Early Risers.

[Tony_S]

1 minute ago, Gwiwer said:

Just as a chap would open a door for a woman and offer his hand to her if there was a step or two.

Though I suspect for many women the right to equal pay and career opportunity outweighs being helped up a stair. I always hold a door for anyone following me, I would hate to let it slam in someone’s face. 

[laurenceb]

Reminds of the time I held a door for someone that I had seen out of the corner of my eye. I got an indignant "I hope you didn't hold that because I am a woman!", my response was "are you?" I tend to zone out in crowds to avoid the screaming abdabs so who I held the door for didn't register. I hold doors for people not anyone in particular

[BSW01]

Good morning everyone 

 

A rather disrupted nights sleep last night but that was only to be expected in the circumstances. Things seem to be settling down and my body is slowly getting back to normal now. A normal ER, well I’ll leave that all to you to decide upon. 

 

Today is world kindness day, they seem to have a DAY for everything now don’t they, so I’m being kind to Sheila and watching the Hornby programmes whilst she is in the kitchen doing the ironing, that way she doesn’t have to put up with the music, which she finds by very boring, personally, I’ve not noticed the music. 

[polybear]

1 hour ago, Tony_S said:

 I always hold a door for anyone following me, I would hate to let it slam in someone’s face. 

 

As does Bear, though I do often wish I'd let it slam in their face when I get not so much as a "B0llox", let alone a "Thank you".  What is often most surprising is that such non-acknowledgements can come from those who would appear most likely to be well mannered...

 

In other news:

Bear has posted a sale on the 'bay off to it's new owner - I thought I'd been shafted as the buyer turned out to be located in Jersey (which apparently is a part of the UK) and the likes of Hermes don't like - if you seen what I mean.  So it was the Royal Mail  - and I thought I'd be in for a shock at the price.  Happily not - a 1.5Kg parcel came in at four quid, signed for.  Result.

 

Then it was the joys of the Co-op; the freezer cabinet has obviously died so that kinda limited some options, though not of any significance.  I was somewhat shocked that the two options for packets (qty 4off) of Scones (definitely pronounced "ownes" in Bear Castle, rather than the incorrect "ons"......incoming.....) being sultana or butter - with the former costing ten bob more than the latter.  Bl00dy expensive sultanas, those.....  This Bear didn't, incidentally.

 

And finally....

Bear's Good News of the Day**:

NNN's next door have a nice shiny (or perhaps not) skip on their drive.  A very empty skip.....

I must tell the builders not to go filling this one up 

** Not great news for NNN's though, as skip hire near Bear Castle is the wrong side of 250+ notes a time - and this is number 3.  Ouch

 

And finally finally....

Bear's little inner Bear tells me that Jumbo sossie and a chip roll works wonders for bvggered shoulders.  Worth a try...

[JohnDMJ]

1 hour ago, Gwiwer said:

Split loyalties here of course.  We are ready with fan-repellent aerosols and stale meat pies which can be lethal at 50 yards .  A sizeable contingent knows it is easier to take the train to the Hill of Strawberries and walk into town than to join the melee of around 80,000 all trying to get into the pubs, fill up with falling-down waters, avoid covid, urinating in public and stumbling into people's hedges.  I accept that with the two of us being respectively Cornish and Australian that there will sometimes be a clash of support but neither of us is an egg-chasing fan. 

 

Some aspects are better and some not so.  When folk bemoan the lack of doorstep deliveries i remind them that we now live in an age when it's not just the baker, milkman and Betterwear salesman who call at your door but the entire supermarket and indeed almost anything one can buy is now available for home delivery.  What is lacking is the choice to select our own fresh items to suit personal preference. 

 

Health services?  I don't recall any difficulty in seeing an NHS doctor, dentist and even optician in the 1960s.  Covid aside it was hard enough to find a GP appointment two years ago and NHS dentists (especially those taking on new patients) are rare than rocking horse poo.  

 

Socially we have lost a great deal of respect and courtesy and have forgotten how to interact nicely with our fellow humans.  Is this because the population has massively increased?  Because it has become much more ethnically diverse (bringing with it, perhaps, widely differing traditions and expectations?) or are we just in an ever-faster dog-eat-dog race to a finish line somewhere?  I was asked recently by a colleague why I always took off my uniform baseball cap upon entering a building.  To me it is second nature - a chap always removes his hat when entering.  Some of my colleagues had never heard of that.  Just as a chap would open a door for a woman and offer his hand to her if there was a step or two.  

