Me me me

Last One

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As mentioned in the previous post, I went to the last of this year’s Xmas parties on Friday.

It was a good do – free bar and free food, etc. I really quite enjoyed it.

Thing is, there weren’t that many people who I knew. The company has such a high turnover of staff that, of the sixty or so people there, I probably only knew about a dozen of them – just the old stalwarts.

But it was great to catch up with those that I did know and haven’t seen since I retired.

There was Football Freddy; Doroffee; The Big Boss and The Other Big Boss; The Legend that is… ; Moany Eric; AC/DC and Steve… amongst others. And let’s not forget Scrubs Up Well Julie, who always looks fantastic at parties, in her low cut, little black dress with the split up the side (Phew!)

The DJ was a bit rubbish, I thought, playing some modern shite that no-one had heard of, apart from half a dozen young girls with impossibly short skirts covering their ridiculously small bottoms, dancing away in one corner of the room by themselves.

Eventually, he put some decent stuff on and I was able to strut my stuff. It was like John Travolta had just stepped onto the dancefloor.

Probably.

But – under strict orders from the current Mrs Masher, not to return home like I did last week – I refrained from drinking too much of the free booze and I left in time to make sure I caught the train so that I would get home at a reasonable hour  (2am wasn’t too bad, methinks).

So, that’s it now: no more festivities until the big day, when we celebrate the birth of Santa.

My liver will appreciate the break, I’m sure.

Xmas Dinner

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Tomorrow (Friday the 13th – what could go wrong?) I am having a Christmas do, down that London.

This is with the people I was working with, only earlier this year.  As per usual, it’s a free bar and free food. It’d be rude not to go.  I hasten to add, that this soirée isn’t being held – or paid for – by the impecunious and somewhat, beleagured water board that I used to work for. No, this is being thrown – as it is every year – by their more affluent contract partner.

If it’s anything like last year (or the year before that, or the year before that) I shall likely get a little sozzled.

And, this isn’t my first Christmas party/lunch/get-together this year. This will be the fourth.

I’ve already had a get together with some old work colleagues, in Reading, this week.

Last Saturday, I attended the Xmas bash of the motorcycle club I belong to: forty of us turned up and pretty much took over the pub where it was being held, which was great fun.

And the day before that, I was with my old BT pals in ‘spoons in town.  Even though the food wasn’t brilliant, fourteen quid for Xmas lunch and a pint? Can’t knock that.
It seems though, that I had rather too much to drink.  One minute I was seated at the table, chatting away with the guys, next thing, I wake up the following morning, naked in bed, next to the wife.   Between those two events, I have nothing but a vague recollection of being bundled into a car.

I’ve not been that far gone in the last forty-five years!

I’m wondering whether someone spiked my six pints of Leffe?

Super Mashero

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There was a strange noise coming from upstairs: a hum that sounded like the shower pump, except that it kept going on and off.

Mrs M and I looked at each other, quizzically. I paused the film we were watching on telly and headed up the stairs. Just as I got to the top, Son walked out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist. “Shower’s broken”, he said nonchalently, as he went into his bedroom and closed the door behind him

I went into the bathroom and pressed the shower button. It whirred into life with a loud hum but was silenced after just a few seconds as the pump shut down due to no water coming out.

I checked the pump – located in the airing cupboard. It looked OK: no signs of leaks or anything, so I rebooted it (I turned the power off and back on again).  It was still the same.  I did a diagnostic check on it, using the app on my phone, but it said that the shower was in full working order.

Then I turned on the taps. Water flowed from the cold, but nothing came out of the hot.  This had me puzzled and I spent ages checking around the hot water cylinder, but again, everything looked OK.

Flummoxed, I turned the taps on again and watched as the cold water flowed out, but then started to slow and quickly stop.

“Aha!”

I got the stepladder out, climbed into the loft and looked in the water tank.

