What goes up...

is often a lot of hot air. In my mind I soar like an eagle, but my friends say I waddle like a duck.

My Photo
Name:
Location: No Man's Land, Disputed Ground

Flights of Fancy on the Winds of Whimsy

Monday, April 30, 2007

It's so unfair

I suppose everyone gets days like these. A lazy Sunday, when everything I tried to do turned out not wrong, but not quite right. The sides of the shed I was building just didn't quite fit. The battery-powered drill just couldn't quite drill through the metal frame before running out. The creosote I was brushing onto the exposed wooden edges just wouldn't quite stay on the brush, and trickled down my elbow. The cat which had shat on the ground nearby just hadn't quite buried it deeply enough, and I knelt in it. The rag with which I tried to wipe it off my trousers just wasn't quite strong enough, and I smeared light brown shit over the dark brown creosote already drying on my fingers.

So I said 'enough', left the tools laying where they wanted to be, and we went out in the heat of the afternoon sun to visit the airfield at Compton Abbas. It is just a small grass landing strip on the top of Spreadeagle hill, and we found it had a small museum attached to it with a collection of replica aircraft constructed by Doug Bianchi. Some of them you will have seen in the film 'Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines', and another in 'The Adventures of Young Sherlock Holmes', and one, made for the film 'The Great Waldo Pepper', (that I have yet to see), was a replica of a Sopwith Camel. I suppose this means I should post a picture of it for those of you who still think my blog name has something to do with dromedaries. Well, I will, but not today, because today I am bemoaning my lot.

We got home for early evening, and I started scurrying around picking up tools, putting creosote brushes into jars, storing solar chargers and batteries safely away, and lighting the Rayburn so that there would be bathwater ready for later that night.

My camera battery had run out during the visit to the museum and I had swapped over to the spare. As little petal started chivvying me to come and get my supper I paused, put down the armfull of wood, clipped the dead battery into the charger, plugged the charger into the mains inverter, and connected the inverter plug leads to the 12 volt battery that the sun had charged up all day. In my rush, I connected the leads the wrong way round, and the brief flash as I touched a black clip to a battery positive terminal alerted me, but too late. The green LED on the inverter failed to light after I had correctly connected the leads. I groaned, threw the wood into the Rayburn, and sat down to eat.

As I chewed on my chicken-in-filo-pastry pie, I felt an ominous crack. 'Please let that be a piece of chicken bone'. But no, the fates that day had decided that it should be a piece of tooth. One of my teeth. One of the two teeth on which I recently had root canal work. Quite costly root-canal work.

This week, I are (sic) mostly weeping by the waters of Babylon, and wailing at the wall. I shall not, however, be gnashing my teeth.

Saturday, April 28, 2007

The Duncliffe Bluebells



Finally, I have started that thing for which I gave up my computing work; taking my mother out to see the things she wants to see for the last time.



Yesterday it was the Bluebells at Duncliffe woods.



We none of us know exactly when we are to die, but she has been put on standby. "Be packed and ready to go."



Her condition is inoperable, and she has informed us all that in the event of a further stroke there are to be no more resuscitation attempts.



She knows now that everything she sees or smells or touches could be for the last time.



Normally these woods are accessible only by footpath, but at rare occasions the Woodland Trust opens up their logging tracks to allow cars to visit. The car park I first arrived at was an uninspiring rectangle of loose chippings amongst straggly trees.



I spoke to the woman who was marshalling, and backed the car down a nearby track until we were surrounded by bluebells.



I left her with little petal, sitting amongst the quiet of the trees and went walking with the camera. I am now to be her eyes.



She in turn will put names to some of the pictures I shall put on a CD for her to view on her new laptop.

Could you walk through through these mossy tracks and look around you with composure if you knew that you would never see them again?



I found afterwards I had lost the knack of holding the precise focus needed for delicate shots, the blurriness you will detect is a tremor in my arms and shoulders.



I had heard there was an orchid that grew locally, and I think I found it, but I will need her confirmation. My initial description of what I had photographed was met by little petal stating firmly that 'Bluebells can be purple, too'.



