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The home-made elderflower champagne is still proving explosive. We’ve steam-sealed some caps onto the bottles, but even they don’t seem to be up to the job of keeping the volatile liquid contained. So for the time being we’ve put them inside a steel dustbin half-filled with cold water to regulate the temperature and put on the lid.

Of course, this means that the bottles are firing their corks into the underside of its lid, which creates an ear-splitting bang every time one goes off. The cat, rather surprisingly, seems completely unfazed by it - even if he’s sitting right beside it eating as one goes off. Neither did he seem to care when he and I were standing in the kitchen together and one exploded in my hand, showering the floor and me (although fortunately not him) in a sticky yellow liquid.

It smells really sickly sweet.

Anyhow, yesterday we put the champagne to one side and spent some time building an Omlet Eglu Cube. It’s a chunky green home for chickens, which will sit at the bottom of the garden and be home to three feathery ladies that we’ve already Christened Margot, Gerry and Barbara. There won’t be a cockerel - the council forbids it and it would be antisocial anyhow as they’re so noisy - so we can’t have a Tom to complete the set. Gerry, we’re reasoning, could be short for Geraldine.

It was a big job, but an easy one. This is the range of pieces you get through the post (seven VERY large boxes that took over the whole of the outhouse):

They took a couple of hours to put together, and required only a screwdriver and a trip to B&Q to buy a couple of bolts as we found ourselves two short by the time we got to the end.

By then, though, all those pieces looked like this:

We don’t have the chickens yet, unfortunately, and won’t be getting them until after we’ve been on holiday, so for the moment it’s sitting in the corner of the garden looking a little redundant.

Nonetheless, it’s quite exciting.

So at the weekend we made elderflower champagne for no better reason than the fact that the hedgerows are absolutely dripping elder flowers at the moment.

Plus I’d always fancied it.

It turns out it’s actually quite easy. We cleaned out the fermenter that we’d used to brew our beer and dropped in 20 elder heads that we’d gathered from the alley down by the allotments. To this we added the squeezed juice and chipped skins of six lemons, 4.5lb of sugar (whatever that is in kilos), a tablespoon of yeast and 12 litres of water, most of which was cold, but some of which was hot. You can read about how we did it here.

They say the results taste about as close to a good bottle of sparkling white wine as you can ever hope to achieve at home (unless you live in the middle of a vineyard and have plenty of willing feet for grape pressing, of course), but the smell last night as I bottled the fizzy results was like a light, feint hot cross bun. Yummy.

We got 15 bottles-worth, plus all the sticky mess that caked itself to the kitchen floor, the drawer fronts, the worktops and my hands and arms. I mopped it all down before bed but even this morning it needed a second going over.

That could in part be to do with the fact that the last bottle to be filled, which must have got the lion’s share of the undistributed yeast and is cloudier than the rest, is proving to be highly volatile. It had blown its cork in the middle of the night and spurted out some of its contents.

I put in a fresh cork and thought nothing of it until I got back from work tonight to find it had done the very same thing, this time spitting a quarter of its contents along the outhouse corridor. Thankfully I’d had the foresight to put them out there rather than storing them beside the cat’s bowls where we’d brewed the beer.

So now I have an outhouse that smells of easter, too.

But at least the cat still smells of cat.

The Hop Farm describes itself as ‘one of Kent’s most popular tourist attractions’ and ‘the ideal place to visit in 2008′. I don’t doubt it. It was certainly popular at the weekend, after all, although we weren’t specifically there to look at the reindeer, pigs and chickens (although we did clamber into the chicken run to give them a tickle until we were chased off by a dog-sized rabbit).

We were actually there for the VW Expo. So lots of vans and campers and shiny polished cars all glinting under a clear blue sky, plus the usual mix of spare parts and trinket stalls, and proud owners showing off their vehicles to the panel of judges in the hope of winning rosettes.

Half of the farm itself was fenced off for an impending concert, so after wandering around the cars for a while I headed off to the farmy bit of the farm to poke the animals. They had the biggest horses I think I’ve ever seen, and two very cute pigs who lay side by side, as close to cuddling each other as their little piggy legs would allow.

They were cute, but the funniest thing had to be the waxworks, which could most accurately be described as ‘mediocre’.

You could tell who the people were supposed to be, but some of them were so generic that the little descriptive notes proved to be more essential than just helpful. This picture (sorry for the blur - it was dark and I only had my phone there to take any pictures) is supposed to be Kylie.

Shockingly, it actually looks like my cleaner.

Last night was the Macworld Awards. A fun night at the Dome as a guest of Adobe.

Getting home, though, was another matter. They’d fixed the torn-down overhead wires and the morning’s slow-running was a result of ‘residual delays’ and trespassers on the track. Later in the afternoon, though, a freight train derailed a little way up the line from Chelmsford and the fragile timetable was thrown into disarray.

