Rather taken aback to hear the name of the town I spent my formative years in.  I lived in Tenbury from 0-2 and then the nearby village on the other side of the river until I was 11.

The town was hit hard by the floods last month, and this evening, the town was highlighted in the evening Radio 4 headlines as hit again by flooding.

There are some dramatic pictures of the floods from last month on Flickr.  The water was at waist height as far from the river as Caldicotts! Other photos also worth seeing.

I went to the Savoy Cinema on Sunday evening to see Oceans Thirteen.  Unable to find anyone else who wanted to see it who hadn’t seen it before, I went on my own.

The Savoy is in Lenton, a suburb of Nottingham near the University that these days is nearly entirely inhabited by students.  At this time of year, when the University term has finished, the area is almost entirely deserted.

I do like the Savoy, and haven’t been there for ages. It’s the only cinema left in Nottingham that was there during the war.  Their ads call it the only independent cinema in the city. The large screen has been subdivided, and ten years ago or so (it was after I moved here) they opened another screen in a small room, with only 50 seats.  It feels almost like a living room, but has a full size projector in the room behind.

And it’s that screen I was in on Sunday evening.  On my own.

The point of going there was to help send more money their way in their off-season.  Now I’m worrying I made them spend far more money to show a film just to me than I put over the counter.  There were a few other people there seeing other films, but probably between us, there were fewer punters than staff – they had a barman, a ticket collector, a projectionist and a box-office woman.

Still, they’re showing lots more films I still want to see, so I will probably go back.  Maybe even this evening.

So, holidaying in Switzerland, I bought a cuckoo clock.

I’m not sure why. I went out saying it was the last thing I wanted to buy and as we went into the cuckoo clock shop, I forbade P from buying one.

We went to a shop in Montreux that boasted “the only cuckoo cave in the world” – it turned out to be a room in the back of the shop decked out to look like a cave with anything up to 200 clocks in it, all of them just a few minutes away from 12noon on their dials.

There was a huge variety, in varying degrees of tastefulness, from ‘almost’ to ‘OHMYGODMYEYES!’ in prices from just over 100CHF to nearly 4000, real mechanical ones and battery operated ones. There were even some that played tunes every hour, had dancing mannequins and turned themselves off at night.

The lady in the shop gave us a very detailed demonstration of lots of different types, and how they worked, and how much space you need. They need to be over 6′ off the ground to have enough drop for the pine-cone shaped weights that keep the mechanism going.

Here was my out! I could have said – there’s nowhere in my house with a six foot drop. Or even – the cats will play with the chains and pull the clock off the wall. Or even indeed, no, actually, I don’t want a cuckoo clock.

But somehow, I got suckered into buying one of them. The cheapest mechanical one, which came in three versions, tat, bling and BLING. We got the least bling one with tasteful birds etc around it. It cuckoos on the hour and the half hour, and also has a gong noise it makes at the same time:

So far, every time it sounds the hour, it makes P laugh. We haven’t forgotten to wind it and it actually keeps reasonably good time.

And the cats have been good, and not chased the chains. But I think they’re biding their time, and one day, the cuckoo will be catfood: