Didn’t go to The Dog for dinner after all. An old school friend dropped in on his way from the US to Australia (he runs a superyacht refit business in Florida), and so we went for an Indian, followed by a boozy session at The Dog with some horsey people from the Badminton Horse Trials till 2am. My mate turned up in a Corvette he keeps here is the UK – quite a week for exotic cars.
Phil Nicholas and his Corvette.
Some friends we made at The Dog.
I was admiring myself in the bathroom mirror this morning and wondered what the purpose of male nipples is. Every part of the male body (including, surprisingly enough, the brain) serves a purpose – except for the nips. Design fault? Hay informed me that it is because the default position for an embryo is female, with hormones effecting the change to male. I corrected her by telling her it is not a mere change, but a design improvement.
On Friday night we thought we’d see if there was anything worth watching on BBC iPlayer (for non-UK residents, iPlayer enables you to view TV programmes off-line via the internet). The following in a list of the most popular programmes on the BBC last week, which is a sad indictment on the waning level of the British intellect.
1. EastEnders: Thu, 07 May 2009 2. The Apprentice - Series 5: Episode 7 3. My Family - Series 9: 8. The Guru 4. The Apprentice: You're Fired - Series 5: Episode 7 5. Waterloo Road - Series 4: Episode 18 6. Claire Richards: My Big Fat Wedding: 7. Great British Menu - Series 4: Wales Dessert 8. Have I Got News for You - Series 37: Episode 2 9. Crimewatch on the Streets:
Wall-to-wall soaps and so-called reality TV, with the one exception of a news quiz (which has increasingly incorporated canned laughter of late due to the jokes getting worse).
I think I need to liven things up at the office and need some creative ideas. We’ve done the usual things – you know what I mean; filing cabinet scaling, office free-running and all the chair-based sports (synchronised chair spinning, office chair down-hill skiing and office chair regatta). All contributions welcome.
Ugh! Badminton Horse Trials at the Duke of Beaufort's estate. The road is chocker already. We don’t want the glare of publicity here – leave us alone! The event is turning into a celeb media opportunity with people like Kate Moss, Liz Hurley and Katie Price turning up. Young kids descend on the place like it’s a pop festival and come purely to get pissed. Hideous. Reckon we should all get our pitchforks and rush torches out and go up to the master's house to complain.
I hear Taliban insurgents have moved into the Swat Valley, between Bradford and Leeds.
Had to regale you with this extract from the book Hay bought that I mentioned a coupe of days ago – In Defence of Food, by Michael Pollan.
QUOTE:
It’s easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a raw potato or carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthy foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the Produce Section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles away in Cereals the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming their new-found wholegrain goodness to the rafters.
UNQUOTE
The Child Support Agency called me on my mobile on Friday. Daft buggers had lost my last maintenance payment, which is unusual, as I pay automatically by standing order and have never missed a payment. Had to go through the usual damned-fool security questions, one of which was what my contact phone number was. The operative was totally oblivious to the irony of my statement that it was obviously the very number she’d contacted me on – said while rolling on the floor in fits of laughter. These idiots must live in an alternate reality. I wonder who dreams up these security questions – Homer Simpson? I’ll bet anything that the stupidity of the question is not filtered back to the security people by the drone who called me.
No. 2 daughter and boyfriend came round a few evenings ago (and as usual it was without prior notification and happened to coincide with left-overs evening). Daughter insisted on showing boyfriend my tattoo – the one that used to be a representation of a sailing ship under full sail with the words ‘HOMEWARD BOUND’ below it, but now 35 years later (and due to the ink having spread) resembling a badly drawn articulated lorry and says ‘HFTHRDUO BLTHWD’. She was foolishly trying to persuade him to get one, but I was doing my best to dissuade him. Told him that if he was determined, then he should avoid like the plague the temptation of putting daughter’s name anywhere on his body. Had I done that in my teens, then by the time I was 40 I’d have ended up with a veritable roll-call of ex wives, girlfriends and a variety of acquaintances from east of Suez adorning my arms.
