Walking toward the supermarket I spotted D a little way off. He's a tall guy, very individual, a sort of happy go lucky bloke who doesn't let life get him down in any way. I used to work at the same warehouse as him when I was employed by DS, but more to the point, where's his mate?
"He's in there.." Says D smiling, "But he's not my mate"
Thanks for the warning. D's mate is MS. He's another jovial chap, shaven head, but someone with a more direct way of achieving his ends. Years ago he w
The weather yesterday was nothing short of a battle between the gods. In the blue corner, the sun god, a warm and comforting brightness in his perfect blue realm. In the red corner, the rain god. A bringer of greyness and wet, master of dampening chaos, riding the wind to wreak rainfall upon the land.
All morning the wind was dragging ragged grey cloud across what was otherwise a fine and sunny day. By lunchtime, the first heavy grey mountains were on the horizon, and by the time I was walki
Scientists are busy discovering why african naked mole rats live so long. Apparently they can live for thirty years, nearly four times the lifespan of their genetic cousins, and don't suffer from cancer. Naturally scientists believe that studying the hairless little mammals might have beneficial consequences for us too.
Sometimes I wonder if the answer isn't a bit more obvious and doesn't require intense study of graphs, spreadsheets, slides, and scanner imagery. These little mammals don't s
Now we know the security arrangements for the forthcoming 2012 London Olympics. The armed forces will keep the invasion of foreign athletes from conquering Britain. We certainly are going for gold.
Seriously though, 13,000 troops? Attack helicopters? Jet fighters on scramble alert? A battleship on the Thames? I'm struggling to get my head around this. I agree there's bound to be a risk of terrorists making some explosive statement of their anti-whatever views, but this stuff is protection
It's misery month in Britain right now. never mind all tjhose predictions of economic woes and european isolation, it's raining. That might suprise a few people given that Britain has a repuation for damp weather, but you see, most of our dampness is down to showers which do have a habit of catching people out. Today however is wet. It will probably be wet all day. That means I probably will be too.
Yes, It's Happened Again
No I don't mean rain showers, but meteorite showers. The Gemenids a
Yesterday I was browsing the net and just for a laugh did a search on my name (the real one, not my UNRV moniker). What's this? A facebook entry? Lets check it out....
Imposter! There's a guy in London pretending to be me! Here's a little clue if you ever get confused. He likes icelandic music, I don't. Thanks to social networking, he's more famous than I am. There is no justice!
Or Perhaps There Is...
Last night I starting reading a novel - a pleasure I rarely get time to indulge in th
How things change. Years ago, in more affluent times, I could drive into town and quickly find a parking space while I popped down to the shops. Pay for a spot in the council car park? I think not.
The situation changed with the resident parking schemes. Fed up with visitors like me clogging up the streets - though in fairness it was the long stay parking of commuters from outside the town who were the worst offenders - Swindon was divided up into zones and if you didn't pay the fee, you go
The Big Stocktake is due in a couple of days, the managers are nervous, and the weekend shift has predictably left chaos in their wake. No pressure then.
My paltry duty today was to bring some kind of order to the rows of cardboard boxes behind the stairs, the most chaotic region of all, and so off I went, wading through collapsing piles of boxes, waste polythene, and discarded piles of clothes. This is life on the sharp end of Stockrooming. It's a strange experience working in a singularity
With the Greek Cities no longer bothering us, and rebels pushed aside on Sicily, my obvious next move was to attack Carthage. Surely a victory would raise our standing in Rome, which I have been informed is not good. We need triumphs!
Herenius Valerius, our adopted colleague, led the assault on the city of the Punes. A small relief force attempted an ambush upon him, led by none other than Hasdrubal himself, who I understand swore not to retreat from the field of battle until we were defeate
This morning's local paper starts with the headline about our dearly beloved ruin, the Old College site. Yes, it's still there. The issue is apparently no longer the number of rare and protected species of roosting bats, but whether the developer can be bothered to actually do anything. I mean, despite all the presentations anf fine words, there seems to be a distinct lack of progress in getting anyone to sign up to fill the new shopping mall to be built in its place.
Now they're saying it w
Oh look. It's the end of the world again. Someone has worked out by complicated mathematical formulae based on a date arrived at by a medieval monk (no doubt according to complex mathematical formulae too) that the end of the world takes place on May 21st.
So if anyone fancies the pretty girl in the office and never had the courage to make a pass, better get a move on. Time is running out. Joking aside though, how you would you spend your last 24 hours on earth?
This subject came up with
What makes me happy? Various things. I used to enjoy driving fast cars and flying aeroplanes, but sadly life in the fast lane is no longer available to me. A good game on the PC? It helps if your computer works of course. I got mine back from the repairers yesterday evening after a heated phone call only to discover that they hadn't connected the sound.
What about sex? That's a luxury increasingly scarce in my middle age and a news item tells us that couples shouldn't sleep together because
A couple of times now staff at the Job Centre have frowned at my paperwork and asked me why I haven't had many interviews of late.
