Survival of the fittest?

 

‘Breathe deep the gathering gloom…’

Winter seems to be approaching rather rapidly, today it was pitch black and rather chilly when i set off  for work. And now, late afternoon in early October, it is starting to get a little gloomy. It will soon be time to shut the curtains, put the lights on and get cosy. The heating is on and the house is beginning to feel a little warmer.

But that is not what this is about. You should know by now that I am the one of the grumpiest people on the face of the planet so i must, therefore, have something to complain about. And this time it is Ninja cyclists.

Dark mornings, rain, general gloom. You will see these, if you are lucky, cycling in the road with no lights, dark clothing and no idea of their own safety or vulnerability. Darwin wrote about the survival of the fittest but sometimes I feel that it should be survival of the luckiest! Twice this week i have nearly curtailed the existence of some dim and dim-witted cyclist as they plough on regardless of the fact that while I am in a car with lights I may not see them until the last minute. And that may be too late.

When I am out on my bike I want to be seen. I will festoon myself with lights. I would put a neon sign over my head to drivers where I am. But then I want to survive the trip. To be honest, I would cycle on the pavement all the time if I could.

Also why do the cyclists where I live not use the cycle paths?? I bet that by night they are sneaking around the roads of Southampton trying their hardest to get themselves killed!

Rant over.

Regards

Giant68 (Grumpy old git)

Things to do with food

Yeah, I know. Food is for eating. Not all the time in our household. We have a habit of playing games with it, nothing kinky though, generally the kind of games that involve ‘how many can you eat’ or ‘how fast can you eat’.

How many Jaffa cakes can you eat in a minute? I thought that one was simple. Hundreds? Tens? Nah! I managed to get the sixth one in and start to chew as my minute ran out. Mini Giant didn’t even get that far.

Yesterday was my granddaughters 3rd birthday and as usual there were allsorts of cakes, sweets and other goodies lying around. So there were some challenges to be attempted. As I have already stated, the Jaffa cake challenge was won by me with a poor count of 5 and a bit. Next came the teacakes, those delights of chocolate, marshmallow and biscuit. I managed 1 in 17 seconds. Really poor attempt even if I do say so myself. One of our guests managed 1 in 8 seconds. I think that he just swallowed it whole!

There is one other game that we tend to play at Christmas. And that is the After Eight challenge. What you have to do is place an After Eight mint on your forehead, minus the wrapper of course, and get it to your mouth without the use of your hands. This, obviously, can get a little messy, with participants left with chocolate on their face (and also the floor at times!) It is amazing what people will get up to once they have had a drink or two!!

 

  

Regards

Giant68

Who will remember the humble slide rule?

I had a conversation yesterday that was a bit of reminiscing about things from the past. I can’t remember how it started but it covered the slide rule, ready reckoners, abacus and other things of that ilk. One of those conversations that has meandered along not really having a set destination.

Now, I think that some of you will read this, the few of you that follow this blog, and wonder what on Earth i am talking about. Well, this is a slide rule:

The Americans call it a ‘slip stick’ and it works by aligning numbers marked on the scale in certain ways and you can find the answer to all sorts of mathematical conundrums. This is the device that put man on the Moon in a time when this was the calculator of the day. There were no fancy LED screened boxes of electronics that will calculate Pi to a thousand places. In this day and age when physicists are trying to find the Higgs Boson and the numbers that they are dealing with are so miniscule that the ordinary man cannot really comprehend them computers and calculators are an essential item. But back in the fifties when the British had a space program boffins in brown overalls would be sliding their slide rules and calculating gravitational pull and fuel consumption rates all without the need for an electrically powered gadget. I found my slide rule the other day and I can almost remember how to use it. Makes me sound quite old doesn’t it?

Then, before that was the abacus. The Chinese could, and still do, calculate so quickly with this rack of beads that they can beat a man with an electronic calculator. They still have contests for school kids  using abacus in a race against the clock.

