SodiumLightsTheHorizon.co.uk » family

Another part done autobiog

pjm — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 18:05:00 +0000

Amongst my father’s stuff I found the beginnings of an autobiography. It’s disjointed as hell, and probably of no interest to anyone who isn’t in the family. For them, I may end up copying it out.

But the thing that caught my eye was the list of topics yet to cover…

dog
cuffley
hardware
nursery mopeds
- cucumbers
- tomatoes
college
school
- knee
- acheivements
bikes
her
kids etc
wormley
- horse
cars
racing cars
france
swiss border
- car window
st trop
toes
gpr
aei
calder
meyer
kingsmoor
boats
- canals
- hooligans
- students
- gas
- booze
geoff welsh happ
- stone
- lee
- martin steering
- black pig
  - dustbins
- Crash
  - wrist cut
- landyatch
- tree towing
- operations
- y c
- badgers, deer
- orwell
- aerial
- radio

What I did on my Holidays (pt 3)

pjm — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 13:45:55 +0000

Are you ready for the next thrilling instalment of the SodiumLights whirlwind tour of Kiwiland…?

Day three and we’re leaving Auckland for the coastal town of New Plymouth. This news amuses some who tell us that no-one goes to New Plymouth…

For the sake of my sanity (I’m currently fighting a migraine that started while I was in New Zealand 4 weeks ago) we’ll break this into three parts. Each part is more exciting than the last. Well, each part has more photographs than the previous one.

Auckland to Hamilton

Auckland to Hamilton is actually a deeply boring road… I have no doubt that when we drove the road it was a wide and wonderful road through beautiful countryside, but compared to the later roads it was just dull. Sorry.

So, instead, I’ll talk about the roads. Maybe our visit to New Zealand was perfectly timed for the end of the financial year, but everywhere we went we found roadworks. Strangely, these roadworks seem dedicated to improving roads that were in frankly superb condition. As far as we could see, New Zealand had a wonderful habit of improving roads before they fail instead of waiting until they fail, patching them for five years, and then closing the whole bloody thing for a month. More surprisingly, roadworks are accompanied by equipment and workmen…

Hamilton to Mokau

In Hamilton we filled the car with petrol for the first time, and let Karen guide us back out of Hamilton, following a ’69 Camero (with the helpful reg plate 69CMRO) in a wonderfully gentle run through rolling countryside. For the first time (and there were many) I wished that I was driving anything other than the lumbering hire car we had. This was countryside that was created for a mid-sixties V8 lump and some half decent rock music on the radio, but we had a year old Mondeo automatic that cruised wonderfully, but had all the get up and go of a lethargic tortoise…

You always know that the road ahead is going to be exciting when you see a bloody great sign that tells you which of the roads ahead are currently open.

The road from Eight Mile Junction to Mokau had me desperate for another alternative car – this time Little Un, our little Corolla SR – as the road headed up into the hills. Lots of hill climbs and sweeping bends make for an exciting road for a driver, but ultimately a boring road to talk about. Especially when you can’t stop very frequently to take photos…

Every few miles the hills would suddenly part to leave us in a large plain – like a cheaply designed “sandbox” computer game, where the sandbox limits are marked by suspiciously convenient steep faced hills…

Panorama near Awakino

Why were we parked here? Well, because it seems like every time they improve the road and cut a corner off, they turn the old bit into a parking area or a picnic area…

The old road...

Mount Damper Falls

Leaving the mountain road, we followed the coast for a while and for the first time ever, I realised I had no idea what was over the horizon. I know that sounds stupid, so let me explain…

I’ve spent the very vast majority of my life in England, and I have a pretty good sense of direction, so I can normally tell you that in that direction is Ely; Norwich is somewhere over there; London is that-a-way; and Milton Keynes is that way hiding roughly behind Bedford. Going abroad, I’ve always known that Just north of Varaderro and Cayo Coco is Florida; east of Shannon is Washington (ish); and south of Cork is either Britany or Northern Spain.

Suddenly I realised I had no idea where Australia was. Obviously, it was over there somewhere, but if I went due west, would I hit Australia? If not, did I hit Africa, or was I too far south for that?

In a strange way, no matter how stunning the views were, I was actually slightly relieved to dip back inland and drive across the hills, so a turning to the almost ‘eponysterical’ Mount Damper Falls had to be taken.

Once again I fell in love with Kiwi roads. Once again, Karen went a bit nutty.

There’s a wonderful tickle of pleasure runs down my spine when roads become enjoyable, and this road had me genuinely giggling. The wide(ish) road swept round the foot of mountains,across views that had us slack jawed. Repeatedly the road quality dropped slightly until we’re driving a rally cross stage across roads topped with rough lime gravel.

View mount damper falls in a larger map

Where did the gravel come from? And if they could get a gravel truck down here, why were only very short sections of the road tarmaced?

Then we found the rockfall signs.

We’ve all seen them. They’re stupid signs that mean nothing. Have you ever seen a rock fall on a road?

The first time we've seen a rockfall, by GB

The worrying thing is that this is a photo of me moving a boulder out of the way so we could get past. On a road which had a school bus down it earlier that day. That meant that… Oh feck. Still, it was only a little rock…

We continued on down a road that curved round cliff faces and (on one occasion) a tree. We drove up a slope steep enough that the automatic gearbox went a little nutty and I could smell something getting distressingly warm.

Finally, we reached Damper Falls.

No, sorry, we reached the car park for the footpath to Damper Falls – a 45 minute walk across a field with no shade at 2pm.

I look at GB. She looks at me. She says just two words… “Fairy Falls”.

We turn back.

Purple Trees, by GB

Driving back the views were disconcertingly different – to the extent that I wondered if we had taken some hidden mis-turning.

