Category: General

I have spent a couple of hours in the sunshine, wrapped up against the cold wind, listening to the radio, and tidying the  front garden. How therapeutic! The drive is swept and the brown bin full of twigs, leaves and the seed-heads of various plants. I have trimmed the Nellie Moser and the tips of the bay tree which were nipped by the frost. Evidence of Spring is bursting forth. Sedum shoots tightly packed, furry magnolia buds – in fact buds on most things; bulbs pushing through. Marvellous. My mood has improved by an immeasurable quantity.

In the back garden the lawn is scattered with snow drops (in the deep shade of the yew hedge) and various crocus and anonites among the tussocky grass and under the trampoline.

A cheery deliver of my Ocado groceries complained of the cold.

“More  snow in its way, I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said.

The lovely Christine Bleakley, co-presenter of the BBC’s One Show, is going to attempt to water-ski across the English Channel next month as part of a Sport Relief sponsored challenge. I wish her good luck, but so far, her progress looks less than promising, made worse by the fact she could not practice for three weeks because the lake she practised on was frozen.

There is an addictive water skiing game that has appeared on the site, so I  thought you might like to have a go at it. I have so far made the grade to “Rubbish”!

On the 4th of March 1975 Charles Spencer Chaplin was knighted, he was 85.  Wiki claims that the honour had first been proposed in 1931, and again in 1956, when it was vetoed after a Foreign Office report expressed concerns about Chaplin’s communist views and his moral behaviour in marrying two 16 year girls; it was felt that honouring him would damage both the reputation of the British honours system and relations with the United States.

Charlie was born on 16 April 1889, in Walworth, London. His parents were both entertainers. His father, Charles Spencer Chaplin Sr and Hannah Harriet Hill, both singers and actors, were married at St John the Evangelist, Walworth in June 1885.  The couple had separated by the time Charlie was three. The 1891 census shows Hannah living in three rooms at 94 Barlow Street, Walworth with her two children: Sydney S.H, aged 6, and Charles, aged 2. Apparently Charlie’s mother moved around a great deal in and around Kennington Road, Lambeth. His father was an alcoholic and had little contact with his son, though Charlie lived with him and his mistress, Louise, briefly while their mentally ill mother was in asylum in Coulsdon. Louise sent Charlie to Archbishop Temples Boys School. Charles Chaplin Senior died in 1901, and Charlie was then, more or less on his own – and didn’t he do well!

Continue reading “On This Day – 4th March 1975”

A recent post by Cyanide Bunny here and the thread that followed reminded me of a Foreign Mime I was involved in a few years ago, I was in Egypt and in a street of leather garment makers. On a whim I decided this would be a good place to buy a pair of leather motorcycle chaps (just like horse riding chaps and worn to protect your legs). I started to try to describe and mime what I wanted but with no success, I went back to my hotel and chose my least loved pair of jeans and with the nail scissors cut them down to a set of chaps, just two legs joined by a waistband, no body and the legs split up the sides so as to be closed with snaps. Taking this pattern back to the vendor I showed him what I wanted, in black leather. After turning the pattern over in his hands for a few minutes he looked up to me with a big smile on his face and said “Ah! Is for your wife, Yes?” “Well no” I said “is for me” “No, no” he replied “You not ladyboy, is for your wife, yes?” Finally I agreed “Is for my wife” “Good, good, tomorrow” he said, when I returned, no chaps were to be seen and I was told with some difficulty that they had been seen hanging in the store and been bought by another American, “for his wife, yes” next day I had my own pair and noticed that another pair were hanging there also, waiting for the next American deviant to purchase. They may be there still, it was only twenty years ago.

A reflection on days long gone.

I never really got used to saying goodbye when I was at sea. It’s part and parcel of the path you choose and yet was something I had to get used to. I have known men who never did get used to it and who, as a result, did some pretty silly things in the belief that it would somehow make it all OK. Me? I just thought it could never be just OK;  It was what it was. Continue reading “Of old ghosts and goodbyes”

When I was a nipper my folks took me and my sister on a holiday to Whitby in Yorkshire to visit my Dad’s brother who ran a pub there. We set of for Victoria coach station at sparrows fart and boarded the motor coach that took us part way. This took the best part of the day,  no Mways and town bypasses then, we just jogged along in the traffic. We then boarded a train which again only took us part way and one thing I remember was the fact that this train changed gear, it must have been one of the first local diesels to go into operation and was really a bus that ran on railway tracks. By the time we got onto the local bus it had been dark for a long, long time and well past me and my siters bedtime. We yawned ourselves stupid in an heroic effort to keep awake as we did not wish to miss any sightings of the strange people that lived this far north from our home in South West London. We finally pulled into Whitby at around midnight and were given a cup of hot milk before being whisked between crisp white sheets and bed.

The whole journey had taken about nineteen hours door to door and that is why I say that with todays aircraft it is possible to travel from the UK to Australia in about twenty four hours, which in my book  and real time,  makes  Sydney  almost as close as Whitby in Yorkshire.

Since Sunday was the Lantern Festival I left my house at 6pm to give myself plenty of time to get to the airport for my 8.30pm flight.  I needn’t have worried, the flight got put back until 11.30pm so I didn’t arrive in Beijing until 1am.  Then I had to queue 30minutes for a taxi and didn’t get to my hotel until 2.15.
Continue reading “Room Service”

I’m going to try to publish all the hack’s stories I have written on life at sea. Don’t panic, there’s not many You never know – it might encourage someone else to have a go – there has to be more ex sailors on here other than Alan and myself!

These are all true stories, by the way. In days when life was simpler, the craic better and the life itself? Oh aye….a great one. Better times than these…..

Coastal tugs are unimportant wee craft in the eyes of the pointed heads and Minor Gods who are Harbour Control. Invariably when you are on tugs and you enter a harbour, you get the worst berth the Harbour Master can find because – let’s face it – you are just a scruffy wee tug boat and in the great scheme of things, way down the list of really ‘important’ shipping.
Continue reading “Sea stories”