I had some Sainsbury’s own-brand muesli
for brekkie. I have to wonder whatever possessed me to buy two bags of the
stuff; it isn’t that good.
I watched a little telly as I scoffed
it, then sparked up my lap-top. I sent out birthday wishes to three friends, and
had something of a little existential crisis. My old schoolfriend Dave Thornton
was fifty-six today. Fifty-six. Where have the years gone. How can he be that
old? Is it really that long since we went fishing, or walked miles to get
chips? He was the chap who introduced me to the Electric Light Orchestra, and
now he’s old?
And then I realised that I’m two months
older than him, and suddenly all was well again. What was that all about?
I told the world about my third album
choice. As luck would have it, having decided to list alphabetically by album
title meant that of the albums I’ve chosen, the two most mainstream and most
remembered ones went out first. The last eight are rather more obscure;
particularly now some forty years after most people have forgotten about them. Take
today’s choice… do any of my loyal readers remember BA Robertson?
Having completely forgotten where I'd
left my car yesterday I spent quite a while this morning roaming the streets to
find it. It came to light where I'd left it.
As I drove to work the pundits on the
radio were talking about the ongoing moves to form a "land army"
to harvest the crops of fruit and vegetables that have been planted but have
seemingly no one to pick them. This problem was originally brought up four
years ago when all the East European fruit pickers went home after the Brexit
vote, but no one in the media really wanted to say anything about it then. But
now we have coronageddon to blame it all on, it looks like a small army of
workers will be mobilised to get the harvest in.
Odd how the public will come together to
sort out what is being billed as the aftermath of the corona virus, but no one
did anything for the last three years as Brexit was seen as too political.
I got some petrol on the way to work,
and then went on to Sainsburys where there was some consternation in the queue.
The idea was that everyone forms one queue outside the store, and then the NHS
workers come forward (when called) when the doors opened at half past
seven. What actually happens is that everyone comes forward when the doors open
at half past seven and every person who is in the queue has an argument with
the staff on the door when they can't show a valid NHS staff ID card. Having
seen this happen before, several NHS staff formed their own queue this morning,
and when half past seven came, a row kicked off between those in their own
queue and those NHS staff in the main queue (like me). In the middle of
all of this was some old bat who announced that she was going in anyway as
she's an old lady and no one was going to stop her. She got rather irate when
she was stopped.
Interestingly for all that the
Sainsburys staff (both at the store and the petrol station) are very
quick to ensure that the general public maintain social distancing, they
certainly don't do it themselves.
It's got so that I don't so much go to
Sainsburys before work for the shopping as for the entertainment.
I got to work; I did my bit. As we
worked the boss was singing the praises of a certain source of continuing professional development. I'm not sure who was
the most impressed; her to find that I was the author of that website, or me to
see that the boss had a shortcut to my CPD blog on her phone.
At tea break we had cake (again).
Some grateful member of the public had sent in a load of "thank you"
buns. I scoffed mine as I finished my current e-book... I must make a
confession here. the author of these books is a friend of mine. This must
affect how I view them... His writing style is very reminiscent of the works of
John Wyndham; whilst dealing with rather up-to-date concepts in astrophysics,
they do read as if they were written fifty years ago. The books are billed as a
series; and realistically that's how they should be considered. It's a shame
the last one hasn't been published yet. I thought it had been; I wouldn't have
started reading them had I known that. I don't want to be critical, but
together each book is rather short (to my mind).
I would say that I would sack the
proof-readers... there were more typos, punctuation and grammatical errors in
these three e-books than in anything I've read for the last year.
I spent quite a bit of today thinking
about yesterday’s video-meet-up with over twenty geo-mates. Would it be *that*
difficult to organise an on-line quiz night for the weekend? I could come up
with some questions easily enough and then have (say) a dozen teams (it
would have to be households because of the lock-down) each of which could
log in on the Zoom software. We’d have a round of questions; everyone would
email me the answers. We’d have another round of questions… The winner would
have bragging rights.
I wonder if there would be much
interest…
The new Red Dwarf special starts in a
minute…
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