Category: Uncategorized

Remembering all those who we have lost.

I was given this beaded badge (which I’ll be wearing today) exactly nine years ago – the first time I took Maurice to an appointment at his HIV clinic.

A couple of weeks ago, the train I was planning to catch over to see Mum was cancelled. It was a Sunday lunchtime, and trains are only every two hours, so I gave up. I put in for “delay repay”, of course.

This morning my compensation arrived. Rail travel vouchers – which I specify as they cause the much-loathed GWR  much more inconvenience and cost than refund to debit card (and I don’t particularly want to email GWR card or bank details). It will come in handy for my next visit (which has been postponed from today to the weekend).

An interesting day spent wrestling with WordPress themes and styles. I think we’re about there for now, though it can always be changed later.

I discovered that some of my last blog can be accessed through the Wayback machine, so not quite all of it is lost. That gives me some encouragement to start again – especially as I discover that my web host now offers a backup service (at extra cost, naturally), so hopefully even a catastrophic crash like the one that killed my last blog will not lose masses of data.

With all that firkling on the web, I was late cooking supper. A rummage in the freezer found some pork-‘n-beans of indeterminate age, so I’ll have that with a couple of slices of garlic bread.

An early night is called for tonight: I’ll be standing outside a local Polling Station wearing a Green Party rosette from 0700h onwards!

Having flowered profusely in late November, both my “Christmas” cactuses have now started flowering again – thus cunningly avoiding the actual festive season itself!

Christmas Tree is now outside for the next 11 months. Hope it survives the sudden transition from (a barely-heated) indoor room to the Great Outdoors – I’d really like to get my usual three years use out of it.

Would you believe it!

I spent 45 minutes rootling through the 3 boxes of “miscellaneous leads” in the loft, looking for an IEC (kettle-type) lead. Not one to be found! Ten years ago, I had half a dozen spares, I’m sure. Now everything seems to be the “cloverleaf” design (which is smaller). So I’ve had to order an IEC plug from Ebay.

Why do I need one? The power cut on New Year’s Eve seems to have finally put paid to the monitor on my desktop PC. Well, it came back on for an hour, but next time I tried it, it was thoroughly dead. Considering it was free, second-hand, 9 years ago, it’s not done badly. Anyway, replacement (secondhand) monitor arrived this morning, and needed an IEC lead (the old monitor used a power brick with a cloverleaf socket).

The trigger for my own interest in pacifism, at the age of 12 in 1967, was reading “Goodbye to all that” by Robert Graves, which covers his experiences in the trenches in the Great War. It’s scary to think that the distance between 1967 and now is the same as the distance between that War and 1967, and we’ve made so little progress.

Anyway, having (as usual) passed out a few White Poppies to assorted friends and acquaintances over the past few days, I will be observing the Silence on my own.

I then plan to listen to the War Requiem – something I haven’t done for at least ten years. Britten was, of course, a pacifist (and a supporter of the Peace Pledge Union, who produce the White Poppies).