Family on David Marsden

The Last Screw

Fri, 22 May 2026 19:41:51 +0100

Another DIY victory to add to my ever growing list.

Mum had her friendly neighbourhood gardener attach the two blocks of wood to the bench feet to raise it up so she could get on and off.

She then decided she didn’t want the bench after all, but it was too high to sit on comfortably for anyone else.

The blocks were attached with numerous long screws. Some came out. Some didn’t.

Having learnt from my earlier tortuous experience fitting a new toilet seat (full story still to come), I knew the best way to remove the remaining screws was to saw them off.

And (now I knew where it was) my trusty saw did the business right down until the last screw (it’s always the last screw).

I just couldn’t cut the last screw!

Of course! My trusty saw was a wood saw, not a hacksaw, and by now it could barely cut through butter (although it would certainly have melted butter, the blade was so hot). It was as blunt as the blocks I was trying to remove.

New hacksaw (and a few days to rest up) later, a couple of strokes of the fresh blade did the trick.

Now the bench is frankly a little low, but at least my bare feet can touch grass.

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 19:48:11 +0100

Eleven distant 📷 years tomorrow since this rascal appeared and took over my life.

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 17:26:33 +0100

Déjà vu this week, as I spent time trying to help my mum reply to an email and send an attachment.

I can’t do it. Please do it for me!

Simultaneously, I receive email with attachment from mum. Not a reply, though - a new email.

“OK, so just reply to the email you need to reply to and send the attachment like you did to me just now.”

I don’t know what his email address is!

To cut a long story short, I discovered that her old Tiscali email account hasn’t sent or received email since 2019!

And because it was set as her default email in her Gmail settings, she couldn’t reply to emails.

Hence she sent a new email to me, and why she couldn’t do the same with the person who’s email address she “didn’t know”, as the address is helpfully hidden in the UI.

I asked her why she didn’t tell me before, and she quickly changed the subject.

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 13:24:58 +0100

Mum’s house has been on the market for just over a week, and photographs have been uploaded to the online estate agent listing for a full three days. She’s had three viewings, including one with a lady who really likes it and who’s friend lives on the same road - of course, she needs to sell hers first.

We’ve had an offer on the flat she wants near me provisionally accepted - just waiting on getting a firm offer on hers.

Now she’s panicking and looking at online house cash purchase merchants and auctions, because she reckons she hasn’t got time to waste, and she doesn’t want someone else to make a better offer.

A new hope

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 17:56:01 +0100

It’s been quite a week.

My Mum has had a rough few years. Eight years ago, aged 71, she lost John (my step-Dad) to cancer. One moment he was fine, the next he started deteriorating rapidly, was soon bedridden, and spent weeks waiting for for death to take him as his body wasted away. Three months and he was gone.

Mum sold their beautiful big retirement bungalow she’d nursed him in, and got a smaller bungalow in the small town where she’d grown up and her cousin still lives and owns the amazing wool shop.

Two years later she had a mini-stroke, fell and broke her ankle, and had to hand in her driver’s licence while she recovered.

Then came COVID-19 and the isolation, followed by misdiagnosed heart failure, and then cancer of her own. She needed major surgery, but the doctors said she wouldn’t survive a general anaesthetic (because of the misdiagnosed heart failure).

She prepared to have the surgery with an epidural. On the day of the op, they decided she couldn’t have the surgery without a general and so that’s what happened. Then there was the radiotherapy and follow up tests every three months since. She survived it all.

Then her beloved, very elderly (and very fat) cats died one after another.

She’s been through a lot!

Just before xmas last year she had a chest infection. She’s had breathing problems on and off for as long as I can remember. As a kid she said it was bronchitis. Later it was asthma. Now, like me, it’s COPD.

She hasn’t recovered from this episode and is struggling to do everyday tasks including personal care. Her neighbour has been a godsend throughout and describes my Mum like she’s her own mum. I’ve been trying to help from a distance (a four hour drive away) to organise home help, etc.

Last Sunday I noticed that my neighbours on the ground floor had a For Sale sign outside their relatively (these days) spacious one bed flat. I messaged my Mum saying it’s a shame she can’t move in there. Me and my wife could help her with the things she can’t do for herself plus keep her company and she gets to see her grandsons in the flesh more than twice a year.

