Bimbling Along

With the temperature pushing the low thirties (or mid-high eighties, depending on your preference) it is most certainly a time to be working indoors with the windows open and fans on full. I suspect that those of you who only work in offices would disagree with me but as someone who works both inside and out, indoors is a lot nicer.

Yesterday I was sent to a rather posh school to do some work for a few hours, arriving about eleven in the morning. For the next four hours I was standing in the middle of a lawn, sweltering underneath an umbrella in an attempt to find some sort of shade.

Needless to say it was rather uncomfortable and I was very glad to get back to The Office where I could get out of the sun, have an ice cream and not feel like I was slowly melting!!

I very make actual plans for the very simple reason that they so often go wrong. I find it much easier to work things on the cuff and hope that it all comes out ok in the wash. Monday was a prime example of this.

It was my last day on site at Greenwich University and I knew it would be a very easy day, only an hour or two and then I woul be free. So I tried to see if a friend wanted to meet upfor lunch, organised going to t-shirt printers to sort out squad tops and still have time to get back into London to meet up with another friend before she headed back Up North.

That was the plan and it was going wrong before 8.30am…

Having been battling the heavy traffic for the previous week I was pleasently surprised how much easier it was, especially for a Monday. Arrived at the Uni and set up the equipment, hit the ‘ON’ button and nothing. A piece of equipment costing near to twenty thousand pounds and it refuses to turn on.

Three hours of doing nothing while a spare instrument was sent up from The Office meant that I was unable to make lunch and was left with not a lot of spare time to get back home and to the printers before I was supposed to be on a train back to the Capital.

Something I discovered is that traffic through Peckham is worse during the day than it is in the Rush Hour.

However, I did manage to get the squad tops ordered, I did get back into London and I did get to meet up with my friend for drinks. I then missed my train getting home and had to wait at Waterloo.

There were elections a few weeks ago. I was quite happy to discover that I was actually registered to vote down here so I got to vote. I don’t know why, this area is so Tory blue that they actually take more than 50% of the vote… somewhere about 65% I think.

Anyhow, despite all this those Up North have let us all down by somehow managing to vote in a couple members of what could be nominally called the British Nazi Party, though I believe they go by a slightly different name.

Now these are a bunch of people I just don’t understand. They have a hatred inside of them which makes no sense to me. I mean, they say that they want a “great” Britain and yet how much of that greatness waqs actually built by those of foreign birth?? Across the Sub-Continant, Africa, The Americas, Australasia. There have been peoples of non-British stock living here since… well, since before the Romans. In fact, considering that Africa is the bowl of the human species we are all from somewhere else.

I have only really known one person whom I would call racist (I honestly had never heard the term “wog” being used in general conversation before) which was quite funny considering that they were a first generation immigrant.

Driving home from work on Tuesday my assistant and I were listening to the radio when they started talking about the attacks on the Romanian population in Belfast that had driven them out of their homes.
“Well, they’re all illegal immigrants anyway”
“No they’re not…”
“Really..??? Well, none of them can speak English..”
“Well, the one they were interviewing on the radio seemed to be doing pretty well.”
“Doesn’t matter, that’s why I voted for the BNP, I totally agree with what they think should be done for this country…”

Quite frankly after that I could think of nothing to say other than, “You’re walking the rest of the way.” I mean, I know that he is a Daily Star reader but even so. How could anyone in their right mind think that a vote for the BNP is anything other than a vote for stupidity?? If you want to protest spoil your ballot or vote from one of the slightly less dangerous fringe parties, like the Greens but why would you vote for the BNP??

Afterall, didn’t we learn about a certain Austrian in history class?? With hindsight surely we wouldn’t vote him back in again, so why do people vote for the British version??

I just don’t get it…

I have only been driving into London (Greenwich) for this week and already I have developed a totally understandable hatred for all things on two wheels. I don’t know what it is but it only takes a couple of days of driving into London and the effort of making sure that you don’t clip a moped rider or run down a cyclist that just drives me to wishing that I could just run them down.

Or more accurately let them ride under my wheels by not making the effort of missing them.

A couple of weeks ago the idiots of the RMT union decided to strike, closing down half of the London Underground. This unfortunally coincided with me having to drive into London to pick up equipment that was being stored near St Paul’s. Being a nice day what this meant was that there were even more cyclists than normal, most of them had obviously not riden their bikes in a while… I shall leave the rest to your imagination…

Cause there’s nothing better than coming back from a short period of non-blogage with a bang… and a fire… which I would like to point out now wasn’t my fault in any way shape or form. I mean, just because I had been using the chipper to mulch some of the hedge; the very fact that when it caught on fire and effectively self-destructed I was no-where near it!!

Needless to say it is my fault, on the other hand I now know what to get my mum for Christmas!! ;o)

Today is the last day of May, in fact, we’re into the final twenty minutes of May which means that we are only weeks away from being halfway through the year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Nine… How on earth has that happened??

I mean, that’s half a year and where has it gone…??? But hopefully the upcoming summer will be great and full of fab stuff!!

Well, a sunny if not glorious bank holiday… doesn’t happen too often does it?? In fact, it was so glorious that I stayed indoors on the Monday simply to recover from the ten hours a day that I’d been out competing on the Satuday and Sunday. I am certainly a lot brownier than I was at the start of the weekend!!

I hpoe that you all had lovely bank holidays (at least those of you who had them) and let us hope that this is that start of the BBQ Summer that we were promised!!!

After getting hailed on (BBQ summer anyone??) last Sunday I’ve been telling myself that I’m not goign to get ill… I am infact still insisting that I’m not going to get ill, however my body is startig to disagree with me.

I’m already on to my second hanky of the day and just feel sort of run down and ready for bed. On the up side, I fully plan on ignoring my body because the weather is nice and I have things to do.

Hope you’re all feeling better than I!!

It’s only been a week, and it means I shan’t be writting about Eurovision (which was great) I thought I’d share a couple of photos that I took last week. The first is from Salisbury Cathedral, which when you consider is something like eight hundred years old, it is pretty impressive.

We did do the tower tour and I suspect that we were lucky in getting possibly the most enthusiastic tour guide in the place. I say this as the group that left an hour after us had caught us up by the time we got to the top.

And yes, you get to right to the top of the tower… if you don’t like heights I wouldn’t advise going. The climbing isn’t too bad as it’s spread out and the views are brillient. You may spot some rungs in the spire photo… that’s because you can only get to within forty feet of the very top from inside and you have to climb the last bit on the outside, including the overhang at the very top.

Hampton Court Palace is a beautiful place, it always amazes me how lovely the gardens are though I was lucky in that desert meant that I was unable to prove my claim that I can navigate the palace maze blindfolded. I also discovered that if you want to take photos of any of the paintings at the Palace you need to get a letter from the Queen herself saying that you’re allowed.

While I upload promised photos of Salisbury, Hampton Court and Platform 9 & 3/4 I thought I would share something I saw on The One Show while they were interviewing Dervla Kirwan (of BallyK fame).

This is even related to my trip around some of the touristy attractions of Southern England as I was driving Yip and Ceiwen around and Yip is somewhat of a Christmas song fan; very much in the vein of ‘why limit Christmas songs to Christmas‘ kinda way. You can imagine my shock and horror to discover that she had never even heard of the classic Pouges track ‘Fairytale of New York‘. Well, that was soon corrected!!

Enjoy!!