Getting ready for the weekend

• Personal mobile phone fully charged? Check!
• Podcast mobile phone fully charged? Check!
• Videocamera batteries fully charged? Check!
• Digitial still cameras (2) batteries fully charged? Check!
• Spare batteries for digital still camera (1)? Check!
• Portable stereo mp3 recorder batteries fully charged? Check!
• Spare batteries for mp3 recorder? Check!
• Condenser microphone (for mp3 recorder) battery fully charged? Check!
• Spare battery for condenser microphone? Check!
• ID? Check!
• Cash? Check!
• Plastic? Check!
• T-Shirts (boxful, maybe 100 of them)? Check!

As you can tell from this checklist, we’re gearing up for something *very* special.

We are preparing for a weekend that promises to be absolutely brilliant. This weekend it is the Cornbury Music Festival. Yippee!

Somehow I’ve managed to wangle us (us in the name of our audio production, This Reality Podcast) full press accreditation and a pair of go anywhere/backstage passes for the weekend.

Forty-four bands appearing on 3 stages over 2 days.

And we can mingle with them all!

I’ve lobbed in a speculative request for a one-to-one interview with Jackson Browne. We’ll do other interviews on an ad hoc basis.

And the public, of course; we shall be interviewing them too.

Last year we camped at Cornbury. This year we’re going to try the ‘day visitor’ experience.

Camping at Cornbury was a piece of cake and a very pleasurable experience, but as we live so close, we’ve decided to come home to recharge our batteries – and the batteries of some of our electrical items.

Not only am I looking forward to a weekend full of music, I’m also looking forward to meeting a bunch of interesting people and having the full-on ‘festival’ experience.

If you’re at a loose end on Saturday or Sunday, why don’t you come up to the village of Charlbury, Oxfordshire and get yourself a bunch of musical listening? Day tickets are an unbelievably affordable £55 each – and under 12s go free.

Testing times

Tom’s times for the Ascott-under-Wychwood British Eventing Horse Trials are:

15.16: Dressage
17.43: Show-jumping
18.31: Cross-country

If he Show-jumps like he did on Sunday, we’ll have lots of issues and a swift elimination.

If he Show-jumps like he did on Wednesday, we’ll have a nice, relaxed double-clear and then we’ll get to play games on the cross-country course.

I wonder on which side the coin will fall in the morning.

OMG I am turning in to my wife!

There’s a strange smell around here; it is most peculiar.

It is lunchtime and I’ve just had breakfast. That’s nothing to do with being lazy – I was up at 6.30 and working from 7.15; instead it is everything to do with being too busy to stop and eat.

Except now I have – stopped, and am eating.

And the television is on, and therein lies the thought behind the post title.

Soph loves to have the television on when we’re sitting on the couch eating, and I suppose I’ve got in to the same habit.

I’m watching this year’s Badminton Horse Trials.

Yes, I know it happened weeks ago, but I can appreciate the skill of the horses and riders in all three phases, without seeing the Event as a real-time competition. Besides, I know a significant number of the competitors.

A mug of tea, a bowl of cereal and a Pringles sandwich, that’s what I’m having for brunch.

And Badminton Horse Trials, obv.

This evening Soph’s going out with Pigeon Girl, so I’ll be doing my own thing for tea, too.

Tom saw the Vet yesterday afternoon; I wanted a professional opinion on some small lumps that have come up on his saddle-patch. The good news is that they’re nothing to worry about, probably just a kind of sweat rash; we have remedial treatment to make them go away.

I’ve just had a phone call from Vodafone.

Because I’ve been on contract with Vodafone for so long, I am now, apparently, a Gold Customer. This means that they’ll give me a new contract for 24 months, upgrade my tariff, knock £10/month off the contract price and will give me… free of charge… a new handset…

OF MY CHOICE!

My brand spanking new Nexus One is being delivered tomorrow.

FREE OF CHARGE!

Woot!

Anyway, because I am a Gold Customer, I can offer one person a discounted PAYG deal; 300 minutes to any network and unlimited texts for £10/month.

I am probably going to offer this to the yard. Just yesterday Hayley was moaning about how expensive the yard PAYG phone is.

I was in the yard office yesterday, trying to come up with a reason for a slow PC. It took a minute to identify the cause and ten minutes to fix, but while I was there I noticed how slow their internet is, so I’ve been digging in to that.

It turns out that their local exchange is not ADSL+ capable. This means that no telephone subscriber in the village – or any neighbouring villages that also connect to the same local exchange – can have broadband.

Isn’t it funny what we take for granted?

I discovered that the office PC at the yard is connected to the world via an ADSL line that delivers 1Mb/s.

The ISP that the yard uses is charging them £17.99/month for a 1Mb/s service, with a 5Mb ‘fair use’ download cap. The ISP throws in free hosting of a very small website.

