I can't tell how how pleasant a day it is right now. Bright sunshine and a cool breeze. Even the mood is relaxed as I go about my business among the throngs of people feeling exactly the same way as I do. Okay, I avoided the marching band, but hey, each to their own.
The museum has been unusually busy too. Paying customers? Whatever next? Asking that question was my mistake. For those who've ever watched the comedy series My Name Is Earl, Karma is alive and well outside of California too.
During my last years at school I was a little less than well behaved. Nothing malicious, just totally unable to act in a mature or acceptable manner. It was of course a teenage rebellion. The teachers were not impressed and I remember stern lectures and demands to know what I intended to do when I left school and went out into the big wide world.
I chose to join the Royal Air Force. So I popped down the recruiting office and the man in uniform there said "Sorry, Son, no vacancies". Huh? Well
The doorbell rang last night. Wow, thats a forgotten pleasure. Most people announce their presence by shouting in the street. So I drop my dry sandwich and rush downstairs in a fit of uncool eagerness.
A hopeful adolescent stood in the hallway, looking a bit uncertain at my raffish squalor.
"Is that your Mazda out back?" He asked. Oh no... Don't tell me it's been vandalised again....
Yes it is, I responded.
"You thinking of selling it?" He enquired nervously. I stared for a sec
Every so often I see news footage of some disaster or conflict that results in people abandoning homes to live in tented shanties. Like most things reported by television, it's all very terrible and you know people are suffering, but the filmed sequences never really prepare you for the reality of it. After all, when you're watching these things, the chances are you're comfortable in a warm secure house with no particular worries except how to afford the bills.
Just of late there's been a se
I read this mornings local paper with a smirk. It appears that a local club (the Lava Lounge) hasn't got a music license so under british law it cannot provide music for its customers without incurring a large fine - and they already have to pay more than
The lady on the supermarket till is an endangered species these days. They're all being replaced by robots. Well, until a bunch of guys with dark suits and sunglasses escort this particular lady to a large black vehicle waiting outside, I'll avail myself of the customer service.
"Are you going to Fairford?" She asked. I looked out the window, surveyed the grey clouds and damp ground, and said no, I wasn't. She meant of course the RIAT air display, our annual traffic jam north of Swindon. Fai
One of the features of the Wiltshire countryside is the crop circle. A pattern made in a field by flattening crops. Since their early days these patterns have gotten quite sophisticated and some are extraordinary to look at. For me it's a part of everyday life in the country. Every year there's a crop circle or two, so no big deal, though I doubt the farmer sees it that way.
Why do these circles appear? This morning I've picked up a book at the local library that discusses this very point. I
Another day, another jobsearch. My claims advisor doesn't like me doing anything other than seeking gainful employment and is trying to force me to waste more of my time looking for jobs I applied for last week, but you see, all work and no play makes Caldrail a dull applicant. So my claims adviosor can... well... off.
As I write this I'm entertained by the efforts of a young man to woo the pretty young blonde sat next to him. He started quite well - she liked the attention - but he hasn't g
The last few days have been quite warm, a typical British summer, and that wa quite enough for me. Luckily the nights cooled things down. A bit. Before the weekend however, the weatherman on television was beaming with malicious delight. Watch out for the weekend - it's going to be a scorcher. Okay. yawn.
I got up late this morning having been up all night. As usual in summer, the air within my home was a little stuffy but I had things to do, so the atmosphere was of little concern. As soon
"Just like being on holiday" observed a shaven haired monster of a man sat with his family on the streetside tablle under a cafe awning. "Swindon On Sea".
He's right. There's a huge crowd of people milling around aimlessly for no other reason than aimlessly milling around. Come on people, do something! There's shops all around you. Stop obstructing the pavements with aimless miling and buy stuff. Save the economy and create new job opportunities for me to apply for.
The Bike Sheds
I was
Time to get on with my search for gainful employment. I think I'll phone Jobseekers Direct - its a happy friendly service to help idiots like me get a job by finding vacancies on their extensive database. After the usual identity checks the woman asked me what areas of employment I was interested in.
Warehouse, distribution, logisitics.
"We've got one vacancy for a warehouse supervisor.."
North Swindon? Yes I've applied for that.
"Well thats all we've got. Have you done any stock
There was an obituary in our local paper recently. Bill Slater had passed away at the grand old age of 65. I don't think many people outside the Swindon area knew him, but he was an Oxford man, a rugby player, a stage performer, but most relevant to me, my old history teacher.
I read that small story on the bottom of the page with mixed feelings. In all honesty I wasn't aware of his understated stage career performing the works of Gilbert & Sullivan, and I knew from another source that h
Much of the news is about Wikileaks at the moment. Quite why this site is viewed with such regard is beyond me. Anyone else who goes around telling everyone everybodies elses secrets usually gets cold shouldered. No, that's not right, I do know why. It's because their readership are anonymous idiots who take great delight in finding out stuff they shouldn't know.
