cold calling

Just before Christmas the doorbell rang and I found a young man at the door with a box. "This was delivered to our house by mistake," he explained. He lives in a house with the same number as mine, but in the next road. This sort of thing does happen. Quite often, in fact. At least, we often get the wrong mail, and I then drop it round to the right house. I rarely get stuff brought to me, though.

Anyway, the box had a cake in it, all the way from Texas. There were no clues on the packaging and labelling to tell me why I'd got the cake, or why it had been sent. I sniffed it suspiciously for explosives or poisons, but I don't really know what explosives or poisons smell like, apart from cyanide, which apparently smells a bit like almonds, according to a Biggles book I once read; which is unfortunate if you've got a fruit cake on your hands, that may or may not have been laced with cyanide. If that's the case, it's probably your safest bet not to eat it.

I put it on the tumble drier, where things go when I can't decide what to do with them.

Yesterday John phoned. He was on the mobile, and I could hear wind blowing in the microphone.

"Sounds bit cold, John," I said; "are you on the Downs?"

"Yes," he said. "Can I come round?"

"I'll put the kettle on."

"I'll be there in five minutes."

When he was settled in the kitchen, I offered him a bacon butty, for I know John's likes.

"I'm afraid I must say no to the bacon butty, because I've got a lunch appointment, and I expect to have a bacon butty then."

I then remembered the Mystery Cake. John is a great man for the cakes.

"What about a slice of cake?" I asked. "Lord knows where it came from."

John made a sort of bubbling and fizzing noise. "It came from me," he said. "Didn't it say so?"

"No; no clues of any kind."

"Damn; I shall have to get in touch with everyone else I sent one to."

It was a good cake.

I played with John's camera's funny fish-eye lens, and called Katie through so that she could be in the picture too.

snow business

School's out, so we went trogging around the Downs. The sky was clear and the sunlight almost painfully brilliant; birds flying over us were brightly underlit by the reflected light, and looked very different to the way they usually look; I stalked a kestrel for ages to try to photograph it in flight, and ended up with an unusably poor photo and presumably a paranoid kestrel.

I fell over twice, too.

Pavements in Bristol are in a shocking state, icy and mostly untreated and uncleared, even on the busiest thoroughfares; one of the places I fell was on Whiteladies Road.

Over at Green Bristol, Chris Hutt observed the results of this state of affairs, and was invited by Councillor Jon Rogers to go and take some direct action with him. And so they did. Well done, both of you!

My contribution has been to clear the path at the front of the house and a little way beyond, as I have always done, as it seems like an obvious bit of civic duty. Not so obvious to the neighbours, sadly; next door's elderly widow has a house full of young lodgers, who happily let her attempt to scrape her own path clear. So I did that too.

Total number of houses on my road where someone has cleared the path: three. And none of them are the big houses which are used as old peoples' homes, of which we have several on the road. Still, it's better than the state of play citywide; hardly anyone has done anything on their own patch. Shame on you all, I say!

radio on

Listening to Laurie Taylor on Thinking Allowed yesterday, he said something that got me thinking. Appropriately enough, I guess. To a backing of Calling All Workers, he said

"I don't know whether I've somehow imbibed my dad's socialism, but as a child I couldn't ever hear this music without imagining a vast factory full of downtrodden workers who were required to fulfill their mundane repetitive modern-time tasks to the insistent, unrelenting rhythm of the marching radio."

..and there went another of my cosy versions of an imagined past, where I'd cycle into the factory along with a horde of fellow-workers, and spend a useful day building engines for Spitfires and spinning stuff on a lathe and designing something really neat on a drawing board, aided by my trusty slide-rule. And occasionally singing along to Our Gracie.

Fat chance, really, perhaps.

When I was building tricycles for children with special needs a few years back, I worked with a bunch of people who'd once worked in the engineering factories around the Stroud area, now defunct or reduced; like Lister, whose engines have powered several of the ships upon which I've worked. My colleagues' tales of life in the factories fitted reasonably well with my imagined past, though there were unpleasant things too; the description of the comapny in the link above mentions the good integration of Eastern European refugee workers into the workforce and locality in the immediate aftermath of the war. It doesn't mention the West Indian workforce who, as one of my colleagues described it, were brought in to work for Lister, but obliged to live in Gloucester because they didn't want That Sort living in Dursley.

In fact, of course, any workplace is going to have its annoyances and petty feuds and plain nastinesses, and the tricycle factory was no different. But I am thinking mostly of music-while-you-work, so I'll limit myself to that. The workshop always had the radio on. The best you could hope for was Radio Two, which was just about survivable, though I prefer Kenny Bruce and Terry Wogan as options rather than forced listening. As often as not, though, if the young apprentice got to the radio, it would be Radio One, or one of the local commercial stations. And that was deeply unpleasant, and contributed nothing at all to my productivity...

...silence was not an option, of course. Like telly in ships' crew messes. I remember a bosun coming into the mess of the Havelet, where I was quietly reading, and sticking the telly on. It was Rainbow. I asked if he really wanted to watch Rainbow. He said, in a tone of voice that said it should be obvious, "It's the telly, isn't it?" Duh.

