Unwellitude – Another Update
Posted: Wed 3 July, 2024 Filed under: Domestic, Health, Thoughts Leave a comment »So, six weeks after the initial Unwellitude happened, my chest was still fairly well stuffed, ongoing coughing, and generally feeling crappy.
At night I was starting to make noises like the Predator, which is never a good sign.
So I finally got round to making an appointment with my GP, and saw them yesterday. (On a side-note, pretty impressed – called them Monday afternoon, not expecting anything to be available ’til next week, and instead got a slot at 8am on Tuesday!)
Diagnosis? A nasty chest infection – they wouldn’t say which one, but from previous experience and having done some reading, I’d say pneumonia is the most likely candidate. So a prescription for a week’s worth of hefty-dose Amoxicillin, and we’ll see what happens.
Literal vs Lateral
Posted: Fri 12 April, 2024 Filed under: Domestic, Driving, I Don't Understand, People, Thoughts Leave a comment »One thing I’ve found fascinating with people – both where I live now, and previous places – is how literal they are, even when it means they take longer to do things.
For example, where I now live there are several junctions where turning right onto a busy road can mean significant delays for people. But most of those junctions also have roundabouts a short distance up the road if people instead turned left.
So here, for example – the scenario is that I’m pulling out of the Stephenson industrial estate, wanting to turn right.
If I turn left, it’s 400m to the roundabout. It’s a simple thing, an 800m round-trip, and far faster than the delay when waiting to turn right. But no-one does it. They’re so locked into “I’m turning right” that they somehow don’t even think about turning left instead.
On another regular drive, in the run-up to another roundabout, the left-hand lane gets utterly jammed, waiting for a safe gap in which to get out and turn left. But if one takes the right-hand lane, it’s all too easy to get up to the front, go all the way round the roundabout and then come off to that same route – well before the equivalent drivers in the left-hand lane have caught up. Yes, it’s effectively a 450° turn, but it’s *so* much quicker. And again, people are locked into “I’m turning left” and seem to not see the alternative at all.
It’s all very odd. I mean, I’m glad I can look at it and see those lateral decisions that make life easier, but I do find it fascinating that so many people simply can’t/don’t do so.
Car Progress
Posted: Fri 8 March, 2024 Filed under: Domestic, Driving, Thoughts Leave a comment »Somehow I’ve already had the new (to me) car for three full months, and thankfully it’s turned out to be a good buy.
I had my concerns – for a car registered in 2016, a mileage of 18,000 is gobsmackingly low, so I did wonder if it had spent a lot of its time in garages or whatever, but it seems that the previous owner just didn’t get out much. Obviously that is not the case with me, so that mileage has already increased by a third. (6,000 miles in three months – yeah, that’s about standard for me)
It’s proved to be an absolute beast on the motorway, and just handles all the miles I’ve thrown at it so far. It’s weirdly quiet in general – which isn’t a complaint, just an observation that a diesel vehicle still doesn’t feel like it’s meant to be that quiet! It’s also sitting happily at an indicated 49Mpg. I’d be happy if that were slightly better, but it’s a decent enough figure for my purposes.
It’s also meant that I’ll be able to split the costs of MOT / Servicing and Tax / Insurance Renewal – I got it with about six months MOT left, so that’ll be due in April, and Insurance etc. isn’t til November/December, which is definitely nicer than having Everything Due All At Once.
There are niggles – primarily it turns out that what I’ve got is a 2015 model that was registered at the start of 2016, so it’s just missed out on having better tech integration (no Apple CarPlay, for example) although I can – and will – fix that with some form of aftermarket sortout. On the positives though, it means I also don’t have driver “aids” like auto start/stop , or the lane-change-warning stuff (that tried to kill me last time I had it on an Insignia) which is all fine with me.
All told, it’s worked out well.
Driving Change – Better Services
Posted: Thu 30 November, 2023 Filed under: Business, Cazoo, Customer Services, Domestic, Getting Organised, Insurance, Thoughts 1 Comment »Following on from the utter farce with Cazoo being shockingly shit at customer services, it’s only fair to mention that there have been other companies who have made things a lot easier than they could have been.
First among those has been Enterprise, who have always been a stand-out for me when it comes to car-hire firms. They have one simple thing that makes them stand out (and I don’t understand why other hire firms don’t mimic it) in that quite simply, they come to collect you rather than insisting on getting to them. Alongside that, there’s been no hassle when I’ve needed to extend the hire period and so on. I know that really it’s “just” a case of doing the jobs they’re paid to do, but sometimes even that feels like a rarity.
Honourable mention also goes to We Buy Any Car, who again just did what they said they would – I got the old Kia to them, they checked it out (and explained the entire process really clearly) and paid what they’d agreed within the day. All the paperwork came through fine, the V5C change of ownership and so on, and it was all smooth and easy. (Cazoo wouldn’t do a trade-in on the Kia, as it was over their mileage limit, which is fair enough)
Alongside that, even my car insurers (Darwin Insurance) made life easy. Once I’d taken delivery of the car, I checked other insurance providers so I’d got a good idea of costs, and then called my current insurer to see what the charges would be with them. It turned out that sticking with Darwin would mean a premium that was about 50% higher than a different provider, so it made sense to cancel the current policy and start a new one for the new car. Darwin made that cancellation process easy and smooth – and it turned out that I’d paid enough that I got a refund rather than having to pay the cancellation fee. (Which has just *got* to be a win!) The new policy has also all come through fine and been easy to sort.
So, despite Cazoo being a monumental pain in the arse, there’ve been others who’ve made the entire thing a lot easier than it could have been. And that’s something I’m deeply thankful for.
Unhelpful Timings
Posted: Tue 7 November, 2023 Filed under: Domestic, Finances, Insurance, KwikFit, Thoughts 2 Comments »The one downside of the whole “need a new car” thing is that I’d only recently sorted out all the MOT, Servicing, Tax, and Insurance Renewal for the current car. Which is, to say the least, a bit annoying.
Thankfully, the MoT hadn’t needed too much work – simply realigning windscreen wipers and headlamps, no major stuff at all – but still it’s annoying to have done all the stuff for ensuring it’s mechanically OK, only to then have something unchecked go ker-fut. (OK, *start* to go ker-fut!)
The insurance renewal is a bit more of a pain. I could make alterations, but I suspect that the massive difference in vehicle values might make it ridiculous. So I might have to cancel the newly-renewed policy – I know what that will cost, and it’s doable. And before I make a decision, I’ll find out what the costs will be, so I can properly evaluate the pros and cons.
Again, things could be far, far worse. It’s just annoying.
Changes, Privilege, and Good Fortune
Posted: Fri 3 November, 2023 Filed under: Bankruptcy, Domestic, Finances, Getting Organised, Rebuilding, Thoughts Leave a comment »Every so often, in situations like this week’s need to organise a change of cars, I sit back and realise just how lucky I am.
Ten years ago I was just out of my official bankruptcy period, with another five years to come with it still on my credit record. I was doing OK, but something like this week would still have made life interesting. (As it was, I did have to go through a car change while in that bankruptcy period, but thankfully got through it OK because the administration people were excellent)
It’s taken a long time, but everything since then has been in a positive direction, and I’m happy with it all. It leaves me somewhat gobsmacked that now I can again pay for a car on a credit card (and once everything’s gone through, I’ll move it all to an interest-free balance-transfer card) with no real hassle.
Hopefully the new car will also not need anything major for a while (fingers epically crossed!) which will also help a lot.
Obviously, it’s more debt than I’d ideally like to be in – but it’s feasible/affordable, and I can sort the rest. It might even give me some impetus for getting some other things off the ground and get some extra income that way. We’ll see.
Regardless though, it’s good to have these occasional reminders that I’m fortunate enough to be in a good place, and simply appreciate that simple fact.
Pods
Posted: Sun 3 September, 2023 Filed under: Domestic, Thoughts 2 Comments »Ages back, while I was still in Tiny House, there was an offer going on for a particular brand of laundry pods – my usual brand of laundry detergent, but the pods instead of the liquid. I took advantage of the offer, but then didn’t use the pods until after I’d moved here.
So far they’ve been OK, but nothing special. Not massively impressed – to the point of “wouldn’t bother getting them again”. They’ve been doing the job, but… yeah, nothing epic.
Anyway, this week I saw an advert on TV for (a different type of) laundry pods, which showed people putting the pod in first and then covering it with the laundry to be washed.
“Oh!“, I thought. “I didn’t know that was how they’re supposed to be used“. (I’ve been putting them on the top of the laundry or in the middle, same as I did with the liquid dispenser)
So I looked at the instructions on the container of my ones, and yep, pod under the washing, and if it’s a large load or hard water (which my area is) then use two. Which is another “ooops”, as I’ve only been using one at a time. (Because you pretty much expect it to be in a “one pod per wash” set up – or at least I did!)
Yes, I should’ve read the instructions. But I’ve been doing laundry now for decades – and I’m a boy – so that wasn’t my first consideration. Ah well. Live and learn.
As a result, I’ll just have to see how they go when I’m now using them properly. Should be entertaining…
Finance Trials
Posted: Fri 11 August, 2023 Filed under: Bankruptcy, Customer Services, Domestic, Finances, Getting Organised, Rebuilding, Thoughts 3 Comments »Over the last few months I’ve been intermittently fighting with two different finance companies about their shitty ways of handling things. I’m not going to name names (yet) so it’ll be “Company A” and “Company B”
Company A
The shorter of the disputes started back in June when I logged in to the app for their credit card, and discovered that my credit limit had dropped from around £6,000 to £1,000. With no notice or warning. Which is, it’s fair to say, a bit of a concern…
I rang them (I know, old school!) to find out what was going on, and was told “Oh, well you weren’t using your full credit limit, so we dropped it”. Which is, to be honest, well within their rights – I wasn’t using it, and *shrug*. But it’s still not right to do so without any notice or warning – if they’re increasing the limit they give you 30 days notice and allow you to decline the change, so why not do the same for a decrease?
I got the change rescinded, but made a complaint about how it had been done. There could’ve been any number of reason why I might’ve been relying on that card/limit that Company A were unaware of (if I’d been getting the car significantly repaired, as one example) and where a sudden drop would’ve landed me in the shit. (Fortunately that wasn’t the case – but they didn’t know that)
Alongside that, a drop in credit limit would almost certainly have a negative effect with the credit-scoring people – at a bare minimum it would have raised the Credit Utilisation percentage (the amount of your available credit that you’re actually using) But it also makes other lenders twitchy – that whole perception of “why would Company A drop the limit if they didn’t think there was a problem?” and so on, and would’ve lessened my credit score as a result.
I got the response from them last week that my complaint wasn’t being upheld “because we can’t find any errors in how we administered your account”. Which again is (kinda sorta) true/fair. Errors weren’t made in the decisions (although who ever heard of a credit card company decreasing a limit?!?) But errors were definitely made in how that decision was then actioned, which was the actual reason for the complaint.
So today that’s gone off to the Financial Ombudsman for them to have a look at.
Company B
Company B’s problem has been *far* more long-winded. Back in December I had fraudulent transactions made on the card, which got spotted and reported. No idea where that leak came from, as it wasn’t a card I used often, but there we go. Stuff happens.
When I next used the app, as a result of the fraud, I had a flag put on for “heightened security”. Just to check it was me, verify transactions etc. And then they sent me a new card (as expected)
Only somewhere in that process, things went tits-up. I went through the “heightened security” checks, validated myself, had to call them (I know, old school again!) and that should’ve been that. But instead, the app locked up, and stayed that way – every time I went through the process for registering the new card in the app, it froze on insisting I needed to give those checks again. I did that four times, with Company B saying each time that they couldn’t understand why it was still wanting those checks, I’d definitely already done them.
I *suspect* that what happened was a clash – the “heightened security” was on the old card, which then got cancelled, but somewhere in the depths of their system, it wasn’t cleared in my account. So when I registered new card, it was still checking back and seeing that flag from old card.
Anyway, complaints (yes, plural) were made – firstly because of how badly it was handled (they agreed, and I got their default compensation payment) and then because the problem was *still* ongoing three months later, I couldn’t log in to the app. That ended up going through their app support team, who might as well have been a black hole for all I heard from them. And so I gave up for a while, and left it. I wasn’t using the card, didn’t have any payments to make, so *shrug* what the hell. Their problem, not mine.
Last week I reinstalled the app again, just to see. It’d been six months, after all…
And lo, it finally worked. No-one from Company B had been in touch, despite those outstanding complaints and support issues, but at least it was working.
I got back in touch with Complaints because not being told was a bit shit, and they agreed. (In an hour-long phone call) It hadn’t been handled well, the support team were rotten, blah blah.
So I’ve had another default compensation payment out of them, and it’s now all done and dusted.
Conclusion
All told, life could be worse. I’m stupidly lucky to be in the position I’m in now, where neither of those issues has actually caused me any more inconvenience than yelling “Oh for fuck’s sake” on a regular basis.
But both of these companies are supposedly specialists in dealing with people with credit issues – as I was when I got them – yet haven’t seemed to have any real insight on how these issues could/would affect someone who truly was still having those issues, or anyone for whom life was a bit tight at present. (and god, who *isn’t* in that situation to some degree or other – even if it’s “just” being aware of how much prices have risen and so on?)
As such, I’ll be the person to use that fortune/luck and privilege to be able to have the time and energy to raise these complaints and hopefully make things better as a whole.
But really, neither of these things should ever have been as much of a problem as they turned out to be. And that’s what makes it all so frustrating.
The Naming Of Things
Posted: Mon 13 March, 2023 Filed under: Cynicism, News, Politics, Stupidity, Thoughts Leave a comment »At the moment I’m decidedly amused by the way the UK government hasn’t even thought about the name of one of its controversial Bills, and how it gets reported and described.
So what we get now is news coverage saying “[politician] has condemned the Government’s Illegal Migration Bill“, which makes it sound like the Bill is illegal.
Comes to something when they can’t even get the name right, doesn’t it?
Spare Space
Posted: Thu 16 February, 2023 Filed under: Domestic, Getting Organised, Thoughts, Weirdness Leave a comment »One of the reasons for my move last year was to have a bigger house, with space to have a home-office and so on, rather than Tiny House and also renting an office in Milton Keynes.
It is lovely to have a larger house, to have space for bookcases (and to have all my books out of boxes for the first time in Far Too Long) and to have that home office and so on.
However… I find that most of the time I’m still in “Tiny House” mode mentally, in that I don’t actually use that home office. It’s there, and I know it’s there, it’s just that I forget when it comes to actually working, so a lot of that is still done down in the living room instead. Additionally, I don’t yet really sit in the other part (that was the ‘dining room’, and is now ‘book room’) as a matter of course. I’ve used it a couple of times – and suspect I’ll use it more in spring/summer with some natural light coming through.
Both rooms are fine, and fit for their intended purposes. I just… don’t use them properly. Yet.
Maybe I’m expecting too much of myself. It’s not even six months that I’ve been in this place yet, and I was in Tiny House for over a decade, so in some ways it’s not surprising that I haven’t really made the mental switch yet.
I will do. I’ll get back into the mindset, I’m sure, and I’ll make use of the rooms the way I meant to. It’s just taking me longer than I thought it would.
Romance Fraud
Posted: Tue 10 January, 2023 Filed under: Cynicism, Domestic, I Don't Understand, People, Stupidity, Television, Thoughts Leave a comment »In the new house I’m working from home a lot more, which has also led to me having slightly more TV on during the daytime. (I know, I know)
One of the things I had the misfortune to catch this week was BBC’s “For Love or Money” (that link takes you to the iPlayer page for it) about people falling for “romance fraud” – basically, fraudsters getting contact with lonely people who respond, form online ‘relationships’, and end up sending money to these “partners” for all manner of outlandish reasons.
Actually, it’s not fair to say “misfortune” – I guess that morning daytime TV is a good place for this, as the main demographic for seeing it and going “Oh shit, that’s what I’ve been doing” are likely to have it on. So it’s probably useful and good on that score.
In some ways I have sympathy for the people who fall for this shit – the main group seem to be older people who’ve usually lost a long-term spouse, and suddenly find themselves alone for the first time in decades, are lonely, and will grip onto anything that makes them feel less lonely. I do understand (kinda/sorta) that side at least.
But at the same time, Jesus Fuck, these people are bloody stupid. I don’t understand how they can class the communication as a relationship, or being “in love” with someone they’ve never met. And I really don’t understand the whole thing of giving money to someone they’ve never met. I know it’s a psychological thing, that the scam starts (comparatively) small and then people keep on paying out because they don’t want to be proved to have been scammed/stupid – which boggles my mind in all kinds of different ways – “I don’t want to be seen as stupid for sending them £200, so I’ll send £2,000 to end up proving I was right” What?!?
Even more mind-boggling are the ones who get into this trap with one “person” , realise they’ve been scammed, and then get caught again in the same situation. And (in my opinion, blah blah) those particular people are too stupid for words. And then they say *on the programme* “Oh, you must think I’m really stupid” and the presenters say “No, no, you’ve done nothing wrong“. And I don’t feel that’s right – they didn’t do anything wrong initially, but if they carry on (and particularly if they fall for the same thing twice) then the presenter should be allowed to say “Yes, you are. What kind of fucking idiot gives money to someone they’ve never even met?!?“. Shock them into realising how bloody stupid they’ve been, and it just might have a lasting effect.
I don’t know the answer – there’ll always be stupid people in these kind of horrible situations. But it seems to me like the basic thought process of “I don’t know this person, we’ve talked but I’ve never met them, yet they’re asking me for money – why?” shouldn’t really be that difficult, should it?
Home-Made
Posted: Fri 6 January, 2023 Filed under: Domestic, Food, Getting Organised, Thoughts Leave a comment »When I moved, I decided that I was going to be doing a lot more of my meals from scratch, and I’m happy to say that so far it’s been a pretty successful change.
At the old place I fully acknowledge that I’d got lazy – not crap food as such, but more of the prepared ranges (still with fresh ingredients etc., but packaged and just shoved in the oven for 20-30 mins) alongside steamed veg and so on. So not particularly unhealthy, but also… not exceptionally healthy.
I have an odd relationship with food at the best of times, to be honest. While I can be a foodie when going out (Michelin restaurants etc., although obviously that’s not every time I go out either) when it comes to my own meals I.. really can’t be arsed a lot of the time. I don’t go for fancy stuff that requires recipes and effort, because by about halfway through I’m just bored with it, and by the time it’s done I don’t even want to look at it.
Alongside that, food really isn’t a major driver for me – I’ve had to build a kind of routine around times to eat otherwise I can easily go through an entire day and only think at the end “oh yeah, I haven’t eaten yet”. It’s not a fixed framework, not like “eat breakfast at 7am, lunch at 12, dinner at 6 and throw a strop if that schedule is disrupted at all“, but it’s more about general “Have something in the morning, somewhere roughly lunchtimeish, and something in the evening” reminders.
As a result of those, the easy stuff became the norm, stuff I don’t really need to think about or make an effort with.
But when I moved I wanted to change that a bit, make use of the kitchen gear I’ve got (and the space I’ve now got where I can use it!) and cook more from fresh, see how I do. It’s all more along the “make several portions at once” plans like soups, slow-cooker stuff and so on, but so far it’s been successful and I’ve been enjoying it.
I can’t claim perfection – there are still days where “beans on toast” or “a sandwich” is perfectly acceptable, for example – but it also helps to have made enough [whatever] for three or four portions, so it’s easy to just grab and eat when I want to. (Another side of that weird food relationship – I don’t really care about what I’m having, so I can have the same thing for three or four days on the trot and that’s fine)
I might slip back to “easy” over time, but I’m hoping I won’t – because at least with the current stuff I know what’s gone into it all, and that can’t be a bad thing.
As with all things, we’ll see how it goes. But it’s been three months already, so it seems to be fixing itself in my head quite nicely.
Coming To A Close
Posted: Sun 18 December, 2022 Filed under: Advertising, Cynicism, Domestic, Media, News, Thoughts Leave a comment »Thankfully, we’ve come to the end of a number of things this weekend, and I couldn’t be happier.
- The Kickyball World Cup has finally fucked off. I don’t care a jot about the entire thing, and I’m just glad that we won’t have to hear about it all the sodding time.
- Strictly Come Dancing has finally fucked off. I don’t care a jot about the entire thing, and I’m just glad that we won’t have to hear about it all the time.
- The Festering Season has nearly fucked off. By now you can guess the rest of my sentiment on that score.
This time next week we’ll be done with the Festering Season too, and some form of sanity will return for a few months.
Oh, and also it’s going to be a bit warmer in the coming week. Which is nice.
Health Check
Posted: Tue 22 November, 2022 Filed under: Covid, Domestic, Health, Thoughts Leave a comment »I usually try to get a fairly regular health check every couple of years with my GP, just to keep an eye on things (and with particular awareness of the family history with a whole horde of fun conditions) However, what with Covid, lockdowns and life in general, it hadn’t happened since 2018. I was just about due for the 2020 one when all hell broke loose, and my GP refused to do anything except urgent on-the-day appointments which I try to not take up (none of what I’m doing is urgent, and there’s plenty of people with more urgent concerns than me getting a bloody health check!)
So anyway, when I moved I registered with a new GP, got a message a couple of weeks ago that I was due for a health check, and booked it in.
That day was today. And I’m pleased to say that it all went well. They took bloods for further analysis (nothing to worry about, all part of the process) but the highlights so far are :
- Blood pressure of 140/70. Absolutely fine and within NHS acceptable levels.
- Pulse – about 70. Not ideal, but nowhere near awful.
- BMI / Weight – too high, but that’s nothing unusual. They’re both absolutely normal for me, so I’m not going to worry too much. As always, I’d like to lose some, but nothing so far has really worked, so 2023 is going to involve some other stuff.
- Cardiovascular Risk – so far (and this one is also connected with those blood tests, so it may change) my results indicate I’m at something like a 5% risk of having a heart attack in the next decade.
I’m also booked to get further blood taken in a couple of weeks in order for proper checks of some of those family-history points.
I’ll also get a call in a couple of weeks to go over the results properly, but for now I’m happy with these data points, and happy to have been able to get it all done again with a bare minimum of hassle and inconvenience.
Yet another MoT
Posted: Wed 5 October, 2022 Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Driving, Getting Organised, MK Kia, Thoughts Leave a comment »This week the car’s been in for its MoT test – it’s October, so it’s been time to renew Insurance, pay Road Tax, and sort the MoT. For the first time with this car, I didn’t bother using the proper dealership (the car’s on 200,000 miles, and I no longer give a sod about service histories and so on) alongside which, the dealership I was using were… less than professional on a number of occasions, so I wanted to try something else and see what they had to say.
I chose (on the basis of other positive experiences) to use KwikFit , albeit a branch/location I hadn’t used before. I booked a service at the same time, just to get everything done in one go.
As it turned out, it did fail the first MoT, and needed a couple of things doing. Which was fine, KwikFit sorted everything on the same day – although obviously it made it a long day all told – along with recommendations of what I need to do (in their words) “sometime in the next year”, which I’ll get sorted at some point soon.
But all told, that little Kia has done pretty well – I’ve put about 130,000 miles on it since I got it in 2016 (just under 22,000 miles a year on average!) and it’s still really running fine. (Mind you, I’ve been very clear to it on what will happen when it becomes unreliable, so no-one’s under any illusions) That was definitely a good buy.
Online
Posted: Mon 3 October, 2022 Filed under: Domestic, Getting Organised, Thoughts Leave a comment »Happily, I’m now back to being connected to t’internet at the new house. It’s taken far longer than I’d have liked, and been expensive on mobile data – turns out, I use a lot more than I thought I did.
Even so, I’ve mitigated the mobile data use as much as possible, and I’m also making changes for the future, but yeah, not been cheap. Although the reality-check it provided has also proved useful, and will not be wasted.
It’s still going to be interesting though. I’ve stepped back from the “as much bandwidth as possible” option that was costing me a lot and was almost certainly not being used as much as it could/should have been. I’m looking forward to seeing whether I do notice the difference in the “downgrade” (honestly, I doubt I will) and of course I can always boost it up a level if I decide I need to.
But yes, anyway, back to a level of civilisation and connectivity. I’ve been OK with the mobile data, but it’s nice to be back to normality…
Autumnal
Posted: Thu 1 September, 2022 Filed under: Domestic, Thoughts Leave a comment »So, welcome to Meteorological Autumn.
How time flies when you’re having fun, eh?
Relocating
Posted: Wed 24 August, 2022 Filed under: Domestic, Getting Organised, M1, Thoughts 1 Comment »A while back I said about moving, and that I’d explain more about it – and then of course didn’t get round to it ’til now.
Basically, the current house is tiny – four rooms, and an outbuilding for utilities stuff. It’s suited me fine for a long time – far longer than I ever expected it to, to be honest.
But over the Pandemic (and I know it’s not over, but we’re in the “living with it” stage now) I realised that without my rented office, this place was just too small. If the lockdown had been tight, it would’ve driven me mad. (I could justify using the office I rent, as it was just me driving to an office that contained just me, in a building that was closed to the public. But still.)
Alongside that, I’ve just got more and more tired of the limitations and hassles of living in this area. I’m tired of listening to my newest neighbours argue (at great volume, and at weird times of day/night) through the walls. I’m tired of fighting to get a parking space outside my own house. (Pretty much every other house in this area has at least two vehicles, and parking spaces are… limited) I’m tired of all the bullshit, traffic and noise around school commute times, and also of the general noise and arseholiness of people coming out of the pub opposite on most weekends. And I’m tired of the ongoing dust and dirt from living with the windows open beside a busy road.
So, once things had settled post-Covid, I started thinking about Where Next. It was difficult because there was no-where that I really wanted to be, unlike most other times I’ve moved. (In fairness, this place wasn’t one that was calling my name either, it was a practical choice for the time) It’s taken me a fair while to figure things out on that score – and in the end I’ve stuck with practicality. This place has been tolerable primarily because I’ve hardly been here – it’s been easy to get to pretty much anywhere else, because of proximity to the M1 and A1 for north/south travel, as well as the A421 for east/west.
The new location will be similar, an hour further up the road, but just off Junction 22 of the M1. It’s a location that also connects to the M42 and M6, which gives me even greater flexibility. It doesn’t grab me as a location in itself, but it’ll do on the “Getting to anywhere else” front. It means that I’m (obviously) an hour closer to my friends up in Manchester and Newcastle, so it makes life easier on that score. Weirdly, it also means that seeing my friends down in North Somerset will also involve journeys an hour shorter (because I can cut across to the M5 and straight down, rather than dicking about with the M1, M25 and M4) So in those ways it’s actually more convenient than the current place!
The criteria for the new place are pretty easy to work out, given the things I’m tired of. A larger house, probably 3-bedroom, ideally with its own driveway and garden, on a quieter road, with no nearby pub or school. And ideally without paying a stupid level of rent – a house with that spec where I am currently would be at least triple my current rent, which is just insane.
Anyway, after some looking around, that’s what I’ve ended up with. A 3-bed semi in a small estate, with its own driveway, garage, and low-maintenance garden. No school, no pub. And for a rent that’s still a 50% hike over what I’m currently paying, but that’s expected – and infinitely better than a 300% hike!
I’ve done all the paperwork and finances, but don’t get the keys til the 5th of September, and then properly move mid-September. I’m really looking forward to it all.
Making More Work
Posted: Fri 12 August, 2022 Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Getting Organised, I Don't Understand, People, Thoughts, Weirdness 2 Comments »As part of my preparation for moving (about which another post sometime soon) this week I ordered some decent moving boxes from SafeStore. Yes, I’m sure there are other sources for them, and so on, but I was happy with the stuff on offer, and they’d deliver it, so *shrug*, it’ll do.
For cost-effectiveness (within the provisos of “I’m sure I could get it better somewhere else, but CBA to hunt”) I got one of their “kits” – 4 each of small, medium and large box sizes for considerably less than individual prices – and also added in some bubblewrap, tissue paper, and a mattress cover. All well and good.
It got delivered this morning, as expected and on-time. Two boxes – one the ‘kit’ box, and one for the bubblewrap roll etc. Except… there’s no mattress cover, no tissue paper. So I called them up to let them know, and the lady went off to check with the despatchers. And that was where it got weird.
“Have you checked in the Kit box? They say they might’ve put the extra things in there, to keep it all together“.
And it turned out that was exactly what had happened. But that boggles my mind.
Now, I assume (and I’m aware it’s an assumption and thus could be utterly flawed) that the kit boxes are exactly that – they come as a sealed box with the kit contents in. That makes sense to me. (Otherwise they’d be assembling the kit from box stocks for every order, which seems… odd)
So, if that’s the case, the despatchers opened a kit box, put the extra bits in, sealed it up, and then put it with the other box that already had bubblewrap etc. in it. Why go to that effort when there’s an unsealed box (with space in it) right there? Why make even more work for oneself?
I despair.
[Note : I actually did better than expected out of this deal – because they didn’t send me the kit box I’d ordered, and instead sent one that’s larger, and should’ve cost about £10 more!]
Getting Stuff (Finally) Done
Posted: Fri 29 July, 2022 Filed under: A428, Anglian Water, Central Bedfordshire Council, Change, Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic, Driving, Getting Organised, I Don't Understand, Laziness, People, Politics, Thoughts 1 Comment »My local council are, to be polite, utterly fucking useless. Their skills in organisation, communication, professionalism and competence appear to be absolutely zero – in fact, most of the time I doubt they could even spell any of those words, let alone be good at them.
But, after literally years of nagging, they’ve finally done two of the jobs I’ve been nagging them about.
First, we start with The Bridge
Six years ago (I’ve probably written about it before, but can’t be arsed currently to check) we had a mains water line burst near the village – a burst that was so powerful, it destroyed the bridge wall that the pipe was next to. Now, it’s not a main road per se (i.e. it’s not an A-road or motorway) but it is one of the two main roads from my village to Milton Keynes and the motorway. So it’s not short of a fair bit of traffic.
Initially, Anglian Water put up some cones/barriers and traffic lights so that the road was usable (kinda/sorta) but reduced to one lane, on the side that wasn’t missing half a bridge wall. That situation remained for about six months (with regular failures of the traffic lights) until I asked Anglian Water what was actually happening, and had they forgotten about the bloody thing. Turned out, they had forgotten. And there began the saga of getting it fixed.
Anglian moved things about, put in a temporary fence and barrier, opened the road up, and tried to get a repair done. (Which was fraught with its own issues around who actually owned the fucking thing, who was responsible for what, etc. etc.) The council insisted it should be done by their Highways department, who would do the work properly, and all that happy crap. So after eighteen months, Anglian handed the entire clusterfuck over to Central Bedfordshire Council, as requested, and washed their hands of the problem.
For four years I’ve been asking when it’s going to happen, what’s occurring, and so on. It’s outlasted four admin assistants, and two managers. And every time they’ve said “Oh, it’s all scheduled, we’ll hopefully have it done in about three months time“. I do realise there’ve been a lot of hassles – again, with who owns the bridge and the land underneath it, who’ll be stumping up the money, how it’ll all work and so on. But it’s been four years where it would’ve been all too possible for someone to come off the road, through the fence, and end up twenty-odd feet down underneath it. After every decent storm we’ve had, I’ve had to contact the council and suggest that they might want to come and put the fence back up, along with the holders/barrier that’ve fallen over.
But about a month ago, signs went up around the bridge saying that work was going to start, and take about eight weeks. And it actually started, and has been progressing nicely. (Not that anyone from the council has thought to send a message saying “Hey, just to catch you up, it’s all happening”. That would be expecting far too much from them!
Second – the other bridge.
Back at the start of the pandemic, in the next village to mine, someone went on a graffiti spree, writing/spraying stuff on all the village’s road signs and so on. Nothing monumentally offensive, just stupid shit that no-one needs to see. And in fairness, Central Bedfordshire’s Highways department cleaned most of it off comparatively quickly. (I think it only took them a fortnight to get rid of the stuff that was nasty about Central Beds Council, and then about another two months to get rid of the less offensive but stupid stuff)
And then when Captain Tom hysteria was at its peak (Captain Tom was from the village I live in, so it was all relevant locally) they sprayed a big message about him on one of the other local bridges. You can see some of it below, or go to Google Streetview here for the full experience
Yes, it lasted long enough that it even made it onto Google Streetview.
That’s taken two and a half years to get rid of, but finally got cleaned off last month. Of course, others who’ve seen how long it takes Central Beds to sort these things, have also taken to graffiti’ing local walls and so on. Fine, it may be an influx of new people, but before the first lot happened (and that person has since moved away) we never saw any happening. Now though, I can easily think of eight or nine sites that have been hit.
Again, allegedly there were problems for the council in gaining permissions/clearances to clean that bridge – it goes over a railway line, and they were saying they couldn’t clean/wash the bridge while things might be running underneath, although that sounds like bullshit. The cleaning job when it finally happened didn’t go over the top of the bridge wall at all, so nothing would’ve been affected. But there we go.
Purely personally, I suspect that if that graffiti had said “Central Beds council are useless bastards” it would’ve only been there a couple of weeks. But because it was about Captain Tom, I wonder if they thought it would be worse to get rid of it than to leave it. I don’t know.
Anyway. Both jobs have (finally) been done, and it’s really nice that I won’t have to nag the useless bastards any more. But things like this shouldn’t take that long to get sorted. If it had been me in charge of either project I’d have got the work done, and *then* chased whoever needed to pay for it, including court stuff if necessary. But the general public don’t need to see those delays, regardless of the cause – we just want to see stuff that’s been broken get fixed.
I don’t know what the answers are on all this – but government (both local and national) at the moment just seems like one giant clusterfuck of ineffectiveness and general incompetence. And surely there must be better ways than what we’ve currently got?
Crunch/Scrape
Posted: Wed 1 June, 2022 Filed under: Car Repairs, Domestic, Driving, Getting Organised, People, Stupidity, Thoughts 1 Comment »Today I had my first ‘crash’ involving another vehicle. (I’d only had one other incident before, but that was an icy road in Norfolk, nearly 13 years ago, and it was only me involved) Before anything else, I’m fine – the car’s got a scraped body panel, but it was all fairly low-speed, no air-bags needed, no injuries, nothing.
