Head-hunted

It is always nice when a previous employer gets back in touch to ask if you are available to do a bit of work; with no minibus driving last month, zero maths mentees this morning, and tutoring having settled down to just all day Mondays. I reckon I have scope to take on job number four, with the most onerous aspect likely to be the conversation with the taxman about my four PAYE codes.

Cherry Blossom

A little late this year, the cherry trees across the road have finally blossomed, and for a few days will put on a fine show before shedding their load onto our neighbours’ cars; unlike autumn’s detritus of dead leaves the springtime precipitation stays clear of our own frontage so the new black Nissan should be spared a similar pink and white splattering.

Field Judge

Having responded positively to my sons athletic club’s appeal for volunteers to help officiate at the Sunday meetings, I wrapped up warm and, armed only with the sketchy knowledge gleaned from long gone schoolboy participation and watching a dozen Olympic Games, stepped into the arena to play my part as follows: first manning the high jump bar, which was demolished just the once; then off to the long jump pit where my job was to “spike” the spot where the jump landed with (bizarrely)  a meat thermometer poked through the end of the measuring tape  - the distance was read off the other end at the take-off board, but at least I could confirm each jump was ‘well done’; next job was retrieving javelins which thankfully weren’t going very far nor very fast; to finish off were three rather low key senior events (shot put and triple jump), with only one competitors in each; nevertheless the five hours went quicker than usual and it was good to support the hard-working coaches who make it all possible for the youngsters. 

Food Festival

A trip to visit the food festival at Bishop Auckland today, where the market square and castle grounds were given over to a hundred or so stalls selling everything edible from black pudding to biltong, pies to paella, and chocolate vodka to strawberry smoothies; after two hours wandering around, punctuated by a cookery demo from a celebrity chef (Simon Rimmer from the Sunday Brunch I was informed) and a rare-bred pork sausage hot dog, we had garnered five types of cheese, scones in three flavours, pies, bread, cake and curries.

Money Laundering (Friday 25/4/14)

I have assumed the lead responsibility for laundry in the house which thankfully does not require beating the clothes in the local beck, just feeding the washing machine on a daily basis; one of the perks of the job is the coinage that emerges, bright and spotless, from time to time, and today a heavy clunking promised, and eventually delivered, the top dividend of a £2 coin.

Reconnected

I may have been a little unfair on the TalkTalk helpline as my wife, after 48 hours off line, gave them a ring last night, and without any human intervention a BT engineer arrived at the house at 8am this morning, diagnosed the fault, summoned a colleague to assist, then spent four hours installing a new line from the telegraph pole, through the wall, and into a new junction box to reconnect us to the information super-highway, albeit via the information little-country-lane that makes its old fashioned, copper wired way into the village.

High Spec / Hi Specs (Wednesday 23/4/14)

Replacing the car every five or six years makes the technological advances more evident between vehicles, and although the most important ones (safety, fuel efficiency, lower emissions) are largely imperceptible to the eye, their invisibility is more than made up for by the shiny IT features in the cockpit – built in satnav, reversing camera, climate control, drive mode selection, USB port for the I-pod – all controlled via touchscreens, which now necessitates I drive with my specs on (probably no bad thing for the other road users).

Ford Farewell (Tuesday 22/4/14)

Picking up the new Nissan meant abandoning the old C-Max and more significantly the Ford Motor Company whose various models I have owned exclusively since about 1976 (4 Escorts, 2 Mondeos and the C-Max) and which have served me pretty well over the years; it also meant unloading, from its numerous nooks and crannies, the accumulation of CDs, tools, spare parts, clothing, leads, maps, sunglasses and of course small furry animals that together must significantly increase the payload (and fuel consumption) but which I feel that I have to cart around ‘just in case’.

Past Time’s Pastime

A leisurely final day of the Easter holiday spent, in part, in quiet contemplation of 750 pieces of coloured cardboard that allegedly can be arranged into an attractive picture of an English country garden (with a bit too much grass for my liking); does anything better illustrate the generational change than me patiently sitting, staring and occasionally fitting in a piece of jigsaw while my son sits in front of his X-Box or PS3 manically stabbing away at a controller and cursing at the graphic images created on screen?

