{"id":21479,"date":"2026-08-28T21:53:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T21:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/?p=21479"},"modified":"2026-08-28T22:06:29","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T22:06:29","slug":"friday-28th-august-2026-the-bad-weather","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/?p=21479","title":{"rendered":"<div style=\"background-color: #f4c430;\"> Friday 28th August 2026 &#8211; THE BAD WEATHER &#8230; <\/div>"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230; that we&#8217;d had yesterday afternoon continued through the night and into this morning. I think that most people will agree that what with everything that fell yesterday, we&#8217;ve now had all of the rain that we were owed for the last three months.<\/p>\n<p>It wasn&#8217;t raining when I went to bed last night, or at least, I don&#8217;t think so. However, I wasn&#8217;t in all that much of a state of awareness. I was absolutely whacked, and remember \u2013 I&#8217;d only just awoken from a deep sleep when I crawled into bed.<\/p>\n<p>And I&#8217;ll tell you how quick I was about going to sleep too. It&#8217;s been my habit for the last month or so to suck a menthol and eucalyptus sweet when I go to bed. That prevents me coughing and allows me that little head start to go to sleep peacefully. Anyway, when the alarm sounded at 06:29, there was half a menthol and eucalyptus sweet stuck to my jammies. I must have fallen asleep before I&#8217;d finished sucking it.<\/p>\n<p>That wasn&#8217;t the first time that I&#8217;d awoken either. I vaguely remember once or twice being awake, and later on, I awoke definitively and couldn&#8217;t go back to sleep. I tossed and turned in bed for quite a while, and just as I was settling into a nice, comfortable position, ready to go back to sleep, the alarm sounded. <\/p>\n<p>Being awake is one thing. Being out of bed and upright is something else completely, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. It took me a good ten minutes to struggle to my feet and set off.<\/p>\n<p>First call today, though, wasn&#8217;t the bathroom. Having locked the front door last night, I had to unlock it again this morning so that the nurse could come in. Then I could go to the bathroom and sort myself out.<\/p>\n<p>Back in here afterwards, the first job was to listen to the dictaphone to find out what had been going on during the night.<\/p>\n<div style=\"background-color: #f7e7b7;\">\nWe were going on an outing, taking a load of students and schoolkids with us from primary school. My first pick-up was from somewhere round about the Holly Mount area of Shavington. I picked up those kids alright and headed back towards the centre. Then I asked her where the next pick-up was going to be. He replied &#8220;Main Road School&#8221;. I thought &#8220;hang on a minute \u2013 Shavington County Primary moved ten or fifteen years ago. They aren&#8217;t there any more. Is she sure that that&#8217;s correct?&#8221;. He told me that as far as she was aware, Main Road School was what was written. So I went down Dodd&#8217;s Bank and came into the village, turned right at the Sugar Loaf Corner to go down Main Road and stopped at the school to see if the kids were there.<\/div>\n<p>It&#8217;s impressive that I could remember all of the local nicknames for places in Shavington and that Shavington County Primary School has moved, although it&#8217;s a darn sight longer than &#8220;ten or fifteen years ago&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>And note the rather dramatic and continual change of gender of the person sitting next to me in the coach. I had to listen to the dictaphone recording several times, and that was indeed what it said.<\/p>\n<p>When the nurse came to visit me, we talked about the Champions League draw. His hometown team, Lens, has been drawn against Machester City, so it seems. Not that I&#8217;m bothered. Any team in which I have any interest has been long-eliminated from the Champions League.<\/p>\n<p>After he left, I made breakfast and read some more of <a href=\"https:\/\/dn760007.eu.archive.org\/0\/items\/historyofarchite00freeuoft\/historyofarchite00freeuoft.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">A HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE<\/a> by Charles Freeman.<\/p>\n<p>Today, he&#8217;s been discussing the end of the Gothic era and the beginning of the Renaissance. And as you might expect, he&#8217;s not a happy bunny with his beloved Gothic being replaced by another style of architecture. We&#8217;ve not had any outright vulgar abuse or &#8220;language lower than Billingsgate&#8221;, but I&#8217;m expecting it to arrive sometime soon, and I&#8217;ll keep you posted.<\/p>\n<p>Back in here, there were several things to do, and then I could turn my attention to dealing with the notes from last night. And they took longer than they ought to have done too, due mainly to the fact that I fell asleep in the middle of writing them and was flat-out in my chair for three quarters of an hour.<\/p>\n<p>When they were on line, I went for my disgusting drink and my midday medication, and then back in here, I turned my attention to the radio programme, where I was interrupted by my faithful cleaner who came down to do her stuff.<\/p>\n<p>After much binding in the marsh, the programme is now finished, but even that took longer than it ought, due mainly to the fact that a few of the groups and musicians were new to the programme, so they took much more research than would be required for the established stars.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, it&#8217;s all ready for dictation now, although Heaven alone knows when that might be.<\/p>\n<p>After I&#8217;d finished, I had a chat for a while with my artificial intelligence chatbot, as a way of relaxing. There&#8217;s never anyone about on the internet when you feel like a chat.