As it was, I’m almost certain the responsibility wasn’t mine – although the other driver insists it was my fault, so I’m just letting the insurance companies fight it out. Basically though, I was in the correct lane, the other car was merging in and for some reason expected me to give way. We’ll see what the insurance people say.
It was at a new-ish junction, and the signage isn’t the easiest to understand, but I’ve driven it enough times that I know how it works. (Although the other driver also does it fairly regularly, so should know better! 🙂 )
Using the photo below, I was turning right out of Mike Griffin Way. You can be in either lane (which is fucked up in the first place). If you’re in the left-hand lane then that becomes the direct route; the right-hand lane has another turn-off (the rough equivalent of a hairpin turn) and then merges into the direct route. It was, in short, designed by a fucking idiot.
The junction – click to Embiggenify
So I was in the left-hand lane having come out of Mike Griffin Way, with the other car in the right-hand lane. And at the merge (top-right of the image) they decided to pull into the left-hand lane. No indication or anything, just pulling in.
Fortunately, I was aware they were there, and as they pulled across I was already braking hard and sounding the horn to let them know I was there. But still, impact. Rather than blocking the road, we went up to the nearest layby, pulled in, did the whole exchange of details, photos and so on, and then got on with life. I’m happy with how I did everything – making sure they were OK, but also getting names, details, numbers, registration plates etc., and ensuring that they got mine as well. Basically, I didn’t want there to be any chance of miscommunications, or “he just drove off” accusations.
Because there’s been no injury, no road blockage etc., the police haven’t needed to be informed (another thing I also checked with the insurance company, to make sure they were happy with not having a police incident number or anything) and I’m quite happy to not have to involve them..
I don’t yet know what the outcome will be. My car’s OK, it’s got some nice new scratches and a dent, but it’s perfectly driveable, and I don’t know if I’ll even bother getting the scratches repaired. My insurance shouldn’t be affected (even if they decide it was my fault) as I’ve got a protected 10+ year No Claims Bonus, which means I could even have another accident (not that I’m planning to!) before even beginning to worry on that score.
We’ll see what happens, but all is good so far as I can tell. I wouldn’t recommend it as a way to spend an afternoon – but equally, things could have been *so* much worse in so, so many ways.
False Registration
Posted: Thu 12 May, 2022 Filed under: Cynicism, Domestic, Driving, Security, Thoughts 4 Comments »A few weeks ago, I got a weird piece of post – a V5 registration document for a vehicle I’ve never owned, to a name I’d never heard of, but with my address on it.
Having asked around a bit (in case the person was just a cretin who put in the wrong address) it turns out that this is a semi-common scam, registering a vehicle to a different address in order to avoid parking and speeding tickets etc.
As such, some people suggest that it should be registered as SORN (Statutory Off-Road Notification) but that still connects the vehicle to the address, and leaves you open to receiving documents, fines etc.
Instead, I decided to instead return the document to DVLA, along with a cover note explaining that I didn’t know the car and didn’t know the person, and had been at current address long enough to know that the person hadn’t lived there any time in the last decade. I scanned in both documents so I’ve also got a record of it, should it be needed.
Yesterday, I got a response from DVLA, which confirms that what I did is the best thing to do. They’ve removed the connection of my address to the vehicle, although it’s still possible that some fines etc. may come to me – but in that case, to send the issuing authority a copy of the letter received, and confirm that It’s Not Mine.
So, interesting to see how things work. Hopefully I won’t get any further issues with it, but I’m as protected as possible if anything does happen.
Lockdown – Two Years On
Posted: Wed 23 March, 2022 Filed under: Covid, Domestic, Health, Lockdown, The Future, Thoughts Leave a comment »In many ways it’s hard to believe that it’s already two years ago today that the UK’s first Coronavirus lockdown was announced.
Since then, time feels like it’s done some very strange things – some things feel like only yesterday when it turns out they were three or four years ago, but stuff that was yesterday feels like an eternity has passed.
Here, I’ve been lucky, as I still haven’t caught it – although that’s more by luck than judgement, and probably that’s helped by being single, antisocial, and without children, thus eliminating an awful lot of the potential vectors. I’ve also been lucky in that it hasn’t affected me in the same ways it’s affected a lot of people – I wasn’t suddenly thrown into a world of working from home, with a lot of my social interactions removed, and nor was I suddenly having to be in close confinement with partners or others.
It’s still not been easy, but it’s been OK. It could have been a lot worse – and obviously for lots of people, it was. And is. And will continue to be.
I don’t know how we’ll handle things in the future. I know that “going back to how things were” is a pipe-dream. We’ll find ways to accommodate life with Coronavirus, and it’ll affect us less (much as it’s already doing) but it’s not going to disappear, and things won’t ever be “how they were”.
Onwards, upwards, whatever.
Chucking Out
Posted: Tue 4 January, 2022 Filed under: Domestic, Food, Getting Organised, Thoughts 3 Comments »I really don’t like waste – but sometimes it still happens.
Over the Christmas/New Year limbo, I spent some time clearing out stuff, as it needed doing. On this occasion, that included clearing out the kitchen cupboard under the sink, and that’s where the waste kicked in. Various packs of crisps and the like, and they were all out of date (like, well, well out of date) and some part-bake bread rolls that had collapsed and compressed into horrific lumps of nope.
In the great scheme of things, it wasn’t actually a lot of value – maybe £30 all told – but it’s still annoying to throw it out. (Not that there was really anything else I could do with them)
It has, however, shown me the things I think I want to have as snacks and then don’t get round to actually eating, which helps in reinforcing (in my own head) why I won’t buy them again. So I suppose that at least this is a lesson that will work for longer term better effect.
Still makes me grouchy, though.
Normality (or a Semblance of it)
Posted: Mon 3 January, 2022 Filed under: 2022, Commuting, Domestic, Driving, Legal, Making Plans, Milton Keynes, People, Thoughts Leave a comment »Now we’re through all the crap of the Festering Season™ and New Year, it’s starting to feel like a return to a version of normality. Past today, people will be back to working ‘normally’ (albeit with the current ‘Work from home if you can’ ethos and so on) and schools will be open again so we’ll be back to more usual levels of traffic and the like.
Personally, I quite like this limbo time – the drive in to the office is quiet, the office itself is deathly, and it all suits me pretty well.
That said, though, I’ve found this year (and last year) that a limbo time within a Covid-driven limbo time is… a bit much. A step too far. I want to go back to a “normal” limbo rather than this weird fuckery.
Alongside all this, some of the other crap I’ve been dealing with in the background is finally approaching its conclusion, and while it’s not been openly affecting me, I’m also glad it’s nearly done. I’m being a bit enigmatic about it all because it’s now sub judice (and before anyone snarks, I’m the ‘victim’ in it, not the perpetrator!) but I’ll write a bit about it when I know more. The initial court appearance happens later this month, and once I know how the idiot pleads, I’ll be in a better position.
So… yeah, limbo appears to be (slowly) righting itself and becoming a bit more active again. I hope that continues to be the case…
Re-Identified
Posted: Mon 25 October, 2021 Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Getting Old(er), Getting Organised, Technology, Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »For some reason, this year has involved renewing both of my primary forms of ID – a few months ago it was the passport that got done, and I’ve now had to do the driving licence as well.
In fairness, both processes have been pretty painless, and made much easier through technology – the passport had some issues with uploading a new photo (because I wear glasses, and photos without a reflection on the lenses is *difficult*) but it’s all involved a lot less hassle than one would expect.
The driving licence also pulls through the photo from the passport process (although the reverse doesn’t apply, weirdly) but it needed a lot more linked information than I expected – for example, why does my driving licence renewal require me to know/remember my NI Number? I’d already connected it to the passport system/number etc. for verification, so that seems like an unnecessary extra step, really.
Still, it’s all done, the new licence card arrived promptly – and well within the quoted two weeks – and the old one got cut in two and returned.
I now shouldn’t need a renewal on these things for another decade. How time flies, and all that!
MoTivated
Posted: Wed 29 September, 2021 Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Driving, MK Kia, Thoughts 1 Comment »Today, the car got its annual service, and also passed its MoT for this year. All told, a much better process than last year – and, of course, a lot cheaper!
I did take it back to the same dealership to get things done, and they’re still as shambolic as ever, insisting on filling every slot in the workshop, rather than leaving anything free for people who need work (for example, if the car had failed the MoT today, they’d have had to book me in for work to be done, rather than having availability on the day) It’s a farcical situation – and similar to the bullshit system my GP is currently operating – and takes no account of things failing, or accidents happening. Deeply annoying, to say the least.
The thing is, despite me raising it every time I deal with them, they just don’t seem to understand that the servicing side of the business is just as much of a sales tool as any of the people on the shop floor (most of whom seem to spend their days just farting around, but that’s beside the point) The company – in this case, Kia – make a huge thing of their reliability, of their seven-year guarantee (so long as people follow the service routine, of course) which is great. But when I’m faced with a constant “Oh no, we can’t do [the work] on [that date], you’ll have to book something else” attitude, why on Earth would I buy a car that ties me in to that even more?
It’s something that would be so simple to fix – and something I’ve been told that they’ll try, but I’ve been being told that for three years now – but there just seems to be no real inclination to do it.
Still, my little car is doing OK, and as and when it does die, I just won’t get another Kia. Their loss long-term, not mine.
Non-Emergency
Posted: Mon 20 September, 2021 Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Getting Old(er), Health, Introspective, Milton Keynes, Thoughts Leave a comment »Back in early 2021, I did something stupid to my knee – still no idea what – which I didn’t take overly seriously. It was sore enough that I did use a knee brace – particularly overnight – but it didn’t incapacitate me or anything.
Anyway, it turns out that the brace is quite possibly the worst thing I could’ve done, as it allowed things to heal incorrectly and so on.
The knee still plays up – but it’s intermittent. When I first stand or move, it’s sore as fuck, but then it eases off. I’m still fully capable of walking miles on it, but it’ll hurt significantly the next day, or if I then stop and leave it in one position for a long time (for example, driving home from wherever) Having talked to others with a similar thing, and doing some research, I think what I managed to do was a meniscal tear – basically ripping some of the meniscal membranes in my knee. Ooops.
Honestly, it’s pretty certain now that there’s not going to be much I can do to improve it. It’s as healed as it’ll get. But I’d like to get a proper diagnosis of it, in case I’m wrong – I’m only basing this so far on personal experience (of my own damage, and the stories of others) and Dr. Google/Wikipedia, so it’s quite possible that I could be wrong.
However, getting that diagnosis is proving problematic. It’s not an urgent thing by any chalk, but that’s an issue. My GP surgery are still only taking bookings on the actual day, so it’s a free-for-all of calling in at 8:30 in the morning in order to get a slot that day. And honestly, I feel guilty at that point about trying to get a slot that could be better used by someone with, you know, something actually important/urgent.
It really is a massively fuckwitted plan. I don’t understand why they can’t do it so that at least one of the GPs in the practice is doing non-urgent bookings for even one day a week. (Or balance the load and have a rota of who does a non-urgent day, or even week as a break from the urgent daily shit)
As it is, in this case I don’t honestly know that the GP would even be the best thing – all they’re likely to do is say “Oh, that’ll need an X-Ray/MRI” and refer it to the local(ish) hospital anyway. So maybe it’d be better to go direct to what used to be the “Minor Injuries” clinic, so I can get a scan straight away. But “Minor Injuries” is now somehow “Urgent Care” (which is somehow different to “Accident and Emergency”) and that has the same effect on me – it’s non-urgent, and there are people way more in need of treatment than I am.
I’ll get round to it in the end, I’m sure. But in the meantime it’s a situation that is utter, utter bollocks.
September Restart (Hopefully)
Posted: Wed 1 September, 2021 Filed under: D4D™, Depression, Domestic, Health, SAD, Sleep - or lack thereof, Thoughts Leave a comment »So, yes, I’m still alive. There’s been a bundle of stuff going on that isn’t blog-friendly (or even interesting) and August has been it’s usual shower of shit.
I don’t know why it happens, but it does, and it’s not a conscious process at all. But I’ll have about two weeks where pretty much nothing goes right, and it whacks my brain hard, and then I realise that yes, yet again, it’s bloody August.
Obviously this year I also got slightly walloped by July, but well, who’s counting?
As is obvious, I got through it all – and in fairness, it’s nothing major that’s been occurring, I’m still in the same house, same job, nothing epic has altered. But it hits me hard anyway, like I’ve had enough energy to keep going ’til now, then I just feel like I’ve been slammed into a wall, and there’s little to no time or energy to do anything for a few weeks.
So anyway, yes, September. Let’s see how things go from here…
Smart Motorways, Dumb Drivers
Posted: Tue 20 April, 2021 Filed under: Domestic, Driving, I Don't Understand, M1, People, Stupidity, Thoughts, Travel 2 Comments »I see today that the UK has decided to stop any new “Smart Motorway” projects, insisting that they need extra safety precautions. This is primarily the aftermath of coroner’s reports into certain fatal accidents on these Smart Motorways.
From the article…
- In 2019, 15 people were killed on “all lane running” and “dynamic hard shoulder” motorways. This is four more deaths than in 2018.
- The number of people being killed on motorways without hard shoulders increased each year from 2015 to 2019, and totalled 39 deaths.
- By contrast, on so-called “controlled motorways” – a type of smart motorway which have variable speed limits and a hard shoulder – there were 24 deaths in that period.
- On conventional motorways, which cover more of the UK than smart motorways, there were 368 fatalities from 2015 to 2019.
The M1 around where I live was one of the first Smart Motorways, and I’ve written a lot about how stupid people can be on those motorways – particularly about the availability of lanes, and a lack of general driving standards (Middle-lane cunts and the like)
From my experience, a lot of drivers seem to be incapable of reading road signs saying whether a lane is open or closed (although also even whether the approaching junction is the one they want or not, until the absolute last minute) This also seems to be borne out by the latest rash of road-safety adverts telling people that they should ‘go left’ in case of problems on motorways (and fucking hell, in my opinion anyone who needs to be told this shouldn’t be in possession of a driving licence!)
As an example of this, one of the cases the coroners were looking at was one local to me where the person’s vehicle had a problem, showed the ‘engine problem’ warning light, and they pulled in to one of the emergency refuge areas. Now, when that happened to me, I got out of the car (in a snowy January) and called recovery to get me off the road safely. But not this twerd, oh no. They gave it a few minutes, started the car, no light came on, so they pulled out to continue their journey. (The ‘engine problem’ light doesn’t necessarily immediately light up on starting – for example, if the issue is to do with the turbo, the EGR valve, air filter etc., it’ll only come on when you accelerate over a certain rpm limit, at which point you’re shafted) And that’s what happened to Twonktacular – the light came back on, the engine performance disappeared, and they got hit by another vehicle. Yet somehow that’s the fault of the smart motorway, not the dumbass driver.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a huge fan of motorways without hard-shoulders. And I’m sure there are considerations and gambles that have been taken about how people get to emergency refuge areas, how the road monitoring is managed/staffed and so on. But I also understand how impractical it is, with current traffic levels and so on, to have a quarter of each road surface only available to vehicles in emergencies.
All told, I don’t believe that Smart Motorways are inherently dangerous. I think drivers (and their decisions, or lack thereof) are far more dangerous than roads. You just can’t blame an inanimate road for human stupidity.
Burning Money
Posted: Tue 2 March, 2021 Filed under: Domestic, I Don't Understand, Lockdown, People, Thoughts Leave a comment »Over the last year, a number of businesses have (unsurprisingly) moved out of the building where I have my office. The move to primarily working from home and so on has made them more aware of the costs of the offices, and in general I can see that it makes sense for them to downsize and so on.
What’s been more of a surprise is that other ones have moved in. Again, I get it for situations like mine, where it’s better to have the office, and where working from home isn’t practicable.
There are some of those new businesses though, that despite paying the office rental/lease for a year, haven’t actually been using the offices at all, and I really don’t understand that at all.
I suppose it’s a good write-off for tax purposes or whatever, but to me it’s still odd to be basically burning that cash for no benefit at all.
Obviously it’s not my problem, and nothing to do with me. It’s other people’s business decisions and so on. I just find it interesting, and slightly baffling.
Raspberry Jammed
Posted: Tue 9 February, 2021 Filed under: Domestic, Food, London, Reviews(ish), Thoughts 2 Comments »I’ve been a fan of raspberry jam for a long time, and it’s usually part of my breakfast. I’ve tried most of the different brands and types over the year, although over the last few years I’ve settled more on Tesco’s “Finest” offering, which is pretty well priced and tasty. (Before that it was the Bonne Maman version, which was almost twice the price, and even now is £1 more expensive per jar)
Over the years, I’ve also always been interested in Fortnum and Mason when I visit London. I returned there in 2015 after far too long of not visiting, and have been back a few times since.
On that 2015 visit though, I saw they had some interesting jams – in particular, a golden raspberry one, and a purple one. I couldn’t get them at the time (because I was doing a ton of walking and theatre stuff, so wasn’t going to be carrying other stuff as well!) but on and off they’ve been on my mind since.
They are also ridiculously expensive – six-ish times the cost of my Tesco one, for a jar half the size! – so it’s a bit of a jump to be able to justify that kind of cost.
Anyway, back in October, I’d been to one of my favourite restaurants for my birthday meal (a saga in itself of rescheduling, lockdowns etc.) which is also effectively just round the corner from Fortnum and Mason. So, having done an epic lunch, and needing to walk, I went in. And having just spent a silly amount on Lunch (as well as a couple of drinks) it was probably the only time I could rationalise the price of those jams. So I did. (Although I’m still gobsmacked at the price of them)
They’ve sat around since then, waiting to be tried, and it’s only been in the last couple of weeks they’ve been opened.
All told, they’ve been good, but definitely not worth the price. The golden one is noticeably sweeter and soft-of softer than standard raspberry jam, and the purple one is slightly different in taste (and very much so in colour) but certainly neither one is anywhere close to being something I’d eant to have on a regular basis – even if they were the same cost as the usual ones.
I’m really glad I got round to buying them and trying them, and to now know what they’re like. But I can’t see me getting them again.
Gradual Improvements
Posted: Sat 6 February, 2021 Filed under: Bankruptcy, Domestic, Getting Organised, Rebuilding, Thoughts Leave a comment »Over the last couple of months, I’ve slowly been upgrading some things around the house. Nothing major, but a few things had started breaking or failing, so it’s made sense to replace them with better versions.
Among other things, a lot of my cookware was on the way out – my main frying pad had buckled (my own fault for thermal-shocking it too many times), my baking trays were grim and no longer non-sticking, and my wok had gone horrible with rust. So I’ve replaced them all with better things – and in fairness, none of those bits was less than a decade old anyway, so it’s not like I’ve not had my money’s worth out of them.
This weekend, I’ve also replaced the main lamp in my living room. I’ve had a (revoltingly cheap) uplighter for six years, that I bought while bankrupt, when the previous one’s halogen bulb died. I think it cost me £20, and it was ridiculously wobbly, but did the job – and has done the job for that six years without fail, and without any replacement bulbs.
However, during the week it started buzzing – not just from the bulb, but also from the switch, and to me, that’s not a thing where it’s wise to keep it going. So I had a look round for something new, and ended up with an interesting LED light that offers a range of white-balance colours, as well as being able to move lighting to my requirements and so on. It wasn’t the cheapest, and the lamps aren’t replaceable in the same way as a ‘normal’ bulb would be, but there’s also very little that can break, so we’ll see. Regardless though, I’m really pleased with it at the moment.
All told, I’m happy with how things are going – I’m not paying out stupid amounts for things, but I’m also not staying at the cheapest levels, because I simply don’t need to. Hopefully all these new bits will last me another eight to ten years minimum, and god only knows where we’ll all be by then…
Slouchy
Posted: Mon 25 January, 2021 Filed under: Domestic, Getting Organised, Lockdown, Single Life, Thoughts 4 Comments »This time last year, I didn’t really have any ‘slobbing out’ stuff at all. The closet closest I really came were some tracksuit bottoms that I used for workouts and the like, but there wasn’t really much else.
Since then, with the Lockdowns and so on, I’ve expanded my collection a bit – after all, there’s not really any point getting “properly” dressed on the days you’re not even venturing out. So over the summer I had/have some thinner cotton trousers which are really comfortable, and for colder times, I’ve got some warmer ones that aren’t quite tracksuit bottoms, but also aren’t really fit for anything other than staying indoors.
My real concession though, and I’m not at all proud of them, are some slippers. I’d found that my feet were getting achingly cold, so it made sense to get *something*, and these horrors came up at just the right time. They’re unbelievably ugly, and I’d happily burn them if I ever got a partner, but for now they’re warm and comfortable, and that’ll do me.
But I can be sure that, no matter how warm and comfortable they are, they won’t be seen outside the house…
Clipped
Posted: Sun 10 January, 2021 Filed under: Covid, Domestic, Getting Organised, Lockdown, Thoughts Leave a comment »Way back when the first Lockdown was announced, I bought a set of hair-clippers, and it turns out it was probably one of the best things I did.
It’s already more than paid for itself – I think that since then I’ve only had two haircuts at my usual barbers, and all the rest have been done myself.
Of course, it’s also been a learning experience, but once I’d (sort of) figured out the hair length thing, it’s been useful.
I’m not perfect at using them – each use has ended up with a couple of return visits as I’ve discovered bits I’ve missed (or at least that feel like I’ve missed them) – but the results are at least passable, and I’m not worried about being seen out in public once I’ve done it.
Once sanity returns, I’ll still be happy to go back to having a barber do the job properly. For now, though, I’m just happy to be not looking like Cousin It.
Return of Warmth
Posted: Tue 5 January, 2021 Filed under: Car Repairs, Customer Services, Domestic, Driving, Getting Organised, MK Kia, Thoughts Leave a comment »Following on from the post about the car’s heating system having packed up, I finally got it sorted just before Christmas.
As usual my dealership was a clusterfuck from start to finish – although there appears to be some light at the end of the tunnel on that one.
Initially, I asked them to have a look at what was wrong when I took it to get the brakes fixed. They ‘checked everything they could’ and couldn’t find a problem, but the heater pack is behind the centre console, and they hadn’t allocated the time to do that, so it had to come in again.
That happened on the 21st, at which point they told me it was “only a diagnostic visit – we’re just finding out what’s going wrong“, which was what I’d suspected might be the case, but regardless, my sense of humour started to fail. Because obviously that would mean a third visit for the same problem, which is just fucking ridiculous.
As it turned out, the problem wasn’t with the heating system itself, but with a cracked/fucked radiator that was leaking at a good pace. (The mechanic actually brought me through to the garage to show me) Apparently it was only doing so once the system became pressurised (about 10-15 mins into a drive), but still, fairly serious. And because the leak meant it was losing pressure, the heating system wasn’t working. So we needed to get that sorted.
Then they told me it couldn’t be done ’til December 31st, and my sense of humour utterly failed. I wasn’t nasty, but I was quite obviously pissed off that they were happy to send me home (a not insignificant distance) with a close-to-broken car, and leave it that way for ten days.
Fortunately, at that point the light at the tunnel switched on, and one of their people (a sales manager) suggested to the reception that they move some stuff around, so that they could deal with my car the next day. Not ideal, but far better than waiting ten days. Even better, he’d come and collect it from my house, get the work done, and bring it back. (Which also meant it would be their problem if it went pop on the way there)
And that’s what happened. I filled the rad with water before he arrived, to make sure it was as good as possible. The car got collected, fixed, and returned. (They fucked up the costs too, but that’s another story) And since then, it’s all been OK, so it does appear that the problem’s been fixed.
Once he brought it back, we had a chat about how the service department had really let down the sales side on this – when it went in for a pre-MoT service, they noted that it was virtually empty of coolant, but never looked at why; they missed the leaking rad in the MoT itself; when the brakes were being replaced and they were ‘looking at everything’, they didn’t notice the rad pissing water everywhere; and the ‘diagnostic visit and then return to get it fixed’ was bullshit.
As it turned out, they’ve listened to my previous complaints about these practices, and that sales manager is now in charge of the service department, and has been tasked with making it run better, with a more customer-focused attitude. It’ll be a challenge, but it was good for him to have been able to see exactly why he was needed, and what the problems are with the current set up.
I hope it works – they’re at least aware of the problem, and trying to fix it – but only time will tell.
The End of 2020
Posted: Thu 31 December, 2020 Filed under: Domestic, Festering Season, Politics, The Future, Thoughts 1 Comment »So here we are, at the end of a true bin-fire of a year. Covid, Brexit, Lockdowns, it’s all been more than a bit bollocks, hasn’t it?
In many ways, I’ve been lucky this year – as I’ve said before, I’ve not been too badly affected. I’m still working, I’m still healthy, I’m still solvent, I’m still going.
I’m not saying that to be smug, or to belittle anyone else. I know that in many ways I’ve been fortunate, and that some of my privilege is probably showing. But equally, I’m not complacent about any of it, and I’m not going to tempt fate along the way.
In other ways, I’ve not done well at all. I’ve missed out on seeing friends, and on doing stuff – and again, I know that’s true for most people.
This year has definitely affected me, it’s left me with less motivation to do things, and with more loose ends than I’m used to. I don’t like not doing stuff, don’t like not having plans. I’m better at having plans changed last-minute – but that’s more because those things are outside my control.
I don’t know what 2021 will bring. (Obviously – no-one does. This time last year, no-one expected Covid) I do think there’s going to be a lot of hardships still to come, but I also hope it at least gets easier than 2020 has been.
Onwards and upwards, anyway. Have a good one, and let’s hope it’s a better one.
Colder Than Necessary
Posted: Sat 5 December, 2020 Filed under: Driving, Getting Out More, M1, People, Stupidity, Thoughts, Weather Leave a comment »Yesterday, for reasons I’ll write about some other time, I had to drive up to Newark.
It’s not a horrific drive, about 90 minutes usually, and pretty easy. Straight up the A1 , and then down the M1 to come home.
Yesterday though, was bloody vile. About halfway through the drive up, it started to snow – not super-heavy, but enough to make things interesting in the still-quite-dark winter morning.
It was at this point that I discovered that my car’s heating had packed up. Fuck.
By the time I stopped at Newark, it was snowing fairly heavily, and starting to settle.
When I came out to go home, the car had a good three or four inches of snow all over it, and the roads were full of it as well. The start of the drive home was emphatically Not Fun, although for me that was mainly because it was bloody cold inside the car, and no heating meant it was also steaming up a bit. The real Not Fun was more in the purview of other drivers who couldn’t handle snowy roads and/or hadn’t put lights on, and were generally utter fucksticks.
The M1 was OK – once I got down past Leicester the snow turned to heavy rain, and then it was just a slog through shitty weather and shitty traffic.
All in, the temperature (according to my car) rose by five full degrees (Centigrade) in the hundred miles between Newark and Home.
It’s been a long time since I’ve had a drive where I was actually thankful to get out at the end of it. But that was definitely one of them.
December Already
Posted: Tue 1 December, 2020 Filed under: Cynicism, Domestic, Festering Season, Lockdown, Thoughts 2 Comments »
Somehow we’re already in December. How time flies when you’re having fun locked down for half the sodding year.
It’s been weird this year already, in that I’ve seen a number of people who’ve already put up their Christmas trees and so on, even more prematurely than usual. There seems to be a school of thought that says it’s OK because “we need something to look forward to“, but that rings with the dull plop of bullshit. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m more of the viewpoint that even if I started today, I’d be sick of the bloody event by the time it comes round. Adding another two weeks to that is surely just a way to be even more jaded about it all.
But then, as we know, I’m a grouch.
I’ve also been gobsmacked about the hysteria around “We’ve got to have our Christmas“, and the mindset that people would’ve broken all the rules in order to have “a proper normal family Christmas“. We’ll get past the horrific racism of the government being quite happy to cancel the festivals of other religions (The first Lockdown was announced less than 24 hours before Eid, and the second one blocked Diwali – and I’m fairly sure there’s been at least one more festivity that’s taken a kicking) while Christmas is apparently the be-all and end-all of UK Civilisation.
Honestly, I’ll be glad when this year’s over and done with. I don’t think 2021 is going to be any easier, although there’s some hope on the horizon with Covid vaccines etc. But it’s still looking like it’ll be another ongoing hellscape – just possibly slightly less of one than this year has been.
Again, I can’t deny, I’ve been lucky throughout the whole Covid thing this year, and I’ve been affected far less than a lot of people have. I know that, and I accept it. But I’ll still be happy to be through this year.
Alone vs Lonely
Posted: Sun 22 November, 2020 Filed under: Domestic, Health, I Don't Understand, Lockdown, Mental Health, People, Thoughts 1 Comment »With the current Covid stuff, I’ve found it interesting to see how it has affected a range of people.
One of the big complaints about it is how the lockdowns have made so many people realise how lonely they are, along with the damage it’s done to those social norms and events.
Truly, this isn’t something I can empathise with. I’ve never really lived close to any of my friends – they’re scattered all over the place – so I’m absolutely used to being on my own in any particular area. So I’m alone, but I’m never lonely.
Alongside that, I don’t know, I simply don’t feel those things. I’m happy on my own, and always have been. Being sociable is my “not normal“, being on my own is the default position.
In all of that, I recognise that I’m “lucky“. I’ve come through this year OK, with far less damage than most people have suffered – whether that’s realising their lives are more lonely than they thought, being ill (or watching others being ill), or just seeing things change so much and feeling insecure because everything “normal” has suddenly tilted beyond recognition.
I sort-of understand that desire for everything to “go back to how it was“, but to me even that still carries a fair degree of self-delusion. Things have changed, and it’s (to me) far easier and smarter to embrace those changes and make progress with them (I hate the expression “the new normal”, but that’s what this is – even with vaccines and so on, there’ll still be major changes for the forseeable future)
I don’t know what 2021’s going to bring – although I don’t think it’s going to be a positive year – but I’m pretty sure I’ll get through it, same as I have this year. And all I can do is hope that the same is true for those I give a sod about.
Staying In Place
Posted: Mon 16 November, 2020 Filed under: Change, Covid, Domestic, Finances, Getting Organised, Thoughts Leave a comment »With everything else that’s going on, I’ve made the decision to stay in my current house for another year, and sorted out the tenancy agreement to that effect.
I’d been seriously looking at a couple of different locations (although still in the same region as I’m in currently) that would’ve worked, and enabled some other stuff to be a lot easier. It would also have been nice to have a slightly bigger place, as I’ve said before.
However, all the places that were available were at least double the price of the one I’m currently in, and weren’t making enough other things easier. Alongside that, the way things have been with Covid, and the upcoming clusterfuck formally known as Brexit, I ended up deciding that it was likely to be better/smarter to stay here, rather than over-extend things too much.
If nothing else, I’d be properly mortified to end up being in the shit because I’d moved to a better house and then everything else had gone to crap, knowing I could’ve still be in this little cheap(er) place.
So yeah, here for another year. That’s eight-and-a-half years now – by far the longest I’ve been in any one place since I left home.
For now, it still suits me enough. I’d like to move elsewhere, and I’ll look again come summer 2021, and see what happens in the meantime. If things are properly shit, I might stay again, but we’ll see.
Decade
Posted: Wed 21 October, 2020 Filed under: Domestic, Introspective, Looking Back, Thoughts Leave a comment »Last month, for a couple of reasons, I was looking back in the archives, and realised it’s now just over a decade since Herself and I broke apart.
Obviously things have changed a lot in that time, and some of it’s been tough, but in general it’s been positive.
Time flies, and all that jazz.
Six Months In, and No Real End In Sight
Posted: Sun 27 September, 2020 Filed under: Covid, Domestic, Health, People, Thoughts Leave a comment »This week, it’s been six months since Lockdown was announced. And in the same week, they’ve announced that the newest set of rules/laws/guidelines/guesswork are likely to apply for at least the next six months.
I wish I could say I was surprised. But I’m just not.
I don’t honestly think things will go back to “how they were”. Things will change – things have already changed – and they won’t go back to what they were. I fucking hate the expression “the new normal”, but it’s true, that’s what we’re going through, and we’re still finding our way through it, figuring out how things will be.
All the people-pleasing crap about a vaccine/cure for Covid is just that – crap. We might end up with the equivalent of the flu jab for Covid – might – but it will just be a defence. Even the flu ‘jab is just guesswork, a prediction based on what flu strains were around two years ago. Even those who’ve had the jab can still end up getting flu.
I don’t know all that the future will bring. I don’t even know how things will look in six months time – and nor does anyone else.
All any of us can really do is keep ourselves safe, and hope everyone else is doing the same thing. Other than that, it’ll just be a case of “we’ll see”.
Obsessive Dedication to Perfection
Posted: Sat 12 September, 2020 Filed under: Domestic, I Don't Understand, People, Thoughts 1 Comment »Since re-starting the archery, I’ve been going pretty regularly, and it’s reminded me of one of those things I really don’t get, or don’t understand about other people.
I don’t get obsession. I never have – I don’t get it when it comes to collecting things, or dealing with people, or things like competitions.
In the case of the archery, to excel in it you need to be super-precise, to do everything exactly the same each time. And, frankly, I can’t be arsed. When I tried collecting things, it was the same – I did OK, but then when it gets to the obsession with completing things, with finding the rarities and the one-offs, I can’t be arsed.
I know I’m not perfect – but I’m good enough. I’m almost certainly not going to win against people who practice every day, or even multiple times a week. (Although from what I’ve seen, some of those people still aren’t any bloody good at it. But there we go, that’s a different matter) I don’t insist on everything being identical with each shot, I don’t have any aiming rituals etc. Instead, my mantra tends to be “Yeah, that’ll do”
Honestly, I don’t quite see how being that obsessed with perfection makes the entire thing any fun. To be that focused on something, when it’s the minutiae that matters, it seems to (in my opinion/experience) just suck all the life and enjoyment out of things.
At the end of the day, I’m good enough. It’s rare I miss, but I simply don’t care enough to want every single shot to be in the inner gold. I do what I can, and I don’t get stressed out by something I enjoy.
All things considered, that’ll do me.
A Quiet Life
Posted: Wed 9 September, 2020 Filed under: Cynicism, Domestic, Noise, People, Single Life, Thoughts 1 Comment »In an ideal world, I’d actually like a quiet life. Not in terms of being (and/or keeping) busy, but in terms of once I get home. Once I’m there, I’d quite happily have a place with no noise.