I can't live there either, apparently (by GB)

Once again, a jovial suggestion that we could happily live ‘here’ is shot down. “It’s a bit rural”. We live in the middle of a bloody field. “A field that’s 10 miles from a county town”. Arse…

We see human life again – a local farmer in a beaten up van; a school bus loaded with children; and a guy tending multicolour bee hives – and wonder how the hell this road copes with traffic. There’s no where to go, and I’d be less than comfortable trying to get two cars past each other in the rockfall zone…

I'm sure those weren't there on the way up... (by GB)

About 45 minutes has passed since we went up this road and yet more rocks have fallen and been cleared out of the way. I decide that rally driving is more exciting that sight seeing…

New Plymouth

We arrive in New Plymouth at the “Nice Hotel & Bistro”. Despite all logic, it’s actually a decent hotel, although a little… poncy. Our room is colour co-ordinated. The bathroom has a collection of pebbles in the corner. And, from our balcony, we can see straight down the top of the busty woman drinking tea in the dining room.

We have just one objective tonight – to get drunk and to have some food. Two. Two objectives – to get drunk, have some food, find some aftersun and badly rip off a Monty Python sketch. I’ll start again…

New Plymouth is strangely beautiful. It’s not the most stunning town for architecture, but it’s sat between the Tasman Sea and the semi-active volcano of Mount Egmont.

As with all towns we visited, we wonder where the kids are. This town should have an eternal struggle between chavs, emos, goths and townies. Every street corner should have a couple of kids making loud comments about boobs every time a woman walks past. Every door opening should have either litter, a homeless guy or a drunken bint announcing loudly that she’s “‘aving a slash!”

Nothing.

Still, I’ve jumped ahead to drunken time. While we’re still sober, I find a pharmacy and ask the chemist for some anti-histamine. She looks at my arm in horror and tells me that I’m looking very burnt. My arm has got significantly worse than yesterday and I’m starting to look like someone poured scalding water on my right hand. I convince her that it’s an allergy and that I always get it on my hands for 2 weeks of summer.

She pretends to believe me, but refuses to sell me anti-histamine, instead giving me a hydro-cortizone ointment. An ointment that I have just this second remembered is prescription only in this country, and I’ve probably just transported it illegally back to this country…

We head back to a restaurant we’ve seen (Andres) and spend about £90 on a feast for two, with some superb local wine, coffee and spirits to finish. We’ve been looked after beautifully by the young lass who has been serving us, so I tip her. An average Brit doing 10% of about $190, I hand the lass a $20 bill.

She looks at my hand in confusion, looks shocked, and playfully bangs my shoulder. I’ve upset a balance…

Apparently, the rules on tipping at different here. Where as I tip 10% for someone who has looked after me (and the Merkins tip 10% for everything and 15-20% for someone who has done well) New Zealand seems to take tipping to be a sign that the gods have shone on your experience and you would happily offer your first born as thanks for the service you have received…

It’s a mistake I was to make again whenever we have alcohol with our dinner. Needless to say, I made quite a few people uncomfortable…

We headed back to our room and planned our next day…

The question on everyone’s lips was – would tomorrow contain as many ellipses as today…?

What I did on my holidays (pt 2)

pjm — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 22:23:21 +0000

First up, lets all just say “Woo! Isn’t that impressive!”.

View larger map

If, of course, you don’t think it’s impressive, don’t bother. I’ve already said “Woo!” enough times to make up for you unimpressed types.

Right, moving on…

For reasons most (all) would associate with masochism, we decided to go play in the traffic again. Specifically, since every country claims that its roads grind to a halt, we decided to go play in rush hour traffic.

There was a small but significant hole in this theory – neither of us know what time rush hour is in Auckland. Working on the principle that evening commute seemed to be at about 5.30, we scoffed our scrambled egg breakfast and hit the main motorway at 8.15.

Most of you will know what a traffic jam is like… London, LA, Paris, Baldock… they’re all famous for their traffic jams. So too is Auckland. And it’s possible that Auckland traffic gets really horrific, but for us it was the most relaxed city gridlock we’d ever seen, with the main motorway flowing smoothly enough that we were on the harbour bridge before we realised we’d driven through the traffic…

The roads are something I’ve spent a lot of time talking about since we got back – the scenery, the length, the altitude, the terrifying corners – but first I want to talk about the motorway and how fecking sensible people are.

Under normal road conditions (as best I can fathom) Kiwi roads work like British ones: you get on; you travel in the right lane for your speed relative to other vehicles; you try and stay left. And that’s how it works when it’s quiet. When it gets busy, someone changes the wiring inside Kiwi drivers’ heads, and they seamlessly change driving styles. Suddenly the three lane motorway has turned into a marvellous contraption where lane 1 is for people leaving the motorway at the next junction (or joining it); lane 2 is for people who are planning on leaving in the next few junctions, but not this one; and lane 3 for people who are going some distance. I’m not even sure people were aware that they were doing it.

Traffic over the harbour bridge is also rather impressive. The bridge, when it was built, was just four lanes wide – four lanes of tarmac with no central divide. Ten years later, it was already handling many times the anticipated traffic load, so two more lanes were bolted on to either side of the bridge (if you trust Wiki, these Japanese made units are known as the “Nippon clip-ons”). The central four lanes have always had a ‘tidal’ lane system, where more lanes were given over to the heavier flow of traffic. Originally this was done with overhead lighting rigs telling you which lanes were open – nowadays it’s done with concrete barriers that are shuffled back and forth across the traffic by specialist rigs that pick the barriers up, redirect them down an s-shaped channel and dump them back down on the other side of the carriageway.

Does it show I’m a bit of an engineering nerd?

So, first stop on our second day was Army Bay. I’d like to suggest that there was some special reason for us going to Army Bay but, in reality, we were heading up the motorway and discovered the next bit was a toll road where you had to phone in your details within 24 hours to avoid punishment – rather like the congestion charge in London – and we turned off. Much of the holiday was like that actually – drive in a previously agreed direction, then turn off as and when we felt like it. It’s a strangely relaxing way to tour a country. You know that you aren’t going to see all the tourist sights you might have wanted to, but you get to see a lot of random stuff you would have otherwise missed. Like Army Bay.

