Food for thought

I had a pretty busy weekend. I had dinner with one of housemates from university on Friday night. We used to see each other very week but over the last year or so we haven’t been able to see each other so much, so it was time for a catch up. She is also a very good cook, so it was also time for her to feed me again. We talked about loads of things and one of the things I mentioned was that I had been to a lecture at LSE on Monday and, as it turned out C knew a lot about the work of the guy who gave the lecture (this was the lecture incidentally) and not only does she know a lot about him but actually has written various article related to his and others work (on uncertainty in the work place etc). I was surprised that she knew who he was, let alone writing articles about him. We have very different careers and one the surface you would think they have very little in common but it is weird how often our lives cross each others both in work and outside.

Saturday I went over to G’s to do a mass tidy up of what is meant to be G’s bedroom but generally has more of a resemblance to an apocalypse. As I seem to recall I managed to spend a lot of time sorting it out on my own because G was off doing other things, but I did manage to create order out of chaos. I think I am going back next weekend so that we can try and keep up the momentum and get rid of various things. G often has trouble sleeping and an untidy bedroom apparently can be a big contributor to that, so hopefully this will improve things.

We then went out for dinner in the evening and ate at a Colombian restaurant, which was quite nice. We had intended to eat at a particularly Italian restaurant but when it came to it G couldn’t remember where it was so we ate at the Colombian place instead. I imagine this is a very ignorant comment, but quite a lot of it did seem fairly similar to Mexican food.

Then yesterday we went for a stroll near where I live and bought some cheese at a French market, which was really nice. I spent quite a bit of time reading War and Peace and am now on something like page 800 – only another 550 to go… I think that makes me about 60% of the way through the book, not that I am counting.

Under the skin

A few weeks ago I heard a certain famous explorer give a talk (he shall remain nameless because what I am going to say is quite personal about him, but there are clearly a limited number of people I could be referring to). He gave a talk giving his tales of expeditions and tests of strength and endurance. Should I ever have had an ambition of being an explorer, they were knocked on the head that day because living in a tent unable to step outside for months on end and running the risk of constant frost bite etc is not my idea of fun.

Anyway, at the end of the talk the person I was sat next to asked him what he saw as his greatest achievement and he replied that it was that his marriage had endured (although his wife has now died). She then went up and spoke to him afterwards and he thanked her for asking that question and he talked to her about how he worried that his constant striving for more and more challenges and somehow contributed to his wife getting ill and dying. She replied that she suspected his wife knew that had he had to give up his expeditions he would always have lived a life that was dissatisfying and somehow would never have quite been who he wanted to be, so in reality she probably supported him in what he did because she wanted what was best for him. He thanked her for what she’d said and said he’d never thought of it like that and would think about that some more. I was just really struck by how we can look at people who are able to conquer the world and think that somehow they must be totally different to you and me, but they can have the same fears and anxieties and need the same reassurances as us. We are all vulnerable in our own ways, regardless of how we are seen by the world around us.

It's not going to kill you...

In the past I have expressed concerns about what my hands come into contact with when I travel on the tube each day. Well, it seems I had even more to fear than I thought. If you never pay attention to any other advice that I might give, please pay attention to this: You should wash your hands after you go to the toilet. It’s one of those things that should become second nature to you: use the toilet, flush, wash your hands and then dry them. The thought of coming into contact with other people’s faecal matter is really quite abhorrent and I may now have to disinfect anything I might wish to come into contact with on the tube.

You should do it for your own benefit. Let alone anyone else’s. Think of how often your hands get near to your mouth, how often you use your hands to eat, how many other people you come into contact with. When you go to the toilet and you flush the toilet and then unlock the cubicle door, think how many people have done exactly the same thing before you and have therefore left their own ‘intimate samples’ on the toilet flush or lock. Even if you think you are somehow immune to your own waste products then surely you still don’t want to be wandering around with other people’s on your hands. Come on people, how difficult is it? It’s not going to kill you. Honest!

I sent the article to G and pointed out that the problem seemed to get worse the further north you go in the country, so people in Scotland surely should only be approached if you are wearing a full protective suit. For some reason G was not amused by this.

Mother knows best

I woke up yesterday morning and felt decidedly sleepy. I have been quite busy of late and have various things ticking round in my head and so on and it’s all just made me feel very tired. I guess ploughing through War and Peace isn’t the most relaxing thing either, but I have started it and I intend to finish it, even if it kills me. Anyway I managed to get my act together enough to get both me and G out the door for work and we got on the tube and I was reading my book and suddenly my blood ran cold as I remembered that I was meant to have dropped my car off to be repaired. Somehow I had just totally forgotten. I can’t think of another instance where I have totally forgotten to do something like that.

So I got off the tube, phoned my boss to tell him what was happening and headed home. Strangely on the way to the station I had seen a plane boarding pass on the pavement and as I walked home I picked it up and it was mine from when I went to Manchester last week. I guess I must have dropped that on the way home last night. Anyway I got home and drove my car to the garage and arrived at work about 10.30am in the end. Not a great start to the day. My memory seems to be doing bizarre things at the moment, particularly my short term memory and it also now seems that I am discarding items in the street. This is not a good sign. I did get loads of work done yesterday and only got out of work just in time to get to the garage about 5 minutes before it closed.

In other news, I may have mentioned before that my mum has always said that I’m not allowed to eat kebabs (because, of course, I always do what my mother says) – and now I know why.

Interesting

Yesterday I overheard some colleagues talking about the programme on Channel 4 on Sunday night “Britain's Got The Pop Factor And Possibly A New Celebrity Jesus Christ Soapstar Superstar Strictly On Ice” and were saying how TV had reached a new low that people had to have such issue sin their life to be on these programmes and how they exploited people etc. They then brought me into the conversation and asked if I had seen it and I somewhat sheepishly said “you know that was a spoof don’t you?”. They both looked utterly shocked by this and took some convincing that it wasn’t a real programme. I would have thought Peter Kay dressed as a woman was a bit of a give away but clearly not. Or even the title of the programme for that matter. Or… well pretty much the entire content of it. Sometimes my colleagues scare me.

I went to a talk at LSE last night which was on probability. I have to see that it was not a particularly accessible talk. They lecturer was a philosopher who had quite some disdain for economists, econometrics and pretty much anyone who tried to predict any sort of trend. But he did make some interesting and challenging points, three of which I give you here:

- Probability is not in itself important, impact is.

- Past performance does not necessarily predict the future, particularly if this is based on creating predictions based on rare events. This is primarily due to lack of data and that when we do have data we often impose our theories on it rather than allowing the data to speak for itself. Therefore we create trends based on flawed theories and that is partly how things like the current economic crash. People looked at past performance and predicted that it would continue based on drawing incorrect assumptions.

- It is important to be able to say “I don’t know”, especially if pretending you do know something could have a high impact. On a more basic level, which was evident from the attitude of the lecturer though, it is also quite freeing to feel able to say you don’t know something. You state what you do know and you admit what you don’t. By doing this you are acknowledging that the world can be unpredictable and that we don’t know everything and probably never will. Accepting that we live in a world of uncertainty is part of coming to terms with understanding that economies crash, floods happen, society changes and so on – and can also mean that you can stand up in front of a lecture theatre and be asked lots of intellectual questions and be willing to say “I don’t know”. Somehow I think it would take a huge shift in people’s thinking for this approach to become generally acceptable but there is something quite refreshing about it. We live in a culture where we have to be experts and always want to win the argument, but what if we could just admit we don’t know everything and we don’t need to? Interesting.

Progress

Another weekend over – and for October, it was a very pleasant and sunny one. G and I continued our monthly walks around London and did a four and a half mile walk, which was really nice and we walked by the Grand Union Canal and through lots of really nice park areas and so on. We did mange to fit in drinking a cup of tea along the way as well, so that was good too. G had always been a bit mixed in terms of enthusiasm for walking but seems to have got far more into the spirit of it of late. This is probably a good thing as we are thinking about ascending Ben Lomond next year.

