A Little Fall of Snow

We went shopping at the brand new Morrison's store at the leisure plaza. We have shopped at the Morrison's at Westcroft and did so in the build-up to Christmas when they ran a promotion whereby you had to spend at least £40 a week for six weeks and got a voucher for each week and then when you had six of the vouchers you got £25 of your Christmas shop. Carol had a hair appointment at 9 o'clock at her usual hairdressers in Shenley Brook End at Arcana, and that was completed by 9.15 and then we drove to Morrison's (Westcroft Morrison's is a good deal closer to Arcana, by the way.) We parked in the car in the underground carpark which is similar to Sainsbury's in Witan Gate (around a mile away, and was a brand new store around two years ago when it moved from the Food Centre in the centre of Milton Keynes. Likewise, Waitress moved to their brand new store earlier this year from the centre of Milton Keynes.) We went to give it a try the other evening after Carol had finished work. It's a very much bigger store and seems to have all the services that we have got used to but we weren't all that impressed by the meat section as some of the meat, displayed in refrigerated units, didn't look very inviting as some had turned a nasty colour which denotes that maybe the refrigeration isn't cold enough which put us off buying. They will have to check that their units are cold enough because we had a similar experience in Asda a while back and meat that looks the wrong colour to be stored at the correct safe temperature isn't going to help anyone as who wants to get food poisoning?

We got home and unloaded the groceries we had just bought in Morrison's and no sooner than we had sat down to have a cup of coffee than we saw it snowing outside in the garden. It didn't last long and didn't settle, so no inches-deep blanket all over the centre of Milton Keynes and no closed Milton Keynes Academy on Monday as expected and, indeed, forecast on the local television weather forecast. Never mind, it may cause havoc over the next week or so.

A Slight Sprinkling

It has been an odd sort of couple of days on the weather-front here. Mostly mild. The sun has  shone and on the whole quite cold out of the sun. The television weather forecast for the last couple of weeks have promised snow, which, up to a point has been correct, as the north of England and Scotland seemed to have have quite a few inches over the past few days, but this corner of England seems to have escaped. But this afternoon, at around 3 o'clock there was a fair fall of the white stuff, but it didn't last long and certainly hasn't settled, not to the extent that it would interfere with transport in and around Milton Keynes, delaying trains and inconveniencing motorists. It went very over-cast and quite dark around 1 0'clock and I would have said we would have had a fairly torrential rain storm, but it never happened. As I write this at 3.45 p.m. it is again reasonably over cast but it's not clear whether we'll get sufficient snow over-night to mean the Academy is closed for the day.

As regards the incident I reported in yesterday's post about the Immigration Enforcement Officers in Eaglestone: I have no further information to report and there have been no further incidents, or at least from what I could see from our kitchen window. As soon as I have more on this matter I will endeavour to write it up on this blog.

Immigration Enforcement Officers In Eaglestone

I just went into the kitchen to do some washing-up at the sink at around 9.15 this morning, when I looked out of the window and saw three vehicles parked in the road immediately in front of our house. One is a police car and two of them are mini-busses with 'Home Office' and 'Immigration Enforcement' emblazoned along their sides. As I looked I couldn't but notice around eight or ten police officers walking into one of the side closes off Golden Drive. So one puts two-and-two together and thinks 'what on earth is going on?' Is someone going to be arrested for being an illegal immigrant or something? Or a gang of people going to be bundled into the mini-busses and be driven off to be interrogated?  Are they going to end up in Yarlswoood  Immigration Detention Centre? Which is just outside Bedford and only a few miles away from Milton Keynes? I am keeping a keen eye on developments and will post on here as things unfold.

A little later. . .

I didn't see exactly what happened later on during the morning. I saw two police officers come out of the close and drive away in the police car. The two Immigration Enforcement vehicles had gone when I next looked out of the window, so I can't saw what happened as regards anyone being detained, carted off in hand-cuffs, or whatever. Maybe there'll be something in the local press, the Milton Keynes Citizen, the B.B.C.'s local television news programme "Look East" or I.T.V. Anglia's "About Anglia."

Cough Continues

The cough is gradually coming to an end. Carol wants me to go to the doctor if it doesn't clear up soon. I may attempt to get an appointment tomorrow is at all possible.

I have begun a course following a book I purchased from Amazon. It's entitled 'Complete Creative Writing Course' by Chris Sykes. I had bought another book as a result of the Futurelearn course, but I found it wasn't really suitable for my needs so I returned it. I have found the current book far better. I will just have to see how things progress, so keep an eye on this blog for developments.

