Thursday, February 12, 2009

food poisoning] you feeling all right just now


Just had a peanut butter sandwich earlier and now I read this:

The peanut-related recall has renewed calls for increased oversight of the nation's foodmakers, and even regulators are saying they need to change procedures to better protect the public.

Uh-huh. Wonder how we're doing for food hygiene:

Around 80,000 people in the UK report food poisoning each year.

Oops.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

[good news week] hope the recession continues

We have a Morrisons just down from us. There's an ASDA too so I'm going down there on my bike to check them out:

Wm Morrison Supermarkets is cutting the price on 4,000 products as grocers step up the battle to attract shoppers hit by the economic downturn.

[chutzpah] just about sums it up

You have to admire their Chutzpah:

Ex-bank chiefs say sorry for mistakes

Former bankers blamed for taking RBS and HBOS to the brink of collapse offer public apologies for their actions.

[fireball] run when it comes at you



Let's face it - I'm not getting much blogging done. What was a slowdown has almost become a hiatus but I do plan to be back. The issue is not things to blog about.

The novels I'm revamping don't mean a lot to most readers but they do to me and I've almost finished the 2nd one, which needed to be virtually rewritten. It does seem more exciting now. The 3rd is going to be tough because it involves combining all the remaining bits and pieces into a smooth narrative which you could still stand reading after the first two.

Anyway, enough on that.

I see they have their annual fires in Oz. Every country has its traditional trouble - California its tremors, Britain the wrong snow, Australia its bushfires. This particular lot of fires seem bad, even by Australian standards:

The fire that dropped from the sky on Saturday plunged us into a new reality. Environmental conditions had changed drastically before our eyes, but the advice to the community had remained the same. Even on Saturday the urgent words were streaming out of the radio: Be safe! Stay inside!

Had the fireballs come as far as our place our hoses and pumps and cotton clothes and every other piece of paraphernalia we had accumulated (such as wet mops and buckets and a bath full of water) would have counted for nothing.

If you've never been close to one of these, they are not nice. As the article points out, when that thing comes your way, all the nice little things like damping the gutters, staying inside and all that - you still get consumed in a fireball. People did.

And what did I walk home to from the shop last evening? Mist. British mist!

Friday, February 06, 2009

[family life] when tempers fray

Bulgarian police arrested Thursday the man who shocked the nation by decapitating his two children and seriously injuring five relatives by setting the family house on fire.

The 29-year old man, apparently distraught by feuding with his in- laws, killed and decapitated his two sons, aged five and eight, in a street in the village of Osikovo in southwestern Bulgaria on Wednesday night.

The mother of the killed children, 30, was still listed in a critical condition.

And here was I bemoaning not having a family. If that's family life, then I'm out of here.

[blogger] an interesting organization


Dear oh dear. Wonder if he'd like me as a character reference in his appeal to Blogger?

Thursday, February 05, 2009

[one of us] and one who will never be one of us


When Kim Philby was finally sprung in the 60s, there was widespread incredulity that he had betrayed his land and his people but even more incredulity that he had betrayed his class.

This latter was the one in which he remains unforgiven.

Difficult to know why the pointers to him doing this weren’t noted by more people. His family background and then his education at Cambridge, the past and present communist hotbed of intellectual England, the times in which he lived and his actions in distancing himself from his past – these all pointed to the possibility of his being a bit suspect, to say the least.

In the end, the phrase which was more often than not used about him was that he had been ‘one of us’.

This post is not about him nor about anyone even half interesting like him. It’s about me, so skip it if the topic is a bore.

Two years ago, one blogger described me as an anachronism from a long forgotten era and that epithet sits nicely. Look, mine was no more nor less than a typical white English, nominally Church of England upbringing or more specifically, Yorkshire upbringing but if you were to meet me today, you’d detect no Yorkshireman in me, either by accent or in attitude, except in a certain curmudgeonly dourness on occasions but that could equally be put down to age and my father, around whom I voyaged.

The fly in the ointment is the Australian connection. There are anomalies everywhere with me. For a start, my mother’s side is Protestant Irish and yet her family name is from the deep south of Ireland, County Cork and is spelt in the Catholic manner. My father was straight Yorkshire, living between the city of the mills and ‘oop on’t moor’ and he couldn’t stand Australians, so he really did well for me, di’n he, eh? Shades of Johnny Cash’s Boy named Sue.

I suspect I have Jewish blood somewhere but nothing in our genealogy suggests that.

In Australia, there were four main classes in those days: the colonial Australians themselves - the vast majority, then a smaller educated class, with family ties to the land or to the old country – the Macarthurs are the type of family I’m thinking of, then a class of English expats who settled in certain areas and finally the new immigrants from Europe and the older Chinese brigade. Oh … and in the outback were the aborigines. Sorry … koori.

Being one of the English expats and also, to an extent, of the educated class by upbringing, your humble blogger was a hybrid. Enough of my formative years were spent out there to develop a ‘twang’, also exacerbated by rhinitis, to make me acceptable to the French and I have ties to France too.

So, Australians always consider me a Pom, from my la-di-da manner of speaking; the Brits are divided on the issue. The uncritical place me as a convict but the shrewd can’t quite place it – I often get, ‘South African, yes?’

