Category Archives: Ramblings

To fly or not

For the past few years, I’ve had an informal personal policy of limiting the amount of flying I do. One short-haul return flight a year.

This hasn’t previously been much of a hardship.  Up until this year, the idea of jetting off on more than one holiday hasn’t really come up.  This year, however, lots of opportunities have arisen.  We’ve already flown medium-haul to Cyprus; in July, I have booked Lufthansa to get to Munich, and now the latest opportunity is a trip to Dublin in the Autumn with the gay bellringers. (Actually, it’s been a gay year all-round, staying with gay friends in Larnaca, and the Munich trip is organised through Thingbox).

So, I’m already over-carbon-budget on flying with a medium haul flight.  Munich compounds that because you can’t fly direct to Munich from many places, and the itinerary I have ended up with involves two flights in each direction (Birmingham International to Munich via Frankfurt outward bound and via Dusseldorf on the homeward leg.)  I did consider the overland alternative to Munich, but ruled out the rail journey as a little too complicated:

  • 3 hour train Nottingham to St Pancras
  • 2h30 journey from London to Paris Gare de Nord
  • 6hr20 journey from Paris Gare de l’Est to München Hbf

You’d be looking at nine hours just on a train, with assorted complications with changing, customs, passports.  And I’m not sure it’s possible to buy a through ticket which could mean you’d be in a mess if you messed a connection.

Mind you, there’s the sleeper alternative – this Guardian article has some interesting long weekends in Europe by rail, most of which entail a sleeper service at some point.

My other alternative was considering a direct flight from EMA to Salzburg in Austria followed by a 30minute ICE train journey to Munich, but it transpired that the EMA/Salzburg service is winter only, and only on a Saturday, which wasn’t terribly convenient.

But if you think 9 hours to travel the nearly 900 miles to Munich from Nottingham is bad, trying to get to Dublin overland is worse!  The National Rail router says Nottingham to Newport (South Wales) then a five-hour long train from Newport (South Wales) to Holyhead (North Wales) – before a short ferry trip from Holyhead.  All in all, just … another nine hours on a train.

RailEasy comes up with a slightly more sane route that avoids South Wales at least by adding changes at Derby, Crewe and Chester, but still only brings it down to 7 hours.

So, for Dublin, I could

  • Drive to Holyhead and catch ferry
  • Spend an entire day and more on dreadful slow local trains
  • Fly direct from EMA, and to hell with personal flight policy
  • Not go at all.

Hmmm.

Good election broadcasts

OK, so the Lib Dems have a slot on party election broadcasts this evening, for the parts of the country that are up for election.

In London, they have this:

The rest of the country gets this:

Isn’t it amazing that the same group of residents managed to show two Lib Dem VIPs around the same estate without the two of them bumping into each other?

EDIT: hello to all the traffic coming in from Iain Dale!  My smart-aleckery aside, I do quite like the current party election broadcasts.

Using IwantSandy to remember birthdays

Right. I should send birthday cards to my friends and family but far too often, I forget. I have come up with many different strategies to try and remember. The birthdays are all in my electronic calendar, but that’s generally no good, because I don’t see them until the day itself rolls round.

So I’m trying desperate measures with IwantSandy to try and remind me. This is very much a belt and braces approach – lots and lots of reminders.

First of all, prepare a list of all the birthdays in the year. In my case, I e-mailed my super-organised mother, and she responded with all the family ones. Then I could go through my own calendar and add in my friends that she doesn’t know about.

Then I can send Sandy one humoungous email with all birthdays at once…

(NB if you’re American, you’ve probably told Sandy that Christmas is 12/25, so you will have to switch the numbers round)

remember @birthday @yearly +

* Nick Clegg 7/1
* Boss 15/1
* Mother-in-law 26/1 @family
* Best friend 15/2
* Dad 27/2 @family

… and so on all the way through the year

Then because I need a reminder before the day itself to give me a chance to buy, write and post a birthday card with any hope of it arriving in time, I have also set up an “early warning” list. It’s essentially the same list but with 4 deducted from each date

remember @birthday @yearly @earlywarning @twitter +

* Nick Clegg 3/1
* Boss 11/1
* Mother-in-law 23/1
* Best friend 11/2
* Dad 23/2

… and so on all the way through the year

Now, Sandy will email me and text me a reminder four days out for each of the birthdays.

But for a really belt and braces approach, I have also asked her to let me know on the first day of each month who’s birthday is coming up later that month

Remember January birthdays @monthlybirthdays @yearly 1st Jan

* Nick Clegg 3rd
* Boss 11th
* Mother-in-law 23rd
* Best friend early Feb

… and so on for each month.

