The Little Alfie Gramophone Awards 2024

What’s a “gramophone?” I hear some of you ask.

Well, if you need to ask you are probably an ignorant young snot who thinks that CDs were the only thing before streaming came along, who “doesn’t do History” and prefers “Rap, or the styles that my dear wife calls “Hippety Hoppety” or “Shed” (because she can’t decide if it’s “House” or “Garage” and opts for something in between).  I’m not going to explain it to you – you will just have to look it up!

I decided that I needed to write a new piece about music and it seems that (until something as yet unforeseen turns up) I have currently dried up as far as the “CD of My Life” series of articles is concerned!

These, as you may recall are the songs connected to certain “memory boxes” taking me back to specific places, times and/or events. I have written quite a lot of them down (which you can find in the “Categories” heading on this page) and really have no idea how many of those associations are still to be made.

So, until the necessary trigger happens, if I want to write about music at all it has to be a different aspect.

A few years back I did a piece here: https://littlealfie.wordpress.com/2017/04/05 about my favourite songs that I think are the greatest but which, because they are not connected to a specific memory, will never be a part of CDoML.

And then, last Christmas I produced an annotated list of what I consider the all-time worst Christmas musical offerings – and I use the term “musical” advisedly!

All of which really only leaves me song lyrics to play about with.

There are numerous websites devoted to misheard song lyrics but I am writing this on the deck of my caravan in North Norfolk which part of the world remains blissfully in ignorance of the benefits of Wi-Fi or even a decent mobile phone signal. This means that I am having to rely only on my unassisted memory and should probably put up a disclaimer concerning likely inaccuracies in content.

Because, as Abraham Lincoln famously stated, “Everything you read on the Internet is completely true”! And I know that to be the case because I read it online!

The most regularly quoted Misheard Lyric is from the 1967 classic “Purple Haze” by the late Jimi Hendrix where debate still rages over whether he sings “Excuse me while I kiss the sky “ or “Excuse me while I kiss this guy”!

If that song came out now I don’t think anyone would care either way but trust me, it was a big deal back in 1967 when, despite the “Summer of Love” and homosexuality recently being made legal in the UK, a man kissing another man would not only get you talked about but probably, in many parts of the world, arrested as well!

While I may edit in a few more examples when I can look them up I will, for now, pass on to you another example that I saw on social media a couple of days ago and which I had not come across before.

Someone in one of the weirder Facebook groups to which I belong related that it has taken him nearly 48 years to realise that the line in Abba’s 1976 hit “Dancing Queen” is NOT “Young and sweet, only seven teeth” rather than “Seventeen”! I cannot unhear that now.

Leaving that side of things for the moment, my train of thought then moved on to the category of “Weirdest Song Title” and having decided on a label like that, conceived of the idea of turning this into a simple inaugural award ceremony for the “Alfiegrammies”.

For this (very) shortlist I am indebted to the Country & Western genre for the candidates that sprang immediately to mind.

The first of these (in third place) is the somewhat unpleasant “Dead Skunk in Middle of the Road” – with the follow-up line of “And it stinks to high heaven”! It is pretty awful and made worse if you can imagine it sung in a flat Texas drawl.

The Runner-up candidate is presumed (mainly because I’ve never actually heard it and am basing my comments entirely on the title) to be an extremely witty little number concerning the problems of solitary drinking and probably addressing mental health issues too.

It is called “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy” and I think that is a pretty clever piece of wordplay.

The winner, though, is a song that I have known ever since I found it on an album that I purchased in 1969. The album is the late Glen Campbell’s “Galveston/Where’s the Playground Susie and the song is about a well-meaning wastrel who blows all his pay on dubious schemes every week.

So the Alfiegrammie for Weirdest Song title goes to… <drum roll>

“How Come Every Time I Itch I Wind Up Scratching You?”

And now we move on to the “Most Meaningful Lyric” category which has three candidates – two of them from the same song. It was those two, as you may have guessed, which I heard a couple of days ago, that gave me the initial idea for this piece.

In third place then is the following extract from the Billy Bragg song “New England” made famous by the late Kirsty McColl (particularly the underlined bit):

               “I saw two shooting stars last night; I wished on them but they were only satellites.

               It’s wrong to wish on space hardware; I wish, I wish, I wish you’d care!”

I don’t believe it would ever have occurred to anyone to put that sentiment into song before!

In the Runner-up spot is the brilliant final verse from the same song – double negatives have surely never been used to such effect before:

               “Once upon a time at home I sat beside the telephone.

               Waiting for someone to pull me through, when at last it didn’t ring I knew it wasn’t you!”

Actually that last one was the winner right up to when I was transcribing this onto my computer and I overheard the next one on someone’s car radio as they went past the caravan.

The winner then is from The Beatles’ 1966 album “Revolver” and is “Tomorrow Never Knows”.

I do put it in first place for the entirety of its Lyrics but do not intend to type them all here for you – I’ll let you have the pleasure of discovering it for yourselves!  It’s the one that begins “Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream” and I used to have it as a scrolling screensaver on my computer in the early (1993) days at the Barclays Bank Trust Company Taxation Sweatshop in Peterborough. I think it’s called “passive resistance” these days!

That concludes the 2024 awards but I would love to hear from you with your own nominations for the 2025 ceremony. You can nominate for the categories I have used here or add some of your own if you like. Contact me via the “comments” bit at the end of this page or email me at littlealfie@hotmail.com and I’ll add it for you. Then, in twelve months’ time I can do this again.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Alfie 

 

Name that Team!

While writing the last piece it dawned on me just before the end that there was still more to say. As the aspect that I was thinking of did not really fit in with the “historical” side I was then writing about, it seemed that a separate article was needed.

There is not a lot of preparation that can be done for a quiz – other than finding out the format – you are either going to know the answers or you aren’t. If, however, you are attending a pub quiz you haven’t done before (for example) or anything of the Church or Village Hall variety there is always one question the quizmaster will ask you that invariably throws everyone on the team into confusion.

“What is your team name?” It catches me out every time!

When you are in a team representing an office or a specific pub this isn’t a problem – “Crown & Castle” or “Trust Co. A or B” told those watching all they needed to know (although I did like to mix up the “A” and “B” things in the Barclays competition so that the opposition didn’t know whether they had drawn our top team or not)! Besides that the team name(s) had to be stated on the entry form weeks before.

With teams competing regularly against each other it does become a little more difficult especially when the people turning up tend to vary from week to week in both persons and numbers.

For example, one Thursday evening in the early days of the BBTC Peterborough office, the quiz in “The Chequers” was about to start and, of my usual Tax Department colleagues, only my friend Mike Thomas and I were present (some hold-up with meals at the hotel I believe) so we had to come up with a team name.

We had been discussing our favourite Led Zeppelin Album and when the barman came round with the answer sheets we had to think of something both to tell him for his record and to write on the paper. The track titles and lyrics were uppermost in our minds and thus “The Angels of Avalon” were born – for the uninitiated the name is part of a line from the very Tolkien-influenced track “The Battle of Evermore”.

As far as I can remember no-one else turned up to join us and we won it on our own. FOUR pints each!

Mike and I made an agreement that night that neither of us would use that team name again unless the other was present too.

There was a similar snap decision when we moved from The Chequers to The Windmill. Again, they wanted a name before the quiz started. I think four of the six of us were drinking Guinness and that brewery had a current advertising slogan on its beer mats stating “Guinness – Pure Genius” and the last two words of that suggested themselves!

Although we used “Pure Genius” for a few weeks, in the interests of modesty we soon shortened it to “PGs” and were known thus from 1995 to about 2010.

Throughout that time our arch-rivals were a group who did, I believe, fancy themselves as “semi-professional” and who rejoiced in the name of “The Quizzington Bears”! They always arrived early and went into a huddle to discuss the questions that they got wrong the previous week (they always asked for their answer sheets back to help with this) and how they could avoid similar errors in future!

By contrast, if WE got there early it was a) to make sure we got a table and b) to get some additional rounds of drinks in! I think it really annoyed the QBs that we frequently beat them without, apparently, trying.

As the prize given to both the winners and runners-up each week was a single bottle of decidedly ordinary table wine, it was hardly worth taking it seriously.

Anyway, that takes care of established regular team names but what do you do when you are thrown together with a bunch of people you may not know very well for a one-off event?

Well, the first thing I do is start the rest of the team thinking of a team name while I take care of the really important thing – getting executive control of the answer paper!

This is necessary because there are often situations where I know what the answer is but the rest of the team but the rest of the team will come up with a popular misconception. When that happens I can diplomatically agree with them while writing down the right answer!

Then, when the answers are read out I can tell them that I had second thoughts and changed it at the last minute! Sneaky, I know but it has won it for my team on at least one occasion. For that sort of quiz I don’t actually care what the team is called.

The last time I had to make a naming decision was when faith and I did the one at the caravan site where I chose the rather dull and prosaic “Just the two of us” which, given that we won it, could possibly be considered thumbing our noses at bigger teams!

I have noticed, over the years, a tendency for quiz competitors who are wittier than they are knowledgeable to try to draw attention to themselves and embarrass the quizmaster by using “smartarse” team names.

“In first (or second or third) place” is an example of this type of name and you can easily see the confusion when the poor quizmaster has to announce “In last place, ‘In first place’”!

The other trick frequently played on the person with the microphone is to choose a name which causes them to inadvertently say something rude or unpleasant – round after round. A nice example of this that I once heard involved sticking an “s” on the end of a pseudonyms adopted by one of the radio supporters of the late Terry Wogan…

Rudolph Hucker!

When I started writing the last couple of paragraphs I thought that it might have been unfair to hold quizmasters up to ridicule or embarrassment – but then I thought of the number of times I have been denied points through the application of the rule “the quizmaster is always right” – even when they clearly weren’t!

Embarrassment is too good for them!

Alfie

 

Your Starter for Ten!

I mentioned today’s topic most recently in the last article of 2023 and from the title you won’t have too much trouble guessing that it is about… quizzes.

This then is a brief (although not as brief as I thought it was going to be when I started) history of my involvement with questions and answers of a general nature and you may recognise some parts of the tale which have cropped up from time to time in other articles. I will provide you with links if I spot them myself.

My connection with General Knowledge quizzes is all the fault of my Junior School 2^nd year (now called “Year 4”) teacher, a young man probably in the early stages of his teaching career named Barry Green.

This gentleman who, despite what I just said about his age, appeared (like all adults to us) to be OLD, thought it would be interesting for his pupils to have something intellectual to occupy their weekends. Not wishing us to waste all of our Saturdays having fun on Bourne Park playing Football or Cricket he set us some General Knowledge questions on a Friday morning with answers to be handed in on Monday.

I do recall that there were usually 5 questions but I don’t think it could have been either every weekend or compulsory. For one thing, I don’t believe that very many of my classmates would have been interested and for another I cannot remember THAT many of the questions a mere 60 plus years on!

Yes, surprising as it may seem there are indeed questions and answers that I KNOW are in my head because and only because of that little quiz! There are several that surface in my memory from time to time but here are two that come straight to mind:

• What is a “Bath Oliver”?
• Which (UK) bird is known as “the Butcher Bird”?

Answers later.**

As you can tell, I was not one of those who ignored Mr Green’s attempts to educate us above and beyond the school curriculum and I was fortunate in that my father was willing and able to help point me in the direction of the answers – either through his own small collection of reference books or a Saturday trip to the Reference Library in town.

No, we didn’t use the Internet for the simple reason that in 1962 we didn’t have a time machine!

It set me on the path to absorbing loads of “useless information” which might come in handy in future.

There was surprisingly little quiz activity for the next 20 years (I don’t count trying to outdo the competitors on TV’s “Mastermind” from 1972 onwards) until the arrival in 1982 of a new board game – “Trivial Pursuit”. Not only did this give my quiz muscles a good workout against other family members but the game fuelled a kind of quizzing mania across the country which resulted in my employers at Barclays Bank adding inter-branch quizzes to the list of social team events such as darts and 10 pin bowling.

