Meet Doris

Last week I had to go to an in person meeting. This is the first in person meeting I’ve had with this client since early 2020 when the pandemic was just about to kick off. The client had asked for a 0830 start which meant with travel time and a bit of leeway I had to leave the house at 0600.

We’d been experiencing some cold nights and heavy frost and because our house-move means I no longer have a garage to park in I either have to cover the car up or scrape the frost and ice off. I didn’t actually have to do that on the morning of the meeting as it was quite mild, so I was good to go on time. My car has a built in Sat Nav (I used to use Google Maps in our old car), so I programmed it with the destination and set off. As we headed North I noticed that the temperatures outside were starting to drop and we hit a pretty consistent -5°C and then not long after that the Sat Nav (let’s call her Doris) said “Traffic Jam Ahead! Recalculating Route…”

Now I’ve visited this client before and I roughly know the route, I really only need directions for the last little bit, so I was expecting to stay on the dual carriageway but Doris had other ideas to avoid the traffic jam and she told me to leave the dual carriageway. Wanting to make sure I reached the client on time I decided to do as I was told rather than risk the delay in the traffic jam. At this point the outside temperature was now down to -8°C.

I left the dual carriageway as told and over the next few minutes the quality of the roads deteriorated to narrower and untreated single track roads. Doris was insistent that this route would avoid the traffic jam and I would still make my destination on time. I have to say at this point I wasn’t convinced and had visions of ending up sliding off the road into a ditch. The roads got narrower and more slippery and progress was slow as I made sure that I could maintain control of the car on slippery roads. After about 20 minutes Doris told me to rejoin the dual carriageway and we were back on roads that had seen a gritter in the last few hours.

I made the meeting on time and it went well. On the way home Doris was back on duty and again she decided on a slightly unconventional route back to the dual carriageway (and different to the one she’d taken me on earlier in the day). Once I was on familiar territory I turned her off.

I think the moral of the story is that I need to look at Doris’s options because I’m pretty sure that there are ways to avoid being taken on unclassified roads. If this had been the middle of summer it wouldn’t have been a problems but untreated narrow country roads that you’re not familiar with are no fun in winter with ice and frost!

A little bit of housekeeping. I have now turned on paid subscriptions and if you were a free subscriber at the point this happened you now have a free “paid” subscription for life, you won’t be charged for this.

Not One of the Fifty

So last week was the 50th of 50. I won’t lie I feel a certain sense of achievement in having done what I set out to and as promised here’s what I’ve decided in terms of what happens next. Life After Fifty.

I’m going to continue, I was easily persuaded. However there will be some changes. I don’t think I necessarily have enough 50 Things post ideas left to do that indefinitely but there are still a few that I haven’t told. I did love all of the suggestions as to things I might do and if I had enough time would do all of them, but sadly I don’t. This takes a little bit of time each week to sit and write, probably when I should be doing something that is paying the bills and I enjoy doing it.

What I do love though is that each week I write about one thing. Whether that’s about music or Action Man™ or anything else for that matter. I write about one thing. So that’s what I’m going to continue doing. Each week I’ll write about one thing that’s inspired me from the ideas that you all gave me or is something from my 50 years (soon to be 51). It might be a book I read or had a big influence on my life, it might be about the garden, who knows what will come next! I’ll try and keep to the same routine, but I might take the odd week here and there for holidays and stuff if I don’t bank posts up, so you shouldn’t find me in your inbox any more frequently than you do already.

Of course if you don’t like the sound of this please feel free to hit the unsubscribe button at the bottom of this email. I’ll be sorry to see you go, but I understand if this isn’t what you signed up for and no hard feelings.

Now I’m also going to make some other changes. I’m not using anywhere near the potential that Substack offers, so I want to up my game a bit. Starting somewhen between when this post goes out and before the next one after that, I’m going to turn on paid subscriptions and the chat feature. I don’t yet know quite what I’m going to do with the chat yet and initially there will be no difference between being a paid subscriber and a free subscriber. I’m also going to make everyone who is subscribed at that point a free paid subscriber for life (unless you unsubscribe at a later date). So if you’re one of the people who reads this newsletter by following the Twitter or other link but isn’t subscribed now’s a good time to hit the subscription button. Ultimately I will be doing some things for paid subscribers only but not quite yet. Should you not wish to be a paid subscriber (even a free for life one) then let me know. It might sound counterintuitive to do this but loyalty has its rewards and you can always buy me a coffee here.

Away from the newsletter I’m thinking about using my blog more. Perhaps as more of a status update or more immediate news. I haven’t quite thought this through. You can also subscribe there (if you really want an overload of me in your inbox) or use an RSS reader or just stop by now and again. I’m thinking of this more as a replacement for Twitter unless by some miracle that’s rescued by someone sensible, which seems increasingly unlikely.

