Moving on in England

We're moving house in a couple of weeks' time. I'm paying just over 400 quid to move the contents of one house less than 500 yards into the new house; and that' a rock-bottom rate. If I'd been so inclined, I could have paid closer to a thousand pounds.

My old friend and colleague Steve O'Donoghue reminded me yesterday that now would have been a good time to be able to call on 30 wiry Indian men and a battered old lorry. I still recall having a heavy fridge-freezer delivered to the first flat I rented in Bangalore. A little chap, probably not much over five feet tall, somehow managed to carry it on his back up four flights of stairs and still, incredibly, managed to slip off his shoes before entering the house. Delivery charges? About 100 rupees I think.

Sat-nav take-away

Take-aways have gone hi-tech in the UK. These days they just ask you for a house-number and a postcode which takes the hassle out of explaining that your road is behind such-and-such, just left of so-and-so; past the brown stain on the wall. In India it's obligatory to quote a landmark when giving an address, even though sat-nav is very much in use in the country (and probably developed there as well).

I've been busy on other projects recently, hence the lack of posting on this blog. One of these projects has been a new Punch cartoons blog to showcase some old Punch covers that I have, and I've also been pre-occupied with other matters. I always have good intentions of posting when I get home from work but then domestic matters take over. God, do we miss our Indian servants.

Here's a nice take on sat-nav from Roy Nixon though. Fortunately our Chinese take-away wasn't using the same system last night, and our meal was delivered in pretty good time.

A taste of winter weather

We had snow last night; not a lot, but enough to send my wife into paroxysms of joy, and the children into various states of amused fascination. This photo was taken when I thought I'd be going into the office. However, I soon realised that the snow had also been enough to send the road and rail networks into chaos and so shortly after this photo opportunity, I abandoned the work idea and jumped into jeans and a jumper instead. Today has been spent watching snowflakes falling, and what a pleasant experience that is, after many years in the land of heat and dust. Mind you, we don't half miss the Indian temperatures.

eBay ain't a bad place to be

In the interests of even-handedness, and having written about people's wastefulness, I suppose I should also comment on certain buying habits.

Years ago, my brother and a friend and I took ourselves up to Hammersmith Odeon, bought tickets from a tout and then shook our heads to AC/DC and Def Leppard. I kept my ticket stub from that concert and thought I'd put it up for sale on eBay. It's of no interest to me now, and anyway, it's been in my parents' loft for the past thirty odd years. I see from the ticket that the face value was £3.75 which means that we probably paid a fiver for those tickets. If I remember rightly, I paid for my brother's ticket because it was his birthday the previous day.

That ticket stub has now reached the heady heights of a £10.50 offer on eBay with the number of people watching the item now well into double figures. Here, you can bid on it yourself if you'd like to: AC/DC Ticket.

Hallowhere?

I was well prepared for Halloween this year. Having been reminded that the US-imported nonsense of trick or treat is now an annual UK occurrence as well, I thought that well, if you can’t beat ‘em, at least be prepared to dish out sweets on your doorstep to the local horrors rather than have them throw eggs at your door, or uproot your plants. And so I bought a tub of sweets from the supermarket and left it ready by the front door. I also somehow found my hairy werewolf hands and witch mask which I’ve worn at Halloween parties in the past, and I determined that if anyone did knock on the door, that I’d turn the hallway lights out, put the hairy hands and mask on, and try and scare the living daylights out of whoever was waiting on the doorstep.

I waited and I waited.

Finally, at around eight-thirty I think, there was a ring on the doorbell, and I went into action: hands on, mask on, lights off, hairy hand creeping slowly round the door, followed by the warty old witch face… There was a little gasp, a faint “Oh!” and… it was the woman from over the road delivering the local church newsletter.

So I invited her in, she exorcised my demons and I gave her some sweets from the tub for her and her husband. And that was the only visitor we had that whole evening.
Halloween? Hallo-WTF.