The first Barclays quiz that I recall was written about here: https://littlealfie.wordpress.com/2016/06/29 and as I left Norwich at the beginning of 1983 that region must have been pretty quick off the mark at jumping on the Trivial Pursuit bandwagon.

At the Barclays Chelmsford office (1983 to 1988) I not only took the Captaincy of one of the two Trust Company teams in the inter-branch knockout competition but also appeared on Essex Radio one Saturday as a member of a Barclays High Street Chelmsford branch Trivial Pursuit team against the Chelmsford Rifle Club.

The “live on air” game (which we won) took place in the Rifle Club’s clubhouse/ firing range and they were serving alcohol at 10am – which struck me as a bad idea but which also proved too much for one of my colleagues who consumed a lot of strong ale in a short time to get over his “stage fright” and somehow contrived to drink the dice cup with the dice in it!

I also associate that stint at the Chelmsford office of BBTC with making money from quizzes!

Some pubs at that time were featuring (alongside the more normal fruit machines) Quiz machines based on the BBC Radio snooker themed quiz “Give us a Break”.

To win at this you had to answer a 1 point Red Ball question followed by a selected coloured ball question (valued from 2 to 7 points) then another Red and so on. All questions were multiple choice and appeared with a time countdown that got shorter the higher its point value.

The start point for winning cash depended on previous pay-outs and I was fortunate to find a pub near the office where the evening Darts and Pool players were much more optimistic than they were knowledgeable. Thus, when I turned up the following lunchtime it only required a score of 10 points to get into the money – albeit only 50p.

I would get in just after noon, “milk” the machine of £5 to £10 until the 50p starting score was up to 20 or 30 points – so that the evening patrons had to pump more money in for little return. Doing this 3 or 4 times a week meant that I hardly ever finished a week with less spending money than I started with!

Unfortunately that source of income stopped dead when I moved to Cambridge in 1988 – the machines were still there but the pubs were frequented by superior grade smartarses and the 50p minimum win level was never less than 30 points so I had to give it up.

So, for a couple of years I was back to Barclays inter-branch quizzes for my quota of General Knowledge but as a result of one of those events I met a colleague who asked if I would like to join his ailing pub team in the Greene King brewery Sunday league.

I was extremely flattered at this recognition of my superpower and the fact that the pub in question, “The Crown & Castle” at Risby near Bury St. Edmunds was 28 miles from my home in Histon didn’t matter one bit.

For a couple of years in the early 1990s then I commuted on a 55 mile round trip to take part in matches in Bury and the surrounding villages. And I have to say that during my 2 seasons with the Crown & Castle team we rose from the basement of the division to the top and even got through the first 2 rounds of the League Winners knockout at the end of the normal season.

That run of success ended when the company centralised to Peterborough in 1993 but the league matches were quickly replaced by Thursday night quizzes for an 8 pint beer voucher at The Chequers, Orton Wistow – which, as well as being my “local”, was the nearest pub to both the office and the hotel in which staff still in the process of moving were accommodated.

I actually wrote about that here: https://littlealfie.wordpress.com/2009/04/17/ and that post was also referenced here: https://littlealfie.wordpress.com/2019/02/15/ and if you just pop off and read those, they will take you to the end of my regular pub team appearances. The “Pure Genius” team finally dwindled away when the pub in question, The Windmill in Orton Waterville, had a massive and expensive refurbishment in about 2010 and immediately afterwards let it be known that their new, up-market set up no longer wanted their long-term quiz teams spending money there anymore!

And apart from the occasional holiday quiz or “guesting” on friends’ teams at village events, that was it for “live” events of that sort.

However, in 2020 we all got to stay indoors because of the Covid pandemic and communicated with each other by “Zoom”, “Google Meet” and similar. I was told about a weekly Zoom quiz organised by a fellow Mensa member in the North East of England and got the login details from the website to enable me to join in. And since April 2020 I have joined in with other members from various parts of the UK (and Canada) every Monday night.

I occasionally have to miss this now because I have insufficient signal on my mobile phone to support a connection when I am at the caravan in Norfolk but if you’ve been reading more recent posts on here you will know that I do now have the Forest Park Friday night quiz (and meat raffle) to fall back on now!

For the future I have been told by some of the Monday night crowd that I ought to have a go at Mastermind – one of my fellow competitors got to the semi-finals a couple of years ago and I often beat her!

We’ll have to see but first I need to find a good solid specialised subject!

Alfie

** The answers to the school questions earlier in this piece are:

• A Bath Oliver is a hard, dry biscuit or cracker invented by a Doctor Oliver in (would you believe) Bath, Somerset in about 1750.
• The Butcher Bird is the nickname of the Red Backed Shrike, due to its habit of impaling small prey animals on thorns like meat on hooks in a butcher’s shop. 

 

How long has this been going on?

At the end of February 2009 I was sitting at my desk in a former residential bungalow just off Whittlesey Road on the edge of the small Fenland town of March in Cambridgeshire. The bungalow was right by the main entrance barrier that allowed access by heavy trucks across a large concrete apron to the main parts of the potato processing factory and it housed the Information Technology and Agronomy Departments of a now-defunct company called MBMG Ltd.

At this point in time a part of the factory had been sold off to a competitor along with some of the offices and one-third of the IT staff leaving my Manager, Mike, and I with a somewhat reduced workload compared to the previous 3 years that we had been working together. We both were wondering just how long the rest of the company (which included several satellite sites around East Anglia) could last and were reluctant to start any new projects –  just keeping the existing equipment working correctly seemed enough.

As it turned out I was to have six more months with them and Mike five so over-exerting ourselves on the company’s behalf would have been a wasted effort. So how did we spend our time when there were no computer repairs or password resets to occupy us?

Well Mike, as I have documented on here before, spent his days indulging in the new-fangled thing called “streaming” which meant he was able to catch up on the multitude of TV Science Fiction series that he was unable to keep up with at home. He also spent some time spending what he could of the departmental budget on small “techie” gadgets and gizmos which were justified purchases were we to be asked about them but which were otherwise too insignificant to be put in the Asset Register. This would prove to be a shrewd move when the company did eventually go under and the Administrators arrived in the summer.

I also needed something to do and the old standard of Microsoft Solitaire was not an option as my screen faced the door and was the first thing that our immediate Superior, the Finance Director, would see on any of his random, unannounced visits to us. By a piece of good fortune I had, earlier that month, made contact after 40 years silence with my old school friend Mike Vincent who was living in Thailand and writing THREE blogs! I didn’t recall him being all that “literary” at school, had come down with a case of “Well if HE can do it…” and had conceived the idea of “Little Alfie”.

This meant that I had something non-work related going on that would look perfectly innocent if anyone came in. Let’s face it, if you see someone typing in an office it is more reasonable to assume that it is to do with work than not – unlike a Microsoft card game! And just in case the visitor was inclined to look closer I did also have open a partially completed document for the company Procedures Manual which I could switch to imperceptibly in less than half a second!

And that, of course, explains why in the remainder of my time at that office until I was made redundant in August I actually managed to compose a total of 54 articles on this site – a six month total I have never come close to since!

And why am I telling you all this especially as quite a lot of it has been mentioned in greater or lesser detail in those 54 articles? It is because if you want to go back into the archives to look them up you will, as of today, now have to go back a whole FIFTEEN years to get to the beginning – because that’s how long I have been doing this!

And they said it wouldn’t last.

Alfie

 

A right pain in the…

In my “forthcoming attractions” piece just over a month ago I mentioned my summons to participate in the mystical National Health Service ritual known as “the investigative colonoscopy”! As I said this is a thing that UK males of retirement age are supposed to participate in every 2 years (even during Covid) if they show certain preliminary signs suggesting the possibility, however remote, of Colon cancer.

I have had my test every two years since 2017 but this is the first time since then that I have been asked for any sort of follow-up examination. If you check the archive for this site for August 2017 and the article entitled “Getting to the bottom of things” you will read that I treated that whole experience with a light-hearted, maybe even flippant and, as far as I could manage it, found the whole process hilarious!

This time was different in a number of ways – location and preparation not the least of them.

I submitted my “sample” (only one this time – in 2017 it was SIX, all done on different days) towards the end of November 2023 and then came back from my annual fishing trip in the middle of December to a nice letter telling me that someone would be calling me from a private number at a particular date and time to discuss my circumstances and determine definitely whether another survey of my pipework was required. I do not recall that step from 2017 – perhaps the reduced number of samples leads to greater uncertainties that need to be discussed!

After this very friendly and “chatty” interview I was told that I did indeed need the Colonoscopy which would be booked towards the end of January.

The letter duly arrived and was followed in the first few days of the new year by a massive padded envelope containing three separate boxes of substances to be taken starting five days before the procedure was due to take place.

So, resisting the temptation to try out the contents ahead of time  “just for fun” I waited until the appointed time (Friday 19^th January) before opening the two smaller packages as instructed. These contained a blister pack with 10 small Senna tablets and 10 sachets of a powdered concoction called Movicol and for the next five days I had to have one of the tablets twice a day and the contents of two of the sachets each mixed with 250ml of water and drunk twice a day.

This five day preliminary contrasted with 2017 when the first part of the preparation was two days on each of which I was required to swallow FIVE giant sized Senna tablets – which had no apparent effect at all.

Actually, I was getting slightly worried by the time I got to the end of the pills and sachets on the Tuesday evening because, once again, the expected consequences had not come to pass by the time I went to bed.

I need not have worried, however, as I still had packet number 3 – the last resort!

In 2017 its equivalent was a frothing potion called Citramag which had to be mixed with a litre of water and drunk in one go. Twice! This gave an effect not dissimilar to an internal pressure wash.

This time, because I had an afternoon appointment rather than a morning one I had to have one of the 2024 equivalent gut-blasters (called Moviprep – which sounds like it ought to be a chain of multiplex cinemas or a Spanish mobile phone company*) on the Wednesday evening and the other on the Thursday at 6am. These were also large sachets to be dissolved in a litre of water and downed in one!

I think I had to wait a whole 5 minutes after finishing the Wednesday evening batch before swearing profusely and rushing to the toilet! I only just made it and I swear that a damn sight more than a litre came out!

There did not actually seem a lot of point in taking the Thursday morning dose but I did and, not too surprisingly, it worked even quicker. At least I was ready for it that time! I think the purpose of that second load on the day of the procedure can only have been to put a nice shine on the inside of my colon for the light on the end of the cable to reflect off – it certainly wasn’t to remove anything else as that litre of liquid came out as more or less as clear as it went in!

Having assured myself that the flushing process was as complete as it could be I resigned myself to inputting nothing but the occasional sip of water until it was all done and, at 2pm Faith and I set out for my 3pm appointment.

Why so far ahead? Well, rather than the quick 5 mile drive to the Peterborough City Hospital of August 2017, this time we had to undertake a 25 mile drive down the A1 to Hinchingbrooke Hospital on the outskirts of Huntingdon.

We did, of course, check the entire journey out in advance on Google Street View – a precaution that was necessary because the road layouts around there had changed somewhat in the 10 years or more since I last drove in that vicinity. That trip was to the nearby Cambridgeshire Police Headquarters for an IT job interview – an experience that was, in its way, just as unpleasant as having a camera on a cable shoved…! I didn’t get the job.

Happily, we found the patient’s car park exactly where Google said it would be but it was a good job that we had plenty of minutes to spare as there were no obvious spaces available and we had to do three complete circuits and a partial one before coincidence finally had us stopping to let a car out and diving into the vacant spot! This made us precisely on time for the appointment.

The Endoscopy Department receptionist was one of that tiny minority of people who, due to some character defect, do not get my sense of humour and for this reason did not crack a smile when I complained about the car parking problems and added “according to Google Maps it was almost empty when we left the A1 20 minutes ago!” Ah well, some fall on stony ground!

