It's not that we don't like fondues, it's that we don't like fondues you heat up by lighting a container of methylated spirits underneath them.
The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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9:14am on Friday, 13th June, 2025:
Anecdote
When I was at school, my weekend job as was a bingo caller in an amusement arcade (Pastimes, now sadly demolished). The chap in charge of maintaining the arcade machines, Eric, had a Simca van. I don't know that I ever saw any other road vehicle made by Simca, and I'm not surprised because it was an ugly thing, but it was Eric's pride and joy.
Soon after getting it, he was pulled over by the police. Here's a 50-years-later paraphrasing of how I was told the conversation went.
Eric: Hello, officer, what's the problem?
Cop1: Your van has our registration number.
Eric: No it doesn't.
Cop1: Yes it does. ATB 18S, the same as ours. [Note: I don't recall the actual number, but it was something like this]
Eric: That's not right, it's ATB 19S
Cop1: No it isn't, look.
(Eric gets out of van and looks)
Cop1: See? ATB 18S, the same as ours.
(Eric looks)
Eric: That's not right.
(He goes round to the front of the van)
Eric: ATB 19S, yes, that's right.
Cop1: You have two different numberplates. That's against the law.
Cop2: Er, are you sure we're ATB 18S?
(He goes round to the back of the police car)
Cop2: Yes, it's ATB 19S.
Eric's van and the police car were indeed ATB 18S and ATB 19S, but each had one of the other's number plates. It turned out that they'd been manufactured in the same place and mixed up when they were sent to the dealers.
I'm sure this doesn't happen nowadays.
I was reminded of the story because my daughter wanted (and got) two identification labels on her newborn son, to make sure there was no chance of an accidental baby-swap.
11:30am on Thursday, 12th June, 2025:
Anecdote
My wife finally conceded that if we haven't used her fondue set for 40 years, we're probably not going to use it.
It's not that we don't like fondues, it's that we don't like fondues you heat up by lighting a container of methylated spirits underneath them.
10:23am on Wednesday, 11th June, 2025:
Anecdote
The clock on my home office wall stopped. A battery change did nothing, so I bought a new one.
Buying a replacement anything is a good way to make the original work again, and that's what happened here.
I was looking at the hands on the clock, which were slightly bent, and in the process presseed on the axle in the middle to which they all connect. This caused it ro burst back into life. There must have been a loose wire or something.
The new clock makes a slight whirring noise as it goes round, so I stuck with the now-functioning old one. The new one is under the TV, where no-one can hear it, and it's more visible than the carriage clock also we have there.
I guess it'll have to be moved when the grandchild gets old enough to self-propel, but for the moment it's doing a splendid job.
Yes, I know the two clocks in the picture aren't exactly synchronised, but so long as neither of them is slow I'm OK with that.
9:08am on Tuesday, 10th June, 2025:
Anecdote
So, yesterday our younger daughter presented us with our first grandson.
It was something of an effort, on account of how he weighed 8 pounds 10 ounces (3.9kg) and my daughter is only 5 feet 1 inches (155cm) tall.
Needless to say, we're rather pleased.
7:53am on Monday, 9th June, 2025:
Weird
From this week's Essex County Standard:
Disappointingly, he was found to be in possession of cannabis rather than crack.
9:30am on Sunday, 8th June, 2025:
Outburst
There was a yellow weather alert yesterday covering most of the south of England, including Colchester and its environs. We were warned to expect thunderstorms and heavy rain — perhaps more rain in a day than we had in the entirety of May.
Because of this, we didn't visit the Roman and Medieval Festival in Colchester's Castle Park.
Undoubtedly because of that, there were no thunderstorms, and what rain we did get was a half-hearted effort for a couple of hours, starting at about six in the evening.
Weather warnings should come with warnings of their own.
8:58am on Saturday, 7th June, 2025:
Anecdote
When I handed back my office and desk keys, I reorganised my keyring and found this lurking there:
I may have been carrying it around for half my life, but I have no idea what it opens. I think it might be for a bike lock that I threw away ten years ago because I couldn't find the key. This is contrary to the usual way with keys, which is to throw them away only to discover within a week what it was they opened that you now, for the first time in decades, want to open.