Now, I have no idea how Army Bay got its name. What I do know is that the Kiwi Army apparently learnt a lot from the British Army, and decided that the incredibly scenic bit of land right next to it would be a perfect place to run around shouting bang and throwing bloody great lumps of metal at each other…

Army Bay rock pool, by GB

Army Bay beach

It’s another of those beaches that seem impossible to my British brain – crystal clear water, thick grained sand, rocks to wander across, trees for shade, and no other buggers around.

The trees fall into two categories – dead and sun bleached or gravity defying…

Dead tree on Army Bay

Knot of exposed tree roots

On the other side on the peninsula (which is, at this point, about quarter of a mile wide) are incredible views across clear water to a scale model of Auckland (1:1 as it happens) with, again, no obvious massive over development of land.

The sun gets hotter very quickly, and we’re suddenly aware that our pasty white legs aren’t covered in sun cream in the way that our arms and faces are. The sun is disarmingly evil and even I, who shuns sun cream whenever possible, am covering myself in the stuff. It’s the second day and already my yearly sun allergy is kicking off, leaving an itchy trail of red pinpricks down my arm.

So we decide to head off and investigate the old road back round the bay – the route that would have been taken before the bridge was built. Except, in a masterpiece of misunderstanding, we end up heading 15 miles to far north west towards Helensville.

This is beautiful country… agricultural land with mountains in sight; the sea just over the horizon; and a pace of life that’s slow to a fen-dweller. It’s my idea of heaven. As if anticipating my thoughts GB contradicts me – “I could never live here”. Why not? “I couldn’t live in Helen’s Ville. Jean’s Ville maybe…” Ah, sibling rivalry… there’s nothing like it.

Our aim, right now, is to find food. It’s gone lunchtime and my stomach is rumbling. The problem is that everywhere is smaller than our SatNav (and the road signs) imply. The town in 10K turns out to be a handful of houses and a closed pub. The beachside village turns out to be couple of holiday homes and a dozen hippies somehow surviving on sand that’s too hot to touch. The sprawling metropolis suddenly vanishes as the quiet suburb turns out to be the entire town. That’s how we drove through Helensville – while wondering if there’s somewhere to park up we run out of town and find ourselves back in open countryside.

Finally we stop. On the roadside. In a layby.

There’s no food here. There’s just another car, a small pile of broken glass, and a sign pointing down a footpath to Fairy Falls. At this point we’d not yet wised up to the wonderfully misleading nature of Kiwi tourist signs, so we decided that a wander down a shady path to a waterfall would be rather pleasant.

We learnt our lesson.

The rainforest we walked through was beautiful, don’t get me wrong, but it was clinging to the side of a hill. The signs said 40 minutes, so we decided to tackle the route. After 30 minutes walking down a slope that no-one from the plains of Cambridgeshire should be made to experience, we found a sign. 20 minutes to the falls. This was not a landscape where maths had any hold. The problem was that my knees were already aching – and so far we’d only walked down the slope.

Your intrepid explorer, by GB

Banishing all hopes of a nice little National Trust tea shop (and yes, I know how old that makes me sound) we turned our back on the falls and headed back towards the car. There are different estimates on how long it took to walk back. The signs claim it took 20 minutes. Some claim it took nearer to 45. Some claim it took a week and a half and a pack of pit ponies. I lean towards the latter. By the time we reached the top we were knackered, in pain, and wondering where our lunch and water had gone.

Onwards to Arataki.

The road we drove is a beautiful road called “Scenic Drive” despite the fact all you can see are trees, tarmac and black rubber snakes from where teenagers go to show off their mad driving skills. I mean “skillz”.

Arataki, however, is incredible…

View from Arataki, by GB

Here we met two large milkshakes, and a man called “Mike from London” – who came from Nottingham. We decided it was probably best not to ask.

Mike gave us a wonderful overview of what he, as a Brit, saw New Zealand to be. And that could, as he put it, be summed up by the word “easy”. We agreed. We’d have agreed even if he wasn’t feeding us free wafers as they came out of his ice cream cone making machine.

Mike was working the stand because someone else (a member of his staff possibly) had called in sick and he’d been lumbered with the job himself. But, if we were around tomorrow, he’d love to show us around. Sadly, we were planning on being on the road, so instead he told us to head off to ~~Peha~~ Piha, where there was a lion in the surf and the surfers all grew (and smoked) a huge amount of dope.

The Piha Lion

With a little imagination (or maybe a lot of that dope) you can see how the ~~Peha~~ Piha Lion got its name.

Sadly, hunger and annoying sunlight got to us, and we headed off towards our food, so I shall leave you with this – why is it that we are so insistent on serving battered cod as our national dish? It’s a boring fish that is being fished to dangerously low levels. It’s expensive too. Why don’t we eat haddock (a far superior fish, to my mind) or something just as dull but more populous, like Hake or Hoki?

Failing that, we could do as the Kiwis, and deep fry anything that comes out of the ocean. Our dinner that night was deep fried red snapper and chips. With the wreckage of the previous night’s salad we were stuffed on under £5 of the best fish and chips I’ve ever had…

What I did on my holidays (pt 1)

pjm — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:27:11 +0000

So, I’ve largely recovered from the flight, and I have an OU textbook to avoid. What better time to start the holiday memories…?

We flew out from Birmingham International on Saturday night. We landed in Dubai Sunday morning, and took off two hours later for Brisbane. An hour layover and we’re on again, this time to Auckland. It’s nearly 30 hours later, we’ve had about 4 hours sleep and it’s now lunchtime Monday. The brain is no longer working.

Auckland Airport is a marvellous thing. Sure, Dubai terminal 3 is a magnificent structural phenomenon, with walls of glass and two Oases, but Auckland is full of Kiwis. Somehow it’s completely alien and completely at home. I mean, we step off the plane straight into an immigration queue – but it’s efficient. It’s like the twilight zone.