Today has started fairly bright and sunny. No frost or ice to clear off the car's windscreen this morning. 

Continuing Cough

The cough persists. It's one of those coughs which seems to not want to come to an end. Not TOO bad, but still bad enough to be annoying. I am currently taking something that Carol bought in Boot's  The Chemist, called Bronchoscope.  Sounds like something you'd take to keep a dinosaur away. It tastes foul (don't all medicines? I can't see why. Can't they be made to taste pleasant? It can't surely be too difficult.) My chest feels tight and then I get a sort of spasm of coughing and it doesn't seem to shift.

Cough and Cold

Not feeling too well today. Have had a sore throat for the past couple of days, which has developed into a cold. Just unpleasant. Constantly blowing my nose and coughing, which is made worse when I lay down in bed. I suppose I really shouldn't complain as I haven't had a cold for at least five years. It seems to drain all the energy out of me.

I have begun a course from Futurelearn this morning, the subject being "Hamlet", the play by William Shakespeare. I have done several courses from Futurelearn. They are free which is amazing. All done on-line. I did one on Shakespeare's world last year and another on Hadrian's Wall, as well as one on creative writing. 

Snow- No Show!

The snow we were expecting never materialised. We had a slight shrinking on Saturday morning but it didn't settle. Certainly not the great drifts we had forecast. Poppy loves snow and she was racing around the garden like a young puppy. Meanwhile, Alfie wasn't in the least bit interested. Carol was hoping that there would be enough of the white stuff to have the Academy closed for a couple of days, but it's not going to happen. As I write this it's over-cast, but not cold enough for show.

We were kept awake until gone 2 a.m. by our neighbours. We don't know what they were up to, whether it was someone's birthday, but they came home and there was loud music playing and laughter and goodness knows what going on in their garden, but it not only kept us awake but the dogs started barking and very unsettled.

Working on "Shadow of The Noose"

Having been with the Lee-Evans Casting Agency for quite a while during the early 1990s I got quite a lot of work from them, mostly in and around Birmingham. After the "Golden Oldie Picture Show" I did work on a B.B.C. television drama series called "Shadow of The Noose" which was centered on the work of the famous Victorian criminal barrister Edward Marshall Hall who was known as "The Great Defender." When I was originally booked to do this I was supposed to be a policeman, and had to go for a costume fitting at Pebble Mill studios several weeks before the filming days, but when I eventually arrived to start filming I was told that they didn't have a policeman's uniform that would fit me, so I was re-cast as Junior Counsel. They had built the set for this series, a replica of the Number One court at the Old Bailey inside the auditorium of a theatre in Stoke-On-Trent.  I was going to be quite an important part of the action, not merely in the background. I was introduced to the principal actors, one being Jonathan Hyde, who played Marshall Hall. During the action I had to inter-act with him and several of the other characters. I wore a wig, one of those traditional barrister-type, made of horse hair and really quite uncomfortable. The bench I had to sit on was particularly narrow and had a padded seat. I had to sit very straight otherwise the wig would fall off! In the completed show, when it was eventually aired, I had quite a lot of very prominent camera 'shots' so was not merely a 'walk-on' although I didn't speak any lines I had to 'act' as if I was speaking, although you couldn't hear what I was saying. The agency sent me a cutting from one of the colour supplements, I think it was from the 'Sunday Telegraph' or 'The Sunday Times Magazine' which had run an article about the real Marshall Hall. There was a large colour photograph taken on the set of the B.B.C. drama series and in one corner of this photograph was myself! I only wish I had kept this cutting as it was a really good shot. It is actually quite annoying that I have no photographs of any of the walk-on or extra television work I did. This is before digital cameras or mobile phones with cameras in them, as it is so much easier to take photographs and up-load them onto Facebook and other websites on the internet.

Working on 'The Golden Oldie Picture Show'

Somewhere around about 1986-7 I signed up with a walk-on agency based near Birmingham, I think it may have been Dudley or one of the out-lying towns to Birmingham, called Lee-Evans (not related to the comedian Lee Evans. The name was from the surnames of the two ladies who owned and ran it.) I did quite a few bits and pieces of 'walk-on' work for various television dramas. One of the best things I did was for a show called 'The Golden Oldie Picture Show' which was shown on BBC1 and made up of short videos set to pop music but before pop videos became popular when they were originally released. I was booked for two days and the first day was on General Election Day 1987 so that gives you a good idea when it was. I recall driving to Pebble Mill studios in Edgbaston, Birmingham and having to park outside the studios in the road and because of the election having to get through some tight security before going into the reception area to report that I had arrived. The filming I was working on was to be on location somewhere in central Birmingham, in an empty office block alongside the canal which runs through the centre of Birmingham.

