Culinary Delights

Mrs Blog did a fine job last night preparing a great curry flavoured vegetable dish to go with chicken. (Not, alas the chicken stuffed with rocket of earlier blog fame).

However Mrs Blog declined this masterpiece, instead settling for a salad. But this was no ordinary salad - it contained shaved carrots! Which to my mind implies they needed a shave in the first place....

Hello Iran Again /سلام دوباره ايران

Somehow this site has become a sensation in Iran this month. Not being entirely sure who is reading it (they could be English speaking expats or more of the Iranian Secret police featured in the post of 21st March) - I thought I should welcome them in Persian/Farsi. If you are an Iranian reader please put up a comment to tell us who you are so that we can rule out the secret police...


...of course they could be tracking this blog because it mentioned Osama Bin Laden last week!! In which case it may be that the secret police in Iran (and possibly elsewhere) have search engines programmed to look for key words which they then investigate. In which case I may have just hit on a way to get my blog more hits than any other....

Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, Terrorist, WMD, Jihad, Al Jazeera, Kalashnikov, M16, Cell.....

I will let you know how it goes!

You know who you are!

This will be a short post to protect the innocent and not so innocent.

The title says it all

Sunday Shopping

Sunday and the day of rest. Fat chance - Mrs Blog is after a day out shopping. I should be grateful since the outlay will be quite small - a mere £1, which compared to some shopping trips is a blessing.
Why, then, am I not grateful? Because she wants to go out and buy - Manure!
Yep - we are going Poo Shopping!!


(Afternoon update)

Mrs Blog cancelled the poo-shopping thank goodness. It turns our that manure contains everything you need to start weeds running rampant in the garden.

Just what you want at the end of a long hard week at work is to sit quietly with a beer and relax in your own home. This is precisely what I did not get.

It was a long hard week - it involved a full day course with my boss and a dozen others learning how to be less Nazi-like in our managerial style. The company wants us to be more personally responsible for actions and to develop our people. I bought into it and so did my boss. There was a point when I worried that he might actually have walked away thinking that the best way to get more out of your people was to be a really extreme Nazi. I will have to wait and see.

The relaxing with a beer went out of the window when son-blog turned up with a gang of  his friends. You have never seen a chocolate swiss roll pass from existence to oblivion faster. They ended up in the garden with sticks doing some kind of Ninja practice session. So immediately any chance of enjoying my beer in the garden was out of the window. More than that I was on tenterhooks waiting for one of them to come rushing in bleeding profusely



Today is daughter-blog's birthday - Happy Birthday Daughter-Blog. She is staying with friend-Heather who makes the most fantastic Chilli Jam.


Heather is an American studying at the "Centre for Modern Thought" in Aberdeen. She is a great ambassador for the US because she has a truly British sense of humour/humor. This was ably demonstrated when I asked her why there was a centre for studying a thought (singular) and really, with all those clever people, could they not study more than one? She has since taken up the implied challenge and is seeking to widen the curriculum whilst seeing the funny side.

Osama Bin Laden

This one is a serious post.

So OBL is dead and the general view in our press is that this was a good thing. We have, however, stepped over a mark as society.

The facts seem to be agreed,-

• The Americans went in to Pakistan to specifically assinate OBL
• They did not telll the Pakistani authorities
• OBL was unarmed
• OBL was shot in the head

All this might seem justified to rid the world of a "bad guy" who admitted master-minding the killing of thousands of people, however, it also sets a very dangerous moral precedent insofaras,-

• A foreign power carried out a military operation in another country without permission
• The operation was an execution
• There was no trial
• There was no UN resolution sanctioning an execution or assassination
• The ends are seen to justify the means

How long before some despot, dictator, lunatic ruler/regime decide to copy the Americans? After the "war on terror" being used  by Bush as an excuse to invade Afghanistan etc we saw Putin use the same reason for attacking his own people. More recently we heard Gadaffi suggest that he was fighting Al Qaeda whilst killing his own people.

Perhaps we need to stop and think?