The various officials are happy too. Back in Australia the security staff all looked like they’d had exceptionally bad news and were waiting to take it out on someone (and later on in Birmingham we’d walk into a world full of automatons) but here the immigration guys joked with us about what we were doing. The biosecurity lass was even cooler – we ticked just about all the red boxes we could find on the biosecurity form (food, plant matter, hiking boots, animal contact, living on a farm, smuggling wood, liking Marmite) and she cheerfully worked down the list before telling us that we could go on our way.

Free, and into fresh clean New Zealand air. Surprisingly warm air. The Ford Mondeo we hired had air conditioning, so we did the British thing and wound the windows down instead…

20 minutes from the airport was our bed for the first three nights – the Grange Lodge Motel. Now, being British, we’d never been to a motel before and we had no idea what to expect – motels are where Americans live when they get thrown out of their apartments or need somewhere to go brew crystal meth in the coffee pot.

If you find yourself in need of a decent night’s kip in Auckland, give Pat & Bernie a try. A truly friendly welcome, a bloody comfy bed, and a studio style living/dining/cooking area. Most hotels I stay in are either horribly expensive (and not very good) or the predictable boxes of the big chains (and therefore expensive, not very good, and smaller than my room at Uni). This I’d have killed for at Uni. It was probably bigger than our first house…

The next day, we pry ourselves out of bed and go talk to Bernie. The night has been good to us, but apparently we were more travel weary than we felt – we now apparently look 15 years younger. Bernie clarifies a couple of points on NZ’s weird traffic rules and we head off shopping. Since shopping is ultimately boring, we’ll skip on to St Helier’s beach…

Look at that beach.

Now go back and look at it again.

That’s a sandy beach, on a Tuesday lunchtime, in a high 20s heat. It’s 10 minutes away from the centre of Auckland. So I ask you, “where are all the people?”

It’s actually a question we kept asking ourselves while we were away – why is this beautiful resource, which is readily available to everyone, not jammed solid with students, the unemployed, and the elderly? Can you imagine any beach in the UK being that empty? Now realise that the water is crystal clear instead of the brown sludge that you get on an English beach…

The reason, we realised, is that there are only 4 million Kiwis, so you could spread them evenly across every beautiful location, and there’d still be no-one on that beach. When you put a quarter of the population (of both islands) in Auckland, it leaves no-one else to visit the beauty in the other parts of the country. Except for gawking tourists…

We did what every well adjusted tourist does next – we went shopping.

Auckland CBD (the Central Business District – or city centre) is the busiest in the country and Queen Street is the busiest shopping street in the city. Now, I’ll admit that we were there on a Tuesday afternoon, but I’ve genuinely seen Cambridge busier on a Sunday. It’s partly an illusion because the pavements are nearly as wide as the carriageways and the shops supply welcoming shadows to shelter you from the sun, but you could still have dropped a dozen Oxford Street’s in there and had space to spare.

This is the old Ferry building in the docks. Pretty, isn’t it. I wish I could tell you more about it, but I was hot and tired and just thought it looked nice.

It was time to move on, so we decided to go play in the rush hour traffic – a strange exercise that we would attempt will alarming regularity. What we actually ended up doing was staging the first part of a 13 day torture exercise on our annoying Aussie sat-nav, Karen. Karen, you see, had been told to avoid motorways and u-turns at all costs, so driving the wrong way up a motorway was a surprisingly effective way to drive her insane. That Tuesday’s attempt took us over the harbour bridge to Devonport – the side of the bay that was, until the bridge, only accessible by ferryboat or 2 hour drive.

It’s an area full of nice houses, almost certainly full of well paid execs from the CBD. Cool breezes, big houses, lots of green and a view of the harbour. I wanted to stay there forever.

Sadly, my camera decided that focussing was not something it wanted to do (something connected to the polariser I was using) so the best photo I have is this stunning paparazzi snap of Jean…

We spent an hour or more sat there, staring at the Auckland skyline, watching the ferry bring weary workers home, and wondering how the commuter on a jet-ski would get it off the beach.

Part 2 : Army Bay; driving Karen mad; the Peha Lion; and Fairy ~~Footsteps~~ Falls.

Killed by naked soldiers…

pjm — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 11:19:47 +0000

I was thinking about how adults say things they don’t mean, and how they confuse little kids…

Many moons ago, when I was about five or six years old (beds were made with sheets and blankets; my grandmother still had all her marbles; and the Model T was still in production) my grandmother came up to tuck me in to bed.

As part of the tucking in process, she pulled the blankets up said “you’ll catch your death if you don’t have your shoulders covered”.

I spent the next few years terrified to go to sleep, certain in the knowledge that I’d die if my ‘soldjers’ weren’t always covered…

Cassoulet

pjm — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 23:29:15 +0000

Cassoulet is a wonderful thing. It’s a beautifully simple and tasty French dish that reminds me of family holidays in Frejus. Unfortunately it’s not a pretty dish. The might that is flickr can’t take a nice picture of it. It’s not surprising, since it’s basically beans and fatty meat in a tomato sauce. It’s like posh sausage and beans…

I don’t think I’ve ever made two batches that are the same. It’s beans, meat and sauce after all. So… here’s the one that we just spent the last two days eating…

1 x 5.5 litre slow cooker
A huuuge number of beans. Traditionally Haricot beans but the ones we get in the UK are tiny, so…
- 3 x tins Butter beans (Lima beans?), 260g drained
- 2 x tins Haricot beans, 290g drained
- 1 x tins Black beans, 260g drained
A crapload of meat, preferably fatty. Confit of duck is traditional but expensive, so…
- 200g paprika spiced sausages (not an air dried Chorizo, but a fresh Chorizo or Merguez type)
- 700g pork belly rashers
- 2 big duck breasts (gresingham duck ftw)
Then some tomato type sauce
- 2 x 400g tins of tomatoes
- 4 x tbsp tomato puree
- 1/2 litre of vegetable stock
- couple of glasses of wine (red, white, whatever… I tend to use cheap port actually…)
- couple of teaspoons of paprika (I heart La Chinata smoked paprika)
- two bundles of bouquet garni
- a couple of bay leaves

Right…

Brown the sausages. Cut them into 2 inch lengths.