On arriving at the location I learned that I was working with one other 'walk-on' artiste, a young lady and that we were involved in a short video which was going to be made for 'The Golden Oldie Picture Show' and using the Gerry and the Pacemakers number 'I like It.' The director of this piece was called Laura Simms. We were kitted out in our costumes and I had to wear a grey suit several sizes to big and because of this it had to have safety pins to keep it together at the back. I was to be the boss and the sound lady was supposed to be my secretary and I'm something of a male chauvinist pig which upsets her. It starts out with me alone in my office and I'm plying with a model railway layout. At one point the secretary puts my tie into her typewriter (I know, thinking about it, how many offices today have typewriters in use? I think they have all been replaced by computers using word processing.) She is supposed to wind it down so that my head is almost touching the keyboard. Actually quite uncomfortable. In another sequence I'm staring at her (more like boggling.) to such an extent that I spill the cup of coffee I'm drinking down my shirt. This has to be re-short several times so I have to change my shirt and tie for each 'take.' Later on, for some reason which I forget, the secretary throws me out of the window. I can't think how, but outside there is the canal and there's a sort of ledge outside the window, and I'm supposed to climb up and look through the window at which the secretary winds down the venetian blind and I have water thrown over my hair to make it seem I've fallen in the canal and got wet. This bit it done several times. Another bit has the secretary put a rubber stamp on my forehead which reads 'wolf' or something and, again, this has to be shot several times. The video is shot over two days so we come back the following day to finish filming.

It was great to be treated as 'The Star' of this little mini-movie! It was raining during the filming, and when we went for a lunch break during the day we went to a local pub and had umbrellas held over us by assistants on the way! Although the video only lasted about two minutes I was the central character, very prominent throughout, although the character I was playing wasn't particularly nice. I just wish I had a tape or DVD of it. It was on You Tube, but unfortunately it was removed because it contravened copyright.

Another Wet and Windy Night

As I write this, at 10.35 on Wednesday night, I'm sitting in the lounge and I can hear the wind howling around outside and the rain rattling down the windows. We had been promised in the television weather forecast that we would be under several inches of snow last night. It never appeared, although in some parts of the United Kingdom, Scotland and Yorkshire, had quite a fall and there were problems with roads being blocked, but Milton keynes escaped. No doubt we will get snow before the winter is over, but we'll have to contend with rain and wind.

Cars I've Owned- Part 2

That little Ford Anglia lasted around three years. I drove all the way to Liverpool in it when I got the job as A.S.M. This was before the opening of what has been called 'Spaghetti Junction' which joined the various bits of motorway together so that when you drove north you went from the M1 and then onto the M6. But in those days the only way you could get from the M1 to the M6 was by driving through the middle of Birmingham.

One evening me and one of my brothers went to the cinema in Bedford. I have an idea it might have been to see '2001: A Space Odessy" so it gives you some sort of idea when it was, possibly about 1971. On taking one of my cousins home in my car, seeing how it was late and dark I couldn't see to reverse and put on a reversing light which turned on from a switch inside the car. Some previous owner of the car had installed it and, thinking about it now, it was quite a good idea to have an extra light to see by when you reverse. Unfortunately there was an almighty flash and 'pop' (not exactly a bang, but quite dramatic, nevertheless.) I think the car ran perfectly well for a while then it stopped dead. Apparently the 'flash bang' had burnt out something do with the car's electric circuits and it had to be repaired. I drove the car to several more of the places I worked, Colchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, until it died as all ancient cars do.

I bought a car from my brother James. A Triumph Herald. It was green, had a sort of leather-effect on it's roof. I drove it up and down the Motorway when I worked at the Phoenix Theatre in Leicester. When I went to work at Century Theatre in Keswick I had a problem with the driver's side door which wouldn't shut properly. I used a piece of string which I tied to the inside door handle and the other end to the steering wheel column. As I drived up the M1, the door kept swinging open and this got worse when I drove off the motorway and had to negotiate roundabouts, so the string-method of preventing it opening of it's own accord was come up with to keep it closed. I can't believe it did this and I got away with it. I could easily have fallen out onto the road, but fortunately I didn't. On another occasion I was on my way to work when one of the windscreen wipers flew off when it was raining. A rather strange occurrence, worthy of a few smiles, but probably not so amusing at the time, as it can be difficult to see where you are going if you can't keep the windscreen free of rain which is running down the glass and obscuring the view.