So that’s it. I hope you’ll stick around but if not thanks for joining me this far. Any questions then just leave a comment or simply reply to the email that delivered this newsletter and I’ll get back to you.

50 of 50

So we’ve reached the “end” 50 posts from 50 years. If you’ve been here from the begining or joined in at any point over the last 50 weeks, thanks for reading. I really do appreciate you taking the time to read the words that I’ve been writing. I hope that you’ve enjoyed it and that it’s bought you some enjoyment.

I’m going to send out a separate post in the next week or so about what I’m thinking of doing next but in the meantime on with the show!

Growing up we used to have a regular visit from a travelling fairground which would set up near us once a year for a few days before moving on to the next location. We didn’t go every time they came but I do remember one particular visit. It might possibly have been the first time that I was taken / allowed to go, probably by virtue of being considered to be old enough.

My memories are snatches of the different rides and attractions. From having a go at trying to shoot a target with an air-rifle to trying to win a goldfish in a plastic bag by bouncing a ping-pong ball into a glass bowl. Looking back these seems a bit barbaric as I’m sure the fish would be much happier in the bowls and I wonder whether this is still a feature of fairgrounds today?

By the time we’d tried some of the static attractions it was time to try some of the rides. I must have still be quite young as I do remember being too short to go on some of the rides that my older friends were allowed on. One of the exceptions to this was the ghost train. At the time I don’t think I had a concept of what this was, other than it was supposed to be scary; that I didn’t want to really go on it and it took a lot of persuasion to get me into the car that you rode in.

I remember it being a bumpy, jerky ride and with adult hindsight what was obviously puffs of air, sprays of water and strands of cotton wool and other things designed to give you the chills along with clearly past their best mannequins and dolls in all manner of different “scary” poses with fake blood and gore, along with the sudden changes of direction to make you think that you were going to run into one of them. The thing that scared me the most and I do remember vividly though is when we rounded one corner in the dark and up ahead we could see another car with people in it coming straight towards us on a collision course.

As we barreled towards one another I distinctly remember thinking that this was how it was going to end, until of course at the last minute we made a sharp turn away from our reflections in a mirror. The combination of poor lighting and the build up really did make for a scary experience.

I suppose that the scary experience I get now looking in the mirror probably isn’t quite the same thing, but that is a memory that sticks with me to this day. It’s odd that it does because it’s such a minor thing from 50 years. I also remember from years later when we went on trips with our youth club to Thorpe Park (somewhat different now to how it was then), that the Ghost House wasn’t nearly as scary to me as it was to some of my friends.

Thanks for reading.

49 of 50

There’s just one more of the original FiftyfromFifty to come after this one and for me this has been a bit of a nostalgia trip. I’ve tried to keep most of the posts positive and avoid any sense of weltschmerz, there are of course exceptions that prove the rule in the archive of posts. It’s also worth noting that all the posts are more memoir rather than diary, by which I mean they are my recollections of the time and not something that I have taken from a verbatim first hand account written at the time.

I’m pretty sure that my memory is reasonably reliable – at the moment at least. But having said that I had a long list of possible things to write about and some I definitely remember better than others and I’ve tended to stick to the ones that I am more certain of. For example I have memories of flying kites on the Downs and hunting for tadpoles in local streams. I know these things happened, I’m sure of them and even to a certain extent who else was there but I’m not sure enough to write coherently about the adventures.

They are happy memories and I feel blessed to be able to talk about such things where many people don’t have the same feelings about their time growing up.

I’ve also spent a lot of time going through old photographs this year, digitising some of them as I went. Some of them come from a time when I was too young to remember what was going on or why the photograph had been taken. Some I’ve been able to make a guess at though.

For example the image above definitely shows my Dad (in the apron) and my Uncle. They’re in my Grandad’s butchers shop. Beyond that my guess that the baby is either me or more likely my cousin and this is a christening or a christening tea afterwards. I probably wasn’t born when this was taken or even if the baby is me too young to remember it, but it does bring back happy memories of three significant people from my childhood and most of my adult life.

While I’m happy to share these pictures and my surmises about what is happening I can’t do so with any large degree of confidence and make a post about them, so I tend to err away from them. So although I have a nice photo I don’t necessarily have the memory to go with it or similarly I’ll have good memories and no photos.

Memory is a fickle thing.

Thanks for reading.

48 of 50

Wishing you all a very happy New Year, and welcoming new subscribers who’ve signed up over the last couple of weeks.

It’s that time of year when some of us start making promises that we might or might not keep. The New Year’s Resolution seems to me to be the kind of promise that is just made to be broken after a bit. For years I made them, often they were similar each year – lose weight, get fit, etc., etc., – but more frequently they would fail at some point, quietly forgotten about until January 1st the following year.

