Time

This weekend was move the clocks weekend. Well actually, not so much moving the clocks but moving the time on the clocks. Isn't that just ridiculous. This time of year we loose an hour. One instant it's 01:00 in the morning and the next it's 02:00. Where did that hour go? Why did that hour go? These are important questions - For goodness sake that's a whole hour of sleep I lost just then. It wouldn't matter so much except that for me that's actually about 25% of my sleep for a day, on a good day maybe 33%.

I don't really see what relevance this lose an hour here, gain an hour there has any longer. Does it really make any difference to people. Do even the farmers care nowadays? I know that this morning, on the way to work, the streets were deserted - and cynical me thought that perhaps there is a whole population out there that did not remember to move their clocks. They managed to get through Sunday without noticing and woke up on Monday a whole hour later than they should have done.

Can you imagine the scene? Rouses from bed, switches on radio and half hears the time as 08:37. Goes into kitchen, switches on television. Notices, in an absent way that it's the wrong program. Looks at clock in bottom of screen. Not quite what was expected. Looks again more carefully. Goes pale, drops egg down front of shirt. Rushes upstairs puts on clean shirt but buttons it up one button out of sync. Dashes down stairs, switches off the cat and puts the television outside for the day. Runs down road to catch bus. Waits an age and swears a lot. Bus not running to time. Why? Because this is the bus driver and so should have been at the depot over an hour ago to collect bus to arrive at this stop for 08:45.

And so it goes on, a million micro catastrophes and maybe some larger ones, all because we want to play with time. You know what? In engineering we have a saying "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!" I think that applies to our amateur efforts to manipulate time too.

Plane Silly

Well, on my transport hobby horse again. I must be getting quite boring. But this time it's air travel. The question is; how to turn a non event into something vaguely interesting. It's Monday, the first day back to work after a few days off. During those few days I got a txt from work saying that I had to be in Livingston for a 10:00am meeting this Monday. "Ah, that's short notice" I exclaim to myself - or something along those lines, during which time the swear box got a couple of pounds richer. A quick web search demonstrates that I will need to be out of bed about 4am if I take plane from Heathrow, or if it's Gatwick I can have a relatively late departure from home of about 6:15. That's feasible - I might manage to wake for that. I check the web again, Hmmm doesn't look too clever, Gatwick are remodelling the North Terminal car park - so no parking there. But, transfer from South Terminal is quick and frequent so ....I ring the wonderful Amelia, our departmental secretary. She does some magic and lo and behold a few hours later electronically booked tickets appear in my e-mail. Thus far so good. And, come Sunday I manage to work my way through BA's eCheckin and pick my seats for outbound and return flights - and its a breeze. I'm feeling happy - I've just saved myself about 30mins of tedious queuing to collect tickets.

Monday morning; 5:30. I wake. I listen - it's raining. Hard! The prospect of a quick ride on the bike looks less than pleasant.Arriving with soaking wet clobber and nowhere to dry it - not a nice prospect. I wake my wife and beg a lift to the station to try and catch 6:14 train (47 minutes to Gatwick - 6:18 train 1hr 30mins; amazing what a difference those 4 minutes can make) credit where credit is due - she is happy to give a lift to the station. Come 6:10 we still haven't left the house, the 6:14 train looks unlikely, but the weather has improved to the extent I won't get soaked. I jump into the biker gear and leap on the bike. 30 minutes later Gatwick. I even find parking for the bike. And I make the transfer from South to North Terminals as planned. It's all going swimmingly.

Security. Ah, security! It's looking a little busy. I join the merry throng. We do a very slow conga through the tapes. Many people wave clear plastic bags full of colourful cosmetics - how festive. We wind down to the booth officials. I have a very dodgy picture taken as I pass through boarding control and on towards the metal/bomb detectors. I divest myself of mostly everything, including my jacket. I pass through, I fail, I get thoroughly patted down and have my belt, watch, cufflinks and motorbike boots examined. Boots cause a raised eyebrow, I explain that I'm not a goth and my bike is parked at the South Terminal - hence, also, the rather heavy jacket. I pass on through. Loads of time left, I stroll rather than rush to the boarding gate. I stroll rather rush onto the plane. I sit down. I relax. I look at my watch - 15 minutes to take off...... 5 minutes to take off .....2 minutes to take off. Announcement from captain - 'Sorry our plane is disintegrating as we sit here I have decided to delay take off until some engineers can be found to stick it back together'. Engineers arrive with parts, ETD is now 9:15 rather than 8:10. ...... I look at my watch 9:00 ...... 9:10. Another announcement from our esteemed captain - another delay, maybe the glue hadn't quite set or the part couldn't quite be hammered into place. Another hour sat here by the terminal. 10:15 - the captain announces we're OK to depart. Ah, only 2 hours late for the meeting then. Another delay, I would have decamped the plane.