You may have noticed that there is a financial crisis going on at the moment and so if you want to give to others in a rather low cost way to you (i.e. it costs a small bit of time, but no money) then you could try the free rice game and give rice through the UN Food Programme and test your general knowledge at the same time. Alternatively, if you want to try and get a £10 Amazon voucher, then if you look at this thread on Martin’s Money Tips, it tells you a way that you can do that.

In other news, I am over a third of the way through War and Peace and am still enjoying it. If I carry on at this rate, I should have it read in about six weeks time. That is quite a lot of reading still to go...

Poetic Justice

So I went to Manchester yesterday, but I’m not sure if it was because of the early start or something else but by the time I got home I felt so sick that I immediately had to take some anti-nausea medication and some pain killers. The day itself wasn’t stressful or difficult, but by the end of it I just felt terrible. Fortunately I live really close to someone else who had been there and we got a taxi together back from the airport which meant I got home quite speedily but by then my hands were sweating and all I could think about was finding someway not to feel so awful. After taking various bits of medication and not doing a lot for a couple of hours I felt better and G came over anyway and cooked some dinner and made us both lunch for today, so I didn’t really have to do anything.

On the flight on the way home I was reading The Times, which incidentally I think has had some really good reporting on the current financial crisis, and I was amused by a letter which said:

“Sir, With the banks coming cap in hand to the taxpayer, shouldn’t we impose monthly penalty charges for administering an overdraft facility?”

Oh, wouldn’t that be poetic justice.

On an entirely different note, this year is 90 years since the end of the First World War. I have been reading a couple books connected to the First World War of late, most notably Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain. Anyway, the Royal British legion will be doing something extra to the selling of poppies this year. You can fill out a dedication to appear on a poppy, which will be ‘planted’ at the Menin Gate in Flanders. I actually have a form that arrived via the post (which has the poppy in it so I can write the message myself) and whilst part of the purpose of the appeal is to honour the dead, it is also a way by which to raise money for current veterans. Whilst there is no obligation to give money, if you did make a tribute then you might want to consider a donation as well. I actually have no particular connection with the armed forces, but I am just sometimes reminded that we have many privileges as a result of the sacrifices of the generations that preceded us.

Incoherent

An early start today, which is not ideal, but also an early finish, which is some compensation I guess. Although, there’s quite a long journey to Manchester and back so it’s going to be a tiring day.

I seem to have a lot of stuff going round my head at the moment. Mainly stuff to do with work and around management and leadership and delegation and dumping stuff on people – there is a kind of hierarchical approach to that list and I am trying to get my head round all of it. I realise I’m not explaining myself very clearly, but that’s nothing new. Then there’s other stuff to do with getting upset on Friday night and so on. It wasn’t crying that bothered me, by the way, it was all the other stuff that went with it, that I might get round to explaining some other time. Hmm, yes that’s even less well explained.

Anyway, taxis to get and Manchester to visit. Hopefully I will find a way to be coherent by the time I get there, particularly as I have to speak for a few minutes at the meeting.

Tedious

I have just finished reading Fahrenheit 451. Well worth a read and there were passages in that book that I thought were jaw-droppingly good – particularly the ones where Beatty was telling Guy Montag why they burn all the books. If you haven’t read it then I would highly recommend it and I found it hard to read that book and not be inspired to want to read others and soak in as much literature and information and poetry and prose as possible.

Yesterday was such a tedious day. Busy but tedious. I have another busy but tedious day ahead today as well doing almost exactly what I did yesterday. In the end after almost 5 hours yesterday I just said that we would have to stop because it was driving me insane. So we now have to pick up where we left off, which is not ideal but I just could not carry on with it yesterday. At least I am out of the office on Thursday and so therefore cannot possibly have to carry on with it then as well. I am going to Manchester for all of about 3 hours, which didn’t seem like a terribly good use of time, but is looking more appealing by the moment.

Over the last couple of days my boss and I have been discussing the credit crunch (did the phrase even exist 18 months ago??) and I suggested that this situation would never have arisen if our finances were invested in the Buildings and Loan in It’s a Wonderful Life. Oh, if only we had Jimmy Stewart to sort out the current crisis.

Mondays

Yesterday was a real Monday morning and so many things seemed to go wrong. I couldn’t get my soda farls to defrost, I forgot my lunch and had to go home for it and I forgot to take my phone to work. There were other things as well, but I have tried to wipe them from my memory so as not to believe that somehow Monday mornings are cursed.

Someone I work with was talking to our IT support people and they put her on a hold for minute while they fixed something. So she wandered off for about 10 minutes and then when she came back to the phone and found there was no-one there she incredulously told me that she couldn’t believe they had hung up. Actually what had happened was that the IT had come back to the phone, found no-one at the other end and then called the office to find out what was going on and told me the outcome of the issue. I am still scratching my head as to why she was surprised that she couldn’t wander off for so long and somehow they’d just be dutifully waiting for her at the end of the line.

My weird colleague continued to harangue me yesterday. He came over to sarcastically comment on my hair cut. I suggested that he choose his words wisely. He then came back a while later and asked if I had a bus map. I didn’t. Finally he came over to tell me about the latest form of flu that is expected to hit the country. I listened briefly and then walked off. Maybe he’ll get the message in the end.

Oh and it seems that it truly does pay to recycle. Although I suspect Tesco will be withdrawing this scheme rather sharply if they have not done so already.

Is that really a moustache or has your eyebrow come down for a drink?

Well, it turned out to be a better weekend than last week was, but had its ups and downs – fortunately more ups than downs though. On Friday night I was meeting up with some of G’s friends for a drink and G was coming along a bit later. I absolutely hate going to the pub on my own and I knew I was likely to get there before anyone else. But I decided to be brave and went along and sat down and had a drink. Time ticked on and no-one else turned up and I couldn’t get hold of G, so after quite some time I decided I’d go home and as I headed for the door, I saw that G’s friends were there. One of them had turned up not long after me and he’d assumed no-one else was there and so had sat down elsewhere. He was so apologetic and after that it was fine.

We did also have a bit of an incident that made everybody really upset. It’s not worth going into the detail of what happened, but it did actually make me cry because I was so upset by it all. I was really surprised by my reaction and need to think about that a bit because it all obviously just hit a really raw nerve.

Anyway the remedy to all of this was moustaches. We were at the Windsor Castle in Marylebone and Friday night was the monthly Handlebar Moustache Club night. Clearly if you are there on that sort of night you need to get into the spirit of it and sport your own moustache. So G managed to acquire some for us and we put them on and spent the rest of the evening chatting in our moustaches. It’s amazing how such things can lighten the mood and I suggest this as a potential solution to any adverse situations, as we had such a laugh for the rest of the evening. Despite the preceding paragraphs it was actually a very nice evening.

Saturday morning I went and got my hair cut and while I was having my hair washed an ambulance turned up as one of the rather older clientele had fainted. I don’t think this was a reflection on the hairdressing she had undergone, but they did take her away in the ambulance anyway. I got out with a decent haircut and all my limbs intact. So I take that as a success.

Marvellous

I’m glad it’s Friday. It’s been a mixed week, which was not helped by yesterday finding out that this really major piece of work we are doing might be stopped. I think the chances of that happening are low, but it could be totally reshaped and not go forward in the way we would want. Whilst not ideal, I am at least more able to be philosophical about it than the new member of staff who has just started working for me. I think she thought it might not be worth turning up for work today but I assured her that there would still be work to do and next week we will have far more of an idea of where we are at. I won’t actually know if she turns up today though (although I am sure she will!) because I am not in the office. I’m at a meeting that is meant to be inspiring my colleagues and me to be marvellous. We shall see how successful that is.

It is probably a good job I am out of the office anyway, as my little Australian stalker is driving me mad at the moment. He keeps coming over and making comments and asking unnecessary questions and just generally being annoying. It is very tempting to just tell him to go away but that a) wouldn’t be very polite and b) would not be very professional and c) I am a lot more senior than him and would set a very bad example. I may have to arrange to have him killed though. My boss sometimes catches the same train as him (although perhaps generally tries to avoid doing so) and this could therefore be of assistance in formulating a plan. Now that really would be marvellous.

