Karcher Strimmer Update and Any Questions

I am back to normal this morning having slept very well last night. 

First job was to hoover the living room which I haven't done for a while and the area around the woodburner was beginning to annoy me with ash and also wood debris and dust from the woodbasket.  I did that first.  Then I sat at the table and fixed up the Karcher grass strimmer or Lawn Trimmer as they call it.  Having got into a state about it on Saturday I was able this morning to fix it all up in 10 minutes without problem.  All I had to do was fix the front handle to it which required quite a lot of force to get it round the pole and had defeated me on Saturday and there was nothing in the instructions to say that you needed a great deal of strength to fix it on.  I noticed that one woman of my age had also been foxed by it and had asked in a question on-line as to how she was supposed to do it and it looked like it might break. My thoughts entirely on Saturday.   Karcher instructions are not terribly helpful.  There is also a great deal about safety matters which seemed a trifle over the top.   

I also fixed the strimmer shield around the cutter which was easy.  That was three Philips screws and done, slotted into place in moments.  I then lengthened the cutter string.  Easily done.   I clicked the battery in place, already charged on Saturday, and put on hat and coat, gloves, goggles  and boots and went out to test.  I take common sense safety seriously but the eye protection, i.e. wearing goggles,  was not mentioned in all the two pages of safety information.  

Zoom, I was into business strimming along.  I am totally satisfied with it.  I came in and rang my brother as I was so excited and thanked him and his wife for the recommendation.  This is big brother who got me the ride-on mower.  So all is hunky dory as far as garden goes.  I also ordered some spare cutter line spools so that I don't suddenly find all the cutter string has been used and can't strim.  All I want now is some better weather.  It is cold and windy this morning so I only tested the strimmer  for 10 minutes because it is too horrible to be out in the wind for longer.  I have just been gathering twigs for kindling as there is plenty blowing down off the trees. 

The schools are now on Easter holiday so I won't be going out much but tomorrow I have a massage booked so will go to that. 

I missed getting my petrol yesterday because I was so exhausted so may go out for that in a minute when I get the papers. 

Simone was saying yesterday that she enjoyed reading my blog post yesterday, as did Linda, and Meike, and the beginning of me stockbroking.  I am never sure of what interests people or what they don't already know and it is nice to get feedback and questions.  If there are any questions or things you would like me to blog about please do not be too shy to ask me.   There are over a 150 page views per post so there must be some interested parties who would like to talk to me but never do.

Thank you. 

Sunday

I haven't got much to say today.  I slept badly which leaves me in a mess today.  Added to that changing the clocks and I am all over the place.  I don't generally mind the clock change but when you haven't slept a wink all night to boot it really throws you.  I can see the time is just after midday but it doesn't feel anything like that. I have one clock that doesn't change itself but I can't be bothered to change it.  The other clock, I only have two, changes itself as does my phone and my tv.   My watch can wait until I go out tomorrow. 

We had minus temperatures in the night and a sharp frost so my bedroom was cold as I like to have a window open.  Added to that the cats have started to come up to sleep with me on the bed.  Now I like a single bed and that is how I like it.  However, two cats on a single bed with me is not so good even though they know they are only allowed to sleep at the foot of the bed out of the way as far as is possible.  So that didn't help and eventually I put them off the bed but they hung around, didn't go far, one to the bathroom and one to another bedroom with no doors in between.  The bathroom one made a couple of attempts to come back on the bed.  I was cold so I shut the window.  Then I put socks on.   I did all the things I do to get to sleep but it just would not come. 

I have nights like that.  I did the alphabet backwards, prayers, and breathing.  Nothing worked.  I wasn't worrying about anything, sleep just wouldn't come. 

So today I am wiped out.  I had my porridge for breakfast although I was tempted not to and to just flop out in a chair with a cup of tea and a biscuit but I knew that would be the start of the slippery slope to bad habits again so I put the porridge on, had my cup of tomato juice, my linseeds, and then the porridge was done and then I flopped out.  I think it was only just after 7am.   I have managed to light the fire and fill the dishwasher.  The house was so cold.  I am too out of it to put the Karcher strimmer together although I have charged the battery.  I did that yesterday.  The instructions for fixing it all up are awful, I looked yesterday and it was to be my job today but that is out of the question.  

