DOMESTIC INTERRUPTIONS – Page 2 – Unsuitable Blog and HappenStance News

WHY IT’S SO HARD TO SLEEP IN THESE DAYS . . .

The “first fine careless rapture” is startlingly loud just now. And it’s not the first.

It’s not just bird song that wakes me up. Several times recently one of the young birds has arrived on the bedroom window sill and is evidently trying to get in.

And so I lie awake trying to identify the different calls but I can’t — apart from wood pigeons, crows and gulls. I never have been able to. Even when I listen to them on the radio and feel sure I’ll remember, I don’t. Perhaps you have to be trained when you’re young.

So much I don’t know! I didn’t know till today, for example, that there was a difference between the song thrush and mistle thrush, or how to tell it. And now I do know, I’ll probably forget. What a confession! I didn’t know a blackbird was a thrush too (they’re all the same family) or that their Latin un-graceful family name is ‘turdus’. And I now know we have both songs and mistles in our garden, though not all the time. Last week a pair of mallard arrived just outside the garden fence. At least ducks go quack.

But who’s making all the noise this morning, on the first day of June? A lot of it’s the chaffinches (even better in Latin, fringilla coelebs) but some of it’s sparrows and bluetits (who sing their song many times more than twice over). And the coaltits – they’re my favourites to watch because they’re so very tiny. But their song (I now learn from YouTube) is much bigger than their size. Same with wrens. But I’ll still forget which of them is which. I remember standing underneath a robin singing in the spring, determined to memorise the sound because it was so beautiful. But in bed, listening, I’m not sure which one is robin.

I’m not even sure (when I’m half asleep) which sound belongs to the starlings (stukkies in Scotland) because they make such a range of noises when out and about. It may be young starlings that knock against the bedroom window. They do a lot of clowning about. In the tall trees in the road, when roosting together, their beautiful conversation is unmissable but on their own they don’t make that high looping, keening sound.

Thankfully I warm to the calming sound of the fat wood pigeons, who roll around the garden, eating everything in sight. I associate it with holidays in Wales. Probably the only bird sound I’m sure of.

Bird song brings me inevitably to Home Thoughts from Abroad, by that songster R Browning, one of the earliest poets ever to be recorded forgetting his own poem (though not this one). But I love him all the more for that. and at least I could recognise his voice anywhere. Obviously it is the Wrong Month now for this poem. But I woke with it in my head, along with the birdsong . . . so here it is.

I
Oh, to be in England now that April’s there
And whoever wakes in England sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England – now!

II
And after April, when May follows
And the white-throat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossom’d pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops—at the bent spray’s edge—
That’s the wise thrush: he sings each song twice over
Lest you should think he never could re-capture
The first fine careless rapture!
And, though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children’s dower,
Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

MY SOUP HAS LUMPS

The weather forecasters are doing nothing but apologise.

More rain. More weather.

I’m making a lot of soup. My soups aren’t inventive: a combination of carrots, leeks, onions, lentils and something else that’s green. Depends what’s in the veg compartment in the fridge. Sometimes I add a little bit of chopped bacon. Herbs if the garden is growing any.

My soup has lumps. It never sees a liquidiser. (The liquidiser, poor thing, is somewhere in the dark recesses under the stairs.)

My very first soup contained butter, onions, carrots, potatoes, lentils and a stock cube. I was a little nervous about it. I was staying in a cottage in Wales with my boyfriend. From lessons at school, I’d learned things I cooked went wrong. So I cautiously followed a recipe in a book and, to my amazement, an amazingly good soup emerged. I didn’t know lentils did that. I never looked back.

I know I make good stock, because I keep simmering bones. I like the word ‘bone’. It sounds (to me) like the thing it is. I use a bone folder to sharpen the creases in cards. Matt uses one to flatten the new pamphlets (Chapter Eight went out last week and it needed a lot of flattening). Bones pop up in so much of what we say. They can be rude, ancient, bare, idle. Bones are fundamental.

