When Does It Start Growing Ma?????

Work Colleague is due to depart this coming Friday. He took us all out for a meal last Friday after work. I felt guilty that he insisted upon paying for us all. He always buys flowers for the women on their birthdays and Valentine’s Day. He even bought them a rose each on Friday night. Every now and then he goes to Tesco and comes back with doughnuts for everyone.

So imagine my surprise when I got an e-mail saying that we were all going to contribute £5 for his leaving present. After all he has spent on people, over the 10 years that he has been with the company, and all they give is £5 each.

My guilt got the better of me and I contributed a little more than the others. After all, I owe him the most as he got me the job.

This week I have had 2 invitations to attend events in other cities not that far from home. However both events were arranged for tomorrow afternoon. Don’t people think to look at the Pontypool fixture list before inviting me?

Having said that I did go to the away match last weekend.

In other news….

Work Colleague is definitely going. He has a meeting with our HR manager on Monday afternoon and they will hopefully decide on a leaving date.

We had some very good news today but someone else will tell you about that.

Today has been “Stroppy Boy’s Day of Fun”. We collected him from swimming and took him into town to buy his belated birthday presents. We had lunch at Frankie & Benny’s and then came home, his choice. He is currently watching From Russia With Love and then Quantum of Solace later.

History Today:

 193: Emperor Pertinax is assassinated by the Praetorian Guard.

1854: France and Britain join the Ottoman Empire in the Crimean War to halt Russian expansion. It was one of those glorious follies that Britain specialises in.

1930: Kemal Attaturk announces that Constantinople is to renamed Istanbul, as part of his campaign to form a secularised Turkish state.

1939: Madrid surrenders to General Franco and brings an end to the Spanish Civil War. The Facsit Falange Party will rule until 1975.

1969: Former president General Dwight D. Eisenhower dies at the age of 78.

1979: Prime Minister James Callaghan loses a vote of confidence in the House of Commons and is forced to call a General Election. Guess who won?

1990: Jesse Owens is posthumously awarded a Congressional Gold Medal by President Bush (the not as dumb as the other one).

may not necessarily come down in the same ondition.

Do you remember the British Airways 777  that landed 1000ft short of the main runway at Heathrow in January 2008? What about the Delta Airline flight that had similar fault occur 32000ft over Atlanta the following November?

You may have read last week’s press coverage of the 2 reports released – one by the Americans and one by the British. What you may have also heard was the difference in tone between the 2 reports. The US report said that another incident could happen at any time. The Brits just said that Rolls Royce had to solve the problems as soon as possible.

The 777 is a replacement for the 747 in terms of range but only requires 2 engines. Therefore it’s routing means that it has to be within 90 minutes of an airport for its entire flight. Many of these aircraft are routed over the Artic – the cold, white bit at the top, inhabited by Polar Bears, Killer Whales, Seals, idiots (sorry Inuits) and idiots on treks to the North Pole in their Y fronts or by party balloons. 

It may not have escaped your attention that the Artic is very, very cold – even with global warming – during the winter. So the fault in the Heat Exchange must be a worrying problem for someone. Not for our British Air Accident Board though. They don’t like to make a drama out of a crisis.

The airlines refuse to ground the aircraft until the fault is resolved – at current estimates in 12-18 months time. This would cost them to much money in lost revenue. However what this means is that should another 777 have an “incident” then they leave themselves open to massive compensation claims.

BA have announced that they will not tell passsengers whether or not the 777 they fly will have (un)safe Rolls Royce Trent engines or the uneffected GE90 engines. According to BA this is not possible for them to do – even though which aircraft are and aren’t absolutely safe.

Personally I would play safe and  book with another airline not operating 777’s on that route or can guarantee using only GE90 engines. Is it worth spending another hundred or so knowing that you will have a much better chance of arriving   landing safely.

If you don’t believe that Trents are a problem then let me just say that Rolls have issued at least 3 notices for part changes in the past few months – these are circulated to the airlines and made known in the trade press. As I much as I believe in supporting British industry, for something this serious I would sooner buy foreign.

History What Did ‘appen:

1190: People in York celebrate a special event – St. Pogrom’s Day – by massacring 150 Jews.

1660: The Long Parliament dissolves itself.

1802: The military academy at West Point, New York is founded.