Back Again

Been a bit busy lately and failed to post a number of times so I thought I should give a brief update on what you have been missing - which is really not a lot!

Last week son-blog dealt with a "Giant Spider" in the bath to prevent Mrs Blog having a fit. But then blew it by telling her it was 7.30 a.m. - she dashed about thinking she had overslept until she saw it was actually 6.30 a..m

Daughter- blog returned from a trip to Whitby. Among the photos she had was one of a display cabinet filled with religious memorabilia - statues of Mary and rosaries and so forth. One item that stood out in the shot was a bugle.
"Look" I said to her "The Trumpet of Jesus"
"Really!?" she replied (thirty seconds before the embarrassed blush started).


And then sadly we bade farewell to daughter-blog as she returned to Aberdeen with Mrs Blog driving her car with a boot full of cookery books.

Aberdeen is having a Rock Festival today - "Wow, what a cool city!" Alas no - it is a festival of Granite!!

Annoyances

Having been forced to drive daughter-blog to Edinburgh at the last minute this morning - all because she cannot work out how a bus timetable works - I had one of those annoying return journeys. You know the sort - slow drivers in front of view leaving you caught by red traffic lights, drivers who brake for no reason, people who drive at 45mph in 60 mph zones then carry on doing 45mph in 30 mph areas.

All of this was topped off by a really slow and wide Tesco van I was forced to follow for five miles. As I sat there behind it reading the writing on the back I realised it was not an ordinary van but a "Tesco Online Shopping" van. This is one of those that drops off your shopping once you have bought it on the internet - or at least that is what they tell you.

My only experience of using Tesco online was horrendous. The web page takes forever to complete and it would not let me choose my nearest Tesco instead it insisted I use one a further 8 miles away. Despite all this I thought - this is not too bad - sitting at home ordering the week's shopping and just relaxing till it turns up. I marvelled at the wonder of modern technology and all the clever people Tesco had employed with degrees in website design and IT. What I had not counted on was "Wee Jimmy" from Galashiels who is the guy who actually puts your shopping in the bags and pops it into the van.

"Wee Jimmy" does not have a degree in IT but he is in the responsible position of deciding what item he should place in your shopping if they are out of stock of something - and that is where it all went wrong...

Funny start to the day

Mrs Blog was up early again and so was Son-Blog which was more surprising given that he is 17. Not one to waste an opportunity I asked him if, rather than waking his sister up with a cup of tea, he would wake her with his saxophone. Always keen to oblige an again parent he did just that. In the process he created the "Saxalarm" and turned Daughter-Blog into a screaming banshee.

Of course as always in my life when I am responsible for a little mischief I am struck down by a cunning plan of the Spite Goblin. Today he sought his revenge while I was topping up the "Wee Box" with loose change. The "Wee Box" is a cardboard box with a slit for coins to go in which are collected for SCIAF. Our Wee Box was on the bread bin by the toaster and the S.G. made me drop a twenty pence piece in the toaster rather than the box. Undeterred, I simply turned the toaster upside down and got covered in four billion burnt bread crumbs. Will I ever learn?

More misunderstandings

Last Thursday I cooked supper for my son and I whilst Mrs Blog was away in Corsica retrieving daughter-blog from the Frenchies. By way of a change and bearing in mind my high cholesterol I opted for fish in a Keralan marinade. Not knowing what sort of fish they catch in Southern India I settled for good old cod. When Mrs Blog got home with charge in tow and had settled down she asked how we had been and what we had eaten while she was away. The following day she asked about the cooking again

"Where did you get the halibut?" she asked,
"Cod" I corrected her
"God?!!" said daughter-blog


And so began an evening of misunderstandiings - the highlights of which were Mrs Blog looking at a magazine and exclaiming that she had found an "easy tart"

Followed by suggesting that I should sniff "naughty Alice" - which gien that we number among our friends one who is called Alice (apologies to that Alice) made for a confusing moment. It took a while for me to be convinced thtat there really is a perfume called "Naughty Alice"

In order to prove a point I thought I would run a google image search on Naughty Alice - luckily it threw up this,-

Because with hindisght that could have been a whole lot worse!