I didn’t really expect her to take it seriously, but as her helpful and caring neighbour said, “It’s a no-brainer.” The neighbours downstairs told me that they hadn’t decided if they were selling or letting, but today I viewed the flat opposite which, although I’d forgotten about it, has been on the market for longer. It’s also in good condition, and my neighbour is not in a chain and has somewhere to move to.

It’s given my Mum some hope. It’s a big move at her age. Fingers crossed it all works out.

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 12:25:36 +0100

Relaxing morning with the kids.

I’m sucking on stray lumps of Red Leicester while stirring the rest of the grated cheese into thickened white sauce, monitoring the macaroni simmering in the other pan (for big kid and me), and checking on sausages in the oven (for little kid).

Big kid is playing Minecraft with a friend and little kid is exploring space on his tablet.

Wife is having her morning nap.

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 10:03:02 +0100

Wife can’t believe it’s March already!

The code of life

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 21:58:37 +0100

// SIGNAL: INTERGENERATIONAL LINK

Big kid has been learning about WWII at school.
He took in a photo of his great grandfather (my Grandpa on my Dad’s side).

Grandpa Fred was a coder.
He was in the Royal Signal Corps, decoding Morse code messages from the Nazis.

// SIGNAL: CHANCE & FATE

When war broke, he tried to join the Royal Navy.
Because he knew Morse code from his job at the Post Office, they sent him to Scotland.

If he’d joined the Atlantic or Arctic convoys,
he’d very likely have ended up at the bottom of the cold, dark sea.
And we wouldn’t be here.

// SIGNAL: MY EARLY CODE

As a teenager, I spent hours typing pages of machine code
from computer magazines into my Dragon 32 PC.

One wrong keystroke and the game wouldn’t load.
But if I got it right, I’d have “Bomber” to play.

// SIGNAL: THE HUMAN PROJECT

We’re all coding — encoding and decoding —
stories that give our lives meaning and purpose.

Weaving unique patterns in the fabric of space-time.
Searching for answers in the world wide web.
Gazing at the stars, as we always have.

Using threads from the code of life
handed down by our ancestors, since time immemorial.

// SIGNAL: MARKS WE LEAVE

From cave paintings to fossils and footsteps on the moon,
from the Pyramids to the Parthenon to the Pentagon —
we’re leaving reminders of our existence.

Building structures to organise, process,
and understand information about our world.

// SIGNAL: THE NEW CODE

Now we’re coding large language models.
Training them on the whole of human knowledge and history.

Hoping they’ll tell us the meaning of life —
or at least not destroy us
in the hands of our new Nazi overlords,
or serve us up tasteless slop.

// SIGNAL: THE OLD GUARD

I’m not sure what Fred would have made of it all.

Like my great grandfather Frank before him,
he was from another time. Conservative. Happy with his lot.

He loved Oldham Athletic (“Latics”),
the Telegraph crossword,
driving carefully, and Freemasonry.

He wrote letters on a typewriter.

// SIGNAL: A BODY REMEMBERED

He had all his teeth removed at a relatively young age
in a “buy one get them all removed free” kind of deal.

The dentures never fit properly.
He spent years struggling to eat anything that wasn’t tasteless slop.

Raw egg mixed with milk and Ribena was a particular favourite.
If I remember correctly.

// FINAL PULSE

Fred would have loved his great grandkids.
It’s a shame they never got to meet.

He would probably have said:
“Give over, lad.”

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 13:39:28 +0100

Wife beefed about the beef (“too salty”) and the horseradish (“tastes like jalapeno flavoured toothpaste”), but otherwise enjoyed the “perfect” roast potatoes and the veggies.

Kid A said he would try the tiniest piece of beef along with some cabbage, but ate neither.

Kid B said, “Maybe yesterday”.

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 13:54:46 +0100

Wife has just got back from Ealing Broadway on a work visit with a very nice pair of brand new trainers.

While she’s decontaminating in the shower, our friendly neighbourhood Evri delivery driver has delivered another new pair of shoes for her.

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 13:51:44 +0100

Wife has had a sore throat on and off for a couple of weeks, so naturally she asked me to “get some beef” to cure it.

This reminded me of childhood weekends at my Granny’s house, especially with the hot horseradish sauce.

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 21:54:52 +0100

My Dad has been radicalised by the far right on YouTube, and now he’s started using emojis in messages.

Sun, 12 Jan 2025 13:07:44 +0100

My pizza waiting to go in the oven. Kids' and wife’s pizzas are in there at the moment.

