The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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8:56am on Friday, 11th July, 2025:
Weird
I know peppers are supposed to be hot, but these seem rather more amorous than most.
8:56am on Thursday, 10th July, 2025:
Outburst
9:29am on Wednesday, 9th July, 2025:
Weird
Timpson is a chain of shops that does all kinds of small walk-in jobs for you: key-cutting, shoe heel repairs, watch repairs, dry cleaning and engraving. It's one of the most progressive companies in the UK (employees have free rein to do whatever they think will deliver good service, employees get their birthdays off work, 10% of its employees are ex-convicts, ...). In general, it's one of the most admirable companies in the UK, despite its rather humble service offerings.
One of the shops in Colchester is in an old building, which has this plaque attached to it:
To save you from straining your eyes, here's what the text says:
"This Doorway Has Been Retained In The Interest Of Preserving The History Of Colchester. It Is Thought To Date From 1500 AD. And It Seems Likely That Even At That Time The Building Was Being Used As A Shop. Which Was Probably Of A Similar Size And Shape To Our Present Shop
TIMPSON
Great Service by Great People"
That use of a capital letter at the start of every word is somewhat ... unconventional. Only in the last line, which is probably corporate in origin, is it more like what would be expected in English. Also, the second and third phrases following the full stops aren't sentences. The final sentence doesn't end in a full stop, either.
Timpson may be good at engraving, but I'd want to see what the output was going to look like before I asked them to engrave me anything.
I do have a jacket with them for dry cleaning at the moment, though. They really do offer a Great Service.
8:25am on Tuesday, 8th July, 2025:
Anecdote
I went to the dentist yesterday to have some work done on a tooth that will need a crown. It only needs a crown so that I can get an implant next to it: it was at an angle, and apparently they don't make molar implants the shape of a Lego roof tile.
The dentist (who's really good — he trains other dentists) gave me an injection and told me my lip would start going numb, which it did. That is, it started to go numb, but didn't actually go numb.
The dentist started drilling, but in one particular place I could feel it. It rather hurt.
He gave me some more numbing agent, waited a couple of minutes, and carried on. My lower lip was numbish where he said it would be numb, but when he drilled the part of the tooth where it had previously hurt, it still hurt.
The dentist gave me another dose of whatever it is in the needle, and waited another minute or so, then he continued. My lower lip was still not entirely numb, and when he reached the bit that hurt, well, I could still feel it but the pain was bearable. He did whatever it was he needed to do and carried on. There was no more pain thereafter.
However, while he was working with his drill, all three jabs kicked in at once and my lower lip on the right-hand side turned to rubber. My tongue was numb at the same side, and everywhere on my cheek from my chin to my cheekbone was also numb. It took four hours before it all came back, and when it did my jaw muscle where the jabs had gone in was so stiff I could barely open my mouth enough to shovel food in. It's still a bit stiff this morning.
That's not the weird thing, though. That was when my cheek was completely numb and started to itch. I don't know how something I couldn't feel could itch, but it did. Scratching it did nothing, and was a bizarre experience in itself because I could feel where I was scratching with my finger but not with what was being scratched. As a result, I got a glimpse of how people with phantom limb syndrome must feel; they have my complete sympathy.
Anyway, the exercise was a success and I'll be getting my implant and new crown at the end of next week.
I rather hope they fit, as I'll be going to my elder daughter's wedding the week after, and don't want to be unable to eat cake.
8:38am on Monday, 7th July, 2025:
Weird
When I was in the beautiful village of Nerja last year, I spotted these trees racing to be first to jump into a swimming pool.
I bet one of them has reached it by now.
9:56am on Sunday, 6th July, 2025:
Weird
This is the sign for an "espresso lounge" in Colchester:
It seems to have expanded its remit to include non-espresso items such as cakes, sandwiches and something that might be teas, might be coffees.
What I like about this sign, though, is the apostrophe in "Panini's". None of the other plurals have spurious apostrophes, so it gives the impression that it's a genuine, possessive apostrophe, and therefore the jacket potatoes belong to the panini in some way.
I've never eaten there, but given that this particular espresso lounge also serves a full English breakfast all day, perhaps I shall.
If only the espresso lounges in Italy did that, Italians wouldn't be such healthy people.
10:31am on Saturday, 5th July, 2025:
Weird
From the front of the Baptist church in the middle of Colchester:
I thought Victorian builders were supposed to be good at their jobs, yet here they are, constructing a church that has to be fixed up less than fifty years later.
You're not as good as you make out you are, Victorian builders.
10:55am on Friday, 4th July, 2025:
Weird
In case you throught that social media were entirely responsible for menacing conspiracy theories, here's an article from the Daily Mirror, dated 9th July, 1990.
I happen to have a copy because I bought a copy of every newspaper on 9th July, 1990.
12:02pm on Thursday, 3rd July, 2025:
Anecdote
We went strawberry-picking this morning.
Fortunately, I anticipated that I would kneel on some, so I put on my gardening trousers.
I hope those are strawberry stains, anyway, and not wounds from shrapnel.
9:27am on Wednesday, 2nd July, 2025:
Weird
There's a barber's in Colchester called The Master Barber. The barber has expertise in some quite specific areas:
Turkish, English, Romanian and Persion seems quite an eclectic mix. There can't be many people who have that experience.
Well so you might have thought:
This is one of their other places in Colchester. They have six barbershops altogether.
I hadn't realised that Turkish, English, Romanian and Persion hairstyles were so in demand.
