Tag Archives: manners

Day 112

We had another poppy today. They seem a bit slow at the moment, but it looks like we might have a few more tomorrow. Total for the season – 2.

We used the option of picking up the shopping from TESCO tonight – you still avoid people but by picking up the minimum order is less than the delivery option. We have built up a backlog by ordering too much for the last few weeks and need to get through some of it. Carrot soup is likely to feature in our menus several time next week.

On the way we passed a strip of what was once probably woodland. It’s now just a strip of trees and weeds between a footpath and an old railway cutting that is now, I think, a nature trail/footpath/cycle path. OK, I admit I’ve never actually used it and am slightly hazy on details. However, under the trees, a wonderful sight emerges at this time of year. Bluebells. I don’t know if they are survivors from the old woodland or new foreign interlopers, but they do look nice and they always give m a lift at this time of year.

At work today I had an enquiry, which I handled with my customary tact and good humour. I do that on the first enquiry because that’s how you should be. I only start getting sharp when people tart winding me up. People can’t help being stupid or annoying or any manner of things. That’s how we are. They can’t even help it when they advise me on how to package their items properly (because it’s not as if I send over a thousand items a year safely through the post, is it? On the other hand, having told them once, I don’t see why I should have to repeat myself.

Anyway, the customer wrote back and thanked me for my reply, and noted that I clearly had a good grasp of customer service. So far, so good, though I was a little worried that this was just the start of quite a long message. Having answered his question (we didn’t have what he required) we weren’t going to take any money off him and, with time being money, it’s not cost-effective to take on a pen pal.

The gist of his letter was that after a long and successful career in retail he was in a position to advice me that what I should have said in my letter was . . .

I won’t bother to quote it all, but it hinged round us producing the items he required and giving him some for free in gratitude for his input.

At the moment I am torn. The owner has told me not to answer it. This seems rude. On the other hand, if I answer it I will probably be rude anyway.

A tricky question of modern etiquette.

Sometimes I wonder if these people are really just doing it for fun, or if it is a test from eBay.

Etiquette and Editors and Lifestyle Changes

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I’m never quite sure about how to treat editors. I treat them politely, but it’s difficult knowing exactly how to do that. I was brought up not to use first names until I knew someone, but the simple use of Mr or Mrs or Miss or any other simple title is now a politically charged minefield with the capacity for causing great offence, so I try to avoid it.

Talking of that, did you know that the Post office had a set of stamps in 2002 that included a rabbit and the words “a new baby”. I have nightmares about using them on a parcel that goes to someone who, for one reason or another, finds it upsetting. It’s a great stamp for someone who just had a healthy baby but there are are a number of circumstances where it could cause offence.

Anyway, back to editors. Apart from the problem of how to address them, there is the problem of how to reply after they have either accepted or rejected something. I’ve seen mixed advice on this, including several opinions that editors have enough to do without extra emails.

I took that advice to start with, as I don’t want to cause extra work, but after a while it began to seem rude.

Several editors, including one who turned me down this week, go out of their way to tell you that they can’t, or won’t, offer help or advice on your work. Others do offer some comment, which is always a happy extra. I’m happy that they don’t comment (as it isn’t their purpose). I’m not so happy with the ones who make a big thing out of not commenting, as it seems slightly aggressive and negative. Which leaves us with the ones that do comment – it seems rude not to thank them. so I now do that. In general, the most helpful comments seem to come from people who are turning my work down.

That just leaves the question of whether writing anything but a submission looks like an attempt to suck up to an editor. I don’t have a clue about that one, and would be interested to hear from any editors or ex-editors out there who have a view.

I’ll stop there as I am planning a drive North and a pub lunch. They were things that I used to do without thinking eighteen months ago. Now, I’ve had to book, which means I need plans and timings, and I have had to read the website. We can now have a party of any size we like, don’t need to wear masks and don’t need to use track and trace. I have looked at the menu on line and see that they do vegan Fishless Fish and Chips with Crispy Quorn fish style fillets.

Why oh why oh why, as I so often find myself asking, do the producers of vegan food have to align it with meat? Why not just advertise battered slabs of tasteless crap served with chips and peas. Vegans are hardy souls, I’m sure they could take it on the chin with a description of what they are about to be given. Mentioning fish three times in a vegan menu description doesn’t make the Quorn sound better, it just makes me think of succulent flakes of fresh fish in crisp golden batter.