It was empty, save for a puddle of lime scaled water at the bottom.  The red ball float hung forlornly in the air, when it should have been floating atop two cubic metres of water.  I wiggled it it up and down, but nothing happened. I checked the header tank and that was fine, so the ball valve in the main water tank was obviously knackered.

This isn’t the first time this has happened. I’ve probably replaced that float valve three times in the past five years.

“Can you fix it?”, Mrs M shouted up, a slight note of panic in her voice. “I’ve got that big meeting in the office tomorrow, so I’ll need to shower and wash my hair.”

“I’ll see what I can do”, I said reassuringly.

I looked at the ball valve carefully.  The plunger felt stiff and pretty much immovable. I was unable to get at the innards as the cap was sealed tight with limescale and wouldn’t budge, even using my biggest pipe wrench.

It was 9pm on a Sunday night, what was I going to do?   And why do these things always go wrong at the most awkward times?

And then I had a moment of inspiration (or was it desperation?)

I hit it.  I got my biggest spanner and I hit the valve. Hard.

Water started to dribble from the outlet. I hit it again and the water flowed out quicker and before long, the tank was full again.

I went to the Plumbing Merchants this morning and bought a new valve.

I should have bought a spare.

 

Nuts

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Last night, I attended a webinar – a seminar carried out online.

Our local doctor’s surgery often do these and I regularly receive texts inviting me to attend. The topics vary, but mainly tend to be around mental health and wellbeing.  As I have no issues in that area, I usually just discard the text.

But, my phone beeped with an invite the other day, inviting me to attend a discussion on Prostate Awareness.

Now, I’ve got one of those and whilst it isn’t giving me any problems – that I’ve noticed – I am of an age where these pesky, walnut-sized glands can start to cause some grief.  So, I thought maybe I should give this one a go.

The event was quite well attended, with about 25 to 30 men on there, all of a similar age to myself, by the looks of it (I actually turned my camera off, as this event lasted over an hour and fell right in the middle of dinnertime – I reasoned that nobody wanted to watch me chow down on a Southern Fried Chicken Burger and Chips, whilst they were talking about this particular part of their reproductive system).

But the event itself was actually pretty good. I came away at the end of it with a better understanding of what this paticular part of the male anatomy does and the issues it can cause.

The big takeaway for me was that some research suggests that there may be a potential prostate health benefit, by eating Brazil Nuts.  OK, all a bit wishy-washy, but with Christmas just around the corner, I think that’s as good an excuse to stock up on chocolate covered Brazils as any.

But, shall I tell you my main bugbear about this particular little gland – aside from the fact that it can cause all sorts of problems… including death?

It’s when people pronounce it wrong and call it the prostrate gland.

I don’t know why, but that annoys me so much.

And I’m not going to take it lying down.

Ahoj Zlato, Jsem Doma

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Yesterday afternoon, myself and the current Mrs M arrived home, after spending a few days visiting the lovely city of Prague.

It’s a great place to visit if you like art galleries and bookshops. There are SO many art galleries and bookshops.
It’s also great if you are into old churches, because there are plenty of those too.
And, if differing styles of old architecture are your thing, then Prague needs to be on your list: Gothic, Renaissance, Baraque, to name just a few, are in abundance.

However, Mrs M and I aren’t into any of that rubbish – one Gothic church looks exactly the same as another, to me.

What it did have for us though, was some good weather, cheap food, cheap beer and lots of history – I don’t mind a bit of history, me.

Unfortunately, our last day there was marred by me picking up some sort of bug – possibly from the overcrowded Hop ‘n’ Stop buses, that we used so much to get around.

So, I have returned to Blighty, feeling absolutely shite and am currently missing the club BBQ that I was so looking forward to.

I have looked up my syptoms on Dr Google and it looks like I have contracted a dose of Spanish Flu – not the mild one that lays you low for a few days, but the one that killed about 50 milion people at the turn of last century.

Mrs M is constantly dosing me up with Paracetamol, so I’m sure I’ll be fine.