Easter Goodies

Easter weekend for the last twenty years has featured an Easter egg hunt in the garden for the kids (age range now 15 to 24) but with only one at home, and him shaving, we thought the Easter Bunny would give us a miss this year; however one, not very well hidden, chocolate egg did turn up in the garden for my wife, which was well-deserved as she had produced a dozen crispy-cake nests complete with mini-eggs, and a chocolate cake that overcame decorating difficulties to achieve true greatness.

Love Punch

A rare Saturday night at the movies (normally we go on a midweek afternoon when my wife is less likely to fall asleep at some point in the warmth and the dark) to see The Love Punch in which Emma Thompson and Pierce Brosnan take unlikely steps to recover the loss of their pension fund by stealing a diamond from the responsible corporate raider’s chateau in the south of France; once the 25 minutes of adverts and trailers were out of the way the feature was funny, fast paced and over in an old fashioned hour and a half, which factors combined to keep my companion conscious throughout.

Deals on Wheels

The old C-Max is closing in on 60,000 miles and today I thought I would start to look for a replacement, with the main specification being good ground clearance to cope with the monster puddles that gather in the country lanes after even moderate rain, while not being so big as to guzzle gas and block out the light when parked at the front of the house; four hours later I had put a deposit down on a perky-looking, nearly new, Nissan Juke with absurdly low mileage and an impressive array of gadgetry, that will be mine when I turn up next week with the balance.

Homeland

I finished the Homeland DVD box set today, several years after the rest of the country was so taken with it on TV, just over a year since I received as a present, and three months after starting it in January; the delay did just take the edge off the tense ending due to the knowledge that series two and three followed, but I still found it enjoyable and gripping with great lead performances and the kind of complex plotting that I like in my serious drama.

On-off-line

The way to get the internet to connect appears to be to take out the phone line, blow on it, and plug it back in - who needs a help line or a techie?

Why No WiFi? (Tuesday 15/4/14)

Posting to my blogs is becoming irregular due to a frustratingly erratic internet connection that comes and goes on a whim, but never quite disappears long enough to force me to enter the dark labyrinth called, ironically, the TalkTalk Helpline, which requires dedicating an hour of my life quoting a myriad of account numbers and passwords to someone who speaks in jargon I have a very sketchy grasp of, with no guarantee of emerging with anything other than an assurance it is not their fault and advice to get a new computer, install a new phone line, or move out of the sticks into fibre-optically connected civilisation.

Spring (Window) Cleaning

Window cleaning in winter is a horrible job as the ice cold water runs up your sleeve and the wind makes the ladder a precarious perch, but today there was no more than a light breeze and the warm weather meant the water heading up my arm was a balmy 15⁰ C, making the task almost enjoyable; what was enjoyable was to see in the house some spring sunshine, previously unable to penetrate those grubby front windows.

Track and Field

Today saw the first athletics meeting of the season and as experienced parents of the boy sprinter we (despite the sunshine) prepared as usual with layers of clothing, travel rugs, insulated cups for hot drinks, and plenty of food, for our trip to the optimistically named Sunnydale Stadium in Shildon, where two or three hundred young competitors gathered in hope or expectation of a personal best performance; with our own track star a little rusty due to lack of training, our best result looked to be by a pair of his old spikes worn by a young colleague finishing fifth in the Under 13 boys’ 600m until, in the penultimate race, with the stadium rapidly emptying, he came up trumps with a great run in the 200m to win his heat and grab a bronze with the third best time overall. 

Bovril (Saturday 12/4/14)

My visits to watch Shildon play at Dean Street usually involve wind, rain and a mud-bath of a pitch, with the highlight being the half time cup of Bovril which is made to perfection, not too strong (as at Spennymoor) or too salty (as at Bishop Auckland) but just right to set you up for the second half; however today a bit of spring sunshine and a grassy surface enabled the home side to show some quality in comfortably seeing off Sunderland RCA by four good goals to nil, pushing the polystyrene cup of the rich brown stuff into the background for once.

Manchester

A trip to Manchester today to enable the boy to cash in the ice-climbing voucher we gave him for Christmas, which we combined with a few hours in the city centre where I was able to point out a few old haunts (mainly pubs) that provided the backdrop to my early working life at the Town Hall, and a a visit to see my Dad on the way home; in town the ice-climber was not the only strangely dressed person trying to maintain his poise - among the Market Street buskers and street performers was a bronzed man (apparently) impossibly balanced on an outstretched walking stick that just had to be photographed.