Stone on the Floor

Time, Travel and Temporal Trickery

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A few days ago I noted that the time on my computer was wrong. This seems to have corrected itself.

I reset the clock at work last week because it seemed to have slowed down during lockdown. We though the battery might be running down but it has now been keeping good time for over a week.

Then, last night, when I tried to set the alarm, using my phone as I do these days (look at me being all 21st Century), I realised that the time was wrong. All the world time was wrong. And the calendar was reading 17th June 2017. To be honest, I could do with going back in time three years and sorting a few bits out, so I wasn’t too upset.

It would be just far enough back in time to make a few improvements, but not far enough back to involve reliving the bad bits, like adolescence.

Obviously it was too good to be true, and as nothing else seemed to have changed, I checked the time on Julia’s phone, set a timer instead of the alarm, and went to sleep.

In the morning, with daylight and glasses, I reset the time and all seems back to normal.

Photo by Stas Knop on Pexels.com

I have no idea why this happened, or why any of the previous incidents happened. May be clocks are joining in with the rest of the world in a widespread campaign to hate me.

It was my day off yesterday. Julia allowed me to drive her to the laundrette. It is the first time since lockdown. We have nice clean laundry and it smells good because it dried on the line. She has done some things by hand, so standards have been preserved, though I have mainly just aired, rotated and relied on my large stock of shirts and underwear which almost fit. There’s been a certain amount of breathing in as I got to the older stuff, but no disasters so far.

After lunch she allowed me to drive her to the gardens so she could check they were still OK. The grass is growing. We saw a greenfinch.

On the way back we saw two rows of traffic stop as they allowed a lady cyclist to retrieve her hat, which had been blown off. It was a comfort to see that manners still exist, though there was a bit of me that wondered why she didn’t have a string to hold it on.

Tomorrow I have a blood test, followed by dropping Julia off at work and then going to work myself. In the afternoon I will reverse the process (apart from the blood test).

If it wasn’t for the time travel I would lead a very dull life.

Photo by abdullah . on Pexels.com

A Rare Visit to Arnot Hill Park

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I’ve tried several posts today but none of them worked for me. The day started badly when all the driers in the laundrette were taken by a couple of women who brought their wet washing from home. This forced me into being rude to someone who turned up with more washing from home. He asked me to move because I was sitting in front of the only available dryer.

I refused, pointing out that I had three machines full of washing coming out in the next five minutes. I’m not sure what the correct etiquette for this sort of thing, but I can get very irritable when people bring their wet washing from home and fill the dryers.

This follows on from some thoughts I have been having recently about an error I made in bringing my kids up. I always taught them to consider others. The only problem is that other people don’t always consider them, which tends to make good manners a bit of a problem. The nicer you are, the more you lose out.

After a long drawn out drying session, using one dryer for the contents of three machines, I decided to go to Arnot Hill park. You can rely on ducks, and I haven’t done much walking recently.

Mallard – Arnot Hill Park

Tufted Duck – Arnot Hill Park

Red Crested Pochard – Arnot Hill Park

A selection of ducks, followed by some photographs of Black Headed Gulls. They are only just getting their black heads back. Well, brown heads. They are badly mis-named.

Black Headed Gull – Arnot Hill Park, Arnold

And finally, a picture of a Japanese Quince. It looked better in real life than it does in the picture.

Japanese Quince – Arnot Hill Park, Arnold

Breakfast

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As promised earlier, I’m going to move on to describe breakfast on Sunday morning, even though it is currently Tuesday. Such is the magic of blogging.

It was a budget hotel, and one of the ways they appear to keep costs under control is by economising on bricks and mortar. As I walked along the corridor I mused on this as my shoulders appeared to brush the walls. Admittedly, I’ve expanded a bit over the years, but they do seem to have skimped on width.

The breakfast room was similarly snug and called for some creative slalom movements to make my way between tables. I didn’t hit anything on the way to the table, though I did notice several people blanching as I insinuated myself through a number of unfeasibly small gaps.

Now I know what the elephant in the room feels like.

A few minutes with the menu resulted in an order for sausage, bacon, black pudding, eggs, bubble and squeak, hash browns, mushrooms, tomatoes and beans. Note that we emphasised the healthy vegetable aspects of the meal. Generally the quality was good, though the bubble and squeak did taste more like herby potatoes than proper bubble and squeak.

