I slept like a log last night, but was still wide awake a couple of
hours earlier than I needed to be.
I got up, made toast and watched an episode of "Shameless"
in which some young lad followed his base urges, did "the dirty deed"
with a rather unmoral young lady but found himself biting off far more than he
could chew and got porked to death (by the rather unmoral young lady).
The show then explored the moral implications of what do you do if
you (albeit accidentally) pork someone to death. I suppose there are all
sorts of things you might do; reporting it to the police being the most
obvious. But instead, the rather unmoral young lady (and her equally unmoral
pal) chose to roll up the dead body in a carpet and chucked it in a ditch.
This turned out not to be the best thing to do with the corpse of someone who
has been porked to death.
One lives and learns.
I stopped off at the co-op on the way to work. That place is quite
odd at half past six in the morning; it certainly attracts a certain sort...
Here's a question for you. Given a car park with only one other car in it, why
would you park so close to that other car that its driver (me) can't get
to the door of the car? And would you really be justified in taking umbrage
when asked to move your car so that I can get to mine?
I drove up the motorway listening to the news on the radio (as I
do). A major dam in Ukraine has been attacked and been blown up. Downstream there will be
floods; upstream a nuclear power plant won't get cooling water. Obviously the
Russians did it as part of the war effort. Obviously? It was implied that many
international observers aren't convinced. Did a Ukrainian faction do it to
frame the Russians and to garner sympathy from the international community? I
don't know. Perhaps they did, perhaps they didn't. Perhaps I'm just old and
cynical but more and more it seems this Ukrainian situation is just going to run
and run.
There was also talk about how many nurses from overseas are being employed in the UK for the simple reason that
the UK isn't training enough of its own. The Ugandan government isn't happy
about the constant flow of their trained staff to the UK leaving them with
massive shortages. The UK has no formal recruitment process from Uganda (unlike
other African countries) but if a nurse in Uganda has no ties to where they
live and can get seven times the wage doing the same job in the UK, what are
they going to do? It's called "market forces"; the UK
government would have us believe it's a good thing.
Certainly my line of work would come to a shuddering halt if the UK
had to rely on home-grown staff. One thing (among many) that boils my
piss is seeing the same old problem continuing year after year when it has such
an obvious solution.
I got to work and did what I couldn't avoid. At tea break my phone
rang. It was my brother. The chap who is (hopefully) going to buy Dad's
house reckons he's found woodworm in the loft. He might have done, he might
not. I have no idea. I don't think I've ever been in that loft and I have no
intention of clambering up there any time soon.
Anyway, the (potential) buyer has asked his solicitor to ask
our solicitor to ask our estate agent if we'd pay to get the woodworm sorted. I
sighed. The survey on the house happened ages ago and it has taken weeks just
to ask the question. I wonder how soon he will get the reply. This is why the
sale of the house is taking so long, isn't it? Such a shame that the process
doesn't allow him to give me a ring and we'd have it all sorted in a couple of
hours.
I took a little diversion as I drove home after work. Hearing there
was a lorry on fire on the bit of the motorway closest to work I drove through
Aylesford where the traffic was very slow-moving. And then I saw why it was
slow-moving. On the other side of the road was a fire engine in front of which
was a land rover type car with the front stoved in and a huge tarpaulin
covering all the windows. I’ve never seen that before – something horrendous
must have happened there.
It really brings home how fragile life is, doesn’t it? Someone set
off to drive round some back streets in Aylesford this afternoon and won’t be
coming home again…
I got home and took the dogs down to the woods and enjoyed the
simple pleasure of walking round. As we walked we had a minor episode. As I was
posting up the obligatory photo to Facebook I was having a little
difficulty and was concentrating perhaps too much on the phone. I was conscious
of two black dogs to my right, and Bailey wouldn’t go far away. And then a
voice said “hello”. I looked up and saw some woman puffing up the hill
behind me on a pedal bike. It was then that I realized that only one of the two
black dogs to my right was mine. Treacle had (quite uncharacteristically)
found a friend. I said hello to the woman on the bike and to her dog, and
commented that I’d obviously lost a dog.
The woman on the bike immediately went into a panic that would have
made Corporal Jones (out of “Dad’s Army”) proud. She wouldn’t be told
that Morgan wouldn’t be far away, and as she paced to and fro (frantically
looking in all directions) I gave three sharp blasts on the whistle. Morgan
appeared within seconds.
I meet these sorts of idiots all the time. Does no one else ever
come across them?
Pausing only briefly to cap a SleepZee (it’s a Munzee thing)
we came home to find “er indoors TM” had gone
shopping.
She eventually returned, and we had a rather good bit of dinner and
a bottle of plonk. You can’t beat a decent bottle of plonk… As I realized earlier
life is too short not to miss the opportunity of a decent bottle of plonk.
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