She won’t make old bones. Let’s make no bones about it. Not a mean bone in her body. Work my fingers to the bone. Chilled to the marrow. Brrrrr.

Boil me some bones, mother, boil me some bones.

Making soup is good for thinking. It’s the chopping of the different bits into different shapes and sizes. It takes close attention but doesn’t use much of your brain. And then when it’s cooking, the smell cheers the house. And ready so quickly! Three cheers for soup!

The combination of soup and grim weather takes me back to Frances Cornford’s poem, one of my favourites of all time. Hell’s bells! I have to stop chopping to go and look it up. Why haven’t I got this one by heart? Here it is.

Late Home

The winds are out in the abysm of night;
The blown trees stoop,
But man invented fire and candle-light,
And man invented soup.

And now I can cheat. Because this week Anthony Wilson chose to write about another of my favourite soup poems, by Michael Laskey, from his book The Tightrope Wedding. Leek and potato for Michael.

All I need do is give you the link.

IN PRAISE OF LOGS

From the middle English ‘logge’, a variant of lugge, meaning pole or limb of tree.

We spent two hours yesterday lugging and stacking logs, and last night I slept like one. In fact, going to sleep was as easy as falling off one. A lot to be said for logs.

They make me think of the poet Richard Church, because our logs – though hardwood – are never from apple or pear. But I’ve always wanted pear because of one of his poems (I’ll get to it shortly).

Whatever our logs are made of – which tree, I mean – they smell comforting. Perhaps that’s because I grew up with an open fire, and this log burning stove of ours is not so far from that. My memory must be selective though, because the fire I grew up with smelled of coal, not logs, and my mother would burn everything a human being could burn on it. I remember her kneeling on the rug, first thing on a frosty December morning, crushing newspaper into little balls and stacking the small coals to get the fire ablaze. Then later, when it was roaring, she would emerge from the kitchen to tip a colander of potato peelings onto the flames. In winter that cut the heat dramatically and we shivered resentfully.

It’s often said that family life is disintegrating in the UK because folk don’t eat together any more. I don’t think it’s the food. I think central heating is to blame. When the only source of warmth in your house is the main fireplace, in the winter you sit with your family. When we were kids, hiding behind the sofa was always attractive but it was also cold. Soon we would be back at the feet of the grown-ups in front of the fire.

Upstairs, in my grandmother’s sitting room (she lived with us), there was an electric fire, and that was . . . acceptable. You could melt the chocolate on your digestive biscuit by holding it near to the bars, and then lick the deliciously melted surface off while watching TV. My grandmother presided over the family television and over the tin of sweets she kept in the cupboard. This was her lure to get us up there. But the comfort of the coal fire downstairs far outweighed three bars on an electric fire, especially when you weren’t supposed to have more than two of them lit.

At this time of the year, early October, we would have been scouring roads and hedgerows for fallen trees for the November bonfire. We didn’t call it Guy Fawkes. We called it Bonfire Night – because the bonfire was the thing – that huge pile of wood in the back field. I always thought of a bonfire as a good thing, a thing of joy, and in my mind the ‘bon’ was like bonbons – sweet and good. But I was wrong.

The bon in bonfire is from bane, and that’s what a bonfire did: it burned banes (bones) in circumstances not always favourable to their owners. Poor old Guy Fawkes, a terrorist before his time, was not burned, of course. But when we burned him in effigy (which we certainly did) ‘bonfire’ was the right word. Standing out at night beside the flames, hunkering on the grass beside the glowing embers – now that was something.

Back to the log stove. It is an enormous comfort. Fitted by Maddox and Potter from Abernethy, this thing works. The downside is the log lugging. You can’t get a car to the door of our house, and that means you can’t get a log truck there either. The logs have to be dumped about 50 yards away and we then wheelbarrow them along. It’s hard work. But in October sunshine, it’s a lovely kind of work.

