Monthly Archives: October 2022

In which my plans go mainly right . . .

I didn’t feel great this morning, so used it as an excuse not to go for my blood test. It was just a walk-in at the hospital, so I didn’t have a slot and that made it easier. Not much easier, as I still had a Covid vaccination booked for 8.30. Moving slowly, as I was, it was a little marginal, but I was in line for 8.25. The system has improved a lot since the first vaccinations, and I was in and out in ten minutes, though I did have to wait in the car for fifteen minutes. It seems you aren’t insured for fifteen minutes after a vaccination, This is something the insurance company never tells you.

Then it was off to Julia’s dental appointment. This was interesting, as they have a car park, which they share with the health centre. I have nothing to base this on, but looking at the cars, I would estimate that most of the car park was taken up by staff. This something to remember when relying on the parking for my appointment. Then it was time for a trip to the jeweller for some information (and a pair of geometric white gold ear rings) before going home.

Seaside postcard c 1950s

We had lunch then – nice healthy avocados with prawns and toast (and eggs in Julia’s case. I did a little editing and then went out to collect my prescription (which I had been told would be ready yesterday). Note the technique I use here – it is called “dramatic foreshadowing”. The plan, after that, was to fill the car up, as the fuel warning light went off yesterday.

So, there I was, standing in line at the pharmacy, when I was told they had just had it delivered and were packing it now. Thank goodness I hadn’t made a special trip yesterday. It took around 20 minutes, and I was able to see many more people being messed about, so at least I know it is general inefficiency, not just personally aimed at me.

That set me back a little, but even so, it was a bit early for rush hour when I started to queue on the main road. It was raining slightly too, and there seemed to be a competition for the World’s Worst Driver going on. They seem to have had, based on what I see, several heats this week, followed by today, which, I hope, was the Grand Final. I hope so, because I’m not sure I can keep dodging idiots as they hurl themselves at me.

The tank of fuel was £8 cheaper than it had been last time I filled up from empty. However, it was also about the cost of filling up my old Ford Escort in the late 70s. How times change.

There had been two sets of roadworks on the way, so I decided to take a different way back (I am recovering the navigational skills I seem to have lost during lockdown). The new route avoided the major queues but still took me back through two more sets of roadworks. You wonder what degree of planning goes into this. I’m sure with another couple of strategically placed temporary traffic lights hey could have brought traffic to a complete standstill.

That was the end of my day. We had ginger biscuits, followed by TV then cauliflower cheese, broccoli, sprouts and potato wedges followed by more TV.

All in all, a frustrating day, but I ma vaccinated, Julia is well on the way to completion of her treatment, I have pills and I have fuel to last for the erst of the month (we don’t drive far these days).

On the negative side, fuel is expensive, the queues were irksome, the pharmacist inefficient (surprise!) and my arm is just starting to ache a little bit at the site of the vaccination.

Seaside postcard c 1960s

Today I am using seaside postcards to lighten the mood, though they don’t seem as funny now as they did in the 1960s. This is a bowdlerised seelction, as some of the others are definitely unsuitable for the blog.

A Day to Remember

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My first blogging task today was to answer comments and the second was to add a note to yesterday’s blog as I was tired when I wrote is and didn’t explain something properly.

Unlike life you can actually go back a day and improve it. If only you could do that in reality. It’s something I have often thought about, and have blogged about a few times. My main conclusions are that I wouldn’t want to be a teenager again (too painful) and I wouldn’t want to do anything that would risk me not meeting Julia. On a more practical note, I wouldn’t want to live in a time before antibiotics and anaesthetics either.

I’m having a blood test tomorrow, then a Covid booster (booked on the computer this morning) and am then taking Julia to the dentist They rang her today and told her they had a cancellation. This means her treatment will progress faster, but also means she will have to visit the dentist. It’s one of those things – everyone wants to avoid painful teeth but nobody wants to visit the dentist. I’m not exactly antsy with anticipation.

Bee Mural – Stoke

We had an interesting find in a collection of postal covers today – two of them were signed. The owner wandered through from the front of the shop and asked “Do you know who Millvina Dean was?”

The name sounded familiar, and I drilled deep into my accumulated memories of 30 years as an antique dealer before finding the answer. Millvina Dean was the youngest passenger to be rescued from the Titanic, at the age of two months. I’m not sure if the others were impressed by my depth of knowledge, but as a man who has trouble remembering what I did yesterday, I was impressed I could remember something like that. They aren’t hugely valuable because she lived to be over 90 and signed a lot of stuff as interest in the Titanic grew.

No, I can’t understand it either. It was a ship, it sank. It doesn’t require the same level of effort as climbing a mountain or discovering the source of the Nile. It’s strange what we hold on to from history.

