Life in lockdown - Being Practical (ha ha)

I cannot believe how tedious scraping anaglypta wallpaper is - wallpaper that seems to have been stuck on with cow glue leaving a grotty sticky mess even after being scraped, rubbed and and washed down with sugar soap!!! its a foul job and I will NEVER buy a house so covered in it again!!!

However it is keeping us occupied in this lockdown period - I am still suffering from lost mojo for the more creative projects so a practical task is the next best thing..... I'm not really patient enough for all this prepping malarkey but I do know that it needs to be done and believe me I'm only doing it once so it needs to be done right!

We have spent over a week engaged in the thankless task of clearing the paper from the hallway - it feels like three months but its done and its job well done as its a task I have been dreading ever since we moved in. Some of it came off in massive satisfying strips but for every big piece there were a million wee nasty scrappy bits that took forever scoring wetting scrapping and scrubbing....I don't think it helps that we haven't got a coherent plan or idea about what we want to do with the decor once we clear the hideous blown dirty cream paper off - I've been on Pinterest for inspiration but most peoples hallways are pretty boring and that wont do for us! Everything is very clean cut and bit too shiny for me although I do like these dark brooding colours they will be too dark for this space.

upstairs downstairs..

Our hallway is an interesting space - its quite big and has some of the original Victorian features - (sadly not the floor tiles) and its other disadvantage is that its not really our main point of entry. The house is kind of back to front with no road so only a path leading to the 'front' door and porch - most visitors arrive at the back door and enter the house through the kitchen so the hall only becomes apparent when you leave the kitchen for the rest of the house. We haven't had a house with a proper entrance for a long time - our previous 3 (rented) dwellings have all been small cottages - with entry straight into the living area and I have to say while this a cosy arrangement it is very nice it is quite a luxury to have a hallway space again. But how to dress it to get the right reception!!! A big win will be the removal of the pink carpet - but we figured keep it for warmth while winter is with us.

Privileged problems I know - and I realise how lucky we are to have this dilemma especially as we are in lockdown - were we still living in the village of the doomed we would have gone seriously bonkers with nothing to occupy ourselves with no lush garden to enjoy and so really the anaglypta is worth the trade off...... but its now ready for the enjoyable bit - no pain no gain and less sense of achievement! That's my pep talk for today!!!

When the paper came off it left an interesting pattern both on the removed paper and in some places, the wall itself - if the pattern on the wall was more uniform I would kind of like to live with it and even the less uniform bits where the original possibly Victorian wallpaper is left are interesting but a lot of the wall has been butchered and re plastered to put electrics and a new window in so I don't think it something we can make a feature of...

if it was all like the left hand side I'd keep it!

Almost last chapter... In which our Go Stargazing team watch Astonishing Aurora Borealis seen from the deck of the Astonishing Borealis!!!

The weather brightened considerably and the snowy peaks lining our sail down the fjiords looked glorious and sparkly in the sunshine against a (mainly) blue sky back drop. More awesome scenary.... the Go Stargazing team wrapt up their lectures ... only searching for the illusive Northern Lights remained. The tension from the night before dissolved in the sunshine the forecast for Aurora borealis was looking fairly positive - it was the captains farewell cocktsil party so everyone had their gladrags on.. We ate dinner and sky remained clear so we headed back to our room and donned as many layers as we could move in and proceeded to deck 10 in anticipation of stars and northern lights..... it did not dissappiont - just we got there as the bridge announced that the lights could be seen on the starboard side of the ship. It was stunning. Slowly the intensity built. The auroral green became brighter and bigger areas appe...

Vigo

We left the ship to explore Vigo. Its a much larger place then we expected... although tbh I hadn't given ut a lot of thought. Its a real mish mash of old and new and having got a map from tourist info we decided to follow the walking trail to the Monte Castro... the highest point of the town. Most of the town was pretty much as everywhere else... lots of traffic... lots of people... one or two interesting buildings and a lot of shopping. We headed to the art gallery - this has been a year of gallery visits so we we seen o reason to change now. The Museo de Marco is housed in the towns ex prison building and its very grand. In fact, I think that on this occaision the building might have been more interesting than the art.... Although the visiting exhibition by Susanne S D Themlitz was strangely compelling. It was a huge varied collection of eclectic items... found, salavaged, manipulated and arranged in lots of ways - weirdly inspiring - and mostly enjoyable to look at...

verdant lushness

Its a never ending island hop... today we hopped of the boat at Kingstown, on the island St. Vincents and Grenadine. Once through the usual port duty free - cheap booze and diamonds to go milarkey we were straight into the town... crazy noisy smelly chaos... refreshingly no tat shops for tourists, just local markets and street traders all vying for local sales. Music blasting from everywhere, cars (very battered and often very pimped) all over the roads - parked in the middle of the street, loading, unloading, chatting seemingly oblivious to the total traffic jam caused behind them... We walked through this mayhem - the temperatures were rising probably about 30 degrees - tourists evident by trying to walk on the shady side of the street - even when we turned off the main drag and there were less people it was still like carnival time with music blasting everywhere. Its very atmospheric and mostly promotes a good vibe although I have heard '3 little birds' everywhich way a...

Planet Ruby Starrs

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