I believe that it reassures her to see this springtime episode, knowing that it will keep on happening after she has gone.



Thinking about it is becoming very painful indeed to me. The loss of my father all those years ago was bearable because it was so quick; a telegram, then eight agonised days at his bedside convinced that he would rise again, and the final realisation that there were things in life that were greater than my beliefs about the power of the mind and the strength of the will.



She insisted that she took us to lunch, and so we drove to an old inn called the Coppleridge Hotel, with a view from the dining room window of Duncliffe hidden in the haze that characterises the Blackmore Vale. She and little petal were talking about the hospital visits. I have not accompanied her on any of them. They both decided to have starters only, in order to have a sweet; so I decided to have a main course, followed by a starter. A herring, pan-fried in oatmeal, and while they had their sticky sweets I had five asparagus spears in melted butter. I have developed a love of simplicity, eating one thing at a time to savour it to the utmost.



She has decided not to go back to the large hospital so many miles away. Although they are the centre of excellence for her sickness they have not lived up to this claim. They lost her folder of notes as it was transferred from one department to another. Imagine nature losing some of the flowers one year as winter moves into spring, "I'm sorry, but it is a very large planet and these things sometimes happen".



(I've removed the section here about arthritis because of something I since learned.)



She has resolved to stay with the smaller hospital in Yeovil, because it is nearer, and friendlier. She and little petal had felt obliged to try and cheer up not just the patients at Taunton Hospital, but the staff as well, they all looked so sad and serious.



I finished my meal and had a coffee, managing to convince her that if we got a folding wheelchair to keep in the car we could venture further afield on our trips. Although I could go out on my own with camera and video, and return like some small-scale Marco Polo with tales of wonders for her to view, I feel that she needs to make the effort to go out one last time to places, to see the world and reassure herself that it will always be there.



I don't know how I'm going to conduct myself these next few months. I want her to have as long as she possibly can, but I am finding it agonising on the periphery. I can do nothing to help her condition, and neither, it seems, can the health service. Supposing it takes a cynically appropriate nine months? Can I bear it?



This is a rehearsal, I suppose, and I must play my part.



There is no understudy for my role.



Or for hers, either.

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Bak in the chare agane

I thought he had taken the roots out last week. I am laying back in the chair, conscious that I slept poorly last night, wishing I had the nerve to sit up and cancel this session. But the injections have already gone in, and the new assistant is far too pretty for me to throw a wimpish fit. My pride, which will always be my downfall, is up again. I am too tired to resist. How did I manage to find myself in this predicament?

Well, a long time ago, there was a mummy and a daddy. Enough. Apart from childish irreverance, there are images of penetration, of helplessness, of a wide-open wet orifice and a long intruder. Turn it off, go elsewhere. The patterns on the overhead lamp go to orange upon blue when my eyes stop searching for a meaning in them, and I see a picture of sailing boats on the calm blue surface of Poole harbour. Shimmering water under a friendly sun. Flowing water that is everywhere, and goes nowhere.

I woke at four this morning, hearing the rain beat randomly on the window glass. I got up, put on a bathrobe, and went outside. The row of solar lamps still shone their pale moon-like gleam upon the wetness of the ground. I watched the silver stream of water overflowing from the second water butt and felt compelled to catch it in a watering can, then in a bucket beneath the lip of the can, and stayed long enough to watch both fill and spill. Beyond the pool of pale lights the vegetables sat there drinking up the long-awaited rain with their thirsty roots.

Roots, why did I think of that? He's just called for 'A thirty-two'. What is this, a golf course? Oh no, flags and holes, try another tack. What can he mean by thirty-two? Not inches. It must be millimetres. What is thirty-two millimetres in inches? Take away 25.4 that leaves 8, 8 into 25 goes 3 times without putting too fine a point on it, oh no, don't think of points. He's rachetting away inside my tooth with something that's one and one-third of an inch long, my tooth is only half an inch, the point will be in my nose at this rate. Stop, break off this engagement now, fly away.