Ouch, The Irony

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I was helping my dad, over the weekend, with fitting some new fence panels.

Rather annoyingly, each panel needed to have about a quarter to half an inch cut off it, to make it fit.

For this we used my handheld circular saw.

As we were handling fence panels, I made sure I was wearing suitable safety gloves – if there is even a 1% chance of me getting a splinter, I’ll get one.

Everytime.

But, we got it all done and despite this type of work giving ample opportunity for some sort of injury, there was none.

Back home, I was putting my tools away in the garage and as I put my safety gloves back on the shelf, my finger caught the shelf edge and it took off a couple of layers of skin, right by my fingernail cuticle.

Ouch!  It really bloody hurt!

Looks like I need to wear safety gloves when I am putting away my safety gloves!

A New Chapter

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Today, is the first day of the rest of my life… as someone once said.

Of course, that applies to every day, but today actually holds some significance for me, because today, I haven’t gone in to work.

I won’t be going in tomorrow, either.

In fact, I don’t plan on ever going in to work again.

Yes, I have quit the rat race and have taken early retirement.

It feels a little bit strange on this, the first day… it just feels like I am on holiday.  Speaking with friends who have already taken this path, it can apparently take between a month and six months to get used to it.  Personally, I reckon I’ll have the hang of it after a couple of weeks!

I’ve also been advised that the trick is to keep busy, and to that end I have been making plans to keep myself occupied. Obviously, there will be more time spent playing on the radio and on my motorbike, but also I’d like to get back into taking pictures – a hobby that I’ve always enjoyed, ever since failing ‘O’ Level Photography at school, but also a hobby that in more recent years, I’ve not found the time to properly partake in.

Dabbling in electronics and computers will also feature heavily in my activities, along with some renewed vigour (hopefully) on the geneological side of things – my family tree research has hit a wall recently and needs some proper time devoted to it.

And indeed, even this very website will likely benefit from some more activity.

Along with the myriad of little DIY jobs around the house and garden, I’m sure I will be kept pretty busy and hopefully won’t let the mundanity of modern life get to me.

Anyhow, gotta shoot, Homes Under The Hammer is on shortly.

TW3

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It’s been a busy seven days.

On Tuesday, Mrs M and I went to see  Mind Mangler.
A comedy theatrical show with some magic thrown in.   It was pretty good and we both enjoyed it.
A good night out

On Wednesday I was walking the dog in the woods, when I happened across two young men setting fire to a pushbike.
They were using several aerosol cans of deodorant as flame throwers, to set light to this bike which they had propped up against a tree.
It was well aflame by the time I came across them.   I questioned them as to their actions and told them to put it out, which they tried to do, but the tyres were stubbornly alight and took some extinguishing. Nonetheless, I stood with them until it was done and then continued to berate them, explaining  just how stupid they were. They looked somewhat abashed at my dressing down of them. Thing is, they weren’t kids, these were grown men of about 19 or 20 years old, I’d say.  A sudden police siren from just outside the woods had them scarpering off, however, it wasn’t a police car but rather, a big red fire engine: someone had seen the smoke rising and had called the Fire Service. I explained to the fire men (people) what had happened and they thanked me for making sure it was put out, but I sensed they felt a little annoyed, having driven halfway across town to find just a smouldering bicycle.

On Thursday, upon discovering that I’d been somewhat remiss with my weekly grocery shopping and hadn’t got us anything to eat, Mrs M and I went to dine at our local pub. Turns out that Thursday night is Build-A-Burger night, and so we built ourseves a couple of fantastic burgers, served up with a side order of chips and onion rings.  We left the pub feeling absolutely stuffed.   And all for a fiver each. Can’t complain at that. We’ll probably go again this week!

On Friday night, we went out to the pictures to see the new Bad Boys film.  It was alright.  I quite enjoyed it, actually… despite missing all the previous Bad Boys films.
Even better, though, was the Nandos we had beforehand.

