People

Dumb and Dumber

/ masher / 8 Comments

Stupid people really annoy me.

They shouldn’t, but they do.

I shouldn’t let it get to me, but I can’t help it.

 

Currently, there are two types of people who are unneccessarily annoying me.

The first are those people who still wear a face mask.

When they are on their own.

In their car.

Who are they protecting themselves from? Themselves?

But, I s’pose it’s no worse than those who continue to wear one when they are on their own, walking down the street.  Walking on their own in the open air, wearing a face mask.

OK, I know that wearing a mask is no longer mandatory and is now a matter of personal preference.  But, even at the height of Covid19, I don’t believe there was a single recommendation from the government or it’s medical advisors, to wear a mask when you are outside on your own.

The second type of people who are annoying me are dog owners. Not all dog owners obviously, but those who don’t pick up after their dog.

If I’m walking down the road with my dog and there is someone walking towards me and we both pass a great lump of dog turd on the pavement… I feel guilty!  As a representative of the dog-owning community, I feel like I should be apologising on behalf of whoever it was that allowed their dog to foul the footpath. Which is ridonkulous.

Just as bad are those who do pick it up and bag it, but then leave the bag there.  WTF?!   I’m seeing plenty of this happening in the woods.

Do they not realise that by doing that, they are actually making it worse?

Dog shit will not bio-degrade if it’s in a plastic bag.

You stupid, dumb-arse people.

Crime & Punishment

/ masher / 6 Comments

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s post, where I said that we should be looking at the positives of where we live, I now give you this.

Each month, I get sent the crime statistics for the town for the previous month, by the local Neighbourhood Watch bobbies.

I always read it, but to be honest, I don’t care too much about the rest of the town, I just look the area where I live. As we all would, I’m sure.

To be fair, being on the outskirts of town, we don’t get too much bother here and the stats show that last month there were just two recorded incidents in the roads near to us.

One was INTERFERING WITH A MOTOR VEHICLE, which sounds wrong… especially if the motor vehicle in question was underage.

The other was MALICIOUS COMMUNICATIONS. What’s that then? Shouting something nasty to someone?

So yes, it was pretty quiet round here, last month.

Not so much for the rest of the town though, which suffered with:

ASSAULT WITHOUT INJURY
ASSAULT WITH INJURY
THEFT FROM A MOTOR VEHICLE
PUBLIC FEAR , ALARM OR DISTRESS
STATE OR PUBLIC ORDER
ARSON NOT ENDANGERING LIFE
CRIMINAL DAMAGE
CONTROLLING OR COERCIVE BEHAVIOUR
BURGLARY RESIDENTIAL
BURGLARY COMMERCIAL
THEFT FROM A PERSON
HARRASSMENT
FRAUD
THEFT OF A MOTOR VEHICLE
SHOPLIFTING
THREATS TO KILL
MAKING OFF WITHOUT PAYMENT
TRAFFICKING OF DRUGS
CRIMINAL DAMAGE
POSSESSION OF CONTROLLED DRUGS
OBSCENE PUBLICATIONS
RACE OR RELIGIOUS AGGRAVATION
STALKING
SEXUAL
ASSAULTING A CONSTABLE
BLACKMAIL
ROBBERY
PERVERTING THE COURSE OF JUSTICE
KIDNAPPING
CRUELTY
POSSESSION OF AN ARTICLE WITH A POINT OR BLADE
POSSESSION OF FIREARMS
POSSESSION OF OTHER WEAPONS
MURDER

With the exception of the last one, there were multiple counts of all of these, giving a grand total of 1546 recorded events.

In one month.

I’m not sure we have enough positives in the town to offset those.

A Walk In The Woods

/ masher / 2 Comments

Every other weekend, I have to drive my daughter into work.  So much for getting a lay-in.

I always take the dog with me and on the way back, we call in at Kidney Wood, just off J10 of the M1

It’s a lovely little wood. It doesn’t take long to walk around, but it’s somewhere different to go.