Breath calmly, unclench your fingers, uncross your legs, and sit up when he asks you if you'd like to rinse. The new girl has made her mark in less than a week; a box of tissues has been fastened with a pair of rubber bands to the stainless steel mast beside the porcelain spit-bowl. It is a touch of simple genius, and I shall add her to my list of angels to be revered, remembered, roped and ravished - stop that now. Desist. She'll notice, move your hands a little, flutter the tissue, as if that would be enough to hide it. He might see it as well, and it will distract him, and he'll poke just once too deeply and... That is most definitely enough. Stop thinking of the letter R.

Go somewhere else, somewhere well away from here, far in time as well as space, to the Old Schoolhouse in Penzance, where you first came home from the sea to try and calm your worn-out nerves. Contemplate the keening of the seagulls in the morning on the tiles, the coolness of the downstairs space behind the massive wooden door, the lack of windows in the wall between you and the lane that made it such a private place to live.

Consider the differences, and also similarities, of a life nearly two hundred miles and twenty-five years away. The sudden shock, then and now, of no longer earning a steady income but having instead to live on meagre savings. No television, no phone, just a radio, a music centre, and books. No computers. You punched holes in cardboard torn from cereal packets and pushed silicon chips through them, to be joined with copper point-to-point in lieu of printed circuit boards. LED's glowing, or not, as they flashed up the answer to the question presented to the inputs by paper-clips and drawing pins for keypads. One and one gives nought and carries one.

No emails, no web-sites, no search engines to answer questions instantly. Knowledge coming instead from books, committed to the vagaries of a shattered mind trying to rebuild itself. Books on psychology side by side with books on silicon circuitry. The circuits of the brain, the logic of the mind, the muddle of the dream. Remember B F Skinner's 'Beyond Freedom and Dignity', which you read in preparation for an attempt to go to university as a mature student, and how you became side-tracked by a trivial piece within it? Rats, in cages, given food pellets in response to pushing a treadle several times, in a simulation of work. One group of rats were fed at fixed times for a fixed number of presses, the others fed at random intervals. The rats on the random cycle pressed the treadle more often than those on the regular cycle. They expended more energy, pressing the treadle in a frenzy until a food pellet appeared, then almost immediately returned to their task of trying to score another jackpot, sometimes not even bothering to eat their reward. The gambling urge is not exclusive to man.

In a moment of clarity, I saw the similarity between those gambling rats and myself, trying to earn a living from an inbox full of emails. A muddle of sales on ebay, sales of car spares from the website, offers of contract work; pointless spam advising me that my bank account has been compromised, I need to buy these shares, my aid is most solicitiously required to further a transaction subsequent to the unfortunate death of a cabinet minister, somewhere lonely housewives are ready to fuck and suck me, my penis length could be as much as thirty five.

'Will a thirty-five one be enough?'

'I hope so. The next size up is three hundred and fifty four.'

No, please, not that long, it'll rip through the top of my head. I'll stick with what I've got, I'll just use it more. Thirty five is fine, so long as it's mine.

I was doing fine until I remembered the rats, damn that letter R.

Monday, April 23, 2007

Water of Life

It has rained this morning, the first moisture to fall from the sky this month. Sadly, it was only a fine mist that made faint pattering noises and raised a sweet smell, but it wasn't enough to let me check if my quick repair to the broken gutter was going to work, and it didn't put anything into my arrangement of water-butts.



The new green one was bought from a garden centre recently to satisfy little petal's urge to buy new things. She won't even re-use last year's earth in the pots, every spring she wants to see sacks of brand new compost ready for use. Sadly, having positioned the water butt so that the ground-level tap was high enough to get a watering can underneath, she complained that it was too painful having to keep bending down. I was waiting for just such an opportunity, and placed the tatty old black plastic water tank alongside the butt so that the overflow from the one would fill the other.

I love finding new uses for old items. If I were a Womble, I would be Uncle Buggeritaboutabit.

A short distance along from the water butts is another 'old' item.



Actually, it isn't old by my definition, it is a solar-powered water feature that little petal bought five years ago, and used for a few months. After that, it fell into the category of 'old', meaning that she hadn't bought it that spring. I stopped her from throwing it away and had a joyful fiddle. The pump, I found, still worked, but the nicad battery connections were rusty, and the solar panel had corroded from the inside. I cobbled together an old car battery, a voltage reducer, and one of my small solar panels, and it ran happily all through the party.




