Category: General

I’m quite sure that most people here have thought that my lack of comments lately have been due to my playing with my new toy. And that is, in part true. I think I know what every button and icon does. It’s a great machine – and I am well pleased with it.

Continue reading ““Sew” what have I been doing?”

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The garden is particularly lush this year, we have had a very wet spring interspersed with some really nice warm sunny days.  We have the house on the market 5 acres just being too much now but have worked like dogs to keep the weeds at bay ( the beastly actual dogs only supervise!)  The bastard weeds grow at an alarming rate, actually I’m sure they are triffids, they just described them wrongly in the book!

It has now got to the point that the garden is fairly mature and people, total strangers, actually stop and ask if they may walk round and look as it is fairly unusual for Whatcom County in that it is filled with flowers not public lavatory style landscaping as are most properties.  So we are reasonably and justifiably rather pleased with it.  Not unreasonably it is being sold with the garden being very much one of its selling points.  One would not expect a non gardener to buy this place.

Would one?

Continue reading “Tales of the Holy Goat”

I am afraid that this might turn out be a rant, possibly a ramble and maybe a non-event. I don’t know where I might end up but I feel the need to set off on the journey anyway.

On 19th May 2012, Embra’s big team, the mighty Heart of Midlothian gave the wee Embran team a thorough skelping in the final of the Scottish Cup. The following day, there were, by common consent, 100,000 Jambos on the streets of Auld Reekie celebrating that result. My chosen vantage point was at the foot of the Castle Rock.
Continue reading “You Read it Here First”

However, I have been extremely busy – up until the last few weeks during which I suffered from descent into a slough of lethargy, lolling around doing nothing but reading trashy novels and watching old movies.  I was rescued by a request to deliver a weeks training to a company here in London and the effort required to prepare the content seems to have put me back in circulation, as it were, as far as the lethargy attack is concerned, anyway.

So, if anyone might be interested, what have I been up to?  Since I returned from Kazakhstan at Christmas time, I have been working on a book which will be published towards the end of the year – not that you’re going to see it in WH Smith’s, or on Amazon, because it is a manual for business security managers and will be marketed through specialist channels.  Working on the book kept me pretty busy through the day and by the time knocking-off time came around, I was pretty much ‘computered-out.’  I did fit in a couple of short trips to Bucharest and Cairo, and I’m off to Kiev at the end of the month, all to deliver training courses of one kind or another.

I’ve also been into hospital a couple of times, once to get the arteries reamed out, again, and once to fix a bleeder in one of my eyes – the laser surgery in the eye was fascinating, but a most unpleasant experience as I found it very difficult to keep my eye open while someone was shining an incredibly bright light into it so she could see what she was doing.  (As an aside, I found the perfect GP for me – the lady served 12 years in the RAMC so it was very easy to strike up a relationship…I call her Ma’am and she calls me Mr Judge, just like old times 🙂

I learned that I was entitled to a wrinklies pass – though the official name is a ‘Freedom’ pass, which is a very useful thing to have as it gives me free travel throughout the town and well out into the suburbs – getting to Twickenham for rugby matches, for example, is covered.  It is a substantial benefit, but I have to say that I do think it is one of the benefits – like Child Allowance, that should be means tested and properly targetted.  I shall not complain too loudly, however.

My son is recovering well from the depression from which he was suffering, with a new job and a new ‘significant other,’ who has just moved down here from Sheffield.  She is a chef, and was delighted to receive a ‘phone call from the Ivy restaurant a couple of days after she arrived.  She is now working there and loving it. 

So, the Bravo crew is well settled in East Acton, which is not a particularly salubrious part of town, but is also not particularly insalubrious, either.  Lots of non-Wasp neighbours, but, fortunately, no overwhelming concentration of any particular ethnicity, so fairly civilised, except for the BNP hangout just across the road which receives regular attention from HM constabulary, though I did watch the Boks –  England match there on Saturday.  Whenever I go out to the shops, I speak to people in Russian, Romanian or Chinese, depending on which shop I’m going to, and there is an interesting fmaily who run the local hardware store, South-Asian extraction but apart form the patriarch, who has a quite difficult accent, all of them speaking super-strength Jockinese.

On the downside, I lost my owner.  She went one to one with a fox and came a very poor second.  I’m a bit surprised at how much I miss the little bugger.

So, I’m back, with a bit of catching up to do, I see 🙂

As I might have mentioned before, I am a British Army brat. Born in West Germany, due to my Dad being there at the time occupying. Luckily for me, existence-wise, Mum had been allowed to trail along with him and it all turned out all right. In my opinion.

So, pure Jock but totally British is what I was born and is what I remain. And one of the British Olympians in the first Paralympic games in 1948 was one of Dad’s fellow officers who carried on despite having had various bits blown off him in the service of our country. I will always be proud of the fact that I had the privilege to meet him.

It follows that today was a bit special. I really do care about the fact that the Olympic Games are taking place in my country and Capital this year and I really don’t care if anybody else wants to get torn-faced about that, for any reason whatsoever. Continue reading “Bread and Alleged Circuses”

We’ve just returned home from greeting the Queen as she arrived at Hitchin station for her Diamond Jubilee tour of North Hertfordshire.  The royal Bentley was parked outside the station with the chauffeur giving a last-minute polish to the windscreen and there was a collection of ladies wearing hats, including the Mayor of Hitchin  (dress a bit crumpled), someone else in a( badly hemmed) powder blue outfit whose hat was just the wrong shade of blue, and worst of all the Lord Lieutenant, the Countess of Verulam, in a coat dress that husband described as something out of a 1940s newsreel.  Her hat was lilac and too large for a tall lady and did not match the dress at all.  Unfortunately when HM arrived she was wearing a lilac coat and hat.  (Off to the tower with the Countess!)  The Queen’s lady-in-waiting, wearing a smart navy outfit and hat with red trim, reminded me of Christina Osborne, as in her avatar photo.  We thought HM looked a little frail, but she smiled happily at the crowd.  She is quite small, the same height as me I believe, and 5ft 3in is a very good height but easily hidden by inconsiderate taller people.

I was reminded of Christina’s comment about the punishing schedule the Queen has had recently and I really would not want to be in her shoes (or beautiful outfits).  Anyway I was glad to have seen her – and I hope she felt the same.  And, as husband said, I had fun criticising ladies’ outfits.

Continue reading “Closure”