Crossing lines

So, I had a very busy day yesterday which included a meeting yesterday afternoon which had been running for three and a half hours and we still had about three hours more to go if we wanted to cover everything. One of the other people thought we should continue, I said no that we would have to make time at another point. If we’d carried on, I might as well not have bothered going home last night.

I was sitting at my desk at lunch time yesterday and my Australian stalker came over to speak to me. He’d left my payslip on my desk and seemed to want me to express my delight at this – even though I had already checked my payslip via our IT system and also seen the money had gone into my bank account. Anyway, for some reason he then started to make some comments about weight, at which point I told him that perhaps he should choose another subject. But being his somewhat oblivious self he just carried on and was making comments about where he thought I might be storing some extra weight. In the end I pointed out to him that somehow he always managed not just to cross a line but go over it with size twenty shoes. He still didn’t quite get that he should back off, so I just shook my head at him and returned to what I was doing. My new member of staff was sitting next to me and I have no idea what she made of the conversation, but she politely declined to make any comment.

It's the thought that counts

I had a meeting yesterday afternoon which started with some saying “I’m really sorry if you can smell a wet dog smell. It’s actually my shoes.” It ended with us joking about a plate of biscuits (its sort of an in joke based on something my boss did a while ago) and a Blind Date type (rhetorical) question of “if you were a biscuit, what biscuit what you would be?” to which one of the people at the meeting instantly piped up that she would be a Viennese Whirl. Well, I never.

If you happen to have a spare moment late this morning and wish to use it by sending out some positive thoughts my way or to the powers that be then feel free to do so. It would be much appreciated. Nowt serious, it would just be of assistance and I may explain why at some point – but you’ll only find out if it works out, so get to it later this morning.

Observations

I went out for dinner with my friend K last night. She is one of those people who is always good at giving me her take on things - and she is also normally very accurate in her observations. So as ever, she totally analysed my life and quizzed me about various things. We worked together a few years ago and have stayed in touch, we do walk for the same organisation still but she was off sick from work for about a year and only recently came back. We did see each other while she was on sick leave but it is a bit easier now she is back at work. She is in the process of trying to emigrate to the other side of the world though, which would not be quite so convenient. Although good for holidays.

I did also find out that she has read War and Peace three times. I think once would be enough of an achievement. I am actually doing ok with reading War and Peace and have read about 150 pages so far (over 10%!). I have been surprised at the amount of humour in the book and I am finding it a good read so far. I am reading another book on the tube at the moment though, which is The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, to give me a bit more of a mix in my reading.

We went to Wagamamas for dinner and that was nice enough, except that they forgot to cook K’s food and so I had practically finished mine before hers had even arrived. The food was nice enough but I wasn’t actually terribly impressed by the particular branch we went to and am not sure I would go there again. At least it was vaguely healthy though, which given the amount I am eating out at the moment, has to be a good thing.

Turn around...

Monday again… it was a fairly busy weekend. I met up with G on Saturday and we had lunch at the Cafe in the Crypt at St Martin’s in the Field. G is not very well at the moment and so was craving warm food, so I figured that was a good place to get some decent food and then just sit for a while and chat. Then we went towards Piccadilly and had a cup of coffee and ate cake (it was a very strenuous day). We did look for some new work shirts for me but I couldn’t find anything suitable, so we gave up on that. G then went home to carry on being ill and I went back to my place.

On Sunday my sister and I took our parents out for dinner at Gordon Ramsay’s Boxwood Café, which was very pleasant, although, unsurprisingly, not the place to go if you are on a tight budget.

When I got home I had done less than 1000 steps all day and so went for a walk in the sunshine. I found that a few minutes walk from where I live I have a really great view across London, which I was really surprised about and will have to go back and have another look sometime soon.

Then yesterday evening I phoned a friend but then realised that she is a big fan of Poirot and there was a new episode on last night so I cut the conversation short so she could watch it. Then I phoned a friend from school and chatted to her husband for a few minutes, as they had just got back from hospital because their son had been really ill with suspected meningitis. They still don’t know what’s wrong with him and are holding a bed for him at the hospital but let him go home as there was no advantage in keeping him in.

I saw the new Cadbury advert on TV last night, but actually saw it first over at the Vicious Chicken’s blog. Anyway go here and watch it. Another marvel from the people who make the best chocolate in the world*.


Update: I did correct the typo that seemed to suggest I wear shorts to work... The world could not cope with such a thing, particularly on a slightly chilly September morning.

* yea, yea I know all the stuff about Belgian chocolate having so much more cocoa in it etc but I’d still choose Cadbury’s over any other chocolate and to be honest I have a gorilla on my side, so it you want to argue about it, I am going to win.

Probing

G and I went out for dinner last night. We had accrued enough points with Toptable to get two free meals, so we went to Awana in Chelsea. It was very nice food, but I did fell we were a bit shoved in a corner, but then I guess they were never likely to make a fortune out of a free meal. I would recommend going there but it is quite pricey so you would probably want to go there on some sort of offer.

I was travelling home on the tube on Wednesday night and there were quite a few delays. I have concluded that it is never encouraging when a message comes over the tannoy saying “looks it all just really confusing to be honest and the train we thought was on its way here has disappeared, so we’re not really sure what’s happening”. Yes, I think that probably is quite confusing. Honest, though.

I also overheard two of my colleagues talking the other day and one of them had been to hospital and it seems he had undergone some form of internal examination that involved a lot of prodding and probing. My other colleague, a rather well spoken chap just replied “yes, the finger lingers”. I raised an eyebrow and decided that sometimes there are times when you should just let a comment go and continued with my work.

Anyway, a fairly busy weekend ahead, as I have a whole load of things I have to prepare for next week and it involves various bits of research. On Sunday my sister and I are taking our parents out to a Gordon Ramsay restaurant for lunch, which I hope is nice. At least, based on his programmes, the kitchens should be clean.

Have a good weekend all.

Absolute Beginners

Well, I survived last night. Think “The Kids from Fame” - but set on the Orkney Islands. If I go back I might invest in a head band and some multicoloured leg warmers. Nobody else would be wearing that, but I think it would give off an air of professionalism.

So it was a beginners class for Scottish dancing but I was immediately suspicious about how many people were actually beginners based on the number of people who were there wearing proper Scottish dancing shoes. I was even more suspicious when during the first dance the chap opposite me asked what the music was going to be and then gave a knowing nod of his head at the answer. I think there are a number of people who have done the beginners class and just keep coming back year after year. I’m not sure if that is a sign of success or failure.

Anyway, I managed to keep up with most of it and there was this one old chap who was just so off the pace and people were constantly having to direct him that he helped to cover up any errors made by anyone else. He seemed like a really lovely chap and he persevered. I did also get asked to dance by a boy of about 12, which I thought was really sweet of him. After each dance you had to find someone new as a partner, which was not something I relished but fortunately it wasn’t too traumatic and not like being at a school disco with people awkwardly sidling up to someone and asking them to dance and then getting turned down and lurking by the wall all the rest of the evening.

Will I go back? We shall see… I reckon if I don’t go back next week, I won’t go back at all, as I will worry that I am too far off the pace, but it was quite good fun once I got over my initial reservations. It certainly is not my first choice of things to do on a Wednesday night but there is a part of me that thinks it is probably good for me to do something that makes me feel a bit uncomfortable. I enjoyed it far more by the end, but the jury is still out on whether this is ever going to be something I truly enjoy.

All singing, all dancing

I took my car to the garage yesterday morning. It took 15 minutes to drive there and 15 minutes to drive home. It took about 30 seconds for them to look at the car, so I can see why it wasn’t worth leaving it. They will write to me with a quote. I had previously spoken to another Ford dealer and they would have charged me £40 to look at it (deductible from the bill if they carry out the work). I can see they don’t want to be wasting their time quoting on cars they then don’t repair but £40 for 30 seconds work would work out at £4800 an hour. I am in the wrong job.

My mum got my TV fixed yesterday. The chap came out to take the TV away but then couldn’t work out why the previous chap didn’t just take the front of the TV and clean up the switch. So he did that and now it’s fine and there’s no need for them to take the TV away and bring it back again. Marvellous.