1872: The first FA Cup Final is played between Wanderers and Royal Engineers at the Kennington Oval. Wanderers are the winners.

1926: Robert H. Goddard successfully launches the world’s first liquid fuelled rocket at Auburn, Massachusetts. This helped to give reality to man’s dreams of reaching the stars – though Charlie Chaplin did complain at this intrusion on his privvy.

1953: Marshal Tito, of Yugoslavia, becomes the first Communist head of state to visit Britain.

1968: US troops slaughter between 200 & 500 unarmed villages at My Lai in South Vietnam.

1976: Harold Wilson unexpectedly resigns as Prime Minister. It may have been to do with Alzheimers  - or because of his holidays on the Sciliy Isles every year.

1978: Aldo Moro, a former Italian Prime Minister, is kidnapped by the Red Brigade in Rome. He is later murdered.

1988: Sadaam Hussein’s forces mount a chemical attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja, killing about 5000 people.

This morning I decided that I had to end an old relationship.

I no longer have the time or inclination to spend so much energy trawling across the web trying to keep up with e-mail, Facebook, Wibsite, news and research. So I’ve decided that the time has come to sacrifice something.

This morning I have deactivated my Facebook account. It was either that or the Wibsite and I much prefer the Wibsite. I don’t really think I’ll be missed there and I was fed up with receiving non-important messages and application requests that required my details being opened to more and more outside applications.

All I need to do know is make sure that I keep up with the Wibsite more than in recent months.

It has been an interesting day for news:

A firm has been discovered that supplied information to construction companies on potential workers. It appears that many of the people on their database are union activists or people who had complained of health and safety issues at work.

Of course, the construction companies who paid for this information deny operating a blacklist of workers. Then why pay for the information? What other use could there be for it? We are talking about all the major construction companies being involved in this.

Then we had the Plane Stupid campaigner who threw “green custard” over Lord Peter Mandelbrot (our much loved, and not in the least bit iffy, unelected Minister for Business) as a protest against the third runway at Heathrow. Personally I think that she was wrong and that the third runway should be built – then Gordian Braun and his cronies could be used as the foundations – aka 60’s and 70’s gangster movies.

It was ironic though that he was being two faced (when is he not) and addressing a conference on “Green” policy.

Lastly, General Motors – better known to us as Vauxhall, Opel or Holden, are actually bust. Even after the US government had gived them $13bn and they are asking for a further $26bn. Personally I thnk they should be allowed to die. That way the most profitable parts can be saved and the rest disappear. They, like Ford, have been a basketcase for the past 10-15 years.

Instead of pumping countless amounts of taxpayers money into them and the banks, maybe someone should think of letting the badly run ones expire. If we keep pooring money in then we’ll never see it again and the bad executives and managers will just keep losing more and more.

History Today:

1475: The future painter, sculptor and architect Charlton Heston is born in Florence. He later built David and the Sistine Chapel.

1836: Mexican troops massacre the beleagured garrison at the Alamo, an event that has reached mythological status in Texas and the US. “The green leaves of summer” – RIP John Wayne and Ricahrd Wydmark.

1899: Felix Hoffmann pantents acetylsalicyclic acid. Better known today as aspirin. “When you have a headache, nothing acts faster…”

1902: Real Madrid is founded. It was down the back of the settee.

1957:  To celebrate its independence the Gold Coast changes its name to Ghana. It is the first African colony of the British Empire to gain its freedom.

1961: The man who used to clean the nation’s windows while playing a ukelele, dies of a heart attack. 

1981: Walter Cronkite reads the news for the last time.

1987: The Herald of Free Enterprise capizes in Zeebrugge.

I am currently enduring a 4 part Management/Supervisor’s course in work. So far we’ve done 2 parts and will do the next one at the end of April. What amuses/frustrates me is that I am not a manager nor a supervisor. Therefore I have to laugh when I’m told to go back and practice what I’ve learned, then report back at the next section.

I have pointed out that we are an office of 5 people plus our manager and that I have no one to practice on. I know that the “plan” is that I’ll be the next manager but feel bemused by the way the company prepares you.

Yesterday we learnt about communication skills. It turns out that I’d done this 4 years ago on a Customer Care course at my last company. We had to do an exercise to see how effective our listening skills were. Our instructor read out a news report in a flat, monotone voice, with no eye contact. We were then asked questions to see how much we’d learnt.

