Category: Life

It has now been four years since I started this blog and although a lot has happened in that time it only seems like a few months ago since I started. My first post was on February 23^rd 2007. I have no idea where the time goes but it slips by so quickly. I had plans to be well away from here by now but those plans are on hold indefinitely, or at least until the world returns to some semblance of normality. Judging by the turmoil in the Middle East it may be some time!

The turmoil has affected most people on the planet if not all with the increase in oil prices as fears mount that the supply may be cut off. For my friends in foreign parts petrol (gasoline) is now close to six pounds a gallon and is set to reach £6.50 within a few months and possibly £7 by the end of the year. You can do your own conversions to your own currencies. This will not help to end the recession and the bankers are not to blame for this particular incident although much of the current burden is theirs to share alone, unless…… Yes speaking not so long ago to one who works in a bank he reckoned it was the fault of ordinary Joe Public. You see he reckons that if us lot had repaid the money we owed to the banks then there would be no problem. It is out fault for borrowing so much and not paying it back you see.

There, the answer is clear it is not the banks fault at all. We should have kept our jobs and made the repayments and all would have been well with the world. Bernie Madoff was merely misunderstood and ponzi schemes are fine. Don’t you just hate it when everyone else expects you to pick up the tab for them? A little bit like our own nationals who decide to go and work abroad because they hate the UK and then pay tax to foreign governments until the shit hits the fan and then they start screaming about how the British government should get them home. In other words you and me have to pay tax to mount the rescue of someone who has pissed off on us. Wouldn’t it be nice of the companies they worked for to pay and arrange to get them home instead of UK tax payers?

On the bright side the weather is warming up and the days are getting longer. The blowy season will be here in a few days and then the clocks go forward again. That means the start of the Barbie season, if we have a summer that is. The last three years have been awful with the last two the wettest I have ever known. My chief partner in crime Ted Magnum comes home next week from a tour of Africa and I already have plans for this year’s highlights and events. The smoker is getting refurbished along with a good ole scrub and re-paint in readiness for plenty of action. I have not used it since Halloween and it has since been neglected and like the greenhouse looks a little bit sorry for itself. When the clocks go forward and it is light in the evenings I will be able to start working in the garden again and clear up the storm damage. I may even be able to give Rhonda a service. Without a garage this task is difficult in winter when spanners stick to your fingers because they are so cold and the rubber on tyres is so stiff you can’t lever them off the rims.

When I was in my teens most of my bikes were fixed in the kitchen, the sink was handy for cleaning engines although Elsie never thought so, but Rhonda is too big to get through the back door.  What I want is a garage or a decent size workshop, I have never had one of those in my life and I am starting to really feel the need for one. By the time the recession is over and in my experience these things last about 7 years, I may be able to move to somewhere that has one in which case I will probably be too old to handle Rhonda.  Yes time is flying so fast that before I know it my pension and bus pass will be here.

 

Yes I have to admit it I am baby boomer, born in the 1950’s. This is not something I had any control over it just happened. So, imagine my horror when I opened several newspapers to read that us baby boomers are responsible for the state of the world today. Yes the entire economic downturn has been caused by my generation with no thought for the past or future generations. We have been labelled as the want it all now and to hell with the consequences brigade. To top it all the youngsters are accusing us of not dying young or fast enough.

It would appear that the first boomers are ready for retirement and the fear is that there are not enough people working to pay for our pensions. This is hardly the problem of people who have worked since they left school. If it was not for the boomers then there would be no schools hospitals or any of the other amenities that people take for granted. It is the boomers that have been working since 1945 that have paid for everything we have today including the schooling and pensions of those born before them and since.

To label three generations as feckless, and self centred because they want a pension after working for as long as the government asked them to is a bit harsh. Maybe it is the fault of those who choose not to work or those who plunder the savings of the prudent in the name of profit that have ruined the economy. Banker’s bonuses are still being paid out in telephone number style. If they can afford to pay so much bonuses they can afford to pay decent interest rates on savings and pay back some of the loans that the taxpayer made to them to bail them out. In fact I have often wondered why people who are against the bonuses being paid out do not simply switch their bank accounts to a bank that does not pay as much.