I worked for DaSilva's puppets during the early 1970's. I went on tour with them with their production of "Snowhite." We had a week of performances somewhere in the North of England. I think it was Burnley or Blackburn, but I'm not so sure as my memory isn't as good as it should have been. Most of the company went off in the Landcover, which towed the large trailer which had the entire show in, but I went off with someone else in my car. Unfortunately I took a wrong turning on the M1 and landed up almost in Yorkshire. I think I was supposed to take the left turn onto the M6 which meant we didn't catch up with the Land Rover as we were supposed to. We did get onto the M6 eventually, but then we hit a really thick bank of fog, so thick in fact you could barely see a few yards in front of you and the police had to use lighted beacons along the side of the Motorway and traffic had to leave because it was so bad. We must have come off the Motorway near Preston or Accrington or somewhere. We decided that we'd have to find somewhere at the side of the road and spend the night there. I pulled off the road and we settled down for the night and could see a vehicle in the lay-by ahead of us. Amazingly, it was the rest of the crew from DaSilva's and they had done what we had and were settling down to spend the night at the side of the road. It was not easy trying to sleep in the Triumph Herald and it was quite cold as the heater wasn't particularly efficient. I must say, I don't think I've seen such thick fog and I never have liked having to drive in fog.

My younger brother, Sandy, was always messing around with cars. He had several vehicles when he'd first got his driving licence. One he had was a Messerschmitt. I believe it was a kKR-175. It was very basic, to say the least. Actually no more than a sort of three-wheeled motorbike. It had a very small engine, not much more than a lawnmower engine in a sort of motor bike with a sidecar or some sort of bubble car. I was taken out in it for a ride, and you had to sit directly behind the driver, rather like riding pillion on a motor bike. It had a lid which lifted up so you could get in and when you were moving you were extremely low to the ground. So much so that, if you were following a large vehicle, such as a H.G.V (Heavy Goods Vehicle) you were so low to the ground, I swear the thing would fit underneath the lorry. Not a nice feeling, I can tell you. It tended to break down frequently and on one occasion it broke down on the road between Ampthill and Woburn. My mother or father had to go and collect him and the vehicle was manhandled into the horse box my mother had which was towed by the Land Rover. I suppose because it was so small it could be put inside the horse box. He later had a Morris Minor, and it was in something of a rough state. If you sat in the front passenger seat, which I did occasionally, and lifted the piece of matting from beneath your feet, there were a hole which meant you could see the road moving past as you drove along.

Cars I've Owned- Part 1

Over the years I've owned many cars. Some I've loved, but many I have hated. You have a definite love/hate relationship with the car you own, basically because when they run smoothly, get you from point 'A' to point 'B' without any problems, when they decide not to behave, for example, refusing to start, or breaking down unexpectedly, they are more hated than loved. Most, if not all, the cars I've had have been second hand. I never seem to be in a position financially to afford a completely new vehicle, so the old cars I've had were prone to the usual faults such as refusing to start in cold or damp weather and one-hundred-and-one other problems. I suppose an older car is going to cause more problems than a brand new one because the bits and pieces, such as brakes, tyres, water pump, starter motor and so on are the bits that wear out fastest and so cause you the most problems.

Having been brought up on a farm does have it's advantages, particularly when you're starting to learn to drive. There is always space, or at least there was at Malting Farm in Cardington, I don't know whether all other farms are the same, allowing you to be able to drive a vehicle along farm tracks or across meadows and fields without encountering other vehicles. I was able to drive tractors which aren't exactly like driving a car as they have so many gears and sub-gears and far more levers to shift into these sub-gears. But at least I was able to drive such vehicles as Land Rovers which gave me a chance to do some driving, although off-road, before I was able to start driving lessons. 

