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Let's have a classic bit of religious intolerance going wrong shall we?
Nice 'n' Springy |
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![]() Somewhere between frogs and locusts... First of all I will say that I am not a great believer in religion. I am certainly not a believer in religions where her religion is less important than his religion so he is going to have to kill her if she doesn't swap immediately. I am definitely not a believer in religions where you feel the need to burn, maim, murder or whatever because someone else makes fun of it or of your prophet. Seeing as the majority of religions preach tolerance and kindness I find this hard to countenance. As someone said, "If you have an imaginary friend they call you a lunatic. If lots of people have the same imaginary friend they call it religion." Be that as it may, I had a little bit of a religious happening this morning. I waltzed down to the main bathroom for my morning ablutions (I really must fix that upstairs en-suite shower!) and as I took my slippers off, a desperate thing to have to do because the linoleum floor is getting colder by the day as the season changes, I stepped on something sharp. Stifling a little yelp of discomfort I reached down and felt around (I had taken my spectacles off so seeing anything was out of the question) and my hand came across a small screw, no more than an inch long. I looked at it and puzzled as to where it could have come from because the only screws I have ever used in the bathroom are big meaty ones for holding bookshelf brackets to the wall. I shuffled forward to find a pot to put the errant and mysterious screw in when I had to stifle a second yelp of pain and the ensuing Anglo-Saxon oath. Fumbling around (because I still hadn't put my glasses back on) I came across an identical screw that was just lying on the floor and I just happened to have trodden on it. Two screws of a size I rarely use. Oh well, it must just be coincidence. I found a suitable pot on one of the bookshelves, lifted the lid and popped them in - just in case something fell to the floor for the lack of two screws. As I backed away from the shelves, blow me down if I didn't tread on a third small screw! This was getting decidedly fishy and I am beginning to wonder if this wasn't a sign from some omnipotent being. A plague of screws! One might be an accident, two might be coincidence but three is downright weird! It's certainly more technologically advanced than frogs or locusts but still decidedly mysterious. You see, this bathroom has also suffered from two previous plagues in the past - bees. I have come into that room on two occasions and found lots of dead and dying bees. On both occasions they must have been two different swarms of bees because they were attacking and stinging each other - hence the large numbers of dead bees, I suppose - two different swarms with opposing queens? I have never worked out what had happened apart from assuming that these two sets of feuding bees had settled in the chimney in that room and had disagreed on something (some sort of bee religion perhaps?) and had fought it out to the death. Then I remembered that the chimney in that room has been capped so there would be no easy ingress for the feuding little beggars. Do you know? I think that I might have a miracle on my hands folks. First bees, then screws (actually that should be first bees, second bees and then screws.) That's it! I can make a fortune here - none of this Lourdes rubbish! Roll up, roll up! Come and see the two plagues of Cowfold. So how much do you think I should charge the adoring masses when I make the room open to the public? I suppose that I ought to go over to Homebase and buy up all the screws and sell them as souvenirs or do you think that is going a bit far? I'm not keen on honey so I suppose that they will have to do. Somehow I don't think that I will get many takes. In the meantime I'll let you know if something falls off overnight because it has run out of screws. Let's have a classic bit of religious intolerance going wrong shall we? ![]() Perhaps there is a hint of autumn... And the public gets what the public wants But I want nothing this society's got I'm going underground (Going underground)... Thus warbled Paul Weller and The Jam all those years ago. Well, perhaps not warbled; more like "belted out" I suppose. Today was a lovely day so Donna and I decided that it was time to take to the roads and go forth on our annual trip to Reigate to see what the charity shops and book shops had to offer over there. Weatherwise we couldn't have chosen a better day however traffic wise it was dreadful. Because there were major hold ups on the M25 at the Reigate junction, everyone was trying to get through Reigate and on to Dorking via the A25 so we queued and crawled the last two miles into town. The downside of all this was that my temper frayed. The upside was that I decided to use a different car park from the usual one. Why was this an upside? First off it meant that we had further to walk in the sunshine which improved my temper no end and secondly, it meant that after a pretty fruitless trawl of the shops we walked back a different way, taking in the Tunnel Road. Nothing special there except that there was an open door leading into the tunnels. Ladies and gents, we had struck pay dirt! These tunnels are rarely open to the public (about five days a year) and weren't meant to be open today. If it hadn't been for a bunch of workman doing some repair works inside then it wouldn't have been open either. We got an impromptu guided tour around these tunnels with a bit of their history from the mining of solver sand (for high quality glass making and floor scouring), through to their use as a bonded warehouse for wines and liquor, an explosives