I have recently taken down my website, including all my sketches and cartoons. It then occurred to me that I can share them from within this blog. Here is a topical one, given what is going on in the UK Tory party over the course of this summer…
So, there it is. I think I will try to resuscitate this blog, given that I am now completely out of Second Life and am no longer streaming my music, singing, playing guitar, or piano. I am in the process of simplifying my sense of self, although I would hesitate to go as far as saying that I am undergoing an identity crisis. Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.
I have finally given up on the intractable problems I have with getting my music to stream up to my Internet shows (both to Second Life and to Third Rock Grid – 3RG). I can’t waste any more time on all the endless technical problems I have faced relating to getting software (butt & Rocket Broadcaster) to work properly both on my PC and laptop and also my computers to do what they are supposed to do. I don’t think these problems are related to my Internet Service Provider or to the person from whom I rent my stream. However, I regret to say that the whole thing is no longer enjoyable activity for me.
I’m not sure what I’ll focus on in the future. For the time being I shall keep my avatar, Fyrm Fouroux, and my small music performance venue in SL (Terra Fyrmusica). I may put more energy into my fiction-writing, my art work, or my classical piano playing. I’ll see how it goes over the coming summer months. Speak to you later my dear blogophiles.
Today, I decided to start doing some brisk walking around a suburban road circuit. It has a fairly steep and lengthy hill and several ups and downs along the way.
Apparently, the average walking speed for a man aged between 70-79 is 2.8 m.p.h. The Healthline site says a brisk walking pace is around 3-3.5 m.p.h. I covered something between 2 and 2.5 miles in about 45 mins. So that looks like a speed of around 3.00 – 3.5 m.p.h. Basically I would appear to be, roughly-speaking, on target.
It remains to be seen whether this mirrors the dreaded New Year’s resolutions, and will cease after a few weeks. It might be difficult to manage a daily walk and my motivation may take a dip if it is raining. I shall have to wait and see. Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.
Today, I decided to bring the manuscript of my latest novel out of hiatus; I have not touched the manuscript since October 2021 – about six months. The provisional title is ‘Joe Bloxhall (b. 1945): a fictional biography‘. I shall give no more away about the book, at this early stage. My purpose, in today’s blog, is to reassure you that writing is, once again, taking place.
It is still rather cold but the sun was out this morning, and I decided to kick-start this new phase by setting myself up as if it were summer. So, I brushed down the garden lounger and made myself comfortable. I then let the muse guide my hand, writing some draft m/s with a ball-point pen and and a pad of lined A4 paper. I like to do this, as a first step, then I type up the material using the Scrivener software for writers (thank you Mr. James Scott Bell). Here is a picture of my external writing studio:
My external writing studio
My garden thermometer gave a reading of 10 degrees Centigrade and it was quite windy. So, I wrapped up well with a chunky woollen jumper and a warm hat (I like the large peak, to shade my eyes when the sun is out). Here is a selfie I took indoors using the bathroom cabinet mirror. It looks a bit weird but maybe we can think of it as post-modern realist photography. I’ll try to come up with an even sillier category (if I can be bothered) in due course.
I wrote for about an hour and a half. Once typed up on the PC, with a modicum of editing, that amounted to approximately 750 words. I feel very pleased with myself.
Selfie with external manuscript writing jumper
Of course, now that I am back into writing, I may have to keep my blog posts shorter than I should ideally like, and their appearance may be less frequent than my recent posts have tended to be. Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.
Today we ventured out into the officially-nearly-done-with-Covid world for lunch at the local pub. In the car we we had a mini-debate: To wear masks vs. To go commando mask-wise. Although I kept mine in my coat pocket, I did not put it on.
The pub was populated mainly by family clusters, spread around the bar tables here and there. One such cluster was seated within shouting distance of our own table. It is perhaps churlish of me to mention that the delightful little girl sitting with them managed to generate a level of decibels inversely proportional to her diminutive height.
Having bagged a table, we checked in with the bar staff and they said they would be over shortly to take our order. Returning to the table we revised our previous decision to drape our winter coats over the back of our chairs, and surreptitiously put them on again in order to avoid an attack of the shivers. Our drinks were brought swiftly to us. I enjoyed the sound of ice clinking against the glass as I sipped my sparkling mineral water. The waiter stood with pen poised over pad. ‘What can I get you?’