Saturday evening saw us driving down to Basingstoke for a family function.
I won’t go into the details of that, here.

And on Sunday, Son and I went down to (what was) the Olympic Stadium – but is now home to West Ham FC – to watch some American men playing rounders. Major League Baseball (MLB) came to London for the weekend and as Son is a bit of a baseball fan – and a fan of the Phillies (Philadelphia) in particular –  we went along to watch them play against the New York Mets.  I have to say, it was a fun, friendly event and everyone seemed to enjoy it… even fans of the Phillies, who ultimately managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, right at the last… er, innings(?)  (I really had no idea what was going on).  But it was a good day out and everyone had a great time and there was no trouble… despite the copious amounts of alcohol being consumed in the stands.

I had a chilli dog.

It was enormous and lasted me all day.

 

Big Weekend

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This last weekend saw the Radio 1 Big Weekend come to town.

Held in Stockwood Park – the largest bit of greenspace in town – and attended by approximately 100,000 people over the course of three days, it was – by all accounts in the local and national press – a resounding success.

Which I am pleased about: we normally only get in the news for bad shit.

I didn’t attend the festival, of course, but I could just about hear it sometimes when I was walking the dog and the wind was blowing in the right direction.

The Radio 1 Big Weekend (as an aside, I own a Shure microphone that Noel Edmonds used, back when it was called The Radio 1 Roadshow.) isn’t something I would normally take any notice of, but as it was in my home town my interest was piqued and I watched snippets of it over the course of the weekend, as it was being shown live on iPlayer.  I’m not ashamed to say that I didn’t recognise any of the acts or any of the Radio 1 DJ’s (are they still called that, or is it just ‘presenters’ now?) as I stopped listening to Radio 1 many, many years ago.

The one act that I did recognise, was the headline act that closed the festival on Sunday night: a band called Coldplay. Whilst I’m aware of them, I’ve not really paid any attention to their work. But as we watched, I found myself saying things like “Oh, I like this one” or “Ahh, didn’t realise this was one of theirs”.  By the end of the night, I found I was becoming a bit of a Coldplay fan… especially when Chris Martin sang a short song he had composed, just for Luton Town FC fans, which he called Orange.

The next morning, I found myself perusing YouTube videos of Coldplay songs, when I stumbled across this one. If the sheer look of joy on The Doctor’s face doesn’t brighten your day, I’m not sure anything will!

 

Nicked Nanas

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I went to our local Sainsbury’s supermarket yesterday morning, to do the weekly grocery shop.

At the Self Service checkout, I was randomly selected for a trolley scan.  “Helping you make sure you haven’t missed anything”, it said on the handheld device. Or words to that effect. Obviously, what it was really saying was “We’re checking that you haven’t nicked anything”.

As I don’t nick stuff, I wasn’t concerned.

I waited – with my red light flashing on the till – until the lone girl working that section (and totally run off her feet) eventually managed to get to me. “Sorry about this”. I said.

She smiled. “No problem. I just have to scan… ” – she looked at her handheld device – “… fourteen items”.  I had quite a trolley load.

She started scanning a few items.  “You need to scan the items at the bottom of the bags… that’s where I put the stuff I’ve nicked”, I joked. She threw a withering smile at me, having never heard that before.

By now, there were a couple more people awaiting her attention and so I decided I’d help, rather than just make sarcastic comments.  I passed her a few items from the  Pets At Home bag that I always pack the fruit and veg into… hey, everyone has their own system.  “These aren’t on the list”, she said, as she scanned the bananas that I’d just passed her.  I was a bit perplexed by this. How could that be?  And then I remembered that just as I had weighed the bananas and stuck the ticket on them, Mrs M had phoned me to ask if I could get some chicken, some mayonaise and some bread rolls for lunch. Distracted,  I’d obviously forgotten to scan the bananas.

“Oh, sorry about that. Can we just add the bananas retrospectively?” I asked, feeling a bit embarrassed, as the waiting customers were standing there watching what was going on and were probably assuming I was trying to nick the bananas.

