Happy new year, everyone

 I remember all last year; whilst walking through the streets in London, trying to wriggle past the gauntlet of people trying to foist lateral flow tests onto me. And I, not wishing to be ungrateful, gently shrugged them aside like irritating mosquitoes, as I always kept a couple of boxes at home.

    Well those times have been absent for weeks, and after driving what must be a very lot of miles to find aforementioned tests, I've finally got one. It's funny how we (well, I) always take things for granted until they're gone. Never again. 

    My bout of Covid passed without incident as I had no symptoms whatsoever. My wife's has also gone now with only a few. Thank goodness for the three injections we had. I'm no doctor (my own skills, if you could call them that, were learnt in the Marines, and were the polar opposite of saving life), but I firmly believe that if it weren't for them I would have faired much worse.

    And finally, I realise that Christmas has gone because tomorrow, I have to go to my boss' restaurant and take down all the decorations, and neatly slice the twenty foot Christmas tree we put up in the reception. It's going to be so depressing when they're gone.

  

It's gone.

 To be truthful, the only reason I know I had Covid was because two lateral flows, and a PCR test told me I did. Nary a symptom a presented it's awful self.

    So, after the requisite number of days and two negative lateral flow tests later, I told my beloved that she could come back.

    Great, you might think.

    Well it was, until she tested positive two days later, even though she'd tested negative the day before. She hasn't given it to me because I used the last but one test to find out. Leaving just one for her in five days.

    Remember all those cretins that bought up all the toilet roll, dried food and pasta? Well they've come out of hiding again and now there's not a lateral flow test to be had in the country. And I, for one, am not camping all night outside the local chemist to get another.

    Apparently the test kits are manufactured in China.

    There's a certain irony there.

I finally got it.

 None of those naughty diseases, I hasten to add. My wife would be exceedingly irritated I were to be naughty. No, despite being very careful, and having three inoculations, I have COVID.

    Am I the only pedantic twit that thinks Omicron should have been called Epsilon - it being the fifth letter of the Greek alphabet, and all?

    Anyway, the only way I know I have it is because two lateral flow tests said I did. I feel fine, chipper in fact. This afternoon I did an official PCR test - finally. After begging for another swab from the irritated and overworked attendant because I'd shoved it so far up my nose that it began to bleed.

    Now I just have to wait three days for the official verdict. Luckily I'm taking all the holiday I haven't taken this year and not currently on what laughingly passes for sick pay on this miserable little island.

    My wife was away visiting our grandchild and now she'll have to stay another week until I'm all better.

    I'll get by, somehow. A whole week of beer and war films. It's an awful job but someone's got to do it.

    Did I mention that my new computer boots up in exactly five seconds.

My life ended last Wednesday.

 Nothing so trivial as a hurtling meteor, or a perhaps a plane crashing into my house. Oh, no; nothing so mundane.

    My computer finally gave up the ghost. And as if just another merry jest, my monitor also croaked at the same time. what are the odds? 

    I was bereft, and hadn't realised upto that point just how much time I spent on the stupid thing. All weekend I wandered around muttering to myself until finally She-who-must-be-feared threatened me with extinction unless I either A, shut up, and leave the house, or B get another.

    So I did.

    Now I'm armed with something I swore I'd never buy; an all in one computer. It's great, and it works, and it's got sound, and ultra super duper high resolution. Unlike the last monitor which was so old I could barely make out anything on the very scratched screen.

    So all is well in the Lawrence household, much to the joy of SWMBF.

I got a strange urge last night.

Like most (moderately normal) people I sometimes get strange urges, but this time it was to write; something I haven't done for over a year. I don't know if I'll carry it on but it amused me at the time - 04.30 this morning.

‘Did you go out last night?’

  ‘Do you mean last night, or last evening?’ She made to reply but her husband continued in the voice she knew very well. ‘Technically, evening ends at eight pm. Thereafter, it’s night. So if you're asking if I went out last night, then the answer is no. I went out at seven thirty. Thus, I went out last evening.’

  She eyed the kitchen knife so close to hand. Every time he got into one of these moods the urge to disembowel him became so great she didn’t know how much longer she could resist the temptation. She stormed off before her hand automatically finished the job of which she had dreamed for so long.

