Doorbell

A bell to fix onto a door so that you can be alerted when a visitor arrives. This one, admirably mechanical and unelectrical, has become increasingly intermittent since I moved in, then last week it stopped working altogether. 

If I were paid at minimum wage for the time I have spent removing it from the door, where it had been painted in several times over, cleaning out the coagulated oil and dust, freeing the spring then trying to discover how it's meant to work and whether I could encourage it to do so again... If all that, I'd nearly have been able to afford one of those super-duper ones that send your secrets to Google's Cloud. 

I don't want a Google Spy but I have given up on this. It's too fiddly and time-consuming and even if I did get it working I still wouldn't be able to hear it when I'm in the garden. So tomorrow I shall go out and buy two cheap bits of battery-powered plastic, one to screw onto the door and the other to put in my pocket when I'm communing with the compost heap.

I'd still quite like to get this working though, simply for the cunningness of it. I might need a chat with the brother who can mend everything.

This evening distanced Daughter and I watched a shared-screen video together, stopping it at key points to talk about it. 75 minutes of lecture, almost 3 hours on the call. Very satisfying. I wonder whether we would have done this if we'd been able to meet.