where art collides philosoperontap

Sat on the 10.06 seat E2. First to get served from the trolley. Not that I’ll want much more than a cup of tea. It’s been a full-on three days in London. Really I’m in a state of trance. Never got round to my planned visit to camden market yesterday. Breakfast started at 8am and finished at 10.30. Lunch then started at noon and finished at around 5.30. Ma gurd. An early night is called for. 

A French woman is holding a loud conversation on her speakerphone. We are about to hit some tunnels so hopefully that will sort her. Otherwise I’m going to say something. Huh, harrumph.

I still have a few things to do this pm that I need to gather the energy to sort. Meetings, meetings, meetings. Not much reely. Just need to tick a few things off the list.

The Frenchwoman has stopped but has been replaced by someone on the next table who is a wedding organiser. At least I can only hear her end of the conversation although that in itself is quite irritating. I’m also getting the hello? can you hear me? I’m on a train.

Vaughan Williams to the rescue. I happen to know she gets off at the borough of Pete but that is an hour away.

Sorry if I’m boring you as I periodically have a bit of a rant about other people’s loud train conversations. I suppose it is why some folks have private jets 🙂I’m not about to get a private jet. Nowhere to keep it for one thing. You can’t get anything in our garage as it is.

It has been snowing in Lincoln and the house will be cold. I may repair to the shed where, before leaving for the South, I just turned down the heating rather than switching it off.

Now listening to a Mozart Horn Concerto No 4 in Eb Major K495 I. Allegro maestoso. It isn’t really doing it for me. Let’s move on to Bizet. Carmen. Actually no, let’s not. Donna Summer Hot Stuff. Raise the tempo.

Kid opposite is still working his way through his bacon roll. Finished mine ages ago.

I’m glad to be leaving London behind. Full on big bad fast paced city. Not a place for the faint of heart, or the weak. That said, we are returning for five nights in June. The lure of the bright lights. Hoping to make our fortune, or spend it. Will find somewhere more convivial to stay than the Doubletree Angel.

The norther we get the greyer it seems to get. A smattering of snow still on the ground. I invented a new word there. Norther. Seems reasonable. I don’t really care whether it is liked by the grammar gestapo. Ve haff vays of making you spell.

Just to spoil a different, politically correct party I should at this point tell you that I identify as Tref. Not he/him/it or duck billed platypus or any other description you care to apply. Came up in conversation yesterday. Occasionally I am addressed as Sir but that is premature and I am quick to correct anyone that makes this mistake. My name is Tref. Glad that’s settled. Or Huw. My full name is Huw Trefor Davies. Call me what you like.

As the sleepy hamlet of Grantham gets nearer the landscape gets whiter. Horse drawn sleighs glide silently through the picture postcard streets of the ancient market town. Smoke billows from the chimneys of cottages lining the road on the way north. 

The train has ground to a halt to the south of the station awaiting a signal change. Owen the Signal, on secondment from the Meirioneth and Llantysilio Railway Company, wakes up with a start from his untimetabled nap, gets up and pulls the lever. The train begins to move again.

We are thirty five minutes away from Lincoln and the train’s final destination. The spire of St Wulfram’s Church disappears to the rear.

Left the heating on in the shed overnight thinking we were in for a big freeze. Doesn’t seem to have rocked up. I now have the door ajar to the garden.

Tis a Monday morning in the merry month of March. March is not a particularly merry month but I’m trying to raise your spirits. Cheer you up a bit. I realise it is a little presumptive of me to think that your spirits need raising but even if they don’t there’s no harm in upping them a bit more. You might move from a state of happiness to being ecstatic. What’s not to like?

In reality March is quite a miserable month. It offers a sniff of spring and better times ahead whilst reminding us that we are not quite there yet.

As I write a robin is chirruping merrily on an apple tree branch. I expect it will particularly be looking forward to the good times ahead. I must buy some mealworms. Robins like mealworms. 

I quite like the idea of burying myself in gardening activities. There is something quite wholesome about it. Better to be worrying about greenfly than the shenanigans that life otherwise throws your way. Need to get some grass seed anyway and to deploy the scarifier that I borrowed from Lee yesterday.

The main issue over the next couple of weeks is that I am pretty much booked up. 4 days in London this week and the rugby on Saturday. Then next week it is 2 days in Brussels, one in Bangor for the Annual Engineering Lecture and Dinner about which I am v excited, and finally two days in Cardiff before dashing back for the 6 Nations Super Saturday. All go innit.

