Good Friday

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Just been listening to Argus by Wishbone Ash. It began as something to listen to whilst peeling potatoes, the idea of listening to something while peeling potatoes prompted by the sight of Diana’s headphones lying unattended on the window sill and the weight of my iPhone in my pocket. I don’t usually think to listen to something whilst peeling potatoes. It just never occurs to me.

While there is a fair bit of umpty-tumpty-tum in Argus – the rock equivalent of an oompa band, you might say – there are several good tracks. Diana’s favourite is ‘Worrier’ because of the line “I’d have to be a worrier…”, though the album sleeve persists in misprinting it as ‘Warrior’…

Album sleeve, did I say? Yes, I did. How did I come to be listening to an album with a sleeve on headphones whilst peeling potatoes? Do I have a portable turntable that I can just cart into the kitchen and plug in next to the kettle? I do not. I already said (or heavily implied, at any rate) that it was on my iPhone. It’s just that the original is an LP, a disc of vinyl in a cardboard sleeve in my study, but through the magic of a turntable with a USB cable and a piece of free software called Audacity I have converted it into an MP3 file and loaded it into iTunes on my iPhone – for personal use only, I hasten to add. This has the merit (ahem!) of reproducing the crackles and blips familiar from much playing in the old days.

I bought Argus many years ago whilst at university, largely because my friend Allan had it and we used to listen to it at his place, and also because it has a picture of a dark ages soldier with a spear looking into a sky containing a tiny flying saucer. It was the type of thing that was really meaningful back then.

The potatoes, to get back to the subject (I think), were for dinner on Good Friday, after a walk on the beach. We have been in Cornwall this time for about two weeks and this was our first trip to the beach. Partly it has been too wet and cold and partly it is the result of starting to think of ourselves as living here. As visitors, we just had to go to the beach as soon as possible, but as residents we can take it or leave it, like living in London and not bothering to visit the Tower, because it’s always right there.

Tris and I came down about two weeks ago, with a car load of her stuff from uni, and a few things of mine and Diana’s. Diana stayed in Woking so as to attend her final Surrey County Council Meeting on the Tuesday and came down by train straight after that. And in the fortnight before coming down we got the Woking house ready to go on sale.

A professional decorated Ellie’s old room (too complicated for us) and our bedroom (too big), while I painted the walls and woodwork in the kitchen and dining room. Then there was much cleaning and arranging of the decluttered furniture. Finally we got a couple of estate agents to look at it and tell us what price it should be. We chose one and they took the measurements and photographs and before the end of last week it was on the market. Several people came to view it, and one made an offer, which we accepted. Just like that. There’s many a slip ’twixt cup and lip, as the old saying has it, but so far so good.

This not-living-in-Woking concept is getting very concrete.

Another reason for going to the beach was that Tris’ friend Luke is visiting us over Easter, and as a visitor he just had to go to the beach as soon as possible. Luke and Tris can go striding off over the beach and cliffs at a pace that Diana and I no longer manage. There were quite a few surfers in the water, some of them so far out it seemed the waves would never break in time for them to catch, but clearly they were waiting for the one big one. It is still too cold for us to join them.

Argus has segued into Tales from Topographic Oceans (by Yes) on the basis of alphabetical order of artist. Before it in my list is White Light/White Heat by the Velvet Underground, another university days acquisition. To be accurate, it was a gift. It was bought by a friend who had heard it at a party in Cambridge and thought it was terrific. She went out and bought it and played it to us, extolling its virtues, but it seemed I was the only one who liked it. And as time went by (not much time, to be honest), she became less enamoured of it, veering towards dislike, and concluded that it was one of those “you had to be there” things and she wasn’t there any more, so she gave it to me.

A lot of my music stems from university, which coincided with the prog rock era, a music which suited the university ambience of long hair and beards. That doesn’t explain the Altered Images and Siouxsie and the Banshees albums, I confess. And how I came across the Blue Nile I’ll never know. Travel east to Egypt and turn right? Don’t be a smart aleck…

In case you were still wondering, the potatoes have been eaten, except for the ones that weren’t.

Spring Cleaning

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I’ve been spring cleaning my study in the last week or two. I packed up all the books into boxes, blowing the dust off, and took apart all the bookshelves to move them away from the walls. Similarly, I packed up the files and shifted the cupboards. I took the desk apart so it could be moved as well.