Around 7 billion will be paid out by the top five banks in the form of shares or bonuses to employees; this is on top of their wages. The top five? According to these people, http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/jan2011/bank-j12.shtml
They are HSBC, Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), Lloyds and Standard Chartered. They are making around 200 million per day. Now how much of that is going to savers in the form of interest payments and how much is going into the government coffers in the forms of corporation tax? Sadly not very much but some quarters, including the young and the middle aged are blaming the baby boomers for this sorry state of affairs.http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/227764

I did not ask to be born when I did, I have worked continuously since the age of 21, I have no debts and I consider myself to be careful with my finances. Given this I take exception to the arseholes who blame me and many like me for the state of the world.

For those who do, well F*** you!!

 

Finally January went out with a whimper and February roared in, quite literally. After coming back from a camping session in Cornwall I stood helplessly in the kitchen watching 50 mph gusts of wind tear my greenhouse to shreds. It also tore down some of the trellis and many of the plants. Sadly the greenhouse is only fit for the skip and the trellis will go the same way, strangely enough the neighbours trees which have blighted me for so long are still standing. (I am sure some readers will chuckle at this)

The bad news on the economy front rumbles along and unions are planning strikes and demonstrations in protest. Even the students have got in on the act bemoaning the end of the EMA. EMA? I did not know it existed; it stands for educational maintenance allowance and is paid to 6^th formers who stay on in school. For gods sake we have been paying kids to go to school. I have no idea how this sorry state of affairs happened or even when but it has and now the new coalition government want to stop it.

At long last it seems as though the Government is standing up to the European Courts. Britain has been told it has to give prisoners the right to vote. Now I may have misunderstood here but if you are in prison it is generally because you neglected your moral duty or just walked over some one else rights. The Bigwigs in Europe seem to think that just because you don’t care about any one else rights you should still be entitled to your own and so you should have the vote.

This seems to me like asking Turkeys if Christmas should be abolished. Anyway our own government has a rebellion on its hands as many backbenchers have said no to the idea even if it is enforced upon us. This could mean us even pulling out of the European human rights act if the courts of Europe reject the UK’s own elected Government in what is essentially an internal affair.

I have never been a fan of the European human rights act and to replace it with something that incorporates human responsibilities seems a lot fairer.

It is not too long before spring arrives and the clocks go forward again. I am sure my old friends the collared doves are hanging around somewhere just waiting to reclaim their old nest in my neighbour’s tree. The mercury is no longer falling and even the snowdrops are poking their heads through the frozen soil. It will seem strange not having a greenhouse this year and I will have to decide what if anything I am going to attempt to grow in the space the greenhouse used to occupy.

As the seasons change another birthday approaches and it seems to have come around even quicker than the last one which was faster than the one before. I am sure that even if Einstein’s theory of relativity was written about the speed of light it was inspired by birthdays as they come around faster each year relative to your age. When you are six years old your seventh birthday seems a long way off, when you are in your fifties it only seems like weeks since your last one and that to me is the theory of relativity.

 

January is almost over and I will be glad to see the back of it. As one journalist from the Daily Mail said, “any month that starts with a hangover and the need for a diet coupled with a huge credit card bill has not got a lot going for it”. In my case only the credit card bill was missing. I have still not lost the weight I put on over Xmas but I have become virtually teetotal and I am giving up the demon drink completely for Lent.

As the weather is warming up a touch and the days are becoming a little longer I thought it would be a good idea to start some maintenance work on Rhonda. After an hour my fingers were dropping off with the cold and I discovered the water pipes in the shed had burst. This meant not being able to use the jet washer and most of my time was taken up with spanners replacing copper pipes and repairing leaking joints instead of tending to my trusted steed. Rhonda will now have to wait until the coming weekend when I can wheel her into the warmth of Ogri’s garage to finish her off.

