Category: Flashbacks

Bump! (Fandango’s Friday Flashback)

Yay, it is Friday again, and Fandango has just published his Friday Flashback post. The idea is that he picks a post from this day in a previous year, to give newer readers a better insight into what does and doesn’t make him tick.

I have always liked that idea, so shall also post my own reminiscence. As much as anything, it reminds me of where I was, where I am now, and how far I have come. Hopefully, you will find it entertaining along the way.

For my flashback post today, a family post. It gives some insight into my daughter, and hopefully gives a sense of why I want to keep her at arm’s length.

I hadn’t realised that it was so recently that we lost our first chicken, since that time we have had two generations of chickens, and have lost them all. The first generation died naturally, the second, a badger kept getting into the garden, broad daylight, and picked them off one by one. I met this badger one night at 3AM, as it was trying to break into the coop, and regret to this day that I didn’t kill it on the spot. Back then, of course, there is every possibility that it might have killed me instead!

Incidentally, who’d have thought that I’d have come up with the new name for the blog, all those years ago?

Mister Bump

An eventful weekend, for all the wrong reasons.

Daughter come over – she’d been having trouble with her health again and has been in hospital. So she came over mainly to get some rest, but also to bury a couple of her guinea pigs, who had just died. I attempted to help by going out to the garage to find a spade for her. As I was pulling the garage door open, BANG. My daughter had got into the garage by the other entrance, and had started pushing my door open – at exactly the same time as I’m on the other side, pulling. The result? I’m on my arse, cries of pain, cuts and bruises to my shin.

Then, on Sunday, I went through to the kitchen, without anybody telling me that they’d just wiped the floor and that it was currently quite slippery. So, over on my…

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Maturity (Fandango’s Friday Flashback)

Yay, it is Friday again, and Fandango has just published his Friday Flashback post. The idea is that he picks a post from this day in a previous year, to give newer readers a better insight into what does and doesn’t make him tick.

I have always liked that idea, so shall also post my own reminiscence. As much as anything, it reminds me of where I was, where I am now, and how far I have come. Hopefully, you will find it entertaining along the way.

I have never before written a post on this date, so you’ll have to settle for one close by. This is from last year.

Obviously, something must have come up on the news, and I passed comment on it. The headline argument was framed around sexuality, but actually the question was about – I shan’t say the age of consent – but perhaps, the age of appropriateness. This issue itself is long gone, but I’d still be interested to hear any views.

Mister Bump

Part of me chuckles whenever some kind of sexuality-based issue comes up. LGBT, Pride etc. I mean, I have a broad notion that a couple should be able to behave as they wish, as long as it is consensual, but beyond that, it raises an eyebrow that it is such a big deal for people.

Actually, I should not be surprised because with any non-hetero situation, there has been an associated fight for equal rights, and equal rights is important.

There’s an issue currently with some schools in Birmingham. I have no school-age children so, as you might imagine, it’s not a topic I follow closely, so I might have this wrong. A group of schools up there are teaching kids about relationships. The teaching includes gay and bi relationships, and I’m not sure if all the schools involved are primary schools (4-11 years), but certainly some of them are…

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I ❤️ Paris! (Fandango’s Friday Flashback)

Yay, it is Friday again, and Fandango has just published his Friday Flashback post. The idea is that he picks a post from this day in a previous year, to give newer readers a better insight into what does and doesn’t make him tick.

I have always liked that idea, so shall also post my own reminiscence. As much as anything, it reminds me of where I was, where I am now, and how far I have come. Hopefully, you will find it entertaining along the way.

I found this post from exactly a year ago, and I remember it because it was one of my most enjoyable posts to write, it brought back lots of happy memories.

It’s also poignant because it was my introduction to WordPress. I didn’t realise it at the time, but that was the platform this blogger used. So from her posts, I got an account, then discovered the reader and other blogs, and eventually moved my own blog here. Out of acorns…

Although I have now been here happily for several months, it is not all good news. I mentioned in my post that she could go months between entries, and earlier this year she hadn’t posted for ages so I went looking for her. Her blog was now private. I can only imagine that there was a lot going on with her, far more than she ever wrote in her blog. And it struck me as strange, when her blog was public, that she was quite stand-offish on the couple of times I commented on her posts. We bloggers usually tend to be a very friendly bunch. Maybe that’s the price of “fame”?

Mister Bump

I saw a nice surprise yesterday. Years ago I used to read a particular blog. In those days, I had no idea about platforms, I just signed up for emails when she posted. Her tale was interesting – she was an English woman living in Paris. I guess from her perspective, it was just “life”.

I used to love it in Paris, I’d have liked to have lived there myself, but my choice of career made that unlikely. IT is very English-language-focussed and France is, well, French! And by working in both London and New York, I was already in the Premier League, and France would have been a step backwards.

