Still fixing here, and today two fixers were supposed to come, but nothing was actually fixed. The window cleaner was coming at 11 AM, so I got up early at 10 AM. That probably doesn’t sound too early, but it always depends on what time you go to bed and it was somewhere between 4 and 5 AM. He’d been the day before and the windows were so dirty that the water was thick black, it was almost goo. He said he’d never seen the bucket so black. It was oil and petrol, five years of pollution, it’s what your lungs look like if you live in a city, the only difference – you can’t get a brush on them.

It was also the day of the electrician (finally). He had been here before, weeks ago, and he had taken panels out of the ceiling to trace wires but left the wires dangling and panels open and it’s been like that for weeks. So although most of the painting of the walls is done, the cubicles and the doors, the renovation still isn’t complete as we have to look at the dirty linoleum floors and get the wires back behind the panels. Some of the plug sockets don’t work, we don’t have a light switch in the front room, some rooms need more plug sockets and we need separate power lines in the kitchen because at the moment if too many things are on, everything goes off.

So at this point, the electrician is coming back next Saturday, the window cleaner just didn’t turn up to continue what he started, so we don’t know if he’s coming back or not. Hopefully, he hasn’t fallen off a ladder somewhere, not that he had one, he had an extension to reach the top of the windows. He didn’t have a real bucket either, just a plastic see-through container and his trusty fairy liquid (which he swore by). All this means that time is rushing by, there are extra costs and the money we need to actually transport everything isn’t going to be available till next year, via projects, general income, and fundraising, we probably need to have €20,000 to be safe with transport, customs, and storage. Unfortunately, it means we still have to be paying for the storage in England, which is kind of throwing money away, but it is what it is. Phase 3 will have to wait so although we reached the goal, with all these extra costs, we’ll keep the GoFundMe open till we get a firm idea of when we can realistically look at moving and then instigate the next phase.

In the meantime, it gives us time to try and sort Ariel out. Initially, it was the cylinder head, which we finally found in Portugal and sent to England (€400 to send). Now it’s the camshaft, probably damaged in the same event, but we are optimistic that we can find that part and after a year finally get her back. This will mean flying to England and taking the opportunity to do some more sorting in the storage and bring some things back in the vehicle and hope we don’t get too badly hit with customs like we did last time (€500). Will keep you posted on the progress.

Music today has been sticking with King Crimson and their second album In The Wake Of Poseidon (1970). There’s even a video of them performing Cat Food on Top Of The Pops. The lineup was pretty much the ex-lineup doing Fripp a favour – Greg Lake was on the way to joining ELP, Michael Giles was joining the other ex-band member Ian McDonald to form McDonald and Giles. Peter Giles came in on bass, he had been in pre-King Crimson band Giles, Giles & Fripp. Keith Tippett is on piano (Pete Sinfield wrote the words).

Music Of The Daze

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