Category Archives: Ramblings

What to do in Paris

I wrote this two years ago for another place, but I keep pointing people to it, so I thought I’d cut’n’paste here for posterity. The original question was about a short break away. Oh, and apparently, Samaritaine is closed at the moment, so for rooftops do Montmartre and the Tour Montparnasse.

Things to do: avoid the places you’ll have to queue. Don’t bother with the Eiffel Tower, do the roof top cafe at the Samaritaine department store. Don’t do the Louvre — or at least, stick to the outside, the Jardins des Tuileries and the shopping centre under the glass pyramid. Also — a food hall is under there for cheap tasty international cuisine. For art, do the Musée d’Orsay instead.

Get a hotel in the Marais and do everything on foot — there’s loads of picturesque roads around there. See the Place des Vosges, walk as far as La Bastille and Place de la Concorde. Check out the bouqinistes, the river walkways along the Seine and Pont de L’art. Do the first few meters of the Bvd St Michel on the other side of the river — as far as the Deux Magots. There’s no real need to get on the metro or go further afield.

Bar-hop around the Marais for gay Paris life — Cafe Open on the corner of Rue St Croix de la Bretonnerie and the Rue des archives. The terrace in front of the Marronier, the, er, naughty upstairs at Quetzal si cela te branche.

Some things you can do for free: the Madeleine church inside and out, (check out how the front of the church is reflected in the front of the Assemblée Nationale on the other side of the Place de la Concorde) Samaritaine’s roof top, shopping but not buying in BHV, the walk along the Grands Boulevards with the mini arcs de triomphe, the doors with the lion carvings on the Rue vielle du temple (as featured in Dr Who City of Death), wandering around the Forum des Halles, and the outside of the Pompidou centre. Browse for haute couture in the Place Vendome. You used to be able to go around the Opera for free during the day, but I think they’ve stopped that now.

I spose these things will be old hat to you if you’ve been to Paris before… that’s when you need to get on the metro and go further afield to see some of parks a bit further out (Citroen, Buttes Caumont, Jardin du Luxembourg around the French upper house, the Sénat and the two either side of Line 1, Bois de Boulogne, Bois de Vincennes), or the Moulin Rouge or Montmartre or les Invalides, or the Rodin museum, or the Montparnasse, the highest tower block in the city, or the catacombes, or the sewer tour, or the walk from the bastille along the old canal, or the Champ de Mars, or BCBG of the 16th or the chinatown district in the north east or Père Lachaise cemetary (Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison, very moving monuments to the Nazi death camps)

… gee, I wanna live in Paris again!

EDIT 2013 – see this amazing (French language) list of places to get good views over Paris.

Busy day

A busy, but good day, today. And whilst I’ve been dashing around like thing possessed, so has P. And he’s been doing completely different things, with our paths barely crossing.

First thing, a delivery day in the Meadows area of the city. Two new deliverers joined in today, and it was very nice to see them.

I had to leave early to take some flyers about the Lib Dem petition about homophobic bullying to Nottingham Pride, so I spent an hour or so wandering round hundreds of groups asking “Want to help stamp out homophobic bullying?” There were some really interesting responses, including “I’ve already signed the petition” which is great. And some funny answers too — “My feet are already busy helping stamp out poverty, but I’ll sign the petition.” And plenty of people who didn’t want to help at all. At least, they wouldn’t take a flyer. Maybe I shouldn’t have printed the bird on it quite so big.

I spent a happy hour wandering amongst the gay totty handing out leaflets and having brief chats, and bumping into some old acquaintances who didn’t seem to recognise me. I also think I spoke briefly to Reluctant Nomad.

advertise!It was also nice to walk around the stalls at Pride. Lots of local businesses, and not just the gay ones, represented. Tents from several of our local scene bars. The city and county councils. Local FE colleges, trades union and related groups. And strangest of all, Nottingham’s brand new gay sauna — with a lifesize model dalek. I’m intrigued to say the least to know what the link is.