I got to Stratford at half 11, and there was little sign of anything heading in the direction of home. In a half-hearted attempt to clear his platforms, the only person I could see on duty there directed me onto an all-stations train back to Shenfield that was so old it was one of the models I used to take to school more than 20 years ago. Not comfortable. And full of people eating burgers and arguing.

We were all turfed off at Shenfield and left to mill around on a platform. By now it was well gone midnight, and getting cold. I was still in the tux, which isn’t really the warmest thing to wear. Over half an hour later, by which point the connecting service was 25 minutes late but still marked on the boards as ‘on time’, a busy train finally pulled in. It took all the platform staff by surprise and they shooed us off from platform 3 to platform 5 like collies chasing sheep.

I’m not surprised; the real issue throughout this whole sorry episode has been lack of information. And occasionally the availability of disinformtation. As ihatenationalexpress points out,

They told the press that this was the first time this had happened and blamed vandalism. It turns out that this is the third time the lines have fallen down at Ingatestone and no vandalism appeared to be involved. Their relationship with the press needs to be questioned.

I did make it to my bed, eventually, but not before two this morning. This has been one of the worst weeks I can remember on the trains. It has almost rivalled the months of go-slow that followed the Hatfield crash. At least then we knew that there would be trains, even if they were slow.

This week, there’s not even been the guarantee of any service at all.

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trains, national+express, national+express+east+anglia

I had two companions while out watering the plot last night. Here’s one. The loveable lazy cat who likes nothing better than to be made a fuss of while slobbing out on the bed (the towel keeps his hair off the pillows).

The other was this little chap, who sat by me and watched as I filled the cans from the water butt and hunkered down in the longer blades of grass.

And then they met, and just where Oscar killed him, I found the rest of his family, picked off one by one.

Yesterday was another day spent working from home. The fourth this year caused by problems on the trains. This time around it was a mile of overhead cabling coming down one station down the line from Chelmsford, which meant not getting home until gone 11 on Monday night.

Today, two days later, they’re still trying to fix it, and will no doubt have been slowed by news that some of the engineers were injured after their equipment ‘failed’ and were taken to hospital. The line was closed mid-afternoon, just after the accident, and further repairs have been halted until investigators have found out exactly what went wrong.

So, predictions that it would be finished by eight tonight now look hopelessly optimistic. The latest estimate I’ve seen is early tomorrow morning, by which point it will be into its fourth day of disruption.

This wouldn’t be so galling had the penalties for these disasters not been so weak. Network Rail, which maintains the infrastructure, was fined £14m when overrunning engineering works meant a late return to work after Christmas for many commuters, but still managed to pay out £55m in bonuses to its staff last week, with the chief exec bagging a £500,000 salary, £305,581 performance-related bonus and additional £205,000 ‘incentive’. Clearly the £14m wasn’t enough if it can still afford such lavish rewards.

Meanwhile I’m off, with some trepidation, to see what state the trains are in tonight. If I get home before ten, I’ll be surprised.

Noisy, noisy, noisy. We went to the races at Snetterton today, setting out under cloudy skies, wrapped up tight in coats that we had to take off before lunch. By the end of the day we were burnt and stinging, such are the vagaries of a British summer.

It was a meet of the British F3/GT championships, about which I knew nothing before we went, but the best races of them all had to be the Volkswagen Racing Cup, which is a wide field of regular cars racing against each other, with a couple of vans thrown in for good measure. This is classed as a support race, as it’s not the main focus of the day, but it is certainly more entertaining than the F3 cars, which buzz around the track like wannabe Formula 1 cars.

Despite the wide variations in the specs of each car, though, some clever maths lets all the entrants in the VW Cup compete on a level playing field by balancing power and weight ratios.

Yet the van - my favourite as the visual underdog - performed poorly throughout, and put out great clouds of black smoke, like it was trying to put off its pursuers in some kind of film car chase.

For anyone who knows little or nothing about car racing, though - me, for example - it’s the perfect introduction to the sport as you get to watch all manner of races in close succession.

A kind of car racing tasting menu.

It doesn’t help you write more informed blog posts about it, though, so you might like to try this one instead.

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snetterton, volkswagen, vw

QI takes two whole hours to record. That’s not two hours of stopping, stalling and chopping bits out, but two hours of full-on, unbroken chat. I know because we got tickets to see a recording tonight, at the London Studios on the South Bank.

The show, now in its sixth year, was all about the letter F (series one was about the letter A, series two about B and so on), with this particular episode majoring on Families, as it’s due to go out on Children in Need night. That was strange enough, as the studio was decorated with Pudsey Bears and it won’t go out until November. Last week, though, they did the Christmas episode which must have been even stranger.