Fry the belly slices fat side down ’til it crisps up a bit, then seal the sides. Cut into 2 inch lengths.

Fry the duck, fat side down ’til it crisps, then seal the sides and cut into 3/4 inch thick slices.

Throw it all into the slow cooker.

Wash all the beans in fresh water. Throw them into the slow cooker.

Take all the sauce items and throw then in too.

Go to bed.

When you wake up, go to the bathroom, get dressed, turn on the slow cooker, go to work.

Come home with a stick of French bread and eat it with hot cassoulet.

Christmas Photos

pjm — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 21:09:51 +0000

I took my big camera with me to Christmas dinner. I got a new lens for Christmas. I took no photos.

These were the 27th, and the only photos I liked from a twenty minute session and nearly 60 photos…

All change…

pjm — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 17:08:37 +0000

It was only a matter of time.

Back on 18th November, my grandmother died – less than 10 months after my grandfather. I’m not the oldest member of our branch of this rather depressing little tree.

There’s my wife and me (who aren’t planning on having kids), my brother is rapidly approaching 30 and yet to settle. Both our parents were single children – mum through adoption. It’s hardly a thicket we’re discussing here.

Going back up the family name, my grandfather’s only brother died during WWII without having kids, and I think their father was the only boy in the family. Our little branch of a relatively rare surname (50 entries in the UK phonebooks) look like it lies just on our shoulders.

Our plans have to change too… there’s no way I can afford to take on the half million pound house that I grew up in, so it’s getting sold off.

One way or another, everything has changed in the last fortnight…

Happy Anniversary…

pjm — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 20:58:42 +0000

It’s strange to think, but Jean and I have been married 6 years today. And we’ve been together 10. That’s a third of our lives, near as damnit (I’m 32, she’s 28).

Today was a good day.

The cats levered us out of bed just before lunch, demands for breakfast merging with demands for the lunchtime meal that they never get.

For lunch we went off to the incredible King William pub in Heydon. It’s a pub embedded firmly in the past (even it’s website is lingering in the mid 90s). It’s exactly as it was when I first went there 15 years ago – the gloom in the in entrance hall, the beams threatening to brain me, the horse brasses on every wall, the hanging tables and the huge fireplace. The menu is the same too…

I know how dull it is to listen to someone else’s food choices, but this was beyond all descriptions… Beef sashimi with chilli jam; local sausages with bubble and squeak; and a jaffa cake bread and butter pudding. I’ve possibly never eaten any better.

Bread and butter pudding is traditionally a thick stodgy mess or carbs and fat. This horrifically rich sounding version was actually the lightest bread and butter pudding I’ve ever had, almost having the texture of a light but rich moist cake.

And by god, it’s perfect weather for a pint of Adnam’s Bitter to go with it all.

Then over to Wood Green at Heydon to be tempted by cats looking for a home. I can’t say enough good things about Wood Green – they’re everything that the RSPCA should be, but aren’t. They ignore the politics that the RSPCA has embraced, and instead dedicate their time to looking after animals. They went even higher in my estimation when I discovered that they never put down an animal just because they can’t rehome it. They have one pair there who have lived with them for over seven years. They got our yearly anniversary gift this year…

Then, this evening, we travelled in to Cambridge to watch “Cloudy with a chance of meatballs” – a truly wonderful film – and to eat ice cream for dinner.

Who needs to be a grown up…?

Fete worth than death

pjm — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 09:09:54 +0000

Tomorrow is the day when the village I’m planning to move in to gets together and tries to earn money to stop the village hall from falling down.

Everyone gets together at The Chase, or the farm, or the house that is still known by the surname of the old lady who died 20 years ago, and they eat cream teas made with Tesco Value jam, and play those strange games that you only ever see at this level of fund raising event – tombolas and raffles; guess the name of the teddy and the weight of the cake; get as few points as possible at clock golf or as many as possible at pig bowling on a lawn that resembles the Himalayas. And I know that I will both love it and hate it.

I’ve lived there, on and off, for 15 years, yet I know that I’m still considered a new comer. In all that time, just one house has been built, and that was for the old farm manager not an outsider. I’ll go to the fete and know that barely half a dozen people will recognise and acknowledge me – and one of those will think I’m my brother.

Yet still, I’ll enjoy it in that way where you don’t really enjoy anything. It’s a sign that the village still cares about itself and is still small enough that everyone feels that they need to take part. Hell, I know that by next year I’ll be conned into running a stall of some kind – the ultimate sacrifice since it means you can’t bugger off when it gets tedious.

But I’ll be there – just like I’ve been there every year since 1987.

Yet, if I’m honest, one of the reasons I love it so much is that it lets me replay my old “Fete worse than death” joke. It’s hardly an original joke, but it’s one that appeared spontaneously many years ago and has remained a family joke ever since. I don’t recall who first made the joke either. It has a certain dark depressing cynical word play that could well be my doing. But that’s hardly unique in my family.

Yet, despite not being original, it always raises a smile, and it always seems to be new to someone.

There’s just one rule… don’t let anyone in the village hear you call it that…

Beating the lawyers

pjm — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 23:17:07 +0000

Before he died, my grandfather decided to write his autobiography. Sadly, not much of it made it onto a computer and I now have sheets of barely legible scrawl to work my way through. I’ve just found an absolute gem… Before you read on, remember that my grandfather was the head of what was to become the National Archives…

I learnt to get my own back on the nit picking lawyers by throwing back at them some of my own mischievous legal concerns. My best one was to argue that s5 of the PRAct of 1958 did not create a right for members of the public to see documents which were more than 50 years old (the 30 year rule came later). I argued that the act said that “public records in the PRO [...] shall not be available until they have been in existence for fifty years [...]“. I contested that this did not say that such records must be made available. The Lord Chancellor agreed with me; and I was happy to agree that unless challenged we would ignore this bit of bad drafting.