After that, I was gasping for coffee, so nearly drove across town to Starbucks (the horror!) when I remembered that just last week Development Control gave planning permission for a nice looking deli, the Iberian Delight, on the Radford Road, so I popped in there for a double espresso and a Pao de Deus, a sort of sweet roll thing with coconut and sugar on top. It was slightly odd — almost as if they weren’t expecting customers and didn’t know what to do with me. But the coffee was very good and so was the cake.

Back home to, erm, sort out the fish tank. P noticed we’d had a fatality last night, so I finally got around to doing tank related things that I ought to do weekly, but haven’t done since we moved here in December. I cleaned the glass, changed 1/4 of the water, netted out the dead one and flushed it. I also did some bigger things – replaced my Fluval which had almost stopped working entirely with an Elite Stingray (!), fitted a new lightbulb. It remains to be seen whether the lack of cat interest in the fish tank was because previously they couldn’t really see in…

Now I’m taking five to listen to my answerphone messages, grab a cup of tea, return calls, play with the internet (we now have a full cast for Pygmalion), update blog, etc.

Tonight I’m heading over to the reception of some University friends who have tied the knot today.

At some point I have to fit in going to the laundrette, too, so that I have clean clothes to go on holiday with since I won’t be home for over two weeks. I’m off on three very different activities before I return so packing is going to be quite an enterprise and the car will be full: a week in Windsor singing – I’ll probably be wearing shorts under my cassock. A week in Hereford at the Three Choirs, where I need fairly smart clothes. Then two days camping at a pub somewhere off the A1 for the Cix BBQ.

50 greatest films

Well, wtf happened to this post?  The WordPress editor has totally arsed it up, inserting multiple redundant strong tags that persist beyond the end of the post.  Even when I manually remove all the strong tags from the post in Textpad, the bloody thing puts them all back in when I copy the text back into the HTML editor. Grr.

Channel 4 this evening. Good list. I’ve seen 19 of them I think.

2001: A Space Odyssey

Not counting this. The videotape ran out, so I’ve only seen about half of it.

A Bout de Souffle

Saw this in Paris. Don’t think I liked it.

Aguirre, the Wrath of God – Not seen.

Alien
An old favourite. One of the first films I bought on DVD. Not sure where my Alien DVDs are now — does my brother still have them?

All About Eve

Never actually seen, but a friend has a copy I’ve threatened to borrow, after saying I liked Almodóvar’s Todo sobre mi madre.

Apartment, The
Not seen. In my list to be rented at Lovefilm. Will take forever before I get through my list.

Apocalypse Now

Never seen. Blimey, was that really Martin “Bartlett” Sheen?

Badlands
Black Narcissus
Boyz N the Hood
Brazil
Breakfast Club, The
Not seen any of these. Must ask P if knows the Breakfast Club. Apparently THE teen movie for people in their 30s. I wouldn’t know.

Cabaret

Three big musicals I know most of the words to: Cabaret. Rocky Horror. Little Shop. Maybe this time. I’ll be lucky. Maybe this time, he’ll stay…

Chinatown

City of God
Come and See

Not seen.

Dawn of the Dead

Seen as part of my Film MA. Sponsored by a butcher, who provided real offal for the gore scenes.

Donnie Darko

Saw this with P and his sister on a trip to see a Bollywood film. The film turned out to be unsubtitled, and I threw a strop, so we went to see Donnie Darko instead. I thought it was great. She wasn’t quite so thrilled.

Erin Brockovich

Only saw quite recently thanks to LoveFilm.

Fanny and Alexander -Nope.
Fight Club

Yes. Crazy film once you know the ending.

Heavenly Creatures

Yes, I own all the early Peter Jackson films after a friend enthusiastically described a scene in PJ’s awful debut film. Braindead subsequently became my favourite film, if not actually the German film Kondom des Grauens.

Hero
Ipcress File, The
King of Comedy, The

Nope.

Ladykillers, The

Oh, I must hae done? Surely?

Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India

This looked good. Will add it to the list.

Lost in Translation

Urgh. Hated this.

Manhattan

Good soundtrack.

Manhunter

To my shame, never seen, despite owning a copy.

Mulholland Drive

Craaaaazy. I have a bit of a love-hate with David Lynch. My friends all watched Twin Peaks in formative years, and have shown them to me subsequently. Part of my massive cinemagoing time in Paris included a David Lynch retrospective with many of his films. I did like Dune.

