Posted on

When the wind blows

(which is a British cultural reference). All sheep were present and correct on Monday morning and after I checked everything else outside I thought we’d got through the spectacular storm unscathed (a number of trees fell in the village). However halfway through the morning a plum tree behind the house leaned over at 45°. Strangely the wind had dropped by then but I guess the tree’s hold had been loosened overnight and it just needed one more gust to move it.

Annoyingly, due to where it is, I can’t use the tractor to pull it straight (unless I do it from the neighbours’ garden) so it’s temporarily propped, awaiting the arrival from Amazon of a come-along winch. Which made me realise: I almost never buy books from Amazon, partially because I almost never buy books nowadays (lack of reading time) but also because buying books is best done in a bookshop as far as I’m concerned. However living as we do in the countryside where any buying of vaguely specialist equipment involves a 50-mile round trip, Amazon is a boon. There are online French suppliers I could use who maybe treat their staff better but often they are overpriced, unreliable and unable to match the speed of delivery of Amazon Prime.

Posted on

Today’s highlight: counting sheep

No, really. We have sheep and at the start of every year we have to tell the local Chamber of Agriculture how many we have.

I actually didn’t need to count them as I know we only have five. But I did, just to make sure. That said, with Storm Ciara blowing a gale outside at present I won’t be surprised if we have fewer in the morning. I may be mentally counting sheep tonight to try to sleep through it…

Posted on

Winging it

Yikes! It’s 1st February and my bullet journal for the new year is still in its cellophane. This means that I’ve been basically winging it since the start of the year, relying on my memory to keep track of things that need to be done. And yet I know this is a recipe for disaster; there’s only so much stuff I can keep track of mentally and as new things crop up, old ones are inevitably going to get forgotten.

This rather sums up my flawed approach to organising myself; I don’t take the time to prepare and plan things in advance even though doing so will save time in the long run. The reason being that I’m still trying to catch up on the stuff I should already have got finished a while ago…

It has to be said that I’m fairly clear on the current big stuff as I cheated and made a list of it in my old journal. However the routine chaff is being badly handled; for instance, I realised yesterday that I had forgotten to pay our gardener for the month of January. And then simply forgot about it again, until this evening. Arghh!

So, tomorrow morning’s task will be to start my new journal…

Posted on

Brexit: a sad day

So, Brexit day is upon us. At 23:00 GMT today, the UK will leave the European Union after 47 years within. Whilst I’m (still) vehemently opposed to Brexit, a part of me wants to see this whole ghastly business behind us. British society is more fractured today than I have ever known and I can only hope that people will start to come together now that the waiting is over, but I have my doubts. The BBC has an article about how people will be marking the day and I find pretty distasteful the idea of the leavers celebrating while millions of people lose rights they have had since birth.

There should be little or no effect for me personally as I have both British and French nationalities and I have few financial ties to the UK (although the value of my future private and state pensions from the UK is a mild cause for concern) but I am concerned about the effects on family and friends. I don’t doubt that the UK will weather this storm, but at what cost?

I’m curious to see how I will feel about my native country in the coming months; for the last few my sentiments have been pretty negative and I have been saying I won’t bother renewing my British passport when it expires next year (as an expat this is an expensive process).

Today would also have been my dad’s 87th birthday and I’ve been wondering how he would have felt about Brexit. He was a dyed-in-the-wool Conservative and would have rallied against EU red tape but I don’t remember him as a vociferous Eurosceptic. I think that as someone who experienced WW2 and it’s aftermath as a child, he was profoundly attached to the idea of European cooperation as a force for peace and, whatever the failings of the current model, would have believed the UK was better off as a member of the EU.

Miss you, Dad.

Posted on

Pet Shop Boys – Hotspot

Pet Shop Boys - Hotspot

This morning, while I deep-cleaned the laminate floor in our living room, I listened to the Pet Shop Boys’ new album, Hotspot (we have a large living room)! And what an album! Classic PSB sounds but bang up-to-date. This is the boys’ 14th studio album. And to think Neil and Chris are now both in their sixties! NME’s review is here.

Edit Having listened a bit more to the album, Dreamland (a collaboration with Years and Years) is probably my favourite track. Of the pure PSB tracks, it’s Monkey Business. I’m looking forward to hearing remixes of these two. I Don’t Wanna is a nice tune as well, with huge remix potential.

Posted on

Tragic

Last weekend I spent some time at an all-day benefit in Second Life, raising real life funds for the Australian Red Cross in the aftermath of the catastrophic bushfires. All told we raised over 300,000 L$ (Linden dollars) which is around 1400 $AU.

My SL brother and top DJ Weylin (an Australian in real life) played an Aussie-themed set including this tune, which I had almost forgotten existed* and which has been stuck in my head ever since. Except the lyrics have turned into “You have to believe we are tragic”. And that made me think of a silly game which I came across years ago on a sadly long-gone blog around gay life in London: take a song containing the words “heart” and/or “eyes” and replace those words with “arse”…

* To be honest, I think I had almost forgotten that Olivia Newton-John existed. Which is tragic.