Archive
life log #9
Today I hit 70. When I was younger that seemed like an ancient age, but having got there it somehow doesn’t. I am fairly fit and healthy, some bits are a little clapped out with wear and, perhaps, abuse. Generaly though I am doing OK and am grateful for that. The love of a good woman helps a lot and the Wonder of Wokingham does police me well to curb some of my excesses. She is the good angel on one shoulder to counteract the demon on the other who urges me on to bad habits.
These are worrying times though. Inflation is rampant and it gets harder to make ends meet. We are not too badly off because we have the fruits of many years of hard work behind us and I am still, albeit part time these days, working. Like many we are cutting back on our spending and consumption at the moment because we don’t know where all of this is going. The government, despite all of the shrieking on social media, are doing a good job at trying to address both the short term and look at the longer term. Hopefully things will improve, but if a certain lunatic in Moscow presses the button it won’t matter anyway. Some of us have been here before…
But let’s look on the bright side and assume that we do not vanish into the mushroom cloud. Christmas is coming and we have that to look forward to. There are things that we can do to help ourselves. One thing that the Berkshire Belle and I have done for years is to start putting something extra in the shopping trolley each week to start building up the Christmas stash. There are lots of things out there that will keep to beyond Christmas and New Year: The shops are full of things already. We still spend the same amount of money maybe, but it gets spread out over three months or so and doesn’t seem so hard.
Another thought for this year is to maybe consider a Turkey crown rather than a full bird. It will cook in less time so that saves a bit on your energy bill and it certainly saves on some of the waste. Buy one now as they are freely available. A lot of the supermarkets are also flogging off beer and soft drinks that they have been caught out with overstocks after the sudden drop in temperature. Check the best before dates, but there is plenty on sale now that will last past Christmas and you can cash in on the savings. It won’t be on sale in December.
We decided not to take a holiday for the third year on the trot and I am using up my work holiday weeks to try and take us around on day trips. It costs money to travel of course, but we are trying to amuse ourselves without breaking the bank. At this time of year the weather is not always conducive to walking around, but we are making the effort to get about and explore a bit. It helps to make us feel that life is returning to pre-Covid times a little, although that virus is still lurking around and the cooler weather does seem to suit it.
We have had invitations for another Covid vaccine dose, but having tried to book we have no centres within about 50 miles which seems ludicrous for a town with over 160,000 citizens. We wanted to wait as late as possible before getting jabbed on the basis that the protection would be stronger through the really cold months and so we have left booking an appointment for now. I have an appointment at the doctor’s for an annual blood pressure test and a blood sample in a week’s time and they may well give me my ‘flu jab then. If they offer the Covid one I’ll take it just to get it out of the way.
In the garden I am not up to much at the moment. Just a little light maintenance, but the leaves will soon be falling heavily and I will have all that to clear up along with doing the late season pruning. When we had the fencing done we thought that we had lost some things, but they have all come back and we are thrilled with that. It was a strange year in that the foxes did not do anything like the damage that they did in 2021, but I had held back on some planting just in case and I also had to put off some jobs whilst waiting for the fencing guys to do their stuff. Because the new fence was about 5 weeks late I did not do some of what I had planned either. Then came the really hot spell and we lost some things to that instead. Overall I am fairly pleased with progress out there though and, with no major infrastructure works to come next year I can look forward to doing things at my own pace.
Stay safe wherever you are.
PS: With Sod’s law in full swing I have just read that there may well be a turnkey shortage this Christmas. If you can buy one now, get it. There were plenty in the shops this week.
on ethnicity and nationalism
Perhaps I am straying into dangerous waters here, but it what I am musing on on this morning so here I go. It is on my mind because I have been reading some of the media coverage of the build up to the soccer World Cup competition and the words of one fan have started me off on this topic.
The chap concerned admits that he has concerns about going as a fan because of his sexual leaning, but he feels that he needs to go as an English fan and wants to support his team in the competition, even though homosexuality is against the law where the tournament is being held. Sport does encourage nationalist fervour; it makes money out of it, but it is it worth putting yourself at risk over?
