Monthly Archives: December 2018

And so it starts…

We’re both off work now and Julia has gone shopping for the bits she forgot to tell me to add to the list yesterday.

Good luck to any of my readers in a similar position – I had to try two supermarkets yesterday before I could find a parking space. Hopefully it will be quieter today, though there may not be any food left.

Happy Christmas – I’ve been a bit erratic with my Christmas Greetings, so will put it here so nobody is left out.

Now, fuelled by porridge, I am off to get her engagement ring from the jewellers. She insists on wearing it for work and finally managed to lose a diamond. A new diamond and re-tipping all the claws is coming in at £150, which is nearly as much as the ring cost originally.

It wasn’t an overly expensive ring, as my mother told me several times But as I said, expensive rings are for love-struck teenagers and millionaires. I’m a practical man, and got her to pay half, so it was quite economical. Now that we’ve been married for thirty years hindsight indicates I could have spent more, but you never know at the time…

Went for a blood test this morning, was second in the queue and, when I tried to get out of the car park, used the wrong ticket. The one for the car park was in my shirt pocket but the one I tried to use was on the passenger seat and turned out to be ineffective. Oh, how I laughed after three abortive attempts to leave the car park.

New Year Resolution – clean the car out!

Edit: when I said “short” pocket I meant “shirt” pocket. I don’t wear shorts, particularly in winter.

The Christmas Letter

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I’ve always resisted the temptation to write a letter to go with the few Christmas cards I send because there’s a fine line between sending news and showing off. Whereas I tend to write a warts and all version of my year when I’m blogging, the Christmas Letter always seems to be full of perfection.

Here’s mine. It’s an antidote to sweetness and perfection, a sort of Christmas Anti-Letter. I have used a different colour to indicate it should be read with your tongue in your cheek.

Dear All,

Last year we had a wonderful Christmas in Suffolk. Sadly it has all gone downhill since then.

The children, whilst not particularly successful or good at anything, unlike the children of everyone I know, are both planning on going travelling in Spring. Unfortunately, they are both planning on coming back, but it’s a start.

I suppose this is due to poor parenting so, as usual, I will get the blame. It has always been the same – It’s the same the whole world over It’s the poor what gets the blame It’s the rich what gets the pleasure Ain’t it all a bloomin’ shame? as the song says.

Julia continues to suffer from being married to an idiot. I can’t help thinking she could emulate the Spartans and suffer in silence but she seems to disagree. She shows too much interest in the plots of Poirot for my liking but in the absence of readily available household poisons (unlike the house and garden of the 1930s) I am still quite healthy. She did, however, look at the possibility of visiting the Poison Garden at Anwick Castle last year.

I wasn’t too keen on that.

That’s about it. If I wanted people to know more about what I’m doing I’d write more often.

We’re having turkey sandwiches with mayonaisse, cranberry and stuffing on Boxing Day. It’s the best bit of the year.

All the best,

Simon

Mistletoe from eBay

With any luck that should stop people sending me appalling upbeat letters.

Bah, humbug!

Sorry about the repeated picture – I only have one Christmas photo.

A Slow Day

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It’s harder than you think, working without the internet. We knew we wouldn’t be working on eBay, taking card payments or using the phone. We hadn’t realised just how many times a day we needed it to look things up, research prices or simply to settle arguments.

Instead of sitting in front of a screen enjoying myself I had to sort pennies, looking for 1895s to make up the sets. They had the lowest mintage of the Old Head pennies by a long way and are always a pain to find.

I also cleared my desk, sorted my stationery supplies and ranked my pencils in order of length. In other words, apart from seven parcels in the morning, and a few customers, we were rather underworked.

Fortunately the engineers are coming out on Monday to fix it. Fingers crossed!

Now I’m going to relax and slide gently into Christmas…

Mainly Mistletoe

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Biggest news of the day is that the phone and internet in the shop have finally broken. After some patchy service they started going seriously wrong yesterday and today, after limping along for a bit, finally downed tools. The phone is useless, on account of deafening noise on the line and the wireless hub spent all afternoon refusing to connect.

We think that years of damp have corroded the innards of the main socket, which is irreversable, inconvenient and probably expensive.

As the main business of the shop centres round our internet presence this a Bad Thing.

More cheerfully, after a couple of squirts of WD-40 into the door locks my keys operate as smoothly as if they were made from pure silk. Of course, if they were they would be useless, but I’m trying to make more use of interesting imagery in my writing, even to the point of talking nonsense.

After some discussion we decided not to adopt this approach with the socket in the shop.

