Casual day

We set off today to find a replacement armchair. Norma has killed hers; the seat bit is collapsed and, whilst it may be extra comfy, it looks scruffy. I had wanted a replacement club chair style and had checked out a few second hand dealers. Scarce and when I did find one it turned out that the design was not as accommodating as my memory had it. Next choice was a reclining thing with a foot extension. Comfort was the main selection criteria.

Fort Kinnaird is the home of furniture shops up this end of the world. My sought after style would be expensive if not closely supervised so we started off at the cheaper end of the market. Surprisingly, I found what I wanted at the otherwise despised DFS outlet. Electric with back recline and foot rest all included.  

We have to wait a bit as we want it in green leather rather than the black they hold as stock. It actually goes into far more recline mode – I felt as if I were about to give birth. This will be for me and Norma inherits the remaining armchair from the suite.

Of course, being at that end of the world we were not too far from our favourite foodie place and slid along there. No reservation but we are obviously known and a new table and seating arrangement was found and we were well ensconced.

 

Two defenceless bream were soon consumed. We did not have our usual server; a very bright and chirpy young woman with strangely dyed pinkish/red hair and the male alternative was not up to standard but the food (and gin and tonic) amply compensated.

Of course, the gin and tonic disqualified me from driving but did make me suitable for a long deep sleep all the way home.

So – nothing planned but a fine day indeed!

Home is the Hunter

I am conscious that I have been away from here for some while. No real reason behind not blogging; just I have had other things to do with the time I feel like spending at the console.

When we got the replacement car after my older car was written off by Farmer Giles, I decided to add a few bits. There are a number of places up here where one can only get patchy reception on a car radio so I decided to get a transmitter so that I could play my iPod through the radio. That was not a total success in that the adaptor for the iPod was not readily available – it was relatively aged. I had been looking at the Touch for a while and decided to change to that as my music resource.

The Touch is a wondrous machine and more or less took over my life. There are so many applications – many of them free. Loads to try and reject. Those kept had to be configured to best advantage.

Another planned improvement to the new car was a hands-free phone fitting. I got one that clips to the sun visor. Setting up that took a while. I got a new phone as the Treo was not holding a charge and had to be reserved purely for use with the sat nav. Choosing and setting up a new phone took a while.

So, that is where I have been and what has kept me away from here.

I’ll try and do better. But, the Touch keeps nudging me ……………

No hole deep enough

Fabulous quote in the Mail on Sunday in its article on Gordon Brown's rage on Harriet Harman:

One former Minister said: 'When he calms down, he will know he cannot realistically kick her out of the Cabinet. That would play into her hands, with more freedom to boost her support among party members.

'But he may find another way to clip her wings and demote her. Harriet has no eye for detail so he could burden her with a job which is completely detail-driven and let her sink.'

It's not so much the touching use of the word "when" in relation to Gordon Brown calming down. It's more the cheerful cynicism of this quote.

The Prime Minister is being advised to appoint her to a major job, involving detailed work and therefore making an impact on daily life. He should do this, you understand, deliberately so that she should fail.

In other words, just to dish Harman, the Government is being urged to fail in an important area on purpose. They do well enough merely by accident.

Harriet Harlot

Brown must be sitting in his smallest room as a place of refuge with his head in his hands saying "What more Oh Lord? What more?"
I can, quite literally, not believe what I am reading here. A senior minister of the government of the United Kingdom is brushing aside the rule of law and opening the door to the rule of the wishes of the Prime Minister and/or that of the baying mob.
I am stunned. Is this what has come of more than two thousand years of British history? A bunch of spivs have walked in, brushed aside centuries-old rights and turned us into some sort of bizarre feral tyranny ... is that really it?
With an introduction like that, I have to include the words of the woman who will do anything to improve her leadership challenge:

"Sir Fred Goodwin should not count on being £650,000 a year better off because it is not going to happen," she told BBC One's Andrew Marr show. Ministers have said they would be prepared to take legal action and other unspecified measures to recover some of the money, saying the pay-out is inconsistent with the disastrous state that Sir Fred left the bank in. Ms Harman declined to say how the government would achieve this but made it clear it would not tolerate the award as it stands. "The prime minister has said that it is not acceptable and therefore it will not be accepted," she added. "And it might be enforceable in a court of law, this contract, but it is not enforceable in the court of public opinion and that is where the government steps in." (My emboldening)

What next - fellatio with the copper at the door of Number 10? "I'm a sucker for punishment" said the Labour deputy leader.
Meanwhile ................
Meanwhile, conversion of the official residence of the Justice Minister has now been finalised.

