Change it's name to Snickers

I instinctively dislike the London Marathon. The whole thing is ludicrous. What have wheelchairs to do with Marathons ? Whats so elite about an elite runner that merits a separate start from the rest of the field; the only thing that might induce me to watch would be the possibility of some kid working his way up through this bunch of professional miseries and winning the race on Tower Bridge by running the last few yards backwards waving an open can of lager tauntingly in the face of the pursuing elite.
Even though Paula Radcliff wasn’t there this year I was still unable to bear the awful voices of Brendan Foster & Steve Cram for more than 10 minutes. At one point Cram piously said ‘at what other sporting event in world could complete novices compete against sporting giants’ at which point the camera cut from the sparsely populated elite race well under its early started pampered way to a great mass of ordinaries strolling and squeezing its way through the lovely gates of Greenwich Park completely despoiled by huge advertisements for some kind of politically correct margarine.. My heroic little yob runner would have to be very good indeed to overcome all this and beat these sporting giants.

More Money for the NHS

So £250,000 pa GPs.
Dr Del to Dr Rodney, "This time in 4 years we'll be millionaires ".
Missing millions

Another Fishy Business

Years ago in Post Magazine - an insurance paper taken by me mainly for the jobs, I read the story of a trawler called the 'Girl Pat'. I could never thereafter find any reference to it, the internet not being invented. I have just found the following BBC link.
Girl Pat With some research and a script this could be a good film.
Now I must see if I can find a copy of the book by the mutinous captain George Orsborne.

Gravitarse

Have just read the following first bit of a conversation on the Chess website I play on.
‘Johnnyjohnson(50): I have a theory its my own theory that in some cases gravity can go sideways, that explains chairs moving across the room in poltergiest behavoiur. I don’t know why gravity goes sideways but I think in some cases it does its my own idea but noone seems interested.’

The Fastest Gun Alive - Idea for research

Yesterday I watched ‘The Fastest Gun Alive’ with Glen Ford. There was a very good , if out of place, dance sequence with Russ Tamblyn.
Perhaps now would be a good time to record my own contribution to the knowledge banks of Psychology. So to start could you imagine that you are Wyatt Earp about to draw your gun in Dodge city. Draw your gun fast and shoot and then hold it there. Now look at your gun and remember what you see.
Now imagine that you are flying a Lockheed Lightening jet around the room – off you go. Now freeze , remember the position. – and as Harry Hill would say , “and relax”.
Playing cowboys and Indians and flying a Lockheed Lightening dates my childhood terribly I know.
Think of the gun – had you extended the first one or two fingers like the barrel of a gun ? Or when you looked at your hand was your index finger curled around the trigger of an otherwise invisible gun, as mine always was.?
Think of the plane were your arms swepped back like the wings of a Lightening jet or was your aircraft, as mine was, totally invisible with your hands clasping an imaginary joystick.
I think there is a significant difference between the two modes of imagining.
Pointed, gun like fingers and swepped back wing like arms are signals to the world outside of the personal imagination whereas my way of doing it seems much more a ‘private world’. I wonder if there are two groups distinct groups in the populace displaying these characteristics.

Theology

It occurs to me that God like an anxious parent leaves us at the school gates of life and is reluctant to intervene until it is time to go home; but I think I may have suffered from too much Readers Digest.




Advertising ‘The rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket’ – George Orwell

Philosophy of Art

Did this course at the OU.
Lionel Blair style lecturer on how to take the exam.
"Now you are all students of aesthetics so when you come to your desks I want you put a beautiful bowl of flowers (gesturing) there - not there , but there"
Ann has just come back from the village art exhibition. Quote "Its a £100 but its got a beautiful frame mind".

GP's again

Picked up a pensioners pills yesterday from the surgery and they included this warning.Id love to be a fly on the wall during one of these meetings to 'discuss their behaviour'. Personally I think the behaviour of some GP's needs a bit of explaining too.

Kingsclere murders

I bought an old Daily Herald dated November 11 1944 , cost 1d.
On the back page down the bottom was this curious story, and I dont mean the 'Double dried egg allocation'. 9 US soldiers jailed for life for murder most foul.
How come it occupied such a small paragraph on the back page? Even in these days of depravity it would make banner headlines.
I looked it up on the internet and found that in fact it was only the Daily Herald that reported it , the whole story had been hushed up.
Details of the event can be found here

Planes

During the first year of an OU degree course I was on there was also a BA pilot.
He assured us that a fellow pilot had got the sack from BA because while in the air he tied two balls of string to his seat in the cockpit and then, walking backwards gradually unwinding the string and keeping it taught backed out of the cabin into the passenger area and approached, backwards the first passenger , a lady. He asked her if she would mind just holding the two pieces of string carefully just to keep the plane steady while he quickly visited the bathroom.
While on the subject of aircraft I used to work at Lloyds of London and a friend of mine who was an aviation broker showed me a claim he was trying to get settled.
I think it involved an Indian airliner. The airline was new and while it’s own pilots were training the principal pilots on the planes were Australian with Indian Co –Pilots. The plane had been held up on the runway for a long while and when it finally got the go ahead, as it sped past the control tower, the Australian pilot gave the tower the V sign to express his annoyance. The Indian co-pilot took this as a signal to raise the undercarriage and the whole thing sunk down into the tar mac. Nobody hurt but it cost a lot.

à la mode

Terribly excited - just heard my new machine washable , tumble dry, boil in the bag suit has arrived from Marks & Spenser's.
I do hope it is up to my usual sartorial standards.

Tilt

I hear that it is Spring in Hong Kong just as it is Spring here.
Something puzzles me about seasons.
They are as I understand caused by the tilt of the earth towards the sun.
If it is the turn of the northern half of the globe to tilt towards the sun its summer in the north and winter at the bottom. As the earth goes round the sun in an ellipse the tilt relatively changes so that the bottom bit gets it’s turn in the sun and the top half takes its turn with the snow etc.
There is a big difference between winter and summer temperatures at least at our latitudes.
Life survives within a very narrow temperature range.
The Earth is 93 million miles from the sun.
It seems tremendously fortunate that we should be at just the right distance from the sun to evolve and it is the seasons that seem to underline that point to me. 93 million miles from the source and yet a ‘tilt’ on the axis of the Earth which accounts for big temperature ranges so far as life is concerned only brings the Summer Pole of the Earth closer to the sun by 3000 miles or so.
But then there is something called the anthropic principle which rather screws up this feeling of being specially selected.
I think this says that the only reason that there is this extraordinary set of circumstances is that there is somebody here to observe them. There might be a billion other ‘suitable’ planets where no observers have evolved.
Hold on though doesn’t that make life here even more improbable?
I am off to www.anthropic-principle.com see if I can make some sense of it all.

"I had that Bertram Russell in the back of my cab one day and I said 'Lord Russell, you're a philosopher. What's it all about then Guv?' - and do you know, he couldn't tell me"
from Sir Isaiah Berlin Memorial lecture

Grandmaster and the Plod

Here is a picture of the signature that appears in a couple of chess books I bought in Hay about 10 years ago. I would like to know if they are the signatures of the author of the books, Alexander Alekhine. I have found a specimen of Alekhine’s signature on the web but it looks nothing like this. But then Alekhine was such a devious character it wouldn’t surprise me if he had more than one. So if you know that it definitely is or is not his signature please let me know and I might make a few quid.
His games are brilliant and the defence that bears his name is so good because when you play it you feel like Muhammad Ali employing his ‘rope a dope’ tactics against George Foreman, it is so completely contrary to normal chess instinct. (As I suppose is playing chess in boxing gloves but you get the point- I am making an analogy about tactics)
Now what is the connection between Alexander Alekhine chess artist extraordinaire and Paula Radcliff our own, well, obsessive runner and, perhaps more to the point ,why does the kind of theme I am about to recount crop up regularly in this blog in one way or another?
Alexander Alekhine or Dr Alexander Alekhine as he called himself, although there is a strong suggestion that he did a bit of Jeffrey Archer with the claim to a Doctorate, was given to urinating during a game on stage especially when drunk and Paula Radcliffe , well I still cant believe she did that! I could pursue this comparison further but I think it will only increase the reader’s unease and so I will spare you that. As to the unanswered question I am not even going to think about it. But if you are ever in a pub quiz and the Alekhine/Radcliff question crops up this might just make all the difference.

Money

Trevor Johns sat on our sofa puffing at his unlit pipe and pondered the question what would he do if he won the lottery. He gave it deep and serious thought before removing the pipe and announcing. “I'd get a new shed”.

