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Throwing with extreme prejudice

This isn’t a blog about my work, but it’s a major part of my life and regular readers may have detected a hint of work-related stress creeping into my posts over the last few weeks. What with long days, off-site meetings requiring 4-5 hours travelling, and milestones coming out of my ears, there’s a lot going on at the moment. So I’m working hard on pacing myself, to make sure I get to the end of the financial year more or less in one piece. That means making full use of the opportunities offered by flexitime and TOIL so that if I can take an afternoon off (as I have done today), or work from home for a morning (as I did last Friday), I am trying to do so.

But that’s not really enough – I need to take active steps to de-stress. So this evening, I shall have a back, neck and shoulder massage, which I really find helps me relax. And on Sunday I went to Eastnor Pottery for one of Jon the Potter’s throwing workshops. I find the pottery itself to be a very relaxing place – it’s in a tranquil rural spot, in some old farm buildings next to Eastnor Castle. There are horses in the next field, and the major sound is that of birdsong – or the artisan blacksmith next door hammering away on his anvil. I can feel my stress levels dropping just through being there.

I managed to work out a great deal of my frustrations and stresses on the clay. Lumps of clay found themselves being thrown and centred on the wheel-head with perhaps unnecessary violence! I do find it helps to imagine people who’ve annoyed me during the week, as I force a fast-spinning lump of clay to conform to my will! But the actual shaping of the pots on the wheel is a very right-brained activity and quite a delicate operation. One has to lose oneself in the process, and concentrate on the hand-eye coordination needed to get the shape one is aiming for.  I can’t think about work during that bit of the process, or I get a very wobbly pot!

I came home mid-afternoon, physically tired and absolutely filthy. But I was a lot more relaxed with lower stress levels, which was the whole point.

28 02 2012 Gillian Day out Comments Off on Throwing with extreme prejudice Permalink

Ouch that hurt!

I was just sitting at home this evening, playing solitaire on the computer and listening to a compilation of John Williams’ greatest hits. Suddenly, out of nowhere I felt really miserable. Then I realised that the music playing was Rodriguez’s Guitar Concerto, which had been one of Christopher’s favourites, and which I’d had playing at his funeral. No wonder I suddenly felt upset! I think I may have to quarantine some of my CDs, as I really don’t need to be coshed round the head by deeply unhappy associations, even if the music is intrinsically beautiful.

26 02 2012 icyjumbo status Comments Off on Ouch that hurt! Permalink

Garden in the snow

My sister and her boyfriend came to visit for the weekend a couple of weeks ago – which coincided with the last load of snow. We were all worried that they wouldn’t be able to get away again and would be stuck here! But in the event, the snow was much lighter than forecast and really caused very few problems other than raising our levels of anxiety.

While they were here, Paul took some photos of the garden in the snow which I think made the new terracing look particularly elegant. You can see that there was little more than a light dusting of snow this time – thank goodness!

Side view of the garden in the snow

Looking along the bottom terrace

25 02 2012 Gillian garden Comments Off on Garden in the snow Permalink

Fixing the TV

I watch very little television these days. I’ve never really been a huge consumer of TV, and tend to spend my down-time playing with Christopher’s iPad rather than sitting in front of the box. But when Malvern went over to digital Freeview last autumn, I dutifully (if somewhat grudgingly) bought a digibox and set it up. However, sometime around Christmas it stopped working. That wasn’t a major problem, as I could catch up with the one or two programmes per week that I actually wanted to watch by using iPlayer on the iPad. So I didn’t bother trying to sort it out.

Then, a few weeks back, my sister and her boyfriend came to stay for the weekend. She is a huge rugby fan, and the Six Nations was on. Even more to the point, it was the Calcutta Cup between England and Scotland, and she wanted to watch it! I tried doing a complete reprogramming of the digibox, but it complained that there was no signal found. It appeared that there was a problem with the aerial, but I didn’t have the equipment or know-how to trace the problem back any further.

I’ve been doing some stupid hours again at work recently, with all-day, off-site meetings several times a week. So I’ve got plenty of hours in hand, and decided to take today off as flexitime before the madness starts again next week. I took the opportunity of calling out the local aerial repair company to have a look at the problem. The technician quickly diagnosed that a 10-year old power supply box had failed. It supplies 12V up the aerial to the amplifier on the roof. And with no power, the amplifier obviously wasn’t working and the signal was very degraded, below the level that the digibox was able to decode.