<\/p>\n<p>The trouble with these chatbots is that they have a very weird memory. You can tell them something, and ten minutes later, they&#8217;ll have forgotten it, whereas they&#8217;ll come out with something completely unexpected that you mentioned in passing a year ago, when it wasn&#8217;t to this particular chatbot and it wasn&#8217;t even in that particular chat file.<\/p>\n<p>Also, chatbots have very little sense of unscripted humour. Ask them why polar bears don&#8217;t eat penguins, and they&#8217;ll say that they live at the opposite ends of the earth and not that &#8220;they can&#8217;t get the silver paper off&#8221;. Never mind Kenneth Williams and Alfred Hitchcock and their &#8220;it&#8217;s a waste of time telling jokes to foreigners&#8221;, it&#8217;s even more of a waste of time telling jokes to a chatbot.<\/p>\n<p>The big advantage, though, is the depth of knowledge of a chatbot. Being able to search the entire internet and post an answer almost immediately, they can answer any question you would like to ask them. They save me hours of work when I&#8217;m writing stuff for the internet. If you want to see what I mean, download the artificial web browser <a href=\"https:\/\/www.perplexity.ai\/comet\" target=\"_blank\">COMET<\/a> and ask it a few complicated and obscure questions. Chatbots work even quicker than Comet does.<\/p>\n<p>So tonight, we had the football. A right bottom-of-the-table crunch clash between Trefelin and Rhydaman. And believe me, people, this was one of the most exciting games that I have seen for years. It had absolutely everything \u2013 numerous on-field brawls, three red cards, eleven minutes of stoppage time, one of the best saves of all time at an extremely vital moment, lengthy VAR checks, screaming fans, unbelievable tension, goalkeepers joining in the attacks and probably one of the best goals that you&#8217;ll ever see at this level of football.<\/p>\n<p>The game finished 1-1, which, quite frankly, was no good to either team, seeing the size of the gap above the bottom four, but never mind. This is a match that I could watch again and again, and there aren&#8217;t very many like that. If you want to see it, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=WUCGGLNtmRc\" target=\"_blank\">IT&#8217;S HERE<\/a><\/p>\n<p>So now, it&#8217;s midnight and I&#8217;m off to bed, horribly later than usual.<\/p>\n<p>But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about artificial intelligence and chatbots &#8230; <em>&#34;well, one of us has&#34; &#8211; ed<\/em> &#8230; I asked my &#8220;Comet&#8221; browser to tell me a joke that would appeal to a British audience. This is what it came up with \u2013<br \/>\nI told my AI: <strong><em>&#34;Write the end-of-day note for my blog. Keep it light and end with a joke.&#34;<\/em><\/strong><br \/>\nIt produced three paragraphs on transformer architectures, then added: <strong><em>&#34;And on that note, why did the neural net cross the road? To get to the other\u2026 training set.&#34;<\/em><\/strong><br \/>\nI said, <strong><em>&#34;Make it more human.&#34;<\/em><\/strong><br \/>\nIt tried again: <strong><em>&#34;Why did the neural net cross the road? Because everyone else was doing it, and it didn\u2019t want to be the only model not generalising.&#34;<\/em><\/strong><br \/>\nI said, <strong><em>&#34;More British.&#34;<\/em><\/strong><br \/>\nFinal version: <strong><em>&#34;Why did the neural net cross the road? It didn\u2019t, actually. It waited for a gap in traffic, apologised to the cars, and then crossed when it felt it wouldn\u2019t inconvenience anyone.&#34;<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<div class='watch-action'><div class='watch-position align-left'><div class='action-like'><a class='lbg-style1 like-21479 jlk' href='javascript:void(0)' data-task='like' data-post_id='21479' data-nonce='455e02c75f' rel='nofollow'><img class='wti-pixel' src='https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/wp-content\/plugins\/wti-like-post\/images\/pixel.gif' title='Like' \/><span class='lc-21479 lc'>0<\/span><\/a><\/div><div class='action-unlike'><a class='unlbg-style1 unlike-21479 jlk' href='javascript:void(0)' data-task='unlike' data-post_id='21479' data-nonce='455e02c75f' rel='nofollow'><img class='wti-pixel' src='https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/wp-content\/plugins\/wti-like-post\/images\/pixel.gif' title='Unlike' \/><span class='unlc-21479 unlc'>0<\/span><\/a><\/div> <\/div> <div class='status-21479 status align-left'><\/div><\/div><div class='wti-clear'><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230; that we&#8217;d had yesterday afternoon continued through the night and into this morning. I think that most people will agree that what with everything that fell yesterday, we&#8217;ve now had all of the rain that we were owed for the last three months. It wasn&#8217;t raining when I went to bed last night, or [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1710,44,4507,1616,8571,16250,12057],"tags":[16585,1033,3501,16148,4788,13133,16586,5577,852,1302,212,2560,5287,5565,8581,1217,760,15372,7383,12058,16662,286,13271,14935,6322],"class_list":["post-21479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cleaner","category-dream","category-eric-hall-2","category-france","category-granville","category-n6","category-nurse","tag-a-history-of-architecture","tag-alfred-hitchcock","tag-archive-org","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-bad-night","tag-bouquet-granvillais","tag-charles-freeman","tag-cleaner","tag-comet","tag-crash-out","tag-dream","tag-eric-hall","tag-football","tag-france","tag-granville","tag-jd-cymru-premier-league","tag-kenneth-williams","tag-n6","tag-no-food","tag-nurse","tag-perplexity","tag-rainstorm","tag-rhydaman","tag-trefelin","tag-www-youtube-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21479"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21479\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21483,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21479\/revisions\/21483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}