Richard Church (back to the poet) wrote a whole essay on this topic. It’s called ‘Laying in Logs’. I found it recently – a beautiful piece of writing, lamenting the loss of the old ways when one bargained with a local farmer for the wood and he brought some when he felt like it. These days, says Church (writing in, or before, 1962) “I ring up an agency in the country town, and a week later get a ‘delivery note’ warning me (yes, warning me) that five tons of eighteen-inch logs will be delivered on such and such a date. And that’s the end of the human side of the matter. I might as well install an electric stove.”

But here it’s still quite human, frankly. I phone David Smith who lives just up the road and whose website is, reassuringly, still ‘in progress’. He phones me back and drives round with the logs within a couple of days. I count out the cash and stick it in an envelope. My other half puts on his boiler suit and gloves. We prepare to lug logs.

So here, finally, is Richard Church’s log poem. I can’t remember the title because I’ve drawn this from his essay which doesn’t mention it. Though dead for over four decades, he would forgive me, I think:

Now I come to the farmer about some logs.
He says in a casual way, ‘You can have pear.’
I stare at him for a moment. Shall I dare
Tell him I know that on the smithied dogs
In the brick hearth, black oakwood soaked in bogs,
Rose-roots, apple, ash with its swift, short flare,
And sparks thrown chimney-length to the open air,
Or elm that looks the part but easily clogs,
No firewood smells like pear? My conscience jogs
Me, saying, ‘Tell him that it isn’t fair.’

And so I do. But he just laughs and looks,
Thinking I’m crazy. ‘I don’t charge for smells,’
He says, ‘only for labour and the wood.
I’ll bet you got that notion out of books.’
But he is wrong: such perfume with its spells
Has never been described nor understood.

AN INSPIRATION IN EVERY MOUTHFUL

Report on the FreeVerse Bookfair? Better late than never.

The hall was busy from start to finish – a hubbub of busy, chatting, poetry buzzing people. It was enormously friendly. At first I thought it too full. But no, it added to the warmth of the occasion. Parties are always better when there’s hardly room to move.

And since this is the third fair of its kind, a pattern has emerged. The remarkable Charles Boyle (or another member of the team) stands on the platform and rings a large brass bell to announce readings. Talk is hushed. A rivulet of people exit the hall to hear the reading. Their place is immediately filled by others. Talk starts again, but louder.

You see people you haven’t seen in years. You meet people you have never met before, but will certainly meet again.

Sales from HappenStance were good. Much better than I expected. We despatched nearly all the Seamus Heaney jelly, made from blackberries picked with my own hand the day before I left. D A Prince, who was assisting on the HappenStance table was plugging it cheerfully as “an inspiration in every mouthful”. I agree – but then I would.

After the bookfair. I went to my mother’s in Sussex for a few days. I got back late Wednesday night.

When I left there was a depressing space where a conservatory (albeit crumbling) once stood. And the window to the sitting room was boarded up, making it permanently dark inside.

When I got back the edifice was up! The window was back. And there was a sparky in the house putting in new plug points, even though it was 8.30 pm. In fact, it was he who came and picked me up from the bus stop. It isn’t just poets who are versatile.

The furniture from the conservatory, and some of the stuff from the sitting room, was in the HappenStance room. (Still is.) The contents of the dresser in the sitting room, which had to be moved to allow the sparky to move the points, were on the dining table. The television was in the bedroom. The telephones were on the floor. The furniture in my study (aaargh!!) was in a pyramid in the centre of the room to allow the sparky to get in with his drill and implements.

There was dust. A lot of dust. And some rubble.

On Thursday and Friday the Men worked on the inside of the conservatory and laid the laminate flooring. Mugs of tea were supplied.

Tomorrow (Monday) a painter comes to tape things in the conservatory and make the back walls look like wall, as opposed to plaster board with nails in it. The harling man may come back this week with more scaffolding. It has not been possible to get him on the phone.

