Category Archives: ramblings

ramblings

Make up Your Mind!

Have you ever noticed how we always get, even through “official” sources, lots of variation in the stories covered by the media?

Yesterday’s horrific helicopter crash in Vauxhall was a case in point.

Everyone agrees that the chopper hit the crane on a tall building under construction. But no-one could (initially) agree where the wreckage landed:

  • In the road below the crane
  • In Wandsworth Road, 150m away
  • From an aerial view (via I suspect Google Maps) that site looked more like 300m even in a straight line
  • But the crash site was indeed in Wandsworth Road, not where first shown but more like 4-500m away from the crane

And then there was the workman (or was it two men?) who should have been in the crane at the time of the crash. Because he wasn’t in the crane he had a lucky escape. But why was he not in the crane?

  • He was late to work because of being held up taking his daughter to school
  • He wasn’t allowed into the crane because of the fog (aka low cloud) obscuring visibility so there could be no crane activity
  • And this morning apparently it was two men who both overslept

FFS guys, get it right. If you don’t know, don’t make it up! — say you don’t know.

But of course Joe Public thinks admitting to not knowing is a sign of weakness, so they guess. Whereas in fact admitting not knowing is a sign of strength and maturity.

Let’s just hope none of these people have to be witnesses in court!

ramblings

At Last!

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This morning sees an unusual juxtaposition …

It is January.

There is snow remaining on the ground (just).

It is cold; the mercury is below freezing.

There is a really hard frost on everything.

There are even roses with frost on them.

The air is still and there is steam rising vertically from everyone’s boiler vents.

I shall be wearing a sweater.

No, it isn’t Siberia … it’s WINTER. In England. At last!

And this is how it should be.

personal, ramblings

Weirday

What is it that makes birthdays so strange? Today seems to have been one of the odder ones, but for no very obvious reason.

We’ve never been ones for making much of birthdays in my family, so I always expect them to be much like any other day. The trouble starts when other people think birthdays are special days. Which is very nice but not what I expect. Maybe I’m just getting old but it seems that these days everyone is much more wanting to make something of birthdays; I’m sure this wasn’t so when I was young. Maybe it’s just because we’re now much more open about things.

In the past I’ve managed to avoid some of this, especially in the last few years I was working when I had a policy of taking the day off work. But now that things like Facebook tell the world when your birthday is, there isn’t much hiding. And yes, in many ways that is nice but I’m still not used to it.

But although a quiet day, this has been one of the odder birthdays.

It started with an alarm clock and the usual unwillingness to engage vertical hold. Oh and I need to do a pee sample for the doctors to check I really have gotten rid of the bladder infection.

Then off to do the weekly supermarket run. Well this is better than it could be as (a) it is always quiet at 9am on a Friday and (b) I get to have breakfast in the café. This morning, being a special day, I indulged in a full English breakfast rather than the usual bacon roll.

Just as we were leaving the supermarket (luckily after we’d paid!) the fire alarms went off and the store was evacuated. Frankly it could have burnt down as it was nearly 10 minutes before a solitary fire engine arrived.

Home about 1040 to news that one of my parents’ closest friends had died. Not unexpected as he was in his late 80s and had been ill for some time. Fortunately, when I rang, my mother already knew, so I didn’t have to break the news to her.

… And a short doze in front of my PC …

A scratch lunch of the remains of last night’s stuffed peppers with bread & butter — not bad cold, but better hot. This was followed by teh grand opening presents. Oooo goodie! … Another bottle of gin! Plus an early music CD and some books from my wanted list. And what!? No-one gave me chocolates. Which is probably as well.

While away the afternoon doing this and that — ie. nothing — followed by a shower and shave. So exciting I could hardly stand afterwards.

Then to cook my birthday dinner. A massive quantity of seafood (prawns, mussels, scallops and sprats) and linguine in a tomato, lemon and chilli sauce. Dead easy and though I say it myself it was bloody good — better than many restaurants. Devoured with a rather nice bottle of Roger Brun Réserve Grand Cru Champagne (from Nick Dobson Wines).