At the end of the exercise we totted up our points and were told that no one would get much more than half right. As I got 15 out of 23 I was chuffed to have proved her wrong and prove to people that I actually listen more than they think. She was right that the next closest to me was on 13 and the majority achieved 11 or less.

Today in History:

1681: Charles II grants William Penn, a quaker, a charter to establish a colony in North America. Being a modest bloke William called it Pennsylvania. He also established a monopoly in the supply of oats. Have you ever wondered why they’re called Quakers? It is because their first church was destroyed in an earthquake and that the congregation believed that it was the voice of God talking to them.

1685: Charles II declares war on the Netherlands. They’d tried marketing their own brand of porridge oats and threatened William Penn’s monopoly.

1824: The Royal National Lifeboat Institute is founded – underneath a rock on a beach in Cleethorpes.

1933: Franklin Delano Roosevelt is inaugurated as the 32nd President of the USA. He will be the only President to win 3 terms in office. Popular chap then… Unfortuately it is no longer possible for a President to do this as they are now restricted (thankfully) to 2 terms.

1936: The first flight of the Zeppelin Hindenburg takes place. “Oh, the humanity!” was said a few years later.

1941: Those plucky Brits raid the Lofoten Islands, Norway, and capture a German Enigma machine. Churchill was upset that there was no problem rapped around it.

1969: Those “loveable” men who “loved their dear mam”, Reggie & Ronnie Kray (otherwise known as the Kemp brothers), are found guilty of murder.

1979: Robert Mugabe wins an election to become Prime Minister of Zimbabwe.

2001: The “Real” IRA (not to be confused with the Surreal IRA or the Replica IRA) explode a bomb outside the BBC in London.

Lying in bed or on the sofa suffering from a viral infection. I didn’t eat for three days, apart from 2 bowls of Crunchy Nut and 12 uncooked swedish Meatballs (you can eat them this way mmm….). I hardly slept for 2 nights due to a fever and painful aches in my lower back.

Unfortuantely it meant that I had to cancel our offer of having the Troublesome Trucks to stay. I was looking forward to having them over last night and tonight (separately) but was just to washed out.

Today I’ve spent it relaxing to recover. So I’ve watched The Man Who Knew To Much, Schindler’s List and the second half of Harlequins v Gloucester. The aim is to do very little tonight and tomorrow.

I’ve also been reading Silesian Station by David Downing, his sequelto Zoo Station. I love these because they combine my love of historical fiction and being set in immediate pre-war Berlin. Reading it has reignited my hunger to go for my third visit – I’ve haven’t been since I took FW for her birthday the year we were married. Just reading about the cafes, Tiergarten, Zoo, Funktrum Tower and the food.

Last night I dreamt that I had emigrated to Australia – I didn’t like it.  Weird that reading about Berlin makes me yearn to return but my dream is about Australia.

Just to reassure my Australian contingent I do intend to visit at Christmas 2014 to celebrate my 50th.

Yesterday was supposed to be a reelaxing day. I had booked the day off because we were due to have a meeting in the afternoon fro the Plot. However for the morning as I had some urgent things to finish. In addition I’d been called by a customer who had an urgent job that needed doing.

As the morning went on it just got busier and busier. At several times I had callers queued up waiting to speak to me, all of whom were urgent. By the time I got home at lunchtime I was stressing beacuse we had the meeting and the important job was escalating into something that would need resolving in a very short space of time once the customers had signed their contracts.

When I got home I discovered that one of the trustees had had to cancel and the person from the local Communities First project had also cancelled. Thankfully I could cancel the meeting completely and not feel guilty.

As the afternoon and evening wore on and I was getting busier and busier as more problems arose that needed sorting. Eventually I managed to finish things off by 21:00hrs.

The wife remarked that it was odd that I could be stressing about things and cursing at the idiocy of others but then take a phone call and speak as though nothing was out of place. All calm and charm, that’s me!!

Today I have mainly been writing tomorrow’s sermon and having Shouty Boy’s “Birthday Day of Fun”. This is where Auntie FW and Uncle T&E take Shouty Boy out for lunch and to shop for his present(s). He gets to choose what he wants – but Sad Sister says “no guns, knives or whips”. What else would you buy an 8 year old boy?