 

Then there was the Ready Reckoner. My dad had several, using them in business to help with various aspects of finance, weights, measures etc. It was just a book of tables to help with pounds, shillings and pence and other values. But then people of my parents generation could add, multiply, subtract and divide in their head. There was no need for a thousand decimal places. When I started as an engineer we worked to thousandths of an inch, now engineers work to millionths of a millimetre. Times and measurements have changed. And the degree of accuracy.

Regards

Giant68

Certainly sir…

I am going to go back to what I do best. Being a grumpy old sod. Today I went into a large, well known supermarket which, for want of a better name and because it was, we will call Tesco. Don’t get me wrong, I am not going to pick only on Tesco, all the big chains seem to be guilty of the same thing: the deterioration of customer service.

I walked through the store picking the items that I needed, mainly alcohol if the truth needs to be known, and queued at the checkout. Now this is where it all starts to go wrong. Actually, thinking about it, it starts to go wrong as you walk across the carpark but that is another story. The lady sitting at the checkout grabs the items I have placed on the conveyor belt and scans them as quick as she can, flinging them down towards me at double quick time. She is reasonably polite as she asks for the payment, and my loyalty card, but then I have to get my own receipt. Now what is wrong with that I hear you say. Nothing really, apart from the fact that it is designed to do away with any human interaction in the shopping experience. The receipt is vomited from a machine that is just out of reach of the checkout girl, so she either stretches for it or lets the customer get it. I don’t want this.

I am a little old fashioned about all this shopping business. Actually I am a little old fashioned about everything. But what I like is to go to a shop where the staff will refer to me as sir, not mate. I have nothing against the term ‘mate’, not when used in the context of friends, but not by some teenage, spotty, tattooed youth with bum fluff on his chin which he likes to think of as a beard. I will, generally, never be  a ‘mate’ of this person. I want eye contact, I want ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, and I want ‘sir’. And I want my receipt handed to me with a smile. If I am expected to treat the staff of these shops with respect I want it back.

There are certain stores that have a better customer service than others, Marks and Spencer, Waitrose, while the likes of Lidl and Aldi are a little more lacking than Tesco or Sainsburys. Can you see the pattern here? The more high end the shop, the better  the customer service. In my local Asda I have walked past staff whinging to each other about other staff, their management, conditions, working hours, who they were sleeping with last night, and the language is not always the best. As the public face of the company they should be smart, clean, lacking in piercings and visible tattoos and polite. They should treat the customer as king. And likewise the customer should treat the staff as human beings.

There is a  small Indian restaurant near where I live. I have used it for years and consider the owner a friend. But every time I go in I am referred to as sir. I am treated well by the staff, and so is everyone else who walks through the door. Nothing is too much trouble as they know that the customer is what keeps them in employment. Maybe the big stores should pay Jewels Restaurant a visit and be reminded of what they have forgotten. They want as many people through the door as possible. The checkout girl is paid as little as possible and works as long as they can get her to work for. Every company wants its pound of flesh. Gone are the days of the corner shop where you can have a chat with the jolly shopkeeper. I mourn the loss of that day.

Regards

Giant68

Jack Frost comes calling.

Did the camping thing again last weekend. As is our wont we descended on the Salisbury campsite en masse, well some of us did anyway. There were only 6 of us camping this year, i reckon the other regulars finally came to their senses, with a few extra just visiting for the day.

Now bear in mind that for a couple of weeks before this we were under drought conditions, this meant that it was persisting down with rain almost continuously. But on the day that we were due to camp the rain stopped and the sun came out to shine on our little venture. I must admit to a certain amount of surprise that we have been so lucky when we go under canvas, having had only a little drizzle last year in Sussex. The days were lovely, compared to what they had been like in the previous weeks, but the nights were a different kettle of fish.