It seems that the male penchant for tattoos these days solely embraces ethnic tribal markings – be they Aboriginal, Celtic, Maori or East End of London. Women with tattoos are such a turn-off – especially fat birds - makes them look like skanky dockers. I bitterly regret having mine, but as I have said elsewhere in this blog, I was comatose through being under the affluence of incahol when it was carved into me and so didn’t know it was happening.
Here’s some trivia about me, the questions for which I culled from Single Parent Dad’s blog.
1. What are your current obsessions?
Getting in touch with my female side and getting a new job.
2. Which item from your wardrobe do you wear most often?
My little red dress.
3. What's for dinner?
We’re going to The Dog for din-dins. My treat.
4. Last thing you bought?
Flowers for Hay - first time in ages. Oh, and I did buy a haircut the other day. Oh, and a couple of books on eBay – one for Hay and The Elegant Universe for me.
5. What are you listening to?
My thoughts – scary! I think Hay just said something, but I can’t remember what.
6. If you were a god/goddess who would you be?
Thor – love that hammer and the winged helmet he wears in the DC comics.
7. Favourite holiday spots?
Home, or anywhere where someone else is paying the bill.
8. Reading right now?
Wild Swans. I’m not really into this stuff, but I promised Hay I’d give it a try and it’s in line with number 1 above.
9. Four words to describe yourself.
Confident, emotional, argumentative and challenging. Hay suggested these.
10. Guilty pleasure?
Cheese – the smellier the better.
11. Who or what makes you laugh until you’re weak?
Politics and religion – i.e. the concept of absolute certainty based on nothing more concrete than guesswork.
12. Favourite spring thing to do?
Coming out of hibernation.
13. Planning to travel to next?
Windsor, for a sales conference. Deep joy!
14. Best thing you ate or drank lately?
Anything and everything prepared by Hay and a nice Australian shiraz.
The Shiraz Mosque.
15. When did you last get tipsy?
It depends what is meant by tipsy, and I refuse to incriminate myself. Anyway, only women get tipsy. Men get uproariously drunk.
16. Favourite ever film?
So many to choose from. I’ll plump for Kingdom of Heaven for now. Check out my profile for a list.
Eva Green – mmmmmm!
17. Care to share some wisdom?
• Drink South African whites and Chilean reds and you’ll never go wrong. • Let people talk about themselves, and they’ll think you’re a wonderful conversationalist. • Never offer advice.
18. Song you have most enjoyed this year?
Not exactly this year, but Staind’s version of Alice in Chains’ Nutshell from 2006.
19. How is it possible to encourage a gaggle of women to chase after you, without being Brad Pitt?
Steal a handbag at the Women’s’ Institute.
While eating an orange yesterday I mused on the obvious conclusion that the orange evolved its shape to exactly fit the shape of the human mouth when quartered – a perfect symbiosis. The watermelon, however, is more specialised in its evolution - when quartered will only fit women’s mouths.
The traffic around Old Sodbury is going to be horrendous this weekend due to the Badminton Hose Trials. We’re hoping for a conviction.
I’m probably about to commit heresy in the eyes of most of the British public, but Joanna Lumley has become a hideous parody of herself in her quest to gain residency rights for ex Gurkha soldiers who served in the British Army. She decried the fact that the Prime Minister didn’t response personally to any of her letters, as if to say she should be accorded instant access to him by virtue of being a celebrity with Living National Treasure status. The phrase: "Do you know who I am," comes to mind.
Earlier in the week I heard Lumley saying that she’d written a personal letter to Brown and sent it at midnight – the assumption being that it had arrived at 10 Downing Street in the early hours. Do celebs have access to a letter delivery service that’s hidden from we mere mortals? If I were to pop something in the post, it wouldn’t be collected till the next day and then I’d consider myself lucky if it arrived within 3 days.