I haven’t made any New Year’s resolutions for over ten years. What’s the point? You can make a change at any time. I don’t think doing it on the first day of the year means that you are any more likely to succeed than making it at any other time. If anything my experience says you’re more likely to be successful if you make the decision when it’s right for you.

As you’ll know if you’ve read a few of these posts you’ll know I like to read, and I always like to read more if I can. That said I found having a target of reading X number of books a year to almost be a barrier to reading that many books. So a few years ago I set my target to just read one book and low and behold I read more books in that year than I’d ever read in any previous year and I’ve been pretty consistent. Even in a year when I’ve had a lot going on like this year I’ve still managed to read 80 books.

I’m not saying that this would work for everything, but if your aim is to do lots of something you only achieve that by doing it once and repeating it lots of times. Lose weight – well you need to lose one kilo and then repeat – admittedly that’s an oversimplification because ultimately your diet and exercise will also play a part in whether you can, and how fast you’ll lose that weight.

Over the years I’ve seen more people including myself fail at achieving a personal change when they set out to do than if they set out to do it at any other time of the year and I think this is because we’ve been conditioned to say that we are going to undertake x, y, z thing as a New Years Resolution when ultimately our heart isn’t in it, rather than achieve the exact same thing by doing it another time when we’re up for it.

What do you think – have you succeeded with your New Year’s Resolutions in the past and have you made any this year? Let me know in the comments, and thanks for reading.

We’re two posts away from the mythical Fifty, and I’m still thinking about what happens next. I’ll be writing more about it in due course in a separate not one of the fifty post.

47 of 50

This year has been one of parallels to my younger self, not all of them have been particularly pleasant e.g. the aggression of Russia in Ukraine compared to the Cold War of my childhood, but others have been a little more whimsical.

As a kid the majority of the heating in our house came from an open fire in the winter, on which logs and coal were the main sources of fuel. Although it was pretty good at heating the whole house there were parts it didn’t reach. This included our beds. For these we had plenty of blankets and quilts and when things got really cold there was the humble hot water bottle. These were later replaced by central heating where bedrooms were heated and supplemental heating wasn’t required.

As an adult I don’t think I’ve owned a hot water bottle until now. With the rising cost of energy we’ve made a concerted effort to use less energy including turning our heating down / off. To make up for this we’ve gone back to using hot water bottles at night, purchasing them at the little village hardware store for around £5 each.

In the last week temperatures have dropped, we reached -6°C on a couple of nights and rarely got above 4°C during the day, but there’s something quite comforting having a sack of warmth on or next to your feet, and which stays warm for most of the night.

I can’t help but marvel at how a rubber bladder of hot water can keep you warm in the way it does and I had completely forgotten this. I do remember from my childhood the rubber failing on occasion and waking in the night to find yourself a little damp, but so far this hasn’t happened to us and as our bottles are relatively new hopefully won’t anytime soon.

Sometimes the old solutions are still the best.

Thanks for reading.

46 of 50

Christmas.

It means different things to all of us, and over the years these things change. I doubt very much if anyone’s Christmas remains the same from childhood to adulthood even if only the roles change as we get older. That said I suspect we each have little traditions that we do at this time of year, even if you’re not someone who celebrates this festival.

Some of these might date back to childhood and have followed us all the way through to adulthood, others might be more recent. For many years I’ve read Dicken’s Christmas Carol or one of his other Christmas stories in the run up to Christmas itself.

There are also a few that stopped or changed when a particular relative passed away or became unable to do them. My Grandma always used to make our Christmas puddings (plus Brandy Butter and Rum Butter). She had her own recipe for the pudding, and would batch make them often so that there would be one for different members of the family. This then fell to my Mum and ultimately to me. I know that the recipes are very different, even if I couldn’t tell you exactly how.

I think this is also true of other times of the year or for certain things. They’ll be a goto family member for certain things in many families or a particular tradesman who’s always used for something. Until recently we had a goto gasman who did our boiler services etc. When he decided to retire we had to find someone else. With many of these types of things there’s an element of trust – that they’ll do good work, won’t overcharge, etc, etc,. Often though it’s a recommendation from friends or family in terms of who they use.

This year having recently moved it seems like we’ll be having some slightly new traditions or variations on a theme. I don’t think that we’ll have properly settled into Christmas in our new home this year and we’ll be having a very quiet celebration. We have found all of our decorations amongst the myriad of boxes that we still haven’t managed to unpack, and we have a tree and limited other decorations.

So what if anything are your traditions? Let me know in the comments.

Thanks for reading.

