Tag Archives: modern life

A New Day and Old Complaints

8.40 – arrived home.

Julia is safely dropped at the railway station. My journey back just beat the major build up of traffic which occurs about this time – a few minutes can make a lot of difference.

Bread. Looks like the crumb is a bit dense at the bottom. I seem to remember this one had honey in it.

There is noise in the woodlands. I can just make out a white pick-up, as used by the park rangers, and hear the sound of a man playing with a chainsaw. There is a difference between the sound of a chainsaw in use and one that is being revved just because some man-child likes making noise. This is definitely the later.

I wonder if I can write a poem on this theme.

Probably.

I wonder if I will bother.

Probably not.

I fight with the system TESCO has for the ordering of groceries, and wonder who designed the system. Probably, I decide, someone who was either brought up with computers and can work it out, or somebody who hates people who shop on line. Probably the latter.

Pizzas

You would think that it would be easy to find the page to book a slot, hard to book the wrong slot and impossible to order a basket of groceries without having first booked a slot.

It isn’t.

People say to me that they can’t understand why I hate modern life.

Nearly an hour has passed. I can still hear the chainsaw in the distance.

Cars (driven by other people and getting in my way), chainsaws and online shopping systems (I like the online shopping, I don’t like some of the systems). Three good reasons to dislike modern life.

Anyway, time to go. I may be back later, depending on how interesting the rest of my day is.

Soda bread

Photos are bread from March 2016.

Ruby Tuesday

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Marigolds at Mencap Garden

Second day of the song titles posts and it’s a classic from the Rolling Stones. I was going to make a curry tonight and then discuss the rhyming slang “Ruby Murray” but my sister is coming to tea and we are having Chinese style rice instead. I was thinking of making a multi-layered Angel Delight dessert, as I have some in the cupboard, but Julia’s last words on the subject as they left this morning was “Don’t you dare.” She’s not a fan of 1970s convenience food.

I can’t actually think of any other songs with Tuesday in the name, but I don’t need to because this will do. This is in direct contrast to Thursday, which is worrying me. I might have to write one myself. It can’t be that difficult, not when you hear some of the stuff that gets played. You just need a few rhymes (I can already think of six rhymes for “Thursday”) and a subject, which is generally love, alcohol or heartbreak, or love, alcohol AND heartbreak. Bung in some choruses and the job’s done. I have no musical talent, but since the 1970s this has not been so much of a problem. Musical talent is obviously quite useful, but it isn’t as important as it used to be.

Mooring ring

It’s a bit like honesty in politics. Though I consider it to be important it doesn’t seem to be necessary these days. The sight of the President of the USA telling the Knesset to give their Prime Minister a pardon on multiple counts, shows the depths to which world politics has sunk. The “cigars and champagne” Trump referred to are allegedly worth $195,000, and are only part of one of three cases being brought.

The world is not a nice place at the moment, and it pains me to see the UK sinking down the corruption rankings from 11th to 20th in the last five years. I how we might be able to do something about it but I’m doubtful. If you lie with dogs you will end up with fleas.

Lost in Modern Life

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Daffodils in Nottingham

Number Two Son has just been promoted, he is now a senior analyst in something I don’t understand. He doesn’t understand it either, so I don’t feel too bad. He’s hoping to pick it up once he starts . . .

Number One Son has been doing jobs I don’t understand for years.

This, I suppose, is the way of things in modern life. We didn’t have computers in my day. We barely had calculators. I used to keep track of millions of vaccinations and the necessary monitoring using a ledger and sheets of squared paper which we used to tape together to give us the required length. Today I suppose I would use a spread sheet and be done with it, though I suspect the accuracy might not be as good. Pressing a button has inbuilt hazards, making a mark on paper is a more thoughtful process.

Daffodils

On the poetry front, I have just been informed that my long-listed poems at Butcher’s Dog have failed to progress to the next stage. Unusually, the editor has written a note to explain the selection process. The main stumbling block is, it seems, that poems don’t always fit together to produce a harmonious whole with other poems within an issue. Seems fair enough, and it’s nice to have another excuse for failure. Not that I need another one, because I already have enough and, as previously mentioned, it tends not to worry me too much.

However, it was nice of them to do it, and it’s in distinct contrast to a couple of others that I deal with, who seem to go out of their way to be gruff, or even unpleasant. That of course, is wasted on me. I’m old enough, and gruff enough to take it in my stride. I think this is because I have a balanced outlook on life. Julia thinks it’s because I am ruder than most people who are rude to me.