Night at the Opera – Nope.

North by Northwest

Nope. Unbelievable. This was already on my list at LF, but will see it eventually.

Pink Flamingos – Nope.

Player, The

Nope, but looked good, so will add to list.

Princess Mononoke – Nope.

Pulp Fiction
“Oh, you must see this, Alex, it’s got one scene you’ll really like.” Turned out my university housemates were talking about the anal rape scene. Hmm. Thanks, guys.

Raising Arizona – Nope.

Royal Tenenbaums, The

Wow. Saw this with friends in the cinema when it came out – in a matinee audience full of people who weren’t really getting the film. We sat there and laughed like loons throughout. Everyone else sat there in stoney silence, and occasionally made faux-whispered thorny remarks. I’m used to sitting there laughing whilst everyone else does that. Remind me to tell you about the Dario Argento version of Phantom of the Opera some day.

Scarface
Searchers, The
Secrets and Lies

Nope.

Sexy Beast

I own this one. One of those films you couldn’t quite believe and had to get so you could watch it, then show it to other people to see what they thought too.

Shawshank Redemption, The

Well, yeah. Good story too.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day

Hell, yeah.

This Sporting Life – Nope.

Three Colours Blue

Saw on BBC 2 while I was doing my A levels. Can’t really remember.

Touch of Evil – Erm, don’t know.
Trainspotting

Can’t remember when I actually saw this, but hundreds of people had the poster in our first year at university.

Walkabout – Nope.

French fantasies

Over the last few years of visiting friends who have retired to France, I have been developing my own increasingly sophisticated fantasies of moving there myself.

Don’t get me wrong, I love living in Nottingham. MORI  polls show that most of the people who live here would recommend the place to others, and that’s true of me too.  So while it’s more or less by accident that I live here (of a small set of universities that offered the course I wanted, Nottingham was the one that combined the prestige with a beautiful campus that at the time was the halfway house between city living and the life in the country I was used to) there’s plenty that keeps me here.  At Christmas, I love it when people ask for obscure CDs long after last posting rules out Amazon, and I can be pretty sure of finding it in the shops.  I love being able to buy pretty much anything I need just by getting a bus into town.  I love the theatres and the cinemas and the art galleries and museums, although I don’t go to any of them as often as I should.  I love what as a councillor I have learned to call “my district shopping centre” where I can do all of the shopping and restauranting I need when I don’t quite fancy a trek into the city centre.
But still a secret half of me is longing for life on the other side of the channel.

The fantasy has various different phases.

1) The flat in Paris

I have very fond memories of the six months or so I lived in Paris when I was a student.  All the facets of city life I enjoy at the moment I could continue.  Late-nite life in the all-night cafés.  A developed social life for gentlemen who, what’s the phrase, share a common interest in musical theatre and physical fitness.  Absolute certainty of “haut debit” internet connections.

And, compared to, ooh, say, houses in Nottingham, modest flats in the déclassé areas of Paris are actually quite affordable.

2) The former farmhouse

The second variety of the fantasy is buying up a rural idyll somewhere in the Hexagone and soaking up the isolation.  The friends I stayed with last week spent roughly in Euro what we spent in pounds for our present house.  We got a 3 bed semi in the suburbs with a medium-sized garden; they got 24 acres of farmland, a small cider orchard, anything up to 11 outbuildings in various states of disrepair, resident owls, swallows, deer, and inordinate numbers of beetles, and glorious solitude when they choose it.  On the other side, we have cable broadband and mains sewerage, and they have a septic tank they have yet to locate and four miles of telephone cable serving only their house that doesn’t seem to be a high priority for repair should someone accidentally fell a tree onto it.
Were I to follow this little fantasy, I’d settle down, buy milk and cheese from my neighbours, keep chickens and an eccentric number of cats, grow my own food, live simply, rising with the sun and going to bed early, etc. etc.

I never actually managed to grow and eat anything. This year, the beans refused to come up. Two years ago, given how many slug pellets I’d put on the tomatoes, I was chary of eating them.  The one year I did successfully grow runner beans, I forgot to pinch out the tops, so they got all straggly and unmanageable, and I got about a plateful.