If you want to read something interesting about Titanic survivors, try this link. I find it very interesting, and there’s a good chance you might too. I won’t tell you anything about it, as it might spoil the surprise.

Pictures are off the canal side murals we saw at Stoke last week.

Bee and other things – Stoke

Interesting Times

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We had a good talk at the Numismatic Society tonight. The subject was FAO coins and the 57 slides passed swiftly, taking just 45 minutes. That’s what I like about a talk – informative and short. One of the other members then spent five minutes checking that his PowerPoint would run on the technology we have available. It does. He is due to give his talk in January. I’m due to give mine in February and I haven’t even started. It is a slight worry, but there is plenty of time. I will, of course, still be saying that a week before the talk.

Sorry, I was tired when I wrote this post and forgot to add information about FAO coins. They are a series of over a thousand coins (1,214 according to one article) released under a programme directed by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN. The idea was to raise funds and awareness by the use of coins. It originally started with stamps but the organisers soon realised that many of the poorer areas of the world were more likely to see a small denomination coin than they were to see an organised postal service.

One of my headlights has blown in the car. That’s not so bad at the moment, but will need replacing before I drive in the dark again. I still have plenty of light, and it’s still light when I drive home at the moment. However, as winter draws on, this won’t always be the case.

A detail from the barge

On my return from the meeting I found a wonderful meal of sausages, roasted veg and gravy was in the oven and nearly ready to serve. I had taken no chances tonight, as Julia often loses herself in preparing for tomorrow. The vegetables were all a little faulty (woody parsnips, tiny carrots and a rather bulbous leek) which I attribute to the general malaise affecting farming and the supply chain since Brexit and Covid combined to bring us down.

Readers in fifty years will probably be appalled that we didn’t have everlasting lights and radar, but particularly that we had to drive ourselves.. Give it a few more years and we will all be travelling in driverless cars. Not a prospect I welcome.

Pictures are details from the wharf at the pottery.

How to manage a rope

I just deleted this post, but managed to get it back. maybe I’m starting to get the hang of this stuff.

Sunday (Part 2)

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For Part 1, see here.

I’m currently washing my mouth out with salt water. I was once advised to do this by a dentist and try to remember to do it every so often as a precautionary measure. As I have an appointment at my new dentist in a couple of weeks, I thought this might be a good time to do it. Ideally I should have thought more about my teeth fifty years ago, but that’s just how life is.

Old Factory Sign – Middleport Pottery

I have to do this late at night after Julia has gone to bed as the time taken swilling a mugful or brine one mouthful at a time, accompanied by sucking and swooshing noises, tests her fortitude and patience to the limit. I did write a haibun about it once but, strangely, nobody wanted to print it.

A wet day in Stoke

In an attempt to improve our budget and diet I have been looking at a low carb cook book. It features a lot of soups and salads but not a lot in the way of actual food. Salad is OK in summer, and in moderation, but it’s not going to hit the spot in October. So it’s roasted veg and sausages tomorrow and some hard thinking tomorrow night as I try to come up with something cheap, healthy and inspired. I’d settle for two of them to be honest. Over the last six months we have gradually lost the plot and we need to get back to good habits. That’s another area where we improved in lockdown.

I always thought these wee cobbles, but it seems they may be setts. Whatever they are, they aren’t good when you use a stick.

Julia walked down to the shop fro a few items this afternoon (we are giving it a few more days before doing a major shop) and reports a lot of space on the shelves. We note that expensive Free Range eggs are still available, but the cheaper, cage produced eggs are not. Could it be that people on budgets are deserting Free Range for cost effective eggs or are the supermarkets just going for eggs with the best profit margins? One thing I do know is that it’s not because farmers have switched their chickens off – you can’t do that.

Narrowboat, canal and winch and rain. Our industrial past.

Pictures are taken at the Middleport Pottery.

Danger of Tedium . . .

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Sorry, another day and another late night slump in front of TV. Julia woke me to tell me she was going to bed and I fell asleep again. I awoke with a head full of peculiar dreams (I’d obviously being listening to TV as I slept) and found the remote on the floor, where it had obviously dropped when I drifted off.

You didn’t miss much, as it was a truly boring day. The man with the “13 gold guineas” didn’t turn up, but we had always suspected that might be the case. A dealer did turn up with a load of junk, which is always interesting as some of it was quite interesting – one man’s trash being another man’s treasure as they always say. Silver has gone up so he wanted to cash in his lower grade coins and he also had various bits he’d bought in auction which are not his normal type of stock. The other two enjoyed themselves with that and I ended up with the task of writing up empty display cases for eBay. They are easy enough, but not very interesting.

