The Wedding

Fantastic wedding and everyone loved it - even the town hall staff said it was one of the best they've had there. Must have been the hands-off planning. A big thanks to all who helped make it happen!

Some initial photos of my own with official photos to follow once they've been Photoshopped. 

Grammar Schools

In every field of human endeavour the search is on for excellence - except when it comes to education, where some parties settle for the ideological mediocrity of the comprehensive system.

Be Like Wulf

This is Wulf. Note Wulf's plaited beard. Wulf is one of our German salesmen. Wulf is fed up with the quips about him needing to get a starring role in Amazon's Vikings.

Wulf thinks having Viking tattoos is OK if you work in a bar, on the docks or in the music business, but not if you're a salesman.

Be like Wulf.

This looks like bar furniture made of pallets. On closer inspection it's bar furniture made to look like it's made of pallets.

Don't be like something made out of something, but made of something else...

Big day tomorrow.

2nd Referendum in Torched Epsom

Fizzy water - what's that all about? Tastes like Andrews. Can't see how people stomach the stuff.

Spotted an advert on Facebook the other day for an item called a tactical flashlight. Is that different from a strategic flashlight? Advertisers obviously have an unhealthy disregard for the English language.

My answer to those Brexiteers saying; "You lost, get over it." If you buy a car from a car showroom and the salesman has been proven to have lied about the mileage, or some other aspect, do you just accept it or demand to return it? 

What are those denouncing a 2nd referendum afraid of - losing? On the way to Heathrow on Monday I listened to an interview with people from Newcastle about why they voted for Brexit and it was plain that the narrative of lies had been accepted by them, hook line and sinker, as truths. The £350m a week figure was trotted out, along with them (allegedly) personally knowing people who had lost their jobs due to foreigners coming over here and doing them for minimum wage. If you're an employee you can't be sacked because someone else will do the job for less - it's called constructive dismissal. The only way that can happen is if you're a self-employed tradesman and a competitor offers a lower price. We used to call that competition.

Here's the parliamentary subcommittee debate on the 2nd referendum.

An important issue was mentioned; that if truths were not delivered to the electorate then that was the fault of the respective campaigns. However, most people in the UK are not interested in watching debates and their political view is heavily influenced by whichever daily rag they read. The singular failure within the referendum was the failure of the media to report accurately. The printed media has the greatest control of the electorate and somehow needs holding to account for perpetuating lies. The danger here is one of censorship, but newspapers have nonetheless brought this on themselves. The media like to say they  merely reflect the opinions of their readership - I  believe they inform opinion more than reflect it.

Having watched the debate I'm gradually coming to the conclusion that the result must be accepted. Daft decisions are made in general elections and we don't seek to overturn them unless there was evidence of fraudulent voting. Sow the wind and you reap the whirlwind - I just hope the whirlwind falls solely on those who voted to leave, but it won't, it will hit us all as attention and scarce resources are diverted away from areas in genuine need of attention.

Spotted some work going on at the weekend in Chipping Sodbury High Street. I jokingly asked one of the workmen if it was part of the work for the Chipping Sodbury underground system. He looked at me as if I was a lunatic.

Stourhead & Marston Bigot

I'm in Hamburg today, returning Thursday afternoon - just in time for my wedding on Friday. Oh, another thing that annoys me - people in security queues at airports who make no attempt at preparation for the scanner. Weather on Friday is looking iffy, so the decision against a garden reception seems to have been a good one.

Went to Stourhead in Wiltshire on Sunday. The place is stuffed to the gills with Chippendale furniture and souvenirs from the Grand Tour, the 18th and 19th century equivalent of the Spanish straw donkey and those hideous flasks for drinking gut-rot Mediterranean wines. Beautiful place with a garden designed by Lancelot (Capability) Brown - a man who could not have ever seen the result of his works, as they took a hundred years or so to mature. A man of foresight. Lots of follies in the grounds surrounding the lake.

Came back through a place called Marston Bigot. Wonder what kind of people live there? 

Before the images, why do some parents think it's OK for their kids to run around frightening the wildlife? The very reason the ducks come up to families is due to a trust that they won't be harmed, and then irresponsible parents revel in allowing their cherished offspring to chase them, destroying that trust and the ensuing spectacle. 

This item above is known as "The Pope's Cabinet". Attributed to the ownership of Sixtus V, who reigned 1585~1590. The Badminton Cabinet, which was made for the Duke of Beaufort in 1726, sold for £19m in 2004. Just what the Pope's Cabinet is worth is anyone's guess. It's filled with 150 secret drawers.

British Burqa Circa 1950s

Went to Stourhead yesterday - yet another National Trust property. There were some books on sale in the gift shop targeted at people who were born in the 40s, 50s, 60s, etc. Being a child of the 50s I naturally gravitated to the one for the 50s and found this image of a 1950s British burqa:

Just goes to show....

