Tag Archives: cricket

Sunday 21st February 2016 – OHH WHAT A BEAUTIFUL MORNING!

As indeed it was too. I crawled downstairs at about 08:00 this morning and opened the door into the kitchen where I met a whole host of shafts of bright sunlight streaming into the room.

You’ve no idea how much that cheered me up today seeing that. It’s just like the first day of Spring and it did remind me very much of that early morning in Labrador in late September – that freezing cold night when I had been sleeping out in the Wilderness in Strider and the sun bursting out over the horizon. That made me feel so much better too!

And I needed cheering up too because I’d had a rather difficult night. Not as far as sleep went – that was just as normal – but the voyage that I was on was one that was very uncomfortable, almost to the point of being distressing. I was working with a group of other people in a laboratory doing some tests on radio-active material. We broke off work to have the office party and I ended up dancing with a young girl, the daughter of one of my female colleagues. Afterwards, we went back to work, carrying on checking these samples for radio-activity. Suddenly, we found one that hadn’t been accounted for. It had been dropped in its watch-glass on the steps of the enclosed booth where we did the tests. This of course was a monumental error as the radio-activity could spread like wildfire, worse than the bubonic plague. As I had instituted this activity and was responsible for the tests, the woman actually carrying out the tasks asked me whether I intended to report the matter and accept the serious consequences. I immediately reported it and there was immediately a plant lock-down. Two women who were in one particular area of the factory were left behind and locked in and we could see, through the glass door, them dying an agonising death as the radio-activity spread across their bodies. The factory and its personnel dispersed but the personnel started to die off. The woman who had been carrying out the tasks went home and her mother who lived there, who was old and feeble, developed the radio-activity. She became seriously ill and her daughter, my colleague, was trying to reassure her and her own daughter (the one with whom I’d been dancing earlier) but kept fainting and collapsing, obviously gravely ill but doing her very best not to let anyone notice. The young girl was really frightened by all of this, hiding behind a door. She had two sons too and they didn’t know what was happening either. As everyone was dying out rapidly and my brother had put in an appearance by this time (what on earth was he doing here?) I asked him if he would go and check on this family to make sure that they were okay. He reckoned that they hadn’t been up to anything so they shouldn’t have any problems, not being aware of the woman’s involvement with the missing sample. I ended up back at home, in bed, and Nerina came round to visit. She had a bed at my house when she stayed the night and tonight, she needed a couple of extra pillows so I told her that she knew where they were. At this moment I noticed that I was starting to become ill. I had a touch of dysentery and thought that this isn’t like me and suddenly the revelation hit me that the radio-activity was now affecting me. I started to panic and wondered just who was going to be left over if even I was starting to succumb. We were all going to die and there would just be this young girl left. What a nightmare she would have, being surrounded by nothing but dead bodies of her family and friends.

No wonder I had an uneasy night with all of this going on. I really was happy to see the sun this morning.

i’ve spent most of the day watching the English cricket team totally humiliated by the South Africans (“just a blip” says the England captain but he’s clearly been watching – and playing in – a different series of matches than everyone else has been watching) and Manchester City bring the FA Cup and the game into disrepute by fielding a weakened team in a 5th Round competition. How I hate foreign footballers and foreign football managers who have no sense of pride and achievement and want to change the game to suit their own requirements.

Apart from that, I’ve finally finished the dictaphone notes for the 2015 trip to Canada. I’ve made a start on the notes of a voyage I made to Central France just before I left and I’m hoping to finish those tomorrow. Then, there will be the Germany trip and before that, the 2014 voyage to Canada.

But it won’t be done tonight as I’m going to have another early night in a bit. And I hope tomorrow will be just as lovely as today was. 16°C outside this afternoon, apparently.

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Saturday 16th January 2016 – I’M TRYING TO THINK …

… "always a difficult task" – ed … if I went outside yesterday. And the answer is that I did, briefly, to buy a loaf of bread when the mobile baker came round. That was the sum total of my adventures outside in the snow today.

But there wasn’t much in the way of snow. The promised downpour during the night never came and instead we had maybe half an inch and that didn’t last too long. The gritter finally found its way down here too this morning so at least it’s possible to travel around, if you wanted to.