And the sad fact is there are a lot of English expats in France unable to cope with living alone in the countryside ostracised by the locals whose language they’ve made little effort to learn, but unable to move back to Blighty because the differential between property prices doesn’t work so well in the other direction when your savings are exhausted.

3) Self-build

One feature of French living is that land is cheaper than in England, and more widely available.  So building the home of your dreams from scratch is a more obtainable dream.  I was hugely impressed at the ultra-sustainable housing at the Hockerton Housing Project when I visited as part of a Council report into climate change, so a frequent fantasy is of building myself a South-facing earth-sheltered dwelling that doesn’t need any heating apart from the solar hot water panels.  I’d probably grow my own food here too.
Anyway, nice fantasies, but not likely to come to fruition any time soon.  But more than enough to keep my mind occupied whilst my hands are mechanically operating a printing rig keeping the next 10,000 leaflets churning out.

Graffito


Graffito

Originally uploaded by nilexuk.

Whilst the drains were being done earlier in the year, we noticed this pencilled note on the wall under the car port – “As the grate was locked, I had to leave it (the coal) here”

When did anything in this house last burn coal? I seem to recall from the house searches that Nottingham has been a smokeless zone since 1966, but the note could refer to smokeless coal, or it could have been burnt since. There are definitely people around who burn smoking fuel in ignorance or defiance of the ban. Of course, the city — and the country — goes a different sort of smokeless next year.

The grate referred to isn’t there any more — it’s been bricked up and now the boiler vent comes out of it.

When we bought the house, much was made of the ‘electric woodburner’ that had recently been installed. The thing is terribly kitchy and makes an unbelievable racket when you turn it on. It is connected to real flue that snakes over the lounge ceiling and is boxed out through the hallway to the front door. The presence of the real flue — and almost complete absence of radiators on the ground floor — suggest there was something that burned real fuel even after the central heating was put in.

A funny thing happened on Friday night

I was driving home from work with the plan to take P straight out for dinner, as I was late, we were both starving, and neither of us particularly felt like cooking.

When I got home, there was a car blocking the entrance to my road. I live on a residential side-street just off a fairly steep principle thoroughfare. The car was right, slap-bang in the middle of my road. It had parking lights on, although kerbside, not the ones in the middle of the road.

I just managed to get around it to drive up on up the hill, but as this was a really peculiar place to leave a car, I felt riled, and decided it was worth reporting to the police as an obstruction. In Nottingham parking offences are ‘decriminalized’, which means the city council has responsibility for some parking offences, like parking in a residents’ parking scheme without a badge, or parking on double yellow lines, or parking in a bus lane during rush hour. However, for some parking offences, such as causing an obstruction, it’s still the police who are responsible. Just as well, because I don’t think we employ city council traffic wardens at 9pm on a Friday. That said, by and large, police officers are busy doing other things at 9pm on a Friday…

So, once home, I phone the non-emergency number for Nottinghamshire Police, and get through after a moderate wait. Explain the problem, and after taking details, Control asks me for the car registration number so that she can carry out a registered keeper check. I didn’t take that info down, and I’m using the house phone, not my mobile, so I can’t go down and look. Explaining all this, the officer promises to phone me back, and I trundle down the hill to get the reg plate.

Off I trundle. By now, there are several cars trying to negotiate the hazard, and a few local kids are peering in through the windows. After taking the plate, we establish the car is not running, it’s locked and secure. There is no sign of the owner, and no sign it’s been stolen. P’s thoughts that the owner was taken ill and had to leave to get help don’t really make sense either as, apart from being in a daft place, the car is perfectly parked.

Back home, I wait for the police to phone back, and eventually, after 20 minutes of waiting, I discover the phone’s not been properly on the hook, so the police won’t have been able to get through if they’ve been trying. I phone them back, and this time, there’s a much longer wait to get through. I think it got to almost half an hour of the most unbelievably cheesy hold music, along with repeats of the message that my call was important, and a voice telling me in which circumstances I should hang up and phone 999. Also, it gave me the option to try for Crimestoppers and rather more worryingly, the Terrorism Hotline, if I felt I had info for those two bodies.

