Pipes and pins

As I’ve said before, it’s always a bit of an anticlimax when you get back to normal after a break, however short. Which means we’re back to our normal day-to-day inactivity.

Amongst the ‘normal’ were our infrequent but frustrating fights with the internet: forgotten passwords, forgotten subscriptions, things that worked last week but don’t any more for no obvious reason. Our devices don’t know how lucky they are sometimes, not having had an axe embedded in their nether regions.

Having been disappointed by only seeing a stuffed fox in London, it was delightful to see a couple as we drove over to Sale Water Park. I don’t think the M60 slip road was the best place for them to play, to be honest.

From Sale Water Park, we took the tram into Manchester and had a ten minute walk to Bridgewater Hall. Not for a concert on this occasion, but to have a close look at the very impressive organ, with its 5,500 pipes. I counted them. David Wood was our very informative and interesting host. He maintans the organ, as well as hundreds of others in the north of England. I was hoping for a blast of Toccata and Fugue, but, instead, he regaled us with the history of the instrument, its construction and installation.

There were about 8 of us on this particular tour, and David took us up a narrow staircase to the second of three floors that the 22-tonne organ occupies. We had to duck under and carefully step round various obstacles, but it was fascinating to see the inner workings.

We didn’t see it, but apparently there’s a mouse in the organ. Way up high, carved into the wooden ceiling, with little leather ears, visible from the top floor where we mortals weren’t allowed.

We wandered back via the back of the Central Library, where what we thought were left-over Christmas decorations were actually something else, looking to the future rather than the past.

It will soon be Chinese New Year, the Year of the Snake.

The building work at Martha and William’s school continues, meaning that access to the car park is restricted. Usually, when it’s our turn to pick the children up from school, we walk back to their home and then drive them back to our place. Today, though, we drove to the school and took them to Parrs Wood.

My ten-pin bowling skills are, let’s say, limited. We played two games, Martha won the first and I won the second mainly because William and Martha were losing interest and getting tired!

After the bowling, they spent some time in the arcade, playing many of the games, winning hundreds of tokens which they redeemed at the end for some cheapo sweeties. Great fun, they enjoyed themselves, that’s the main thing, but I thought the prizes were rubbish.

For dinner, we took them to Zumuku Sushi in Cheadle, a place they visit often enough that Wilma was happy to see them and knew their names. Frequent visitors, or notorious for some reason?

Going back to the internet, Liesel and I have both X-communicated ourselves. Yes, we have deactivated our X, formerly Twitter, accounts. A small way to fight back against the new American oligarchy, I know, but other than referring to Elon’s vehicles as Swasticars, what else can we do?