Monthly Archives: February 2024

Coins, Coins, Coins

Gibraltar £20 Coin 2016 – made from salvaged silver

Slightly warmer and slightly drier today. My arthritis attack, which I don’t think I’ve mentioned so far, is subsiding. The swelling has subsided, the pain is much reduced and I have most of the normal function back in my hands, though tucking my shirt in still needs concentration.

I didn’t avoid mentioning it because I am stoic and brave, I avoided mentioning it because I am stupid. I’d avoided injecting myself for a while as it’s painful and you can get way with missing few doses. But if you miss a dose of tablets, which I did when I lost the last dose in last month’s cycle, things can get tricky. Yes, it was a self induced attack, not helped by the doctor’s system failing and taking an extra week to reorder.

Coin of Cabinda

It’s over now. I can confess. I’m on the way back to health and am grateful, once more, for the drugs. The cold and damp haven’t helped. They tell me it’s just a myth that cold and damp make arthritis worse. That might be true. It might just be that cold and damp makes everything worse.

We sold some decent coins today, and bought more junk. Fortunately we manged to sell some of the lower level stock on eBay. It’s nice and decorative, but it’s not quality coins. As we normally charge half price or less compared to the marketing companies, often just a quarter, we are providing great value. However, we don’t have to pay for massive advertising campaigns or pay large wages to marketing directors and people like that.

There is a quality coin sale on in London soon – a hoard of coins detected in Essex and thought to have been buried in 1066. There is some speculation about the owner burying the pennies and then being killed in the battle. But why would a soldier decide to hide his pennies in Essex and then march off to fight at Hastings, one hundred and five miles away? More likely it was a Saxon householder (though a rich one, as 122 pennies was a considerable amount of wealth in those days). Unfortunately the press do love an inaccurate, though poignant story.

And that is a brief account of events on Saturday. All in all it was a good day.

Then we mixed the left-overs from two meals and had corned beef hash and veggie stew and dumplings, to which Julia added a rack of sticky ribs. Yes, ribs twice in a week. This comes close to the lifestyle I would adopt if I won the lottery.

Dylan Thomas £5 coin Alderney

Tch! Forgot the title. Added it later so it may be OK.

Still No Snow

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It looks like we’ve dodged it for the time being. It isn’t even raining at the moment, though it is grey, damp and cold. No, not as cold as those of you who live in Canada and the northern US, or many other places. I watch Aussie Gold Hunters and am constantly amazed at the amount of snow I see on that. Actually, I’m amazed to see any. Australia in my mind is a desert surrounded by beaches. It’s beyond me why anyone would live in a bit where it snows. If it happened to me I would load up the car and drive somewhere warmer.

The main anecdote of the day. A mother and son with limited English entered the shop. It got off to a bad start because we were (a) busy and (b) working to a deadline. They didn’t have an appointment and they left the front door open.

Silver Britannia coin

Then they took a load of rammel out of a bag and heaped it up on the counter, wanting us to bid on it. Even from several yards away I could tell that the cameo was plastic – shells don’t come in bright red – and plastic is not usually mounted in gold. The ones in the link are exceptional – a normal average cameo brooch is more like £75 – £100. Sometimes, though, it’s nice to look at a bit of quality.

They actually had nothing we wanted to buy, a most of it was either base metal, fake or very low value. Eventually the mother pulled her ear ring out – it had a coin mounted on it and was bent and worn. It was probably also a jeweller’s copy and they are generally 9 carat gold copies of 22 carat originals. It definitely wasn’t a collectable coin.

I suppose I should have admired their enterprise, but instead I felt resentful that they stole half an hour from us. It’s probably time I retired . . .

Silver Britannia coin

No Snow

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We missed the snow today. We had a little sleet and the erst of the day was taken up with cold rain. They had snow in Mansfield and Derby – about 15 or 20 miles away but we seem to have been on the other side of an imaginary line.

Having finished the first three books in Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time I have paused. For one thing, I can do with a break. It’s never healthy to read too much of one thing too quickly as it can become too much. The other is that the Kindle version of the next three volumes costs £9.99. I am resistant to paying £10 for what is essentially a non-existent book. It’s just a licence to read a book and I don’t see that as being equivalent in value to owning a book. I can see why some writers price their books at the same level as the print copies – they are trying to earn a living or cover costs, but Powell, has long ceased to need to earn a living and I suspect his costs were covered long ago.