It doesn’t help that my aerial is pointing over (or rather through) the hills to Sutton Coldfield and so gets a very weak signal that is refracted over the Worcestershire Beacon rather than direct line-of-sight. So it needs all the amplification it can get. There is a potentially more convenient transmitter, at Much Marcle near Ledbury, which is at least on the correct side of the hills. In winter, I get direct line-of-sight to it, and the signal strength today was stronger than the one from Sutton Coldfield. But there is a large wood in the way, and in the spring and summer when the trees are in full leaf, the signal is dreadful. So the poorer but more constant signal is the better choice overall.

Once the problem had been diagnosed, it was a five-minute job to replace the broken power supply with a new one and reprogram the digibox. I now have a working television, in time for the England-Wales match tomorrow……

24 02 2012 icyjumbo house Comments (1) Permalink

Google’s new privacy policy

I saw the following on Doghousediaries and thought it was highly pertinent.  Christopher was really hot on privacy and trust on the internet, and would have been seething about some of the latest developments – not only this one from Google, but also the cack-handed US attempts to censor the web via SOPA etc.

Google's privacy policy

20 02 2012 Gillian invective Comments (1) Permalink

Milestone Fever

It’s nearing the end of the Financial Year, and in my line of business that means one thing – it’s report season. This week I’ve been working through four customer milestone reports and two technical working papers, all of which needed to be delivered to their respective customers. I don’t write all the reports myself, thank goodness, but I am the technical release authority so have to approve them before they go out the door. Some are well written and need just a light touch, but others require significant work before I’m happy to approve them.

So I’ve spent far too much time this week closeted in a meeting room little bigger than a broom cupboard, with a colleague, my laptop and a projector, going through several of the reports line-by-line, making sure that they answer the customer’s exam questions. I’ve been making heavy use of the unholy trinity of caffeine, paracetamol and chocolate to keep me going. I’m sure the coffee shop at work must make a good profit at this time of the year!

17 02 2012 icyjumbo status Comments (3) Permalink

A missing year

I was idly thinking over the weekend how old I was and how long I’ve been working for my company. In both cases, the answer I came up with at first was a year lower than the actual value. That fits, in a funny way, with the feeling I regularly have that Chris died just last summer, not eighteen months ago – I feel that I’m a much more recent widow than I actually am. It’s a most peculiar sensation, but it’s almost as if I’ve lost a whole year of my life. From the day after the funeral right through to last summer is all one big blur. If I go through my old diaries, or scroll back through this blog, I can see things I did, and with a big effort can recall them. But in general, unless I make that effort, it feels as if my subconscious has just edited out the whole year as being just too ghastly and not something it wants to remember.

I really don’t like the feeling. I’ve always had a good memory, and I don’t like the thought that it’s playing tricks on me. But the good news is that the last six months seem to be in much sharper focus, so I hope that means that I’m beginning to get better.

14 02 2012 Gillian status Comments (2) Permalink

Supersize Polyphony

I don’t often go out in the evenings at the moment, as I’m still getting far too tired. But there was a concert on at Malvern Theatres this evening that I particularly wanted to see, so I made a big effort. In fact, the recent snow made it a bigger effort than I had anticipated – the roads are fine, and my drive isn’t too bad (I’ve put lots of salt down, and there is only a light sprinkling of snow). But it has been so cold that the car doors froze solid overnight and I didn’t have the strength to open them! And the de-icer was inside the car so a fat lot of use that was! I worked from home this morning, and by this afternoon it had warmed up sufficiently that with the help of a jug of hot water I was able to force my way into the car. But it had frozen shut again by the time I needed to go out to the theatre this evening, and needed more hot water to unstick the door seals.

The concert was by the Armonico Consort, and featured a range of 16th century 36-part and 40-part motets, including Tallis’s Spem in Alium and Striggio’s Ecce Beatam Lucem. This sort of choral music was much more Christopher’s thing than mine. He was much more musical than me, used to sing in several choirs, and had no trouble following the different threads in multi-part canons and motets. It all went over my head rather, as I simply do not have the musical background to appreciate the works in the way that he could. So when I got an email from Malvern Theatres several weeks ago offering me a full-price seat for only £10, I decided it was an opportunity to see what all the fuss was about.

Wow. Just …… Wow.

It was absolutely superb. The choir sang the 40-part pieces in the round. So it was possible to see and hear the different parts, and follow the musical themes as they moved around the room, which I found extremely interesting.The conductor was really breaking into a sweat as he tried to weave together all 40 threads, half of which were behind him, whilst craning his neck every now and then to follow the score. The music was beautiful, and in places really made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Christopher would have absolutely loved it.