The first car I owned was a Ford Anglia, the classic car from the 1950's- 1960's. I was working at the Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham in 1969 (see earlier post on here which gives a full  description.) Before I'd gone there I had been doing driving lessons and hadn't yet done my driving test. I don't know how many lessons I'd had, quite a few I seem to recall. My test was set to be during the summer break in the theatre's season so I went home to Bedfordshire. I probably took a few more lessons and then did the test. Unfortunately I failed miserably, on something quite trivial, like not turning right or left when told by the examiner, or keeping up with the traffic. I went back to Cheltenham and did a few more lessons there and did my test and this time I passed! As a result my parents bought me the Ford Anglia, which cost all of £75! I know, looking back, it doesn't seem possible that you could buy a car for so little! It was two-tone green, light on the top half and dark on the bottom half. It had quite a few quirks. One being the windscreen wipers. When you put them on, and you drove slowly, say, up a hill, in a rainstorm, they moved fast, but if you drove faster, for some strange reason they moved slowly. Why? Seems odd thinking about it now. On those old cars you had the headlight 'dip' control on the floor near the clutch pedal, unlike in a modern car where you control the 'dip' with a lever on the steering wheel column. I think it might even have had indicators which actually stuck out from the side of the car when you were going to turn either left or right and not just a flashing bulb on the four corners of the car. It's a wonder they never got knocked off when a bicycle or someone went past. Goodness, how cars have changed, but this is a good 45- or more years ago.

Of course, having a car was made use of as part of my stage management job. Moving on to work at Greenwich Theatre a few years after working at the Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham, as part of my work I had to return a lot of items which were used as props in a show we'd done. I had to load up the little Ford Anglia with no end of items and then drive into the centre of London and return the things to some of the prop hire companies around Covent Garden in particular. I had not been driving for very long and it was quite nerve wracking driving through Marble Arch, not knowing exactly where I was supposed to go and no sure which lane I was supposed to get into as well and looking at an A to Z Atlas of London which was open on the passenger seat beside me. It was quite hair-raising, to say the least. The best way to learn to do something that might be difficult is to just get on and do it, a good motto for life I always think. Spending to much time mulling it over is a good way of talking yourself out of it, so that incident driving through Central London certainly taught me a thing or two and came in handy a good deal later when I used to go in to London in my car when I used to do TV walk-on work and had to get to, say BBC Television Centre or any of the major television or film studios such as Pinewood or Shepperton.

On another occasion I had to drive a large van with a load of furniture into central London and was going to return it all to the various hire firms around the city and beyond. It was a rainy day, which didn't exactly help matters. I don't think I had ever driven such a large vehicle before and I think it must have been the largest vehicle you could drive on an ordinary driving licence. I soon found out that stopping the engine was no easy matter. You couldn't just use the key to turn it off when you wanted to park the vehicle. The only way to stop it was to stall it by shifting the gear stick and the clutch at the same time or something weird which made the lorry shudder horribly. I went with another stage management member to help me unload the furniture, which included a piano. Somewhere in Covent Garden (at a time when the fruit and vegetable market was still there.) it was a real knot of small alleyways and roads and I accidentally got into a one-way street- the wrong way, so I had to reverse the lorry quite a distance so as to get out and so get back into the correct flow of traffic. Not an easy manoeuvre at he best of times, but not helped by the fact that it was raining. My vehicle-driving experience was increased several times over that particular day.

I was always very keen to keep on the right side of the law. For some reason or other, one always gets somewhat edgy, almost guilty, for whatever reason, when you are out driving somewhere and you see a police car, when you're absolutely sure you've done nothing wrong. On one occasion, when I was working at Greenwich, when I'd gone home for the weekend and was driving back to work fairly early one Monday morning. The route required me to go through the Blackwall Tunnel. I never like driving through tunnels at the best of times, but I had to go and ignore an instruction on a reading or one of those overhead gantry things, which told me to move over into a different lane. I just drove on and didn't move over to a different lane and I got stopped by a Police car, pulled over to the side of the road. I didn't have my driving licence with me and was told I'd have to go into a Police station and show my licence. I was numb with fear. I don't know why. I don't think, up until then,  had ever set foot in a police station. So, I did as I was told and a few days later I did just that, produced my licence at the police station somewhere in or around the Greenwich area, was told to not do 'it' again, and went away, fully warned off. I don't think, after that, I ever ignored an instrucion as regards driving in the right lane ever again.

As for hating any cars I've owned one was a bright red Ford Escort estate. Bought from a neighbour. It was a real pain to get started, particularly when the weather was damp or cold. I tried to remedy it with such things as new spark plugs, battery leads and other bits and pieces that I replaced, but all to no avail. It was worse when it was damp, even when there was no rain. Those cold, misty mornings, a slight drizzle, you name it, the confounded thing refused to start. Even having a tow from someone else's vehicle and jump starting, it would not start. So much so I just lost my temper and gave the confounded thing a good kick. A bit like that famous scene in "Fawlty Towers" when Basil Fawlty can't get his car to start and hits it with a branch of a tree. It's almost always when you need to get somewhere in a hurry, early morning, have to get to work. The thing had an almighty dent in it's side for ever after. I'm not surprised I lost patience with it. Stupid thing.