Yes, there’d be a TV and so on, but that’s all noise that I control. I’m thinking more at the moment about other stuff, the noise I can’t control, and that sometimes drives me crackers.
The Bengal is one of the main culprits on this, if I’m honest – as soon as I get home, I’m being shouted at. It’s not like she’s hungry or anything – she’s just shouty. Sometimes it’s even before I get through the door – if it’s late evening (even if I’ve popped home in the day to make sure she’s fed etc.) it’s not unknown for the sodding cat to be sat outside waiting for me, and shouting the moment she sees me, like a mum going “And what time do you call this!” And it doesn’t let up for bloody ages. It’s exhausting.
Alongside that, I have the joys of neighbours. Throughout the lockdown/shutdown/slowdown, they’ve both seemed determined to be out in their yards, playing music loudly, and having loudspeaker/hands-free conversations on their phones – and it’s even seemed like they’re in direct competition sometimes. So it’s not been unusual for me to come home and not even be able to open the back door, because of the noise war going on.
All I want is for things to be quieter. I’m generally super-tired at the moment, which also makes me more sensitive to it all, and far far grumpier about the entire thing.
Recently I’ve even been thinking about moving – some of which is because of those neighbours – although with the looming of Brexit etc., I’ve made the decision to not jump things just yet. But there’s still the potential for the same to happen again.
In some ways – hell, in most ways – I’d be happy to be a hermit, to be out in the middle of nowhere with zero human contact on a day-to-day basis. The only problem with that concept is that the really out-of-the-way places then don’t have the other thing I want/need in life – a decent speedy broadband connection.
I’m sure there’s a balance to be found somewhere, and I’m sure I’ll figure it all out. For now though it’s just a bit bloody annoying. </grouch>
Memory Failings
Posted: Fri 28 August, 2020 Filed under: 1BEM, I Don't Understand, People, Thoughts, Weirdness Leave a comment »Do you suffer from long-term memory loss?
I don’t remember, I don’t remember(Chumbawumba’s “Amnesia”)
Within my office block, I’m regularly gobsmacked by how people seem incapable of seemingly simple tasks, like remembering to turn things off that they’ve just turned on. For example, walking in to the toilets, turning on the lights, and failing to turn them off again when leaving. (And sometimes also somehow forgetting to turn off taps that they’ve just used)
I honestly don’t understand this – and I’m potentially being charitable by attributing it to forgetfulness, rather than just being unthinking asshats – but it does seem to be ever more prevalent. Maybe it’s related to the office rentals being all-inclusive, meaning people give less of a sod about utilities and so on.
But even then, I wonder, is that also how they are at home? Do they keep leaving things on there as well? Do their partners/parents just keep on tidying up after them, turning things off again?
(And just because I’m not perfect – I’ve been meaning to write this post for the last two weeks, and I’ve kept on forgetting to do so)
Fifteen Years On
Posted: Tue 11 August, 2020 Filed under: Domestic, Driving, Thoughts Leave a comment »Looking back, it’s fifteen years ago today that I passed the driving test.
It took me a long time to get it done, and for the longest time I wasn’t bothered at all about driving. But now I wouldn’t be without it.
Indeed, if I lost my licence now, it would mean a total change for me – I’d have to move, reconsider work and so on. It would be a massive upheaval in so many ways.
For example, I looked recently at my commute on Google Maps (I do this sometimes, just to check on what the traffic’s like on my route) and saw the other travel-method options at the top. Driving from home to my office is (on average) a 20-minute drive, door-to-door. It’s pretty much my shortest commute ever (I had a stint while in Bury St Edmunds where it was slightly shorter, but not by much) and yet if I were to do it by public transport, it would take me two-and-a-quarter hours! (There is a route at specific times that would be a 50 minute bus-ride, but also drops me at the other end of Milton Keynes, so would then be a two-mile-ish walk – and that route doesn’t run at the times I commute in to my office)
In similar vein, visiting my parents is a simple hour’s drive. Public transport? It’d be three hours on a good day.
Even a simple journey to London Euston (which I can usually do in 75 mins – driving and then tube down to Euston) would be at least double that by public transport.
And my archery club? Forget it, no chance at all.
So just on that tiny subset of what I regularly do, life would be hugely different without driving. When you take into account the extra stuff – the on-site client days, the weekends away, the visits to friends, the idiot day-trips – it would now be a completely different life if I weren’t driving. Not necessarily a better or worse one, but a very different one.
Archery Return
Posted: Wed 5 August, 2020 Filed under: Domestic, Getting Organised, Health, Introspective, Personality, Thoughts Leave a comment »Back in March, I wrote about my starting to get back into archery after way too long – it’d been a decade or more since I last went, and this year I found a local(ish) club and went through their ‘beginners’ process (for insurance purposes etc.) before getting my bow checked over and slightly updated. In a spectacularly piss-awful piece of timing, I got that done on the same day that lockdown was announced. Bugger.
Fortunately, the club has its own field, so it’s been possible to use it during the lockdown. I had to sort out a first induction meeting (to establish that I knew their rules and so on) and get my membership card, and from there I’ve been able to go on a regular basis.
So far, I’ve been for eleven sessions, and enjoyed pretty much all of them – last week’s one was less good, but that was just weather and environment being a bastard, plus a healthy dose of hubris from having had a really good session the week before, and it all just clustered up into a shitfest.
As it turns out, it seems I’m generally OK at the whole thing. I’ve been taking my time, building up my strength and stamina through the sessions, rather than aiming to be super-competitive or anything.
The thing for me is that I’m good enough. As with a lot of things, I find I don’t have the obsessive side of things, so I lack that desire to do everything exactly the same way, that push for perfection and rigid routine. Indeed, the people who are like that bore and annoy me. I’m doing this primarily for fun – I like the challenge of getting things right and doing well – and it’s another way of building up my strength and stamina, which is fine with me. But no, I don’t think I’ll ever be at the high end of the club’s score table and so on, because I get to the point of “That’ll do”, and it’s enough for me.
But I’ll keep on going, and see how things go.
Healthy Figures
Posted: Mon 29 June, 2020 Filed under: Cynicism, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Food, Getting Old(er), Health, Thoughts, Weigh Less, Weight Loss Leave a comment »I said a while ago that I’d write this, and then never got round to it. (I also thought I’d written it before, but a couple of searches didn’t find anything. Which is odd.)
Anyway. Back at the start of 2018, I did my semi-regular checkup visit at the local GP, which all worked out as “fairly healthy in general“. As usual, the main ‘problem’ was that I’m significantly heavier than I “should” be. So I asked for help from the GP, asked what they could do or suggest. And the response? “Oh, you’re not obese enough to get NHS treatment“. Well OK, that’s about as helpful as a kick in the cock.
So, being me, I pushed for some referrals – I already wanted to lose weight, but that kind of attitude really steamed my piss, and I wanted to get some better figures and find out more about what was going on. I’ve been logging my food intake for years now, and also keeping track of what I walk and so on, so I knew beforehand that my usual calorie intake was around the recommended 2,500 a day mark (albeit with some days/weekends of excess) and I walk an average of at least 10,000 steps a day.
First, I got a referral to Slimming World – and the less said about that, the better. An unremittingly negative and unhelpful experience all round.
I also got a referral to the Dietician service at Bedford Hospital, which wasn’t much more positive, but did end up with some good connections and results.
With the service, we tried a set of calorie-reduction diet plans, none of which worked. However, through it I also got a connection to the Uni of Beds’ Sport Science department, where I was able to (finally) get one of the tests done that I really wanted – an RMR (Resting Metabolic Rate) test, to establish what level of energy I’m actually burning. RMR is basically a measure of the calories the body burns if it’s simply laying in bed doing nothing. No food intake, no exertion at all. It took about an hour to run from start to finish, and then a couple of weeks to crunch the data and produce a report.
So. My RMR is 2,800 calories a day – even if I just laid in bed and did sod all, I’d need more calories than the recommended 2,500 a day. Taking into account calories for digestion, as well as exertion, It’s likely I’m burning around 4,000 a day. (As it turns out, I did write about BMR/RMR – ten years ago!)
On the downside, this information never really sank in with the Dietician. They kept on insisting that eating less had to result in losing weight. And in all honesty, it should – but didn’t. Looking at the figures, I’m already taking in less than I’m expending, and dropping the intake simply widened the gap even further. All it did was leave me even more tired, and seriously grouchy.
It ended up with a bit of an argument as my sense of humour finally failed, I wrote a full bulleted list of what was happening (with all the information from above) and why I suspected things weren’t working. That actually finished things fairly positively, although they didn’t have any better suggestions once we were outside the standard answers.
Also along the way, I ended up joining a local group called “Gutless” for overweight men. It consisted of two hours a week, one of food education, and one of physical exercise and workouts. For me, I didn’t learn much from the food education, but the training was positive, and started me doing more than I had. And since the Gutless course finished, we’ve maintained the exercise routine with the same trainer, which has also remained positive.
All told, I feel happier with how things are – if nothing else, my health record contains the whole list of things tried from the Dietician, and the RMR figures from the Uni of Beds. It means that when the GP tries their “you’re overweight” thing again, they can see what’s been tried.
However, I don’t really know what the answer is. My food intake has stayed much the same (and some of those weekends of excess actually make me lose weight) and I do more, with the extra workouts twice a week, and the archery I’ve recently re-taken up as well as maintaining the walking I do. I’m far, far stronger than I was, my shape is better, my stamina is fearsome, and I feel far healthier – but somehow, my weight hasn’t actually changed in a good decade, no matter what I do.
I’d like to lose more some – it’s just that still, everything I try isn’t working. I think that at some point I’ll have to go back and get more data and ideas, but really I don’t yet even know the right questions to ask.
I’ll figure it out one day, I’m sure.
Lockdown – Non-events
Posted: Thu 18 June, 2020 Filed under: 2019/20, Do More, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Getting Out More, Gigs, Lockdown, London, Single Life, Theatre, Thoughts Leave a comment »I’ve known it’s coming for a while, but this coming fortnight is probably the one that’ll grump me the most about the Lockdown so far.
It’s the time when I had a lot of events lined up, all of which have now been moved to next year. Among other things, that list includes
- Tonight, when I was supposed to be seeing Skunk Anansie at the Royal Festival Hall
- Tomorrow, when I was likely to have been at the Taste festival in London
- Saturday, when I was supposed to be seeing Jessica Chastain in “A Doll’s House” at the Playhouse Theatre
- Next week, I was supposed to be at the Lead Developer conference in London for two days
- Next weekend, I was supposed to be seeing Much Ado About Nothing at the Globe
So yeah, bit of a slump of “I should’ve been doing [x]” for the next couple of days.
I had a similar slump a while back when I got a load of “this won’t be happening” emails over a couple of days, and this is much the same. I’ll get over it, and it all could be much, much worse.
But still, blah.
Lockdown – Post-Fatcat
Posted: Mon 15 June, 2020 Filed under: Animals, Change, Domestic, Lockdown, Thoughts Leave a comment »Updates have been a bit sparse over the last couple of weeks. No particularly good reason, life has just been a bit dull.
Following on from the departure of FatCat, it’s been a lot quieter. The Bengal has, thankfully, settled a bit too, and seems to be OK with being a solo cat. She’s not behaved anywhere near as badly as I was expecting, and the entire experience has been OK.
What I’ve noticed more than anything is the hindsight with which I now realise how bad FatCat had become. I’ve had two weeks where I haven’t had to clean up puke, where she hasn’t had accidents of not getting to the litter tray in time (or just deciding that she couldn’t be bothered, and the floor would be fine) and there’ve been none of her normal noises and behaviours as well (obviously)
All told, it’s reinforced that I did the right thing, that she was getting worse and would’ve continued to do so.
But that doesn’t stop it from sucking. For me I think it’s the worst part of pet-owning, this whole process of making decisions about whether they should live or die, having that control and so on.
Anyway, things are OK. I still look at some of the stuff in the living room, expecting to see her asleep on it (particularly the Sky box, which was always a favourite) and then remembering she’s not here any more. But it’s OK, and it’s only been two weeks.
Lockdown – Space
Posted: Mon 1 June, 2020 Filed under: Domestic, Lockdown, People, Thoughts, Weirdness 2 Comments »One of the weirdest things I’ve found about the Lockdown (I can’t really call it the current lockdown any more, the speed with which it’s being rescinded) is that outside my house, there have been many more parking spaces than usual.
I can’t explain it – all logic says that with fewer people travelling, the spaces would’ve been filled at the start of the lockdown and then vehicles wouldn’t have moved. However, that’s not been the case – there are fewer vehicles, and the spaces seem to vary all the time, but there are always spaces.
All I can assume is that where I live has a fair percentage of people who have second homes here (for commuting during the week or whatever- we’re only an hour from London, so it kind of makes sense) and who haven’t been here while things have been different.
I’m not complaining – it’s just always seemed odd to be able to park outside my own house, rather than having to find spaces further away.
Farewell, FatCat
Posted: Fri 29 May, 2020 Filed under: Animals, Change, Domestic, Lockdown, Milton Keynes, Single Life, Thoughts 3 Comments »Today, FatCat was put to sleep.
Over the last couple of months she’d slowly been going downhill – not eating as much, not keeping food down, losing weight, blood in the poo, and a bundle of other things. I’d initially put it down to a change of diet (for whatever reason, I hadn’t been able to get their usual food, so I’d been changing things and giving them whatever was available) but she should’ve got used to the changed food in that time.
She’s never been in pain, and I’ve kept a close eye on that as well as everything else, but I’ve been aware she’s doing less well.
This week, though, she took a bigger downward turn – more lost weight, worse poo and so on – and the really significant thing for me is that she was a lot more cuddly, and was actually choosing to sit on me or against me most of the time. That was absolutely new behaviour – she normally avoided that sort of contact like the plague – and definitely not a positive sign.
As the week went on, things didn’t improve, so I made the appointment with the vets. And today, we went in. She didn’t even fight going into the cat carrier, so she knew things weren’t good.
I’ve always known that this was how it would work out – she’s antisocial enough that even taking her to the vets for an examination would’ve led to her not trusting me as much for [x] weeks, if not months. (It usually takes her about two to four weeks to recover trust of me after I’ve applied anti-flea stuff to her, so God knows how long it’d take after a vet visit) Similarly, traumatising her daily in order to get meds into her would’ve utterly knackered her quality of life, so it was always likely that this was how it would all work out. (The same is true for the Bengal, so that’s something to look forward to…)
The vets themselves were really good – the entire process has obviously changed in the current Lockdown, but it was all done as well as humanly possible.
As it is, I still feel like an absolute shitbag. I know it was the right thing to do, I know she wasn’t well and that this was the best (indeed, the only) way to do things that kept her life as good as possible. I know she wasn’t in pain, I know she had a really good eight years here with me, and I know the end wasn’t a vile experience. But I still hate being the one to make that life or death decision, it just doesn’t sit well with me.
I’m going to see now how the Bengal – a change-averse little twat at the best of times – handles things, as she’s never been a solo cat before. She’ll either do fine and accept it, or she’ll be a nightmare for a while.
All told, a shitty, shitty day.
Lockdown – Missed
Posted: Tue 19 May, 2020 Filed under: Change, Domestic, Lockdown, Thoughts, Weirdness 2 Comments »In a similar vein to the previous post about things that might survive, I’ve thought a lot about the things I’ve actively missed in this time, as opposed to the things I just haven’t done.
The list of things actually missed – the things I’ll look forward to being able to do again – is really quite short.
- Seeing films at the cinema
- Meals at my favourite places – with Mere being the key one I’ll be at as soon as they re-open
(There are a couple of other places I want to go back to, but Mere is the only one I’ve actively missed) - Walking in London
And that’s it, really.
Of course there are other things I want to be able to go back to doing and so on, and I’ll enjoy life slowing going back to normal. It’ll be interesting to see how it all works out
Lockdown – Changing Values
Posted: Mon 18 May, 2020 Filed under: Change, Cynicism, Domestic, I Don't Understand, Lockdown, People, Thoughts 3 Comments »One thing I hope will be interesting – as and when the current lockdown is properly eased – is to see the things that people decide are important, the things they’ve actually missed, as opposed to the things they’ve just not been able to go to as part of a routine.
For example, I wonder if [big chain] coffee shops will suffer, as people have (hopefully) realised that they don’t need all that caffeine and sugar.
[Note : I amended this afterwards, following Gordon’s comment, because I’d particularly meant big-chain (Starbucks, Costa et al) places rather than independents/locals that definitely deserve the business and support]
On the evidence of the things that’ve currently re-started, I don’t think it’ll be the case – as soon as they’ve re-opened, there have been huge queues outside places like McDonalds, Burger King and KFC.
It’ll be more interesting to see what happens longer-term, once the “Oh good, they’re back!” novelty value fades.
Lockdown – Blinds
Posted: Thu 14 May, 2020 Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Getting Organised, House Work, Lockdown, Thoughts 1 Comment »A while ago, I ordered a vertical blind from Tuiss (Edited on 23/05 : who now sell as Blinds2Go – sorry, forgot to add this before) to replace the shitty curtain in the front room, and got it fitted. I’ve been really pleased with it since, and it’s generally handled life pretty well.
However, two heavy-footed felines stomping in and out of it had meant that some of the clips to hold it all together (plastic chain with connectors onto each slat of the blind) had snapped, so it was beginning to look a bit ropy. (Additionally, the fabric I chose is slightly rough, so grabs cat fur like an absolute bastard, but that’s a different issue)
Anyway, the number of snapped connectors was getting close to outnumbering the ones still intact, so I got in touch with Tuiss to find out whether I could get some replacement weights and chains.
As it turns out, when I say it was bought and installed “a while ago”, it turns out I meant “nearly six years ago”. All things considered, that means they’ve lasted pretty well.
Tuiss found my order, and we discussed what bits I needed – and at each point I was clear and said I was happy to pay for the pieces, it seemed only fair after six years. But they’ve kept on insisting that they’ll just send them out – and they’ve done so.
The bits arrived yesterday, and are now all in place on the blind. I’m really pleased with it, and impressed with Tuiss. Depending on how things go, if I decide to replace the blind then I’ll go back to them and do so, and see what they’ll charge me for a replacement blind without needing the infrastructure (the actual holding frame/mechanism and so on)
Lockdown – Ongoing
Posted: Sun 10 May, 2020 Filed under: Cynicism, Domestic, I Don't Understand, Lockdown, News, People, Thoughts Leave a comment »Tonight, the PM has announced a “conditional plan” to help the country get through the next phase of Covid-19.
To be honest, it is (as expected) a bit of a car-crash, with mixed messages, bloody awful phrasing, and no real clarity on any of it.
So for me (and, I hope, for a lot of others) I’m sticking with my own Plan A, which is to carry on doing what I was doing before.
I’m still planning on mainly using my office – which is OK (so far as I can tell) because I go from a house on my own, to a car on my own, to an office on my own, with no real human contact at all, and thus an absolutely minimal chance of catching it, or passing it on. If my office building gets too crowded then I’ll re-assess and figure out a different plan. Until then, we’ll see.
Other than that, all I’m doing is keeping myself as safe from everything as possible, and hoping that everyone else is doing the same. Really, I don’t see that there’s anything else that can be done.
Eight Years
Posted: Tue 5 May, 2020 Filed under: 2012/13, 2019/20, Bankruptcy, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Getting Organised, Thoughts Leave a comment »Turns out, it’s eight years today since I moved to the current house.
A lot’s happened in that time, and I’m still here. It’s the longest I’ve lived anywhere since I left home, which still feels very weird.
I keep on thinking about moving on (and, as I said in a previous post, right now I’m glad it hasn’t happened) and being somewhere new, but so far I haven’t found anywhere I really feel right about moving to.
I don’t know what the future will bring, or where it’ll find me, but for now well, eight years. Wow.
Lockdown – Error #1
Posted: Wed 29 April, 2020 Filed under: Domestic, Getting Old(er), Lockdown, Single Life, Thoughts 1 Comment »This week – week seven of Lockdown, in case anyone is counting or cares – I learned something really important.
Hair clipper grades are not the length of hair in mm.
So this week, when I decided I’d had enough of my hair being too long (by my standards) I got my new clippers out, and put on the blade that would do a 2mm length. Because that’s a Number Two, right?
Wrong. So, so wrong.
It turns out, each grade is 1/8th of an inch, so a Number One results in hair 1/8th of an inch long, a Number Two in quarter-inch hair (about 6, 6.5mm) and so on up to Number Eight, which is a full inch long.
So currently my hair is just under a third of the length it would usually be after a trim. It looks and feels like a kiwi-fruit. (However, it’s also lost the silver halo that was developing, andlosing that’s A Very Good Thing)
As it is, I really don’t mind it. I’ve done a decent enough job of trimming it, it’s smooth enough with no tufts, and I won’t have to do it again for a while. It’s not the same as going to the barber, and it’s not something I’m going to end up doing for myself for ever. (Besides, I actually like going to my barber)
All the same, I’ve had a learning experience, and I’ll know better next time.
LockDown – Getting On
Posted: Mon 27 April, 2020 Filed under: Domestic, Health, Lockdown, Single Life, Thoughts, Weight Loss Leave a comment »It’s been a strange couple of months, with all the Coronavirus stuff, and the resultant lockdown. At the time of writing, we’ve completed five full weeks, and it’s looking like there’s still at least another couple of weeks of it to go (at a bare minimum)
All told, I’ve actually done OK (so far, so far) with the whole thing, and it hasn’t affected me too badly – indeed, for the most part my daily life hasn’t changed all that much.
A lot of people have found it tough to be on their own (or in a very restricted domestic situation) and they definitely have my sympathies, but for me it’s been much the same as usual. Indeed, the whole thing has really just proved to me that – for me – it was right to go back to being single, and staying that way. (That one might end up being a larger post in the fullness of time)
Additionally, a lot of people seem to have had real issues with shopping, panic-buying and the like – and again, so far I’ve been pretty lucky, and been able to get things done without running out of anything. (That’ll definitely be a bigger future post) There have been things where I’ve changed the supplier, or found a different method on-line, but so far there’s been nothing I’ve run out of (or even short of)
My health’s been fine, and so far there’ve been no signs of picking up the virus or anything. I’ve slacked off a bit on the whole exercise thing – although I’m still doing some, it’s just nowhere near what I was doing – and in a fit of irony, I actually lost a small amount of weight as a result. (Yeah, my body chemistry is still epically fucked) But I’m also not snacking and nibbling – which again seems to be a lot of people’s coping mechanism – so in general things are pretty good.
Even work-wise I’ve been lucky and most of my stuff is keeping on going. Obviously that might change with time, but for now it’s all still stable, and going well. And there’s a couple of new projects coming in as well, which should (I hope) make things easier as well.
So all-in-all things are good here. And I know that makes me ridiculously fortunate, and far, far luckier than many others.
Silver Linings
Posted: Wed 8 April, 2020 Filed under: Business, Domestic, Lockdown, Looking Back, Thoughts 1 Comment »I don’t really need to update anyone about the current Coronavirus Lockdown and all the fun and games that entails. (Suffice to say for now, I’m doing fine, but there’ll probably be a separate post about that some other time) It’s generally a bit shitey, and a bit dull, but it’s OK.
However, I was also thinking this week that for me things could’ve been so much worse – and very nearly were. So as well as the shitey-and-dull bits, it’s time to look a bit at silver linings, the things that – if they’d happened – would have made things shitey-er. (That’s not a word, but in context it’ll be fine)
At the start of this year, I was looking at renting a different office – still in Milton Keynes, but with a nicer specification, some more facilities and so on. And, of course, significantly more expensive. They were still fitting it out when I went for a look – which was perhaps a short-sighted move on the part of the company, as I’d have far rather seen things when they were a bit further along, rather than saying “This is where the walls will be” – but all the same, it looked nice, and suitable for most of my needs, along with some interesting extras for being “one of the first in”. But for a number of reasons (primarily the cost, and that I don’t like being hassled by sales people afterwards – particularly when they then can’t even follow their script efficiently) I decided to wait and see. And if I’d taken it, I’d have moved in a month ago, and then been effectively locked out a week later, while still paying that contracted rent for a locked-in 12-month minimum. (At my current one, if all else fails, I can now give them a month’s notice and be done and dusted)
In a similar vein, back in November I was looking at a couple of other houses I could move to instead of the current one. My tenancy was expiring on the current one, I’ve been here a scarily long time, and in many ways I’d like somewhere with more room. (That would’ve been nice in the current situation, I’d have had space to set aside a room as a home-office, which simply isn’t possible where I am now) But again, the ones I liked were a lot more expensive, and not quite right enough to make the decision. So again, if things had worked out differently, I’d be in a bigger house and so on, but also be paying considerably more for doing so.
There have been (and even are) some other silver linings to this whole thing, but for now, I think these two will do, to remind me that things really could be a lot worse…
Bow Time
Posted: Sun 29 March, 2020 Filed under: 2019/20, Change, Do More, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Getting Organised, Getting Out More, Health, Looking Back, Norfolk, Thoughts Leave a comment »Decades ago, I used to be highly into archery, and enjoyed it a lot, including shooting up to County level.
Then life got in the way for a while, until I was reminded (15 years ago now) that I enjoyed it when we went to Center Parcs that I went and sorted out a bow and so on and started to get back into it again, and then life got in the way again.
I’d kept the bow and so on, even though I wasn’t doing the archery, and kept on looking for local(ish) archery clubs whose schedules worked with my own. (This is actually a lot harder than you’d think – most of them are on school grounds or similar, so only open specific evenings, and usually ones where I was already doing stuff)
Anyway, about a month ago now, I found a semi-local (within about 30-40 minutes drive) club that has an outdoor range which is open to use seven days a week, which does suit me. But before I could join properly, I had to do their beginner’s course, in order to prove I could use a bow safely.
I did that a couple of weeks back, and again really enjoyed myself.
The final step was to get my bow properly checked out and serviced (it’s not been fired in eight years, I wasn’t going to try it without getting it inspected!) and that happened a week ago on Friday at a place I’d been recommended to use. Again that was a really good – if not cheap – experience, and by the end of my time there, I was grouping my arrows (at a shorter indoor range) within the space one gets if you circle fingers into an OK gesture.
I filled in, signed and sent off the membership forms the following day, so now I’m just waiting to get my confirmation and card.
All told, I’m generally feeling pretty optimistic about it, and looking forward to seeing how things go.
A Flaw In The Safety
Posted: Fri 6 March, 2020 Filed under: Cynicism, Driving, London, Technology, Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »Following on from the post a while back about driver assistance things, I had another interesting one a few days ago.
I’d hired a Vauxhall Insignia in order to ferry people around a bit, and the weather was disgusting – heavy rain, lots of spray, and lots of idiots with no lights on.
Anyway, on the section of the M4 I was driving on, there were roadworks, and the lanes had been narrowed as a result. And that was where the problem came in.
The Insignia had the Lane Change Warning thing, which detects when the driver is drifting across lanes without indicating – and in the case of the Insignia, it also tries to push you back into the lane you’re departing. Not my favourite thing at the best of times, but in this case it was actually picking up on the wrong lane markings (because they were glossy and shiny in the rain) and so actually kept on pushing me “back” towards the crash barriers, and would have left me scraping along them if I’d not been paying attention.
I can understand why it happened, and how. It was also easy enough for me to sort things out (eventually by turning off the Lane Change completely) but I can also easily see how things could’ve gone wrong, if I were the sort of driver who relied on these aids, who didn’t pay attention, or left those aids to do things because they’re there to help.
And what would’ve happened in that situation if it were a fully autonomous (“self-driving”) vehicle with no controls, or potentially people who didn’t drive, or couldn’t understand the danger signs?
There’s still a way to go on these things, I think…
Levels of Stupid
Posted: Tue 25 February, 2020 Filed under: Advertising, Cynicism, I Don't Understand, People, Stupidity, Thoughts, Weirdness Leave a comment »At the moment, I get a *lot* of spam about property investment – probably an average of five to ten a day. I don’t know why it’s suddenly this subject, but it’s definitely noticeable.
Student flats in Hull, Hotel rooms in Leicester, Apartments in Liverpool and Manchester, and even some overseas stuff. I don’t pay attention to it, but it does make me think.
Basically, what kind of idiot (or lunatic) is going to decide to invest in a property, based on receiving a spam/junk email? It’s a huge amount of money, however you look at it.
I mean, obviously people do fall for this crap – the spammers/scammers wouldn’t bother sending it out if they didn’t – but I can’t deny, I figure that the people who do so pretty much deserve everything they get.
Self-Incrimination
Posted: Fri 21 February, 2020 Filed under: Domestic, Driving, I Don't Understand, Legal, M1, People, Technology, Thoughts Leave a comment »It’s no secret that I tend to assume people with dashcams are usually shit drivers. Obviously that’s not always the case, but in my experience it’s predominantly true – as though there’s an attitude of “Well I’m perfect, and it’s all these other idiots on the road” or something.
I also know that it’s now far easier to upload one’s dashcam footage to report driving offences when the police haven’t been there.
What I do wonder is how many people self-incriminate on those uploads? For example, if one were to upload video of someone undertaking on a motorway, only for that footage to also show that the reporting driver had been middle-lane-hogging for the previous ten miles, and thus being at least a partial cause of said undertaking…
And no, this doesn’t involve my own driving. Just something I noticed occurring in front of me on the M1 this morning, and then started thinking about the extrapolations.
Road Muck
Posted: Tue 18 February, 2020 Filed under: Domestic, Driving, Thoughts, Weather Leave a comment »It’s that time of the year again where the roads are filthy, and all the grut ends up on cars. I’m not quite sure how it all works out – I think it’s a combination of grit/salt for expected sub-zero temperatures, plus rain lifting and loosening the daily-wear dirt off the tarmac and making it airborne.
It surprises me how dirty everything gets, and also how unaware people are of how vile their cars are – I regularly see lots with their number plates completely obscured and unreadable because of that caked-on junk.
Personally, I don’t get that – regardless of how well one drives, why draw the attention of any passing police, and give them a reason to stop you?
Admittedly, last week when I was driving home one night I did think I’d had a headlamp blow, as there was considerably less light/illumination than usual – but I checked when I got home, and it was just congealed gunk on the lenses. Easy to sort (and I took the car to the car wash the next day) but still, I don’t get why/how people leave their cars to get into a state where you could pretty much scrape off layers of dirt…
Ciara
Posted: Sun 9 February, 2020 Filed under: Domestic, Driving, M1, News, Thoughts, Weather Leave a comment »Today the UK got hit by Storm Ciara – nothing in the scale of American weather and so on, but still, enough to be entertaining
Among other things, it meant that there was a record-breaking subsonic crossing of the Atlantic – just under five hours, arriving at Heathrow a full 80 minutes ahead of schedule – because of the storm’s effect on the Jetstream.
Fortunately, the area I live in wasn’t too affected – we had several trees come down and so on, but they were all apparently cleared away pretty quickly, and a couple of trucks on the M1 were blown over, which must make life interesting. However, other areas were hit far harder, with some winds over 90mph, as well as flooding and so on.
Thankfully, I wasn’t doing much today. I had thought I was back down in London to see a play, but it turned out that is actually on a different day/weekend completely. And I can’t deny, I’m really quite pleased about that.
Petrol and Diesel
Posted: Fri 7 February, 2020 Filed under: Change, Cynicism, Domestic, Driving, Green, Green, Thoughts 1 Comment »This week, one of the main stories in the news was about the UK announcing it had brought forwards a ban on the sale of petrol and diesel-fuelled cars to 2035 from its initial target of 2040.
That’s all well and good, but it does have its problems as well. To my mind, the biggest of these is the necessary infrastructure.
You can tell that the great majority of the people proposing these requirements (and expecting everyone in the country to follow suit) live in houses with driveways – or at least off-road parking – as well as the funds to pay for a significant increase to their electricity usage.
However, lots of people don’t live in those situations. Those in blocks of flats, for example, wouldn’t necessarily have access to anything. For those who (like me) live in a house with on-street parking – and even then it’s not guaranteed or reserved parking, so I regularly end up parking a distance away from my place – but even if I were parked outside the house, an electric car would mean dangling a power cable out of the house, and across the pathway that’s regularly used. For that scenario, I’m honestly not sure what the infrastructure requirements would be – and I don’t think anyone else knows either.
The costs are another matter. Yes OK, you’re cutting out the costs of fuel, but if the demand for electricity shoots up that much, then so will the costs of it. Additionally, there are plenty of people who are on paid-supply meters, or high tariffs (whether because of laziness and not changing, or because that’s all they can get because of debt, income, whatever) and that can also be an issue.
Alongside those concerns – and just using myself as an example – there are plenty of drives that fall outside the range of all but the most expensive electric vehicles. An ‘affordable’ vehicle like the Nissan Leaf, for example, apparently has a range of 135 miles. So I could do a return journey from home to London, no worries. But I couldn’t do a trip down to see my friends in Somerset (which I can do in 3 hours currently) without a recharging stop each way. (And again, they don’t have a power point for charging a car down there) Same when I go to see friends in Manchester, or Newcastle.
Hell, I’ve even done daily commutes that would take me past that kind of mileage – and the office was (again) somewhere with no connection to a decent charger, it would’ve been power-cable-tastic – which would have been entirely impractical.
If that kind of target for everyone to have electric vehicles is to be realised, I think there need to be quantum leaps in several aspects, including (but not limited to)
- Infrastructure for charging vehicles
- Battery technology, to improve both the range of electric vehicles, and to improve the speed of charging
- and to improve at-home-storage, allowing the potential for using home-based renewable generation – solar, wind, whatever – that can be stored to provide the charging without draining the grid
- A huge review of the costs of that electricity, and to ensure increases to the supply that will handle all that extra demand
- Consideration of the impact on petrol and diesel industry – including the effects of all the staff who might then be in less demand at filling stations and so on
Personally, I think a lot of stuff round electric vehicles is a load of old cock. I’m not convinced that they’re any more efficient (among other things, there’s a lot of power lost in the transmission over cables, so it needs a *lot* more generation in order to provide the supply) and while they’re less polluting at the point of use, I’m not convinced that it’s doing anything more than moving that around. We don’t know what happens with the constituent parts of the car batteries, or what happens when they expire (or when a car crashes or whatever)
I don’t claim to know what the answer is – but I also don’t think that a wholesale change like this is necessarily the best plan. It needs a lot more thought, and a shitload more planning than currently seems to be happening.