And while on the subject of phones. My Significant Other has observed, in his ongoing study of the Ubiquity of Mobile Phones and their Destructive Effects on Modern Society, how often the Men, whether builders, joiners, harlers or plumbers, take phone calls. You see them in the garden chatting away, or texting. And yet – when they are not at your house and you try to phone them. . . .

The worst point of the week was when the joiner appeared behind me while I was busily typing away and trying to clear the backlog of email and orders. He made me jump, and knocked my concentration for six. He had arrived to reseal the leaking double-glazed windows. I had forgotten about the leaking windows.

So I had to move all the furniture around the window in my study and in the HappenStance room. There isn’t really anywhere to move things to any more. The chair I am sitting on is falling to bits. The desk is propped up in a somewhat worrying way because it collapsed irretrievably when I moved it and fell on top of it. I still haven’t hoovered up the sawdust round the skirting boards.

There will not be a blog next week, not because of the building works, which still won’t be finished, but because I will be in Devon and about to participate in an Arvon course at Budleigh Salterton for the first time ever. I hope I can find all the bits I need to take with me. I hope I can get my head clear enough to prepare (I am a great preparer, though I’m not always convinced this is a virtue).

Why do I keep making bramble jelly in the middle of this mayhem? (More will be made this afternoon.) It’s a stay against confusion. I find it works better than poetry.

HAPPENSTANCE GETS FACELIFT

Actually not a facelift, an office lift.

Actually not an office lift, more of a mood elevator.

Actually not really an elevator but a coat of paint or two, and the removal of four layers of wallpaper.

Once it’s all back in place, thinking and writing may be easier. When the entire HappenStance ‘office’ (what was once the spare bedroom) is all in lumps and piles and packages and under dust sheets, it is truly awful.

I’m convinced the house in which one lives has a direct relationship with the brain with which one thinks. If one of the rooms — especially a room that’s central to functioning — is in upheaval, then the brain experiences fundamental disruption. It’s all to do with the Roman Room theory. If one of the rooms is out of action, how can memory work?

It may be easier next week.

ENSLAVED!

I’ve been away. Temporarily I was free.

I have seen other writers, on FaceBook, declare they are leaving for weeks/months/years/permanently (delete as appropriate) in order to work on a manuscript. I always wonder what on earth they’ve been doing on FaceBook to prevent them writing.

Not me. I am immune (except when it comes to Scrabble).

But I realised I was in fact enslaved when I came home from a week’s holiday. It must have been gradually getting worse. After unpacking, I spent six hours working through emails and messages on social networks (I haven’t finished yet). One hundred and twenty-five people said Happy Birthday to me on FaceBook. There was a party on my FaceBook page – in my absence.

And for the first time, although there was a bunch of mail behind the door (to use an American expression), it wasn’t a huge pile. The postal pile was much smaller than the equivalent personal part of the email. And I like letters.

I am not reading less than I did. I am reading more. But the more I am reading is an online more, and it’s in bits and pieces, updates and mini-blogs, quotes of the day and offers from websites, links and jokes, pictures and comments.

Away from all this, last week I was reading books.

I read, for example, The Etymologicon by Mark Forsyth, which not only looks magnificent with its red (embossed with gold) cover, but is hugely entertaining. It’s the sort of book which is deeply annoying for everybody but the reader because of the amount of chuckles and ‘you must listen to this’ announcements.

It was Mark Forsyth who educated me in the origin of slaves. I now know about Basil the Bulgur Slayer, one of many who contributed to the low status of the Slavs: “When they weren’t being slain by Basil in the south they were being subjugated by the Holy Roman Empire in the north and forced into lives of servitude. So many Slavs were defeated and oppressed that the word Slav itself became interchangeable with forced labourer, and that’s where we got the word slave.”