I used to enjoy watching sport and, like music, seeing it live enhances the enjoyment so I can understand, to a degree, a desire to go to a World Cup where the opportunity to afford the time and cost may only come around once in a lifetime. I have seen the England football team play in a World Cup qualifiing game at Wembley and, further back, have watched the England cricket team at Lords in test matches against the West Indies and India, but my interest in these was not so much in support of my country as an opportunity to watch the sport being played at the highest level: I did not care too much who won.
My ethnic background is, for about three generations, English. Beyond that it gets a little murky as I am, like most British people, a bit of a mongrel. My surname is classic Welsh; I am a Son of Owen. However that misleads because many people from Wales moved to Ireland where the surname is also common. Some of my ancestors moved there to get away from invaders, forced West by an influx from mainland Europe, or from Eastern tribes who were also faced with continental immigration: The problems of today are nothing new for, if you think about it, there wasn’t anyone here at the beginning and we are all ancestors of immigrants.
My family background on the ;paternal side can be traced back to Ireland and that trail goes cold with a fire that destroyed parish records back in 16 something or other. So my Welsh ancestors had gone over at some point before that, but here comes a small irony in that one of the biggest moves of that sort came after the Norman conquest when Bill’s mob took Welsh people as serfs (slaves if you prefer) over with them.
Now the ironic thing is that the Norman’s achieved their conquest of the UK with help from, amongst others, mercenaries from the Germanic states, (Germany as we know it did not exist until the latter half of the 1800s). My background on the maternal side can be traced back to those Germanic people so there is a good chance that my Mum’s andcestors either chased my Dad’s lot out of their homes or were part of taking them forcibly to the Emerald Isle.
I do understand the difference between English and British. My passport has me down as a citizen of the United Kingdom and, if asked, will say that I am British. That is an inescapable fact; I was born here. Technically, having be born in Berkshire, I am English and there have been many times when in the company of Scottish, Welsh or Irish (both North and South) people I have allowed my Englishness to come to the fore in banter, but I have never really felt strongly about it. Having a laugh over where I come from is one thing, but I can’t take it seriously.
Something else that I understand is that the European Union and Europe are not the same thing. I am glad that I am no longer a citizen of the former, but have long seen myself as a European. Whilst I have Celtic blood physically I take after my maternal side and am tall, blue eyed and lean towards fair so perhaps there is something in that that colours my judgement. In any case, England is in the United Kingdom and that is, in turn, in the continent of Europe.
I am an ethnic mongrel if you go back down the family tree a bit and that is maybe why I have no strong ethnic feelings nor nationalist ones. I was born here in England, have lived most of my life here and will probably die here. I like my country, but I have liked many of the places that I have visited around the world and would have been quite happy to have moved to some of them. Would I fight for my country? Yes, in the sense of defending it, although I’m not sure what use a seventy yer old would be these days. I suspect that that is just a base instinct about protecting one’s territory.
Perhaps it is that same base instinct that comes to the fore in people like the one that I mentioned early in this musing, that makes you want to support your country’s sporting squads. I can only speak for myself. I came into existence as a result of two people having, I hope, a good time. For me the location happened to be in Southern England and that hangs a label on me. I have some pride left in my country and I am not ashamed to be British, even if I don’t like what has become of the place in many ways. I just cannot get impassioned about my nationality in the way that so many others do.
Nor can I get excited about my ethnic background, although there may be something in my genes that has made me feel so at home in Northern Germany from my first visit to Kiel in the mid-seventies and then working in Hamburg and Hannover in the nineties. It could also have something to do with the way that I have felt so comfortable on the Emerald Isle for it was long after working in these places that I found out about my roots.
