from home by road so very easy to get there and probably not much more than 15 minutes to Wareham.
This post is a massive tribute to all involved in our eventual successful move.
Finally posted 19/6/2024 after the new house is a little more settled.