Paperwork/Admin, Gardening, a T-bone steak and the Italian Grand Prix

The last week since the sale of 41 has been spent with a fair amount of paperwork and other bits of admin connected to the sale, but thankfully it is now more or less over. In today's world of pitiful returns on non-risky investments, it takes a while before you can find anything with a reasonable return. I also had to cancel the house insurance and the gas maintenance contract amonst a few other matters. After all that we could turn towards the garden again.

The roses are still going strong and the peppers too. Unfortunately, the village was hit by a mysterious tomato blight, which rotted the remaining fruit on the tomato plants.  Thankfully, we have already harvested 20-30 kilos earlier in the summer, so I wasn't too upset. The prolific pepper harvest was definitely the success story of the summer and as you can see they will carry on producing for a good while yet.

After nurturing the little plants of Brussel sprouts from seed, we started planting them out this last week.  Half of them were done in the place where the tomatoes were and the other half is still to be done in the place of the peas.

On Friday we revisited the Fenyves Inn where we had a lovely lunch the week before last.  This time we had to go to Tesco for the fortnightly shop and came home via the Fenyves. Roy suggested that we make it a celebratory meal for both the sale of 41 and his approaching 73rd birthday. He spotted T-bone steak on the menu last time and decided to put the chef to the test of whether he can cook a really rare steak? In other words: can he buy in good enough steak that is edible when rare?

Well, the steak was very good and after he finished it and his pint I managed to talk him into a 7 year old Havana rum, which was also well appreciated.  The only complaint received was with regard its colour, as Roy is used to good old English Navy rum, which is very dark brown.  Still, he put away the good double measure of it pretty sharpish.  I was, unfortunately, not as lucky as Roy.  I ordered the same pasta dish as last time and found that due to a different chef in the kitchen, it was not nearly as nice as the week before. Then it was made with cream, while this time the pasta was practically swimming in about half a pound of cheese, which tasted great, but was not the best for my digestive system.  Roy finished it for me and enjoyed that as well.

This week I also started my usual spending spree on Amazon, which I am in the habit of doing round  about this time of year.  Electronics, books, DVD's, toys are usually what I buy. This time I started with a new GPS, to replace my ancient over 10 year old one, which occasionally goes barmy, usually under tree cover and/or near metal objects.  It is also very slow and not sensitive enough to pick up enough satellites fast enough. The old one was a present from a friend and while browsing on Amazon I realised that there is no point in buying the most up to date version of the same GPS, as that would set me back about £300. So I went for a little e-Trex, which is perfectly adequate for my purposes, which is mostly geocaching and one of them was on offer, so that went into the basket with a protective case and some screen protectors.  Then came the books, now that is financially dangerous in our family when I start buying books.  This time I stopped after 6, but who knows there might still be some more to get.

The shopping list consisted of: Patrick Leigh Fermor's posthumous 3rd volume of his travels back in the 1930's, Artemis Cooper's book about PLF and Nick Hunt's book on retracing PLF's steps in the 21st century.  A bit later I ordered another 3 books, but these were pre-orders.  Somehow, by chance, or more likely by design, Michael Palin, Stephen Fry and John Cleese are publishing books within 2 and 4 weeks of each other. Palin on 11th September, Fry on 25th September and Cleese on 9th October.  As I love all three, I couldn't resist. Palin is bringing out the third volume of his edited diaries (I have the previous 2), Fry has produced his memoirs, called More Fool Me and Cleese has probably done something similar, we'll see.  I have never read anything from Cleese, so that's be a new experience for me.

Talking of new experiences: television provided something fascinating last week.  ITV started a 4-part police drama called Chasing Shadows. It sounded interesting and the main character was familiar from somewhere.  It took me a while to realise that the actor was Reece Shearsmith, whom I saw earlier in the year in The Widower, a real story of a multiple wife killer and he played Malcolm Webster who is still inside, hopefully for a very long time. I read some of the journalistic comment about this series and while everybody thinks that the actors are pretty good, many criticised the 21st century phenomenon of spicing up detective stories with putting high functioning sociopaths into the main roles. I quite enjoyed the first episode and will make up my mind about it after seeing a bit more of it.

