Monthly Archives: March 2024

A Surfeit of Humour

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One of my favourite jokes – as good now as it was between the wars, though the picture has grown less subtle  by the 1970s.

 

I overdid it a bit yesterday and suffered as a result. I was loading comic postcards all day, as I have been for several days, which meant I had to do a lot of work with the mouse wheel and with moving my arms up and down. This made my swollen  knuckle very sore and brought on the pains in my forearms again. In the evening I rested and applied a hot water bottle.

This is always the problem with recovery. It can be a delicate thing.

As I say, subject matter was less sophisticated in those days.

 

Today was busy in parts, which allowed me to break up the listing of postcards. I used to find them amusing when I was younger. I still do find some amusing, but many of them are just dated and one or two are truly cringeworthy. To make it worse, as we go through them, many are repeated, and a bad joke does not improve with age or repetition.

It’s  a bit like chocolates when you work in a chocolate factory. You are allowed to eat as many as you like when you work there, because they know you will soon get fed up and leave them alone. I had the same with eggs. We were given free eggs every week, but I often didn’t take them, and hardly ever used them in recognisable form. I probably used to eat no more than half a dozen eggs a year unless they were in baking. Now that I don’t see thousands of eggs every day, I am happy to have them scrambled, fried or in sandwiches several times a week.

Another one from the mists of time. The clothing of the “little squirt” is still 1930s but the  salesman has been updated to the 1970s.

I doubt that I’ll ever find seaside postcards as funny as I did when I was younger though – I’ve moved on since then, and though some are still funny, the majority are not as good as I recall, and one or two, as I say, are terrible. However, that’s the subject of an essay on social history, not a blog.

 

A Tale of Two Cities

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Bear with seed packet from Kew

I touched briefly on the subject of the internet and the pitfalls of using it unquestioningly. I am, as you know, intending to move to Peterborough at the end of the year and I wanted to check up on the Peterborough Coin Club. I’m going to need to make friends when I move, and this seems as good a way as any. There’s a lot about it on the internet and it seems like a lively club with an annual Coin Fair. So far, so good. It meets monthly at the Peterborough Zoo.

Zoo? There is no zoo in Peterborough. Not in the Cambridgeshire one, at any rate. Then I realised what had happened. It’s happened before. Peterborough cropped up once before when I searched. I’m told it’s the canoe building capital of the world, which is a surprise as I hardly saw a canoe last time I lived there.

Bear in the Garden

It’s Peterborough, Ontario that grabs all the internet attention. Peterborough, Cambridgeshire is much less interesting, and its coin club, which hasn’t posted on Facebook since lockdown, meets in a Community Centre. Things aren’t looking good for this one . . .

There are three other Peterboroughs in the world – two in Australia and one in New Hampshire. One of the Australian ones was renamed in 1917 due to anti-German feeling in 1917 (it was originally Petersburg)  and one was named after someone named Peter. Peterborough NH was named after a man called Peter too and Peterborough, Ontario, was named after the New Hampshire town.

This is a bit of a blow to civic pride – I had always imagined that they were all called after the original Peterborough. Still, Peterborough was originally called Medeshampstede in Anglo-Saxon times, changing to Gildenburgh and then Peterborough by the 12th Century, so even the original Peterborough isn’t really Peterborough.

I note, reading the article on Wiki, that we are twinned with ll the other Peterboroughs and with Ballarat. I didn’t know that.

Bear in a tree

The Talk Last Night

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We had a good talk last night at the Numismatic Society, with a talk on Newark in the Civil War. Newark was  a key garrison for the King, sitting astride the Great North Road (yes, parts of the A1 are still called that on my satnav) and the River Trent. These were two important communication routes in the 17th Century, as the canal building craze was yet to come and the railways were many years off. Having said that, here is a link to the Wollaton Wagonway, an early stage of railway development that was built before the Civil War.

For the sake of balance I should also add that the Romans built some early canals in England – the Foss Dyke, Car Dyke and Bourne-Morton Canal (all in Lincolnshire) were originally Roman canals.

For my American readers, who may be having trouble with this, yes, despite what happens when you search “Newark” online, there is another one that isn’t in New Jersey. The same goes for Civil War. The internet may think there was just the one, but we had one too. In fact, if you count the Anarchy, the Baron’s Wars, the War of the Roses and the Bishops’ Wars we had several. For some reason we only called one set of them “the Civil War”. I say that, but in fact there is an academic move afoot to call the Civil War the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. This reflects the reality of the situation, with much fighting in Ireland and Scotland too. It’s even worse when you consider there were three Civil Wars wrapped up under the title of “The Civil War”

So, having said it was a good talk and having spread confusion, I will go. I have promised Julia not to overdo the typing and make my hands relapse.

Newark Siege Shilling – used after the siege as a pendant to demonstrate loyalty to the King. More on this tomorrow.

33 Days To Go

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I’ve just been counting. I have 33 more days in which I will hve to go to work. Eight of them will be half days. I have always hated those half days, as it never feels worth going into work for half a day. It isn’t a bonus half day off, as the shop owner seems to think, it’s a day wasted by the intrusion of a half day at work. The worst thing about working in the shop has always been the rotas (he loves sitting in his office working out complicated things) and the fact that even a “full day” is only six hours long. I go to work to earn money. My ideal week would be four ten hour days and three days off. Or five ten hour days.

