Year, months-wise, half over

Despite myself, I did actually watch the England versus Germany game last night and in an unexpected turn, quite enjoyed it. Philippa, being sporty, wanted to watch ‘The Boys’ and show her support, so in a rare moment of marital solidarity I sat with her and forced myself to pay attention. It was nowhere near as bad as I anticipated, but I think I was probably just relieved not to be watching another match with Ted.
I won’t go on about it anymore, as I imagine those of you who like football are indulging yourself in other, more informed, people’s writings, and those of you who don’t like the sport are doing your best to ignore all the craziness, and would welcome my blog being the non-ball related haven that it normally is.
But I have to say, in passing, before I leave the world of overpaid games-playing behind, that I am very delighted to have two weeks of women in white outfits at Wimbledon. It is shameful, and not very modern of me, but it is an annual treat that I did not realise I had missed quite so much in Summer 2020.

RC 30-6-21

Traditions

With it being two years since we were able to watch Wimbledon, how good it was to turn on the TV and see the covers on the courts as the June rain battered down in SW19!!!

The weather has indeed become ‘typical British Summer’ rather than ‘longed-for Mediterranean heatwave’. Every year we go through this – getting excited in March about ‘the long six months of joy’ ahead, only to have our dreams drowned by a downpour in April and our enthusiasm dimmed by dull skies heading into July.

I suppose today will all be about England against Germany at the football Euros. A chance for tabloid newspapers to break out decades-old prejudicial headlines and for fans to sing chants about a rivalry that is so one-way it could be a street in Yarmouth.
I have met many Germans in the past few years, and not one of them has ever given me the impression that they consider England to be a major sporting rival. My compatriots thinking we are a serious challenger to a successful Germany is delusional. It’s like me thinking I’m a challenger to Albert Einstein for the title ‘Greatest Physicist Ever’.

RC 29-6-21

Strange brew

I am experiencing an odd mix of emotions today. I feel very tired, and yet enthusiastically energised and almost tearful with hope. I’m not sure how I’m feeling from one second to the next.

I might blame the vaccine, as I’ve had my first dose now. Can’t remember if I told you about that or not, as my brain has felt a bit fuzzy since I had the jab done. AstraZeneca was The Blood Clot One, but I don’t think I have a blood clot. I just seem to have a brain clot. I keep forgetting things. I keep losing track of time in weird ways. Concentration is a real issue and I seem to be sleepy a lot of the time. Are those all side effects? Or is it just a combination of the stress of learning a new job, relief at being vaccinated, and exhaustion from the whole entirety of the pandemic?
I wish I knew, but it’s hard to answer that question when I keep losing focus of my thoughts every thirty seconds or so.
Hey, ho. If it is caused by the injection, it’s still better than two weeks on a Covid ward, right?
Right.

RC 27-6-21

A review of a peach of a meeting

We had our management team get-together yesterday. It’s the first time we’d all been together in one room, and there was no real benefit to that if I’m honest. The whole thing could have been done via Zoom or Teams and would have been just as beneficial and productive. Maybe more so, because we wouldn’t all have had to take an afternoon off.
Anyway, Gavin was very happy with how the whole thing went and seemed to take delight in casting his owner’s eyes out over the room full of personalities that he has assembled to run his Empire for him.
And Empire might be the right word to use, because he made a big speech about the possibility of expanding the company over the next few weeks. I thought the whole point of him bringing me in was to give him more time to spend with his family, but it seems the novelty must have worn off because he is now spending all the extra time he has travelling around East Anglia looking at other sites he might want to buy. He has his eye on a number of seaside hotels that are currently unused and going to ruin and therefore available quite cheaply.
One of the other people in the room spoke to me later and said “Don’t worry – he does this sometimes. Gets all excited about the idea of branching out and then realising later it’s impossible. Give him a month and he’ll be on about something else.”
I hope that’s true. I like his set-up as it is now, and I’d hate to see it endangered by him trying to make it bigger when it’s not ready for it. But then – what the Hell do I know? I did physics, not economics, and maybe right now is exactly the right time to be buying up more holiday properties. God knows the ones we have are fully booked for months on end, and it’s not exactly certain that foreign travel will open up fully any time in the near future. There’s also a bunch of people looking to simplify their lives post-Covid and not have so much responsibility and not spend so much time in the rat-race, so maybe Gavin can pick the pockets of the ones who own hotels and get himself a bargain by persuading them to enjoy an early retirement….
Anyway, my main conclusion from the meeting was that we didn’t do anything we were supposed to do. It was planned as a ‘finalising the management structure’ agenda and we ended up losing the whole three hours to pipe dreams.