Ripped off by Oxfam

I have just been reading Chase me Ladies and he gives a quote by PG Wodehouse about ‘Gone with the Wind’ :"After an eternity of it, they fell into the embrace, and I was just reaching for my hat when damned if they didn’t start a whole new story".
Which reminded me that living so close to Hay on Wye, Town of Books, I did once dabble in collecting. I once came across among the old books in Oxfam a thickish hardback covered in wrinkley brown paper with ‘Gone with the Wind’ written upon it in a spidery ancient hand.
I opened it up to find that it was a 1st edition. Whoever priced the book knew it was a 1st edition too because they had written it in pencil on the inside cover and alongside it the price, £5. I knew that the price of a first edition ‘Gone with the Wind’ was at the time about £300 because I took ‘Book & Magazine Collector’. Should I tell them to reconsider the price it was a charity after all?
I glanced shiftily over my shoulder adopted a casual pose and bought it in silence for £5. Maybe I might send them something when I ve sold it on – perhaps.
Rushed back to the car and drove the 8 miles home.
Carefully removed the wrinkly paper and found that the wrinkley paper wasn’t to protect the book but more to hold it together. The spine was badly damaged.
But it was a first edition after all, I hunted out the relevant magazine. Yes there it was, £300 in very good condition ran my finger down the various categories of condition until I came to , “Poor £4. “. Ripped off by Oxfam!

Only a lark

Alouette gentille alouette,
Alouette je te plumerai.


I am disturbed to find today the verb plumer meaning to pluck.
All these years, since at least 1961, telling myself, ‘I must look that up’ - at last I do and am shocked at the barbarity of it. Poor little skylark.

Old School Ties

Last week a package arrived for me. I wasn’t expecting anything.
I ripped it open and two ties fell out. But they might as well have been two vipers my whole body stiffened as subconsciously I recognised them before the brain could put a name to them. Brockley County Grammar School ties. They expelled me in 1961, loathsome place.It wasnt for stealing a postal order either.

Llyswen from the air

I once heard a canoeist telling his friends excitedly that he had just found another river going in the opposite direction.

Judgement

I have noticed in the last few weeks I take uncharacteristic pleasure in folding up a letter I have written so that the address just shows in one of those envelopes with a ‘window’.
In the height of summer when we had a dog and I cut the grass I would sometimes encounter one of his overlooked little ‘Richard the Thirds’ in the path of the mower.
Incidentally I bought a copy of the Lawrence Olivier film Richard the Third on ebay a week or so ago and it must have been good because I stayed awake right the way through, I have yet to keep my eyes open beyond the first 10 minutes of Jurassic Park.
Anyway Richard is itself again and impedes my progress with the mower.
This calls for a simple decision which requires a fine judgement founded upon a long experience in these matters. Do I remove it manually or do I mow straight over it? The prize for getting this judgement right is for the idle inestimable: call it right and ‘go over the top’ as it were and it would cost nothing. Call it wrong and go ‘over the top’ and the position is far worse than removing it first.
Some might say the correct thing to do is always to remove it manually, Ann among them, but for the pathologically lazy this is a challenge requiring judgement.

Twins

Brecon is twinned with a small Breton town called Gouesnou, near Brest.
Alternate years we visit each others homes and stay with a host family.
It is good fun.
New members sometimes get the wrong idea of what they are supposed to do when hosting. I heard of a case where the Brecon host did not know you were expected to feed your guests. It was two days without food before the stoical Breton made enquiries which resolved the issue.
Last year our guest told us of a pre-visit lecture given by the leader of the Bretons to those for whom this visit to stay with Welsh families was a new experience.
He urged them to follow the customs of their Welsh hosts when it came to food.
“If your host gets up off the sofa and wanders over to the fridge, peers inside, rummages about, drags something out and carries it back to the sofa to consume; you do the same”.

How are the mighty fallen?

2 weeks ago were you to have typed 'nasal hair trimmers' into the MSN Search engine as I noticed in my stats somebody actually did then my blog, this blog, would have come out as the no 1 site!!. There were 4,600 other entries.
I began to dream of selling my soul to the specialist mail grooming market perhaps by subtle product placements within my meanderings. This week I am devastated to find that the number of sites has increased by more than 1000 and I cant find mine in the first 10 pages. Hair today gone tomorrow.

A small pleasure

Pleased to receive this morning from Citi bank through the post another monthly statement and five bits of paper for the 50p that is still outstanding on my account see bankers and has been for the last 12 months now.
I am now going to try for year 2.

Poem

Here is a poem by Sheenagh Pugh, a welsh poet. She says she is sick of it and has removed it from her website.

Sometimes things don’t go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail.
Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war,
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best intentions do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen ; may it happen for you.

The Wincey Willis hypothesis

Much about modern life has crept up on me. A couple of days ago I said to Ann, “Where have all the Morris 1100s gone – the roads should be crawling with them?” She did not spare my feelings and gave me the verbal equivalent of a nasty slap on the legs. I then paid proper attention to the cars and noticed that they all looked essentially the same. It is as if there is a kind of parallel evolution going on – all vehicles tending towards the same shape. Its not that all have a common physical difficulty to overcome – re entry into the earths atmosphere say which might require a specific shape.
I had already noticed that all roads looked the same. You try and follow a route today that was once an interesting and pretty journey and are continually channelled , bullied , diverted and forced off of the route and onto some nondescript uniform motorway.
I blame Wincey Willis. I may be wrong but I remember weather forecasts as straightforward expressions of data. “Temperatures of 63 degrees Fahrenheit or 17 degrees Celsius can be expected”. I am damn sure it was Wincey Willis who in place of numbers introduced “not too bad” as a metrological term. Now they all say it and that Andrea Maclean on TV am irritates me further by always ending with “Now here is your summary” – its not my summary its her bloody summary.
In the little evolutionary tree that I am drawing up Wincey Willis ,surprisingly perhaps, is entered at a node. Thereafter down that branch all aspects of life converged to a dumbed down sameness.

Who

"The situation my dear girl is normal and it can't be worse than that"
-Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart

Choking not Waving

Just been reading a blog on Dulwich and it reminded me of a time when my mother had a flat there in the very top of a large old victorian house. She was looking out of the window when the sash broke and the window collapsed like a guillotine trapping her head and hands outside the building.
Her shouts to passers by, for she lived alone, were either ignored or else they thought she was waving and waved back. I am not sure how she eventually got free but like everything else in her life it was almost certainly down to her own ingenuity rather than anyone else.

Great Sporting Moments

We are going to the Isle of Wight in September for a week. I like the place because it dosn’t seem to alter beyond recognition. We seem to go there about every 10 years. The first time I went was also the first time I had ever stayed in a hotel it was a ‘school journey’ probably circa 1955.
Edward May had been practising ‘gobbing’ for many weeks before the event, make as much spit as you can before depositing it in one, hopefully huge, globule. Success was measured by the size and coherence of the effort in its final resting place on the pavement. If it were an Olympic sport marks would be deducted for any separation in the body of this watery projectile when finally at rest.
Lee Manor Primary school in south east London was a long way from Shanklin Isle of Wight and Edward May’s effort to achieve the record must rank along side the greatest sporting efforts. His cheeks were going in and out as we boarded the coach and I think if he did manage to say anything at all it would have been at this point before the precious cargo had multiplied to a level that required careful containment.
I am sure the ferry port was Portsmouth and that would be about 90 miles from the school and on roads that were still pretty to travel on. Edward May’s cheeks pumped away , occasionally they paused , I suppose to rest the muscles in his face but he could say nothing. Not without tremendous risk to those of us who sat near him and to the ultimate perfection and beauty of his great work. Then the ferry which takes about ½ hour and again back onto the coach for the journey to Cliff Top Hotel Shanklin. Finally we arrived at Keats Green and walked up the gravel drive of the hotel. In my mind I now clearly see the white bay window where its base meets the gravel drive and nestling in the crevice the enormous but slightly disappointing Ted May deposit. His big error was not to realise the importance of gravel as a means of drainage.

Raising funds

One way they raise funds here for the Church or the new village hall etc is to hold a Chinese Auction. Why it is called a Chinese auction I don’t know and you don’t have to travel very far outside the area before you encounter locals who haven’t a clue what a Chinese auction is and so maybe it did evolve here first.
With a conventional jumble sale the organisers are left with a huge pile of rubbish that nobody wants and it is a real problem to get rid of it.
I remember once having to store a huge pile of the late Mrs D…’s old corsets in our garage – why she thought they might have some resale value I don’t know.
I wished Id hung on to them though because I think I might have been able to shift them on ebay especially if I lied about their provenance.
Incidently Mrs D….. in the days of Thatcher regularly delivered to our house the local Tory newsletter much to my concealed annoyance. In one issue they were running a competition, which was , complete the following ,’ Oh dear Kinnock and Hattersley……..’
I sent in ‘will soon stuff the tories and then where will Maggie be’.
I didn’t win but she never delivered another Conservative newsletter.
Now the thing is that under the Chinese auction regime Mrs D…..’s corsets would pose no problem at all. With such an event all the donated bits of junk are set out in piles and in front of each potential prize is placed a plastic cup. The punters come in and buy a book of cloakroom tickets. They then wander among this cornucopia of crap dropping a cloakroom ticket into each mug which is adjacent to prize in which they are interested. But you are saying at the end of this session Mrs D….’s corset collection will have attracted no tickets – surely not?. You would be right but the beauty of this system will now be demonstrated. Suppose that you, a punter, wished to win that first edition copy of ‘Gone with the Wind’ nobody had noticed and placed all your tickets in the plastic cup adjacent to it and suppose when they came to draw the winning ticket it was yours! The skilled assistant auctioneer would gather up your book, and here is the beauty of it, Mrs D…..’s corsets too and present the lot to you as your winnings. You would say ‘I didn’t put in for these’ to which the standard reply is ‘ Its all part of the same lot’ . Brilliant , all gone no crap left.
I thought I would help out once with an advert. I scoured the internet and found a magnificent picture of the Duke of Edinburgh in fully military kit and he was pointing towards the camera. I inserted a speech bubble which had him saying ‘Go all slitty eyed at the Llyswen Chinese Auction’. Unfortunately it was deemed not suitable by the committee.