I have moved on to the Mrs Pargeter books of Simon Brett. I bought one a few days ago, as it provides good light relief from Powell and tonight I bought a box set – eight volumes for 99p. I’ve read quite few of his books and he’s a reliable writer of traditional whodunnits. These are much more my level of literature and though I’ve enjoyed Powell, I’m enjoying the break. Eventually I will make myself spend the money, one the next volume of Powell, but I will check in future before embarking on any major reading projects. Prices do have a regrettable habit of rising for the second volume of a set.

Apart from that – sleep in front of TV, vegetable stew, not much else to report.

Header picture is a Gadwall. One of my recent acceptances was a haibun about Gadwall. They are a quiet and unassuming duck, but very pretty in a grey sort of way. Other, flashier, ducks are available.

Mandarin Drake – Arnot Hill Park

Wednesday? Already?

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Another outing for this photo

Somehow, I missed Tuesday. It wasn’t much of a day and we had rain falling audibly on the flat roof above us as we worked.

The only good thing was that when I switched on my emails to check them before going to bed, was that I have had another acceptance.

It my look, to someone just reading the blog for the first time, as if my life is one long acceptance, but this isn’t the case. Due to the erratic nature of my submissions I hadn’t submitted anything since October. My October submissions produced one acceptance and two rejections. It ws a poor month, everything considered, but sometimes there are months where nobody is open for submissions. I appear to have made twelve submissions in September, but they were better spread than my efforts in January and I didn’t notice them.

I have noticed that editors tend to select the first haibun or tanka prose from the selection when I submit the required three. This might be because I naturally order them from bad to worse. It’s definitely true that the third is often not as good as the others. Then I looked again. My last six successful submissions all resulted in the first one being picked. However, I then had a run of six where the first was only picked once, so I may be wrong.

This is known as clutching at straws. Tuesday produced little to write about and Wednesday has been little better (a blood test and a Shingles booster vaccination) so I’ve written about submissions.

Snowy Detail

The alternative was to tell you about my nosebleed (I’m currently typing with a piece of kitchen roll shoved up one nostril) but I thought a couple of hundred words on submissions might be less disturbing than the word picture of a gory keyboard warrior and the resulting discussion. So I won’t discuss it.

No photographs on this one because WP seems to have stopped working. I can select photos but the button to load them seems to have stopped working. This applies to headers and photos in the text.

I suspect interference from foreign governments. I’m having problems with eBay photos at work too. It’s state-sponsored hackers. Has to be. I mean, WP and eBay never have problems . . .

Magpie in the snow

There is a warning out for snow tomorrow, though it is hedged round with provisos. It may not actually arrive. Or it may be sleet. None of the scenarios engages my enthusiasm. Even if there is no snow I won’t feel happy until it’s Friday and there is definitely no snow.

Yes, later in the evening I was able to add photos.

Getting Used to my New Mondays

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I forgot to add photos to the last one. Sorry about that. It’s been that sort of day. I probably won’t do it now.

I read a book on how to be more productive in my writing yesterday. I then read another about how successful writers organise themselves. Modern ones seem to have computers that aren’t linked to the internet. Having spent the early part of the morning sleeping and the later part on the internet, I started cooking. Then Julia came home.

So far, writing hasn’t figured in my day to any great extent. You can read a book about something but it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. Take decluttering for example. That’s not going well. It’s not even going well enough to be described as “going badly”. It’s just, in truth, not going at all.

There are quizzes on tonight, so I won’t lie about all the effort that will be made tonight. I will go and watch TV with Julia now and relax. On Tuesday I will start my self-improvement campaign.

Coming back to this post, I have to admit that I slept through the end of Only Connect and the beginning of University Challenge. I will use the I-Player to see University Challenge, but won’t bother about Only Connect.

When Julia came home she brought a rack of ribs in sauce and some large prawns in sweet and sour sauce. They were on offer at M&S. This is fine, but we now have the problem of fitting them into the menu plan. They are currently in the freezer. Then one of the neighbours rang and asked if we could use a beef and onion pie and some cauliflower cheese. So we ate that tonight (with some added sweetcorn) and will eat hash tomorrow, curry on Wednesday and Vegetable Stew on Thursday. Batch cooking is all very well, but it doesn’t sit well with random buying.

I hate to think how many calories and chemicals there are in the rib sauce, and can’t help thinking that my plan to eat mainly vegetarian, and mainly unprocessed food has gone astray. On the other hand I do like ribs in sticky sauce.

I heard a robin singing last week – spring is on the way, though we do have an Amber Snow Warning for next week.

More Good News and Some Trivia

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This is the Sunday post I prepared then forgot to load.