Personally I can’t see why any Gurkha would want to live in the UK. While their meager pensions enable them to live like kings in Nepal, they wouldn’t stretch that far in the UK and they would even find it extremely difficult to live like MPs.
Went to HQ in Basildon yesterday and had to rise at sparrow’s fart to ensure I could negotiate the M4 and M25 without substantial delay. This meant dressing in the dark, with the result that on arriving at head office I found I’d put my jocks on back-to-front. Panic moment when I went for a pee.
My boss has just bought a 2nd hand Aston Martin DB7. He’d offered me a drive around in it at lunchtime, but sadly there wasn’t enough time. The man is in his early 40s, no wife (or partner or girlfriend) and no kids. That’s enabled him to blow £40k on a car – a car which has back seats capable of carrying only small children, dwarves or amputees.
The following sequence of images are solely for my male readers – women simply won’t understand them.
One of the girls at work gave me some money saving tips for my elder daughter’s wedding. Apparently you can send an image of your favourite designer wedding dress to someone in a sweatshop in Hong Kong who will knock it up for you for under £150. I’ve yet to determine details, but will report when I do so.
Yesterday’s foray to Basildon was to partake in a strategy meeting, strategy being a word which heretofore has had no meaning within the company, but is now the latest buzz word (despite few having any inkling as to what’s involved in developing a strategy). It was pointed out that our company is expert in changing its name, having had about 5 name changes in the space of 7 years (and they wonder why so few in our market recognise us). A news item on the radio yesterday caused me to think how a large number of companies change their names willy-nilly for no good reason (Norwich Union, for example), while others desperately need a name change, but seem reluctant to do it. The news item said that British Gas had reduced its electricity prices by 10%. Now if ever a company needed a name change to reflect what it actually does, it’s British Gas. The news headline sounded as incongruous as hearing that British Airways had reduced the price of its cars.
Yesterday Mark Vernon’s blog alerted me to the Kindle, a device for reading e-books.
Can’t see it catching on. Mark provides a list of reasons but neglected to mention the fact that whereas you can safely leave your copy of Madam Bovary on your beach towel, safe in the knowledge it won’t be nicked while you’re having a dip in the ocean, one’s Kindle would be half inched within a blink if left alone for more than a nanosecond. Also, because it’s tangible, a book gives you an immediate impression of size (and hence length of read), whereas that’s difficult with an e-book.
The only advantage of a Kindle would be to enable you to take your entire library with you when on holiday, and I don’t really see that as an advantage. No, the Mark I codex, or book as we experts call it, has stood the test of time and will remain my preferred reading technology until I peg it.
According to news reports, the jailed US-Iranian reporter Roxana Saberi has ended a two-week hunger strike which was in protest over her eight-year jail sentence for spying. Iranian judiciary officials denied Ms Saberi was ever on a hunger strike – I guess they thought she was merely on a diet.
In a weird twist of fate, the boss of speed camera firm Serco has been caught by one of his firm’s cameras driving at more than 100mph on the A11. You’d think that he, of all people, would have a satnav that alerted him to the location of his own cameras. Bet he's spitting feathers.
Ever wondered what the consequences would be if Man Flu crossed the species barrier? Total catastrophe! Millions of male pigs and/or sheep sitting in comfy chairs with a TV remote control demanding beer, hot food and TLC, hamming it up enough to make Lord Olivier turn in his grave.
Talking of the archetypal considerate, altruistic and totally unselfish male of our species, a male contraceptive jab has been developed and tested in China, which is believed to be as effective at preventing pregnancies as the female pill or condoms. It’s a monthly injection that works by temporarily blocking sperm production.