We boxed up 70 coin covers this morning and the are nowwaiting for a courier to pick them up and take them to the USA, proving that with the reach of eBay it’s possible to sell anything.

The Queen – Coin on Cover

Queen Coin on Cover

Finally, my mistletoe arrived. We haven’t seen any around this year (apart from clumps that are so far up trees you’d need ropes and oxygen to pick it) so I ordered it on eBay. It only took a few days and it was lovely and fresh when it arrived. There was a lot of it too. The picture shows the box after I’d given four big sprigs away.

I’m very relaxed now, having obtained Julia’s mistletoe and done enough food shopping to see us through until the 27th.

I may permit myself a small sherry later…

No1 Son Has a Bad Day

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He was supposed to fly from Gatwick yesterday. However, he ended up with a daytrip to Brighton whilst waiting for his flight yesterday and today headed off for a weekend in East Anglia. It’s not the Christmas trip to Innsbruck which he had planned, but he’s better off than a lot of people who have had their plans disrupted.

Assuming that this is an eco-protest rather than a terrorist attack or prank, I’m not altogether out of sympathy with the protest, as we are killing the planet with all our travel.

However, a couple of hours would have made the point without wrecking Christmas for thousands of people.

It now seems that airlines and travel insurance companies may be able get away with taking the money and cancelling the flight as it is “an extraordinary event” and not covered by insurance. Nice work if you can get it, but typical of insurance companies and airlines, who never seem to take their responsibilities too seriously.

I’m expecting a major backlash against drones now, and some questions in parliament about the lack of effective action against the drone.

A Day of Various Errands

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This morning I went to the garage to get a headlight replaced as I’d been unable to get the bulb out yesterday. That seemed to be the theme of the day, as my dentist had proved similarly inept when it came to taking things out. It took five minutes to replace the bulb. Unfortunately he doesn’t do teeth. He did, however, tell me a story about a tooth extraction he had. The slightly built lady dentist couldn’t get enough traction to remove it, so she went for help. This arrived in the somewhat square shape of another female dentist. She had an eastern European accent and the build of a hammer thrower (not that I’m pandering to racial stereotypes, you understand…).

She took a firm grip on the tooth, squeezed and destroyed the tooth. He said it sounded like a car crash.

Then they cut it out.

I left the garage feeling I’d had a lucky escape.

Then I came home, blogged and ate a sausage sandwich. I had sausage rather than bacon because they are softer to chew with a booby-trapped tooth.

After that I ran Julia to the doctor, dropped off some Christmas cards and then went down to see my Dad. He’s suffering from a chest infection, which, in turn, makes him more vague. I then lost nine games of dominoes – three to my sister and six to a man with dementia and a chest infection.

My life has hit rock bottom…

Photography Puzzles

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Looking through the old photographs, as I was yesterday, I am reminded of the complexity of regulations around photography.

Care Bears came to visit

I have photographs of children and vulnerable people and I have permission to use them. So I’m clearly OK to post them on the blog aren’t I? Well, no. According to some regulation, which may be data protection rather than safeguarding, I should have asked for time-limited permission and I shouldn’t use them indefinitely. Schools, for instance, are only supposed to use photographs of children while they are attending the school. This would tend to suggest that I shouldn’t use the images now we have closed down.

This suggests that even if you are lucky enough to get a decent shot of a child you can’t keep using it. Unless you’ve paid a child model – that will be OK. That’s one anomally. Another is that I can’t publish names, but newspapers can. Presumably predatory perverts only cruise amateur blogs – professional photos and newspapers hold no interest for them.

The Quercus Group in disguise

There’s another anomally – if I want to take pictures of children on a visit I need permission, which some schools take more seriously than others. We once had a teacher shouting at one of our group members because they had taken a picture with their telephone, which might have included a school pupil.

Yet that teacher thought it was OK for the school to take pictures of the visit without asking our permission and without checking with the vulnerable adults in the group. In fact no school ever asked permission to take pictures.

I’m not saying they should do, but I am saying that there should be one rule for everyone, particularly for schools that insisted on coming on days when the group was in. Julia, being soft-hearted always resisted my requests that we should have a photo permission form for visits and only give permission to groups who gave us permission.

It’s funny how a train of thought can rise from a few photos…

Agroforestry project

Imagine what that would mean for the famous Pears Soap advert. They used this one for years. Oh, how Admiral Sir William Milbourne James GCB must have mentally thanked his grandfather for this portrait of him in green velvet as he strode the decks of his various commands, where he was known by the nickname “Sir Bubbles”.