I listened to Simon King (Si of Hairy Bikers) on Desert Island Discs.  He was great but I didn't particularly like his choice of discs apart from the Chieftains.  I was a big Irish music fan at one time and went to see the Chieftains live at Great Yarmouth.  My mother asked who I was going to see and I said The Chieftains.  She was horrified.  I went alone because I didn't have anybody to go with.  Parked my Mini outside the Wellington Pier and loved every minute of the music.  I also liked the Bothy Band.  I didn't tell mum when I went to see them, I decided it was best to keep it to myself.   In the 1980s I went out with an Irish musician who played the fiddle. I loved him but I don't really know what happened;  he used to play the fiddle in the subway and gets loads of money from people walking into work in the mornings.   They used to throw him pound coins and he played for an hour everyday and got a enough to live on for a week doing that.  Then he just sort of disappeared.   I enjoyed those days.  I went out with several different men in the 1980s, worked in pubs and did all sorts even though midway through I started work training to be a stockbroker when I wrote to a new stockbroking office opening.  I was working full time in a pub at the time but I thought I had better get a more decent job so that was how I ended up stockbroking.  I wrote them a letter and asked if they needed any help and they rang me immediately and said can you start tomorrow.   I started off freelance doing the filing.  Then I got to answer the phone then they said I could train.  At that point I became an employee.  I kept a pub job all the time though but didn't tell them.  Then when I went to London for a bit of training I had to give it up. I sometimes stayed over in London in a hostel, my choice, I preferred it that way rather than a hotel, and other times I used to commute but Norwich to London is a long daily commute.  Sometimes I used to drive to Stansted and park there when you could park all day for £3 right outside the terminal when Stansted was more like a coach station than an airport.  I could get the train into central London from there for less than a tenner.  All those days have gone now.  I left my car in the short stay at Stansted a few years ago and when I got back they wanted £90 for the week.   

Then I finished training and exams and didn't have to go to London anymore.    

Bring Me The Horizon and I will escape

 Yesterday I felt in need of a complete "getting away from it all".  One or two family things keep coming up where little sister has to act like a big sister and keep the boys happy.  The latest is that our long term accountant may be folding and it causes a bit of stress in that three of us have our tax returns prepared there and a relationship of some years has ticked along nicely.  When you reach your 80s the last thing you want is upheaval of this nature, finding a new accountant etc. etc.  I have had alarming phone calls from two brothers and I have had to reassure that so far we don't know if the man is giving up for sure and secondly, even if he does, we will find somebody else.  There are any number of people offering Tax Return services.  Even my former lawn-cutting brother who has refused to speak to me since January rang me.  So one good thing is that at least we have picked up with each other again and bigger problems have overridden the smaller one of January.

So yesterday I thought a day off was in order.  I went to see Bring Me The Horizon Live in Sao Paulo, at the cinema.  This is a rock band and I was the only person booked to see them.  The whole screening to myself.  That for a start is a joy because I can do what I like, make a noise, scream, gesture, whatever I want.   (A woman came in after I had taken my seat and I spoke to her when she was fussing about a seat number very close to me and assuming she had come in and just bought her ticket I suggested she could more or less sit where she liked because as far as I was aware I was the only booking (until she came in of course).  She didn't answer this but said she could barely walk (this was truly obvious and her weight prevented her climbing the stairs easily) and she said that there were four in her group and they would be sitting two in front and two behind each other.  This led me to believe she hasn't been to the cinema in a while because now you cannot see the row in front of you because of the de luxe seating.   Anyway, the others arrived and I moved because in an empty auditorium there is no point in all sitting on top of each other.  They never paid any attention to me whatsoever nor smiled or nodded and apart from my brief words with the woman I may as well have not existed.   However I had plenty of room to move and move I did.  

The trailers went by and the film of the Concert started.  It was wild from the get-go.  All of a sudden there was a big kerfuffle as first the man stood up and shouted at the people he was with in the row in front of him.  Clearly they were in the wrong screening.  Still they paid no attention to the fact that I was there, made lots of noise, stood in front of the screen, talked loudly and then practically had to carry the big fat woman from her seat to the steps and then lead her down, only a short bit thankfully.  It was annoying the noise they made and the standing and talking loudly but they went.   (I was imagining them arriving wherever they wanted to be and upsetting lots of other people in another screening after a film had started but that is no doubt another story).

Anyway back to Bring Me The Horizon.  It was amazing and all adjectives cannot begin to cover how this concert was for me.  I escaped everyday life and I was totally immersed.  I wasn't there in Sao Paulo but I felt like I was.  The music was great and the visuals superb and as much a study of audience participation as well as music.  I thought of Dave and must tell him about this.  Some audience were saying how Bring Me The Horizon had saved them through grief and tragedy and taken them through it and I could see that which made me think of Dave.   I was totally blown away.  (How much we have moved on since live performances of bands in the 1970s when I was a regular gig goer.)   There were 50,000 people in the stadium and they all knew the words to the songs.  The lead of the group was amazing and kept it all together.  I think the young in this way are so great and would I rather see the young than Mick Jagger?  Yes.  It was the night for young people and I was happily taken away with them.  I even considered how important tattoos are to them all and felt not one iota of criticism for them.  It is how it is and it exuded love and belonging.   