I was also concerned about the definition of “records selected for preservation [...] shall be transferred not later than 30 years after their creation” when I discovered that two or three departments, including the Press Office, would simply create a minute, date is just before the last paper turned 30 years old, thus keeping the file from the PRO for another 30 years. This was not sloppy drafting, but merely a lack of understanding of [unclear word] procedures when senior officials wanted to keep files closed. This teased my lawyer friends, but I did [unclear word] departments to avoid this function (I expect the result was simply to shred such files and register them as ‘missing’).

Tomorrow will be a long day

pjm — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 01:20:59 +0000

Tomorrow will be the 12th of April. He would have been 88 years old.

It’s hard to think that he’s not here any more. I don’t think about him often, but when I do it hurts me so hard. It’ll be strange reasons too. I’ll discover a great recipe that I want to cook for him, or I’ll be told a cool joke. Or I’ll have a choice to make and I’ll know that he would have known the answer…

This branch of the family line is now down to Steven and myself. And since GB and I have decided not to have kids, it’s all down to Steven. God, we’re fucked…

All change

pjm — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 23:18:08 +0000

Holy fuck… where do I start? I’ve been kind of awol the past few weeks.

My grandfather’s pancreatic cancer finally caught up with him and he died back on the 29th.

I spent the last three weeks on part hours, working in the mornings and then spending the afternoons trying to sort his things out. We threw out twenty or thirty bags of scrap clothes. We gave away another 15 or so to charity shops and hospitals. We’ve cleared the loft of crap and we’ve sorted a lot of stuff from the cupboards but we’ve still got a pile of banks, trusts, charities and associations I need to talk to about his death.

Granny is now in a home – a great place near to her house where the nurses look after her beautifully. She doesn’t have any idea who I am. Hell, I’m not sure she knows who she is.

We had a cremation service for him on Friday 13th. It was sad to see so few people there, but most of the people he knew from work are in their 80s and live in the London area. It was never going to happen. Family were there, as were the village. It was a nice service, even if we weren’t able to have the music we wanted (stupid virus precautions).

We opened up the village hall and invited everyone down for booze and pizza. It was good not to have a normal reception but to have a bit of a party. He was a good man who deserved to be celebrated not mourned.

Monday we went down to London, the horrible smelly people filled city that I hate so much. A wonderful woman from Kings College showed us around the old PRO site at Chancery Lane. It was a trip that we’d arranged for me and my grandfather. She happily showed my brother and I around instead. It was a shame that he couldn’t make it with us. He’d have liked it down there. The building has changed a lot since his time, but they’ve been sympathetic to the building at the same time. They’ve kept several of the old ‘cells’ with their metal frames and slate shelves. When they stripped out the rest of the cells they reused the slate shelves to put features around the lift doors.

Next stop was the National Archives. In comparison it’s a horrible 70s abomination. It looks like a brutalist concrete car park with some library/call-centre hybrid inside it. The only upside to the entire building was a decorative edging in the walkway up to the building – made from slate slabs the size of a bookshelf. A nice touch that would have been completely lost on all but a very small handful of other people.

Today (well, Tuesday, since it’s now after midnight) we buried his ashes. It went perfectly according to plan, apart from the fact the vicar didn’t turn up and we had to reschedule for 3 hours later.

I realised something scary though. I’m the oldest male in the family. I’m the oldest sane person in the family. So what, you may ask. I asked the same thing. Until I realised that people have started looking to me for a little leadership. That’s fucking scary.

The other scary thing is that I’ve just spent more time talking about bookshelves than my grandfather’s death.

They’ll be writing an official obit for The Times. Maybe I’ll post a link to it – they’ll describe his life so much better than I can right now.

no words

pjm — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 21:19:27 +0000

Well…

My grandfather died this morning, 20 minutes after I arrived in a manic dash. It sounds cliched but it was peaceful. I had to go fetch a nurse to confirm he had gone. She was halfway through drawing up a new medication package for him.

Then I visited my grandmother. She’s as gaga as we’d all expect. I was about to explain the situation to her when my back went. Apparently my spine stiffened and my muscles braced to protect it. When I leapt up to intercept a nurse before she spoilt the surprise I pulled and tore the muscles.

One emergency trip to the osteopath and I’m back up, doped up on codeine and wearing a very fetching weightlifters type belt thing.

All in all, it’s not been a great day.

Still… it could have been worse. I could have done to that Focus ST driver what I wanted to when he blocked the motorway then accellerated when I tried to pass him on the left…

downhill

pjm — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 22:07:58 +0000

Well… He’s getting worse. Every day he’s slightly less alert, slightly less able to talk to you, slightly higher dose of pain killers.

It’s becoming more and more obvious that he’s not coming home.

Which means that he can’t move house. And I can’t sell it, but it needs to be around until my grandmother croaks. Which means I might be about to move house.

Yeah… my grandfather is dying and I’m getting stressed about the idea of moving house. It’s great the way your mind works, isn’t it…?

Nonsense

pjm — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 09:24:21 +0000

Nurse : “I thought you’d like to know, the bear’s t-shirt is missing because I washed it. It’s hanging on the radiator next to Granny’s bed.”
T42 : “Ah thank you. I’ve washed the pink dog and put it in her bedside cabinet. If you could swap them by the weekend, I’ll take the bear home and wash it. If you can do it overnight hopefully she won’t notice.”
Granny : “No, she never pays attention to anything. She won’t notice.”

Nurse goes off to have giggles fit.

She’s doing well… she called me Granny, Daddy, Mummy and Uncle. We had an argument about whether her ‘Daddy’ was male or female.

We also had a wonderfully playful bickering session about tickling. My argument being that if she tickles me, I’m entitled to tickle her back…

Food is for wimps

pjm — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 01:43:15 +0000

I’m not enjoying this week.

Today i woke up with toothache, earache, sore throat (why doesn’t the throat deserve an ‘ache’?) and a hacking cough. I decided to spend the morning carving the feet needed to level off our sideboard and the new fishtank. At twelve I turned off my PC and gave up on that plan. Decided to have breakfast.