Anyhow, being Children in Need night they had Terry Wogan on as a surprise guest. A bit hmmm, but at least they balanced him out with Ronnie Ancona and David Mitchell (and Alan Davis, of course).

We were lucky to get in. Doors opened at quarter to seven, and we were told to get queueing (beside the people for Have I Got News For You) from five, but that doesn’t really work with general office hours, so we were much later than that. When we got there they were queueing around the block, with burger and ice cream vans doing a good trade by the kerbside. But of course we did get in, although only by the skins of our collective teeth: just a few spots further back and we’d have been turned away.

As ever with these things, once we got inside we found everything to be smaller and slightly tattier than it is on TV. We also found it hard to work out what would make it to air out of the two-hour recording. I’m guessing Wogan’s admission that he can understand why a parent would flip out at their crying child would most likely be trimmed, though, as this will be shown in the news break of a charity show about child abuse and poverty that he himself will be hosting.

He seemed to have calmed down about the Eurovision voting, acknowledging that countries that share similar musical tastes will probably vote for each other. That’s not what he was intimating at the end of this year’s contest.

But it was a fun night and I’ll tune in on 14th November to see how they manage to squash down 120 minutes of recordings into 30 minutes of airtime. By then I’ll probably not remember much of what we saw live, so I doubt I’ll spot the cuts.

I’ll probably forget the surprise guest, too.

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qi

So I spent today working from home. Around quarter past seven last night something - and nobody’s yet saying quite what - happened to the new bridge just outside Liverpool Street.

You know - the one that they were working on over the Easter break that they guaranteed would be completed on time, only for it to over-run so that I and countless other commuters spent a day working from home. It’s the one that replaced the bridge they took out over Christmas and the New Year. You know - the one where they planned ahead so they would get the job done on time and we’d all go back to work at the start of the year without a hitch. Only for it to over-run and for me and countless other commuters spend another day working from home.

Are you seeing a pattern here?

They got fined for that Christmas cock-up. £14m in total, making it a very expensive bridge indeed.

So anyway, last night something happened, which blocked the track and cut off Liverpool Street. The inevitable outcome was radio pronunciations not to travel on the trains unless absolutely necessary, although why they think anyone would ride a rush-hour train to London unless it was ‘absolutely necessary’ is beyond me.

It couldn’t have happened on a worse day in terms of PR, as it coincided with a story on Railway People about what is going to happen to that £14m fine, which most commuters would probably like to see ploughed back into the network so we can get a better service.

Rail chiefs have reacted with annoyance to the news that ORR’s £14m, imposed on Network Rail for the New Year’s over runs, will not be ploughed back into the railway industry. Instead the money will be remitted to the Treasury…

Michael Roberts, ATOC’s Chief Executive, described the decision as a missed opportunity. He said. ‘While the ORR has clearly considered this matter seriously, train operators and passengers will find their decision disappointing. It represents a missed opportunity to use the money to deliver some real additional improvements to passengers. Instead, we are left with a ‘money go round’ where money raised from the taxpayer to fund Network Rail is just being ploughed straight back to the Treasury.’

So Network Rail will be losing some of its subsidy, which will have to be made up somewhere - either through cost-cutting, which risks introducing more problems as corners are snipped, or by the costs being passed on to the train companies. And we know what will happen then, don’t we: ticket prices will rise.

So ultimately the fine for those delays will probably end up being paid for by the people who were delayed in the first place, the passengers. And they say they want to encourage less people to use their cars to get to work…?

So if I reckon the UK on the whole can’t pick a winning Eurovision entry, how did our party do? We voted each song and performance on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 obviously being the best and 0 the worst. After collating them at the end of the night, these were our results. Shockingly the UK actually came third in our group, despite all my bitching, so we were well out on that one.

We did best in predicting the final positions for Serbia, Turkey, Israel and Albania, getting them exactly right. We were one spot out for both the Ukraine and Germany, in each instance liking them just a little more than the rest of Europe. Of the others we liked more than Europe, we were three positions out for Norway and Georgia, four for Poland, five for Denmark, Romania and Croatia, and well out for France, Finland, Iceland, Sweden and the UK.

Shockingly we somehow put the UK third. I still don’t know how as we all agreed that we didn’t actually like it.

Of the ones we disliked, we rated Bosnia & Herzegovina and Spain three positions lower than the rest of Europe, and everyone else - Greece, Portugal, Latvia, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Russia - a lot lower than the rest of the continent (nine or more positions lower than they actually achieved).

So we didn’t do so bad, but again we weren’t brilliant. We pretty much got the second placed contestant right, but were shockingly off the mark when it came to spotting the winner.

Or, to put that another way here’s how the positions we gave the finalists differed from their actual finishing places. The darker the background, the further out we were.

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eurovision, eurovision song contest