This might sound a little drastic just to do a little spring cleaning, even when I tell you that the shelves and cupboards had been in place for over a decade. The next step will sound even more drastic: reassembly in a new room 225 miles away.

I’ll come clean. This wasn’t just about spring cleaning. We are actually starting our move from Surrey to Cornwall. Diana’s study and Tris’ study were also packed up, plus the books, DVDs and shelves from the sitting room, and the dining room furniture. And a few other items. (But not everything.) Removal men put it all into two vans and I headed for Cornwall to get to the house ahead of them.

The idea was for the smaller van to unload in the late afternoon and return home the same day, and for the larger van to unload some things and finish off the following morning. Then they would take a couple of items to Eleanor in Oxford and three beds back to Woking, where Diana awaited them. (I’ll explain that later.) All went according to plan, until the larger van was a street away from the Cornwall house and its rear wheel all but fell off. The guys were kind of glad it hadn’t happened earlier, such as at 60 mph on the A303. Fortunately, the garage up the hill was right dealership for the van (Ford) and a man came down to effect sufficient repairs to enable the van to park outside the house overnight. They finished unloading in the morning, then took the van up the hill for a full repair. This took most of the day, apparently, and so the delivery to Oxford had to be delayed until the following Tuesday, though they did get back to Diana on Friday morning.

The guys unloading had a tough job. My study and Diana’s are at opposite extremes of the house – mine two floors up in the attic conversion and hers through to the back and down a level. The guys had a lot of going up and down stairs. On the few occasions where I could say “that goes in the dining room” or “that’s for the breakfast room”, they seemed very happy.

At the end, my study was full of boxes and pieces of furniture (by which I mean ‘furniture in pieces’), with barely enough space to squeeze between them. It was a matter of putting shelves up, unloading some books onto them and taking the empty boxes out of the room in order to open enough space to put the cupboards up and unload some files into them, and remove some more boxes. Finally I could put the desk together. There was more room to move in Diana’s study, so I was able to put up shelves and cupboards before she joined me, by train, on Saturday. On Sunday I moved one set of shelves to a more satisfactory place.

Then the work began.

I had to amalgamate the shelves and books from my study and the sitting room (since we won’t have many books in the Cornish sitting room) so there was a lot of sorting into order and deciding what went where. Also, taking out duplicates which we hadn’t managed to find in nearly thirty years of marriage. And, to free up space, taking out books I am not too bothered about keeping. This included a string of naval warfare novels set in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, bought when I ran out of new Hornblower stories and didn’t want to go cold turkey. At length I had all the books in various types of order. Then Diana found some more in a box so I had to go through again to find some more ‘disposables’, which of course were not in the same part of the alphabet as the newly discovered ones, so much shuffling of books along and between shelves was necessary.

Then the real work began.

I had several boxes of stuff collected over the years – memorabilia, things related to my career, old diaries and notebooks, photographs. These all had to be looked through to see if I really wanted to keep them. Most of the diaries just had work appointments and I really couldn’t see myself wanting to know which audit client I went to see on which day in 1980, when I worked for Ernst & Whinney. If I ever write an autobiography (highly unlikely), it won’t contain details of audit clients. So out went the diaries. Then there were my notebooks from my last ten years at Shell. (I didn’t have any paper diaries from this period, since we were all electronic by then.) The note books are chronological and contain interview notes, task lists, drafts of documents, rough plans, mind maps, records of meetings and other stuff. They are full of initials and acronyms which I had to struggle to understand, though it was common parlance at the time. It’s amazing what three years (nearly) can do to the memory.

Anyway, I should say, “the notebooks were…” because they too went into the recycling bin.

In this way, I emptied three boxes about the size of a case of wine (actually, they were exactly the size of a case of wine, that having been the contents prior to superfluous notebooks and memorabilia). Still got two left though, sitting on the floor in a corner of the room, sneering at me and saying “What are you going to do about us, then?” If they don’t shut up, it’ll be the garage for them. The old one, with the ivy growing through the roof.

