I forgot to say, we went around to my sisters house last Sunday. She is a bit of an evil genius at the making of puddings. If you think of the artistry of Gary Rhodes, the relish of Nigella Lawson, and the to-hell-with-the-calories of the Two Fat Ladies, you are in the right area. Add a soupcon of talking snake and you’ve got it. With one pudding she managed to break two diets. I love my sweet stuff so I piled straight in, but Wendy was saying ‘perhaps I’ll have a spoonful out of one’. Lisa, gave her a bowl (they were already made up into little bowls) and after the first spoonful, even though she was full, Wendy was eating the lot. I was half way through my bowl, in an ecstasy of creamy goodness, when our Lisa started talking about the problem she’d had with the jelly. Bugger! Jelly =gelatine =animal product. I’m a veggie. I paused, spoon laden with calorific sublimity, then thought ‘well I’ve already eaten some. Screw the animals’, and troughed the lot. Bad Bucky! Buddha demerits. Which is a recurring ethical problem. I have leather goods, I use slug pellets and pesticides, yet I want to be a veggie. At what point does a life inherit value? Buddha says not to take any life, as we are all indistinguishably one. But would he not have boiled dirty water? It’s a dilemma, but it’s bedtime. Later, Buck.
Continue readingTag: Life
And there’s more…
Well it’s proving a good week for us. Wendy had her interview today, passed with flying colours, and is back to being a (part-time) wages slave as of next week! When she was last with the C.A.B. she worked on a project called G.P. Outreach as a sort of independent advisor. She would go to doctors surgeries and deal with people the doctor referred, such as people with debts, housing issues, benefits problems etc. The idea was that she could then deal with people who were too loony or simple to just attend the regular bureau. Then, in dealing with the some of the causes of stress and misery in their lives it would let the doctor offer a more holistic package whilst freeing the doctor up to just deal with the medical issues. I only mention that to explain that in her last role Wendy had to take on a whole lot of issues then deal with most of them herself as the clients weren’t capable, and keep on dealing with every little issue that arose in their lives. She was constantly having ongoing clients calling her and then she was worrying over every thing in their sad lives. Although on the one hand rewarding, it was emotionally draining and too much of a burden for her. Which brings us to her present job; trainee debt specialist. In this capacity she is specialising in her favourite subject (debt), she is part of a team, and because of the massive (and inevitably increasing) workload in that field that the bureau faces, it is her boss’s policy to deal with all of the clients problems in one, or at the most two interviews. Then case closed. These are going to be compos mentis clients so there is no need to hand-hold and take over their cases. It’s sort everything out, tell them what to do, or arrange it, then let them get on with it. Also it is one very short bus ride away from where we live, her previous job entailed two buses, or a bus and a train, or if I happened to be off, an hour’s drive in rush hour traffic (to cover about seven miles!) So, old job bad in all sorts of ways, new job better in just as many, and having the added bonus of letting Wendy specialise in her favourite subject. Also she’s lost the best part of another stone since we returned from Scotland, so everything is peachy in the world of the Wendster. I have made a decision about my martial arts. I went to a Karate class the other day to try it out. It was weird, but I expect it was good if you stuck at it. The only reason I went is, as I’ve mentioned previously, Taekwondo more or less ignores the fact you have hands. They are just handy (as it were) counterbalances for when you are kicking. This is fine in a competition where your opponent won’t […]
Continue readingFinally!
Hi and a big huzzah! Finally passed that bloody test today. Glen, the examiner, was desperate for me to pass, I think if I’d have failed it this time he would have driven for me next go. He was telling me to relax, not panic, then when things got dodgy he was saying ‘not your fault, you’re in your lane, that was his fault’, telling me not to go to pieces as I’d not failed yet, etc. Bless him, he really did want me to pass. I had a few moments, pinched some of an oncoming lane for a turn when, strictly speaking, I didn’t need to, went into some situations a little too fast, and felt I was overcautious in others, but my new best-mate Glen said it was good enough. I came away with eight minor driver faults, and one of them was for taking a shunt on my reverse manoeuvre (I’d left it a bit tight and thought it was better to take a shunt, and the consequent driver fault, rather than possibly fail the test there and then). I have been saying, since my last test, that I can pass it now, that I should get it this time. When I knew I’d only failed on missing a gear and pulling over on a single yellow line, I thought ‘I can do this’. Which is all good and well until you get back in the cab. You’ve already failed eight times, an infinity of variables await you and everything is riding on the next fifty minutes as you pull out of the (infeasibly tight) corner from the test centre onto the road. Huge gulp, massive deep breath, chi focused, and off we go. God it is horrible. The fatalist in me is saying ‘you are never going to pass this’ while I’m so desperate to pass it. You just have to brace yourself for failure whilst trying your damnedest not to. It is truly horrible. The money you are throwing out the window, the doubt that you will ever pass and the knowledge that you’ve invested too much to be able to quit. You have to keep on trying until you pass, be it nine or ninety tests. Then when he told me I’d passed…, really there are no words. The emotional overload of joy that is primarily inexpressible relief, it feels like this:, sort of. Bloody hell, I’m glad that’s over. I felt like my hands were shaking, though they weren’t, and I thought I might need surgery to remove the grin. Sent my license off today to have the three penalty points stuck on it (couldn’t send it away before as you have to present your license to take the test) when it gets back I send it off again (with my pass certificate) and when that returns I can start looking for work. Which reminds me, I’ll have to get a really good photocopy of my pass certificate in case they keep the […]
Continue readingDays off, huzzah!