The snow and the ice may have temporarily receded but it is still damn cold. Not too cold though to stop me going away camping on the Bodmin moors in a little over a week’s time. Hence the need to have Rhonda in peak condition if she is to carry me for over 700 miles there and back again with all the equipment I think I shall require.

My broadband provider, the dreaded silicat , has been taken over by Yak Yak and frankly the service has gone from bad to worse. I have had varying degrees of access since last Friday and calls to the helpdesk have not been helpful. There is the possibility that if I actually understood what they were saying I may get somewhere. So why am I still with them? Well no other provider will take me on without a fixed term contract and as I live in the perpetual hope of selling the house it would mean being contractually obliged to pay for something I would not require.

There is of course some good news. My renewal quote from the AA for breakdown cover had gone up by over 100%, yes a staggering 100%. I looked at other providers and obtained rival quotes and rang the AA. The man on the end tried to explain that the previous year was a heavily discounted offer to welcome me back to the fold. I asked him about loyalty to customers who stay with the companies that provide services and he merely sighed. I then informed him I was off to join the RAC and I would be back next year as a new customer and would be expecting the discount again. There followed more heavy sighing coupled with the almost pleading “well let me see what we can do” and he came back to match the offer of the rival companies.

If only they could have done this in the first place we could have both saved some time. So many companies are offering discounts to new customers and it is the same with banks. One of my banks was paying virtually no interest on an old account I had so I rang them up to vent some spleen and they told me to open up a new account for which they would give a preferable rate of interest. Naturally I did but it begs the question why didn’t they just up the interest rate on my old account? Of course I expect to go through this horse trading some time next year when even newer bank accounts are available and more discounts for new customers, but not existing ones, are offered to tempt us to switch service providers of one sort or another. But here is a novel idea why don’t they reward loyal customers who stay with them. Maybe it is because it would take away the fun of horse trading? 

Hello 2011 and all of that. A professional blogger from the BBC once asked why so many amateur bloggers gave up and came to the conclusion that they run out of things to say. In my case it is that I run out of time to say them. It seems that as soon as I get in and have fed the cat, got changed, had something to eat then it is time to go to bed. I seem to be so busy earning a living I have no life! It is most definitely not the case that I have run out of things to say.

So with nothing more than a brief run down of what has been happening since my last entry, I am giving up trying to write about what happened yesterday because something always happens today. Bean counters youngest, Johan the Destroyer and his babe, took delivery of a healthy new baby girl called Holly in mid December. For the technical she weighed in at around 7 pounds ish and is now no longer pink and wrinkly.

Xmas came and went with all of the usual hustle and bustle and so did New Years Eve. I did manage to barbecue at midnight on New Years Eve and cooked several cuts of meat aided by Roger Moor while the rest of the guests sat in the warmth deciding that we were mad. Indeed the New Year was let in by the waft of grilled meat and spices, surely an auspicious start to 2011?

The Traveller has been to Gibraltar, back to Greece and then headed off to America where he is currently in Manhattan checking out suitable land. The search is not going well and Greece and Gibraltar have been written off as too primitive or too expensive and the good ole US of A is not looking much better.

Ted Magnum is more than ¾ of the way through a trip down Africa and was last heard of in Malawi and about to enter South Africa over 2.500 miles from the end of his journey to table top mountain. Yes everyone is travelling except me!

This brings me to the state of the country; petrol has gone through the roof and is now £1.28 a litre or almost 6 quid a gallon and it is set to rise. Conservative economists reckon it will be £1.50 a litre or £6.78 a gallon, for my American chums that is $10.50. Banker’s bonuses are still sky high and Dave Cameron has said it is time to stop bashing the bankers. Sorry Dave but it wont be time to stop bashing the bankers until they have pulled us out the shit they have dragged us all in to and then paid some compensation.

