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Posts Tagged ‘Somerset Levels’

It is odd how what on the surface seems a pretty mundane task can take you unawares and become far more significant than you imagine or, could possibly have imagined at outset but this tale is all about such things. What at first glance seemed a simple thing became like dropping a stone into a still pool and watching the ripples spread far and wide across the surface awakening the ‘dark creatures’ that dwell deep down in the depths.

But having written that, I must question whether that is true or whether in fact, there was an inevitability attached to the whole thing and the ‘simple task’ in this case hanging pictures, merely served to reveal the underlying complexities that were already lurking there awaiting some appropriate moment to erupt like a volcano over a suburban parlour carpet…

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For me, 2011 has been an interesting year with most of the excitement crammed into June when as I was about to depart for a month long trip to the USA, my grandson Mika was born up in Scotland, the day before I left. So June 2011 was to be a very intense month indeed !

Inevitably when I sit and write anything on December 31^st, I think immediately of my Father who died in 2007, if he were still alive, he would have been 91 today, his birthday. But I will think no sad thoughts, nor sing sad songs for we all have our time on this Earth and all eventually will leave it, the measurement being what we did with our time here, not the length of our stay.

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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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It really doesn’t matter how long you live, there are some mistakes that you will tend to repeat as I was reminded only the other day. The mistake is to assume that in some old fashioned way, a supplier that you use regularly, wants to maintain the relationship and keep you as a satisfied customer. Bollocks, they couldn’t give a flying fart.

The absolute farce that operates on car and house insurance is a prime case, move to a new provider each year and you get a good deal, stay with the same one for the second year and they will Roger you Royally by upping the premium considerably. Where the logic lies in that, defeats me entirely unless all sales are outsourced and the outsourcing company only gets commission for new customers. Whatever the reason, it is the business practices of total lunatics.

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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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It is quite funny how in life, change often creeps up on you and you just suddenly “notice it” although in all truth, only change is a constant in our lives. I always liken it to a spectrum made up of a gradation from black at one end to white at the other. At any moment in time, you are looking at the colour grey but suddenly you realise that this is a darker/lighter grey than the one you had in your mind.

Physical changes as you get older, just creep up on you, it is the way of things but the real difficulty really lies in your own mind because it needs to update the “self images” we hold of ourselves, to adjust to the change in our circumstances and to also appreciate that by being smart, we can create new opportunities for ourselves which accommodate our reduced physical abilities whilst enhancing our intellectual ones. By clinging to the past and ‘resenting’ that we can no longer do rather than looking forward, eagerly to a new and different future, is foolishness.

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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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Although not an earth shattering event, I awoke today to my 65th birthday, I am now official an Old Age Pensioner as well as just being an ‘Old Git’. I cannot report that I felt any different, there were no string quartets and choirs of Angels to herald the dawn, in fact it was a pretty ordinary day.

With one exception: Having a birthday immediately after Christmas means that it is often forgotten or ‘over looked’ by most and yet this year, at least by my low standards, there were quite a number of phone calls, e-mails and a flurry of birthday cards and even, one or two presents so, yes it was an unusual birthday in this regard. There were no great events of celebration,  I had my ride by the River Brue, my friend John came round to help me reassemble a bed and my afternoon treat was a visit to the Blood Pressure Clinic but never the less, that is how some birthdays go !

Christmas really loses its charm once your children have passed the age when their presents change from “Yuletide Treats of Delight” to a list of the latest “Consumer Goodies” they want which certainly takes place by the time they become teenagers.

Also this year, freak weather saw the Town covered in heavy snow and whilst you may say, “No surprise there then !” in a sense, it is because we have a bit of a micro-climate around Bridgewater Bay so that bad weather normally passes to the North and South of us and snow events when they happen, tend to be 48 hours and gone, this was very different.

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