By half one I was down in Letchworth. I witnessed the funniest carpark argument I’ve ever seen, but which I can’t even begin to do justice to without about a dozen toy cars, some masking tape, half a dozen bemused pedestrians and a a woman terrified by her own car. Wandered around, discovered that the shops I wanted had closed. Realised I still needed to have breakfast.

By half two I was at the hospital visiting Granny. I spent an hour just sitting next to her, my arm across the back of her chair while she pointed at the Christmas tree, held my hand, tried to hide biscuits in pockets she doesn’t have and occasionally answered rhetorical questions asked by the guy on the TV program everyone else was watching. No idea when she’s escaping. The social workers can’t get their act in gear until the 30th, and even then it depends on when they can find a nursing placement or enough gadgetry to turn her house into a warehouse. They want us to choose the ‘home’ option. Realised that breakfast was probably a lost cause and wondered about lunch.

By half four I was at a different hospital visiting Pop. He was still in the assessment ward when I got there, but he was sleeping so I settled down to play games on my phone. They wanted to discharge him today, but the consultant discovered that he lives alone and has refused to discharge him until they can get a social consult to put together a care package. No-one knows what this actually means, other than that it won’t happen until at least Monday. Yes, after xmas. By the time I got around to leaving I realised the flaw in my plan was putting a time-descriptive label on the food I wasn’t buying. Solved the problem by buying biscuits and red bull.

I timed the drive home tonight. The traffic was about what it had been on Sunday afternoon and it took 45 minutes. On Sunday it took me just under 30 minutes. It would appear I still know how to drive quickly. Some day I’ll discover just how badly the experience scarred/scared Jean. I only undertook 2 vehicles. I only broke one speed limit by more than 40mph and that was by accident during an overtake. Strangely, When I checked my heartrate against a track on the radio, I discovered that my heartrate was actually lower than normal. Interestingly (and possibly because the Police often use Skoda Octavias round here) twice I had people see me coming up behind them at high speed and pulled over to the side of the road to let me go past.

EDIT : I realised afterwards that this post makes me look like an idiot driver. There are people who would say I was, but on Sunday I got a phone call from Pop to say he’d made it to the phone after 5 hours on the floor. Somehow obeying the rules of the road weren’t top of my list of things to do…

I’ve wrapped all my xmas pressies. And all of ours. And all of Steven’s. And all of Pop’s. I then realised that I’d not labelled any of them. Thankfully I dicided that wrapping each cd/dvd/book/whatever seperately was a stupid idea, so each ‘cluster’ of gifts was a different shape. I then managed to trap the sellotape inside Granny’s present.

Since I refuse to wrap xmas presents on xmas eve, the 23rd was officially 2 hours longer today. This means that the 24th should be 2 hours shorter. This is, obviously, not on. So I’m rolling this on until we get to the 27th. I think we can all cope with 2 hours less of the 27th. It just means that I’ll be spending the next few days in the “Mid-Atlantic” timezone. No idea what that means… Ascention Islands probably…

I have 4 minutes of laptop battery left. Time to stop talking crap and go to bed…

Death

pjm — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 09:44:03 +0000

Something just occurred to me.

My father’s death didn’t effect me. It really didn’t. I mirrored other people’s emotions a little, feeling shitty because they did, but I felt very little myself.

The reasons for this are many and varied, but there were two important factors…

Firstly, he and I hadn’t been getting on for some time. A little while before he died I discovered he’d written a will that stated that I’d only get some of his worldly wealth if he and I were on good terms when he died. I believe I reacted to this news by sending him a text saying he could stick his will up his arse. You can imagine how well that went down.

Secondly – he died in France. He pissed off without telling me, spent a week away without me noticing, and basically never came back. I never saw his body. I never saw him going down hill – I just never saw him again. It’s a common enough experience in my life that it doesn’t jar. People I consider close friends (like Scott or Stacy) I just simply don’t speak to for months or years at a time. I’m asocial. I just don’t do interaction. I’m happy when I get into a social situation, but I don’t go looking for it.

Now, remember those two factors. And then look at Granny and Pop. A couple who were the parents I didn’t have. The two I love with all my heart, and I see them both on a regular basis. I watch them failing and falling apart.

I fed granny last night. I had to do the “big aeroplane” thing to get spoonfuls of banana and icecream into her mouth. When I arrived she had her ‘sippy cup’ twisted round by 180 degrees, so that when she tipped it up to get the mouthpiece in her mouth the tea poured out of the vent. They look after her there, but they quite simply can’t do 1 on 1 care there.

*sigh*

I am NOT drunk…!

pjm — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 08:40:56 +0000

Me : “Are you drunk…?”
GB : “No…”
Me : “what’s 2 times 2?”
GB : “4″
Me : “what’s five fives?”
GB : “…twenty five”
Me : “What about eleven elevens?”
GB : “132!”
Me : “What’s eleven elevens?”
GB : “…132?”
Me : “Eleven elevens…?”
GB : “…122!”
Me : “… eleven elevens…?”
GB : “it’s 122! I’m NOT drunk!”
Me : “what’s ten elevens?”
GB : “110!”
Me : “what’s eleven elevens?”
GB : “It’s one hundred and twen… SHUT UP!”
Me : “drunky, drunky, drunkard!”

Is the end nigh?

pjm — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 09:08:15 +0000

Life has been getting interesting recently.

Granny is in hospital after she broke her hip. Every time they put her in a chair for her meals she stands up then falls over. She’s now (I believe) as medically fit as they can get her, but she has to stay there until a rehab position appears for her. This could be 15 minutes from here. It could also be over an hour away.

The problem with rehab is that it need her to behave, to do as the physios tell her and to exercise. She doesn’t do any of these. She spends her time rubbing her wounds and calling out for her mummy, daddy, uncle or baby. When I saw her yesterday she didn’t know who I or TPS were.

Pop has finally started showing signs of his illness. 18 months after he was told he had 3 months to live, he’s started turning yellow. It looks like his pancreas is finally giving in. Equally it could just be that a narrowing had got clogged by slow moving, and the bloody minded git will last another 10 years.