I may be partaking of some Scottish related activity tonight. Despite not having the best sense of rhythm. This may turn out to be a huge mistake. I, or others, may end up hospitalised. *takes a deep breath*

Epic

I am taking my car to a Ford dealer in a few minutes to get a proper quote for repairing the bumper so that I can tell my neighbour how much it will cost. What I really want to do is to drop it off and head to work and they can then inspect it at their leisure and tell me later how much it will cost. The chap I spoke to kept insisting that they will be able to look at it as soon as I arrive though, which is helpful but will then mean I have to drive home and then head off to work from there, so will end up arriving at work quite late. So that’s not quite so helpful. Anyway, we shall see.

I was talking to mum on the phone yesterday lunch time and was telling her that I have just started reading War and Peace. I am not entirely convinced I will make it to the end but am going to give it a go. I have tracked down some notes on it so that every few chapters I can check I am keeping up and also plan to read some other more light-hearted books so that I have a bit of variety. I was telling mum how long the book is (over 1300 pages) and that it takes me something like 2 minutes per page (it is small print so there are a lot of lines on a page). That means it will take about 2600 minutes to read it, which is about 43 hours. Mum wanted me to do nothing from then on until Wednesday lunch time except read the book. I suggested that wasn’t very convenient, so now she wants me to start at 7pm on Friday night and keep reading until I get to the end. Mum doesn’t seem to think I need to sleep and will have plenty of time for that on Sunday night in order to be refreshed for work the following day. I am not entirely convinced. I am also not sure that it will make the book seem less daunting either. I have read about 1% of it so far. There is still a looooooooooooong way to go. I have a slightly more realistic target of hoping I can have read it all by Christmas. I have not specified Christmas of which year as yet.

Bad choices

Another weekend over and a fairly busy one at that. One of G’s friends came for dinner on Saturday night and then stayed over. That was a pleasant evening even though we did do a pretty major clean in anticipation of R coming over. Not that my place is particularly dirty or that R is the cleaning police, it just seemed a good reason to make a bit of an effort. G cooked a very nice fish pie for dinner and we followed that with apple pie and custard. Lovely.

Then yesterday it was my parents’ fortieth wedding anniversary. They had arranged a part – or actually mum had as my father did absolutely nothing towards it either in advance or on the day. It was nice to see various people I have not seen in years and also various relatives and there was also lots of really nice food, some of which forms my packed lunch for today.

I potentially have a fairly busy week ahead but some of my plans are dependent on when I can drop my car off to get a quote for getting it repaired. At the moment dropping it off won’t be a problem as I can do that on the way to work but I wouldn’t be able to pick it up, which is not so great. G wants to go to a Scottish dancing lesson this week and for me to go along as well. I’m not 100% keen on this plan and it takes me back to memories of attending the Woodcraft Folk, which despite what it may sound like was neither a cult or involved any naked tree hugging, but was a mixed gender version of Brownies and Scouts - and not my cup of tea at all. I just have many memories of having to do lots of country dancing. So we’ll see if I can bring myself to join G or if my car will save me.

Returning to my parents for a moment, you may wonder what the secret is of staying together for forty years. As my sister discovered when she was trying to find out who had also got married in the same year she found that they were either dead or divorced. Encouraging… Anyway, I would suggest that it is not down to my father’s choice in cards. My father chose a card that some might think reflects his sense of humour, but let me tell you, it doesn’t. It reflects his inability to make any effort and that he will buy the first thing that he sees. It was not this exact card, but this was basically what my father gave mum as an anniversary card. He’s such a charmer.

Avast me hearties

It’s Friday! Hooray! Not a moment too soon. It’s a fairly busy weekend though, as one of G’s friends is coming over on Saturday and then on Sunday it’s my parents’ 40th wedding anniversary and they are having a party. Quite how my parents made it to 40 years is one of those things that will continue to perplex me. I’m not sure they are people to go to for marriage advice – and in fact my father has probably forgotten most of the last 40 years anyway, as he only seems to be aware of what is on television at any given moment.

Yesterday I ate some coconut ice and I think I had rather a sugar rush, which made G and I wandering around the supermarket much more amusing and then when we were driving home we had to take it in turns calling out animals (although G did try to sneak in a leprechaun and an elf). I think I should keep my sugar intake to a minimum in future.

I spoke to a couple of Ford garages yesterday about my smashed bumper and it is going to cost a minimum of £350 to get it repaired. I will have to break the news to my neighbour and find out what he wants to do. I bet he will wish he had been a bit more careful now.

Anyway, in order to avoid being the odd one out today you may find it helpful to know that today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. I expect you to telling people to walk the plank and shivering your timbers all day. Not convinced? Well it seems this will also be the perfect day to use all those pirate chat up lines you’d been practicing. Arrrrrrrr, as the pirates say.

Incidents

Yesterday:

I sorted out the John Lewis problem in that at least the chap came round to look at my TV. But he needs to take it away to repair it and he didn’t want to leave me without a TV. My mum let him in and despite looking in my bedroom failed to see the other TV in there, which would have meant he could have taken the TV then and there. Mum’s going to sort it all out though, so I can’t complain really.

One of my neighbours came round to see me. He’d reversed into my car earlier in the day and cracked my bumper. He was very apologetic and is going to pay for it – and probably could have got away with not telling me, as I hadn’t noticed it and would have probably seen it at some point and thought it had happened elsewhere. So I’m going to get a quote to get a new bumper and he’s going to pay for it and I just told him not to worry about it and we’d sort it out at some point in the next few days.

I got an e-mail from a friend to say that her in-laws (who live in Nigeria) were making their toast in the toaster and they could smell burning. They popped the toast up but it was fine so they buttered it and ate it. But they could still smell burning and peered into the toaster. There they found a cooked mouse that had crawled into the toaster and met a fiery fate when they sat down to breakfast that morning. Ick.

The same friend texted me last night to say that she was doing her ironing and had just ironed a large spider that was hidden in a shirt. There were legs and remnants everywhere. Whilst I agreed it was horrid, I did commend her for ensuring there is now one less spider in the world.

The BBC lost their pips. What is the world coming to?

Yesterday

Some things that happened yesterday:

I went to the Midlands. On the way back our tickets were inspected, the people who were sitting behind me showed their tickets. They were meant to be going to the neighbouring town, they had got on the non-stop service to London. Oops.

Overheard mobile phone conversation – “That IT course was so annoying. If he had used that word one more time I would have punched him in the face. I mean, is functionality even a word?*”

I had to conclude that John Lewis is a bit rubbish (again). They are meant to be coming out to repair my TV today, as the on/ off button keeps getting stuck. They were meant to phone to tell me if they are coming in the morning or afternoon, so that mum can be there to let them in. They didn’t phone. I phoned them but had to leave a message with someone who said they’d call back. They didn’t phone back. Grr…

I added the Black Box widget to my blog. It’s on the side bar, go click on it. It is to do with this.

I read Maggi Dawn’s blog and liked what she said in her latest post, particularly her quote (quoting herself…) saying:

“Regardless of what is sensible, and regardless of what you think you "ought" to do, which of the courses ahead of you makes you feel alive, makes your heart open wider, makes you feel hopeful and as if the future is opening up not closing down? That is the route you should go."

*Yes it is.

Rambling

The picture is of a Scottish loch (I can’t remember which right now). There were times when we drove though parts of Argyll and the lochs were just so beautiful. On Friday we went to Glencoe and a couple of the lochs were so perfectly still that there was a fantastic reflection on them. If you ever have the chance to go to Scotland, go to the Glencoe region, it is so beautiful there.

Being in Argyll we were not far from a lot of the places I went through when I walked the West Highland Way a couple of years ago – a 95 mile walk from Milngavie to Fort William. It was really nice to go back and see places that I saw previously weighted down with a back pack. It did also bring back the memory of having such a raw sole to one of my feet that one night when we were staying in a youth hostel I was in such pain that a stranger helped me in the middle of the night and the only way we could cover the size of the sore was for her to give me a panty liner to cushion my foot. If you do use this method as a plaster one day then make sure you put the absorbent side against your foot and secure it with some tape, don’t attempt to stick it with the pad’s adhesive. Just in case there was any doubt about that. Anyway, it worked a treat. I would recommend walking the West Highland Way, just make sure you have toughened your feet up a bit first.

