THE Prepping thread - a new beginning :)

Thats right GQ those with a veneer of civility ...will try to rationalize their behaviour....while others if they perceive their stronger will just take it off you....i prefer the grey man approach.....Russia being provocative sending their battleships through the English channel we need to up our defence spending in conjunction with france

Matches - MUST remember to buy matches, virtually all of my methods of cooking & keeping warm without mains 'leccy depend on matches! Though I do have a firesteel somewhere...

Getting into "normal" winter preps here. My neighbour's Glaswegian mother would have been muttering "there'll be some snaws" (i.e. lots of snow) as there are ridiculous amounts of hawthorn & berberis berries this year; the little trees are quite literally bowed down with them. However it almost never snows at all here, and when it does, it doesn't lie. Need to buy some "official" logs too as OH's mindset is that if wood was meant for burning, it would be sold as such, so "scrumped" wood obviously isn't "fit" to be burnt. Despite the fact that our garden produces a fair amount of it, and the council chop up fallen trees down at the riverbank specifically for us citizens to take away - which saves them trying to get a chipper down there! I have a few stashes of wood maturing for the stove, but if he finds them, they'll go into the compost bins - sigh!

The sweep is coming this week, and I must also get the boiler service arranged now the heating's coming on. Not to mention bubble-wrapping the conservatory... sounds ridiculous, but it really makes a difference & makes it possible for the cockatiels to live out there all winter, and my windowsill herbs, saladings & pot-plants to keep on growing right through.

Just had a phone call purporting to be from HMRC stating they were starting a case against me. :eek:

Press one to speak to my case officer.

Yeah, right :rotfl: just put the phone down.

Don't get taken in folks (I know none of you will!).

Have rung my mother to warn her, she is over eighty and frets about calls like these.

Usual preps going on, more for winter weather than anything else.
Feeling very organised for a change, which obviously means I've forgotten something crucial.:rotfl:

Have finished sorting Dad's things out now.
Quite a lot of unused medical stuff (leg bags, catheter tubing etc.) which cannot be returned to the NHS is going via a friend to a remote hospital in Uganda.

We made sure he spent money on himself so some excellent quality clothes have gone to the charity shops.
Very little thrown away apart from some OOD foodstuffs

Feel sad but at ease.

Seven days exactly after my Nan had died after 5 weeks in hospital, we were all at her home, starting the sad business of sorting out her affairs.

We jumped out of our skins when her phone rang. A man with an Indian accent asked for Mrs XXXXXXXX because she'd been involved in a car accident and could make a claim.

No she hadn't, snapped Aunt, very distressed. She was 93 and she's just died. And slammed the phone down on the beggar. I hope they were ashamed of themselves for adding to our distress.