She shook her head. “No, sorry, we can’t”.

“OK, don’t worry, we’ll put them to one side and I’ll buy them seperately”.

She shook her head again. “Sorry, but because it found an item that you hadn’t scanned in, we need to re-scan the entire trolley”.

WTF!

There was nowhere to do this, other than where we were standing, so right in the middle of the SmartShop section – in front of everyone – I had to empty all the bags out onto the floor, and then the girl scanned everything back in, one by one.  There were even more people waiting now and some were getting quite agitated because some bloody idiot had tried to steal stuff and had been caught, and he was now slowing everything down by monopolising the only check-out assistant in a five-mile radius.  I could feel daggers raining down on me as I bent over the bags, throwing stuff into them as quickly as I could. My system was in  complete disarray, with everything going into the wrong bags, but I didn’t care, I just wanted out of there.

After a few mins – which felt a lot longer, I can tell you – we were done and the new total was 46 pence higher than my original. Funnily enough, 46p was the price showing on the ticket stuck to the bananas.

I then had to do the walk of shame, past all these waiting people, pushing my trolley – with its obligatory squeaky wheel – past all these annoyed people.

One woman glowered at me as I walked past.

I smiled at her and shrugged my shoulders in an apologetic manner. “It was the bananas”, I said.

She didn’t smile back.

Le Weekend

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Ahh, Le Weekend… to coin a phrase nicked from us by the French.

Just because we nicked cul-de-sac from them.

Le tit pour la tat.

Or, should it be la tit pour le tat… what with tits being feminine and all?

I dunno.

Anyway… it was a good weekend because – despite the very blowy weather brought on by storm Kathy, I managed to get the bike out for a few hours, for the first time this year.

Saturday was a couple of hours up and down the A5, just to blow away the cobwebs. And then on Sunday, I met up with a couple of mates and we headed out for breakfast at one of our favourite biker cafés on the A10.  It was still a bit chilly, but my heated jacket did a marvelous job of keeping me toasty.

And we weren’t alone: it was packed in there.  I could barely hear myself think, as I tucked in to my Set 1 Breakfast – sausage, bacon, egg, beans and fried slice all washed down with a cup of slosh. Marvelous!

As we rode along some of the country lanes though, I found myself dismayed at the amount of fly-tipping… it seems to be getting worse. Rubbish everywhere. These people should be strung up!

Sunday afternoon, Mrs M and I decided to go out for a Sunday roast at a pub in the village up the road. To get there, we went along some of those very same country lanes that I’d travelled in the morning on my bike, but this time we were in her car.

Parked in a lay-by on one of these lanes where there was a lot of fly-tipped rubbish, was a black Astra. It’s boot was open and I could see lots of black bags full of rubbish, stowed in the back. A man and a woman appeared to be dumping their rubbish here.  I wound down the car window so that I could hurl some abuse at them as we passed.

But then, as we got closer, I noticed they weren’t dumping rubbish at all… on the contrary, they were wearing rubber gloves and were picking up the rubbish and bagging it and then putting it in their car… to take to the tip, I assume.

Rather than hurl abuse, I leaned out of the window and gave them a round of applause as we went past.

There are some bloody idiots out there, but there are some damn-right heroes as well.

Horizons

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Last night, I dragged the current Mrs M along to a lecture talk on cosmology given by Professor Brian Cox.

To be fair, she came willingly. “You never know, I might enjoy it”, she said.

It started with lots of pretty pictures of stars and galaxies and over the next ninety minutes he went on to explain formation and expansion of the universe, ending on black hole singularities and event horizons, even using some ‘simple’ maths to explain black hole temperatures and Hawking Radiation.

It was fascinating.

Mrs M held up surprisingly well and found much of it very interesting, but I thnk that by the time we had reached Einstein’s General Theory, time in the theatre was moving somewhat slower for her than it was for me.

Relatively, of course.