I found other stuff, carefully hoarded, just in case, such as sheets of Letraset, once upon a time used for headings and titles in the camera copy for amateur magazines. I think I am safe in chucking them out. If we reach a state where laptops and the internet and electronic publishing all cease to work, 32 point Cooper Black transferrable lettering will be pretty far down my list of priorities. (The same reasoning might be applied to the vinyl LPs – but it won’t. I’m keeping them.)

Study1

The next thing I need to worry about is the CDs. They aren’t in the right place at the moment, but there is nowhere better to put them, and nothing better to put them in. I need to look out for a CD rack, preferably a cheap one in a second hand shop. I have a strong suspicion, however, that they will just sit where they are, annoying me mildly, for the next several years.

Study2

So now my study is useable, and Diana has sorted hers into shape too. The house is growing into the amalgam of both houses that we had envisaged. The collection of unwanted furniture in the (top) garage grows. Which brings me to the furniture going back east. Eleanor has long had her eye on the sofa bed and we were happy to let her have it, along with the dishwasher that became surplus to requirements when we had a new kitchen fitted in 2011. We’ve been trying for a year to find a way to get them to her that didn’t cost more for transport than buying new ones, and finally succeeded. As for the beds, well the Surrey house has three rooms that need to look like bedrooms again when it comes to selling, and we had excess beds in Cornwall from its holiday letting days. QED (or something like that).

The plan now is to be in Cornwall more than in Surrey, until we sell the Surrey house, at which time we will be in Cornwall very much more than in Surrey.

SOGs on Belvedere

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 [With apologies to Damon Runyon]

Well, it is a while since the SOGs get together for lunch, around six months, which is more than somewhat longer than usual, on account of I spend September thinking I should email the guys about getting together for SOGs in October, and October thinking I should email the guys about getting together for SOGs in November, and in November finally sending out an email about getting together for SOGs in December. Even then I announce the date as Friday 15th December and it is a good job I mention ‘Friday’ as 15th December is a Saturday, which is by no means a good day for SOGs to meet. But SOGs have more than a few brain cells and are not confused by this and assume I mean 14th anyway.

About half the guys and exactly half the dolls say they can come and the others say they cannot, except the couple of guys who do not care to reply, and Ian the Adder who is in a superposition of quantum states, being uncertain whether he can come or not. The half of the dolls who can come is Rosemary (SOGs is a tad short on dolls) and this will be her first time.

So a couple of days before the lunch I am expecting nine and a half guys and dolls, which is a good number for lunch, and I send out a reminder. Then the second round of apologies come in. Hands-on Adam has a lot of stuff to do. Rosemary cannot make it after all, so it is only guys again. Keith the Spear’s ever-loving partner is knocked over at a gas station by some dizzy driver reversing around the pumps and fractures her wrist severely so naturally Keith the Spear has to stay with her. Safari Paul has a cough which makes itself known in restaurants and other such places of public amusement and he declines to share it with the rest of us. This is just as well for Safari Paul as if he gives all the SOGs a cough just in time for Christmas we might get to considering this unfriendly and place him in a sack and drop him off Waterloo Bridge. Then Justice Peter says he can come after all. We also hear from Travelling Dave who tells us how hot and humid it is in Singapore just now and there is much muttering about placing him in a sack also.

We assemble at a quarter to twelve at Shell Centre and by twelve the uncertainty about Ian the Adder collapses when he does not turn up. So there are six of us: Athlete Alun, Morbid John, Keith the Bear, Flying Nigel, Justice Peter and me. The guy on the door lets us in and we make our way up to the restaurant on the 2nd floor. The lunch tickets allow us £6 for lunch and as ever it is the challenge to get as close as possible to this price without having to take a yoghurt off the tray at the till. I take the fried fish and chips with mushy peas and a slice of key lime pie and have 75p left. I discover that a fresh orange juice costs 75p. The doll at the till looks at my tray and says like this: “You know you can only spend £6, don’t you?”

I nod and say how it should be OK. She rings up the prices and the total indeed comes to £6.00. “How do you do that?” she says. I smile and walk away with my lunch.

