What’s Happened To Me?
This is not a bad post, but I’ve changed over the last few weeks.
I think it is actually that I have got much more confident. Why I don’t know, but my confidence seemed to improve greatly, when I changed my doctor. Perhaps, it was the decisive act of changing or it could be that the new doctor has actually fixed a couple of my problems. I don’t know and I don’t care why!
But take today! I went for a lunchtime drink with my financial advisor and normally, I just have a drink and go. But today for some reason, I made the decision to stay behind and have the kedgeree. It was almost, as if I’ve got some sort of fear of the unknown and generally only eat in the same places.
Before and after lunch, I also found it easy to post to my blog and I wrote several complicated e-mails to people. It was almost as though something had unlocked in my brain. Strangely, this has happened before and also it happened before I had any stroke. I remember coming home after a glorious holiday in Malaysia and virtually vegetating for several months.
And then this afternoon, I felt I ought to see a show of some sort this evening. So I went up to the Angel to get a paper and checked what was on at the cinemas there. I noticed that Untouchable was on at 20:10 at the Vue. I didn’t expect I would go, so I bought myself a supper in Waitrose.
But I did go in the end and bought a Senior ticket for £7.10. It was in a new screen and a lot better than last time, I went to that cinema.
I thoroughly enjoyed the film.
Coming out I also solved my friend’s dress problem. Or at least in my mind, I got a plan of action! She will hate my solution, but it has to be tried.
In some ways this extreme decisiveness started on Saturday, when my son told me to go down to John Lewis and check out carpets. But I’d already gone to Primrose Hill to sort out bathroom suites, as requested by my builder.
I might have a theory that works.
I think by nature I’m a man who likes to be ordered around and people have always used that to get the best of my brain. There’s nothing more I like, than to be presented with a problem and told to go and solve it. Living alone, I don’t get that stimulus!
C didn’t take advantage of me, but would get into a flap all the time, knowing that I’d rescue her from her predicament, often with an unusual solution. I remember one day, she was in a very sour mood, as she was doing a very difficult and disturbing case for the local County Council, where the other side was represented by a QC. What made her angry as well, was that she had the difficult side and the QC was getting three or four times she was. So I asked, what would happen if they got a QC on their side? She said that the Council wouldn’t pay. I said why not and all her barrister’s insecurities kicked in and she said they were mean and wouldn’t. But I said you had a good argument as the other side had a big gun and surely fairness should prevail, so I told her to ask. The Council capitulated and she was led by a real gentleman of a QC, who used all the work she had done and eventually won the case. Her clerk put in for the largest fee she ever earned and we had two weeks holiday on the result.
My problem now, if I have one, is to sustain this mood, which is not unlike the one I had that night in the Star at Lidgate, as we trawled through her problem.
It’s now just after midnight and I’m not tired. I’ve also only had one drink of half of cider all day, other than tea, coffee, milk and orange juice.
So it’s not the alcohol talking, as that’s long gone from my system.
Allergies
This chicken Provençal from Waitrose was rather nice.
Waitrose Chicken Provencal
But why can’t we have the allergy information on the front? That way, I wouldn’t need to pick up the package and turn it over.
Incidentally, this dish has fish in it. That surprised me, but it was defined as anchovy on the packet.
On the subject of allergies, Waitrose has brought out a range of chilled foods by Heston Blumenthal. All seemed to have added gluten. A pity really, as I recently heard of a sensitive coeliac, who went to his restaurant and had no problems.
Who Ate All The Kedgeree?
This board in the Fox pub on Paul Street by Old Street Tube station tells a tale.
Who Ate All The Kedgeree?
But who ate all the very nice kedgeree?
I did. And very nice it was too!
A Big Hole
This isn’t typical, but I did find this hole in a slice of Genius gluten-free bread.
A Big Hole
It was nice bread though.
An Incident On A Bus
I was on a bus this morning, when a couple tried to get on without paying. They seemed to produce an old ticket claiming it had been issued earlier. But obviously, this didn’t fool the driver and he said no.
After a minute or so everyone on the bus started to get a bit impatient ringing the bell and rumbling about moving on. But the couple stood their ground.
it was then that the two biggest passengers on the bus moved forward to try to support the driver and sort the impasse. One was a stockily-built, fifty year old or so, white man in a suit and the other was a much younger, tall black man in jeans and a cotton jacket.
Faced with this irresistible force, the couple got off and possibly waited for another bus.
I was sitting next to a rather slight young lady and remarked that luckily you don’t see that too often. She agreed and we both wished each other well, as we got off a couple of stops later.
Perhaps we should have all cheered, but I think we thought that discretion was the better part of valour.
So, in the end, no-one or nothing was hurt, except perhaps the couple’s pride.
How To Fit A Toilet
I’m thinking about using a Geberit Monolith toilet in my house.
My builder and I liked the video about installation.
But you don’t buy a toilet because of the video! On the other hand, you might, if you were installing it yourself.
You’re Never Too Stupid To Do Science!
I like this story about Sir John Gurdon. Eton College told him he was too stupid to do science and now he goes and wins a Nobel Prize.
I could have titled this post, You’re Never Too Stupid To Do Anything!
In my case, an English teacher, told me I’d never pass my O Level in the subject. I just did, but now, I’ve self-published a couple of books, written stories and had letters in several publications.
It’s probably still not good, as people say I use too many commas and shrieks. Shriek is printer’s slang for exclamation mark. Or it was my father’s! Wikipedia says this.
The name given to “!” by programmers varies according to their background. In the UK the term pling was popular in the earlier days of computing, whilst in the USA the term shriek was used. It is claimed that these word usages were invented in the US and shriek is from Stanford or MIT; however, shriek for the ! sign is found in the Oxford English Dictionary dating from the 1860s.
My father had never been to the United States, so it must have come from his printing background somewhere. His father was also a printer.
The Biggest Cannabis Plant In The World
This story just has to be passed on. Here’s the first paragraph.
An elderly couple have unwittingly grown the “biggest cannabis plant” police officers had seen after buying what they thought was an innocuous shrub from a car boot sale.
The question also has to be asked, as to whether the seller in the sale, knew what they were selling.
I don’t think, I’d know what a cannabis plant looked like.
NatWorst Opens The Door To The Fraudsters
Natwest have brought in a system called Get Cash based on a mobile phone app. But according to this on the BBC’s web site, it’s all started to backfire.
It looks to me that the Get Cash app is just too easy a target for fraudsters and it appears to me as a humble programmer and system designer, that they used programmers and designers, who didn’t understand the criminal mind.
If my bank offers me a mobile phone app to do my banking or use a credit card, the answer is no, no a thousand times no!
Incidentally, the computer that does my banking, never leaves my house and sits behind a door with a powerful lock on it.
I usually only draw out cash from a small number of cash machines fairly close to my house or at the Angel.
The Anonymous Widower 