Echoes of Flavio's Ghost Dreaming

This island feels much smaller now. In various senses. It feels meaner, less generous, more selfish and vindictive. At least in London we may be spared the worst of the xenophobic -no, wait, already a friend was told to go back to 'wherever she came from'. She's not even European. Those of us that are a little darker, have a funny accent, look different may not feel safe.

I also feel a bit.. disappointed, shall we say, by not being able to take part in a vote that was going to decide the rest of my life -and that of many others, even after nearly 30 years here. Maybe 'disappointed' is too mild a word. I feel like I've been put in my place as a second class citizen and I'm only good for paying taxes and be a good sheep. This is not a good feeling.

Finally took off-line the Icy Box four disk external USB box I had been using for the last couple of years to keep a bunch of external disks as, well, ABOD. A 4TB red WD disk was so totally corrupted this morning that no utility could see even the partition map. The same thing had happened a few months ago and then I'd bought the red (supposedly 'nas, always on' drive) WD. So now I'm not sure I have recent backups of a lot of the stuff in that drive. Boo.

Given that I cannot spend money on that sort of thing at the moment, I'll be stuck without that external storage. Keep the drive in case I can rescue it at a later date but prospects are not good.

Other annoying (not tragic or disastrous but annoying nonetheless) things have happened today.

Well, the last few days have been rather strange and testing. In minor ways, nothing very dramatic but all the little things together do accumulate.

The most dramatic bit (or perhaps the most ridiculous one) must be my getting run over by a bicycle while coming back from feeding a travelling friend's cat. This resulted in a fractured radius, which impacts rather a lot of what I do: I cannot drive, lift weights... more importantly, I cannot play the guitar, which makes teaching it rather more complicated -half a bar of music demonstrated to a pupil can be worth hundreds of words. Literally. I also cannot properly wash or shower or do anything that requires two functional arms. Stretching or bending my left arm results in horrific shooting pain. Moving it at certain angles produces an intense pain that is very much like a cramp. Luckily (?) the bone didn't break, just fractured lengthwise and didn't change its position. Also feeling, curiously, like I let my friend down, somehow. One good thing is that the Royal Free Hospital people reassure me it won't take six weeks for me to be playing the guitar. Now, they do require me to do exercises stretching, flexing and rotating the arm. In other words, all the things that currently make me scream in agony...

The internet situation is even more strange. I had reported that my telephone line and broadband were dead. An engineer came on Monday and sorted it out, telling me that somebody ('a contractor, surely') had just disconnected me in order to connect somebody else. He reconnected me and I had internet and telephone... for less than 36 hours. Yesterday evening the line was dead again. I need the internet for a lot of stuff, partly for my teaching (I do a couple of online lessons) and communication with my pupils in several ways, apart from everything else I use it for. If that engineer was right I might be getting a sort of war of attrition, if BT/Openreach are going to be coming to fix that line for it to be pulled by ... whoever is doing it. This is unsustainable. We'll have to wait and see.

One little thing that compounds the internet situation is that I have very poor mobile reception in my flat. With luck I get enough to make phone calls (which often become warbly or get cut off). This hasn't always been the case and started about a year and a half ago. It means that in order to get some very patchy, very very slow internet I must put my mobile phone out the window and then tether the computer to it. Absurd, in these days. There's been a couple of other irritants these last few days but that's probably enough to mention. Nothing fatal, nothing big enough to warrant a good fit of sobbing screaming, but...

It looks nigh on impossible that I'll be getting the mortgage to buy the flat, even though I have a 48% deposit and the amounts required are tiny. There is one more thing to try but I'm not holding hope. At least this time I got an explanation on what is happening. Back to plan B. Or C.

The council presented me with a bill for unpaid council tax for £38.20 for 2007. So I phone to enquire about this -final notice with no previous notices, two years on? And they tell me that there is an outstanding amount of o£350-something for that period, for ‘recalculation of benefit’. I never claimed benefit (two of my flatmates at the time did, if I remember correctly) and they’re long since gone from this place. No matter, I have to pay that amount, they say, even though it is a bill that largely has nothing to do with me. I should imagine it would be impossible to recover those ‘recalculated benefits’ from those two flat-mates (one of whom may be reading this). I really didn’t need this at this point, grr.

When politicians (no, not just Gordie; all of them) talk about their working on the ‘Future’ and ‘Preserving our Planet...’ why do I get this doomsday, this end-of-the-world feeling...?

If we pray really hard, we’ll keep the heathens out of the White House....

Right. I bet you hadn’t thought of this use for peanut butter (no, not that :



Such breathtaking ignorance and conceit has to be admired, I suppose...
(and people like these may have a degree of power and influence in the most powerful country in the world..)

borrowed from kingtiger

First ritual moan of the term about how wrong it is to have to get up at 6:00 am *.

There. Done.



* Yes, I know some of you have to get up earlier, regularly. Doesn’t make it any better, though, does it:P

I just went in the local Tesco’s to buy a couple of things, for the first time in a couple of months at least. And I was reminded why I hardly ever go there. It is not cheaper or better supplied than the local shops, almost everything seems to cost around 15% more than in the larger hangar-sized Tesco in Watford, there’s that self-service till which I hate... and there’s the Asian gentleman in the blue suit following me everywhere, ten paces behind, peering over when I’m picking up things from a shelf, looking over from round the corner when I’m standing in front of the bread counter or the beer fridge, contemplating what to buy. Do a little experiment, move two aisles up -yep, he’s there. Move to the previous one two aisles away -there he is, at the end of the very short corridor. Then I pick up the last thing I was going to buy and head for the tills. There’s no-one at the tills. The gentleman in the blue suit is suddenly behind me, pointing at the self-service till when I turn around. “I don’t like those machines”, I say, “Do you have anyone to man the tills?” “I’ll do it for you, sir” says the other guy who had been behind the till. “N-no, I know how to use those machines, I just don’t like them”. Tell him he’ll lose his job to those machines and he will stare back, uncomprehending. Never mind. Will go to the local shops in future, until I forget again in two or three months...