Today (Sunday) has mostly consisted of bacon croissants, ginger biscuits and going through old emails. I lost my list of submissions when the computer failed, and I need to get it back together for future use. If I want to reprint anything (I’m still ambivalent about putting a book together) I will need all the details of first publication. A trawl through the emails has netted me 22 haiku (which was a surprise, as I thought it was only about a dozen) and 20 tanka. I have not been writing tanka very long, but am obviously better at them than I am at haiku. I know there are a few tanka missing from that total and I think I know where to track them down, so suspect that the amended figure might see tanka outstripping haiku.

And suddenly, from telling you that I had a boring day on Saturday, I start telling you I spent Sunday making lists. Sorry about that – let’s hope Part 2 is more interesting.

Gold!

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Is it really that time already? Friday night, another week over and time to make the sandwiches for tomorrow. It’s tuna tomorrow. More healthy fish.

We packed up a little early so the owner could get home and do some computer bidding on the Ellerby hoard. You may have seen the news report that was on the news. Julia has just been through to tell me it has been on. Here is a copy of the sale catalogue. It was a pot of gold coins from merchant family that had lived in a house in the eighteenth century – they came to light a few years ago during renovations of the kitchen floor.

We have “14 gold guineas” coming into the shop tomorrow. if you read the Ellerby story the expert from Spinks refers to his expectation that the hoard was going to be brass tokens. I’m sure that’s what ours are going to be. A number of retailers in Victorian times made tokens that looked like old guineas and we often get them brought in as gold. We will just have to see.

There was a cloud burst of surprising violence this afternoon, though they always sound like that when you work under a flat roof. It was about as bad as the one that soaked us yesterday. This seems to be the motif of the moment. Consequently there were lots of leaves in the gutters on the way home, and lots of pedestrians being soaked by passing cars. I was careful and didn’t splash anyone, so my conscience is clear. I had to laugh at one lot. They were using our forecourt and blocking our exit when we left the shop. As they sorted themselves out a car went past on the main road, hit some standing water and soaked them. It wouldn’t have happened if they had not been badly parked and I’m afraid I did let out a small triumphal “Yesssss!” as it happened.

The Haibun Journal arrived today. I’m not in it, so I had to try not to be too critical as I went through it. It is, as usual, very good, and my writing hasn’t been up to scratch recently, so I can’t complain. However, it is starting to get like a few other journals – same group of writers, same trend towards snappy verse. One of the problems is that the editor is a great writer of haibun but he never uses his own work. This is in contrast to American journals where editors and volunteer helpers always get one of their pieces included automatically. This was a surprise to me when I first saw it, and still seems strangely immodest.

One Third Guinea George III

The header picture is a George I coin, but I’m not sure now if it is a Guinea or a half or quarter Guinea. A Guinea is 21 shillings, or £1.05. It was supposed to be a con of 20s but the gold from west Africa was purer than other sources, and the gold value fluctuated, so the coin’s value was varied but was eventually fixed at 21s. Race horses are still auctioned in Guineas.

An Extra Post

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This is the post I should have written yesterday, but I had to write one to catch up on the previous day and then I drifted off to do other things.

In the afternoon I rang a dentist to sign up for treatment on the National Health Service. It’s getting harder to find dentists who do NHS work. I could do a couple of paragraphs on the evils of dentists here, as it’s a subject I feel strongly about. It probably stems from the days of my youth when i had a dentist who had the bedside manner of an undertaker, the tool wielding dexterity of a stonemason and a waiting room that reminded me of a crypt. I’d better be careful what I say about him as it is quite likely that he lacks the capacity to die like a normal man and if I upset him he may reappear in my dreams. It’s a whole new Horror Franchise – The Dentist. The film posters will feature an open mouth of carious fangs with various unspeakable scenes within and the films will be blamed for putting children off dentists for generations. Doesn’t bother me – if I make enough money out of the idea I’ll be able to go private.

So, dentists. Highly paid health professionals who, over the years, have benefitted from the NHS but want to opt out and coin it when they see an opening. I know we have a laugh about never seeing a farmer on a bike, but I’ve never met a dentist who didn’t send his kids to private school.

I know someone who has a private dentist and he is just paying a touch over £500 to have three fillings. As I recall, the NHS charge is just over £60.

I could go on, but I’ve hit my target and I don’t want to give anyone nightmares . . .

Meanwhile, have a look at these.

A Trip to Stoke on Trent

The Missing Day

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Sorry, I missed a day yesterday. It started badly when we arrived at our planned breakfast stop to find it shut, though the website said it was open. Then we got caught in a cloudburst, couldn’t find a suitable replacement and eventually ended up in Stoke on Trent late, wet and(in my case) extremely grumpy.

