Tag Archives: alexi watkinson

Tuesday 12th January 2010 – Well, the weather man got it right today.

It was bound to happen sooner or later – the law of averages is bound to match a wild guess with an actuality sooner or later.

In fact I couldn’t believe it – at first I thought that he had mixed up today with yesterday as the morning was magnificent – a proper Alpine winter day and the solar controllers were ticking over the charge like nobody’s business. I carried on insulating the floor this morning. And it seems to be working too. The early morning average difference between in here and in the lean-to is usually about 7 degrees. Today it was almost 10 degrees. That can’t be coincidence.

I didn’t get much of a chance to do much work though – I had a phone call that involved me doing quite a few other things instead. And seeing as it was a nice morning I had the computer on and started to catch up with a whole pile of messages that have been outstanding. I must have sent out about 30 e-mails to people and they are all going to get a surprise when they try to reply to me, as my web site is down again.

It appears that my web host has closed its doors rather … errr …. suddenly. Not that I’m surprised about this as a phrase involving booze-ups and breweries springs to mind whenever I think of this organisation. What with crashed servers that they couldn’t fix, lost data in e-mail accounts, disappearing files due to fits of pique, a whole host of other things as well that regular readers of these pages will be well aware, I’m surprised that they managed to stagger on to this extent before finally rolling over. There’s a lot more to running a professional and ethical organisation involving hi-tec equipment than you will ever learn by studying an Open University course. But then again most normal people would realise that.

And there you are, trying to be loyal and supportive of people that you like and people who are making an effort to carve out a living for themselves against all the odds and all the rubbish that life has heaped upon them, and it all falls to pieces anyway. “There’s no sentiment in business” I keep on being told, and it’s high time I learnt the lesson. Trying to be nice to people and giving them a helping hand just causes me more problems than it’s worth. I should have been much more ruthless and kicked this shambles into touch the first time they let me down.

I’ve been approached by a “successor” who wants to have my business and we are trying to salvage what we can from the wreckage of dazzling incompetence.
“I’ll match the terms and conditions that my predecessors offered” he announced. So I told him what the terms and conditions were – and his jaw hit the floor.
“They told me you paid …(almost twice as much)” he stuttered
“Well I have the invoice, the bank statement and the cancelled cheque here if you would like to see them“
Someone is speaking with forked tongue, and I know that it isn’t me. And as for the motives – well, just lets say that “it’s fun to speculate”.

Meanwhile, if you want to mail me and the e-mail bounces, wait for a couple of days and resend it.

So after all of these shenanigans, the weather dramatically warmed up and we had a torrential downpour. And about 10 tonnes of snow slid of the roof just three or four feet above my head, and crashed to the ground with the roar of an express train. It put the wind up me for a minute. Rather like the man who gave his pitbull terrier a bicycle pump. “That’ll put the wind up the postman!”.

I was talking to Alexi on a chat program earlier. We were discussing cars and driving tests and she was telling me about hers – which she took in Zambia, where she was living at the time. She had to reverse between two bollards and then drive the examiner to the post office – and that was that. I told her about the Libyan driving test where you have to reverse between two palm trees -which are about 5 miles apart.

And I did hear about a driving test in the Spanish Sahara or the Central African Republic or somewhere like that. The pupil was involved in quite a serious collision in which the examiner was killed. As they pulled him from the wreckage the pupil shouted “did I pass? Did I pass?”
“Wait a minute” shouted one of the policemen at the scene. “We haven’t found the examiner’s clipboard yet!”

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Wednesday 7th October 2009 – I’ve made a start …

tongue and groove attic ceiling… on the last row of tongue and groove as you can see. I finished off the row under the eaves this morning – I did it all at once as my back managed to hold out pretty much. And this afternoon I started on the scaffolding, which is much easier for working.

I’ve got to the first window now and I’ve built a framework around it. It needs to be tongued and grooved in the plane that you can see, but it also needs to be tongued and grooved “upwards” to enclose the different layers of the roof. It’s out of there that the roof breathes so when I’ve done it I have to drill some holes and put air grilles over then.

I was once again kept pretty busy on the phone too. Working it out, this last 24 hours I have –
i) translated an e-mail from English to French late last night (how anyone thinks that they can get any kind of coherence out of me after 19:00 is a mystery to me)
ii) helped out this morning a little with the arrangements for Friday night
iii) liaised between a garage and a client over some repairs to a car
iv) liaised between a client and the local mairie.

Last night I was talking to my friend Alexi on a messenger program that I use.We were both bemoaning the lack of night school opportunities over here on the mainland. Back in the UK I used to go to as many as I could and so did she. And that got me thinking about all of the people who have moved over here from the UK either full-time or for holiday purposes and who haven’t learned any French at all. I just dunno why, especially with all of the night school classes that the UK has.

But that’s not the point of this blog entry – people do as they please and how they feel comfortable.

But nevertheless, many people who read this blog have connections to the Open University and have engaged in the heavyweight debating conferences that exist there. I spent many a pleasant evening scrabbling through reference books and the like to back up points that I was making, and so did many others. That was probably the most rewarding part of our entire study.

But there was one competitor … er …. contributor who most people will recall and I shan’t mention any names. And while we were quoting data and statistics gathered from all of the far-flung corners of the world-wide web and the like, this contributor would come out with the most utter … er …. well, nonsense. And when we were asked to name our sources and quoted things like “The CIA International Yearbook” and “The Auschwitz On-Line Museum” and the like, this contributor would say that “well, I overheard someone talking about this in the Post Office this morning”.

And one of that person’s favourite hobby-horses was to go on and on and on ad infinitum about the flood of foreigners in the UK who can’t be bothered to learn English and have to take interpreters with them to the local council and the like (like I have to do quite often for the English living here but of course you wouldn’t expect people like her to understand that). And the bunch of mindless morons that loitered in the wings would come out in total agreement and sympathy. And now have a look at what I’ve been doing all day, apart from tongue-and-grooving. Yes, sometimes you really can’t understand how it is that the total irony of the situation goes way over the heads of most British people.

But when you break it down to the barest facts, the difference is that “we” are white and “they” are brown. And that somehow makes it all right.

Another favourite hobby-horse of this person is how certain sexually-transmitted diseases come from the (brown-skinned) peoples of North Africa because of their (alleged) social habits involving camels (Open University debates could be quite exciting places to be) but in this case the contributor definitely got it wrong. And how! In fact, the story originates from the days of the French Foreign Legion when a new Legionnaire signed up at the fort in the middle of the Sahara.
“What do you do for female company around here?” he asked
“Ohh, the men take it in turns to borrow the camel. In fact it’s your turn in three weeks time“
So three weeks later, when it’s his turn to borrow the camel he goes into the stable, removes certain items of his clothing and sets about the camel. And halfway through doing what it is that he’s doing he notices all of the other legionnaires standing around watching him.
“What do you think about this then?” he asks proudly.
“Well actually, all of the other men, when they borrow the camel they ride it into town to look for a woman“

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