This means that on the first day of each month, Sandy will email me with a list of everyone due to have a birthday in the next four weeks. Who knows, I might even remember to buy a whole stack of cards in advance, write them, and put them in the appropriate filing doodah in my 43 folders in my filing cabinet (43 folders still very much on @todo)

So far, each of these steps will work very well. But what do we do when appraised of a new birthday that wasn’t already in the calendar? Simple! One quick email to Sandy can update everything you need

Remember Friend’s baby (2008) 6/3 @birthday @yearly
Remember Friend’s baby (2008) 2/3 @birthday @yearly @earlywarning @twitter

Lookup March birthdays

When Sandy responds, she should tell you she’s scheduled both reminders, and give you a list of your March birthdays. To this email, you can then say

Update #3 * Friend’s baby (2008) 6th

Update #3 +* Friend’s baby (2008) 6th

NB – putting year of birth with someone’s entry can help you remember significant birthdays in the future. If they’ve only just been born, then pretty much every birthday is going to be significant for the next 21 years!

The one significant disadvantage of doing it this way is that you can get loads of rogue responses to your searches. If I now search Sandy for “Nick Clegg” he will come up on every birthday in the year because a copy of the initial email had his name along with everyone elses.

Making my own postcards

OK, that didn’t take long to convince myself. I’ve ordered a set of postcards from moo.com using these pictures:

Lord Byron’s Wallpaper

Newstead Abbey

From our Newstead Abbey trip last week

Council House Dome

Council House Dome

The inside of the domed roof over the main staircase in the Council House.

Ghandi Statue

Ghandi

Statue of Ghandi, just behind the main staircase in the Council House

Green’s Mill

Green's Mill, Sneinton, Nottingham

Picture Green’s Mill, Sneinton – I just love the greens and blues of the grass and sky in this. I’ve given consent for the picture to be used in publicity around National Mill Day or somesuch.

Sunset

Sunset

That really striking orange sunset we had a few weeks ago, seen from our street.

Postcrossing update

Time for an update on the Postcrossing website, which lets you send and receive postcards to complete strangers around the world.

I initially signed up to send five cards around the world, but it took me a few days to get started – finding and buying postcards (I’m not all that impressed with the few I got to start me off, so will have to look out for some better ones or even make my own), getting to the Post Office to buy the right sort of stamps and stock up on “Air Mail” stickers, then finding the enthusiasm, and deciding what to write – I have mostly been moaning about the weather.

Anyway, four of the first five have been sent now, and three of them received.  Those three received mean I can sign up for three more addresses and this time I got Mexico, Germany and NE, USA, which I first thought was New England, but now think is probably Nebraska. I’ll be able to post those out straightaway, having stocked up on all I need in the way of stamps and postcards!

And having had cards received means the system starts sending them to me as well, so today I received my first, from Finland with lots of pictures of snowy landscapes. Apparently there are more Finns than any other nationality on the system.

More double dactyls

Having infected all around with me finger-tapping scansion seeking, I’ve spent the last hour having fun in the comments on Kathryn’s blog – new baby-wrangling has led to thinking-time a-plenty, and she started off both G&S double dactyls, to which I have contributed…

Piraty-piloty
Freddy’s apprentic’d til
Reaching maturity
That’s what he thought.

Paradox-Ically
Birthday’s a leap year day
‘Prenticeship lasts until
After the war

(Kathryn’s Iolanthe one is much better)

…and new-baby double-dactyls, which allowed me to try a particularly vile poo-based neologism:

Crippity Crappity
Zachary Caple-san
Likes to feed slowly so
Mummy can’t type

Her patience rewarded by
Faeco-exuberance;
Mummy is left with a
Bottom to wipe

I’m quite chuffed with that one – but a more revolting poo-based one comes from this website:

Enteric Water-loo by Roger Lee Robison:

Higgledy-Piggledy
Vibrio cholerae,
Spread by excreta in
Water supplies,

Roils the intestines with
Pathogenicity;
Practice good hygiene, or
Cork it, you guys.

Same website also has one about Sisyphus, confirming to me that when I used the word “sisyphean” in a budget speech on the council, I was talking about what I thought I was. Which is always reassuring.

Rock ‘N’ Roll by Roger Lee Robison

Higgledy-Piggledy
Stone-Pusher Sisyphus
Twice cheated Death, but then
Learned who was boss:

Sentenced to Hades for
Pretereternity,
Rolled a stone uphill, just
Gathering dross.

And of course, don’t miss Rosie’s well finessed lines in the comment to the last one of these posts.