But no-one wanted to. We all had a day in watching England dispose of the South African Test team in what can only be described as an eventful day’s cricket, and then watching the football. And probably the most exciting Premier League match that I have seen in years – the second half of Aston Villa v Leicester. A game that was played in exactly the fashion of how a good old First Division match of the 1970s would have been played instead of the boring, monotonous garbage that’s served up today where teams will pass the ball all the way back to the goalkeeper from the opponent’s penalty area if it means keeping possession of the ball rather than going on an all-out attacking rampage.

I’ve caught up with the second week of my animation course too. Back right on schedule although I’m the first to admit that I’ve not done the practical work. I don’t have the facilities here to do any of it so I’ll have to wait until I return home, whenever that might be. Furthermore, they make available the animation software that you need, but only for an i-Phone and my phone is a long way from being one of those.

But here’s something amusing. The postie came by this morning and brought three letters, all of which were for me! One was my blood test results and the other two were the long-promised letters from the hospital. I now know what is wrong with me and what they intend to do with me, and I also know that it’s going to be of long durée. so after this operation, I won’t be out of the woods – I’ll just have moved into different woods instead.

But it’s pleasing to know that I don’t have Hepatitis C, I’m not HIV-positive and that there are no traces of alcohol, tobacco or … errr … toxic substances in my blood. Not that there ought to be any of those things of course, but you never know what it is that’s going on when you are being injected with needles at least twice per day and receiving pints of blood from unknown sources.

So having had a nice, restful day, I can tell you about my nice restful night because for once these recent nights I didn’t get up to all that much. I started off doing something with one of the kids characters that I’ve created with the 3D modelling program that I use but I can’t remember what it was and which character it was (it was very likely K4). Anyway, someone (it might have been Cécile or Nerina) came around so see what I was doing but I explained that I don’t like people looking at my work until it’s finished so I wasn’t very enthusiastic about the idea. There was a new release of poses (for those who can’t create their own) for the character but these had to be applied only under certain circumstances. I applied them under all kinds of different circumstances regardless, but the characters came out all very wooden. I was wondering whether this was because I’d applied the poses in the wrong circumstances, or whether something else was going on.
I can’t remember where I was after that but it was Manchester or somewhere like that, at a concert venue below street-level and Man were due to appear. Instead of hanging around waiting for them, I went for a little wander around in the immediate vicinity and found another concert hall almost right next-door and this attracted my attention for a while. Then, returning to my venue, I could hear the music drifting upstairs so I dashed down, just in time to miss the last number! Drat! So I went to buy a beer (I haven’t had a beer in over 25 years, by the way) and there, sitting on a stool behind the counter as if he was supervising the place, was a boy who lived in the same village as me and who was on the same educational path and whom I haven’t seen for probably 40 years. But to buy a beer, you had to queue down a line of trestle tables until you reached the end, which was right up against the wall of the building, but the seats were so close to the trestle table that it as quite a squeeze to come back with your full beer glasses.

What? Me drinking beer? This really is becoming quite nostalgic. I’ll be eating cheese next, you just wait and see.

AND JUST IN CASE YOU ARE WONDERING why your comments on these postings aren’t appearing automatically these days – WordPress (which supplies the technical support for this blog) is being hit badly by another mega-spam-surge and we are being overwhelmed with spam-comments.

I’ve therefore had to delete the “automatic approval” setting for now and approve (or otherwise) all comments manually until the panic dies down. Normal service will (hopefully) be restored in early course (if I can remember how to do it).

Don’t let this hiccup stop you from adding your pearls of wisdom to my remarks.

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Sunday 3rd January 2016 – WHAT ARE THESE PEOPLE …

… doing intruding into my nocturnal rambles? All kinds of people from my past have played some kind of supporting role in them, but quite recently there have been some people roaming by in the night who certainly wouldn’t ever have given me the time of day in the day, if you see what I mean.

And so it was last night too.