  In the kitchen April nursed a cooling cup of coffee. She really didn't want it but it gave her hands something to do which didn’t involve slaughtering her husband. How had it come to this? Their first encounter was at university. Was it really twenty years ago? April’s student days were among the best of her life. A natural at music theory, all her friends and tutors said. For their first three weeks she had assumed the man she’d met in the library to be just another faceless student who didn't really feel the need to discuss his course. It was only after realising that he was not, in fact a first year student at all but a third year, far more experienced in life, but more importantly, student life than she, had quickly warmed to him. Expecting that they would have a lot in common, indulging his amusing slurs of everything academic and acerbic but often amusing wit, had been easy at first.

 

Back to work full time.

 That's the good news.

    After almost eighteen months of lockdown, and having weekends, actual whole weekends off, two days in a row, kind of thing, I finally remembered why I so welcomed lockdown in the first place, even if I was only getting half pay.

    I'm now getting full pay once more, and in order to get that I've gone back to doing over, way over, sixty hours a week at work.

    I'm finished with the whining now. You can't get anything for nothing. I'm just glad to be earning once more and not living on my wages.

    Actually, now I'm once more part of the proletariat, it's my God given right to complain - so I will.

Britain's going bonkers

 Yet again this morning I was up before 5am in the forlorn hope of buying petrol.

    As usual I was almost at the front of the queue after being told yesterday by the local garage manager that the resupply was happening overnight.

    It hadn't, and when he arrived he told me it was coming between 6 and 10 am. I should have waited but it was raining so hard I was beginning to feel concussed - and thus I went home. 

    Mistake. 

    I just popped down there to look and the queue of cars seemed to last forever. Now they're even bringing in the army (unfortunately not to shoot or arrest the idiots determined to fill up their cars up every day with fuel they don't need) but to drive tankers.

    Well, until this is all over I have to take the Underground to work as I've got absolutely none left in my two bikes. Knowing my usually miserable luck I'll probably catch Covid.

Somebody stop me

 I know, it's rubbish.

    I'm stuck here at home with nothing to do; and I'll be damned if I'm going to get into a four mile queue for the petrol station on my motorbike.

    If this continues I'll have to finish the novel I started six months ago,

Off work yet again

 Do you remember those times when most, or a lot of people were laid off work because of Covid?

   And those cretins that bought all the toilet rolls, and pasta, and long life milk because Armageddon had clearly arrived? Now, because of an innocuous story that Esso had a slight shortage of drivers, it's been extrapolated to an absolute absence of petrol everywhere. And now there is an absence because the toilet roll, pasta brigade are now all besieging the petrol stations, jackal-like. To the point where there is no petrol - anywhere. Last week I sat behind a person at 04.30 hrs in the endless queue for the only petrol in the area for two hours. When the garage opened, she spent £4.30 on fuel. 

    So now, as I can't get fuel for my boss' gas guzzling monster, I'm off work yet again.

    Do you remember this from a few weeks ago?

    Well they've been working hard, although I'm not entirely sure that it could be called progress.

    At this rate I won't have to wait a year until my shortcut is back. I'm not even sure I'll live that long.

 

I spent the evening with Bob Ross.

 Last night as I was finally becoming tired of NCIS, science fiction, and other programmes where people get dead and injured, I started flicking through my approximately 85 channels of pure nonsense and happened upon Bob Ross.

    Even though constantly screaming at the TV for him to stop because he always put too much into a picture, I always loved listening to him.  And as I have a small TV next to my computer, he urged me to get on with it and experiment.

    So I did.

    I know, it's absolute rubbish. On the plus side, I haven't put too much in, and upon Bob's urging, tonight I'm going to play with it.

    The painting, that is.

I caught a cold - remember those?

Presumably because I've been wearing a mask for nearly eighteen months, (although not in the house, you understand) I haven't had a cold for about two years. 

    I'd almost forgotten how annoying they were. But after all the lockdowns, missed work - and missed wages, I've got one and subsequently been sent home from work.