Cool out bottom in

I don’t use new words when an old word will do nor do I give them permanent new meanings. Temporary, new, one off meanings is a different matter that’s style.
Never will I describe any thing as ‘cool’ or ‘wicked’ and mean anything other than cool or wicked. I further expect that the number of occasions I am going to be able to use the word ‘awesome’ in the declining balance of my life is limited and I certainly don’t expect to have to deploy it in connection with a pair of trainers.
But there is one new usage which I feel does add something to the English language and that is the figurative use of the word arse. ‘I cant be arsed’. It seems to me to sum up a unique hitherto inadequatley described human predicament.
I was going to write some more but frankly I…etc et……………..

Black Mountains looking a bit pink

On the way home just now.

balloons

Who says we in the insurance industry dont have sense of humour.
The following from Rod Gibson in Brokers forum
'The Balloon family are asleep in bed. Baby Balloon wakes up and decides to get in bed with his mum and dad.

He can't get in so he lets a little bit of air out of his mum.

He still can't get in, so lets a little bit of air out of his dad.

He still can't get in so he lets a lot of air out of himself.

In the morning his parents wake up and are really cross that he got out of bed.

His dad says “I'm really disappointed Son, you've let your mum down, you've let me down, but worst of all you've let yourself down”'

Wimpish curry and ugly spud

The View from the Harp's Car Park - River Wye in the background.

The Harp used to be good for food but when I revisited it today in my role as Welsh Food Correspondent for the Man from Catford I was disappointed.
I regret to report that The Harp Inn Glasbury on Wye under Catford ownership now for a couple years is not very good.
We arrived at 1.03 pm on Saturday bought some drinks and asked the barman if they were serving food and did the owners come from Catford. Yes the owners did come from Catford but his faced screwed up at the mention of food. He seemed reluctant to anticipate what the response might be if he asked the old Catfordians about any grub. “Sometimes they do sometimes they don’t it all depends Ill go and ask them”.
He came back a third of the way through my pint of Fosters and made some kind of facial expression that I thought might be the equivalent of a thumbs up and so I approached the bar. Yes they would do it; he handed me the menu with the proviso that although they would do it he wasn’t sure what they would actually do and so could we chose and he will go away again and see if it is feasible.
Ann chose a jacket potato with cheese and I chose from the separate curry menu a so called superhot curry they called ‘Welsh Dragon’ , there were at least 3 other curries but this one I took to be for the expert curry eaters.
The curry was pathetically wimpish and I say that with no bravado even Ann could have eaten it. I know they didn’t specially make the curry and the rice for me but don’t you think after they had heated the stuff in the microwave they might have taken a fork and moved it about a bit so that at least it didn’t look as if it had been set like that back in the distant past?
Presentation of the baked potato was also severely lacking a certain je ne sais quoi . Ann didn’t know quoi either.
There were about 8 of us in the bar as we finished the meal and two of them were the owner and his wife.
It is always a bad sign when the pub owners are drinking on the wrong side of the bar.
All in all a thumbs down.

Mystery

What has become of the writer of the Policeman’s Blog?
This is surely a job for Hetty Wainthrop. Coppers blog

Snow good I will have to go in

Looked out the back garden this morning and it had snowed. Not alas sufficiently to prevent me from going to work.

Denny

I owe it to L E Denny Latin & English Master deceased to preserve a little bit of him electronically and so I repeat what I wrote in Friends Reunited.
Saves thinking up something new too.
I cannot believe that L Denny does not get more of a mention here yet.
Granted Harry Jankers Jarman had a certain violent charm, incidentally Harry played his role very well - he was never genuinely evil unlike that vile headmaster who I do hope has by now come to a sticky end. ' I am going to thrash you McLeod' the words sliding monotonously from that slit in his face.
Mr Denny however was an excellent teacher of Latin and English and what was more important at the time he was a superb instrument for the skilled class disrupter to play.
He frequently called anybody who was being a little thick a 'silly arse'
I still feel extremely guilty about his retirement day. Do you remember the catch phrases in Round The Horne.? He came in to the class on his last day highly emotional after many years service to find written on the blackboard 'Dennus silly arsum est'.
Tears rolling down his face the class fell silent he turned and slowly and quietly spoke ' You do this to a master who has been at the school for 35 years'.
Round the Horne suddenly filled us all simultaneously and the question was with one voice shouted back at him ' How long sir?'
Ive just realised I sound a bit like that chap on the Fast Show.

Historic Smut

Verse from a Benny Hill song - Gather in the Mushrooms 1961

She said, "You give me half a crown I will read your palm,"
And then she saw his love line went half way up his arm.
So now she's changed her prices, although she's just as willing,
It's big fat men at two pound ten and little boys a shilling.

I dont suppose the BBC plays this anymore.

Paranoia time again

Consider this syllogism
1) We should emulate the brave.
2) Suicide bombers must be brave.
3) Therefore we should emulate suicide bombers.
The conclusion must be true if the two premises are true.
Neither premise 1 nor premise 2 are illegal thoughts and they may be freely held by anybody.
However the conclusion 3 is soon to be made illegal.
Is this not ridiculous nonsense?

There is a lot to be said for being a Viking, raping and pillaging etc
Personally I would not care if somebody did blow up Tony Blair.

All of this becomes unsayable with the stupid ‘glorification’ law.

What films will no longer be shown, what books will be censored, what works of art withdrawn because of this moronic tosh? There will certainly be an effect.
The BBC has already censored The Goon Show of all things for political incorrectness – maybe we shall never hear the real thing again as they are entrusted with the recordings.
When will the first council start withdrawing Robin Hood from the shelves?

My wife‘s Aunt, who reads the newspapers, tells me that they are going to go through our dustbins and make sure that we are recycling and if they find a tin can in the paper only bag we are going to be fined £1,000. She is terrified. Me I just shrug my shoulders and adopt the pose an Anti- Blair resistance fighter (or terrorist) and plan my next act of defiance. I have horded 3 Tetley beer cans which I intend to lay like an explosive charge in the black kitchen refuse sack tonight. But I must get past the guard (Ann) first without alerting her.

And as for ID cards………………….

When nasal hair trimmers go wrong

Very worrying isn’t it? What if it catches a hair and wont let go and you cant find the button to switch it off!! Ive done my risk assessment.
I had an irrational fear that the sun was going into supernova , not even Patrick Moore’s reassuring tones on Sky at Night would stop me waking in a cold sweat. Valium cured that along with a nasty rash on the hand and a curious sinking feeling every time I got the train at Fenchurch Street Station. I have been more or less sane since.
I met Patrick Moore twice and had one postcard from him. First time was in a hotel in London – a charity chess event. You paid £25 and you got to play a simultaneous game of chess with the 8th best Grandmaster in the world – then Dr John Nunn. There were about 20 of us. At the same time Patrick Moore , Stephen Fry, Greta Scacchi and some others played a simultaneous game against some whiz kid – I think it was Michael Adams. Refreshments included!!. What value I cant think it raised a lot . Patrick Moore stood with me in the queue for grub. There was much clicking of the press cameras when Patrick loaded up at the buffet and stood in mid room with vast mounds of tuck balanced on two plates.
We all lost to the Grandmaster but I was not the first one to resign. In fact he looked a bit surprised that I did as I was only a pawn down. But I was about to lose another and remembered that if you are material down and in a bad position against a much stronger player good chess manners demands that you resign not waste his time by demanding proof of the obvious.
Next time I met Patrick Moore was at Hardwicke which is just outside of Hay on Wye and again we met in the food queue. This time he was giving a talk at a house called the Haven which had been the home of a Victorian Astronomer called Webb.
I reminded him about the chess match we had played in and I half hoped he might suggest we play a postal game but he said he wasn’t very good at it and proceeded at once to the refreshments.
Then I got to thinking. From all directions in the sky there is a constant background radiation equivalent to a temperature of 3 degrees above absolute zero. We are told that this radiation is ‘left over’ from the ‘Big Bang’ . But I thought that all electromagnetic radiation travels in a straight line at the speed of light.
Therefore it follows that the energy at the moment of the creation of the universe would have buggered off at the speed of lights and be way beyond Manchester by now and never looking back and so I wrote to Patrick Moore to point this out and ask for an explanation.
He wrote back and said maybe time and space were created at the same instant as matter/radiation. I took this to mean that matter/radiation did not appear in an infinite space but that space too grew.
Later I learned something of Einsteins theory of relativity and the warping of space by the presence of matter and it made a bit more sense.