Daffodils

Day 60

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Day 60. Also known, in more traditional terms, as 1st March. The first day of meteorological spring, Pancake Day and St David’s Day. It’s also National Barista Day and National Pig Day. If we were still on the farm I’d be all over National Pig Day, starting with a eulogy to the magnificent animal and following up with a bacon sandwich. Baristas, I’m not so bothered about. If you need a national day for people who make drinks with hot water why not have a National Tea Lady Day, or National Quercus Day – I can handle a kettle well enough to produce hot drinks. It’s hardly an unusual skill. As I didn’t even know what a barista was until a couple of years ago, I really don’t see why they need a day to themselves. It seems, after further digging, that it is a day started by a manufacturer of almond milk, another modern fad we can do without. If you can’t deal with milk, take it black.

It is also National Cornish Pasty Week and this is where the concept come undone quite badly. Cornish pasties are, it seems made with “shortbread crust or puff pastry”. In addition to this they are obviously written about by people who know bugger all about pasties. However, isn’t that the story of the internet and the content writers and influencers who inhabit it? It’s “shortcrust” pastry. Idiots. However, I’m ranting about the proliferation of national days and weeks, not about the half-witted population of the internet underbelly.

You can read the list for yourself here. There are some days that are more important than others but they are mainly trivial and set up recently by people wanting to push a cause or make money. In general, unless they include sugar or bacon, I don’t have much time for national anything days.

However, I can’t allow the day to pass without letting all my wonderful, intelligent and discerning readers know how important they are in my life. Even Charliecountryboy. Yes, it’s World Compliments Day.

Modern Life and the Cost of Postage

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Another day, another post to write.

My sister recently told me about a visit to the bank where they now expect you to establish your place in the queue by use of a QR Code. Modern phones have them, as do modern phone owners. I haven’t bothered to connect my five-year-old phone to the internet and still think that the late 19th century had a lot going for it, It’s almost superfluous to add that I have never used a QR Code and intend, if at all possible, never to use one. I have reached 63 without them and don’t see why they are suddenly so popular. I feel the same way about bungee jumping, incense and colonic irrigation too.

We went on the Ashmolean Museum website a couple of nights ago. Not for any intellectual reason – Julia had seen something she liked in the shop. I ordered it and pressed the button for postage. – nearly £9. I swallowed hard, but it was a Christmas present . . .

Then Julia came to life.

“Nine pounds, you’re not paying that. I’ll look for something else.”

It is a bit high for P&P, but having just paid a London Auction £12 for postage and packing I am toughened to this sort of thing.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I searched the internet and found the same item £2 cheaper and with P&P £6 cheaper. Not only have I secured her Christmas present, but I have saved £8 – a true win-win situation.

Sorry about this turning into a post of postage and packing but we’ve just been told off by an eBay customer for our high postage costs. It’s been a burning topic since I first did mail order, in a time well before eBay. People don’t like paying for it, and they certainly don’t like paying for the materials and time that goes into packing things properly. However, they don’t like it when things get lost or broken either.

And with that thought, I will go and have my tea.

Me Being Grumpy About Modern Life

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We had three phone calls on the landline. We know they are going to be nuisance calls but there;s always the possibility it might be a call I want to take. It never is.

Number One was a call from a man telling us that the roof insulation we had installed ten years ago was dangerous and needed replacing. His company, it seemed, would replace it for us and help us institute legal action against the original installers. Julia asked where he was calling from and he said “London”. When she said, “No, what company are you calling from?” he hung up. To the best of my knowledge fibreglass isn’t dangerous, lasts forever (though it does go and get less efficient) and shouldn’t be replaced by strangers who ring at random.

Number Two hung up before I could get to it.

Number Three was a lady who delivered the alarming news that my Sky TV equipment was out of guarantee and needed me to take out a new warranty. I’m not sure what was most alarming – the prospect of spending money or the fact I’d got a Sky TV and hadn’t noticed.Was it possible, I asked her, that she was lying to me and was in fact a criminal trying to defraud a vulnerable, though admittedly cantankerous, old man? The phone line must be faulty as it cut us off before I finished my question.

And that, dear readers, is just one of the reasons that I hate modern life and am thinking of having the landline taken out.

