Category: General

For those of you unable to watch the Man United v Aston Villa final the BBC radio commentary is available here live!

If I can hear it down here, my fellow members elsewhere in the world should be able to.

It looks like the commentary on England’s tour to Bangladesh is also available.

Some years ago when I worked in a State Education Department here in Oz, a number of employers declared their intention to set their own examinations for school leavers who applied for jobs. They claimed that the youngsters leaving school were inadequately educated and that the Year 12 Examinations had no value.

In an attempt to prove that the employers were wrong, the Education Department set new papers in Maths and English. The results were so appalling, that the markers were told to ‘upgrade’ the marks so that any student who wrote his name correctly would get 20%. If they got the date right – they got a pass mark.

It is about time that more people took Professor Buckland’s stand…

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/7332452/The-university-professor-who-stood-up-against-dumbing-down-of-degrees.html

The employers were not convinced…

A friend has given birth to a beautiful little girl.

So we chatted and cooed over her lovely little one during a visit – though the experience made me secretly very glad to have passed those frazzled milk-sodden days…

Apparently, the woman in the next bed had just been told that the father of her child must be Asian or mixed race, unlike her white partner…

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall at the precise moment when the midwife gently broke the news…

 Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Liverpool Women’s Hospital:  better than Shameless any day.

Talking about my career as a teacher last night on MyT reminded me that I had never got round to writing about the world of archives, for which I originally trained. During my first degree in modern languages I became interested in medieval French language and literature. Old and Middle High German never held the same attraction. I then moved on to study medieval Latin and paleography and diplomatic – that is old handwriting styles and the different forms of documents issued by different authorities.

A lot of such knowledge is only useful if you end up working in the Public Record Office or the Vatican archives or somewhere equally high powered. Local record offices concentrate on local parish records, local landowners and local government records. Not all vicars can be persuaded to deposit the parish records, though they usually regret that if their church burns down and everything in the parish chest is reduced to ashes.  These are the sort of records most useful to genealogists, though if your ancestors got transported to the colonies for a felony, then the Sessions records are also good.

London has a large number of record offices, from the Public Record Office, under the aegis of the Master of the Rolls, to the India Office archives, which have some amazing artefacts as well as documents. It is the number of parishes in London that causes the most problems for family historians. There were over 100 parishes in the City of London alone at one point. So anyone arriving to look for an ancestor with a fairly common name really had to know in which parish he/she lived. I was always on the look-out for a name like Ichabod Shufflebottom that would stand out from the rest, but never found one.

Archivists  have to learn how to deal with damaged documents and to prioritise repair work. The repairer is a very skilled craftsman and does wonderful work, but needs to be told which document needs treatment first. As there is always a long back-log of of collections waiting to be catalogued and indexed, so there is always a long list of documents waiting for repair.

Archives, like libraries, always come bottom of any list of projects on which money should be spent, but are definitely in the top ten when it comes to cuts. Shortsighted? Of course, until everything is either on microfiche or transcribed. But then the records are all very British – not “multi-culti” enough, I expect.

I have been using an electric toothbrush for the last twenty five years or so, and wouldn’t be without one. A few days ago my latest model, an exorbitantly expensive Philips model just crashed. Lots of flashing lights but none of the buttons worked and none of the fourteen programmes worked. No extra care, super duper deep clean plus gum massage no “brush and go”, economy programme; nothing! It was no consolation that the really splendid sonic device which renders the brushes germ free continued to function. Continue reading “I lurve my toothbrush!”

Never having lived in a bedsit, until recently I kind of assumed a bed has just three purposes.

Perhaps bedsit dwellers find lots of other things to do with a bed – sitting on it being the obvious one but perhaps as a generous ironing table for people of restricted growth?  A relaxed dining table where you can lie about munching with friends?  With a board on top, a flat surface for a really really big jigsaw?

I’ve never really had a hankering to just hang around in bed for no reason but recently, under doctor’s orders to rest dodgy knee in position where it was elevated, the bed seemed to be the most convenient place to do it.

“Are you going to make breakfast?” I enquired of DT man last Sunday morning. Continue reading “….and so, to bed.”

Been having a bit of tussle with my laptop the last couple of days.  I’m a Linux man but still use Windows (i) for word processing because it has good proofing tools for documents and (ii) the Tor version of the Mozilla web browser (torproject.org) is only available as a precompiled package – I need this to open all the sites that are blocked in China.
Continue reading “Windows 7”