I have been calling in there for nearly a year now, but I have never met anyone else as we walk round.

No-one.

Not a soul.

Until today.

A chap came walking towards us, as we ambled along the western path.  He had two dogs with him, who were friendly enough, but I don’t know what make they were… I’m not very good with dog brands.

Of course, we stopped and chatted briefly – as dog owners do – and I took an instant liking to him… in part because he had a small radio in his pocket that was quietly playing classical music.  I mentioned that he was the first person that I had ever met in Kidney Wood.  He smiled. “I think I’ve met you here before though.”  He pointed to Saber. “This is Simba, isn’t it?”

Well, maybe he has met us… that was a pretty close guess.

“It’s Saber.” I corrected.

“Ahh, that’s right. Well, if it wasn’t you, then it must have been your wife, I met.”  What? He knows I’m married?

I explained that was fairly unlikely, as Mrs M didn’t even know where these woods were.

“We live in the Bramingham area”, I said, “Maybe you’ve been over that way?”

“Nah, that’s too far for us. We never venture over that way.”

We bade farewell to each other and walked on. I mentioned it to Mrs M when I got home and described the chap and his dogs, but she didn’t recognise him at all.

I hope I bump into him again, as I’m keen to know whether we have actually met or whether he is just a really good guesser.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

/ masher / 7 Comments

I was overjoyed this morning, when a very nice Indian lady from Virgin Media phoned me.

Firstly, because it gave me something to write about.

Secondly – and far more importantly – she was explaining how people from other countries were hacking into my IP address.  I asked what these naughty people were doing when they got into my IP address and she couldn’t answer that properly, but the urgency in her voice convinced me that it was something that needed rectifying straightaway.

She told me that I needed a special firewall on my phone, in order to prevent the bad people from hacking into it.

She then took me through the process of installing remote access software on my phone, which I duly did.

And then I opened the app on the phone, just as she instructed me to.

But, when I questioned whether I should just agree to the EULA and DPA policies as she suggested, without actually reading them first, she hung up on me.

I’ll admit to being a bit disappointed: I thought I was playing my part very well. I wasn’t dithering too much and I hardly spelt anything wrong when we searched for the remote software – her phonetic alphabet was spot on.

But, without a word, she hung up on me.  Maybe the scammers have inroduced a ten-minute rule, in order stop time-wasters like myself.  I mean, she probably had targets to meet, else she would be marked down in her monthly appraisal.

Eleven minutes and thirty seconds.

Not bad, but I know I can do better.

The Shining

/ masher / 4 Comments

Or rather, it wasn’t shining at all.

One of my brake lights failed the other day.

Fortunately, modern cars make you aware of such things immediately and so I popped into our local Halfords to purchase a new bulb.

Of course, they come in a pack of two and that’s fine, as it’s always good to have a spare. Even though, when I find myself in the same situation later, I will have completely forgotten that I have a spare and will go out and buy two more.

Four and a half quid for a couple of bulbs… that’s OK. No problem with that.

Then I saw the ‘weFit’ sign, where they kindly offer to fit the bulbs for you… for a small charge, of course.

A small charge of eighteen pounds!

Eighteen quid to fit a bulb?

Get real, Halfords.

I fitted it myself. Took all of fifteen minutes.

I did actually use their weFit service a couple of years ago – it was only a tenner then, so there’s inflation for you!
A headlight bulb had gone and when I looked at how to replace it, it looked way too involved, so I decided to let them do it.
However, two of their staff had a go and failed. After half an hour they admitted defeat and gave me my money back, so I drove down to my local Ford dealer, who fitted it in ten minutes… for a tenner.

My Left Foot…

/ masher / 5 Comments

… is an 80’s film starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Brenda Fricker.

It was also a source of amusement to me when I recently went on holiday.