So ladies, all you have to do now is to trust that the hunky young chap you met in the bar last night - the one who is evolutionarily and biologically motivated solely by an uncontrollable, testosterone-fuelled urge to impregnate as many females as possible, while simultaneously having no concept of cause and effect and being possessed with the sense of ethical responsibility of Sir Fred Goodwin - has done the proper thing and taken his monthly jab. I’m certain that millions of women will now have had their minds put at ease. No longer will they need to rely solely on the evidence of their own eyes that a condom is being used, or suffer the uncertainly of remembering whether they’ve been on the pill for the last decade. The sheer freedom from worry is, I’m sure, exhilarating!
Come to think of it, that’s exactly what men have to consider now – whether the woman they’re with is telling the truth that she’s on the pill and hasn’t been taken over by a sudden and overwhelming urge to beat the biological clock or to obtain a council flat.
I just hope these Chinese contraceptive jabs are more reliable than my Chinese e-cigars. They’re guaranteed for 28 days and I consider myself extremely lucky if I can get as much as 3 weeks out of the damned things.
Manchester is to be the first UK city where ID cards can be purchased. Government officials say the amount of personal data to be collected and retained for the new cards will be no greater than for passports.
If the card is going to have the same data as a passport, then why the need for a card? If I try to hire something as mundane as a carpet cleaner at a local shop, my passport is next to useless as a form of ID – they insist on a utility bill. If an ID card has no more data on it than a passport, then surely it too will be useless for anything other than showing PC Plod who I am. Why should I part with £60 for a card which serves no purpose other than to assist Plod in knowing who I am, when other forms of ID will serve the same purpose at no extra cost?
I have no intrinsic ideological objection to ID cards, I simply need someone to present me with a logical and coherent case for the benefit, which the government and other ID card advocates have singularly failed to do.
I can see the dawning of a day in the future when I’m queuing at passport control and the immigration officer says: “No – I’m afraid your passport won’t do. We need to see a couple of utility bills.”
Forgot the traditional 4th of May greeting yesterday – May the 4th be with you.
Depressed again on returning to work after a Bank Holiday. The problem with sales is that your best is never good enough and there is no end-game. Your reward for doing your best is to have 10% added on to your target next year, which is soul destroying.
Hay bought a book yesterday on Amazon – Michael Pollan’s ‘In Defence of Food’.
I found this review, which is both amusing and edifying:
QUOTE
Subjects covered:
The French Paradox - why do French people spend so much more money and time on food and yet consistently live healthier and longer lives than Americans?
Why nutritional claims should be ignored on food products (hint; if they're telling you it's low in fat, check the sugars etc.).
Just why it is so hard to work out what difference adding or removing one element from a person's diet has. When you factor in the person lying about their diet in the first place, the very long and extremely detailed forms they have to complete to track food intake, life changes etc., it's a wonder any judgment can ever be made.
Why switching from eating fat to carbohydrates makes you fatter and unhealthier and why the American government encouraged an entire generation to make that misguided switch.
Pollan's rules of thumb:
'Eat food' - meaning proper food made from proper ingredients instead of food products made from everything else. Homemade cake instead of 'diet' cake bars.
'Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognise as food', with the additional comment, 'don't eat anything incapable of rotting is another personal policy you might consider adopting'.
'Avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable, c) more than five in number, or that include d) high-fructose corn syrup.’
'You are what you eat eats too’ - that is, the diet of the animals we eat has a bearing on the nutritional quality and healthfulness, of the food itself, whether it is meat or milk or eggs.'
Do all your eating at a table. No, a desk is not a table.
UNQUOTE
Regarding 3 above, I would add that you shouldn’t eat anything having ingredients that comprise more than one word, unless one of them is the name of a place.
I read an article in the papers this weekend saying that Farley’s, the baby food company, has been censured after its rusks were found to contain almost 30% sugar – more than can be found in adult biscuits. Farley’s defended themselves by saying they contained little fat and no added salt. That’s like being accused of killing someone with a knife, but saying you should be let off as you didn’t use a gun or a hand grenade.
Cow & Gate, another baby food company, has discontinued a range of biscuits after they were found to contain hydrogenated fats, which are proven carcinogens.