45 of 50

Before I get started with this week’s post there is a hangover from last week. When I was writing about my Auntie Matt I was sure that I had a photograph of her and I intended to include it with the post. By try as I might I couldn’t find it before the post went out. Then randomly I opened an envelope and it was in there with a whole host of other photos that I’d forgotten about. So I’ve added a scan of that photo at the end of this week’s post. Speaking of which…

I’ve mentioned before about Collecting Books and the Stephen King novels that I own. In the last week or so I picked an old Stephen King novel off of my shelves to reread. I say reread but really it’s been 30+ years since I’ve read this book and although I knew the general premise I soon discovered that I had forgotten most of the story. The book is ‘Salem’s Lot.

I mention this for a couple of reasons. Firstly this book is the same age as me, and secondly it is one of the only stories to have directly given me nightmares.

I first read it in my middle teenage years, having read some of King’s later novels before it, most notably It and Christine. I guess at the time I’d gotten a taste for his books and was hoovering up every one that I could find.

I don’t remember the nightmare now, but I do remember the feeling of it and waking in a sweat having just escaped or perhaps succumbed to the blood sucking residents of the small town of Jerusalem’s Lot.

Perhaps you’re wondering then if the book had such an effect on me all those years ago, would it now? I did; and then I figured that I had my grown man pants now, so surely not. Right? Right??!!??

Well, although I do have my grown man pants, I also have my falling asleep while reading jacket too. Books these days take me a lot longer to read than they used to as the old man nap gene kicks in after a couple of pages and pretty soon I’m doing the nodding dog and then I’m gone. Asleep.

It took me a while to get through the book and so on this reread, no nightmares. I did find the book just as creepy and scary as I did all those years ago and I still rate it as one of the best horror novels I’ve ever read but no nightmares.

Thanks for reading.

44 of 50

The temperatures have started to drop this week and I’ve been wearing a hat and gloves on my early morning dog walks. For me this is most likely to be a wool or insulated beanie hat if it’s dry and a baseball cap if it’s raining. I wear the baseball cap because it means I can turn my head with my hood up and the peak of the cap pushes the hood around so that I can see and don’t have to pull the hood to one side. Great for crossing roads and general visibility. My gloves are a bit of a mixture, I had some of those posh ones that meant I could still use my phone with them on but I can’t find those since we moved so I’m using whatever comes to hand.

I’m reminded of my childhood too and my Great Auntie Matt. She was a knitter and for Christmas each year she would knit me a combination of hat, gloves and a scarf from the leftover wool she had from whatever projects she’d been working on that year. This meant that I could end up with a kaleidoscope set of protection against the cold. The gloves might be one colour or they might be any mixture up to having all the fingers and thumbs different colours, stripes were not uncommon.

These gifts were a bonus for me as they often came at the point where the set from the previous year were wearing out or had been misplaced. I used to do a paper-round, so whatever the colour the gloves started out as they would always end up blackened by newsprint.

I can picture my Auntie Matt in her little bungalow knitting away. She used to stay up late watching her black and white television, she particularly enjoyed the snooker (despite the obvious impediment) but would rebuff any attempts to encourage her to buy a colour set. She lived there with a succession of particularly evil cats and I can remember one Christmas Day morning we spent several hours at Accident and Emergency because one of those cats had scratched her so badly that we couldn’t stop the wound bleeding.

35 years on and I miss those soft squashy Christmas parcels that kept me warm around to the next Christmas and she was knitting right up until the end.

Thanks for reading.

43 of 50

For most of my professional career I’ve been working in environmental roles of one form or another. I’ve noted changes over time in weather patterns and climate that accord with the predictions that were made back when I first started out. All those chickens are coming home to roost.

I am of course a very small fish in this pond, but I swim in it most days and like the real environment it is more polluted now than it ever has been. There used to be a few of us small fish back in the early days, and we were often branded as alarmist or thought to hold one point of view of which there were many alternatives. If you’ve followed this for any period though you’ll know that there is now consensus on this and apart from sceptics who spout a lot of nonsense, most of the world is listening. Except that it isn’t really.

Although I’ve seen changes in my time and moves to more sustainable sources of fuel and energy, the reality this is really too little too late. After the complete failure of COP27 to achieve a meaningful agreement on carbon reduction it seems likely that we’re in for catastrophic climate change. It’s likely that the poorest countries will feel it the most, but don’t think that it won’t affect you because it is likely to at some point. If you are my age or younger it will. Unless you are going to check out from your mortal coil in the next few years it will.

Should you be worried, yes probably you should be. It depresses me and although I work with some engaged and smart people, there are regular periods when I’m left thinking – “What is the point?” If the big fish can’t get their act together what hope do us small fish have?

Don’t believe the Greenwashing that COP27 is a success, it isn’t. It would have saved more CO2 emissions by not happening at all. It is a flawed and obsolete process that is little more than an exercise in countries talking about what they should be doing and then failing to agree to do anything substantive.

Apologies for the rant, but if you made it this far; thanks for reading.