Double Dactyls II

Following on from my writing about double dactyls, two family members have come up with some suggestions:

My Mum, writing about my Dad, who is a chiropodist:

Clippety snippety
Christopher Fosterfer
Cutting the nails on our
Fingers and toes

Sorting verrucas out
Hard skin and other stuff
Chiropodially
Curing our woes

And P, who surfed a certain website and found a certain euphony in “Liberal Democrat / Mayoral Candidate” suggested:

Bibbety bobbety
Brian L Paddick an
Ex-Police Officer
Currently is

Incontrovertibly
Liberal Democrat
Mayoral Candidate
Let’s hope he wins

Poisson d’Avril II

We had brekkie in a Little Chef this morning before going on to visit friends in Ipswich and their weeks old little baby.

We were rather taken by stories this morning that later turned out to be April 1st spoofs about Daniel Craig saying that maybe Bond could be a bisexual scoundrel.  The best bits were the headlines, which were “Diamonds are for Trevor” and “Live and let bi”

I’m sure we can do better than that, can’t we readers?

Feeling old

Quick debate during the evening news which P was watching whilst I passed by.  Which of us is older in outlook?

* He can remember a time when the weatherman used to stick little see through rainclouds on a weather map; I can only remember clicky-button-to-change-picture-style weather forecasts

* I hadn’t heard of either Leona Lewis or Duffy until very recently, and he took great delight in explaining.  Bah.

Still, neither of us is as old as Nottingham’s Mr Sex.

Dr Who Double dactyl

Forget the limerick and the haiku, I have been reading today about double dactyls, an extremely structured comical verse form. A dactyl is three syllable word with the stress on the first syllable, like “blankety”.

The double dactyl verse form is 8 lines

Blankety blankety
Blankety blankety
Blankety blankety
Blankety blank

Blankety blankety
Blankety blankety
Blankety blankety
Blankety blank

But there’s more rules than that!

  • The first line has to be nonsense – hickory dickery and higgledy piggledy seem to be favourite;
  • The second line has to be someone’s name
  • One of the lines in the second stanza has to be a single word
  • The last lines of the stanzas rhyme.

The example given in UMRA, where I’ve been reading about this, was by Wendy Cope:

Higgledy-piggledy
Emily Dickinson
Liked to use dashes
Instead of full stops.

Nowadays, faced with such
Idiosyncrasy,
Critics and editors
Send for the cops.

A quick google finds a page for the form on Wikipedia, with a few elegant examples – I liked Brian Flanagan’s:

Hey-nonny, ho-nonny,
Penis Van Lesbian
Entered the bus’ness that
no biz is like.

Keen on increasing his
marketability,
he took on the stage name
of Dick Van Dyke

Further googling finds the Braden Files, with three pages of double dactyls here, here and here. So enamoured of the format is the writer that the “about” page is also in the form. Each of the examples is brilliant, many of them about figures I know nada about.  One particularly brainy one is in Latin, but of all them, my favourite is

Pitter pat, pitter pat.
Noah of Ararat
Heard the rain cease on the
Fortieth night.
Shem, Ham, and Japheth said
Antediluvian
Meteorologists
Called it just right.

It’s an extremely dense format, and the challenge in writing them for yourself is the dual problems of finding a double dactyl name, and a single dactyl word, and then putting the lot together with enough other stuff to make sense. Limericks and haiku are trivially simple by comparison.

Here’s my first attempt:

Diddledy-diddledy
Christopher Ecclestone
Famously portrayed a
Doctor named Who

Flying about with a
Relativistically
Capable copper box
Without a loo.

I’m not the first to attempt a sciffy double dactyl.  Further googling finds this wonderful discussion thread  with many further fabulous attempts – some clearly baby-steps, some extraordinarily well honed.

The sciffy one, by a poster called Badger, takes us to a galaxy far, far away

Foolishly, Ghoulishly,
Anakin Skywalker,
Took his light sabre from
Light side to Dark,

Known later as Vader,
His son fell his caper,
Paterfamilias,
Losing his spark!

Midway down the thread is a huge list of double dactyl words, culminating in the quite possibly solitary quadruple dactyl word  paradichloroaminobenzaldehyde.

Finally, the thread is taken over in style by Chris Doyle, who has had numerous verses published under various names:

Higgledy piggledy
Little Red Riding Hood
Skips to a fate that she
Doesn’t deserve.

Lying ahead is an
Anthropophagical
Wolf for whom Grandma was
Just an hors d’oeuvre.

and this one, where every possible line is a single double dactyl word:

Flappity clappity
August von Wassermann
Bacteriologist.
Germany’s best.

Extracurricular
Heterosexual.
(Overpromiscuous.)
Flunked his own test.