As to whether any of these former secrets are actually true I can't say. Chances are a great deal of it is fiction to begin with,
I woke last night dimly aware that my bed was wobbling. Now usually the rattles and vibrations I experience at night are the result of heavy lorries thundering down the hill, or perhaps my neighbours stereo (or just my neighbours), but this felt different. Objects were rattling around, and the bed was still wobbling. Its an extraordinary sensation and one that left me wondering "Was that an earthquake?"
Yes it was. Measuring 5.2 on the Richter Scale and centered in Lincolnshire, the earthqua
Time to take Ol' Reliable down from his perch on the kitchen surface. As microwaves go it was a simple beast. Put your food in, select a cooking time... Three minutes?... Yes, let's try three minutes. If I see steam building up I know it's time to cut the power early. How simple is that? No complicated programming or indeed any intrinsic knowledge of cooking required. Just hot food, on demand.
There can be no sentimentality in the cutthroat competition of consumer electronics. Ol' Reliable h
The other day I was chatting to a colleague about popular music. In my youth music was scarce, hard to come by, and watching Top Of The Pops on a thursday night was an event to be savoured even with Noel Edmunds introducing the evenings mime actors. If one of your mates bought an album, a fragile twelve inch disc of black plastic, we all converged for that all important first listen. We all sat around admiring the artwork of the cover, wondering who all these names were on the credits, or discus
I'm watching the news this morning and one of the featured stories is about knife crime. One more young man of 19 has been stabbed to death in London recently. The family have organised a protest march to demand action from politicians. The brother of the latest victim is interviewed in the studio. Now I've no doubt whatsoever that this family have suffered a grievous loss, yet there was something artificial about that interview. It's hard to put your finger on it. The modern media are very slic
That's it for this week as my college course closes because of half term. This is the first time in thrity years that I've been to College. I have to go back next week to finish off my course and again shortly after to finish it off even more.
What course am I studying? Well, it isn't Roman History. It isn't a degree in Dynamic Temporal Physics either., sadly, so I still can't argue with Professor Brian Cox without being put in my place. No, it's Employability Level One, so I'm finally being
"I don't want her!" Insisted the young man to his paranoid girlfriend last night. To be honest, the sordid details of peoples love lives don't interest me overly. I'll leave that sort of thing to the people who watch soap operas. That said, it was impossible to ignore. He was a typical specimen of british youth. Thin, gangly, shaven haired, spitting out his words in a descending tone. She was was quieter, insecure, prodding him for a reaction and definitely achieving her objective. Had this conv
What does a photograph mean? On the face of it, probably not much, as it is after all a static recording of light received by a chemical or electronic process at that given moment. Sometimes it can convey information, or perhaps preserve a happy memory. You could say a photograph has whatever significance you place upon it.
Some people have a gift for photography. They manage to capture more than a smple recording of light. They capture movement, frozen for that instant, or a scene that invo
I woke this morning to discover that bruises have a life of their own. Sounds strange? Well, the bruise obtained in my argument with a door the day before has now migrated from a large lump over my eye to a black ring around it. Oh no. I have a black eye. I look like like I've done ten rounds with Mike Tyson, though in all fairness, experts would probably note I only have one bruise thus did not last beyond one punch. Doors are tough opponents.
What bothers me though is that I nearly achieve
This morning I was walking up a street around the corner from where I live. Strewn with yellow and brown leaves, damp after last nights rainfall. It was also covered with broken glass in one place beside a car.
Yes, the mystery car thief has struck again. Its hard to understand what he gains from this. Its entirely opportunistic, his targets are at random, and judging by the stuff left lying around the car I passed today, he simply isn't interested in what he finds. So is after anything spec
The opening of the library is my daily ritual these days. I come in and browse the selection of paperback novels. Ye gods there's some rubbish getting printed these days. A lot of it is genre based. Half a dozen tales about the Roman period are there, and the details on the back are sounding very similar... Johnius Smithio the detective... On the trail of the man who killed the other one... blah blah blah. I've heard all this before. Doesn't sound like a likely scenario anyway.
Ooh look, a
Industrial accidents happen. There's no denying that. I know of a guy who drove his forklift off the bay because he hadn't noticed the lorry had gone. There was a forklifter at one place I used to work who regularly smashed holes in the breezeblock wall because he reversed out without looking. There was another who broke off the sprinkler head and flooded the warehouse with brown sludgy water.
There's a chap who works in our warehouse who thankfully doesn't work for us. He fell out of the ba
In case anyone didn't notice, it's now 2011. That means I haven't written an entry in this blog since last year. Strange... Only seems like a few days since I last typed a message... Oh well, never mind.
With the new year the weather has ceased to be quite as frigid as it was prior to christmas. I've even turned the heating off again. Maybe I'm just getting used to living in cold conditions that I can't bear being in a warm room any more, at least not without dozing off every five minutes.
