Crock of Gold

About four years ago Mary's sister, Sandra, bought Mary a ceramic piggy bank. Mary decided she would feed it two pound coins. For the last few years she has spent scarcely a single one. They all went into the jar (along with any she could steal from me).


Crock before smashing

But then it got so full that even with a good shuggle we could not get another coin in so it was time for the hammer! Including three coins in her purse that could not be forced in, the grand total came to a surprisingly tidy sum!!


Crock after smashing


Counting the money

Of course it's all gone now - she went to Max Mara and bought a very fine, brown winter coat and used the change to buy trousers and a dress.

T-shirt folding

A belated thank you to Bonnie Wren for transforming my t-shirt drawers. In her regular Super Sabado posting at the start of the year she pointed me at How to fold a T-Shirt (and the Long Sleeved version). Since then I have never folded a T-shirt any other way, it's *brill*! Thanks again Bonnie.

You are old, father William...

...the young man said
And your hair has become very white
And yet you incessantly stand on your head
Do you think, at your age, it is right? *

My first ever yoga teacher, thirty years ago at Oxford, was a guy called Kofi. It seems he became a big teacher in the world of Iyengar yoga. He was very keen on Shoulder Stand and Head Stand so early on I got used to being inverted for long periods of time.

Last week the teacher at Esporta got us to do the head stand. She was saying things like "this is difficult but give it a go" and "use the wall to help steady yourself". I just plonked my head on the floor, fingers interlocked behind the head, straightened the legs, lifted gracefully into a free-standing posture and "how long do you want me here?". But pride comes before a fall...

This week we did the Pigeon [see Google images for pictures of the Pigeon posture]. I may be able to put my hand flat on the floor in a forward bend but in reverse my spine has the flexibility of an oak plank! The hip joints were no help either. As soon as I tried to lift my hands off the floor over I toppled.

H-m-m, more practice needed methinks!

* You are old, Father William by Lewis Carroll

Male Grooming Products

Friday's trip to Italy followed the usual routine: get "air-side" asap, have a late lunch of champagne and smoked salmon, then I guard the bags at the coffee shop whilst Mary does a tour of the emporia.

This time she returned with a Clinique Skin Care Starter Kit for men, four handy little travel-sized tubes in a zip-up bag. This to prevent me from acquiring the complexion of a wrinkled old saddle-bag like my father though I attribute that more to his life-long smoking habit than any dereliction of his skin-care regimen.

The contents: face scrub, liquid face wash, hydrating lotion and the curiously named "scruffing lotion". As if we boys weren't scruffy enough someone has gone to the trouble of developing a potion that will make us even scruffier! As Americans say "Go figure".

Hole in the Head

Blackadder to Percy: "You are as much use to me as a hole in the head, an affliction with which you must be familiar, never having had a brain" *

Now is it just me? I can never get the earphones that come with mobile phones, walkmans and mp3 players to stay in my ears, they just fall out. How do other people manage?

My ears don't seem at all unusual or malformed but they are not perfectly circular like the earpieces. Perhaps all the people who work for these companies have perfectly circular ear-holes.

Do other people have more curly ear-flappy bits that hold them in? Or perhaps they have all done a bit of home surgery with a Black and Decker and a 12mm drill bit? The only ones that work for me are the in-ear type with rubber grommets on the end.

* Blackadder Insults. Another favorite from the same page: "We live in an age where illness and deformity are commonplace and yet, Ploppy, you are without a doubt the most repulsive individual I have ever met. I would shake your hand but I fear it would come off."

That page I found via See Here archive for 01-Nov-2005. See Here appears to have too much time on his hand.

A tail of two shirts

Purple seems to be the "in" colour at work. At last week's team progress meeting I was the only one not attired in some shade of purple or lilac. So Friday I went lunchtime shopping for a new shirt but ended up on the horns of a dilemma, torn between meanness and snobbery.

I could not bear to pay as much GBP 45 for a work shirt from Haines & Bonner whatever the quality(and anyway they were double cuff). Nor could I bear to pay as little as GBP 9.50 for an easy-iron shirt from M&S; at that price what thin quality could they possibly be?

So I went back to the office shirtless and the hunt continues.