About 5 minutes after checking in I had to leave Faith in the public waiting area and go through to a more exclusive waiting room where I was asked about my general health and the question that made me laugh out loud last time – “Do you wear dentures?”

As it was a different hospital and different staff I risked the same reply – “Blimey, how far up is this tube going?” I then apologised and told her I was really aware of why she was asking – in case I needed resuscitating after complications arising from a tube up the bottom!

A further wait of not much more than 5 minutes ensued and I was then escorted to a row of small rooms each containing a hospital bed and a locker for outdoor clothing. This was a great improvement from the communal locker room at Peterborough City 6 ½ years ago and I was shown to my room, handed my backless gown and paper trousers (the ones with a “rear access” slit) and left to get changed with a degree of privacy. After I got changed a nurse then came in and put a cannula in the back of my hand should I require “sedation” at a later stage in the process

The bed was then pushed by an orderly to the “theatre” for the main event with me walking behind them hoping I was not flashing my arse at passers-by.

Before the business began I elected to have some mild sedation through the thing in my hand which was just as well as the whole thing didn’t feel like it was going to be quite as comfortable as last time. And so it proved. While the Endoscopist wielding the equipment did everything quite correctly and with due care and attention the movement of the tube did hurt more than before to the extent that I had to go not only with the sedation but was also taking fairly deep gulps from the “gas and air” painkiller breathing tube supplied.

So, rather than watching with rapt admiration the progress of the camera along the gleaming length of my Large Intestine I was, for most of my time in that room, looking away trying to think about other things to distract myself from the discomfort. I was not, in fact, even aware until I received a printed report just before I left the hospital that 2 small polyps had been removed for testing – last time I actually watched similar things being snipped off.

I was taken back to my little room and, bearing in mind that I had not eaten anything for more than 24 hours, given a substantial Tuna sandwich and a cup of coffee! I then had the cannula removed, got changed back into my normal clothes and rested there until the above mentioned report arrived and I was free to go if I felt up to it.

Approximately 2 hours after going in I was back in the car and being driven home with no lingering effects. The next day one of the team phoned me to ensure that I was having no problems and within a week I had a letter advising that the polyps were harmless – so that all turned out well. Again.

The report on the procedure did throw up one interesting thing, though. It mentioned a term that I had not heard before and which required a bit of research. It said that I had “A tortuous colon” which sounds painful but means that it is longer than necessary and has to twist and turn rather more than normal to fit into the space available. I do not imagine that I have grown extra pipework since 2017 but that particular anomaly could explain why it was hard work moving the camera around those extra bends!

So, no need to think or write about that little problem again for the next two years but I hope that reporting on it might help inform and allay any fears that my readership might have about having a Colonoscopy done.

Alfie

* The multiplex cinema organisation is “Moviemax” and the Spanish mobile phone company (that I sometimes access in the Canary Islands) is “Movistar”

 

The CD of My Life – “Birdhouse in Your Soul” – They Might Be Giants.

I was lying in bed the other night (and at this point the small part of my brain that remembers listening to the late Ken Dodd on Sunday lunchtime radio in the 1960s wants to add the words “… oiling my bike” to the first eight words there) when the song in the title came up at random on my mp3 player.

I was immediately transported to another place and time and, before the song had finished playing, was taken to another radically different place and time 8 years later.

Because, if you haven’t yet read any of this series (and it has been going since 2011 so where have you been?) I should inform you that it comprises a list of songs and the “memory boxes” that they provide the keys for. Actually, it can work the other way round too with the memory of an event triggering the recall of a particular song. Oh, and I don’t have to like the song either – mostly I do though and there is currently only one in the “dislike” category, oddly enough the very first one of the series!

If you want to read them all there is a category in the list down the right hand side of this page called, oddly, “CD of My Life” and if you click on it it will bring them all up.

Anyway, back to the other night, you know what the song is called and who it is by so all you need now is the connection in my head!

If you have been with me all the way through this wonderful literary miscellany you will, no doubt, remember a delightful series of articles published in April 2010 concerning a holiday that Faith and I took in Puerto Santiago, Tenerife the month before. If you read Part 1 of the series you will see that the whole holiday was to celebrate our 30^th Wedding Anniversary. In the opening paragraphs I listed where we had gone to on previous 5 or 10 year anniversaries and I refer you to the following quote applying to our 10^th, thus:

“Twenty years ago it was a hotel (the name of which escapes me) in Bournemouth. The weather must have been the best that the south coast of England had experienced in March for many years and while swimming in the sea wasn’t advisable the hotel did have an adequate indoor pool.”

I am still not sure the name or the exact whereabouts of that hotel, only that it had an indoor pool on the roof. Combining a distant memory of what it looked like, a vague idea of what it might have been called and Google Maps has given me to think that the favourite contender is The Ocean Beach Hotel & Spa. That no longer advertises a rooftop pool – just a small outdoor one at ground level – although it is possible that the old one is now part of the Spa facilities.  It is 34 years ago now that we went there and things do change!

Whatever my difficulties in recalling the accommodation, I do have a very clear recollection of walking around the shops in Bournemouth Town Centre and hearing this song from various pubs or shops. It was, I believe, a new release at the time.

The lyrics (look them up) are more than a little quirky and confusingly contradictory as shown here:

              I’m your only friend
              I’m not your only friend
              But I’m a little glowing friend
              But really I’m not actually your friend
              But I am.

See what I mean? I still don’t know exactly what to make of those words but the song, which I rather like, seems to be about the history of lighting – electric or otherwise.

The more I got used to it the more I heard it and, as I remembered on the most recent hearing, it does take me back to that short Spring break by the seaside in March 1990, an astonishing 34 years ago!

The second memory associated with the same song is slightly less pleasant and concerns the takeover of the Barclays Bank Trust Company Taxation service in early 1998. We were bought out by number of our own senior managers and a couple of financial entrepreneurs (a.k.a. “chancers”) who wanted to assemble a complete financial services company from small component companies (a Stockbroker, an Investment Management company etc.) and we were to be the tax advisory unit.

For reasons that no-one associated with the running of the new company has been able to explain satisfactorily they renamed us “ieTaxguard”    !

As far as we know we were the only unit they ever got around to buying and, by the end of 1998 they were heavily into cutting costs by relieving themselves of the salaries and pension contributions of the most senior junior management and non-management staff. On Statutory Redundancy rates – about 20% of what would have been paid had Barclays taken that action prior to the sale. That included yours truly and yes, even after more than 25 years it still annoys the hell out of me!

In the first couple of months of 1998, however, that was all in the unknowable future and the important job was moving everything we were allowed to keep from the old site not far from my home to the new office about a mile away – and doing it in a single weekend.

As Systems Liaison, sitting between the taxation staff and the IT people I was heavily involved with connecting the computers on desks with the new network and testing them. On this particular weekend this meant two 12 hour days (fortunately at “double time” overtime rate – which was nice).

On the Sunday afternoon (when most of the IT work had been done) some of the Tax staff came into the office to check that everything was going to work as expected on Monday morning. These were all the people who actually did the work and earned the fees, none of the management either middle or senior could be bothered to come in and micro-manage us as was their usual technique!

One of the guys bought a radio in with him and when he turned it up so that we could all listen while we worked see if you can guess what the first song was to come blasting out around the room?  Clue: it was an “oldie” from March 1990!

And yes, the computer kit did all work perfectly on Monday  morning so , all in all, I don’t mind having that memory connected to “Birdhouse”.

Alfie

 

Coming up later on this channel!

OK, so I have now got all of the festive messages and reviews of the last year that can reasonably be written out of the way and, therefore, I need some more things to write about if I am to make 2024 a year with a respectable number of posts, an average or better wordage and a wide range of topics.

Bearing in mind that I do not, at present, have any special events or holidays coming up to give me a nice, long, wordy series, I am going to have to do quite a few of my staples – the “Normal for Norfolk” and “CD of My Life” series as well as exercising my imagination for things to entertain you.

Over the last few years my favourite pieces have been the science-based ones where I have taken some simple Physics principle and made it more complicated for you – or something like that anyway! You may recall my efforts at putting into everyday English concepts such as a finite but unbounded Universe and the Time Dilation Effect with regard to near light-speed travel.

In the same vein I have in mind pieces on Quantum Mechanics and Time Travel, although it is entirely possible that I may already have done the latter – I just don’t know about it yet!

After these in complexity come the slightly less confusing (but still involving a certain amount of complicated research on my part) pieces akin to the one I did in September 2022 concerning our outer Solar System – particularly the Kuiper Belt and the Oort cloud.

The next one of that sort that I do will shift to the systems of other stars and the various methods used to detect what are known as “Exoplanets” – several thousand of a variety of types of which are now known to exist.

And if I get tired of those there are other topics that I can revisit in January alone. I have a return visit to the opticians coming up shortly (which may or may not be interesting enough for a follow-up to the previous version from a year ago) and, even more exciting still, my submitted faecal sample has caused me to be summoned to hospital for another Colonoscopy! Yes, at the end of this month I will be re-entering the jolly world of recreational laxatives!

You may be sure that I will, once again, be glued to the operator’s computer screen watching my insides gleaming in the fibre-optic light and trying to obtain a copy of the video!

I am sure that I will find something humorous to record about that, whatever happens. We’ll see.

This space-filling article was going to end at the end of the previous sentence but since I started it I have already had an idea for another piece not specifically mentioned above that forms part of one of my long-running series. I fully expect and hope that you will be reading it in the very near future.

Alfie

 

The Little Alfie Review of the year 2023

For some reason 2023 was the 4^th most productive in terms of both posts (36) and wordage (just over 40200) since I started in 2009. It is possible that this may have had something to do with a certain series that popped up in February and March and which accounted for 13 posts and in the region of 14,000 words. I had no way of knowing when I started it just how many of either articles or words would arise from this event – more on that later, however.

The year began, if you recall last year’s review, with me not feeling in the best of spirits having been knocked back by illness, accident and customer service let-downs. Thanks to the particularly stressful, utterly unnecessary and deceitful faked order tracking system used by a Chinese company pretending to be an American supplier of an item ordered online by me, the month of January continued in terms of annoyances where December left off.

As February opened, however, all of that got put firmly aside as we prepared to catch up on our “cancelled-by-Covid” Caribbean cruise from almost 3 years ago!

As I explained in the first part of the series we avoided the problem of having the holiday cancelled just before we set out for Birmingham Airport by travelling to Birmingham Airport the day before our flight and staying overnight in a hotel. No cancellation happened this time though and we made it to the P&O cruise liner “Britannia” with no difficulties – although, had we been flying from Manchester things might have been a little bit fraught because their aeroplane had a mechanical failure at the English end and they were several hours late arriving in Barbados!

With a view to keeping knowledge of our two week absence from home from the Peterborough housebreaking community I actually wrote most of that thirteen part series by hand on the boat and only started publishing them after we got home. This explains why the last one didn’t appear until 31^st March – after we had been back over a month!

Still, I did get to celebrate my 70^th birthday in the sea and on a beach in Antigua and actually took up snorkelling off beaches in both St. Kitts and Barbados – which was nice!

And shortly after we returned a package arrived containing that item ordered from America in January waiting for me. Strangely it was postmarked as having come directly from China and, interestingly, the tracking site still (as at 30^th December) shows it as awaiting delivery to me from a residential address in Cardiff!

I rather carelessly fell out of the back door at home in April and spent about a month in considerable discomfort with a sprained ankle – which was NOT nice!

The late spring and early summer were split between the caravan and doing the final episodes of the East Anglian Mensa Regional newsletter which I had to compose and edit almost single-handedly. Having been between 8 and 10 pages in normal circumstances, the final episode ran to 22, many of them more than a little scathing about the Management and Board of Directors. So far there has been no response so I guess none of those people actually read it!