Finally, I got back through to an officer, and got halfway through telling the story — an obstruction, speaking to an officer earlier, phone of the hook — when the guy interrupted and said, “Is that a Golf with the registration XX05 XXX?” Erm, yes. “Officers are on site now. Thank you for calling.”

When we walked back down the hill to head out to eat, there were indeed officers on site. They had just begun to knock on doors to see if anyone knew anything about, and I stopped to talk to them for a bit. Their working hypothesis was that the handbrake had failed and the car had rolled down the hill. That didn’t seem right either, to us, because it would have rolled a lot further, we think. But as people who live on a hill, we’re well aware of the importance of leaving the car in gear. A registered keeper check had shown that the car was registered in Milton Keynes, which wasn’t helpful in working out which door in the immediate vicinity to knock on. After a bit of canvassing, they had decided to tow the car away.

It was still there when we came back from eating an hour and half later, but was towed a little bit after that. Too much excitement for one night!

Another day

Another day.

Today, I went to the dentist at Cripps Health Centre (I need a filling. I’m slowly replacing my cheap silver fillings with invisible white ones, so the new filling will let me replace an old one on the cheap. Bright side, eh?) While I was there, I got hygiened, too.

Into town for a meeting about our next Focus leaflet, which I have to lay out whilst in Harrogate this weekend ready to print next week.

On to D&A for an eye test. I went in determined to replace my current “transition” specs for a new plain pair and some sunglasses. I have had these glasses since before I could drive, and although they go dark fine in the open air, they don’t at all the far side of a windscreen.

Had a lovely time in D&A. After a slow start where all the staff ignored me, they eventually spent over an hour helping me choose new frames, with whizzy computers to show me what they will look like, and even to calculate just how thick the milk-bottle bottoms will be, to help me decide whether I need UltraUltraThinPlusUltra lenses, or can get away with just the UltraThinPlusUltra ones. Eyes have deteriorated slightly to -8.0 in one eye and -8.5 in the other. But apparently I could now have contact lenses if I fancied the idea of plunging a giant piece of plastic directly through my tiny eye holes first thing every afternoon. Which I certainly don’t. Not when I can have sexy “Blade” frames.Back into town to sign some letters I had typed while I was at the optician. I never got to grips with the dictation machine. When it comes to long letters, I much prefer to type them myself, because I can compose sentences better when I can edit them and shift words around to improve meaning. Normally, then, I type the texts of letters, then e-mail them to our wonderful admin support workers, who top and tail them, print them on headed paper, and log them through our system that is supposed to remind me to check whether I get the answers I want. Then all I have to do is sign it, and they get them into the post.

Back to Sherwood, where I get a hair-cut (scary short, not the best cut I’ve every had) and pop into an antique/junk shop to hunt for lamps.  Unsuccessfully.
From there back home, where the new breadmaker has arrived. Of course, I can’t wait to try it out, so set it going making a wholemeal loaf. Which takes over three hours!

In the meantime, quickly through the shower to rinse hair off me.  Start of trimming my beard, and slip, and take a huge great chunk out.  Hmmm.  Shave down to goatee.  Can’t get it even.  Shave the whole lot off.  OMG.  I don’t like my face.  The beard will return.

Heat up some pasta and the remains of a bolognaise sauce from a day or two ago, eat, then hurry back into town for a group meeting ahead of Full Council on Monday when, like councils up and down the country, Nottingham City Council will set its budget for the year. We will spend eight hours or so talking about it, and the outcome will be that Labour’s budget, with a council tax rise of 4.8%, will go through. They will spend a lot of time talking about how wonderful they are. We will spend less time disagreeing (because there are less of us) and putting forward our own suggestions. Eventually, they will vote us down.

Group meetings are never short, largely because we don’t stay on topic (and I’m as bad as anyone else when it comes to distracting ourselves and allowing myself to be distracted). So, it doesn’t finish til 10pm, at which point the poor staff are tapping their feet and ready to lock up the building and get home.