The 50s and easly 60s were the days when your mum would buy clothes that would fit you in 12 to 24 months time, so we all wandered about fully covered, even in shorts.

Found out on Saturday that, due to the exploding battery issue (can only be due to ISIS having infiltrated the factory), the delivery date on my new Samsung Galaxy Note 7 has been delayed by 2 weeks. That means I have to soldier on with my old Note 3, the GPS on which decided to give up the ghost yesterday. Had to dismantle it when I got home and buff up the contacts on the GPS aerial, which happily solved the problem ahead of my trip to Hamburg this evening..

High Fashion

First (and probably only) BBQ of the year last night with family and neighbours.

Hay's dad has gone high fashion at the age of 80.

Talking of fashion, spotted these on a Facebook advert.

They're called Mahabis and they weigh in at the astronomical cost of £79 for what is a pair of carpet slippers which you could get on a market stall for less than a fiver. I guess there's one born every minute.

Things That Annoy me

The antidote to "These are a few of my favourite things". All have happened this week, most on a single day.

1. People who put bottles on supermarket conveyor belts across the direction of travel, rather than pointing in the direction of travel, resulting in the bottles rolling all over the place and into my shopping.
2. People taking selfies in supermarket checkout queues, especially when they pout and have the face of a small pig - in fact any pouty selfies taken by total narcissists 
3. Four teenagers clogging up a supermarket queue while buying a single bottle of water for the four of them.
4. Customer services representatives from Vodafone in India (using webchat) asking me how my  weekend was when I'm rather irate for having received a text to say I can upgrade my phone early, but find on logging on to their site that I have to wait till November.
5. The Vodafone website in general, especially the security system which has to send an access code to my mobile to gain access and the Byzantine procedures and mental contortions I have to go through to see what my individual phone bill is (I have 4 family phones on my account).
6. Vodafone's 191 number not accepting that my phone belongs to the account holder, despite the very obvious fact it does, resulting in me being cut off and unable to speak to anyone.
7. Being switched to an upgrade team member from Vodafone (via webchat) and having to wait much, much longer than the 1 minute 40 seconds the click-down timer tells me I have to wait. I gave up in the end - twice.
8. Eventually speaking to someone at Vodafone (an English person) and having to say; "I'm sorry, but could you repeat that as I couldn't understand a single word you said." I think she was Geordie.
9. Having my Nat West card payment for the eventual phone upgrade refused due to a possibly fraudulent transaction, which wasn't.
10. Hearing that the newly released Samsung Galaxy Note 7, which should be arriving on Monday, is having problems with reports of exploding phones.
11. Financial numpties commenting on Facebook posts about Mark Carney and even contradicting themselves within their own infantile statements.
12. Investment banks having a prejudice against brown shoes. Light brown shoes are the height of fashion on the continent (the continent being that remote place we've decided to leave).
13. Professional liars (aka politicians, as evidenced by the Brexit debate) accusing junior doctors of playing politics with patients.
14. Discovering that the rotary washing line you put up is ever-so-slightly leaning to one side - after the concrete containing the holder has set.

I'm sure the checkout staff in Lidl secretly enjoy it when pensioners can't remember their car registrations. I'm lucky that mine is easy to remember - K500 PVB (it's a 500SL combined with my initials) - but for the modern cars in our family with the totally unmemorable registrations I took the precaution of taking a photo of the registrations on my phone so I'm not caught out. One of the staff there now knows my registration by heart and doesn't even ask me anymore.

Radio Speed

"Sue Perkins will be missing from tonight's Great British Bake Off episode." Good grief, it's amazing what passes for  news on the BBC website these days. As of last night that was the 2nd most read news item.

Found a wooden box in our bookcase yesterday and opened it to find this. I'd never seen it before and asked Hay what it was. She said it was her mother's PYE radio which she'd had since the age of 16, so it must date from 1955, the year of my birth.

As you can see, the inside of the lid is the speaker. Must see if I can get it working. 

Here's an interesting factiod for you. Speed equals distance over time. If you were to travel at the speed of light from say the sun to the Earth, relativistic time dilation says that time stands still at lightspeed (as evidenced by particles not decaying when boosted to lightspeed and clocks slowing down at high velocity - GPS signals compensate for that), thus if distance is 90 odd million miles and (for you) the time is zero, withing your reference frame you'd appear to travel the distance instantaneously - or at infinite speed, and be some 8 minutes younger than those on Earth.

Stop press: it's the aerial in the lid, not the speaker...

Rammed Full

Hay's up in Newcastle on business today having traveled by train yesterday. Apparently the train was rammed full with passengers; however, she managed to get a seat by the absolutely stupid expedient of booking the journey a few days in advance and automatically being allocated a seat. How dare she!

I think she should have sat in a corridor and made a political point at the train operator's expense.