So what have we got to look forward to in 2011? Globally it is very uncertain but the feel good factor will certainly be enhanced when the Royal wedding takes place in April. Indeed if you look at the last few royal weddings they all seem to have taken place under a Conservative government, you might say they have bought the franchising rights. As for me well I intend to lose some of the weight I gained during the festive excesses and do some travelling or holidaying at the very least. Right up there on the list is to finish the house when the clocks go forward and the mercury starts to rise. There is not a lot to do and hopefully it will all be finished by the end of June. Oh and I definitely intend to take Rhonda out more often good health willing. Happy new year.

 

It has been some time hasn’t it? Approximately four months! It isn’t that I didn’t have anything to write, I had too much and before I could get thoughts down more stuff worth writing about happened and so I decided to take a sabbatical. So now for the hard bit, condensing 4 months worth of stuff into 3 minutes worth of reading.

Work continued on the house despite the wettest summer on record, 3 years in a row, where will it all end? The outside of the house is almost finished but it will only be completed after the good weather is here and the clocks have gone forward again. There are 3 rooms inside to be completed and then it is as finished as I can get it to be before I start spending negatively. IE spending £500 to add only £300 to the value. It should be on the market at some point next year.

What else happened? Well I fell over in the bathroom and landed side on upon the edge of the bath. This resulted in at least four broken ribs (the X rays were inconclusive due to the amount of fluid and swelling) and a perforated lung. I spent a week in hospital with lots of painkillers and plenty of oxygen. I was off work for six weeks only returning three weeks ago. I have been told I was lucky as the broken ribs could have pierced the lungs completely instead of badly grazing them. Fortunately Beancounter, The Traveller and Roger Moor have all looked after me.

The weather has taken a turn for the worse and winter has arrived several weeks early. Some parts of Scotland have experienced temperatures of minus 20 degrees Celsius. The outside pipes in my shed have frozen despite plenty of lagging to ensure they would not do so like last year. The peninsula that I live on has mercifully been snow free but already the popular national press has been scaremongering with stories of food and fuel shortages due to Lorries and wagons being unable complete journeys. I have no idea why the UK cannot cope with a few inches of snow a couple of times a year when Scandinavian countries cope with six months a year of the stuff. It certainly makes it hard for the young ones to believe the Brits once ruled an empire upon which the sun never set when they see us get battered into submission by a few snow flakes!

Christmas is almost upon us and the annual orgy of consumerism and self indulgence fuelled by clever advertising agencies has begun in earnest. Shops are advertising sales within the first few days of December in order to attempt those with the least to part with the most. If Christmas really stood for what it was supposed to, the frugal but joyous worship of the birth of Christ, I would be all for it. Sadly it seems that Charles Dickens has destroyed that with his Christmas story. (Brits did not eat Turkey until his tale but ate Goose instead) Never underestimate the power of good advertising to destroy the true meaning of anything spiritual. It makes you wonder how long will it be before the admen and money guys come up with some way of exploiting and profiting from the Dalai Lama?

Until next time when I try and catch up and post lots of photos in the gallery, enjoy the snow.

 

Three weeks ago United Utilities (those nice people who supply our water and charge us extortionately for the privilege of doing so) announced there was a water shortage and that there would be a hosepipe ban, Guess what? Yes it has rained every day since the ban was imposed. Flash floods have taken place and one or two areas have had a month’s rainfall in a single day. The company’s response? It has not rained in the right areas. You could not make this shit up.

Due to all of the rain the grass and the weeds in particular have acted as though they are on steroids and as you can’t cut grass when it is wet, (particularly with an electric mower) the gardens are starting to look like jungles again. Work on the outside of the house has ground to a halt. This is the most important work as it needs to be done during the hours of daylight and in dry weather. Fresh paint tends to be washed away during a downpour and it won’t stick to damp timber in any case. As summer rolls by in an endless torrent of rain and grey skies that shorten the daylight hours, my dream of having the house finished by September has all but gone up in smoke.