RC 26-6-21

Why "Comfortably Numb" is the best song ever

I have written this while a little drunk, after watching Pink Floyd’s “Pulse” concert yet again. But what the Hell – I’ll post it anyway:

Music can stir your soul. When music is at its best, it connects with your soul directly. But this song goes beyond that – it makes a connection with your soul, then lifts it out of your body, gently caresses it, holds it up to God, squeezes it in its fist and then throws it back into you with a forceful but caring slam.
Listening to it is not a musical encounter, it’s a spiritual experience.
Everyone remembers the first time they heard it, and the way they reacted to it. And every time you listen to it again, you find something new to entrance you.
Why does it work? Who cares? It could be the wonderful contrast between the two vocal styles used by the two singers. It could be David Gilmour’s pain-soaked emotionally raw rendition of the title line. It could be his sumptuous, almost-unarguably-never-bettered guitar solo. It could be the way the instrumentation seems to gel perfectly with the tone of the lyrics. It could be the fact that those lyrics are meaningful enough to bring tears to hardened eyes and ambiguous enough to apply to everyone.  It could be the incredible third act, in which Gilmour’s guitar becomes another voice, carrying on the tone of what came before and then screaming its way through the final, dying moments of the track.
Or maybe it’s simply a combination of everything. A culmination of the confluence of a collection of geniuses, working at the height of their individual powers and lifting each other into a previously unreached apex of artistic brilliance.
It is as close to perfection as you can get. Nothing about it could be improved. Not one beat. Not one note. Every decision made was the right one – from the strange pronunciation of the work ‘sick’ to the number of notes the ‘I’ is held for before the last line of the chorus.
If you are reading this and are not familiar with the song I am speaking of, then I implore to rectify that immediately. Find it, start it, sit back, close your eyes and allow yourself to be taken to places you never knew existed; some within you, some without.
It is beautiful beyond words.

RC 25-6-21

White line and red faces

Well, last night was quite an experience. Have you ever seen a guy in his late 80s leap to his feet and look like he’s about to put his fist through his own television? If so, then you’ve experienced something very similar to what I went through with Ted.

I’m not a huge sports fan, as you know, but it was nice to see that - having not being allowed back into a football stadium for well over a year - England fans celebrated by booing the opposition’s National Anthem and then singing abusive songs about the Scots. And when I say ‘nice’ I am of course being sarcastic. So much for ‘football is one family’ and ‘we just can’t wait to see live sport again’. Quick note to England’s players - there’s no point taking the knee on the pitch if your fans are behaving like jingoistic c**ts in the stands.

I distracted myself from the pain by making silly anagrams of the names on the back of the players shirts. In a moment that brought a proud smile to my face, I realised GREALISH can become SHAGLIER.

In other news – 16,500 new Covid cases reported in the UK today? My prediction that we’ll be thrown into reverse on 5^th July is looking better and better.

RC 23-6-21

Solstice Shitstorm?

It doesn’t exactly feel like we’re approaching the end of June, does it? Everyone I saw onsite today was wearing a coat. I suppose that’s the downside of being on a caravan park that’s close to the sea – any hint of a coastal breeze and you’re going to be ten degrees cooler than a few miles inland.

I am committed to watching a game of football with Ted tomorrow. Beryl spoke to Philippa at the weekend and said something along the lines of “Can I please, for the love of God, borrow your husband to babysit my husband during the England game? None of his offspring are available, and if I have to sit here while he moans and swears his way through a 90-minute match I’m liable to end up braining him with a saucepan.”
So, despite having as much interest in Euro 2020 as I have in the contents of a Robbie Williams album, I shall be winging my way Northwards in time for the 8pm kick-off.

We’re having a big meeting at work at the end of the week. Gavin wants to have a ‘check-in’ get-together to have a review of how the new management structure is working out, which is funny, as we still haven’t been told exactly what we’re all responsible for, we’ve just been mucking in and getting things done as they crop up. But there’ll be food available, and it’ll be good to get ‘the team’ in one room and see how they feel about my first three months or so in the job. Actually - it’s nearly FOUR months. My God, how time flies when you’re constantly anxious and white-knuckle-riding your way through the complexities of learning a new position.