I am who I am and I feel no need to get excited about where I came from. It is all in the past and I can’t do anything about it. All I have ever been able to do is to try and work with the cards that I have been dealt. I have spent moire than half of my adult life with the woman of my dreams and am very content in my own little world. Life has been hard at times, but I have been very lucky along the way and am content with my lot. I don’t need to feel that sense of national or ethnic identity that seems so important to others.
on immortality
Someone commenting on my upcoming 70th birthday got us into talking about life coming to an end sooner rather than later. This has been on my mind recently anyway; the Berkshire Belle and I took out funeral plans last year. My demise certainly is not too far off in relative terms for reaching the three score years and ten that was, when I was a lad, reckoned to be one’s expectancy as a man.
I long ago came to terms with death, probably some time in my forties and have no problem with shuffling off. I have loved experiencing life and death will be the last experience I get. I would prefer not to linger or suffer too much pain in my demise, but accept that it is coming.
As an atheist I do not believe in any afterlife. Once my heart stops I will be gone and that’s it. Quite honestly the thought that there might be more appalls me regardless of whether it is upstairs or down (and I have no doubt that I would be going down). Life is hard enough without having to go on forever. This line of thought caused some distress to one of my religious friends who thought that it was a bleak outlook, but I don’t think so. It gives me comfort to know that it will, one day, all be over.
I have enjoyed most of my life so far. There are times that I try to forget and there are things that I have done that I would, with hindsight, prefer not to have done, but all of the steps that I took along the way led me to the Berkshire Belle and the love of my life. There is nothing to regret about prior relationships because they all taught me things that helped when it came to the big one. Likewise I do not regret my first marriage because it produced two children of whom I am proud. I regret the pain that comes when relationships end, but such things are all part of life.
None of us ask to be born, but we turn up, planned or not. What we do with the hand that we are dealt is largely up to us. There are always external factors that we can;’t control, but we can choose how we react to the slings and arrows and that will shape us. I have had a good life, even if I was, at times, bad. I am still reasonably fit, most of me still works pretty well albeit that some bits are well past there prime. I am still working as my eighth decade approaches and am making do with what I have.
Whatever talents I have do not include any that might make me immortal. I can’t paint or make music that will stand after I have gone. I write, but none of that is likely to live on too long after I go and I have not invented anything that might advance to race. I will not care once I am gone whether or not I am remembered and I am happy with that.
I have spent more than half of my adult life, almost half of my life for far, with the woman of my dreams and I am content. Immortality? You can keep it; I don’t want it.
on HM Queen Elizabeth II
I was going to write another humorous post for today. Her Majesty was well known for having a good sense of humour and I felt that a funny story on the day of her funeral would be appropriate. However, the connection between my mind and my fingers has failed to come up with anything that I am happy with and so instead I thought that I would share my only experience of being in her presence.
Belfast is one of those wonderful maritime cities around the UK and I fell in love with the place back in the mid-1980s even though it was tough place to love back then with The Troubles at the height. I was flying back and forth, staying there a few days at a time at most, other times in and out on the same day and, because of security concerns, not seeing much more than the airport at Aldergrove and our offices in Queen Street and Tomb Street. Two of my colleagues were murdered in separate incidents at that time.
Over the tears things got better and I was able to move around the city on my own in perfect safety. By the early 2000s I was again a regular visitor and on one sunny day I had been to a couple of morning meetings, had lunch and was walking out from the city centre to call in at one of the sites that I managed down at Clarendon Dock.
I was enjoying the architecture when I turned a corner and encountered a crowd. Barriers lined the street to keep the crowds on the pavement and there was a heavy police presence. As I squeezed along between the back of the crowd and the railings I became aware that many of the crowd were expecting something to happen at any moment and I paused as a motorcade pulled up outside a building opposite.
A huge cheer went up as the doors of the building were opened and The Queen and Prince Philip emerged, p[asuing on the steps to wave to us all long the street. Then they were into the car and away. It had been a magical moment and completely, for me, out of the blue. It is the only time that I saw my monarch in person and the twenty feet that separated us the closest that I would come. It remains a very special moment for I am an unashamed royalist and have the utmost respect for the way that HM The Queen ruled. I was born between her ascension to the throne and her coronation, so I have lived my live so far as an Elizabethan.