The cuts announced by the government have not yet taken place and the stock markets and money lending banks are on a knife edge watching to see what will happen. Of course all of this is affecting the housing market with few people buying in case they lose their jobs. I did start to wonder if I will ever get away. There is an age factor to be taken into consideration. If the financial gurus are to be believed then by the time the housing market recovers I will be over 60. Naturally I got rather depressed by all this and my SAD kicked in 5 months early. Not since Elsie passed away have I felt so demoralised and unable to plot or plan my own destiny. It is no exaggeration to say that on more than one occasion I have gone to bed not caring if I wake up or not.

But enough of this sadness and despondency some of my friends have been great. The Driver turned up to see me last week and stayed for a couple of nights. Much merriment was had by all. The Traveller is away in Gibraltar looking at yachts and Bean Counter has been there to cheer me up and remind me that things could be so much worse. She is right of course but that is the thing with depression, you don’t see things the way other people see them.  But yet again I digress.

Some of the things that have made me chuckle over the past few weeks is the state of our education system. One of my colleagues, a young rising star, and myself were in a discussion about tyranny and after the usual conversations about Hitler, Chairmen Mao and Stalin, I mentioned Pol Pot. He looked at me quizzically and said isn’t he the guy who won Britain’s got talent? I then put him straight and mentioned the Khmer Rouge, he thought it was eye shadow but had heard of Cambodia although had no idea where it was.

It does make you wonder, what the hell are they teaching kids in school?

 

Finally my computer is now back up and running. I have in the last few years gone through more hard drives than any one I know. It would appear they fall to bits just days after Microsoft updates and have to be either re-formatted or binned. Either way it stops me from compiling my blog and adding photos of events that have taken place. The fact that my old faithful machine is back up and running is in no small part due to Roger Moor. Armed with only a bagful of second hand spare bits and a bottle of Buffalo Trace we set to work rebuilding the mighty Green Meanie and only managed to finish when the bottle was empty!

So what has been happening over the last few weeks and months? I along with Bean Counter and Ted Magnum stayed at my brothers one weekend in May and I took Ted along to the Dukes pass. Photos and a detailed description of the event should appear in the travel section in a few days. I also went camping to a HUBB meeting at Ripley and again another write up will appear in the travel section as soon as I can upload the photos.

Rhonda has been given a service with some replacement parts and photos and details to appear in travel. I finally believe she is ready equipped and with all the modifications I require for long distance unlimited travel. Indeed it has been some time since I last saw anything and thought I need one of those.

More work has been completed on the house and Animal has replaced some of the plaster on the hall stairs and landing that had come away from the brickwork. The rear windows are in the process of being stripped back to the wood and stained and should be finished in around another four days weather pending. The garden is looking great after much sweat and toil and the greenhouse is positively blooming.

All of this sounds so positive what could go wrong? Well I keep finding things that require either work or money spending on them. Last week I decided that the bathroom needed tidying up and came up with a cost of a couple of hundred pounds and within the last two hours the garden shed has become damp again despite the new roof and guttering. The cause has been tracked down to a leaking ball cock valve in the toilet cistern. As it is a non serviceable item it will have to be replaced and usually this is not a big job. The cistern though is not in a usual place it is so high up the wall access to the inside of it requires a feat of contortionism.

I still have hopes of having the house completed by the end of September this year and ready to go on the market for Easter of 2011. This will in large depend upon financial events around the world as the UK has set a large austerity budget with massive cut backs. The cut backs may not affect my own job but if the jobless total rises then people will not be in a position to buy houses and those who are employed may be put off by the fact they might lose their own jobs at some point soon.

I am not alone in this position; a few people that I met at the HUBB meeting in Ripley are in the same boat. They have had houses on the market for a few months with little sign of them shifting at all. I fail to see why the bankers who caused most of this doom and gloom are not the ones picking up the tab for this mess. Instead the governments of the world have bailed them out, they are still awarding themselves massive bonuses and it is the little man on the street that is paying the price for it all with job losses and loss of spending power.