On the caravan front we had the interesting experience in May of applying a couple of coats of “deck oil”. Oiling the deck is something that apparently needs doing every few years to keep water from soaking in and rotting the woodwork. It is, I should point out, not the same thing as “greasing the decking” which is anti-social and frowned upon by the Health & Safety executive!

In the Autumn I usually start getting ready for the annual Barclays Bank Inter-District Sea Angling competition (despite the fact that I left that organisation in 1998) which usually occurs at the beginning or middle of November. This year, however, it was scheduled for 8^th December with the result that all of my gear was checked, cleaned, packed and ready to go well over a month ahead of time. That was possibly the longest six weeks that I can remember and I was really looking forward to it as it was to be my 40^th consecutive appearance.

I have to say though that the anticipation did not in any way live up to the reality – the beach at Barry Island in South Wales was extremely steep and composed of large round stones that made it very dangerous, the weather was foul with high winds blowing heavy rain at us for 6 hours and to cap it all only ONE fish was caught between 40 anglers! And that was on the last cast of the day to the guy who organised the whole thing!

A few weeks later Christmas came upon us as usual and was hosted by my elder daughter Hannah and her family – who live just over a mile from us. We served as a dormitory for our other daughter, Carla and her husband and children so it was all somewhat manic with loud, excited grandchildren everywhere! So on Friday 29^th December we took the opportunity to escape to North Norfolk (where I am writing this) to see the New Year fireworks on Cromer seafront. I have written a separate “Normal for Norfolk” piece specifically about this visit which will leapfrog this review.

I was going to finish there but looking back through the 2023 posts it occurred to me that I should revisit one from the end of July – the one in which I wrote about surpassing my late school friend Michael Vincent’s achievements in the blogging area. I should tell you that my wordage count finished the year 10,000 or so ahead and there’s nearly another 1000 here. That will be the last time ever that I mention that comparison because having died in January 2020 the poor guy can hardly fight back!

And finally… before we left the caravan, for the annual shutdown, in January 2023 I set up a digital maximum/minimum thermometer in the lounge. I shall reset it when we leave on 3^rd January but you may be interested to know that in degrees Celsius the maximum was 34.7° and the minimum 2.9°. Obviously both of those temperatures happened when we were not in residence because we would have had the windows open to minimise the hot one and the heating on before it could reach the cold!

A very Happy New Year to you all,

Alfie

 

Normal for Norfolk 12 – Let’s meet the meat!

The sub-title, as my regular reader will know, is a quote from Douglas Adams’ second book in the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” series “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe”. It refers to the practice at that establishment of the diner discussing with the food animal which parts of it are particularly good to eat before it goes off to be butchered!

Rest assured that nothing of that sort happened to inspire this piece.

My lovely wife and I are currently at our caravan on the Forest Park site between Cromer and Overstrand to watch the New Year’s Day firework display being fired off from Cromer Pier – as we have for the last two years. After that we will be doing what is necessary to shut the Caravan down for the “close season” from 15^th January to 15^th March.

When we are allowed to return we will be starting the 4^th season since we bought this place, almost on a whim, in May 2021. A lot of Covid restrictions were still in force then and (for that first season anyway) there was not a lot pf activity surrounding the “Foresters Club” which, under normal circumstances, provides drink, cooked food and entertainment for the occupants of static and towed caravans, campervans and tents.

Those Covid restrictions gradually eased as 2021 went on and we did make occasional visits to the clubhouse – but never on the crowded Friday night events.

These follow the same format each week and despite the fact that the third and final element each week is a quiz we have never, until now, been in attendance. This was to me not quite the tragedy it otherwise might have been because the first part of the evening is BINGO!

I am not the biggest fan of this game (despite having once won a pair of cheap, plastic sunglasses in a trilingual version at a holiday resort in Majorca in 1997) but it certainly appeared to be very popular with regulars as the main bar area was absolutely heaving! And by “regulars” I do not just mean caravanners and campers because I have it on very good authority that many local residents also use the club as their only or main source of entertainment.

This is not really surprising given that the next nearest “social facilities” are the White Horse in Overstrand (over a mile away) and pubs in Cromer (even further). There is the clubhouse of the Royal Cromer Golf Club near at hand but (having seen and heard some of them in the Foresters) I doubt many of the “locals” would be accepted as members!

So far I have mentioned the Bingo and the Quiz as the first and third events of the evening respectively but the two were separated by the item that actually caused me to write this article…

The Meat Raffle!

Because Faith and I have lived sheltered lives in parts of the world where such things are not a traditional part of everyday life, this was a new concept to us and over the last couple of years we have indulged (without actually going to find out) in some odd speculation about what is actually involved. For example, does someone turn up with a pig (alive or dead) and a meat cleaver?!

And then, last Friday, we needed some exercise and decided to take an evening stroll down to the club – timing our arrival to miss most of the Bingo. We sat with our drinks in the adjoining function room until the games had ended and when the bingoists started leaving in numbers, moved into the bar and found a table for two for the quiz.

First though we had to wait for the Meat Raffle which, rather disappointingly turned out to be a straightforward ticket draw for vacuum-packed cuts of meat such as you would find at any Farmer’s Market. What made it rather wonderful, however, was the strong Norfolk accent of the man announcing the prizes (the same man who had read the Bingo numbers and was going to read the quiz questions in a while).

There were a couple of packs of Lamb Chops which his accent had no effect upon but I made notes of the others because they sounded so good!

At this point I have to apologise to my spellchecker which is going to have the usual kind of fit it suffers whenever I attempt phonetic pronunciation!

• “A Hool Chicken” (as opposed, of course to “harrf a chicken”)
• “Belly Pork with the roind on” (That’s “rind” to those of us who speak other versions of English)
• “Unsmooked Gammon” (Work this and the next two out for yourself!)
• “Anarther Hool Chicken”
• “Smooked Gammon”

That makes them sound a lot more exotic don’t you think?

After the event I researched the term (that is to say I used Google and Wikipedia) and found the following:

“A Meat Raffle is a tradition of raffling off meat, often in pubs and bars in Australia, in some areas of Britain and the US, and in Western Canada”.

It does not go into details of exactly which areas of those places habitually have them so it probably is not too surprising that we had never experienced them before. I just thought you would like to know that!

We didn’t buy any tickets for it (although we may do next time we are here on a Friday) but did, of course, enter the quiz. This comprised 5 rounds, of which 4 were on themed subjects and the other was a picture round. Several of the questions were “2 pointers” and we also received 4 additional points for being just a 2 person team.

When the results were read out in reverse order Faith and I, along with another team on the other side of the room both had 50 points and the organiser decided against a tie-break question but split the prize so that we received £10 per team.

Incidentally, I should point out that the first prize for the main Bingo game was around £180 – which just shows the value we put on knowledge in this country!

I was also slightly disappointed to find that the old rule of the question master always being right, even when he is wrong is still in force here! “What country is Zurich the capital of?” we were asked.

The correct answer is, of course “None at all” * but like just about every team in the room we put “Switzerland” and were given the point. I find that really bloody annoying!

Despite that we will be going back again after 15^th March and look forward to more success.

There only now remain the fireworks tomorrow evening (1^st January) before we pack up and go home and as I have written this at the caravan with no internet connection I feel completely justified in posting this when back in Peterborough as a 2023 item. I think that’s a fair way to end the year.

Alfie

*The capital of Switzerland, in case you didn’t know is actually Bern!

 

The Little Alfie Christmas Broadcast 2023.

Over the fifteen Christmases that I have been among you in this guise there have been only four occasions when I have not done either a “Christmas message” or, at the very least, a “Review of the Year” and there have been quite a few where I have done both. It is yet to be seen whether 2023 will be one of those ones but meanwhile here is the first bit – in which I do not feel I have to regale you with the story of 365 days of my personal history.

Regular readers (or Masochists who choose to read back over the posts from the previous 14 Decembers) may know that most of the “messages” are simple greetings but that I really excelled with that for 2019 – the one where I demolished Chris de Burgh’s Christmas hit “A Spaceman came Travelling” in a scientific and logical fashion. Since then I have been trying to surpass that one without repeating the format and so far I have failed to get an idea that would, by itself, meet my self-imposed 1000 word minimum for these pieces.

So, this is what I decided to do instead.

Write a rambling introduction (taking up 200+ words) and then fill it out with a couple of shorter but distinct ideas also on the subject of Christmas songs!

Part 1 – Examples of the interaction of Christmas song lyrics and Health and Safety legislation.

I know! It really is a great title for an utterly worthless University degree Dissertation – and I wish I had the time to fully write it up and submit it somewhere!

Nevertheless, we must not treat the concept embodied in that title in a frivolous fashion because when you really listen to the plethora of Christmas songs available there are some lyrics that for various reasons do not now sound as “nice” and “safe” in our over-cautious and over-sensitive age as they did when they first appeared not so very long ago.

In the lengthy preamble to the 2019 hatchet job on Mr de Burgh’s festive ditty I mentioned the obvious candidate for inclusion under this heading and, on the assumption that you are all too bloody idle to go to the December 2019 archive and read it for yourselves, I will tell you that it also appears on just about all of the “Now That’s What I Call Christmas” type of CD and give you a couple of minutes to have a guess.

OK, time’s up!

It is of course the line in “I believe in Father Christmas” by Greg Lake that I always imagine has Health & Safety Officers (or “Safety Elves” as I think of them) throwing up their hands in horror and it goes like this:

“And the peal of a bell and that Christmas tree smell
And their eyes full of tinsel and fire”!

How dangerous is THAT?!

I think the aforementioned Safety Elves must have put the whole country’s Accident & Emergency Departments on full alert when they heard those lines although I don’t recall too many reports in the mid-1970s concerning accidents involving blazing tinsel induced blindness! Perhaps it wasn’t that serious after all!

There are other examples (as I am sure you will have guessed) notably the, literally, highly toxic offering from the immortal Cliff Richard, “Mistletoe and Wine”. The parasitic Mistletoe plant (Viscum Album) is one of those delightful plants, fortunately rare in the UK, where every part is highly poisonous and the mere mention of it in connection with a tasty alcoholic drink must surely be highly suspicious!

WARNING! Do not under any circumstances consume any part of the Mistletoe plant with your festive glass of Pinot Grigo, is that clear?

Incidentally I use the word “immortal” about Cliff quite literally because I am convinced that he will go on forever for the simple reason that neither God nor his opposite number want him up/down there conducting the community singing for all eternity!

On a slightly more physical note I am pretty sure that a couple named “Patsy & Elmo” will be questioned by both H&S and the local Traffic Cops as witnesses concerning the appalling acts of violence by Santa Claus and his transport as related in the 1979 “festive“ song “Grandma got run over by a Reindeer” which includes the lyrics:

“When they found her Christmas mornin’,
At the scene of the attack,
There were hoof prints on her forehead,
And incriminatin’ Claus marks on her back..“

I will leave you to work out from wherever your home legal system is located just what criminal charges should arise out of this action but I am convinced that someone should be locked up for a very long time!

You will be pleased to know that I haven’t found any other examples as yet so don’t have nightmares about these ones. I do note however that I am only about 80% of the way to that 1000 word minimum so here is another aspect of Christmas popular music that you may enjoy.

Part 2 – my Top 10 Appallingly Awful Christmas Songs of all time.

Nine out of the ten songs on this list were already well known to me and the Number 2 would have been top until I did a bit of research and accidentally discovered something unutterably worse! You’ll see.

So, in reverse order we have:

10. “Christmas is a Joyous Time of Year” – Marty Feldman. This is in here to make up the numbers really and I actually rather like it. However anything that has a line “My elder sister Anna has been sick in the piana” cannot be all good!

9. “Christmas Time (Don’t let the Bells End)” – The Darkness. These guys may be from my own home county (Suffolk) but I just feel that they recorded this for a bet, just to see how many times they could get away with saying a phrase sounding like “bell-end”!

