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Badly in need of a haircut

Lockdown isn’t going too badly here, on the whole. I’ve not been furloughed and am managing to work from home ok, notwithstanding my lousy “broadband” which keeps dropping out. My freezer and larder are well stocked with food (thanks Hugh for the tips about local places with short queues), and I’m not about to run […]

Not in France

I’ve got nearly a week off work, with leave that was booked well before Covid Lockdown. Today I ought to be having a glass of wine over dinner in Lille, having spent the day exploring WW1 battlefields and some of the Commonwealth War Graves cemeteries in northern France and Belgium. It would have been another […]

End of FY in lockdown

Today is the last day of the Financial Year for both my company and our main customers. It’s always an extremely busy time of the year, with project reports to be written, reviewed and delivered. I’ve had three significant reports to review and approve in the last two days, which is about par for the […]

Bureaucracy in the midst of Covid

My mother died last month. We had been expecting it since around Christmas, and fortunately we were able to hold the funeral well before everything was shut down with the Coronavirus pandemic. Now it’s a case of sorting out the paperwork. My sister and I were both named as executors of her Will, but in […]

More flooding

Worcestershire was really hit badly by flooding on Thursday. Not as badly as Yorkshire, as far as I can tell from the news, but it still caused chaos. Not only were the train lines to Oxford and Cheltenham flooded, as I found out through personal experience, but also the route to Hereford was flooded at […]

More GWR misery

I’ve got a meeting in London on Friday morning, and I really can’t cope with getting the stupid o’clock in the morning train, so I decided to come down the day before and stay overnight within easy striking distance of the meeting location. My aim was to get the 13:10 train from Malvern, change at […]

A Trip to New York

I’ve not posted recently because I’ve been away, spending the last nearly three weeks in New York. It wasn’t a holiday though – I was there on business, participating in the latest round of equipment trials as part of a big multi-national team. It was the most complex field trial I’ve even taken part in, […]

Christopher’s Tree 2019

Christopher’s stepfather, Peter, has kindly provided an update on how Christopher’s Tree is getting on at his local Woodland Trust. You can see that they’ve cleared the vegetation behind the tree, so its got a bit more room. It looks to be a flourishing young maple tree. It’s hard to believe sometimes that Christopher died […]

Pork Pies and Plumbing

The holiday apartment was owned and run by a family-run business who make self-proclaimed “world-famous pork pies”. Indeed, the very comprehensive welcome pack included one of their very tasty pork pies, which meant I didn’t have to cook dinner that night! The matriarch of the family had clearly decided to expand the business by turning […]

Yet another pair of glasses

About this time last year, at considerable expense, I bought myself three new pairs of glasses: one for distance, one for using the computer at work, and a third for reading. For the next few months I was constantly swapping glasses depending on what I was doing – it was really quite tiresome. Then a […]