Who’d Have Thought of it in Bury St. Edmunds?
Bury St. Edmunds is not thought of a town for anything risque! It did once have an eBench in the Abbey Gardens, but who’d have thought a wine bar would mix sausages and burlesque in the town?
But they have according to the local daily paper, the East Anglian Daily Times.
Memories of My Grandfather – Henry Millbank
I never met my grandfather, Henry Millbank, as he died a few months before I was born. All I have is a couple of photographs at my parents’ wedding in 1946.
He was an engraver and one of his specialities was to engrave the die by which names and other words were stamped on to pencils. These days nearly all pencils are hexagonal and that according to my mother, is because her father was the last person with the skills to engrave one for a round pencil. Apparently, according to my mother in the last years of his life, people were always asking him to engrave others, as there was no-one else.
Interestingly, you now get engraved round pencils again, but that is because computers and the machines they control can do what few craftsman can.
That Terrible Word From
Go to the Premier Inn web site and you’ll see a smiling Lenny Henry telling you thewy have rooms available from £27 a night.
But search for a real room, that you need and you’ll find prices are a lot higher per night. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a room I might need at less than a hundred a night!
I have better things to do, but there comes a point, where this is misleading advertising!
Other sites seem no better. I’d like to stay in London on the 9th and 10th of September, so that I can look for a house in the city and also be better placed for the trip to Portsmouth on the 11th. I can’t find anything affordable at all.
A Farce at Whittlesford
When I picked up my ticket at Whittlesford Parkway station on Wednesday to go to Lingfield, the machine was a struggle for my limited eyesight, as it is placed in the sun. I also found the touch screen very unresponsive, unlike other machines I have used on East Coast and Virgin Trains.
As I eventually got the tickets successfully and I had a few minutes before my train, I popped into the booking office and explained what had just happened and on a Saturday a coiple of weeks ago. He said that the machine was badly placed and that it took a lot of pushing to get it to work. I also asked if the offce would be manned today, as I was going to London. He said it would be fully staffed as it should be!
But today it wasn’t ,manned and despite twenty minutes of trying, I could not purchase the ticket I required. I did get to the payment stage, but it rejected every credit card I had as unreadable.
I was not alone and of the dozen or so of you fought with the machine only one got a ticket.
After perhaps fifteen minutes a train for Cambridge pulled up and the driver or collector, told us all to travel and sort it out at the destination.
So this is what I did!
At Tottenham Hale, I bought my required Travelcard from a friendly ticket inspector called Youssef. And it was also with one of the unreadable cards rejected by the machine at Whittlesford.
Nothing annoys me more than technology that should be to everyone’s benefit, installed and implimented so t just makes people angry and causes extra work for others.
The sooner this machine isreplaced by something that works in a better place, the better!
The Anonymous Widower 