8. “I wish it could be a Wombling Merry Christmas Every Day” – Roy Wood and the Wombles. This is an unholy mash-up of Wizzard’s “I Wish it Could be Christmas Every Day” and the Wombles “Wombling Merry Christmas” (both of which are classic, fun tunes) and it just doesn’t work !

7. “Please Daddy don’t get drunk this Christmas” – John Denver. I had heard of this one but I had never actually played it until compiling this list. It is as bad as it sounds like it’s going to be and only lacks a storyline about the little boy’s dog getting run over by drunken Daddy’s truck to be much higher up this list!

6. “All I want for Christmas is my Two Front Teeth” – Spike Jones & his City Slickers. One of those horrible seasonal earworms from my childhood. When I started this list it was a “Top 5” and this was marked as “5a” with the next one as “5b”. It is just irritating!

5. “All I want for Christmas is a Beatle” – Dora Bryan. Another , like number 6 above, that got played incessantly on BBC radio’s “Children’s Favourites” in the 1960s. It was plainly jumping on the Beatlemania bandwagon and ceased to have any meaning at all once The Beatles broke up in 1970.

4. “Grandma got run over by a Reindeer” – Patsy & Elmo. I think I said all I wanted or needed to say about this in the first part of this post. Mind you it does not come anywhere near winning the “Worst possible taste” award as you will find out shortly!

3. “I want a Hippopotamus for Christmas” – Gayla Peevey. I had this on the list but could not decide on the right chart position for it until it was played on the BBC Radio 2 Breakfast Show this morning (20 December 2023) and I remembered how terrible it is. Miss Peevey was 10 years old when she perpetrated this monster in 1953. That makes her 10 years older than me and I gather that she is still alive and living in Oklahoma (which seems to me to be an excellent reason to avoid Oklahoma)!

2. “Dominick the Donkey (the Italian Christmas Donkey)” – Lou Monte. In December 2011 I was working on a Windows 7 migration contract at the National Construction Skills College in deepest North Norfolk (see posts from October to December 2011 in the archives) and one of my co-workers was an Indian lad who had a part-time job as a DJ on a station called “Raaj FM” in West Bromwich. Through this job he had picked up on a national campaign to get this song into the music charts and thought he was aiding this campaign by playing the damn song over and over again to us on his iPlayer! It is of the same stamp as Joe Dolce’s “Shaddupa your Face”, the rest of us hated it and his music player was threatened with a violent death if it didn’t stop!

And so we get to the last one. I am going to give you some comments about this before I give you the title and Artist. Back when the Covid pandemic started at the beginning of 2020 I made ill-considered and flippant remarks about it, not knowing how serious and deadly it was going to turn out to be. “If there has to be Corona virus, can I request the Dandelion & Burdock flavour?” is one that occurs! I mention that because the only possible justification that I can think of for this song existing at all is a similar level of ignorance pertaining in 1980. In the light of what followed I can only hope that the performer came to regret creating it! It is:

1. “Santa Claus has got the AIDS this year” – Tiny Tim. Yes. Really! Tiny Tim was previously known as a long-haired singer with a Ukulele who appeared on US comedy show “Rowan & Martins Laugh-in” and was famous for his falsetto rendering of “Tiptoe through the Tulips”.

Any comments will, as always, be appreciated.

I will leave you to look up the lyrics and even performances of all of the songs listed above and will finish with my customary seasonal greeting.

A Merry Christmas to all my readers!

Alfie

 

Normal for Norfolk 11 – Stately Homes

If the title used here for this episode about my “second Life” in the northern part of East Anglia were not already quite long it would have had five extra words added to the end.

These words (which I will get to in a minute) are those which my wife and Carla, our younger daughter say whenever they visit an old property together.  They have been saying this for so many years now that it has become a sort of family catchphrase.

Many times in recent years I have heard Faith or Carla say something akin to “Let’s go and visit a Stately Home – with a view to purchase!“

All of which has absolutely nothing to do with this article except that today Faith said that sentence to me when we were trying to decide what to do.

Let me set the scene.

It is late November 2023 and we are at our caravan just outside Cromer for what will probably be the last long visit of the year. By “long” I mean at least a week – there will still be shorter visits before the 2 month “close season” begins on 15^th January. We will for example, weather permitting, be here over New Year as we have established a tradition of turning up for the New Year’s Eve fireworks display on Cromer pier.

Anyway, we arrived on Wednesday afternoon along with gale force winds and rather a lot of rain. This has continued with only a gradual diminishing until today (Sunday) when neither were present.

Having decided that we would, indeed, venture out and determine whether to go out and make a completely imaginary and unrealistic offer to buy an old country house and estate we then had to decide which of the North Norfolk National Trust properties we would visit.

There are two such properties within a 30 minute drive of our location and, unsurprisingly, the closer, Felbrigg Hall is the one that we visit most often. It has a quite magnificent walled flower, fruit and vegetable garden but November is not really the time of year for those items to be at their best.

So we went for the other option which I had only visited in passing!

OK. I’ll just explain that remark.

On our short New Year visit up here in 2021/22 we decided to go to this one on 1^st January and it turned out that most of Norfolk had made the same choice! The main car park was absolutely full and no-one appeared to be leaving. There were, however, signs pointing to “Overflow car park” which we duly followed until, after half a mile or so we found ourselves back on the main road and heading in the general direction of “away”. We went somewhere else instead!

The place in question is Blickling Hall and to get to it you have to go through the small market town of Aylsham. And to get there you need to leave Cromer by the coast road then turn right onto the A140 – the road that, via Aylsham, Norwich and my old home in Long Stratton leads ultimately to my place of origin, Ipswich.

Now our caravan at Forest Park is not actually in Cromer so we first have to get to the coast road and the shortest route to that is along one of those one car wide roads which I absolutely hate driving down! It does have frequent spots where the edges have been worn away making passing places but I still tackled it dreading meeting something large coming the other way!

“Be brave”, said Faith and “drive in the centre of the road so you can see what’s coming”!

“That’s not difficult”, I responded “It’s ALL centre”!

I suppose it could have been worse as I only met three cars coming the other way on that stretch of road and two of those were in convoy.

There were no further problems getting to Blickling and the car park had spaces so we didn’t have to resume our hunt for the secret overflow parking!

As we walked to the Hall entrance it became apparent that Faith was pointing things out to me in the belief that I had seen them before. It turns out that she had visited this place a couple of times between 2011 and 2015 in the company of her mother, her sister and daughter Carla while on holidays in Norfolk. She was assuming that I had been with them, forgetting that while I did participate in those holidays (except 2012 when I was in Italy) it was only at weekends – I was a daily paid contractor and could not afford (unpaid) time off.

Having now (finally) experienced the place – or at least some of it, as it was too damned cold to do all of the grounds  – I want to go back a few more times. Felbrigg Hall, while it may be closer, is definitely now in second place!

If you want to know what, apart from the Jacobean buildings and the extensive formal gardens, impressed me about Blickling I made a note of three things:

1. To warm up after walking around outside we went to the larger of the two cafes and I had a big bowl of Parsnip and Apple soup and it was delicious (as unlikely as that sounds)!
2. It has a charity bookshop that would put a small town library to shame. I could have spent the whole day in there and spent hundreds of pounds but managed to restrict myself to shelling out a magnificent £2.50 on a hardback book from the “science” section. The description on the cover underneath the actual title is “Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos” – so that sounds like fun! The actual title is “The Hidden Reality” it is by a Physics Professor named Brian Greene and I cannot wait to get into it! When I understand it you may be sure that I will do one of these articles explaining it to you.
3. And finally, when Faith and I were walking on the outer edges of the formal gardens we spotted a group of a dozen or so volunteers clearing an unruly piece of woodland a few hundred yards away. Possibly because it is only a month before Christmas, or more likely just because it was bloody cold out there, they were all wearing bright red, pointy, woolly bobble hats. “Look” I said excitedly to my long-suffering wife, “REAL Garden Gnomes”!

And you don’t see reviews like THAT on Trip Adviser, now do you?

Alfie

 

Three years in “pending”!

If you have been wondering where I’ve been lately I have spent most of October and three quarters of November catching up with the missing chapters of the monstrous document that records my annual (since 1984) attendance at the increasingly inaccurately named “Barclays Bank Inter-Region Sea Angling competition”.

I should mention that, while some chapters were partially done when I picked it up, the last fully finished account was the 2009 event – so it was a big and very time-consuming job!

I managed to get it up to date as at 20^th November (just under three weeks before this year’s match is to take place) and suddenly realised that I needed to find something to put in here in the next five days to avoid having a blank month.

And I was looking for another document entirely on one of my older USB drives when I came across the article below.

To give some background it was written in November 2020 (it had a “last modified” date of 7^th November 2020) when we were going through various stages of Covid-19 lockdown and I have no idea why I didn’t publish it then – November 2020 was a blank month.

Possibly it had to do with both my mother and my mother-in-law being unwell and in what were to be the final weeks among us. In other words, “Faith and I had bigger things to worry about”!

It may also have been that, at under 700 words, I considered it too short or possibly even, unfinished – although I cannot think what else I could have wanted to add.

So here, with only small editorial corrections, from out of USB stick limbo, is the three year old piece concerning:

Email.

For nearly 4 years prior to March 2020, my Tuesday mornings were spent as a volunteer in the computer suite of the Peterborough Central Library, teaching the basics of computer usage to absolute beginners of a surprising range of ages. Lack of knowledge of how computers are used is not just the domain of old people (although most were) so I had to be quite adaptable.

One of the things that the older “students” would ask about was how to use email and my first task was usually to help them to set up an account. To test this I would log on to one of my own email accounts and send them something. Some would pick up on that “one of my email accounts” and would ask me just how many I had!  I was reminded of that question the other night during the later, drunker (and slightly strange) stages of a Mensa East Anglia Zoom meeting and thinking about the answer to it gave me the idea for this article.

Back in 1996 when I started to change career from Personal Tax adviser (Note: that’s “Tax Adviser” and NOT as one moron at Peterborough Job Centre tried to put into my record, “Taxi Driver”) to I.T. Support I had a job called Systems Liaison which entailed reporting requested changes to the rudimentary Tax and Work Management programs to the “proper” IT staff and then passing back to the users the reasons for them not being able to have them. Amongst other things, of course!

At that time it was not considered that workers filling in printed paper Tax Returns for our clients had any need for access to the Internet (the Inland Revenue was not on-line then and the Gods of Production would have been angry about wasted time!) but I was able to sit with the IT staff and was quickly shown how to bypass the Proxy settings that shut off the wonders of the universe from “the rest”, including said Gods of Production (aka Senior Managers and many other less flattering names).

This meant that during my lunchtime and whenever my work was up to date I was able to explore and opened, for no other reason than that I could, my first internet-based webmail accounts. One of these was the Hotmail account that I still use. The other was with search engine “Lycos” which had obviously not yet arrived in the UK as the address ended “@lycos.de”. I wish I could remember the password for it – there must be thousands of messages waiting for me!

With the acquisition of first dial-up* and then fibre-optic broadband for our home internet access we also got “normal” email accounts running on either Outlook Express* or Outlook. I did not tend to use the Hotmail account so much then but kept it going for various things that required an email address as an account login.

(*Sorry children – you’ll have to ask your parents about those; I haven’t got room for a history lesson!)

In the last 15 years I have opened various other webmail accounts for specific purposes including a “Gmail” one (because I thought I might need it one day)! And in 2010 I started IT Support work on a contract basis and discovered that I did indeed need it.

Why so? Well I was working at various times for companies which had IT policies which banned the use of Hotmail and the webmail versions of other personal email accounts and I needed to keep in touch with home. I soon discovered, however, that as Google is far too useful a tool to block, its associate Gmail (formerly called Googlemail) almost always gets through. So all I did was set all my other working accounts to forward to that one and all of my messages reached me! Since then it has been my main email account.

I am sure you are still wanting to know the answer to the question I was asked by my Library students concerning the actual number of email accounts I have.