G and I drank quite a lot of Irn Bru while we were in Scotland and G also mentioned that you can get Irn Bru bars. So we went in search of these, which have now actually been slightly rebranded and are Wham bars. I think the reason why they were rebranded is that many years ago Marti Pellow’s (he of Wet Wet Wet fame) girlfriend sued the manufacturers, as she believed that the Irn Bru bars had damaged her teeth. Well, it is made of girders. Apparently.

I leave you with the latest Irn Bru advert (some details about it are here).

Highlights of the Highlands

Another holiday over and it’s back to work today. It’s amazing I managed to drag myself out of bed this morning. Anyway a few highlights of the time away.

Meeting G’s family went well. The most amusing moments (taking into account that we were there for G’s sister’s wedding) were:

- The priest getting the couple to say their vows and then saying to the congregation “I now present you all with the new Mr and Mrs [completely wrong surname]”. Oops. I did have real trouble not inappropriately laughing for the rest of the service.
- G’s dad was wearing a kilt, not that unusual for a Scot at a wedding, but it did make it all the more amusing when he kept going up to dance and at one stage was getting on down to “I’m just a love machine”. You would probably have to have been there to have picked up on quite how amusing that was. I think he had been drinking the cheeky water, as the Scots would say.
- G and I were staying at the bride and groom’s house and the following morning we got up and I was tidying the living room up a bit and found two pairs of underpants behind the sofa cushions. I believe these belonged to the two teenage (kilted) ushers, who it seems at the last minute found the courage to wear the kilts with no pants on.

We had arranged for a hire car to be dropped off so we could go away for a week and were expecting something like this:


But in fact were given something like this:




Nice car to drive, but slightly rubbish acceleration. It’s a good job I am used to driving all sorts of different cars as I ended up doing all the driving and it was a big car.

The Argyll region of Scotland was lovely and well worth a visit. The weather was a bit mixed but didn’t stop us doing anything. We ate lots, saw lots and did some walking in a vague effort not to return about a stone heavier than when we went.

I’ll upload some photos in the next few days so you can see a bit of what we did. But now it’s time for work…

Meetings

Right well, I am now on leave and am off to King’s Cross station in a bit to go and hop on a train to Scotland. We are going there for G’s sister’s wedding, which is tomorrow. This is the first time I meeting G’s family. I have somewhat mixed feelings about this…

Anyway… on Saturday morning we’re picking up a hire car and are then driving off to Argyll to stay on a cottage for a week, which hopefully will give us time to recover from the previous day and also to do lots of nice relaxing things. Then we’re flying back the following Saturday, as there is lots of engineering work on the trains so it would have taken hours longer than normal to get back by train.

When I get home I will find out if the chap who will have been doing various bits of work on where I live has a) done the work and b) not stolen everything. I should have a newly painted bedroom ceiling, a working light in my bedroom (both remnants of having the boiler installed), the light switch in the kitchen should be the right way up, the shed re-roofed and a wall painted, plus maybe a bit of work in the garden. Or I will have no possessions. It will make an interesting return to London.

So have a good week or so all and expect freakishly good weather on Scotland, as clearly it wouldn’t dare rain while I am there on holiday.

Differences

I was thinking about the cotton bud incident and I do need to find another way to clean my ears. It’s not that I think there is a huge chance it will happen again in the near future, after all I have gone 33 years without it ever having happened before. What bothers me is the complete waste of everyone’s time that such things are. If that walk in centre didn’t have to get things out of people’s ears each day they would see 10 less patients – and therefore presumably see other patients more quickly. I will also never get those two hours of my life back that I spent waiting to be seen. I felt like my life had plummeted into the depths of boredom. A complete waste of time that was entirely avoidable. I just think a bit more care and everyone’s lives could be made a bit easier. So don’t be sticking things in your ears people. Of course G did suggest an alternative way to remove the blockage in my ear, which was by blowing in the opposite ear and seeing if it would pass through the vacant space in between and deal with the problem. G had much practice at using this sort of technique the previous weekend when trying to unblock the hoover tube. I am not sure I liked the analogy. I politely declined the offer of assistance.

I was interested in an article on the BBC yesterday. It reported a study into how people view the justice system and where their responsibility lies in tackling bad or criminal behaviour. It seems that Brits did not do well in the survey and were the most like to abdicate responsibility. I could comment on many things in the report and I think it is a sad indictment of our society if it true, but I was struck by an interesting sentence in the article that said

Crime has become so "nationalised and politicised" that the home secretary and the prime minister are held responsible for every assault

I think there is a lot of truth in that sentence and not just in relation to crime, but in a lot of other areas too. If someone is stabbed, if a document is lost, if a database fails, if companies go bankrupt, if people can’t afford to pay their mortgage… somehow it is all the government’s fault. I’m not trying to defend Labour and I mean government in the general sense rather than the one that is currently in office, but it seems that somehow any failure is entirely the fault of those in power. But surely life is so much more complicated than that. We like to think that we are autonomous beings, but somehow we are unwilling to consider that we might somehow have some responsibility in those things too. If someone loses their house it might be due to redundancy or some other unfortunate event, but equally it might be that they took out a mortgage that was beyond their means and they gambled on the economy remaining buoyant. The economy normally goes in cycles of prosperity and recession and if you rely on things always being good that is a very short term view. Clearly it is terrible if someone loses their home, but sometimes we do play a part in that.

Equally with crime, whilst the amount of money the government put into policing and other crime related issues plays a significant part in tackling offending but equally so do we – do people know where their children are? Do we protect our property adequately? Do we report crime? Do we intervene when we see a crime being committed, if only by dialling 999?

I just think that sometimes we see others, particularly politicians, being the root of the problem and forget to wonder what we could do to make a difference.

I know it’s a bit of a cliché but there is that part of me that thinks that, at least in part, something Gandhi said is the answer:

“Be the change you want to see in the world”

You hum it and I'll...

I have found a new thing on the tube that is irritating: Someone listening to their music and occasionally whistling a few bars, all out of tune. Occasionally supplemented by a couple of bars of out of tune humming. Don’t do it. Or I will have to kill you.

Anyway… over the weekend I ate lots of really nice food. For lunch on Sunday G and I had such a good meal, which I would highly recommend. I am not a recipe sharing sort of girl, but I liked this so much that it would be wrong not to pass it on.

Slice up about 500g of courgettes about half a centre long and coat it in a clove of garlic and a tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil.
Place in a frying pan and cook.
Put it on a plate and grate some lemon zest on to it, lemon juice and 2 chopped mild green chillies.
Let it cool and marinate for a while. I think we only left it for about 15 minutes.
Drizzle a tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil over it.
Just before serving scatter some Parmesan on it (cut into small pieces from a block rather than the dried stuff) and about ten grams of fresh mint.
Serve.

We had it with tuna steaks and some noodles. We cooked the noodles and then quickly put it in the frying pan to soak up the remainder of the olive oil and garlic. Worked a treat. It was such a good meal.

Only two days to go and then I am on leave. Not a moment too soon… But it’s September already. How did that happen?

Follow the directions

There are times in your life when you think you should have listened. Times when, despite the instructions telling you otherwise, you decide to do your own thing.

Let me take you back to Friday morning. There I was doing my usual bathroom routine and, as per normal, giving my ears a quick clean with a cotton bud. After a few seconds I thought all was not right and I noticed that there was no cotton wool on the end of the stick. I checked my ear and it didn’t seem to be there and then looked on the floor and it wasn’t there either. I decided that I didn’t know the answer to the question of where the end of the bud had gone and so just carried on. I got dressed and then made my breakfast and tucked into my soda farl. Only every time that I chewed I could hear a sound like cotton wool tearing in my ear. This did not seem normal.