Check-in at the Self Service desks was quick and easy – now that we are old hands at it. Security was another matter though. The rest of the family all went through with no problems, but as I passed through the scanner, it beeped, even though I had removed every piece of metal from my person – save for my fillings.

I was directed to then go through the super scanner thing.  I assumed the hands-up, legs-spread pose, as directed. The guy checking it wasn’t happy  with what he was seeing and decided I needed further investigation.  “Is it alright if I touch you?”, he asked, pulling on a pair of blue latex gloves.

“Well, if you think it will help, I’m game”, I said.

“Good. Do you have anything sharp on you?”

“Only my wit.” I replied.  He let out a small laugh, pretending he hadn’t heard that particular response a hundred times already.

He felt up and down my left calf.  And then my right calf.  And then the left again.  Then he brought out a small step and instructed me to put my left leg up on it. He felt up and down my calf again.

I thought this would make a good photo to stick into the album and mouthed to my daughter to take a picture. She did so and immediately got a bollocking by a very stern looking woman in uniform who forced her to delete it and watched over her shoulder as she did so.

Meanwhile, the guy was still feeling up and down my calf and inside the bottom of my jeans.  I offered to drop my trousers, if that would make it any easier, but was told that wouldn’t be necessary.

He then took a small wooden stick with a cotton pad on the end of it, out of a sealed cellophane wrapper and took a swab around the outside of my left shoe. He  put it into a small machine to the side and pressed a button.  The machine hummed and whilst he waited for the result, he turned to check on a chap in a wheelchair who had drawn up alongside me.

He fussed around the wheelchair, checking it over thoroughly and then started checking on the chap himself.  Meantime, I’m stood with one leg up on this wooden box and swaying a bit as I’m starting to lose my balance.

He finished with the guy in the wheelchair and motioned the next person to come forward and started to pat him down.

I coughed to get his attention, as he had obviously forgotten about me and I felt that if I didn’t put my leg down soon, I was likely going to fall over.

He looked at me and then cast a glance over his shoulder toward the machine. “You can go”, he said, matter-of-factly.

“What was that all about?” asked Mrs Masher, as I threaded my belt back onto my trousers.

“I have no fucking idea”.

It stopped!

/ masher / 6 Comments

This first picture was taken just before I hit the sack last night.

The second was when I got up this morning.

Somewhere between those two times, the world got all excited and launched several megatonnes of fireworks into the air.

People threw parties and drank themselves silly and enthusiastically wished each other a fortuitous and healthy next 12 months.

Others, serenely sat and watched Jules Holland’s Hootananny, with a glass of wine.

In the Masher household, the current Mrs Masher and I, firmly shook each other by the hand and then went to bed early, thereby missing out on all the shenanigans.

We were supposed to be at a party: my dad usually throws one at his gaff and it’s generally a hoot, with plenty to eat, plenty to drink, games, dancing and loud music. It usually ends at about three in the morning, after we have conga’d our way down the street… much to the annoyance of the neighbours.

But this year it all got cancelled at the last minute as half the family have gone down with Flu / Covid type symptoms.

And I didn’t mind, really, as celebrating New Year doesn’t do much for me, anymore.

I’m obviously getting old and grumpy.

Anyway…

I think it would be overly optimistic to expect this year to be any better than last, so I’ll just wish you both a “Reasonable New Year”.

Miss Daisy

/ masher / 7 Comments

I mentioned several posts back that I got done for speeding on the motorway.  47mph on the M1. In one of those variable speed limit areas, where they had dropped the speed to forty.

To be honest, I’m not sure I even remember seeing any signage and was likely just driving along with the flow of traffic.

Any road up (pun intended), earlier this week, I attended the “Motorway Awareness Course” that they kindly offered me. For ninety quid.

And you know what… it was actually quite good and certainly better than three points on my licence.

I’d gone there, full of indignant anger and a pocketful of questions relating to motorway signage, and I came away feeling much better and with all my questions answered.

I think I actually enjoyed it.