I dusd been do de dendisd. Was nod a gread experiende. My moudd is sdill numb. A well.

Check up booked for one year hence. No availability before then anyway! Wtf!! Hygienist booked for about a months time. £75! Wtf!!! My old dentist used to tag it on for nothing at the end of a check up. Ok he was a pal of mine and he died a few years ago so that avenue of joy is no longer available.

It was a very tense experience this time for some reason. I’m normally fairly relaxed about such visits. You can just picture me lying back on the chair, mouth wide open, with two masked heads peering down at my face. Grinding, drilling, whirring, sucking. Shudder 🙂

Walked back up Steep Hill at a very measured pace. The measured pace is because Steep Hill , if you aren’t familiar with Lincoln, is bloody steep. I even go down it slowly. A classic candidate for an escalator were it not for the fact that it is in a very historic place and some jobsworth would frown at the proposition 🙂

Home now.

Yes we have no tomatoes

Feasted well this morning on half a grapefruit, half an orange and half a clementine with some yo gurt. The other half will be consumed tomorrow. Quite invigorating. No mint though which was in the recipe but its absence did not detract from the experience.

The day ahead is a busy one with earth moving, sunday lunch cooking and lane swimming on the menu. The bag of “enriched organic soil” delivered on Thursday needs moving from the front drive to various raised beds in the back garden. The only way to do this is one wheelbarrow at a time as the bag is too heavy to lift and shift. I did start on Friday afternoon but yesterday was too cold and rainy for me to drum up any enthusiasm for the job.

Before I start on the soil I have a chichen to stuff and pigs in blankets to ‘roll’. ie wrap the bangers in bacon. My fave daughter Hannah is swinging by for lunch with boyf George.

No tomatoes will be used in the preparation of the meal. Nor lettuce. We do have lemons but they will not play a part. I prefer to stuff the chichen with sage and onion rather than the citrus alternative occasionally observed in recipe books and online. I won’t be cooking turnips either although we do occasionally have them in a roast vegetable bake accompaniment.

The first half of France v Scotland will feature this afternoon but lane swimming at 4pm precludes the viewing of the denouement.

There you go. The day ahead in two hundred and fifty nine words. A concise summary of a tiny part of my time on planet earth. Beam me up Scotty.

…

Beeootiful afternoon in Lincoln. Done some jobs and now watching France v Scotland. Both sides down to 14 men

The milkman doesn’t come on a Thursday. He usually brings two pints of milk on Mondays, Wednesdays on Fridays. Drops them off anytime between three thirty in the morning and four thirty. Sometimes I hear him, sometimes I don’t. A snapshot of Lincoln life in the year twenty twenty three.

I doubt that many people have their milk delivered anymore. Sometimes we supplement it with more milk purchased from the supermarket but ordinarily two pints keeps us going. It is mainly for tea with the occasional splash on breakfast cereal.

We don’t get anything else delivered, other than online purchases. There was a time when we received a Sunday paper but it is rare for us to buy hard copy these days. 

This is a shame really. It is partly a reflection of the way society has moved. Buying a Sunday paper means you, presumably, spend time sitting down to read it. It was quite handy when it came to lighting the fire, especially when you needed to block off the opening to create an updraft. I might light the fire today. See how it goes.

I have been considering taking the Weekend Financial Times. It is a very good paper. Not just financial shit in which I am increasingly disinterested. Once met the technology editor of the FT in a hotel bar in Tokyo, fwiw. We got on well enough and arranged to meet the following evening in the same spot. He stood me up! Bumped into him on the bus to the airport and he was most apologetic. The editor had asked for ten thousand words on a very tight deadline so he had to drop everything.

That was two decades or more ago. Ma gurd. This cannot be so! I remember it like it was yesterday. I don’t really remember much about Tokyo. It seemed a bit of a dump to me. Concrete jungle. I do remember cellar bars and restaurants and not being able to understand any of the street signs. Navigating around Tokyo without a minder was, at least back then, not the easiest proposition. Ditto Taipei.

Singapore on the other hand was a paradise for Westerners. English signs and fantastic food and drink. I stayed a couple of times at the Hyatt Regency on Orchard. Great bar, like a gentlemen’s club, and fabulous rooftop pool. 

