Month: June 2011

various

A great victory for England yesterday in the ODI. Wimbledon turning into a tournament of shocks, with both Williams sisters and Federer all shown the exit door in the space of three days.

Away from sport some big news: I will be moving to Genesis Homes (nee St Matthew Housing) in the near future. I spent a couple of hours today going through a risk assessment interview with two of their professionals and Dave from Julian Housing (standing in for my regular caseworker Duncan). They have a room in each of their two Kings Lynn houses so I await with interest finding out which house I will be in.

Between tomorrow and Tuesday inclusive I will be in London for Marxism 2011, a big political festival.

cricket

The thrid and final test match of the series between England and Sri Lanka has ended in a draw. Perhaps the most significant occurrence of the match was the return to form of Kevin Pietersen who contributed a magnificent 85 to England’s 377-8D. The horrible weather that has blighted this series was particularly unfortunate here as the groundstaff had produced a proper cricket pitch on which all types of player were in the game, as opposed to the shirtfronts we see far too often. Today we witnessed Kumar Sangakkara’s 1st test hundred in England, wilile Thilan Samaraweera was 13 short when the rain came.

Various

On Thursday I had a day out in Southwold (lunch at the Red Lion, home of Adnams). Adnam is a family name. Family names ending in -nam appear to be a Suffolk peculiarity. In the eighteenth century there was a Suffolk family called Bradnam, one member of whom was incorrectly registered at birth with the n and the m transposed, and it so happened that it was the son of this individual, still using the -man ending who emigrated to Australia, where his one of his grandsons attained considerable fame. As I write this England are making a fine effort to win the series against Sri Lanka 2-0 istead of 1-0. Andrew Strauss made an excellent declaration yesterday to give England a chance of finishing it in spite of the poor weather. The sea views at Southwold are impressive even on when the weather is ordinary, as it was. I append some photographs:
The Red Lion, SouthwoldAnother sea view at Southwold
Sea view at Southwold

wood and other stuff.

On Sunday I collected a substantial quantity of kindling, having been unable to purchase Asparagus I put the bag I had with me to alternative use, and filled it without ever leaving my path! Today we had a delivery of wood which means we now have ridiculously large quantities, but at least we will not need deliveries in midwinter when everyone is thinking about such things

A rose which a couple of months ago was showing no signs of life is now in full flower, having had no assistance other than being watered by me – a truly resilient plant. The stuff growing abundantly around the outside of the pot is wild Marjoram, which I use in some of my cooking.

Rose Miracle

A baby jay was in our driveway look very forlorn this morning, but it has gone again, hpefully safely back to the nest.

baby jay
baby jay

various

England have made a magnificent recovery from a poor start to the second test match. Having at one stage been 22-3 they reached 486, with Cook, Morgan, Prior and Broad all making major contributions.

Have just had a marvellous barbecue (our first this year). Our local butcher supplies the best burgers you could ever hope to eat, while for accompaniment we had locally grown rocket and even more locally grown lettuce.

 

Computer Purgatory

This is the first post I am writing on my new computer, and in it I will tell the story of how an apparently straightforward process took over three weeks to be finally sorted.

When I decided to launch this blog, I also decided it was time to replace the world’s slowest laptop (which will be going out to Greece to enable schoolchildren there to have access to computers), since it was no longer able to connect to the internet regularly. I naively imagined buying the new machine, connecting it up and then launching the blog from it. Part one, finding an appropriate machine went extremely smoothly, and for an extra £30 it was supposedly set up ready to go. After getting the machine home and switching it on the problems started. It proved impossible to connect to the internet, so we went back to the shop and they apparently sorted the problem. Take two failed as well, so next up was a call to Talk Talk. They said we needed a new router, which would have locked as into a further 18 month contract, so we decided to switch to BT as we had had problems with Talk Talk. This entailed extracting a MAC code from Talk Talk and passing it to BT. Once we knew when the BT router would arrive we arranged for an expert we had used before to come out to do all the various things that needed doing. So approximately three weeks later than intended I finally have a computer with which I can access the internet instead of having to hop on to other people’s computers.