Puglian Bicycle Thief

Last week was busy at work so I had no time to blog. This weekend we were in Puglia for the last visit of the year so I had no technology to blog. The works progress slowly but steadily, with the emphasis more on the slow than the steady.

The excitement of the weekend was catching a bicycle thief red-handed. Between visits everything is put away indoors and securely locked up but while we were there I put the bikes out in the Lamia chained together.

On Saturday night I heard noises and, given we are near the end of a secluded, dead-end dirt track, I went out to investigate. There was a bloke struggling with two bikes and heavy-duty bolt cutters trying to get them out the Lamia door. He appeared to speak no English but body language is pretty international. Mine was unambiguous as I grabbed him, shoved him up against the wall, stuck my nose millimeters from his and said rude words at loud volume.

He seemed pretty scared and engaged the gibbering coward circuits as he made for his van. Mary came out and joined us for more shouting of the limited vocabulary variety including the Italian for "thief" and "police tomorrow". We took a note of his van number and a photograph which sent his craven cringing into overdrive as we let him go. The flash flashed but unfortunately the camera battery was so flat we got no usable image. However he doesn't know that and hopefully has slept very badly the last couple of nights.

Guilt-free surfing

Mary is at the wine bar round the corner with Andrea A. and I am catching up on random "follow that link" surfing. One was of great interest, the other made me laugh:

"Two nations divided by a common language"* points to two execellent wikipedia entries
"Lego Escher" does what is says on the tin. <LOL>

* Of course you knew the correct quote is "separated" by a common language.

Gullible's Travels by Cash Peters

Buy at Amazon.com Gullible's Travels : The Adventures of a Bad Taste Tourist

I can only presume that someone in the US media made mention of Gullible's Travels : The Adventures of a Bad Taste Tourist by Cash Peters as I have had a flurry of North American hits from Google.com.

Nice to know I am global number one ranked for "gullible's travels" though I suspect this blog is not what they were looking for. I must buy the book myself as it has excellent reviews.

Which is more than can be said of this blog. Those extra vistors certainly cannot be as a result of the write up at The Weblog Review. Babz wrote a "damn with faint praise" review and gave me a rating of 2. That is hardly going to bring a flood of visitors. Still at least it shows there is room for improvement :-/

Jabba the shed

When I wrote yesterday's post I could not for the life of me remember what Sunday's DIY had been. Now I remember: it was assembling a Bike shed from Homebase. As yet the shed does not have a name.

At Avon cottage we have four compost bins (not counting the fifth "Bin With No Name" down by the dustbins). The first three I bought at the same time and christened Tom, Dick and Harry after the tunnels in "The Great Escape". When we added a fourth I wanted it to be called Selene (after the Greek goddess of the moon) but Mary named it Gertrude (after Gertrude Jekyll the garden designer).

Then we bought a shed and I decided it too should have a name. I thought long and hard. All of a sudden inspiration struck - I would call it Jabba. I haven't stopped chortling since.

Now we have another (bike) shed and I am once again searching for inspiration and a name. Suggestions welcome.

Garden furniture for cheap

Moving house has meant shopping and lots of it. All managed by the distaff side natch. This has meant everything from K&B knick-knacks to bed linen to furniture to a whole new shower room, central heating boiler and kitchen re-fit (though we are staggering the latter).

Now we have a garden we, of course, had to get some garden furniture as well. And here we had a bit of a result. I say *we* but my contribution was to pack an astonishing amount of teak into a BMW, drive it home and lug it into the house.

Courtesy of Criterion Riverside Auctions we bid for, and got, two and a half grand's worth of table, chairs, loungers, side tables, lazy Susan, parasol and cushions for a paltry 850 quid. OK they are second hand having been used as display items and lugged around from fair to exhibition but then what would new ones be like after a summer in the garden?

See, I am in touch with my feminine side. Isn't this is simply a variant of "I bought this in the sales, look at the money I've saved"?

Do something amazing

Give Blood goes the slogan. And so I did on Wednesday for the first time in about six years. Shameful that it took me so long really since I have been on this contract and in a stable location for over a year.

I always have been an erratic donor; it has taken me 30 years to get into the mid-teens. I am not sure exactly how many since the little paper tokens fell out of my donor card years ago and it is all computerised now anyway so I have become a man without a past.