Towards the end of lunch we get to talking about which bar we go to next. I say I do not care to walk very far, as I have an injection in my foot the day before. It is the kind of injection, says the doc, which makes the foot feel worse before it gets better, and he is not wrong about the feel worse part, at any rate. Athlete Alun says he knows this place, and this place is the bar in the Marriott Hotel in the old County Hall. Keith the Bear says he meets us there after he calls in on friends still in Shell Centre.

So we cross the street to the old County Hall and Athlete Alun leads us into the hotel and along the corridors to the bar. I say to him: “I guess it helps if you call Keith the Bear and tell him this is the Premier Inn, not the Marriott.” I for one am pleased that it is the Premier Inn and not the Marriott as it is not so far to walk and I will give plenty of seven to four that the drinks are cheaper. The bar is not one for real ale fans as all the beer is jet propelled, but the Guinness tastes good enough, at that. It is also easy to hold a conversation as the background music has the day off, which makes it a better place than the Allbarone on the corner.

Four of the guys (not including Morbid John and me) have a share in a dog and a great deal of the conversation is about this dog. It seems this dog wins more than a few races and the guys are onto a good thing, but sometimes the dog ambles out of the trap and takes the scenic route round the track and no one knows why. I am thinking maybe the trainer slips the dog a Mickey Finn, but of course I do not say this. And the four guys buy another dog, which is too young to run yet.

Around four it is getting dark outside and I start to feel I drink enough Guinness for one day, and the other guys feel the same, although they are not drinking Guinness. So we all say merry Christmas and happy new year, and I head for the train, which is full of guys and dolls, and go home.

Les George

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Last Wednesday was the funeral of Uncle Les – Mr Leslie George, OBE – who became my uncle when he married my mother’s sister, Helen, in 1961. He was the founding headmaster of Christleton High School (which is now an academy but was then a secondary modern) in 1958 and stayed in that position until his retirement in 1980. He remained active in education-related areas for the rest of his life.

That’s the formal part. I remember a kindly man, a proper uncle who, after visiting us in Wymeswold, would slip us children a half-crown each with instructions not to tell mother. I remember staying with Auntie Helen and Uncle Les on several occasions, once after the end of term at Oxford when the rest of the family were on holiday, when I proudly showed him a story I had written, “Alcain and the Swamp Demons”. “A bit ploddy,” was his verdict. What does he know, I thought. This brought the house down at the OU Speculative Fiction Group when I read it to them after the pub one evening. But he was right and I had to put lots more jokes in before I managed to sell it. I remember a quiet, appreciative comment about the engagement ring I bought for Diana. I remember how easily he spoke to an audience, a one-man BBC keeping people informed, entertained and educated. I remember more, the particular, the general, too much to write here.

The funeral was at Malpas church, which was full, though not bursting at the seams. The general view was that many people were leaving the funeral itself to family and close friends, and instead electing to go to the memorial service in Chester Cathedral a few weeks later. Les’ daughter Juliet spoke beautifully about her father.

The hearse, funeral car and a procession of four further cars, containing family, closest friends and the vicar then headed for Wrexham Crematorium, taking a cross-country route and including one traffic light-controlled junction where the green was on insufficiently long and the tail of the procession went through a red light. The ceremony at the crematorium was brief and we departed for the “Cock o’ Barton”, a short trip away round the ring road, where the other people from the church were already long assembled, and there were tea, coffee, sandwiches and cakes for sustenance, and a chance to talk.

Someone said they had seen John Prescott at the church. Yes, the John Prescott, Lord Prescott, former deputy leader of the Labour Party. In a previous school Les had taught him and was instrumental, some years later, in enabling him to go to Ruskin College, Oxford and on to better things than a 15 year-old secondary modern school leaver might have expected. He wrote about it in his Daily Mirror column on 25th October – click here and scroll down to the second piece “He’s a man in a million”. He also called Juliet to speak with her. Good man.

Coco da Mol

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Lots of things to write about since the last posting on August 25th – another Orieladelphians dinner, a replacement cooker, more surfing, for example – but two things have conspired to inhibit me from actually writing them.

First, my laptop developed sloth-like, not to say glacial, tendencies: click on <Word>, five minutes later Word opens. Click on <File>, five minutes later the File options deign to show up. Diagnosed as faulty hard drive. So I’m having to use the old PC in the hall instead, which means I’m not doing nearly as much.