Dinner was rapidly followed by a long phone call with my closest aunt — mostly about family things and our researches into our ancestry.

So now to switch off and read for the rest of the evening.

And I still don’t know why it is that birthdays are quite such strange days!

food+drink, ramblings

Lunnun Adventure

Yesterday Noreen and I ventured into central London to have lunch with our friend Patric.

Lunch with Patric is always most enjoyable. As one of the country’s most senior Heralds he mixes with everyone from the Queen down. Not that you would ever know; he’s a perfectly ordinary guy, albeit one who went to Oxford and trained as a barrister. He’s just as happy meeting in the pub, a café or a small Italian restaurant as he would be at the Ritz or a gentleman’s club. Meet him in the street and you’d pass him off as just another eccentric Englishman in an overcoat and a flat cap!

And so it was that Patric introduced us to a small Italian restaurant in Shepherd Market on the southern edge of Mayfair. Da Corradi is tucked away in the alley which runs from Shepherd Market into Curzon Street. It is friendly, unpretentious and small; the ground floor eating area is not spacious and only about 20 covers, but there is a larger area downstairs.

Da Corradi
The food was excellent, generous and not at all expensive. Between us for starters we had minestrone, insalata tricolore and antipasto (which was enormous!). Then for main courses we all had pasta: spaghetti with meatballs in tomato sauce, cabonara and fusilli with salmon. Again the pasta helpings were so generous we passed on pudding. That with a bottle of house wine (a perfectly acceptable Pinot Grigio), some soft drinks and tea amounted to only just over £90 including service. Extremely good value especially for that area.

What’s even better is that they are open from early to late, so you can get full English breakfast right through to a meal after the theatre. They also have a sandwich bar. We shall be going back!

We arrived at the restaurant about 1230, had a leisurely lunch and left about 3pm. This was good because Patric is always interesting to talk to and usually has some unconsidered trifle or tale of genealogical whimsy with which to amuse. Amongst other things we were discussing the correct original recipe for Buck’s Fizz, which Patric has unearthed via a serendipitous route. It is also interesting to see his professional approach to genealogical research and where (and why) he is prepared to accept connections “on the balance of probabilities” rather than needing to have “100% detailed forensic certainty”.

In fact lunch was sufficiently good and protracted that we ended up not doing anything else while in town other than a preprandial walk round Shepherd Market. Nevertheless my camera spotted a couple of oddities. The first was in Shepherd Market itself …

Nude Gold
… and yes, it really is a jeweller’s!

The other was seen on the Marylebone Road.

Thai Hmmm
One wonders what other services they offer?

Altogether an enjoyable, if short, day.

beliefs, ramblings

Four Agreements

A few weeks ago, quite by chance, I came across The Four Agreements.

What are they? Well that depends on who you are and how you view them.

According to Everyday Wisdom they are based on ancient Toltec (an archaeological Mesoamerican culture) wisdom and

offer a powerful code of conduct that can rapidly transform our lives and our work into a new experience of effectiveness, balance and self supporting behaviour.

Everything we do is based on agreements we have made. In these agreements we tell ourselves who we are, what everyone else is, how to act, what is possible and what is impossible. What we have agreed to believe creates what we experience. When these agreements come from fear obstacles develop keeping us from realizing our greatest potential.

According to others they are four principles to practice in order to create love and happiness in your life or for stress management and personal growth.

Yeah OK, that’s what they all say!

What is clear is that they are based on the thinking of Mexican shaman and new age spiritualist Don Miguel Ángel Ruiz and they seem to be the cornerstones of whatever wacknut religious beliefs he holds. They have made him lots of money as he sells “self-help” books about thee agreements by the million.

All of which leaves me feeling very sceptical and mis-trusting.

However when you read the four agreements they do make a lot of sense and they aren’t too far apart from my own personal modus vivendi (see here and here).