Some hours and a meeting later, and now - here I sit in Edinburgh airport. As I type this, ominous announcements over the tannoy declare "Your attention please! The fire alarm has been activated in another area. Please remain where you are and await further announcements." I await the announcement that says "PANIC!!!!" At last boarding is called and we take our allotted seats. After a mere 1 hour extra delay, passenger missing error, we can depart - homeward bound at last!

Full Circle

Well, another month, another entry

Today is the first day back at the new office. Yes it sounds strange, but since I have been with this company, about 7.5 years now. During that time we've moved offices several times. I started in the West End office, this is a mixed blessing. The location - good restaurants, high tech shops and a fair mix of clothes, paper, furniture and other odds and sods means that any purchasing needs are catered for. And the proximity to Soho, the cinemas and theatre land and the nether world means that if you can't find something to occupy yourself for entertainment then your needs are probably beyond the legal norm.

The West End office itself, by way of contrast, is probably some of the worst office space available. Yes, it looks OK, but the aircon doesn't work, it has limited space and the lift has an irritating tendency to deposit visitor at floor 2 and 3/4. Since Harry Potter and his Hogwarts colleagues are sadly missing this means a call to the lift engineer or the firebrigade to get the poor souls out.

Anyway, this was my office home for the first few years. Then we took a lease on some property on the East End - Brick Lane. A disused sweat shop - aka clothing factory. The sort of place that made me feel as if I'd spontaneously flown a few thousand miles south to Bangladesh. 20 minutes on the tube from Charing Cross and it's a whole new world. Same weather, completely different place, new sights, sounds, smells and ambience. This is the cultural centre of the Bangla community in London. Curry houses line the street. A radical change from the leather shops that used to be the mainstay of business there when I lived in Hampstead (as a lodger.I couldn't afford a house there!). So, what with curry houses, beigel shops (a legacy of the Jewish history of Brick Lane), Spitalfields market and Noodle King up the road your culinary tastes are generally well catered for. Let's just hope curry is what you want. Just recently the City has been encroaching. New office blocks around Spitalfields and a whole gentrification of the area. Now 'Meejaa' competes with curry and sari shops for space. The side streets are shifting emphasis from seedy down at heel shops to wide expanses of glass fronted offices which look in on Mac laden desks. And yes, the flat prices are rising to match the new wealth.

Then Easynet had a reverse merger with another company, and for a while my offices were several in Chertsey. The back end of no-where and a nightmare to get to, and once you were there you wondered why you'd bothered. Still the offces were good ......... Yawn, ZZzzzzz.

And so back to Brick Lane, and then back to Whitfield St (9 months - a pregnant pause I suppose) and now back to Brick Lane. Full circle again and again.

On the rails

I am saddened to report that the dear old bike has had to go to hospital. Shortly before Christmas it was due it's MoT and Road Tax. No big deal, needs a new tyre on the front just to be sure, but part from that it should be fine. How wrong can one be. I gave it a quick once over with the intention that on the Monday I'd ride to work, nip in to the local Watford Tyres en route and get both tyre and MoT sorted. Errr no.. the bike would not start, I could not hear the fuel pump start, there was total silence. Maybe flat battery? Nope - headlight shining bright enough to blind. Get suspicious, jiggle wire coming down from handlebar - pump springs to life. Release wire, pump stops. Turn handlebar left and right, pump starts, pump stops. Damn. I know what that means - a broken wire. Go back inside house, dump biker gear, emerge as alter ego - commuter man!

And that's who I've been ever since - weekly train pass and gently trying to sort getting bike to garage. Not that simple - RAC doesn't cover me at home, it won't fit into the back of the SAAB. I feel a bit of a cheat wheeling it down the high street and pretending that I arrived there and 'it just broke down .... honest guv!'.

So Christmas comes and goes - the bike sits outside the house. Mind you, I'm not going to work over Chirstmas so no big deal. I take a look at the wiring but stripping the insulation from the loom to find the break in the rain and wind is unappealing.

