2009 — 28 May: Thursday
Christa was very fond of her mother. Here they are in, I suspect, 1981 and, I suspect, in Mayflower Park. Though I could be wrong. And I could do little to rescue the faded print, which she kept on one of the shelves of the living room's "tic-tac" unit for many years:
Christa and Mutti in 1981? in Mayflower Park?
Unless it's raining, it's time to prepare for a walk...
Hello, sunshine!
It's 08:30 and looking good.
My first job was with Hawker Siddeley (Aviation), back in 1969. Long since gone. My second was with ICL, in 1974. Long since gone. My third was with IBM (UK), in 1981. That saw me through until my early retirement though it's fair to say we had our ups and downs. (At one point in the early 1990s IBM held the world record1 for size of loss in one year — a record now long since shattered, of course.) It sometimes seems to me that I've left a trail of corporate woe in my wake.
Then there's the fraught business of housing. My first mortgage was with Abbey National, back in 1976. We lost the Abbey habit in 1988 when the perceived wisdom was "get an endowment mortgage" with the implicit subtext "and make a fortune". A year into that, my lender had changed from cheapest to most expensive in the UK (or so it felt) and a close (and overdue) reading of their small print revealed the scam for what it was. So, we wrote off the endowment, and it was off to the Royal Bank of Scotland for a simple, no-frills, repayment mortgage and the ability to overpay as much as we wanted. Eight years into a fifteen year loan, and the Title Deeds were ours, glossing over the fact that the Royal promptly put them somewhere so safe that they only turned up two years ago while they were looking for something else — I get that a lot these days... Abbey, meanwhile, has been swallowed up, my endowment loan provider has long since disappeared without trace, and the Royal Bank isn't exactly smelling of roses.
When I retired I moved from the Royal (nearest branch in Southampton) to Alliance & Leicester (nearest branch just up the road). Now Santander rules, it seems. I await developments.
Right. Time (09:56) to start putting one foot in front of the other.
He's back
Only slightly sticky, though with squashed insectile remnants on the freshly-washed shirt, dammit. The rain stayed away. The sun was mostly absent. The breeze was mild, and the humidity high. So a road walk of 7.something miles around Froxford was just right. Followed by the delightful discovery of how very easy it is to play simple MPEGs directly from a USB stick on Mike's Oppo DVD player — the same model as mine (he was won over by the built-in scaling technology that I've been singing the praises of for the last three years).
I'm listening to something about tool-using crows. Definitely time (16:59) for the next cuppa as the motorway was both crowded and fraught and the nerves were a bit jangly by the time I turned onto my little drive.
I'm being bribed...
... by that august establishment, the UK guvmint. They've given me a book of six first-class postage stamps "as a gesture of our appreciation for your time." They want my help with the 2009/10 British Crime Survey. From little me. Can you imagine? They don't put a very high value on my time, do they? Let's hope it's not a scam.
Is it just me, or does the "silly season" really start earlier every year? What better time to float the goat, indeed? (Thinks: I hope that isn't some ghastly NZ euphemism.)
Tori Amos, live in the BBC Radio 2 studio. Does it get any better than this? I don't think so! But then I didn't know she now lives in Cornwall, either. Wonderful county.
Life's sweet mystery
How odd that I should publish a picture of my mother-in-law today. Big Bro's just emailed to tell me his mother-in-law died overnight, at a ripe old age, so there's more than a chance I shall meet up with my sister-in-law (who'll be over from NZ for the funeral etc.) sometime in the next couple of weeks. Ho-bloody-hum.