Lunch today

Didnt get anything on my shirt but an escaped bit of sweet corn did lodge in the B N M area and I suddenly came to my senses when I realised I was trying to poke it with an unwrapped paper clip into the keyboard - intentionally.

Tedious but relatively short

It’s a pity about the Post Office.
Remember the joke about the letter written by the little boy to Santa Claus asking for £100 for some tearjerking reason being intercepted by the sorting office workers and they having a whip round among themselves and raising £50 which they then deliver to the little boy. Next thing they intercept the boys letter of thanks to Santa Claus but note the complaint that those thieving gits at the Post Office had stolen half of it. When I first heard that joke years ago I didn’t think it funny because I just did not recognise how anyone could believe that of the Post Office. Every so often there would be a report of a postman going off the rails but it was always a rare and solitary vice committed from among a workforce of 250,000.
I worked for the GPO for a while and found most of the people in it pleasant, intelligent and many of them quite gifted, gifted as a proportion, much higher than I have noticed in any other segment of industry. Most lacked any ambition as regards material advancement which is an appealing attribute anyway.
Now after the benefit of modern management methods theft seems to be rife and the Post Office like other great institutions of the past is going down the pan rapidly.
BBC News

Tom cats and the speed of light

This Morning

Ann said something this morning which included the phrase, ‘not last night but the night before’. Into my head popped a poem from a south London school playground of 1954 which I have not thought of since.
Not last night but the night before,
two tom cats came knocking at my door.
I went downstairs to let them in,
they hit me on the head with a rolling pin .
The rolling pin was made of brass,
And I fell down on my fat arse.
I think the ‘arse’ word was replaced at the time by a discrete cough.

Memory

About 6 years ago and still smoking I was obliged to indulge my filthy habit in the garage. To pass the time while puffing I learned Keats poem Ode to a Nightingale by heart and when I could recite it perfectly, word perfectly that is, I put a little slip of paper in the book with the date on. I thought I would go back to the poem in 6 months or whenever I felt like it and see how much I remembered. This way I could observe how memory, my memory, decayed over time. I hoped it would not because I could remember perfectly well ‘Shall I compare they to a summer’s day etc’ which I had learned when I was 14.
After a couple of years the results were pretty good – but now I cannot remember the opening line.

Similarly I learned as a child that the speed of light was 186,000 miles per second and have never forgotten it. But when I actually had to use the speed of light in calculations regularly for a whole year while doing relativity in the OU ‘Space & Time’ course this figure was in meters per second rather than miles per hour. Despite the fact that I used the metric equivalent for a whole year and have never in my entire life had use for the 186,000 mph figure it is only the latter I can remember.

Toads

I like this poem by Philip Larkin. I heard it first at an OU Summer school.

Toads

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison -
Just for paying a few bills!
That's out of proportion.

Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losers, loblolly-men, louts-
They don't end as paupers;

Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines-
They seem to like it.

Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets - and yet
No one actually starves.

Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout, Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that's the stuff
That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney
My way to getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.

I don't say, one bodies the other
One's spiritual truth;
But I do say it's hard to lose either,
When you have both.

Duchamp Revival

I think I ought to record, because Ive never seen it repeated anywhere since and it may well be an artwork to rival that of the superficially similar Duchamp masterpiece.
I was alone in a motoway service station toilet at least 15 years ago and as I approached I noticed the individual urinals all in a line at the same height except for one on the end which was much nearer to the ground obviously intended for small boys. Somebody had written above it ‘Big Boys’ .

Miserable Git concludes

-----Original Message-----
From:]
Sent: 07 February 2006 09:05
To: boughrood
Subject: RE: OU resources

Hi Douglas
Yes they do seem expensive and it is precisly because we do not sell thousands of them. Most of the Open University videos are made for OU students to help them more fully understand a variety of different,often complex, subjects they are studying. In as many cases as possible OU Worldwide attempt to bring this expertise to the wider market, though obviously we are not always able to do this as sometimes the costs involved in clearing third party material is too expensive.
The videos we do clear for sale are targeted mainly at educational institutions to enable them to bring their teaching to life. In this role as a teaching tool they actually offer exceptional value as they can be used time and time again and are of a very high standard. As is the case in any programme made for theatre, tv or video the costs involved can be extremely high and as we don't sell through high street shops or launch our films through the cinema we are unable to benefit from the economies of scale of large production runs and box office sales, our market is much more limited and specialist. We do attempt to run promotions and discount older videos as much as possible so do please check our 'special offers' page.




Dear Jackie,
Thanks for the email. You say;
'Yes they do seem expensive and it is precisely because we do not sell thousands of them'.
I have never done economics but I do believe according to the latest theory that when demand is low the price drops and when demand is high the price increases - perhaps you can raise this with the committee that deals with policy they may find the results of this new research enlightening. As regards the costs of production; 1) Unless you actually sell any you wont recover any of these costs. 2) I am not interested in some over produced video that the OU is hoping to flog to this country or that, all I want is flares and a camera that barely moves. If the OU paid more than £500 for any one of the productions I am talking about they were overcharged and what is more the costs of production of these videos has already been recovered many times over by the students who paid fees to do the courses as I did. The only production costs to be recovered are the costs of producing copies and these days you cant buy a newspaper without a free DVD of 'Gone with the Wind'.
Anyway thanks but I will get the information I want free from the internet It is just that I rather liked the old style OU before it forgot why it was created.

Further OU

-- Original Message --
Subject: RE: OU resources
Date: Mon, 6 Feb 2006 08:58:29 -0000

To: boughrood
Dear Douglas
Thank you for your query.Unfortunately we do not know the content of all our videos,may Isuggest you look up the topic on our website, the year the vidoe was
made is next to each video description so you should get some idea fromthat
Kind regards



Open University Worldwide
Tel: 44(0) 1908 858785
Fax: 44(0) 1908 858787
Dear Jackie,
Thanks - I have just had a quick look - How come you are charging £170 for a 24 minute video on a subject which must be about as popular as a Danish pastry at a Muslim teaparty. The number of people apart from myself that might be interested in that video you could count on one hand.Does the OU have shareholders now? Is Blair getting you ready to privatise?One more great institution laid low by greed and
committees.
Still have a nice day
Best Wishes
Douglas Mcleod

Coleman, missing presumed rich

I wondered what had become of David Coleman, the BBC commentator and in researching him I came upon the following quotation which was nothing to do with him.
'The black players at this club lend the side a lot of skill and flair,
but you also need white players in there to balance things up and give the team some brains and some common sense.'
(Crystal Palace chairman Ron Noades, speaking in 1991.)
Can you imagine a live interview these days and this being said? The interviewer would become apoplectic trying to politically correct it. Id love to see it.
I couldn’t find anything recent about Coleman though.

After the Watershed has gone to bed

Long to see an old style OU late night program on something obscure and so have just written to them.
Dear Sirs,
Do you have any mathematical videos preferably in DVD format but more than anything else where the presenter/lecturer is either wearing flares or the recording was made at a time when flares were in fashion? I do not really want anything made in recent years because I expect they are bit dumbed down. I maybe wrong of course but having seen a series a couple of years ago on the periodic table presented by an excessively emotional chap who seemed to think it a good idea to try and incorporate himself into some computer graphics like Bugs Bunny muscling in alongside Lawrence Olivier in Richard III, I suspect things can only have got worse.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely


I bet they wont supply me with anything.

Incident in the Garage

Recycling and identity theft came to a head in my garage this morning when the bag designated to carry ‘paper and materials’ burst as I was trying to tie it up to take and leave for the dustmen. Reams of shredded paper spilled across the garage floor.
To tell you the truth, and I realise this might be akin to admitting I’m a racist in its shocking impact but I don’t really care about recycling , in fact I think it’s a waste of time.
As for ‘identity theft’ if someone assuming my identity can get anything useful from Lloyds Bank then they will deserve it because it would be far more than I have achieved and I have been with them for years.
So whats all the shredded paper and plastic bags doing in the garage?
Well that’s Ann, she is a believer and gets quite aggressive if she catches me nonchalantly slinging it all into one black sack

Good cod - no winkles!

Couldnt wait any longer - went to seaside today - Tenby.Ate Cod&Chips.Noticed in Saundersfoot what I think in the summer is a whelk stall having been fitted with CCTV. Perhaps there is a high incedence of seafood theft in these parts.