 

It is easy to look back through rose-tinted glasses.  What we should avoid in my opinion is looking forward through blinkers.  There are around 67 million of us on these shores alone, plus the occasional Caulkhead or Manxman   We cannot live comfortably in splendid isolation; we have to at least acknowledge others around us and their equal rights to share the air we breathe and the space we stand in.  Who knows - one day we might even start shaking hands again.  

 

I am reminded of Gerard Hoffnung's "Misleading advice to tourists" which includes such delights as "Upon entering a railway compartment make sure to shake hands with all the passengers"  From 5m 00s here though the entire clip may amuse.  

 

 

Don't forget the brick layer!

[Gwiwer]

45 minutes ago, JohnDMJ said:

Don't forget the brick layer!

Never forgotten.  "Halfway up I met the barrel coming down."

[Gwiwer]

2 hours ago, Tony_S said:

I always hold a door for anyone following me

Absolutely.  Unless, of course, the train is about to depart   

[Dave Hunt]

Re Rick’s point about respect and courtesy, a while ago I opened a door for a woman and stepped aside to let her through, whereupon she spat, “Sexist,” at me and stepped away from it until I had entered. She then swept past and glared at me. I used the term woman as I don’t regard such behaviour as ladylike.

 

Dave

[45156]

Afternoon All

 

I must commence with the usual apology for absence - this was due in part to my not having my laptop working - a windows update saw to that. and it stuck mid-download - my computer guru was able to sort it out for me this afternoon, and I now appear to be on the latest version of windows 10 - my laptop which is just one year old does not appear to be compatible with Windows 11 - but I really am just getting used to 10, so I'm not too fussed.

 

Anyway, belated happy birthday Ian, and I can only offer greetings to the ailing and the celebrating, as I have had to skip so many pages.

 

In other news, got a phone call from Guy the guitar repairer, who gave my the glad tidings that my Ibanez Artwood is fettled, and is now much more playable - and it is indeed.   The fingerboard which was almost the colour of dirty pine is now a glowing rosewood again, the action has been lowered, and the frets polished, and the proud one dressed, the electrics checked and new batteries fitted - and strung with Elixirs.  All for under £40.

 

So here it is in all its glory, sitting with my Ovation on the left, and on the right my Hofner Congress (once owned by the late Malcolm Lockyer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Lockyer

 

Regards to All

Stewart

 

 

Edited November 13, 2021 by 45156

[laurenceb]

2 hours ago, Dave Hunt said:

Re Rick’s point about respect and courtesy, a while ago I opened a door for a woman and stepped aside to let her through, whereupon she spat, “Sexist,” at me and stepped away from it until I had entered. She then swept past and glared at me. I used the term woman as I don’t regard such behaviour as ladylike.

 

Dave

That's why I put woman, she called herself a lady. I would disagree

[TheQ]

4 hours ago, laurenceb said:

Reminds of the time I held a door for someone that I had seen out of the corner of my eye. I got an indignant "I hope you didn't hold that because I am a woman!", my response was "are you?" I tend to zone out in crowds to avoid the screaming abdabs so who I held the door for didn't register. I hold doors for people not anyone in particular

My reply would have been " Well you're certainly not a lady with that behaviour".

 

 

Afternoon Awl,

Unloading the trailer turned out to be a major exercise, the jockey wheel fell off again and I again had to lift the tow bar from zero feet. This in constant drizzle, not nice.

 

The problem I now realise is that the rear tow ball is a lot lower than the front tow ball on the Landrover. This luckily I can remedy that in the future, in dry weather  as the rear tow bar is adjustable in height by up to a foot. Then I can set the adjustable by spanner position rather than just windie handle, jockey wheel to one height.

 

The layout section is now ensconced in the gardening shed, unfortunately the first 5 inches had got wet with the odd dampness reaching the full width of the layout.. What damage there is I won't know till it's fully dried out.

 

The mower had been moved out to let the layout in, so the trailer parking area was mowed, and only on the highest setting the main route to the mobile home and muddling shed was mowed out to about 6 mower widths before parking it in its home.

 

The trailer top was then wrapped in plastic before parking it.

 

The boat received its  mirrors, 4 cleats the front mooring eye and a second coat of paint on the cockpit sides some places.

 

Then Ben took me for a shortened walk, the pheasant massacre opened up again, I was glad of that, heaving the trailer around really took it out of me..

 

So I've spent the afternoon on eyelid inspection interrupted by the occasional sip of a large glass of Talisker.

An off centre picture of the boat with trailer in the back ground, taken off centre because the car registration plate would have shown to the left..