HMRC

Cracked on with some jobs today – mowing the front grass, re-attaching the washing line, taking rubble and garden waste to the tip – but none were as tasking as trying to get my 2014-15 tax code corrected by Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs, who have assumed, or rather presumed, my various casual jobs will be sufficiently lucrative to propel me into the higher rate tax bracket (chance would be a fine thing); having shed many staff in recent years it would be hoped that those remaining at the tax office would know what they were doing but judging by the incompetent I eventually spoke to (after 20 minutes of recorded apologies for the delay in connecting me to an ‘advisor’), that is not the case and I must try again after they have received some (totally irrelevant) information from my latest employer.

Confused Cactus

A week before Easter and our so-called Christmas cactus finally bursts into bloom, the final conclusive proof of global warming.

Family Walk

With the younger daughter still visiting and the weather fine, if a little breezy, we took the opportunity for a family walk, following the Teesdale Way Path from Blackwell, high above the right bank of the river, to the bridge at Croft, and returning through the fields on the other side; with two Endomondo apps running in tandem we had the miles counted off in stereo, encouraging a tidy pace with the six miles covered in just over two hours, working up an appetite for our tea of Monkey curry (if worried see Farmers’ Market below), onion bhajis and pappadums.  

Richmond Park

A day dodging showers in Richmond with lunch in The Station before returning to the car through the park where I noticed the path now passed either side of a circular bed of shrubs and flowers that used to be an impenetrable group of rhododendron, laurel and hawthorn bushes; well not quite impenetrable as I recall the elder daughter disappearing head first into it on her first attempt to ride her bike in that very same park some twenty-odd years ago.

Farmers Market

Sedgefield farmers’ market was re-launched today with about ten stalls operating and they had clearly done good business by the time we arrived judging by the depleted stocks from which we made our selection: a piece of Morden Blue cheese and three curry sauces from spicymonkey, including a worryingly named monkey curry which needed careful perusal of the ingredients before purchase.

Tip Toers

The Tip Toers quiz team, supplemented by the younger daughter and her familiarity with current music, had a good end to the cricket club quiz season with a very respectable score of 81 out of 100, though that was only good enough for eighth place in a close bunched finish that saw us separated from second place by just 8 points; what we need now is to find a summer-time venue with easier questions or less formidable opponents.

Friday Night Lights (Friday 4/4/14)

Not the iconic Buzz Bissinger book following the fortunes of a Texas high school American football team that played on Friday nights to fanatical crowds of 20,000 but a much lower key association football match at Moore Lane Park, Newton Aycliffe, where in front of 285 spectators the hosts were narrowly beaten by Spennymoor Town; the floodlights always add focus, intimacy and a touch of theatre to proceedings and with a backlog of previously postponed games to catch up on in the Northern League, there should be a few more such occasions to enjoy before the end of the season. 

Robin Hood’s Bay

Drove over the mist-shrouded North York Moors to meet my old walking buddy Pete at Robin Hood’s Bay where we wisely amended our planned route to avoid the low cloud inland and instead kept to the relatively clear coastal strip, following the Cleveland Way along the cliff top to Ravenscar and back, taking advantage of the low tide on our return leg to cover the last mile or so via the beach, below the worryingly crumbling cliffs; a good seven and a half mile stretch of the legs even if the usual stunning scenery was absent, with the best view of the day to be found back at Robin Hood’s Bay – the cake stand in the Old Bakery tea shop. 

Stockton High Street

Stockton High Street used to be the widest in the country and, despite its multiple re-configurations in futile attempts to regenerate business, a visit remains entertaining due to the strange characters or weird behaviour often on view, and today was no exception: first at the Quaint and Quirky Café where our lunch was accompanied by the usual inadvertent floor show provided by the waiting-on staff and some of their customers, then in the outdoor market where a man was striding along oblivious to, or unconcerned by, a large plastic bag that had attached itself to his right shoe producing a ridiculous clunk swish, clunk swish sound as he walked along.

Mechanics

Today’s maths mentoring required dredging up more physics, this time the calculation of forces, energy, work and power, which I used to enjoy doing on the basis the words meant something and the concepts could be visualised quite readily, however with the “s.i.” units (new-fangled things when I was a lad) now completely replacing the old imperial units it took a moment or two before I could relate newtons, joules and even watts to good old pounds force, foot-pounds and horsepower, and even longer to work out that under this terminology weight (being a force) is measured in newtons not kilograms (which measure mass not weight); confusing -  but so were the old days when pounds were both used as (different) units for mass and force.