Trip to Barra

This month Mrs Blog and I spent a couple of days on Barra (the Hebridean island and not Barra-in-Furness).

It is about twelve miles long and four miles wide with an airport where the runway is a beach. It has an "A" road which is a single track with passing places not unlike many other Hebridean islands. Knowing that transport from the airport to the hotel might be problematic I rang the hotel beforehand to ask about my options.

"Can you tell me how best to get to the hotel from the airport please?"

(Singsongy voice ) "Aye, you could take Hector McNeil's coach service".

"Thanks. Is there a taxi service?"

"Aye, Hector McNeil runs a taxi service."

Before I could stop myself and knowing what the answer was going to be I asked again

"Is there a car rental service on the island?"

"Oh yes, Hector McNeil's car rental service."

Which left me wondering if Hector McNeil had one vehicle with three signs - taxi, car rental and coach to stick on the roof!

Nuns and Machines

Went to Church yesterday and I thought I was pretty well awake by the time I got there.

The sermon was replaced by an appeal from an Indian nun, this can be good or bad depending on whether the appeal lasts longer than the sermon would have done. I closed my eyes to look as if I was in a deep spiritual reverie and tuned in.

"We need your help with the machines", implored the nun.

I sat up, intent, wondering where this was leading. In the next five minutes I heard that we need to help the machines in India, Africa, Asia and South America. There are special machines for children. Apparently. There is even a machine which teaches poor women in India how to use a sewing machine!

Then it hit me she was actually saying "Missions" not machines, I closed my eyes and went back to looking deeply spiritual.

Sleepless Sleepers

As I had to be in London yesterday quite early I was faced with the choice of travelling down the day before and staying an hotel or taking the Caledonian Sleeper. Based on cost and time with the family I opted for the Sleeper.

Safely boarded at 11.00 p.m.on Monday night I got into my pyjamas and hit the hay. I would love to say what a great sleep I had, but I cannot, because I did not.

Despite my restless night of sleep at 5.45 the steward knocked on my door to tell me we were 25 minutes away from Watford Junction and handed me my breakfast tray. I was not quite sure why he decided to wake me and tell me this but I figured he was doing the same to everyone.

I drank the coffee, chewed on the rubber croissant and avoided the yoghurt. The steward returned and told me we had arrived at Watford Junction. I thanked him, though I don't really know why.

Knowing that Euston was about another 20 mins away I got on with shaving, still in my pyjamas. two minutes later there was another knock on the door. This time a young lady in the train steward uniform appeared and said,

"You have to get off here!"

Before I could protest she disappeared. Still in my pyjamas and with white foam all over my face I thought that getting off at Watford Junction was not really an option after all.

A minute later the original steward came back.

"You have got to get off you're holding the train up"

"Where is the train going on to?"

"London Euston!"

"Good. That's where I want to go anyway!"

If I weren't the sort to stand up for myself I wonder where I would have been at 6.30 yesterday morning...

Where not to live

The blogs love living in Peebles. We are keenly sympathetic towards those who live in the following towns identified in a survey by findmypast.co.uk as embarrassing places to live,

3rd place Brokenwind, Aberdeen

2nd place Scratchy Bottom, Devon

1st place Shitterton, Devon

Tree surgery

Last weekend son-blog had friend-blog round. Friend-blog stays here most of the time actually, so much so that his parents think he left home last year and only occasionally pops back for visits. Usually we don't see them until after 3.00 p.m. owing to the nocturnal nature of teenagers.

Last weekend was different, Friend and son-blog made a big mistake they were up at 11.00 a.m. Not just up but washed and dressed! It was too good an opportunity to miss.

"Would you guys do me a favour?"

"Sure" (At least that is what it sounded like)

"Could you cut down the bent holly tree in the corner of the drive -way?"

"Yeah OK"

To them, this seemed like one step away from the teenage dream of being let loose with a chain saw. Fortunately, I only allowed them access to an old-fashioned-manually-operated wood saw. Just as well, if the eagle-eyed Mrs Blog had not been watching out of the bedroom window....

Good old British Airways

I heard the lovely story of a BA flight. My source was upgraded to business class and sat the other side of teh aisle was a grumpy old fella who had clearly paid for his business class seat.

After take-off grumpy old fella had the cabin crew running in circles - get  me a drink, is that what you call a Bloody Mary? Try again, and so on.