depot during the first World War, as an air raid shelter in the second World War and a nuclear bunker during the Cold War. Each of the galleries now houses some item of historical interest. In the one dealing with the air raids in WW2, there was flickering kerosene lamps and music of the day playing. All very evocative. The whole tour took about twenty minutes but could have been much longer if it weren't for the fact that some of the tunnels had collapsed because of a burst water main above and the local council is considering filling in the collapsed portions to stop it happening again; that will be a shame if it happens. Actually, the Wealden Cave and Mine Society are trying to preserve a lot of the local mines and caves and there are more to see. Perhaps when I feel like going underground again, I might try to get to the Baron's caves. Anyway, the moral to this tale is "if you see an unusual, open door then stick your nose inside. You just never know what might be through there." Let's leave you with The Jam performing their number one hit on Top Of The Pops all those years ago. ![]() "Jack, I want you to draw me like one of your French girls" It really has been! First of all, it is the last day of Donna's holiday but we had to get up a bit early because... I had a job interview! Well blow me down. As HH put it in an email "You kept that quiet last night! Good luck!" The reason I kept it quiet was that I didn't know that I was going for an interview until late last night! It was for a local computer company and is only part time but after the interview today I will say that I am cautiously optimistic but I was only one of a shortlist of three people and I have yet to prove my worth. The others may have the full set of skills that the chap wants but I have a lot of experience and can come up to speed with what is required very quickly. I think that I came across well but only time will tell. As I said, I am cautiously optimistic with the emphasis very much on the word "cautiously". Anyway with the interview concluded I tootled back to Horsham to pick up Donna to tell her all about the interview and we were just a couple of minutes outside of Horsham when she exclaimed "turn around, I've lost my handbag!" so we came to a screeching halt, turned around and I dumped her off near to where she last remebered having seen it. I parked the car and went to find her but despite all of her searching and enquiries, no-one had seen the bag, nor had anyone handed it in to the security bods in Swan Walk. Then began the long haul around banks so that Donna could cancel credit and debit cards and then ther was the trip to the local Police station to report its loss and now there is the contacting of various third party groups to make sure that tickets (IIRSM, British Museum, National Trust, RSPB and the like) can be re-issued. There is also the matter of keys - yes they were in there too so we might have to change locks... Anyway, by the time that we had sorted out matters financial and got home it was about two o'clock. I then shot over to the doctors surgery to make an appointment - I had a sniffle earlier in the week and now my blocked ear is getting uncomfortable. Having returned to the house with my new appointment, I had to go back across the road to the surgery within five minutes because another appointment I had for the middle of the week after next clashed with a much more important appointment. Hell! I don't think that I have ever had so many conflicting appointments at any one time. Anyway. By three o'clock, I was about ready for something to eat. Seeing as today is a normal feeding day, it didn't half feel like another fasting day. I'm sure it is all part of Donna's master plan to get me slim! Anyway, I am done for the day. I have a new challenge ahead of me (learning a new computer language for the potential new job) so I am setting my PC up accordingly and downloading various learning resources and now it is definitely time for a glass of cold beer. This is a bit of fun... "Don't Look!" ![]() Little sign of autumn colour yet. The law is really an ass. You only have to look at the case surrounding the so called "cleric" Abu Hamza and his eight year struggle to avoid being deported to the US for alleged terrorist activities to see that the judiciary just don't have the wit and wisdom to make a final decision. This "cleric" is jerking our lariat a treat and using the law against itself and against this nation whilst he spends countless thousands of pounds of our taxpayers money to do it and to support him whilst he does it. Anyway, apart from that sort of stupid legal tomfoolery, I was reading a webpage about a particular miscarriage of justice that happened almost three quarters of a century ago when the Americans sent a simpleton to the gas chamber for a crime that he might have committed but was most unlikely so to have done. The case of Joe Arridy makes for strange and disturbing reading and it seems that he was set up for the crime and went to his death not really knowing what lay ahead of him. He just couldn't understand the finality of what was going to happen. Doctors who examined him gave him an IQ so low that they described him as an imbecile attributing to him the sort of intelligence that would make him about six years old. To give you some idea of his level of intelligence, he spent his last day on death row playing with a toy train and when asked what he wanted for his last meal he didn't quite understand but when they told him he could have anything he wanted, he asked for ice cream. Lots and lots of ice cream, all day long. Apaprently he went to his death a happy man. I don't know how I would cope if I was on death row for whatever crime I was supposed to have committed. That awful feeling of one moment you are alive, the next you aren't is not really one worth thinking