Silence Explained

On this the last day of the June I realised that I hadn't blogged at all this month.

My excuse is that I've been distracted by by the excitement of preparing to move house. There will eventually be much to tell about my adventures, but not until arrangements are complete, which will not be for a while.

A rare commodity

I noticed that samphire was on sale in Leicester Market today.

If only I know what to do with it, I might have bought some. Readers are invited to append their comments to this blog.

Why Thursday ?

Nearly all British elections for public office are held on Thursdays, though the votes for today's European election will not be counted until Sunday, the day on which  many other countries prefer to hold elections.

Sunday has the advantage that few people work on that day, so that it is not necessary to start voting early to cater for people voting on the way to work, or to keep polling stations open late at night for the sake of people wanting to vote after work.

I support Sundays!!

Expensive Plastic

While selecting cooked meats from a supermarket I noticed that slices of beef in plastic packets cost two pounds for 85 grams, but at the delicatessen counter beef was sold at £1-48 for 100 grams, at which price 85 g would cost £1-25.8, so the plastic wrapping costs more than 74 pence, more than a third of the total price.

Scottish Independence and the 2015 General Election

A referendum on Scottish Independence will be held later this year, but Independence, if approved, will not take effect until 2016. Meanwhile there will be a General Election in 2015.

If Scotland elects members to the 2015 Parliament, the composition of the British Government may be determined by Scottish MPs who will leave as soon as Scotland becomes independent, and the British Government that has negotiated the terms of independence may as a result fall as soon as Independence takes effect, possibly to be replaced by another government that might want to repudiate some of the terms agreed by its predecessor.

Things could get nasty.

Back Dated Compliment

The Turkish Prime Minister has tried to excuse poor safety in Turkish mines by saying that in the nineteenth century English mines were similarly dangerous. Is he offering nineteenth century England as a model for twenty-first century Turkey ?

twice neglected

Several times recently I've heard people on the television say "two times" instead of "twice". Where do they find such people ?

Defeat of a Child-Proof Bottle.

Suffering from quite a bad cold, my afflictions were increased by the struggle to open a bottle of cough medicine, so once I'd opened it I investigated the top, noticing a layer of compressible material inside. Once I'd removed that with a knife, the top behaved in the normal child friendly way.

The victory has done at least as much for my cold as the medicine.

Overspecialisation ?

Riffling through some old jottings on one of my many clip boards, I found a reference to a Professor of the Philosophy of Sport in the University of Gloucestershire.

A Web search has revealed many references, yet if there is any point in Philosophy, it is a search for generality and a scrutiny of ideas. Is 'sport' sufficiently well defined for its supposed philosophy to constitute a subject? Is the institution in Gloucestershire sufficiently broadly based to constitute a university?

A Few Minutes at a Time

I've usually been a little disorientated by losing an hour when we move the clocks forward to enter Summer Time, so I did it differently this year.

I moved my alarm clock forward an hour  on the night before the change, but also moved the alarm time forward by the same amount. Then, every day or two I moved the alarm time back a quarter of an hour or so until it was back at the original time. My inner clock was quite unperturbed, so that seems to be the way to do it.

Obsession with hot food

The deputy Prime Minister has proposed that all children in their first two years at school should be provided with a hot meal every day.

If children are to eat the meals without suffering trauma, those meals had better be enjoyable, and preferably also nourishing and filling, but why must they be hot?

Some people seem obsessed by the temperature of food and drink. "you can't eat/drink that, it's cold" they'll say trying to prevent me from drinking a beverage I've deliberately allowed to cool to a drinkable temperature.

Quite the cruellest thing anyone ever did to me was to provide me with a hot drink I didn't want.

I had a bad cold, and was consoling myself with drinks of Ribena with added slices of lemon, and had accordingly taken to work some slices of lemon and some Ribena. I made the drink with hot water, but it was at its best when it had stood for a while and absorbed lots of lemon. I left half a mug of this delicious concoction on my desk when I went to teach, thinking from time to time of the treat waiting me when I returned to my desk.

Alas, when I got back, a colleague had decided that I needed 'a hot drink', had thrown away my Ribena and the slices of lemon and replaced them with a cup of coffee.  I drink coffee only at breakfast time, and when a I have a cold, coffee gives me a headache, and I couldn't replace the discarded drink because I had no spare lemon - having intended to re-use the same slices through the day.

The sad event happened more than 25 years ago, but I still remember it vividly and recall it whenever anyone praises hot food or drink.

A delightful Circumlocultion

Sometimes I'm just irritated by by people using complicated pseudo technical language to say simple things, but the following example delighted me.

 Referring to signals that might have come from the black box of a missing air liner, an Australian Naval officer said:

"If they gain another acoustic event" What a wonderful way of saying "If they hear it again"