Instead, the best I manged was, was five six-hour days. I actually looked at fitting in a second job around that in the days I was more active but couldn’t find one that fitted.

It’s nearly seven in the evening now and the day seems to have passed with nothing much happening. The kids have both been in touch for Mother’s Day, as we now call Mothering Sunday. I always thought it ws the day when servants were given a day off to visit their mothers, all the stuff about “mother churches” is new to me. It’s good to learn new things, but it’s a shock to find that something you thought you knew isn’t true.

We are treating ourselves to beef today. It’s a joint that we bought for Christmas as a back up in case the turkey supply let us down. It didn’t. However, as we need freezer space we decided it was time to break out the beef. I expect that after a couple of meals and several days of sandwiches we will start to think of fish and vegetables again. We’ve drifted off our vegetarian influenced diet a bit. It’s not that we want meat, or that we don’t want vegetables, it’s just that I find it hard to cook, and to chop vegetables, whilst my hands are bad. Even the sweeping motion of buttering bread for sandwiches is hard work, though it is getting easier.

50p coins

Quercus – TV Critic

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Things are getting better. I didn’t take any painkillers last night and my hand didn’t hurt overnight. It was also usable this morning. Unfortunately all my other joints were stiffer than usual and getting dressed took a while longer than I would hve liked. That’s the trouble with painkillers, you can come to rely on them. I will just hve to get used to life without chemical assistance.

I watched The Marlow Murder Club this week – a good two part mystery set in the Buckingham town of Marlow. It was very enjoyable – good cast, good characters, reasonable plot, though it did rather depend on a well-worn plot device (which I won’t reveal). I spotted it a little way into the second episode and was able to have a decent go at unravelling it. Do not believe the review behind the link when it says the ending comes as a “genuine surprise” – it doesn’t.

Bear with tools

It’s by the writer who created  Death in Paradise. That annoyed me this week by having a solution that depended on (a) a talking parrot and (b) a solution that depended on you spotting that one item was missing. I felt we didn’t get much of a chance to solve it. I also think that, in line with all the rules/guidelines relating to mysterious orientals, identical twins and secret passages, talking parrots should be banned.

This is the second week where we have avoided The Apprentice, and have enjoyed ourselves much more as a result. The formula is old and dull now, the apprentices are dreadful, Karen and Tim are poor replacements for Nick and Margaret and somebody appears to have told Alan Sugar that he is funny. He isn’t.

Bear in the Garden

The Slow Return

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It’s been quite a strain over the last few days. I’m addicted to writing and the inability to hold a pen or use a keyboard has been very frustrating. It’s not been total, but I’ve had to preserve my limited abilities for work. Even using the wheel on a mouse has been enough to cause painful joints. This has been a very bad winter.

Yesterday was the first day for ages that I haven’t come home with aching joints and sat all night feeling miserable with a hot water bottle.

I’m risking a bit of typing today and will see how it goes.

Yellow flowers in need of identification

Fortunately I have been able to fire up my Kindle and read a few history books. This hs still given me a few problems. One is that the weight of the device (which is lighter and less awkward than a proper book) has still caused pain in my hands and forearms. The second is that I am finding my memory is retaining less and after reading a book I am left with little more than a general impression, rather than the detail I would once have absorbed. I’m thinking of adopting a more structured approach and making notes, almost as if I’m studying.

The good news for the day is that it only took two attempts to give  blood. I was back home by 8.40 and eating bacon sandwiches made in croissants. I then watched antique programmes until Julia started to protest and decided to take to the keyboard.  It’s good to be back, but it isn’t a full time return yet as I will have to see how my joints react.

Flowers – detail

The Only Way is Up

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Just a quick note.

After several days of resting my arms and not doing any typing apart from the bare minimum at work, I am finding myself much imp[roved. As I suspected, some of the p[ain was RSI rather than arthritis. That has mostly gone, though a few minutes of typing is enough to start vague aches in the arms starting again. The hands are recovering, the swelling is going down and though one of my fingers is still very stiff and sore, today was the first day in weeks where I have felt that things really are improving.

Well, the hands are improving. in writing terms, I’m at a low ebb. I had another rejection yesterday and I didn’t submit anything for February. My hands/arms were painful as I tried, I couldn’t concentrate and in the end I gave up. As I still have two submissions out, and neither are likely to be accepted, it looks like my results for January submissions is six acceptances from eleven submissions. A few years ago I’d have been ecstatic about that.

Goat. Looks cute but does everything it can to make life difficult.

At that point I thought of indulging in self-pity, but I am in the middle of a good book about Edward I and I decided to read instead. A few years ago I’d have been ecstatic about six acceptances in a month, so it’s just a case of managing expectations.

The thing about rejections is that you get them because your writing isn’t good enough. Yes, there are other reasons we give, and it is true that there are other factors, but  the truth is that if you want acceptances you have to write to a high enough standard. There’s no point sitting in a darkened room whimpering.  When I have rested enough I will start writing again, and do it better.

In the meantime, I’m going to rest for a few more days before easing my way back into typing.  Same goes for writing, as holding a pen is still difficult too.

I’m hoping that I will be back to normal in about a week (though “normal” is probably something I need to think about), and with any luck I may even be light-hearted and humorous.

Lambs. I expect you knew that.