about. You could drive yourself insane. I also don't know what I would ask for as my last meal. Would I go about making life as awkward as possible for all concerned by asking for something impossible to get? "Yes! I'll have Dodo liver pâté on toast please, followed by T-rex chops and a large slice of brontosaurus to finish off." Maybe I should ask for a meal so sickeningly sweet that it brings on a diabetic coma and I collapse and sleep through my last moments on this planet. Or would I request a favourite dish? Actually, at the moment I don't really have a favourite dish. I have favourite foods such as peanut butter but I wouldn't want to eat nothing but that. I adore chateaubriand (very rare) but don't know if I could face it if I was going to be judicially murdered at eight o'clock in the morning. Then again, I don't think I would want to meet my maker with nothing but a bowl of cornflakes and a glass of OJ inside me "Oh, and make sure you bring my vitamin tablets and cod liver oil. My arthritis is giving me gyp this morning." I suppose that if time of day wasn't an issue, you couldn't beat the good old fashioned Beefeater special of prawn cocktail for starters, steak, chips and onion rings for a main course and a good old fashioned Black Forest gateaux to round it off with all washed down with a bottle of Blue Nun Liebfraumilch - that's just too plebeian to think about. Perhaps I could get a stay of execution with "Sorry! I can't eat today because it is a fasting day." No; I think that I would have to go out with a bang on a good old fashioned full (and I mean full) English breakfast - porridge, kipper, devilled kidneys, kedgeree, bacon eggs, sausages, black pudding, tomatoes, fried bread, eggs, mushrooms, toast, marmalade and tea. Knowing my luck they would tell me I couldn't have it because I might damage my blood vessels with all that fat! Anyway, last meal or not, I have made myself feel very hungry and seeing as today is a fasting day and the time has come for my meagre repast, I'm off to go and cook it! Here's a fun animation - Things you better not mix up. See you all tomorrow. ![]() Always a pot of gold if you know where to look for it I learned of a little hidden treasure in Horsham today. Actually, I am indebted to Mrs Nice-Neighbour for the information. The day started with the usual routine... get up, put on spectacles, take mobile phone off charge and switch on and that is when I noticed I had a missed call. So I dialled in to pick it up and it was Mrs Nice-Neighbour (Hilary) telling me about a little known exhibit in Horsham. One of the local businesses which stopped trading last year has had its premises taken over by a charitable concern (Chloe's - an independent charity shop). "Yet another charity shop in Horsham... so what?" I hear you ask. Well, apart from the usual charitable items for sale (bric-a-brac, furniture, CDs, DVDs, books) it has a gallery of different items upstairs that you can only visit if you ask the staff and are accompanied. This gallery has various items of militaria (different World War Two helmets) and other items of interest from the War period (everything from newspapers of the time to clothing). There isn't an astounding amount of material but it is interesting to see all the same and it is all for sale. Proceeds from the sale of donated goods are going to go to the Salvation Army. We picked up another five books for my collection including a fascinating one on the evacuation of children of persecuted races to Great Britain from Germany - the so called Kindertransport. Up until now I had only ever thought of the various mass evacuations of children in London and had only vaguely heard of this continental mechanism but now I will have more knowledge. This thirst for knowledge has had me traipsing around charity shops for most of the morning. Donna and I had planned to go for a walk today but the weather was so abysmal that we gave up any hope of it and drove on down to Haywards Heath and went for a trawl around the charity shops there. That was quite a walk in its own right as they are spread right around the shopping areas and at both ends of the town. We are always surprised by the paucity of the books available in Haywards Heath. With such a diverse population we would have expected a greater variety of books to be available. So it's either a case of the locals hang on to their books until the Grim Reaper comes along and relieves them of the need to read or they have disgustingly low tastes in literature. Anyway, be that as it may, I did manage to find one or two good ones to add to my expanding collection - over five hundred books in my online database already and that isn't quite two sets of bookshelves in my study dealt with - just the other two sets of shelves to go in there and then we can move into other rooms and catalogue those ones. Right! I have to go because I need to help prepare for HH who is coming around for dinner this evening - what a good thing it isn't a fasting day today! Here's your collection of this month's best fails to keep you amused. ![]() Th..th..th...that's all folks! From the time I started way back on the sixty-eighth anniversary of D-Day to today has been almost four months but finally, Operation "Sod Off!" is complete! HOORAY! Yes, the carpet fitter (Mr Turner) arrived this morning at just before nine thirty and he worked like the devil to lay gripper rods, underlay and carpets and he was done by one thirty this afternoon having made a good job. There were sufficient scraps of carpet left to put under the feet of the pew and all of the other items that will remain in the hall and a nice sized chunk to go into the cupboard under the stairs where we keep the suitcases. This has all been done and all the furniture that was to be kept in the hall is in place. All that was left to do was to hoover up the loose