Driving Assistance
Posted: Sun 19 January, 2020 Filed under: Driving, Technology, Thoughts 2 Comments »During the last three months of 2019 I ended up hiring a few cars for longer rides and so on. There was no particularly good reason for it – the primary motivation was that some of the drives were likely to involve heavy traffic, so having an automatic seemed like a decent plan. Outside of that, cutting down some of the mileage on my own car, and also well, it was just fun to play with some different cars.
Out of it all, it was interesting to me to see how much driving has changed, and primarily the plethora of driving assistance things that’ve been added in the last few years. Things like auto start/stop, lane-change warnings, automatic lights, automatic windscreen wipes, intelligent cruise control (the one that automatically adjusts speed based on vehicles around you, rather than just ‘70 mph and that’s it‘) , road-sign recognition, and speed limiters.
In general, I’m really not a fan of these aids and “helpers” – as has been noted before, I’m a bit of a control-freak, and I don’t like ceding driving decisions to them. My main reasoning on this though isn’t actually about my own driving, it’s about the driving of others. It seems like a lot of these things help to make drivers feel that they don’t need to be so aware of what’s going on, and so they become less conscious of their surroundings, which makes for things being more dangerous, rather than less.
In the end, there were only two that I found to be useful, and even then there’s only one that I’ve “missed” having at all.
I used the speed limiter more than I thought I would – mainly on trips where I’d been an idiot and done big day-trips (three or more hours each way) or where I was coming back after a long and active day. On those occasions, knowing that I couldn’t take the car over whatever I’d set meant it was something I didn’t have to concentrate on, and that meant I could give more awareness and concentration to the actual drive. I wouldn’t use it on a day-to-day basis, but it was definitely useful on the times when I did activate it.
The only thing I’ve actually missed though is the automatic windscreen wipers. It’s more about reducing my own annoyance than actually being useful as such, but I’ve noticed its lack. Particularly on motorways (which is still the great majority of my driving) I find rain is too changeable, too random for regular windscreen wipers to be effective without occasionally squeaking when there’s not been enough rain, or not clearing rapidly enough when a sudden dollop lands (or there’s more as one passes a truck or whatever) So you end up changing the intervals, or only triggering a manual sweep when it’s needed, or whatever. Anyway, it annoys me whatever happens.
The automatic wipers took all of that away. Leave them on auto, and they’d handle it all without hassle. Yes, it’s odd (in some ways) to see them go from nothing to a sudden three wipes, or increasing the cadence in response to that truck chucking up a load of water or whatever. But it still meant it was something that wasn’t annoying me, which tends to be a positive…
Unaffected
Posted: Tue 14 January, 2020 Filed under: Cynicism, Driving, Legal, People, Thoughts Leave a comment »There are times where I really wonder about our legal system. Today is one of those days.
There’s this story on the BBC, about a driver who killed a cyclist while driving like an utter dickhead. He drove away from the crash – still driving like a dickhead, and nearly causing another crash as well – and sold the car (his girlfriend’s, so he wasn’t even legally able to sell it) that afternoon in order to try and avoid being caught/blamed/arrested.
That all failed, he was caught, and yesterday he plead guilty to a whole range of driving offences.
He pleaded guilty to causing death by dangerous driving and has been sentenced to six years in prison.
He also pleaded guilty to causing death by driving whilst disqualified, causing death while uninsured, dangerous driving and two counts of leaving petrol stations without paying for fuel.
He’s never passed a driving test – indeed, he says he’s never even taken a driving test.
He’s been jailed for six years, which means he’ll likely be out in three. But that’s not where I wonder about the legal system. This is…
Dellaway has also been banned from driving for six years and was told he would have to take an extended driving test before being allowed on the road.
Now, I’m sorry, but if someone has already shown that they’re quite willing to drive without passing a test, what on earth makes them think that a prison sentence is going to change him enough that he takes a driving test when he comes out, let alone an extended one?
Come to that, what on earth makes them think that being banned from driving will stop him from being back on the roads as soon as he’s out of prison?
Going Dark
Posted: Tue 7 January, 2020 Filed under: Domestic, Driving, Festering Season, Thoughts Leave a comment »Now we’re at the end of the Festering Season, and it makes me happy.
With Twelfth Night having just passed, it’s the time I honestly like the most – all the decorative lights are off again, and the streets return to being much darker.
I don’t really know why it makes me happier, but I noticed it again this week, that whole “Oh, this is different, it’s really nice” thing as I drove home.
I know, I’m a grouch and so on – it’s not something I could ever deny, after all.
Into 2020
Posted: Sat 4 January, 2020 Filed under: Bankruptcy, Change, Domestic, Driving, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Getting Old(er), Looking Back, Milton Keynes, Norfolk, People, Rebuilding, Single Life, Thoughts, Time Leave a comment »It’s been interesting (for no good reason other than that this is a year that ends in a zero) to look back at what was going on this time ten years ago.
It’s fair to say that a lot has changed in that time – albeit none of it recently.
Back then I was still in Norfolk, and working in Bury St Edmunds (and I did keep the promise to stick with the one workplace for the full year of 2010…) I’d just had the first (and still only) accident of my driving career, sliding on ice onto a set of concrete fence posts, which did a blinding job of twatting the front nearside.
So in that ten years, I’ve
- split with Herself, had another shorter-term relationship, and been single now for much longer than either one.
- moved four times – and been in one place (the current one) for far longer than anywhere else I’ve ever lived since leaving home
- changed jobs more times than I care to think about (I could work it out, but truly can’t be chuffed) and been doing the current one for far longer than I ever expected
- been through the whole bankruptcy process, and come out the other side
- been to more plays and theatre things than I’d ever have thought I’d have been to
- and the same for restaurants – Michelin-starred and otherwise. This time ten years ago, I’d not been to any Michelin places – that happened in mid-2010, and I wasn’t impressed at the time. Maybe I should go back there, maybe not.
- changed car twice, and rented a bundle of others as needs directed
There’s a lot of other stuff – it’s interesting to see how a lot of the things I wanted to change then that I still want to change now, for example – and I’ll write more about that elsewhere/elsewhen.
It’s a whole new decade out there (and I can’t be arsed with the argument about whether that’s 2020 or 2021, so don’t bother) and it’ll be interesting to see what happens next.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane – National Theatre
Posted: Sat 28 December, 2019 Filed under: Domestic, London, Reviews(ish), Theatre, Theatre, Thoughts Leave a comment »Just before Christmas I was lucky enough to get to see the play of Neil Gaiman’s “The Ocean at the End of the Lane” at the National Theatre. It’s on for a comparatively short run – only about eight weeks, I think – and in the smallest theatre (the Dorfman) which only seats 400 people – so it’s fair to say that demand for the tickets were pretty high.
It’s been an eventful couple of months for “Ocean…”, as prior to the play starting there was also a new version released with illustrations by Elise Hurst (which is beautiful) although as I understand it the two things aren’t actually related or connected.
Anyway, the play itself is superb – I would say it’s probably the best thing I’ve seen this year – and the staging and lighting are excellent as well. It’s hard to explain things without spoilers, but basically the story of a man returning to his childhood home, and remembering the things that happened back then. It’s a lot more than that, with themes of magic, loss, change and sacrifice.
I truly hope that it goes on to another theatre, and/or on tour – if it does, it’s totally worth making time to go and see it.
2019/20 – Doing Less – Plans
Posted: Fri 27 December, 2019 Filed under: 2019/20, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Getting Old(er), Getting Organised, Thoughts Leave a comment »In the comments on the post about doing less, Gordon said
For your ‘busy’ do you get anxious when the calendar is empty, do you just like having ‘a plan’? Would it work if you planned an afternoon of deliberately doing nothing? (the challenge being to stick to it?)
It’s a bit more – and less – complicated than that.
I don’t need a full plan of “I’ll do [x], then [y], then [z]” for either a day or a weekend. In general I’m happy with an outline idea, even if it’s just “I’ll go to London” or whatever.
However, I do like having at least that idea. A blank space in the calendar is an oddity, and it does leave me feeling uncomfortable.
The other side of it is that my time off is precious to me, my weekends are important. I make sure that I do all my domestic stuff during the week, I refuse to spend half of those important two days doing cleaning, laundry, shopping and so on. They’re my own days, and if I do nothing with them, I feel they’ve been wasted.
So long as I do *something* with them, I’m OK. And even ‘just’ spending a day at the cinema catching up on films counts as “doing something”, so my criteria are quite low on that basis.
It’s that balance I need to find, somewhere between going out – day trips and time away, seeing friends, that kind of thing – and just doing enough to appease my work ethic. I also probably should find a way to be able to class days of doing nothing as also somehow counting as doing something.
It’s not an easy balance to find, and I’m not quite sure how I’ll get it right, but I think it’s time to at least try…
CostCluster
Posted: Fri 20 December, 2019 Filed under: Car Repairs, Domestic, Finances, Getting Organised, Thoughts Leave a comment »Have you ever noticed, there are some times where things all just decide to cost money all at once? And it’s usual at the most inconvenient times…
The last ten days have been a pretty good example of that. Since last Wednesday…
- The car had a front tyre blow out , so has needed a replacement tyre.
- The clutch on the car also started playing up, so has needed to be replaced.
Admittedly, it wasn’t yet completely stuffed, but you could feel it was well on the way, and I’d rather not be stuffed by that over the Festering Season - In the kitchen, the steamer I use most days died (tripping the circuit breaker along the way) and needed replacing
- And one of my smoke alarms also started doing the beep-of-battery-death. And of course it’s a non-replaceable battery (not my choice, but that of my landlord) so that’ll need replacing
On top of that, all the usual stuff for the Festering Season and so on, and it means it’s been an expensive month…
2019/20 – What’re the plans?
Posted: Thu 19 December, 2019 Filed under: 2019/20, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Getting Organised, Thoughts Leave a comment »Having thought about it way more than originally expected, my plans for the coming year are actually pretty basic. It can all be summed up as :
- Do a bit less
- Write a bit more (both here and elsewhere)
- Be a better friend – see friends more, that kind of thing
- Be better to myself – do some different stuff just for me.
- Consider a new location
So that’s the basic plan and points. I’ll aim to explain them out in a bit more detail over a couple of further posts – which might seem like I’m padding things out, but it’s more about wanting some time and space to figure it out, rather than just brain-dumping right now.
All Quiet On The Western Front
Posted: Tue 17 December, 2019 Filed under: 2019/20, D4D™, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Thoughts, Writing Leave a comment »Needless to say, it’s been quiet here for the last month or so.
There’s been a fair amount going on in reality, but primarily it was just about taking a break.
OK, I can’t deny, a lot of this year has been a break on D4D, and that’s something I plan/want to change. (That’ll be another post)
The last month, though, has been an intentional break rather than the accidental ones that’ve been occurring. I wanted to take a break from even feeling like I should be writing stuff on here, and to see whether there’s been any further drive to write anything away from here.
It’s been kind-of successful – I’ve got ideas of things I want to write outside here, but I’ve also had ideas and thoughts for posts here as well, so I’m regarding it as generally a positive thing.
There’ll hopefully be more about those things and thoughts over the next few posts, and we’ll see how things to.
2018/19 – What Happened?
Posted: Wed 6 November, 2019 Filed under: 2018/19, 2019/20, Creativity, D4D™, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Getting Organised, Introspective, Self-Doubt, Single Life, Thoughts 1 Comment »So, I had some plans for the last twelve months, and it’s time for an update. It won’t make for hugely positive reading…
The list from the post a year ago is as follows.
- Keep on working on losing weight.
This one is a long-term thing, and one I’ve written about before. For me, it’s a struggle – I’ve worked with a number of resources this year so far, and feel better-informed than I was, but there’s still a long way to go. If nothing else, this year so far has eliminated a lot of options and bullshit.
RESULT : Absolutely sod-all difference. Which is both positive (I’ve not gained any) and negative (for fuck’s sake, nor have I lost any) - Keep on improving fitness/health
Linked to losing weight, I’ve had more success with this one over the last 12 months, but there’s still stuff to do and improve.
RESULT : Fitness and strength have continued to improve, with very few visual clues/hints that it’s happened. - Continue doing the stuff I enjoy
Various bits here – but basically, do stuff I want to. Not as a “fear of missing out” (“FOMO”) thing, but just as in “I really want to see/do [x]” and doing so. (This is, of course, in direct contrast to ‘doing less’ in the list below, so it’s a bit of a balancing act!)
RESULT : This one’s been a success, actually. Although it’s not been a great year in many ways, at least I’ve kept on living my life and generally enjoying it. - Be more sociable
I’ve realised this year that I’ve been utterly crap with seeing friends – I’ve been doing a lot of stuff, but at the same time it hasn’t been overly sociable, hasn’t involved going to see friends at all. And that needs sorting.
RESULT : And this one’s been a failure. In fairness, it hasn’t got much worse, but it hasn’t got any better either.
I’m getting rid of some of the longer-running goals. They’re still things I want to work on – I’m not giving up on the plans, just on the having them as goals – but it affects me more when I see my ongoing failure to complete/do/start them year on year.
So I’ll note them here as reminders, but they’re not part of the main “What I’m aiming for” list. See if it works better for me as advisories, rather than as targets/goals. And those reminders are…
- Writing
I want to do more writing – I’ve got the ideas, but it’s finding the time, inclination and drive to get them actually going. I hope to schedule more in – I’ve also invested in some tools that should allow me to do so – but we’ll see.
RESULT : Nope, hasn’t happened. Even more ideas bouncing round in my brain, and an absolute zero on getting them addressed - Business plans
As with the writing, I’ve got the ideas, but need to allocate time and energy to getting them to work. In some cases I’m frustrated by time, in others by funding for getting them how I want them. We’ll just have to see how things go.
RESULT : Nope, nor this. Ideas are still there, but I’ve done keck-all with them - Doing Less
This is kind-of related to the above two – if I could sort my brain out so that ‘doing less’ was better, then I’d hopefully have more time to spend on the writing and business ideas.
RESULT : Nope. Still been an idiot all year and kept busy for about 95% of the time - Plan Better
And the final one, which controls all of the others – make better plans, notes, and be better organised.
RESULT : Again, Nope. Not even close.
So, all things considered, while it’s not been a bad year per se, it’s also not been a good one. Which also goes to sort of explain why I’ve been crap at getting this organised/written, and why I haven’t yet thought about whether I’m doing this for the coming year, or just sacking it off.
Smart Motorways, Dumb Drivers
Posted: Thu 24 October, 2019 Filed under: Cynicism, Domestic, Driving, M1, News, People, Thoughts Leave a comment »I’m really not surprised that there are now some calls to do a safety review of the “Smart Motorways” concept. It’s a particular source of interest as I travel on the M1 on a regular basis, and that’s one of the roads that will be looked at.
The concept of Smart Motorways ( flexible speed limits, the ability to make the hard shoulder into a running lane at peak times ) is a decent one, but it also missed out a couple of key factors.
The first – and most important – of those is that a huge number of drivers are fucking idiots, and have no idea how to handle the flexibility of the hard shoulder. I’ve lost count of the number of times I can see the hard shoulder being in use – with signs saying so every quarter-mile or so – and no-one using it. (Admittedly, I tend to then use it and make progress past idiots, but I’d rather see the lane being used correctly) And of course there’s also a significant number of drivers who won’t even use the inside lane, preferring to stay in the middle one, overtaking fuck-all for mile after mile, which also screws things up.
The second factor is that they didn’t seem to think about what happens when someone does have a breakdown or an accident, it necessitates at least a full lane closure (because there’s no hard shoulder to get in to) which screws the traffic up worse than it used to. Yes, there are refuge areas off the main running lanes, but there was a stat (which I can’t find in a story right now) that only something like 30-35% of breakdowns manage to get to the refuge areas rather than stopping in the live lane.
So yes, I’m not surprised that they’ll probably be getting reviewed – I do think they’re a good idea in general, but at the same time I don’t think they’re all that suitable for UK drivers, primarily because of some of their apparently unique behavioural traits.
Environmental
Posted: Sun 20 October, 2019 Filed under: Advertising, Cynicism, Domestic, Driving, Green, Thoughts, Travel 3 Comments »On my post about mileage and so on, BW commented “No environmental conscience chez toi, then, eh? 😉” And I can’t deny, that annoyed me a fair bit.
So…
-
- That weekend, I hired a car that was supposed to have a better Eco-profile than my current car. Sadly, that turned out to not be the case – it got a lot less MpG than mine, and generally wasn’t very good. But the intentions were there, at least. Even though I should’ve stuck to my usual car.
- Where possible – in this case, the run to and from Oxford – I carried friends, rather than everyone driving individually
- Taking public transport was simply not a realistic option, for a range of reasons, including
- I’d still have to drive to my nearest station, and (as I understand it) shorter journeys like that are the worst environmentally, as most of the nastys happen on start-up/warm-up, rather than on longer runs
- The runs to Oxford and Chichester would both have been over three hours each way, and cost more than the fuel for the entire weekend
- The journey to Kent wouldn’t have been possible at all
- Also, knowing the mileage etc., I make use of a carbon offset programme – it’s not perfect, but (I hope) it helps
- The Big Cat Experience in Kent use most of the money from the experience days and so on to go towards ecological and animal protection/preservation projects overseas.
Outside of those things, there’s also the following other little bits
- I’m still using a car that’s now ten years old (and passes the MoT emissions test with flying colours) rather than using up a load of resources with a new vehicle
- My domestic waste/rubbish is absolutely minimal – indeed, if I didn’t have cats, I’d be easily able to get away with one domestic waste collection per month – and I recycle far more than most people.
- I rarely fly anywhere – the last time was two years ago
- Most of my electric/electronic devices are recharged via a battery bank that charges off a solar panel, rather than via the mains.
There’s probably other stuff as well, but anyway, it’s a pretty good start.
I fully accept that my environmental profile isn’t perfect – my main downsides are electricity and driving. And I balance as much of that as possible. However, I’m also pretty sure that it’s a lot better than that of most people.
Even more importantly, no matter what I do to improve my profile, it’s utterly irrelevant in comparison to other environmental things. For example, if the new phase of advertising on video screens (particularly the stand-alone street-furniture versions) were deactivated/turned off overnight it would save more in a week than I could contribute in a lifetime.
So – do I have an environmental conscience? I’ll let you decide – although I think the answer is generally yes.
Annual Car Costs
Posted: Fri 4 October, 2019 Filed under: Domestic, Driving, Finances, Getting Organised, Thoughts Leave a comment »The start of October is expensive when it comes to the car, because it’s the anniversary of when I bought it.
So first there’s the renewal of the vehicle tax, although happily that’s not a big expense at £30 for the year.
Then there’s the insurance renewal, which is always a fun dose of bureaucracy and weirdness. And at least that one is an expense that’s spread through the year – I could do it in one payment, but find I usually can’t be bothered.
And then of course there’s the MoT test. Never fun – even if it passes with no problem, you’ve still spent time beforehand worrying about what’ll happen, and figuring out as many of the financial permutations as possible.
Last year, it passed the MoT OK, with just a couple of advisories – although one of those was about the brakes needing attention next year. So I knew that was going to come up, as well as the MoT and a service – which makes it all already Not Cheap.
Luckily though, that was it. I got one small advisory for this year, but absolutely nothing else to worry about. I suspect the clutch is likely to die sometime this year (although I said that last year too) which’ll be an expense at some point.
But for now, it’s all sorted, and my wallet isn’t as light as it could’ve been, so I’ll take that as a positive…
Withdrawn
Posted: Fri 27 September, 2019 Filed under: Domestic, Gigs, People, Thoughts Leave a comment »Over the last week, I was supposed to go to two different concerts. In the end I didn’t go to either of them.
The first one turned into a farce, with tickets not delivered, a venue with a remarkably disinterested customer services team, and all just became a lot more hassle than it was worth. I’ve been in touch with them since, and there’s been some progress, but still, not a good experience at all.
The second one, well, I just wasn’t in the mood at all. I’d purchased the ticket when the gig was initially announced, but as it came closer to the day I was totally unfussed about it, not at all excited or even looking forward to it. And then on the day itself, I’d been for lunch at one of my favourite places (newly re-fitted and re-opened) and was feeling epically fat as a result, which isn’t really conducive to a good concert.
In both cases though, I also just wasn’t really in the mood for dealing with people – and particulary the type of vacuous bastards that seem to be the gig-going majority at present.
I was going to write a bit more about how I was dealing with it, and some of the other stuff around sociability (or lack thereof) but at the moment I can’t really be chuffed to do so.
More during the week, I’m sure.
Equinoctual
Posted: Mon 23 September, 2019 Filed under: Domestic, Getting Old(er), Thoughts, Time Leave a comment »Today is the Autumn Equinox, when the day and night are equal in length.
What that means is the from now until next March, the nights will be longer than the days.
Winter is coming, my friends, winter is coming
Kindling Discontent
Posted: Sat 14 September, 2019 Filed under: Domestic, Kindle, Reading, Technology, Thoughts Leave a comment »Last weekend, while down in Devon, I lost my Kindle. Entirely my own fault, and primarily due to being a dickhead – but still, bloody annoying.
I ordered a replacement pretty much immediately, and hoped that Amazon had improved the method for restoring all the books I’ve got onto the device. It’s been a bloody awful experience the last couple of times, but the last time was three years ago. So, knowing how swiftly they release new stuff on AWS/Cloud, it’s got to have been worked on, surely?
Welllllll, yes and no.
The experience is a bit better – at least now it keeps a record of what books have been put into Collections (think of each Collection as a bookshelf) which sort of makes things easier. But not much – because you can’t actually select, for example, a set of Collections and say “Deliver these”.
Instead, it’s still horrifically manual, and dirt-slow. You have to go to the Amazon site, and then “Manage Content and Devices”. If you only have a few books, then great, that’s fine. I haven’t – I’ve got about 600. So even selecting the maximum of 200 books at a time – which is sort-of easy, although still involves scrolling the page down until it’s got that full 200 listed, and then “select all” – then takes forever to actually push them to the Kindle.
With the Collections, once the books have been pushed to the Kindle, it should then put them into the right places – so that’s at least a small improvement. Last time, I had to re-add books to the Collections as well, which made the entire thing a massive pain in the arse.
The thing is, none of this should be difficult. So long as one does backups of the device (and the Sync process is actively encouraged by Amazon, so one can read a book on one device and then continue it on another) then it should be a simple matter of going “Copy the stuff from this backup onto that machine”, in the same way it does for my iPhones.
All told, even with the improvements, it’s a rotten first experience with a new device. It surprises me just how bad it actually is – the entire thing seems to be something that Amazon doesn’t expect to happen, or that’s only been tested with five or ten books. I wonder if it’s something Amazon will ever get round to fixing…
Anniversal
Posted: Tue 13 August, 2019 Filed under: 2018/19, Bankruptcy, Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic, Finances, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Getting Organised, Rebuilding, Thoughts 3 Comments »Having gone through the six years of the bankruptcy process (as I’ve written about many times in that period) today marks a year since that process completed. Time flies, and all that rot.
It’s the final real anniversary of any significance though – even though it came off my record a year ago, most of the banks work on a “Six years plus one” basis (fuck only knows why, but that’s their choice) when it comes to ‘full’ current accounts and the like.
So that’s where we are now – the full “six years plus one” is complete.
It shouldn’t affect things much – it would be nice to have a ‘full’ account with overdraft facility and so on , but only because that’s another thing that is good to have. I’ve done fine over the last seven years with no overdraft and never needing one, and I don’t see any reason why that would change now.
However, it does mean I’ll almost certainly move away from my current bank’s offering, purely because they were lying dicks about it all the way through the process. Once I’d gone through the first year where I was officially bankrupt, I was fine to have a basic current account. When I got it, I was totally honest with the bank, and they said I could try to apply for an upgrade to a ‘full’ current account on a regular basis (every six months or so) and see how I did.
It was only after three years that anyone mentioned that they wouldn’t give me an account until the “six years plus one” – ‘but it’s not that we have a policy, sir, it’s just that’s how it works, we won’t do it before then‘ – and so had basically lied and wasted my time for all those reviews. That did cost them money in the end – a complaint went all the way to the Financial Ombudsman, who found in my favour. (The rule in this case is keep a record of all paperwork and appointments, so you can show a history of wasted time, and stuff that you wouldn’t have done if they’d been honest and said to not bother for seven years!)
So yes, I’ll probably change banks for the current account – I’m not yet sure who to, but we’ll see what happens.
But the most important thing really is that now, seven years on, there’s nothing else keeping me back.
Wallets
Posted: Sun 14 July, 2019 Filed under: Advertising, Customer Services, Domestic, Thoughts 1 Comment »Back in October, based on a recommendation (and a liking of the style) I bought a new wallet from Rains. Not the cheapest of things, but also not world-shatteringly expensive, I liked the (slightly weird) sort-of-rubberised material it’s made from, and that it wasn’t leather.
Over the last three or four years I’ve swapped wallets a few times, trying out new things and designs, most of which haven’t really worked out for how I do things.So far though, the Rains one has suited me pretty well.
However, last week I realised that the rubber holding strap was breaking – along the line of the cut-in company name, which wasn’t really a surprise. But for a not-cheap wallet, I would still have expected it to last better than that. So I emailed Rains to say about this problem, and attached a photo of the problem. I could’ve lived with it – once it finally snaps I could cut the strap off completely, and it wouldn’t affect the actual functionality at all – but still, might as well let them know.
Within the day they’d come back to me, offering a replacement or refund – and either way, to not worry about returning the faulty one. I chose a replacement, which was sent out the same day, and arrived (from the Netherlands) a couple of days later.
I’ve again offered to return the faulty one (I figure they could at least see what’d gone wrong – but maybe it’s more of a common thing, I don’t know) but they’ve insisted on me keeping that as well, so fair enough.
All told though, I’ve been really impressed with Rains and how they’ve done things. There’ve been no questions or quibbles at all, just a simple smooth process that really stands out from most places. It shouldn’t stand out just for that (ideally this should be just how things are done) but it definitely does.
Scheduled
Posted: Wed 5 June, 2019 Filed under: Advertising, Bad Ads, D4D™, Domestic, Food, I Don't Understand, People, Solo Dining, Television, Thoughts, Weirdness 1 Comment »At the moment, there’s an advert on TV for Just Eat, and it freaks me out a little bit.
There’s one part of it where they talk about people “ordering their usual”, and doing so at a specific time – implying that it’s the same thing every week. And that just weirds me out, that there are people out there who do the same thing every week, who eat the same meals with little to no variety.
At the same time though, it’s odd in other ways. I’m just as bad at being uninspired when it comes to meals and so on – but that’s when I’m just cooking for myself. If I’m paying for it (i.e. a takeaway, a restaurant meal or whatever) then I’m going to go for random stuff that I fancy eating.
So I think it’s the combination – that there are people who are paying for their meal and still only having the same thing at the same time – rather than *just* that it’s the same thing every time.
Anyway, it weirds me out – even though in some ways I’m also a massive hypocrite about it, as I’m semi-guilty of the same thing, but only in the privacy of my own home…
Good Omens
Posted: Sun 2 June, 2019 Filed under: Day Trips, Domestic, London, Television, Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »Last week, I went to see Neil Gaiman at the Southbank Centre, as part of the promotional activities for the new series of Good Omens. (It got released on Friday on Amazon Prime, and will apparently be on BBC2 later in the year)
Good Omens (the book) was written by Neil and the late Terry Pratchett thirty years ago, and it was one of Pratchett’s dying wishes for Neil to write it again as a TV series. At the time, they thought he’d got plenty of time, but he went downhill rapidly, and so after Pratchett’s funeral, Neil wrote the series, and then insisted on being the showrunner in order to make sure that it got to screen in a way that both of them would’ve found acceptible.
Anyway, I’d managed to get tickets even before they announced that he’d be accompanied on stage by David Tennant and Michael Sheen (who play the two main characters of the series, Aziraphale and Crowley) which made it even better.
The entire evening was fun – there was a choir of Satanic Nuns (if you’ve read the book, you’ll understand) in the foyer of the Southbank Centre, singing Queen songs (again, book, understand, blah blah) which boded well for the rest of it.
Compered by Kirsty Wark (who also appears in the series), they talked about how the series came about (see above), the story of Neil and Michael meeting for a dinner where both of them couldn’t work out how to tell the other that they didn’t want to play Crowley (Michael had originally been cast, but realised as he read the script that he was far more Aziraphael) , Neil discovering that Michael could do a pitch-perfect impression of David Tennant, and many other tales.
From the sound of it, while there were problems along the way, the fact that Good Omens is loved by so many people (and has been for a long, long time) worked as a great leveller of those problems – another story being that Nick Offernan was brought in very late in the day to replace someone else, and told Neil that a) he’d have paid his own flights in order to take the role, and b) that when the director apologised to him for coming such a long way for so (comparatively) few lines, he said “I’d have come twice as far for half as many”
It was a really good evening, and when the series came out on Friday, I saw the entire thing in the space of an evening (not something I usually do, but this time it was worth it) and I can honestly say that they’ve all done a bloody good job of the entire thing. Utterly worthwhile.
Worst Retailer
Posted: Wed 29 May, 2019 Filed under: Business, Domestic, News, Shopping, Thoughts Leave a comment »In the news today, a survey (admittedly, of only 8,000-ish people) lists WHSmith as the worst retailer, for the second year running.
Which doesn’t surprise me – to be honest, the only thing that ever surprises me about WHSmith is that they continue to keep trading. They’ve been in my retail dead pool for about a decade now, and they keep stumbling on.
Personally, I rarely (if ever) darken the doors of a WHSmith. They simply don’t do what I want to buy, there are plenty of places that are cheaper/better, and (to me) most of the stores look dull and dirty. I’m not saying they are dull and dirty, but they look it – again, to me.
The most recent example of this was a couple of weekends ago, I was in a place I’d not been before, and they had a big WHSmith store. But from the outside, the lighting inside was so dull that it looked as though the store wasn’t actually open. Just grim.
Anyway.
The thing that interested me in the story was this :
Every week we serve three million customers in our 600 UK High Street stores
That doesn’t seem like a very big figure, to be honest. So I worked it out.
3,000,000 divided between 600 stores is 5,000 customers per store. Per week. Which isn’t much.
And then you average it out over the seven days of the week – I’ll round it up to the nearest whole, as .25 of a person is ridiculous – and you get 715 people per store per day. Which really isn’t a lot. I can’t see how those numbers all the stores to break even, let alone make a profit.
I truly don’t understand how they stay in business
History Plays
Posted: Mon 20 May, 2019 Filed under: Day Trips, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Getting Organised, Theatre, Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »As I said last week, this year’s Shakespeare intake has somehow ended up being all about the history plays. It’s not been an intentional set of decisions, just the way things have worked out.
I’ve already seen two productions of Richard II, Richard III, Henry IV parts 1 and 2, and Henry V this year. (And of course I also saw “Queen Margaret” late last year, which takes all of Margaret’s lines from Henry VI – all three parts – and Richard III and builds a play/story around that)
And now I’ve also booked to see the RSC’s production of King John later in the year.
All told, that means that of the histories, by the end of the year I’ll have seen …
King JohnRichard IIHenry IV, Part 1Henry IV, Part 2Henry V- Henry VI, Part 1
- Henry VI, Part 2
- Henry VI, Part 3
Richard III- Henry VIII
- Edward III
So, I’m more than halfway through the histories. Not bad, in less than a year.
Richard III
Posted: Fri 17 May, 2019 Filed under: Day Trips, Domestic, Reviews(ish), Theatre, Theatre, Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »This year, for some reason, it appears that my Shakespeare input is primarily consisting of various history plays – not something that’s been planned, but that’s how it’s worked out. Prior to this year I hadn’t seen any of them
I’ve already seen two different productions of Richard II this year, and last week’s Henrilogy of Henry IV parts 1 and 2, and Henry V. And last night I went to see Headlong’s production of Richard III at Northampton’s Royal theatre.
I was really impressed with the whole production – the set is small, making interesting use of mirrors and lighting – and overall I really enjoyed it.
The cast were excellent, and I found the entire thing far easier to understand than some of the others I’ve seen. (That may also be down to the source material, I don’t know for sure)
Obviously it’s not a happy play, but all the same, it was well worth going and seeing.
Henrilogy
Posted: Mon 13 May, 2019 Filed under: Domestic, London, Theatre, Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »On Friday, I went with a friend to Shakespeare’s Globe to see their Henry season on one of the Trilogy Days.
That meant we got to see Henry IV part 1, Henry IV part 2, and Henry V all in one day – starting at 12.00 noon, and finishing at 22:30 (give or take)
It’s three plays, all around the two-and-a-half-hour mark, with a decent break between them. But all the same, it makes for one long-ass day. Particularly because the Globe’s seats (no way was I going to do the whole thing standing) are solid wood, backless, and pretty bloody unforgiving. Yes, you can hire cushions or a seat back, but even so, it makes it hard-going.
I hadn’t seen any of these before, and (as usual) went in with very little knowledge of the stories involved. I’d seen Richard II earlier this year so knew the prior events, but that was about it – and my history knowledge (as I keep on being reminded by things like this) is fuckin’ abysmal. (I’m also seeing Richard III this week – I must be a glutton for punishment!)
I enjoyed the plays – IV Part 1 and V more than Part 2, as I don’t really do well with the “political intrigues” type of thing. I think that seeing all three in a day meant it all gelled together better in my head, although I’m still going to need to read the plays and some of the history around them in order to build up the knowledge a bit.
It was worth going, and I enjoyed the whole day. I don’t know that I’d necessarily want to see any of them again any time soon, but I’m glad I’ve seen them.
Seven Years
Posted: Sun 5 May, 2019 Filed under: Domestic, Housing, Looking Back, Milton Keynes, Single Life, Thoughts Leave a comment »It’s seven years today that I moved to where I currently live. That’s the longest I’ve stayed in one place since I moved out of the house I grew up in.
As I’ve said before, I never expected to stay here this long – it was a location of convenience, a house that came up at the right time, in the right place, and was affordable.
As it turned out, it was more that it was a convenient location, a place to stay that’s easy to get away from, easy to go anywhere else. For the moment it’s still that.