[PeterBB]

11 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

Another very early Good Morning to all (and belated birthday wishes to @Oldddudders)

 

The cavalier approach to personal safety around chemicals wasn’t just the province of the armed forces in the 60s and 70s. Even as recently as the late 70s, laboratory practices weren’t that stringent (GLP - good laboratory practice - didn’t really get going until the 80s). In grad school I was working with neurotoxins in the lab: I’d do a morning’s worth of experiments with the toxin, wash my hands and then eat my lunchtime sandwiches in the lab. A mug of coffee was never far away - even when doing experiments. All very streng verboten nowadays - but not unusual for the time (looking back, sometimes I wonder how I actually made it out of my 20s).

iD

Hope @O@Olddudders birthday went well.

 

Brings to mind the 60s - suxmethonium sensitivities  and working on cholinesterase's etc.  ... cup of tea brought round  an placed on bench  ... and in one TB lab worked in the 'boss' was quite happy sticking a hot wire into sputum and 'spits' flying around.  Mentioned it 'higher up' and was 'moved'.  

 

Then came the real work and things greatly improved, in fact, very quickly ... Aberfan as well as the utter disaster for the children and families had an enormous 'knock-on' effect on overall health and safety.  The problem now is 'elf and savstie' where 'spurious hazzards' are used with dreams of paper because some twit is too lazy to do an appropriate risk assessment to stop people doing appropriate work and this in turn affects some attitudes to real and necessary health and safety at work.  (rant over)

[laurenceb]

Visitors to the Museum of the Jewellery Quarter in Hockley are told that you didn't offend the tea lady as next to the sugar tin was another containing cyanide!

[New Haven Neil]

Evening.  Mad day, as usual with Mrs NHN on a Saturday.

 

Glad the hear Brian's doing OK, F-I-L recently had the same rebore, he's fine.  Upside down (in NZ!) but fine.

 

Odd that the bear can't pronounce scone properly.  Thought he was all clever and that. 

 

Out for a Chinese meal with new neighbours tonight, I'd rather stay in, in front of the fire, but that's just middle age - they're 10 years younger than us.

 

As for control of substances hazardous for health....the merch in the 70's and 80's was not a safe place to be.  Once outside of territorial waters of course little UK legislation applies, and this little brown bear spent the grand total of two days in UK waters in an 8 year career at sea.

 

Postal charges - Jersey isn't in the UK BTW, neither are we, we are Crown Dependencies.  We weren't in the EU either.  However, Royal Mail provide the same service, at the same price, as UK post.  At Trackshack we would only use Royal Mail/Isle of Man Post, couriers were a nightmare.  they gave us great service, and advantageous rates due to the volume of parcels we were sending out, often over 200 a day and 99% of the time next day delivery.  They would lose maybe one a year, pretty impressive.

 

 

[TheQ]

28 minutes ago, PeterBB said:

Hope @O@Olddudders birthday went well.

 

Brings to mind the 60s - suxmethonium sensitivities  and working on cholinesterase's etc.  ..

You be keeping suxmethonium, away from me. That be rapid death..

cholinesterase deficiency be a major problem.

[Gwiwer]

3 hours ago, Dave Hunt said:

Re Rick’s point about respect and courtesy, a while ago I opened a door for a woman and stepped aside to let her through, whereupon she spat, “Sexist,” at me and stepped away from it until I had entered. She then swept past and glared at me. I used the term woman as I don’t regard such behaviour as ladylike.

 

Dave

You can please some people all of the time and all people some of the time but you can never please all people all the time.  

 

There are some for whom you can never get it right no matter what you do.  Open the door - sexist; don't open the door - sexist; let it slam in her face - rude.  Darned if you do and darned if you don't.  

 

 

[PhilJ W]

Afternoon all from Estuary-Land. Had a very good day at the model railway exhibition in Theydon Bois. Came away with one hand built item for running on two parallel strips of metal 16.5 mm apart and a pile of GE Journals. That should keep me occupied for the next few days. Arthur Itis was making a few grumbles so Nurofen has been deployed. Afterwards my friend and his boy went to Tesco's for a bit of retail therapy. While there we met his eldest daughter and I noticed that his lad was a good three inches taller than his big sister (he's 13 and she's 21). I remarked upon the size difference, big mistake as she is very sensitive about her small stature.  If looks could kill I'd be stone dead by now. 

[simontaylor484]

Bit of a steady day for us today first job was to jet wash the filthy car due to mud on the road near a couple of house building sites we pass on the school run.

By the time we had been to Tesco and had a bit of lunch it was time for our appointment to visit her ladyship. She seems in good spirits despite not been able to get home for the weekend 

[Ozexpatriate]

9 hours ago, Tony_S said:

Misplaced  nostalgia is common now, just read the online comments on newspaper articles. I worry about those who want to remove the advantages of a supportive state and return to the ”old days”. I think some of those who give support to such ideas will be surprised when they find out it affects them adversely. 