Truth of the matter is that I never did catch the attention of employers all that often, and with the job market so cutthroat these days, my interview rate is no less than expected.
Perhaps then I shouldn't have been suprised that I was given a vacancy offered by a retail chain, who describe themselves as a multinational company in England. Ahem.
Anyway,
Monday means back to work. Despite the early morning start I couldn't resist staying up last night and checking out a program about animal life along the upper west African Rift valley, that starts in Ethiopia and cuts south. It includes the worlds only lava lake, and I was genuinely suprised by the number of african volcano's littering the area. Great shots of foxes hunting mole-rats, mountain gorillas sitting around waiting for something to happen, or simply just playing and having a great tim
In the news lately is the revelation that employment law is to be changed to make it easier for bosses to fire their workers, the idea being to reduce costs of tribunals, mediation, and trade union intervention.
That's all very well, but if my experience is anything to go by, bosses are already well capable of getting workers they don't want out the door with little difficulty. I've seen employers resort to chicanery and dubious excuses succesfully for some years. Those talents aren't going
Another day, another takeaway vindaloo. Having ordered my meal I sat down and watched the world go by outside. Regents Circus is a busy little road junction and all sorts of people stroll by. Sometimes you see odd things. Now I'm no expert on ethnic dress, but the young moslem lad in a beige dress did look odd to my decadent and preconceptive western eyes. Even stranger was when he calmly walked across the road and drove off in a Bentley Continental GT. How much is this curry costing me?
Tha
There's a lot of nuclear weapons out there. That probably won't suprise anyone, but so far, according to a documentary I saw last night, there are at least 23,000 warheads out there and probably more unaccounted for. America, Russia, Britain, France, Israel, China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea are countries known to have them. South Africa briefly built three before deciding such weapons weren't desirable, opting out of the big league by disassembling them.
It's a chilling thought isn't
Yesterday was not a high point in my life. My credit card was withdrawn. Such a simple little thing isn't it? Just a small rectangle of plastic that allows you spend some of other peoples money provided you pay it back. You might immediately assume that I got into debt by using one. Not so. They withdrew it because I don't use it enough. Profit and loss you see. Due to a technicality in financial assessment, I can't have a replacement card. The tragedy is that I'm now excluded from buying goods
Can you trust statistics? Anyone who watches the tv news or reads the papers every morning is bombarded with facts and figures, most of which are selected to prove a point. As a schoolkid I once had a maths leasson that illustrated how the display of statistics can affect your perception of the result.
The latest statistics about crime are in the news. Murders are down by 17% to a twenty year low, despite the shock horror stories about knife wielding kids stabbing crowds of teachers to death
Swindon is a place of opposites. A place that is comfortable with its future but not with its past. A place that aspires to be a city but cannot free itself of a small town attitude. A place that is ribbed by comedians and... well... deserves to be. This paragraph alone probably puts me on a council ninja hit-list but I shall not be silenced.
I saw a letter in the local newspaper written by a concerned visitor. His Swindon experience was marred by the number of rats running round the old pla
Cold. Wet. Dull.
Welcome to a very average Tuesday in Swindon. I'd like to say more but there's only so many times you describe the realities of the rainforests of Darkest Wiltshire.
The highlight of the last twenty four hours was bumping into the boss of the museum as I dragged my weekly shopping home. We had a nice little chinwag, mostly about recruitment agencies, and we're both agreed that agencies are the curse of western civilisation.
As it happens one of my recent job applicat
Late last night I got bored with my struggles with computers that know more about information technology that I do. Technical stuff gets a bit dull when you get nowhere with it. Instead, I decided to chill out with a video game and discovered getting trashed by pixellated space aliens is no more interesting than arguing with my computer.
For a while I listened to the radio instead. An hour or two of classic rock, an hour or two of back to back adverts for stuff you'll never buy, and an hour
Today has been my first day at the new warehouse. Poor old AD can't cope, there's no official office for us yet (Its a portacabin buried behind stock in another unit nearby) and he's got nowhere to plug in his fridge and microwave. Now there's a man with priorities. At the moment, our office is a pile of pallets shoved into one corner. Cool. Especially in winter...
And what a site! Its huge!! Enormous!!! They give you a map when you sign in at security and boy oh boy do you need it. Warehous
Dampness is the order of the day. Gone is the warm sunshine of yesterday, when I took a stroll through Lawns Wood. Getting out and about means you sometimes encounter unusual sights, and yesterday was no exception.
Firstly I came across a fashion shoot in progress. You don't see that in Swindon very often. Young ladies in the latest summer styles waited patiently as the photographers and commercial directors relayed endless instructions on poise, expression, movement, and what to do about id
Last year I attended a programme designed to teach jobseekers how to go about searching for a job. Yes, it really was that banal. The course was aimed at young people who had never worked before in their lives so for me, it was like being back at infants school.
One of the lads on the course at the same time was LB, whose penchant for stopping at Greggs (A high street bakery) o the way meant he never, and I mean never, arrived on time, though in fairness his light hearted attitude toward lif
