2008 — 29 May: Thursday
Suddenly it's 00:59 and I'd better do something about that sleeping thing. OK, another placeholder entry with another bit of my scanning. This one's from June 1974. Christa had by then got into the habit of giving me a lift in the morning from the vicarage to the ICL Beaumont offices as it was on her way up the hill to Englefield Green where she worked at Royal Holloway College. We also enjoyed being together in the relative quiet of the morning, so both tended to get up earlier than strictly necessary! Hence the rather dim lighting, perhaps? It made for a lovely start to the working day.
Christa in the ICL Beaumont carpark, June 1974
I have high hopes of improving some of these slides with the help of the Nikon scanner. It's optimised for the task, whereas my Epson flatbed scanner is really designed for A4 sheets of paper, not 35mm slides. We shall see.
Big Bro, meanwhile, is looking into "round the world" business class ticket costs for me to get down to New Zealandland. Perhaps I need to remind him that I'm an
impoverished pensioner rather than a highly-paid airline consultant... (I did once fly across the Atlantic in First Class — I got upgraded at the last
minute on a British Caledonian flight in July 1984, though that flight lacked both food and metal cutlery; I gather that's more nearly the norm in these
straitened times.)
This just in: £3,900 for the round trip?! I can clearly hear Christa's "Good God!" even as I say it myself... Perhaps dear Mama can
step into the financial breach? On that thought, and at 01:40, g'night!
I spent some of the night thinking finances, spending, pensions, costs, inflation, "rainy day" money... all the usual suspects. The chaps we pay to collect and grind what we do up into numbers have come out with this, too. I've chopped out some of the rows:
In 1971, by the way, my "salary" as an engineering apprentice was about £750. It's basically impossible to assess what has really happened to inflation1 since then (there's a good discussion here although its agenda is to get regional differences better allowed for). However, I can't say Christa and I noticed any tendency for prices to fall since the early 1970s!
Buried in the "robust" comments to this Daily Torygraph article is this interesting snippet:
The Government inflation figures are a joke to the person in the street, I judge inflation as that which is core to everyday living, and those items are: Mortgage, Council tax, Water, Gas, Electricity, Food and Fuel, these are items everybody has to pay and cannot be avoided. And if you look at these it is frightening. Mortgage costs 10% Council tax 5% Water 6% Gas 15% Electricity 16% Food 16% Fuel 21% If we then add these up and get and (sic) average it comes out at 12.71% That is the real rate of inflation in the UK over the last year. These are the items that people have to pay for before they have any disposable income to buy the deflationary items like 42" plasma tv's. These are the items that you should use to judge the Government's economic competence on.
Back in the real world...
... it's 11:27, breakfast is a fading memory, the second cuppa likewise, and two gentlemen with large tools have been and reworked the tarmac around my new water meter. I can't see much difference, myself, but it keeps them busy I suppose. More importantly, they showed me how to lever off the "lid" so I can see the meter and also get at the stop-cock.
The sun is still shining, the sky remains blue, and I need to think about a future meal or two.
And, speaking of the real world, here's a snippet from a fascinating piece on modern video games.
When Mogwai isn't online, he's called Adam Brouwer, and works as a civil servant for the British government modelling crisis scenarios of hypothetical veterinary disease outbreaks. I point out to him a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, billed under the line "The best sign that someone's qualified to run an internet startup may not be an MBA degree, but level 70 guild leader status." Is there anything to this? "Absolutely," he says, "but if you tried to argue that within the traditional business market you would get laughed out of the interview."
Personally, I've avoided almost all manifestations of computer gaming2 since the earliest days of "Space Invaders" — I arrived late to a group visit to one of these, then-exotic, machines in a Gerrards Cross club back in 1978/9 during my time in ICL, so had time to be struck by the constant sound of coins chinking into its slot from the excited crowd of players and spectators clustered around it. My son, by contrast, is very much a child of the computer gaming era. Every computer we got him exponentially filled with games software, to our bemusement and occasional faint alarm. We instituted bans and curfews around exam time, which seemed to help as he did spectacularly well. And, of course, he's now earning more than I ever did in the computer industry. Go figure, as they say (or used to).
Sure as eggs is eggs... dept.
I have no knowledge of, and therefore no informed opinions about, stem cell research or IVF. However, I have just found out the hard way exactly how odd the texture of a hard-boiled egg becomes when it has been in physical contact with the working element of my fridge and has therefore frozen. New potatoes are not much improved by such a low temperature either. I was struck by the way the egg white separated, onion-like, into alternating layers of what is, I suppose, egg stuff and layers of ice. Most odd. The lettuce and tomatoes escaped unscathed. The soured cream was fine, and the added ham and cheese "normal".
It's 14:27 and will soon be time to hit the road. I hope the water meter's new tarmac surround is up to the strain. What's odd about the word "redivider" by the way?
Went the day well?
It was an up and downy sort of day,3 to be honest. The weather turned pretty lousy; I got to inspect some amazingly-bodged water pipe work over at Mike's in Winchester. I also came away clutching a Nikon slide scanner — how Cool(Scan) is that? I avoided a very busy M3 both ways, which turned out to be a wise move, then called in to top up supplies at the foody shop. It's now 21:18 and the new, higher-resolution scanning adventure is under way.