Well, according to my secret password spreadsheet, the grand total, including the one I have as local secretary of Peterborough Mensa is… 14 and I may well be getting another “vanity” account with  Mensa International shortly!

How many have you got?

Alfie

 

The Plain Man’s Guide to… Part 1 – Introduction

I can think of a couple of instances over the 14½ years of this site’s existence when I have, with good intentions, started what I thought would be useful series that would be of some benefit to my reader(s) only for them to fizzle out out after a couple of articles (or even just the introduction) because I didn’t think or care enough about the topics.

I am not going to tell you what they were – you will just have to read through all 400-odd posts from February 2009 onwards to find that out!

This time I have actually written a list of certain things to write about. They are things where the information tends to be picked up by hearsay or from ill-informed journalists and there is no obvious source for a clear, simple explanation of that thing.

I hope to be that source.

I mentioned journalists a moment ago and will confess to you that there was a time when I really rather liked the idea of writing for a regular salary and that goes from my move to Information Technology work in 1999 (when I wanted to do procedures manuals for the stuff I was learning for the first time and trying to understand) well past the start of this blog.

As you trawl your way through the total work to find those old abortive series you will find occasional references to local newspapers and including the odd plea to be given a job writing for a living. One of these pointed out in what was probably not a very tactful fashion that I would, at least be writing in (almost) perfect English unlike the present incumbent who, apparently, did not know the difference between “have” and “of”, as in “He shouldn’t of done it”!

As I no longer have to rely on any employer for remunerative work, I can now, happily look at the output of local or national news publications and say to myself “Well, I’m glad I didn’t ever have to work for or with a bunch of ungrammatical, ill-informed jingoistic twerps such as yourselves”!

And, quite often, I find that the things I have put on my list to inform you about come from things that I have read in the papers or heard on the radio or television news and thought “Either you don’t know what you are talking about or you do and are deliberately putting a emotive slant on something that just isn’t so to colour public opinion!”

Other things have come to me as a result of my employment history which falls into two distinct sections – 1969 to 1999 and 1999 to 2016.

The former period was spent either in the Inland Revenue (now known as HM Revenue & Customs or HMRC) or Barclays Bank Trust Company as an adviser on personal Income Tax matters. Please note (and I am repeating this from an earlier post) that is “a Tax Adviser” and not, as a useless lump in Peterborough Job Centre wrote down on my record, “a Taxi Driver”! That career ended when Barclays sold off its Tax division and I got made redundant.

My second career, as you will find mentioned many times in these pages, began in August 1999 when I managed to cajole (it sounds so much nicer than the word “blag” that I usually use) my way into a night shift IT Support role which gave me time to actually learn that job. It continued in a variety of short-term and contract jobs until I decided I’d had enough of that nonsense in 2016 and retired 2 years before my state pension became due at age 65. While doing that career I learned quite a few little tricks of the “turn it off and on again” variety which are also going on the list as I remember them.

I have decided that the first two articles in the series will date from the Tax phase of my working life – which should keep us going for a while.

But…

If you decide when you have read them that you have anything (not necessarily Tax or Computers) that you have always wanted a simple, clear explanation for, please send me a message in the “Comments” space below and I will have a go at it.

Alfie

 

Well! That was nice!

Somewhen around 14 months ago I wrote telling you about the day when the temperature in some parts of the UK reached 40° Celsius. I don’t think it quite made it to that level in Overstrand, North Norfolk but it was far enough up into the 30s that Faith and I found it necessary to retreat neck-deep into the sea to keep cool!

You may recall that earlier this year we made a number of forays into the M.V. Britannia’s swimming pool and the sea at a number of Caribbean Island beaches for exactly the same reason. Those dips, it must be said, were not as effective at achieving those cooling objectives because the water was frequently as warm or warmer than the land.

The sea off North Norfolk, however, never lets us forget that there is nothing (not even the west coast of Norway) separating it from the North Polar ice cap – or whatever may be left of it!

I am sure that you will probably have guessed by now that the same sort of thing has happened again.

Yes. A heat wave. In England. In September!

That’s tough luck on the schoolchildren and their parents who were obliged to take them on their holidays during August and the second half of July when the weather was reasonably dry but not particularly hot – they had been back at school for less than a week when “summer happened”!

It was, however, very good luck for retired people with a holiday home on the Norfolk coast (Hello!) who got to escape the worst of the heat by running away to the seaside.

We came up here (to the caravan) on Thursday 7^th September, arriving too late to do anything other than recover from the drive by spending a couple of hours lazing on reclining chairs and listening to gentle breezes wafting through the trees. It’s a tough life!

On Friday we decided that, as nice as doing nothing may be, we should really go out and do something – maybe go for a swim. So we packed swimming clothes and towels and set out for Sheringham.

Now while Peterborough, other inland bits of East Anglia and coastal parts of Suffolk and Essex may have been roasting in the sun, this particular section of Norfolk had failed to get the message and had virtually disappeared beneath a cold, clammy sea mist which only very, very slowly turned into a warm, clammy sea mist! I was not going to go swimming in THAT – too easy to get out of sight of the lifeguards and too hard to get dry afterwards!

So, after a leisurely Crab Salad for lunch we headed back to the caravan where we were just far enough inland for the weather to be hot and sunny again. Oh well – back to the sunbeds!

Saturday dawned with the sun shining again so we decided to beat the anticipated rush of weekend day-trippers and get onto the beach at Overstrand (and, hopefully, into the sea).

We thought that Overstrand would perhaps attract fewer visitors than Cromer or Sheringham and while we have no proof about that it does seem likely to have been the case because at no time were there more than a dozen or so people in sight on our section of the beach. From the top of the cliff it probably looked a lot like one of my photographs 3 and 1 years ago showing the despicable and irresponsible overcrowding that went on during the Covid-19 lockdowns”

See both photos in question here: https://littlealfie.wordpress.com/2022/06/

This year we left any valuables that an opportunistic bag-snatcher might have wanted either in the caravan or in the boot of the car – so that we were able to go into the sea together – and a very few minutes after dropping our towels on the sand we were, once again, neck deep in the North Sea. I should add that it takes quite a bit of doing to get that deep given the almost non-existent slope of this beach – it means that you have to walk a hell of a long way out before even getting to do that little scream that boys do when the cold water gets to the swimming trunks!

By the time I had waded out to shoulder depth and started swimming about I had got used to the temperature and was even noticing occasional warm patches wafting past. I presume that this was a result of the hot sun quickly warming the large expanse of really shallow water closer in – it would have bothered me a bit had there been loads of small children nearby!

The last time I experienced warm patches like that (as opposed to the whole sea being warm as in the Caribbean) was in the early 1970s when I went swimming at Sizewell on the Suffolk coast The warm bits were not due to the sun but to the outflow of seawater being used as coolant in the Nuclear Power Station about a quarter of a mile away. This explains why, even now, I still glow faintly in the dark!

After floating lazily around for 30 minutes or so we body surfed back to the waters edge (which was now at least 25 yards closer to our towel than it had been when we went in) and laid down to dry out in the sun. I did in fact get so close to being completely dry that I didn’t bother to change out of my swimming shorts and just put on a t-shirt and trainers for the walk up the cliff path to the car.

All that swimming proved rather tiring so we had to spend the rest of the afternoon recovering on the sunbeds – I bet THAT surprised you!

Sunday was also warm but we stayed on the site and, just to be perverse, walked to the bar/restaurant and had a piping hot roast dinner!

On the Monday we drove home, still in clad in shorts and t-shirts, and have remained dressed thus for the next couple of weeks while the temperature in Peterborough has slowly dropped back to the seasonal norm. Only in the last few days have I gone back to wearing long trousers again.

It has been a lovely and unexpected late summer interlude but you are probably wondering why I have bothered to tell you about it.

Well, I should explain that prior to the sun coming out in September I was working on two distinct writing projects – the first of which you will hopefully read here soon.

It is an article about rights and duties (although only the former ever seem to get mentioned) and I have been meaning to do it since 2009. It is quite heavy stuff to write and still has a way to go – as has the second project.

This is a barely started dystopian novel set 4 or 5 generations in the future and the part I am writing now is rather dark and more than a bit depressing (I am fairly sure it won’t all be like that though).

So, basically, the nice weather was the first excuse that came along for a break from those serious but not vital things – and I jumped on it!

Now it’s back to my ideas for a Rights and Duties Covenant and the potential doings of my grandchildren’s great-grandchildren!

Oh, and I still have several chapters of the memoir about my annual Sea Fishing match to finish and a bit to do for this site about Exo-planets.

It’s all go!

Alfie

 

We’re going to the Zoo, zoo, zoo…

And to continue the children’s song lyric “…you can come too”.

Especially, it must be said, if you’re coming along to help look after my first and third (in age order) grandchildren – brothers aged 6 and 4 who have really begun to nail down the art of annoying the hell out of each other with an air of total innocence!

These tiny demons along with their mother (who was, of course, once the same sort of tiny demon in her own right along with her sister) have been visiting us at the caravan as part of the programme to keep them occupied during the interminable school summer holidays.

To explain, for most families with working parents the six weeks from mid-July to the end of August are taken up farming the children out as follows:

Week 1 – Mother has a week off work with the children.

Week 2 – Mother and Father have a week off work and the whole family go away somewhere.

Week 3 – Father has a week off work with the children.

Week 4 and 1^st half of Week 5 – one set of grandparents somewhat reluctantly accept the challenge of entertaining increasingly bored Grandchildren until…

Week 5 (2^nd half) and Week 6 – they hand the little sods over to the other set of grandparents along with stories about what well-behaved little angels they have been!

Broadly speaking that was how it went with our children although the order was not fixed and there would be a number of days included for shopping for school uniform, shoes and the like.

Incidentally, I still remember from over 50 or 60 years ago the annoyance I felt on seeing, only days after the holidays started, clothing and shoe shops displaying “Back to School” signs in their windows!

I believe that nowadays such adverts actually appear before the schools have broken up – that is unbelievably rotten of them!

Back to the school holiday roster, we also have to take into account that we have two children each of whom have 2 children of their own – so there are two families whose schedules have to dovetail just like they have to at Christmas.

My younger daughter, who lives in Essex (in the bit famous for Jam [U.S. = Jelly] production), currently works from home and as her youngest does not start school for another year, he still gets to go to Nursery School for as much of the holiday as necessary – so that isn’t quite as complicated as it might be.

His sister, our six year old Granddaughter, has already spent one week of the holidays with us and she has been back a few days from a week’s visit to her other grandparents in Hampshire. After that her remaining three weeks will be spent doing the “split parenting” thing before, like her two cousins, she returns to school and all (from our point of view) goes quiet again.

Meanwhile, back at the caravan we decided (and I’m sure that you have already worked this out from the title) that on Sunday we would visit something called “The Amazona Zoo” which we have often seen signs to in and around Cromer. Size wise it is no Regents Park but neither is it like the legendary Zoo which only has a dog in it – it’s a Shih-Tzu! Read that last bit out loud if you don’t get it!

The animals at Amazona are, not too surprisingly from the name, mainly South American in origin – although, given that this is Norfolk, I do wonder how many local customers ask if they can get a discount for Amazon Prime membership!

It does have a reasonable selection of animals from that continent – from Big Cats to tiny Monkeys and even Guinea Pigs, although I found the colony of just three Flamingos somewhat disappointing. They are very gregarious birds and because there have to be rather lot of them before they will breed their favourite pond has a number of mirrors around its edge so they think there are more of them than there really are!

The boys enjoyed it (which is all that matters really) and my daughter wins an award for the brilliant suggestion that a baby Ocelot should be called an “Ocelittle”! I don’t know where she gets her sense of humour from! And that was quite enough for one Sunday.