Simple economics

Hilzoy tells the truth: I have been hearing for years and years about how the financial services sector pays such exorbitant wages because the people who work there are so immensely talented that they are cheap at $50 million a year. I never particularly bought that line before. But I never imagined that all those Masters of the Universe would do quite this badly. If we had paid them $50 million a year to go far, far away and leave our financial system alone, it would have been a bargain

The way we are - update

I reported on the near miss to immortality on Sunday before last.
Having done the immediate things on the day of the collision, I went on the offensive on Monday. I had Farmer Giles confirm his full acceptance of all responsibility in an email and that he would instruct his insurer to proceed on the basis that I would not be involving my people. That got me a very nice replacement car far better than the dead basic set of wheels my insurers would have allowed. My garage confirmed that my car was a write-off, The other party assessor was not due to be in the area for another five days but I convinced him that a total write-off would not take long to assess and he went there on the Wednesday. Two days early. By midday Friday, we agreed a value for my dead vehicle. £250 over the value shown in the trade-confidential guides as I was able to prove that it had been maintained regardless of expense and was all prepared for an already booked MOT five days after the accident.
And that is where it has stuck. A week to process a cheque and get it to me. The operatives seem to have understood that time is hire car charges but the shiny arses in the administration departments have failed to keep up the momentum. I've short-circuited the process and have agreed with my garage to collect the replacement tomorrow; he will trust the insurance people to come up with a cheque in the fullness of time. I'm left thinking the admin failure to show any initiative is part of where the country has gone wrong.
Personally, I've come out a bit ahead. The replacement is exactly the same model, five months younger with 33,000 less miles and an extra of a full length glass roof.

Manpower

I sent an email to a named individual in a government department. It bounced with the explanation that his mailbox was full. Repeated 12 hours later. Same result. Using the 'Contact Us' link on their web page returned a 404. I telephoned the department and got through to the head honcho's secretary. Having explained my problem she kindly gave me her email and said she would sort things out. The guy I wrote to had left six months ago; let us hope there was nothing urgent in his overflowing mail box.
I had a reply from the co-operative secretary telling me the name of the person I should contact. It was copied to eleven ( e l e v e n) internal addressees - ten of them in the IT department. As my query was in the text of my post to the secretary, she could have forwarded it to the man named in her reply.
I suspect there might be a tad of over-manning in that department?
I had reported the problem of the full mailbox to the postmaster@the site. No reply but I just wonder how many of the Legion of the Damned he might have e-mailed?

A police full hand gets flushed

Had I not read this on a police site, I would have assumed it was just another swipe at the police.

They do not need critics - they destroy their own reputation.

New speak

This message appeared on a forum that I haunt. Shows a certain bravado as text speak is attacked and there are a lot of male posters who have absolutely no feminine side, She wrote:

heya people, im new here so please dnt b mean, id like a blokes point of view,,
ive been wi m bf for lyk 2 years n he gets sex on tap (frm me ov course) n il do pretti much owt he wants,, soooo, y is it he has to watch porn when he's away on trainin or wteva, im nt big headed bt im nt ugly at all coz i just got scouted to be a model, but him doin this makes me feel like im nt doin it 4 him even though he swears im everythin he wants,, Is this just a basic man need, that doesnt have owt 2 do wi wt i luk like or our sex lives?
Id be great full for all your comments, im oni 18 so be kind

She was, of course, savaged by the attack dogs. For her posting at all and for the daft language. She took it in good part and re-submitted the question in perfectly good English.

So, able to write 'properly' and not amongst her usual group of pals, so, why resort to text? I liked the inclusion of a bit of dialect as well. 'owt to do wi'.

Haven't seen and not really sufficiently interested to check but has anyone written a novel or whatever in the New English? I can read her text and it does not offend me at all. The purpose of communication is to communicate and she has done that. So why do so many get uptight?

Interfering

It is not just oldies like myself who are denied the solace of euthanasia.

Even the creatures of the sea have to soldier on until all vital signs have worn themselves out.

And. lest anyone query why euthanasia? Read what can happen with our Notional Health System when it takes against you. And do not expect the lawyers to help there either.

Still waiting but too timid to complain

His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI has conceded that there have been unforeseen delays regarding an outstanding commitment made nearly 2000 years ago. In an official communiqué, the Vatican acknowledged: ‘although it was promised that the Meek shall inherit the Earth, there have appear to have been some delays fulfilling this aspiration, and we would ask the Meek to bear with us as we look into the possible causes for this apparent hold-up.’

