Thursday 23 January 2014

Tales Of The Unexpected

My colleague is a funny old stick. He’ll be 50 in a couple of months and he’s one of the most engineery men I know (and given my employment background that’s no mean feat). He is logical and methodical and he likes a scientifically reliable fact.

Just recently he had been quite poorly and was been bemoaning the aches and pains and general inconvenience of it all. A couple of his desk neighbours had been badgering him to go to the doctor (a thing he seemed singularly unwilling to do). All the persuading and cajoling and pressuring came to an abrupt halt however, when he recently announced that he’d been made well overnight.

He explained that he’d gone to bed as normal in the evening and the following morning had suddenly felt entirely better. Nothing too unusual so far, until we got to his view of the reason for this sudden recovery.

The spirits did it in the night.

We asked how he’d arrived at this slightly leftfield reason for feeling better and he explained that when he’d gone to bed he’d been wearing his socks (with his pyjamas tucked in to them, mind you), but when he’d woken up in the morning HE NO LONGER HAD SOCKS ON (pause for dramatic music).

Now I know very little about either spirituality or medicine, but a sockectomy seems to be a pretty unusual activity for spooks or doctors to be involved in whilst working on curing a bit of a cough.

However, just to be on the safe side, he went to see the doctor anyway. I asked how it’d gone and he told me that the doc had said it was just a virus that his immune systems had sorted out and he just had to take things easy for a while.

He also told me that he’d asked the doctor if it might have been spirits that took the illness away. Apparently the doctor thought it quite unlikely.

Sometimes I worry that I’m just imagining these people.

NDC

Wednesday 22 January 2014

Of Mice and Men

I know that those of you more organised than I (which means pretty much all of you) will have already made your New Year’s resolutions. I’m sure that you will have stuck resolutely to them, wavered and discarded them by now. Some of you may even still have one or two intact, in which case I salute your tenacity.

I, however, have only just got around to thinking about such things, which has a couple of positive aspects to it:

  • They aren’t concocted in the alcohol-hazed aftermath of Christmas.
  • I can say with honesty that I haven’t given up on any of my resolutions yet.


 So I am hereby committing my harebrained schemes to the ether.

1.  Travel
Last year we didn’t really get to too many places. This year some more weekends away are on the cards.

2. Get back into shape
I’ve been slacking terribly for a while on this front (as my half-arsed half-training debacle illustrates beautifully). I’m thinking that the backbone of this will be running 3 times a week, but there may be swimming and cycling involved too.

3. Wrestle a tiger
Well, everyone has at least one exciting but wildly optimistic New Year’s resolution and I figure that it might as well be super exciting if it’s not likely to happen. This is mine.

4. Dust off the camera
I’ve been letting my one and only creative outlet slip for a long time. I’m thinking that the 365 project may get another go, maybe with some themes along the way. All suggestions gratefully received (but only stuff that won’t get me arrested/sectioned/put on a register please).

5. Charidee
At least 2 things. Nuff said.

So that’s the plan. By December I will have interesting tales and images of foreign lands. I will be able to tell these tales without being out of breath and with a sense of balanced karma. Hopefully the scars from the claws will be healed too.

We shall see.

NDC

Sunday 12 January 2014

Drive By Friends

Some years ago my drive to work in the mornings used to take me along a piece of singletrack road. It was by far and away the best part of my journey, as I was heading Eastward and consequently quite often got to see some beautiful sunrises across open countryside. Although the road was probably a good couple of miles long, it was invisble to satnavs and not particularly well used at all, so on most mornings I had the place to myself save for the occasional cow and an elderly Sikh gentleman.

I used to see him pretty much every morning miles from anywhere, ambling along in his duffelcoat, trainers & wooly hat (winter gear) or T-shirt, trainers & wooly hat (summer gear). Over the years he and I eventually got to a stage where we would cheerfully wave to each other, although I never actually stopped and said hello (I am not one of your arrive-at-the-office-15-minutes-early kinda guys and hence never really had the time to stop).

Eventually my route to work changed and I just didn't see him in the mornings anymore, but I often wonder if he's still ambling about the Leicestershire countryside and wondering what happened to the idiot in the Volvo that used to wave at him for no reason.

After our house move, my new route to work takes me past a house that quite often has a very portly lady standing on the doorstep smoking a fag and looking cross in her dressing gown. Sometimes I see her on the way home too, although usually the dressing gown has been swapped for a tracksuit (she still looks cross though). I've not waved at her so far as she looks more of a punching than a waving kind of lady.

NDC