After a while he calmed down. The stewardess then bourgh along the dinner menu....
"Dinner manu for you sir?" she asked.
"What are the options?" he replied gracelessly.
"Yes or No sir"

Executive Rewards

As regulars will know I travel around Britain quite a lot. It means I get to stay in many different hotels and fly with many different airlines.

Hotels and airlines are pretty keen to secure the loyalty of busy executives so they have entire teams dedicated to improving customer loyalty. At British Airways they came up with the idea of BA Miles (now Avios Miles), I have enough to get to Hong Kong and back. British Midland have their own BMI miles, I have plenty to take the family to Barbados and back. Hilton have HiltonHonors where you can get a free night or two, I have used this to take Mrs Blog to the Waldorf free of charge. Hilton also upgrade you where possible to a bigger room, great!

A couple of months ago I joined the Holiday Inn reward programme. Clearly their budgets are not as big. Last week I received my first benefit from the programme when I checked into their Bristol Filton Road Hotel, a paper bag.

I rushed up to my room to open it.

"What could it be?" I thought.

Surely something they have researched that the foot weary, tired executive will want after a long busy day....
It was a bottle of water and a Crunchie.

In case anyone from Holiday Inn is reading, could you swap the Crunchie for a bag of mint Aero Bubbles?

Blog the artist

In an idle moment I decided to create a work of art. I call it "a picture of Mr Blog on a Scottish summer day"!

Those who have followed my art work in the Tate Modern will realise it bears a remarkable similarity to my famous piece "a picture of Mr Blog on an English summer day".

Planking is back

Son-blog and I went out to the pub quiz on Thursday. I, sensibly, left after the quiz and came home. Son-blog, less sensibly, went on drinking with his friend Scobie. Rather than come home he decided to copy Scobie. One of them "Planked" on a bollard and the other on a local monument to our our local hero the Salmon (Fish, not first minister!)

Isle of Man

The Isle of Man has a pizza parlour, no real surprise there.However it is called "Stone Willy's". Can you imagine asking,
"Can I have a 12 inch Stone Willy please!"???

Plays what he wrote

Was at the local pub quiz last night, always an entertaining evening.

Sat next to myself and mate-blog Paul was a team of students, including three followers of "Drivel and Wisdom". The group included grubby-blog who was sporting a brand new pair of ears. The students were a little nervous that their poor scoring was going to be a source of embarrassment on this posting.

Lucky for them there was a team of maltezers (brown on the outside but blonde on the inside) on the other side of us.

In answer to the question "Which Shakespeare play inspired the film "Ten reasons why I hate you?"", they decided to cheat by listening in to Mr Blog and mate-blog's answer. Sadly for them they misheard and wrote
"The taming of the shoe"!!

Higgs Boson

Having now been found the elusive Higgs Boson (God particle) decided to go on a bit of a tour. He headed off to Rome where he was keen to see the Sistine Chapel. The Vatican guards refused to let him though...
The Higgs Boson pleaded,
"You have to let me in, you can't have Mass without me!"

Mistaken identity 2

Leaving Church this morning with Son-Blog, the Priest asked Son-Blog if he was Spanish. He explained that with dark hair, dark complexion it was an easy mistake to make.

"Don't worry, Son-Blog" said I. "I was mistaken for being Spanish when I was in the south of France."

"Is that cos you were slow?" says Son-Blog.

15  Love

The Hobbit

On the same trip to the Isle of Man mentioned in the last posting, I had a team meeting. One of the team, Tony-Blog, worked with me at two of my previous companies where he was often called "Frodo". This was due to him being somewhat height challenged and portly, giving more than a passing resemblance to the famous Hobbit.

Somehow it slipped out during the team meeting during an unguarded moment that this was his nick-name. He took it well acknowledging the truth.

Then he slipped up badly. he went on to tell me that his fingers are now much bigger than when he was married. As a result, he cannot wear his wedding ring on his finger anymore.

"I wear it on a chain around my neck." he confided.

"Hang on!" I said quite loudly (well, loudly enough for all the team to hear).

I continued, "You are  nick-named "Frodo" and you wear a gold ring on a chain around your neck???"

Forgotten but not gone

Following a restructure of my sales team we decided to have a "kick-off" event in the Isle of Man this week. It was worth celebrating because it was a positive restructure in which we are expanding the team instead of contracting it (which is what most Financial Services companies are doing!)