I think the other 22 people on the course with me, quite enjoyed it too and it doesn’t do any harm to have a refresher every now and then, does it?

I even made a suggestion that they said they would pass on to Highways England for consideration:  those red X’s on the gantry which mean the lane is closed, should have another sign underneath that says “BMW drivers: this applies to you too”.

Going Out

/ masher / 2 Comments

Sitting in TGI Friday’s last night, munching my way through a 10oz sirloin, I looked out of the window and watched as a large man, clad in a long black coat and wearing a black fedora, strode through the crowds, his head slightly bowed to hide his face and his hands thrust deep into his pockets to keep them from the chill air.  Incognito, he passed through the crowd without recognition from anyone.

Apart from me.

“Dara O’Briain just walked past”, I said nonchalantly to Mrs. Masher, who was busy tucking into the world’s largest plate of spare ribs.

“That’s handy”, she said.

It was indeed handy, as we had tickets to see him in his ‘So… Where Were We?’  tour: the Milton Keynes leg starting in just over thirty minutes.

We finished our food, hurried over to the theatre, paid an extortionate amount of money for two drinks and then seated ourselves in  our rather excellent seats up in the circle (I heartily recommend seats AA 9 and 10 ).

For the next two and a half hours (with an interval) Dara entertained us with stories of his knee operation; mistaken identities; his attempts to get a free fancy toilet ; home schooling during Covid lockdown and so much more.  His interactions with the  audience were superb – gifted as he was, with a front row that consisted of Rolls Royce aircraft engineers, Formula 1 engineers, Data Analysts, a bloke who worked with a supercomputer and a family business devoted to Karcher jet washers.

Much of the second half was taken up with his tale of how he found out he’d been adopted and the lengths he had to go to to find his birth mother: a strange subject for stand up, but, as you’d imagine from a raconteur such as he, it was delivered with facts, emotion and a huge dollop of humour.

It was an excellent show.

Catch it if you can.

Come Fly With Me…

/ masher / 2 Comments

… or not.

Mrs. Masher and I have just got back from a dirty long weekend in Madrid.

We only had a couple of days to see the sights, because two days were taken up with getting there and getting back.

I know we all marvel at how aviation has made the world smaller… and it has: it only takes two hours to fly from London to Madrid.

But, either side of the flying bit, there is a whole load of shit to put up with.  Getting to Heathrow airport first thing in the morning is no easy task, I’ll tell you, what with the traffic and then the parking and having to catch the shuttle bus.

Then there is the endless queueing: queueing to check-in;  queueing for Passport Control; queueing for security; queueing at the gate and finally queueing on the plane to get your seat, while people with too much hand-luggage try desperately to squeeze it all into the overhead locker.  And, what is it with that? Every airline states that each person is permitted to take on a single piece of hand-luggage, small enough to fit into that measuring thingy that everyone ignores, at the check-in desk.  But, you always get these people stuck in front of you, as they try to squeeze their regulation sized hand-luggage into the overhead locker along with a rucksack the size of a Renault Clio – which, for some reason, was invisible to the check-in desk and the flight attendants when the passengers boarded the aircraft. And, once that’s all been forced in and the locker has been closed, they’ll produce two  large plastic carrier bags with the words “Duty Free” emblazoned across them, full of vodka, whiskey and Toblerones, which have to somehow be squeezed in there too.

“One piece of hand luggage”, my arse!

And when you land at your destination, there is the same again, as everyone jumps to their feet as soon as the Fasten Seat Belt light goes out and then they stand in the aisle with their luggage for ten minutes.  Then there’s Passport Control; Luggage Reclaim; finding the car rental place and filling in a dozen forms in triplicate.

It all takes an age.   We left home at 7am and didn’t reach our hotel till 5pm.

By then, we were exhausted and needed a holiday.

Where were you?

/ masher / 4 Comments

Unless you have been living out at Ice Station Zebra for the past month, it can’t have escaped your attention that HRH Queen Elizabeth II has finally shuffled from this mortal coil.

