Chris James's Blog, page 12

Documenting the new motorway, #10: The whooshing deadline

One of author Douglas Adams’s most endearing quotes concerned deadlines: “I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by.” There is certainly going to be a loud whoosh as the deadline passes in August to complete the S2/A2 extension. Although I work in the legal industry, I’m no lawyer. Nevertheless, I shudder to think of the daily penalty payments the main contractor is going to be hit with, unless they’ve managed to renegotiate. This stretch of motorway is not going to be just a couple of weeks late; all the way from the Vistula to Radosc, bridges aren’t ready, the surface isn’t laid, and the feeder roads are incomplete. It will be fortunate if they can finish this time next year.

I will do a proper before-and-after post when the motorway opens. However, if you don’t want to wait, click on one of the tags at the bottom of the post to filter all related posts. The last time I pictured the bridge was last September, and my first post about the bridge was two years before that.

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Published on May 17, 2020 11:52

Apple blossom!

So, it’s come to this: a blog post solely featuring pictures of the blossom on the apple tree in my back garden. Apart from the one photo of a plane that, when I checked on Flight Radar, transpired to be an Ethiopian cargo jet flying over Warsaw west-to-east to God-knows-where.

I took all of these shots over the last few days, especially trying to capture the evening light when the sun strikes the blooms with softer light as it gets lower. I only wish I could’ve photographed the incessant buzzing of bees and wasps and the chattering of the birds all around. Still, take a look and see how many blue tits and bees’ arses you can spot in these pictures. Have a great week!

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Published on May 10, 2020 09:38

Making the most of a long weekend on lockdown (before and after pics)

This weekend included a bank holiday day off on Friday, so I enlisted the help of the rest of the James family to fix a problem that had been bothering me for the last 18 months or so. This:

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This was our front fence. As you can see, 18 years of rain hitting those engineering bricks and splashing back up into the wooden panels had made them rot to the point where dogs, martens, foxes and others could and did push through at night and have a hunt for anything tasty. As the panels broke, I bodged the gaps with other bits of wood, but they were never going to be a long-term solution. The options for replacement were not especially appealing. To replace the wooden panels was a non-starter. I built that fence 18 years ago and re-stained it nine years ago, so I was not going to replace those panels with more wood and give myself the same ultimately futile maintenance work. Metal seemed the preferred maintenance-free option, but it also came with a snag: price. Modern metal panels look snazzy enough but are not cheap; they would have to be made to order, and I would not be able to fit them myself because I don’t know how to weld or have my own welding gear. This is what we did instead:

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This solution has a few advantages: it cost about one-fifth of what the headline metal panels would have set me back. I enlisted the whole family to help remove the rotted wood panels, paint the supporting metalwork, and then fix the new wire panels. I was able to trim the wire panels to fit with my old bolt-cutters. Each wire panel needed just 18 screws to hold it to the metal supports, while for the same area, 24 wood panels needed a whopping 72 bolts. But the best part is what comes next: we’ll plant ivy and other climbers so that in a couple of years, the wire should be mostly covered in greenery. As my dad would say: that’s another job jobbed!

Here are a few more before-and-after shots, and then a few shots of the apple blossom that finally put in an appearance this weekend (and look out for the out-of-focus moon).

Have a great week!

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Published on May 03, 2020 09:31

The Battle for Europe pre-order links

The Repulse Chronicles, Book Three: The Battle for Europe is available for pre-order at the (usual) special introductory price of $2.99 or equivalent in your territory.

The Kindle release date for this title is 18 July 2020. Here is the synopsis:

“Danger: sixty-one Spiders have targeted this landing zone. ETA ten seconds. Take defensive action immediately…”

In the early hours of Friday 2 June 2062, the New Persian Caliphate resumed its merciless invasion to crush Europe and its peoples. Over the next six weeks, soldiers, scientists and civilians would do everything in their power to confront and delay the enemy. In this battle for Europe, many of them would be obliged to pay the ultimate price merely to slow the enemy’s relentless advance.

I love writing these books; editing them, not so much. But I have a small army of kind, patient, and sympathetic people behind me who help ensure that the best quality product is released. And while those blessed people are giving the book that vital help, I can get on with writing Book Four. In the meantime, here are the pre-order links: the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, Germany, Italy, France, Spain.

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Published on May 01, 2020 12:32

Bonnie, birds, blossom, and a bit about the next book

It’s been a hectic ten days here in the James household. The headline news is that the new “kitten”, Bonnie (see previous post), is in fact already pregnant, so we’ll have kittens in a few weeks.

And that isn’t the only headline news. The other headline news is that yesterday, I wrote “THE END” on, er, the end of my next full-length novel, the eighth. This doesn’t happen too often, but for those of you who’d like to know, The Repulse Chronicles, Book Three: The Battle for Europe exists somewhere other than inside my head. Finally. I can’t tell you how ridiculously happy I am that I’ve finished another novel. Phew!

I will post more on that later, but for now here are a selection of photos all taken in my garden in the last couple of days. There’s an update on the maple blossom, and plum blossom, pear blossom, as well as numerous winged visitors who were kind enough to wait while I took their mugshots.