It’s not ideal. It’s a tiny house, which suited my needs then and now – there’s no spare bedroom for friends to stay over or anything, but that’s part of the price I pay, and it just means I go to them instead. At the same time though, I can’t deny I’d like a bit more space, so I could take my books out of their boxes, that kind of thing.
I’ve been looking at other places and so on, but there’s nothing (yet) that’s grabbed me, that’s made me think I want to be there rather than here.
There’s six months on my current tenancy (the first one was a six-month-only one, just in case I turned out to be a nightmare tenant etc., and since then they’ve been annual renewals) and I’m going to take that time to assess things, see if there’s anywhere else that would work better for me.
I might still be here in a year’s time. I might not. We’ll see.
Local Elections
Posted: Fri 3 May, 2019 Filed under: Domestic, News, Politics, Thoughts Leave a comment »While in general I despise politics and politicians, I also always vote. It’s my right to do so, and I fully believe that everyone who can vote should vote – and that if they don’t, they have no room to gripe about what’s happened in politics.
Yesterday’s local elections were the first time I’ve ever been so apathetic about it that I honestly could’ve not bothered.
Thing was, it seemed like even the candidates couldn’t be arsed – I didn’t even get any leaflets dropped through the door, let alone any visits.
Sadly, my local council is a pretty safely Conservative (as it turned out, that’s still true, but it’s a lot more precarious than it was) and my useless ballbag of an MP regularly gets re-elected by a decent majority. So it was never likely that anything interesting would occur with my council – which also increased my apathy on the “even voting won’t change anything” score.
All told, I don’t quite know what can happen to fix things and increase the voter buy-in. The current situation is just dire, with no real sign of any light at the end of the tunnel.
Small Wins – Backup
Posted: Fri 26 April, 2019 Filed under: Business, Change, Cynicism, Domestic, Getting Organised, Photography, Technology, Thoughts, Time Leave a comment »Way, way back in the day – Nov 2006, to be precise – I bought a backup drive for all my music, photos and work. It wasn’t anything hugely special – a now laughable 320Gb drive – but it did what I wanted, and made sure I’d got everything preserved. (Amusingly, I just took a look, and the roughly-similar drives now done by WD start at 3Tb!)
And then I moved a few times, and the drive got separated from its power brick, and I sort of gave up on it a bit. Over the last few years I’ve mainly been using online backups instead (which mean that as soon as I save a file, it’s backed up, and synchronises to my other machines) and the drive became even less of an issue.
I always knew where the drive itself was, even though I was fairly sure I’d lost (or thrown away) the power lead/brick. The drive has been on one of my bookcases, doing nothing except attracting dust.
Last weekend, though, I found a random power cable that looked like it might fit the drive. So I took them both into my office this week, and gave it a go.
At the end of the day, I’d pretty much given up on it – it’s been sat there doing sod-all for a number of years, and has been carelessly moved, shoved in boxes and so on. So I expected nothing.
And yet, when I plugged the cables in and connected it to the laptop, it all worked. Straight away, with no issues, clanks, grinds, or other Warning Noises Of Doom. Needless to say, I’m actually pretty impressed.
Of course, I’ll also now be working to ensure that a lot of it is backed up somewhere else as well, as that drive is distinctly venerable, but all the same, it’s a bit of a win for it all to have come back in the way it has.
Small Wins – Suited
Posted: Mon 22 April, 2019 Filed under: Domestic, Getting Organised, Health, People, Thoughts, Weight Loss Leave a comment »As part of the “generally busy” of the last few weeks, I was asked to attend a funeral/cremation for the father of a friend of mine. As the dresscode was described as “formal” I opted for my much-loved three-piece suit that I got made in Cambridge. Turns out, that suit is exactly 12 years old (I took delivery of it at the start of April 2007)
Anyway, when I tried it on, I was really pleased to find that it still fits just fine – the most I had to do was brush the dust off it, as I haven’t worn it that much in the last few years.
So basically, I’m taking it as a small win that actually I haven’t changed size/weight/dimensions over that 12 year period. I know I’m still overweight and blah blah blah, but it’s been utterly consistent for over a decade, which I’m pretty happy with. I know there have been fluctuations over that time, but this current state certainly appears to be my default.
And I’m OK with that.
Slump
Posted: Wed 17 April, 2019 Filed under: Bankruptcy, Change, D4D™, Depression, Domestic, Getting Organised, Health, Insomnia, Rebuilding, Thoughts 1 Comment »Things have been quiet on D4D of late. Basically, I’m in a bit of a slump, and at the moment I’m not quite sure how to get out of it.
There’s a lot of reasons behind it, but mainly it’s down to an overbearing feeling of stagnation, or being a bit bogged down. I’m used to having change in my life, and at the moment it’s not really there. Some of that is inertia, some of it is still the final stages from the bankruptcy process and some of it is the current state of things. But it all adds up to an overall sludge – and while I know I want things to change, I also don’t quite know what I want to do next, or where I want to be.
Domestically, I’ve been in this house for seven years. That’s by far the longest I’ve been in any one place since I left the family home. I was looking at moving last year when the tenancy came up, but that was only just after the bankruptcy finished, and I didn’t want to push things while it was still showing up on credit checks and the like. So I’m thinking about it for this year – but there’s also nowhere that’s dragging me, nowhere that I’ve been and thought “OK, this is where I want/need to be”, and it’s all a bit up in the air. There’s still time, though.
Workwise, I’ve been working on the same project for more than three years. (Probably closer to 4, all told) And while we’ve got a lot done, there still feels like no end in sight (things keep on being added in to it, or stuff is more complex than initially expected) which doesn’t help. I like contracting in general for exactly this – that each contract is finite – even though they can (and usually do) get extended, they still have an end date where I can say “Nope, I’m done”. This one is open-ended, and it’s feeling more and more like a proper job and blah blah.
Outside of those two things, there’s so much doubt about what’s going on in the UK – with Brexit being delayed even further, it’s left everything in limbo again, of not knowing what’ll happen with it, and what’ll happen with jobs, economy and so on if and when it happens. I can’t deny, that all contributes to the current sense of stagnation.
I’m not depressed – well, no more than usual – and I’m still getting out and getting other stuff done. It’s just that I’ve not got the time or energy for anything extra. I wish I did, but I don’t.
I’m going to keep on working on it, though. I know I need a couple of new projects to be getting on with – but I also need to find the motivation to get it going. That’s where the stagnation is really hurting – I know I need and want to change, but right now the drive to change things is also being blocked.
I’ll figure it out, I know – I always do, and always have done. And hopefully it won’t take too much longer to turn the corner.
Incompetents (Part Two)
Posted: Wed 27 March, 2019 Filed under: Cynicism, Domestic, Driving, Thoughts, Travel, Weirdness 5 Comments »Following on from the other post about people (or at least politicians) not thinking things through, the other one is/was about the EU’s new plan for all new cars to be fitted with speed limiters from 2022.
Speed limiters are – in some circumstances – a really good idea. If the limiting was in place for areas with lower speed limits – the areas with speed limits of 20,30, 40, and perhaps even 50mph – then that would be good. I see so many people speeding in those areas. I still think it’d have its problems, but this would at least help. (I’ve said before that I have my reservations on this in the 50mph average speed limit areas currently in place on a lot of motorway work areas)
If, however, it’s something that is brought in universally, for all roads at all limits, then it’s idiotic – and again, shows a lack of understanding when it comes to people, business, cars, driving, and umpteen other things.
The first thing that occurred to me when I heard this was that a goodly portion of police (or council) funding is generated or paid for via speeding fines and the like. If speeding is hugely reduced by automation and limiters, where will that money and funding be coming from?
For another thing, if everything is limited to the national speed limit, it’ll reduce people’s desire/drive to pay more for larger/faster vehicles. If you can get a basic [car model] that’ll do everything and can go up to the speed limit where it’s limited, why would you pay two or three times the price for a performance version of the same [car model] that can’t do anything extra, that can’t go faster or perform better? (Personally I don’t see much point in these super-performance models anyway, but that’s not the point here)
Again, I like the idea of auto-limiting speeds/cars in slower and busier areas. But making it a universal solution seems to have missed a fair number of knock-on issues, with no clues or hints about how to actually fix them.
Incompetents (Part One)
Posted: Mon 25 March, 2019 Filed under: Advertising, Cynicism, Domestic, Marketing, Thoughts Leave a comment »There’ve been a couple of times in the last week where I’ve been surprised by how little some people understand things – which is kind of surprising, considering what low expectations I have of people in general.
The first of these surprises was with Tom Watson (MP) blithering on about how McDonalds should cancel their Monopoly promotion this year. In and of itself, it’s not a bad idea – I’m no fan of McDonalds, and their Monopoly thing definitely encourages people to buy/eat more than they usually would.
However, Watson’s announcement was made the day before the promotion launched. By that time all the necessary materials have been prepared, printed, distributed, all the ads have been made and booked, and it would be almost impossible to cancel the promotion. And there seemed to be no real understanding of that.
If the press release had been a couple of weeks later, and was aimed at getting McDonalds to stop using it after the current promotion then that would’ve made more sense. (Not a lot more sense admittedly, since even a rudimentary Wikipedia search will tell you it’s been an annual promotion since 1987, but there’s always a chance that they might do something else, if a new idea could come up that would work equally well as a promotional tool)
All told, it just showed (in my opinion) that it was all just a “This is bad, OK?” press-release, with no real thought or understanding of the business (and marketing) processes underneath it.
The Joy of Tech
Posted: Fri 22 March, 2019 Filed under: Bankruptcy, Domestic, Finances, Geeky, Getting Organised, Rebuilding, Technology, Thoughts 3 Comments »Yesterday, while doing a quick shop on the way to work, I suddenly realised I’d left my wallet at home. Bugger.
I was just about prepared to take everything back to its shelves/locations, when it occurred to me that actually I was still OK – I had my phone with me still. That meant I’d got the ability to make a contactless payment – and because I’d also added the details of my Monzo card/account to the phone, it meant I had everything I needed.
It’s pretty amazing, the way these things have now become so much more mainstream than they were ten years ago, or even five. Since I got the Monzo card eighteen months ago (it’s the only one I have that also connects into my ApplePay account on the phone) I’ve stopped carrying cash except for specific occasions – for example, the car wash I use still only takes cash.
I still prefer to carry physical cards (hence usually having a wallet) but it was still interesting to realise that forgetting it is no longer the “Oh shit!” moment it used to be. (So long as I remember my phone, and that I can use it, anyway)
Ain’t progress grand?
Dick Comparison
Posted: Wed 6 March, 2019 Filed under: Day Trips, Domestic, London, Reviews(ish), Theatre, Theatre, Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »So far this year, I’ve been to London to see two versions of Shakespeare’s “Richard II” – first at the Almeida Theatre, and then last weekend at the Sam Wanamaker theatre at the Globe. (I’m also seeing Richard III later in the year, as well as the Globe’s three-plays-in-a-day marathon slog of Henry IV Part One, Henry IV Part Two, and Henry V – by the end of that, I may be somewhat kinged out!)
The Almeida’s production was a modern interpretation, and much-abridged – it had a run time of 1hr 40mins, which was pretty much the same as the first half at the Globe. By comparison, the Globe’s was more traditional in how it was staged and performed, but with a cast entirely of Women of Colour (WOC).
It’s been interesting to compare the two, so I thought I’d write a bit about it here. Obviously all views are my own, and all that jazz. It’s also worth pointing out that I had done my usual thing of going in with no real idea of the story, chronology or characters, which sometimes doesn’t help.
The Almeida
I found the Almeida’s production to be far harder to follow – and primarily that was because of how it was being staged. The entire stage was made into a steel box, with no active exits (there had to be some, for getting on/off the stage at least, but they weren’t used during the actual production) which meant there could be no cleanups, no costume changes, and no scenery changes. That meant it was hard to actually keep track of who was who – and even more so with a reduced cast. As an example, one actor’s first character died off fairly early on, and they then played a different character (and possibly two) but still wearing the blood and costume of the first role – which meant it was pretty hard to follow. Honestly, I’d almost rather have just had the actors wearing placards with names on, in order to explain who they were at any one time.
Additionally, the abridging of the text – and the speed with which it was performed – made it even more confusing, with seemingly more focus on people chucking gloves at each other than the actual plot and actions.
So all told, I didn’t like the production that much – I felt there was too much that got rushed, or that made no sense at all. It was interesting in many ways, but also fairly high on the infamous “Load of old bollocks” scale.
The Wanamaker / Globe version
The production at the Wanamaker was (for me) far preferable. I’ve found I have very few issues with changing roles/stereotypes and doing things differently – particulary with Shakespeare, the story seems to take precedence over who’s doing what, so it doesn’t matter (to me) whether Richard is played by an older white man, or a coloured woman. I know it annoys purists and so on, but I truly don’t feel it matters.
I’d not been to the Wanamaker theatre before, but really liked it – the entire thing is lit by candles (with the exception of the windows ‘out’, which are lit changeably with LEDs, although it’s not intrusive) which makes for an interesting semi-authentic feel. (It also means that there’s a person in the cast/creatives list whose title is “Candle Consultant”, which is pretty special)
The production itself made a lot more sense to me – the cast size is similar (I think there’s one more cast member in the Wanamaker version) but because they’re allowed off-stage to change costumes for the different roles, it was far easier to follow who’s who and so on. Additionally, the extra run-time meant that it didn’t feel rushed, which also helped.
I’m glad I went to see both productions – but in this case I far preferred the more traditional version at the Wanamaker to the modern/short version at the Almeida.
Night Mode
Posted: Wed 23 January, 2019 Filed under: Domestic, Driving, Thoughts 4 Comments »One of my favourite things on the Saab was a thing called “Night Panel“. It was a simple button, but turned off all the instrument illumination except for the speedometer. Even the speedometer range was reduced – I think it just illuminated 0-80mph, although it activated the full dial if you went past 80. All the other dials went to black, and the needles to zero. (Which was weird to see in daylight, but made sense at night, because if it’s not lit, why would you need the needles to be indicating anything?) If anything goes wrong, the night mode is cancelled, and everything revives to display the problem – low fuel, high temperature, warning lights, whatever.
That sounds pretty basic, and not a lot of use – which was kind of true. But it was great if you were doing a long drive at night, and I found that it significantly reduced eye strain and so on. Originally it was just a gimmicky thing, but I found I used it more than I expected to.
Until recently, I’d only seen it on the Saab, and couldn’t understand why other manufacturers don’t have the same thing. (I feel the same about the little plastic clip at the side of the windscreen that could be used to hold parking tickets and so on)
This week, though, I’ve had to use two different Hyundai cars, and they’ve both had little Night Mode buttons. Not as comprehensive as the Saab one, it still turns off the majority of the in-car dashboard illumination, and makes for a nicer night-time driving environment.
And again, I wonder why other manufacturers (or at least those whose cars I’ve driven) don’t do similar things.
Ten Years Back
Posted: Mon 14 January, 2019 Filed under: D4D™, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Health, Looking Back, Memory, Norfolk, Sleep - or lack thereof, Thoughts, Weight Loss 1 Comment »This weekend there’s been a bit of a “ten years ago” meme going round social media, and while I won’t get involved (mainly because I don’t do photos of me, let alone photos of me from a decade ago) it did make me go back to the archives here and have a look at what was going on. Which was quite interesting (to me, anyway)
Ten years ago, I was still with Herself, we were in the Norfolk house, and sleeping abysmally while also sick as chuff with a chest infection of sorts. So, some things never change. I was working in a local-government job I hated – and the post about that was exactly ten years ago today – and generally doing OK.
I did also find a post about my weight – and again, not much has changed. I’ve lost a bit of weight since then – which I’m happy with – but all told it’s really stayed pretty stable. (There’s another post back in Jan 2005 about the same thing, with similar figures to where I’m at now)
Of course, there have been a lot of changes in that ten years, but it’s also interesting to see what’s stayed much the same…
Twelfth Night
Posted: Mon 7 January, 2019 Filed under: Charm School, Domestic, Festering Season, People, Thoughts Leave a comment »Unsurprisingly, today is probably my favourite day of the Festering Season™
All the real Christmas trees are down, and waiting by the bins for collection, all the lights and decorations are down, and even the radio is back to playing normal music instead of being bloody carols all the time.
I know I’m a grumpy bastard, but getting rid of all the tat for another nine months is A Very Good Thing.
Starting The Year
Posted: Tue 1 January, 2019 Filed under: 2018/19, Business, Change, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Getting Organised, Resolutions, Thoughts Leave a comment »And so, Happy New Year. Another orbit round the sun, and as is the tradition, some thoughts about what’s coming.
As usual, I don’t really do resolutions – particularly not New Year’s ones. I do a list around my birthday, which can be found here, but I’m thinking about some changes this year as part of that as well.
One of the things that will change a bit is that I’m going to put more into sorting out routines for things, rather than necessarily just looking at the goals themselves. There are a couple of bits on my list where it’s about “I want to have done [x]”, and that’s fine. But more of them are about “I want to achieve [y]”, and while I’ve always had the intention, the actuality has evaded me.
Last year I got pointed at this article about creating systems rather than setting goals, and it rang a major bell with me.
All told, I’m in a good place to get started on this stuff.
I’ve just completed version one of a project for another contact, and I’ve done pretty much all I can on it until they get back to me with final information. It’s a working version, although I’ve had to replace some of the functionality/information I’m waiting for with automated processes for the minute. But I’m happy with where it is, and it’s now out of my brain, which is A Good Thing.
Of course, it’s immediately been replaced with another project – this one something that’s important to me as well – which I want to work on sooner rather than later.
So, Happy New Year. Onwards and upwards, etc. etc.
And as one of the Doctors would say, “Allons-y!”
Closing The Year
Posted: Mon 31 December, 2018 Filed under: 2017/18, 2018/19, Bankruptcy, Domestic, Finances, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Getting Organised, Health, Looking Back, Rebuilding, Reviews(ish), Single Life, Thoughts, Travel, Weight Loss Leave a comment »And so we’re at the end of 2018. And as such, it seems apt that the last post of the year should be a quick assessment and overview.
All told, it’s been a good – and busy – year.
There’s been more travel than usual, with that week in Toronto to add into the bargain.
There’s been more work, but also more fun times, trips out, meals, etc.
I’ve been doing a lot of work on weight-loss which has ultimately ended up not doing much – but I have more knowledge, more figures, and the steps I’ve taken have improved my health, strength, stamina, and resilience. They’ve just done sod-all to lose actual weight. But I’m OK with that, and it’s something I’ll continue to work on.
On the downside, I’m ending the year with a bit more debt than I’d like. It’s nothing earth-shattering, nor even major. A fair chunk of it is for tickets for things in 2019, of which another decent chunk is owed to me by others for their tickets. But all the same, it’s more than I’d like it to be.
However, in a fit of progress and being grown up, it’s also now all in one place, with zero-interest ’til 2022, and it’ll be done by the end of 2019. I could do it even quicker if I wanted – and I may do so – but it’s all under control, and I’m OK with it.
There are, as always, things I haven’t done – no matter the good intentions, they just haven’t happened. I’ll continue to work towards those things, and I’m going to write more about that tomorrow.
All told, it’s been a positive year, and I’m feeling pretty good at the end of it.
Unplanned
Posted: Sat 29 December, 2018 Filed under: Domestic, Getting Organised, Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »In a distinctly rare occurrence, I’m ending the year with a weekend where I’ve currently got absolutely nothing planned. And it feels a bit odd, to be honest.
There’s stuff I’ll still be doing (getting rid of some of the extra stuff in the house, for example) so it’s not quite a “doing nothing” weekend, but there’s also nothing significant planned.
Normally I’d just go down to London or somewhere, but there’s not even anything grabbing me on that front.
So yeah, it’s all a bit odd. Not bad, and I’m sure I’ll find enough to do to keep me busy.
Clearing Out
Posted: Fri 28 December, 2018 Filed under: Domestic, Green, Thoughts Leave a comment »In general, I’m pretty good at not being too wasteful – I try to recycle as much stuff as possible, and generally don’t over-buy or buy stuff I don’t want or won’t use.
However, I’ve amassed some things that now need to be got rid of, so that’s part of my plan between now and the start of the year.
It’s not a lot, in the great scheme of things – my house isn’t large enough to have room for storing a load of unused stuff – but it’s one of those “when I get round to it” jobs, and now is the time for me to get round to it.
I’ll still aim to get as much as possible to the local recycling centre, although I know that some will also end up going into normal rubbish, just because it’s stuff that isn’t actually recyclable.
Endurance
Posted: Fri 21 December, 2018 Filed under: Domestic, Health, People, Thoughts 2 Comments »The “Weekend Reading” posts by Gordon are one of my regular sources of interesting stuff – I know I’ll usually find something interesting there that I haven’t found/seen myself.
A few weeks back, he added a link to this story of endurance (and absolute lunacy) which I found fascinating.
Gary Cantrell clanged a bell at 6:40 a.m. on Saturday, Oct. 20, signaling 70 runners to jog off into the woods on his farm in Tennessee. They had an hour to complete a 4.1667-mile loop trail. Easy. Most of the group finished with 15 minutes to spare. The bell clanged again at 7:40 a.m., and they ran it again. And at 8:40 a.m., and 9:40 a.m., and every hour after that until, one by one, they quit. There was no known finish line. The race went on, day and night, until the bell clanged and only one runner answered.
I find myself hugely in awe of people like these – the determination to keep going, at the cost of just about everything, until they simply can’t do any more. I know my own endurance isn’t bad (well, at least in the context of general humanity) and that I can keep on going for a decent amount of time. While I’d never do a challenge like the Backyard Ultra, it’s not the walking/running that would destroy me, it’d be the time spent stopped each hour. If I’m walking (or working, driving, whatever) I can keep on going for as long as necessary. But when I stop, I stop. Restarting is (for me) far, far harder.
Regardless though, the entire concept of running four miles each hour, every hour, without a break – that’s awesome.
Seven Days
Posted: Wed 19 December, 2018 Filed under: 2018/19, Domestic, Festering Season, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Thoughts, Time Leave a comment »Just think – this time next week, Christmas will be all over, and we’ll be starting to see the adverts for holidays, and stopping smoking.
Days will be getting (slightly) longer, and we’ll be over the worst.
Two weeks’ time, and we’ll be in 2019 and seeing what that brings.
How time flies when you’re having fun, eh?
Weirdly Consistent
Posted: Fri 14 December, 2018 Filed under: Cinema, Customer Services, Domestic, Films, Geeky, Single Life, Thoughts, Weirdness Leave a comment »When I moved here six-and-a-half years ago (and yes, that does still freak me out) I got a Cineworld Unlimited card, so I could see as many films as I wanted to. It’s a decent deal, less than £20 a month, so as long as you see more than one film per month, it’s paid for itself.
Because I’m a geek, I also started listing what I’d seen, with a separate sheet per year.
And it seems like I’m really quite consistent in how many films I see each year – not through any plan or schedule, it’s just the way it’s worked out.
The totals are
- 2012 – 26 films (although that’s in under six months, as I didn’t get the card ’til July/August)
- 2013 – 61 films
- 2014 – 64 films
- 2015 – 64 films
- 2016 – 54 films
- 2017 – 66 films
And so far this year I’m on… 62, with a couple of weeks to go.
Each year I think I’ll up my quality control a bit and see fewer films (when you’re not paying anything to see them, it’s remarkably easy to just say “Yeah, fuck it, I’ll give that a go”) And yet it all ends up being much of a muchness.
It’s odd, but I’m not going to complain. At least I know I’m getting value for money out of my Unlimited card. (It’s an outlay per year of £215 all told – so each film is costing me an average of £3.30, which is one fuck of a lot cheaper than the £10-ish for a single ticket!)
Ambivalent
Posted: Wed 12 December, 2018 Filed under: 1BEM, Cynicism, Domestic, Festering Season, People, Thoughts, Weirdness Leave a comment »This year is currently a weird one for me with regards to the Festering Season.
Usually by now I’m totally done with it, had enough, and generally pretty fucked off with the entire thing.
This year, though, I’m just ambivalent about it. And I don’t actually know why.
We’re still being faced with the same inanity and vapid bullshit on TV adverts and the like. We’ve had Christmas Shit™ (cards, confectionary, blah blah) in the shops since September. Now we’re in December they’re playing sodding christmas carols and tunes in the shops and on the radio, and various fuckwits are already blithering about “It’s christmas”. (No it’s fucking not, it’s just December)
And on the face of that paragraph, you’d think I am hating it. But I’m not. I still feel the same, that it is all crap and bollocks, but it’s not enraging me this year the same way it has in the past.
It annoys me that I don’t know why it’s not annoying me as much as usual. But I’m also not going to complain – in some ways it’s quite nice to be a wee bit more tolerant of the whole farce than usual.
I don’t like (let alone love) the season and what it does to people – and I honestly doubt I ever will. But at least this year I also don’t hate it the same way I usually do.
Coming To A Close
Posted: Mon 10 December, 2018 Filed under: Domestic, Getting Out More, London, Reviews(ish), Thoughts Leave a comment »This weekend, I saw my final performance of the year – I know there’s only three weeks to go, but still, I’m pretty sure I was seeing stuff ’til later in the year last time round.
This weekend I was at the BBC Radio Theatre (as a plus-one for the friend who’d managed to get the tickets) to see Neil Gaiman recording a programme that will go out on BBC Radio 4 on Christmas Day. As it turned out, he’d also brought along some friends, including Mitch Benn, Peter Capaldi, and some refugees (his words, not mine) from the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain. It was a good evening and lot of fun to see. It’ll also be interesting to see what makes the actual broadcast.
The previous weekend, I’d been to see Tamburlaine at the RSC in Stratford for the matinee performance on its final day. I did enjoy it, although some casting choices were a bit odd to me, particularly in the second half, where the same actress is doing two roles – one as the wife of Tamburlaine, and one as the heir of the dead king, aiming to overthrow Tamburlaine. It’s a credit to her that it was impossible to confuse the two roles as she played them, but it still made things rather more complex and odd than they needed to be.
I’ve already got several theatre visits lined up for next year, but just for now it’s on pause. Which is fine by me.
Dickhead
Posted: Fri 7 December, 2018 Filed under: Domestic, Geeky, Music, Stupidity, Thoughts, Toronto, Travel, Weirdness 1 Comment »There are times where (as many people already know) I’m an absolute dickhead. This is the (fairly short) tale of one of those times.
One of the reasons I wanted to visit Toronto (which I finally did earlier this year) was because I’ve been a fan of a band called the Cowboy Junkies (who I’ve written about several times, and saw twice in November) for a very long time – since the first time I heard their “Trinity Sessions” album, in fact. The Trinity Sessions was an album that was all recorded at the Holy Trinity church in Toronto, with only one ambisonic microphone to pick up all the voices and instruments. It’s one of my all-time favourite albums. However, I’d never seen a picture of the church. (This is relevant)
Then, on the anniversary of the recording of Trinity Sessions, they put a photo on their Facebook page of the church
And I thought “I recognise that church“. It turns out we’d gone in and visited it while we were in Toronto, and I hadn’t even realised it was the same place. Indeed, we only went in because it looked interesting (and was hidden away down a little side-street, so we’d only glimpsed the place and its architecture) and it turned out to be a great little find, because it’s beautiful inside, as well as having an absolutely massive organ. (Fnarr) And I knew it was called the Holy Trinity church. I just hadn’t connected the two.
So it took me another six months to realise that I’d actually been in the place, despite all the clues that were there.
And that, in this case, is why I’m a dickhead.
Shakespeare Park
Posted: Mon 19 November, 2018 Filed under: Advertising, Creativity, Domestic, Milton Keynes, Thoughts Leave a comment »Last week, I noticed signs around Milton Keynes pointing to a new development of homes, called Shakespeare Park.
I’d really hoped that they would make a big thing of puns/content based on Shakespeare stuff, but no, it’s all very dull.
OK, they’ve named most of the house types after Shakespearean characters – but still, there’s so much more they could’ve done
“Shakespeare Park – ”
- it’s no ordinary hamlet
- Your home, as you like it
- Your midsummer night’s dream
And that’s just off the top of my head. I could probably come up with a bundle more.
I just think it’s a bit sad that Taylor Wimpey don’t seem to have tried…
Nasturtia
Posted: Tue 13 November, 2018 Filed under: Domestic, Food, Getting Old(er), Health, Single Life, Solo Dining, Thoughts, Travel 2 Comments »So far this week, I have been Unwell. It was very similar to the episode in February where I was also spectacularly Unwell – thankfully this time wasn’t as bad, but it’s still been no fun. Well, I say it’s been better, whereas actually it’s been just as nasty, but in different ways – and I’ve been more prepared this time to deal with the warning signs early.
In February I wasn’t sure what had caused it – I’d had a meal at a (now closed) Michelin-starred restaurant, and was pretty certain that it wasn’t food-poisoning in any way that I recognised. This weekend was the same, no real idea of causation – although I’d had another couple of spectacular meals in the preceding days.
However, there’s only been a couple of common ingredients through the various meals, and with the whole set of symptoms being so similar, they’re what I’m looking at in particular. (And this is also where it’s really useful to have taken photos of the stuff I’ve eaten, to be able to use them for reference on stuff like this)
The conclusion I’m being drawn to is that I have a *really* unpleasant reaction to either nasturtiums or marigolds. It takes about 24-36 hours to kick in, and then yeah, no fun at all. In the case of this week, the lunch I had in Manchester on Saturday was very heavy in nasturtium garnishes, and I think that’s what triggered everything. And looking at WebMD (via a Google search) I found that nasturtium can cause stomach upsets (look in the “side effects” tab) – which is one nice term for what’s affected me on both occasions.
I may at some point decide to experiment a bit, by trying another meal with nasturtium garnishes and see if the results are the same – but it’s not something I’m going to be eager to do.
In the meantime, it’s not an allergic reaction – and I’ll never be dramatic enough as to claim it as one – but at the same time I think it’s going to be something I might need to start mentioning to restaurants when I book in. Which sucks, but when all’s said and done, it could be a lot worse. And at least I’ve now got a fairly good idea of what’s going on.
Daft as a Brush
Posted: Mon 12 November, 2018 Filed under: Day Trips, Domestic, Driving, Food, Getting Organised, Introspective, London, Personality, Public Transport, Solo Dining, Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »In an ongoing thread, there are times where I realise I really am a silly sod. This is another of those things.
A fair while back, the Cowboy Junkies (one of my all-time favourite bands) announced they were coming to the UK. It had been a fair while since they’d been here last, and even better, it was happening the weekend after my birthday. However, that was also the end of the week I was already booked up to spend in Northumberland, which was a Friday to Friday booking. And they were playing Manchester on the Saturday, and London on the Sunday.
So I figured what the hell, it’ll be a weekend, and booked tickets for both Manchester and London. Well I was up in the area anyway, and the London one was billed as being different to the Manchester one (although that has since changed). So why not? (Other than mileage, of course) I’d drive over from Northumberland to Manchester on the Friday, stay in a hotel overnight, do the gig on the Saturday night, and then drive home afterwards. Easy.
And then the plan changed a bit. When I saw the play Queen Margaret in Manchester, I realised how painless the journey was by train. So instead I figured I could drive home from Northumberland on the Friday – allowing me to get laundry and so on done in the evening and so on. Then on the Saturday I could get the train up, have lunch somewhere new and fancy that had grabbed my attention, then walk down to the hotel, check-in, drop off bag etc., go to the gig, stay overnight on Saturday, train home on Sunday morning, then down to London for Sunday night.
Yes, I’m an idiot, and an absolute loon. But I cut my mileage by taking the train, and improved my own safety by not driving home from Manchester late on a Saturday night. So that, at least, was sensible…
2018/19 – What’s the Plan?
Posted: Tue 6 November, 2018 Filed under: 2018/19, Business, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Getting Organised, Getting Out More, Health, Single Life, Thoughts Leave a comment »As has become traditional round here, it’s time for a list of what I’m aiming for and hoping to do in the coming year. Some will be familiar (because I keep starting and not finishing) but I’m also hoping to get rid of a couple that never really happen, and maybe add a couple to replace them.
- Keep on working on losing weight.
This one is a long-term thing, and one I’ve written about before. For me, it’s a struggle – I’ve worked with a number of resources this year so far, and feel better-informed than I was, but there’s still a long way to go. If nothing else, this year so far has eliminated a lot of options and bullshit. - Keep on improving fitness/health
Linked to losing weight, I’ve had more success with this one over the last 12 months, but there’s still stuff to do and improve. - Continue doing the stuff I enjoy
Various bits here – but basically, do stuff I want to. Not as a “fear of missing out” (“FOMO”) thing, but just as in “I really want to see/do [x]” and doing so. (This is, of course, in direct contrast to ‘doing less’ in the list below, so it’s a bit of a balancing act!) - Be more sociable
I’ve realised this year that I’ve been utterly crap with seeing friends – I’ve been doing a lot of stuff, but at the same time it hasn’t been overly sociable, hasn’t involved going to see friends at all. And that needs sorting.
I’m getting rid of some of the longer-running goals. They’re still things I want to work on – I’m not giving up on the plans, just on the having them as goals – but it affects me more when I see my ongoing failure to complete/do/start them year on year.
So I’ll note them here as reminders, but they’re not part of the main “What I’m aiming for” list. See if it works better for me as advisories, rather than as targets/goals. And those reminders are…
- Writing
I want to do more writing – I’ve got the ideas, but it’s finding the time, inclination and drive to get them actually going. I hope to schedule more in – I’ve also invested in some tools that should allow me to do so – but we’ll see. - Business plans
As with the writing, I’ve got the ideas, but need to allocate time and energy to getting them to work. In some cases I’m frustrated by time, in others by funding for getting them how I want them. We’ll just have to see how things go. - Doing Less
This is kind-of related to the above two – if I could sort my brain out so that ‘doing less’ was better, then I’d hopefully have more time to spend on the writing and business ideas. - Plan Better
And the final one, which controls all of the others – make better plans, notes, and be better organised.
2017/18 – What Happened ?
Posted: Sun 4 November, 2018 Filed under: 2017/18, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Getting Organised, The Future, Thoughts Leave a comment »This time last year I wrote about my plans for the coming year, and the goals I was going to aim for.