GP's

I have a recurring problem with my foot. About twice a year it becomes impossible to walk on and takes several weeks to recover before returning to normality. Medical science is baffled or at least it can not be arsed. (I do hope that’s a british expression because it feels like it should have evolved out of 60 years of living in Britain)
It is odd that the human body is the most complex machine there is but it takes GP’s less time to diagnose than a garage to work out what is wrong with a car. The reason is that if your car is broken it stays broken until it is properly diagnosed and repaired , whereas the average GP attendee stands a 90% chance of recovering if he doesn’t bother seeing the doctor at all. It follows that in 90% of cases it doesnt matter to the immediate outcome whatever the GP says.
While on the subject of GP’s I shall not forget the incident about 20 years ago in Stanford Le Hope, Essex. I was riding a Scooter along the main road. A car pulled out from a side road and I hit the bonnet. As I accelerated upwards into the air and turned a summersault my helmet fell off. I crashed back down again onto the bonnet bounced up into the air, not so high this time due to the first law of thermodynamics, and down again onto the tarmac. Luckily this was right outside my GP’s surgery.
I picked myself up and staggered into the surgery clutching my helmet grazed dazed dusty and bleeding. The waiting room occupants visibly cheered up at the sight of me painfully limping towards the receptionist. They had heard the screech of tyres and the double bang of collision and my bounce and thought they had missed something interesting.
I stood before the receptionist.
She looked at me, paused and said;
“Have you got an appointment?”

Rorkes Drift

Until Christmas I never owned or used a mobile phone unless you count the time I accidentally sat on Reggie’s and rang his landline in the other room. For a while that mystery held the entire household in it’s grip before they got to the bottom of it so to speak.

Worries about people ringing me up wherever I was proved groundless – I just don’t give them my number. Since Christmas the £10 we put in is down to £9.72.
I am secretly pleased to have it though as this dream of the day before yesterday shows.
First 10 years ago when working for the awful Pearl Assurance in Hay on Wye I noticed about the town a tune constantly playing in my head. Durrrr dur durrr dur – dur durrr dur durrr.
When I got home I recognised it as coming from Zulu. Paranoid about meeting clients around every corner of the little town, they had become Zulu’s to my Gonville Bromhead.
The night before last I dreamed I was home and the house was surrounded by some unknown terror. The feeling was the same as being in Hay on Wye and waiting for the Zulu attack.
I locked the doors and hid knives about the house. A door burst open and a huge ginger chap flung himself at me. Later, (this admission is to my eternal shame), I recognised him as off of Coronation Street.
I killed him with knife OK and relocked the door. I ran to the phone to call the police but they had cut the lines.
Then a great sense of joy overtook me as I realised I had a mobile phone and I immediately woke up smiling. An odd dream because in real life I wouldn’t have put much faith in a mobile phone to work when needed and no faith at all in the police.

Optional Reading

It is self evidently true that Tony Blair is a liar.
It is true that he took a nation to war on a lie, his lie.
Why is it then that no enquiry ever finds any wrongdoing against him?
The Kelly enquiry for example is correctly regarded as a whitewash.
The answer is obvious but I have only just seen it, but before I say what it is I will have to go on a little diversion otherwise this revelation will be as impressively novel as the fact that Tony Blair himself is indeed a liar.
‘Too many cooks spoil the broth’ . For years I was aware of that saying, knew the meaning of the words in the sentence and even knew what the saying meant , but I knew all of this in an abstract, theoretical way.
Eventually there came a time at work when there were so many people dabbling in a particular case that the whole thing became totally screwed up and at that point I suddenly felt the meaning of the saying. It became real and not just theoretical.
The answer to the Tony Blair conundrum is that the reason no investigation ever nails him is that it is a conspiracy of the establishment.
We all know that phrase, we all know what it means and nothing is changed in its meaning by applying it to Blair except that now it is felt, by me at least, it has ceased to be theoretical and become real.
It would damage the establishment terribly if Blair were justly convicted and so the establishment will not convict. I find this knowledge that the judiciary would act in this way shocking as I have always thought of them as truly independent.
I think the word ‘felt’ might be a little confusing what I mean by it is what William James in the ‘Will to Believe’ called a ‘living possibility’. That’s probably even more confusing.

Summer memories

So humus won after all and I voted for taramasalata – well that’s life.

Last summer a gentleman came into the office wearing a rather nice frock and filling the air with the intense and unmistakable smell of TCP.
After he had gone I said to the lady mortgage adviser “I don’t know whats the matter but something is obviously chaffing down there”. To which she replied “Don’t even go there”.

Coffee Break

Ive just remembered Ann & I were at the Drovers Arms Tea Rooms , Builth Wells and I was not being allowed double egg and chips when two elderly men on the adjoining table began a conversation in the quiet local accent of Mid Wales.
“How is the wife?” was the question and the reply which seemed a long time coming “ Oh - not very lively”. Ann nearly choked on her coffee as she tried to suppress a laugh and I in mid- sip felt the coffee shooting up my nose via the back door and begin dribbling over my lip

Criminal Injuries Compensation

Why should this be paid at all?
If somebody has their skull smashed in by a thug and somebody else sustains the same injuries tripping over his own bootlaces why should one be ‘compensated ‘ and the other not? But just to avoid any suggestion that ‘fault’ has anything to do with this question let us suppose it was somebody else’s laces he tripped over.
Is there less grief in the death of somebody from a sudden illness than the death of somebody murdered?
In the dreadful recent case of the police failing to turn up at a shooting incident because it was too dangerous then had injuries ensued I would support a compensation claim against the police but that is not the same thing.
There is no justification that I can see for awarding money for injury simply because the injury arose in a way that was illegal. Compensation of this kind bears all the hallmarks of the quick fix politician the same bunch that produced the unbearable Financial Services Authority. The public feel sorry for victims of crime – so let us be seen to be making a law that will give the victims money. Doesn’t matter if it is illogical.

What no starter!!

I regret that I have to record my own wife Ann may have begun to talk in the very odd way of some of her friends and relatives.
The following occurred in the car just now as we came back from Brecon.
“I had some nice oatmeal biscuits that would have gone well with a piece of Cheddar but I thought – No!!”
If this were about some stupid diet I wouldn’t have even noticed it. This was about one of her friends who Ann invited round for lunch today because she was on her own and a little unwell. We were going to have roast chicken and syrup pudding.
The lady in question is one who feels terribly unfinished unless there is a starter, a main course, a pudding, cheese and biscuits and several cups of coffee.
I remember her daughter in law complaining to us once that she served straight away a main course to be greeted with “What no starter!?”
I also remember our guest once telling us that a friend had invited her to stay with the proviso “you will have to take me as you find me” to which her response was “Well I certainly wasn’t going to do that!”
Anyway what I gather is that Ann valiantly resisted an attempt to usurp completely control of the Sunday lunch. She had to back down on the syrup pudding because our guest is apparently unable to eat such things but was staunch on the question of the missing cheese board, hence; “ “I had some nice oatmeal biscuits that would have gone well with a piece of Cheddar but I thought – No!!” “

Dont Lerk Now

In about 1960 our school acquired a teacher from somewhere up north who’s name was Waddington. The words look, cook, book etc, he pronounced , luke, cuke, buke etc, much to our amusement. We pronounced such words as they should be pronounced, as the BBC before it became politically correct pronounced them.
Today look, cook book etc seem to be generally pronounced , lerk, cirk and birk.
There has been a movement in my life time from the primitive luke , through the sensible look to the estuary English lerk.
Does this have any more significance than fashion? I suspect that it does.
I cant believe that somebody who ‘lukes at the buke’ can be experiencing the same event as somebody who ‘lerks at the birk’.

Bankers !

I think the Grand National took place in March, I know nothing about horse racing, and I never bet on anything because I don’t like loosing.
But this once I thought I would try an online bookmaker as this was a novelty.
I think I may have had a subconscious vision of winning a £10 bet and then going on to create a vast financial empire solely from these winnings.
I placed a small bet and entered my Citi Bank credit card details.
But the computer said “No”.
So I rang Citi Bank to see what the problem was and they said that there was no problem with the card it’s just that they , Citi Bank, didn’t like what I was trying to pay for.
I paid the outstanding balance on the card , about £20 and told them to stick their card, returning it to them shredded.
Ever since then , every month, I receive a statement from them showing 50p owing.
It’s been 9 months so far. I wonder how long they will continue to send these it should prove interesting.

A question of Etiquette

Bit of a moral dilema here. We received a normal Christmas Card from one of Ann's friends but inside it contained this note. Should I send them £1.21 and cross them off of next years card list or just cross them off the card list. I dont think it says much either for Anns friend or the Post Office come to that.
When we had next doors dog for an evening it chewed through the kitchen door but we wouldn't have dreamed of saying anything. Likewise the post office, I remember writing letters from London for delivery in Brighton and getting a reply the next morning. The lazy buggers these days when they do turn up go through tremendous feats of advanced driving to avoid getting out of their vans at all as if prolonged direct contact with terra firma was destroying their life force.

Me surrounded by all my friends

Apparently Fisherman's friends were amused by my email and sent me a bag of Fisherman's Friends Goodies - which was nice.