I take the train. First thing that surprises is the cost - ye gods, how much? But I only want to go to London. For less than that I can get a return to Madrid by plane! Well maybe not ... it'll cost me more than the flight to get to the airport. Still a stranded biker and his cash are readily parted and at least I'll have a warm seat. Wrong again! Seats are a rare commodity and have usually been bagged by people earlier than me on the line. Even when, on odd days, I do get a seat I find myself next to some immense man mountain who occupies more than his fair share of the padded real estate.

Of course trains run to a regular timetable. This is true sometimes. The rule is that if you are late to the station then the trains run on time. If you arrive in good time for the train then it is delayed or cancelled. I have yet to work out how they know whether I am going to be late or early - and how they could possibly schedule the trains to take advantage of my random arrivals, but somehow they do.

Every week I have to buy a new weekly travelcard. This is quite a good idea, not only does it prevent me incurring a fine for travelling without paying, but it also acts as an underground pass as well. I like the underground. You get to have close encounters with people you would never meet intimately otherwise. The tube train drivers seem to delight in attempting either a GT start from the lights with 10,000 close packed souls on board, or discovering that they have mistimed the braking as they arrive at the next station and they are forced to do an emergency stop to prevent the train running on out of the station. These maneuvers invariably result in a collision with some other unfortunate as they too become detached from whatever support they had been clinging to.

As we arrive in Goodge St station the entire train empties. I'm not sure why. Why is it not Leicester Square or Tottenham Court Road that attracts the masses. Why Goodge St? Anyway, a mad rush for the 4 lifts ensues. There is only ever one of them down, the other 3 are going up. How does that work? Needless to say, the outrush from both the northbound and the southbound trains will not fit a single lift. I take the stairs. 186 steps later I emerge - my heart is doing about 130 beats per minute and my throat is dry and a slim girl walks nonchalantly past as I gasp for air. Damn! I'm on the rails!

Aici zace un om .....

Well hello again dear reader(s) - my boundless optimism has considered the possibility that there may be more than one.

So it's a new year. So what? One day it was 2006, the next it's 2007. And this is supposed to change everything? I don't think so. The fish in the tank can barely tell one day from the next. The cats schedule their feeds twice a day, so maybe they have some concept of time. But we, the human race, homo sapiens (spot the oxymoron), think that the transition from one year to the next is a time of renewal. Why should it be, and why should it be this arbitrary point in the calendar. I mean, for example, the winter solstice has some meaning in astronomical and astrological terms - but what's 2 or 3 days later mean? What does 9 or 10 days later mean? Just arbitrary points in a time continuum - it's like that faux invalid, Andy, in the 'Little Britain' series had stood up at some distant point in the past and said 'I want that one!' but Lou wasn't there to say 'Are you sure?'

Anyway, I'm off topic. I'm also off paint. Ugh .... people do this for a living. Well I can understand that, I suppose. At least they get paid for it. But as a hobby? No, no, no, NO!!! So I have been painting the hall for the last couple of weekends on and off. We have chosen a calm mix of magnolia and 'biscuit' - roughly digestive biscuit colour rather than chocolate or pink iced biscuit colour. This is, in fact, probably better than the mix of aubergine, green and yellow we had previously - at least it doesn't challenge the more conservatively minded fiends (freudian slip) we have.

Decorating seems to consist mainly of preparation; sanding, filling, more sanding, washing, laying the masking tape so you don't accidentally paint the carpet, choosing colours, trying to get the ladder into position, and then tidying up - rinsing brushes in smelly white spirits, endlessly rinsing the roller to clear the paint blah, blah bleugh.

Somewhere in this cycle of prep and tidying comes the actual painting bit. This would be quite easy if the area awaiting paint was a simple flat surface, but it isn't. Of course it isn't, you stupid fool! If it was then you could do the whole lot in a single day and done with it. No, there are corners, pipes, door frames, doors, coving, dado rails, skirting boards, banisters, and even a moulded plaster arch surround. All of these variations on the theme of 'flat' has to be coped with. And each takes time - extra time, lots of extra time!

Oh there are short cuts. Use a 'one coat' paint? Oh hahahahaha! One coat, yes if the previous paint happened to be the same colour, or very close, to the one you are applying now. 'Oh yes we improved our hall radically - we changed from a pale cream to magnolia - it made all the difference.' Errr no! You could probably have gotten the same effect by not smoking 40 a day in your house for the last 20 years and washing the walls! Anyway, for those who think you can just apply a coat of 'one coat' paint and cover a completely different colour - you can't. Undercoat and 2 coats of the 'one coat' are required for a decent finish.

So enough on painting and decorating - it will be the death of me.