Thank you to Bring Me The Horizon and thank you for making a film of the concert in such an amazing way and thank you to Odeon for showing it yesterday.  If I could go again I would but I have a feeling that there will not be another showing for me to see. 

I got my escape and a smile on my face that still hasn't gone away. 

This beat Project Hail Mary for me  by a million miles.  I am afraid that as much as everybody is raving about it, it did nothing for me.  I love Ryan Gosling but sorry, I hated the film.  I was thinking I might try it again but after Bring Me The Horizon I don't think I will bother. 

Cryptocurrency fanatics

 Yesterday I went to the Women's Institute meeting.  48 members attended and we were informed that we had all paid up our annual membership.  I was given a badge to wear at each meeting as I am now a full member.  The meeting started with the introduction of the afternoon's speaker, a lady who came to talk to us about pearls.  She certainly knew her stuff and had a well prepared slide show of the various types of pearls and how they are produced around the world.  Who thought there could be so much to say about pearls?  We had been asked to come along wearing pearls and I duly got out my plastic poppets from childhood and hung these around my neck.  There were many examples of pearls around the room, all of the fairly regular thing that we expect of pearls.  I believe I was the only one adorned with poppets.  I remained quiet about them as they seemed to be well accepted as three strings of pearls around my neck.  They used to fall to my knees as a child but now I gave them a nice three loops.  The lady had timed the speaking well but I found her rather flat and bland but knowledgeable.  She bought pearl products along with her to sell at the tea interval.  Several sales were made.   She then took an hour to pack it all away while we did the afternoon's business after the interval.  

The second part involves reports from the different groups, like the walking group, the book group etc.  I attended one meeting of the cookery group last month as they are a jolly bunch and I already know some of them from my creative group.  I will continue with that group for now.  After my experience of a book club some years ago I am not inclined to join a book group again and walking sounds too much for me as they drive miles before they start their walks, sometimes to the other end of the county.   We are having a summer outing to Kings Lynn. I found myself agreeing to go.  It was better than the first suggestion of a summer outing to Norwich.  The lady sitting next to me said she would not be going to Kings Lynn because her husband told her the pubs don't open until 5pm.  This was without so much as a laugh or a smile.  I replied that of course this is very important and tried to find positives about Kings Lynn in the form of the Hanseatic League etc.  She wasn't impressed.   WI members can be very unpredictable.   Actually I believe I could find a pub in Kings Lynn that opens before 5pm but that is beside the point.  

On arrival home I had tea which was chicken rolls.  I bought fresh rolls in the bakery and had cold chicken in the fridge.  I opened a bottle of rosé wine for a drink and watched a programme on a crypto scandal in Canada where a man who offered a crypto banking service  kept the real deposit money for himself.  All this was done on line and no money in the form of cryto currency appeared to exist at all while he made off with their real money.  He then disappeared for a long time and the website kept thinking about it when people asked to get their money out and then in the end disappeared out of existence altogether along with the Crypto King who then appeared to have died in India.  Was his death fake or real?   Crypto charts kept going up and up but it was not real.  Trust No One, the hunt for the Fake Crypto King.   Anyway nobody got their money back and many lost all their savings.  One man admitted that he had been greedy and led by greed and he lost everything.  When it is down to giving money via the internet to professional looking websites making out they are like a good bank to help you make money in a currency that doesn't have anything real and  you have never heard of the bank before except in a chat room they are best given a wide berth.   I see that Farage is being given the no no about accepting crypto currency political donations this morning and if nothing else this must be a reason enough to give a wide berth to this man.  I find his mouth spouts nothing but ill judged and illogical and unachievable promises.  Local elections are coming up and I hope that many will return to the Conservative Party. 

It is bad enough that I ordered a strimmer on Amazon yesterday, that is enough fear and gambling on-line for me in a day.  I am expecting delivery today.  

Antisemitism attack North London

 Antisemitism continues in Britain with the torching of four Jewish owned charity ambulances which were parked outside a synagogue in North London in the Jewish area in Golders Green, a short walk from Finchley.  This is a direct attack on Jews in Britain.  Three firebombers wearing hoods were caught on camera going to the ambulances with a can of accelerant.  Oxygen canisters exploded and windows were blown out of the synagogue.  It is being treated as an antisemitic hate crime and being investigated by the police counter-terrorism squad and the British Intelligence Service.  