Worryingly, he’s visibly deteriorating since Granny has gone into hospital. It’s quite possible that his bloody mindedness has been there to look after Granny. For the first time ever he told me he thinks she’ll be able to survivie in a hospital without him. That’s not good.

So… I have a funny feeling that within 6 months the family may be down to just me and TPS…

The stupid text message game…

pjm — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 15:14:33 +0000

Following a conversation with HelenFin last night, I’ve been trawling through my sent messages log on my mobile phone. Messages were sent to various people, mostly female. I’m sure context is everything. Unfortunately, these messages have no context any more…

Have a drink for me and enjoy your vibrating sensibilities

Thanks! Remind me to have a good alibi when you next get rope burn…

You mean I’d look better in Madagascar than in a Bonnie Tyler video?

Today we get lesbian seduction, marriage, adultery and declaring war on the lady in waiting

I’ve got 6 bottles of SlimFast milkshakes and two bags of Polish cherry flavour “jaffa cakes”…

Have the acts eaten? They keep following me, staring at me like they’re wondering what my feet taste like.

Noooo! I’m losing my perversity!

Newmarket is scary… I feel like I’m being followed my munchkins on horseback…

What’s the cross country assault course thing they do with horses?

Tell him that I’ll only charge him half price if he keeps you for three months [How do I always seem to end up joking that I'm my friends' pimp?]

Damn. BBC says hookers are only £15 quid now. There goes the profits…

Nice green or “pants left in wash” green?

I’m assuming “shake it all about” is not an option…?

Do you want to put on your comfortable shoes and join in the perving then…?

No, no burns but the glass got rather warm.

I learnt everything from the cat. And the intertubes.

The four horsemen of the Apocalypse : Chronos, Telecoms, Valet and Hattie.

Fashion still runs in 200 year loops, right? The buxom beer wench look needs to come back…

I now have this image of a small gold plated clown desperately hanging on to a chain, terrified it will fall into a sweaty cave of Primark bra and metalic silver boob tube, its little arms and legs flailing every time the world takes a Breezer fuelled stagger for a dark alleyway…

No… Pimping is immoral. I’m merely talking about selling you on to an exploited existence as a captive circus freak. Morally much cleaner…

My only VC experience was a PVC who got confused by people being honest.

My fledgling sense of tact has just been chucked off a cliff and expected to fly…

4 in a million

pjm — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 17:56:56 +0000

So, where do you come from? Where has your family gone?

According to this little flash effort, my family surname is down to 4 in a million in the UK. We’re densest (shh you) in a region of New Zealand, but otherwise unheard off in the country. And in the UK we’re mainly in Liverpool and Cardiff.

How does your surname compare…?

Roundup

pjm — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 00:47:41 +0000

Firstly, I’ve just realised that roundup is the name of the weed killer I can still smell on my arms. I think I need to go scrub a couple of lays of skin off before I go to bed.

Right, so then, what has happened in the world of me?

My doctor’s stuff that I was obsessing about was as scary as it could be but in ways I hadn’t anticipated. My heart seems to be fine and my glucose response is fine, so it looks like heart was a false alarm (even if my BP is high) but my results came back with fucked liver enzymes. Seeing as how Pop’s pancreatic cancer was diagnosed from “fucked liver enzymes” this didn’t scare me at all. Oh no…

Apparently the likely cause is either random variations (so a retest on wednesday) or fatty liver, which sounds highly pleasant. So more tests on Wednesday, a week for them to remember what to do with blood and then back to see the doc and try (again) to get an increase in meds. It’s not looking promising, but I think I need them to stop my stomach lining from eating itself or me killing the boss. Considering how I warned him I wasn’t doing overtime and not doing stress, he’s not exactly made things easy for me.

Last night was fun. HelenFin came round for a little celebration and we hit the town for a night of drunken debauchery. Well… kindof. Not nearly enough alcohol was drunk and too much time was spent talking about life, the universe and everything, and not nearly enough time staring at behinds. I tell you, her tastes are slipping… not only was there very little pleasant scenery, there was a surprising lack of slappers to be spotted too. So we retired to an old man’s pub and drank there til midnight.

’twas a great night and much of the world was put to rights. When I take my rightful role as benevolent dictator of the Commonwealth, I think I may have found my minister for ethics and alcohol.

Many conclusions were reached. The most conclusive one being that no-one in their right mind should be friends with anyone who even knows a larper, D&Der or roleplayer (ahem…), but that it would be quite cool to go to a Renaissance Fair and run about like a prat in silly clothing. My only problem is that I’d spend all my time pretending to be Brian Blessed

Doctors

pjm — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 11:10:19 +0000

As most of you will know, I’m rather uncaring when it comes to my own health. I tend to ignore medical issues and anything that does turn up tends to be ignored.

But I’m crapping myself about the test results that I’m due tomorrow. My fasting glucose somehow turned into a complete cardiovascular and liver enzyme workup complete with an ECG. This isn’t a great sign.

The doc asked if I had any important family history… “Well, my father had diabetes and died of a diabetes related heart attack about six months before his replacement artery was predicted to fail, losing him at least one leg. My grandfather has had a long series of minor heart attacks, has angina and is currently refusing to die of pancreatic cancer. My grandmother has OldTimers, emphysema and asthma. My mother is an unknown quantity apart from the fact she’s an alcoholic. Oh, and my brother has high BP too.”

“I’ll take that as a yes then”, she replies.

Something tells me that the answer is either going to be diabetes (hardly a shock) or a heart problem. I already know I have high (but not dangerous) cholesterol, so it would hardly be a shock.

Moving up the morbidity stakes (what with this being such a cheery post so far) I’ve quite liked the idea of a heart attack as a way to die. Do it properly and it’s fast and the pain is major but brief. Pretty much the only other alternative is blowing a good sized blood vessel in the brain for speed and pain. And either of them let you joke about dying aged 90 whilst being ridden by an 18 year old nymphet…