Moving stealthy on, but still staying on the garden theme, here is the potato patch, and the first signs that I might be causing her to rethink her 'it-must-be-new' strategy. Although the two plastic bags are brand new, the stacks of tires alongside them aren't. She even suggest we use them without any prompting.



This is the onion field (in honour of the Jazz Butcher's song), which was an old plastic box I rescued, and then used a soldering iron to weld up the gaping crack in one side which probably was responsible for it being thrown in the skip first of all. In front of them are spring onions in an old plastic crate that was foolish enough to stay still for long enough for soil to fall in it. She was going to throw it away. I think this craze for recycling things hgas gone far enough, it's time to look at repair, re-use, or even rejuvenate. (Thanks for that one, Pea, I'll plant some in your honour :)



And this old glass-fibre water tank is now the carrot plantation. Vegetables, I have been told, are mostly water, and so are permanently thirsty. Walk into any bar, in any town, and you'll find similar allotments all swaying gently in the breeze waiting for their next sprinkling to quench their thirsts.

By now you should all be realising why I am praying for rain, and collecting it when it falls. Our tap water, for which we pay the second-highest water rates in the country, is limescale-saturated stuff that stinks of chlorine. We have to pass it through a filter before using it to drink, or make tea and coffee, and when we did use it to water some of the house plants their leaves turned brown and died. A recent piece of advice for saving the planet was to use rain water for flushing the loo. Well, in our house, that's about all the tap water's fit for. I want to collect the rainwater, put it through a small reed-bed, and use it for washing. More on that in a future post.

Saturday, April 21, 2007

A forage, a rant, and a recipe

I've had a good day at the auctions; you can expect a blog post soon, (more cuddly toys, more memories). To celebrate, we've just got back from shopping at Waitrose, and I managed to score a rarity, one of their Sashimi trays, complete with proper Wasabi paste, not the green-coloured mustard that other supermarkets try to fob you off with. It's gone now, but I thought I'd share the memory of it with you.

As I struggled to find places in the kitchen for all the things I had bought that didn't require immediate eating, I realised that although I have finally learned to curb my appetite, I haven't yet got my compulsion to store food under control. Well, maybe not so completely out of control; I no longer store it in me, but the shelves are full of packs of Canadian flour, couscous, tins of mushy peas (poor man's guacamole), and goodies such as tins of octopus chunks and squid cooked in ink sauce. If the end of civilisation arrives next week, I shall die a gourmet's death.

I have another reason to celebrate; I read last night on the BBC website that an entrepeneur who had suffered his idea being rubbished by the Dragons had gone ahead anyway, and his first orders were rolling in. Good for him. I watched some of the 'Dragons' series, and some of 'The Apprentice', and some of 'Big Brother', and some of 'Masterchef', and some of, well, the list is almost endless. And my reaction to these programs? They're all celebrating the rule of the gob. Whoever puts their views across most forcefully wins, because it's television, and TV producers want gritty tell-it-like-it-is programs that don't pull any punches, and civilised, well-balanced, moderate individuals who can consider other people's points of views and pull several disparate ideas into a way ahead just don't come out with sound-bites. But that's television, life's not like that.

I've worked once or twice with individuals who would have fitted straight into The Apprentice, but they were not the norm, and most people were glad to see the back of them when they moved on. Most of the people I've worked with have been mild-mannered easy-going types. It pains me to see these reality shows giving the message that the only way to get ahead in life is to be a bit of an over-bearing bastard, because the sad thing is the youngsters who're watching these shows are going to get that message loud and clear. It looks good, it looks flashy, it seems to work, so they'll try it.

Rant over, here comes the recipe.

Poor Man's Guacamole

Take one tin of mushy peas (mushy, not processed)
(Optionally, see footnotes) open the tin and empty contents into a microwave-proof dish.
Heat for 60 seconds.
Open a bag of Tortilla chips and place on a tray.
Remove the dish from the microwave, place on the tray , season liberally with Lea and Perrins sauce.