Secondly, I have had my shoulder operation and it hurts and I’m on painkillers. It will get better eventually, but for the moment anything more than a few lines typing and a few clicks on the mouse is painful and I have to stop

How to find fossils

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Well, last Tuesday I did go to see the consultant about my MRI scan results. He showed me the pictures of my shoulder and pointed to a large white area. “This is a calcium deposit,” he said, “about 2.6 cm by 2.7 cm.”

That sounds big, I thought. “That’s big,” he said. “Too much to get rid of by injections. I think we have to operate.” So I’m booked in for second half of September. (Not all of it, just one day.)

I told number one daughter about this. “Where did the calcium come from?” she asked. I didn’t know, I hadn’t thought to query its origins. I was thinking more about getting rid of it. I checked on-line and found that the calcium is excreted by cells, but the cause is not entirely known.

Bearing in mind the gall stones I had last year, it seems clear to me that there is only one answer: I’m fossilising from the inside out.

Scanning for Lifeforms

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I had an MRI scan last week. My right shoulder has been giving me gip for quite a while now and I’ve been progressing through various treatments. I had physiotherapy, which involved manipulation and electrotherapy and ultrasound and heat treatment. After four sessions, it appeared to be improving, but in the fifth session we tried acupuncture, which had no apparent effect, except that my shoulder felt worse again, and after the sixth it seemed back to where I started. The therapist recommended an X-ray.

So I returned to the doctor who agreed about the X-ray and followed it up with a steroid injection. Fortunately I’m not an elite athlete (nor any kind of athlete, as it happens) so there were no ramifications from that. (Whilst in A&E a few weeks ago, on an entirely unrelated matter, I spotted a notice in the triage room warning nurses to check with cyclists from the Olympics road races what medications they were allowed – obviously preparing for carnage in the narrow roads to Ripley and not wanting to have Bradley Wiggins disqualified from next year’s Tour de France.)

The steroid injection eased the pain a bit, but did not remove it, so my doctor filled out a form for an ultrasound scan and gave me the name of a consultant, whom I duly went to see. He discarded the notion of ultrasound and said I should have an MRI scan. We went through a safety checklist. The ‘M’ in ‘MRI’ stands for ‘magnetic’ and it’s a strong magnet in a scanner – three tesla. Doesn’t sound much, 3T, but the ITER fusion reactor only has 13T. You want to keep metal away from a 3T field. So, did I have a heart pacemaker? Any metal replacement joints? Any fragments of metal in my eyes? No I didn’t. “How about mercury amalgam fillings,” I said. Not a problem.

The radiologist went through the list again when I went for the scan, in the reception area before I got near the machine, just to be sure. Then I stripped off my clothes, down to underpants, and put on a gown. This was in a changing room, not the reception area, I hasten to point out. Good job I wasn’t wearing my chainmail pants, I thought. (No, not really. I just made that up.) I lay down on a bed with my shoulder wedged into a support to keep it still and in the right position. I was going to have to lie completely still for twenty minutes. Twenty minutes? I don’t think I’ve ever lain still for twenty minutes, while awake.

The radiologist warned me that it would be loud, like road works. “But we have headphones through which we will play music.” She put the headphones on me, gave me an emergency bulb to squeeze in case of emergencies, jacked up the table and slid me into the tube of the scanner. The music was some easy listening stuff that I didn’t recognise. It didn’t matter. The music was just to fill the gaps between different phases of the scan, because when the scanner started up that was all I could hear. To drown out the scanner you’d need Deep Purple on full throttle, though, come to think of it, heavy metal probably wouldn’t work inside a scanner. (Metal? Magnetism? It’s a… oh never mind.)

The main purpose of the headphones, I decided, was for the radiologist (who by this time was safely out of the scanner room) to talk to me. She announced three bursts of three minutes each. When they were over, she said there were eleven minutes to go. Still eleven minutes? I needed to move something. Would it be okay to wiggle my toes? The minutes dragged on. I stared at the  wide green line just off-centre in the roof of the tube. Or perhaps it was my head that was off-centre, for my shoulder to be in the right place. The line was maybe ten centimetres above my face. That was no problem; I went caving once, as part of a leadership training course, and the gaps were much smaller, the rock right in your face. How much longer to go? My body, inside the machine, felt hot and sweaty, whilst my feet were in the cool of the room. The noise was unceasing, but not constant, varying between continuous and staccato. I decided that I would not make a good secret agent, couldn’t take the torture.