Been quiet lately!

Not had much to write about lately but then I noticed that someone from Australia has visited this site and could not resist .....



Then my sister-in-law rang to tell me that she was living in half a house....

(Millie is the suicidal dog that lives with her and jumps out of second floor windows when left unattended.)

......and then the daughter who went to Corsica for three months came home bearing gifts. "Gifts" might be a more correct way of describing them - they consisted of a variety of foodstuffs given to her by Corsican well-wishers (no surprise given that she writes a food blog - see margin). Foodstuffs - you might be wondering  - "What exactly?"


Yes - sausages!



Bacon Cheese Chocolate

A couple of weeks ago I had a blood test and Friday saw me get the results from the same German doctor who saw "zee pus" in my tonsillitis diagnosis. She explained that my Cholesterol was high - a score above 5 is in need of action and 7 or 8 are serious heart attack. I got a 5.7 - no serious worries but she warned me off bacon, chocolate and cheese.
Great I thought  - I never eat bacon chocolate and cheese at the same time! Alas it turns out she meant indivdually I have to avoid bacon, chocolate and cheese.

Mrs Blog had been reading up on Cholesterol and decided to add biscuits and sausages to the list of proscribed items sinc ewhen life is not worth living.

Living in Scotland we hardly ever see the sun and when we do we make the most of it by dusting off the barbecue. Yesterday (Saturday) was just such a day. So first barbecue of the year and I cannot have sausages!

Harry's Revenge

I should have known better, I really should. Earlier this week (29th March) I wrote a post about my anonymous nephew Harry and his ex-mobile phone. I should  not have done so. It was tempting fate from the start and was a cheap blog post at his expense. Somehow Harry (Or some cyber-mercenary employed by Harry) got hold of the "Spite Goblin" (8th January post).

The Spite Goblin was obviously employed to exact revenge on Harry's behalf and by God did he! The day after the post about Harry appeared i.e yesterday I had a full day of meetings in London most of them an hour long. This meant being up at about 5.45 - no serious issue there and getting to the airport for about 7.00 a.m. So far so good. The Spite Goblin waits until I get to City airport in London before unleashing the "Tummy Bug"! One of those which keeps you guessing about how far you can walk and how long you can wait.

Yesterday was a long day - the bug got worse as the day wore on. I hardly heard a word that was being said in any of the meetings I went to and on several occasions I tried to close the meetings early so I could walk to the nearest loo. Notice I did not say "run" to the nearest loo,- I could not have run if my life depended on it. Had it not been for my physio Mark giving me the bum exercises (7th February) I might have been in the Sh$t!!

So all day I went looking for toilets

....with no thought of it being a safe place (4th March)

With the end of the day approaching I had to get back to Edinburgh which involved a walk to Monument tube station. 9 minutes wait for the train, 30 mins on the Docklands Light Railway, an hour at the airport (including 20 mins queuing for security), an hour on the plane and 45 min drive home. Plenty of opportunity for serious public embarrassment. The tricky bit was going to be getting to City Airport......Then a moment of genius....The Imodium Sprite!!

Home safe and feeling better and promising I will never mess with Harry ever, ever again!!

RIP

Sometimes you sit in front of your blog and struggle to think what to write about. Other times the "Gods of the Interwebtube" intervene and gift you a blog from out of nowhere. The Gods have done just that for me today.

My nephew, who will probably want to remain anonymous, called Harry had a mobile phone. He works on a farm and has recently been digging a trench. From what I can gather he filled the trench in again since when he has not been able to find his mobile telephone. We probably all reach the same conclusion at the same time - the phone has got to be in the trench. From my point of view it cannot be anywhere else since it would destroy this posting! So Harry-the-anonymous-nephew has three options

1. Dig up the trench
2. Post a comment to let me know he has found his phone and
3. Put a gravestone on the trench to mark the passing of his phone

My vote goes to

Dutch Tourists

It started with the Iranian Secret Police but it has now gone further. It turns out people in Holland are now reading this drivel. Holland is a great country - having been there I can testify personally to that fact. However Holland suffers with a road traffic problem which is pretty unique and almost unheard of - Hill Starts. I am not making this up - given that the country is pretty flat it is nigh on impossible for the average Dutch learner driver to find a slope big enough to practice a hill start. When I visited Den Helder - right in the north of the country I witnessed a day long parade of learner drivers from up to an hour's drive away waiting to drive up the approach ramp to the sea wall. It was obviously a pretty big sea wall - about three metres high and the ramp was not that long but just enough to meet the need.