Footnotes

1) A good party trick is to put the tin directly into the microwave and double the time.

2) A subtle stratagem if you're going through a difficult marital patch and want to bring matters to a head is to put the tin, unopened, into the oven, together with several other tins of peas, and turn up the heat. When the inevitable explosion occurs and the kitchen is covered with green goo, announce that cleaning is her job, and wait for the ructions to run their course.

Author's comments

Please don't try 1) and 2) at home. If you have to, try them at someone else's home.

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Roots

I had two roots taken out at the start of this week. I'm not good in a dentist's chair. I struggle to relax fully, and when I do, I often find the world starting to swim before me. I need a little tension to keep me alive, it seems.

Root treatment is so easy now, one jab, a little drilling, and then the process of dragging out the unwanted contents of the tooth. The trouble is, for me, my over-active imagination. I have some of those little twisty drills the dentist uses for clearing the root, I know what they look like, and how they work, and I can't help wandering slighly out of my head and into the space above my tongue to watch the process.

The other trouble, more for doctors and dentists than for me, is that I have a slight history of vagus nerve reactions. If I suffer too sharp a nervous pain, I black out. It is some sort of survival mechanism; the brain and body jointly decide that they are better off waiting until the pain has stopped, and shut down. To an outsider, I appear to be dead.

The first I knew of this tendency of mine was when I had some jabs before going overseas. One particular jab started a strange sizzling in my ears. The noise grew rapidly, and I became fascinated by it. Then, some time later, I realised I was lying on the floor, and the receptionist was trying to reassure the doctor, who was a locum on his first day in the village practice. He asked me, rather shakily, if I felt better.

"Yes," I answered, listening to the strange insistent sizzle reasserting itself, "but I think it's happening again". And it did. I woke up shortly afterwards, feeling cold, but rather invigorated.

The next time I went out , a year or so later, was purely my fault. I had sat down to breakfast at the hotel after finishing a night shift, and stretched my left arm. Something clicked at the base of my neck and the pain became intense. The sizzling noise built up, the pain went away, and sometime later, I found myself lying on the floor under the breakfast table in the recovery position, with the waitress stroking my cheek. The chef was relieved to see I hadn't touched my food.

I frightened a dentist a few months later, with a dramatic faint in the chair after he began drilling without waiting for the injection to take hold. He refused to treat me again until I had seen a doctor, so I registered with a local GP and explained the problem to him.

"When you black out, do you piss yourself?" was his only question.
"No, will it help if I do?"

He looked at me in exasperation, put me down as "suffering from fainting fits", and suggested I go to a different dentist.

I had my revenge on the medical profession with my last blackout, in the treatment room of Southhampton hospital A&E, where I had been taken after ripping a fingernail loose from my finger in a removal accident. As the doctor began to try and stitch it back into place without bothering with a local, I warned him that I had a tendency to vagus nerve attacks. He nodded as if he understood, and carried on sewing. The sizzle came quickly.

When I woke up, the nurse was trying to comfort the doctor, who was white and shaking like a leaf. "Look," she was saying, "he's awake, he's moving".

"You could have warned us," he said grimly, as he watched the nurse give me an injection. What more could I have said? Vagus nerve attack means short spell of death-like coma? Was he really a doctor, or just an Eastern-bloc trainee on work-experience? Thank God for the receptionists in the surgeries and the nurse; at least they all knew what to do. Just leave him alone, and he'll come home.

I haven't had any more attacks since I stopped doing long night shifts, fatigue must have played a part in my reactions. But last year, when the toothache started, I went to see the dentist, and as I sat in the chair, felt the tension in my arms and neck, and knew that if I went through the treatment, I was going to have another trip away. The stress of the long journeys and life away from home had worn me down again. I put up with the mild pain for the few remaining weeks of the contract, stroking the web of skin between thumb and forefinger to cope with any twinges.