‘Do you have Scottish salmon?’
‘Scottish salmon. No, I am afraid we do not. We do have Scottish sturgeon. Can I interest you? I’ve got a pic of it somewhere. Would you like to see it?’
I nodded my head and settled back in my chair while he went to fetch it. The waiter returned and placed his tablet on the table. And this is what I saw…
I hastily declined the Scottish sturgeon and settled for cod, chips (a.k.a. French fries) and garden peas (can’t stand the mushy ones). He wandered off in the direction of the kitchen.
Anticipating the plate of fish and chips that was about to come to us, engendered a certain amount of salivation. As it happened, this turned out to be somewhat premature. The minutes ticked by. Eventually my saliva glands became exhausted and I have to say that by the time 45 minutes had passed they appeared to have gone on strike!
Of course, the moment the food arrived all grumpiness vanished in a trice. It is strange how that happens. Similar to waiting for a delayed bus or train; all is forgiven and forgotten, once the curtain goes up on the main event.
Getting down to business, I wielded knife and fork as if I were a surgeon (no ‘t’ in that word) in a hurry to get away for a family birthday party. The fish had a firm paper serviette between it and the plate and the chips were placed half falling out of a matching paper bag. I found this both puzzling and a tad annoying. I couldn’t understand what the point of it was. The paper had the function of rendering the knife blunt, when compared to how it might have cut were it to be slicing directly against the hard china plate. My partner then explained to me that it symbolised the old-fashioned way of eating fish and chips (wrapped in paper). If that really was the case, why on earth did they bring cutlery? Why were we fish-and-chippers not strolling round the room, eating the stuff with our fingers? I eventually allowed my indignation to be dispersed by a good glug of sparkling water, and relaxed into an enjoyable lunch.
I noticed that a Bob Dylan song was playing while I was chasing a couple of peas onto my fork, but by the time I got to attack my chips Dylan had morphed into Rod Stewart. I gathered that Rod didn’t want to talk about it and Bob sounded far too nasal to bother. I think the management were using a track list designed for the grey-haired lunch brigade.
I have never seen the point of playing music in restaurants. The assumption has to be that all customers have identical tastes in music. I suppose you could make some broad assumptions: a spot of classical music for the leafy suburbs, heavy metal on the wrong side of the tracks. To expand on this would be to reveal too much of my own stereotypes and prejudices; I think I will leave that for another time.
So, without putting too fine a point on it, I am now fully stuffed. Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.
Hello! This is just to let you know that I have an mp3 version of the show I streamed up live to the Internet yesterday, 7th February, to the virtual community known as 3rd Rock Grid (3RG) on OpenSim. The gig lasts around 40 minutes. I have spent minimal time editing out mistakes and so forth, so what you hear is a warts & all version. The programme is as follows:
Fish & Chips*
Bad Things
Breathe Softly*
Rant about the Prime Minister
Civilian Reveille*
Full English Breakfast*
Homburg
Creaking Joints*
First Time Ever I Saw Your Face
*These songs are my originals (Lyrics & Music by John Lewis Smith)
I played the gig as Fyrm Fouroux (my avatar, since 2008).
I doubt I shall leave this gig up for very long. Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.
Tight Socks Firstly, and let me be clear about this, I am not accusing my socks of walking down to the local pub and having one too many. Nor am I suggesting that they are way too frugal when it comes to spending money since, au contraire, I have to say that they usually foot the bill nicely(ouch!)
I am here concerned about the fact that they tend to leave their mark upon me after I have taken them off. I suppose you could think of such marks as podiatric love bites. I’ve tried talking to them about this before I put them on in the morning, but they take no notice. In the autumn I bought a bunch of them to get me through the winter. Perhaps we should speak of a ‘foot’ of socks, in the way that we talk of a ‘hand’ of bananas?