I do remember my first donation back in 1975 for two reasons:

• Firstly, I stood up too quickly and nearly fainted. It was then I decided that 9¼ stone (59 kilo) was too light and spend the following period trying to eat more pasta and put a few pounds on.

• Secondly, the NBS wrote to me saying "Your blood group is of a type not often met with." Made me feel like Tony Hancock in The Blood Donor. Gone now, that card, it said I was negative donor but positive recipient (or was it the other way round). No matter, if it is an emergency they stuff you full of Type O and other times they test you first.

If you are able to give blood please do. For most of us it is the only chance we have to genuinely save lives.

Isaac Newton invented the cat flap

I am much indebted to ScaryDuck for pointing me at the wonderful factoid that Isaac Newton invented the cat flap. It is in Wikipedia so it must be true.

A survivor's blog

This is a blog worth reading: Survivor's Diary

Rachel from north London was in the bombed carriage of the Tube train travelling from King's Cross to Russell Square on the Piccadilly line. She has told the BBC News website about her experience and has been making daily postings.

Full of fruit goodness

Pret are a fine sandwich chain and I normally buy my lunch there but I do think their copywriters should be kept on a tight leash.

Their granola bar advertises itself as "Full of Fruit Goodness". B*****ks! It's a solid briquette of cereal held together with sucrose. Pure carbohydrate. Good fuel for the body and if the odd bit of dried fruit contributes any vitamin content of significance I would be very much surprised.

But the pièce de résistance is the blackcurrant drink "Naturally Low in Fat". <Voice="John Cleese">Of course it is! It's a FRUIT! No ANIMALS were slaughtered in the making of this FRUIT drink!<Voice="Normal">.

Mind you it is a bit like the "Reduced Fat" Lurpak spreadable butter we buy. Basically they have worked out how to pump more water into it but they are hardly going to label it "Increased Water"!

Mark and Mary are OK

A number of friends have emailed to check that we are OK. We are fine and unaffected by the bombs (in the physical sense). We are both working in central London (me only 1/2 mile from the bus bomb). But both safely in our offices before it happened. I cycle in so getting home was easy. Mary walked down to Vauxhall (avoiding Waterloo) and got a train home. Working at home today.

Make Poverty History

http://www.live8live.com/
http://www.makepovertyhistory.org/
No more to say!

Plastic urinals - whatever next?

Dateline: International Youth Hostel, Zurich

I normally arrive here about 20 minutes to midnight on a Monday night to collect the keys for the client apartment that is to be my home for the next two nights. Today, because it is a public holiday in the UK and I was originally going to be en route from Stansted to Wandsworth (see next post) I am on an earlier flight.

So that means time to (in reverse order) use the internet cafe here, have a beer and make room for the beer. It did not sound right as I peed and it was because they were plastic urinals. Such things I have seen at events and festivals but this was the first I have seen one that endeavours to imitate the proper porcelain. Which it did so convincingly that only the ear told the tale.

Piss up in a brewery

For the benefit of non-native English speakers: "Piss up" is a social event involving alcoholic drinks. "Couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery" is a phrase used to describe someone low in planning and organisational skills.

On Saturday I arranged for myself and George (the brother-in-law) to do the Youngs Brewery Tour while Mary and her sister, Sandra, did a day's pampering at The Sanctuary. It has to be said that I kept remembering then forgetting, remembering then forgetting to phone up and book it. It was not until Mary sent me a text message, "Piss-up in a brewery!", that I finally made the booking. Oh dear :-(

I can thoroughly recommend the tour. This was my sixth brewery tour but always interesting to see another. The real novelty was the stables tour to see the shire horses that pull the drays. They are *big* and friendly. Finished off the tour with an excellent pint of stout in the Brewery Tap.

Inconsistent Man Machine Interface

MMI does not just mean CHI. It also applies to mechanical machines.

Of the three lifts in this building only one goes to the lowest level. The lift designers simply ordered the button in rows of three starting at the bottom and working up. That means those of us who get in and hit the button in "the usual position" have a one-in-three chance of being whisked to the wrong floor.

Majority lift	Minority lift    (there is no "2")	Minority lift should have been
12 9 10 11 6 7 8 3 4 5	11 12 8 9 10 5 6 7 1 3 6	12 9 10 11 6 7 8 3 4 5 1

That is, the same as the others with "1" pre-pended.