The talk went off OK. I had an anxious moment setting up my equipment when I fired up the projector, and it just looped through the options in its menu instead of coming up with a list of the slides stored on the USB stick, like it was supposed to. I candidly do not understand the projector. It is currently set up to run images stored as JPEGs, I give it a memory stick with the presentation I want to use saved in that format, it reads the stick, I operate two buttons on the remote control to bring up slide one, and away I go, using forward and back. That's about all I know, so if it starts doing anything else I'm sunk. I used that first line of defence suggested by IT help desks the world over, to try switching it off and switching it on again, which took a nerve-wracking amount of time, since switching it off involves a lengthy cooling-off period, and it won't come on again until it's finished turning off. Second time around it located the presentation correctly. Phew, panic over.
We have the Aga back in commission as well, after a week of microwaved ready meals supplemented by a takeaway, a toasted sandwich, and some barbecued steak. Having to live on Waitrose instant meals because your Aga is broken is a strictly first world problem, and I did not like to make too much of it, but when you are used to cooking, it is a shock to suddenly find that you can't. The Aga is electric, and includes a fan which distributes energy from the core that heats up overnight on cheap rate electricity, to the rest of the machine. The fan tends to break every five years or so, and we were on our second. It had been making ominous rattling noises, but the first I knew of it breaking down completely was when an apricot pudding, left to cook for the hour prescribed in the recipe, emerged strangely pale and flabby.
Engineers who know how to service electric Agas are not to be found advertising in the parish magazine. It is, I imagine, a fairly small market (just as if there were a top predator which ate only ospreys, it would require a territory about the size of Scandinavia. Which is why there isn't one). We had to wait a week before someone with the requisite expertise was available. Not that I think fixing an electric Aga is especially difficult for a trained electrician, it's just that not many people choose to do it, and carry a supply of spare fans around in their vans on the off-chance that somebody will want one. The good news is that the only thing that had broken was the fan. He tested the core, and said that was taking up charge normally. It's when the circuit board finally goes that things will get really painful.
(Waitrose beef cannelloni and lasagne from their everyday, three for six pounds range, are very nice, incidentally. We thought we wouldn't mind eating them again on purpose, if we didn't have time to cook for some reason. Their chicken penne with rosemary was pronounced horrid by the Systems Administrator, rubbery chicken and over-the-top seasoning. Tesco lamb hot pot, which the SA ate last night while I was out, was said to taste peculiar in places. I refused to buy Finest, Heston's, or any other premium product, on the grounds that I wasn't paying four or five pounds a head for something I was only going to heat up in an elderly microwave.)
My second efforts with the mousetraps were no more successful than the first. One was emptied of its peanut without going off (again), which with the peanuts I fired across the greenhouse by accident while trying to set the trap means that the voles are pretty well fed. The second trap vanished, which is upsetting since it must have caught something but not killed it outright. That is too cruel. I have bought two new mousetraps of a different design, and am psyching myself up to take them out of the packet, and try and work out how to set them. Just as we only discovered the literal truth of the saying about chickens coming home to roost once we started keeping hens, I am beginning to think that the one about the world beating a path to your door if you can build a better mousetrap might be literally as well as figuratively true. The woman in the garden centre who sold me the mousetraps said that they were very good, though she didn't like taking the mice out of them, but that put her a step ahead of me, who hadn't caught any mice to take out. She also had rats, she said, which came into her house and chewed the floorboards. It was a nuisance, but she didn't like to poison them because of her cat.
The SA has almost got the multi-volume history of the war to run. It works except for the maps, which will still only come up on a very old laptop and not the SA's current one. Turns out it is an official history of the Great War, not the second one, written in the interwar period by the most eminent historians of the day, who of course were able to take first hand evidence from the survivors as well as consulting written archives. They interviewed the German side as well, in an attempt to be as objectively factual as possible (if such a thing is possible. Discuss). I did not like to seek clarification yesterday, as you don't, when somebody is grappling with Microsoft Windows.
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