I still get my hair cut at Rodney's. He used to train people to cut hair, having himself been trained by Vidal Sassoon. OK, so Rodney died a few years back so now I get it cut by one of his former trainees, but if I ever need it done in a Turkish, Romanian or Persian style I'm spoilt for choice.
9:48am on Tuesday, 1st July, 2025:
Weird
I'm sure there's a reason for these barriers, but I don't know what it is.
If they were in a game, you still wouldn't be able to get through the gap.
8:48am on Monday, 30th June, 2025:
Anecdote
There's a country lane a couple of miles from where I live that's used by agricultural vehicles. It's tarmacked, but there are no kerbstones. Every so often, a tractor or something goes too close to the edge and breaks a chunk off. These individual bites add up, and in time the edge of the road is worn away.
This is how coastal erosion works in Holderness, the part of the country where I grew up. It averages about two metres of loss every year, but it doesn't lose it two metres at a time. For any given part of the coastline, nothing will happen for maybe five years then suddenly the sea will take a ten-metre bite out of it.
The obvious way to stop this is to build the equivalent of kerbstones. The larger towns do have these — breakwaters and boulders — but elsewhere the cliffs are exposed and they're gnawed away at. Some thirty towns have been taken by the sea since Roman times, four of them off the coast of my home town, Hornsea: Northorpe, Southorpe, Hornsea Beck and Hornsea Burton. In Hornsea itself (which used to be the second-largest of the five villages, behind Hornsea Beck) there's a Hornsea Burton Road that runs perpendicular to the sea: if you carried on in a straight line, you'd end up where Hornsea Burton used to be.
As for why we're not protecting the coastline by dumping huge rocks from Norway along its length, well there are two answers. The first is money: coastal defences are expensive, and although the larger settlements are protected, arable land is not regarded highly from a cost-benefit perspective. The second is that defending against longshore drift tends to move the problem elsewhere: Holderness suffers so that Lincolnshire doesn't. This is somewhat controversial, and came out of a Hull University study in the 1970s or 1980s that basically said to let it happen, the Netherlands needs the extra soil that makes its way there over time.
Oh well. If Hornsea becomes an island surrounded by concrete walls and chunks of rock, that might increase tourism.
8:24am on Sunday, 29th June, 2025:
Anecdote
As predicted, no sooner had I thrown away the mystery key that I found than I discovered what it was that it unlocked.
The metal recycling plant will feast upon this in due course.
8:49am on Saturday, 28th June, 2025:
Anecdote
When I was at aged 16-18, we visited a power plant on a school trip. This was notable for three things:
1) Only after we entered a room with immense electro-magnets in it did the person who was showing us around remember to ask if any of us had a pacemaker, because if so we'd be dead.
2) I encountered my sixth first computer scientist , the first one who wasn't called Tony. Her name was Roz.
3) I was given a punched card.
I kept the card, because it says Nuclear Data File Card on it. When I was at university, I had the idea of using it for one of my assignments to confuse the punched-card operator, but I never did; they probably wouldn't have noticed it.
It's amazing to think that Essex University used to go through a million punched cards a week back in the late 1970s.
We weren't allowed to take the chad and throw it around. Being card, it was biodegradeable, but apparently it was deadly if inhaled. We could understand that, so only threw it at weddings instead of confetti.
10:41am on Friday, 27th June, 2025:
Anecdote
As en Emeritus Professor, I was invited to attend the University Court yesterday. This is an assembly of the local great and good (High Sheriff of Essex, commander of the Colchester Garrison, Bishop of Colchester — that kind of person) along with the university executive team (including those of the Student Union) and padded out with people like me.
The event was opened by the Chancellor, then there was a report given by the acting Vice-Chancellor, Maria Fasli, whose term ends in July. I didn't learn much from either of the presentations, because I'd heard most of the content before. Still, it was worth attending and I'll go to the next one.
Maria is moving the the University of Sussex, which is another research-intensive 1960s UK university. Back in 1973, Professor James Lighthill was commissioned to write a report into the worthwhileness of funding AI, and concluded it was a dead end so no research funding should be made available for it. All UK universities that were getting into the subject immediately dropped it, except three: Edinburgh, Essex and Sussex. Maria's aread of specialisation is AI (particular big data analysis), so Sussex is a good fit. It wouldn't surprise me if she was being groomed to be their next vice-chancellor, given that she has the experience and is still only in her early 50s.
Given that she's been at Essex for the past 29 years, she got quite emotional, especially at the sustained level of applause that accompanied the end of her speech.
The University Registrar is also leaving, and at the end the Chancellor thanked them both and there was a standing ovation. I don't bow to peer pressure, and only stand for standing ovations if I actually agree with them. If it had just been for Maria I would have stood, but not for a joint one with someone else I wouldn't have stood for. I don't want to be patronising, even if almost everyone else was.
After the event, there was a networking gathering. There were five or more trestle tables there with drink on them. Half a table had non-alcoholic drink on it (berry and mint fizz) and the rest had wine, beer and gawd knows what else. There were also three bottles of sparkling water on offer. Large numbers of people descended on the non-alcoholic section, probably because they'd driven to get to the event and didn't want to be consuming alcohol for the drive back.
I thought there were going to be nibbles, too, and had been expecting to fill up on them. None appeared, though, so after half an hour I left. That may have been the cue for them to bring something out ("the guy who didn't stand in the standing ovation has left — bring out the roast swan and the suckling pig"), but I suspect not.
I had a McDonald's on the way home. Thanks to the touchscreen ordering system, I couldn't say I wanted no dill pickles and had to pick them out by hand.
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Copyright © 2025 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).