bits of fluff and take a trip to the tip to get rid of all the spare scraps of carpet and underlay. On the way back home a suitable front door mat was purchased and placed in front of the door to add the finishing touches; and that, says Paul, is that. ![]() Rain, rain, go away... please? I can't say that I am sorry to see the back of this project because now it means that I have spare time to start the next project which is to re-plumb the upstairs shower once I have found the leak! So apart from a swift walk around Nymans in the torrential rain (I didn't realise that we had monsoons in this country) I have had a bit of time to play with the latest bit of upgraded software on my PC. Thankfully, with a bit of birthday money behind me, it meant that I could get the latest version of Cyberlink PowerDirector (version 11) and whilst Mr Turner was hammering away and laying carpets, I had time to download it all, install it and then play with it. So with little more ado, I will pop up a slide show for you to peruse. This one was knocked up using some of my photographs of Madeira last year. I know that it isn't perfect because (a) I haven't tweaked any of the photographs (b) I rushed it to make sure that there was something to view today and (c) I didn't take into account how poor quality the music would come out as but I hope that you enjoy it all the same. I'm not going to prattle on about little things that most people would think of; the laughter of a child for example. That's only because I am cynical enough to think that the child is up to something unpleasant like microwaving worms or something equally disgusting. As someone once said... "Silence is golden... unless you are the parent of a toddler, in which case it is suspicious."
had a polarising filter which meant that you could watch the cilia on some of these beasties beating and creating fascinating coloured patterns. This love of life has never deserted me and just once in a while it comes back in all of its glory. Just the other day whilst Donna and I were out taking a walk around the world - we've got as far as China now but more of that later - we took a stroll around the Wild Gardens at Nymans. This was so that I could look for signs of fungi coming up (I'm hoping for a bumper year for photography purposes). As we walked deeper into the woods, we took a bracken lined path, in the sunshine, and that is where it happened. In the morning sunlight, a flash of wings caught my eye and there not more than three feet in front of me was a dragonfly darting and hovering with its magnificent compound eyes looking straight at me. I called to Donna to draw her attention and raised my hand slowly to point it out to her. As quick as a flash the dragonfly settled onto the back of my hand, wings outstretched. I must have flinched because in a split second it had leapt into the air again but I slowly held my hand out once more and this wonderfully prehistoric creature settled again. It landed with the lightest of touches, wings spread (that's the difference between dragonflies and demoiselle flies - a demoiselle can fold its wings along its body length whereas a dragon cannot) and contemplated me as much as I was contemplating it. Have you ever looked into a dragonfly's compound eyes? They are a mass of different and varying colours. There we were, close together but separated by hundreds of millions of years of evolution, old coming to grips with new. I would have killed for my DSLR to capture the moment but that would have been difficult because (a) I didn't have it to hand and (b) being right handed, guess which hand the dragonfly was sat upon? I reached for my mobile phone and the camera on it but even that was difficult to achieve left handed. Typing in the security code to unlock it, find the camera app and then execute the shot would have been almost impossible but I had to have a go. The dragonfly sensed my movements and intentions and took to the air once more and wouldn't return but somehow that little touch and communion between one of the oldest lifeforms on earth and one of the newest was just pure magic. Oh yes... the walk around the world (you haven't forgotten already, have you?) Nymans Gardens in association with a life and health assurance company are asking people to log how many miles they walk around the gardens and the surrounding woodlands. Their intention is to see if the total number of miles walked around the gardens before the experiment closes in early November will equal a trip around the world. So far, that has taken them to China. At the start of this blurb I talked about children. This is a tenuous link to today's video, a track by The Offspring. Enjoy. <Post publishing note... I had to remove the video due to copyright reasons. If you want to see it on youtube then you can click here> ![]() Wet, wooden sheep at Sheffield Park today. Today is my birthday. I have managed to make it to fifty-five with most of my faculties intact despite the attempts of various angry fathers and jealous women in the past. Not everyone is lucky enough to get this far in life and Mr Wang (or Mr Li) was one of them. I chose Wang or Li as the surname because I really don't know what his name was. All I know is that at the moment Wang is the most popular surname in China and Li is the second most popular so there is a fair chance that he was one or the other. If not, I will apologise profusely but seeing as I never knew if there was a Mrs Wang (or Li) or any little Wangs (or Lis) I don't think that it makes a great deal of difference. What does matter is that someone remembers Mr Wang... or Mr Li... Why? Because it was fifteen years ago today that Mr Wang (or Li) died. Seeing as multiple thousands of Chinese citizens die each day, from old age if they are lucky, by the state machine if not, why do I find it so important to remember