Tag Archives: early start

Notes from a Decaying Island

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I was awake at 6.40 this morning, pondering on the subject of insomnia. More particularly why I sleep better in a chair than I do in a bed. I managed three hours in a chair last night, and woke feeling very rested. I also felt cold and stiff and had to spend ten minutes relocating my limbs. Sleeping in chairs is a pastime for the young.

Anyway, after a trip to the bathroom and some time feeling warm but wakened, I decided to call it a night and get up. By 6.30 I was at the computer, checking emails, answering comments and reading a few blogs. I then went of Amazon to buy a couple of bits and claim a refund for an order they seem to have lost.

It rapidly became 8.30 and after a leisurely breakfast and some planning, it is now just after 10.00. How the time flies!

Robin Hood lurking in the Forest

I suppose that’s what happens when you live in a decaying country with weak leaders and an evil Mayor of London. Still, as I said to Julia, although we miss out on the benefits of the USA’s high living standards, strong leadership and gun ownership, I’m quite happy with the way we are. We will just have to put up with universal healthcare, low murder rates and  women having  control over their own bodies. It’s obviously an imperfect system, but not every country can achieve the peak of perfection.

As for our “horrible, vicious, disgusting mayor” in London, I have to admit that I don’t know much about him, but even he has some good points – he’s never been photographed with Jeffrey Epstein, for instance.

Pictures are random shots from previous Decembers.

Robin at Clumber, Nottinghamshire

A New-style Monday

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I rose at my normal time and took Julia to work this morning. It might be a day off, but after a few weeks the novelty of having a lie-in while she struggles on her two bus trip to work has worn off. It’s a rehearsal for retirement – I can either show some discipline and do stuff, or I can decline into a grumpy watcher of daytime TV. It’s a tricky choice but I have decided to do things while I still can.

After that I will become a grumpy watcher of daytime TV. Grumpy is easy enough, but I may have to pay for some better TV.

Second, I made a drink and set to with a submission for a poetry magazine. It involved editing a few poems that had been returned (it’s strange how you can see improvements once they come back).

I then relaxed with another drink  and read a few blogs.

It’s time for lunch next, using more of the  Sweet Potato and Chilli Soup.

After that, the plan is to do some decluttering and do another set of submissions but experience suggests I will probably watch TV and fall asleep for most of the afternoon. This life/work balance stuff is quite tricky. I’ve been decluttering for weeks now and only succeeded in moving a few things around. One small bag did eventually move as far as the bin, but it’s not an impressive record and Julia is talking about having a go herself, meaning that more of my carefully collected treasures will be at risk. Once she gets going she knows no mercy where my stuff is concerned. Her own stuff, however, seems to spread throughout the house, because you always need wool and fabric bits and half-finished cross stitch kits . . .

That, it seems, is a Well Known Fact.

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Dreaming of Spring

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Backlit Sumac Tree in the MENCAP garden

It’s cold. Apart from that everything is fine and t6he nights are definitely lighter. Tomorrow I will be having a blood test. It’s all very dull and wintery.

We both fell asleep in front of the TV tonight, which was a bit too much like hypothermia, despite the fire being on. Fortunately we only have one more winter here. Our next winter, I hope, will be better heated and easier to endure.

A house on  hill is great if you want to avoid flooding, and so far that part of the plan has worked. However, it is draughty, it does tend to catch the full blast of the north wind and, due to various factors, the heating is not good. However, meteorological winter ends in six weeks, and proper winter ends in ten weeks or thereabouts. Not long now.

Fungus at Mencap gardens

Tomorrow I will start with the list of jobs I need to do to enable us to move. It is likely to run to several pages and to prove completely insufficient for our needs. We are going to need a books to make this move a reality. Fortunately we are in a position where we are able to compete the move without everything being perfectly aligned.

This is good because we want to be moved in to the new place for Christmas, which is a terrible time to move out of a place and sell the house. However, looking on the bright side, give it a few months after Christmas and things should look up for spring. It’s all Julia’s fault. If she had been born six months earlier it would make everything so much easier.

Common Newt – Mencap Garden

Today, we set off fifteen minutes earlier to ensure we arrived on time to meet workmen who had come to fix the new summerhouse in the MENCAP garden. It didn’t quite work out. They rang to say they were going to make the garden their second call, the traffic was heavy and we were only just on time, and by the time I got to work I was there at my normal time. Why, I asked myself, do I bother to plan thiongs when life conspires against me? I suppose I’m just an optimist.

Pictures are the MENCAP garden in various seasons.

Poppy – Mencap Garden

Day 20 and Some Thoughts on Fibre

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When I post this I will receive a message from WP telling me I am on a 20 day streak. This is not so much a tribute to my ability to turnout a post a day for weeks on end, but a reproach that every so often I become so disorganised I can’t post every day. Sometimes I get so wrapped up in Wikipedia or TV that I forget the time, and sometimes I fall asleep. Either way, I don’t se it as something worth recording. But WP does. I thinks it’s all part of the process of keeping us addicted to blogging, (and paying for the privilege).

I was down for 6.50 this morning, having once again risen when my body decided rather than trying to cling on until the alarm went off. It does feel a bit better as a start to the day, though it has deprived me of a smidgen of my beauty sleep. These things are always a trade off, but I’m not a Kardashian and my blog doesn’t depend on my looks, so I don’t think this is a problem.