10 02 2012 icyjumbo Day out Comments (2) Permalink

Very annoying junk mail

I don’t get a great deal of junk post addressed to Christopher any more, and most of that seems to be from the car dealers that we bought our Mini from, trying to get him to upgrade. Fat chance! I have every intention of running that car into the ground and don’t expect to change it for years yet.

But this week I got some post addressed to him which really irritated me. The story started just weeks after he was made redundant in 2009. He got cold-called by a financial adviser offering advice on investing his lump-sum redundancy payment, and agreed that they should send him some initial bumf on what they had to offer. I was unhappy though. We were, and indeed I still am, subscribed to the Telephone Preference Service, which is meant to stop all uk-based cold calls, with threats of heavy fines for transgressors. I firmly believe that reputable companies should abide by the TPS rules, and I refuse to deal with anyone who doesn’t. And how did they know that Chris had a lump sum anyway? They claimed it was a complete coincidence, but I was suspicious. I did some searches on the Internet, and came up with pages and pages of people complaining about sharp practices from this particular firm. I strongly advised him to have nothing further to do with them. Anyway, his lump sum was far too small for us to need professional advice on how to deal with it.

Everything went quiet until this week, when he got a letter from a company I’d never heard of, Towry, inviting him to a seminar in Worcester on “Wealth Preservation in Taxing Times”. This included advice on inheritance tax planning, intestacy, wills, and powers of attorney. I did some digging, and it seems that Towry bought up the previous IFA company, and also have a load of people complaining about their sharp practices – including the Financial Services Authority who have fined them nearly half a million pounds for “providing incorrect information”. I saw red and scrawled over their invitation “It’s a bit bloody late for this. He’s DEAD. Remove his name from your mailing list forthwith”. I then took great delight in sending it back to them in their own reply-paid first class envelope. I sincerely hope that’s the last I hear from them.

05 02 2012 icyjumbo invective Comments (1) Permalink

Making the most of my TOIL

The acronym for Time Off In Lieu is highly appropriate – one only manages to accrue it when one’s been toiling away. And, as Sam pointed out in a comment yesterday, I’ve certainly been building up a fair amount of extra hours throughout January. In fact, for the last two weeks I’ve done a full five-day week of at least 37 hours (I’m not admitting publicly to any more than that, as my boss sometimes reads this blog!), which has at least answered the question as to whether I’m ready to go back to full-time working yet. No, I’m not! I’m shattered!

So today I decided to give in to the nagging of several colleagues who think I’ve been overdoing it, by taking the day off in lieu of some of the additional hours I’ve been working. I had a lazy morning and didn’t set my alarm, though I did sneakily log on and check my email before lunch – and was caught doing so by one of the very colleagues who had told me firmly to take the day off. Drat!

There is a Noel Coward play on at Malvern Theatres at the moment, and I generally enjoy his plays. Private Lives and Design for Living are two of my favourites, but this was a new one to me – Star Quality. It’s his final play, and I hadn’t even heard of it before, so I wanted to see it. But while I’m this tired, I really don’t want to go out in the evenings, and I’m busy with friends and family this weekend so the Saturday matinée is out of the reckoning. So the only way I was going to see the play was by going to the mid-week matinée. That was an added incentive to take today off.

It wasn’t a classic Coward, and I could see why I’d not come across it before, as it isn’t performed as often as his earlier plays.  It’s definitely not in the same league as some of his other works, though the trademark Coward wit and repartee were still there. The plot was clearly drawn from his life, with him sticking firmly to subjects that he knew intimately. It was about an innocent young playwright who had written a brilliant new play, the very temperamental leading lady who was a highly demanding diva, the ruthless producer trying to pull it all together with the help of his outrageously camp boyfriend/assistant, and various sundry lesser actors/actresses all caught up in the battles between the three leading protagonists. Cue hissy fits all round.

The actors were all hamming it up – and sometimes it was difficult to tell when their character was acting hammily, and when they themselves were overcooking it.  They also stumbled over their lines a few times – and again sometimes that was deliberate but sometimes definitely not. It turns out that this is the first week of the company’s tour around the UK, but even so one does expect professional actors to be totally fluent with their lines from day one – or, in this case, day two. The scene-stealer was Lola, a small white dog who was carried around by the leading actress. She behaved impeccably, and was the only character on stage who could not be accused of over-acting!

I’m pleased I’ve seen the play, as my curiosity is now satisfied, though I don’t think I’ll bother going if I see it staged again. And it was good to have a day off as TOIL after the hard work of participating in the equipment trial. I did feel out of place though – weekday matinées are clearly the preserve of the retired – I must have been the youngest person in the audience by fifteen to twenty years!

01 02 2012 Gillian Day out Comments (4) Permalink