The problem doesn't end there - once they have passed their tests the average Dutch driver never does a hill start in normal day to day driving. Eventually they settle down get married have kids and decide to go on holiday. They are big fans of Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, British Rock and the Monarchy so head to Britain. The drive from Holland to Calais/Ostende is pretty flat and then they arrive at Dover or Folkestone. Getting out of either town involves going up a hill - these poor Dutch guys start at the bottom in fourth gear and halfway up their engines sound knackered. Luckily the council has put a lay by there for just this emergency. The hapless Dutch drivers are thinking - "great my first holiday abroad and the car has broken down two miles from the ferry!". In the lay by, I am reliably informed, there is an RAC phone on which it tells them in Dutch to try changing down gears when going up hills.

No sense of humour!!! And real live footage of your blogger

A few weeks ago I explained the trouble I got into using a photo of George Clooney on the company intranet  directory and revealed my latest masterpiece which replaced the image of George. You may remember the issue was copyright.




As of today I have had my wrist royally slapped for not taking our (My French employer's) communications seriously. Is it my fault that others expect realism in their representations and cannot see that my art communicates so much ore? Nonetheless I am forced to comply - and I thought it was the Germans who had too many rules and French who had none - shows how wrong you can be!

So to keep the French masters happy here is a link to the real me in action
http://www.axawealth.co.uk/investments/videos

Hello Iran

As a relatively "new-to-the-world-of-blogging" person I am still learning a lot about what goes on. I found out today that one of the people who has viewed this blog lives in Iran! Why? Who? Language barriers and all that?? What would they have made of my picture of chicken stuffed with rocket? (see Jan 30th Misunderstandings) The questions are spinning around in my head.

So if you are the person in Iran who clicked on this - please leave a comment and tell me who are you are.

Of course it might have been the Iranian Secret police using a search programme to throw up every reference on the internet to words like "rocket" in case they find someone who can help with their nuclear programme. In which case - please do not get in touch at all! Not only will I be very nervous but you will be severly disappointed when you discover that far from being a nuclear rocket scientis I failed Physics A Level.

If you never see another blog posting it could mean that the Iranian Secret Police have no sense of humour and I have been taken out!!

If you want the easy way to follow thi blog - pop your email in the bar above and hit submit!

God's a Porpoise

Been a weird week - kicked off with seeing a doctor, a German doctor, who looked at my sore throat and declared
"Ah, I zee pus!"
Any British doctor would no doubt have said
"You have tonsillitis".
Nonetheless I took myself off to Basingstoke for three days where I attended a course run by a trainer called Ecky- a German trainer. (You can see a theme developing). The trainer repeatedly told us he was married to an Argentinian woman and he lived in Switzerland whilst training a group of English people who work for a French company (I was probably the only one picking up on the Nazi war criminal link during the course).

My sore throat was joined by a cold and I stopped paying total attention to what Ecky was saying. At some stage he wrote on the flip chart "God's a porpoise". I sat there lost - I have studied theology in my past and at no point had anyone even hinted at the notion of God being a porpoise.

I wondered briefly if this was some new fangled German/Argentinian/Swiss cult thing before I realised that I had misread the flip chart. It actually said "Goals & Purpose".

First joke in the blog

An Englishman, Scotsman, Spaniard, American, Chinaman, Russian and a Frenchman were queing up to get into a night club. The bouncer looked at them and said "You can't come in here without a Thai!"