Who Do You Think You Are was a real classic this week.  Sheridan Smith found out that the singing and acting talent that she has came down the generations. She came across very genuine and nice, with a lovely mum and dad and the whole thing was brilliant. Amazing, how this series, now in its 11th season, gets just better and better.

 And then today we had the Italian Grand Prix, which was probably the best race I have seen not just this year, but for several years. F1 can get very monotonous when it is just one great procession, but today at Monza the overtaking and sheer race craft exchibited by several drivers was breath taking. Obviously, I am extremely happy with Lewis Hamilton winning, but even if he didn't I would have still considered this GP one of the best I have ever seen. I am not often given to schadenfreude (joy at somebody's misfortune), but what happened to Nico Rosberg today he deserved a thousand time over. Lewis managed to pressurise him into two stupid mistakes, the first one didn't hurt him, but the second did. That was what lost him the win! Considering that Lewis won more GPs and is behind him only because 80% of mechanical and other troubles with Mercedes cars happened to poor Hamilton and not Rosberg, it was about time he had some bad luck. Lewis was awsome, how the problems with the car, which robbed him of his first place off at the start, didn't bother him and the way he fought back like a lion to win. He is definitely a superb driver and a very nice guy to boot. He is still 22 points down on Rosberg, but I will cross anything and everything for him in the remaining 7 races and hope he wins overall.

On Thursday we are going into town, which will make a change as we haven't been there for nearly 8 weeks. I hope everything is OK there, but we'll find out soon enough. We are staying for 8 days, during which I have several concerts, theatre and opera visits, have to see my doctor, get my pills etc., etc. After that comes the Hash group's visit in the village when I get my Hash name, which should be quite an event.

RIP 41

Today's post is written just a few hours after we heard that we had finally exchanged contracts and completed on our sale of our long time family home, 41 Osborne Road, Brighton.

The house in the middle is 41.

We bought it in 1970 (I won't tell you for how much!) and we sold it at exactly 44 years and 1 month to the day after we moved in. I don't miss it, but spent half a minute of being a little sad that it went. A very nice lady bought it, and we all hope that she will have just as much  happiness living there as we did.

Roy managed to get one of his family history friends to scan for us a page from the 1973 Brighton Kelly's Directory where, if you look hard, you will find Roy's name against the house number 41.

The living room

The top back bedroom

Other than this, nothing much had happened since I posted last. We had a couple of Skype calls from Elian and Xander first and recently from Callum. Couldn't take pictures of the little ones as the quality was crap, but will include the links to a couple of their little videos Lucy keeps sending me attached to e-mails. Callum was a bit grumpy, so I could only take a few photos, one of which is posted below. I will also post a couple from his birthday party, which I only recently received.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFTtpuMZSGA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oIjN96tiig

A happy birthday boy with his Star Wars birthday cake.

The weather had been pretty changeble this last week.  To start with it was overcast, then we had a couple of glorious hot and sunny days, followed by torrential rain for the last two days.  On one of the sunny days we went for a drive and tried a restaurant our Dutch friends from the village recommended. It's called the Fenyves Fogadó. It was superb food, good service and generally nice environment. Roy had his usual gypsy roast and I had a plate of pasta with forest mushrooms in a cream sauce.  It was delicious.

The Fenyves Fogadó

As there was still a bit of afternoon left, we went geocaching and managed to get one.  The second one got a bit complicated, as it was a three parter - I might finish that one another time.

The glorious countryside near the cache we found.

Impressive Transylvanian gate in the village above which the cache was.

The view of the village from near where the cache was.

There were news on the visitors front: three visitors are expected this autumn: 1. Carmella and her mother Michelle are definitely coming in November.  They have just booked their flights, so that is definitely on. 2. Alan and 3. Attila with Noni are two which are not fixed yet, but hopefully they should turn up as well.  Alan promised a visit this autumn and I think he is planning it for October, while Attila is thinking of the end of September/beginning of October.  I hope they will not clash, but if they do I am sure we'll cope.