this anonymous Chinaman who I never met before this day fifteen years ago? Because I was there at the instant of his death. It was on my fortieth birthday. I had been made redundant by Lloyds TSB just a couple of months earlier and I had splurged well over half my redundancy money on taking Donna to China on a second honeymoon (seeing as the first one was done on the cheap - out of necessity!) The weather was pretty grotty and we were travelling by train from Xian to Shanghai, or possibly in the other direction. It was a very nice and comfortable bullet train too - tooled leather seats and seat belts - very swish (British rail companies could learn a thing or two). The turbines wound and howled their way up to fever pitch and the train fairly hurtled across the countryside; a countryside that hasn't changed a great deal in millennia along with the agricultural practices that were taking place. It was as if technology hadn't reached here. That, alas, was the downfall of Mr Wang (or Mr Li). He had pushed his ancient bicycle alongside the railway track and was probably thinking of what to have for his lunch or whether to go and play cards with his mates that evening or whatever, instead of taking note of his surroundings and what they might mean. He chose to push his bicycle across the tracks despite the oncoming train. All we knew of the accident was the train driver applying the brakes to do an emergency stop and the sight of a bicycle and body flashing past the window before being thrown into a field as a tangled mess of metal, flesh and bone. The train came to a halt further down the track and the driver, guard and many of the Chinese passengers got off for a confab. A few minutes later everyone re-boarded and the driver got us on our way again. He was in a foul mood and as our guide explained this was because this unexpected incident had ruined his timekeeping and meant a lot of extra paperwork for him. I was quite stunned. A man had just died and all anyone could think about was paperwork? What happens to his family now that the breadwinner has been taken away? I hope that they survived and that things have got better for them. Every year on my birthday I always drink a toast to this little Chinaman. Dead he might be, but forgotten? Not by everyone, not by me. I'll drink a toast to your memory Mr Wang (or should that be Li?). Obviously we can't avoid our destiny as this animation shows in a vaguely amusing fashion. ![]() The fungi are starting to pop up. What is it with the British and eating, particularly social eating? If you look at the French and the Italians, they do a great job. They can make a meal last for hours. They eat a little, laugh a bit, talk a lot and drink even more. That's the sort of meal I would like to have but we British don't quite manage it. Yes we talk and drink but as soon as the food arrives, it's noses down and eat, eat, eat! Partly I think we can blame our climate. Hot food is served and unless one tucks into it with rapidity, it grows cool and then goes cold and congealed whereas if we had a hotter climate, then (a) more cold food would be served and (b) hot food would stay warm for much longer. The problem is that I have seen British eating behaviour extend into other countries when we have been abroad. By the time we become old enough to go to foreign climes we have the British trencherman attitude well and truly ingrained into our psyches. Even when we have guests who we know then the topics of conversation are somewhat stultified. For instance, last night we had the nice neighbours around to dinner (we really owed them). Because they are parents, obviously the talk fell to how their kids are doing - ups and downs, the latest one being that one of the girls has got herself into an interesting condition with the aid of her boyfriend. After that the conversation turned to various subjects but eventually it fell on to our ailments and physical condition. Why does it do that? No matter how you try to turn things, it ends up like it. I suppose that it is down to the way we grow older. Thirty years ago perhaps we would have spoken of our latest hobbies, how fast the motorbike goes, where you went skiing, scuba diving or parascending but you would have been too young to have dinner parties. Then when you go steady and you start having folks around for meals all you seem to talk about how well the job is going, mortgages, cars and where you want to go on holiday. In later years and if you have them you talk about "the kids" and how well they are doing at school. Later still (and this is the point where we are at) you talk about pensions, retirement, ailments and medication. How boring! There must be other topics of conversation in the world. Let's start a movement. The "let's have an interesting mealtime conversation" movement. Let's talk dirty! Long live sex and politics! I'll leave you with a strange animation about a working proletarian who wins the big lottery to be part of a better society and finds that it doesn't live up to his dreams. ![]() Even my blog software tells me to "F off"... I hate this time of year about as much as I hate Christmas, perhaps even more so. You see, it's the run down to my birthday. That time where if you were to cut my head off, you would see an extra ring appear in my neck, like they do in trees. It's a time when I sit back and try to look at all of the positive things that I have done for the last year and try and think what I am going to do in the next one. Let's see.... climbed a mountain? Nope. Fought a Grizzly bear? Uh uh. Made a million pounds. Yeah... right... as if. I suppose that one could say that at least I have survived another year of recession and now I will be of an age when I can turn around to my pension providers and legally say "cough up, you bastards!". I suppose that I can say that I might be a bit