Back on the bus home (I’m really getting VFM out of my bus pass today) and I can taste the bread out of the breadmaker. The loaf is a deeply peculiar shape, practically cuboid, but it’s certainly tasty. I’m a bit disappointed that the device for putting in fruit/nuts/olives at the last minute is in fact just a beep to tell you to put the additives in yourself.

I should get my car back tomorrow, just in time to drive a few people to Harrogate for conference. First, though, I will be going to work in Chesterfield by train. When I got my job, almost a year ago now, I firmly told myself I would regularly commute by rail rather than driving over every working day. Tomorrow will be the first time I take the train.

My day

Well, it started late.  The drains guys have now made the drains useable, but they didn’t come back today to fill in the hole and make good the drive.  At least we have plumbing again.

I was getting ready to leave for work when I remembered it’s my Dad’s birthday on Monday and to be sure of getting his present to him in time, I needed to get it in the post today.  So, I popped into our local district shopping centre to get a card and some wrapping paper.  Whilst I was there I remembered I still had a bunch of shirts waiting for me at the cleaners, so I picked them up, came back to the house, printed a stamp, wrapped the book, signed the card, and put it with my bags ready to take with me to work.

By this time I was starving, so I thought I’d drive to McD‘s for a spot of lunch before hitting the M1 and heading up to the office.  Whilst I was doing that I remembered that I was supposed to pick up a couple of boxes of envelopes before going in to the office, so when my coffee had cooled I turned round to drive back through town to the office supplies shop.

But my poor car never made it.  After sitting in traffic for a few minutes, there started to be some really peculiar noises, and finally halfway up the hill to St Andrew’s church, it completely conked out and wouldn’t restart.  To make matters worse, my hazard light button stuck halfway in meaning I couldn’t put my hazards on and I couldn’t indicate either.  So I was stuck in a totally dead car and couldn’t even warn the growing stream of traffic behind me.

No choice but to leap out and start pushing the car up the hill, one hand on the steering wheel, the other on the frame of the door and both feet slipping on the tarmac because I’m wearing leather-soled shoes.

I’m very grateful to the guy who crossed the road to help me push, and the boys who joined in once we got round the corner.  They got me to a safe flat spot I could stop and have a look-see what had happened.

No coolant in the engine *at all* and a nasty burning smell from the engine. I only topped the coolant up on the way to Scotland last month – and that was the only time I’d ever topped coolant up at all.

So I wandered down the hill, posted Dad’s birthday present, and bought a bottle of Evian to dilute the coolant I had in the boot.  Poured a litre of coolant into the system, and it just bubbled away and belched steam at me.  Not good, I thought, so I phoned my garage, checked there was someone there and got them to recommend a tow-truck to me.  I really need to join a recovery outfit.  What would I have done if this had happened to me in the fast lane of M1, which is where I could easily have been?

Car’s with the garage now.  They weren’t making encouraging noises when it was dropped off.  “Let us see what’s wrong, and whether it’s economical to repair.”  Uh-oh.  I never made it into the office, but I’ve done a bit of work from home instead.
I seem to be getting in a habit of writing long self-involved posts at the moment.  Tell me, dear reader, am I getting a bit Darbyshire?

Lost Germans

On my way into the Council House for Development Control today, I walked past two young men outside the Guildhall looking at a map, clearly trying to figure out where they were.  I see it as almost a civic duty in such circumstances to ask if I can help.  I can’t always, but I usually know most places lost people ask for.

On one occasion, I even got into someone’s van to help them through the one-way system because I knew how to get them to their hotel, but I sure as hell couldn’t explain how you get from one side of the city centre to the other in a vehicle because it is extremely complicated if you don’t know the city.
This time, the guys weren’t English, and didn’t really want to talk.  I thought it was a language issue — they didn’t want to show that they only had a little bit of English, so would rather not talk to me for fear of tripping up.  I thought I recognised the accent, and asked them where they were from.  Germany, they said.

Wahey! I’ve not got to speak to people in German for ages. I had 40 minutes before Development Control so I switched to German and asked them what they were looking for.