The two enduring memories I have of the attacks are the mesmerising quality of the sizzling sound, and the feeling of absolute cold when I first wake up again. And in between those two, nothing. No out-of-body experiences, no visions of lights or angels or spirits on the astral plane. Just nothing. Ever so peaceful.

And, for my friend who's waiting for her appointment later in this week, I wish you a painless session.

Saturday, April 14, 2007

Oh Merde, God In Potty time again

This is what I've been slaving for these past two weeks. I haven't stopped since I left Lincolnshire; I've shovelled and swept and heaved and humped, all to tidy up the house and narrow strip of concrete that passes for the garden, because Little Petal's son is coming here today for a brief visit back from Australia, and she wants to give him a right royal welcome.

During my long spell away the home deteriorated into a mass of small piles of things I just didn't have time to sort properly or find places for, and outside became a jungle of Bindweed and Cranesbill fusing heaps of flower pots and sacks of strange compost into ragged alpine ranges.

So I set to on my return, labouring all day outside, and half the night inside, cleaning cobwebs and painting over crumbling plaster, fitting a new handle to flush the loo with, and yesterday was able to declare it done by lunchtime. I set off up to London for a brother's birthday party, and got back long after midnight.

I stumbled out of the bedroom shortly after nine, and found that the toilet was not flushing away properly. Quick and decisive, even only half awake, I poured a couple of buckets of water down, and realised with a sense of awful resignation that this was one problem that I couldn't just close the lid on. I had a set of rods handy, and dealt with it.

And so, an hour before the guests were due, I had packed the rods away after hosing them clean, and swam joyfully in the bath to get myself free of the awful cloying odour, but when I wandered out in my dressing gown to dry off in the afternoon sun, I realised that the problem still hadn't quite been solved. The smell was still there. To make matters worse, the perfect weather she had prayed for had arrived, there wasn't a breath of wind to waft the smell on to someone else's little cabbage patch.

"It's nothing to worry about," said my little petal, "after a couple of drinks they won't notice it."

"Your lot might not," I answered, "but I can assure you that my lot will."

It might be fine for her, she was obviously planning on hosting a sort of Gillian McKeith convention, 'Fee-fo-fi-fum, I smell the poo of an English Mum'. (Gillian's like that, I've noticed, ever so twee about her descriptions of what I frankly would rather not see on television. I'd rather watch a politician than a fat person's turd.)

I began to prepare some words to deal with the situation. "Hi mate, great to see you again. Look, the good news is, your mum hasn't lost her mind, despite all that's happened to her. But, I'm afraid, she's rather lost her sense of smell". There was no way I was going to take the blame for this.

The problem was finally solved by hosing down around the place, moving a Japonica nearer to where everyone would be congregating, and lighting a few scented candles and joss-sticks. Outside? In the daytime? Hey, we're the hieght of unconventiality, we are.


Afterword, or 'final flush'. 'God in Potty' comes from Finnegans Wake, and represents a plummy english voice saying 'Garden Party'. I know you all knew that because you're all educated and well-read blog-readers. I'm just letting you know that I know what it means, too.

After-afterword, or 'Dam that floater'. Finnegans Wake was written by James Joyce. Again, I know you all know that, I just want to make it clear that I do too.

FFS, or 'Out with the plunger'. I really have read Finnegans Wake, really. I know that you all have too, but I really do want to make it clear that I haven't just spent my life downloading pr0n from the internet. Here comes excrement, A lovely pong.

Thursday, April 12, 2007

The Orange-Tip Butterfly

This is a new visitor to the Camel's hangar, although my litle petal says it was here last summer. It might indeed have visited then, but I was miles away at the top of the fens and didn't get the chance to see it. So it's new to me.



The name is unsurprising, I can't think of anything else that it might prefer to be called.



What is quite unusual about it is the patterned underside of the wings.







I looked it up on the Butterfly Conservation website, and found that it is not rare, but is described as "having an expanding range". So does this mean that it is spreading further afield as a result of climate change?

Answers in a comment, please.

Labels: ,

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

The Pain of Going Green

I've had the chance to play around with some solar cells I bought on ebay and charge up some car batteries that are no longer capable of starting my heavy old cars, but will still run a small inverter for a while. An inverter is a device that turns the 12 volts from a car battery into mains voltage. It won't boil a kettle or run a washing machine, but it will recharge my mobile phone, the batteries for my cameras, and quite a few other things.