On the other hand, by adept use of Amazon and Tesco delivery services I think I have managed to organise presents and chocolates for Julia’s birthday without setting foot in a shop, so there are some good modern things, just not many.

I wrote this a couple of days ago and seem to have forgotten to post it . . .

I have added “senior moment” to the tags. Julia suggested “idiot”.

Why Bother Blogging? (Part 1)

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I’ve just had a message from WordPress thanking me for renewing and saying “so your site has all its great tools and features for another year”. This is ironic, to say the least, when you consider I’m having to use a version which seems to have been developed by James Watt and has, as a result of WordPress “improvements” noticeably fewer great tools and features than it did this time last week. Having said that, James Watt would probably have made a better job of it.

They then add “Until then, have fun with your site!”. Fun? I had so much fun last week that I nearly cancelled my subscription and gave up blogging. It would have been more fun to insert broken glass into my nostrils.

One thing I’ve noticed on the plug-in Classic Editor is that when I have comments waiting I rarely get a red spot on the bell icon. If it was always absent, I could understand it, but to have it appear once in every ten times I look seems peculiar.

Same goes for my replies. It no longer tells me I have replied. Before I realised this I actually replied twice to something Derrick had said. It was bad enough looking like I am losing my marbles, but he now has the moral high ground in the question of which of us is blogging with fewer marbles. Having said that, his post today, with photographs from his Assistant Photographer, Head Gardener, Driver and Wife (that’s one hard-working multi-tasking person rather than an entourage) indicate that she’s planning an early claim on his life insurance as he plummets to his death whilst photographing storms from cliff tops. That sort of peril just to get a few photographs for a blog is beyond the call of duty.

Summer View Nottinghamshire

Anyway, enough of my adventures with WordPress, it’s time to write a thoughtful examination of my blogging career so far. That’s what I call it anyway. Others may consider it a series of disjointed rants about things I can’t change and things that don’t matter. That is probably fair, but it wasn’t meant to be like that.

Six years ago I dreamed of writing things that mattered and would change the world to be a better place. I wanted to crusade, to be revered as a master of witty and elegant prose and, some months after starting, to be offered jobs writing columns for top London papers. I thought “months” was realistic, whereas “weeks” would have been an impractical daydream. It has proved to be so – seventy months, to be accurate and the London Editors are playing hard to get.

When the call came, I told Julia, despite my probable membership of the Groucho Club, I would try to remain the ordinary, grounded sort of person I had always been. The cocaine fuelled binges, the women, the wads of cash and the free holidays on the yachts of Russian oligarchs, would not change me. So far, I can say that this has been the case. I am unchanged from the idealistic youth of fifty-something that set off to be a famous blogger, with my dignity and integrity in tact. Actually that may not be true. My integrity is still in tact but having written more than once on the subject of the National Health Service inserting a camera into my bladder in a very undignified manner, I feel my dignity may have suffered.

One of several ex-windmills in the area

So that, at least has gone, mainly, to plan.

As for the rest, I rattle on about trivia in a style that relies heavily on a spellchecker, and has only a nodding acquaintance with good writing practice (too many commas and Too Many capitals, for a start) and no longer expect an email from the Editor of The Times.

Looking on the bright side, at least I have not had to employ an accountant to sort out my tax affairs.

Having just checked the membership details for the Groucho Club so I could add a link, it seems unlikely I’d be able to join anyway, and, as several of you are probably thinking, would I want to join a club that would have me as a member?

I think I should end Part 1 here, as it has gone on long enough and I have to cook tea.

Having disposed of the show-biz element of blogging, with the orgies and the oligarchs, I will continue tomorrow with further discussion of the rewards of sitting down at the dining room table and bashing away on a computer that can, like me, no longer cope with the demands of modern life.

Photo by Burst on Pexels.com

Instant Ink. Or Not.

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We are having trouble with the printer at work. It has stopped printing properly, and we didn’t originally notice until it had mis-printed ten sheets. This is an annoying waste. Yes, I can use the paper as scrap note paper, but we use the so-called “Instant Ink” service from the printer company and this is ten sheets towards our monthly target, even though they are useless.

In theory, the system is good, and cheap, but in practice it doesn’t seem to work quite as efficiently as it should. And when we end up with a faulty cartridge we can’t print and we are having to get by with no buying slips and a limited number of compliments slips for parcels. We can get round the former problem by writing things in a notebook, but it doesn’t look professional. We can get round the latter with business cards, but again, it isn’t quite so good, as they don’t deliver the same sales message.

