Carry On Camping II, "This Time It's Personal"

You will know by now, well you will if you read these things I take time to write and post, that I have had an experience camping. If you don’t know this you need to go back to the beginning and see what started all this blogging nonsense for me. You will find out interesting things such as: what colour shorts Ted wears when he goes running, although you won’t be as traumatised by this fact as we were seeing it.

Well, it looks as though I am going to have this experience again. So I decided that I would look around and see what equipment I could purchase to make the weekend a little easier. I spent a morning surfing the net and found that I could buy portable washing lines and a laundry basket, a cooker with grill and double oven, wardrobes, beds of all types and sizes. I could get a power invertor so that I could run my portable microwave and fridge from the car. That is, of course, if I didn’t have the luxury of an electric hook-up on the site... . There are fancy little stands that you can stick in the ground to hold your can of beer, Lord forbid that you should have to put your beer on the cold ground! Armchairs and sun loungers, the list goes on ad nauseam…

The question is: if you have bought all this so that you have all the comforts of home, why not just stay at home? It’s warm, comfortable and hedgehogs don’t bother you in the early hours (well, maybe they do, but to be honest I was very drunk at the time, please don’t tell the RSPCA!)

Looks like the boy is not coming this time. I don’t think that he can handle another night sleeping in his car due to the hedgehogs.

I am going to have to do this, relatively, sober as well as the diabetes still has to kept under control.

Am I a god, or what??

What do you see, in your head, when you think of yourself? This was something I was thinking today while eating an ice cream, people watching. I and Mrs Giant68 were sat in a shopping centre, somewhere in Hampshire, with a Thornton’s ice cream each, just watching people go by. I have spoken about this before, so you shouldn’t be too surprised about our pastimes.

Everyone is different and it takes different strokes to make a world, and boy did we see some different strokes this afternoon. Tall skinny ones, short fat ones, tall fat ones… You know the sort, the intelligencia mixing with the dregs of humanity. The Chavs and the Chav nots.

But what do they see when they look in the mirror? The middle aged bloke with his trousers slightly too short, shirt a bit too tight, the comb-over and the tattoos on show? Does he see an Adonis with the sartorial elegance of an Italian fashion house? Does the Chav single mother with the bacon belt see some sophisticated super model, as she looks at her reflection in the shop window, with a cigarette stuck between her lips?

When I look in the mirror, intellectually, I see a middle aged, overweight, exceedingly tall bloke. Yes, I have broad shoulders and, apparently, a nice backside, but I want to see a tall, broad shouldered, narrow hipped god of a man. Do the people that are out and about sometimes let their “want to see” take over from what they actually see. Does the 60ish year old woman in tight leggings and high-heeled shoes think she looks like a goddess instead of hooker for a niche market? Sometimes I wonder.

I also wonder if I will ever follow that route. Not the leggings and the shoes, obviously, but maybe dressing like a tw*t in some other way. Mini Giant68 reckons I already do! Thanks, son!

The Tall Guy

It’s time to get grumpy again. Let’s face it, I seem to be better at grumpy than I am at deep and philosophical. Yet again I am p*^^ed off with the world, nothing unusual there. So far, over the last couple of months I have lost over 2 stone in weight. This leads to the fact that all my clothes are now too big. OK, so when you are 6’8” and weigh 21 stone the clothes are going to be damn big, but now I am smaller in girth, and without a tight belt my trousers fall to the floor.

So now I have to go and get more trews. Difficult at the best of times. I have walked the floor of the department stores and drawn a blank. This is due to the fact that I need a 35” inside leg trouser. Now, they are available, but only if you are built like Peter Crouch. If I have the waist size equivalent to something that a gardener would grow beans up then I can buy trousers. But if I am a more normal size I may as well forget it. 32” waist, 35” inside leg, certainly Mr Beanpole, 40” waist, 35” inside leg, forget it you fat b*^$^rd.

Now I can’t be the only one that is slightly larger size, can I? There must be a clothes shop somewhere that can help me.

I have been, pretty much the same size for the last 25 years so why is it that whenever we get a new issue of t-shirts at work do I always get issued with a size to small? Everytime I have to hand them back and ask for bigger ones and then wait while they are ordered?