Fishermans Friend

Had a sore throat - couldnt find any Fishermans Friends - got them muddled up with 'Victory V' - found Fishermans Friends Web site and asked them where I could buy them and have they been fiddling with the formulation. They replied and said where I could get them including Boots and they said 'No' they had not been fiddling with the formulation.
I then reply as follows;


Thanks for the full reply.
Glad to see its still going strong. Found some in the
end at the village shop!.
I had previously tried Boots, one of the most useless
companies I have ever dealt with, and they said they
hadnt any and pointed me towards their own products
for sore throats. I told them Id rather have something
that worked and strangely they lost interest.! What I
dislike about Boots in particular is that you buy a
packet of Aspro Clear and some jaded pharmacist
appears from behind the counter and enquires in a
voice more suitable to a knackered stripper starting
her 23rd song and dance of the evening whether you
have ever taken Asprin before! I am 60 years old for
Gods sake. Just before Christmas I was going in to
Boots to purchase two sets of ear plugs as a half kind
of joke for my son and his girlfriend with whom we were
going to stay as apparently I snore. I was waiting
for the line 'Have you ever used ear plugs before?' to
which I was determined to reply 'Well I rather thought
I would stick them up my arse'. Unfortunately my well
rehearsed performance had to be cancelled because my
wife bought them elsewhere. But some day I will give
it.
thanks for your help.
Douglas Mcleod

Gold for Britain

This is a picture by Alan Mcfaden who I haven’t seen for 40 years and who became and is aphotographer. We are now in regular contact electronically.
Thats me back right aged about 15.On the left standing is Rodney Hugh Lesley Brangwyn who I was astonished to discover recently had won a gold medal for Britain when in his 50's. It turned out to be for single sex dancing in the 1998 Gay Olympics and so the shock was not quite so great. An enduring memory of mine is watching cricket practice at the school ground.On the right the first and second elevens played each other. In the centre pitch the less talented cricketers played and on the far left an extraordinary sight as the fat the unfit and the otherwise no hopers appeared to be moving in a convoluted way for cricketers as Rodney led them in a military two step which culminated in a mass salute.

Only half a cup of team for me.

Spent Christmas with son and girlfriend. The first Christmas Ann has not had to do and she was ecstatic. I feel a lot better than I usually do 3 days after Christmas too as I did eat so much. Not because of lack of opportunity but because I didn't want to appear too much of a pig in someone elses house. Sometimes this unatural restraint backfires badly on me. I still have nightmares about an event which occured 15 years or so ago while staying with friends. "Would you like some bacon and eggs?" they enquired.
"No thanks a piece of toast is fine", I said, feeling that I must not put them to any trouble. They duly produced the toast but then went on to cook themselves a full english! I was devasted, this was an appalling lack of judgement on my part.
Anns mother, back of head in picture, has a nice little ploy that she frequently uses. " Just half a cup of tea for me please" as if this request saved the host either time or fortune. If we eat in a café the obligatory roast its "Just a small meal for me you always give us far too much". I feel like throttling her on such occassions as it is cardinal rule in my book that you never ever, ever, ever, tell a restaurant their meals are too big.

Bacon sandwich fails to impress

Soon I am going to have to have to turn somebody in.
There is not much more I can say without involving either somebody I work with or live near and that ultimately means trouble.
The urge to blog is strong. Like walking along the Pembrokeshire coast path and being pulled towards the edge I feel drawn towards two subjects. Together they could keep me going for at least a couple of weeks. It is very tempting. I shall resist for the time being.


Meanwhile here is a picture taken in April when we hosted a very nice French English teacher called Geraldine from our twinned town of Gouesnou in Brittany. She has just discovered a Harry Potter book in Hay on Wye, the ‘Town of Books’ . I didn’t know she was an English teacher when she arrived and had carefully rehearsed in French a complete Tommy Cooper joke which I was going to perform at a small dinner party in the week arranged for us and a couple of other hosts and their guests.
As she was so good with English I asked her if I could try it out on her first in English to see if she thought it was funny in case the French translation of mine was wildly off.
You know the one - a chap says to the waiter, “Have you got frogs legs”. The waiter replies, “Oui monsieur” and the punchline line is “Well hop over the counter and fetch us a bacon sandwich”. It took me ages working out how to say that in French.
Any way I run through it all in English and having delivered the punchline I ask;
“Well is it funny” to which she replies without much pause and in French “Non”. So that was a couple of hours work down the drain.

A couple of Vicars

This year Canon Ivor Davies died. An ‘AliceinWonderland’ expert,chess fanatic and a philosophy buff,he and Tom Weston, a retired dentist and fellow chess fanatic who seemed to be possessed with the spirit of Paul Morphy , played each other for 24 hours in a shop window in Hay on Wye where Ivor was the vicar. Ivor smoked a pipe and Tom chain smoked cigarettes ; at 3 O’clock in the morning it would have been an eerie sight for some late returning town dweller to meet these two faces illuminated through the smoke . Clergymen have their own postal chess club to which Ivor belonged its magazine was/is called ‘Chess Minister”.
Then there was the late vicar of Llyswen Martin Jones. He was a good chap. Ann would drag me to Church once a year on Christmas Eve and Martin would give the same sermon every time from an old exercise book except that he would alter it by omitting different parts so that only once did I hear the full unexpurgated version. This full version was very good and I have heard nothing since from anybody else that interested me as much as Martin’s full monty Christmas Eve sermon. I wish I had told him at the time.
I went to Church on Christmas Eve but Ann went every week . One year I was doing an OU Science course and an experiment was to observe the swing of a pendulum.
I tied an old horse brass to a piece of string and swung it backwards and forwards.
The experiment called for me to hold the swinging pendulum and to walk round in a circle . This was to show that the pendulum would continue to swing in the original plane. I didn’t know what I was supposed to see and so as I circled the swinging horse brass on the end of a piece of string in the garage I began to chant in boredom.
I heard the gate go and took it that my son had come back for lunch and just continued in the garage holding the swinging pendulum and walking in a circle chanting.
It turned out to be the Vicar bringing back a plate for Ann. I didn’t try to explain because I didn’t know where to start but I think he might well have had me down as a Satanist after that.

Conspiracy Theory

I have just posted the following to a news group and will be interested to see what they say.
Would any of you know what this is?
On my computer randomly there will occur at no particular time of day what sounds like a signal.
The opening is _ .. _.. _.. then it goes into a little jumble of sounds which I am too slow to translate into dots and dashes. The whole thing lasts about 7 seconds.I thought it might be something within the house switching itself on but for the first time last week I was approximately 1 mile from the house in the car and listening to the radio when the same intereference sequence occured - exactly the same.
I think I am being bugged by Tony Blair for going to the No 10 website and making rude remarks about him so if I should suddenly - its starting againnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn

Faith, Hope and a bloody good salary

Odd how Charities are politically correct and yet charity isnt.
Notice how even some Christians change the phrase ‘Faith Hope & Charity’ to ‘Faith, Hope & Love’.
I am politically incorrect I like the idea of charity but I dislike charities.
To illustrate what I mean, yesterday I received a ‘marketing’ device from a charity called ‘Feed my people’,I notice it has various other names including the much less emotive DSPMM LIMITED.
Accompanying it was a letter saying how most of the children in Africa didn’t even have the shelter provided by an umbrella.
And what was the ‘marketing’ device accompanying the letter – you have guessed it an umbrella. I was tempted to say ‘Don’t you think on the whole it would have been better to send the umbrella to Africa?’
But I told them instead that I would not support an organisation that wastes the donations entrusted to it in this way. I said I ‘d keep the umbrella but that they will be pleased to know that I will make a donation directly to a local Mothers Union branch in Africa and so Africa will receive back at least that which they have squandered.
I see plenty of Charities where I work. Most of the admin staff get salaries equal to mine or better and I inhabit in the grubby world of commerce.

A Rose by any other name

I typed in
anagram genius Financial Services Authority and got Hairy, evil, cretinous fanatics.
I must say that in all my dealings with The FSA I havnt found them particularly hairy.

What is the Wold Coming to?

Stow in the Wold 11th December 2005. England is just about full now.
I'd be all in favour of a cull but for the fact that I would probably qualify for the list.

Vous n’avez pas la prioritée

If you have roundabout with 4 roads joining it and 4 vehicles arrive along each road at the same instant in time then given the rule ‘give way to traffic on your right’ (or left if you are a Jonnie foreigner) , nobody would move at all ,but at least Immanuel Kant would approve of the morality of the situation. It takes a wilful disregard for the law on the part of somebody in order to keep traffic moving.
What is needed then at roundabouts and at life in general is a moderate dose of enlightened anarchy.

Here is a postcard of Llyswen. This particular scene hasn’t changed except that the traffic has increased. Even 20 years ago I remember next door's West Highland terrier regularly strolling down the centre of this road like some kind of canine Gary Cooper approaching high noon. If it hasn’t been remade yet starring Tom Cruise you probably won’t get that reference.
Wouldn’t it be good if the world ran out of oil once and for all? People would be too bone idle to stray from the cities and the roads would sprout weeds. Excellent indeed.