Extreme Spoons

In order to understand Extreme Spoons" you will first have to learn the less extreme game - Spoons. This is a card game and in fact could be any card game in which there are several players (three or more) where the game ends with one person disposing of all the cards in their hand. To turn any old run-of-the-mill card game into spoons you need a number of desert spoons which total one less than the number of players. So seven players requires six spoons and five players requires four spoons and so on. When the first person is "out" having disposed of their last card they shout "spoons" and they and all the other players grab for a spoon. The prinnciples of Musical Chairs now apply as there will be one person who is disappointed - that person is out until the next game. Play the card game again with one fewr player nad one less spoon and repeat until you have a winner.The attached diagram will help

To turn Spoons into Extreme Spoons (For this variation I am wholly indebted to the pupils of Peebles High School) you simply increase the distance between the card players and the spoons. So if you are school kid you play the card game bit in the canteen and place the spoons in a different part of the school as below

Of course you would need to be in the last year or two of school to play this as you would need to be able to intimidate the junior classes to leave the spoons alone.

The possibilities are endless. Students playing the cards bit in halls of residence and putting the spoons in a lecture hall. Office workers playing in the staff room with the spoons in the boss's office -my dream is to see youtube clips appearing of people playing Extreme Spoons.

If you enjoy this blog then help me become a millionaire by passing the address on to others

Sweets and Computers

Not you might think the obvious combination of subjects - the only link is that I am eating my way through  a box of Liquorice Allsorts whilst typing this. I absolutely love them except for the round ones with the liquorice centres that come in yellow and pink.

It isn't just liquorice all sorts - Jelly Babies are the same - there is always one flavour you just can't stand and you end up chucking them away. Why on earth can't they sell them loose and let you pick and choose which ones you want - that way of no-one bought the round liquorice allsorts in yello and pink the manufacturer will get the message and stop making them!

Computers - in an earlier post I mentioned the "outage" and how it mangled my internet connection. Well three weeks on and my company broadband is still not working. The solution from the geek team is to send me a thrid router - not at all convinced yet that this is the end of it!

Then today my good friend Jumbo Jock/ Darth Vader/Studdley returned my wife's beaten up old laptop after fixing it of a whjole host of problems looking like a brand new machine. Jumbo/Darth/Studdley trained as a pilot and he knows more about computers and how to fix them than any PC geek I know. But in reverse would you trust a PC geek to fly a jumbo jet???

The only safe place for a bloke!

This is one I have been meaning to write off an on for a while.

As a bloke you realise early on from your mother that your world revolves around avoiding trouble by doing chores. Not only doing chores but dong them straight away. When you grow up and marry you think, briefly, that now you are the boss and you can get away without the chores having to be done. Alas no! You now have a wife - in my case Mrs Blog who takes on the role previously performed by your mother. So, apart from a few years spent as a bachelor with a flat coverd in dust, a sink full of dishes, a fridge full of green cheese and a loo that you are embarrased by you are stuffed by the chores!

There is a safe place though where you are protected - lucky for me I discovered it early on in my life at about age 4. The safe place looks like this -

 Yes the loo! Once you are in there you are safe - no woman will ever dare disturb you in there! It must be something to do with them being in denial about the normal body functions or something. You do have to be careful though - I used this technique with my grandmother once too often. at the tender age of 5. After a significant period (somewhere between 30 mins and an hour I think) of chore-avoiding in the loo she came after me with remedies for constipation.

George and Me

Time for a middle aged rant.

After working at my present company, AXA, for six months I have been found out. It appears I have transgressed and disobeyed the rules - unwittingly I might add. Given that AXA is a French company you might be forgiven for thinking that there would be no rules at all. As the great Al Murray says "Where would we be if we had no rules? France!"

What was my crime? To bear more than a striking resemblance to a Hollywood star. For the last six months on the AXA UK group employee website my details have been listed for all to see - they can access my phone number, email address and until yesterday a photo of me. Here is the photo,-

Seems that someone was concerned that we might be sued by George Clooney for copyright abuse! As if! George if you are out there reading this can you let me know? So I had no choice but to change it to this,-

Which as you can see has been protected by copyright so that George cannot make money out me.

