Tag Archives: moaning

Belfast, Salad and Blogging

14 Replies

We went out to lunch at Harvester today. It’s not fine dining, but the Early Bird menu offers a good plateful for £6.99 and you get unlimited access to the salad bar. Believe it or not, it was the salad we went for. We’ve been a bit light on veg lately and I want my bowels in top condition for Thursday. From Wednesday I’ll be making notes, as nurses seem fascinated by my inner doings and ask some fairly detailed questions about bowels.

I would hate to be detained in hospital due to lack of fibre.

We are calling it a research trip, because we were looking at Julia’s bus route options for her new job.

I’m now going to moan.

There was a young woman in our section who completely destroyed the ambience.

She was loud, so it was difficult to hold our own conversation.

She was dull.

She’s a student.

When her companion occasionally tried an answer she didn’t listen.

She has trouble parking her car during international cricket matches (she must live near Trent Bridge);

She thinks, due to a list of ailments she’s suffered over the year, that her immune system has been compromised by the flat she lives in. Whatever she’s had has not affected her lungs.

She is going to New York to celebrate finishing her finals.

Her mother has already bought four outfits trying to find one that is just right for her daughter’s graduation.

She hasn’t even finished her finals yet, but she’s clearly confident of passing.

When she returned to the room after multiple trips to the salad bar she started talking (or shouting) while she was still yards away from the table.

Worst of all, she had a Belfast accent. (If you aren’t familiar with the Belfast accent, it’s abrasive and always reminds me of a chainsaw).

I was glad when she left.

She’s probably a lovely girl and clearly gets on well with her mother. I hope they have a good time at graduation.

But I never want to be in the same room as her again.

Do people have no sense of volume? Or do they just think we will all be interested in details of their banal life.

Ah, I suppose, when you think of it, I may just have described a blogger…

 

 

In which I have some Brilliant Ideas

11 Replies

I dropped Julia at work this morning then went to the jewellers.

We didn’t talk about jewellery much, but we did set the world to rights and form the idea for a new TV programme.

The programme will take place in two shops in Nottingham and feature two groups of miserable old men sitting round moaning about how things used to be better. We already have one shop with three miserable old sods (even though one is quite young, he moans with the best of us) and have another shop and group of old gits in mind for the second one. We’re going to pitch it to a successful producer we know and see what happens.

People like antiques, reality shows and grumpy old men so I think it has legs as an idea. Personally, I’ll be looking for some advertising and a book spin-off. If Scarlett Moffatt can do it I’m sure I can, though, looking at her profile, I may need a new middle name. Karloff seems good. It has the right ring to it and you can see why William Henry Pratt adopted it as a stage name.

We were talking of the things that used to worry us, like Russia invading Afghanistan. Do you remember that – we all thought how stupid they were for trying – it rarely ends well for the invader.

Now we worry about recycling and financing kids through college.

We also spoke of the good old days and a local dealer who just bought a forgery of a rare coin, losing £2,000 on the deal. It was offered to him, gleaming and uncirculated, in the middle of a parcel of average worn coins. There’s a place where enthusiasm for coins, and the love of profit muffles the alarm bells that should be ringing.

How, he should have asked, did such a remarkably well-preserved coin end up in a batch of worn silver? It takes remarkably little wear to downgrade a coin in the eyes of a collector. Terms such as bag marks and cabinet wear are used to denote the sort of damage that can be done to a coin even before it is circulated. Bag marks are the marks that occur during manufacture and packing into bags. Cabinet wear is the light scuffing that occurs when a coin moves in a cabinet as you open and close the drawers. That is how fussy they are.

Anyway, he didn’t ask, he paid the money, and he can’t get the seller on the phone number he supplied, which gives me an idea for the next TV programme – CSI Coin Shop.

Stranger things have caught on…

It rained, we made pom-poms and played balloon ball

6 Replies

It’s rained all day, we don’t feel like using the kitchen because of the internal politics and I’m not eating biscuits.

So what do we do?

Well, we have to feed and water the chickens whatever the weather.

We also had a good moan about various things (centre left in a mess, one of the new toilets out of order, someone has thrown some of our stuff out of the kitchen).

We did a stock take of what we have left in the kitchen.

We picked the last of the chillies and the cape gooseberries

We made pom-poms. I managed 14 today. I explored a method I found on the internet – using a fork to wrap the wool round. I hope these photos explain it. It’s tricky getting it tied tight enough and fitting the scissors in, but it seems to work OK for producing small pom-poms.

A fork with longer tines may have been better (as would sharper scissors) and I’m just wondering how much wool you’d need to wrap a garden fork…

Then we played indoor balloon volleyball/tennis. It’s a game  we invented last year using a large balloon. The rules are not fixed, the umpiring is abysmal and the scoring is random, but it seems to work. So far nobody has died playing, we’ve had no tears, and we haven’t damaged the building (though as we’re under notice to quit I’m not sure I’m bothered).

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Indoor Balloonball – just look at the speed of that serve!

 

As we told the group – only boring people get bored.

 

Me – sleeping, moaning and changing things

9 Replies

I didn’t sleep well when we were away. Hot room, strange bed, hen party down the corridor…

However, I seem to have missed the last half hour, have a set of red marks on my face from the keyboard and have just had to edit the opening line of this post, which originally read “ro ro ro ro” for the first five and a half lines (I’ve edited it because it lost some of its novelty value after the first inch).

From this I deduce that I’ve got over my difficulty sleeping.

We’ve solved the mystery of the phantom gardeners – it was a local volunteer aided and abetted (not the first time they’ve heard a legal phrase) by the Community Payback Team. If you aren’t familiar with such teams they are the modern equivalent of the chain gang but without chains. Or a work ethic. I’m convinced that the ones who do come to work and rehabilitate themselves would have done anyway, and the ones who don’t want to work aren’t going to benefit from a day in the countryside wrecking a garden. It always seems to me that the difference between the two groups is the family support they get. Anyone can get into trouble – it’s something that can happen when you’re young (and I am making no claims or confessions here), but a supportive family is a big help when lining your life up again.

The volunteer in question has a record of despoiling the garden when left unsupervised and last time the Community Payback Team had a go with power tools they took the tops off all our fig tree cuttings and strimmed the leaves off a bed of leeks. There’s no difference in the result, but it’s a little easier to accept the results of ineptitude rather than malice.

Anyway, as a result of that I’ve come to a decision about blogging. This is supposed to be a blog about our group, though it’s a bit difficult, due to safeguarding legislation. I am therefore going to stop moaning on this one and only talk about the group, growing, sustainability and that sort of stuff. We will be making a few changes after talking to the parents of the group and you will be seeing more of them.

I am, however, not going to give up moaning entirely and intend restarting an old blog for moaning, travel and other things I do. I’m just going over to look at it now. It’s Sherwood Days at sherwooddays.com if you want to potter along and have a look.

I can’t see myself ever blogging 365 days in a year, or doubling my daily word count so we will have to see how it goes. Hope to see some of you over there.