Indeed so Tony. These sentiments are not limited to the UK. Without my being explicitly political here, some candidates actually make such messaging the theme of their election campaigning. It can also be a smokescreen for a lot of ugliness. (I apologize for being intentionally vague.)

 

Related to the observation made by @grandadbob, I find that while online, people (in the general case*) can make sweeping generalizations, about say a country/culture/what have you, that when written down take on a greater power than an offhand comment over a pint at the pub might.

 

* I'm not referring to any individual here

 

There's something about it being written down that compels a reaction in a way that a comment waved away with a smile over a pint would not.

 

[Ozexpatriate]

Observations vis-à-vis politeness to strangers (females in particular) are interesting. At the risk of making a sweeping generalization (   ) I find Americans to be generally more polite than the specific examples shared here today.

 

This might vary with location. Places like the New York City conurbation (by which, I include suburban New Jersey) are notoriously more abrasive, in particular with tourists, so 'your mileage may vary'.

 

Apparently one of the tourist behaviours that New Yorkers are particularly sensitive to is suddenly stopping on the sidewalk to look up and take photographs of tall buildings.  (I think I saw that mentioned by presenters on at least two different television shows in the last week.)

[pH]

11 minutes ago, Ozexpatriate said:

There's something about it being written down that compels a reaction in a way that a comment waved away with a smile over a pint would not.

 

No body language/non-verbal clues to add any subtlety to what’s written. Emojis can help to some extent, if appropriate to the subject and situation.

[Ozexpatriate]

58 minutes ago, PhilJ W said:

If looks could kill I'd be stone dead by now. 

I had one of those on Halloween. I asked a young trick-or-treater if she was dressed as a La Catrina - a Mexican Dios de los Muertos trope. The deathly stare informed me she was "Frida"* - which she had actually done quite compellingly, only I had failed to pick up on it.

 

* Frida Kahlo

[polybear]

2 hours ago, laurenceb said:

Visitors to the Museum of the Jewellery Quarter in Hockley are told that you didn't offend the tea lady as next to the sugar tin was another containing cyanide!

 

Bear's first (and most excellent) Boss used to work at Barrow in Furness on "the boats" (aka Submarines) - there was a team of women who would keep the boats as clean as possible whilst they were under construction.  One new guy made an "untoward comment" to one of them....BIG mistake.  They stripped him naked in front of the whole boat and scrubbed him with yard brooms and carbolic soap.  He never made that mistake again....

 

2 hours ago, New Haven Neil said:

Odd that the bear can't pronounce scone properly.  Thought he was all clever and that. 

 

Hmm.....

Noted, for future reference....

And they're still scones, not scons....

 

2 hours ago, New Haven Neil said:

Postal charges - Jersey isn't in the UK BTW, neither are we, we are Crown Dependencies.  We weren't in the EU either.  However, Royal Mail provide the same service, at the same price, as UK post.  At Trackshack we would only use Royal Mail/Isle of Man Post, couriers were a nightmare.  they gave us great service, and advantageous rates due to the volume of parcels we were sending out, often over 200 a day and 99% of the time next day delivery.  They would lose maybe one a year, pretty impressive.

 

Thanks - yes, another check does show that the RM do class it as "overseas".  Oops.

Incidentally, I've just had a certain object called a "Peckett" delivered from South America (55 notes - currently the next cheapest seem to be £85+, with Hattons wanting £104.  A right result ) - the courier played their usual (though not always) stunt of leave it on the doorstep, ring once and scarper.  They seem to have accepted that as "the norm" now, which is a bit naughty.  I do wonder what would happen in the event of theft - would Bear lose out?  In which case I'd be a Most Unhappy - and Very, Very p1ssed Off Bear....).  I'd probably challenge the practice/loss via the small claims court.

 

52 minutes ago, PhilJ W said:

While there we met his eldest daughter and I noticed that his lad was a good three inches taller than his big sister (he's 13 and she's 21). I remarked upon the size difference, big mistake as she is very sensitive about her small stature.  If looks could kill I'd be stone dead by now. 

 

You could always mention to her that it's an advantage as she could get on the buses for half price.  On second thoughts, best not....

[PhilJ W]

28 minutes ago, polybear said:

You could always mention to her that it's an advantage as she could get on the buses for half price.  On second thoughts, best not....

And buy childrens size clothes (no VAT).

[Tony_S]

37 minutes ago, polybear said:

And they're still scones, not scons....

I have always called them scones as did everyone else I knew. Though what my mother actually made were probably rock cakes. 

Edited November 13, 2021 by Tony_S