Maxine Peake

And to ensure that no post goes without a report on some televisual experience of the past week, I am watching the second series of The Village, which I think is absolutely fantastic.  I read somewhere that the story lines are inspired by the life of Steven Moffat's grandfather, who lived in similar circumstances to the characters in the series. Whether this is true or not it's immaterial.  What matters is the brilliant script, direction and acting which is Moffat's hallmark (see Dr Who, Sherlock etc.), but the acting talents of Maxine Peake and John Simm are also breathtaking.

Brendan O'Carroll

The last Who Do You Think You Are episode was also absolutely epic. Brendan O'Carrol, an Irish comedian of Mrs. Brown fame tried to track down who killed his maternal grandad back in the days of the fight for Irish Independence in the 1920's. It was undoubtedly one of the best, if not THE best episode I have ever seen in this program's 10 year existence. Although it was only hinted at, as even today you cannot openly say what the British Secret Service got up to nearly 100 years ago, but we were left at no doubt that the old man was executed in cold blood because his sons would not leave the IRA. They didn't name him, but the researchers must have even found out who the bastard was who shot and killed him, because they said that he ended up as a banker.  Fitting, I thought.  Considering what the world now thinks of that evil species.

Kate Bush

And finally, I really enjoyed the documentary on Kate Bush, which told me a lot about her, why she disappeared from view for so long and why she came back to tour this year. She is in her fifties now, but still looks good and sings like an angel. Now I have got to go to bed as I have still a lot of admin and paperwork to do tomorrow in relation to the house sale.  Night, night to you all!!

Hungária Kupa

After the long hike with Jutka I had to take it easy at the beginning of last week and then pack and depart for the Hungária Kupa on Wednesday. In order to save on accommodation we went directly to the first day's event, so spent only 4 nights in the student hostel sharing a 4 bedded room with our friends Pista and Klari. It was adequate, but I must admit I will try not to book such accommodation again, as some aspects of cleanliness (or the lack of it) and certainly quite a few aspects of comfort (like your own bathroom) were missing.  We are both too old and needy to rough it any more. B&B's or camping from now on.

Day 1 with my route drawn on by hand

I was somewhat perturbed by the thought of doing a 5 day event after such a long layoff and especially in such a well known rough, steep and hard mountain as the Mátra. Of the 5 days I knew the area of the first 3 days, as I have competed there before.  Days 4 and 5 were unknown to me, which is just as well, as you will find out later. Day 1 worked out quite well, but I soon found out that one of my arch rivals, whom I have last competed against about 2 years ago was back with a vengance.  Unless she made some big mistakes (which she is prone to do on occasions) there was no chance that I could keep up with her.  The rest of the field consisted of a few Hungarians plus 2 Russians and one Canadian. The two hiccups on the first day were: 1. the weather was rainy and unpredictable; 2. my GPS watch decided to misbehave due to having filled up its memory.  Unfortunately I couldn't work out how to delete the internal database, so I was back to drawing my course on by hand, as I used to do it until 2011, when I got the watch. No probs, although the GPS is a lot more accurate than memory. I was lucky that it never poured while I was out running, but I still got a bit wet in the first three days.

Day 2, same terrain as Day 1, but different start

On the second day we were still at the same place and this time the start was "only" 950 metres away, not 1650m like the day before. I even felt a bit of energy left at the end, so Klari and I went up to the Asztag-kő, which was on the O map, to find its geocache.  Unfortunately we didn't find it as the weather was threatening a downpour and having climbed a lot my GPS (that's the other one, not the running one) also started playing silly buggers due to thick cloud cover, so we gave up.  Not until after I took a few pretty photos though from the edge of the quarry cliff face.

The abandoned stone quarry en route to the cache

A reservoir in the distance

An overgrown but picturesque gully by the quarry

Thankfully, we found some lovely restaurants in nearby Mátrafüred, where all our evenings were spent, eating and drinking with friends.  A couple of evenings Klari and Pista, then Laci, Koxi and Földvári Laci, finally Hilary and John were our table mates, and pleasant it was too.