Those things were
- Keep rebuilding the finances, adding to savings and so on.
By the end of this year, I’ll have completed the whole bankruptcy process, and it should be off my credit history. (As I understand it. Some people have said it only comes off at six years from the end of the bankruptcy period, which’d make it September 2019. We’ll see) - Exercise more, lose weight, improve health
Another ongoing process, carried over from 2016/17 - Complete September’s walking marathon
This imploded epically in 2017, so it’s another carry-over. And this year I’ll do some more training, and not destroy my feet four weeks before it… - Write more
Actually complete some stuff, and see what to do with it from there.
I’ve also got some tech answers to this, giving me more time and space for writing (I hope) - Do less
I’ve written about this before, but I am *really* bad at doing nothing. Lazy days do my head in, and I end up feeling stupidly guilty about “wasting” a day. But conversely, I’m acknowledging that I do need downtime for other things. So I need this as a reminder. - Business ideas
Look at completing some of the business ideas and plans, and see what I can do with them from there.
And how did I do ? Not too bad…
- Keep rebuilding the finances, adding to savings and so on.
Fairly successful – I’ve kept rebuilding, the bankruptcy is now off my credit score, and I’m keeping on rebuilding - Exercise more, lose weight, improve health
Still ongoing. I’ve been doing more, going to the gym more, and taking a lot of information in about my health, weight, fitness etc over the year, so I feel better prepared again - Complete September’s walking marathon
Again, a failure – although through lack of preparation, rather than health/foot issues - Write more
Didn’t happen. Ideas, and started a few bits, but nothing that’s been completed, let alone released into the world. - Do less
A gruesome, gruesome failure. - Business ideas
Ongoing. I’ve launched a couple of smaller things, and been working on a larger project (as well as some stuff I’m working on this week) so it could’ve been a lot worse. (But could’ve been a lot better, too)
Next… What’s the plan for 2018/19 ?
Staying Put. Again.
Posted: Mon 29 October, 2018 Filed under: Domestic, Single Life, Thoughts Leave a comment »This is the time of year where I decide whether to move or not. And this year (as with the previous six and a half) I’ve decided to stay where I am. Again.
It’s weird in many ways. This is the place I’ve stayed in the longest since leaving school. I think I’ve now been here in this one house for longer than any of my relationships have lasted.
Some of it my staying here is voluntary, and some of it is less so. During the bankruptcy process, it was easier to stay here and not have to go through the hassle of explaining to estate agents and tenancy checkers what had happened, or to get blocked at the first step (having paid a couple of hundred quid in non-refundable fees) because of credit-scoring. It’s been a lazy way to do things, but sometimes even I just think “You know what, I don’t need that hassle in my life”.
Additionally, as I’ve said before, the best bit about where I am is how easy it is to get away from it. I can cover a huge swathe of the country in a two hour drive, and I’ve done so. It makes everything else in life easy. If I were stuck in the back of beyond, where it took an hour just to reach civilisation, I’d probably have moved several times.
Alongside that, I kind-of like my little house. It’s almost a hermitage in that there’s really not the room for visitors – certainly nothing that would allow friends to stay for a weekend, or whatever. That suits me, and isn’t a complaint – it’s just a fact of this place. It means I go and see friends, they don’t come to see me. And that works OK for me.
And so far, while I’d like to move on, there’s nowhere that’s particularly calling me, nowhere that’s making me think “Yep, I want to be there”. I’ve got two or three potential candidates in mind for my next location, but as yet there’s no real decision, no absolute “That’s the one” feeling.
And without that drive, well, for now I might as well stick with what I know.
I want to move on/away. I just don’t know where to, and don’t really have any decent reason to move, except for just “I want to”. And at the moment, that’s simply not a good enough reason. I suspect that next October, it might be.
Already Booking
Posted: Fri 26 October, 2018 Filed under: 2017/18, 2018/19, Day Trips, Do More, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Getting Organised, Thoughts, Travel, Write More 3 Comments »Every year I say “I’ll do less next year“. “I need the downtime“, I say. “I can’t keep on living like this” (or, others say to me “You can’t keep on living like this”) Every damn year.
And then every year stuff starts happening from October where I go “Oooh, I’ll book that“. And suddenly I discover/realise that I’ve already got at least one thing booked in per month through to this time next year.
Plays, shows, activities, exhibitions, travel. It’s all in there already.
There really is just no hope for me.
Laziness and Safety
Posted: Wed 24 October, 2018 Filed under: Cynicism, Driving, I Don't Understand, Laziness, Parking, People, Thoughts, Weirdness Leave a comment »I regularly drive through Woburn, and at least a couple of times a week I’m amazed at how lazy people are, even when it comes to their own safety.
In the case of Woburn, there are two zebra crossings within a very short stretch of road. There are good reasons for this – the road is usually busy, and fairly fast. But people still cross away from the crossings, where it’s apparently “more convenient” rather than walking a tiny way to the crossing where cars *have* to stop for pedestrians…
The first one looks like this…
This is where most people cross – and you can see the markings for the zebra crossing at the top of the photo (the zig-zags, for non-UK readers) Note also that this is just after a busy crossroads, so has any number of vehicles coming round corners and paying far more attention to other vehicles than to pedestrians. I measured it on Google Maps – it’s 30 metres from here to the crossing. Not even a minute’s walk. (I’ll also note that all the people avoiding the crossing are able-bodied, so it’s not like they can’t walk that distance.)
The second one (slightly further up the road from here, after a tight choke-point and just round the corner so out of view from this one) looks like this
This one is a bit harder to see – it’s a bit further, at 45m from where people actually cross – but it’s still there, with markings visible across the road. Here, people cross from the pub to the hotel and back – and again, with parked cars on the right, an extremely tight road with drivers focusing on squeezing through rather than on pedestrians, people trying to park (or turn into the various lanes and archways along this bit) rather than walking that 45m to be able to do so safely.
I know people in general are lazy bastards and so on, but really, it utterly amazes me just how many (and even more so at school times, as there’s a school just back from where this shot is taken) are prepared to ‘save’ time waiting for a space in traffic and then risk their all to cross the road, rather than walking that tiny distance to do so safely (and actually usually more quickly than waiting for that gap!)
I don’t know if they don’t see the crossing, that they’re blinkered to just going straight across the road instead, or if they’re all just fuckwit examples of Darwinism waiting to happen. Either way, it is (to me) a gobsmacking way to live.
Troilus and Cressida, RSC
Posted: Mon 22 October, 2018 Filed under: Day Trips, Domestic, Reviews(ish), Theatre, Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »As part of my ongoing education about Shakespeare plays, I went with my friend M to see Troilus and Cressida at the RSC in Stratford-upon-Avon on Saturday.
As usual, I knew sod-all about it beforehand – I’d figured some of the basics (that it was around the Trojan war and so on) but that was it.
It’s an interesting production, with extra percussion and sound created by Evelyn Glennie, and in some ways feels like it’s a mix of Stomp and Shakespeare. (Which isn’t a bad thing, in my own pantheon of opinions/preferences) It’s also a fairly modern staging, with shipping containers taking the place of tents and so on, whereas the costuming (and in some cases lack thereof) is more traditional. So it’s a bit confused, but in a way that I liked.
I was, to be honest, less taken with the play itself. It was interesting enough, and enjoyable enough, but at the same time I don’t know that it’s one I’d make a big effort to see again.
Weirdly, Troilus and Cressida themselves aren’t really major roles within the play – they’re on stage a lot less than most of the other primary characters.
All told, there’s a lot of focus on political intrigues and deal-making as well as the war itself, and it makes for a complicated script and set-up that can sometimes be confusing.
So yes, I enjoyed the entire thing and I’m glad I went. But there are other Shakespeare plays I’d prefer to see before seeing Troilus and Cressida again.
Touching The Void, Royal and Derngate Theatre
Posted: Fri 19 October, 2018 Filed under: 2017/18, Day Trips, Do More, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Reviews(ish), Theatre, Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »Last night, I went to see the new play “Touching the Void” in at the Royal part of the Royal and Derngate in Northampton. Based from the film that’s based on the book by Joe Simpson, and all three are the story of Simpson’s near-fatal accident on a climb of a mountain in Peru.
It’s had some very good reviews in the media from the Bristol part of the tour and looked interesting, so I booked a ticket to see it in Northampton.
And all told, I have to say I was really impressed with the play as a whole. The staging is really clever, making use of tables as an initial example of a rock-face, and it’s also a hugely physical production, with a large suspended structure being used to tell most of the story of the mountain climb.
There are a couple of odd bits (two musical numbers in particular seem pretty stramge) and I personally found the last five minutes to be a bit of a let-down, but all told it’s a very very good production, and worth going to see if you get a chance.
A Very Very Very Dark Matter, Bridge Theatre
Posted: Mon 15 October, 2018 Filed under: 2017/18, Day Trips, Do More, Five Year Plan (now Ten), London, Reviews(ish), Theatre, Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »I’ve liked all the films by Martin McDonagh – “In Bruges“, “Seven Psychopaths” and “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” – but didn’t know until this year that he’s also been a prolific playwright.
(This, it turns out, isn’t unusual – the knowledge of McDonagh’s works seems to be pretty polarising. I haven’t yet met anyone who could blather about both sides of his work – people know either the films or the plays, but rarely both, and are surprised to learn of the other side)
Back in January, it was announced that there would be a new McDonagh play premiering at the Bridge Theatre in London, and on spec I thought I’d book tickets and give it a go. (Still knowing nothing about his plays) The play was called “A Very Very Very Dark Matter” (always a good omen) and the description for it was…
In a townhouse in Copenhagen works Hans Christian Andersen, a teller of exquisite and fantastic children’s tales beloved by millions. But the true source of his stories dwells in his attic upstairs, her existence a dark secret kept from the outside world.
As it turned out, I managed to get tickets for the second performance – previews rather than “proper” performances, but still, second ever one. Which is pretty good, by anyone’s standards.
On Saturday, that’s where I was. And it’s a strange old production for sure. I’m fully aware that I have other friends going to see it still, and I’m not tosspotty enough to spoiler it at all (which makes this a bit harder to write) but it’s a weird, dark, sweary and scabrous affair.
Jim Broadbent plays Hans Christian Andersen as a fairly unpleasant human being – utterly self-centred, but also a quite spectacular idiot – who is taking advantage of the source of his stories. He also goes to visit Charles Darwin Dickens (a regularly repeated joke through the play) who is played by Phil Daniels as an exceptionally sweary (and very funny) Cockney – and who may also be housing a similar source for his stories.
Along the way there’s violence, creepy attics and puppets (and arachnophobes should be aware that one of them is a big spider), time travel, writers, lots of swearies, and general weirdness. In short, it’s a Martin McDonagh script.
All told, I did enjoy the play – although I did feel that it could’ve been better, and made more of the subject matter it had – but I don’t honestly know that I’d want to see it again…
Ignored
Posted: Thu 11 October, 2018 Filed under: Domestic, General, I Don't Understand, Laziness, People, Thoughts Leave a comment »This morning, when I rocked up to my office, there was a guy apparently passed out across three of the parking spaces outside. I couldn’t tell much about him – he was asleep/comatose rather than visibly wounded or bleeding – but it still wasn’t a great situation. In particular I was aware of the upcoming rush hour, and of the speed (and stupidity, and lack of observational powers) of various drivers peeling into apparently empty parking spaces.
I didn’t know whether he’d chosen to sleep there, or had fallen over the railings separating the parking spaces from the pavement and bus stops.
So I ended up calling 101 (the non-emergency number for police services) to report the issue, and let the professionals handle it. As it turned out, I should’ve called 111 instead (the non-emergency number for NHS) but I’d forgotten that one, but remembered 101.
Anyway, the details were taken – but what surprised (and depressed) me was that my call was the first they’d heard of this particular man. It’s particularly depressing because where he was, he’d been completely visible to any number of people waiting at the bus-stop on the other side of the railings. (The bus-stop and pavement are slightly raised from the car-park level, so he was definitely visible)
I do understand that a lot of people don’t want to get involved, or all assume that someone else will be doing something. But still, I know that if it were me laying there, I’d at least hope that someone would call the emergency services about me as well.
I don’t know, maybe I’m still feeling all optimistic and stuff, but it just pisses me off when people simply ignore those in need. And yes, I probably could’ve done more as well – although my first-aid knowledge is rudimentary, and old – but I did what seemed right at the time.
(Oh, and to close this particular tale, he was OK, but intoxicated, and got taken to hospital as a precaution – I saw the ambulance people as they were about to leave, and asked how he was)
Queen Margaret, Royal Exchange, Manchester
Posted: Wed 3 October, 2018 Filed under: Day Trips, Domestic, Reviews(ish), Theatre, Theatre, Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »A couple of weeks ago, I read a piece on the BBC about a new play, “Queen Margaret” that was being staged at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester.
“Queen Margaret” is Margaret of Anjou, who has parts in four Shakespeare plays – Henry VI parts one, two and three, and Richard III – and across those plays, she has the most lines Shakespeare wrote for any part. For Queen Margaret, the playwright (Jeanie O’Hare) takes those lines and adds new ones to connect all the extant scenes.
Anyway, it all sounded interesting enough that I booked a ticket for last Saturday’s matinee performance, and made a day-trip of it. It’s easy enough – the train from Milton Keynes gets to Manchester in 90-100 minutes, which brings it well within day-trip range. I certainly couldn’t do the drive in the same time.
I’m really glad I did so, too – I thought the entire play was excellent, and done well enough that you couldn’t easily tell who had written which lines. (Although I’m no expert on those Shakespeare plays, so if one were super-familiar with them then I assume it’d be easier to separate the two writing styles) The whole thing held together really well, and I enjoyed it thoroughly – while also learning a lot about all of the stuff around Henry VI and Richard III.
The run finishes this week (on Saturday 6th October) and I really hope that it’s generally perceived as having been excellent so that it gets a longer run, and ideally comes down to London and elsewhere. In my opinion, it thoroughly deserves it.
MOT Passed
Posted: Mon 1 October, 2018 Filed under: Domestic, Driving, Thoughts 1 Comment »After the car hassles last month, it was in for its MoT test today. I was hoping it would be OK – I wasn’t certain, because the MoT Test rules changed earlier this year, and there were a couple of bits where I wondered if it would fail.
As it turned out, though, it passed fine. One advisory (i.e. “that’ll need fixing sometime before the next test”) and that was it.
I’m glad – it means things are OK ’til next year, and at that point I may (or may not) decide to get something new. (Or, of course, earlier on – if it fails between now and this time next year)
But at least it’s good for now.
Debtor’s Tales
Posted: Fri 28 September, 2018 Filed under: Bankruptcy, Cynicism, Domestic, Finances, Media, People, Thoughts Leave a comment »This week I read the story on the BBC of a woman whose father committed suicide because of his debts. It’s an interesting piece – but, having been through that process, there’s something just Not Quite Right about it too.
I know lots of people – particularly middle-aged men – hide their heads in the sand when it comes to debts and so on, in the seeming hope that it’ll all just go away. (Spoiler Alert – It never does)
In this case, the man ended up being declared bankrupt by the local council, as he couldn’t keep up payments having missed one. (And the council behaved shockingly badly, even for local authorities – I know that if I’ve ever had a problem, I’ve got in touch and it’s all been easily sorted. But of course, you have to get in touch)
According to the story, once he missed a payment, the council billed him for the whole year at once. (Again, I’ve received that letter, but then got in touch and got it sorted down to a new monthly amount that accounted for the missed payment to be spread over the remaining payments) He couldn’t afford the full year, so just didn’t pay anything – and kept on not paying anything. (There is also a quite stunning degree of stupidity going on here, but I do semi-understand the mindset)
Where I get really twitchy about the story, though, is after he’s declared bankrupt. Supposedly, the court-appointed trustees for the debt – and this is where he and I differ, in that he was declared bankrupt by someone else, where I declared myself – super-loaded the entire thing with extra charges, which is something that simply didn’t happen with my own Payments Agreement. From the article…
Straight away he was charged £3,800 in something called “statutory interest”, which took his debt to about £15,500. But that was just the start. Over the next three years my dad actually paid £15,000 to the trustees appointed to collect the debt – the accounting and consultancy firm, BDO – but over the same period the bill from the trustees grew to £72,000.
(c) BBC https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-45581526
Whatever was happening, that was iniquitous – but I don’t know what it was about. When I got my agreement, it was the amount remaining from my income after all the bills and expenses had gone. I paid that amount for three years, and that was it. No further charges, no ‘statutory interest’, nothing. The only other thing I had had to pay was the court fees, which came to £700-odd, from memory. That was it.
Yes, I paid any extra income for three years – but that figure was set at the start of the process, and only changed if my situation did. The entire process was clean, fair, and the best thing I ever did. Obviously I’d have preferred to not be in the situation where I needed to go through that process, but there we go – hindsight is a wonderful thing on that score.
So yes, it’s a terrible story of what happened to this man. But there’s also a lot that’s not being said, or that (in my humble opinion) needs further exploration.
But as always, the biggest thing to say about it all is that the help is there – so long as you make the effort to find it, to keep in touch, to talk to the right people. If you just hide away then it’ll all keep on coming back, bigger, nastier and more brutal than before. There’s no escaping this sort of shit, it just gets worse if you hide from it.
Typos
Posted: Thu 27 September, 2018 Filed under: Advertising, Geeky, Marketing, Sweary, Thoughts Leave a comment »Note 1 : Owing to Muphry’s Law , there will likely be at least one typo in this post.
Note 2 : It may also induce eye-crossing rage/despair in some.
Anyway – this week I’ve had two emails containing images that include typos (or just piss off my pedantry) The first came from Cotton Traders.
Seriously, how the hell does that make it through umpteen proof-readers, editors, and marketing twerds? #rage
The second was a promo for a novel, and I’ve trimmed it down to just the bit that grated on me.
This one is a bit more pedantic – but it grinds my gears anyway. “A prickly woman” is fine. But crossing out the “Prickly” makes it “A Independent Woman” – which isn’t right. Find another word for “prickly” (which they’ve chosen because the title of the book is “The Cactus”) that starts with a vowel, or a synonym for independent that starts with a consonant. Then it works. And wouldn’t annoy pedants.
Anyway, now I’ve shared my irritation. You’re welcome.
Slow Days
Posted: Wed 26 September, 2018 Filed under: Domestic, Food, Getting Organised, Health, Single Life, Thoughts 3 Comments »This month, I’ve come to the conclusion that taking days off (or even having days of doing Not Much) are actually bad for my health. (Note : This post is slightly tongue-in-cheek)
I know I’m renowned for keeping on going, for doing lots of idiot stuff all the time and staying busy. I do also regularly think that I’m doing too much, and need to slow down a bit. However, when I do so, I get massively hit with illness and general ill health.
The weekend before last, I took a day off, doing very little (still maintaining my step count, but not much else) which was much needed. However, that kind of day lets me relax, and my resistance becomes massively lowered – so this time I went down with a stinking rotten cold that hit me like a hammer. which lasted into this week.
This weekend, I did very very little on the Sunday (after a significantly hectic week) and came out of it with the start of a gout attack (happily now faded) and a whole set of aching bones, and an even worse night than usual.
The gout in particular was absolutely my own fault, due to the excesses of the weekend and the fact I hadn’t really planned of prepared for it at all in the ways I normally would. I’ve been able to recover from it quickly this time, because I do know what works and what I need to do.
But all told, I’m pretty sure that days off are just bad things for me.
[NOTE : I actually do know I should slow down more so that things aren’t quite as hyper and exhausting in general. It’s just that I’m incredibly bad at doing so, and this year’s showing no real signs of letting up on that score)
More (and Less) Walking
Posted: Mon 24 September, 2018 Filed under: 2017/18, Day Trips, Do More, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Food, Getting Organised, Health, London, Thoughts, Travel, Weigh Less Leave a comment »The weekend just past is the one where I was supposed to be doing that walked Night Marathon in London. I failed to complete it last year (as I’ve written about elsewhere) and this year didn’t start it – primarily because I just hadn’t been able to get in the practice and preparation that would’ve made it easily doable, so I’d made the decision to not take it on at the last minute.
So it should’ve been this weekend that I did it, and as it turns out, I’m actually quite glad I made that decision. First and foremost, the weather was vile, and doing it while being cold and wet really doesn’t appeal.
Additionally, I’ve picked up a vicious cold (I really should stop having quiet days – they totally kill me) and been feeling rougher than a badger’s backside. To top it off, this week also involved a couple of foodie events (although I’d have rethought at least one of those if I’d still been doing the walk)
All told, I’m still (mostly) happy with the choice to not do the walk this year. I’m annoyed with myself for having let the time slip past, and for not doing the training and preparation I could have done. But there we go, I didn’t do them, and while I probably could have just rocked up and completed it, I wanted to be better prepared this time.
I’m signed up to do next year’s one though, so we’ll see how we go from here to there. And if I don’t do that one either, then I’ll most likely sack off trying again.
Brian Blessed, Cambridge Corn Exchange
Posted: Wed 12 September, 2018 Filed under: 2017/18, Cambridge, Day Trips, Do More, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Reviews(ish), Theatre, Thoughts, Travel 3 Comments »On Monday night, I trolled over to Cambridge to see Brian Blessed on stage doing his “An Evening With” tour. Safe to say, it was a fun night.
I’ve been a fan of Blessed since his turn on Flash Gordon – which is now a very long time ago – which also gave him his most recognised phrase (and with which he opened the show) of “Gordon is Alive!”
The entire show was kind of ramshackle and rambling, certainly nothing like the far slicker comedians and musicians that the audience was obviously more used to. I saw a few people with expressions of “What the fuck?!?” as it went on, because the were very few coherent stories, it appeared to be all more of a shotgun approach, as and when he remembered stuff. (Without seeing the show again I have no way of knowing whether it’s intentionally shambolic, or that it’s just the way Blessed is)
For me though, I’d pretty much expected that, and it didn’t disappoint or disconcert me at all.
I thought the entire thing was a lot of fun (and also very loud, and sometimes sweary – also things I’m OK with) and would happily go and see it/him again.
I think the final note to leave on, though, is this notice on the doors.
Autumn Clearout
Posted: Mon 10 September, 2018 Filed under: Domestic, Getting Organised, Single Life, Thoughts 2 Comments »Every so often I get to a point where I just mentally say “Right, time to get rid of some stuff“. Last week I hit that point, so over the weekend I got rid of some stuff.
During the week I’d bagged up some clothes and other fabric bits (an old duvet cover, sheets I didn’t use any more etc.) to take to the recycling centre, and on Saturday I also chopped and bagged up all the stuff in the yard that hasn’t grown this year.
That’s been a bit ruthless – the weather this year has really not been conducive to new stuff growing, and there were a number of plants that just didn’t make it. It’s been annoying (and kind of expensive) but there we go, sometimes that crap happens.
All told, it meant I had a car-load of stuff to take to the recycling centre (or “tip”, if you prefer) as well as hoying another load of stuff into the usual bins, clearing out old papers and magazines etc.
None of it was hugely challenging, but the house and yard – and brain – feel significantly clearer as a result of my work.
There’s probably still another load of stuff I could get rid of, but it’s not as clearly visible, and will survive until I get to another “Right!” moment. But for now I’m happy with the extra space and having a little bit less crap in my life and in my house.
Meaty Excesses
Posted: Mon 3 September, 2018 Filed under: 2017/18, Day Trips, Do More, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Food, London, Thoughts, Travel 1 Comment »Last week was a very bad one food-wise. Not bad food per se, but more just that I was being bad by eating a lot of meat.
On Thursday it was the National Burger Day event down at Hawker House in London, which is something that’s been in my diary for the last three or four years. As usual, it was a good event, I got to see some people I’ve known from previous ones, and also meet some new ones who I hope to stay in touch with.
Then on Saturday and Sunday it was Meatopia down at Tobacco Dock in London – for my fifth consecutive year. Both days of that were great – personally I think I preferred the Sunday, which seemed to have a greater variety of meats and techniques than the Saturday.
All told, I ate a lot. But in some form of compensation, I also covered just over 110,000 steps over the week, amounting to just under 60 miles. In a week.
In short, I’m just an irredeemable idiot, with no real idea of what’s sensible…
An Unholy Clusterfuck
Posted: Fri 31 August, 2018 Filed under: Central Bedfordshire Council, Commuting, Cynicism, Domestic, Driving, M1, Thoughts, Travel, Weirdness Leave a comment »It seems at the moment like there’s a massive conspiracy going on that makes access from my area to Milton Keynes into an absolute nightmare.
Last month, the Highways Agency started work on the M1 from J13 to 16, installing “smart motorways” stuff, and shoving in a dirty long 50mph speed limit, enforced by average speed cameras. (And there’ll be a post on those some other time) That work is going on ’til March 2022.
Next month, Bedfordshire and Milton Keynes councils are starting the second phase of their joint project to make the A421 dual-carriageway between J13 of the M1 and Milton Keynes. That’s going to have a 40mph limit on it, and will be in place ’til the end of 2020.
So for the next 18 months minimum, the two primary routes into Milton Keynes will be speed-limited and being worked on at the same time.
And then just to top things off, one half of the other primary route (on the other side of Milton Keynes) is undergoing resurfacing work for the next couple of months – which means that my only other primary route is going to be handling all the traffic that should be on that one.
Like I said, it’s all just seeming like either a sinister plot, or a massive organisational clusterfuck. Both of which have the same results, when all’s said and done.
Aussie Masterchef (Again)
Posted: Wed 29 August, 2018 Filed under: Domestic, Food, Single Life, Television, Thoughts, Time Leave a comment »Tonight, one of my favourite cooking shows is back on TV for another year.
No, not Great British BakeOff (although I may watch that as well) – but Masterchef Australia. It’s the only Masterchef version I still bother with, mainly because it’s just so different from all the others.
As the Guardian says in this article, Aussie Masterchef is a huge commitment – it’ll be something like 65-70 episodes all told – but it’s also a joy. (Other than the opening credits/intro, which is truly fucking awful) It’s utterly Australian, with a real focus on people pulling together and supporting each other rather than it being a cut-throat competition. The judges aren’t as aloof as in other versions, and generally are more friendly and supportive.
Hell, even the guest chefs come across better than they do in other things. I’ve gained more respect for people I previously couldn’t abide – Marco Pierre White is the primary example here, a man with a reputation for being an utter tosspot, who instead provides constructive feedback and help to the competitors. (However, even Aussie Masterchef can’t make Jamie Oliver into anything other than a lisping Mockney twat you’d never tire of punching)
So yeah, I’ll be watching again. It’ll mean other TV things take a bit of a back seat for the next few weeks, but I can catch up on them when Masterchef Australia is over and done with.
Missing Bits
Posted: Mon 27 August, 2018 Filed under: Car Repairs, Domestic, Driving, Getting Organised, Stupidity, Sweary, Thoughts Leave a comment »I think that the worst bit of having one’s car in the garage (except for the bill at the end) is that you never ever remember to take all the useful stuff out of the current car to put in the replacement one.
Usually, it’s not even the stuff you think of as actually being useful, until the time comes that it’s needed, and then you think “Oh. Cock.” (or words to that effect)
In my case this time there’ve been three times this weekend where I’ve thought that.
The first was really simple – shopping bags. I have re-usable “bag for life” things in the boot of the car. Did I think about needing them when I left the car at the garage? Did I bollocks.
Then the weather changed (it’s a Bank Holiday in the UK, so it’s usually piss-wet, but I didn’t think about that during the week) and chucked down a load of rain. So where’s my waterproof jacket that I haven’t used all year? In the car. Along with the umbrella. Sod.
And finally, when I was eating a packaged salad thing outside the other office in Chesham, where’s the cutlery I keep in the car? Yep, it’s in the car. Just not the right one. For fuck’s sake.
It’s nothing world-ending, obviously. It’s just irritating, because it’s also stuff I just hadn’t thought about. Which makes me feel like a bit of a tit. (Not that that’s anything new or unusual, obviously)
Othello and Aristocrats
Posted: Fri 24 August, 2018 Filed under: 2017/18, Day Trips, Do More, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Food, Getting Organised, London, Reviews(ish), Theatre, Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »On Tuesday, as I mentioned before, I went down to London to see Othello at Shakespeare’s Globe. I’d not seen any previous productions of it, and it seemed like a good plan – particularly as it was only £5 for a standing ticket.
All told, it was OK. Standing at the Globe is OK, although the concrete floor is a lot less forgiving than the original’s mud, straw and whatever. I get that that’s less sustainable in modern London, but yeah, a bit tough when standing for near-as-dammit three hours, once you include arriving before it starts, interval, and leaving.
The play itself was good, and I had a decent view of the stage, albeit from the side. Going in with a pretty blank and basic idea of the play, it fulfilled most of that, and was easy enough to follow. I had always had the idea that Iago was a lot more panto-villain with hand-twisting moustachioed evil – although I suspect that’s just how it’s been built up over the years, as a lot of the irony of calling him “honest Iago” wouldn’t work if he were being blatantly manipulative and machiavellian – so it was interesting (and a bit jarring for me) to see the way it’s played by Mark Rylance as a much quieter role, more of a jealous little man, overlooked by those in power, assumed to be a nobody who couldn’t possibly come up with such intrigues.
But I enjoyed it (although I feel the ending is another of Shakespeare’s more melodramatic dollops) and came out feeling I’d got what I came for.
Then, because I’m an idiot, I’d also booked to see Brian Friel’s “The Aristocrats” in the evening, at the Donmar Warehouse. Which also conveniently meant I could go and have a quick dinner at one of my favourite places in that area, Chick’n’Sours (Fried chicken and sour cocktails – my kind of place)
So that’s what happened – a walk back from the Globe to Seven Dials, food, and then with plenty of time to kill I sat outside an empty building on Earlham Street, right by Donmar Warehouse, and just relaxed for an hour – which was lovely. It’s a really quiet street – surprising for being in the Covent Garden area – with enough people going past to be interesting, but not chaotic.
And then Aristocrats. Which, in my opinion, was sadly an absolute bag of bollocks. Apparently it’s Chekhov-esque, which apparently means “sod-all happens”. I’d seen generally positive reviews of it, but couldn’t find much to be impressed by in it, myself. It was good to have seen it, and understand a bit more about the kind of plays I don’t like – which is always a useful reference point, so long as you haven’t spent an absolute shed-load of money to find out you hate it – but it’s definitely not one I’d bother with again.
Mind you, I was in a seat in the second row of the stalls, right by the stage, and it cost me £30. So it could’ve been an awful lot worse than it was.
All told it was a good day, and not massively expensive. What more could one ask for, really?
Friends and Family
Posted: Mon 20 August, 2018 Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic, Health, Thoughts 4 Comments »A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the dumb-ass “Would you recommend this hospital to your friends and family” survey that I received. Between here and Facebook, I received a number of comments from friends saying “Yeah, we keep getting those as well”.
So I complained to the hospital about it, and how stupid it was as a question, and how ill-thought-out it was.
Turns out, this question is that this is the “Friends and Family Test“, which is the NHS’ major/primary metric on what people think of their hospital visit.
According to the NHS, it’s “an important feedback tool that supports the fundamental principle that people who use NHS services should have the opportunity to provide feedback on their experience. Listening to the views of patients and staff helps identify what is working well, what can be improved and how.“
Of course, that’s still garbage, because the question has absolutely nothing to do with what can be improved, or how the actual visit/appointment was. So it’s all a bit pointless.
So it’s worth knowing that if you are someone who gets a lot of these surveys, you can talk to the PALS department of your hospital and get taken off the survey list.
And finally, if you think it’s a dumb-ass question and a pointless survey, it’s worth registering a complaint with the hospital about the survey. The only way they’re going to learn it’s shit is if enough people keep telling them it’s shit.
Gym Thoughts
Posted: Fri 17 August, 2018 Filed under: 2017/18, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Getting Organised, Health, Thoughts, Weigh Less, Weight Loss 2 Comments »Following on from earlier posts this week, I’m back to figuring out a gym routine, what works for me, and what will keep me going. (If anything does)
At the moment I’m working first on “just” getting into the habit of going. Without that, it’s far too easy to give up again, so it’s my first goal. It’s hard work, because I simply never feel that endorphin-rush that most people talk about when it comes to gyms and heavy exercise. That makes everything tougher, because the “rewards” I get for going are only statistical – reduced weight (hopefully) and improved strength (which I can track and see in an app or spreadsheet) with none of that emotional/hormonal/endorphinal backup.
Initially, I’m using a gym that’s very close to my office – even fewer possible excuses than usual! On my first visits, I’m not hugely taken with the place, but we’ll see how things go. It’s different to other ones I’ve been to, which may also account for my current feelings, but time will tell on whether I stick with it.
There is another gym that’s easy to access from my office – but it’s about a mile away. It’s the one I was using before, and is one of the new breed of “always open” gyms. (And also cheaper than the current one, but that’s less relevant) I don’t know which one I’ll end up using, but for now it’s more about the routine, the habit, than anything gym-specific.
Ideally, once I’ve established myself a routine/habit, I’ll be able to work on a decent exercise regime as well. (I’ll be doing that from the start, of course, but the routine is the key) I’ll be keeping track of that on the Fitocracy app (or some other equivalent, but I’ve used Fitocracy before)
For now, it’s all just a process, and I’m planning to work on it alongside other things (which will be written about elsewhere/elsewhen) so we’ll see how it goes.
Despite the evidence of this week’s posts, I’m not going to become some kind of gym/health/fitness obsessive – but there’ll be other posts on the subject over the next few months, as I see how things go…
Weaker
Posted: Wed 15 August, 2018 Filed under: 2017/18, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Health, Thoughts, Weigh Less, Weight Loss Leave a comment »Before I made my decision to not do the Shine Night Marathon this year, I was working on losing weight and improving fitness. (That’s another set of posts for later on, though)
There’s some stuff that has taken a long time to happen, and one of those things was getting my arse back into the gym. I stopped going nearly three years ago (October 2015, according to my Fitocracy tracking) because I wasn’t enjoying it or feeling any particular benefits, and I didn’t really regret stopping. I haven’t been paying all that time without using it – I’m not insane! – although I did start a new membership a couple of months back, as part of the process of getting back into it. I just hadn’t actually been in. *cough*
With some other changes in the last week, I finally darkened the door of a gym again this week, to see how I do with it.