There was such a lot to last night’s voyage but unfortunately I can’t remember all of it. But the part that I do remember concerns a company called British Salt, a company for whom my father worked for many years until about 20-odd years ago. Last night the company was based not in Middlewich, Cheshire, but somewhere along the Waterloo Road between Cobridge and Tunstall, and I’d received “the call” to go there. The factory had five entrances, which from north towards the south were two before the first roundabout, one on that roundabout, a fourth between that roundabout and the next, a fifth on the second roundabout and another one south of the second roundabout (which of course does not make five but since when has logic played any part in my nocturnal rambles?). Of all of these entrances, the second was the tallest and that was the way that I went in. I wandered around to the transport yard and into the office where my first task was to respond to “does anyone here understand French?”. It turned out that the woodstove in the garage had all of its instructions and makers’ plates in French. So I translated them, showed them how to light the fire and work the automatic log dispenser (and I’m going to patent this design when I wake up because it was superb). Then, they slid a fork-lift truck underneath the stove and carted it off somewhere else, right through the garage, right past where my father was working.
It had been 14:00 when I arrived but it was 16:00 when they finally told me what they really wanted me to do. There were two lorry-loads of stuff that needed to be delivered (lorries again after last night?), the first of which was a load of metal plates that had to go somewhere beginning with M (I forget where) up by Stretton near Warrington. The man in charge asked me if I knew by which gate I had to leave so I phoned up the lodge at gate two. The lodge-keeper told me that the height was 4m 01 and so I told the man in charge that I’ll go out that way and that I was sure that I remember it being 12’3″ (such is the logic of my nocturnal rambles) back in the old days. He showed me which lorry to take and so I walked around it to check the wheel nuts and the lights, and then off I set – totally forgetting about the height limit on the gates, but luckily going out of Gate Two all the same. Arriving safely at Stretton or wherever (the first time that I’ve driven an HGV for 20 or more years by the way) I had to unstrap my load and then they craned it off. I gathered up the straps but they were all entangled so I needed to sort them out. This ended up by me having to undo the hooks from the straps but that still didn’t work. It appeared that the people in this factory had hooked up my straps to the ceiling so that they could sweep the floor. They needed to be unhooked and rolled up neatly but by this time I was going to be horribly late for my second load so I just threw them any old how into the cab – a cardinal sin in the HGV world.

But anyway, enough of that. In my “taking it easy” mode these days I had my injection, then my breakfast, and spent a leisurely morning watching Ben Stokes and John Bairstow take apart the South African bowling in the Second Test in Cape Town. I felt sorry for the South Africans actually. Ravaged by injury and giving two young bowlers their test debuts, it must have been very soul-destroying for them, watching their best balls disappear out of the stadium. I can’t remember the last time that England scored over 600 runs with 5 wickets still to fall. In fact, I can’t remember the last time England scored over 600 runs in any circumstances.

Another thing that I turned my hand to in the afternoon was something that I ought to have done a while ago. It’s my custom to write a small web page at the end of each year to talk about the work that I had done on the farm in that particular year. And when I was thinking about what I was going to write for 2015 I suddenly realised that I hadn’t done it for 2014 either.

That needed to be dealt with so I cracked on and I reckon that I’ve done about 75% of it already.

I didn’t finish it off though because by 20:00 I was drifting off into the arms of Morpheus and so I was ready for an early night. I really can’t keep going these days – not the 02:00 and 03:00 finishes that we used to have only a few months ago. All of this is depressing me.

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Wednesday 30th December 2015 – AND THE ANSWER IS …

… Wrexham.

The question, for the benefit of those of you who did not read yesterday’s rubbish, was “I wonder where I’ll end up during the night?” – which was, of course, last night.

To cut a long story short … "thank you" – ed … I was in Nantwich, Pillory Street to be precise (although it wasn’t Nantwich last night) looking after Laurel and Hardy. I had to make a radio programme about them and so I had the idea of spending a day with them and just letting a tape recorder turn, so that we could crop certain highlights from the recording and make a programme from them. But the producer handed me back the tape recorder telling me that the recorder was no good and we needed to do it again. This was where the idea came in to pile them both into a car and head to Hardy’s birthplace in Wrexham, to encourage him to open out more. But all of this degenerated into something else quite unpleasant, including a scene where a couple of small boys were being chased by a group of larger lads with chain whips – something to do with an issue involving some library books. I wasn’t sorry to wake up while all of this was going on.