May you live in interesting times

Nothing here for a couple of days as I have been a bit busy.
On Monday last I spent about five hours with a couple of senior police officers from the Historic Investigation Team working in Belfast. They had asked for a meet to discuss how we dealt with incidents where soldiers shot and killed civilians in Northern Ireland back in the early 1970s.
Funny thing was that I could recall details of almost every one they covered - and this without any advance warning of the ones they brought up. When I do look back, I can get almost total recall and it is this that made Monday such fun. The short term does not seem to be a problem; what happens is sporadic. I will start a sentence full of vim and vigour and then come to a word or name and - blank! Yet, there was not a single blank when reviewing something that took place near enough 39 years ago. We had plenty of jokes that only former police officers would see as funny. Or dare to make!
Another good bit about Monday was that it followed Sunday. Well yes - so what is new about that? Sunday was a day we could have brought our shuffle on the mortal coil to an end. I was with Norma driving to the Garden Centre near Edinburgh to get niceys fit for visiting policemen. On a main A class road near Lauder, at about 50 mph - dead straight, slightly downhill, no other traffic on the road and there was Farmer Giles in his Landrover in his farmyard on my right. He was travelling slowly towards the road. Not only towards but onto it; directly in front of me. I kissed his front nearside which deflected me to the left into the end of a drystone wall at the entrance to a farm house. From 50 down to zero in less than a car's length. Cue exploding air-bags. The charge smells awful and the bags get hot but they saved us from worse. I scraped a bit off my chin and we both had bruising later from the seat belts.
Farmer Giles appeared at my window and said it was all his fault as he had not seen us. Physically, there was absolutely nothing to stop him seeing us in broad daylight on an unobscured road. I concluded it was that he made the crossing from yard to house so many times a day that he stopped looking.
He took us to the farm house where plasters were applied and tea administered. Recovery arranged. Details ad-nausea exchanged before his wife drove us home. Really, could not have been nicer. He even sent me a copy of the e-mail to his insurers in which he admitted full and total responsibility. My car is a write-off but I have already identified a Picasso of identical specification and year of registration and have suggested this to his insurers as a simple way to close the whole problem down if they put me into the driving seat of that car cost free.
We shall see.
Tuesday was spent telephoning and emailing reports. I have just reported things to my insurers and not handled it as a claim. We picked up a hire car at Farmer Giles expense. I went and cannibalised my now dead car this morning and it was a bit of a shake to see the damage in the cold light of a couple of days later. There were ditches at the side of the road and we could very easily have rolled the car which would have resulted in a very much worse situation. Once again, I beat the Devil.

Afghanistan

I have to admit I have lost track of what the heck that place is all about and just what might get us out of the country.

So, here is a primer. Long but seems to cover all bases. Short version by my précis? Walk away and let them sort themselves out. If they come into the world of me and mine - terminate them like vermin.

Virgin Atlantic - job losses

It is getting hard out there.

Virgin Atlantic has announced quite hefty job lay-offs.

So, these lovelies will just have to march on all the way to the Job Centre.

Ancient times

It all looks so simple doesn't it?

The clever bit is the woman deciding to use these techniques. She reacts very quickly and I would doubt her success were the man to follow up on his initial attack. And, if you liked that, here is another one.

Bank bonus concerns kicked into touch

A football manager is sacked because his team are not performing. Sacked. It now seems he is in line for £15 million compensation. He has been in post for seven months at an alleged £6.25 million a year.

Make some of those high flown bankers as sick as a parrot Brian?

The cost of cheap goods

Many have commented upon the results of the financial situation where imported Chinese goods are concerned. Having had some exposure to the Chinese way of doing things, I tried not to buy their stuff anyway as I was quite accepting of the allegations of poor working conditions.

Seems I was right. And I have no sympathy.

But, there is a solution.

The Invisible Man

I have written here and elsewhere of where I think the Conservative party is giving the Government an easy ride. By not being condemnatory and confrontational, they are allowing them to retain power and thereby increase the damage they are doing to the country. Damage that will take years to pay off and could well turn us into a two and a half world power.

So, nice to read a similar pov.

Bird brain

No longer a derogatory term I think?

Edukashun

A 15-year-old boy is to be reported over the discovery of a massive cannabis factory worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, police said after officers uncovered about 800 plants worth an estimated £240,000 after a raid on the secret plantation in Shore Road, Cove, near Helensburgh, Argyll and Bute, on Wednesday.

Strathclyde Police said the teenager would be referred to the Children's Reporter in connection with the discovery.

15 year old? Well, no educational qualifications then. He'll never be good at anything will he? Suppose he could take up farming.