    From whom I caught it, I have no idea. Unless the nasty little germs wriggled over the edge of my mask and made a bee-line for my throat, thereby infecting me, I must conclude that there's a new variant, called P*** off-Roger-At-All-Costs.

    Well it's working. Not only am I at home feeling hard done by, but I'm also losing wages - again. I told my boss that I'd done three Covid tests; all negative, but it didn't work.

    Sometimes life really sucks.

Hurty bobo

 A couple of days ago (and not for the first time) I discovered, or remembered what  happens when a human body (that's me) is flying towards earth at what felt like terminal velocity.

    I even had time to think Ohhh s...... you get the rest.

    All the other times it was when I was either knocked off my motorbike, or that never to be forgotten day that I was abseiling down from a helicopter when it caught a downdraft as I was going fast but only about ten feet from the ground. Oh, drat I muttered lumbering to my feet and extracting my rifle barrel from a very soft part of myself.

    This time a mini cab driver decided to go left after signalling right. Foolishly believing him I continued across the road on my daily run. It was only as it bore down on me that I jerked to the side, fell and slammed into the edge of the pavement to an excruciating spasm of pain. Funnily enough he didn't stop. Who'd have thought it?

   Now my right shoulder retains the semi-muscular shape it was before, while my left looks like it was bolted on from someone else's dead body.

    Twenty, or even ten years ago, I could have laughed it off, but now I feel like a cripple and can barely breathe without a grimace of agony.

    Mind you, twenty, or even ten years ago I could have got out of the way a little more sprightly.

I took a bit of a liberty

The other day I went to a well known shop which has much lower prices because they don't have to stock shelves. You just look through a catalogue, or computer these days, select what you want, then buy it. It's delivered from the warehouse to the front of the shop and off you go - all in about five minutes.

    On this occasion I bought a very cheap sound system for my PC, and after checking that I could bring it back if it didn't meet my requirements, went home happy and hopeful.

    An hour later I was back, to a barely hidden look of frustration from the same assistant.

    "But how could you know?" he exclaimed after confirming my address, "You've could barely have been home ten minutes before deciding it's no good."

    "That was long enough." I gave him my best pained grimace of frustration. Then added a slight hint of pathetic resignation for good measure. "It does work," I confirmed, "but it didn't work on my computer, and you said...." That was when I added the final touch. I began to rant in the accent from which I've been toiling all my adult life to escape. In England, everyone with a brummy accent, which to say the accent of the second city in the country (Birmingham) is deemed a thug and an idiot, or both. It might be apocryphal but I'm told that judges find any defendant guilty purely on the basis of this accent. I don't care - it never fails me.

 

    Two minutes later my card was re-credited and I was on my way.

    So I still don't have a computer with sound.

    Don't even get me started about Microsoft. "We are unable to identify your problem."

And heeeees back.

You'd think that after both building my own, and fixing other people's computers since the late 80's, I'd have a tiny trace of skill. A microscopic nugget. Apparently not. 

    A dodgy windows 10 update did for my machine for over a week. Finally it's working once more, and according to my comp, my sound card is working. It isn't. Neither is the USB sound card I fitted, although, assureth the computer, it's pummelling my ears with 100 percent volume. It's amazing how much the lack of sound can turn me off; and as a result I haven't been near it for a week, mainly because the computer generated subtitles on YouTube are, frankly, rubbish.

    On the plus side, as a result of my deep mining of the registry, it now boots up in three minutes and not the approximately half an hour of two weeks ago.

   

    And it that wasn't bad enough, just a few days ago my phone upgraded itself to Android 11. Before, my battery was like the inside of the TARDIS. No matter how hard I used it, it would always give me at least three days of joyful play. Now, I only have to turn it on and it's down to about 75 percent power. 

    Enough of the whining. I'm finally back.

Brick worm

Some people think that it's cool to live in a city like London, where a lot of the buildings are several hundred years old.

    And it is - until this happens. 

    And lest you think it isn't that much, that big green thing (we call them skips in England) is chock full of the debris that fell off.

    That's going to cost a few quid to fix. 

    And just in case you think I'm being smug, that closed off road is the quickest way to get to my boss' house. Now I'm going to have to go almost a mile around, and in London traffic, that's about a day of extra travel.