Wild and Windy Weather

The past few days it's been very wild and windy. Some rain, but not as much as we had around a year ago which caused so much flooding in other parts of the country. I think we seemed to escape lightly compared with, for example, Somerset. I was somewhat concerned that the wind would rip down the rest of the fence. There is a further section which is showing signs of giving up. Still no indication that our beloved landlord intends to actually do something about repairing said fence. It's well over six months ago since we had him here with his mother and the workman who was supposed to do the work on the fence. It would have been nice to be given some idea what is going on. But, it seems, nothing is being done. We will have to do some sort of temporary 'fix' before the whole fence disintegrates.

I've been out in the car this morning. When I came back home I noticed that there are several properties on the estate which have their fences blown over by the wind. I also see that the section of fence in our garden next to the section which has totally blown over is beginning to fall over. Considering the precarious state of the remaining fence, which has slats in it which are very rotten, to the point where merely touching them will make the crumble to a pile of sawdust, it won't be 'fit for purpose' for very much longer. Probably a very violent storm will finish it completely.

We've been watching the television series 'Broadchurch.' This seems to have become  something of a hit, winning three BAFTA awards, for Best Drama, Olivia Colman for Best Actress and David Bradley for Best Supporting Actor at the 2013 Awards. We didn't watch it when it was originally broadcast but have now seen it on catch-up.  I wanted to see what all the fuss was about and was totally taken by it, swept along by the story, and the cliff-hanging at the end of each episode certainly gave it a definite 'can't wait to see the next episode' element to it. Well, at least it you watch it like that you don't have to endure endless adverts every ten minutes or so. We have seen the original eight episodes and have now seen the first of the new series. Not what we were expecting at all. One of the best bits of drama of recent years and the new series has taken things in a direction we were not expecting at all. Yes, I can't wait to see the next episode to see how things develop. David Tennant has certainly made his mark with this, and put his stint in Doctor Who well and truly behind him.

Under the Weather

I'm not feeling too well this morning. It feels as if I'm going to have a cold. You know the feeling- a bit shivery and your muscles ache. I think just a day in bed may help.  Both dogs are really surprised I'm not following my usual routine, but both of them will be upstairs with me and make sure I'm O.K. I'm actually writing this blog sitting up in bed. It's surprising how the dogs can tell when you're not well. They seem to have a sense which detects illness.

It's a rather over-cast day. At 8.15 it was really quite dark, more like early evening. As I write this at 9.45 the sun is attempting to come out. It's surprisingly mild temperature-wise. No need to put the central heating on today.

Carol was about to drive away from  the house when I noticed she had left the bunch of keys and her I.D. card for the Academy in the bedroom. I rushed down stairs and waved the keys through the door. She came to collect them. She wouldn't have been able to get in to the Academy without them as you need the 'swipe' card to open the gate when you drive your car in. No, it's not a 'swipe' card. You just press it onto the device at the gate and it opens. Or that's what it's supposed to do. Also, you can't move around the Academy building without such a card as many doors require a card to get through. She came home yesterday evening and said she was cold. There hadn't been any heating on all day. Crazy when you consider it's a relatively new building which is supposed to have all the latest technology in it. Can't be that difficult to heat a modern building and actually care for the staff who have to work in it.

Back To The Academy

Well, the Christmas and New Year holiday is now over. The decorations are down, the Christmas tree dismantled and the ornaments packed away for another year. We had a real, live tree for a couple of years, with the intention of keeping it in the garden and bringing it into the house every Christmas, but for some reason we never discovered, both these trees just died. I recall when I lived at the farm in Cardington that we had a live tree which was planted out each year and bought in to be decorated and that lasted for years. I think it probably got too big and was left to grow in the garden. Maybe that was the answer; plant it out and take it out of it's pot. Maybe ours got pot-bound or something or even the fact they don't like being put out after the Christmas period.

Yesterday was really over-cast and foggy. I went to church on my own as Carol wasn't feeling too well. I had to scrape of ice from the windscreen as I was about to drive out of the estate. The car is desperate for some work doing on it, particularly getting the windscreen wipers repairs. We need to find someone who can do it at a reasonable price.