So I went to work and said to my boos I thought I’d better go and get my ear checked and went to the NHS walk in centre a few minutes walk from where I work. Generally they can see people within twenty minutes. Two hours later I finally saw the nurse. She looked in my ear and found the offending item, but couldn’t remove it. So then I had to see another nurse and he syringed my ear and within a matter of seconds all was well. I am not one who is normally very good at seeking medical assistance and would usually have to have a limb having off to even consider it, but I remembered this story and thought it best to get it sorted sooner rather than later.

I learnt a few things on Friday:

- Sometimes it is best to follow the manufacturer’s instructions.
- NHS walk in centres can be incredibly slow. I think each nurse was seeing about six patients an hour.
- I thought there seemed to be a lot of bureaucracy for the nurses that meant if they spent twenty minutes per patient the majority of that time was used to deal with updating the computer etc after the patient had left.
- I am not sure that it is great to hear the nurse dealing with you tell you how much she dislikes her job and is looking to leave.
- I didn’t find out the medical complaint of the person before me, but it certainly involved the nurse having to use a lot of air spray. The mind boggles.
- The walk in centre deals with about 10 patients a day who need their ear syringed.
- I got the distinct impression that what was in my ear was tame compared to most other people.
- It’s true that the smallest thing that you should put in your ear is your elbow.

But there is one thing that is still a mystery. What possible use is there for a cotton bud if you can’t stick it in your ear?

Unidentified

I had a busy day yesterday, not least because I had to go and sort out my new member of staff being evicted from her desk. She is sitting somewhere else at the moment and when she got in yesterday someone was sitting at her desk. I went off to crack some heads together and managed to get it sorted out. I spoke to a couple of people and I did wonder if it might come down to having a punch up with someone else to gain ownership of the desk. Fortunately it didn’t come to that though. I would have won though, as the other person already had an injured hand, so I would have used that to my advantage. Don’t mess with me.

Do you remember doing things for the first time – first day at school, riding a bike, first date? Well do you remember the first time you took a flight? You turned up at the airport, checked in, handed over your luggage and then thought “now where do I go to get on the flight?”. Did you think “I’ll hop on the conveyor belt where I’ve just left my suitcase because that is bound to get me on the flight”? Well, this lady did. They did manage to retrieve her, but only after she had accidentally been sent with a number of unidentified bags to be sorted in Rome before being returned to their owners*.

If you aren’t keen on spiders then don’t look at this link. If it had been me who thought they had a spider like that in my house, I would probably move out and never return. As an antidote to that though, check this out. Awwww. Much cuter.


*Part of that sentence *may* be a lie.

Oblivion

One of the things that I really dislike is going to the supermarket. I don’t mind it so much on my lunch break because I know of a really quiet supermarket a few minutes walk from where I work, but doing my main shop is a real chore. I can sometimes drag myself to Waitrose to buy a few bits to keep me going because that never has very many people in it, but generally it is a task best avoided. A few times this year I have tried to run my supplies right down and then order my shopping on the internet and get it delivered. But last night, having looked on mysupermarket and finding to my surprise that Sainsbury’s came out by far the cheapest, I wandered off to the supermarket.

It was practically deserted. I don’t think there can have been more than about 10 other customers in the whole supermarket. There were more staff than that though and they seemed to look at the customers as an inconvenience wanting to go up and down the aisles to pick up items to put in their trolleys. Odd. I did buy some toilet paper, which is another thing in life that I really object to doing. Clearly I see that it serves a practical purpose and should you ever use my toilet you will not have to worry that there won’t be any available, but it just seems like such a pointless product because you just flush it away. Somehow, I object to that.

Another of life’s dilemmas is choosing passwords for things. So many services we require access to need a password, so how do you choose one? Well, you could pick something of sentimental importance or your favourite football team or some other such thing. Or you could choose something designed to have a bit of a dig at the company who require the password. Is it just me or it is slightly risky to insult a company that could well with a click of a button send your worldly wealth into oblivion?

Keeping your head

I set off for work early yesterday morning, as I wanted to get some stuff done before the new member of my team arrived. But the tube managed to conspire against to me and due to various delays, I only managed to get into work a few minutes earlier than normal. I should have got more sleep. At least my journey was better than that of a woman who was standing on the tube platform who it seems had stepped back from the edge of the platform as the train came in and as she did so she slipped her show came off and fell on to the tracks. She was left with only one shoe, with the other one lying there on the tracks, irretrievable during the rush hour. I guess something rather worse could have happened and losing a shoe was preferable by comparison.

I find that my mornings are now a bit quieter than the last couple of weeks. I had been watching the Olympics each morning before going to work and now its over I have rather more tedious mornings. I never thought that I could find any interest in a whole variety of thoughts and on Saturday this included watching the Taekwondo, including our British hope being told she had lost and then going through on appeal and in the male matches the disqualified Cuban kicking the referee in the head. Probably not the best way to submit a successful appeal. I am going to have to find a new form of entertainment to get me going in the morning now.

I would also draw your attention to this story. There are times when it is definitely better to follow the rules. Sometimes when they tell you “don’t open the cage”, you should follow that advice. Keep that in mind. It might help you to keep your head.

Exhibits

It was a fairly successful Bank Holiday weekend and I return to work today and have a new member of staff starting to work for me, so I had better be on reasonable form, so that I don’t scare her off on her first day.

The weekend went well and G and I met up with my mum, sister and nephew on Saturday and we went to the South Bank. My nephew loved all the street performers there – particularly as he got us to give him money to get them to do things. He also really liked the water exhibit outside the Royal Festival Hall and stood there staring at it for ages. I kept asking it he wanted to go in it but he gave me several very definite nos. But after a cuppa and some food he wanted to go back and then G and I went and stood in the water at which point he decided he was missing out and dragged mum in and then he was dashing in and out for ages. He got so wet that we had to strip him down to his underpants in the end. G considered doing the same but was persuaded that thus would be inappropriate.

G and I were going to go out for a walk on Sunday but I asked G to look at my vacuum cleaner and this turned out to be a mammoth task that took about five hours to fix. This was really helpful for me, but possibly not the most exciting thing to have done with a day, but we did then have a Chinese takeaway in the evening.

Then yesterday we did go for a walk and after G had gone home I mowed the grass and put some stuff on it to make it look a bit more grass like and put weed killer down. Then I went to see my friend C for dinner, which was really nice and we sat in the garden and chatted and it was a very pleasant end to the weekend.

Now it’s back to work and at least I am on leave as of the middle of next week…

Overheard

We’re nearly at a bank holiday weekend. Hooray! I think it should be a fairly busy, but pleasant, weekend. Tomorrow I think I’m meeting up with my sister and mum and nephew and Sunday I think G and I are going for a walk somewhere. I am also hoping that G will find time to have a look at my vacuum cleaner to see if there is some way to stop it keeping getting blocked. I’m not sure that will be the highlight of G’s weekend…

At lunch time yesterday I walked passed the lifts on my floor, as a colleague stepped into the lift. There was someone else in the lift already and I then overheard the following conversation:

Person 1: So where are you off to then?
Person 2: well, I haven’t got a particular plan I was just going to wander about for a bit and see where I ended up.
Person1: Right… Er… I meant what floor do you want…

You probably would have had to have been there to have picked up the full (but slightly toe-curling) humour, but somehow I wasn’t surprised by my colleague misunderstanding the question.

I shall leave you with this example of some bad parking I saw recently. Parking really must be at a premium these days.

Timeless

It’s been a fairly busy week, which does not help me to achieve my new aim of eight and a half hours sleep a night. Tuesday night I went to see Hairspray with my mum and sister, which was very good. Michael Ball was very good in it, as was pretty much all of the cast members actually – and it was fairly obvious that this has some kind of cult following, as a lot of people in the audience were clearly there having seen it many times before. People’s enthusiasm was so high that they even applauded the recorded announcement asking people to turn their mobile phones off. Anyway it was very good and do go and see it if you get the chance.