All was good until the neighbours arrived. The thin edge of the wedge arrived in the form of two small squeaky girls. I’m not in favour of small children at breakfast because (a) they are too enthusiastic and (b) it’s easy to offend with jokes about cannibalism.

They acted as pathfinders mess for a miserable old crone who arrived moments later and immediately began ordering them around, sending them for fruit juice and toast and various other things. She did all this in a loud voice and without the use of the word “please”. She did say “thank you” a couple of times, but not often.

Then the parents arrived. They didn’t make much of an impression, being mere conversational targets for the garrulous harridan. I’m being very unpleasant here, but if you mess with my planned relaxing Sunday breakfast you can’t expect me to shower you with compliments.

She wanted vinegar with her breakfast. I’m not sure why, unless she wanted to top up her personality. She then told the unfortunate server that she hadn’t brought any mustard. Well, she wouldn’t, seeing as she hadn’t been asked for any. I’ve noticed this before – people not bringing things you haven’t asked for. It’s one of those facets of modern life that sometimes puzzle me. Surely if your server was able to read minds they would be serving at the top level with Reginald Jeeves and Sebastian Beach. Either that or winning prizes for their mind-reading act on Britain’s Got Talent.

I’ll not labour the point, as I’m coming perilously close to using the words virago and termagant and exploring a whole new world of misogyny, which will never do. I will, however, mention that they demanded to have their pain-au-chocolat warmed.

There is a whole new rant waiting on the subject of pain-au-chocolat, the warming thereof and the modern fashion for foreign patisserie.

The world, I feel, was a better place when toast was the only baked product available for breakfast.

This opinion will not be a surprise to regular readers.

A Favourite Quote and a Question of Manners

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I watched Four Weddings and a Funeral last night. It shares some of the features that make me like the Blandings books (almost eternal summer, romance) but with more depth and considerably more swearing.

One of my favourite film scenes is Gareth’s funeral. Not the famous poem, but the speech.

“I rang a few people, to get a general picture of how Gareth was regarded by those who met him: ‘Fat’ seems to have been a word people most connected with him. ‘Terribly rude’ also rang a lot of bells.”

This rings a lot of bells with me too. Despite recent efforts to diet, fat is still the first impression people have of me. I suppose it’s because my shirt buttons tend to enter a room a foot before I do.

Same goes for rude. I have a tendency to say what I think at the time I think it. That’s not always what people want to hear. It’s fashionable to refer to a lack of “internal censor”.

That this should be considered rude is just a comment on modern society.

I also have a tendency to treat people all the same. This sounds like a good thing but doesn’t always go down well either, as some people seem to think they should be treated better than others. Recruit an idiot, call him a manager and all of a sudden he’s demanding “respect”.

Respect used to be something you earned, now it’s something people seem to expect.

Even worse, I’ve noticed that Julia is starting to use me as a yardstick. The words “nearly as rude as you” seem to be slipping into her conversation more and more these days.

I’m sure that Messrs Volta, Newton and Faraday (plus others I can’t call to mind) would all be happy at the idea of having things named after them. I’m not so sure I want my name to go down in history as the man who gave his name to the International System unit of rudeness.

Ah well!

Bad start to the week

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It’s been a bad start to the week. For one thing, I was confined to bed for most of yesterday with a bad case of man flu and self-pity. I resorted to viewing soup as food, so you can guess how bad this was. As a result I started Monday morning with a bad back from too much time on a mattress that really needs replacing.

At the centre we found three things.

One, broken paper chains and other evidence of something happening at the weekend. As usual, we get left to tidy up. Julia soon had half the group standing on chairs with sellotape to mend the chains as the other half stood by to catch falling bodies.

Two, a card from one of the group thanking us for the time they have spent here. At that point the man flu made my eyes a bit watery, but it soon passed.

Three, an email from Australia calling me “very unprofessional and disrespectful of both copyright and intellectual property rights”. That cheered me up, I love a good fight. I had to check the meaning of intellectual property rights as I wasn’t sure where they differ from copyright. In this context I’m not sure they do, so the depravity of my crime was immediately reduced by half.

So – “unprofessional and disrespectful”? I have other traits too, and the reply I framed in my mind certainly showcased my talent for “rudeness” and “sarcasm”.