This morning after all of the injections and breakfast and so on, we watched the English cricket team quickly wrap up the First Test against South Africa, and then we didn’t do a great deal. I do recall an exciting game of hide-and-seek involving the two kids, Liz and Strawberry Moose, who is a keen participant in these kinds of games.

strawberry moose story time sauret besserve puy de dome franceAnother item on the agenda very popular with His Nibs is Story Time. There’s been no lack of that kind of entertainment here this last week or so, and here’s some more.

Everyone is clearly enjoying himself here as you can see. Even Kate, who has drawn the short straw this morning as chief reader.

After lunch, everyone went out for a long walk but I stayed in and carried on with my 3D stuff, not making a great deal of progress. I’m still not up to much unfortunately.

vegan christmas cake sauret besserve puy de dome franceFor tea tonight we finished off the leftovers from the last couple of days. But because the children had been especially good and had drawn some lovely pictures of Strawberry Moose, I unveiled the vegan Christmas cake and shared it out amongst the assembled multitudes.

And it will come as no surprise to any of you to learn that it tastes even better than it looks. Liz has really done me proud this Christmas and I am grateful for that.

So now I’m off to bed. A blood test in the morning so I need to be à jeun. It’s a good job that I’m totally stuffed.

But I’ve had news today to the effect that on 4th January I have to go to see the surgeon to discuss the removal of my spleen. On the 12th January I have to see the anaesthetist and sometime in mid-March I have to see the doctor for a post-operation report. This implies that the operation will take place sometime round about the end of January or the beginning of February. And the post-op appointment means that they at least expect me to survive it.

I suppose that that’s good news for me, but not for you lot. There will be loads more of this rubbish to come.

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Monday 21st December 2015 – WHAT A HORRIBLE NIGHT!

Last night, I had the worst night that I have ever ever had.

I told you that I went to bed as early as 20:00, watched a film and by 21:15 I was tucked up nicely in bed dozing off to sleep. But at 22:30 I was awake again, with a chronic indigestion – or, at least, what I thought was indigestion. And as time rolled on, the pain became worse and worse, spreading right across my stomach behind the lower part of my ribcage.

It wasn’t long before I was doubled up in agony – I say “doubled up” but that’s not really true as there was not a single position (that I found anyway) that was better than any other as far as the pain went. Within the space of an hour I was driven out of my attic into the bathroom where the proximity of the sink to the porcelain horse was very useful and was put to good use.

And that, dear reader, was where I stayed for a good hour or so even though it did nothing to diminish the agony. So back in the attic again, but 10 minutes later I was back in the bathroom.

This was clearly going nowhere (except into the bathroom) and so I ended up making sure that the route from the living room to the bathroom in the cellar was free, and then I settled down on the really comfortable sofa in the living room.

By about 03:30, having made several trips to the bathroom, the pain slowly began to subside. I remember it being 04:00 and then the next thing that I remember was it being 06:45 and the pain had gone. The alarm at 07:45 brought me to my senses (such as they are) and that was that. The worst night that I have ever had.

I had my blood test at about 08:30 and signed up to a scheme whereby I could receive my results by e-mail. Sure enough, at 17:30 they were there. The blood count has gone down further to 7.7. I was expecting a phone call from the hospital to call me back in, and although I did receive a call, it was to tell me that my Wednesday appointment has been put back to 16:30. Never mind, I’ll discuss my blood situation then.

strawberry moose sauret besserve puy de dome franceAfter breakfast, we had to hunt for Strawberry Moose again.

Today, he was in the sun lounge painting Christmas decorations. And it does have to be said that he seems to have more paint, glitter and Christmas stars on himself than he did on the decorations that he was painting.

Still, he gets full marks for trying.

Everyone went to the shops this morning, except for Terry and Yours Truly. We had a very relaxed morning watching the cricket in Australia. We had our usual argument too. Terry is all for this modern “slash and run” cricket whereas I’m much for the good old days of Geoff Boycott taking three days to score 20 runs.