greyer but I feel healthier at this end of the year than I did at the start of it. This time last year, Donna and I were happily ensconced in Madeira on holiday and planning an uphill walk, on one of the hottest days of the year, to a well known monument. This year, we have spent too much on DIY and carpets and what with that and the pressures of Donna's job, we decided that we would spend this year at home instead. That means that we won't get our sunshine burst to top up our vitamin levels for the winter and it will be interesting to see if we suffer more winter ailments as a result. Let's see shall we? On the positive side, there has been a positive flurry of birthday cards and gifts. I know that there is a bottle of something yummy and alcoholic from HH - I am particularly looking forward to that although where Sunday is one of my fasting days, I will have to wait until Monday to indulge. I'll see how many calories I have consumed and maybe have a small tot of something to celebrate. I'm going to have to leave you now because we have guests coming around for dinner this evening and there is a bit left to do beforehand - Donna has been dashing around like a dervish, cleaning and cooking and I have had to do my bit too. I'll let you know how it all goes tomorrow. Right... let me leave you with a fun scientific experiment using liquid nitrogen - it's a load of balls (you can skip through to about three minutes and forty seconds if you are impatient but you will miss the preamble if you do.) It's that time of year again. The time when I have to get out to clean the windows at the back of the house; the ones that overlook the garden. It's not that I don't like cleaning windows (who does) that I don't touch them from late spring into the autumn. It's because that is when the Housemartins are in residence and despite the bird crap on the window sills and on the windows, I don't like to disturb the little blighters whilst they are breeding and bringing up their fledglings. Donna and I take great joy in watching them zip in and out from under the eaves. We love their chirpings and twitterings and we realise that, as a common species, they ain't that common these days and the species is "under stress" as the experts say so we are happy to let them do their thing and bring more Housemartins into the world. The fact that it is said that they will only nest in a house where there is love doesn't come into it really *but it is a nice conceit.) The only problem is that at the end of summer they take their leave of us and fly south for the winter, to sunnier and warmer climes in Africa. Then the house is strangely quiet and I know that I am safe to get the ladder out, reach up into the recesses of the windows and give them a good scrubbing and wash down the frames. As I said, it isn't a favourite task of mine but it is all the more sad because our summer visitors have left us and we know that the year is on the downturn. OK, they will be back next year (hopefully) but that doesn't stop it being a bit of a glum time for us. The Housemartins aren't the only ones to have left us. Our little colony of arthropods that I mentioned to you some weeks back. Their little puddle of water and moss is devoid of life. All that is left is their chitin body husks. I don't know if they just plain upped and died, mutated into something like a flying insect or whether they became a meal for something else. It's just another little empty hole in our lives. Something that has appeared and I wish would go away is a god-awful stench of well rotted manure. Obviously one of the local farmers has decided to clean out his slurry lagoon or has decided to spread manure on the land or maybe both. I suppose that living out in the sticks means that you have to put up with this type of odour but it is pretty sickening. Thankfully it is a fasting day today because I don't think that I could have stomached a meal at the height of the stench. With a bit of luck, it will peter out before we eat this evening. Either that or I will be so ravenous that nothing will put me off my victuals. The rest of the day has been somewhat of a mishmash of events. We have done everything from picking up parcels in Horsham, to taking a five mile walk, to feeding the ducks, to cleaning out drains, to varnishing tables, to cleaning brass, to loading stuff into the attic. A real meshuga. Not that much to report on. Anyway... you know that I like to whinge about doing the ironing? Well, this chap has it down to a fine art. ![]() Lee-on-the-Solent. Click for a larger image ...to be beside the seaside. There is something terribly British about "going to the beach" and as a child I used to love it because invariably it meant packing up a picnic, grabbing various sandy related paraphernalia (buckets, spades, shrimp nets) and trotting off to find a bit of sand on a local patch of seaside sand. Of course nobody else has thought "Hey this is a lovely day, let's go to the beach!" have they? Therefore, unless you arrived early or had a particularly nice but awkward bit of beach to get to, you would have to rub shoulders with everyone else. Just a few hundred other sweaty folks.. well, maybe a couple of thousand others. Then there is the queue for ice creams... no, you can't have a <insert the name of the most expensive ice-cream here> so you make do with something else - there was always the old favourite choc-ice to fall back on. There might be the possibility of a donkey ride if you had gone somewhere posh or a sand train ride along the foreshore. If you were lucky, there might be a passing porpoise out to sea or maybe the gruesome sight of a jellyfish washed up on the shore. If you were really lucky, the family pooch wouldn't roll in the by-product of that donkey ride you just had. Ah, the simple fun of picking up a bucket of shells and mermaids purses (shark egg