When you look at the service level and the cost, that’s a pretty shit deal really, isn’t it?

Have I mentioned that I’m getting a brand new Nexus One tomorrow?

Free of charge?

What can I say? It’s been months!

I have no excuse for you.

My lack of blogging is inspired purely by sloth and apathy to the art of writing.

Indeed, the art of doing anything that doesn’t involve sleeping and eating has been a bit of a stretch over the past couple of months.

I have received a letter from Aber Uni about my ‘pace of progress’ or lack thereof.

I have received 4 missed calls and a voicemail from my gym asking if I’m ok.

I now have shares in Dominos Pizza and Costa.

OK, I don’t, but I should!

And as for the Reading List – well.  It continues to grow.  But I can’t be arsed to add the books that I’ve read to it.

Mainly because I’ve forgotten.

I have italicised those books I started reading and gave up on, or didn’t even start reading and gave up on.

I did finish the ‘Depression’ book by Tim Cantopher.  Very interesting indeed.

I have read the Paul McKenna thin-making one too.

When I’m eating now I think ‘I should be eating this much more slowly’ and ‘I’m full so I should stop eating now’.

Thinking, my friends, is not the same as doing!

I have an arse the size of Canada.

I’m fine about this though.

Well, maybe ‘fine’ is a bit strong.  If I were to draw a picture of myself, it would be similar to an image of the Tasmanian Devil cartoon when he goes into mental mode and spins all over the place.

Because I feel as though, even though I tend to spend my evenings doing bugger all, that I’m constantly trying to keep up with myself.

That probably makes sense only to me.  And it sounded better in my head.

I need to have my brain scraped.

There’s so much clutter up there that it’s pushing out the stuff that I need to get by.

On the plus side, my fingernails are less bitten lately.

My thumbs and thumbnails, however, have had the shit chewed out of them today.

It’s completely unconscious.  Until the thumb starts to hurt and bleed.  Then I berate myself and hark back to a few moments before when the nail and thumb were intact.

Then I spend far too much time looking at said thumb and urging the skin to grow back more quickly, so that it doesn’t hurt anymore. And doesn’t look like I’ve chewed it.

It’s not nice, is it?

Reading this you’d think I am not happy.

That’s the weird thing, I’m pretty happy at the moment.  Certainly, when the lights came back on (i.e. the sun graced us with it’s presence) a couple of weeks ago, I was a different person to the one who has spent the last few months moping around and wondering what the fuck is wrong with her.

I had a gloomy day on Friday.

But I blame that on a lack of sleep and one glass of red wine with a meal.

I should just not drink.  And sleep more.

Blimey, if I slept any more than I do, I wouldn’t hold a full-time job down!

I haven’t killed any members of the public recently, or even wanted to.  This is a very positive thing, I think you’ll agree.

I have had a couple of job interviews, both unsuccessful, and applied for a few jobs that I’ve not heard anything from.  My lovely colleagues have expressed a certain amount of gladness that I’ve not got the jobs I’ve been interviewed for, because they love me so.

Well, I am very lovely, of course.

And one wise colleague has told me to stop wasting my time applying for jobs and stay with them, and spend the time concentrating on my studies instead.  This may seem like ’stating the obvious’ to some, but I needed to be told.

She also said that I try to do too much at once.  Bless her.  She should follow me home when I try to do nothing at all.

But in a way, I think she’s right.  I want everything and I want it now.  And if I don’t get it right away, I keep it in the background and move onto the next thing that I want.  Adding another ball to the many that I’m throwing around in the air, in the vain hope that I’ll be able to catch at least one of them at some point.

Here’s an example.  The whole book thing.

Last week I returned at least 10 books to the library.

Out of those 10 books, guess how many I had read?

None.

I had started about 3 of them.

But then the Jodi Picoult book I’d reserved came in and I thought ‘now is the time to streamline, and concentrate on something’.

So I returned the 10 books and 3 dvds I’d taken out less than a week ago.

At least 2 of those books were ex-library stock that I’d bought.

Anyway, this is a constant cycle of mine.  I see a book and think that I have to have it.  Immediately.  It sits in my house for a while.  First in the lounge, then next to my bed.  More are added to either pile.  Then one day in a fit of tidying I pack them all into a re-usable Waitrose bag and take them to work with me to be redistributed among the Oxfordshire Library Service.

One day I will realise that I will never read all of the books I think I should, or even those I want to read.  It’s just impossible.  Unless writers stop writing, or the internet stops working, or the television broadcasting service dies, I’m never going to read everything.

Why does that thought scare me?

*Chews thumb-skin until there is nothing left but a bleeding stump*

Feeling it?

We’re sitting on the couch listening to/watching a band from Soph’s youth on YouTube.

Soph’s youth, obviously, wasn’t so long ago – her being a super-young Spring chica and all.

