Monthly Archives: February 2023

Butlins Veleta Competition Medallion 1954

Saturday Stretches Ahead

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I fell asleep after Julia went to bed last night and woke at half past midnight. That is quite early for me, but I decided I need to become more regular in my habits so I went to bed. As usual, I had only a moderate night, but have woken feeling quite  good so am starting as I mean to go on.

After blogging I will make breakfast, make sandwiches and go to work, where I will endeavour to be hard-working, cheerful and polite. It can be a bit of a struggle at times but I will make the effort.

We have a problem with a customer . . .

How many times have you heard that? He wrote claiming he hasn’t had his coins delivered. This isn’t unusual, as Royal mail is, according to rumour, two months behind with deliveries. The difference in this case is that w have no record of his order. We wrote and told him this – it is not the first time people have become confused. He wrote back, being borderline impolite, repeating that he had ordered from us. In the wait for the reply we had actually7 found out what had happened – he had ordered using a different name. It seems that we don’t just sell coins, we have to be mind readers too. Time is money, as they say, and even if the package turns up today it’s hard to make a profit on a £7 coin sale when you have just spent £5 worth of time sorting out the stupidity of a customer.

Sorry if this falls short of “the customer is always right” but that doesn’t apply where the customer changes eBay names in the middle of a sale.

This may be the first of several posts today, as I will be working on my medallion presentation after work and will need something to help me waste even more time. Sixty hours to go, if my mental arithmetic is correct.

Planned Obsolescence or Rip Off?

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When I arrived at work this morning the alarm wasn’t set. We had trouble setting it a couple of days ago, and two weeks ago we had to leave it off all night as it wouldn’t set. Once is Ok, but when it starts happening like this you need to get it fixed, even if the call out is £75., and even if it was serviced just a couple of months ago.

I upset the technician who came to service it when he asked to borrow a brush – I told him at the price he was costing he should have his own brush (What’s it going to cost? £1.50?) He muttered something, so I pointed out that when I have my car serviced I don’t have to take a bag of spanners to the garage with me.

The man who called this morning blinded us with scientific gobbledygook about timing, and how we may be slower now than when it was originally set up. This is clearly tosh, as both my workmate and the boss, don’t hang about when it comes to closing up. I’m getting slower but don’t have any problems – apart from senior moments and forgetting the code.

Dwarf Iris

He then looked at the hard drive on the camera system. We had been leaving that as it didn’t seem like value for money just to call someone out to fix one thing. First he switched it off and switched it on again. Oh yes, £75 and that’s what you get. Then he told us that it had died and we needed a new one. We’ve only had it about four years and all it does is sit there and record on a continuing basis. It seems like we’ve fallen victim to a carefully managed scheme to milk us of our hard-earned profits. Or Planned Obsolescence, if you prefer a term that doesn’t accuse big business of ripping us off. Although I’m not sure why you would want a term that doesn’t big business of ripping us off, because that is what is happening. What with annual fees,call out charges, servicing and shoddy parts it would be cheaper to have a team of warrior monks on constant call to defend our property, while teams of their more peaceful brethren record our daily doings on vellum.

It turns out that the average hard disc drive lasts 3-4 years. You can see that space travel is going to be a problem. It’s OK nipping across to Mars, about seven years, but a quick jaunt to Proxima Centauri b is going to take 75,000 years, and I’m not sure how you are going to launch a space ship big enough to contain all those replacement disc drives. That’s an aspect of interstellar travel they never seem to discuss.

Lesser Celandine

Thoughts on Cake . . .

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The day is ending. It is nearly 7pm, darkness has closed in and it is feeling decidedly chilly.

It has not been a day of inspiration for poetry, or for my talk on medallions, nor has it been a day of industry. I would happily have swapped industry for inspiration, but neither happened. However, our plan did work out – we decided to stay in and keep warm today and that was exactly what I did. I even did a few slides for the talk, though it was far from the amount I envisaged.

Luckily, with my new Kindle to hand, I was able to do some reading so it wasn’t a complete waste. In the book, the police are gradually closing in on a murderer in North Lincolnshire, a place I know well, and which has featured in this blog a number of times. My blogs have mainly been about seabirds, fish and chips and public conveniences, so have failed to create the interest that a crime novel would.

It has also been a day for catching up on reading other blogs. I haven’t caught up as much as I would like to, but have managed a few. If one wasn’t you, don’t feel left out, I will be round in a day or two. It’s partly a case of getting back in the habit. That, of course, can be said for many things.

