I were away ...

... When we did fractions and that.

I am standing next to a map of Halifax town centre next to the bus station in Halifax and on the map I can see

The town hall quarter
The George's quarter
The market quarter
The theatre quarter
The Piece Hall quarter

Erm, FIVE quarters?? There must be a good explanation.

DW

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

The only man?

Why is it that every time the BBC mentions Abdelbaset Ali Mohammed Al Megrahi they call him THE ONLY MAN TO HAVE BEEN CONVICTED OF ... ?

Do they ever say, for example, Jack Scroggins, one of 500,000 benefit fraudsters ...

Or even, Elizabeth Battengurg, the only crowned Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland ... currently reigning??

Clots!

DW Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

The Wonders of Modern Technology

Here I am working away in my office at home and I can do my work on this laptop and at the same time I have plugged in a spare monitor and am keeping an eye on the final test match, England v Australia via skysports.com ... a must win game for England.

Marvellous!

DW

Burnley ONE Manchester United NOTHING

Burnley's first game at home in the Premier League and they have WON!

Fantastic!!

Come on you Clarets!!

DW

I Love Work ...

I could stand and watch it for hours. Name the author!

I am working away on my new book and across the road there are three people painting the fence of a house and digging up the front garden and moving some large paving stones around.

The people involved are

• a 30 ish woman, the owner of the house
• a slightly older woman, sister or friend?
• a young boy, 14 years old ish and possibly the son of the second woman

When they started their work, they all began by painting the fence and they made good progress.

The owner of the house then moved away and started to dig the garden, leaving the other two to continue painting the fence.

As the work got too heavy for the house owner, the second woman moved from painting to digging and moving the heavy paving stones.

That left the boy alone. He painted with some gusto as he leaned on the hand rail that goes from pavement level to garden level. Having lived with three teenage boys I predicted to myself that this boy will be in serious difficulty when he can no longer lean on that hand rail. And so it proved to be!

As the women are digging and sweating their way across the garden with spade and paving stones, the boy has been drinking orange, consulting with the women but now is sitting on the steps leading up to the garden and throwing  a hammer across the garden in an attempt to get it to stick in the soil as if it were a knife! Painting activity there is none!

The boy is uncontrolled and apparently shameless!

DW

I put it in, I did, I did!

On Saturday I got home to find a new viewing card for my Sky television set up. All I was supposed to do was to take out the old card and put in the new one. I looked at the box and could see a slot but there was no card in it and I couldn't see any other slot for any other card.

I put the card in the slot anyway and even though there was no message on the screen as there was supposed to be, nothing broke or stopped so I was happy.

Then last night, Monday, I started seeing a message on the screen telling me to put the card in the box! I said, I have ... This kept happening: maybe half a dozen times in 24 hours so I decided to do some research on the Sky web site.

I found what the message meant and what I should do about it: put your card in the box, it said. Well, I was flummoxed. I read through the instructions and then the extensive FAQ and could see nothing I had done wrong.

Then in the corner of the web site I noticed a photo of a Sky box like mine and lo and behold right next to the slot where I'd inserted my card I could see a flap behind which was another slot! I had known nothing about that slot before.

I scuttled over to my box and found the flap, took out the old card and inserted the new one. Instantly I was presented with the message I had been promised. I did what I had to do and now all is well with my television world.

So there you are and it's Celtic 0 v Arsenal 1 as I type this. C'mon Celtic!

DW

Some Photos What I Have Took

Here are a few photos I have taken over the last few days. They come from my phone camera so may not be up to my mega camera standard!

First photo is an oddity: the warning of death by suffocation is to be found on a safe in an hotel room in Geneva. The size of the safe is far too small for me to get my head in and moreover it is around five feet off the ground so a child hell bent on suffocation would have to be extremely determined!

The next photo subject caught my eye outside Bradford Forster Square railway station, West Yorkshire. I liked this one:

Again from Bradford, this is a sand sculpture of Charles Darwin. My guess is that it is around 10 - 12 feet tall. Very impressive and the photo that follows explains the purpose of the sculpture.

Bit of fun there then and well done Bradford for livening up our lives a bit.

DW

How did that get there?

I think I need a cleaner when I know the reality is that I only want one. Well, judge for yourself as you read this story.

The fridge in my house is small and around five years old. It was a cheapy, cheapy fridge for young Master W's room in Halls. When we all went our separate ways and he no longer needed the fridge, I took the fridge.

This fridge absorbs water from the atmosphere like a sponge and it gets deposited and frozen in the tiny freezer compartment at a rapid rate. Consequently, because I am not fully sorted out domestically (I am really but I don't want to be), I have been squeezing the few frozen things I buy into a smaller and smaller aperture. When I got back from my trip on Saturday I resolved to defreeze the thing and start again.

It has taken until today for me to be able to get round to mopping up the water and cleaning the fridge. However, in the freezer compartment I found some vegetables that I simply cannot remember ever putting there. More seriously, there was half a block of LARD in there. How on earth did that get there? Lard? I never buy lard cos I'm a veggie. Do I? Did I?

Anyway, I know I need to defrost the fridge much more often as I think that was the first time in two years.

Hands up if you think I need a cleaner!

DW

Forgive the Aeroplane Story

On the flight from Zurich to Manchester today I was happily minding my own business when an elderly well spoken woman got on and started talking about her seat and that of her husband, also an elderly person. She announced that he couldn't sit in the seat assigned to him, a window seat, because he needs to have the arm rest lifted ...

One of their seats was the seat next to me and the other was the seat next to the man in front of me. Good egg the man in front of me, he selflessly moved to another seat, the one in front of him and not the one next to me.

The old man slithered his way into the seat in front of me and all was well with the world.

Then one of the stewardesses came out from behind their curtain and said to the good egg man that he couldn't sit in the seat he was now in because it was a business class seat. He said he had given up his seat for the gentleman behind him. The stewardess insisted that it was a business class seat and he couldn't sit there. The man stood up, announced he'd never heard anything more ridiculous and came to sit next to me. He then had a strop on for an hour or so!

The old woman said to her husband, "These people don't seem to want to be very helpful do they." I think in their case, they were helped sufficiently well. Why they accepted a window seat for the old man is something I would have questioned.

The next time I looked at the old man he was taking a mighty swig from his duty free gin bottle.

End of story, such as it is.

DW