But the deep satisfaction of Forsyth’s book is the never-ending connections. One word leads to the next. A medieval Italian courtesy greeting was ‘Sono vostro schiavo’ – I am your slave (a bit like ‘your humble and obedient servant’), and this became shortened to ‘schiavo’ and this corrupted itself into ‘ciao’. For some reason, it’s enormously satisfying knowing this. It reminds me of when I first studied Latin at school. It was a sort of revelation to me. I became a complete pest at home, constantly announcing which words derived from what.

Which reminds me of the time my friend Kate was sitting sunbathing outside our school. This was strictly against school policy but she was with other girls on the flagstones under the windows of the biology lab. They had escaped – after an exam, I think – to a place where they couldn’t be spotted. They could, however, hear the class teacher, whose name was Mr Trueblood (really) instructing the class inside. He was talking about menstruation.

I know it seems hard to believe that a Mr ‘Trueblood’ was talking about menstruation but I have not made this up. Worse still, he announced that ‘menstruation’ comes from the Lation word mensa, meaning month. Kate was studying Latin with me. It was all she could do to restrain herself from leaping up and shouting through the window ‘No, you idiot. Mensis means month. Mensa is a TABLE!’

Where was I? Yes, the derivations of things. Reading Forsyth’s book I was enthralled. But wait – ‘enthralled’ is connected with ‘thrall’, and a thrall is no more than a slave, from the Old Norse þræll meaning a person who is in bondage or serfdom. And who were the thralls? Yes – I’ve just checked on Wikipedia. They were Scandinavian. They made specially good thralls because they were pagan, and Christians around 1100 A.D. were allowed to enslave pagans, of course.

So all slaves were Eastern European, and slavery is no more than a state of enthrallment. Or thralldom maybe.

And the fact is, I am both enslaved and enthralled by my connection to the world wide web. I marvel at the fact that I just looked up ‘thrall’ for myself. I can check and double check. This is fun.

But now there’s another blog I have to keep up with. Mark Forsyth at Inky Fool. And there I see he’s just been at the Edinburgh Book Festival, though I missed him because I was on holiday. But there is a podcast of him, though it’s nowhere near as good as reading his book. Or the previous entries on his blog. Talking of which. . . .

Oh hell.

GET STEAMING NOW!

There are undoubted benefits to steaming broccoli. However, I prefer stamps.

In the last accounting year, I spent £1998.83 on postage. When I buy stamps now I never spend less than £100 at a time, usually double that. There is far more value in our house in postage stamps than there is in cash (attention, burglars!)

In January 2011, a large-letter stamp (second class) cost 51p. A second-class small letter (or Christmas card) stamp cost 32p. At the time of writing these two stamps cost, respectively, 69p and 50p. My Christmas mailshot of 300 large-letter envelopes this year cost £330.00, except some of them went to Europe and other continents, so it was more like £350.00. This time last year the same process would have cost £70 or £80 less.

Nevertheless, the Royal Mail tells us “stamps are excellent value for money”. That excellent value is further enhanced, if you use them twice (I wrote about this in January 2011 too). I am certain more and more stamped envelopes are arriving unfranked. This means you can steam the stamps off and use them again, or preserve the envelope, put a label over the address, re-address it and re-use. Some people just cut off the piece of paper with the stamp on it, and stick that piece of paper onto another envelope. I’ve seen it done, but it seems blatant.

“Stamps are the simplest and most convenient way of paying for postage” says the Royal Mail on its website. My post office does not agree. They tell me they are urged to use the pre-paid labels wherever possible, rather than using stamps. One can see why. You can’t re-use a pre-paid label. You might be able to steam it off, I guess, but it contains the ID of the post-office from which the mail was sent, and the date. Just occasionally, someone sends me what they think is a stamped, addressed envelope with one of these labels on it. My post office tells me this is not valid. So . . .

Last week, my daughter and I met for a cup of coffee and while we were chatting I involved her in steaming. I got out my collection, made during Christmas and the previous couple of months and we did the watery business and laid the spoils out to dry. We lost a few, but ended with an aggregate value of nearly £60.00. Not bad, eh?