Image downloaded from the website of the Victoria and Albert Museum, with permission. Despite a lack of medals and dead animals this kind gesture has elevated thm to the status of one of my favourite museums.

Memories

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Sherwood Forest – Robin Hood and Little John

Owl carving – Sherwood Forest

Sherwood Forest – carving

When I picked up my old camera last week there were nearly 1,400 photos on it. Each one is a memory, even if the memory is “…and that’s one I took in case the first photo wasn’t any good…”.

The first photos I’ve taken off are from Sherwood Forest – I presume three of the sculptures are still there despite the remodelling of the visitor centre, though I suppose the Robin and Little John statue will have gone as part of the demolition of the old one

Sherwood ForestO

Old Oaks of Sherwood Forest

Oak leaves of Sherwood Forest

The last photo of this set is an outlaw in the car park – I’m afraid that there probably won’t be any outlaws in the new car park. Well, there are no trees, for one thing. This is progress.

Robin Hood lurking in the Forest

I’m quite enjoying a stroll through the old photographs, though some are a bit painful when you think about the passing of time.

Teeth and Trouble

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I arrived at the dentist just on time, having spent too much time blogging.

It’s a very pleasant place and the dentist was very pleasant too, and very professional.

She checked which tooth it was, took another X-Ray to confirm, put me at ease, explained everything and applied the anaesthetic painlessly. A little later, as it didn’t seem to be taking, she put some more in. By this time my lip was fat and numb, my gums were devoid of feeling and there was even some dullness in my neck and cheekbones.

I was, it seemed, likely to have a numb face for four hours.

All was looking good. She took the crown off, poked around a bit, applied some pressure, and stopped as I raised my hand to indicate it was hurting. It wasn’t mild discomfort either, it hurt. She put more anaesthetic in, warned me my face was likely to be dead for around six hours, and tried again.

I was starting to lose feeling in my right ear and my eyelid.

I raised my hand. More needles, including a somewhat painful one that went into the tooth and root by the feel of it.

I gripped the chair arms, braced myself, sweated, trembled and was very relieved when she stopped.

“That’s hurting isn’t it?”

I can’t think how she came to that conclusion…

So she tried another type of anaesthetic and again hammered it home. The theory was that if it was uncomfortable it was going in the right place. The estimate of numbness went up to eight hours.

She grabbed the pliers, I grabbed the chair arms and resolved to be brave.

I didn’t exactly show myself up as a hero, but I’m happy to report that she broke before I did.

The problem was that I had an infection under the tooth and it wasn’t responding to the anaesthetic. Every time she pushed it was like she was ramming home a red-hot nail. In case you have never had an extraction, they push to break the grip of the roots before they pull.

Antibiotics – I could have done with these last week

I now have a gnarled stump of a tooth left, a box of antibiotics and another appointment – for the 15th January. I’m taking it philosophically though it’s hardly ideal.

There is a bonus, they have let me keep my gold crown, though it did need to go through the steriliser first. It’s been in my mouth for over 20 years without killing me, but once it’s out it seems that it becomes a health and safety issue.

That’s the featured image – my gold crown in a packet after being sterilised. I’m thinking that it might make a unique and personal charm for a charm bracelet. I mentioned it to Julia. I expect she might get used to the idea…

It’s not the best photo I’ve ever taken, but I’m not on top form right now.

The good news is that although the anaesthetic has worn off there is no real pain, just a bit of swelling and a slight ache. I’m hoping that this situation continues until the 15th.

Off to the Dentist

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The day has come, and I’m in the space only known to people with important appointments. It’s that gap of about an hour where it’s too soon to set off and there doesn’t seem enough time to do anything useful.

It’s the last day for second class post in the UK, and I have cards to send, but I can’t concentrate. There isn’t even time for a decent post.

I’ve been told to eat before going, which isn’t normally a problem, but today I don’t feel hungry.

Today I have a painful appointment with the dentist and come face to face with mortlity.

The wisdom tooth I had taken out twenty years ago was a routine thing, lots of people have that done.

The one I lost last year had been giving trouble for over 30 years and finally disintegrated under pressure from a Mint Imperial, so it worried me, but not too much.

Today I am losing an adult tooth to decay. Memories of my parents telling me to brush properly are coming back to haunt me. It’s neglect and old age and death rolled into one and I can feel one of my feet sinking into the grave.

I’m half expecting the dentist to wear a shroud and hack the tooth out with his scythe.

Ah well, time to go now…

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Life after the Care Farm