A trip to the tip

With excess cardboard to dispose of after our goods from India had been unpacked, I took Shilpi and the children for an outing to our local dump. I'm good like that. We strapped the kids into the back of the car, filled the boot with flattened cardboard boxes, and then sped off to the municipal tip.

It was around 10am on a Sunday morning and there was already a queue. I supposes it gets worse later on when the car boot sales close and people come and get rid of their unwanted tat. In any event, we weren't there for very long, probably about five minutes, if that. But in the time it took us to unload the cardboard and dump it into the cardboard-only skip, we saw the following items being crushed:

1. A sofa
2. An armchair
3. Hi-Fi separates - amp, CD player, cassette deck
4. A coffee table
5. Cupboards
6. Carpets
7. A double mattress

In fact there was enough stuff trashed in that short time that we were there, to set up a new home. It actually made me slightly ashamed to be throwing away cardboard boxes. Seeing what everybody else was dumping I felt somewhat guilty that I wasn't throwing out a chaise-longue, or that old Chippendale chair that had been in the shed.

After our furniture arrived from India I donated the stand-in dining room suite that we'd been using, back to the second-hand charity shop that I'd bought it from for £40 eight weeks earlier. I also gave them a couple of items of Indian furniture, shipped five thousand miles and at some cost, and now on offer in an Essex junk shop. We did wonder why the people who were dumping their furniture hadn't given it to charity instead. Probably they couldn't be bothered or maybe, like me when I'd phoned our local hospice shop earlier, they'd been told , "sorry, but we're not taking mahogany."

It's all a far cry from India where everything has a re-sale value - even those things that you wouldn't normally think of re-selling. We had people almost killing each other for our seven year old mattress and here in Essex, better-looking bedding was just being chucked away. I'm sure that most self-respecting Indians, being the natural businessmen that they are, could have made good money out of that tip had they been given the chance to set up stall there. As it was, there was a lot of very good looking and serviceable product simply being ground to dust.

Mine, all mine

Chilean miners? Aren'tcha sick of 'em? I mean, I'm glad that they're being winched out of their tomb, but I'm even more glad there are only 33 of them and not a hundred and thirty-three. As it is, virtually every news channel seems to have had its cameras pointed at that dusty hole, whilst the reporters have been desperately trying to fill air-time with potted biographies of the men and the family. At times, it felt a little like one of those awful game shows, Chile's Got Talent, or similar.

"Yes, here we are at the dusty hole in some god-forsaken spot in Chile. The next miner up, we hear, will be Pedro Amigo who has been a miner for seven years. He is one of thirteen children - unlucky for some, eh Pedro - and his hobbies are football and tennis. At least, those were his hobbies. Of late, his hobbies have been, eye-spy (something beginning with R - ROCK! Darn! Your go...) and sleeping..."

Sky News even had some idiot psychologist sitting in the studio, talking us through the miners' first moments as they arrived back on the surface:

"Well yes, he'll be feeling delighted right now [as the miner punches the air, whoops and salutes the crowd] whereas this man [cut to a miner kneeling and praying] is just thankful to God for being alive. This man, on the other hand, is a little emotional because he's been buried in a hole in the ground for over two months [cut to miner weeping]."

Well thank you, Mr Miner-Psychologist, for those deep and telling insights. You know, despite all the coverage of these poor chaps; the personal stories, the little details about how they're coping with being banged up with each other for weeks on end, not one news channel has, as far as I know, told us what we really want to know, the answer to that six million dollar question: where have the miners been taking a dump? I mean, of course they HAVE to go somewhere, and yet nobody has covered that angle - and after two months and thirty three bottoms, that will be quite some angle.

I guess we'll just have to wait for the Hollywood film to find out the answers to that one: Tom Cruise as the leading miner and Bruce Willis as the man in charge of the rescue team. You know, I could really see Tom Cruise doing that leaping about bit when he reaches the surface. Well anyway, let's hope there will be a film, and a book deal and endorsements of Homebase special Chilean gravel "because there's nothing miner about DIY", after all, these guys need a break.