So, there we all are for the event which involves a barbecue and drinks in a lovely ittle town called Laxey. Laxey is about 20 miles from Douglas, which is where we are staying. Kindly the company put on a tram ride for everyone to get from Douglas to Laxey.

Everyone that is but me and a colleague called Kevin. By being three minutes late we were simply overlooked!

Some celebration!!!

You gotta love Cabbies

Yesterday I took a fifteen minute cab ride to the office in London from my hotel. The driver was one of those "salt of the earth" cabbies who won't stop talking.

He told me that he had a week of Americans in his cab and that they were always good for a laugh. Apparently on Monday he picked up a couple by the Tower of London who asked him why there were no lifts in the Tower. He explained that it was built before lifts were invented.

On Tuesday he did a pick-up from Heathrow and drove some more Americans to Windsor. They wanted to know why Windsor Castle was built on the flight path to Heathrow.

Finally, on Thursday, he was asked by an Amercian couple if he could drive them round London and show them where all the bombs had landed during the Blitz. I have to admire his spirit, he took them all round London showing them building sites and inventing numbers of casualties.

My apologies to all our regular Amercian readers - this is not aimed at you. Whoever these people were they clearly voted for the other side!

Windy weddings

As mentioned in earlier blogs we visited the Sussex-blogs last weekend for a wedding.

It was a pretty windy weekend, something of only passing interest to me, until I was tasked with looking after the two gazebos in the garden that were going to shelter all the guests at the reception.

The wind ripped the tapes off the side panels, moved one of the gazebos (weighted down though it was) a couple of feet into a flower bed and threatened to whip the two gazebos up into the stratoshpere. So I invented the "Gazebobrella"!

Y-fronts and Weddings

Whilst at Sussex-blogs for the wedding this weekend Yvonne-blog asked if I would put up the bunting she had bought, to decorate the garden and the gazebos, for her wedding reception. Mr Blog is always happy to help, where possible, with such DIY projects and especially as this one did not require a spirit-level, hammer drill or any degree of competence with DIY.

She duly produced two clear packets of white bunting that left Mr Blog slightly confused.

Whatever Yvonne-blog said, the bunting looked suspiciously like a pair of pants. Having never been asked by a lady to hang her pants in the garden before, I was a little apprehensive.

But Mr Blog is not one to shy away from danger or a challenge so I duly set about hanging the strings of pants as directed.

Sussex is a strange place. Everyone who attended the wedding reception thought the pants were lovely and added to the ambiance of the garden. Maybe it is because I live in Scotland, where men wear kilts (allegedly with nothing underneath) and pants are quite rare, that I am unable to appreciate the aesthetic quality of hanging your "smalls" on the fence for a wedding?

By the way - apologies for the recent loss of quality on the drawings due to son-blog completely buggering up the settings on "paint" - hopefully normal service is now resumed.

JT makes a cup of tea

After a weekend rich in blogging material, I find myself spoilt for choice as to what to write about first. (Watch out for Y-fronts and weddings!)

I decided to settle on the blog - "JT makes a cup of tea", because it is chronologically correct. JT is also known as nephew-blog, or more accurately, one of a number of nephew-blogs. He is singular as a nephew-blog, in one respect, the length of time it takes him to make a cup of tea.

Whilst staying with Sussex-Blogs this weekend, JT (don't ask me why he is called that - his initials do not tally up with JT), offered to make the blog-family a cup of tea. In the time it took to get from filling the kettle to tasting the final product, I had two birthdays, a Christmas, added four hundred grey hairs and watched the passing of seven seasons! JT is not quick at making the tea!

I have illustrated below how it might look if he ever makes himself a cup of tea first thing in the morning.

Thanks JT!

Some days finish really well

Today was my last day at work for this week as I am on holiday tomorrow. As regulars will know this has been a tiring week - starting with the Caledonian Waker on Monday night. This was added to by being on the Caledonian Waker on Tuesday night as well. (I had to fly home from Bristol to see son-blog at his prize giving evening. Back tonight after an extended trip to Basingrad/stoke and straight out to watch same son-blog triumph in the school production of Blood-Brothers.
 What a fab week - Son-Blog in the Lead at the play, son-blog winning the Maigret Cup for Languages, son-blog winning the Balfour Medal for the outstanding pupil of the year and son-blog making a superb speech at the prize-giving as his last head boy duty. On top of that daughter-blog is back form uni.

How can a week like that get any better you might ask.

It did....

My lawn-aerating shoes have turned up in the post!!!