To begin, here are two of our three cats. On the right is the pregnant Bonnie, and about to leap on her on the left is Wafer, the cat my daughters rescued from the base of a mountain in Slovakia last July:

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Below, Wafer is on the right, Bonnie on the left:

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Then we have Bonnie lounging on the couch saying: “Can you guess how many babies I’m carrying?” To which I reply: “No, but you can bloody well bet they’re going to help me sell some books when I publish the next one in a few months’ time.”

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Then we have all the birds and blossom in the garden, and some artsy-fartsy tulip shots. Gotta love spring!

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Published on April 26, 2020 10:21

Everyone needs a cuddle

[image error]I do not know what it is about the plot of land I live on that attracts the local stray and abandoned animals, but they always seem to show up here and adopt us. I’ll give the history of these animals below, but first, here is the new arrival. The Daughters have named her Bonnie, which they adapted from ‘bony’, because under that dusty pelt is an underfed, scraggy spine and rib-cage, and not much else apart from a purr like a power drill.

Bonnie turned up late last week from god knows where, miaowing and mewling in the old house at the back of our land, fearful of any advance. The Daughters went to work, leaving out food in a bowl and some water. It took Bonnie a few days, but finally today she deigned to be picked up and cuddled because, you know, sooner or later we all need a cuddle.

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Bonnie is a tabby like Wafer, which the Daughters decided to rescue last summer while we were on vacation in Slovakia. We estimate Bonnie to be about six months old, older than Wafer when brought him back to Warsaw:

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But the first animal to adopt us by turning up in our garden without an invitation was a grey cat we called Susie, who arrived in 2007 in exactly the same manner as Bonnie has just done.

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Susie had a litter of four kittens the following year, only one of which survived to cat-hood, before she died of old age in 2015. Her surviving kitten grew into the notorious Biter, and he really was a murderer: nothing that came into the garden was safe. Here are some photos of Biter when he caught and ate a red squirrel in 2013. And he ate all of it except the tail while I hovered around him taking these photos:

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Biter disappeared suddenly and without a trace in the early spring of 2014, likely caught by a fox from the local forest. Given the number of animals he killed, it was perhaps fitting that he should also have been preyed on. But what a cat he was:

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One day in September 2011, Crazy the dog turned up in our garden, again totally out of the blue. Like Susie, she also managed to get stuffed and have a litter of pups about which I wrote a comedy book in 2012. She is still with us, a little slower but still the same total bat-shit crazy nutcase.

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If there is one thing we have to do with Bonnie, it is get her spayed before all the boy cats in the area realise there’s a new girl in town…

To end, here are Susie and Biter in 2013, and one more of Biter’s numerous victims.

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Published on April 16, 2020 12:44

Spring in my garden

Every winter I tell myself that this year, I shan’t photograph the buds on the maple tree in the front garden because I have more than enough shots of them. And every spring, I am amazed at these incredible things which emerge from those bland branches. I’ve also included a couple of shots of Wafer the kitten who has now become a cat. Sending you all good wishes this Easter.

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Published on April 12, 2020 13:24

After 22 years, we’ve got a road

When we moved here in 1998, Mrs James and I never really expected our local authority to build the road. And given the current chaos going on, we certainly didn’t expect it to happen anytime soon. But this morning, a crew turned up and now we’ve got a road. Wow.

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Published on March 30, 2020 12:46

Living next to a managed forest

One of the many advantages of living next to a managed forest is of course having thousands of hectares of pine, oak, silver birch, and acacia woodland to roam. If you’re lucky, you can see deer, wild boar, and innumerable species of bird.

One of the very few disadvantages of living next to a managed forest is when Mr Forest Manager and his trusty band of vandals come along and cut down a part of the forest you really enjoyed. Yes, it is a business. Yes, they have done this before elsewhere and immediately after clearing, they replant saplings. Yes, I have bought some of those logs over the years and they have kept my family warm back when Poland used to have proper winters. And yes, as the saplings grow they become home to the same diverse creatures.

Still, I do sometimes wish they’d take their chainsaws somewhere else.

These photos show the most recent culling of some very old trees, along with an area that was cleared and replanted five years ago, and another that received the same treatment ten years ago.

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Published on March 22, 2020 13:14

Documenting the new motorway, #9: The bridge on Izbicka street

To say things have been a little hectic in the James household since the year began would be the understatement of, well, the year. However, today we finally had some nice sunshine after what feels like months of dull, overcast skies and a ridiculous non-winter, so here are some more photos of how the new motorway in my neck of the woods is coming along (at least those of the woods they didn’t cut down to drive the bloody road through).

Izbicka street connects Radosc to Falenica the ‘back way’; that is, not following the railway track further west that cuts through Wawer in a straight line all the way to Otwock, but going through the forest to the east. The first four photos below are of the bridge that will lift Izbicka street over the motorway; the last three photos are from the bridge. Two years ago, there was only Izbicka street here, all else was forest of pine, birch, oak and elm. Now look at it.

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