It’s said that we all remember where we were whenever a significant event has happened.

I can’t say that’s the case with me… there must have been dozens of significant events in my lifetime, most of which have  just mixed with the dum-de-dum-de dum-de-dum constantly playing in my head. I can remember a few of them, though.

I remember my parents dragging me from the garden into the living room to watch man step foot on the moon, on our little black & white telly.  As it was nighttime here when they did so, I’m guessing we must have watched it on the news the following day. Either way, I was only seven years old and I don’t think the magnitude of the event resonated with me at the time.

When I was fifteen, we went on  one of our regular caravan holidays in Harwich (my grandparents owned a static one on a site). Each morning, it was my job to walk down to the little shop near the entrance to the site and pick up some milk, a loaf of bread and a copy of The Sun newspaper.  To this day, I can remember picking it up and saying “Wow!” out loud.  I ran back to the caravan excitedly to tell the news, but didn’t understand why my mum suddenly burst into tears when I told her that Elvis was dead.

In 2001, Mrs. Masher and I flew home from a holiday in Brazil.  Out of the airport, it was dull journey home around the M25 and I turned the radio on to help keep me awake.  Every station was broadcasting  reports of a terrible accident in New York, where an aircraft had flown into one of the towers of the World Trade Center.  This struck home with us, as we had been on the roof of the WTC only nine months previously.  As soon as we got home, we put the TV on and watched the smoke billowing from the tower and then our sorrow turned to abject horror as we watched the second plane hit Tower 2 and we realised – along with the rest of the world – that this was no accident.

And where was I when I learned of the death of Her Majesty?  I was walking the dog. We had just come out of the woods and as we strolled across the park, one of two teenage girls  who always sit on one of the park benches, drinking cider and smoking weed, shouted at me: “Hey Mister!”  I looked up.  “The Queen’s dead!” she hollered. Knowing that the Royal Family had been summoned to Balmoral earlier that day, following reports of the monarch’s frailty, I wasn’t really shocked to hear the news. But, it did catch me by surprise. “Oh, OK”, I said, not really being sure of how to respond to such a bombshell. “That’s a shame”.
I’m not a Royalist, by any means, but I’m also not anti-monarchy.  As with so many others, for me, the Queen has always just… been there.   But I think I’d liked to have received the news in a more fitting way than from a couple of skanks shouting at me from a park bench.

IYGDTTWT…

/ masher / 5 Comments

Regular readers of this drivel (you know who you are) will be aware that I spend a lot of time in our local woods, walking the dog,  and that – as per my last post – I sometimes find myself in various situations… I mean, who can forget last year’s shenanigans with the hormonal teenagers or the County Lines encounter?  Or even the petty arsonists?

This year has been less eventful, but there is nearly always something going on.  This year’s theme appears to have been camps, with groups of kids building them from fallen branches tied together with string or washing line. Some of them have been quite expertly built.  I particularly liked this one, though it must have taken some effort to get that sofa in there!

And this week, someone has been trying to improve everyone’s disposition, by placing motivational sayings around the woods.

It hasn’t worked for me.

However, I am always quite buoyed when I find stuff and this week – on the same day –  I found a very useful 13mm ratchet spanner (which went straight into my toolbox)  and a USB Lightning cable… which can go to my daughter, as she is the only Apple fan in the house. It’s amazing what people drop, when walking.

 

Earlier this year, I found a USB charger pack, which – being 5V – has proved very useful for powering some of my Arduino projects. I was actually considering getting one anyway, so this find has saved me about thirty quid.  And a week later, I found a set of Google pixel earbuds which retails at over 100 quid! Cleaned them up, sanitised them (plenty of that stuff in the cupboard, thanks to Covid) and they work perfectly.

Annoyingly, I’ve not found any money, so far this year. Last year, I found over seventeen pounds.

Even so, I think I’m doing OK:  it seems walking the dog can be quite lucrative.