The worst thing is that if we get an eBay order which uses Cyrillic or Chinese script, as they often do, we can’t print an address label out, and we certainly can’t hand write them. I’m hoping we will have the new cartridge by Monday, but can’t help thinking that under the old system (a spare cartridge in the drawer) we would already be back in action.

They call it “Instant Ink”, but we reported it yesterday, so surely we should have our new cartridge today? It was, after all, their faulty cartridge that has caused the problem, and many companies seem to be able to deliver in less than a day, even when they don’t call themselves “Instant”.

Ah well, just one more gripe about modern life.

The strange thing is that the more I look at it, the more efficient and economic it appears. I might actually have found something about modern life I approve of, which is not usual.

Today’s photo is one I took ages ago at Springfield’s when I was waiting for Julia and messing about with the camera. It’s a pattern of paving stones taken using the day-glo pink effect known as “Punk”. Presumably because it was an effect used on Punk posters. Though it might be a mis-print for “Pink”.

Sunset

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I have frittered my night away and now have seven minutes to keep my new plan (two posts a day for a fortnight) on track.

It was light this evening. At 4.00 it was still almost daylight where it had been srak at tat time only a few weeks ago. This state persisted until I finished my shopping at 4.45 and walked out into a beautiful evening. The day had gone by that time but the sky was still bright with the remains of a sparkling winter day.

There was enough pink in the sky to bring the clouds to life, and depending on which way I was facing, or how high I was, wisps of cloud streaked the sky, or gathered in hollows to bathe the city buildings in a pink halo.

I eventually got home and was able to take more photos. My camera did its best to average out the colour, because that is what it is set up to do by the scientists who designed it. But it couldn’t completely remove the beauty.

Another attempt

I tried some of the special settings – moonlight, sunset, pop art, but they have atendency to alter rather than accentuate. The moonlight setting removed even more colour, the sunset a setting didn’t seem to make any difference and the pop art setting tended towards the garish end of things. I had thought of using the expression “gilding the lily” but the overall effect was like being hit in the face with a high-vis jacket. whilst standing under floodlights.but they mainly make things look garish

This is some sort of lesson in the use of modern technology to remove all that is good from our lives. Or add much that is tawdry.

Call me old-fashioned, or even a Luddite, but the modern taste seems to be for change rather than improvement.

Looks like I’ve missed the target, but I’d rather develop my theme than cut it short for the sake of meeting a self-imposed deadline. I will add some photographs now and post about 20 minutes late. Twenty minutes, in my flexible world, is not worth worrying about. Or even 30…

Garish & tawdry. The fact that it is blurred is the least of this picture’s worries…

Early One Morning (Just as the Sun was Rising)

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It’s Sunday and, as usual, I’m up far too early.

The students are back in town and at 6am some of them were still making their way home. I don’t really notice them most of the time, they are just background clutter in my life, but this year I’ve noticed them more. It’s probably another stage in my decline towards senility.

At this point, in search of a wider vocabulary, I looked up leitmotif as it seemed a good word to use. Ten minutes later I found myself better informed, more confused and less likely ever to use the word.

My age-related confusion is, I think, destined to remain a theme. It’s easier to spell and doesn’t involve Wagner. However, I’m glad I thought of it, as I found the word leitwort. Any day that includes a new word is a good day, but not all good words are words that I will use. If I ever become Oxford Professor of Poetry I might slip it in, but apart from that I can’t see I’ll ever use it again.

Anyway, enough about that.

Today’s subject is sunrise. There was a nice one today, and I didn’t have my camera.

Taking the long way home from dropping Julia off I drove along the high ground to the north of Nottingham and looked down as the ground fell away.

In the darkness of the vally, amongst the mist, a few lights sparkled.

Above that, in the lower part of the sky, a narrow band of salmon pink formed a slightly understated sunrise. The sky above that moved from grey to blue and cloud formations were picked out in pink.

It sounds fairly bland when I describe it, but that’s the fault of the prose, not the sunrise. It was an exquisite moment that reminded me of so many things.

I thought of using my mobile phone to take a photograph but my phone camera is specially designed to remove the colour and beauty from any scene. (It truly is a product of the modern world).

That seemed a good subject for my Sunday morning post, so I came home and started writing.

quercuscommunity

Life after the Care Farm