cases) and trying to take them home to go with the huge collection that you already have. Surprisingly, I don't like that sort of going to the beach any more but I still like the seaside. Today we visited Donna's parents down at Hillhead but we had a little experiment to perform before we got there. We had been discussing distances and I still hold that our brisk walking pace is four miles an hour so a particular walk that we do is approximately four miles long but checking the map, it shows it to be a little over three. So we measured a mile using the car's odometer, pulled over and parked then took off for a walk to test it. On the outward run, we made a mile in just under fifteen minutes. On the way back, we reverted to our usual, brisk walking pace and made it back in just over fifteen minutes so my estimate of the distance that we walk is correct and "up yours!" Google maps - I'm right. The thing was that we were doing this walk in brilliant sunshine, with a very brisk and cold breeze blowing up the Solent and the smell of that fresh air was so invigorating. No longer for me is it the ice cream, donkey poo and burned whining kids; no more buckets, spades and sandcastles and no more shouting mothers, rude fathers and sewerage infested sand. I want to return to the seaside for the fresh air and to take up sailing again. I want to walk on the beach when the weather is bad, the skies are roiling and the sea is hammering up the shingle. I want to take a dog for walkies in the early morning light and beachcomb for driftwood. I want to explore the sea like a latter-day Jacques Cousteau! ![]() A clever person made this. Click to find out who. I mentioned once before that I am rather adept at misreading things and I believe that I quoted the case of the local pub near us that advertises a "Wild West Fort" for the kids toplay on but I read "Wild West Goat" for some reason. I was busy doing it again in a bookshop the other day when I came across what I read as "Four Curse Meals In Under Twenty Minutes" (Damn, Blast, Knickers and Spit!) which should have read "Four Course..." of course (or 'of curse' if that is how you feel). But sometimes words don't exist when they should. For instance I would like to see the word 'unstart' in the dictionary. 'Unstart' as in, to usefully turn back time. You know the feeling... you have begun to do something such as picking at a loose thread in your jumper and suddenly it becomes a raging hole with unravelling wool coming away faster than you wanted it to. That is when you wish that you could unstart your foolish action. Or when you are in the middle of a conversation and you say something that you shouldn't and you continue to dig yourself a nice deep hole and start to pile the earth on top of yourself. You know that you should shut up but you don't however you wish you could unstart the conversation. Another word I would like to see is 'awenone' for those occasions when you have nothing but contempt for someone. Such as "<insert the name of your prime minister / president / local politician here> thinks that he / she is awesome but the rest of us know that they are awenone." I think there is room for 'downput' as well. It's usage would be such as "The chancellor for the exchequer noted that the uptake of the new nationwide personal pension scheme by employees had been encouraging but that when a minimum tax level of seventy five percent had been levied, the downput was almost one hundred percent. This was, he noted, another triumph for government fiscal policy as the costs of administering the scheme had fallen to zero." How about this? We can have an upside to a situation to highlight the pros and a downside to highlight the cons but there isn't anything to make an issue of things that remain at a similar level. That's where 'byside' comes in. For example... "Ladies and Gentlemen of the parochial council of Cowfold village. I regret to inform you that the zombie apocalypse has struck the village extensively. On the upside, there are more spaces available in the church graveyard now. On the downside the village is full of zombies dropping like flies because they can't find any brains to eat and on the byside, given the levels of hygiene, sartorial elegance, political views and the inability of the locals to get up at daybreak at the moment, no one is going to notice any difference. I move that we spend fifty pounds of funds on air fresheners and for putting notices around the village warning zombies that they will be fined for dropping bits of flesh, brain and bone on the public playing fields." How about you? Do you have any words that you want to add? Drop me a line and let me know. I was considering shaving off my beard and moustache the other day but I decided not to. Maybe this little music video helped me to put off that decision. I'm just full of questions today. Like "Where has all that weight gone to then?" Yes, after three weeks of this fasting diet, I have shifted six pounds of excess avoirdupois (Is that French for "lard", then?). I don't know where it has gone but I am dead glad that it has. Next question... "Where has my flag counter gone?" It used to sit on the right hand side under the Archives section of my blog but Firefox doesn't want to show it any more. If I open Google Chrome I can see it but not on good old Firefox... OK. Next question? "Why did my new smartphone start playing up?" It has been freezing up on me at odd times to the point where I got honked off with it. I backed everything up and then did a hard reset back to factory defaults and then did all the upgrades and restored everything again. It works like a charm now but I want to know "Will I have to do this on a regular basis?" It's probably because I like to try out different apps on it and when they get uninstalled (if I don't like them) they probably don't do a very