Today is my first of five whole, glorious, non-working days! Big yay! I’ve sorted out a bunch of videos, (all the TKD poomse -required patterns- for all of the grades to black belt) numbered them, put them in sequence, chucked them into a file with the photo’ of my badge on the front, (you still wish you had one) and now have written about it. Sad, sad, sad. I have also been making the most of the non-torrential moments to do a bit about the garden. Many’s the suspected weed that has felt the pitiless brutality of the dark side of my gardening. Also I collected a nosegay of sweetpeas and roses, an eye-candy of crocosmia and dahlia, and a touch of hosta and butterfly bush to make an arrangement. I call it ‘Summer in a glass’. Nice, don’t you think? Also I decided to try an idea I’ve been mulling over. For a while now I’ve fancied putting some plants out the front of the house, but we have no garden and the local pre-convict youth would have trashed any plant pots with their relentless football. Now however, the darling youth have mostly moved their delinquency to some other poor bugger’s domain. Mostly. It would only take one hit to knock a plant over, possibly to break the pot. Then I noticed I’ve had to start weeding in the 10" gap between the house and the pavement. It is covered in large stones, with more of the same and sandy gravel below. I thought it would be too inhospitable a terrain to support plant life. But if weeds can do it, why not try some of the hardier plants? So today I’ve been excavating small holes in the stones/ gravel, filling them full of compost and heavy soil, then planting lavender. I had one small lavender growing independently, but the other two were just branches I’d pinned down to root (layered). They were still attached to the mother plant until today. I’ve just snipped them off, cut them right back (to encourage rooting and decrease water loss through the leaves) and stuck them in the front. Watered them in, obviously. Now we wait. If anything can take it it will be lavender. Hot, dry, and poor (to the point of non-existent) soil. Nothing lost, I’m layering another bunch of branches now. While I was at it I potted up one of my dwarf firs and buried the pot in a whole I made in the stones. It’s a nice fir, but I can’t really find a home for it in my garden, so it’s an ideal experimental candidate. Talking of firs, whilst we were in Scotland we were surrounded by the buggers. One particular flavour caught my eye. I went rooting around for pine cones, trying to find one bearing seeds, but they were all wide-open, dried husks (due to it being totally the wrong season). Not to be put off I ripped a few cones apart to try […]
Continue readingSame ol’, same ol’…
Do I need to say that I failed again? Well, I did. This time it was two even more incredibly silly things than usual. I did all the hard stuff, the stupidly tight turns, the impossibly small gaps between parked and oncoming cars, etc. Then, when he asked me to pull over on the left (to test my ability to pull out into traffic safely) I blew it! Normally they say things like "don’t worry about parking over someone’s drive, we are not stopping for long", so I checked the road ahead, spotted a gap between parked cars on the opposite side (to allow traffic to pass) cleared the bus stop, got between two roads that were joining the one I was on, so as not to obstruct vision or block access, and pulled over. On a single yellow line. Fuck. Fail. I didn’t even notice it I was that busy looking for everything else, and I wasn’t looking for it, as I thought the same "we are not stopping" rule would apply. Nope. The other one was an aberration, I was crawling up hill, between cars, went to change from fourth to fifth (by flicking a switch up, which puts you into high range gears, making the first gear position your fifth gear) but in flicking, pausing while the box changes ranges, then putting it into fifth, I think I pushed it too far to the left (into the reverse area of the box) and couldn’t find a gear. I tried dropping it back down to fourth, then third, but was stuck in a false neutral. I had to stop for a second, put the handbrake on, release and depress the clutch then start again. Fail! Ho hum. Six minor faults. Failed again. Still those are things that have never happened to me on test before and should never happen again. If I can pass everything else it is just a matter of time. And money. And indomitable spirit. Bollocks. Buck.
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