RC 21-6-21

Weekends feel Weird

I don’t miss my time as a Filling Station Sub-Division Sub-Area Sub-Par Mini-District Mini-Manager (or whatever the Hell my job title was) but I do miss the familiarity of the routine I had while I was doing it.
I’m settling in well at the new job (is it still ‘new’ a few months in???) but I haven’t yet got myself into a pattern of doing certain things on certain days. This means that I spend most of the time just dealing with things as they come up, and so there’s nothing to tell me what day of the week it is. I think, with the seasonal nature of the industry, it might take me a couple of years to start feeling comfortable with everything, especially with the constantly changing fun and games of Covid restrictions and travel uncertainties. In the supermarket retail game, there were certain busy times of year, but there were also incredibly busy times of each week, and those tended to be consistent. With holidays and holidaymakers, things tend to be more haphazard and arbitrary (at least that’s my conclusion based on what I’ve experienced so far).
Having said that, we do have set days for change overs, so the site gets much more active on those days, and there’s a lot of new people to deal with, but most of them are quite chilled about the process, and everyone has an allocated arrival time so that, in theory, we won’t have a backlog of people queueing up to collect their caravan keys.
I keep thinking I’ll be overwhelmed soon, because we’re heading into the busy Summer period, but the truth is that we’re almost at full capacity anyway, so it’s not as if we’ll suddenly be 40% busier come mid-July. Unlike retail, there is a finite number of people we can have onsite anyway – we’re never going to have more people here than there are beds available, so in that way there’s an absolute limit to how over-run we might be.
I guess all this is just nerves and uncertainty and not yet feeling absolutely sure about myself and my new position. I’ll be fine by 2024, I’m sure!

RC 19-6-21

Variant Sweepstake

Watching ‘The Delta Version’ wing it’s merry way through the young and unvaccinated like a virus-infused knife through unprotected butter, it’s obvious that we’ll have to face a return to restrictions at some point in the not-too-distant future. That’s depressing, so I thought I’d have some fun with it. I’m inviting people to join me in a little game of ‘Pandemic Predictions’. It’s really simple. Just answer this question – “On which date will Britain’s ‘irreversible’ roadmap have to be reversed?” All you have to do is pay me £10 to enter, register your chosen day, and if you get it exactly right, or if you’re the nearest guess in the event of no-one getting it bang on, you win some money. Personally, I’m going for July 5^th, but you may think we’ll last longer. If you want to take part, just contact me with your bank details so we can arrange payment of your entrance fee….

RC 18-6-21

Fans

I have to say it’s nice to be in the middle of a football tournament without having to deal with a bunch of supermarket-visiting, replica-shirt-wearing, knuckle-dragging, lager-drinking, obscenity-shouting, bile-spitting racist neanderthal thugs. I do not miss my days of putting up flags around the garage in a display of mock patriotism and selling multipacks of Carling to every man who stops in for petrol.

It was nice to be out of the sun today, but my God it was muggy. Muggier than a big mug with a picture of someone’s mug on it. We had the air-conditioning blasting in the office and I still felt like I was dressed in thermals and a jumper. Maybe I’m ill….

I seem to have made a good impression so far at work. I’ve managed to meet most of the staff at all three sites I’m sort-of responsible for, and Gavin says they’ve all said very nice, complimentary things about me. I’m not sure what those things might be, as the most I did on any of my visits was to have a walk around and chat to people. Maybe they were impressed by the way I wear my shoes….

RC 17-6-21

Up, Uppity, Upper

I am on the upturn of my usual mood swingings and feeling optimistic about everything. Strange how the world does not really change that much, but my perception of it, and thus my reaction to it, can change in a matter of days.
Maybe I should buy a tent more often….

RC 15-6-21

Mega Moniker

One of the cleaning staff that works on swap-over days at one of the sites I’m looking after is called Athena. I just wanted to acknowledge in this blog the absolute joy I have at having met someone called ‘Athena the Cleaner’.

RC 14-6-21

Canvas

We have bought a tent. A proper one. A decent, family-sized one that we can have fun camping in, even if it’s just in our back garden because the ongoing virus shenanigans prevent us from leaving the County. It was second-hand, but in good condition. I think the couple bought it with the idea of visiting lots of festivals last Summer, so it’s basically sat in their garage while they’ve waited for everything to re-open again. In the meantime, the lady of the house has had a change of heart and decided that spending time living in a home that is basically a sheet, probably in the middle of a muddy field, and almost certainly surrounded by suspect youths and ne’er-do-wells is not something that she ever really found that attractive. So they’re getting rid… so we swept in with a bid and now we have a tent.
I’m very excited about the prospect of giving it a go at home sometime soon, but less excited about the idea of having to grapple to erect the bloody thing, as the instructions seem to have been printed in a language that doesn’t exist anywhere in Europe, and the accompanying pictures are of a tent that is nothing like the one inside the packaging. But there we are – life is an adventure, especially when you’re camping, so we’ll give it a go on the back lawn soon and see how well we get on. It’s hard to know which is more likely – Philippa and I falling out while trying to co-operate on putting the thing up in the first place, or Philippa spending one night in it before realising she hates the whole concept and vowing never to do it again.

RC 13-6-21

Winter thoughts on Summer days

This may be bad planning, and an example of people not learning the lesson of 2020, or it may be incredible foresight and sensible, but either way we have booked and confirmed our Chesworth Christmas Get Together. Hannah and Nathan, Sister Sophie, Philippa, Mathew and I ensconced away in a delightful cottage, in which we shall enjoy the Yuletide season together and overindulge to the point of explosion. It’s done, it’s decided, and it’s a nice thing to look forward to, whatever the Vaccine Rollout and Pandemic Palaver of the coming months might bring.