good job of cleaning up after themselves. One of the latest ones I have added recently checks how far I have walked. It was a bit embarrassing because I ran it today (Donna asked me "What distance do we cover on this walk?") and without realising it, the phone piped up very audibly with "You have been walking for xyz minutes and have covered abc miles" and did so every minute until I tried to turn the sound off. However the phone ws playing up, I couldn't shut it off no matter what I tried! Anyway, in answer to Donna's question, our chosen walk is approximately three and a half miles long and at our normal pace we can do that in an hour. If we put our minds and legs into it, we can do it in forty five minutes but that leads me to the next question "Where's the pleasure in taking a walk if you are too shagged out to enjoy the scenery you are passing through?" OK, next question "Why is everything stacking up for October the fifth?" I have had to reschedule so many appointments because October the fifth is stuffed full already and more appointments just keep cropping up for that date. The backup date for all this is a week later because Friday the twelfth of October is just as jam packed and I have had to reschedule things from then as well. Next question... "Why do I have to open my big mouth and end up doing extra things?" Donna is in the process of putting the dining room back together again and I noticed that our poor old dining table is looking very much the worse for wear (hot plates damaging the surface, wine stains etc.) So without thinking I asked... "Wouldn't the table top look nice if I was to strip it back to the wood and revarnish it?" Guess what? That is what I am going to have to do because Donna thought that it was an excellent idea. The poor old table was a piece of 1930s junk when we bought it and was in a bad way then but it has done us proud and I am not going to throw it away for the want of a bit of TLC. It's not as if it is an antique and a rub down plus a new coat of clear varnish will probably do it wonders. OK... Can you face another question? Good. (You just did!) "Why am I having such vivd and lurid dreams at night?" It's not as if I am eating cheese and pickle sandwiches before bashing my charpoy. My dreams are vivid as in colour and detail, lurid as in content (Phwooar!) I am waking up more shattered than when I went to bed in the first place. That's enough questions for today. Apart from this one. "Where did the lead in my pencil go?" ![]() When I get here, I'll stop! Well, we've stepped up the diet regime to fasting on three days of the week now and surprisingly it is getting easier. Here we are some eight hours after having risen and apart from a plentiful supply of green tea, fresh water and a single small nectarine, I'm not really feeling that hungry. I suppose that it is worse on the days when we get up at just after four in the morning because it adds a further four or five hours until we can eat a meal. It does mean that we have to be quite careful with our cuisine because we need to make sure that we don't overstep our calories for the day (five hundred for Donna, six hundred for me). It does mean that we can be inventive though. For instance tonight we will be having some pork meatballs with a spicy tomato and pepper sauce, brown rice and french beans. I have just calculated the calorific cost of this and it comes to just about one thousand calories if I use set measures. That is the thing though. One needs to do a lot of weighing out of the calorie rich substances (in this case the meatballs and the rice) but a large amount of sauce will be made from ingredients that come to less than one hundred and sixty calories all told (eighty apiece) and that will make quite a hefty portion. It's trying to balance everything to make sure that we get sufficient vegetables and bulk that can be awkward. We did try a smoked salmon and cream cheese risotto one night but the amounts we had to use made it a very tasty but very small and not very satisfying meal. So we bulk everything out with vegetables like french beans, beansprouts and pak-choi to make sure that we have a stomach full. There is seldom anything left after an evening meal. Plates are polished clean and the cats get very miffed because there are no titbits. Actually that isn't quite true of tonight's meal. Seeing as Xarifa has decided that pork is food of the gods, she is going to be a happy little kitty because there will be a few grilled pork meatballs to polished off because we don't want to overstep the calorie mark. Is the diet having any effects? Well, the first week I lost a couple of pounds, last week I didn't and this week? Who knows? We don't weigh in until Monday morning (once a week - no more!). What I can say without a shadow of a doubt is that my body shape is changing - I have had to pull my belt in a couple of notches and more importantly, my morning blood sugar levels have fallen from between 6.5 and 6.8 mmol / litre (definitely diabetic) to between 5.5 and 5.8 mmol / litre (not quite diabetic) across the whole week, not just after fasting days. This is extremely good in my eyes and I'm hoping that it will be reflected in my annual, full blood tests which I will have in about a fortnight's time. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say. Hell's teeth! Why is everything food oriented when you are dieting? Anyway, it's the tag end of the weekend so enjoy your new week ahead. Time for a video. You have never been loved by anything until you have had a dog, as this clip shows quite clearly. This is what happens when you have been away for a while and then you return. I don't think the partner gets a look in until the dog has finished! |
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May 2015
AuthorPaul Everest - Shining wit (at least that is what I think they said) |