Then last night I went to my sister’s to babysit for my nephew. On the train on the way over, the ticket inspector and a passenger were having a big argument on the train because the man had been sitting in the first class seats without a valid ticket. Both of them were really winding each other up and whilst the chap shouldn’t have been sitting in the first class seats the ticket guy was making it worse by saying stupid things like he was going to arrest the man and the man then told him to arrest him and then the ticket guy said he hadn’t said that (even though he had) and that it was an arrestable offence. A call ended up being put out on the train for a police officer. Any police officer should have arrested them both for being complete idiots. It was not the only incident on the train last night, as there is an unattended Cumberland Pie on a train somewhere, as my sister left my dinner on the train on the way home last night. She didn’t really have any other food to offer me so I had two boiled eggs and some soldiers for dinner.

I did manage to summon up the energy to phone a solicitor yesterday to talk to him about the possibility of buying the freehold. He was soooooo helpful and I hope if we do buy the freehold that we use him. Strangely not only did he know *exactly* where I live, but clearly knew of the current freeholder, as he told me of various problems he’d had when he’d been the solicitor for someone who previously lived there. I was somewhat surprised by his level of knowledge and he must have a very good memory to know all the things he did. Anyway, he gave me some really helpful advice on how to proceed and did basically say we really need to buy the freehold, as dealing with our particular freeholder is so awful that we are just storing up problems for the future by not doing so. However, the freehold could prove to be very expensive, so it does depend if we can all afford to do it – although I am going to suggest to my neighbours that we go for a really low offer in the hope that the freeholder doesn’t contest it.

Oh and I was wondering about adding this song to my repertoire to sing to G… (It's 'You're Timeless to Me' from Hairspray)

Events

One of the things about the Olympics is that you probably end up watching lots of sports that you wouldn’t watch in any other circumstances. Over the years the sports line-up has changed and so I present you with a few of the more weird and wonderful sports that for reasons that might not be entirely difficult to work out, have been dropped from the Olympics over the years.

Tug of War (1900, 1904, 1906, 1908, 1912, 1920) – basically who could pull the opposing team over a line. A bit school sport’s day for some, but actually featured in the Ancient Olympics. Apparently the Brits beat the US at this in a matter of seconds once and the US said this was because GB was wearing spiked shoes. So GB offered a rematch in their socks. The US still lost.

Club swinging (1904) – basically holding a juggling club and swinging it around a lot (the clue was in the name I guess. Judges awarded points for the routine.

Rope Climbing (1896, 1904, 1906, 1924, 1932) – again the sot of thing you might expect to do at school – except they were only allowed to climb using their hands and arms, so entirely reliant on upper body strength. The first one to the top of the 8 metre rope won - in some of the earlier years it was 14 metres…

Live Pigeon Shooting (1900)– a rather gruesome sport. They released lots of pigeons and the person who shot the most won. Presumably leaving lots of carcasses and feathers to clear up afterwards.

Horse long jump (1900) – well, erm what it says it is, getting horses to do the equivalent of what athletes still do in the athletics.

Obstacle Race (1900) – swimming through lots of obstacles: climbing over a pole, over a row of boats an then under another row of boats…

And finally…

Solo synchronized swimming (1984, 1988, 1992)- there was some doubt that it was possible to be synchronised when doing this event on your own. Competitors argued that they were synchronised with the music *raises a sceptical eyebrow*


Something else that has been changed in the Olympics is the releasing of doves during the Opening Ceremony. This tradition, representing peace, came to somewhat an abrupt end when in Seoul they released the doves, they flew around a bit and some of them settled on the cauldron where the Olympic flame was about to be lit. Let’s just say the barbecue stall outside the Olympic stadium was given some extra delicacies to sell that night… And not only is the motto of the Olympics “Citius Altius Fortius” (Faster Higher Stronger) but also “Light the Olympic flame first and then release the doves”.

Astronomical

I forgot to mention yesterday that when I was in Southampton my friend had made me a birthday cake:



It has astronomical rather than astrological meaning behind it – well sort of astronomical, it’s based on some glow stars actually. I think it will make even less sense if I explain it beyond that, but it did have a really nice marble cake and butter icing in it. Lovely – and I still have some more left to eat.

I was looking at an article on the BBC yesterday about the effect on the UK since winning all the Olympic medals at the weekend. It was a light-hearted article and reading the comments at the end, I just have to conclude that there are some people who wouldn’t find anything to celebrate if everything they have ever dreamed of came true. What’s wrong with being proud of the competitors from your nation who have achieved so much and are at the top of their sport?

On a lighter note, you may recall the ex-England Manager Steve McClaren. Well it seems that when he left England to manage a Dutch team he also lost his ability to speak English (for those who doubt, he is actually English and was born in Yorkshire…)

Achievements

I had a pleasant weekend in Southampton despite feeling rather under the weather before I drive down there on Friday night. We spent quite a bit of the weekend watching the Olympics, but we also went to the Spinnaker Tower, which I really liked and we had great view of the South Coast.

I was really impressed by our performance in the Olympics and getting to third place in the medal table was quite some achievement, although I imagine it won’t last. But we came up trumps in sailing, cycling, rowing and swimming, which was great. I was particularly impressed by Rebecca Romero who won a silver medal rowing in 2004 and has now won a gold in cycling this time. I did feel really gutted for the women in the quad sculls who got the silver. Whilst normally a silver would be great, they so desperately wanted the gold and when they were interviewed after the race you could just see how shattered they were by missing out. You can see the interview here.

We did also win a bronze in gymnastics, which was our first in about a century. Apparently Louis Smith had two ambitions in life (he’s only 19 so hopefully he still has more…) and one was to win an Olympic medal. The other was to become King of Jamaica. Well the Head of State is Elizabeth II, as in our monarch and so he might have to add “stage military coup” to the list in order to achieve that, as it doesn’t tend to be the sort of thing you can just apply for. I think we can conclude that he thinks big though.

As much as I like the cycling events, some of the ones in the velodrome are very weird. The keirin, for example, is about riding around behind a guy on a motorised bike and then after doing a few laps he goes off the track and the cyclists race each other. You can watch a video if it here. Weird.

And the bronze medal goes to...

Well the sore throat developed and on the way back from a meeting at lunch time yesterday I had to get some cold and flu remedy. That gave me a brief respite, but by the time I left work I felt terrible. I couldn’t got straight home though because I needed to go and buy some theatre tickets, so I waited for a bus but it didn’t show up and then I caught another bus to try and take a different bus later on, but the other bus didn’t turn up and then I caught another different bus and got stuck in bad traffic and was beginning to wish that I had a) walked or b) just not even bothered and just gone home. About an hour after leaving work I finally made it to the theatre and bought the tickets and then when I went to get on the tube that was packed despite it being about 7pm and I just wished I could just be at home already. I made it home eventually despite the tube driver insisting that the train was going to a different destination to the one it said on the boards and finally took some more medication that made me feel a bit better for a short time. I hate being ill. But I plan to go into work today, as I covet my perfect sickness record – I haven’t been off work sick for over seven years and so unless I could not move I would always try to go in. Perhaps I should find more important things to care about.

I heard that A’s dad died at the weekend. What sad news. Despite our differences, we did used to be very good friends and I feel sad for A. What I would like to do is reach out a hand of kindness to A and just say “I am sorry for your loss”, but unfortunately I can’t do that. But still, I am.

Anyway… I’m meant to be going to Southampton this weekend, which should be good. This does depend on me feeling well enough to drive down there though.

And penultimately… wherever you live surely you would recognise it in a photo? Even if you didn’t surely you’d expect your local council to know what it looks like. Well, it seems that Birmingham doesn’t. Regardless, it was worth spending £15,000 to send out 750,000 leaflets to pat residents on the back about how good they have been at recycling so that all the leaflets can then be put into local residents recycling bins and this help them to truly exceed their recycling target. All in all, an entirely successful campaign.

Well finally, I may have found a way for us to increase our medal haul. This one is going spare. If he doesn’t want it, I’ll have it.

You learn something new...