And as it turns out, it was OK. Not perfect – although I’m not going to judge on that, because it was just the first visit, and still a learning experience. So I’ll continue to see how it goes, and aim to get back into some kind of routine with it all.
What is interesting though – and is purely a facet of those records with Fitocracy – is how much strength I’ve lost in that three years. For example, when I left the previous one, I was able to do leg-presses at 325lb for 5 series of 50 repetitions. (Yes, my legs are/were monstrous. I know) On my first visit back, I was only able to do 110lbs for 4 series of 20 repetitions. That’s a massive reduction in strength (I can’t even work out the percentage drop)
[Updated : I’m also a massive fucking idiot. Turns out, the weights in the new gym are in Kg, not Lbs. So I’m still weaker than I was, but a lot better than I thought I was doing. That 110lbs? Well, 110kg = 240lbs. Still less than before – but I’m happier with things again now]
I will see how it all goes, and it’ll be interesting to see what progress I make, both with the gym stuff, and the other odds and sods that are going on at the same time.
Decisions
Posted: Mon 13 August, 2018 Filed under: Domestic, Health, Introspective, London, Thoughts Leave a comment »Last year, I signed up for (and started) Cancer Research’s Shine Night Walk in London. I didn’t complete it – various odds and sods conspired to make it impossible without sustaining a lot of damage – and signed up for this year’s one, at the end of September 2018.
I should have been out doing preparation for the last three to six months. Instead, I’m out of shape – with the heat we’ve had this year I haven’t felt at all able to sensibly get out and do the distance walks. I can still beast a seven or eight mile walk with no problems, but the marathon is three or four times that figure.
Right now, it’s five weeks away, so there’s not even any realistic chance I’d have of being properly prepared for it, either.
So I’ve made the decision – I’m not going to go through with it this year. It’s something I do want to do and complete, but trying to do it this year would again likely result in more damage than benefits.
I probably *could* do it – and complete it – but I’d be running the risk of hurting myself in the process, and I’ve done enough of that over the last couple of years.
It’s incredibly annoying, and I’m really pissed off about it – but also I’m acknowledging that it’s the most sensible option for now.
Next year, on the other hand…
Idiocy (As Usual)
Posted: Fri 10 August, 2018 Filed under: Day Trips, Domestic, Getting Organised, London, Stupidity, Theatre, Thoughts, Travel 2 Comments »Every so often, I realise that I truly am an idiot. Usually only when it’s too late to do anything about it, but still – at least I recognise that I’m an idiot. And yes, I know, it’s nothing new or newsworthy
In the latest example, it all started easily enough – I saw that Shakespeare’s Globe is doing a production of Othello (which I’ve never seen) that had tickets available for a matinee performance. Cheap too, as they’re for standing audience places. And that’s all well and good.
Only then I also saw stuff about another play that’s on in London – “Aristocrats” at the Donmar Warehouse – which had availability for the evening of the same day. So I thought “Yeah, why not?”
Even that’s not too bad – it’ll be a long old day, but hey ho.
It was only when I looked at the calendar on my phone that I realised (again) that I’m an idiot – because in that same week, I’m also already booked in for a one-off cinema showing on the Monday, then the theatre stuff on the Tuesday, then out on Wednesday, and back at the cinema for another one-off screening on the Thursday.
And this is all while I’m still supposed to be doing less.
So yeah, I’m an idiot. A busy idiot, but still an idiot…
Sweet Sixteen. Well, Sixteen.
Posted: Thu 9 August, 2018 Filed under: D4D™, Domestic, Thoughts Leave a comment »I nearly forgot this – technically, I did forget, and have just post-dated the post.
But today D4D™ is 16. Yes, the first proper post on here was all that time ago.
How time flies when you’re having fun, eh?
Satisfaction
Posted: Wed 8 August, 2018 Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic, Getting Organised, Health, Thoughts, Weirdness 5 Comments »Yesterday, I had a (non-urgent, outpatients) appointment at my local hospital. All went well, and I’ll be returning occasionally over the next few months. Which is all as expected.
What was less expected was a text message today from the hospital, containing a “Patient Satisfaction” survey.
The first question? “Would you recommend this hospital to your friends and family?“, and a set of five options for the likelihood of doing such a thing.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I really don’t recommend that my friends or family visit a hospital. Certainly when none of them are even in that hospital’s catchment area.
What kind of cretin comes up with this shit? Even more relevantly, what kind of cretin approves this shit?
And if I’d been – for example – visiting the Oncology department (I wasn’t) for treatment, I wonder if I would have received the same survey?
Time Flying
Posted: Mon 30 July, 2018 Filed under: D4D™, Domestic, Thoughts, Time, Travel Leave a comment »Over the weekend, I had a thought about when I was living up in Manchester, and I wondered how long it had now been since I was living there.
The only easy way to be sure was to check on the D4D archives, and it turns out I left for Bracknell in December 2004.
Fourteen years ago, at the end of the year. That’s pretty scary – how time flies, and all that jazz.
A Break In The Weather
Posted: Sat 28 July, 2018 Filed under: Cynicism, Domestic, Milton Keynes, Thoughts, Weather Leave a comment »At last, today we’ve had some rain for the first time in ages. It’s been lovely.
The heat’s supposed to be coming back next week, but for now it’s just nice to not be roasting away.
Maybe I’ll even get some sleep tonight…
Current Scams
Posted: Wed 25 July, 2018 Filed under: 1BEM, Cynicism, Geeky, People, Security, Thoughts 1 Comment »At the moment, there are a couple of interesting (and fairly well-crafted) scams going around. I’ve seen/received all of these in the last week or so.
First – the ‘we know what you’ve been up to‘ scam email.
It says something along the lines of “I know what you’ve been up to – when you were on that porn site (it’s noticeably non-specific on details) I loaded a screen-grabber to your machine, so we could record your ‘activities’“. Some of them also have something like “We know your password for the site was [whatever]” – the password is usually an old one that they’ve taken from a record including your email address, and gambles on people using the same password across multiple sites. (In fairness, most people do exactly this) And then it asks for a ransom “or your shame will be available for all to see” It’s pretty basic, but is apparently enough to scare a certain sub-set of people (AKA gullible idiots) who so far have forked out around $250,000 to the scammers.
Second – and there are two types of this currently bonging around – are the HMRC scams.
These basically draw on the whole paranoia about HMRC losing payments, or trying to take the business owner to court.
I’ve had umpteen emails about “Your payment hasn’t gone through” along with attached links or forms to fill in – always a pretty damn good clue that it’s a scam. And again, they’re all ridiculously non-specific, don’t mention a company name/details, or what the payment is supposedly for – another warning sign
The second type, which is a bit nastier, is the phone message – I’ve had a couple now, with a message saying “We’re issuing a warrant in order to discuss this matter with you“, and sounding a lot more official. Still no details though, or anything about what they’re wanting to discuss. (I know, in theory GDPR would also stop them from discussing, but that’s a side point for now) However, they show the phone number – in my experience, calls from HMRC and the like come through a switchboard, and usually show as “Unknown Number” – and a quick search on that number provides more than enough evidence that it’s a scam.
Of course, there are plenty of other scam emails out there – it’s just that these are the ones I’ve noticed specifically this week, and particularly after having received a couple of the “HMRC” calls yesterday and today, so I thought I’d write a bit about them.
Calling 101
Posted: Thu 19 July, 2018 Filed under: 1BEM, Commuting, Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic, Driving, Milton Keynes, Thoughts Leave a comment »Every so often, I decide to play the role of “responsible human being”. Today, it turned out, was one of those days.
When I got in to work, I could see that three cars in the vicinity had been broken into (or at least had their windows smashed) so opted to do the ‘responsible human’ thing, and called 101 – the UK Police’s non-emergency number. No point in doing an emergency 999, as no-one else was visible, and the damages could’ve happened any time overnight.
So 101 it was. And while I get that it’s for non-urgent stuff and so on, but man alive, what an absolute faff.
The call goes through, and starts off with “Which police force do you require?”. (Probably because I called on my mobile – calling from a landline would’ve localised things. I assume) That’s fine, if you know who you need to speak to. But if I hadn’t known that Milton Keynes is covered by Thames Valley Police, I’d have been knackered from stage one.
Then we go on to a recorded message from the chief of Thames Valley. Why? No idea. I assume it’s part of the script of 101 – I’ve heard similar on other calls to different forces – but it seems (to me) to be utterly pointless.
And then we get the voice-response asking what you want to do. If you know the name/number you want to speak to, type it now, or press [whatever] to report a crime.
And then we get some piece of crap recorded message about victim support.
And finally, finally, when all that’s done, I finally spoke to someone – who was helpful, and made sense. But what a horrific fucking faff in order to do something I didn’t even need to.
All told, it certainly makes it easy to see why people prefer to call 999, even for non-emergency stuff. At least the response to it is quicker, and gets rid of all that recorded bullshit.
Sporty – Semi-Completed
Posted: Mon 16 July, 2018 Filed under: Cynicism, Domestic, Sport, Television, Thoughts 1 Comment »A couple of weeks ago I wrote about sport, and how we seemed to be having a surfeit of it this summer.
Thankfully, We’ve finally finished with the Kickyball World Cup (although I believe it’s less than a month ’til the next season starts off, FFS), and the Wimbledon Smashyball stuff, and the British Grand Prix is over and done with too.
The Tour de France is still ongoing (thanks, Gordon, for reminding me that this was on too) although that’s a lot more tolerable than the others – if nothing else, I still find myself in awe of the people who can ride 100+km in a day up idiot mountains and so on, and still do a sprint finish…
Anyway, it’s nice to just have fewer sporty-ball things on TV for a few weeks, at least. Happy, happy day.
Catching Up (Kind Of)
Posted: Wed 11 July, 2018 Filed under: 2017/18, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Getting Organised, Television, Thoughts Leave a comment »As well as doing less – or at least going out less – I’m taking the time to catch up on some of the TV programmes I haven’t been watching.
My TV Box is about half full, and I realised that in some cases I’ve got a complete half-season (I know, it’s an oxymoron) of something I want to see and catch up with. They’re all programmes I want to see and keep up on, it’s just that I haven’t been doing so this year so far. I’m actually pretty ruthless when it comes to things I’ve decided I can no longer be arsed with, so at least I’m being picky in that way – but there’s still a fair amount of stuff that I’ve kept.
So while I’m home more in the evenings and weekends, I’m taking the time to get through some of those things. These things will be on as background, allowing me to multitask and do the other things I’m working on over this quarter, and that works for me.
Getting Quieter (Kind of)
Posted: Mon 9 July, 2018 Filed under: 2017/18, D4D™, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Getting Organised, Thoughts Leave a comment »As I’ve said before, I’m intending that this quarter (July, August, September) will be a bit quieter than the last six months (OK, at least six months) have been.
It’s not going to be complete radio-silence, because I’ve still got stuff booked in, and things during the week. But there are empty weekends, and I’m trying to keep them that way.
I won’t deny, it’s a struggle. I see those blank calendar weekends, and they make me twitchy. I am really bad at not doing much, or not having stuff planned. I know I need to do less (and I’m intending that there are other things to replace those insanely busy weekends) so I’m working on it. And I’m getting there. Kind of.
The first week of July was a bit quieter – I didn’t travel much on the weekend, for one thing – although I still ended up being out and about more than I’d planned to be. (It turned out that other friends were helping out with a local event, so it was only fair to go and give a bit of support on that score!) My “I’ll turn up for an hour, and then fuck off” turned into five hours. So there’s still room for improvement on the whole “not doing much” – but at the same time, I didn’t do much except for talking to friends and so on.
It’s early days/weeks. I’m hoping it’ll work out – but we’ll see. This coming week I’ve got a couple of things going on in evenings, but then there’s nothing at all lined up for the weekend. That’s going to be interesting…
The Thermal Properties of Coke
Posted: Fri 6 July, 2018 Filed under: Cynicism, D4D™, Domestic, Thoughts, Weirdness Leave a comment »In the UK, we’re in the middle of a heatwave. Other countries would absolutely laugh at how crap we are at dealing with heat (and in their eyes, it’s “only” 30° C, after all) but for the UK it’s more than enough. As with snow, we’re a nation of mid-range and changeable weather, so we’ve never had any need to invest in infrastructure to deal with more ‘extreme’ (and again, that’s in the context of our weather, not other places in the world!) temperatures. We generally don’t have air-conditioning in houses and offices by default, nor the stuff for dealing with snow, winds, rain or anything.
Anyway, for us, it’s hot. And every time it’s hot like this, I’m reminded that Cola (whether diet or full-fat) is a strange, strange beast.
Obviously Cola is best drunk cold – as cold as possible. But it’s crap at staying cold. Leave it for ten to fifteen minutes and it’ll be warm.
On the other end of the scale, leave it in a car to get hot, and it’ll stay hot for hours. The full-fat sugary one is the worst for it, but even the diet ones do this, so I don’t think it’s a facet of the sugar content.
There’s no real point to this – I just find it interesting that it’s a liquid/substance whose thermal properties are different according to whether it’s hot or cold.
Yes, I need to get out more.
Lead Developer 2018
Posted: Fri 29 June, 2018 Filed under: Domestic, Driving, Food, Geeky, Getting Organised, Getting Out More, Lead Developer 2018, London, People, Solo Dining, Thoughts, Travel, Walking Leave a comment »This week I was in London during the week, attending the 2018 Lead Developer conference. I’ve been before, both in 2016 and 2017 (so I’ve only missed the first one, back in 2015) and this year was as good as the previous ones. It’s gone from size to size, and this year had 1,100 delegates – which also meant that it’s outgrown the QEII centre, so this time we were at the theatre in the Barbican centre instead.
I had decided this year that I couldn’t be arsed with frantic travelling, so instead went down to London on Tuesday afternoon, checked into a hotel in Islington (so I had plenty of opportunity to keep up with walking and so on as well) and stayed for two nights. On the Tuesday I also darkened the doors of Mac and Wild, where I had a truly ridiculous (and rather excellent) off-menu burger. Following the first day of the conference I also walked to Mere (again – and I hadn’t remembered I’d done much the same thing last year until I re-read the post from then) and back.
On the Thursday, once the conference was done, I walked up to where I’d parked the car, and had dinner in Wahaca up there before driving home. This had been planned, as it meant I left London just at the time that England started their kickyball match in the World Cup, which meant that the roads were comparatively much quieter than usual, and that the drive home was pretty easy.
Along the way, I’ve also been able to complete a full working week, allbeit crammed into three days rather than five. It’s been pretty tough, but at least it’s all done now.
After this weekend, things calm down a lot – and I honestly can’t wait.
Bourdain
Posted: Mon 11 June, 2018 Filed under: D4D™, Depression, Domestic, Health, Mental Health, News, People, Thoughts Leave a comment »Last week, I was as surprised as everyone else to hear that the chef Anthony Bourdain had committed suicide.
Bourdain was a huge influence on the catering world – you only have to read the many obituaries (including this one) to see the influence he had, and the respect in which he was held.
Depression and suicide are bastards. They make you think you’re not worth anything, make you think the world won’t miss you, make you insignificant. They’re lying bastards.
Twitter and Facebook have been full of people expressing shock, and making depression and mental health a subject to speak about, to help remove the stigma around it all, and make more people aware of how prevalent these things really are.
If nothing else good comes out of the deaths of celebrities, then at least it’s making people talk, making mental health normalised and spoken about. And that can’t be a bad legacy really, can it?
Busy Busy
Posted: Sun 10 June, 2018 Filed under: 2017/18, D4D™, Day Trips, Do More, Domestic, Driving, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Food, Getting Organised, Gigs, London, M1, Single Life, Stupidity, Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »I slacked off from writing posts last week – primarily just because I was ridiculously busy, and didn’t get round to it.
The week before had already been daftly busy, including travel to Newcastle for a couple of days, and then social and busy bits on both weekend days.
I can’t even remember now what I did on the Monday – I know I was out, I just can’t recall where/why. That can’t be a good sign.
Then Tuesday evening I was seeing The The at the Royal Albert Hall, and on Wednesday evening seeing them at Brixton Academy, as I may have mentioned before (on more than one occasion) Both nights were great, but on neither occasion was I home before 1am, nor in bed before 3am. And also working during the day.
Thursday was no better, although at least it was more local, by going to the local Geek Night for a bundle of presentations and connections.
And then Friday was supposed to be quieter, “just popping out” for food at a local event, that then meeting friends and chatting, meaning I didn’t actually leave ’til gone 11pm.
Saturday was a day in London, starting with cocktails and lunch at one of my favourite places, The Alchemist in Bevis Marks (near the base of the Gherkin) followed by a play called “Sancho – An Act of Remembrance” at Wilton’s Theatre.
And today was another food event in Milton Keynes, and this evening I’ve finally stopped and been able to relax a bit.
So. That’s my reasons for not updating over the last week. I think it’s a pretty good list, but other opinions may differ. 🙂
Lag-Free
Posted: Wed 16 May, 2018 Filed under: Domestic, Insomnia, Sleep - or lack thereof, Thoughts, Travel 2 Comments »Having come back from Toronto on Saturday into Sunday, I’ve managed to stay remarkably free of jet-lag. Most people have pointed out that this is probably because my body-clock and sleep-patterns are so utterly screwed anyway, but I’m still surprised by how I’ve got through it so far. (And yes, I’m aware it could still ruse up and bite me in the arse, but it’s looking less and less likely)
Basically, I just beasted my way through it. I was awake by 6am Toronto time on the Saturday, we spent most of the day walking the final bits of Toronto that we hadn’t seen, got to the airport, and took the 18:30 flight out. We got in to Heathrow at 6:30am UK Time (so about 01:30 Toronto time), and I then drove home.
Being aware of having been up 24-ish hours already, I didn’t do much for the rest of the day – sorted out all the domestic stuff, laundry and so on – but got through the day, and finally went to bed at about midnight, after being awake for about 36 hours straight. Then was up again by my usual time, and it’s been an easy switch back to the usual timetable.
It kind of worries me that I’ve been able to deal with that kind of jet-lag and time change with no ill-effects. It makes me wonder how far I’d have to travel in order to get hit by it – not that I want to, particularly, but it’s sort of interesting, I suppose.
Old Gigs
Posted: Fri 4 May, 2018 Filed under: 2017/18, Do More, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Getting Organised, Gigs, Music, Single Life, Thoughts Leave a comment »This year seems to be another one with a lot of band revivals – and I’m happy about it.
First of all, the band “The The” announced that they were going to do their first tour in twenty-odd years. Having been a fan for a long time, I got tickets.
The first-announced one, back at the Royal Albert Hall (where I saw them *cough* years ago) is the single most expensive gig ticket I’ve ever bought – the gig sold out in minutes, and I was in the queue, so the only ones that remained by the time I got there were ridiculously costly (but also have hospitality included, so I’ll make it pretty much work out, somehow) but fuck it, got one anyway.
Then they announced a second gig, this time at Brixton Academy on the following night. Much much cheaper. So I got one for that too.
Later, they also announced a smaller warm-up gig, in Nottingham. Yup, got that too. (It’s ridiculous, and I just hope it’s worth it)
There are a couple of others this year as well, including Ministry and Nine Inch Nails, both of whom I’m going to see.
And then yesterday, the Cowboy Junkies announced they were coming to the UK for three concerts – in Glasgow, Manchester, and London. I think the last time I saw them was on their last visit here, although for some reason I appear to have missed one a couple of years ago – had tickets, didn’t go. I’ve been a fan of them even longer than I have of The The, so it was a no-brainer.
Glasgow and Manchester went on sale today, and I’ve got one for Manchester. The London ones don’t go on sale ’til the end of the month, but I’m already seriously considering getting one for that too. It’ll depend on the price, but it’s pretty likely, if I’m not going to see them again for another decade…
Gone Phishing
Posted: Wed 2 May, 2018 Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic, Geeky, Security, Thoughts Leave a comment »One of the things about being a techie is that I own a fair number of web domains. Some I’ve got for things like ongoing projects, business names I like, and a bundle of other stupid shit. A lot are in the “when I get a chance” state of being – the ideas remain, and haven’t been done by anyone else, but for now they’re kind of drifting.
However, one of the other things I do is have a couple of domains that are purely for use when buying stuff. They’re set to forward everything to my home email account, so it means I can set up anything @ the domain and it’ll do what I want. While it sounds a little bit mental, there’s a very good reason for all this.
For the purposes of explanation, let’s say I own a stupid domain, like myemail.com
So – when I buy something from a new company, I register with them using [company_name]@myemail.com . Any mail there will come to me – it’s a legitimate email address, just not one I’ll ever send an email from. (I can if I need to, but that’s a different point) Everyone’s happy.
The key, though, is that if [company] starts spamming me, I can block that specific address, rather than having to do any kind of weird and fragile message rules etc. It’s easy – I just add [company_name]@myemail.com to the ‘bin everything’ list, and there we go, it’s gone.
What I’ve found recently though is another interesting one – I can easily tell when [company] has been hacked, or lost its mailing list somewhere.
This week, I’ve been getting some *very* clever phishing emails (the ones about ‘just log in, give us your details, and we’ll sort this out’) to one particular address. They’re good enough that if they had come direct to my home email, I might’ve clicked on one by mistake. (I haven’t, but I could have) They’re *that* good. But I can see that they’ve come to [company]@myemail.com , so a) I know they’re shit mails, and b) I know that [company]’s mailing list is being used.
I’ve let [company] know, although there’s not much they can do about it now. But at least maybe they can notify their customers that their details have been leaked/stolen.
All told though, it’s another interesting reason to have that particular domain, and to use it in this way to keep my own information as safe as possible.
You Had One Job
Posted: Mon 30 April, 2018 Filed under: 2017/18, Customer Services, Cynicism, Do More, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Getting Organised, Thoughts, Travel 3 Comments »[This follows on from a conversation I was having over the weekend, so I thought I’d write a bit more about it here. You lucky people]
This year so far has in many ways been an exercise in frustration. I’ve felt like I’m keeping on having to fight things all the way, just to get people to do their sodding jobs. It’s incredibly annoying, frustrating, and just leaves me tired and pissed off.
I know I’ve written about this kind of thing before – it seems to be a bit of a theme round here. And it’s not even like I expect miracles – all I want is for people to do their fucking jobs right. That’s not too much to ask, surely?
For example, one of the current bugbears has been a particular travel agent, who is supposed to be organising a break. It’s been in the process now for about six months, with the travel happening next month. I’ve given them a decent length of time and space, and absolutely nothing happened. Indeed, the only time anything started happening was once I got in touch with them about six weeks ago, to find out what was going on. All of a sudden the tickets and so on appeared, along with acknowledgement that they’d dropped the ball, that the initial contact had left the company and there’d been no handover or successor assigned to deal with me.
The problem was that the names on all the bookings – flights, hotel and so on – *all* had spelling mistakes. I’ve raised it with them, and they’re “going to deal with it”. But man alive, this is the job they’re supposed to be good at, that they do all day every day, and they still make mistakes like these? I’m honestly not reassured, and won’t be until I’ve arrived at the destination and know that everything has worked out. Which is hardly a relaxing start to a break, it’s fair to say.
The stuff with the bank, the car insurance people, and the windscreen people have also been fine examples. Along with several others I’m not in the mood to add just yet to the list here.
All I want is for people to do their jobs. Why is that so bloody difficult?
More Sorted
Posted: Sun 29 April, 2018 Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic, Driving, Getting Organised, Thoughts Leave a comment »Following on from last week’s “One of Those weeks” post, things did end up working out OK, I’m pleased to say.
The car windscreen got replaced first thing yesterday morning, and the whole process was pretty painless (once I’d got the appointment organised and so on). The crack itself had definitely grown during the week, so leaving it another two weeks would’ve almost certainly ended up with it being a lot more serious. Considering that I was doing a fair amount of driving through the rest of yesterday, I was much happier to have had it sorted.
The bank issues also got sorted pretty efficiently, once I’d escalated the problem a couple of times. They still can’t explain why the auto-systems didn’t trigger for this – although I’ve heard some interesting bullshit along the way – but at least it’s all sorted, I’ve had the card cancelled and replaced, had some compensation for the hassle and lack of information, and the money was refunded immediately. So I can’t complain too much. I’d rather none of it had happened in the first place, obviously, but at least it’s all handled now. And as a happy side-effect it’s also shown the bank that I’m more on top of things than they are, and that’s now on-the-record.
So all things considered, the week has ended up in a much better place than the one it started in. Yes, it would’ve made life a lot easier if none of it had happened in the first place, but as it had happened, at least it’s done and dusted.
Non-Stop
Posted: Fri 27 April, 2018 Filed under: 2017/18, Business, Do More, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Getting Organised, Single Life, Thoughts Leave a comment »This last week has been (and continues to be) pretty non-stop, even by my standards. It’s been a weird mix of work, social, and work-related social.
I’m still trying to calm things down – and weirdly, at the moment my weekends seem to be freer than my weekdays, so I suppose that’s some kind of progress? But as usual, something has to give – and this time it’s been writing on D4D™.
I’m aiming to find a better balance of things, but right now it’s all on some kind of weird mutant seesaw/roundabout combination, and figuring out the physics of that is pretty tiring in and of itself.
I’ll get there, though.
One of Those
Posted: Mon 23 April, 2018 Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic, Getting Organised, Thoughts Leave a comment »Customer-services-wise, it’s been one of those weekends again…
While driving home on Friday evening, the windscreen got hit right on the edge by a stone, and cracked. Obviously the impact speed must’ve been fairly high, and it caught at just the right point, so it’s a fairly significant crack, and one that would almost certainly fail the MOT test (which thankfully is no time soon)
So when I got home I called the car insurance’s glass repair/replace number, and organised getting the windscreen replaced. (A fix isn’t going to be feasible, it’s new windscreen time) That all went ok, until we got to their next available appointment. Which was… May 9th. Yep, three weeks time, to replace a windscreen. Safe to say, not happy. I went back to the insurance company direct, explained why I wasn’t happy with that – I don’t even want to think about what would happen if I were in an accident while the windscreen were damaged. I’m willing to bet that they’d deny the claim, even with having the appointment in place, and the insurance company informed. They’re like that.
Anyway, they gave me a different number to call. Same company, different number, and as soon as I was speaking to them, suddenly a slot came free for a week’s time, rather than three. How amazing.
So it’s lined up to be sorted this coming weekend. I’m still not entirely happy about it, but it’s better than waiting nearly a month (because of other things, the replacement would actually have been another week after the ‘first available’ slot…) for it to be done.
Then today, I looked at my business account online, and there’s a couple of transactions I don’t recognise, and know I haven’t made. I call the bank, get them recorded as fraudulent, get the money back and so on. And that’s all OK.
But. But. The pattern of these transactions was precisely the pattern that’s used in fraudulent transactions. Two small (or smallish) transactions, this time both at the very top of the contactless transaction limit, in very quick succession, with a company I haven’t dealt with before. And then, within twenty-four hours, another large-value transaction, also with a company I haven’t dealt with in a while. That’s the absolute fingerprint for a fraud transaction – the first two check the card’s validity etc., the second is to make sure it hasn’t triggered systems or been registered as stolen, and then they try to profit from it.
As it turns out, in my case the big transaction was a valid one, but that doesn’t change the issue.
So that pattern of three transactions should have triggered every automatic fraud detection system, and put a hold on my card that would’ve then been dealt with during the big transaction. That’s what’s happened before with the same bank, the same account – except they were valid transactions that just happened to be in that order. And no-one can currently tell me why it’s not been triggered this time.
I’m not harmed in either case. I’ve got the money back, I’ll be getting a new card, and everything’s fine. I’ve raised a complaint about it, and I’m pretty sure that absolutely nothing will happen with it.
But yeah, the two things over three days, it all just gets a bit wearing, I could do with not having to deal with it.
Ah well. Fun and games.
Property Inspection
Posted: Wed 18 April, 2018 Filed under: Domestic, People, Single Life, Thoughts Leave a comment »One of the other things that came up last week was the annual property inspection and safety check by my landlord. It’s my sixth year in this house, and I don’t mind the safety checks at all. (Yes, they’re a legal requirement, but still, I’m happy for them to happen)
Getting them done is always a pain in the bum – every time I leave them a note to say please make sure the cats aren’t allowed upstairs, or trapped upstairs when they leave. Every year, they’re upstairs and closed in the bedroom. I get it, they’re not cat people etc., but jesus Fuck, is it really that difficult?
Anyway, this year, I decided to stay home while they did the checks, and now I can see why it all happens. They just leave doors open, no thought of anything else, get the jobs done, and then bugger off. I’m not surprised, but it still just strikes me as being a bit slack. Or maybe I’m too tense/stroppy about these things. I don’t know.
On the other hand, it also meant I got to finally meet my landlord. Again, six years in the place, and we’d never met. So it was good to do that, and for both of us to be able to put faces to names and so on. (Well, I think it’s a good thing so far. He might just decide I’m a disaster area now, and get rid of me come November…)
But all’s well with the house, too. A couple of small maintenance things and so on, but nothing urgent or needing lots of stuff done.
And at least the bloody cats weren’t trapped in the bedroom this time. I class that as a win.
Aging – Making Improvements
Posted: Mon 16 April, 2018 Filed under: 2017/18, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Getting Organised, Health, Single Life, Thoughts, Weigh Less, Weight Loss 3 Comments »Following on from my general feelings of being flattened and feeling old, I’ve also been doing some stuff to try and alleviate it a bit, or at least to give myself better information.
The first part of that was a general health review, a visit to the GP to get basic information, as well as booking myself in to get blood tests and so on. (I try to do that every couple of years, as there’s a family history of stuff like underactive thyroid, type two diabetes, heart issues and the like.) As usual, that all came back fine.
The blood-tests were more of a pain in the arse – mainly because I live right on the border of two health authorities, and my surgery refers me to the authority that’s not the one for where I work. So it took me a couple of weeks before I could be bothered to go that way and get them done. But again, once it was done and I’d bothered rinnging up to get my results, everything was fine there too. A couple of figures that aren’t perfect, but everything’s still well within acceptable range of ‘normal’. Which is enough for me. I’ll probably work on them a bit, but it’s nothing that’s even important, let alone urgent.
As usual, they all say I’m too heavy – file under “Sherlock, Shit, No” – but then when they see the figures, and the speeds/distances I usually walk at, they seem to worry less. I’m still working on losing some again, but it does somewhat lessen the urgency when they pretty much shrug and go “Oh, OK”…
Following on from that, I got the aforementioned eye-test, which was also positive. Small changes, but nothing major, and the optician said that my eyes are a lot healthier than those of most people who have similar levels of vision correction to me.
Oh, she also worried me by telling me that people with my level of vision correction are at risk of detached retinas – something that has never been said to me before! – but that mine were OK. (I mentioned this to my parents last weekend, and they added to it by saying ‘Yeah, there’s a family history of doing that, too”) So that’s been great, being told all of a sudden about a potential future health issue I wasn’t even aware of. Joys.
Anyway, all told I’m actually doing OK. Now if I could just get my brain to follow the same path, things would be wunderbar…
Aging
Posted: Wed 11 April, 2018 Filed under: 2017/18, D4D™, Do More, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Getting Organised, Health, Introspective, Thoughts, Weigh Less, Weight Loss Leave a comment »One of the reasons (I think) for the current phase of my feeling somewhat flattened is relating to me feeling a bit old currently.
That’s not as in “Oh my God, I’m old” and so on, it’s more just some realisations that I’m no longer the age I am in my self-image. Mentally – and many would say emotionally – I’m nowhere near 46. But this year so far I’ve been feeling older – the fun stuff like new aches, just generally feeling rougher than I have previously. It’s all just a bit wearing, no fun at all, and quite demoralising.
Alongside that, over the first three months I put on some weight, which wouldn’t then easily shift in the usual ways I use. Also quite demoralising.
The final bit of the jigsaw was getting an eye test a couple of weeks back. While the prescription hasn’t changed much, it’s changed enough, and we’re looking at my next set of glasses being varifocals. So yeah, I’m feeling a bit old at the moment.
I’m working on it – and that’ll be a follow-up post to this one – but at least I am working on it, and so far that feeling of being flattened is at least lessening as a result.
Sugar Tax
Posted: Mon 9 April, 2018 Filed under: Advertising, Change, Cynicism, Diet Coke, Domestic, Food, Health, Marketing, Politics, Thoughts 2 Comments »On Friday, the UK introduced a “Sugar Tax” on sweet drinks, purportedly to help reduce childhood obesity. Will it work? Personally, I doubt it.
There’s a few reasons – first and foremost, that a lot of manufacturers have already chosen to reduce the sugar levels in their drinks to put them into lower rates for the sugar tax.
Connected to that, diet and zero-calorie versions of most of those drinks have been available for years. If people haven’t chosen to swap by now, will paying 10p extra make them change? Probably not. There’s not even a really visible price difference – at least two of the shop chains I use regularly have upped the price on all the drinks, not just the sugary ones, which also defeats the object. If there were a visible difference ( “I can buy 500ml of the sugary one for £1.50, or the diet one for £1.35, so I’ll save money”) then it might work, but without that, I don’t see that there’s a real driver to force the change.
Alongside that, I *personally* have a problem with government telling me how to be healthy, and attempting to enforce that. I have the same issue when it comes to smoking, the way government encourages people to stop smoking, while also getting massive amounts of income from the tax and duty on cigarettes. (This also applies for alcohol, telling people to drink less while getting the income from the tax and duty, and so on and so on)
I also suspect that there’s a lot more damage done by the ‘invisibly’ sweet drinks – the bizarre creamy milky super-sweet concoctions from Starbucks, Caffe Nero, Costa et al – which now seem to be far more prevalent than sweet fizzy drinks. I suspect there’s a lot more of the obesity blame that can be laid on the coffee culture now than can be laid at the soft-drinks industry. I’m not even sure that the coffee chains are being hit by the sugar tax – I haven’t seen any mention of it being on anything except the soft-drinks industry.
It’ll be interesting to see the results – although of course the government will always claim it to have been a massive success, even when it’s a clusterfuck of monumental proportions – but I really don’t expect to see it have any positive effects on reducing obesity, whether in children or adults.