You see, one of the group has copied an article from the web. They have typed it out, not used cut and paste, and they have worked hard on it. I’m not sure how it got on our website, but I don’t think they even realise that there is such a thing as copyright.

We’re a team and if you cut one of us, we all bleed, so I didn’t hold back.

Then I thought, this person (I’ll say “person” so I don’t upset anyone with my language) probably doesn’t realise that they are being rude, and certainly don’t know that they are abusing a person with learning difficulties, so is it fair for me to give them a hard time?

Having recovered my manners and sense of balance, I’m now feeling better about the day. It’s not been a good start, but there’s a silver lining to every cloud, even an insulting antipodean cloud. As I’ve often told my kids, you shouldn’t let the rudeness of others dictate the way you behave.

I am now going to write a polite reply telling them to contact the farmer. You see, it’s possible to be irritating even when you’re being polite.

Part II of the day’s doings, with pictures, will appear later.

Another day at Rufford Abbey

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We had a disappointing day at Attenborough Nature Reserve yesterday so we decided another trip to Rufford was in order. (I’ll write about it in a day or two when my good humour has re-established itself).

As usual, we have enough for two posts, so I’ll do the birds first. I started off with a sore knee after yesterday’s walk so we weren’t quite as ambitious as last time. We concentrated on the bridges by the lake and then looped back through the woods. There are bird tables at various points in the woods and we spent some time sitting quietly and watching.

I’m gaining in confidence after a decent flying Greenfinch photograph earlier in the week, so I was hoping to carry on the good work today.

The sitting quietly approach has worked wonders in the past when watching birds, but it can be difficult on a busy day.

It amazes me how many people think it’s appropriate to talk like a bugle whilst walking in the countryside. If I can hear them 25 yards away I don’t know what it must be like when you are walking next to them. It also amazes me the details people are prepared to broadcast about their lives, relationships and health.

Whatever happened to reticence?

As you can see from the Featured Image I found a Marsh Tit again. It’s tricky watching a bird table and snapping a shy bird when you only have a screen to work from. I ended up with a selection of shots featuring either blurs or emptiness. It all fell into place nicely when the Nuthatches arrived, but even then it wasn’t plain sailing as I managed several blurred shots and several with them facing away . Julia was away at the time so she missed them, though she did get back in time to see one pecking at a nut it had wedged in a crevice in a yew tree. Unfortunately it was too dark to get a shot.

Nuthatcs at Rufford Abbey

Nuthatce at Rufford Abbey

Nuthatches at Rufford Abbey

As you can see from the other shots we got two unusual birds on bird tables. Moorhens can be quite adventurous when feeding (as I found when they used to rob my bait box when I used to fish) but I’ve never seen them on a table before. Note that the squirrel has a fly on its back – what a photobomb!

Squirrel on bird table (and fly on squirrel)

Pheasant on bird table

Moorhen on bird table

Final shot is a Coal Tit – the best shot from about 20 I took of Coal Tits. You can’t see the distinctive white nape in this shot but in the ones where you can see all lack something else.

Coal Tit at Rufford Abbey

Julia got some good shots today too so I may use some of them later on.

We also saw Goosanders, Siskins and a (very distant) Kingfisher plus the usual suspects we saw on the last visit. The Goosander and Siskin pictures are poor and the Kingfisher was too far away.

Tuesday night on Tuesday night

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If this was a hard-hitting and controversial blog I’d probably write about how we’d hosted a group tonight where few of the kids had any manners (as in a complete lack of “please” and “thank you”). but as it isn’t, I’d probably have to go on to say that it probably wasn’t their fault, but that of their parents.

Yes, I’m nice. This isn’t natural, I’ve have been using relaxation techniques and such stuff and I can now look at them with a fond smile and think “I really hope this karma stuff works because you’re coming back as a pustule, young man.”

Don’t get me wrong, the majority were nice affable people you’d be happy to meet at any time and one or two were so pleasant and friendly it was a true pleasure to meet them. But, as with rotten apples, it only takes one to spoil things. They are the ones you remember. I will say no more, but as part of my mellowing process I am growing more Wodehousian, and there were one or two tonight who were absolute blisters.

On the plus side, we’re getting better with the wood-fired oven and one of the pigs has had eight piglets. We’ve normally managed more, but eight is still good.

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Life after the Care Farm