I have said my own goodbye in private and today is for others. I am not that good with funerals (I won’t be going to mine), so today I might look in on some of the event on TV for we British do this stuff so well. Other than that I will be having a quiet day with the Berkshire Belle, the queen of my heart.
Hoping that your day passes well too. Stay safe.
on words
Yesterday, during the tidying up of my blogs, I read something that I had written mentioning Dan Ruth an American columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner who I first encountered when he wrote for the Tampa Tribune. His politics differ from mine perhaps, but he has a way with words that drew me to his column whenever we were over in FLA.
I learned to read early in life, partly because I was a sickly child and was confined to bed fairly frequently. We were a poor family, but working for larger country estates all of which had library rooms and a willingness to lend books to the children of their servants. Armed with a cheap atlas and a Webster’s dictionary, both bought cheaply at jumble sales, I taught myself to read and to work out where in the world the action that I was reading about was; even fictional works have some factual basis for their locations.
And so began a love of words and language. I have never been much of a linguist, although I used to have sufficient command of French to have negotiated commercial contracts en Francais, and could get by with some factory German when I used to be over there on business, but there is a beauty in some languages that I could appreciate even if I could not understand it. I used to frequent Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park as a teenager just to listen to those on the soapbox for some of them were very good indeed.
Words, written or spoken well, are a joy and it was one of the lessons I learned when the time came for me to get up in front of people and talk. The performance is one element, and an important one, but the choice and order of the words that you use is crucial to get across your message. My experience goes back way beyond PowerPoint and similar packages to the days of flip charts and overhead slides and I was lucky enough to have some professional training to help me. I am not sure that I would have had the confidence to talk for 30-40 minutes without note otherwise.
As I began to write for business the skills of crafting a letter came to me through experience and the support of a long lost business resource, the typing pool: Word processor packages were both boon and curse. The I began to get paid for writing, and the discipline of banging out 1600-1800 words per month for a feature article taught me more about using words to best effect as did the influence of a good editor and the way that the judicious change of a word or two here and there could turn a respectable piece into a good one was a skill that I admired, even if I have not, as yet, grasped it myself.
Another big learning curve was when I began to speak and have my words simultaneously translated. I had already come to understand that I needed to prune out the fillers and padding that permeate our normal speech for people whose first language was not English, but working with translators took that to another level. I used to wear a headset so that I could listen to them, not to check their work, but to pace my speech so that we could match each other’s delivery.
It is a great sadness to me these days to see so many people completely disinterested in their language. Communication is a great social skill. We brag that it is what separates us from the animals and yet it is a skill in decline. Political correctness has robbed us of the great orators. I was so disappointed when I heard Obama give a speech once at a military base. I was watching on television with considerable anticipation because I had heard that he was good, but he went on, and on, and on, and on. His delivery was awful too; speak a few words looking right, pause, look left and say a bit more, pause, look right and speak again. I know that the right, left stuff was to read off the two autocues, but it was too long, way too long. And he was just boring.
The power of spoken words to inspire is perhaps best illustrated by the bad examples; the rabble rousers. I can’t understand most of what Hitler was banging on about, but 5 minutes of listening to one of his speeches and the urge to pack up and head for Poland becomes strong. Bad guys who can talk well will always inspire a following, so why have we allowed the PC brigade to neuter the good guys and gals?
I am not one of the grammar police (if you’ve read this far it should be self evident), I just like to see the language used well and I find myself reading older books more often than recent stuff because they are better written. I prefer older films because the dialogue is better written and delivered.
Yes, I am an old git and will not be around much longer, but I do care about the future for those that I will leave behind and the ability to communicate is as important to us as any of the other crises the planet faces. It is a cornerstone of civilisation, so nurture and protect it as much as any other part of our environment. All words matter.
life log #8
The loss of my Queen last week was a shock. It had to come one day soon, but it all seemed so sudden when the news came that her family had been sudden followed a few hours later by the inevitable announcement.