The writing says IOCHIGIY, or IOCHIGIYA if that /- at the end is half an A.
I hope it's not for anything important, now that I've put a scan of it on the Internet from which any thief can make a copy.
8:17am on Friday, 6th June, 2025:
Anecdote
I haven't bought many 1869 maps of Europe in recent years, but here's one that arrived yesterday.
It's gorgeous.
It's also French, and was sent from France, which explains why it arrived yesterday even though I bought it before I knew I was retiring.
I wasn't aware that the French for Edinburgh was Edimbourg. Still, I'm sure I'll have forgotten this the next time I encounter the fact, so can be surprised again.
The map came with a certificat d'authenticité. If that doesn't mean it's a fake, I don't know what does.
8:51am on Thursday, 5th June, 2025:
Weird
8:26am on Wednesday, 4th June, 2025:
Weird
This is what happens in Colchester when you plant your hedge so close to the footpath that it gets in people's way.
9:32am on Tuesday, 3rd June, 2025:
Anecdote
I was at the dentist yesterday, getting a replacement bridge fitted. I hadn't been expecting to get a new bridge, because I explicitly told the dentist that I didn't want one, but by the time I found out that what I thought was a filling in the old bridge was actually prepatory work for a new one, it was too late.
Anyway, the dentist gave me the impressions he'd made of my teeth so that I could have the pleasure of throwing them away myself.
The gap in the lower teeth is for an implant I'm getting (that I did ask for — it's replacing a tooth that was pulled out earlier this year). That'll be in July some time, and will involve hacking at the tooth behind it because it's at an inconvenient angle. That'll be a thrill.
All this counts as cosmetic surgery, so its cost isn't covered by the NHS. A third of it is covered by the £45-a-month dental insurance I have, but that still means that together these procedures have set me back £6,500.
Great. As soon as I have no income, I'm landed with bills that would have alarmed me when I did have income.
The bridge does look pretty damned good, though, and I can eat the apples I ill-advisedly bought last week when I had the plastic, temporary bridge in place that turned out not to be apple-proof.
4:36pm on Monday, 2nd June, 2025:
Weird
From the BBC sports web site:
Tough luck if you were born in the year 3AD — you're ineligible.
8:58am on Monday, 2nd June, 2025:
Weird
The Big Five personality model, which is almost universally adopted among psychologists, locates the personality of the individual along five different axes: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability and openness to experience.
From https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/geopsychology-regional-personality-variation:
"A high degree of openness signals a willingness to try new things, as well as a higher awareness of one's own feelings and creative talents. Low openness signals seeking fulfillment through perseverance rather than euphoria and being pragmatic — or perhaps even dogmatic."
You can conduct personality tests in different geographic locations and see what personality types preponderate in the general population. Here's what the map looks like for the UK (with orange meaning positive and blue meaning negative):
The openness map is almost entirely blue, meaning that most British people have conservative attitudes regarding change and are practical rather than dreaming.
This is what the class system gave us.
9:13am on Sunday, 1st June, 2025:
Rant
BBC news: I realise you're all excited to tell us that there were surprises in the final episode of this season of Dr Who, and I know that you dutifully put spoiler alerts at the top of your reports on TV dramas, but when the headline for the article is itself a spoiler, showing up on your news home page, you've failed.
We recorded Dr Who because it was on while my wife was cooking dinner, and afterwards she wanted to watch the final of Britain's got Talent. We'll watch Dr Who today. However, the BBC news site has already told me what's going to happen at the end of the episode, so all I'll be watching it for is to find out how we get there.
It's not just the BBC. ITV know that people who watched their show in preference to Dr Who may well have recorded the latter. Nevertheless, they still reported it in the ITV news. This is how my wife found out what happens.
If people haven't seen a TV episode, either they're going to watch it later or they're not interested in it, so why report it? If they have seen it, it isn't news, so why report it?
The BBC leak would have been easily avoidable by a simple change of headline.
This is what happens when reporters think that readers are exactly the same as they are.
9:10am on Saturday, 31st May, 2025:
Anecdote
My wife has now also retired. She was given some flowers by her colleagues.
It would seem that employees at American banks are less cash-strapped than employees at UK universities.
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Copyright © 2025 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).