Day 3 with the ziggy-zaggy course and some ravine diving

The third day we moved to another part of the mountains and while this was also familiar to me, having had to walk 2650 metres to the start, my course ran on a completely different part of the forest from the last time I ran there a few years ago. This was the day of the infamous control 9, which was lethal and which, I later found out, was armchair planned without the planner OR  the controller ever having been near it in the terrain. I don't mind rough terrain, in fact I generally love it as it slows down the speed merchants and I have no objections to climbing or scrambling.  However, there is rough and then there is rough.  This control was next to a boulder, which hung out of the side of a 3m deep ravine about 1.2m down.  There were no trees, bushes, handholds in the boulder or on the hard ground to hang onto, so I slowly slid down, dibbed and then carried on sliding to the bottom of the ravine, not having the faintest chance to climb back up to the top.  While sliding, a sharp branch caught me, ruined my favourite O bottoms and punctured a hole in my thigh. OK, I climbed out later in a place with a few more handholds, but generally putting this control on courses for senior ladies aged between 60 and 70 years was perhaps not the wisest move. Anyway, after the first two days finishing 2nd, all this fartarsing about down and up ravines pushed me down into third place.  Overall, however, I was still second.

Day 4 with thorn bushes and lots of rock

And then came the terrain that was new to me.  Well, knowing that I wasn't on top of my physical capabilities, had I known the place I probably would not have entered those two days. The planner AND controller seemed to have done a bit of a gung ho job of planning and controlling, and while these guys are good friends of mine and I am sure they checked everything (unlike Day 3's planner) they erred grossly on course lengths. No useful rules or guidelines here about the 5% climb or the percentage by which you are supposed to shorten courses for at least 2 reasons: 1. due to the roughness, steepness and rockiness of the ground; and 2. due to the fact that this is a summer multi-day event, which in the high heat and with all the other activities might wear people out more than usual. Day 4 I had a course of 2.6k with 150m of climb.  Day 5 was 3.1k with 125m climb and this in W65.  I know I was not fit, but even the rival I mentioned earlier and who was on top form took 50 minutes on Day 4 and 80 minutes on Day 5. I managed 60 on Day 4 and 93 on Day 5. The winning times were seriously over recommended times on both days.  Mind you, on the last day many people didn't even go out after the privations of Day 4 and even more of them gave up on the day.  While muggins persevered, vowing to herself that neither planner nor evil, rough mountain would beat her.  I was second on Day 4 and third again on Day 5, but stayed 2nd overall and now proudly sport a nice silver medal and a cute little rucksack as a prize.

Day 5 when I was out for 93 minutes

A couple of other events have also happened, one on Friday, the other on Saturday. On Friday I went to spectate at the Beer Relay Competition.  This is something that would probably be frowned upon in many places, but it is very popular over here. Each member of the relay team has to drink a pint before they go out and there are many rounds.  This is usually won by older guys, who are still running about the same speed as the youngsters, but can drink more and a lot faster than the younger generation, due to more practice over the years.

The beverage table awaiting the first leg runners

One of the changeovers

Saturday's event was a birthday celebration for the doyen of my orienteering club. János Buncsik was 80 year of age on the day and we toasted him with a chocolate cake. He is a lovely old guy who had suffered a severe stroke 3 years ago and managed to recover sufficiently from it to return to orienteering.  We all admire his resolve and determination. And he is a really nice person too.

The birthday boy with his cake

On Sunday we managed to get away from the medal ceremony in time to visit Tesco en route home and were indoors by 5pm.

Another peaceful, warm week

Dylan Walsh and Poppy Montgomery

Monday started with two events, one great the other not so much.  The latter was the sorry fact that one of my favourite CBS series, Unforgettable with Dylan Walsh and Poppy Montgomery, was supposed to have episode 7 on, but it had vanished into thin air from their iPlayer - or whatever they call it.  Unforgettable is quite fun and as it is still summer and there is not much to watch, I was looking forward to it. At one point it was amongst the options, but as soon as you clicked on it, something different came up.  I left it for a while and later it wasn't even there to be chosen.  It hasn't reappeared ever since, so I don't think this particular episode is going to happen. In a couple of days it should be episode 8, I wonder what's going to happen then?