Myself and Mrs Giant68 were the first to arrive and duly set up our kit and were settled into chairs with alcohol by the time the others turned up. T-shirts and shorts were the order of the day at this point. Everyone else then had to pitch their tents while we set about cooking the dinner. By this point the sun was getting low in the sky and the stars were starting to appear,  the temperature was also starting to decrease. By 10 ish it must have been around arctic temperature. We were all starting to shiver and it was decided that it was time to start wrapping ourselves in sleeping bags, blankets, several layers of clothing and whatever else we could find to help us get warm. All the men suggested climbing in to the same tent, and sleeping bag, to conserve body heat but somehow that didn’t go down to well with the ladies, women huh!

Now, i have been a shift worker for more years than I care to count I find that I can’t sleep late. I am generally up and awake around 5am. And this weekend was no different. I was awake about 4:30 and needing to pee. I scramble out of the many layers that I had wrapped myself in and started to undo the zip on the tent flap to hear the cracking of the ice on the outside of the tent! By God! It was cold! I shivered my way to the amenities block to do the business, and you know what happens when parts of the male anatomy get cold!!!

But once I was properly dressed I went for a walk, it would be some time before anyone else was up and about so i may as well find ways to amuse myself. Now i don’t know if many of you are up and about as the sun claws its way over the horizon, but this is my favourite time of day. When we had our dog I would, quite often, take her for a walk in the woods at sunrise, or down by the water.

There was a beer festival happening at the rugby club next door, we had planned to go and visit but unfortunately we got too drunk at the tents. None of us were able to walk in a straight enough line to find our way past the tent pegs let alone make it up the road to drink beer. More’s the pity.

All I can hope is that when we go for the next tenting thing it will be a bit warmer!

 

Regards

Giant68

The Longest Sentence in the English language.

There is a joke that goes something along the lines of ‘What is the longest sentence in the English language? I do.’
Today I have been married to Mrs Giant68 for 23 years. It seems hard to contemplate that I have been with the same person for that length of time and it got me wondering about these partnerships. What makes people pick someone that they will then spend the rest of their lives with? OK, I have made a mistake, I married young and divorced shortly after. In a way I regret the fact that it changed my life and hers, and possibly not for the best. Although mine turned out for the better I sometimes wonder how hers turned out. I seem to have wiped that period of existence from my mind and struggle to remember her name, let alone what she looked like. As I have gotten older I realise that no one was really at fault, we just screwed up big-time.
But, as I said, my life turned out fine. I have 2 children to be proud of (although I will not tell them that) and a fantastic granddaughter. I would not change my life now for all the money in the world. But I do wonder what made me choose Mrs Giant68.

Is it pheromones? Is it the shape of her body? Good child-bearing hips? What?
Few animals in nature mate for life, swans, wolves and beavers among them. Why? Surely we are programmed for survival. You pick a partner for procreation, implant the seed then move on to the next one to implant more seed. So why do we stay with one person? I do realise that people are not all faithful, many do stray, and many move on to a new partner. But many do stick with the same partner for many years, my marriage has lasted now for 23 years. If anyone can shed some light please let me know.

Regards
Giant68

Step into the kitchen Maude…

Well, the new kitchen is here and my stress level has climbed through the top of my head and launched itself into space!

To start with the carcasses of the units are all fully assembled, which saves a lot of work but where, in Heavens name, do you store it all? I have a house that was full to start with and now I have the makings of another kitchen in it!

I have stored it all over the place. The conservatory is full. The room that was my office is full. The hallway has 9m of worktop and 9m of upstands laying through it. When I get up in the morning and descend the stairs in the dark I have bruised both shins, stubbed all my toes and turned the air blue.

All I have to do is fit it now. That is easier said than done. When it was all delivered there were a few items missing. And as the law of Sod states it would be the vital pieces. Then there are the bits that I haven’t got a clue where they go. I can see that by the time this kitchen is fitted I will be able to sell the spare parts on eBay!  

Wish me luck!

Regards

Giant68