Becalmed

Well, it has been a busy sort of weekend and we are on the taxi rank once more.

Since this is the latest instalment in a series and I do not wish to prolong the cliff-hanger any further, I am happy to tell you that the slow cooker worked absolutely brilliantly. I cooked a lamb shoulder in it, packed round with vegetables, and it could not have been more perfectly done if we had had it in the Greek restaurant next to Manchester’s town hall. The meat collapsed off the bone when I poked it with the spoon, and it was truly divine. We will jolly well be doing that again, I can tell you, just as soon as we can afford to purchase another dead thing.

In other news, Mark has finished installing his windmill, and we have had a flat calm ever since. We have kept rushing into the yard at the smallest suggestion of wind anywhere, to see if it might just start going round, but to absolutely no avail. The day has been sunny and sufficiently tranquil to send frustrated mariners hunting for the outboard motor. Not a breath has disturbed the gentle mellow fruitfulness of the warm, crystal-clear day.

I was expecting nothing else. I have encountered the Weather Gods before.

We are going to take it down anyway because after careful inspection we think it needs to be painted yellow and to have a little tin cut out of an aviator perched on the top of it, and so we are going to do that. It looks very dull in its present state, grey and functional and boring

We are quite busy creating things anyway at the moment. We have had a small saga over the last few weeks which has kept us occasionally occupied, because we thought we might go to the York Christmas Market and purchase a cuckoo clock.

My grandparents had a cuckoo clock, which I inherited, but which eventually sadly expired with a mixture of age and malfunctioning, possibly hastened by my grandfather’s occasional tinkering. In the end it fell apart, I forget what sort of misfortune was responsible, but after it I no longer owned a cuckoo clock, and always regretted its absence.

I like cuckoo clocks very much indeed. I mean really very much. I think they are lovely. Hence the planned trip to York.

We looked at cuckoo clocks in Manchester a couple of years ago, and thought that they were glorious but several hundred pounds out of our price range.

When we thought about going to York we had an uncomfortable suspicion that the same would be true again.

I have been looking on eBay for cuckoo clocks for ever. The one my grandparents had was made by a German workshop called Helmut Kammerer, and every now and again I have been searching hopefully for them, but to no avail. They are as rare as cuckoo clock poo.

Then last week, for the first time, to my great excitement, a cuckoo clock exactly like the one my grandparents had owned came up for sale. Within hours, even more excitingly, a second one appeared, like buses on a wet day. Obviously we bid for them both.

These were not at all out of our price range, because neither of them was working. They were advertised for spares or repairs, but of course my husband is also an indefatigable tinkerer, so we thought maybe we could build a new one out of a combination of the two.

We bought them, and they arrived a couple of days ago.

One of them, astonishingly, and to my great happiness, after only the very smallest amount of tinkering, worked perfectly. It is hanging on my office wall, where it says cuckoo every fifteen minutes, just like the one did from my childhood. It makes both of us laugh every time. It is the nicest little noise you can imagine.

We have got the other one, which doesn’t work at all yet, left over, and surplus to requirements

Mark has taken it to bits to see if he can fix it. We have got a functioning cuckoo clock now, and so the anxious time is over. Now we are going to see if we can make an exciting new one out of the poor sad broken one.

It is in bits on the table and we keep examining it. It is not very broken, just seized up with age and rust and dust, so it might be possible.

He has been reading up about what he must do. You can get cuckoo clock bits on the mighty Internet, and phrases like Right Handed Bellows have become part of our new clock-manufacturing vocabulary. We are going to re-paint it and make it beautiful again, because frankly it isn’t at the moment, and then, wonder of wonders, we will have two cuckoo clocks.

In the meantime we have found out lots of things. There are all sorts of exciting cuckoo clocks in the world, with little people bobbing up and down, things that wag about and little attachments that play musical box tunes. We thought we would like to make a very exciting cuckoo clock indeed, if we can get this one working and have mastered the art.

There are some amazing clocks on eBay. I have found a little antique French one which is tastefully shaped like a guillotine, and the clock face drops painfully downwards until you wind it up again. There is one which is wound up by dropping little balls down a hole, and several with swivelling pendulums. Obviously we are not going to purchase them, but just looking at them kept us thoroughly enthralled in between customers last night.

We will start considering clock repair just as soon as we have finished improving the windmill.

What an exciting life.