Intex: A bigger splash

Now in its third year, the splash pool is turning out to be the best £150 we ever spent on eBay. With clergy family barbecues coming on, our whole family extends a cordial welcome to its other afficionados, hoping the weather this year will be up to it. With new solar heating the water has reached temperatures of up to 32 degrees recently, four or five degress higher than it ever managed with its original 7Kw electric heating.

With school friends etc,. it gets hours of use many days. One first this year was adoption and families workers on a staff day here using it for a teambuilding game with paper boats. On a cloudier Sunday, I just wanted to try and convey the full solemnity of the naturally Anglican way our children have been interpreting the instructions printed in six languages on the side, about not jumping in:

Solar Heating Payback Time

Avid readers of this blog may note that it started on 7 August 2007 with a piece about the new family splash pool — it cost £150 on eBay, and has brought countless hours of joy to various people from all around over the past three years. It gets, to put it mildly, intensive, almost daily use.

The day after it went in (2006), Nick came back with a bunch of friends from school who jumped into the freezing water. I went down to check everyone was undrowned, and a head emerged from the freezing waves to the immortal line “excuse me, mister; have you got a heater for this thing?” Three weeks and various old bits of washing machine linkage later we had heating but the cost of running it was not fun.

This year with the help of Ken the Swimming Pool man in High Wycombe we have bitten the bullett and upgraded to Solar Heating. The first day temperature was up to 21 degrees. After the sun today, the water reached 31 degrees, far higher than anything we have ever achieved with electricity. Going on Ken’s calculations, that’s payback in 6 weeks. Is this a record?

And this afternoon the pool sprung a leak. But that’s another story.

How to Unchoke a Cherry Tree

Exhibit A is a normal cherry tree in full blossom in May — the sort of thing the young George Washington had it in for. Notice the cherry blossom (as in shoe polish) which will yield cherries in the end for the birds to pinch before we get them (“feckin’ birds” as Father Ted’s friend Fr Jack used to say). Normal cherry tree.

Now this weird old thing, Exhibit B, is a cherry tree that has been systematically garotted by Ivy for the past 40 years. Note the weird colouring, lack of blossom and spindly shape. I gather the Ivy isn’t actually parasitic — it just clogs everything up and voraciously steals nutrients. I’m somewhat amazed that poor old Mr Cherry has managed to survive at all. Lucy has now hacked out a thick mass of offending accretions, so as to give the real tree a chance to live again. Some of the tendrils of ivy were two inches thick! It’ll be interesting to see the tree next year, especially once ivy higher up the bark dies and comes off. In a few years time the birds may have two trees worth of cherries out of the garden here.

And that, friends, is how Elizabethans saw the English Reformation. Their radical method was to pull everything back to the scriptures and creeds. That, they believed, would enable the secondaries to look after themselves, and the whole tree to flourish. Hmmm...

Swimming pool attendants of the world, unite!

Chemicals? Water testing? Pump maintenance? heater control?

When my chaplain retired to Cyprus, she left us the [remains of] a 32 foot splash pool. Sadly the mice in their garage had got there first. Cutting it into 6 inch strips with a Stanley knife (Lucy did that bit) and getting it down the dump (together), left us with a mossy patch in the lawn and some rather disappointed children. Two days and £155 later, with a bit of help from eBay, we were the proud owners of a new 18 foot splash pool. Deep Joy. 4 foot deep.

But soft! some lucky lad has to fallolop about around it for ten minutes every day — keeping it chlorinated, controlling its alkalinity, zapping the slugs, hoovering it out in the rain, cleaning the filters, engineering a heater pressure relief valve with washing machine components from Homebase.

I always wanted to own a boat. Now I know why I don't... but the sprogs like it anyway.