Now I don’t propose that anyone goes out and lines Ruiz’s pocket with more money by buying his books. It should be enough to lay out the four agreements and leave you to think about them. They are:

1. Be Impeccable with Your Word
Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.

2. Don’t Take Anything Personally
Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering.

3. Don’t Make Assumptions
Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness, and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.

4. Always do Your Best
Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgement, self-abuse, and regret.

What’s so special about them? Actually very little. They are pretty much what most belief systems boil down to if you analyse them deeply enough. They can also be pretty damn difficult to adhere to! Not making assumptions is especially hard — the whole of western culture is based upon everyone making assumptions.

Not taking things personally is hard too. I know, from recent experience, that it is all too easy to get upset when someone close reacts emotionally apparently as a result of something you did. But you have to be able to stand back and realise that their emotions are their problem to deal with, not yours, and come from within them. They are not your emotions; you cannot control the other person’s emotions, nor are you responsible for them. Yes that can be hard.

But none of that means the four agreements aren’t worthwhile. Indeed if everyone could just strive towards them society would be a whole bunch better. And you don’t need to believe in some peculiar religious practice to make sense of them; they fit atheists just as well (maybe better?) than they do believers — atheists have no overlying dogma to contend with.

ramblings, science

The Strangeness of Days

The more I think about it, the more puzzling time becomes. Not just from a scientific point of view — and who knows that’s bad enough! — but from an experiential view.

There are two things which especially puzzle me; confuse me, even; despite that I think we all experience them.

The first is the way in which time is not linear.

OK, we know that time works only in one direction: it marches inexorably forward. As far as we know there is no way in which time can run in reverse; physicists tell us this doesn’t accord with the laws of nature they know about, hence our continuing quest for time machines.

But we all know from experience that time is not linear. There are days when one gets up and follows one’s normal routine — some combination of coffee, shower, shave, hair-do, feed the cat etc. — only to fine one is 15 minutes late leaving for work/school. The next day you’ll do exactly the same and be ready 15 minutes early. Some days the afternoon disappears without you realising; other days it drags and you seem to be checking the clock every few minutes wondering how many hours have passed.

Scientists tell us this is impossible; that time is perfectly linear. Yet we all experience it. And no-one so far can explain it satisfactorily.


The second puzzle, which may be related to the first, is the nature of days. Again no-one to my knowledge has ever satisfactorily explained this.

How is it that on Thursday, I was convinced it was Friday? Yesterday (Friday) morning I thought it was Saturday. And by yesterday evening I thought it was Thursday again. Worse, yesterday evening (what time I was existing in Thursday) Noreen was convinced it was Saturday. And today? Well I have no clue; my head is just too full of cold germs to be sure of anything beyond it’s dark, it’s raining and I’d rather be huddling under the duvet.

Now I can understand how it may be possible to explain the way in which time passes faster as one grows older. The theory is that as one ages there is less new to take in; the brain measures time in notable experiences; hence as there are fewer, time seems to pass faster.

But that doesn’t explain the non-linearity of time at either the level of minutes and hours or at the level of days. I’ve been pondering this for years, and still have no idea what’s going on here. Is it just that all our brains are faulty, or is there some underlying system of local time-warps? Has anyone got any clues?

ramblings, thoughts

Wrong!

Crumbs it’s a busy week again, which is why there’s been no blogging. Hopefully I might catch up a bit over the weekend, because next week looks like being busy too.

Meanwhile earlier in the week I came across the best advice I’ve seen in a long time about recovering from mistakes written by Matt Shipman over at SciLogs. It is very simple, though not always easy. It goes like this …

Assuming you are a human, you are going to make mistakes. But [for many of us] those mistakes can be public. And embarrassing. So how do you recover gracefully, or at least with as little damage as possible to your reputation?

Here’s the short answer: admit your mistake as early as possible; never make excuses; and do not make the same mistake again.

The rest of the article is worth a read too.