But wait a moment. What about the submissions pile (pictured last week)? I hadn’t even investigated that pile of envelopes, or opened any of them. Out of interest I went through to see how many unfranked stamps were there too. There were 77 submission envelopes in all, nearly all of them A4 in size. Of these, about 25 had been labelled at a post office, and were therefore no-hopers. But that left 52, of which no fewer than 22were unfranked. This is brilliant. Each possesses at least one large letter second (69p) and many have up to £1.50 in stampage. Thank you, poets!

So Scrooge here, who was due for a visit to the post office tomorrow, has been able to delay this for a while. The process of carefully removing the stamps (we used the vegetable steamer, though I have to say, floating them in a dish of boiling water works just as well) is strangely pleasurable and reminds me of picking brambles, mushrooms or wild raspberries. It’s the food-for-free feeling.

On the other hand, I was conditioned when young with a horrible sense of lawfulness. I have always had a suspicion this was illegal. So I have done a bit of research into this and . . . I don’t think it is. The Royal Mail tells me, helpfully, that

“stamps without a specified monetary value are described as Non Value Indicator (NVI) and are typically First and Second class stamps. These do not have an expiry date, therefore can be used regardless of the length of time you’ve had them. Stamps with a monetary value also do not have an expiry date and can be combined to make up the value of postage required.”

Nothing here about not using NVIs twice. It is like cryonics: these stamps are not necessarily dead. They may NEVER expire. I wonder whether a stamp could be used more than twice? This thought reminds that last week I steamed four first class stamps (£2.40) from an envelope where they had been previously affixed on a piece of paper cut from . . .presumably another envelope. I wonder whether there’s an optimum place on the envelope where it’s least likely to be franked? Or even sorting offices that are more advantageous?

Is this the criminal mind at work? Or am I just an innocent at large? An ebay search for ‘unfranked stamps’ comes up with 640 results. You can buy used stamps that have escaped the franking machine. The issue here seems to be that some sellers may slip in a stamp or two with tiny indications they aren’t virginal. You have to watch out for that. Such stamps are naturally cheaper than properly unused stamps from the post office. Nonetheless, in auctions they are often selling for up to ¾ of the original value. Not that cheap, then. And if you steam them yourself, you can get them for free.

So why is the Royal Mail not bothered about this? I can only assume it’s because most people can’t be bothered to get steaming. Or perhaps most people don’t write and send letters any more. Or perhaps the post office labelling trend has prevented the harvesting of unused stamps from packets and large envelopes, where the dividends are greater.

I wonder what will happen when our mail becomes “digitally enhanced”, the next new thing. Digitally enhanced mail will be scannable with a 3G phone (one of which I thankfully do not have. Why ‘thankfully’? Read on). The Royal Mail says very odd things indeed about this project:

“Combining state-of-the-art technology with history and heritage enables people to link from their post to a company’s online content, such as a website, video or Facebook page, in seconds.”

I don’t see where the history and heritage comes in, except as useful alliteration. More to the point, I wonder why one would want to travel to a website while opening envelopes. I must be missing something. Yes, they go on to say:

“People receiving the digitally-enhanced post simply scan the mail with their 3G phone to start an online journey.”

It all makes sense. Of course, you would want to start an online journey as soon as possible. It’s a way of getting out and meeting people. A sort of free travel. All you will need is the free Digital Space App (my partner, who knows nothing whatsoever about computers and doesn’t even like them knows about Apps now. They have entered the vernacular).

This passport to your online journey is what the Royal Mail calls a “solution”. I could launch into a whole other rant about business use of the word “solution”, but I will only remark that the accent here is on solving things in the Sherlock Holmes way, not on dissolving them in a steamy sense.

But actually the word ‘solution’ is doubly appropriate because the solution in question is embedded in “a digital watermark”. This “enables marketers to integrate their print and online materials without the need for barcodes or QR codes.” Digital watermarking is a solution “launched” (please visualise a ship at this point, and some champagne) by something called the Royal Mail’s Door to Door unit, in partnership with Digital Space.

