Shuting the breeze, A BS5 Book Review.

Early on this morning at a little before three I finished a good book by Nevil Shute, 'Beyond Black Stump' . My brother had been reading it and he gave it to me on Saturday morning when I stayed with him. It's about love, the outback, oil drilling, Australia, sheep and Oregon.

It was a harmless and hopeful read and I enjoyed it but as the pages consumed outweighed those left, to a point where there was simply not enough space for the narrative to go anywhere else, one could see the outcome, which was a little bit of a shame.

Anyhow, I liked the book and it's worth a read if you see a copy in a second hand book store. I am going to try another of his books which I will begin later in the week.

The BS5 Ultimatum...

My friend Bag is a conspiratorial sort of a chap, indeed one day a few years back when we shared a house elsewhere in BS5, Bag solved that whole Kennedy/grassy knoll/Zapruder conspiracy using only the power of the internet, a pencil & pad, and a bottle of vodka.

Bag has lifted the picture from my last fire engine post to enquire as to the gizmo he has highlighted in the bottom r/h corner.

Well of course I can't comment too much other than to say that cunningly disguised as next door's satellite receiver, it has to do with me and my advisory capacity to a certain transition team aiming to be ready for January 20th...

404, Ying and Yang

Maybe I'll apply to be CEO of Yahoo now that Jerry Yang is standing down. Of course I'd have to move to Sunnyvale, California and rename this Blog with an American 'zip' code, not a Bristol postcode. And of course, I'd have to be more into search engines, not fire engines.

We shall see.

Call the Engines.

This was my favourite thing today - right here in my street!

Those shoes were really fucking irritating.

Heels in BS5.

Now this is odd!

I have just finished hosting a meeting of our Church social committee. I am secretary and we met to catch up at my house about our Christmas Fayre.

During the course of the meeting, I offered to donate 15 rolls of Christmas wrapping paper to a stall selling this and that. I acquired a tall box of about 48 rolls when I had a head office job with WHSmith back in the day, and I have been using them and giving them away since.

I bought the box down from my loft conversion and the gang (all women) wanted to have a good old look. In the bottom of the box I found the shoes pictured. Man, did that raise some questions! I don't recall any of the (very few) women who have stayed here (amorously) leaving a pair of size 6 heels. That's a little bit of gossip that will be up and down the pews at the speed of light.

Satellites and Pianos.

This week, here in BS5, I have been thinking about ways to increase my Blog readership. I am building my own satellite which I plan to launch on Wednesday. I have been putting it together in the back room of my local as I don't have a garage. Here is it nearing the end of the construction stage. Please let me know if you have anything you would like to launch into space as I have some spare payload space.

In a more down to earth note, later on today I have to move a piano and a ping pong table from my local boxing club to a new location. This will be the second piano I have wheeled through BS5 this month.

Australian wallop!

A great 24 hours altogether spent at my brother's house and Twickenham! My brother Greg called me and said he had a spare ticket to England-Australia, would I like to go along? Top! I had not been to Twickenham for about 10 years when I went along to see Oxford-Cambridge play each other.

An 80,000 crowd makes lots of noise and at least 50k of them singing the National Anthem is quite a stirring thing, especially the cheer that goes up right after. Straight away the Australians got the points on and didn't stop there, really. We got kicked. The Australians seem to be good at rugby and especially good at encouraging attractive women to follow the game; the place was awash with exuberant, attractive women shouting and screaming!

Here's a fuzzy phone picture.

Back home after the match and London to Bristol was quite a tiring old drive but as ever, VX52 got me home safe and sound. I went crazy and drove at more than the standard 68mph.

Bold breakfast moves.

More culinary drama! I am making bubble and squeak for breakfast! Top stuff and it will probably cancel out the benefit of the morning run and 'the plank'.

And then it's a load of ironing.

Where has it all gone Pete Tong?

We can't comment...

Today after a couple of episodes of The West Wing, and numerous web searches and TV spots on the US election these last weeks, I have been reading this website! I was quite surprised it existed, and I must write and compliment them on some of their techniques, techniques honed here also in BS5 when I am on 'Principal Protection' detail in and about the locale.

I wonder if they will take me on after my recent failure to secure a short term office job in north Bristol.

Irritated of Bristol

I applied for a three month contract as a communications manager today. It was based near home and needed weekly and monthly newsletters, plus a variety of ad hoc communications. It would have been a real help.I have done such a role twice for different but very large retailers with a ton of branches. Now I am not arrogant enough (in this case) to assume I had a shoe-in but I got an email in less than 30 minutes to say my skills were not close enough to suit. I'm afraid irritation got the better of me and I sent back a fairly pissy email suggesting that I thought my CV was a reasonable match, if only that it assisted me to spot the two grammatical errors and one spelling error in the job description. Would you believe they failed to spell 'Communications' correctly for the role of Communications Manager?

My email will have done me no favours and will have been binned immediately but it felt really good to send it.

On with the day, I suppose.

Soup.

Okay, I've read, re-read, re-re-read and re-re-re-read the instructions to make leek and potato soup. All seems well but I am going to replace the leeks with onions and add a courgette too. As my pal Bag would testily point out, if I am doing that what was the point in reading the original recipe? Gonna add sweetcorn too, so I read the recipe just to get the basics on soup.

What I can't work out is how the soup will not end up only as thin as the stock I make, and not thicken like a nice winter broth. We shall see and I will post results.

My brother just asked me if I wanted to join him at England Vs Oz this Saturday at Twickenham!

LOUD!

Now yesterday I happened to wake at 3 in the morning and I just stayed up until about 9.30pm so I was a bit bamboozled by the end of a strange day. I had a great sleep overnight but the noisy-gang next door set a personal best this morning for shouting, crashing, banging, swearing and generally being a noisy, profane family. Not unreasonable to make some noise at half seven but man they are loud! Anyhow, after a pleasant (and warm)10 hours in bed I feel normal again. Off for a run and then various tasks to complete today. I will not be shouting or swearing at anyone, I hope.