The news so far is that I had a tanka accepted on Saturday and a Haibun accepted tonight (by an editors who has been known to reject me, repeatedly, in the past). That is four acceptances from eleven submissions and I am feeling happy. Editors in Japanese style poetry are far more industrious than regular poetry editors, though I suspect that they aren’t hit by the same avalanche of hopeful poets. I’m still feeling slightly comatose after the efforts of getting all eleven submissions out, so sorry I haven’t been reading other blogs.

Talking of editors, one replied within the day and the other three averaged about four days. This is good, even by the standards of the genre. I expect they will all be in within two weeks, leaving just the two traditional magazines to reply. One will take a couple of months if they run to form and the other tells me that if I don’t hear from them after 12 weeks I can assume I have been rejected.

You can see why I am more enthusiastic about writing Japanese style poetry, can’t you?

Meanwhile, in pursuit of other things I have been adding to my store of general knowledge. The body of Napoleon II, son of Napoleon I and cousin of Napoleon III was originally buried in Austria, where he had lived in exile with his mother since the defeat of his father. He reigned twice, once for two days after his father’s initial defeat and once for 15 days after Waterloo. To be fair, his father’s wish for him to succeed was never going to be granted by the allies, and at the age of three he wan’t in much of a position to dispute the decision to depose the House of Bonaparte. He died young, in 1832 and remained in peace until 1940 when Adolf Hitler stepped in and ordered that the remains should be sent to Paris to be interred in the tomb of his father. His heart and viscera remain in Vienna, which is a tradition of the Hapsburgs.

At least the treatment of his body parts has been more dignified than that of some of his father’s parts.

Just Another Saturday

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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.

Looking Ahead

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Trees near Slaidburn

I have three months to go. I’d better start filling in forms, as I need to ensure my pensions will be ready to take over when my wages stop. I’m looking forward to warm weather and a life of leisure now. When all is said and done I am generally a man of eternal optimism and though doubts may arise from time to time I can generally get over them. Having had doubts about retirement when faced with the imminent reality of it, I am now happily anticipating a time of leisure and doing what I want. I admit this will mean I no longer hve the excuse of work blocking my plans. I will just have to face facts – I don’t do things because work takes too much time, I don’t do things because I am lazy and badly organised.

I’m giving serious thought to one of those reclining chairs with a built in footstool and ejection mechanism. That’s just what I need. I’ve been looking at the TV adverts, I may even get one with a USB port so I can plug my Kindle in and read all day. I don’t need the one that has a special arm where you put tea and the remote control. I will have a small table for tea, and continue to lose the remote. Looking for it is all the exercise I get.

Tree – Clumber park

Periodically I will withdraw to my study (the spare bedroom) and write poetry. Each morning I will wake up early, ready to write at the crack of dawn. Then I will reset the alarm for n extra two hours. Ambition is good, but it’s silly to spoil retirement with actually getting up early. We will visit all the local garden centres and have tea and cake. And I will, of course, use my new bus pass, until I get tired of sharing a space with people who cough and splutter and generally spread germs. At some point I will get round to buying an electric scooter so I can take it down to the Country Park and ride round the lake. They have Kingfishers and otters, and I am going to enjoy that bit.

Bear in a tree – spring is coming!

Steak Pie and Idle Chat

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I went out for meal last night – Steak and Ale Pie at a local pub. Since I last had it either the portions have grown larger or my capacity for food has ben reduced. I’m hoping, after over a month of losing weight, it is the latter. I hve to get my portion size down, it’s the only way to do it. Experiences like last night are worrying, because it’s an example of how you cn start eating too much again.

Newstead Abbey Again

Work was dull in parts, interesting in others. I ate my sandwiches far too early. This has always been the case. When I worked on farms I ate at lunchtime but as soon as I had a job driving between farms to do blood tests and monitoring I started eating my sandwiches about half an hour after leaving home.

I had an email last night, two tanka accepted to go with the tanka prose I previously had accepted. Some editors are very quick. One of the others tells me they don’t send out rejections, but if you haven’t heard from them within 12 weeks you can assume it’s safe to send the poems to other people. This isn’t satisfactory and I don’t usually submit to editors with similar policies, but I fancied a change this month.

For January I sent out 11 submissions. I missed one out because they wanted poems to a theme I didn’t feel like writing and two because they were competitions and I’m not altogether in favour of competitions. You tie up the poems for months, pay for the privilege, and then when you read the winning entries you wonder what idiot picked them. Sometimes I optimistically enter a competition but am usually brought down to earth when I read the results.

Next month I just have five. I may look for a few more, or I may just take a rest.

Newstead Abbey again

Thanks to Julia for the photos again.

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Life after the Care Farm