Steaming stamps is an allowable form of resistance: it is the small person’s symbolic action in the face of solution-oriented organisations that say they care. Your New Year’s resolution for 2013 should be to retain suspicion in the face of ubiquitous inroads by digital marketing mentalities. How can you trust a website that says: Got a question? Need some help? We’re here to tell you everything you need to know”?

DON’T READ THIS BLOG

Frank Wood’s pamphlet, Racing the Stable Clock, is on the way. But trees – and logs? Don’t talk to me about the wood kind of wood.

Why? I have spent many hours this week attempting to complete a “Householder Application for Planning Permission” for the external flue/chimney for a wood-burning stove. The saga is long. My advice would be not to read this blog entry.

We are putting in a wood burning stove. At least that is The Plan. The stove has even been chosen, and these things are not cheap. The installation requires the erection of an external steel flue because this house doesn’t have a chimney. Did we need planning permission? It was my job to find out.

I ransacked the Council website for information. I was taken to Building Regulations 2004, which cheered me up. I happily printed a section that indicated apparently clearly that no permission was needed for such an addition. But just to make sure, I emailed a free online facility known as Planning Aid. Belt and braces, I thought. A chap called ‘Armstrong’ replied.

I am very influenced by names. Anyone called Armstrong is durable, honest and steely to me. Mr Armstrong, however, sent me a document titled Guidance on Householder Permitted Development Rights. The regulations changed earlier this year, he said, and now you do need planning permission for flues and stoves: the relevant section is page 38.

I read page 38. Page 38 told me that a “flue forming part of a combined heat and power system” was not permitted “as they are permitted by other classes”. What on earth did that mean? What “other classes”?

On page 64, I found a statement I thought I understood. It said “a planning permission is needed for flues for dwellinghouses or flats within an Air Quality Management Area.” I didn’t, as advised, look up section 83 (1) of the Environment Act 1995 to find the definition of an Air Quality Management Area. I assume it is what used to be called a “smokeless zone”. Yes, we live in one of those. But log burning stoves are permitted in smokeless zones, so long as they are the right kind. Ours will be the right kind. Nevertheless, it appears the flue needs “a permission”.

I braced myself and set off to complete the planning document. Everything in the Council website encourages the applicant to do this electronically. Still, a small part of me was still hoping perhaps this planning thing wasn’t necessary, even though Mr Armstrong was strong, dependable, honest and almost certainly right. So I phoned the planning department, going through the usual options and waiting until one of our Advisers was free. The eventually-free Adviser didn’t know anything about stoves or flues but said she would also send me a paper copy of the application form, which had notes. Thank you, I said.

Of course, the notes in the paper copy must be the same notes that are on line. At least I assume so. I decided to complete as much as possible of the online document while waiting for the paper copy to arrive. This allowed me to discover the cost, which is £160 plus just over £14.00 for a small piece of OS map illustrating the site. Roughly £175.00 in all. Ouch.

Money is one thing. Time is also costly. In the middle of all this, I am attempting to:

finish the HappenStance Christmas Card
check the Inky Fingers proofs (don’t ask)
complete Jim C Wilson’s pamphlet, cover, flyer, website info etc
complete Jim Carruth’s pamphlet, cover, flyer, website info etc
assemble materials for the imminent subscriber mailshot
write three reviews
log pamphlets for Sphinx reviews (pun intended)
pack up and post three HappenStance orders
make dinner

But a little thing like a planning application form? Half an hour.

Two hours later, I have shifted into the present tense. I am ranting and tearing my hair. I have done most of the form. I have attempted to pay the fourteen quid to Ordnance Survey or whoever gets the money for the few square inches of map I must mandatorily purchase. But World Bank says there is a problem with my card, my trusty reliable card used to buy so many online goods. World Bank has locked access to the bit where you pay for the map, so I can’t attempt to put the payment through with any other card.