We may have a new government but as far as I can see nothing has changed at the top despite the assurances of transparency. What is absolutely transparent is that as usual the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Nothing changes does it?

 

It should have been a glorious occasion. England were in a comparatively easy group for this years world cup and our opening game was against America a country who have only recently started playing. What happened? A team that we were supposed to roll over with apparent ease held us to a one all draw and that was only through a horrendous error by our goalkeeper.

 

No matter the second game should be easy, we are playing Algeria. Unfortunately the game was a nil nil draw and a spectacle of such dross. Animal and Roger Moor who had turned up at my house to watch the match left after play had finished instead of staying on and partying all night long as we were supposed to after our “slaughter” of the Algerians.

 

Shortly after, the texts started; “The wags could have done better in high heels” and then “If we cant beat a bunch of camel shagging rag heads from the third world we may as well come home now”. They became a lot more extreme after that one and I wont print them. All of this anger was compounded by Mr Rooney’s comments of “being booed by your own fans is not good”. Well Mr Rooney some people have been saving for an awful long time and made immense sacrifices both emotional and financial to be over in South Africa to support you and your boys and with the display you gave what do you expect? To be showered with rose petals and have dads offering to name their next child after you was never going to be on the cards after that game.

 

Now is not the time for drowning sorrows and slashing wrists, we are not out of the competition yet but I think as a lot of my fellow country men do that we are entitled to expect more from our overblown, overpaid, pampered and preened “Superstars”. They have fantastic salaries and lifestyles that the rest of us mere mortals can only dream about. Who is it that allows them that lifestyle? Us, the long-suffering and paying supporters. It is time for them to give something back and a little sweat and effort would not be unappreciated.

 

We are not the only team in this state. France are perilously close to going home as are a few other nations and the ball seems to have come in for some particularly harsh criticism. To be fair it is not harsh at all, the ball is rubbish and as most of the coaches and a lot of players have said it does not go where you want it to go. Even the makers have said different altitudes affect the qualities of this particular ball. It is almost as annoying as those damn vuvuzelas or horns that have no note and sound like a swarm of bees. Some players have said this affects their concentration. Most notably the players on the losing sides are saying this and not the winning ones.

 

Our world cup is not over yet but never has so much been owed to so many by so few. For gods sake England get your fingers out.

 

Although it seems like forever since the last one it is only four years since but so much can happen in four years. Much of my life can be traced through foot balling events. I was in London at the Hyde Park concert during the last world cup when England were unceremoniously dumped out by Portugal and the little winker himself Ronaldo.

In 1986 the day of the FA cup final between Liverpool and Everton I made a life changing decision and left the home I was living in at the time. I was in Bulgaria when Liverpool lifted the European cup for a historic fifth time. So what has happened since the last world cup?

My mate the Tiler left for Australia, the Marchioness of Gastanbury is sadly no longer with us, an economic recession the like of which has not been see since the end of WW2 is still reaping havoc around the world and in the UK we have a change of government to mention just a few of the important events that have happened to me. The damage to the economy caused by the outgoing government has (according to the incoming one) been catastrophic and will require years of hardship before the countries books can ever be balanced again.

The UK is not alone by any means in it’s struggle to get to grips with a runaway economy. Greece is in deep shit with at least one economist predicting that a coup or overthrow of the government will take place within the next few years followed by a few other south European countries and the break up and death of the Euro, a currency that should never have been born. Strangely a well respected financial newspaper revealed only the day before that the arms industry was the only industry that most countries had not cut back on and indeed in some parts of the world were positively surging.

There is no doubt there will be stormy seas ahead for some time but for now let us hope that the tournament in South Africa can bring a sense of calm and peace to an otherwise troubled world. That is until your team loses!