Llandrindod Wells again - yesterday.
The sign outside the news agents reads, 'Proud to be local'
There is something deeply wrong philosophicaly with that.
How can you be proud to be local? Everybody is local, except God and since he is everywhere even He is local.
How can you be proud of something you share with everybody else? Its like saying "I am proud to be human" - meaningless unless you a trying to make your dog feel inferior about his genetic code.

Haddock fairy shy knee

Today I looked at the stats for this blog on sitemeter and I found that somebody had been referred to it by the MSN Search Engine. They had searched for ‘Rood Off the red nose’. MSN found rood in my address boughrood and it found red in the Cocky Ollie birds bit and it found the nose of the geriatric pole dancer who wasn’t. It therefore concluded that my site was the number one possibility for the poor chap who had typed it in.
I bet he was disappointed when he got here!

Lost Birds

I cant find this song anywhere on the net and so repeat it here in the hope that somebody might recognise it. If you do let me know. It was sung in Junior School (Lee Manor) round about 1955!

‘We are the Cocky Ollie birds in red and blue and gold
We come to earth in penny trays our purpose to be sold
Our little legs are stiff and straight we cannot move a limb
Our voices loud and we are proud and still we always sing
Cocky Ollie Cocky Ollie Cocky Ollie Oh’

Handcuffed by a word

They have taken the scaffolding away from JO’s.
JO’s is what the locals call the Spa shop in Llandrindrod Wells because the owner is J O Davies. The Welsh have a thing about names. A regular in the Griffin, Llyswen, was a man who’s name was Harold but whose history was that of a prisoner of war who stayed on when it ended. He was known ever after as Herman the German.
Dai Farter, another name I remember from the Griffin but I cant testify as to it’s appositeness since I never managed to meet him.
I am sure the Llandod locals when they christened it JO’s had in mind something more than just initials after all Spa has fewer syllables. Probably they liked the contrast between the idea of OJ and the idea of JO as men.
Last week when the scaffolding was up I called in to JO’s to purchase a ‘Bombay Bad Boy’ for lunch. (See Harvest below). Facing one of the scaffolding poles with her nose an inch or so from the metal itself and both hands clutching the pole at eye level was an elderly lady. I shall resist any mention of geriatric pole dancing because it would be in very poor taste but I think I know why she was there.

We used to have a Welsh terrier called Nippy and like all of his kind he was untrainable.
The only way to stop him from escaping from the garden was to shout loudly and violently STAAY!! . He would stop still and turn to look at you. You could see his brain calculating the possibility of your reaching him before he made freedom. His decision, escape or remain still and await capture was invariably right and sometimes very finely judged. Many times when he had decided on the open road rather than surrender he evaded capture by the slimmest of margins , my hand grasping for his tail as he forced his way through the hedge just failing.
I was trying to pretend to my wife that I had given up smoking and part of the plan was to use a mouthwash. I was just approaching by car the house swilling the stuff round in my mouth when I noticed Nippy strolling out of the gate. Coming towards him on foot were two neighbours one of whom was a retired clergyman. I had 3 choices of action but could only think of two.
Let him risk wandering into the busy road or quickly opening the door of the car spitting out the mouthwash and shouting as loudly and aggressively as possible STAAAY! I loved the dog and so chose the latter. What on earth the neighbours thought when they saw this violent performance with additional vomit I do not know.
Meanwhile back at the pole my theory is that either some social worker or perhaps relative of the lady in question wanted to pop into JO’s for their lottery ticket etc.
In an attempt to ensure that their charge did not escape they had positioned her holding the pole and uttered the equivalent of STAAAYY!

Sauce 2

And here is their reply.

Sauce1

I have just found this letter which I sent to HP sauce back in 1986!

Getting to know who

Went to Cardiff on Saturday night to see The King and I’‘ at the New Theatre Cardiff.
Parked the car quite close to the theatre – (only!) £12 for 5 hours.
Walking back to the car park at about 10.20pm and it was like a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Birds’. Hundreds of teenagers queuing to get into night clubs, like crow lined up in vast numbers along the telegraph wires, and just as menacing.
Lots of big pubs full of similar animals each looking very like a modern ‘glass for bars’ zoo cage. One was tempted to peer in to the windows to get a closer look at the curious creatures occupying the deeper shadows. I remember a zoo in Colchester which had a cage with some kind of small furry mammal laying on its back and trembling as if in it’s death throes. There was a sign in the cage which said ‘please do not report this animal as sick it is nocturnal and they always sleep like this’.
By the car park ticket machine one of the, humans I suppose you would call it, was urinating in a corner close to the queue and it was all I could do to prevent Ann from remonstrating with him. She does not understand the etiquette of this species. I do, having watched ‘Booze Britain’ occasionally on the television I feel confident in recognising some of the signals which pass for a rudimentary language among them.
‘Does your mother know you do this kind of thing?’ I am pretty sure would have been regarded as some kind of challenge had I allowed her time to utter it.
Off course we had heard the odd ambulance and police siren during the performance of the musical, which was particularly appropriate I thought during the rendition of ‘Getting to know you’.

Oh I did see two policemen out for a stroll together. One was aged 12 and the other maybe 13.They both wore helmets but even with the helmets on they were shorter than me and I am no giant.
The question which is worrying me is which is the alien species? Them or me?

Prejudice

I am prejudiced. Prejudice is what prevents me from putting my hand in the fire again.
A very nice lady an ex school mistress from the days when they actually knew something, who lives nearby rang my wife and I answered the phone. She had been in hospital and so I asked how she was.
Seemingly taken aback by my interest she said, “Oh! Very good in parts”.
Trying to show off I said “ Like the Parson’s egg?”
To which she immediately replied “Certainly not”.
I realised at once it should have been the Curate’s Egg and took the rebuke to be pedantic.
Months later after she had died it came to me that she was being much more subtle.
The Curate’s egg quotation is all about humility and the very, very last thing you could say about our ‘Parson’ was that he was in any way humble.
I now cannot remember why I am following this particular route when the object in mind is to slander the Americans.
Perhaps I was thinking that my school master prejudice prevented me from seeing a first class joke and a bit of self depreciation might make what follows more acceptable.
Anyway some Americans I like, some Americans I even admire but generally speaking when presented with an unknown American he has to overcome my natural prejudice against his whole kind.
I have played maybe 2000 to 3000 games of chess on the internet against people from all over the world.
Here is a ‘conversation’ that has occurred on at least 3 occasions.
Yank: Where U from?
Me: Wales
Yank: Which State is that in?
More frequently than that and I would say in between 3% and 5% of all games the following typical ‘conversation’ follows a game.
Yank: MOTHERFUCKER
Me: Nice to meet you too.
Yank: BASTARD
Me: I am pleased to see that you have such a fine grasp of the English language.
Etc, etc.
One particular ploy against this kind of thing which I find surprisingly effective is to allow two or three bits of foul language and then for me to say “I take it you are American?”. This seems to startle them and I get the impression that it is as if I have held up a mirror and all of their obscenities are being channelled back onto their precious flag. Maybe they’ve just come to the end of their vocabulary though.
I will say that my own race, the English are the next most aggressively foul mouthed on the net. How appropriate that they should be united in the Iraq aggression.

Freedom of Information and nice work for some.

Here is an email response to a request I made to Powys Health Authority under the freedom of information Act.
No wonder the GPs are fighting to get on to the lists to do this cushy number.
They need something to supplement their meagre pay after all!!


I refer to your request for information which we acknowledged on 27th May 2005


I am able to provide with the following information concerning the rate of remuneration to practitioners providing the out-of-hours service in Powys:

* Weekday evenings 6.30pm to midnight - £65.00 per hour

* Weekday and weekend evenings midnight to 8.00am - £100.00 per hour

* Weekend day and evenings - £85.00 per hour

* Bank holiday day and evenings - £100.00 per hour

* Bank holiday nights - £115.00 per hour


The Local Health Board does not hold information in respect of individual practitioners. As you may be aware, Powys Local Health Board contracts with ‘Shropdoc’, which provides the GP out-of-hours service in Powys.

In contrast to that consider the lower end of the pay scale in the NHS.
They knock off of the wages of anybody who has their monthly payslips posted to them the cost of the stamp!! It is shown as a deduction.
Here is another reply from Powys Health authority under the freedom of information act.
Dear

Thank you for your email request under the Freedom of Information Act concerning the amount of money saved by the Local Health Board each year through the practice of charging staff postage sending them their wage slips through the post.

I am able to advise you that the Local Health Board does not save finance as the Board recovers the charge of a second class stamp from those employees who receive their salary slip through the post. You may wish to know that approximately £450 is recovered from staff each year. You may also wish to know that the Local Health Board does not charge everyone who has their payslips posted home. Members of staff who are community based, or on long term sick leave, or on maternity leave are not charged the cost of posting their salary slips. The only time a member of staff is charged is when that member of staff, based in a hospital, surgery or clinic, requests that their payslip is sent to their home address

From these two letters I conclude that 4/1/2 hours kip waiting for a phone call on a good weekend for a Shrop Doc would pay for all the stamp money saved in an entire year for the poor workers who have 21p a month deducted by their generous employer for the privilege of receiving a wages slip.