This appears to the an Iranian linked incident in North London.  

An Iranian group has claimed responsibility for the Golders Green attack. 

There is a significant rise in antisemitism in Britain and it is clear that Jews in Britain are not safe.  It is not widely talked about but there are spies on the Jewish communities in Britain and the incidents are growing.  Fortunately no lives were lost this time.  Two were killed in an attack on a Manchester synagogue in October.   

There are still those who deny there is anything wrong with Britain and what a quiet and peaceful place it is.  It is anything but. 

The British Government at the behest of Wes Streeting, Health Minister,  has stepped in to buy replacement ambulances for the charity and to cover their work until the replacements are delivered.   Reading the words of Wes Streeting yesterday makes me believe he has a more profound understanding of the seriousness of antisemitism in Britain than Keir Starmer, our Prime Minister,  or the London Mayor, Sadiq Khan,  do.  

Eliot and Hardy and Saturday

 Dull and cold here this morning.  Yesterday was sunny but cold.  We have had frosts everyday for a few days.  Spring is here but the cold weather has not yet gone away. 

Yesterday I met my Saturday friend for coffee when she called me early to say she was ready for some normality again.  That is what we call our meetings, normality.   My Saturday friend, S, lost her husband to cancer in January and is in the process of slowly getting back to normal.  He suffered for a long time as I have mentioned before here spending several months between hospital, nursing homes and a hospice and never actually coming home again after he was hospitalised six months before.  It has obviously been a particularly difficult time for her.  In March her mother died too whch has heaped misery upon misery although her mother was 97.  S is attending the funeral this week in Essex and will be getting the train down to Chelmsford.  

So normality is what we do together.  We talk for a couple of hours and only about death, house sorting, red tape following death,  if she wants to.   I buy my papers and she does a big shop.  I hope she stays living here but as she is not local and only moved here with her husband a few years ago and now has no ties here I think it is likely she will return to Essex.  But time will tell. 

Her husband worked in the oil industry and regularly flew to Baku. So sometimes we have talked about my trip to Baku and she was able to tell her husband that I was going.    S taught languages to businessmen and speaks fluently in Spanish and French.  Her teaching was business language which makes her language skills and teaching quite different to school French.  There is a French lady who works in the café so they chat in French which I love to hear.  S did her language courses in City and Guilds in the 1960s and never went to university as was the way in those days, evening classes and City and Guilds examinations played a very important part of education for many.  

In the evening I watched two documentaries and part of a third.  The first was on T. S Eliot, the poet and writer, the second on Thomas Hardy, and the third, which I didn't finish because I was tired and went to bed, was  The Brothers Grimm.  All of these documentaries are available free on Prime. Whilst watching Eliot and Hardy it occurred to me that writers of that time in the  late 19th and early 20th centuries were writing in troubled times and apart from wars and hardship they were also very troubled men in their private lives.  This can also be attributed in part to the times in which they lived when the openness and freedom that we take for granted were not so free and open as today.  Things like divorce and sexual feelings were kept to oneself and often marriages lasted merely because one or other was too ashamed or felt rigidly tied by family values to not seek divorce. This was the case for Eliot where he did not believe in divorce.  

Thomas Hardy was awful to his wife Emma and she confined herself to the attic rooms of their house to keep out of his way.  She was sad, neglected and badly treated by him.   He belittled her and insulted her and yet when she died unexpectedly he was full of remorse and this released in him his best writing and two years of outpourings of poetry about his love for her.  Too late for poor Emma though.   His marital experiences fed into his books and Emma knew this and was insulted by it.  He later took another woman to the house whilst Emma was still his wife and rubbed salt into the wounds.  

Eliot was also troubled man and this fed into his works, The Wastelands and J. Alfred Prufrock and Four Quartets  and many others. He had a terrible first marriage to Valerie who was by all accounts quite mad but Eliot did not divorce her.  Eliot took a one year teaching post in America to escape and when he came back to England he never went back to her again.  She was eventually put into an asylum by her brother and died there and only then was Eliot free, but by then middle-aged.  His parents in America were also very disappointed that he decided to live in England and effectively become an Englishman.  This weighed heavily on him.  He met with the Bloomsbury Group by night and worked in Lloyds bank by day, but still found it difficult to off-load and be free and Virginia Woolf observed that nobody ever got close to Eliot.  He later found happiness in his final years when he married his secretary Vivienne who had had a crush on him since she was 14.   Throughout all these troubled times and war in London he still wrote plays and poems of the highest quality.  Vivienne was later to release Old Possum Book of Practical Cats  to the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and this became the highly successful Cats musical and some of the profits fed into Faber and Faber and helped many young writers in later years. (Eliot had joined Fabers in 1925 as an editor).  Vivienne said that Eliot would have loved the musical. 