I am a Royalist and have been for as long as I can remember having thought about it. I would have been a Royalist in an earlier life too, even if it meant being, for a while, on the loading side. Let’s face it the Puritans were a joyless bunch were they not? The monarchy were thankfully restored and Cromwell’s remains were desecrated so I feel that I am on the right side here.
Whilst the Queen would have expected the due process of State to be carried out according to her wishes I doubt that she would have wanted the country to shut down during the process of mourning. She cared about her country too much and, at a time like this, she would have wanted it working towards better times, not moping about.
The Hastings Hottie and I are both very saddened by the loss of the Monarch who had been my only and hers since childhood, but we both have worked in sectors where there will be much to do in the changeover from E to C. We both miss the chance to be involved in making those changes happen as we would have done once. QCs have already become KCs (sans Sunshine Band of course) and stamps, coins and banknotes will all change. Much of this work will already have been planned for some time, but it would be fascinating to be in on making some of it happen.
So what else is going on chez nous? We have gone from trying to salvage as much as we can from the garden to it becoming lush and seeing some things coming back from the dead. Some things that we thought that we had lost from the fencing works have come back too, much to our delight. A good few annuals have not survived and some of the perennials have gone from scorched to Autumn mode. Tale season pruning will be interesting as we try to work out what is dormant and what is dying.
We put off our US holiday again, but have agreed that something in the Spring of 2023 is essential for our sanity as well as because there are thing that we need to do over there to tidy up the last remnants of our property adventures Stateside.
For us this is the season of two birthdays and various anniversaries and so dietary considerations are taking a back seat. Not that we are going made, but we are not going mad either, just relaxing the strict regime a little.
We have been trying to minimise our energy consumption for some years now, so are finding it hard to find any more areas that we can cut back on. All we can do now is to sit tight and wait to see how things work out. Hopefully this Winter will not be too hard so that those worse off than us can have a better chance of maintaining a reasonable quality of life.
As I write this the two foxes that live next door are lurking around in our garden. We see them daily and, thankfully, this year they are causing too much havoc our side of the fence. We have most of our small birds back too, including a wren, and their antics give much joy. The other bit of wildlife news is that the little water feature that I created has an amphibian. Whilst cleaning the filter on the pump something crossed the back of my hand and vanished into the depths; whether it was a frog or one of the toads that we have around the garden I can’t say for sure, but it was another pleasant surprise.
Stay safe, wherever you are.
on blogging
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I began blogging. This was my first blog and it was in tended to work around my business identity as ThatConsultantBloke and so it kept to topics that were relevant to the sort of people that I wanted to work with. There were other things that I wanted to talk about though, mostly on topics that I was interested in and so other blogs appeared.
Then I got to another junction in the road where one of my other blogs became an arm of another business venture that I had and so there was another split so that I could balance work and pleasure there too. This blog refined into something of a weekly ritual for me and it has been the one that gets more of my attention, but it was, at one point, one of eleven blogs that I was writing on. And most of those blogs had their own Twitter and Facebook feeds too.
Towards the end of the last decade I slimmed my operations down and closed several of the blogs, but this one and the other business blog still needed upkeep, but my capacity to keep the blogging levels up still fell short of the resource I had available and so content suffered. Then lockdown came and I started doing something different with this blog, but that too has tailed off this year as times move on.
I am going to be 70 very soon now and I think that I need to look at my remaining blogs. The last big revision saw me merge my personal websites into these blogs and it strikes me now that keeping them all going is simply an act of vanity. I have run down both of my businesses and have no need for promotion of them anymore so what to do next?
A lot of the content of the blogs has some value and so I don’t want to let it go so the likelihood is that I will merge this blog with The Voice of the Bloke at the Back and merge my two motoring and transport related blogs into one. That will leave me with three blogs (there is a music related one too). I need to read up on how I do that and also to understand the consequences of doing it so I have some research to do.