So I told her a little tale of how old I was made to feel today.

Lunchtime.

I went in to the new guitar shop in Abingdon. They’ve only been open a few weeks. The whole place has that lovely ‘just been unwrapped’ smell that comes with all new toys/electrical goods/books/vinyl records…

You know what I mean.

Anyway, as I was browsing around, trying very hard not to fall in love with a delicious looking guitar on the back wall, a Bon Jovi song shuffled on to the iPod-plugged-in-to-an-expensive-docking-station-with-massive-external-speakers.

The lad behind the till dawdled his way over to the iPod, to see who the artist was.

‘Oh!’, he said. ‘Bon Jovi!’

‘How could you not know it’s Bon Jovi?’ I asked. And foolishly added, ‘A 1980s band who never found their way out of the ’80s’.

He looked a bit sheepish and said ‘I don’t remember them from the ’80s’.

Great. Thanks.

I paid for the two plectrums I’d picked up and legged it.

All change…

Just a few short weeks ago (what a stupid phrase that is. How can weeks be short?) I was constantly looking upwards, begging the rain to stop.

Now I’m gazing skywards, silently pleading for the dry weather to break.

The ground, in case you haven’t noticed, is as hard as concrete.

There is, as farmers and landowners will also admit, no pleasing some folk. The ground is too hard/the ground is too soft.

I can count the number of days, this year, that the ground has been ‘just right’, and I can count them on the fingers of one hand.

Tom is due to run in a BE100 (formerly ‘Pre-Novice’ – or Pre-Nervous to be more accurate), at Broadway on Saturday.

Yep, that’s why I’m moaning about the weather; I would like the ground to be ‘just right’, for the weekend.

The weather apart, the seasonal changes are making a big impact in other ways.

The hedges in the lanes are overflowing with colour and blossom, and a large number of gardens are broadcasting pleasant odours, scents that have been hidden from us, all winter.

I’m not just seeing changes in the flaura and fauna.

Wood-pigeons.

They’re everywhere.

Accompanied by their almost ever-present ‘Prr-proooo, prr-proooo’ cooing, they flutter down from the highpoints of trees, or glide in from neighbouring hedges, and perch on the post-and-rail fencing around the outdoor arena…

And scare the living daylights out of Tom.

The poor horse, he’s almost had several heart-attacks in the last few days.

We have been working – very hard – on improving our dressage score in the outdoor.

We would be heads down, deep in concentration, when suddenly a small squadron of the little darlings would zoom in, execute a barrel-roll, a triple-toe loop, a double Salko, a half-forward roll with double-twist and pike, and finish their aerobatic display with a perfectly formed Immelman, before landing in a high-speed scrabbling clutter of feathers – on top of the fencepost that Tom and I are about to pass.

Tom, being a sensitive soul, doesn’t take too kindly to this aerial activity.

His first inclination, on being startled by these feathered rats, is to leave the county – and, frankly, he’s not terribly fussy if I go with him or stay behind.

Bearing in mind that horses, by evolution, are not brave animals – in fact, their primary instinct (after eating, sleeping, drinking, pooing reproducing and weeing – and not always in that order, obv) is to get away as fast as a very fast thing driving a Ferrari on an empty motorway. Without speed cameras.

Where was I?

Oh yes, so bearing in mind that it is in their nature to run liked greased weasel-shit at the first sign of something scary, how do I persuade Tom that the feathered Douglas Bader-wannabees can be safely ignored?

I can try and work him through it, as any half-decent equestrian would helpfully suggest.

Helpfully suggest without actually offering to sit on the 17-hand, snorting, straining, sinew-popping, eye-bulging, panic-induced monster.

Believe me, I have tried working him through it.

The sheer proximity and lack of consideration of the Sopwith Pigeons makes ‘working through it’ impossible.

This morning I had an idea.

Ting!

I have a cunning plan.

Well yes, it does involve me buying a shotgun, sitting underneath the trees in the evening (feeding time!) and waiting for the flying rats to get close enough for me to introduce them to an early demise.

But at least my cunning plan has a definite strategy behind it.

What do you think?

Is Woodpigeonocide a legitimate *moral* act? Yes, I do know that it is a legal one, but is it an ethical behaviour?

Or are the ethics police going to come and get me?

That’s ‘ethics’, not ‘Essex’ which is, of course, a county between London and Thuffolk.

Don’t you just love spontaneous village life?

Weekend sunshine. Don’t you just love it? Yesterday, Izzy and I were returning from the fields after walking Naughty George, when we heard the sounds of splashing and much gaiety coming from the garden of a house belonging to some relative newcomers (like me), who lived in the village.

As we approached, we saw two of Izzy’s school friends jumping around naked, in a large inflatable paddling pool. They spotted Izzy and started shouting hello, just as one of their mothers, Julia came out from the house.

