good weekend !

An extremely enjoyable weekend comes to an end. I met 2 very nice new people on Friday evening – went out for a few beers in Richmond and had a great thai meal followed by a boozy/blurry bus ride home – only just managed to wake up in time for my stop…!

Saturday and Sunday was spent in the country looking after my little nephews, Fin (4) and Myles (2). We had a great time: played hide-and-seek, went for a little walk, waved at the steam train, hunted for conkers, got nipped by a shetland pony, saw goldfish in a pond, was barked at by big dogs, had a game of poo-sticks on the bridge, played cricket with squishy apples, looked for rabbits, ran around until we fell over, played endless games of ‘I’m the king of the castle’, watched ‘Babe’ on video (I slept through most of it !), had a messy tea, played with toy cars, had a few little tantrums and then fell fast asleep !

Everyone then descended on my parent’s place for a boozy family BBQ on Sunday with Pims, loads of red wine, chicken legs, plates of salad and a very wobbly summer fruit terrine to top it all off. By 5pm I was spooned into my bro’s car and whisked back to London to recover !

Fantastic…

Night Mail

This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from the bushes at her blank-faced coaches.
Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.
In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes.

Dawn freshens, the climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends
Towards the steam tugs yelping down the glade of cranes,
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In the dark glens, beside the pale-green sea lochs
Men long for news.

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from the girl and the boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or visit relations,
And applications for situations
And timid lovers’ declarations
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled in the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Notes from overseas to Hebrides
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring,
The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

Thousands are still asleep
Dreaming of terrifying monsters,
Or of friendly tea beside the band at Cranston’s or Crawford’s:
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
And shall wake soon and long for letters,
And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

This is a fantastic poem, one of my favourites. It was written by W H Auden for the 1936 GPO documentary Night Mail. I’ve seen it on film and it’s just great with Auden reading the poem and Benjamin Britten doing the music.

ppt ?

Powerpoint, art or evil ?

Oh My God ! The Gettysburg Address in Powerpoint….. It’s evil, it’s evil !

Partition…

I was just thinking… take all the big territorial disputes causing major tensions in the world today – Israel/Palestine, Kashmir, Northern Ireland, Cyprus, North Korea. What’s the common thread ? Bar North Korea, the legacy of British Imperialism.

Perhaps it’s the British taste for compromise which led to partition. Dividing lands between warring parties is easier than imposing a draconian settlement. Ireland in 1921, India/Pakistan in 1947, Israel/Palestine in 1948, Cyprus in 1974.

Almost all the partitioned territories have turned into open wounds of conflict, resentment and lasting hatred. The lesson must be: partition doesn’t work. Take note Mr Sharon.

Heavy levy

Right, that’s it ! I’ve prevaricated, evaded, filibustered, deferred, postponed, dodged and weaved. But now I have to face it… The hour has come ! The dreaded TAX RETURN has to be done !

Procrastination is an art and when it comes to tax I am spectacularly efficient at not getting round to it. I have, however, discovered that you can now fill in your self assessment tax return online. My life is changed forever ! I registered with them today and apparently it takes 7 days for them to send through the activation code. It’s officially sanctioned, I can put it off for another week !!! How good is that !

As the French Statesman Jean Baptiste Colbert once said, “The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest amount of feathers with the least amount of hissing.”

Today, I’m hissing !!!

Faliraki

You know when you laugh at something that you shouldn’t ! Well, I came across this in an article about Brits getting wasted and offending the locals in Faliraki:

In Faliraki – where some taxi drivers now carry wooden clubs – locals say they daren’t walk down Bar Street after 11pm for fear of being mobbed or “touched up”.

“The only thing I am certain of,” says Gorgios Argyrou, a store owner, “is the vomit and excrement that greets us every morning we open the shop.

“Last year the noise was so loud from the sound-system of the bar opposite that it dislodged my wife’s pacemaker.”

That bit about the pacemaker had me in stiches… *smacks wrist*

Always…

Shi Tianji, a Chinese Ming dynasty scholar, recommended the “Six Always” :-

Always be peaceful in mind.
Always be kind-hearted
Always uphold justice
Always be cheerful
Always be pleasant
Always be contented

Rupert Brooke

Rupert Brooke was the charismatic First World War poet who wrote the famous poem, The Soldier:

If I should die, think only this of me;
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven

Dumping Gas….!!???

I had a fantastically funny episode yesterday morning. I had an important client meeting in North London at 9.00am and set off nice and early from Kingston. Foolishly, I had eaten some particularly gassy food the night before and was suffering the consequences…. Wind at the best of times is unpleasant, but in large quantities and with scant opportunities to expel it, can be a real issue.

So, there I was on the train heading towards an important meeting with one thing on my mind – how to quietly dump excess gas before I arrived ? I certainly didn’t want to sit through the meeting bubbling and gurgling like a drain – most embarassing !!!

So, whenever I was outside, between connections or waiting for a bus, I set about venting gas. There are ways and means to achieve this and over time I have become quite an expert ! A favourite tactic is to slowly move up and down the platform quietly expelling air. It’s a bit of an art, because you have to ensure a silent evacuation and a quick disassociation from any lingering odours. Stealth and speed are definitely required !

Anyway, I was at Acton Town waiting for my connection to Park Royal and was concentrating on performing a subtle ventilation. I had a meeting in 15 minutes and had to be wind free ! This was one of my last opportunities to dump a little gas and I was determined to use it to full advantage. So I set off up and down the platform quietly discharging. In my eagerness, I somehow misjudged one of the expulsions and let rip with a giant fart in front of a platform full of startled commuters. This thing went off like a firecracker and I swear the people nearest to me actually jumped in alarm ! Could I run ? could I hide ? I could not !

What can you do except blush furiously. For a split second I contemplated turning round and glaring at the man behind me in a feeble attempt to shift the blame and divert attention. But it wasn’t to be. The train arrived and I scuttled onto the emptiest carriage I could find and buried myself in some work papers while I cooled off !!!

Needless to say I arrived at the meeting and, much to my relief, managed to control myself sufficiently to avoid any embarrasing gurgles… I have been laughing about that little incident all day !!!!!

hooray !!

Today has been bright and shiny….got my new DVD player this aftenoon and what a fancy little box of tricks it is too. Work’s cruising along nicely and, would you believe it, it’s a bank holiday weekend coming up – *yay*. 3 days off, oh yes !