Lovely deep pink lavateras

The second event was much more enjoyable and interesting.  One of Roy's old friends, Wyn, whom I never thought of as a regular reader of this blog, wrote to me explaining what that lovely flower, that I didn't know the name of, was in my garden.  If you look at the previous post, it was on the last couple of photos there.  Apparently it is called Lavatera or Tree Mallow.  I looked it up on the Internet and found a hundred different types, but none of them exactly like mine.  Never mind, they all look very pretty, including this one above, picture of which I nicked from the net.  Thanks Wyn, that was really interesting.

Two rows of Brussels sprouts in pots

In the garden we started separating the little plants that will be Brussels sprouts into pots. There are still loads of them in the old shower tray we used as a seed tray, so I will have to do a few more soon.

The herb patch

The herb garden is thriving, in fact, they obviously all love the recent weather of hot sunny days and downpours at night, as they went jungle like. I wonder if you can all identify my herbs, which are (in this picture) chives, basil, thyme, parsley, rosemary, tarragon, lemon balm, sage, coriander and dill.

The men at the lake side

The cute little silly twerp

Mummy looks stunning

Daddy looks happy

The Toronto branch of the Grant family went on a staycation to Toronto Island. A very good time was had by all.  Callum also had his 5th birthday this week. He celebrated with a big party on Saturday.

With Daddy on his 5th birthday

Playing hide and seek with Gran via Skype - good camouflage

Playing hide and seek with Gran via Skype - not so good camouflage

Chasing a squirrel in the garden, but it didn't want to come off the window sill

Looking for squirrels around the back deck

And this is Callum's favourite toy: his fart gun!!

Skype was very useful for seeing Elian and Xander this week as well. We managed to catch them just between bath time and bed time.  Elian was a big show off (what's new?) and little Xander was trying to join in the fun.  They are such absolute darlings, even though Elian is already full of all the tricks of loveydom.

I love my big brother

A bit of wrestling

I can play with the bars too

The weather has been pretty good and Roy did some more preserving as the tomatoes and peppers are still producing. Another 9 bottles of lecsó is in the larder. On Friday we went to Hatvan market and to Tesco. I bought some giant peaches again, they are so delicious there is only one left and it is only Sunday evening. TV was OK, if not too exciting this week. Brian Blessed had some very interesting ancestors on Who Do You Think You  Are? and Nessa Stein met her end (or did she?) in The Honourable Woman.

And then came an unexpectedly lovely Sunday to round the week off.  My friend Jutka, whom I haven't seen for ages, rang to find out how we are. We chatted for over an hour and found that neither of us was doing anything in particular this Sunday, so we invited her to visit and go for a hike with me.  The hike turned into geocaching and we managed to find three caches while walking about 10 miles with nearly 400 metres of climb.  The weather was perfect and we had some spectacular views from the ridge and a massive look-out tower on one of its tops. We did get lost once or twice, mostly due to dreadfully out of date maps and the decrepitude of my GPS. We also had trouble finding the very last bit, which was actually part 3 of the three parter cache we started with. Today was the day of the "hole in tree" method of hiding the cache.  One we nearly gave up on when Jutka thought of poking it with a stick and the cache turned up. The last one, which was a similar hid out was just simply not there.  Unless, of course, we were looking in the wrong place.  We'll see when we hear back from the owner of the cache.

My friend, Jutka near the first cache

En route to the second cache

The lovely hills beyond the thickets nearby

A pretty village with forested hills behind - photographed from the ridge

Where they thinned the forest

Massive look-out tower on one of the tops along the ridge

Now I am going to bed as I am a bit cream crackered and have aches and pains in my back, knees and kneck. A good soak in the bath and a good sleep should fix me up. Next week we are off to the Hungária Kupa 5 day orienteering event in the next range of hills, so we will hopefully get there in about an hour or so. We are leaving on Wednesday morning and will be back on Sunday evening. Talk to you all after that!