Lavland

I was discussing euphemisms for ‘going to the lavatory’ with a French teacher of English. I told him one that I had heard on the radio. There was a brief pause as he considered each word in turn and then collectively and then he roared with laughter.
‘I am just going upstairs to see an old friend off to the coast’.
I wonder how many French students on an exchange visit to the UK will try that one on their hosts and with what results.
I will confess and although you don’t want to hear it I am going to write it anyway that whenever I visit the said premises I imagine myself to be at some other location but not for the same purpose.
The curious thing is that this is almost invariably at the conjunction of the Thames and the River Kennet, failing that a steeped walled mooring at Goring on Thames.
Finally just to complete this little trilogy Brockley County Grammar School in the early 1960’s had a Geography teacher called Mieux whose favourite punishment was to give out ‘lines’
‘Silence is golden it is only monkeys that chatter’.
Rarely he would come into contact with foul language from the boys, language which these days would probably serve to win for the proposer a grade C in English O level.
Mieux’s, contemptuous would say ‘I will not tolerate lavatory language’. This was felt by us as a powerful rebuke as if we ourselves had been sworn at.
It only occurs to me today all these years later that there is no necessary connection between lavatories and foul language and this is and was a very odd phrase to use.
photograph of Goring Lock courtesy of Jim Shead - see his waterway site

David Shrigley

I regret never having heard of this chap - but he is brilliant. Try the link.

Powis Castle

Yesterday we went to Powis Castle , the National Trust holding a ‘behind the scenes’ tour. There were about 10 of us and we were accompanied round by at least 8 National trust people. One of them assigned the role of ‘sheepdog’, scuttled about at the back of the ensemble ensuring no mavericks made a bid for freedom or engaged in an unauthorised activity. I like the National Trust and it’s volunteers but their enthusiasm makes them unpredictable. When booked the tour was to take two hours, the leader said about 2 1/2 hours and the actual time was 3 1/4 hours. I wouldn’t have minded but we didn’t seem to have among us visitors any of the usual timewasters and inane questions were really at a minimum. It was worth it though.

Blair

It is quite extraordinary that the police can shoot an innocent man 7 times in the head and still manage to ‘tough it out’.
Blair by name Blair by nature.

Big Bang and Roast Beef

As from deepest space there comes to us the earliest sign of the fiery birth of the universe, the remnants of ‘Big Bang’, the ‘singularity’, so too I notice the smell of Sunday roast in the far extremities of the house long after it has disappeared from the kitchen and the dinning room.
The two events are connected.
I don’t mean that my Sunday lunch was simply implicit in the starting point of matter/energy at the birth of the universe and the underlying rules which governed it’s evolution. I mean that analogy is how we think not an aid to thinking.

Evolution

In 1956 Ladywell Recreation Ground had been known as such for 56 years or so.
50 years later and I saw today that they now call the same place Ladywell Fields.
4 syllable words are obviously too much for the modern day dweller of Lewisham & Catford.
Ladywell itself has 3 syllables and surely cannot survive.
Perhaps it will become first Lady Fields, and then, because Fields are a bit of a difficult concept in Lewisham, just plain Bitch Pitch

Harvest Festival

This the first week in October and I decided to go on a 5 day diet of my own invention, one which studiously avoided any connection with anything to do with the bogus science of nutrition. The diet consisted of a random Pot Noodle for lunch and a more specific Bombay Bad Boy for tea. If still hungry I decided that apples were probably OK and so I bought a bag of bramley cooking apples from Sommerfields.
The diet went fine but on Thursday night I found that the Bombay Bad Boy was insufficient to curb my appetite and so I went off in search of the bramley apples which Ann had ‘put away’ somewhere. In the garage I found 3 beautiful looking apples, seeming a little bigger than I remembered, grouped together on a sideboard.
I ate one and found it delicious – cooking apples taste much better than ‘eating’ apples. I do realise that cooking apples and Pot Noodles may be a little advanced for the squeamish.
Half an hour later I went into the garage again and ate another one.
Today it is Friday 7th October and tonight is the Harvest Festival and Ann is extremely annoyed that of the 3 special apples she had bought for a Church decoration, carefully laid out in a practice arrangement in the garage, only one remains.
I appear to have eaten a Church window.

Quotes 2 (Overheard)

Wife's friend "That must be awful to have 2 children one a lesbian and the other killed in Spain"
Wifes's Aunt"I've seen him walking up our road looking in all our fronts"

Talk to your robot

If you type ‘Klatu verada nictu’ into Google it comes up with 469 references to it, or at least there were today. This phrase has stayed with me for more than 40 years during which time I have forgotten countless other things, probably it stayed because I felt that someday it might save my life.
It comes from a ‘black & white’ film called ‘The day the earth stood still’ which starred Michael Rennie and a robot called Gort.
The phrase in question had to be memorised by the heroine and spoken to Gort to pacify him and prevent him from killing her and going on to destroy the world. Gort, by the way, was a huge figure, rather like an animated suit of armour but much more menacing.
The film terrified me but then for 30 years or so I never saw the film again or heard any mention of it.
I was watching, I lead a very sedentary life, the Rockford Files (James Garner) and there came a scene in which a huge thug hove into view, much to the despair of the hero who on sight of his massive opponent uttered the words ‘Klatu verada nictu!’
I immediately understood. I thought to myself surely I must be the only person in the UK who understands that reference, maybe the world?
That was more than 10 years ago so today I thought I would just check out Google in case the film has become a huge cult success and the reference was not quite so obscure as I had thought.
Well 469 does not I would have thought indicate a very high level of recognition. I reckon the James Garner script was almost a private joke by the writers and certainly to be welcomed.

Psalms 78.66

When I worked for the awful Pearl Assurance Radio 4 broadcast the complete bible over a number of weeks. Travelling to Hereford by car to the foul company as I was required to do weekly I found that the program had got up to 'Psalms'.
I was struck by a line in one which went;
He smote his enemies in the hinder parts.
I expect some awful Hip Hop rapper dumbed down translation has already rendered this as He kicked arse
Actually there is no connection between Pearl Assurance and the Psalm other than the arse connection. I only mention Pearl here at all because that is where I was going when I heard the psalm and it gives me the chance to express my contempt for them in passing.

Light question

We see a tree because light comes from the tree and enters our eye.
But why do we see a tree when all we get is light coming from the tree?
What information about the tree does the light contain?
It can only be colour or brightness or both – nothing else.
The colour of light is the same thing as the frequency of the waves of light.
The brightness of the light is the amplitude of the waves of light.
We are told that waves superimpose and that light waves behave in the same way as other waves (see diffraction of light).
Given that the tree is over there and I am here and there are rays of light coming from the tree to my eye made up of light at frequencies and amplitudes corresponding to the colours and brightness of the various parts of the tree.
My question is how does light preserve that information about the tree when in the intervening space between me and the tree there is light of all frequencies and amplitudes passing in all directions and superimposing upon my ‘tree light’.
I would have thought that this would destroy the original information completely by changing the wave.
I am missing something which is pretty obvious I am sure, as nobody else seems to need to raise this question. Can somebody enlighten me?

Apathy

Round about the summer of 1979 I was sitting on the banks of a creek in the middle of an Essex saltmarsh, there was not another human being to be seen. After an hour or so the creek began to fill up energised by the incoming tide.I sat there and noticed something drifting in. As it neared I saw that it was a very old sealed bottle. It bobbed past and I grabbed it. Through the grime I could see inside a message written on some yellowed paper.
I tried to open it but the stopper was well and truly fixed. The only way to read the message was to break the bottle.
I thought ‘bugger that I might cut myself’ so I threw it out to sea.

Me and a recent Baguette

Just in case there was any doubt as to who you were dealing with here.

email after France again

Dear Pat,
just remembered something else - could this be an early manifestation of your interest in poetry? You and Dennis introduced me to autograph albums. There was nobody in mine except what either you or Dennis wrote which I remember as follows;
'The lightening flashed the thunder roared
And all the world was shaken
A little pig ran to his sty In time to save his bacon.'

You know you can have chunks of wood, stones etc found on a beach say which are exhibited as works of art -do they call it objets trouvés ?
Well you can find poetry in a similar way. I 'found' while listening to the shipping forecast,
'Low heading west, slowly losing identity' - sounded like a definite fragment of a poem to me.
Also last week on holiday in St Jacut de la Mer on increasing the croissant order from 3 to 5.
Me: Il mangent plus en plus
Bread lady: C'est le Bon aire de St Jacut.
I wanted to say 'You are a poet but do not know it 'but realised it wouldnt work in French even if if I had a clue how to say it. So I just said Vous etes poet.
Best wishes
Douglas