It strikes me that all this is a form of discrimination. If I was a midget, black, a homosexual, female, missing a limb or all of the above I could scream from the rooftops that I was being discriminated against. But I am just tall. I can’t buy trousers. I struggle to buy shoes, shirts and trousers. I bang my head when I walk through doorways. I can wedge myself between the floor and the ceiling on buses so that I don’t fall over. Buying a car is a bloody nightmare. But it seems that the only solution is to have a couple of inches surgically removed. (Heightwise, what were you thinking?)

Maybe I ought to start a support group? Suggestions for the name on a postcard please…

What's your story?

What’s the story? I was having a conversation with a friend the other day. He was lambasting me for my terrible blogging rate again. I try, I really do. But sometimes the blog just doesn’t flow. Anyway, we were talking about people, and how we never really now the people that touch our lives. And what is the story of some of the people that we pass in the street. This came about after a story in the papers about an old woman who turned out to have been a spy during the war.

So when you are sitting in some café having a cup of latte and just watching the Saturday morning shopping crowds wander past do you ever wonder what people do, or have done. Do you make up stories about them? If you read my blogs you will have read about the courier van stopping by a man stood at the side of the road, that sort of thing. Mrs Giant68 and I quite often people watch. It can be quite entertaining. We have awards for the weirdest person of the day, largest boobs (yeah, I know, kinda strange) Tallest, shortest, fattest etc. But sometimes I look at people and wonder what they have experienced.

Older people will have lived through such different times than we ever will. I used to have a friend who was a gunnery officer in the Royal Navy during the Second World War. He used to tell me all sorts of stories over a few pints down the pub. He talked of sippers and gulpers and cockers p’s. There were other old boys I drank with who were serving in the navy escorting Baltic convoys. These people have been through things that anyone of my generation and younger cannot imagine. Their experiences have shaped their lives in directions that ours will never go. The way the world is going, the younger generation will have their lives shaped by which computer games they play, what films they watch and which lager they drink. What sort of stories will they be able to tell people in the future over a pint in the local? Of how they set their trophy dog on some other chav after he spilled their Stella?

So when you are people watching bear in mind that the old guy shambling down the street could have a story that is far more interesting that the one you have just made up about him. When I think of all the people I know, and what I know about them, there must be some really good stories to hear. My great uncle Norman, ex RAF warrant officer who has served all over the world and tells the most amazing stories, Oggy the ex-gunnery officer, Jumbo from the Baltic convoys. Listen to the stories before they are gone, because the story of Norman getting a tank transporter stuck in Woolworths In Salisbury will be lost forever. Laugh, I very nearly p*$$ed myself over that one!

Abracadabra!

Magic or science? Which do you prefer?

I read science fiction, but if you read my blog you will already know this shameful secret. I also like the popular science books, you know the sort: A Brief History of Time and Why Don’t Penguins Feet Freeze, that sort of thing. I like to think that I understand technology and the science of the world around me. I don’t want to end up like some of the elderly that you see walking around the town looking totally bewildered at the modern world. I know how to use my mobile phone, actually a smartphone, and can surf the internet like a pro.

But I can’t help feeling that something is missing.

Where has the magic gone in the world? There was a time when the television was a thing of magic. Pictures that appeared in the glass fronted box in the corner of the room. Now we know that the pictures are converted into a mass of 1’s and 0’s, transmitted through the air as a stream of microwaves or radio waves to a satellite 36000km up in geostationary orbit, bounced back to the dish and reconverted to pictures again in the telly. Magic was better. In theory planes stay in the air due to Bernoullis Principle, that says that the air flowing over the top of the wing is faster and therefore at lower pressure. But I also read somewhere that scientists aren’t really sure. Why would the air flow faster over the top? Just because it is a longer distance over the top of an aerofoil doesn’t make the air go faster, it is not a race between top and bottom. Maybe it is magic, or will power. 200 people not wanting to drop out of the sky like a stone!

Would we all be happier if the electric light worked by magic? Father Christmas really existed and the Easter Bunny laid chocolate eggs in your garden? And a Pangolin was a musical instrument?

Don't take me seriously...

Don’t overdo it. Oh, and don’t take it too seriously.