Flattened
Posted: Wed 4 April, 2018 Filed under: D4D™, Depression, Domestic, Getting Organised, Thoughts Leave a comment »Yet again, things round here have eased off a bit, I haven’t been updating as regularly as I could/should be doing. In fairness, that’s not just something that’s been happening here, it’s also been breaking through into other aspects of life, and I’m working my way through the whole thing.
I’ve been describing it to myself as being permanently tired, although as per the title, “Flattened” is perhaps a better description. So, probably, is “Depressed, but Functional” They’d all be fair, for sure.
Thing is, I don’t feel depressed. I just feel tired. I still get up, go to work, do all the idiot stuff I do on weekends. But in many ways it feels like I’m doing a lot of it on autopilot – because I’m tired.
It’s meant I haven’t done some stuff, and some new things (or revisited things) just haven’t happened yet, because I’m too tired, too flat to make the effort.
I don’t know quite what to make of it. I’m figuring it out, and I think (hope) I’ve turned a bit of a corner over the weekend, so in some ways it’s a case of waiting to see what develops. I know that in some ways I’ve done more new stuff this week already than I probably did in the previous three months.
I’m not going to force the issue – as I said previously, Q2 of 2018 also involves more downtime, which I’m hoping will free up some mental bandwidth, and allow me to start doing some of the stuff that’s currently sitting in my brain saying “Well? Get on with it”.
That’s how it feels at the moment, anyway. Whether the same will be true tomorrow morning, or next week, next month – only time will tell. We’ll see.
A Tale of Two Macbeths
Posted: Fri 30 March, 2018 Filed under: 2017/18, Do More, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), London, Reviews(ish), Theatre, Theatre, Thoughts Leave a comment »As I said earlier in the week, over the last two weekends I’ve ended up seeing two versions of Macbeth, one at the RSC in Stratford-on-Avon starring Christopher Eccleston, and one at the National Theatre in London, with Rory Kinnear and Anne-Marie Duff .
It’s a weird piece of scheduling – for whatever reason, I’d have expected the two main theatre companies to at least communicate a bit, in order for this kind of clash to not happen. However, everyone else I’ve said that to has said “No, they don’t talk”, but all the same it seems pretty odd to me – not least because as well as those two, there’s also the Verdi operatic version also being performed at the same time at the Royal Opera House !
Anyway, for my purposes, it made it interesting to be able to compare the two performances in such proximity.
For me, the RSC version was the one I preferred, although both had flaws. In the RSCs version, parts of the stage set weren’t visible from our seats – seats that hadn’t been marked as ‘restricted view’ – which was annoying. It’s a modern-dress setup, which is fine with me, but sticks with a more traditional timescale all the same. The witches were played by a trio of young (9-10 years old) who all spoke in sync, and were extremely good at being creepy. The porter in this one was very good, quite creepy, always on stage, and marking off all the deaths in chalk on the wall. I hadn’t noticed that initially, but it was very effectively done in later scenes where news of Macbeth’s rule, and the deaths involved – seeing them all getting marked on the walls was a very effective way of putting the point across. We weren’t just seeing the on-stage deaths, this despot was killing all and sundry, feeling invincible while doing it.
We were very early in the run, so there were some hitches with lines not being perfect – but I am seeing it again with different friends later in the run, so it’ll be interesting to see what’s changed – but all told I thought it was a pretty good performance, and really good to see Christopher Ecclestone doing his thing.
The NT version was much more modern, supposedly staged ‘after a revolution’, on a blackened stage. It is very dark in general, but also emphatically trying too hard (in my opinion, of course!) and in particular I felt the witches were less effective as a result. Rory Kinnear was good as Macbeth, as was Anne-Marie Duff as Lady Macbeth, but most of the rest of the cast faded in the memory very quickly. There’s one particular scene with the witches that is very effectively creepy, but the rest is just… meh. I wasn’t overly taken with the production – and it manages to miss the ‘double double toil and trouble’ speech completely – but I’m still glad I went to see it, and to compare two quite different interpretations of the same play.
A Different Value of New
Posted: Wed 28 March, 2018 Filed under: 1BEM, Advertising, Cynicism, Sweary, Television, Thoughts Leave a comment »Out of interest, how the hell do the BBC get to promote a show as “Brand New!” when it’s been exhumed from the 80s and 90s (and potentially the 2000s, too)
Yes, I’m referring to the “Brand New… Generation Game“.
What. The. Absolute. Fuck?
Q1 Done
Posted: Mon 26 March, 2018 Filed under: D4D™, Day Trips, Domestic, Getting Organised, London, Theatre, Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »This coming weekend, the end of March, is the first weekend this year that I’ve had free.
Until Friday, it wasn’t free, but plans changed – which is fine. It had been a chain change – yesterday became free because of another change, which meant I could bring the planned day-trip for next Sunday back to this one, and it all worked out pretty well.
It meant that yesterday was daftly busy, with a day-trip down to see friends in North Somerset, with an early start leaving by 6.30am – just what you need on the day that the clocks also went forwards an hour – to get down there, and getting home at 23.30 in the evening. A Looooooong day, but a good one. I’d already spent the Saturday in London, doing a fair amount of walking, and seeing Macbeth at the National Theatre (having already seen the RSC’s version of Macbeth last Saturday!)
Anyway, that all means that, at the end of the first quarter of the year, I actually have two weekends on the trot where I have nothing booked in or organised. Which is pretty weird, and is already making me somewhat twitchy.
I’ll still be doing things, and I’ve got some plans in place for both weekends – but they’re all more random and disorganised, it’s nothing scheduled or appointments.
And to be honest, that’s just fine with me.
Utterly Unsurprised
Posted: Wed 21 March, 2018 Filed under: Advertising, Cynicism, Domestic, Marketing, People, Stupidity, Thoughts 1 Comment »At the moment the media is full of the story about Cambridge Analytica, and it’s use of Facebook profiles/data in order to (allegedly) provide personality profiles and feedback to campaigns such as the 2016 US Presidential Election.
Personally, I’m more surprised at how shocked and amazed most people are about this.
Facebook has never really been about being useful to people – it’s always been a marketer’s wet-dream, getting people to voluntarily enter information about themselves, as well as about their interests, social connections, preferences, brands, and so on. The ‘social network’ thing was effectively a mechanism to make things work better for advertisers and marketers – it drew people in, it made them happy to give up their data, and their ‘reward’ was to connect with other people.
In the case of Cambridge Analytica, they appear to have taken the submitted data and linked profiles (as well as the ‘friends of friends’ profiles, which is pretty dodgy as they didn’t consent to it themselves, but again, I’m pretty sure that was part of Facebook’s allowances at the time) and then made use of that data for their own uses. Which isn’t – or at least shouldn’t be – Facebook’s problem. Supposedly the data from Facebook ‘wasn’t meant to be shared with others’, but that’s pretty tricky to word. If a vendor has sold me something (regardless of whether that product is data, goods, services, or whatever) and I’ve paid for it, then it’s mine to with as I will. It’s no longer the vendor’s responsibility. Otherwise we’re saying “I bought a car and drove it at people, it’s the vendor’s fault, they shouldn’t have sold it to me“, which is frankly fucking ridiculous.
There’ll be a lot more of these ‘stories’ to come out now, from any number of different data providers/handlers. Now Facebook are in the media’s gunsights, they’re going to have a tough time getting out of it. (And bearing in mind the ubiquity of Facebook logins on other sites for things like commenting, etc., it’s going to be quite the shitshow, I suspect)
All told, though, it’s just utterly unsurprising – except for the apparent shock of so many people who seemed to think that Facebook was some kind of benevolent ‘let the world stay in touch’ thing, with no cynical over-arching purpose, budget, plan, or activities.
Darwin Strikes Again
Posted: Thu 15 March, 2018 Filed under: 1BEM, Cynicism, People, Stupidity, Thoughts Leave a comment »I can’t deny, there’s a certain part of me that is quite happy with Darwinism, and the way idiots seem to find new and exciting ways to take themselves out of the genepool. (And before anyone asks, I’ve been reading the Darwin Awards for years!)
Today’s news carried the story of an American couple where one was killed “as a YouTube prank” because he believed that a thick book would stop a bullet. So he put said book over his chest, and got his partner to shoot him. Yep, you read that right. (It’s also worth noting that the book was only 1.5 inches thick. So, not very.)
Bear in mind, when people are testing firearms, one medium that’s used to fire into is a block of telephone directories. (You can see an example here on YouTube, and there are many others) So a book that’s less than two inches thick? Yeah, no chance.
As it turns out – unsurprisingly – the guy died. His girlfriend – the one he persuaded to make the shot – has now been jailed for six months, although as the story says, the sentence is actually pretty lenient, as it’s obvious that the entire plan was made by the now-deceased, and his partner was just an idiot who believed he knew what he was talking about.
Yes, it’s a sad story, but at the same time it’s also a story of pretty epic stupidity…
False Flags
Posted: Mon 12 March, 2018 Filed under: Cynicism, News, Politics, Security, Thoughts Leave a comment »Over the last week or so, there’s been an incredible amount of news coverage about the (alleged) ‘attempted assassination’ of an Russian ex-spy in Salisbury.
Today, the news has been full of stuff about how the nerve-agent used ‘points the finger at Moscow’, which just pings all the ‘yeah, but’ bells in my head.
Now, I’m not trying to say “Russia wasn’t involved”, because I simply don’t know. But… this sort of “well it must’ve been them, they’re the ones who made it” ‘evidence’ and hype always makes me a bit twitchy. If you extrapolate that, you might as well say that a car manufacturer must be responsible for every accident on the road, “because they’re the ones who made it”.
I don’t know enough on this one way or the other. But if I were a player on a much larger political stage, and I wanted to (for example) divert public and media attention away from one ongoing political clusterfuck, and point it all somewhere else, I’d be looking at making a Big Bad Enemy that can be blamed for Why You Should Be Afraid. And I’d probably work to either get materials that can be attributed to that Big Bad Enemy, or… well, or just make up all that ‘evidence’. Because of course it’s all ‘top secret’ and ‘in the interests of national security’, so they’re never going to produce that evidence in public anyway.
And it’s impossible to imply that only Russia had access to this stuff. If nothing else, American scientists (and there’s no way there weren’t security/agency personnel in that entourage!) visited and helped decontaminate the plant where the nerve agents in question were being produced. If they were approved for Russian military use (and they were) then those nerve agents would’ve been distributed to army installations and so on. All too easy at that point for them to be ‘mislaid’ and/or sold or stolen to anyone else.
All told, this entire story stinks, and rings very much as “A big boy did it, and ran away!” It’s all just a bit convenient.
Low on Steps – Followup
Posted: Wed 7 March, 2018 Filed under: Domestic, Getting Out More, Health, Thoughts 1 Comment »Following on from my “back to normal” post on Monday, things have worked out somewhat differently.
I somehow managed to twist my back and put it out – something to do with slipping a step while avoiding treading on a cat on a staircase, I’m pretty sure – which means that things are a bit more painful than I’d been expecting.
I still managed to get in the walking target on Monday, and utterly failed yesterday. Today’s looking like it’ll be OK, and I’m sure I’ll manage for the rest of the week.
Thankfully, it’s not (so far as I can tell) a major issue, more that a couple of muscles are properly clenched and not doing me any favours. Initially it hurts like a bastard as I walk, and then eases off. That first phase lasts about five minutes, and hurts enough that it’s making my hips and pelvis hurt because I’m obviously walking differently and clenching different muscles.
Then it eases off. I’m aware of it still, and not walking at my usual speed, but it’s all tolerable and so on.
Even so, though, fucking OW.
Staying In
Posted: Wed 28 February, 2018 Filed under: Domestic, Driving, Milton Keynes, News, People, Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »Today, I chose to stay home rather than driving in what was supposed to be terrible weather. I made the choice when I was about to leave for the office, and there was a significant amount of snow coming down, at which “Sod that!” became the decision. (This is also related to the fact that all roads from my place to work are uphill, and last time it was like this, the roads were paralysed because dickheads couldn’t drive up them safely)
As it turned out, the warnings – for this area, at least – were unfounded. I could have got in OK, and got home. We’re an exception to the rule, admittedly – but I would’ve been OK.
All the same, I’m glad I stayed home. I’m happier to have been here, rather than the regular checking for weather changes, and wondering whether I’d get home or not (with the news having been suitably hysterical about the entire thing all day) so all told it’s been a lot easier on the mind than doing the travelling.
I’ll almost certainly go in as usual tomorrow and Friday, although we’ll see what happens on each overnight, and re-assess based on that.
Planted
Posted: Wed 21 February, 2018 Filed under: Domestic, Thoughts Leave a comment »Since moving to the new place, I haven’t had a garden – although that’s fine with me. What I do have is a small yard, which I’ve sorted and improved over the time I’ve been here. None of it is permanent – although some of it will likely stay as and when I move – and it’s been enough. I’ve got a number of pots with stuff in, some of which have lasted a fair time, and some of which have changed each year so far.
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been changing over the things that didn’t work for me last year – some that actually worked too well, because they took up too much space, and some that just didn’t work out, didn’t grow, or didn’t suit what I wanted.
This time round I’ve got rid of things like the flowering redcurrant bushes that grew way too much, and the raspberries that didn’t grow at all. (That was more down to a mistake when I planted them – I didn’t also add in something round the edges, so the cats treated those two pots as pissoirs)
The redcurrants have been replaced by small salix willows, and I’m looking forward to seeing how they work out. I replaced the raspberries with new ones, and planted some supporting/cover stuff round the edges as well, which should deter the cats.
It’ll be good to see how these things all grow and work out, and then next year replace the stuff that hasn’t worked out this year. Always fun, always changing.
Married At First Sight
Posted: Mon 19 February, 2018 Filed under: 1BEM, Cynicism, Domestic, I Don't Understand, People, Television, Thoughts, Valentine's Day Leave a comment »Following on from Valentine’s Day, Channel 4 has a documentary series going about people who have allowed themselves to be paired up by scientists and specialists, signing up to meet on their wedding day. (It turns out that this is actually the third series of it in the UK – and the results on the previous two series haven’t been all that promising!)
They’ve done it with some run-up in order to do all the stuff like declarations of intent to marry, telling family and friends, and make all the preparations. So they get told that they’ve been paired up (and are now ‘engaged’) and then six weeks later they’ll meet for the first time and get married.
Thursday’s episode was the first one, and basically all the set-up and preparations. From there I assume it’ll be about the aftermath, and how they work out once the wedding is done.
Marriage is something that, to be honest, leaves me cold – it really hasn’t ever appealed to me at all, and it’s never been on the list of Things To Do. And so far, there’s never been anyone I’ve been with who’s changed that opinion, or made me think differently about it at all.
But I do still find it an interesting concept, and the whole arranged-marriage type thing, of seeing how people handle that and so on. Whether I continue watching the programme or not is a different matter, but for now it’s at least vaguely interesting. We’ll see.
Post-Valentine
Posted: Fri 16 February, 2018 Filed under: Advertising, Cynicism, Domestic, Festering Season, Marketing, Thoughts Leave a comment »As usual, I did absolutely sod-all for Valentine’s Day. (A revelation that comes as no shock at all to anyone who knows me)
However, I am glad it’s over and done with. To me, it’s the end of the really useless marketing cobblers for a while, all the materialistic shite about presents, cards, gifts and the like. Sure, there’ll still be useless marketing cobblers about other stuff – Easter, Holidays, Hallowe’en and whatever, but at least that’s all at a greatly reduced level than the shite that goes around the Festering Season and Valentines.
Onwards and upwards, and all that piss.
Writing Tools
Posted: Mon 12 February, 2018 Filed under: Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Geeky, Getting Organised, Thoughts, Write More, Writing Leave a comment »At the moment, I’m waiting for some new tech stuff to arrive, that will (hopefully) enable me to do more writing while I’m out and about.
All my current easily-portable tech is either too big (laptop-sized) or has a shitty on-screen keyboard, which is OK for small amounts of typing (email etc.) but bloody hateful when it comes to writing larger amounts of text.
Weirdly, two are keyboard/typing alternatives, and the other is a new device that I’m pretty excited about, and hopeful for.
The first of the keyboards is the WayBlade – what looks like a really nice keyboard, and I’d like to finally get my hands on it. However, as I ordered it three fucking years ago, I’m not holding my breath for it to finally arrive.
The second one is a typing device, rather than a keyboard. It’s the Tap, a wearable device that appears to use chording as a typing method. It’ll take a bit of learning, but I had a device back in the 80s (the Microwriter AgendA) that also used a chording keyboard, so it shouldn’t be too unfamiliar.
Both of those will be useful to have (assuming they actually arrive) regardless – well, it’d be nice to have one or the other, but knowing my luck, both will turn up within a couple of days of each other. But whichever one works best will stay, and be useful with the phone at least.
The final device though is a bit different. Way back when I wrote about writing tools before, I waxed lyrical about the old Psion devices, the 3a/mx, the Revo and the Siena, that were tiny devices with brilliant keyboards – and how it was surprising that there weren’t any similar things around currently.
And now, there’s a new device coming, the Gemini. They’ve obviously worked from the same kind of viewpoint I had, including partnering with the people who designed the Psion devices. They look really promising, and I hope it’ll be as good as it appears to be.
So hopefully, going on the evidence of preview reviews and so on, the Gemini might just turn out to be a decent replacement for most of the stuff I currently use the phone for. It’ll be interesting to find out, anyway.
Booking Time Out
Posted: Mon 5 February, 2018 Filed under: 2017/18, Depression, Do More, Domestic, Driving, Five Year Plan (now Ten), SAD, Single Life, Thoughts, Travel 1 Comment »At the end of 2017 (and of 2016, and of 2015 – I know, I know) I said about needing to take more time out, take some breaks from work and so on.
I am rotten at taking time off – it’s never been high on my driving factors, and really it just ends up being expensive, and me just spending time on my own somewhere else. And with all that, I find it way too easy to put off booking holidays and time away, it’s such a low priority that it always falls off the bottom of the list of things to do.
So this year, I’ve booked stuff already. I’ve got three breaks locked in, booked and paid for. One in February, one in May, and one in November.
It’ll be interesting to see, come the end of 2018, whether I feel better for having those breaks or not. I’m not sure, but I’m going to give it all a go, and find out.
Friendship Gap
Posted: Wed 31 January, 2018 Filed under: Cynicism, Domestic, Getting Old(er), Single Life, Thoughts, Weirdness Leave a comment »Something odd occurred to me the other day, and it’s been bouncing round my skull a bit since.
Basically, it’s pretty simple – I realised that I don’t have any real friends or connections still in my life from the time I was with Herself, or her successor. Nothing. It’s like there’s this eight year hiatus, from 2004 through to 2012.
Plenty from before 2004, plenty from after 2012. Just a complete blind-spot over those years. In some ways it’s like they simply never happened.
I find I feel like that with a lot of the stuff that went on – a lot happened, a lot changed, and by the end of it, there were very few positive memories at all.
Of course, hindsight has shown that period proved to have some massive mistakes in it – but at the same time, it looks now like I sort of knew that even while they were going on, even while they were good (or at least OK) I wasn’t leaving any anchors or connections to it all.
What annoys me most is that I don’t quite know why or how that happened.
Reducing Caller Spam
Posted: Mon 29 January, 2018 Filed under: Advertising, BT, Customer Services, Domestic, Getting Organised, Marketing, Technology, Thoughts, Utilities 4 Comments »When I moved to the current place, I got a new phone number – not surprising, as I was in a new area, and a new (to me) house. As always, I registered that number with TPS and so on, and made sure it was ex-directory. I usually only use landline phones for broadband purposes – although it turns out I also use it here for some calls, as the mobile coverage inside the house is shockingly bad. So I have a phone landline, and a phone connected to it.
Unbeknownst to me, the number I got had obviously been owned by someone else before me, and that person was the type of fucking moron who’d sign up for all kinds of promotions, and ran up all kinds of debts. So right from Day One I was getting a couple of calls a week looking for the previous occupant. (Well, the previous owner of that phone number – it wasn’t a name connected to the house at all) And because they were for a previous person, it turns out that TPS doesn’t really apply. (Which is an interesting, and fucking annoying, loophole)
Even so, I re-registered with TPS, and put a spam-calls block on the line. (Which was absolutely useless, and so came off again) It was only a couple of calls a week, and usually while I was out at work. *shrug*
Over the last two years though, it got worse. The phone’s call log would get filled up in the course of a week, all with “Number Withheld” and “International” numbers, along with the ones who didn’t conceal their numbers, who left messages and blocked up everything else. I used a couple of other number-blocking services, none of which did much good. Hell, if I were cynical I’d say they were the ones who sold the number on and spread it ever further. Not that I’ll ever know for sure, one way or the other.
Late last year, the situation was ridiculous. We’d gone from a couple of calls a week right up to filling the phone’s call log every day. Nothing was working to prevent the calls, and it was just getting stupid.
So I bit the bullet, and changed my phone number. I explained to BT why I was doing it – in the hope that they now blacklist that number completely (although I doubt it, they’ll just have farmed it off on some other unsuspecting sap) – and got a new number allocated to me. Same set-up, it’s ex-d, and registered with TPS.
The big difference though, is that in the three months since I got it changed, I haven’t received a single solitary spam call. My phone call log stays blank (as I said, I don’t use it that often) and it’s lovely.
Sometimes these extreme measures are the ones we need to take. I wish I’d done this one two years ago…
Burns’ Night
Posted: Fri 26 January, 2018 Filed under: 2017/18, Do More, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Food, London, Reviews(ish), Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »Last night, as you may or may not know (or care) was Burns’ Night in the UK. For the first time, I went out for it, going to one of my favourite Scottish places in London, Mac and Wild, who had a special Burns’ Night menu for a fairly respectable price.
Being Scots themselves, the owners had made sure the entire thing was really good – the food was (as usual) great, and so was the atmosphere, with a live piper playing at the entrance (and for the toasting of the Haggis) as well as pipe-based music in the restaurant. In short, it couldn’t have been much more Scottish if they’d tried.
I’d never done a Burns’ Night properly before, and thoroughly enjoyed the entire thing. I’ve even got a copy of the whole “toasting of the Haggis” process and poem now, which makes for interesting reading…
Overall, I can see me booking myself in for another one next year – although it’s still undecided whether I’ll try somewhere else, or stick with the Mac and Wild I already know…
364
Posted: Tue 26 December, 2017 Filed under: 2017/18, Cynicism, Domestic, Festering Season, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Getting Organised, Thoughts 2 Comments »And there we go, it’s over for another year. Now we’ve got the perineum of the year, the days between Christmas and New Year, where no-one seems to know what the hell they’re doing. (Me, I’ll most likely be working, but there we go)
And then this time next week we’ll all be back to work, and it’ll be 2018. Time flies, and all that piss.
I’m also taking the opportunity to plan things out a bit for at least the first half of 2018, so I know what the hell I’m doing. (Well, at least have a pretty good indication of what I’ll be doing) I’m already solid for January, but from there I’m hoping to cool things off a bit. (I know, I’ve said the same thing for the last two years as well)
Anyway, for now I’m just happy that we’re about as far away from the Festering Season as it’s possible to be. And that’s definitely a good thing.
Getting Longer
Posted: Fri 22 December, 2017 Filed under: Change, Depression, Domestic, SAD, Thoughts Leave a comment »Yesterday was the Winter Solstice – the Shortest Day (and, of course, the Longest Night) of 2017.
From here on, for the next six months, the days get longer again. Only by a few seconds per day, but it all adds up.
Honestly, the Winter Solstice is more important to me than the whole of the Festering Season.
So every year I’m happy to see it happen. The dark days are finite, even if they come round again next year.
Charitable Christmas
Posted: Thu 14 December, 2017 Filed under: Charitable, Domestic, Festering Season, London, People, Thoughts Leave a comment »This year, I haven’t been as ratty as usual about the whole Festering Season thing. It still annoys me, but I’ve been able to ignore most of the retail bullshit around the season (due to not visiting shops as much, primarily) and so on, and avoided most of the raw sentimentality and commercialism that hangs around the entire process.
However, I’ve also been looking more at some of the charity stuff that’s being done – particularly for the homeless.
One of those things – and one I’ve contributed too, both this year and in previous ones – is the “Reserve A Place” scheme by Crisis. Paying £26.08 per place reserves a place for a homeless person at one of the Crisis centres over Christmas, along with support, health checks, and a bundle of other things. I’m all for that, to be honest.
The other one, only announced yesterday, is a slightly different thing, but still pretty brilliant. London’s Euston Station, which would usually be closed for Christmas Day, is instead going to become a homeless shelter for the day, filled with decorations and tables for 200 rough sleepers. I think that’s pretty fucking brilliant, to make use of that sheer space in a different but decent way.
It’s being organised as a collaboration between St Mungos and Streets Kitchen, with about 30 Network Rail staff also involved.
To me, as always, I think these are the things that should be promoted, that are what the whole Festering Season should be about. I truly hope they’re both successful ventures, this year and into the future.
Retribution
Posted: Wed 13 December, 2017 Filed under: Domestic, Health, Thoughts Leave a comment »As usual, my body has reacted negatively to the enforced day off on Sunday.
It’s no surprise – I’ve said before, any time I actually stop, I relax, and any illnesses that have been hanging around take the opportunity to pop in for a visit.
This time, it appears to be the start of a heavy cold. Nothing major, nothing that’ll stop me from the daftness of the next couple of weeks, but annoying all the same.
Among other things, I know that it’s another sign I’ve been doing too much, with little to no recovery time. As with everything else, that’s neither a surprise, nor news.
I’ll be fine, and all is good. One of those things, and it’ll all sort itself out over the Festering Season. In the mean time, I’ll be a bit snotty and a bit under the weather. But I’ll get through, as always.
Snowbound
Posted: Mon 11 December, 2017 Filed under: Domestic, Driving, Health, London, M1, Milton Keynes, Thoughts, Weather Leave a comment »Yesterday, the weather effectively enforced a day off for me, doing nothing outside. Nothing major, but we had a fair amount (for the UK) of snow overnight, which led to lots of issues with accidents, blocked roads, etc. etc. For my own village, the two main roads out were completely blocked – one by a jack-knifed lorry, and the other just by drivers failing to get up the hills.
So technically it wasn’t the weather itself, so much as the sheer number of people who can’t bloody drive in snow. But still, day off.
In honesty, it was much needed. As I’ve said before, I’ve been ridiculously busy for the last two years – I’ve just counted up, and I’ve had stuff booked in for 48 weeks of 2017 (I’ve counted up til the end of the month) and even on those four ‘free’ ones I was still doing stuff – and December hadn’t provided any real change in that. That’s nothing short of barmy.
So anyway, I’d spent Saturday in London with a mix of food and theatre stuff, so it’s not like it’s been a write-off of a weekend, or anything like that. But a day of doing sod-all – barely going outside, catching up on recorded TV etc., doing some reading, etc. etc. – was definitely A Good Plan.
Whether I feel better for it is still to be determined, but regardless, it was a good day.
Relocation
Posted: Wed 6 December, 2017 Filed under: Housing, Milton Keynes, People, Thoughts 1 Comment »Milton Keynes has quite a population of homeless people – a population that’s grown noticeably over the last couple of years – and now we have a number of homeless people who camp in the underpasses and subways around the town centre.
It’s interesting though – as Winter comes in, and the temperature has dropped over the last couple of weeks, the number of people sleeping on the streets has also dropped significantly.
I really noticed it today, seeing empty spaces on the pavements and so on where there’s usually been people sleeping.
I don’t know the reasons – although I kind of feel like I should, same as I feel like I should know where they’re getting all their gear, the tents and so on that now appear to be standard fare. It seems like even the homeless are far better prepared/equipped for being homeless. But I may be being cynical. I just don’t know.
But all the same, it’s odd, seeing how the streets have emptied out in the last couple of weeks.
Operatic
Posted: Mon 4 December, 2017 Filed under: Domestic, London, Reviews(ish), Single Life, Theatre, Theatre, Thoughts Leave a comment »On Saturday, I went to my first opera – a production of Aida at the London Coliseum by English National Opera. As with going to plays and so on, I went in with very little knowledge of Aida or what to expect.
I did enjoy it – although it’s not necessarily something I’d plan to go to on a regular basis, or to see this particular opera again. I don’t yet know – but as with other things, I’m not going to base any judgements or expectations on a sample of one, so I’ll definitely be going to at least one more production.
*Personally*, I found that the first half dragged, but the second half was better. The staging throughout was really interesting though, which did help things.
The plot/story is hideously melodramatic (in my opinion) and would’ve been rejected from most soap operas as being too ridiculous. So yeah, the odds are I won’t bother with Aida again, but there’s plenty of others I can try instead.
All good fun, though…
December
Posted: Fri 1 December, 2017 Filed under: Domestic, Thoughts Leave a comment »Somehow, we’re now in December – and it’s come in accompanied by reports of snow across most of the country.
Still, a month to go and 2017’ll be all over, we’ll be past the Festering Season and New Year.
Time flies when you’re having fun.
Downtime(ish)
Posted: Mon 27 November, 2017 Filed under: Depression, Domestic, Films, SAD, Thoughts Leave a comment »The weekend just gone ended up being a proper weekend “off”, and much needed. The last few weeks (well, months) have been pretty hectic, what with one thing and another. This weekend had been kind-of empty, but that also meant I’d booked stuff in.
I should’ve taken the hint though – a couple of weeks ago I cancelled off my first plan (a restaurant visit) because I just wasn’t feeling it, wasn’t looking forward to it, and where’s the fun in it when every single reaction to it is “blah”? So I sacked that off, and had made other plans, which then fell through a bit. No-one’s fault, just short-notice and other things already booked with the people in question. So I’d made a third plan, a day-trip to Manchester (travelling by train, so it was still semi-sensible, by my standards) which would’ve been fun – I haven’t been back to Manchester in a good eighteen months or so.
And then on Wednesday/Thursday I got an email making me aware that Manchester was going to be full of football stuff, plus a few other events, and I realised that actually I didn’t want that – and I particularly didn’t want that super-packed train home. Not in the mood for the people and the crowds, blah blah.
So I sacked it all off, admitted defeat (not quite the right word, but it’ll do for now) and stayed home. I still did a fair amount – sorted a bundle of domestic stuff, got rid of some things to the local tip, went to the cinema to watch a rubbish and easy-watching film on the Saturday, and then went out with local friends on the Sunday evening.
Basically, it was all enough to appease my brain’s nagging work ethic, but without doing much more than the bare minimum to appease it.
It was good – but also annoying, because I don’t actually feel any better for that quiet weekend. Maybe it’s a lost hope now, but I wanted to sleep, and to feel somewhat refreshed by the end of a peaceable and quiet weekend – but I don’t. I’m still tired, still feeling a bit blah about things, and just trying to figure shit out.
It was needed, but I kind-of wish it felt like I’d had more benefit out of it…
Back To Walking
Posted: Wed 22 November, 2017 Filed under: Domestic, Getting Organised, Health, London, Thoughts Leave a comment »One thing that was good about my London trip over the weekend was that it was the first decent walks I’d had since I stuffed up my feet around the walking Marathon.
Since then, I’ve taken it a bit easier – I’ve still been walking a lot, but in much smaller distances than usual. But at some point I had to get back into it, and this weekend seemed as good a time as any. I knew the routes I’d be taking, and all the stuff I wanted to do – plus I was prepared.
So on the way to Taste, I purposefully took the Tube a couple of stations further than I usually would, so that the first walk back would be three miles instead of the usual five. I was back to wearing the newest walking boots, and everything was fine for the three mile walk. Even with my intention to ‘take it slow’ I was back to pretty much my standard speed and so on, and that was successful.
On the way back – a different route, as I was heading to central London – for another three miler, it was much harder. Miles five and six, in particular, hurt bits of my feet still.
Fortunately, I had a backup plan, and it all worked out fine. I had a lot of time to kill once I got to central London, so I ended up using that time, getting the tube back up to where I’d parked the car, changed my boots and socks, and then headed back to the same place.
All told, I covered 12 miles on Saturday. My feet got sore, but there was no damage. That’s definitely a win. And once I’d changed boots, it was all fine again.
I do think that the boots haven’t helped – it’s not just that they’re still not properly worn-in, but also there are design differences between the new and old ones that rub in all the wrong places. I think I’m going to have to look at some other alternatives, different boots and talking to retailers and so on that actually know what they’re doing.
Annoying on the score of the boots, but all told I’m happy with how things are going.
Weekend Of Idiocy
Posted: Tue 21 November, 2017 Filed under: Domestic, Driving, Food, London, M1, Single Life, Stupidity, Thoughts Leave a comment »The weekend just gone was the one that had been noted as being a completely daft one, even by my standards. It involved a lot of mileage, a fair amount of walking, and a piss-poor amount of sleep.
Saturday had been “planned” for a while, with a full day in London – starting off with the festive version of the Taste festival at Tobacco Dock. I’d got in early (as usual) and walked down to Tobacoo Dock, getting there in plenty of time.
Also as usual, the organisation of Festive Taste was… kinda flawed. The tickets said it started at 12-noon, the email from the ticket people said “Ooops, sorry, we meant 11.30“. Except it actually opened at 11. Genius. And once we were in, it turned out that none of the food places were actually starting until at least 11.15, and in some cases nothing was ready ’til 12. Not good – but standard. The Festive version also appears to be far more focused on booze than on food, which (for me) is annoying, but there we go. It was still worth going, but I was out within 90 minutes.
In the evening I was at the theatre, seeing Stockard Channing in Apologia. It’s an interesting play, and I really enjoyed it – there may be more thoughts later, I’m not sure yet – and then headed home, getting back at around half one. Which would’ve been OK, except that…
On the Sunday I was on the road by 7.30, heading up to Middlesbrough to see friends, and then on to Durham in the late afternoon to see the Lumiere festival, one of my favourite events. Again, I’ll probably write more about it later on – for now though, The Guardian has great pictures of a lot of it here.
A great day, but a long one – and then drove home, getting back about half two on Monday morning. It would’ve been earlier, but it turns out that the M1 was closed (and hadn’t been announced anywhere when I was driving up) for two whole junctions, and the diversion that was in place added a good forty minutes to the drive. Which was a pain, but there we go.
And even that would all have been sensible (ish. Kinda) if it weren’t for the fact I was also on-site in the other office on Monday morning, so I was in Chesham by 8am…
I really am an idiot.