Monday was quite a quiet day due to rain, the 10 Pin Bowling lanes at the Soft Play centre in North Walsham suffering a total scoring system computer failure and everyone being knackered from yesterday so we just booked an hour for the five of us in the Holiday Park’s indoor swimming pool. It isn’t a pool for swimming lengths in but it is big enough for our grandchildren to get out of their depth so buoyancy aids were definitely needed.

It was also big enough to have those standard swimming pool pictorial notices of the things you’re not allowed to do (except, for some reason the one about “No Heavy Petting”) and my small six year old friend tried, while bobbing about in his little yellow lifejacket, to read them all. He was not familiar with the act of running along the poolside and leaping in (an action known as “bombing”) but he gave that unfamiliar word a good try.

This resulted in a small but perfectly audible voice piping up with “Mummy, what’s BUMMING”!

Fortunately nobody answered him!

Tuesday was our final full day and we decided to spend it in Cromer.

Lunch at the Kings Head (which I think is where I caught Covid in October 2021) was OK, the session in the amusement arcade was popular as was running to the public toilets on the pier. The 18-hole Crazy Golf was too long for small concentrations to cope with but the real highlight came right at the beginning of the day. We went to the small activity park behind the largest in-town car park and the most popular thing there was the very long zip-wire.

Four Year Old wasn’t quite brave enough to try it but his brother thought it was amazing. While he had to be helped to get astride the rubber disc and had to be towed (by me) back to the start for the dismount he loved hurtling down the cable, the crash into the spring-loaded buffer and the slight rebound.

Now I don’t know if I was a terrible parent who deprived his daughters of exciting things to do when they were small but for some reason my daughter Hannah simply could not resist that zip-wire! She got on it fine and went along it with somewhat more momentum than her son had – meaning that she hit the “buffer” much harder than he had. This collision flipped her over 90 degrees so that instead of the dignified upright sitting position she had been adopting she was now going backwards up the wire on her back with her posterior about a foot above the ground.

By the time she stopped she was in fits of laughter and I had to help her to slide off the “seat” to the ground. It was a shame that it wasn’t videoed or it could have been very embarrassing – oh, wait! Faith did catch it all on her phone – this could keep turning up at family events for YEARS!

On Wednesday we returned home as we had come – with Faith keeping the little ones entertained in Hannah’s car and me driving by myself with our luggage, food and dirty washing. When we got home Faith and I both immediately fell asleep in armchairs – I wonder why?

Not to worry, they’ll all be back at school soon.

Alfie

 

Normal for Norfolk 10 – Out and about.

I haven’t done one of this series for a while. I thought there would be dozens by now but it has proved surprisingly difficult to find topics to lie about – oops! I mean WRITE about!

Sorry about that – I slipped into “newspaper journalist” mode which, as I am sure you know, means that I won’t let the truth get in the way of a good story.

Anyway, during our latest stay at our caravan near Cromer, North Norfolk last week I made a few written observations – as I write this introductory bit I don’t actually know how many there will be altogether but I can say that at least one will be completely true, at least one will be slightly exaggerated and at least one will be made up.

I have no intention of telling you which is which!

Because of dire weather predictions for heavy rain on Wednesday 2^nd August 2023, Faith and I decided to go to Norwich because it has several indoor shopping centres which would keep us dry.

We drove to the Park & Ride terminus just outside Norwich Airport, got the bus into the city centre and, as it now showed every sign of being a nice day, we decided to be tourists instead of shoppers.

We headed for the Castle (because it was nearest to the bus stop) and decided that, as neither of us could recall ever going inside before, we would do that.

Now I have always had a bit of a low opinion of Norwich Castle, formed by driving past it to and from work on my motorbike nearly every day for nearly four years.

It looks new!

By which I mean that the stone of which it is constructed shows absolutely NO sign of weathering, erosion or discolouration – unlike its supposed East Anglian “contemporaries” Colchester, Framlingham and Orford. It does not even (as do some much newer old buildings that I know of) have chiselled graffiti recording people’s names and the years of their visits!

In fact I have, over time, formed the very definite opinion that the whole thing is something that the Norwich City Fathers dreamed up an indeterminate number of years ago just to pull in the tourists!

And this viewpoint was only reinforced on our arrival at the main entrance where a sign informed us that the main body of the castle was closed, not for “repairs” or “renovations” but “ongoing building work”! If that isn’t an admission that the Castle is not actually finished yet, I don’t know what is!

So it was on to the Cathedral which definitely does look old to compare it with other Cathedrals we have visited in this part of the UK. I found this one a bit disappointing compared to Ely and even Peterborough – it seems rather narrow inside and while it does have a majestic spire, you cannot see that from indoors. I will say that some of the stained glass windows are rather colourful though.

At least they have changed the content of the Cathedral bookshop! The last time I was in there (about 1972) they were prominently displaying a pamphlet proclaiming “Norwich – Capital of East Anglia! I left rather swiftly on seeing that lest my outrage cause me to say something that might be considered inappropriate for such a place. *

After a coffee in one of the shopping precincts – it was an iced coffee because the bad weather completely failed to turn up and we were overheating in the sunshine – we got back on the bus to return to the P&R carpark at the airport.

It was from our seats on the bus that I was able to observe the rather odd safety arrangements!

Faith and I were sitting upstairs in seats beside the “Emergency Exit” window. The glass concerned is printed with instructions to (only in an emergency, obviously) “Use the hammer to break glass”.

And above the window in a small, purpose built compartment is the small hammer referred to.

That is fine as far as it goes but what, I hear you ask, is to stop anti-social ne’er-do-wells from stealing said hammer for their own nefarious purposes or mayhem?

Well, they have thought of that for which reason the hammer is safely ensconced behind a small sheet of toughened glass which has to be broken to access it.

“How?” – You may ask. Your guess is as good as mine but I think I may just carry my own hammer the next time I travel that way!

The next day we were on a bus again – this time trying out our bus passes on one of the two “Coast Hopper” services that run out of Cromer – CH1 to the west and CH2 to the east. We chose the “CH1” service that goes west from Cromer via Sheringham, Weybourne and various other small coastal villages to the very picturesque town and harbour of Wells-next-the-Sea.

And a very enjoyable hour and a quarter it was too – with one minor exception. Just after we boarded the bus a couple of “not from around here” ladies got on, sat behind us and did not stop talking until we reached the Wells terminus! I wanted to turn around and ask them if they were breathing through their ears but was (probably fortunately) distracted by the great work being done under extremely stressful conditions by our driver.

Now I don’t know if any of you are familiar with the “main” A149 North Norfolk coast road but it isn’t as big as it sounds like it should be!

There are places along that road, particularly in the villages of Cley and Stiffkey, where it narrows down to a width not much greater than that of a single decker bus. To make things worse the former village (which rhymes with “cry” rather than “way”) has a very tight right-angled bend at the narrowest point!

I am fairly certain that the CH1 schedule has been carefully worked out to avoid the worst possible scenario – two buses going into Cley from opposite ends at the same time – but that does not help with the pillocks who seem to think that they can park along that road simply because they want to. There were also certain drivers who thought that it should automatically be the bus that reversed when they met at a narrow point!

It was very exciting and the bus drivers both ways were utterly brilliant and patient – obviously very experienced at dealing with everything from idiot car drivers to oncoming combine harvesters!

That evening in our holiday park’s clubhouse there was an old local chap (I believe he does some gardening for the owners) who was talking to some other holidaymakers at the bar. I listened from a distance and gathered that he was telling them about a recent sighting of crop circles nearby. I did not contribute to the conversation as I was quietly sceptical given the amount of harvesting we had seen going on that day in the few as yet uncut wheat fields.

I kept listening for a clue as to the location of this apparition (which I had never seen before) and gathered that this example could be seen from the roadside between Cromer and Holt.

As we were to be driving to Holt next morning I thought that I would keep a good look out and as we passed the only possible field I saw that I had been wrong to be sceptical – there were indeed crop circles and here is a picture of them:

Finally, while on the subject of the small but interesting market town of Holt it appears that one of my most tired and apparently unfunny jokes “Holt? Who goes there?” will have to be laid to rest because on the trip back from Wells I heard a couple of locals talking about it and referring to it as “Ho’t” with the “L” silent. So that’s ruined that one!

Alfie

* The REAL capital of East Anglia is, of course, Beodricsworth, or, as it is better known today, Bury St. Edmunds.  Not Norwich. Never has been; never will be.

 

Big Numbers!

Somewhere early on in the excessively verbose previous post I made a remark about padding it out specifically to increase my total wordage – which is currently sitting at just over 425,000.

Given that 425K (impressive though I think it is) has taken 13½ years to achieve at an annual word rate of just over 31,000 and the current annual figure as at the last posting was already slightly over 30,000 it should be apparent that the “impending event” alluded to was neither a landmark total figure nor a particularly significant annual total!

To find out what the approaching event is let us go back to February 2009 and the origin of this site.

You may recall that this whole thing is the fault of my former school friend Michael Vincent who made contact at that time after almost 40 years!

Amongst the considerable number of stories of Mike’s life that came out in our initial flurry of emails I found the most surprising to be his acquisition of writing skills enabling him to keep (*) no less than 3 WordPress blogs on the go simultaneously – something he had been doing for over a year when we made contact. This site was started on a “Well, if he can do it…” basis as a result of that achievement!

 When Mike, sadly, moved on to the next plane of existence in January 2020 he was aware that it was coming but politely refused my offer to act as a “Blog Executor” to preserve the sites and post some sort of announcement and/or epitaph for him.

Thus, unless they were known to Mike’s son or any of the “Copleston 69” Facebook alumni group, to his readers those columns (he didn’t like the term “blog”) just stopped!

As I cannot get into those sites to do that, I have taken the only step that I can – which is to go into each one in turn, highlight the whole thing and copy and paste it into three separate Word documents. While this preserved the words and pictures it could not do anything about the considerable number of brilliant comments that had been made on the articles over the years!

So, I’m sorry old friend but if WordPress ever decides to clean up inactive accounts and obliterates your work that is the best I can do!

I am sure that those of you who are accustomed to working with Microsoft Word documents will realise that those copied items automatically impart certain information to me of which the most significant is… the word count!

And now we are getting to the significant statistical event that this is all about!

Because I noticed that the numbers of my total words recorded on my statistics spreadsheet were approaching the sum total of the words on Mike’s three sites. OK, the guy has been gone for 3 years now but for some reason I found it was important for me to overtake him!

And, if you wondered just when that momentous (to me) occurrence will be…

See that (*) about 8 or 9 paragraphs ago? Well, the word before that represents the point where I went into the lead!

It must have been a competitive schoolboy thing!

Alfie

 

The CD of My Life – Different Drum “The Stone Poneys”

There hasn’t been one of this series for some time – largely because it has been a while since I heard anything that did the required thing.

And if you are unfamiliar with this site and the concept involved, the “thing” is to be a song that provides the key to a “box” of memories that come back to me as clear as day on hearing it. Or, in reverse, thinking of a particular event causes the song in question to spring unbidden into my head.

Back in February 2013 I posted an item in this series which listed a staggering NINETEEN tracks, all of which were keys to the same box of memories. You may wish to go to the archives pull-down menu on the right of this page, click on February 2013 and click on the highlighted date of the 19^th.

In case you cannot be bothered to do that here is a summary of the circumstances detailed in that earlier story and because this is, essentially an extension to it I will be expanding that back story a bit.

While this expansion will make the post more interesting I confess that its primary purpose is to increase my wordage – I will explain why in the next post.

In February 1999 I was made redundant by the Company that had, one year earlier, taken over the Barclays Bank Trust Company Taxation service – which was called ieTaxguard. Those of us who got chopped by this organisation surmised that the silly “ie” bit at the start of the name actually stood for “intestinal effluence” but that was probably just sour grapes!

After that happened I had a couple of office “temping” jobs and spent a great deal of time applying for IT Support positions – that being the direction I had been moving towards in Barclays.