In a swansong report, Sir Alan Steer, the UK government’s behaviour Tsar and a former head teacher, says that a good old-fashioned bawling out in the head's office can be a better way of dealing with badly behaved pupils than suspending or excluding them. Educationalists will doubtless accuse Sir Alan of heresy and lambast him for daring to speak common sense (why does my American spell-checker want to spell that as ‘lambaste’, which I would imagine is pronounced very differently from ‘lambast’ and is a variant with which I am entirely unfamiliar?).
Family panic on Sunday evening. We’d had a kampong BBQ and were about to retire indoors for coffee when Perry stumbled and dislocated his shoulder. Called the medics, who were unable to slip his arm back into its socket, and so he was taken to Frenchay Hospital in Bristol. We arrived at about 10pm and didn’t leave till 2:20 this morning. Thought I’d capture his distress and embarrassment for posterity.
Chipping Sodbury is now the epicenter of an outbreak of Swine Flu. A local chap caught it from a work colleague who had recently visited Mexico. I hope the locals don’t congregate round his house brandishing pitchforks and threaten to burn his house.
Was listening to an interview with Stanley Weiser, the writer of the film Wall Street, famous for Gordon Gekko’s greed is good speech. He said that while the greed of the 80s was individual, the greed of this decade has become institutionalised. I couldn’t agree more.
Caravan is trying to organise a party for all of his mates before they die. He’s calling it the pre-death party.
Doug, the friend I had dinner with on Thursday evening, has a conspiracy theory which I find intriguing and entirely believable. He maintains that farmers are overcoming the ban on badger culling by gassing them and then leaving them at the roadside, making out they are roadkill. Strangely enough, I have seen a remarkable number of dead badgers on the sides of roads of late.
I noticed Cat doing her business in the loose soil where we demolished the stone wall. It got me thinking why cats cover up their ablutions. I could understand it if cats were predated on by other animals, but they’re at the top of their particular food chain – so why the need to bury it?
Hay was mentioning how perfectly evolved I am as an endomorph. I seem to be able to put on weight fairly easily, which is an evolutionary advantage in times of lean pickings. She is also of the opinion that I’m perfectly evolved mentally too – I can make lightning-quick decisions about whether to fight something, flee from it, eat it or shag it. Women, on the other hand, have more decisions to make – what colour, what size, what accessories, etc, all leading to a more complex and drawn out decision making process.
Ever wondered why some people are fat? Take a look at these foods and you’ll see why.
Cameron is wooing Tracy Emin and following Tony Blair’s Brit Culture and Cool Britannia thing of a decade ago. Tracy Emin endorsing anything is guaranteed to put me off whatever it may be that she’s endorsing, and if Cameron thinks celebrity endorsement is going to buy my vote, then he has another think coming. It will result in the exact reverse, as it demonstrates intellectual bankruptcy.
If you have Swine Flu and are about to recover, then if I were you I'd sell your story ASAP. It seems the strain is only just managing to keep going and will in all probability peter out before much longer. See here for details.
No time for posting today - we're demolishing a stone wall to make an access to the build site.
Hay and I went out to dinner in Bath last night with an old school friend from nearly 40 years ago. Doug bunked next to me in the school dorm between the ages of 13 and 16 and has a prodigious musical talent. His wife, Lizzie, used to be a clothes designer and they now run a greetings card business in Chichester, using Lizzie’s artwork for the cards. If ever you need any cards, call in at Affiche Publications.
An evening of intelligent conversation (with a little reminiscing) ensued and we didn't get home till 1am.
Doug & Lizzie Huxtable
Found a site called FutureMe, where you can arrange to send yourself an e-mail to arrive at any pre-determined date and time in the future. I’m not sure what use it could be, but it’s none-the-less and interesting concept. Perhaps GoogleMail, Hotmail and Yahoo will introduce a delay facility on their webmail services. The Royal Mail was there first though, having introduced its own delayed delivery service decades ago – it’s called First Class Postage. The only problem with Royal Mail’s version is that you don’t actually have any control over when it will be delivered.
