We’re heading back to The Isle of Man in a few days. We’ll be there for a couple of months, but we probably won’t get much relaxation! We bought a three story Victorian town house in August 2011 and it came complete with ivory-coloured fluffy carpets throughout! We have replaced the ground floor with parquet but the stairs and two floors of bedrooms still need to have something done to get rid of the ghastly dust trap underfoot! Our plan is to dump the carpets, strip the pine boards back to original state, tint them just to help the colour a little, then apply a matt varnish. On the stairs and landings, we’ll get new carpet runners and paint the edges white (a bit like it would have been originally except maybe the colour).

When we looked at the cost of hiring an industrial sander, we found it was about £55 a day (plus another £45 for the edging sander). So we took a look on eBay and found we could buy both for about £600. If we sell them again for a loss at the end of the job it still will have only cost about £100 in total, so that seemed like the way to go. The edging sander was OK in the post, but the main sander is big and heavy and would need a courier.

Unfortunately, getting goods delivered to The Isle of Man is like smuggling drugs into Indonesia … it’s a death sentence! It’s all to do with the fact there’s a boat trip needed between mainland UK and The Island. So we asked my niece, Sally, and her husband, Danny, who live in Crewe in Cheshire, if they could take delivery and we would pick it up as we passed by on our way to the ferry. (“Passing by” involves spending the night there – which we often do when we take the car)

Sally and Danny used to live in splendid anonymity until a couple of months ago when Danny was imprisoned for having a gun in his possession… er, he’s an SAS Sergeant with an impeccable history and the whole world got behind him and forced a quick legal appeal where the sentence was reduced to a lighter suspended sentence – and they will be appealing the actual guilty verdict later this month. Without going into the whole story here, it’s enough to say that they are going through a really tough time at the moment and Danny is at home just waiting for justice to take its course.

What do Sally and Danny have to do with the story of my sander? Well the guy I bought it from agreed to deliver to Crewe and asked for the name and address. When I said the name, he said, “Haven’t I heard that somewhere recently?”, so I reminded him of the furor in the national press about Danny’s shameful imprisonment.

I though he had had a heart attack at the other end!

“But what happens if the sander doesn’t work?” he asked.

I replied (half-joking), “It better had, or Danny will come and sort you out!”

Had he known Danny, he wouldn’t have worried! He’s truly one of the nicest, most level-headed guys you could ever hope to meet! In fact, of course, he did meet him a couple of days later when he delivered the sander, and they shared a cup of tea and a joke together!

What has all this got to do with food … er not a lot except that, when we get to Crewe, we will go and eat in the evening at The Hand and Trumpet which is a great little gastro pub serving decent quality pub grub at decent prices. If you get an opportunity, it’s worth stopping by.

And finally, I just added a recipe to the site to make your own Smoked Salmon (without the smoke, of course!). It’s a great little recipe that M-D’s daughter, Muriel, passed on to us and it is stupidly simple. So not you can enjoy high quality smoked salmon at exceptional prices with your very own Smoked Salmon Without The Smoke

Wish us luck with the floors!