In Russia, it was even more weird. Drivers who gave me a lift placed me according to their own education level and exposure to the west, together with my level of Russian on that particular day.

On a bad day, I was asked, ‘Amerikanetz, da?’ through a range up to the highest level I ever achieved: ‘Pribaltica, da?’ This meant that they thought I was from either Latvia, Estonia or Lithuania.

Only about a dozen times did someone phone and take me as Russian, then get annoyed when I didn’t understand what she wanted.

In one way, this was high praise for my Russian speech but from the Russian point of view, Pribaltica was a derogatory comment – I was someone bastardizing their language, one step above Chukcha. When they found out I was British, their attitudes changed for the better, of course.

The most common assumption was that I was Yugoslav, which ties in with my first life partner who was Serbian and a wild beauty at that. She was the type you’d die for [and very nearly did] and I had no defences. On that score, I also had an attachment to a Ukrainian girl and maybe that explains how I slipped into the Russian lifestyle so quickly and why, even today, Olga Kurylenko makes the heart skip a beat [but you’d be hard pressed, in my opinion, to go past an English rose].

Yesterday, in ASDA, I saw a lady with that particular leather jacket and that particular manner and a jawline I recognized immediately but up here, she’s more likely to be Polish, whom I don’t know.

The Americans have always been onside with me and vice-versa. Maybe I think like an American or am educated in their history and culture. I spent every year in America in the 90s and in Canada too, on the strength of a certain lady I was enamoured of, a Vancouver lass.

The Americans are ultra-friendly to most people anyway but still, the point stands – I’ve always been made to feel accepted in America, which is more than I can say for my homeland. Two days ago, I was told I was not a Brit but I’m used to that now.

So, coming back to Philby - there was a man who spoke in a distinctive manner, whose background was impeccable, who also, to many, ‘betrayed his class’. With me, I’ve never been accepted in the first place by any nation or by any class as ‘one of us’.

Sometimes I see myself as the Flying Dutchman, doomed to rove the world eternally, [violin out at this point, maestro and play a mournful strain], forever suspected as pulling a fast one on the locals, wherever they happen to be, due to huge background gaps and therefore my credibility as ‘one of us’.

Let’s just say that, on occasions, it makes me sigh.

By the way, yesterday I joined the ranks of the ratepayers. Bloody outrageous too – over £1000. Does that count?

I said to the council lady, when asked to state my ethnicity, ‘I really must apologize, you know. I’m from a social grouping discriminated against these days – the ageing, white, British male. I’m afraid I can’t even claim to be homosexual [although I did try it out when I was a boy scout], disabled, nonCofE or even riff-raff. Sorry.’

Actually, I didn’t say that at all.

Well, maybe a bit.

Well, most of it, really.

Anyway, she laughed and we plan to meet up again soon.

[adventure holidays] have you considered africa

Modern ladders enable you to disembark from your aircraft.


Tired, jaded, prone to that old ennui? You need a holiday, my friend.

That’s why Nigerian spammer Susan Morgan and Ukrainian mail order bride specialist Boris Goodenough have combined with Higham Surprise Vacations to offer you the trip of your life. Whether fighting off muggers in Kinshasa or succumbing to yellow fever in Tanzania, we offer you a holiday you’ll never forget, a final journey to exotic lands, unspoilt by tourism.

Here is a sampler:

Cape Verde

The Republic of Cape Verde consists of several rugged volcanic islands off the West Coast of Africa. The climate is warm and dry. Evidence of immunization against yellow fever is required and medical facilities in Cape Verde are extremely limited. Some petty theft is common.

The next step up in excitement:

Guinea-Bissau

All official Americans have departed the country. Portuguese is the official language; French is also widely spoken. Visitors arriving without visas via land or air have been turned back.

Medicines often are not available; malaria and other tropical diseases are common. Petty thievery and pickpocketing are increasingly common, particularly at the airport, in markets and at public gatherings and thieves have sometimes pose as officials and steal bags and other personal items.

Fund transfers between banks are frequently difficult and time-consuming to accomplish. Taking pesos out of the country is prohibited. Travelers may have difficulty finding public phones and receiving international calls. Telephone services are expensive.

However, if living on the edge is your thing, try:

The Democratic Republic of the Congo

Dramatic deterioration of the physical infrastructure of the country, insecurity and an increase in looting and murder in Kinshasa’s streets, occasional official hostility to U.S. citizens and nationals of European countries; periodic shortages of basic needs such as gasoline; chronic shortages of medicine and supplies for some basic medical care; hyperinflation and corruption.

In some urban areas, malnutrition and starvation are acute.

Medicine is in short supply. Most intercity roads are difficult or impassable in the rainy season. Government permission is required for travel outside Kinshasa. Armed groups operate in parts of the DRC outside government control and provide pillaging, vehicle thefts, carjackings, extrajudicial settling of differences and ethnic tensions. Travelers in these areas run the risk of attack or detention.

Book today with us. Leave travellers cheques or credit card details with the washroom attendant, Victoria station between the hours of 8 p.m. and midnight and we’ll mail you your tickets, transfers, insurance and accommodation stubs.

Be sure to have left an adequate will with loved ones before

[burma] and the forgotten monks


Any one remember them? Have you thought where they might be at the moment - the monks who protested?