I have a sore throat. It’s the height of summer and I have a sore throat. Admittedly it’s the height of a miserable, wet and wintery feeling summer but it stills feel wrong to have a sore throat. Grrr…

I just finished reading a book called “The Duchess of Bloomsbury” which is the follow on from 84 Charing Cross Road. I only read it because both books were in the same volume, but actually it was a pleasant read. It was about an American author’s first ever visit to London and whilst it wasn’t meant to be a guide to London I did come across some things that struck me. First that when Franklin D Roosevelt died the UK government decided to honour him with a statue in Grosvenor Square. They wanted to do it by public subscription and each individual contribution was limited to one shilling so that everyone could subscribe. They decided to keep it open for as long as was needed to raise the money via this method. They raised the money in 72 hours. Can you imagine anyone now who if the government decided to do that we could raise money in such a short amount of time just based on small public contributions? Surely unthinkable now.

I also read that after the war there were a lot of books that booksellers wanted to get rid of because they didn’t have enough shelf space for them, so hundreds of books were thrown into open bomb craters in London’s streets. They were then built over, so there must be lots of books buried under some buildings in London, although presumably unreadable by now.

I watched “Who Do You Think You Are?” last night (which is a programme about celebrities looking into their family history in case you have never heard of it. Anyway it reminded me of a recent sketch on the Armstrong and Miller show, which rather amused me. It is a spoof by the way, in case you are worried.

Smoke and Mirrors

I am still trying to work out the best option for car hire in Scotland. We have kind of complicated requirements. This has led to me producing a spreadsheet with the various options laid out. At the moment the winner is Enterprise, but I await their response to an e-mail. I also have sent an e-mail to a friendly sounding Glasgow firm and will see what they come up with. I think perhaps I chose the wrong occupation and should have gone into logistics –or something that allows you to draw up spreadsheets of information and highlight bits of it. It would probably be best if it wasn’t very mathematical though. I am not sure there are many jobs that allow you to look up lots of things n the internet, put the results in a spreadsheet and then do some colouring in.

One of the things I find about the Olympics is that I end up watching all sorts of sports that I would never consider watching under any other circumstances. Canoeing, archery etc. Anyway, I think we’re doing pretty well at the moment in terms of medals and I think it is good that people who are relatively unknown have won most of our medals, as that feels like some of what the Olympics should be about. I am not so sure that the Olympics is mean to be about choosing the ‘prettiest’ though. Apparently the Chinese substituted a prettier girl for the one who was meant to be appearing to sing in the Olympics opening ceremony. The less attractive one was still allowed to sing though and the pretty girl obviously wasn’t quite up the job as she had to mime along. The Chinese justified this by saying "The reason for this is that we must put our country's interest first[…] The girl appearing on the picture must be flawless in terms of her facial expression and the great feeling she can give to people." Because clearly anyone who didn’t reach physical perfection would ruin the whole of the Olympics. If the Chinese are so controlling over something like this then it gives just the tiniest indication of how they are likely to deal with other less public issues.

Alert

Yesterday, for a Monday, I felt remarkably wide awake. I seemed to go through most of the day feeling surprised at how awake I was. Clearly a rare even but very welcome.

It was a good job I was on reasonable form yesterday as the chap who has a bit of a thing for me called me over to his desk and produced a large item for me to look at – a huge marrow. It’s probably about two feet long. It’s not often that you get to see one of those in the office. Later on in the day he came over to speak to me, but he has this somewhat annoying habit of leaning on the back of my chair so that it tips backwards – and therefore me as well. I had to resist the urge to tell him to get off my chair, but did mange to free myself by putting my weight on the front of the chair. It felt like someone invading my personal space, something he does quite often, and he hasn’t even given me any cake recently. I think I am moving desks at some point and no-one will be able to walk up behind me. I think I will be glad when that day arrives.

If you’re looking for some summertime reading then this might help you to get ahead at work. I think it might take a bit more than that for me, but if it could work for David Cameron then it could potentially work for anyone surely?

Oh and after work yesterday I went in search of this. Not only is it a guide to mammals, but also their footprints and droppings. Anyway, if you happen to know anywhere that I might be able to go and pick it up in person before the weekend then that would be marvellous. I won’t hold by breath on that one though.

Vouching

Another good weekend over. Despite a somewhat wet weekend, it was a good barbecue and we ate lots and chatted. I was commissioned to make some scones and they turned out remarkably well, although if I did it another time I would make them bigger. I spent quite a bit of the time at the barbecue talking to a 5 year old who was totally bored out of her mind. She was there with her brother who was deeply absorbed in some computer game and so she didn’t have a lot to do. So we chatted for a while, although at times it was like pulling teeth. I did see if the hosts had a pack of cards, but it seems they didn’t. Who doesn’t have a pack of cards??

The slight downer of it all was that it seems that this was the second barbecue they’d had in the last few weeks and normally G would have been asked to anything that was going on, but for some reason wasn’t asked to the last one – which C was asked to. They haven’t actually seen or spoken to each other since the argument a couple of months ago and there is a part of me that wonders if there is some move to exclude G from things because it therefore means that I’m not there. That would be very unfair on G and would not bode well for the future, in terms of friendships. I’ll keep an eye on things and see if there are other strange happenings.

I finished reading Strangers on a Train yesterday, which I quite enjoyed. I did always have this slight paranoia that one day whilst reading it on the train someone might try and put some deadly proposition to me. Fortunately that didn't happen. It had an interesting quote in it that made me think:

“The Theological Germanica, Guy recalled, said that the ancient Germans had judged an accused man innocent or guilty by the number of friends who came forth to vouch for his character. How many would vouch for him now?”

I wonder how many would vouch for me? In the past I think rather more than would now. As I seem to have let so many people drift from my life and seem just as lax about building up new friendships. Although I suppose we shouldn’t judge these things by quantity but by quality. Let’s hope the Germans aren’t right though.

There's always an answer

Friday at last. Hooray! I was woken at 6.25am today by some bloke callign the wrong number. Grrrrr! Dial more carefully that early in the morning! I am off to a barbecue tomorrow, but am not overly hopeful about the weather.

Is fidelity a problem in your life? Well if it is then this might be the answer for you. Cheat Neutral is a way to 'offset' cheating on your partner and basically you get paired with someone who is monogamous and for a small payment you can absolve yourself of all guilt. Watch the video and read the small print to find out what it is all about. Brilliant stuff*!

If that was a all a bit too much for you then why not spend some time creating some of your favourite album covers in Lego. Some people have too much time on their hands…

Oh and isn't today 08/08/08?

*What they are *actually* doing is "brilliant stuff". Cheating is not. I do actually think they have a really good point, but I will expand on that another time and let you just enjoy the link for now.

Learning

The talk I gave yesterday went quite well. Initially I thought the audience was quite hostile and was thinking that it was going to be a bit of a rough ride, but actually it went much better than expected and ended up being very constructive – and the chap who was chairing the meeting came up to me afterwards and gave my shoulders a kind of squeeze* when he was enthusiastically saying thank you.

The BBC have run a couple of articles on what makes men cry. Not being male, clearly I don’t need to come up with a definitive list of things that I am allowed to cry at, but I have to admit that a couple of the things on the list made me cry just reading them (see numbers 61 and 70 in particular). Sometimes I am very pathetic.

Lesson of the week – ‘bum’ is a naughty word. I learnt this when I used the word in front of my nephew, who looked horrified and promptly told me that I was naughty for using it. I spoke to my sister about it later and she confirmed that it was indeed a naughty word. You learn something new every day.


*slightly weird, but not in a creepy sort of way.

Reading Matter

Look at the list of 'classics' and:

1) Bold those I've read.
2) Italicise those I intend to read.
3) [Bracket] the books I love.
4) Pass it on to a few others.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
[8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell]
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
[15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier]
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
[18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger]
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie-the-Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 Er...
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 The Magus - John Fowles
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
[58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley]
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby-Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - A. S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White Maybe, apart from the obvious problem that it’s about a spider. Eek!
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom = after finishing novel 3.
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
[96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute]
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo


A bit of a poor show from me, but a few of them are actually on my list of books to read… I am slightly concerned that a number of the books I plan to read are actually children’s books. I’m not sure what that tells you about me, but there you go.