As I have gotten older this is the one universal truth that I have learnt. Throughout my life have taken part in various things, sporting activities, hobbies etc. And there has come a point where I have started to take it far too seriously. And that is the time to stop and reassess what you want out of the activity, hobby, whatever.

When I was 13 or 14 I got interested in astronomy. I bought the books, a telescope and joined a society. I really enjoyed looking at the night sky with the scope or binoculars or just naked eye. It was amazing. Seeing the rings of Saturn with your own eyes rather than in a picture is just something else. But before long I had joined a national society and become a committee member of the local society. Then I started to get lost in the politics of running a society. Enjoyment gone.

Now 30+ years later I have rediscovered that passion I had at 14. I have a telescope and a pair of binoculars and looking at the sky a marvel again. From the rings of Saturn through Uranus (Oooh, matron!), to sunspots. I have joined the big national societies but have decided not to take it seriously. I will not get involved in organised events unless it really interests me. Otherwise I will read the quarterly magazines and look at the stars from my garden and just enjoy it. It is quite relaxing. I also have a digital camera which I will rig up to the telescope so that I can enjoy the stars when it is cloudy by looking at the pictures that I have taken.

I have a couple of friends who like photography. They have fancy DSLR cameras and they take photos just so. The light has to right, the exposure, the filter stuck on the lens. The subject must be arranged just so. I am sure that they look at the world through a different set of eyes than I do. That obviously suits them. They tell me to remember the rules of photography and do it like this. But I take photos for me. I take photos of things that please my eye and that I like to look at. I hope I don’t start to take it that seriously or I may as well chuck the camera in the bin.

All these pastimes I have taken up and given up when they get to serious, shame really. I enjoyed them to start with, or I must have. But I must also remember not to take life that seriously ever again.

And nor should you.

For one week in six I sit in an office that looks out onto a busy dockyard.
The job is not too arduous and gives me a little time to just watch the
world go by. It is strange, some of the things that I see from my window.
Today, for instance, there was a man stood by the road, just waiting. Then
a courier van pulled up on the other side of the road, the driver got out
and reached into the back of the van and retrieved a small parcel, walked
over to the waiting man, chatted for a few minutes then handed over the
parcel. Now that struck me as odd. Normally a courier would deliver to an
address, not to some bloke in the street. What was in the package? Was it
some dodgy drug deal, or something else just as illegal? Or was it a
message form the past, as in Back To The Future. A letter written a hundred
years ago and stored until a certain date in the future when it will be
handed to a man in a grey jacket stood by the side of a particular road.
Maybe the boredom is just getting to me.

Some of the funniest sights are when we have a cruise liner in the dock. We
get a steady stream of older people walking through the dock gate to their
ship. Most are dragging suitcases the size of the wardrobe that contained
Narnia. By this point most of them are on their way to a heart attack. They
get off the train at the central Station and can see the ship that they
will spend the next few weeks aboard, it doesn’t look to far. They can walk
that distance easily. What they fail to realise is that the ships are big.
Really huge in some cases, and look closer because of that. It is probably
½ a mile from the station to the dock gate. But from their it is easily
another mile to the quayside, along a pavement that is full of lumps and
bumps and potholes. By the time they pass me they are on the point of
collapse. Generally the woman is ok because the husband has, obviously said
“Don’t worry, dear, I can drag every item of clothing and pair of shoes
that you ever bought in this large wardrobe on wheels the short distance to
the boat.”
Strangely enough, when there is a cruise liner in there are generally a
large number of ambulances entering the dock, wonder if there is a
connection?
I am thinking of setting up a business replacing suitcase wheels from the
ready supply found scattered along the pavement.
These people have just spent several thousand pounds on a cruise. You can’t
tell me that their pension won’t stretch to the cost of a taxi from the
station?

There is also a steady movement of brand spanking new cars through the dock
on their way to destinations, probably, more sunny than this. Hondas, Fords
and the occasional Jag. Every now and then, when there is no traffic along
the dock road, some of the guys that shift these cars like to have a bit of
fun. The car stops, then to a scream of spinning rubber and the
accompanying smell and smoke the car takes off at a significant rate of
knots. Jealous? Me? Yep!