“Sehenswuerdigkeiten,” they said.  They weren’t looking for anything particular, they just wanted to see the sights. They were in Nottingham for a day whilst visiting a girlfriend at Loughborough University. We quickly established they’d already seen the Castle  so I suggested they try the Caves of Nottingham and the Galleries of Justice.  Now my German was holding up OK, but I couldn’t remember the German for either “cave” or “court” so I was having great difficulties explaining what either of those great exhibits was. All sorts of bizarre German words did come flooding back and I managed to explain that Nottingham was built on sandstone that people hollowed out–but still never got to “cave”.

I suggested they walk back to Market Square and look for the grey pedestrian signs. I could remember “pedestrian” but couldn’t remember “sign” so suggested they follow me, and I could point them at a pedestrian sign and let them get on with it.

Only, by the time I got to Market Square, I was feeling a whole lot more adventurous and in no hurry to let them get away.

Reader, in the 35 minutes left before my meeting, I whisked them around the entire Council House and gave a mini guided tour in German.

I was reasonably well versed in the history of the building because I mugged up on it the week before for the FODS tour.  So I can stand outside, and get on with the “Dies Gebaude wurde in 1927 gebaut.  Es steht auf dem Ort eine aeltere Gebaude, und ist von derselbe Stein als Londons Sanktpauldom hergestellt. Die zwei Loewen sind beruehmte Treffpunkte fuer die Leuten Nottinghams, und die heissen Oskar und Leo” and so on.

There were an awful lot of German words I didn’t know. Councillor. Mace. Meeting. Staircase. Statue. Ballroom. Sheriff. Minstrel’s Gallery. Minutes. Goose Fair. Virtue (needed for translating the Latin motto “Vivit post funera virtus” under the city crest). I can’t say I gave a truly professional tour this time.

But we got by, and we got round the building in our allotted time before I let them go.  I think they enjoyed it.  They certainly got to see the inside of the beautiful building. I’m sure most visitors to Nottingham don’t realise it’s a public building, and never see the inside. Heck, even most people who live here have never been inside!

Reflux redux

Did not sleep well last night, as I had a reflux episode that in the end I could only fix by sitting upright for a few hours before going to lie down again. A few hours were easily spent on trash TV like Desperate Housewives, which I’ve been enjoying a little less in season 2, but still watching avidly. Big fan of Lynette.
I’ve mostly been managing my reflux condition OK in the last month or so, since having my annual medication review, simply because I’ve been a bit more rigourous in being very sure I take my prophylactic Lansoprazole every day. I’ve been more or less symptom free for the all the time I’ve been careful with my drugs. I’m not sure what went wrong last night. I had a pint of beer with the ringers at 7pm, not much to eat that evening, but woke at 3am with that familiar, horrible burning feeling in my throat. Guzzling the gaviscon didn’t help, milk didn’t help, lying back down made me feel I was drowning in my own bile, hence sitting up for a couple of hours before finally going back to bed at 4.30am and dozing lightly.

It’s always when I’m in that sort of situation, dozing rather than sleeping, that I have dreams I can remember. This morning was no exception, and I had very peculiar and very vivid dreams. We had cats. A black-and-white cat and a tortoiseshell. They had names, but I’ve forgotten them by now. Slightly more worrying, I also had three children. Details of the older two have now faded away but the youngest was a preschool girl with an impish grin, and she is really lodged in my mind.

I was talking about cats with a ringer I gave a lift home to, so that explains why I dreamt cats, but why on earth did I dream I had kids? Why was in the back seat of a people carrier with all my children in front of me?

Someone at work a few weeks ago was trying on a sort of jack-the-lad, nudge-nudge-wink-wink act to tell me I could never be certain whether I’d had a slip up I didn’t know about and had sired kids I’d never meet.

I can say with a fair amount of confidence that I’ve never got anyone pregnant!

Still, I couldn’t shake the impression that this morning, I was going to be woken either by kids or by cats bounding into the bedroom and jumping on the bed.

I wasn’t.  I was woken by P (who strangely had also had cat dreams) telling me to get up NOW at 7.20 because I had to move my car.  A big truck was trying to get up our narrow street to deliver large pipes to the guys who are fixing our drains, and it was stuck at my car.

Can’t complain too much because we need the drains fixing. Tomorrow will be our third and hopefully final day without mains drainage after which we can finally shower and flush the loo again.  Thank goodness for showers at work!