Here’s what happened today. First, having suffered stiffening joints for a few days, I fell asleep in a draught I just had to look that up. The spread of draft from America is making me doubt my own language.
I then woke up feeling like I was tied in a knot, went upstairs, realised I had left my phone downstairs (which also doubles as my alarm clock) and really didn’t feel like going back downstairs. So I didn’t. I just decided to wake up on time without a clock. After all, I wake up enough these days, how difficult can it be to wake up on time? With it being Saturday I can afford to get up a bit later and be a bit more flexible about time anyway.
It all went well to start with. I woke, as is normal, around 5.00 am. No, I haven’t suddenly developed industrious habits, I just have the bladder of an elderly man. As I generally sleep in two hour stints after my first waking, I was confident about waking on time. This is exactly what I did. At 7.20 my eyes clicked open, I checked my watch and gently creaked out of bed. That was the last thing that went right for some time.
With being stiff, everything seemed to take much longer than usual and it took me ages to get downstairs, which meant I was later than I wanted to be for work, which meant I couldn’t get a decent parking space . . .
Blah, blah, blah . . .
I had a number of interesting phone calls from people who had obviously given their carers the slip and gained access to a telephone. One was from a man who had just been reading a Jeffrey Archer novel. In it one of the plot points is that someone in the Royal Mint strikes some 2p bronze coins in silver. They are supposedly worth many thousands of Pounds and the man (and his wife, who joined the conversation halfway through) wanted to know how they would tell they had one and what did I know about them.
I know nothing about them apart from the fat they don’t exist. There are silver versions made in some years as a marketing exercise. There are a few known examples of 2p coins minted on cupro-nickel blanks where one has been left in the machine after making 10p coins. Some make just over £1,000 and some don’t make that. Ignore the reference to “mule” in the newspaper article, a mule is a coin struck using two dies from different coins. I don’t think we have a specific name for one struck in the wrong metal, we just call them error coins.
He wouldn’t believe me that they don’t exist, His wife chipped in then, saying that she’s seen them on Google. I couldn’t find one when I looked. Meanwhile The Owner is telling me to stop wasting time and put the phone down. It ended with the gentleman telling me that he didn’t think Archer would write something that wasn’t true and me telling him that it was a work of fiction written by a man who was jailed for perjury so I didn’t think it was necessarily reliable. The conversation ended with me suggesting he contact the Royal Mint. He liked that idea.
Header is a picture Julia took while she was in town earlier today. Her life is much more interesting than mine. No, we don’t know why it ws there.
These are trees near the Mencap Garden.