Apart from that it was a good day, as these things go. All the small potteries and backstreet shops have gone now and they have been replaced by well lit shops staffed by loud and smiling women. They are not my sort of place, and judging by the price tags, they are not the sort of place where you will find a bargain either. I do not know how people can seriously contemplate buying a circle of glazed clay for some of the prices on display when all you are going to do is cover it with gravy, saw away with a knife and then drop it in a bowl of water with a load of other stuff. In one shop, the cheapest we could find was £9 a plate, and they were seconds!

The strap line for one link to pottery at the Portmerion Seconds Shop actually says “Our Usual Quality At Lower Prices. Shop Unique Pottery Pieces Today!” You probably know what is coming next. How can it be usual quality when it is a second? Unless their usual quality is second grade. But then, it would be their usual quality and it wouldn’t be in a seconds shop. Somebody in the advert department is obviously fluent in Gobbledygook rather than English. And as for the “unique” pieces . . . Unique has one meaning in the dictionary. A unique meaning, in fact. It means there is only one of them. I’d stretch a point to allow them to mean there was only one example in the shop. But there wasn’t. There were dozens, even hundreds of everything. Unique doesn’t mean, rare or unusual or, as in this case, well lit and expensive. It means there is just one. If there are two of them it isn’t unique.

I’m becoming curmudgeonly, so I will stop.

The header picture is from one of our previous visits, as is the bottom one. I did take some others yesterday but will use them later. Stoke has always had an element of decay about it, which has been part of the charm over the years, but this is all disappearing as developers build more and more homes and retail parks.

When we got home I slept, ate and slept again before going to bed. With the addition of a few slivers of TV in my waking moments that was all I did.

Derelict factory in Stoke

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

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You may remember that a week ago I wrote about taking Julia to help at the Robin Hood Marathon, getting caught in the appalling traffic system by the Railway Station and waiting in anticipation for a ticket for using a bus lane. This morning I finally breathed a sigh of relief as the normal three or four day wait has passed. That saved me £35. (It’s not that I make a habit of contravening the regulations regarding bus lanes, but the council actually make it very hard to get round the city without occasionally crossing the line). Literally crossing the line in the case of bus lanes.

However, in my jubilation I forgot one thing – standards are slipping in all areas of life and Nottingham City Council bus lane enforcement is no exception – it took a whole week for the letter to arrive, but arrive, it did.

In a way it was a relief to open it as it looked very like a letter from the NHS from the outside, and, on balance, I’d rather have a £35 fine than one of the procedures that seem to be the fate of an elderly man in the hands of the NHS.

I could be heroic about this. I could prepare a dossier in my defence, demonstrate the evils of the traffic system and submit is with photographs and high flown prose defending my position and seeking to have the ticket set aside. However, I’ve attempted this before and it never works. Basically they don’t need to do anything, they just say no and tell you that you will have to go to court if you insist of defending yourself.

There are a number of things I can do. I could, for instance, kidnap the Sheriff of Nottingham (yes, we really do have one) and hold him for ransom until they pay me £70, halved to £35 if they pay it within 21 days.

Or I could send a bill to the Robin Hood Marathon, as it was their fault. If Julia hadn’t volunteered, and if they hadn’t closed the roads I would have been enjoying my breakfast at 7.42 am, not getting a ticket.

The possibilities for mischief are endless . . .

Picture for the day is more of the school shed. I want a shed like that when I retire.

Codger or Curmudgeon?

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Came home, read and answered comments, watched quizzes on TV, at tea off my lap (which is a habit I keep meaning to break), was shouted at for snoring, read some blogs and now, have settled down to rite my nightly slice of life.

I have just over eighteen months until I retire. It is now becoming real. Julia has a couple of years longer so I may carry on for a little while after that. It is alarmingly close when I think of the work that needs doing on this house to make it look good enough to sell. Then there is finding another place and actually moving. It’s a long time since I last moved. I borrowed a truck from work, got a few friends together and moved a load of books and secondhand furniture 65 miles. It’s going to be a bigger job this time, and I can’t do my own lifting.

It’s time for a decision over what sort of retire I want to be. Do I want to be a genial old codger, or a miserable old curmudgeon? I think we already know the answer to that, so there’s no point wasting time on it.

A friend of mine once suggested that life in a hotel would be an ideal retirement lifestyle – no gardening, no decorating and regular meals. The problem, of course, is cost. And sharing with other people. And having nowhere to put a shed. I’d like a shed in retirement. It would be quite nice to live in a place in a city where you could have a roof garden and have a shed that looked out over a vast display of life. I think I may have left the arrangements a bit late for that. In my next life I will pay more attention to material things and spend less time daydreaming when I should be establishing a property empire. However, for now I’ll settle for a shed.

quercuscommunity

Life after the Care Farm