Busy old weekend

Dashed off to the Highlands of Scotland this weekend with son Robbie (16) (that is his age not his IQ).

If you have never been to the Highlands here is a picture of what they look like...

Had a night at Bridge of Orchy Hotel - truly Scottish welcome from the Russian staff there. It was pitch black when we arrived but the next morning dawned glorious. The views over the hills were stunning with snow, mist, sunlight all fighting for the attention of the eye. So we responded accordingly and went to breakfast. I had a light meal while Robbie went for "Death by Cholesterol" illustrated below...

Unbelievable Robbie ate all this and three rounds of toast.

Off thence to Plockton which is to Scotland what Compton is to England (see earlier blog) except that I really love Plockton. We passed the stunning Glencoe - Not to be confused with Sebastian Coe or Glen Close!

Watched the Rugby - Come on England!!

Came home via House of Bruar where I bought a stupid amount of Venison Salami.

On arrival home I enjoyed a lovely Skype chat with my daughter Eloise -(Still in Corsica- see earlier blog - but not the same one as Compton). The conversation got round to the Venison Salami and the price of it - at which point Mrs Blog joined in and said that she had seen a gold dress she liked which was cheaper than 200g of Venison Salami. This naturally led to thoughts of Lady Gaga and her dress of pork chops or sirloin steak or whatever it was and then I suggested this....

Of course it did not take long before my wife and daughter pointed out the flaws in the design such as....

As you can see our pet Labrador (Muffin) really likes Venison Salami which kind of puts paid to my clever idea of having a dress you wear that looks good enough to eat!

Oh well back to work tomorrow.

A week of IT problems

A week of PC problems is I hope behind me. It started with the local town server going down.Apparently this an "outage" should be an "outrage"! Why is it that IT geeks have BO, pony tails and annoy everyone by inventing words that we don't need??? An "outage" - should read - "buggered", "broken" or "temporarily unavailable"

It took two days to get us back online although all the geeks were sayng that everything was fixed - or "un-outaged".

Then my leg continued to play up so my IT band was suffering even after Magic Mark had done his thing last week. Had another session this morning where I ran into "Mrs McKinnon" - she looked familiar and after a while I realised she was the Chemistry techer who had been at the parents evening last night! Another geek!!

Finally the last IT problem. A guy at work who sent me an email asking if I had managed to solve a client's problem. In itself not an issue except that he had singularly failed to tell me at any stage that the client had a problem. So an upset client is now an angry upset client. I know what you are thinking - was this a computer problem? After all the theme on this post is IT??

No it isnt - this guy is not a geek he is an................

................. "Irritating Tw*t"

Getting Fixed

At just after nine this morning I went to see Mark the Physio. He has successfully treated just aout everything that has ever gone wrong with my muscles in the past. In fact in one session he fixed my neck which for more than ten years had stumped several BUPA physiotherapists.

Mark is a German/Jamaican who speaks English with a Scottish and Jamaican accent (try the accent out in the dialogue below!!). All in all a good guy.
"What is up?" he asked
"My knee" I replied and explained that my running had left me with a knee injury.
"I have been to two other physio's" I explained, "one said it was my IT band and the other that my muscles round the knee were too weak" (The IT band is the Iliotibial muscle which runs down the outside of the leg next to the quads)
Two minutes later and Mark had concluded my legs were of different lengths causing my left leg to work harder than it should. He began the treatment explaining that he needed to loosen up my piriformis....bum to you!
There I was lying on front on the treatment table and he came out with the immortal instruction
"Squeeze your bottom like you were trying to crack a walnut!"
I don't know about you but I have never tried to break a walnut with my hands let alone my buttocks.
The treatment continued with work on my 1st Rib which was stuck, my neck which needed traction, my IT band and my shoulders. Apparently all these problems are linked to my knee.

Finally I got exercises to loosen my calf and to strengthen my buttocks. YES you heard I have at the age of fifty need to do exercises to make my bum work better!!

Having looked at this picture again it really worries me!

So after a few months of this I should look like this -