 I was fortunate to go to a reading of Four Quartets a few years ago.  I wrote about it on my other blog at the time.  The reader who spoke from memory and knew every word, spoke the whole thing as if he was speaking to me alone.   This led to me being asked by a number of audience members if the reader knew me but he did not.  The reading was in a small chapel.   

It occurred to me  in lamenting that I can never find a good book to read today and today's authors seem to lean on the side of fairly lightweight stuff in the  contemporary writing that maybe times are too easy for us and we do not have the angst that these writers I describe went through.  Does a troubled life bring out the best in writers that feeds into their own work?  Of course I read only a very narrow section of fiction in that I don't read crime which is very popular these days and I don't read science fiction, also very popular. But an awful lot of what is published feels to me to be shallow and crass.  Perhaps that is a reflection of life today with social media, tattoos, microwaves, fast food, and frontless dresses feeding the minds of the writers. Storylines that are not deep and writers like Sally Rooney raved about and described as fantastic and exhilerating leave me unsatisfied at the end of a book.    

So many things written on X (Twitter) are now starting with "if this is true" or "if what you are saying is true".   It is really putting me off.   There is much fake news of great gravity written and so many join in because the space for it is open to all and people just seem to get bolder by the week.   Sorry that was a bit off topic but still a sign of the times. 

Parting with Books

 You may have noticed that when I said I was reading the Philosophy of Religion in bed this was because it is one of the only books I have left on my shelves.  

I have been slowly but surely relieving myself of my book collection and it has been much easier than I thought it would be. 

The reason I started this exercise is because I will eventually move into a smaller property, most likely to be an apartment, and I do not wish to have a lot of belongings left by that stage and I do not wish to be heaving a lot of heavy books with me.  I need to start moving items out and not leave it until the time comes when I move and have it all to do in a hurry. 

I used to love my book collection as much as anybody else loves books and I kept everything but about 20 years ago I stopped keeping fiction and off-loaded all my fiction collection, almost entirely paperbacks, so that was a good start to the current clearance. 

(I continue to read fiction of course but ever since then I have had a policy of handing paperbacks straight on to charity shops.   So there is no fiction to be dealt with in this cull). 

The two other collections I had were maps and art books.   The maps went first, about 5 years ago in fact.   I was clinging on to these and the first step was to sort them and where I had two or three maps of the same country I reduced to only one.  This was much easier than I thought and I bagged them up for the charity shops.  It was so easy and a realisation that I really never touch the maps at all and if I want to check a location I Google it so I happily took the next step and admitted to myself that apart from looking in the atlas occasionally I really don't miss the maps at all and so I did another cull.  I just kept the city maps.  And then the final step I parted with those as well.  The only maps I have left are street maps of Norwich, Great Yarmouth  and London.  All the rest have gone and I truly do not miss them.  I still have my father's school atlas, my school atlas and a paperback atlas I bought quite recently for up to date borders. 

Now the major step of my art books came along.  They are the catalogues of shows I have been to in London and mostly published by the Tate Publishing Company or Thames and Hudson.  I started with parting with just three to see how it felt.  I felt nothing.  This is how they originated: I would visit a show, buy the catalogue,  read it on the train on the way home,  file on the shelf.  Quite honestly I haven't looked at them for years.  So three went.  Then another three and so on and so forth.  I set a kind of target to deal with a minimum of three each week.  

I have had to go further afield with the deliveries to charity shops because charity shops have difficulty with reference books, they don't want to be over-loaded with them.  One shop manager was removing reference books from the shelves when I went in and she said they have difficulty shifting books and reference the most.

I looked up the values of some of the catalogues but none of them are worth much,  nowhere near what I thought they might be and anyway it is not about making money, and there is really no rarity in any of them.  They are not out of print and quite frankly nobody really wants them.  However, I persevered with local exit points like the church book stall for those books not containing obscenities, and the village as well as the charity shops. 

My taste in art has changed of late too and I do not feel drawn to contemporary art as I did when I was studying art 30 years ago so it is not the horror that I thought it might  be parting with my books.

I do still have a small collection of poetry books that I acquired last year when doing my Masters.  I am not quite ready to part with them yet but I am sure I can do so quite easily when the time comes.  The internet means I am never without a source of reference in any case.

When I see the empty shelves I feel happy about a job well done and another load off my mind.