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Posts Tagged ‘Personal Journey’

At this time of year, the weekend before Christmas and the New Year, the ‘Media’ is full of “End of Year Perspectives” of one sort or another which generally manage to be totally appalling as the Editorial Staff “Make for the XMAS Hills”. This will be followed by two weekend’s worth of “Sunday Papers” that contain no news and were largely constructed, weeks ago to cover the total absence of any staff on the news desks…all being off on holiday ‘jollies’ whilst the proprietors of the “Titles” still want an income – total bullshit !

To add to that we have the death of a “noted journalist who was an atheist” called Christopher Hitchens and is ‘intimately missed’ by all the other media luvvies, a guaranteed recipe for maudlin sentimentality over a largely mediocre talent if past experience is to go by. Where shall I start ? With the dead atheist of course…

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The other Saturday I attended the 80th birthday lunch of an old friend of mine Simon Mayhew which was held at a riverside restaurant, “The Depot” at Mortlake in West London and was a truly splendid affair attended by his 4 children and numerous grandchildren, I would certainly recommend the venue, both the food and service were excellent.

For a ‘present’ birthday card, I did a framed photo-montage (thank The Lord and Adobe for Photoshop), as the scaled down picture below which was great fun for me to do. The amazing thing being that I used a picture of him from almost 16 years ago when he came to my 50^th birthday, he looks no different at all, good for him and it set me to thinking around age and getting old.

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The following I write without any intention of intending  ‘sounding superior’ in anyway but as a statement of fact: I don’t read the Red Tops, Heat, OK magazine, watch TV Soaps or Big Brother and some may say that I am probably ‘missing out’ on things by not doing so. The truth is not whether I think them good or bad, it is just that they don’t interest me and the endless list of minor ‘celebrities’ they seem to generate is frankly confusing, I just don’t know who these people are or even “what they are for”.

Eventually though, what I suspect is the “meat and drink” of this trade, will percolate through even to someone like me and I refer of course to the case before the Courts concerning a lady called Carina Trimingham who is the “partner” of Chris Huhne, suing Associated Newspapers and if the outline that I’ve read is correct, I find the whole thing astonishing at pretty much every level…

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“The longest way round, the shortest way home ?” I was reminded of this saying recently as I reflected on my recent stay in the US with my Uncle. That unbeknown to me, I really needed that break but mainly to “break my past trail” to free up future progress, became obvious to me by just having made the trip but there was/is more.

Since my return I have had various things to do that were set up before I went on my trip plus and due to the weather whilst I was away, a veritable jungle of garden weeds to tackle in a town where the use of napalm is frowned upon so…

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Recently as I am working on a major redesign of this particular we site, a task made rather more complicated by having to master the unfamiliar technology of database driven content management systems which is really what blogs are all about, I have been looking back at my past entries.

One of the things that you can do is that although this site is hosted “Out there on the Cloud”, I have a local WordPress site on my PC which I’m using for development purposes and I can use a copy of my existing bog entries as ‘data’ to populate my design experiments and doing so led me to some interesting ‘discoveries’ and realisations of the changes I’m personally going through.

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A need to save money for old age: “Britons need to save £16,700 more per year to live comfortably, cover long-term care costs, and pay back debts in their retirement.” was a Telegraph headline. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/savings/8501286/UK-faces-9-trillion-savings-shortfall.html

The first thing to note is obvious, just who apart from the very rich, could actually save that amount of cash when an ‘average wage’ is likely only £23-25,000 pa ? Frankly and regardless of the actual amount of money required, I don’t see that as any kind of surprise. When it comes to retirement income, no one has been talking let alone acting sensibly. The discrepancy between the intent and the actual delivery, just doesn’t match up and frankly, never will either as things stand, we need to look at the ‘problem’ differently…

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I was highly amused to see that an American Academic Sherry Turkle has described “Social Networking Sites” as a modern form of madness, I totally agree with her and only wonder why it has taken so long for anybody to say it. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/8276948/Social-networking-sites-are-a-modern-form-of-madness.html

Quote: “Her warnings – and those from other cyber-sceptics – follow the death of Simone Back, a woman in Brighton who posted a suicide note on Facebook that was seen by more than 1,000 of her “friends”. Yet none of them called for help – instead trading insults with each other on her Facebook wall.”

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From as early as I can remember in childhood, I loved music of all kinds and until my voice broke, enjoyed singing. Rather like the comedian who longs to play Shakespeare, whatever talents I have, I would have traded in an instant just to be able to play an acoustic guitar or a piano perfectly but sadly, this was never to be…

After my divorce almost 25 years ago, a friend of mine lent me a flat to stay in, I was grateful but also somewhat horrified to discover that whilst there was a huge B&O TV, there was no sound system and no means to play music ! How could one live like that ?

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I had to smile at an article by Paul Valley in the Independent on sleep and sleep deprivation in modern life, it is worth a read: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/paul-vallely-modern-life-is-slowing-us-down-2179639.html

As is often the case, in writing a comment to it, it set off a train of other thoughts concerning the way people seem to be living their lives today. Inevitably me being an old fart these days, there is the tendency to write stuff along the lines of: “In my day…” but in all truth, there may be some value in that too so, here goes…

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An interesting and quite amusing article the other day in the Telegraph called “Tablets and Mobile Phones” led me to contemplate the potential: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/ces/8240216/CES-2011-tablets-and-mobile-phones.html

This was of course, bought about by the opening of the CES Show in California. I think CES stands for ‘Consumer Electronics Show’ but in reality, it is a boy’s toys Gizmo event rather than the latest “domestic white goods”. But all that said, it did start a train of thought for me based upon the “latest toys for over grown boys” and the following is the result…

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