My friend Mary had some work done on her house not long back, and was driven mad by the builders' radio, tuned to Radio One, very loud. She asked them to turn it down or off, pointing out that it was her home and she was in it. This did not go down well. I guess it's a class war thing. And a bloke thing. Like leaving fag-ends in the toilet, and tea bags on the draining board. A bit more civilised than pissing on lamp-posts, but. You know.

light my fire

There was a thing on the radio this morning about the Darwin Award, which has been granted this year to a pair of bank robbers who used too much explosive, and blew up the bank and themselves. It's all a bit sad, really, like the Brazilian priest who flew off out to sea under a cluster of party balloons and was never seen again. I laugh, then feel a bit guilty at laughing.

Of course, I would never do anything so daft.

When the gear change mechanism on my bicycle froze up in the cold weather yesterday, I tried freeing it up with a gentle application of the blowtorch. And then a short time later realised that I'd set fire to the lever mechanism. The gear changer worked, though, until this afternoon. When it Ceased To Function.

So I stripped it down, and what did I find?



Uh-huh. New bits on order, and, well, maybe a lesson learned. Don't hold your breath though.

once in a blue moon

New Year's Eve saw a partial eclipse, and so did Katie and I, because we went up on the roof especially. And by heck it was cold. If you click on the picture you may see the notch cut out of the moon by Earth's shadow, in the lower right hand side.


Lord, it's cold. I had to bring my bicycle indoors yesterday, to thaw out the gear changer which is frozen into position.


I've been thinking thoughts about the passing of time, as you do when you mark another year gone, another decade gone. I'm still working on those thoughts, so in the meantime, I'll share this poem that reminds me of my feelings after my father died, a few years ago. It's by Charles Causley. I first encountered it in an anthology of poetry, Staying Alive, that was my constant companion in the wild days of 2002 or thereabouts.

Eden Rock

They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock:
My father, twenty-five, in the same suit
Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack
Still two years old and trembling at his feet.

My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress
Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat,
Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass.
Her hair, the colour of wheat, takes on the light.

She pours tea from a Thermos, the milk straight
From an old H.P. Sauce bottle, a screw
Of paper for a cork; slowly sets out
The same three plates, the tin cups painted blue.

The sky whitens as if lit by three suns.
My mother shades her eyes and looks my way
Over the drifted stream. My father spins
A stone along the water. Leisurely,

They beckon to me from the other bank.
I hear them call, 'See where the stream-path is!
Crossing is not as hard as you might think.'

I had not thought that it would be like this.

get thee up into the high mountain

Christmas Day dawned with not a cloud in the sky, so I headed over to Wales and Ysgyryd Fawr, just north of Abergavenny. I was up there last year, too, but it was misty and windy then. Today it was cold but clear, although the massif of the Black Mountains, just across to the west, had a great fug of fog on top of it, and the Blorenge looked like it was wearing a hat of the same stuff.

There were other walkers, and we exchanged Merry Christmases as our paths crossed, sharing that sense of felicity in being there.

But it was a bit cold for eating lunch (a big lump of tortilla in my bag) on the top, so I drank my flask of hot chocolate and came down again.

Next stop Skenfrith, and St Bridget's church.


I love this church. The windows add gentle hues of yellow and green to the sunlight on the floor's memorial inscriptions. Restoration has touched lightly upon it. And I had the place to myself, in a sense.

blooming cold

With the snow fall the other night, there was plenty of evidence of our local foxes; there were prints up and down the road and the back garden. Though I have yet to hear foxes screaming in the night in this part of the city; while my friend in Clifton says that she has heard them often, recently. It's a good sound for the winter, a feral sound cutting through the night.

The roads are icy, so I've been walking or cycling when I want to get to places; Uncle Jim always reckoned that the best vehicle for snow is a motorcycle combination, and when I had a combi I had to agree with him. The narrow wheels cut through the snow more readily than wide car tyres; and you can do controlled pirouettes down the road, if it takes your fancy... sadly, the combi's long gone, and I rather missed it, these last few days.

I finally got the Trav warmed up and defrosted ready for some vital errands, yesterday. Stuck a big piece of cardboard down the front of the radiator, to help keep the temperature up, and scraped and wiped until the windows were finally clear; there was as much ice on the inside as there was on the outside.

Then I looked up and saw that blue sky was appearing above me, and realised that the fog was lifting (or rather, descending), which would hopefully leave the house riding above a sea of mist over the city. So I dashed up onto the roof...



Out and about, there was solid traffic converging on the city centre as people got into a spending frenzy for Christmas.

I was approached by two women, one with a pram, asking for money. I think they were Romanian gypsies. I gave one of them two pounds. She then retreated, and the one with the pram continued asking for money, pushing forward a piece of paper explaining how needy she was and gesturing to the baby. I told her that I'd given the money for both of them. A cropped-headed young man angrily said, "You shouldn't give them anything- they were here yesterday." Which produced mixed feelings; I wanted to do the opposite of what he'd said, because he was hateful; but I also resented being asked for more.