I’ve spent a little time today thinking about toxic workmates and how to deal with them. The truth is that you can’t do much about them. To be fair they probably don’t realise how they are seen by everyone else, and they don’t realise that they make everything unpleasant. It should be the best job in the world, working in a collectors’ shop, so it’s quite an achievement to suck all the fun out of it.

I did try to see if I could turn it into an article, or even a book, but keep coming up against the problem that most of the people writing about the problem suggest the best solution is to leave the job. Twenty years ago, even ten years ago, I would have done this, but there’s little chance of finding another job if I do that, and I don’t want to do anything that will cut into my retirement savings.

Fortunately, I’m not given to brooding and have plenty to occupy my time. I’m sure the time between now and retirement is going to go far too fast without me wishing it away so will get on with planning my medallion talk instead of dwelling on toxicity in the workplace.

I’m going to think of cake.

Sticky Toffee Cake

Boasting, Bragging and Blowing My Own Trumpet

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You’ve read the title, so brace yourself for a lack of modesty and some tasteless self-promotion.

Normally I wouldn’t warn people, but having recently seen that the University of Greenwich is issuing warnings to students about the disturbing content of jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, I felt I’d better follow the trend. I’ve never actually read Northanger Abbey, though I was traumatised by previous attempts to read Austen. Her books are just so dull when compared to the films and TV series. However, if I had read it, I doubt I would be distressed by the “gender stereotyping” I encountered. If they find that distressing how are they going to cope with Orwell, Hemingway and H P Lovecraft? Or even Beatrix Potter, Winnie the Pooh and the Mr Men, who all cover some hardcore issues compared to jane Austen and gender stereotyping? If they need a warning about the horror of reading jane Austen, what about Shakespeare? Yes, Titus Andronicus, I’m thinking about you . . .

Love Locks at Bakewell

You see more gender stereotyping on reality TV than you do in a classic novel, and so far, unfortunately, nobody has thought to issue a warning about Love Island. I was going to add a link here, but have decided against advertising it.

Anyway, back to my warning.

I had another acceptance. That’s three from the seven I sent out. Allowing for the fact that three are competition entries (where I expect to wait months to find I wasn’t shortlisted) it’s really three from four. I’m happy with that.

That’s the warm-up bragging.

Peak Shopping Village

The other comes in the form of Contemporary Haibun 18, which is an annual anthology. Entries are sent in by the editors of magazines and poems are selected for inclusion. The goal, according to the Forward, is to present “some of the finest haibun, tanka prose and haiga created over the past year”.

Right at the back of the book, lurking in the “W” section, is one of mine. I know it’s not a mistake, because they wrote and asked. Waiting for the book to be published I was quietly smug, and when it actually arrived today I was, for a moment, very pleased with myself. However, it’s important to note that there are 91 other writers in there, and 24 of them have multiple entries, so I am going to show off now by telling everyone, and then I’m going to start making notes for new poetry.

That’s the problem with things like this – you have to keep working harder and harder to make sure the feeling of happiness continues.

An attempt at artistry

A Pointless Prompt

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Today’s unwelcome writing prompt is timely, bearing in mind my last post. How does death change your perspective?

Well, for one thing, I’d stop buying lottery tickets, and there would be no point in worrying about air quality because I wouldn’t be breathing the stuff anymore. What sort of question is that?

I stopped ironing years ago, as it’s pointless at the best of times, and definitely over the top on the undead. I mean, how many times have you turned on a classic zombie movie (Night of the Living Dead or Cockneys versus Zombies to name but two) to hear someone complain about the rumpled state of the zombie hordes?

Meanwhile, moving back to other matters, I’ve had several culinary mishaps today. A new bottle of ketchup, when opened, proved to have a very tricky action. Squeeze and nothing happens, squeeze a little harder and so much comes out at such speed that you end up comprehensively splattered. Add that to the cream I spilled and the yoghurt drink that misbehaved and it’s clear that if you boiled my jumper in a little water you could produce a passable tomato soup.

You would think that after so many years of producing nozzles for squeezable sauce bottles they would have got it right, but it seems not. You press, nothing happens. You press again, maybe a little less carefully, and nothing happens. Another press, and even though it’s done gingerly, as the conclusion is obvious to all lovers of slapstick, there is a sudden splurge, which ends with too much sauce being dispensed.

The surplus goes anywhere except the intended target, including the front of my jumper and up my sleeve. Even the stuff that goes where it is aimed, is travelling so fast that you can feel the splashback.

