Getting The Blues
The tiles in my house are pretty tired. Mainly due to ten years hard wear with innumerable tenants, but also I suspect because knowing Gerry, they weren’t the best tiles to start with.
Getting The Blues
So I’ve decided to get rid of the hideous tiled skirting board and replace it with an oak one and put down a proper carpet.
This afternoon, I went to John Lewis to see what they’d got. I chose a Brinton’s carpet in a shade called Coast. Mainly because the book had been left open at that shade.
It was only after I left the shop, I realised that it might have been the same carpet, we used to have around the Chinese carpet in our house at Debach, nearly forty years ago. In that case though, we bought the blue carpet first from a shop in Woodbridge and then bought the Chinese carpet in Hong Kong.
My only problem, is was it C or the Chinese, that made someone leave the carpet book open at the page? A Chinese friend at the time, said that the carpet was a lucky design.
A Too Polite Society
There were about six of us at the bus stop this morning waiting for a bus, in a rather loose queue.
I wanted a 38 or 56 and one duly turned up.
However, we were all being so polite about who should go first and not pushing in, that the driver shut the doors and pushed off. It didn’t matter as after a laugh about what happened, another 38 arrived and two of us got on.
Now Lloyds And The Co-op Drop Us In It
Captain Mainwaring would not have been amused, as yesterday Lloyds and the Co-op seem to have had system errors, or as I prefer to call them programming bugs, in their computers. It’s here on the BBC.
It may have been unrelated but one of my credit cards wouldn’t work on-line yesterday and they asked me to phone them. They said they were just rebooting the computers, and it should be OK in a couple of hours. Do we reboot computers, as we generally give them a good kicking first?
World Porridge Making Championships
I don’t think I’ll mind missing this, as porridge isn’t my favourite food.
But I suppose it brings the tourists to the Highlands. Especially, as it says this about Carrbridge in Wikipedia.
In 2009 the village took on the BBC claiming that the Corporation constantly got the weather wrong which was putting off tourists. Local businesses claimed that BBC weather reports on television and on their website constantly reported rain despite there being no rain whatsoever. Locals stated that the BBC generalised the weather to “rain in Scotland”. Carrbridge became a minor celebrity with the story appearing on national news networks and the quiz show Have I Got News For You.
It does have a station though. However, it would appear that direct trains from London don’t run, although on Sunday there is a direct service to come home. You have to travel via Glasgow or Edinburgh. Perhaps, it’s a plot to keep the Sassenachs out?
How Zopa Beats The Stock Market
This article was trawled out of the Internet by Google. It’s well worth a detailed read.
The Silliest Legal Case In The World
The BBC is reporting that the Naked Rambler has been released from prison. He is now walking somewhere around Scotland in the nude.
It must be the silliest legal case because it’s been going on for years now. The article contains this comment.
John Scott QC, chair of the Howard League for Penal Reform in Scotland, says the bill to keep Gough in prison for so long must have reached hundreds of thousands of pounds. It costs about £40,000 a prisoner a year, rising when an inmate is separated from others, and when he is repeatedly discharged and readmitted.
It’s funny, but why was he not arrested in England, but is having so much trouble in Scotland?
Perhaps he could be persuaded to walk somewhere else like North Norway or the Sahara Desert. Now that would be a naked challenge!
Or could the Scots not deport him to England and ban him from going north of the border!
They’ve Got Blue Honey In France
This sounds a rather weird story and it’s all here on the BBC web site.
Perhaps the French bees have got the blues over Francois Hollande!
St. Pancras: Gem – Gare du Nord: Dump
The title is not my words, but those of the BBC’s respected correspondent, Hugh Schofield, in this piece, about the differences between Britain and France. This is a typical paragraph.
Now, I am not going to draw any too-facile comparison between France and Britain on the basis of a pair of 19th Century railway termini.
But I will say this – never in 16 years of living in France, and making pretty regular trips back and forth across the Channel, have I ever felt a greater disparity in national moods.
There’s a lot more in the same vein.
As ever with what Hugh Schofield writes, it is a good and thoughtful read.
The Lawyer Likes The New Bus For London
Lawyers get everywhere these days. They’ve even got an article in The Lawyer magazine about the New Bus for London.
Coeliacs With West African Roots
One of the big differences about London, after coming back to live after forty years, is that now everybody tends to talk to each other a lot more. A black lady and myself had a big laugh about it, after we’d walked up the road talking about our ailments and remarking that twenty years before we’d have been on opposite sides of the road.
One thing that has surprised me is the number of coeliacs, I’ve come across with West African roots. I have written about the chef in my local pub from Sierra Leone, who is a coeliac, but several times, I’ve been asked in the supermarket about the gluten-free food in my basket, by shop staff and others, who are coeliac and have some roots in West Africa.
If it was just once or twice, I’d put it down to a random chance, but it is more common than that! Remember though that gluten has little part in the traditional West African diet, which is based on sorghum.
Hopefully the diagnosis of Michael Obiora; the actor, who was born to Nigerian parents, with coeliac disease, will help spread awareness of the disease.
The Anonymous Widower 