Change After Forty Years
My middle son, who is in his forties came round for supper last night.
For the first time ever, he had a cup of tea. Normally, he drinks coffee!
Beware Tesco Customer Surveys
I don’t shop at Tesco’s except to buy the odd EatNakd bar or a newspaper, so why should they ask me to fill out a customer satisfaction survey? Especially, as it was e-mailed from South Africa!
It’s nothing to do with Tesco and is probably a dangerous scam, so beware!
A Bad Painter From Linz
This was how David Aaronovitch described a well-hated dictator in an excellent piece in The Times yesterday. He was discussing, whether the private lives and thoughts of famous people, should affect how we view them and their works. Quite a few of those named make Jimmy Saville look to be a saint.
The article certainly made me think!
What Is It With Zips And Me?
Last year, I bought an expensive waterproof jacket in red and the zip broke after about six months.
It also broke in my North Face padded jacket, which I got my laundry to replace. They replaced it with a single action zip, but as a man I prefer one with a double action.
Today, I went to Bury St. Edmunds to have lunch with a friend and the zip on my Regatta jacket got stuck and broke this morning.
I think it must be my gammy hand, which because it doesn’t pull straight, tends to get the seam stuck in the zip.
At least I haven’t broken a zip in my trousers.
But three in a year, seems rather a lot. Especially as none of these jackets had a pocket layout that I truly liked.
So I went to Bury St. Edmunds in my favourite Gieves and Hawkes jacket, which is twenty years old. But it’s still immaculate!
Where can I get a waterproof jacket of that quality? If I want a double zip and large pockets, I doubt there is anywhere! I don’t need it to be warm, as it’s only for going out in the rain and I can always put a fleece underneath.
The Energy Bill Of The Future?
I saw this advert on the Tube yesterday.
The Energy Bill Of The Future?
After checking Mobile Energy’s web site, there are some nice features, but they don’t talk about a smart meter, which is what we all need.
The IT Brief
I get masses of spam e-mails from these jerks called the IT Brief in the United States.
Is there a yard dog American lawyer out there who’d like a bit of fun, by suing them for wasting my time?
He can have half he gets out of the idiots, provided they don’t send me any more spam!
The Closed Kingsland Fire Station
I walked past the closed Kingsland Fire Station a couple of days ago.
The Closed Kingsland Fire Station
I’m not going to enter into the rights and wrongs of the closure, but I once had a dinner with a senior fire officer in Suffolk. Many of the things he suggested to cut fire deaths from many years of experience, have still not been generally implemented.
One example of something he wanted was battery-less smoke alarms in all buildings. Twenty years later that still isn’t the norm.
As the fire station and several others have now been closed for a few days, I’m surprised we haven’t seen a few stories about how wrong the decision was.
Has The Rain Stopped For A Bit?
I took this picture from the Emirates Air-Line this morning.
Has The Rain Stopped For A Bit?
Let’s hope we’re getting a break from this awful rain!
Not Pure Genius
I needed a snack this afternoon and thought some Genius toast with some strawberry jam would do nicely!
Not Pure Genius
These were the first two slices I got from the packet! So they were discarded.
On the subject of holes, I’m always reminded of a story about a former MP, who died some months ago.
A friend of a close friend of my late wife’s was at a party when she was chatted up by the MP. He thought he had struck lucky and escorted the lady up to a bedroom.
Everything went fine, until he took off his shirt to reveal a grey vest with large holes in it.
The Invisible Busway
I used to see the odd local news story about the Luton Dunstable Busway, when I lived in Suffolk, but it does seem to be rather invisible on the web. It does have a rather poor website, which doesn’t seem to be updated regularly, but information in Wikipedia is very limited. It’s just a section in Transport in Luton, under Current Developments. It does say that it opened in September 2013.
The only news story I can find is this one about low usage on the BBC.
Passenger numbers for the first month of the Luton and Dunstable guided busway were just 43% of those predicted for the £91m scheme.
Perhaps the busway hasn’t been given a high enough profile? The successful Cambridge busway, had a lot of publicity, although much of it proved the old adage, that no publicity is bad publicity.
Perhaps I should go for a look, but there is very little to draw me to Luton or Dunstable.
The Anonymous Widower 