Good Food Show

Posted: Fri 30 November, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Domestic, Travel | Leave a comment »

I’m not in work today – instead we’re off to the BBC Good Food Show at the Birmingham NEC.

So don’t expect much in the way of anything from D4D™ today. (Not that you do anyway, of course. But well, that’s life)

1 Month to go…

Posted: Mon 26 November, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Charm School, Domestic, Festering Season, Travel | Leave a comment »

Bah, HumbugJust think, this time next month the Festering Season will be over, and we can all go back to “normality” once more.

Of course, the coming month is one of ridiculous work levels and travelling – on Friday we’re at the BBC Good Food Show in Birmingham, on Saturday we’re down in Esher for something for Herself, and on Sunday – hmm, what’s Sunday? – oh yeah, Herself is doing a craft show locally. Then in a couple of weekends time we’re down in Reading for the Saturday night – being sociable etc.

There’s also a whole bundle of other things going on, but that’s the main stuff I can recall for now.

Still, one month to go. Not that I’m counting or anything, you understand…

Oral Fixation

Posted: Fri 23 November, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Travel, Weirdness | 3 Comments »

I think I may have written about this before, but it happened again today so sod it, I’ll write about it again.

On my commute, there’s a guy who also regularly catches the same train. He is – let’s be tactful – slightly odd. He’s probably the same age as me, maybe even a bit older. Throughout the journey, he will sit, using his Blackberry phone/email thing. Well, I say using it – but most of the time he appears to just sit and read whatever’s on there. No replies, no real interaction that I spot, just (I assume) reading whatever’s on the screen. I suppose it could be a film or whatever – I don’t know if you can play videos on a Blackberry, for one thing – but equally he’s playing music through headphones from his iPod, so I kind of doubt it. I dunno.

But all the while he’s using the Blackberry, he’s also sucking his thumb. And that, to me, is definitely odd. It jars, seeing a grown man sucking his thumb. Sure, it’s a harmless thing to be doing – and far less offensive than the other people I see picking their noses or whatever – but the thumbsucker is (for me) a stand-out in the day-to-day routine and oddnenss.

Phantom Limb Syndrome

Posted: Tue 20 November, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Own Business, Travel, Weirdness, Work-related | Leave a comment »

Last night, like the twat I am I managed to leave my laptop in the office. I blame being busy at work, and packing away the work laptop when getting ready to head for home. Oh, and being a twat, of course.

It’s been weird though – particularly whilst travelling home last night, and back to work this morning – not having the laptop around. You see, that’s now what I do most of my work on, and I do a fair amount of that work while travelling, so it’s been deeply noticeable to me that I’m missing out on some work time.

Of course, that’s a good thing in some ways. But I’ve got a lot on at the moment, and missing out on 2ish hours of work is noticeable, and I’d rather be doing the work than not. And sad though it sounds, I do rather feel like I’m missing some significant part of me – which is probably a big sign that I need to get out more and/or work less. Or something. (Not that the latter is likely to happen any time soon, I should point out)

Well Timed

Posted: Mon 12 November, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Travel | Leave a comment »

Oh, well done, One Railways. On the first sub-zero day, with frost all over the place, let’s use a train at 7am where not only is the heating off, but the air-conditioning throughout the train is jammed on.

I swear, it was colder inside the train than it was on the platform at Cambridge.

I’ll write more when my fingers have thawed…

Moving Around

Posted: Sun 11 November, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Domestic, Introspective, Thoughts, Travel | Leave a comment »

In one way (OK, at least one way) the last three years have been quite odd, in that I seem to have gone back down the ‘town-size’ ladder. I think some people (mainly estate agents and the like) call it downsizing, but that’s not true either – this is about the size of the place we live in, not the house we live in. Ah, I know what I mean, anyway.

The basic premise is this – I grew up in a small market town. Not a bad place to grow up, I admit, if boring as hell. But since then (and we’ll cut out some of the jogging about) in order I’ve lived in…

  • Woburn : (Another) Small market town
  • Rugby : Large Town
  • Whitstable : Small Town
  • Burnham Beeches : Village
  • Worcester: Town
  • Weymouth: Large Town
  • Oxford : City
  • Manchester : Large City
  • Bracknell: Utter fucking dump Large Town
  • Attleborough : Small town
  • Current Location, just outside Attleborough: Village

So all told, I’ve lived in most types of city/town/village. Those are just the main places, I’ve done a lot of shorter terms in places as well, so they’re just the bullet points really. (Now there’s a phrase I never thought I’d see myself saying) But definitely the last four places have been a defined order towards living somewhere like where we are now – and it suits me just fine.

In a lot of ways, I feel I’ve kind of “done” my entire city-living thing, and now while I don’t have the things I used to love about city living in easy reach, instead I have other things that really work for me now – peace, no traffic noise, proper darkness, lots of cracking photo locations, and all that jazz. Oh, and also the gardenm and all the potential that holds.

Would I go back to living in a city? Probably not, unless I absolutely had to. Circumstances may change over the years, but I definitely far prefer being in a village for life things in general.

Away Again

Posted: Sat 10 November, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Animals, Domestic, Photography, Travel | Leave a comment »

This weekend I’m down seeing the parents, and also taking them to see Kew Gardens, and the Henry Moore sculptures that’ve been put there ’til March ’08. It’s quite a happy confluence (for my parents, anyway) as my dad loves sculpture, and mum loves gardens.

Because of buying the chickens last weekend, it means we’ve had to replan things a bit at home, so that it’s just me going down this time, and Herself will deal with The Girls, and I’ll be back on Sunday. In fairness, she was away earlier this week and I looked after all the animals, so it all works out fine in the end. It means I’m going to be leaving home at about my normal week-day time (i.e. around 6.15-6.30) to drive down to Oxfordshire, pick up the parents, and go to Kew. By the end of the day it’s fairly likely that I’m going to be knackered.

I’m actually quite looking forward to seeing the Henry Moore stuff – I’ve never been an epic fan of his work, but the combination of the work and the setting should be pretty impressive. And, of course, I’ll be taking the camera too – it’ll be good to be able to add some more stuff to the ‘Sculpture’ section of the online portfolio…

So anyway, posts are likely to be a bit thin on the ground this weekend, for the reasons above. There’ll still be a couple, I’m sure, but not loads.

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