Went to a sales meeting in Indonesia once. It was only a 30 minute ferry ride from Singapore. Air conditioned rooms but the public areas of the hotel were open at the sides. We were only sixty miles or so from the equator and spent every evening drinking pineapple daiquiris on the deck looking out at the blackness of the South China Sea. An occasional ship steamed slowly by, visible only because of its navigation lights.

I’d go back to Singapore although there are probably other destinations in the region higher on my list of priorities. It is a non-existent list to be honest but I’ve never been to Vietnam or Cambodia so if headed out there and wanting to visit Singapore it would have to be a two centre trip.

Street Life & gin. Lost in music. I look up and the light has gone. The spin of the planet has moved me into a different place and time. The mood lighting is on in the shed and I spend my time communicating with offspring. They might as well be in a different galaxy. Doesn’t matter so much these days. Economic migrants at the other end of a photon. Beam me up daddy.

Home is good. Life is surreal. Elsewhere there are palm trees and warm waters. There are icebergs and pyramids and vast plains filled with the roar of lions and the thunder of wildebeest. I don’t really understand any of it.

I’ve ordered a 900 litre bag of enriched topsoil for the new raised beds in the greenhouse. Gritty reality. Earthiness. We will shortly be planting tomatoes in the heated propagators. Feet away in the shed, tonight we will watch Liverpool play Real Madrid. Anne and I together. Real not surreal. Surreal Madrid? No. Surreal that we can watch it in the shed.

Modern life. Modern living.

…

Someone I knew just died. I didn’t know him well but he was someone in the wider internet community. His last few years were tough. He wasn’t one of life’s winners. My list of Facebook friends has a growing element of people who are no longer with us. I haven’t deleted any of them.

…

Spring is very much in the air. The shed doors are flung open. Not very widely flung but open nevertheless. I just threw in a flung for dramatic effect 😄

There are signs of new growth in the garden. The apricot bush has started to blossom which is a bit of an issue as we had planned to prune it. We just needed to figure out how to do that. Suspect it may be too late but will consult an oracle or almanac.

Sat in the Nags Head car park biding my time, no wine. I saw no goats and had no truck. I repeat. No goats and no truck although mist blew our way from the waterfall. Thunderous cloud through cleft cliff, hewn by time geological. A father sits on the shingle shore watching  son throw stones at the grey glass sea, flattened by no wind. Then clasps the boy tightly. A bird unprofitably pecks window and flies another coop. Cars flee from fond farewells.

…

Later the Dibbinsdale buzzes. The restaurant appears to be full. Unfortunately, in the bar,  I seem to be sitting, alone, in a sweet spot to hear one person’s conversation. It isn’t interesting. Distracting. Sounds as if it might be a works night out but I could be mistaken. I’m trying to blank it out. It isn’t as if I am listening to a CEO discussing a potential acquisition or some similar interesting topic. Certainly not at the Dibbinsdale. It’s someone discussing what it might be like to work at other companies. I’m also hearing aubergine, mushroom bruschetta and goats cheese pizza.

I’m down here on my own because I had a couple of beers with dinner earlier (at the Nags Head) and don’t want to fall asleep. Beer is the answer. We are off out to some friends’ down the road a bit later. Staggering distance.

Tots phenomenal night last night at the snooker btw. Historic occasion. Nail biter. Mistakes by both players showing the pressure. That kind of night.

This morning, in the shadow of the Great Orme, the Irish Sea is calm. Waves pound gently but rhythmically on the stone beach. Occasional walkers catch the breeze. Hardy swimmer in blue bobble hat puts on her leggings under blue and white striped towel. Bloke in bright orange swim shorts and black and grey top.

…

I am sat on a comfortable sofa in the lobby of The Imperial Hotel, Llandudno gazing out at the promenade. The view is not as idyllic as it could be as a large Pay and Display sign is the most prominent feature outside the bay window. In the distance, wind turbines whirl. Modern times.

There is a proliferation of palm trees on the prom, a suggestion that Llandudno might be in its own microclimate on the North Wales coast. I imagine they have all self seeded from coconuts washed ashore by the gulf stream 😉

The sea front is getting busier. Guests assemble in warm coats and hats in the hotel lobby. The main topic of discussion is the sourcing of change for the pay and display machines. Charging starts in three minutes at ten o’clock (ante meridian). I have already paid and displayed and moved the car nearer to the hotel. Result! although not as much of a result as had I been able to find space in the hotel car park.