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Later and calmer the same day, and logging in with a different browser, I find I am no longer locked out and so I can pay for the bit of map. The money leaves my account painlessly. I now possess a tiny bit of OS map legally, which means I won’t have to use the illegal screenshot I took earlier. (I have never been good at breaking the law). Emotionally exhausted, I postpone the next bit to the next day.

Next day: the paper copy of the form arrives. I have a cup of tea and read carefully through each and every bit of the five pages of notes. They advise me that if in doubt I can apply for a “Pre-Application Discussion”. This sounds like a great idea, so I phone the Council again, go through the number options again, wait for Our Adviser to be free again.

Is it a Householder Application or a Something Something Something Application? Our Adviser asks me.

A Householder Application, I reply knowledgeably (it’s what it says at the top of the notes).

I’m sorry, she says. We don’t do pre-planning discussions for householder applications.

Back to the online planning application. If it turns out that I don’t need it, according to Our Adviser, they will refund half the money and give me a Certificate of Lawfulness instead. I have never had a Certificate of Lawfulness and I think I would like one. (You pay £70.00 for a Certificate of Lawfulness, which certifies that you don’t need Planning Permission. Effectively, it is a Certificate to confirm that you don’t need a Certificate.)

Oh well. I am all in favour of electronic approaches really. They save trees, which means more of them can be cut down and used for log burning stoves suitable for use in clean-air zones.

I click on the Location Map bit of the application and consult the piece of OS map with my house on it in its electronic window. The software requires me to draw a land boundary around my property, and assists me to do so by instructing me to click on all corners of the boundary line. To complete the job – Control + click (or Command + click if using a Mac).

I am using a Mac. I duly click at the corners and the line around the property appears neatly. How very clever technology is.

Wait! “Command + click if using a Mac” to complete the boundary line doesn’t work. I try again. It doesn’t work again. I try right-click instead of left-click. I try double click. Triple click. I try other inspired key combinations. I google for solutions to this command not working. I try some of them. Nope. There’s no way my mouse can release the line from the cursor. No way I can get off the map without leaving lines in non-boundary places. No way I can complete the required action and get on to the next bit. No way I can get far enough to pay the £160.00 and send off the application.

I do many things in my attempt to solve this problem. I lock myself out of the Planning Application more than once. In fact, the only way I can get back to the piece of map I have now purchased but can’t use, is to remove it from the planning application by unclicking the “map-attached” button, and then going back to square one and reattaching it. I am relieved the expensive map hasn’t vanished in the meantime.

An interesting purchase, this map, this little piece of Ordnance surveyed. Although I have paid for it, I don’t seem actually to have it. That is to say, it’s not on my computer. It’s inside the Planning Application that I can’t send off, though I have at least screen-shotted it.

By now, I have spent another couple of hours messing about. I consider phoning Our Adviser (although I don’t think Our Adviser is likely to help) but it’s Friday and after 4.30. Our Advisers will have gone home.

Wouldn’t it be good to have a satisfactory conclusion to this story? I haven’t got one. I have forwarded the link to myself at work, where I can use a pc, but not until Tuesday. Perhaps that will let me do the bit I can’t do at home. But at work I really do spend my time working. An hour spent on this jiggerypokery is more than I can afford.

What do people unfamiliar with the world of clicks and online payments and advance whizzkiddery do? I daren’t share this experience with my Other Half because he will just go into full mutter mode and tell me, as he has always told me, that all this modern computer business is complicated nonsense, don’t I know that yet?

The paper application is in front of me. It is quite short, and I find I mainly understand it well. At the top it refers to “The Town and Country Planning (Development Management Procedure) (SCOTLAND) REGULATIONS 2008.” Apparently we are now following regulations 2012, but not on this form.

There are more capital letters, this time in bold font. They say PLEASE NOTE IT IS FASTER AND SIMPLER TO SUBMIT PLANNING APPLICATIONS ELECTRONICALLY.