Back at last.

 Not that I've been away.

    Before realising that I wasn't one of the approximately 20 percent of the world's computer users that can actually run Windows 11, I began to prepare for it. And subsequently buggered up my PC.

    By all reports my machine would apparently have to be so powerful, that if I spoke to it, then it would understand and respond. That's when it wasn't doing the dishes or taking care of my garden, or calculating PI to ten million digits - all at the same time. It would also have to be so new that the wrappers could not have been off for more than ten seconds.

    Microsoft have overcome this tiny stumbling block by removing the checker tool which tells the end user if they can use it before they install - leaving them with all sorts of headaches upon discovering that they can't.

    It's taken me days but now my machine, is at least capable of jotting down a blog.

    So I'm just going to go with plan B.

    Stick with Windows 10. As awful as it is, it does work - mostly.

What's going on?

 Recently, given the dire state of the planet, I switched my gas supplier to a very well known (in the UK) vendor of such things.

    Feeling a little smug and delighted with my own gumption in helping the planet, I thought no more of it for a while, until:

    Something began to nag at what passes for my brain.

    Before the new gas began to arrive a week or so later, I completely failed to spot the presumably thousands of construction workers, dozens of heavy bulldozers and other industrial equipment digging up my front garden, the street, and in fact scouring the land for hundreds of miles in order to lay a pipe directly from the refinery that was to supply me with this wonderful green-ness.

    Which brings me to just one conclusion.

    I'm still getting the same old c**p as I was before.

    Which part haven't I understood?

An unexpected gift.

 Someone foolishly very kindly gave me a powerful telescope. I used to have one when I lived in France, but the mirrors didn't survive the trip home. Not that it would have made any difference. There's so much light pollution in my part of England that it's almost impossible to see the moon unless one is standing atop a mountain the middle of winter, miles from civilisation, and on top of a ladder approximately twenty miles high.

    It's going to be cooler tonight, so I'm going to go for a shot of a nebula my previous telescope wouldn't have had to power to see.

    Its M27, or the Dumbbell nebula.

    

    It's always been my fave, and allowing for my tenuous grasp of mathematics, is quite far away at about 7.5 quadrillion miles. 

    I can't wait until winter when my absolute no 1 (Pleiades) will be back.

    I wonder how my photos will turn out.

It's been a while.

I haven't blogged for a while because I've trashed one of my kneecaps.

   Why that actually makes any difference, I don't know, but I'm sticking with it. 

    Apparently May in the UK was the wettest since Noah clambered into his boat. However, since the first of June it really has been summer. Heat, lots of heat, blue skies and a total absence of clouds. Taking heed of the less-than-friendly advice from the doc after my recent introduction to melanoma, I literally caked my face and neck with factor fifty this morning.

    Armed with the happiness of someone who hasn't listened to the weather report, I set off to the motorbike shop to get my hog serviced and MOT'd. Can't do it myself for two reasons - aforementioned knee, and more importantly because I just can't be bothered any more. The shop is only three miles away and the walk back would do my partially perished patella some good. My plan worked.

    Until the moment I left the shop.

    In a particularly vicious ambush the clouds hurtled across the sky, coalescing directly above my head, and seconds later about half a ton of rain per square inch almost concussed me. On the long, miserable walk back, and in collusion with the sky, about twenty car drivers, noting my predicament with glee, took the greatest delight in swerving into the giant puddles of storm water to drench me, and in the process indicating that the label on my new bike jacket, proudly proclaiming it to be waterproof, was a tad optimistic - in fact a blatant lie.

I have discovered perpetual motion!!!

 Sort of.

    The First Law of Thermodynamics is a bit of a bummer and eventually gets round to saying that this is impossible. We'll see about that.

    In Britain there's a huge chain of a particular chemist shop.

    Like almost all stores these days they have a customer loyalty card. This morning I went into one of aforesaid establishments and, using just my loyalty card, purchased something. 

     For which I received more points on my card. Imagine, getting something for nothing, and then getting more free points to spend on more stuff for nothing.

    In ya face misters Clausius and Thomson