“Would Izzy like to come paddling?” she shouted to me.

“Yeh, sounds great,” I shouted back, joining her in the garden with her husband Will, and friend Amanda.

“The plan is,” continued Julia, “that the children wear themselves out in the paddling pool whilst us adults drink gin and tonic.

“Bloody civilised,” I nodded approvingly, taking my place on a sun drenched bench.

Within moments, Will had placed a large humungous gin and tonic, stacked with lime and ice in my hand. Ah, I thought. This is the life.

So for three hours, we sat under the blue sky and chatted, watched life go by, and laughed at the antics of the children in the pool.

It could have been described as idyllic if it hadn’t been for Naughty George. He broke free from his lead, peed up the side of one of the chairs and then proceeded to eat from a bowl of pasta that had been served to one of the children for supper. Even worse, whilst aforementioned sobbing child was being placated, he found the grated cheese pasta-topping and ate the lot.

“I’m really sorry,” I shouted, trying to pin Naughty George into a corner.

“No problem,” shouted Julia, “he’s probably over-excited.”

“No, you misunderstand,” I responded, “he is called Naughty George because he is actually a complete naus.”

“Yes,” mused Will, regarding Naughty George disparagingly. Then without even trying to keep up the pretence of ‘oh he’s a nice dog really‘, he added “he isn’t the most endearing of mutts.”

So finally, the sun started setting, and I thanked everyone for a lovely afternoon and set off, striding through the village, and back to my cottage …….. where, upon arriving, I realised that I had left NG tethered to a bench at Will and Julia’s house. Doh! Too many gin and tonics.

So I had to endure the ‘walk of shame‘ (which is generally characterised by a slightly wobbly gait), and traipse back through the village to retrieve mutt, and back again through the village again to get home.

All in all though, a very pleasant afternoon, made more so because of its impromptu-ness (yeh, yeh, I made that word up, but I can’t think of a better one).

So what have you been up to this weekend?

Fancy a trip to the magnificent Blenheim Palace?

So, let’s zoom back to last Saturday (yep, I have been a tardy blogger). My friend Sarah had come to stay for the weekend, and I was also desperately awaiting news about when (or if), my daughter Izzy was likely return home after being stranded in a French ski-resort because of the erupting Icelandic volcano.

After fragmented telephone conversations with Izzy’s father (who was the person who took her to France) I found out that they had managed to catch a coach to take them from the south of France to the north, but beyond that, there were no confirmed travel plans.

On top of that, some experts were predicting that the volcano could erupt for years, so there was a remote possibility that she would appear back on my doorstep at an age where she could earn a wage. Result.

Just quickly, as an aside; I have a theory that the volcano was named by someone who had a violent aversion to newsreaders. Otherwise it wouldn’t have been called Eyjafjallajokull. If that isn’t a name designed to piss someone off, I don’t know what is.

So back to Saturday (again), and Sarah and I decided to go and visit Blenheim Palace, the ancestral seat of the 11th Duke of Marlborough (one of the UK’s landed gentry), and located 30 minutes drive from Oxford.

The Duke of Marlborough actually still lives there, and for six months of the year he opens both his palace and grounds to the great unwashed……….. a gesture which seems to be the metaphorical equivalent of flipping the Royal bird to the commoners ……… ‘look what you haven’t got!’

Having said that, the palace was supposed to be a superb example of Baroque architecture, so we didn’t let the fact that we were members of the proletariat (and probably a target for the Duke’s shooting practice on a lazy Saturday afternoon), put us off.

Pic.No.2.5 Sarah and I had lunch on the terrace (who doesn’t?) and this was our view

Just in case you are interested, here are some other interesting facts about Blenheim Palace:

• The Queen commanded that the palace be built for the 1st Duke of Marlborough after he led troops to victory over France in the battle of Blenheim in the early 1700s (yep, England’s entire history seems to consist of the scrapping with the French)
• It only cost £300,000 to build the whole thing in the eighteenth century
• The palace is set in 2100 acres of land…… hang on a minute….. isn’t that most of England?
• The land on which the palace is built is still rented from the Queen to this day, and all she requires as payment is a Blenheim flag. [note to self: approach my landlord with a new proposition]
• Even though Sir Winston Churchill was born in the palace (he was the Duke of Marlborough’s nephew), in contrary to popular belief he never lived there. The palace always gets handed down from eldest son to eldest son……. and the rest of the heirs are left to face their fate.

So, if the the excitement of Blenheim Palace wasn’t enough, it would be rude not to drive to the nearby village of Bladon afterwards.

“Why?” I hear you cry.

Well, it’s because Sir Winston Churchill, Britain’s great World War II Prime Minister, is buried there because he was a direct descendant of the Marlborough family.

Did we go to the church? Damn right we did. And here’s the proof……………………