We had a late lunch when everyone returned, and then I decided that I was going to do something that I detest – only doing it in the direst emergencies – and that was to go back to bed. And there I stayed until tea time.

The nurse has told me to talk to my GP about my blood results but I’m waiting until Wednesday at the hospital. The GP can’t tell me any more than I know already and all that she can do is to refer me to the hospital. And that won’t be any quicker than doing it myself on Wednesday.

story time strawberry moose sauret besserve puy de dome franceBedtime for the little ones came at about 20:00 and you can’t have bedtime without having story time first. It goes without saying that Strawberry Moose wanted to be involved in story time too.

We’ve ended up being nice and peaceful this evening, with nothing much going on except to sample Liz’s home-made blueberry biscuits – vegan of course. Just for a change, I’m not tired but then again that’s no surprise seeing as how I had a good three hours sleep this afternoon.

But it doesn’t matter what time that I go to bed, I still have to be up at 07:45 for my anti-coagulant injection, and I’m getting quite fed up of this.

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Wednesday 14th July 2010 – Today will go down in history!

I’ve finally fitted the most important piece in the jigsaw of my electrical system here (the wind turbine notwithstanding) and that it the electric water-heating mechanism.

How my system works at the moment is that there are two banks each of three solar panels and each bank is connected to the batteries via a charge controller. The two controllers are set up differently so that one cuts of when the batteries reach 14.1 volts and the other one cuts out when the batteries reach 14.15 volts. They both cut back in when the battery level drops to 13.4 volts or so. This avoids any overcharging of the batteries.

You can tell when the batteries are fully charged by the difference in solar charge received by each of the banks. If there’s a substantial difference then that will be because the one set at a lower charge will have cut out, just leaving the second one running. And if I have the fridge working then sometimes the difference can be substantial. On the 8th July for example one bank recorded 37.7 amp-hours whereas the other recorded 157.3 amp-hours, almost 2 kilowatt-hours of charge.

You can see therefore from this that there can be times when an enormous amount of solar energy is totally wasted. So what you can do is to rig up a system whereby once the batteries are fully-charged then instead of the system shutting down, all of the unwanted power is diverted into some kind of “dump load”.

dump load 12 volt home made immersion heater les guis virlet puy de dome franceI’ve had plans for this for ages and a while ago I bought some 12-volt water heater elements. And today, even though it’s been a Bank Holiday and I don’t normally work, I’ve rigged up an old galvanised 50-litre ash can as a kind of ad-hoc immersion heater.

It’s going to have to be developed further of course. Electric elements floating around on wooden pontoons in open-topped galvanised ash cans full of water right close to the main access in the house is a recipe for some kind of disaster sooner or later and one of the reasons why I’ve been holding off from fitting this dump load is because I’ve been looking for some kind of more substantial and correct recipient but in the absence of anything more positive I can’t be waiting for ever. The piazzo buzzer on there by the way is to let me know when the circuit opens up

vauxhall cavalier car clock renault clio electric timer dump load les guis virlet puy de dome franceThe proof of the pudding is of course in the eating and now that this system is wired in I can put a 12-volt clock in line to tell me how long the circuit is open.

And so while the clock on the right (from a Renault Clio by the way) keeps the time, the one on the left (from a Vauxhall Cavalier) tells me how long I’ve been heating the water.

1h20 (it was about 1h35 by the time it finished) may not seem a lot to anybody and the water didn’t get all that hot but on day one with 50 litres of water in what is effectively a large open bucket – that has to be progress. Just imagine that in a 50-litre sealed tank with loads of insulation around it.

And I had a visitor this afternoon – a guy who I met the other day and wanted to discuss solar panels and wind turbines. He was here for about three hours and we had quite a lengthy chat.

And that’s not the only visitor I had today either. The windows up here are wide open and there’s this lovely gale blowing right through here, and it’s just blown this huge, enormous green thing that looks like a cricket right into the attic. We had quite a chase around the place and eventually I caught him in a plastic box and threw him back outside.

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