I must be roughly the same age as this woman, had kids at roughly the same time, etc. I think mine was a little bit older, but only by a couple of years. We diverged because while I was…

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Tick Tock (Fandango’s Friday Flashback)

Yay, it is Friday again, and Fandango has just published his Friday Flashback post. The idea is that he picks a post from this day in a previous year, to give newer readers a better insight into what does and doesn’t make him tick.

I have always liked that idea, so shall also post my own reminiscence. As much as anything, it reminds me of where I was, where I am now, and how far I have come. Hopefully, you will find it entertaining along the way.

Just about a year ago, the stroke charity gave me a gold watch for my voluntary efforts. Actually, don’t get excited – it was just a paper certificate. They cut funding to most of the charities a couple of years ago and most of them don’t have a proverbial pot to piss in. I chuckled about it when I found the post; I chuckled about it at the time.

I’ve actually stopped volunteering for the charity now. I won’t bore you with the details but they did something, it pissed me off, and this was only voluntary work, after all. I think they were planning on buttering me up to see if I would change my mind, my county has no other volunteers so it was probably a big deal for them to lose me. But then COVID hit us.

Towards the end, I thought I was out of step in any case. I’d chat to patients about the system’s failings, and would be told by the charity worker “oh no, it’s better than that now”, and I would look around me at the paint peeling off the walls, and marvel at all the other things that had (have) improved in society in that time. Looking back, I picked up on this even when I first started volunteering. They could tell you what *should* happen, but they’d then repeat it as gospel, as though it *did* happen. It was bullshit, every survivor I met could reel off how the system had fallen short for them, and it just grated more as time went by.

I have the weirdest feeling of déjà vu about this flashback, although I’m not quite sure why I would’ve presented it before. If I did flash back to this one previously, I apologise – it must have been tough enough first time around! I’m waiting for the calendar to work for us, so I can start posting flashbacks of my flashbacks! Anyway, my undeserved gold watch:

Mister Bump

Hahaha – you have to take this stuff with a pinch of salt!

The stroke charity gave me a certificate yesteray for 100 hours voluntary work. I did say to the co-ordinator that the number was nonsense, but hey, it was just a bit of paper.

In fairness, this woman has quite diligently recorded the time I’ve spent volunteering – since she joined 9 months ago. Prior to that, her predecessors were a bit more variable. In the early days, I would go up to the hospital on my own, so how could anyone know?

So I will try to hazard a guess myself. I’ve been volunteering every 2 weeks for approximately 2½ years. 25 visits per year, so, about 60 visits. Then it starts getting harder. For each visit, “time away from home” is about 3½ hours per visit. Easy! That works out to about 200 hours.

But, not…

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Footprints (Fandango’s Friday Flashback)

Yay, it is Friday again, and Fandango has just published his Friday Flashback post. The idea is that he picks a post from this day in a previous year, to give newer readers a better insight into what does and doesn’t make him tick.

I have always liked that idea, so shall also post my own reminiscence. As much as anything, it reminds me of where I was, where I am now, and how far I have come. Hopefully, you will find it entertaining along the way.

A lot of things are still the same-ish now as they ever were. I’ve tweaked how I live over the years, but not drastically changed anything. But here is a post I found from two years ago, where I had done something for years, flipped, but then flipped back.

In my flashback post today I talk about a dishwasher. I think a dishwasher was one of the first purchases when we set up home together. In the post, almost twenty years later, I was going through a phase where, with just the two of us and that many fewer dishes needing washing, we were trying to get by without one. Don’t get me wrong, I think life without a dishwasher is a very good idea, but next time you wash dishes, try doing it with just one hand, and you’ll see what I mean. I think the crunch came when my wife started instructing me to leave such-and-such an implement, and she’d do it – clearly unhappy at the standard of my washing.

So I eventually bought another dishwasher. It gets used about twice a week.

A tumble dryer is another luxury I can’t do without. Hanging clothes out on the washing line is preferable every time, but when the line is maybe twenty yards away, and the tumble dryer is two, and when I find it incredibly difficult to actually peg things one-handed… So the tumble dryer gets used all year round. I suppose one of the offsets now is that I only need to launder things every couple of weeks.

So some things change. But not others. That guy I talk about is presumably still a pompous idiot. He’s somebody I have now lost contact with, no regrets. I try to be generally friendly to people but sometimes, life’s too short.

Mister Bump

I think I got to a certain age when I thought I wanted to reduce my footprint. The roof got full of solar panels and the Porsche went, in favour of something much more eco.

It was interesting at the weekend, I had someone round who objected to the tannin in his mug. We don’t bother with a dishwasher any more, largely to save water with just the pair of us. Things like tannin have accumulated on some of our mugs, especially when I went through a phase of black tea, just because getting fresh milk is no longer trivial for me. In any case, the tannin is obviously sourced from the tea leaves – drinking water which had been mixed with those same leaves didn’t seem to be a problem. I don’t worry about it myself, in fact it reinforces to me that the detergents used by dishwashers can…

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