So you may see some changes in the coming weeks. The days are drawing in and I will be spending less time in the garden so I can focus a bit on sorting these blogs out. That will probably see a significant change to the way that they look, but it all good stuff for keeping the brain cells active.
Thanks for stopping by.
PS: I have just realised that a large number of posts have vanished from my blogs. It appears that when I thinned things out earlier in the year, and gave up one of the author identities that I was using, anything that I had written under that ID is lost. C’est la vie.
on talent, or the lack thereof
As I trawl around cyberspace I am often offered the chance to buy a t-shirt with the legend “I play guitar because I like it, not because I am good at it”. I also get the ukulele equivalent. I am tempted, but I doubt that I would wear one too often and they probably are not worth the money anyway, regardless of how true the sentiment is.
So far in my life I have not yet mastered playing a musical instrument. I had some piano lessons as a teenager, but no-one seemed to want to teach me how to play like Jerry Lee Lewis. A move of house saw the piano sold and I next found myself playing drums, not because I could, but because I had the van to transport the drums and one night when the drummer failed to appear I took over. My career as a stickman didn’t last too long anyway: Glaring furiously at the bass player when you reverse the beat coming off a fill doesn’t make you right.
Then my little sister and her fiancé bought me a Spanish guitar for my 21st birthday. I tried to teach myself and then turned to friends, but it doesn’t help when they take the thing off you and rip off something immediately recognisable with no apparent effort. Now I have four guitars and four ukuleles on which I make noises, some of which I can recognise, and, one one occasion, so did a fellow shopper in a Florida guitar shop when he joined in with me. It is the only time, so far, that I have played guitar in a duo.
There was a time in my driving career when I made the observation that there are a lot of people who can get a tune out of a musical instrument, but comparatively few have the genuine talent to really play one. I was making the comparison with driving, in that loads of people can operate the controls of a car adequately enough to get from A to B, but very few of them can really drive. I could, and have been a very adequate wheelman in my time in a wide variety of vehicles, but playing an instrument? No. I just do not have the feel, let alone the talent.
I play my various instruments because I love them all. I enjoy the look, smell and feel and the effort of trying to make recognisable noises helps to keep my grey matter active. Yes there is an element of “all the gear and no idea”, but I can live with that. It is probably getting a bit too late for me to get to the point of being able to play with others. Covid arrived on the day that I got a telephone number for a local ukulele group and so I did not make the call. Maybe at some point I will.
Maybe at some point I will also make that breakthrough and become sort of competent, maybe not. One thing is sure: I will not be buying one of those t-shirts.
If you are interested, my musical alter ego blog can be found here.
on humour
I wrote a few months back about personal preferences and touched on humour. I got a bit carried away with my thoughts and wrote so much that I decided to cut it out and give it a post to itself, so here we go.
Humour is very personal and I recognised the generation changes as a teenager. With my parents I had enjoyed radio shows like Hancock’s Half Hour, The Navy Lark, Round the Horne and Beyond My Ken. But then shows like I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again (ISIRTA) came along that I loved, but just bewildered my Mum and Dad. Perhaps that Is why I find very little funny in contemporary humour.
Personal preferences are here again though, and the Wokingham Wonder and I have different tastes.Fortunately we also have a large overlap and, for me, one of the joys in our relationship is that she is tuned into my tendency to go off at tangents from conversations. I have a love of aural humour, possibly from having had so much exposure to radio comedy (we did not have a TV at home on a regular basis until the second half of the Sixties).
That is also probably why I was so disappointed with Monty Python and The Goodies where my heroes from ISIRTA moved on to form part of the former and all of the latter. Visually the humour just did not work for me. I do enjoy visual humour though and two of my favourite films are comedies, (although I did not know that when I went into the cinema to see them). I went to see Blazing Saddles because the lady I was with at the time loved Westerns and I loved it (she didn’t). Mostly it is visual humour, but the dialogue is superb and there are plenty of aural gags in there too. Some years later the lady that I was first married to loved disaster movies and so we went to see Airplane!, me reluctant, her keen and, once again I loved it and she hated it. Airplane! has aural and visual gags aplenty and I was still finding new ones as late as the fifth or sixth time of seeing it.