Last year, I attempted to stretch the socks by pulling them over a pile of books. Surprisingly, this had no effect whatsoever. This year I decided upon a new tactic; I got hold of a pair of scissors. I stretched each sock (using an appropriate bit of scrap wood I had lying around) and then used the scissors to cut multiple elastic threads at the top of the sock. The rationale behind this was to break the elastic tendency to draw the sock too tightly around my calf. I did not want to cut all the threads, since I needed a remnant of elasticity in the sock to prevent it falling down around my ankle.
I construed this as an experiment. If it didn’t work, I would only be losing the price of a few socks, but if the experiment did work I would have bought my comfort through the winter. I was not sure whether it would be possible to reach an optimum level of elasticity, and I did not know if they would disintegrate somehow when in the washing machine. I am pleased to report that the experiment has been a great success. Of course they look a bit manky and chewed up at the tops. However, in the winter I wear long trousers, not shorts. So nobody sees them and nobody knows about what I have done to them. Well, apart from you, my dear reader, but I’m sure you will keep it a secret for me? I’ve been wearing them since October and I am fairly confident that they will last through to May when the weather should be improving.
May I wish you warm feet throughout the winter. Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.
This is the third blog in the trilogy about household heating. I covered the ubiquitous coal fire method, much fancied back in the 1940s and 1950s, in Parts 1 & 2. In the current blog, I shall address the more modern and widely used method of central heating. I hasten to add that I am not about to write an essay on this topic, nor am I able to provide a detailed analysis of its use and/or its forms of delivery. I shall, however, share with you something of my own experience.
In our house we have a system of radiators. The water that pulses around this circuit is heated by our gas boiler. Of course, compared with the messy chore of making up a new coal fire in the grate, every day, central heating seamlessly runs in the background, once installed and set up. However, if something goes wrong, it can be bad news. Our heating boiler packed up one New Year’s eve – try getting a heating engineer to come and sort that out! Our boiler does the hot water, too. Very chilly.
The thermostat control is positioned on one of the walls. The question arises as to what temperature the thermostat should be set.
I feel the cold; my partner does not. Her preferred thermostat setting is cold for me, whereas mine is too hot for her. The accepted view seems to be that it is easier to wear more layers when cold than it is to revert to summer clothing when hot. I think my own biological thermostat must be a tad wonky. I will attempt to illustrate what I mean by this.
As for sleep wear, I have not one but THREE woollen dressing gowns (small, medium & large sizes). The small size is my natural fit. However, as the weather gets colder, I can wear the medium over the small, and then the large over the medium. By that time my torso is looking veritably box-like.
It goes without saying that in the winter I wear the heavy, brushed cotton PJs. I believe the technical term for the material is ‘Wincyette‘ – rather a nice name for a little girl, I think. As for my feet, they may well find themselves snuggled into a pair of woolly hiking socks. You will doubtless be relieved to know that I do not actually wear my hiking boots under the duvet, although I have sometimes been tempted!
I will not infrequently wear a woollen beany hat to bed on cold nights. Years ago my grandma knitted me a tea cosy (before the invention of T-bags, that is). In order for it to fit over the teapot, it had a hole for the handle and a hole for the spout: I could put it on my head and pull my ears out through those holes – very cosy!
Over the Wincyettes I wear equivalent sweaters to those I wear about the house in winter. The main long-sleeved sweater is usually something serious with heavy knitted ribbing, possibly with a zipped front. The one I currently favour is lined with a layer of lambs wool. I should perhaps mention that underneath the long-sleeved sweater I also wear what used to be called a V-neck pullover or tank top (short-sleeved, in wool).
I now turn to the question of underwear, the same specifications work for both day and night. Of course, I make use of a thermal long-sleeved top and a pair of thermal Long Johns. Beneath the thermals I also wear a pair of briefs and a sleeveless vest. These are made of open-mesh cotton, and thus provide good insulation. The holes in the mesh act to provide many small pockets of air next to the skin. If I remember my ‘O’ Level physics (passed in 1960, btw), metals are great conductors of heat (hence metal saucepans). Although hot air can be blown around as an effective conveyor of heat (think of hair dryers and fan heaters), it has to be warmed up first. So the heat from my body does not easily travel from my skin into these little pockets of air which are not going anywhere.