The cream merely splashed me as I knocked it off the bottom shelf of the fridge, and the

yoghurt drink missed my mouth in a moment of carelessness. Generally this would have stuck in my beard, but today it run straight over the beard and ended upon my jumper. It is like life hates me today.

Mute Swans at Budby Flash

We all have Two Deaths

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I just had a comment on an old post from 2017. It was about a visit I made to a childhood haunt and two brothers that drowned there. Since then I have had two comments from people who also knew them, one of whom I also knew.

This got me thinking about the old saying about us all dying twice, once when we stop breathing and  once when people forget us. It’s slightly more complex than that, as mot people die for the second time when the last person who knew them dies.

Others, such as Marilyn Monroe (to pick one at random) will not die as long as films are shown and Hollywood legends persist. Nor, you hope, will Shakespeare. What of Newton and Einstein? They are well known and legendary, but do we really know them in the same way we know an actor or a playwright?

And how about the bloggers? Laurie will be about for a while because of her books. The rest of us, I feel, are slightly less immortal, though we are likely to persist longer than non-bloggers, though only as pixelated phantoms, until Microsoft withdraws support from the internet and relaunches it as  a pay-per-view service on its latest “new and improved” (sic) version of whatever it is working on at the time. They may, by this time, be pushing for the beatification of Bill Gates, though my enthusiasm for making him eternal ends at contributing to a project to have him stuffed and mounted.

So, what do you think about immortality.

Or having Bill Gates stuffed? He could join Lenin and Jeremy Bentham as part of a triumvirate of strange funereal practices.

 

I chose swans because the post on Orton Mere used a swan picture (the one at the bottom of this post, to be precise, and because of the connotation of “swan song”.

 

Butlins Veleta Competition Medallion 1954

No Time . . .

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Sorry, I’ve become unreliable again. I’m having to devote too much energy to  problems in real life (as opposed to the bowdlerised version I present in the blog). One, which I can discuss now, is sciatica. Some heat, some stretching and some attention to my seating arrangements have improved it after two weeks of problems and I’m happy that I’m on the way to recovery.

The other is annoying, frustrating, but essentially trivial matter at work, which has been annoying me, and preventing me from concentrating, for the last few days. This is something and nothing, and the annoyance at being unable to shake it off is actually greater than the annoyance at the situation. However, that’s work, and has no place in my blog apart from a passing comment.

Sometimes, like when I had two boundary disputes with neighbours and a collapsing chimney stack, you just have to work through them carefully and persistently. In the end, all three problems were resolved and though one of the neighbours was annoyed with me, nothing bad happened. The one who was annoyed really had no reason for it – I won’t go over the details as it still irritates me.

This morning I got a new acceptance, so that’s good. Three of last months submissions were competitions, so I won’t get any sort of answer for months yet, probably never, as they disappear into the black hole that is the fate of most competition entries. Of the other four I now have two acceptances and am waiting for two. It compensates fro my other problems in some way – I’m still in pain and I’m still annoyed, but at least I am also grinning while all that is happening.

My current energy is devoted to catching up on reading blogs (with limited success I’m afraid), reading Laurie’s latest book  (I’m only two months late) and thinking about starting the presentation on medallions. That’s about ten days away and I really must start.

In fact I will go and start now . . .

Adventures with a Keyboard

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It is done. It is not done well, but by the end I was just concentrating on the clock. My 7th submission departed my email box at 11.45pm, a full fifteen minutes before the deadline. The eighth, I had already mentally abandoned.

I have learnt some useful lessons about writing in the last few weeks, so it hasn’t been the chaotic waste it may look like from the outside. I’ve also learnt about time management. Or possibly I have relearnt that, as I tend to make the same mistake over and over – not allowing enough time, and always over-estimating my ability to work at high speed as the deadline approaches.

Turning on my email this morning I found I had already had one acceptance – an editor with superpowers. How can anyone work that fast? Also, of course, an editor with exquisite taste.

In my haste, Iet a typo slip through in the accepted tanka prose. This is embarrassing and amateurish. Unfortunately, in missing off the “t” from “the” I still made the word “he” and my lazy reliance on spellcheckers let me down.

Even worse, I woke this morning and remembered that one of the other submissions went off with a single word descriptive title title. You are supposed to be more complicated when submitting tanka prose and haibun. Unfortunately, I tend to start with a title that helps me find it when it’s mixed up with forty or fifty other poems. It’s something I’ve done before when I’ve been rushing. If the poem is good I will probably be asked to do a new title. If it isn’t, I will be able to come up with a new one as part of the edit. I’ve just thought of a good one whilst writing this.

Blood test now. See you later.

My Orange Parker Pen