This isn't going to make any real difference to my electric bill, because the amount of power I've saved is trivial. But it came for free, despite the clouds the past two days getting in the way. And if everybody did the same thing, the power saving switches from being trivial to being worthwhile.

Currently (sorry, that pun is even worse than the switching one I pulled off in the last paragraph); currently there is a craze for paying several thousand pounds to get large solar cells fitted to the roof that generate enough charge to possibly sell any sunny-day surplus back to the Grid. The trouble is, even if you are lucky enough to get the government grant to offset some of the purchase and installation cost, it is still going to take several years to actually save enough on your electricity bill to break even. The other big drawback, for me anyway, is that you cannot tinker around with large roof-mounted installations, (as poor old Rod Hull found out).

So I've opted for a cheaper, more affordable solution. Well, being honest, I didn't have an option, I couldn't afford the cost of the sort of installation that qualifies for a government grant. But I'm a born tinkerer as well as naturally impecunious. I've started my own path on the road to greener living, having been inspired by Dick Strawbridge's Cornish venture. (see It's not easy being green if you want to know what I'm on about).

Some lessons I have had to learn the hard way. Rechargeable batteries have a slightly lower voltage than the non-rechargeable types, and they also have a more rapid run-down time, but they also benefit from being completely run down before trying to charge them up again. I, putting all those facts together, decided that the best way to run the batteries down before putting them in my solar-powered charger would be to put them in my battery-powered electric shaver and buzz the remaining volts away.

Halfway along one side of my chin, in a particularly thick patch of stubble, the shaver got a good grip on the hairs and suddenly stopped. The pain of having the dead weight hanging from my cheek became excruciating, but I was too much of a coward to simply yank the run-down shaver off. I hurried through to the office and picked up a couple of batteries I hoped had more life in them, and then, fumbling awkwardly in front of the mirror, got the old batteries out and the replacements in. The satisfying buzzing noise began again and I could relax.

I bet Dick Strawbridge never had this problem. On second thoughts, looking at that moustache, maybe he did.

Monday, April 09, 2007

Resting

I've noticed over the past few days that a lot of good actors are doing voice-overs in adverts but are not appearing in new films or dramas. They can't be too old to get work, so I assume there is no work around at the moment. Is there nothing new on TV except for reality shows and programs about crime-scene forensic scientists?

So I'll have to watch the adverts once I've watched the repeats of the repeats. I pay a licence fee for this?

Gripe-gripe.

Saturday, April 07, 2007

Final Flight

Thirteen months of active duty have come to an end, and the Camel is back home. As it is, I lasted a lot longer than most new pilots in the First World War; thirteen weeks would have been good going for many of them. But I survived. Thirteen months is the longest that I have ever spent working away from home, and I spent all but the first three weeks of it living in a small village midway between Scunthorpe and Gainsborough.



My last week there was the anniversary of my first week after I had decided I couldn't spend another night in a Travelodge. Spring was just beginning.



Despite my rather harsh description of the village in my first week, I grew to love it, and am certainly going to miss it now I am back in the warmth of the South.



And as much as anything else, I am going to miss the woods through which I spent many happy evenings wandering around, even in the darkness of winter.



There was always something unexpected to be found just a few yards off the beaten paths.



One thing I noticed was the lag that 260 miles produced; these were in flower in Lincolnshire three weeks after I first noticed them in Wiltshire.



I have struggled to get a good photograph of these, this is as good as I have managed so far, and I am still puzzled as to why they should be so tricky to get into perfect focus.



And although I normally only post pictures of wild flowers and plants, sometimes you have to just break the rules without any real excuse.



This isn't the end of the Sopwith Camel; unlike the unknown duo from the war who finished up deep in the bloody mud of the Somme, I shall fly on, but things will be different, and I want to say goodbye to Lincolnshire and all the people I met in my time up there before my new life begins.

So farewell to the fens and the mists of the Humber valley.