RC 10-6-21

Optimism fades, like a sunset

I am watching the daily rates of infection go up and mentally preparing myself for Lockdown 4.
Sorry for the pessimism, but I fear that once again the un-rules-following British public and the un-lessons-learning British government are inadvertently conspiring to send up all back down Coronavirus Cul-de-Sac.
It’s never good to project ahead, especially given the ever-changing nature of the pandemic situation as we’ve been experiencing it for over a year now, but I do find myself looking a month or so down the road and seeing a time where I am fielding hundreds of angry phone calls from wannabe tourists who have had their holidays cancelled yet again. I also – admittedly in the dark of night when my soul is at its darkest – find myself looking further ahead still and seeing a time where life in England has taken on an irreversibly altered state and we’re all limited to seeing people who live within a 6-metre radius of our feet. I shouldn’t be so glum, I guess. We’ve survived pretty well up to this point, and it’s not as if the virus is becoming unavoidable or becoming a guaranteed death sentence, but it’s hard not to be dragged down into the Pessimism Pit that is constantly being refilled and stirred by newspapers, politicians trying to make a name for themselves and 95% of the people on social media.
I had a chat recently with a guy who has a Ph.D. in Evolutionary Biology, and he was convincingly arguing that SARS-Cov-2 (the actual virus name, he kept insisting – ‘Covid-19’ being the disease it causes, and ‘coronavirus’ being a term for a whole group of similar viruses) could very well be The Pandemic That Ends Humanity. (I’ve capitalised each of those words to emphasise their impact. And because it looks like a cool title for a low-budget sci-fi, or a novel.) He reckons we haven’t learnt enough about it, and we haven’t treated it with the respect it deserves, and we keep assuming we’re getting on top of it, when in reality it may just be toying with us for a while before unleashing a mutation that we’re defenceless against. Or – Option 2 on his Agenda of Happy Outcomes – we have to go on living under increasingly more extreme restrictions, to the point where our modern way of life breaks down and the whole world collapses in the style of the Roman Empire.
I can see it happening, if I’m honest. We’re so far down the road of relying on a certain scope of existence that if that were to be dismantled in some way, we’d be ill-prepared to cope. Am I making any sense now or am I just stringing words together that sound like they’re scientific and well thought through, when in fact they’re just the rambling spoutings of a Man on the Edge of a Breakdown?
I’ll stop typing now, before we find out for sure.

RC 8-6-21

Natural inundation

Our house seems to have been invaded by flies. I know it’s an expected by-product of living in the country, but it seems to be much worse at the moment than it’s been at any time since we’ve lived here. Simultaneously, our garden seems to have become populated by every bloody pigeon in Suffolk. It’s as if wood pigeons and houseflies have formed an alliance, and at their first planning meeting it was unanimously decided that they would henceforth all live at Chez Chesworth.
Bastards.
I don’t mind the birds, other than the fact that they shit everywhere and keep other birds away from the feeders, but the flies are a pestilence and a nuisance. Sit still for more than five seconds and you feel them crawling up your arm. Dare to make yourself a sandwich, and there’ll be half a dozen winged gits joining you in the feast and helping themselves to your breadcrumbs. I put up two fly strips on Sunday, and they’re both full, and still there seem to be more flies than there were at the weekend. It’s never-ending. A never-ending onslaught of insects. There’ll be ten buzzing around the kitchen, I’ll successfully swat eight of them, only to turn around and see there are now twelve flying over the cooker. Are they hiding behind saucepans and only coming out when one of their brethren is assassinated, so there’s a continual stream of them making my surfaces unsanitary and driving me slowly insane? Wouldn’t surprise me. Bastards.
I’m seriously considering buying some spiders.

RC 7-6-21

Hot and Happy

It’s been another splendiferous Sunday, full of family fun and serene sunbathing.

I did a bit of a roast and I have to say it was a triumph. A silly idea to have the oven going at 200 Celsius on a hot Summer’s day, but there you go. I kept the windows open and nipped in and out as I needed to. Silverside really is a joyous invention, and now we’re using a decent butchers instead of buying the shit from the supermarket with my discount card, it’s better than ever.  Roast potatoes soaked in gravy are a thing of Heaven, and I can’t believe I ever used to eat carrots without covering them in honey first. Still, we live and learn.

Mathew has loved being able to play outside with very little clothing on. Philippa kept fussing after him and trying to drown him in sun cream, but he just treated that like a game and kept hiding behind the bench. I wasn’t concerned about him getting a bit of sun on his body, I was more worried by his determination to chase bumble bees around. This may be bad parenting, but I did wonder if it would be best to let him grab one and get stung, as I can’t imagine he’d want to do it again.

RC 6-6-21