As for pottering about in the house, I sometimes wear a flat cap. We lose a lot of heat through our heads! I’ve also got a pair of woollen gloves with half-length fingers, and they are great for changing channels on the TV remote control. Well, I think that just about covers everything I want to say on this topic. The trilogy is hereby closed. Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.
My old school friend Dave Marshall reminds me that we used to have a pair of tongs and a poker hanging from a metal holder, kept on the hearth. The hearth in my old house was tiled. A long (extending) toasting fork was also left ready to hand, leaning up against the fire surround. This was used when the fire had died down; it was best with no flickering flames in evidence. A slice of bread would be speared with the toasting fork and somebody, usually perched on a small wood and raffia foot stool (I made my Mum one at woodwork classes in school), holding the bread to the hot coals. Of course it was not unusual for the odd slice or two to get burnt. A bad burn meant scraping the burnt bits off with a knife in short sharp strokes, almost with a flick of the wrist. In most families, there would usually be one person who had a preference for the burnt slices and they would be earmarked accordingly.
Once the toast had been done on both sides, it was removed from the fork and put onto a plate for buttering. Yes, back then we used warmed full-fat butter, and lots of it. Absolutely gorgeous. Well, the bread was brilliant, too. We never ever bought sliced loaves; always white ‘tin’. They were so called because they took their shape from the baking tin in which they were cooked in the oven. Our baker’s shop was a short walk away at the end of the road. He got up early and baked for the day, each day. I grew up assuming that all bread was as delicious as what we routinely ate. It wasn’t until I moved away from home and started work that I realised that many people ate mass-produced sliced bread. By the way, our baker was called Mr. Shufflebottom and you can imagine what fun the young boys in the street had with that name!
My great aunt’s meat mincer
Before I leave the topic of toast, I have to say that occasionally my great aunt (who was a great cook in the old-fashioned English way) made a joint of roast beef for Sunday lunch. This was then sliced cold for the main meal on Monday. After this, the remaining scraps of meat were scraped off the bone and fed into her mincer. This was a strange metal object, made of steel, which had to be screwed to the wooden kitchen table. She would then feed the scraps of meat into the funnel at the top while turning the handle. As if by magic, mince-meat would emerge from an opening lower down. She would typically make a cottage pie which we ate with lashings of gravy and vegetables on Tuesday. Had the Sunday joint been a leg of lamb, she would have made a shepherd’s pie.
Things needed to be eaten fairly quickly since we, like most other folk, had no refrigerator (although we did have a shaded pantry with a cold tile floor, leading off from the kitchen at the back of the house).
Let me return to the topic of toast for a moment. On Sunday my great aunt would pour off the juices from the roasting pan into an earthen ware bowl and let it cool. The fat solidified into what effectively became an air-tight lid. This we would cut into and spread on our toast, taking a little of the browned juices from the roast lying beneath the fat. I have to say that this tasted heavenly. The only thing that might have surpassed such a delight would be her bread-and-butter pudding (to use up a stale loaf) into which she threw a liberal handful of sultanas.
My friend David also mentioned that he had a pot of wooden spills sitting atop the mantlepiece. His, like mine were multicoloured and were about 1/4 inch wide and 12 inches long (back then, that would have been abbreviated as 12″). And to return to weights and measures, there were 12 inches to one foot (typically written 1′ (with the single mark). Hence the spills were 1′ (or 12″) long. They were used by the cigarette smokers and any of the men who smoked a pipe (none of the women did so in my family). One simply took the spill, held it to a flame or a hot coal until it lighted, brought it up to the cigarette or pipe, and puffed away. There was no talk of cigarettes being linked to cancer. People coming back from overseas were allowed to bring 200 cigarettes through the English border customs free of tax duty and thus these cigarettes were very cheap indeed. I seem to remember my brother bringing the fiendishly strong Gauloises cigarettes back from France. Family get-togethers in the lounge sitting rooms quickly developed a dense fug of cigarette smoke. My mother did not smoke cigarettes and she did not drink alcohol. I sometimes wonder how she coped with it all. Well, I think this is enough on the topic of coal fires. In the next episode of these linked blogs, I shall come up-to-date and talk about central heating thermostats. Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.
John's Quavering Pencil 