We’re human. We make mistakes. That’s what we do here; it’s called “life”!

So yes, three golden rules:

  1. Admit you made a mistake — and that includes saying “Sorry!”
  2. Never make an excuse — they cut no ice; it was a genuine error and these things happen.
  3. Log the mistake in your brain so you can guard against it next time.

We all make the best decisions we can, at the time, with the information we have available. That information includes the state of your aberrant brain. Unless we’re mental, we none of us deliberately make mistakes. So yes, we are going to get things wrong sometimes.

When I was at work I expected to make errors, but I knew I could hold my hands up to them and often correct them. I also expected to get a bollocking for it occasionally. And I was fine with my guys as long as they admitted they got things wrong. There’s only a problem when someone keeps making errors — usually the same silly errors — and not learning from them.

Keep calm, admit you got it wrong, and learn from it.

history, ramblings, topographical

Over-priced London

3 Comments

They must be havin’ a giraffe! A bleedin’ big ‘un n’all.

Yesterday Diamond Geezer, who blogs a lot about various London-y things, posted a list of the cost of various London attractions.

This was prompted by the news that The Shard is to charge a few coppers shy of £25 for the privilege of going to the top to see the view. A view which, likely as not, will be mist, aka. low cloud, rather than the promised 40 miles round London.


So everyone can be equally scandalised, here are the maximum prices from Diamond Geezer‘s list with one or two I’ve added …

£30.00 Madame Tussauds (on the day)
£29.95 The View from The Shard (Time Out website)
£29.00 Harry Potter Tour, Watford
£28.00 Up at the O2
£26.95 Ripley’s Believe It Or Not
£24.95 The View from The Shard (standard price)
£24.00 The London Dungeon
£23.00 London Zoo
£20.90 Tower of London
£19.80 London Aquarium
£18.90 London Eye
£18.00 Buckingham Palace State Rooms
£16.50 Churchill War Rooms
£16.95 Hampton Court Palace
£16.00 Westminster Abbey
£16.00 Kew Gardens
£15.00 Houses of Parliament
£15.00 St Paul’s Cathedral
£14.00 HMS Belfast
£13.50 London Transport Museum
£13.00 St Paul’s Cathedral
£12.00 Cutty Sark
£8.00 Tower Bridge exhibition and walkways
£7.00 Royal Observatory Greenwich
£6.00 Apsley House
£4.00 Wellington Arch

I’m sorry, London attractions, but those prices are just not on and they are why you won’t see me visiting any time soon. So don’t go wondering why you don’t see me, at least until you reduce those prices by 50%. We’re in a recession. OK?

Yes, I’ve done a lot of the attractions. I remember being taken to Madame Tussauds at the age of about 10 (so 50-ish years ago) and my father complaining about how exorbitant it was even then. Here’s my verdict on those I can remember:

  • Madame Tussauds : distinctly “so what”
  • The Tower : also distinctly “so what?” 50 years ago
  • London Zoo : a rip-off at £18 about 4 years ago
  • London Aquarium : very disappointing
  • London Eye : the super views made it just about worth £12 for 30 minutes a few years back
  • Hampton Court : haven’t been since my school trip of 50 years ago; I really should go again
  • Westminster Abbey : I refuse to pay for admission to any state funded church
  • St Paul’s : same as Westminster Abbey; and anyway I hate rococo
  • Cutty Sark : boring 45 years ago; the new “replica” seems to me a waste of money
  • Houses of Parliament : interesting, but not as interesting as I had hoped
  • Kew Gardens : with Hampton Court about the only place on this list that’s really attractive
  • Wellington Arch : only opened recently; worth the cost of a pint for the view down Constitution Hill, up at the Quadriga, and especially if you can be there when the Horse Guards go underneath

Add to which that the London Dungeon, Apsley House, Buckingham Palace, Harry Potter, the O2, The Shard, and Ripley’s hold no attraction for me, which is why I’ve not been to them.