I love words and playing with them. Spoonerisms and malapropisms litter my conversations at home. English is full of opportunities with things like words ending in ough; plough, cough and so on. Fortunately the Berkshire Belle is sharp enough, and knows me well enough, to pick up on my playing with words and she rarely misses a beat. Often when I go off on one tangent she will pick it up and change direction again.
Written humour I enjoy too, but again some of the modern humour misses for me. Oddly I got into Douglas Adams from the TV adaptation of Hitchhikers Guide and then read the books, enjoying the ingongruity and juxtaposition of ideas. A fello enthusiast for these books amongst my colleagues suggested the Discworld books of Terry Pratchett and lent me several, but these let me down somewhat. There would begin a thread that I thought was going to be brilliant, but they all petered out. It was like watching football or rugby from high in the stand as what could be a great play develops from the back. Just as you get excited with where things are going the wrong pass is made and all is lost. Load of people love the book though and good luck to them.
I enjoy humour with style and wit and much of that seems to be lacking nowadays where crudity and personal attacks seem so often to be what gets the laughs. If that floats your boat then so be it; I am all for people enjoying themselves and having a laugh is a daily necessity for me. If I find different things funny to you then so what? After all, it’s a funny old world.
life log #7
It was inevitable that we would see a resurgence of Covid here in the UK given the large gatherings to celebrate the Queen’s platinum jubilee followed by the other Summer gatherings; Glastonbury, Wimbledon, Silverstone and the myriad of public events. At the supermarket last Saturday mask wearing was about 50:50 with non-mask whereas in recent weeks the mask wearers have been in the minority. I have not resumed wearing a mask whilst out and about as yet, but am seriously considering it.
I am at one of those times when my weight has come off the plateau and staring going up again and I am not sure what to do about reversing the trend. I am eating more fruit and burning off extra calories in the garden every day, but it is not giving me the right results. As yet I am not back on the scales, but there is a bulge around the middle that is giving me the indication that things are not going well.
Somewhere in my mind is that mental switch and once I can find it I can, maybe, start making a difference again. I am allowing myself a few indulgences to keep me cheerful, for example once or twice a week after a heaving afternoon in the garden I allow myself a can or bottle of beer. Those will have to stop. As much as I enjoy them, as a treat, a reward and for the pleasure of a cold drink, they are empty calories. There are always tough choices to be made and I really should be thinking of my health in the long term rather than a little instant gratification.
I am grateful for still being fit and healthy enough to do what I do. The other afternoon I got the big ladder out and spent a couple of hours working across the front of the house at bedroom window level. I don’t know how many times I was up and down that ladder, but my legs knew all about it a couple of days later reminding me that I am almost seventy and not still in my twenties. I did it though and, despite the balance problems that I have from the mouth cancer operations back around 2008-10 (scar tissue has almost closed the tubes to my left ear) I was quite comfortable working at height and very pleased that I can still do all this stuff.
Mental attitude plays a lot in how you feel and what you believe that you can do. I try not to over think about some of these things because it is very easy to convince myself that something is going to be too hard. Equally there are times when I launch into something without thinking through the consequences such as the afternoon that I shifted just over a hundredweight of gravel in the full sun. I need to balance optimism and pessimism a little better perhaps.
The garden has yielded a couple of portions of mixed berries so far, we have tomatoes forming and the bean, carrot and dwarf cucumber plants are looking healthy. This is another bad year in the herb garden though as my parsley has not done well at all and the two sage plants, that had been coming along well, have both died. The only herbs that is thriving are the chives, several of which have been planted as companion plants to the roses as they are supposed to help ward off black spot and the rosemary hedge by the front door that is rampant again after a savage prune over the Winter.
Gardening is very much like life: You have to work at it and, even then, not everything will work out. Bad things happen and it is how you deal with them that counts.
Enough for now. Stay safe out there wherever you are.
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