You would think that a blank mind and a new day would have come together with an empty computer screen to produce pure genius wouldn’t you? It hasn’t. It’s taken half an hour and several false starts to get this far and apart from the Kardashians the only other thought I’ve had is about dietary fibre. This is getting to be quite a popular subject at the moment.

You need 30g a day according to UK health professionals, and the average Brit is getting  16-20g a day. It’s not good, but compared to other countries, we aren’t doing too badly. However, lots of countries don’t have enough to eat, or have better things to measure, so there’s not a lot of data out there. The ones that ae doing substantially better in fibre intake are the ones where they  have a large rural population growing their own food. The presence of health food shops seems to have little to do with it.

I’ve just been looking at my breakfast.  A two biscuit serving of Weetabix contains 3.8g of fibre according to the internet. My budget ASDA version contains the same, according to the packet. This is distressingly little for something that appears to be compose entirely of floor sweepings and husks. Wholemeal bread has 2.8g per slice, and at least you can have marmalade on that.

It’s going to be a long old slog getting to 30g at this rate. Looks like we might have to call on the prunes . . .

 

A Slow Start and Two Interesting Links

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I just woke up in front of the computer screen. It’s 11.27 and if I can’t stay awake while I’m writing a blog it suggests that the post isn’t worth finishing.

My alarm was set for 6.30 this morning as I had a blood test. Naturally I woke at 6.12. That is a bad time – too soon to get up and too late to have a nice warm snooze. A bit of lateral thinking and I went back to sleep with the clock now set for 6.45. Good plan, but poor execution as I then slept until nearly 7.00.

Next bit of bad planning – the car has been parked up for five days. It started, but with an outside temperature of -4°C and a five day coating of ice and frozen snow, it took a bit longer to de-ice than I had planned.

The Road through Clumber park

Non of this actually mattered because when I got down to Phlebotomy, there were two phlebotomists looking very lonely. The one by the door actually told me not to sit in the waiting area a they were ready for me. It took two attempts, the car parking is still free and, unlike the last few weeks, it was actually light. There are no actual flowers out now, but the snowdrops are on the verge of opening. It was not a bad blood test, all things considered.

The trip into work was uneventful, though there did seem to, be more traffic than you would expect from a lockdown. This agrees with the figures about the number of people in work, compared to the first lockdown. I didn’t find any figures when I looked for them but I did find a story about the problems of hippos in Columbia. They  are taking over the waterways after being introduced, via the private zoo of Pablo Escobar.

In the Mencap Garden

Currently, after waking up, I am trying to concentrate as workmen build a drum in next door’s drive. It was meant to be a wooden garage, but the noise indicates it is a drum. A big one.

I’d better get some work done as this could be my last day in lockdown.  Tomorrow I’m going to the shop to work on my own – I offered to do it because everyone else is working and it seems a bit unfair not to do it. I will wipe everything down before leaving.

Then next week it looks like I will be back in work. By Monday I will be at the end of the self-imposed 14 day quarantine. I still don’t see why we are going back to work, but the owner has paid us full wages through three lockdowns and I suppose he’s getting fed up with it. This is known as Pandemic Fatigue, and is not to be confused with the fatigue that lingers after Covid. That is Post-Viral fatigue.

Off the Coast at Southend on Sea.

The photographs are some I have dredged up from old memory cards – some really good memories. They are random, and nothing to do with the content of the post, but I hope you like them.

 

Close to Last Glimmering - Sherwood, Notts

Now fades the glimm’ring landscape…

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I nearly caused a riot this morning.

Arriving at the hospital for my repeat blood test at 6.58 I went to the machine and pressed the button for my ticket. There were a few comments from people already waiting, though I didn’t really listen. When I turned round there was a whole crowd behind me jostling and muttering like a crowd of zombies.

It seems that the machine doesn’t switch on until 7am so they all sit there, mentally forming a queue until they can get a ticket.

All they needed to do was ask – as soon as I understood what was happening I handed my ticket over the the man who was “first” in the queue. Even after I did that they kept on muttering. It was very tempting, particularly in one case, to administer a swift tap of the forehead  – being backed up against a wall can have that effect on a man.

I made a mistake. It’s easily corrected. There was no need for a lynch mob.

Due to this I now know what the man in the Bateman cartoon feels like.

It seems the hospital keeps the machine off until 7am to stop the problem of people queuing at 6am – an hour before the session opens.

I didn’t realise there were so many people desperate to have blood tests.

It didn’t really save a lot of time turning up at that time, as I ended up seventh in the queue, which is pretty much the result I get when I go down at 7.15, but at least I was able to get home, pick Julia (and a lot of surplus art supplies) up, and get them all down to Mencap in plenty of time to start work.

The NHS, as I pointed out when being summoned for this second test, seems to think we don’t have other things to do in our lives.

The blood tester, incidentally, denies not filling the tube properly, despite her suspiciously lengthy perusal of it yesterday. Her evidence – she always uses a syringe so has plenty of blood to fill a tube. I didn’t argue, but yesterday I had multiple tests and she used three tubes on the vacutainer, with not a syringe in sight.

After dropping Julia off I went to work to bore myself to death. It rained heavily on the flat roof and was dark when we left.

The photographs are from yesterday, tonight was too dull for a decent photograph.

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Last Glimmering…