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 12:06:37 +0100

Wife just rescued little kid who was hanging off the top bunk bed ladder.

Thu, 02 Jan 2025 16:37:30 +0100

We always used the have a special meal to mark New Year’s Day, like Christmas and Easter Sunday, but yesterday, as big kid was away and I had to go and collect him, we ate leftover burgers, chips, rice, beans and salad.

Thu, 02 Jan 2025 16:32:18 +0100

Main course for me. Comfort food from childhood.

Boiled gammon, mashed potatoes, carrots and white sauce.

My Gran and my Mum used the make this. Carrots boiled with the bacon joint. Sweet as!

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 10:39:36 +0100

Today we’re expecting our two nieces and their Mum. They’re at just the right ages to play with our boys, so it should be a fun day for them as usual, and a hectic one for me.

Thu, 26 Dec 2024 23:00:45 +0100

Best part of Xmas Day for me was late last night when my little kid got a book for me to read to him called “Dad”. After we finished he looked at me and said, “I love you, Dad!” and gave me a big hug.

Tue, 24 Dec 2024 14:16:11 +0100

All set!

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 13:13:32 +0100

Boys are having so much fun on a Portal call with their “Papa” (my Dad, their Grandad).

Sat, 30 Nov 2024 10:54:30 +0100

Wife wants to know what I think about the Assisted Dying Bill.

She’s strongly in favour: “It can’t come soon enough for some people,” she says.

Thu, 21 Nov 2024 14:51:22 +0100

Wife reckons she has kidney failure due to her high blood pressure. She says her kidneys are due to expire in 2074.

Sausages

Thu, 21 Nov 2024 12:45:11 +0100

Lincolnshire sausages are the finest sausages you can get.

I remember as a boy, fifty years ago, my grandmother making sausages at home for the local butcher. Sometimes, she would let me feed the sausage meat into the machine and then turn the handle to push it through into the skins.

A special treat then was boiled sausages for breakfast. The skins would fall off, and we ate them with white bread soaked in the soup or broth they created in the pan along with a dash of English mustard.

In later years, my Mum would travel to Boston in south Lincolnshire from her home in north Lincolnshire specially to buy sausages from the butcher who made the best Lincolnshire sausages.

She would freeze them and pack me off with ten or twelve wrapped in old newspaper whenever I came back to visit from university or when I first moved to Manchester and then London.

I haven’t had a proper Lincolnshire sausage for many years now. The ones we get now are made in Hampshire. They’re nice enough, better than any other variety of supermarket sausage I’ve tried, but you wouldn’t want to boil them.

They’re pretty versatile. They’re great with mashed potatoes and gravy, in a special Valentine’s casserole, in a Yorkshire pudding, with xmas dinner wrapped in bacon, in a bread finger roll with (or without) onions and ketchup, in a sandwich or, as my kids like to eat them, cold on their own in the bath after school.

Thu, 21 Nov 2024 11:16:48 +0100

Wife is making plans for my imminent demise.

Sat, 19 Oct 2024 13:27:41 +0100

I thought I’d done great with these pizzas, but big kid ate only three slices (he can usually eat all eight) and spat out his salami, little kid said he doesn’t like the sauce (it’s out of a tin, the same he usually eats), and the missus said hers was burnt and inedible (although she still ate it).

Thriving?

Wed, 13 Dec 2023 14:43:17 +0100

My son’s school’s Thrive teacher is leaving. She helped transform my lad’s experience of school from being one where he had weekly if not daily challenges with regulating his emotions and his behaviour, to one where he enjoys school every day. She’s going to be very greatly missed.

I managed to tell her this today and thank her for her work. It was so sad to hear her story.

She has committed ten years of her life to helping our youngsters get the best start in life, and done lots of extra work getting accredited to do so. But, at the end of the day, she can no longer afford to continue, and has taken a job elsewhere in sales and marketing.

What a stupid, shit country we live in.

Tue, 12 Dec 2023 15:15:48 +0100

Wife has returned home after being abducted by aliens (scroll down past the football).

Frank

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 11:11:00 +0100

Frank was my great grandfather on my dad’s side.

I only met him a couple of times. One time, me and my brother were made to wear the most ridiculous and embarrassing outfits, and we just felt very uncomfortable and ill-at-ease meeting this very old man from another time.

He was born in the early 1901. So he must have been 80 or so when we met him. Not so old these days, but back then he really was like a dinosaur, or a fossil.