These applications bore fruit in mid-August 1999 when I got sent for an interview at Solway Foods in Corby and, after thinking I had blown it through getting snappy with the IT Manager after he seemed to be making an issue of my age (46), I returned home to find that they wanted me to start more or less immediately!

After a satisfactory trial period still paid by the agency that got me the interview I was taken on full-time doing four twelve hour night shifts a week as the only IT person on the entire three factory Corby site.

The job included another Solway Foods factory about 75 miles away near Worksop and, fortunately, night visits up there were not common – although with my fully updated company laptop computer I could connect to the network at either site and access any system needed.

I mention the other site because when it comes to the 19 original music tracks referred to above, quite a few do actually bring up a mental picture of the room I used when there – something I did not record in the earlier article.

The most common reason for me having to make a night-time visit to Worksop was when the label printer on one of the sandwich production lines would drop its database. Until this was put right the “Best Before” date and the time stamp used by Quality Controllers could not be added to the packaging and they would have to put the unlabelled products in big trays until I could rush up there with my laptop from Corby.

I would then don my hairnet, white coat and white Wellington boots, go into the “clean area” and upload a new copy of the database into the labeller then stick around while they tried it to make sure it was working properly on the “trayed-up” backlog. Normally I would not have time to return to Corby for the midnight backup of the main production database so I would take my laptop into an unused dayshift office hook the laptop into the network and relax for an hour while the automated backup job did its stuff.

That hour is when I would have the music on up there and why I get a picture of those offices for some of the tracks.

When everything was done I would restore the network cable to the PC I had borrowed it from and drive back to Corby for my lunch and more music!

The other thing I notice that I skipped over as unimportant in the first article was the bit about the radio stations I listened to before plumping for Virgin Radio Online (from where the 19 tracks were all selected.

As I said in the first piece, my first effort after working out how to get past the Company’s proxy settings (which control levels of access to the internet) was to try to find online “oldies” stations where the Breakfast Shows would be going on between 10pm to midnight UK time – i.e. a time zone 8 to 10 hours ahead of us.

It turned out that, with the exception of most of Australia, which was not well served by online stations at that time, there were not many English speaking areas in the required area – so I abandoned that idea which would have given me the impression of working a normal day (until I looked out of the window anyway)!

Instead I opted for 8 to 10 hours behind and going for the evening “drive time” shows of stations in the Western USA. Actually that tended to mean the “-8” zone only as -9 and -10 were (with the exception of Alaska) in the Pacific Ocean!

For some reason I settled on a 1960s retro station based in something known as “The Tri-cities area” which I had not heard of before comprising the cities of Richland, Kennewick and Pasco on the Columbia River in the heart of Washington State.

Radio Stations in the USA change their names regularly with changes of ownership or franchise and I cannot seem to find a name that I recognise from 1999 – the nearest ones I can find that cover that area and that genre are “KNLT” and “KOLW” – look them up online and have a listen. I should warn you though that you will have to convince the internet that you are inside the USA – something you didn’t have to do in 1999 – I used a VPN that convinced the world that I was listening from Seattle!

When I started this piece I assumed that it would be a simple “I heard this… It reminded me of this…” but my pencil seems to have run away with me. Still, I am happy that I have filled in some background and gaps from the original telling.

The song in question is “Different Drum” by a trio called “The Stone Poneys” (in case the title has disappeared from the top of your page) and was first heard by me on Radio Caroline when it was released in 1967. It was not, however, a hit in the UK and so has hardly ever been played by the BBC subsequently.

It was a pleasant surprise to hear a previously liked song played on Greatest Hits Radio recently – especially as it doesn’t really qualify as a “hit” at all! The band had no other hits either here or in the USA – probably due to its lead singer, Linda Ronstadt, embarking on a much more successful solo career.

And, believe it or not, all of the stuff that I have recorded here (maybe not in quite so much detail) popped into my head when I heard the song a few days ago!

I suppose I could have simply edited the 2013 piece to include the gist of the above and added a 20^th track but I felt it deserved an article of its own rather than just being buried nearly 300 posts down the list.

Oh, and in a final twist the memory box opened by “Different Drum” contained another song from the same era and the same radio station.

It is “Little Red Riding Hood”, the lesser known follow up to “Woolly Bully” by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs.

I am going to leave you to look them up on YouTube or similar because I notice that a lot of the links in previous posts in this series are now defunct – but enjoy them anyway,

Alfie

 

It doesn’t get any better!

Somewhen around March 2018 I wrote an article concerning bus travel into Peterborough from my home.  At that time this was a trip I made both ways twice a week to get to my volunteer job teaching the “incomputerate” at the Central Library.

Until, that is, Tuesday 10^th March 2020 when I told my nominal supervisor that I would not be in for the next 3 weeks because Faith and I would be on a Caribbean Cruise to celebrate our 40^th Wedding Anniversary.  The very cruise that regular readers will know was cancelled hours before the flight was to take off for Barbados due to some disease that was going around!

I do not believe that I would have gone in there even if the cruise had not been cancelled (although they would probably have shut down anyway before I got the choice). Apart from my little cluster of desks, the room known as The Computer Suite had become a haven for (and let’s try not to offend the Politically Correct here) non-working persons of overseas origins, dissolute habits and extremely low personal hygiene standards.

Or (because the Non-politically Correct have a right not to be offended too) Unemployed foreign drunkards unfamiliar with either soap or deodorants!

And that, I believe, would have been exactly the sort of place that an infectious respiratory disease like Covid-19 would have loved to multiply in.

In fact, like just about everything else in this country, the Library was “locked down” and while it was shut the charity that ran it on behalf of the Peterborough City Council folded and management reverted to the Council. I have not been back since.

I don’t mind volunteering for a charity but if Local Government wants to avail itself of my computer teaching services it can pay me for them! That thought was academic as they have not made any effort to contact me and that fact does not bother me in the slightest.

What I am actually getting at in my usual long-winded fashion is that I have not been on the bus much lately.

There was a trip last September when I demonstrated that I could get from Peterborough to Cromer  (via Norwich) on my free Bus Pass but I am still trying to make that journey interesting enough to be an article in its own right. To achieve that I may have to do the trip again in the company of my 6 year old, transport mad Grandson – believe me that will be interesting indeed!

Meanwhile, back in Peterborough, last Tuesday I had some things to get in town and, as in 2018, Faith had the car to get to her keep fit session in nearby Alwalton. This now includes a lengthy post-exercise meeting for coffee (but definitely NOT cakes) at a local Garden Centre so I expected to get home fully an hour before her.

I left the house at 10.00 and made my way to the bus stop for the “one every 10 minutes” service into Peterborough – which duly arrived 30 minutes later!

Now there is (and always has been for as long as I can remember) a common-sense rule that one waits for passengers to get off before boarding and I could see a number of people rising from their seats through the window so I stepped back a bit to wait for them.

Unfortunately, the first person to draw level with the doors was a little old man who had plainly been having some sort of disagreement with the driver at some point on the journey and who wanted to resume it now!

He launched into a tirade about something or other, calling the driver a moron (amongst other things), then turned to his wife who was waiting behind him and asked her to confirm that he was correct about whatever it was.

“No dear, you’re not” she replied but he ignored her and turned back to the driver to resume battle. The other people waiting to get on or off the bus seemed to be getting restless so I felt that it was my duty as “head of the queue” to intervene in the conversation.

“Write him a letter when you get home” I said, “But get off the bus because we’ve all got places to be and we’ve waited long enough already!”

“Well you’ll just have to wait some more” he responded but at that point his wife (who was somewhat larger than him) bundled him off the platform and almost into contact with me.

I bent over to his ear level and in a fairly quiet voice murmured “Were you born an idiot or do you have to practice?”

He had been carried past by the press of other departing passengers before he could reply to that!

And that entertaining interlude added another 10 minutes to the journey and I had been out of the house for nearly 1½ hours by the time I reached the City centre just over 4 miles away as the Crow flies. I could probably have walked it faster.

The shopping tasks that I had to do took very little time – I knew which shops to visit and exactly where within them the things I wanted were located so by 12.00 I was back at the bus station – only to see the bus I wanted pulling away with its doors very firmly shut.

I said in the 2018 article that what we get on this route is not the announced “one every 10 minutes” but more like “one every 10 minutes on average if you’re lucky” so it wasn’t really surprising when the next one turned up about 5 minutes later!

In the end I got home at about 12.45 just in time to make a cup of coffee before Faith got home.

All in all the No.1 CitiBus service between Peterborough and Orton Wistow shows no sign of improvement and the actual journey (particularly the potholes in the roads it uses) is getting worse. I can testify to that as I wrote the first part of this document (up to and including the bit about the trip to Cromer) on the trip recorded above and had considerable difficulty translating the shaky and squiggly handwriting!

I think it may now be time to reconsider getting an electric bicycle which could shorten my trips into town to under 20 minutes each way. The only problem is that I would have to find somewhere to park it securely so that the former denizens of the Central Library Computer Suite wouldn’t be able to steal it!

Alfie

 

Saving History

Over the last few years I have inherited a number of volumes of old photographs going back to the infancy of my parents (the late 1920s) and even earlier and I imagine that Faith has the same.

I further imagine that in the near future all of these small squares and rectangles of chemically treated paper are going to start deteriorating. And so, therefore, if we do not want lose the only remaining likenesses of ancestors long dead something is going to have to be done. Soon!

And that something will, I think, have to be a monumental scanning project – one that will probably fall to me as being a “techie” thing!

I need to start planning it now in anticipation of the long, cold, miserable, dark stay-at-home winter that will be needed for its implementation and a lot of preparatory work will be needed before the first scan can be done.

First off there needs to be appropriate equipment – not too big a deal as I already have a small free-standing photo-scanner (about 6 inches wide by 2 ½ inches deep) which has its own SD card slot for saving files and does not need attaching to a computer. There is also the A4 scanner that is part of my multi-function printer but that brings its own problems as none of the photos are A4 in size so it would make sense to scan four or even six pictures at once. Why is that a problem? Well, part 2 of the project is… Documentation!

It is going to be necessary somehow to record somewhere within each digital image the approximate date of the original, the location and some indication of who are the people in it. Otherwise the whole exercise is meaningless!

One way to do that is to put that information in the file name – however “20230708.jpg” (a typical file name) is one thing; “Gt. Aunt. Flo. And. Uncle. Cecil. With. Little. Alfie. At. Clacton. Aug. 58.jpg” is quite another! Incidentally, I would have done an actual file name like that with dashes instead of dots and the only reason I didn’t do it here is that I got thirteen words for that instead of one!

If you right click your mouse on a “.jpg” file (other formats are available but JPG is the most popular) and go into “properties” you will find some information on the size of the file, when it was created and also quite a lot of room for comments to be added in afterwards. Thus your file name can be kept to a much shorter and more logical scheme.

But how are you to know who is in these old snaps as well as when and where they were taken?

Well, in the case of the photograph albums that came to me when my Mother left this plane of existence in November 2020 are two answers: Firstly Mum had written that information lightly in pencil on the back of each print prior to mounting them in the albums. And then Dad had come along and copied those notes and the position of the relevant picture in the album into a large unused page-a-day diary.

Dad was extremely methodical and I’m sure he wanted to avoid me having to have conversations like the one he had with his father when my Grandad’s family photographs were passed over.

They were looking at a photo from the 1930s of a rather sharply dressed “Spiv” type with a pencil moustache resembling either a stereotypical US gangster of the period or Private Walker from “Dad’s Army”!

“Who is THAT?!” asked my father.

“Ah”, said Grandad, after a moment’s thought, “That’s the bloke that was knocking off your Auntie Rose!”

We didn’t keep that one!

We are going to have to work a little harder with Faith’s pictures although I believe that there are some notes in her albums and she does know who most of them are anyway.

So that’s the next few winters taken care of! By the time we finish I will probably look like one of those old, worn out looking bearded ancestors in the photos – who, if the dating notes are to be believed were about 45 years old!

Life was obviously harder then!

Alfie