And that is from someone who likes history and going to interesting and odd places. What a sad reflection on one of the great cities of the world and my home!

Thank your personal deity the national museums are all free.

amusements, memes, personal, ramblings

I've Never Seen Star Wars

Tim over at Bringing up Charlie has started something new. It may even turn into a meme.

As a result of some new-fangled programme on the wireless, which seems to be called I’ve Never Seen Star Wars, Tim has come to realise that there are a collection of things he’s never done or which have somehow passed him by, but which everyone assumes everyone else actually has done. And guess what? The summit of his list is never having seen Star Wars.

Tim then goes on to challenge the rest of us to document the things we’ve never done but which might surprise our friends. Being as I like memes, and I’m insatiably curious about other people, it would be churlish of me not to join in. So here’s my list of a dozen (apparently common) things I’ve never done.

  1. Seen Star Wars or 2001: A Space Odyssey or Clockwork Orange or any of those other iconic films. (See, Tim, you aren’t the only one!)
  2. Eaten oysters or tripe
  3. Worn a dinner jacket or a cocktail dress
  4. Been skinny dipping

  5. Played strip poker or strip pool
  6. Taken recreational drugs
  7. Driven a car or ridden motorbike
  8. Watched Eastenders or (again like Tim) Friends or Downton Abbey
  9. Lusted after Jennifer Aniston or Pamela Anderson
  10. Been to the races (horses or dogs)
  11. Been on a package holiday
  12. Broken a bone

Interestingly only one thing on that list bothers me not to have done. Anyone care to guess which one?

So now I dare everyone else to tell, their darkest, secret, “I’ve never dones” — either in the comments here or on your own blog (with a link in the comments), so we can all have a good snigger. 🙂

personal, ramblings, science

On Hairiness

Now here is a mystery. Well at least it’s a mystery to me, and I can’t quickly find anything about it on the intertubes.

I’m one of those hairy males; I always have been. Fortunately I’m naturally mid-brown-ish of hair for if I were black haired I’d have to shave twice a day or spend more of my life looking like a villain.

As a child my hair was light brown; it got thicker and darker and wavy as I got to puberty. I ended up with something akin to a coconut mop on my head. Now I’m past three score years it is almost completely grey (the front is actually white), much finer, less wavy and thinning — though I’m nowhere near approaching going bald or even really receding.

But it isn’t head hair or beard that is my immediate interest, but body hair.

(No, no, I’m NOT going THERE!)

We know that as men get older their patterns of hairiness change. As I’ve said, head hair greys and gets thinner even to the extent of baldness; and apparently leg hair also decreases. Annoyingly though eyebrows, ears and noses sprout extraneous tufts of fur, which may also go grey.

(As an aside it’s also interesting that ears and noses continue to grow throughout life, with ears apparently growing at a rate of around a couple of millimetres every decade. Noses also appear to grow with age, hence the caricature of the old man with a large warty nose.)

But in the last few years I’ve noticed something else strange. I’m sure that the hair on my forearms and chest, maybe also my back, is getting longer as I get older. Not thicker, coarser or darker, but longer.

Now it does seem that men do go on growing body hair well past puberty, even into their 30s, and apparently most men over 35 are a lot hairier than they were in their 20s. But I’m talking about something I’ve only become aware of in the last few years, say from about age 55.

Now I can’t prove that my impression is right. I didn’t start measuring the length of my body hair at the age of 18 and don’t have a series of regular measurements throughout my life. (Just see what joys I’ve passed by!) Several searches using “a well known search engine” haven’t turned up any tufty hints.

Not, you understand, that I’m complaining. Inasmuch as I think about it at all I quite like being hairy; it’s part of me and it doesn’t bother me; I certainly wouldn’t shave or wax it. Ouchy!

Am I imagining things? Am I going mad? Do I have hairs on the palms of my hands? (No, not yet!) Does anyone know? If not, why not? — this is a vitally important research topic!

PS. No, no picture of my chest hair; you really didn’t want that much information, did you!?