I remember a couple of stories about him. After the Great War, when he was a young man with a new wife and baby daughter (my grandmother), he had to walk twenty-five miles to work, where he would labour hard for sixteen hours before walking home again, only to be brutally murdered by his father before going to bed and getting up the next morning to do the same thing over and over again. Well, he certainly had to work hard, just to survive and raise a family.

Life was no doubt much harder then than any of us can really imagine, but you try and tell that to the young people of today. Would they believe you? No!

My great grandmother, Ellen, was committed to Lancaster Asylum some time after my grandmother Freda was born. I don’t know what the reason was, but it’s possible it was because she was suffering from what would now be recognised as post-natal depression.

In those days, it was a life sentence, not to mention the shame it brought upon the family.

Frank divorced Ellen and married “Auntie Florrie”. I don’t know if Florrie was actually Ellen’s sister, but it’s possible.

Freda never forgot her mum, and secretly visited her whenever she could.

When Frank got the cancer that would kill him, Freda took him in and looked after him in her bed until he died.

Tue, 06 Jan 2015 22:09:00 +0100

“Mum, passing me a small parcel wrapped in Xmas paper: ‘I didn’t get you anything for Xmas.’

Me: ‘What’s this then?’

Mum: ‘Oh, just socks.'”

Tue, 12 Aug 2014 22:25:00 +0100

Baby son is one month old. Feels like we’ve had him five minutes and forever.

Sat, 17 May 2014 22:14:00 +0100

Wife: “I don’t like the words. I don’t like the music. You sound like a hooligan. I couldn’t care less about fucking Jimmy Carter.”

Careers Advice

Wed, 11 Sep 2013 18:00:00 +0100

“When I grow up, I want to play football for Manchester United!”

For an eight year old boy growing up in rural Lincolnshire in the 1970s it seemed like an honest and rational response to an impossible question. No one else at my school wanted to play football for Manchester United. Leeds, maybe. Liverpool, definitely. Other kids said they wanted to be firemen, soldiers, doctors, and nurses. More of that later. Maybe their parents were firemen? Or maybe not. I didn’t know what my parents were. My dad went out before I got up every morning, and came home after I went to bed. At weekends, he told me stories about George Best, Denis Law (his favourite), Bobby Charlton, and the Busby Babes. About Manchester United and how they had the best team and had the best players. Not any more. That was all before my time. I was born in the year United had won the League for the last time, the year before they went on to win the European Cup. The Glory Days. Now, in my time, United were in Division Two (although I didn’t understand what that meant at the time). What I did understand was that I got to see highlights on Yorkshire TV occasionally, with a young and annoying Martin Tyler commentating on matches against the likes of ‘local’ teams Hull City, Sheffield Wednesday and York City. United were good that season. Stuart Pearson was my favourite then. Stocky and powerful, he played with the passion that I came to expect from United players. He was never the best, but he scored goals and looked like he meant it. I meant it when I said I wanted to be a footballer.

“Think of something realistic,” I was told.

“You’ll never make it.”

“Concentrate on your studies.”

I couldn’t wait to prove them wrong.

I got in to the school team. In games lessons and playtime, I was a stocky and powerful centre forward who scored goals. Our first proper match was against another village school.

Five years later, in big school, I’d had my chips pissed on, but I still wanted to make it. I wrote to East Stirlingshire Football Club (just before a young Alex Ferguson took charge) offering my services. I got a polite rejection letter back.

No one ever told me why. I was too upset to ask.

Later, in Art class, I put together a morbid collage of war and that terrible question in cut-out newspaper headline letters:

“Why?”

“Don’t be so childish!” the teacher scolded me when he woke from his alcoholic stupor.

Well, pardon me. I was a child. Surely I was allowed to ask, and expect an adult answer?

So instead, I told them I wanted to join the Army. Not because I wanted to, but because that seemed to keep them happy.

Later still, when approaching school leaving age, after filling in countless forms asking me what I liked doing and what I was good at, I was told by a ‘careers advisor’ to study chemical or electrical engineering at university. I didn’t know what they were or why they’d been chosen for me. I resolved to go on the dole.

(Has careers guidance gone off the rails?. Was it ever on the rails?)

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 21:41:00 +0100

Eating cold turkey, ham, pork pie, Lincolnshire sausage and haslet. Reminiscing about pig’s chap, chine and brawn.