Then it stopped. “I’m just coming into the room now,” said the radiologist. It was over. I dressed and she handed over a CD with the scan results to give to the consultant. So next Tuesday I’ll find out whether I need surgery, or what.

Surfing USA! Well, no, Cornwall actually

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Cowabunga, dudes! The Smith family (Diana, Tris and myself) are out to hit the waves at Polzeath, not as famous as Newquay a few miles further along the coast, but better. We check the tide timetable and decide that five o’clock, a few hours after low tide, will be the best time, and that coincides with the best of the sunshine according to the weather forecast. Perfect.

We load the two surf boards into the car (two? For three people? What?) plus towels and dry clothes and head for the beach. In the school summer holiday period, the beach car park usually fills up, but by the time we get there it has emptied out a bit and we find plenty of space at the front, nearest the water. And at this time, parking is free.

First thing is to buy another surf board, and there are several shops selling them, but we  know precisely what we want, from which shop, so that’s done quickly.

The next thing, having changed, is to lock the car. I can’t just press the button on the electronic key, as usual, because then I would have to take an electronic key into sea water which seems a really bad idea. But there is a solid metal bit I can pull out of the electronic key unit and turn in the lock, and being solid metal, it is okay going into water. So I lock the car using that key and it doesn’t operate the central locking so only the driver’s door locks. I lock the three other doors from inside and then lock the driver’s door. That leaves the tailgate with its own lock into which the metal key will fit, except that it doesn’t. There is a blockage, the key won’t go in. So I lock the whole car with the electronic bit, open the door with the metal bit to put the electronic bit inside – and the alarm goes off. I stop the alarm, which unlocks all the doors. This is starting to look desperate. Will we all be able to go surfing, or will someone have to stay out with the car key? One final go: I use the electronic bit to lock the car with the driver’s door still open, put the electronic bit in a cubby hole in the car, then lock the driver’s door with the metal bit, and the alarm stays off! Excellent!

I pin the key inside a pocket in my swimming shorts and we head for the water.

How did you reach the shorts through the wetsuit, do I hear you ask? I’m glad you asked. Every body else in the water is in wetsuits, but not us. We is hardcore: swimsuits and t-shirts. We only use body boards, none of this fancy standing up, but we do it hardcore.

It feels cold walking across the beach and colder walking into the sea – the anticipation of that first wave hitting your genitals is like nothing on earth, except when that first wave actually hits – but once immersed it isn’t too bad. It even starts to feel warm. Tris and I walk out to where the water comes well above the waist and attempt to catch waves there. Diana stays in shallower water. I launch into several waves and get nowhere, but then I catch one and travel several yards before subsiding into the water. I miss a few more, then catch one again. This is fun. Even the mouthfuls of salty water don’t spoil it. I see Tris and Diana gliding into the shallows with satisfying frequency.

We swap boards around because the green one is worse than the two blue ones and it’s not fair, man, for one person to have to use it all the time. The first time I try it, it bends. It bends so much I immediately check it for a break, but it is still in one piece. It just bends. That’s probably why it doesn’t perform as well; I’m sure there is a reason that surfboards are flat rather than banana-shaped.

After something over half an hour, but less than an hour, we have had enough and return to the car. With the key that I haven’t lost from my pocket I unlock the car and open the door. The alarm goes off…

By the evening I ache pretty much all over, but the next day we do it all again and I discover it is possible to ache more than ‘all over’.

Mass Airflow

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I took the Mercedes in for a service on Monday. New front tyres, new rear brake disks and pads, new springs on front suspension, new mass airflow sensor. New hole in bank account.

New mass airflow sensor? I didn’t even know it had a mass airflow sensor, or what a mass airflow sensor did, but what it does is ensure the right mix of air and fuel. When it doesn’t work, the car pulls away from stationary more or less as usual, but if you try to accelerate hard it gives a gallic shrug and potters up to your desired speed in its own good time. This is disconcerting when the first time it happens is during an overtaking manoeuvre…

Anyway, now I have a new one. Just thought you’d like to know.