I feel no compulsion to head out and explore the town. Done it before. Quite surprised at how many people are in town. The hotel is full of snooker fans like us. Today is the final. Anne passed Ronnie O’Sullivan on the stairs on her way out. He isn’t in the final. Cue tip problems. She also spotted Sean Murphy in Starbucks. He is in the final. Relaxing before a high pressure afternoon. Llandudno is the place to be to spot snooker players.

Ronnie just walked past me headed for breakfast. Just sayin’ 🙂

It’s quite a luxury having a couple of hours in the hotel all to myself. For some reason it doesn’t feel like a Sunday although I have no idea what any day should feel like really. A white convertible with red soft top drives past the window. Orange life belt on post. Has it ever been used in anger?

Behind me the receptionists babble. They like working here. Imagine spending your whole life working in a hotel reception in Llandudno. Why not? If that’s your thing. Is it really anyone’s thing? Bloke just walked past me in shorts. A month early. I start wearing shorts when the clocks change. This is Llandudno mind you 🙂

…

Interesting to stroll around on your own. Other strollers are a mixed bag of couples, small family groups and other singletons. I get very lonely if i have to spend an extended time on my own.

It is nine thirteen on a Saturday morning, as the crow flies 🙂 The fast has been broken and I am sat without a cup of tea indulging in some relaxation prior to getting ready for the day. This will involve the usual performance of ablutions and getting dressed and then sauntering in the general direction of the shop to purchayse picnic supplies.

For today we set the compass bearing west to Llandudno, the Imperial Hotel and the Wales Open Snooker Championship final. We will see two out of the four semifinalists do battle for the trophy on Sunday.

The semi finalists are Shaun Murphy, Robert Milkins, Pengfei Tian and Junxu Pang. This is mildly disappointing as I’ve only heard of Shaun Murphy. All the other big names have been knocked out wtf! Including Ronnie!!! Presumably we will be watching a new star in the making. I woz there!!!

Gorra go. Ablutions etc…

Nine ante meridian. Doesn’t quite sound the same as 9am. Funny that. I’d like to bet that lots of people don’t even know what am stands for. I had to ask Anne who is a gifted linguist and who of course did know. Obvs all you guys do know, if only because now you’ve just read this (totally random) discourse on the subject.

I was sat here pondering what to write and that just came out. Seems to be a lot easier with a keyboard than with a pen if for no other reason than it is quicker to tap in words on a laptop than to write them on a piece of paper (ie page).

So what, I hear you say. Each to their own innit.

I quite like the pen function on my new phone and have used it to write actual notes. With older phones I’d have to do a voice recording or even a video if I wanted to note something down. Now I just whip out the stylus (or whatever it is called) and scribble away. It is a very smooth writing experience.

It must be said that a cup of tea needs to be finished before the day begins in earnest. This isn’t the most dramatic of opening lines but it is what it is.

We, I’m sure, all have different interpretations of what an earnest day might be. For some it will be hacking away at their corporate coal face. Others will find distraction in a trade or gainful employment in the retail sector.

For me it will involve an initial cleanse (shower) and then a foray into the local market for some milk and freshly baked bread. The staples of life. This isn’t to say I haven’t got a busy day ahead because I do but the timetabled activities do not start until noon.

I have grown used to a leisurely start to the day. It is some considerable time since I responded favourably to requests for early meetings, ie before nine in the morning, and some hard thinking has to be put in before arranging trips to London that involve the seven thirty am direct train from Lincoln Central. 

That is a handy train as it gets you in before nine thirty and provides a good head start for the business day. However I generally prefer to make life easier by staying the night before and having a relaxed start.

An earnest day might be spent pruning fruit trees. Yesterday afternoon I took time out of my busy shed ule to prune the grape vine.The vine in its early years living in our back garden proved to be some disappointment but last year for the first time it bore fruit. Moreover on a trip to Bakewell Anne and I had lunch in a cafe courtyard that boasted a wonderful specimen heavy with fruit.

This was inspiring. Our vine is set in a sun trap behind the barbeque and we have now had posts put in so that we can train it around the patio at a height of seven or eight feet. The pruning involved removing branches headed in the wrong direction and helping the right ones up the posts and along the wire.

Results won’t be instantaneous but I am optimistic. We aren’t sure whether the grapes are eaters or drinkers. All in good time.