Barbie, the iconic doll from the 60s, has had a make-over for her 50th birthday. According to reports, she now comes with stick-on tattoos. Matel, the makers, said that the tattoos will give children the chance to be creative and express themselves. I’m sorry, but a handful of stick-on tattoos provide considerably less expressive creativity than even Mr Potato Head. What they need to appeal to the Jade Goody generation is Obese Barbie, complete with a pram containing an ill nourished infant with its face smeared in toffee and an unemployed, shaven-headed Ken as an escort. There was actually a TV show parody once - a Gangsta Bitch Barbie and a Tupac Ken.
In 1992, a new version of Barbie was produced that said things like: "Will we ever have enough clothes?", "I love shopping!", and "Wanna have a pizza party?" Her vocabulary was obviously modeled on that of the then pre-pubescent Paris Hilton.
Did you know that the likelihood of having Barbie’s vital statistics is 1 in 100,000 (and zero if you’re Susan Boyle).
It’s rumoured that Glastonbury could be under threat – not from its usual nemesis, rain, but swine flu. Imagine if we all have to hunker down and stay at home, putting barbed wire around the gate and sitting on the porch with shotguns to keep snifflers away. I dare say I could work from home for a month and we could cull the seven sheep we now have in the field, risking scrapie in the process. Given the number of cats and dogs we live in close company with, I’m surprised that cat flu and dogs’ breath haven’t jumped the species barrier – oh, hang on, the latter is already rife in the human population.
Here’s some news on the pandemic from a pal of mine in Florida:
“There has been 1 death in the USA from Mexican Swine Flu - a Mexican kid who slipped over the border. There are 100 suspected cases, mostly driven by media hype and hypochondria. These cases are in 20 states (at lunch time) whereas at 0800 this morning they were all in Texas, thus proving that Americans travel far too much. 36000 deaths were attributed to normal flu-related illness in the USA in the last 12 months. Now that’s an epidemic.”
I hear flu recoverees have hired Max Clifford to sell their stories to the media. Sorry? “Headline news – I recovered from flu!” It’s kind of on par with, “Dog bites man,” but not as sensational.
Here’s a story from someone in the UK who thinks he has the Mexican flu:
QUOTE:
My partner and I returned to Birmingham from Cancun yesterday morning at 08:20am. There were no members of the health department there to meet us, over 400 people passed through without help or advice being offered.
We returned home to our seven-months-old daughter and in-laws. Last night we developed many of the symptoms listed.
I contacted the NHS Direct and after several hours we were asked to go to the hospital ourselves. We had to wait in A&E before being seen by doctors dressed in masks, aprons and gloves.
We have high temperatures over 38 degrees, aches, coughing and sneezing, diarrhoea and nausea. The hospital prescribed us both with Tamiflu and told us to drive to a chemist in Coventry, we waited for 15 minutes surrounded by other people before we had the Tamiflu.
The chemist informed us that they only had one dose available and that we would need to return the following day. This morning we were contacted by the HPA, we informed them of the situation and they told us that under no circumstances should we leave the house.
We are waiting the results now, we are very concerned about our daughter and family around us as it looks like we have now infected them.
What idiot, having just returned from Mexico, goes straight home and makes contact with other family members? What government, following all the hype about the UK being the best prepared government in the world, allows passengers on a flight from Mexico to toddle off home with no advice? Also the 'am' on the end of 08:00 is totally unnecessary - there's no such thing as 08:00pm.
We could shortly be a step closer to the internet becoming conscious. A new web tool, Wolfram Alpha, is set to hit the market shortly. Rather than presenting a web surfer with a selection of material to research, Wolfram Alpha will actually do the research and compute the answer. Users will interact with it simply by asking a question using speech and it then goes off and trawls its memory - the internet. Scary.
Phil Nicholas and his Corvette.
Some friends we made at The Dog.
