What I Missed In The Lockdowns

Regular readers will have long ago realised that I am not the life and soul of the party. I don’t have people knocking on the door because they “were in the neighbourhood”. I don’t spend a lot of time on my mobile in conversations about whatever it is that those people who do spend lots of time on their mobiles have conversations about.

My needs for contact with the outside world are fairly modest. I like to sit in cafes for a while, watch people go by and hear the background chatter, or walk along a shopping street and see people going about their daily lives, or wander round a bookshop or a record shop, or go to the movies, or maybe some dance, and have something to eat in a restaurant now and again, where the presence of other people is part of the experience.

None of that is too much to ask. It has been provided by cities since the first one was founded only historians know when. Yet it vanished like sunshine on a cloudy day in March 2020, and did not really return until 2023. (Sure there were people moving around in 2022, but only in the second half, and the mood was still a bit odd.)

 

(Going home from the dentist: Piccadilly Circus 13/1/2021 18:50)

When discussing the Lockdowns, I have tended to focus on the feeling of threat, not from a bad flu virus, but from the Government, the so-called “experts” advising it, and the local council officials implementing and even interpreting many of the ever-changing regulations: they were unaccountable and unregulated, and the “experts” were often acting from ideological motives that don’t bear examination. That would scare anyone.

Recently, I’ve come to appreciate that what I really missed was the very little I asked of and for my social life. Partly because, well, who could really miss so little? Does it even qualify as a “social life”?

Well, it doesn’t matter whether someone else doesn’t call it a social life.

What matters is that I missed it and it affected the way I felt. It wasn’t much of a mooring cable to the rest of the world, but it was enough, and when it was cut, I drifted.

What about the work? I was working from home, dealing e-mails, taking part in conference calls (and Teams when they finally shipped us decent laptops in autumn 2020), and so on. Wasn’t that a mooring cable?

Well, clearly not. Work is not the same as life - which is why we contrast it in the phrase “work-life balance”. “Relationships” at work rarely translate into acquaintanceships in real life. A busy work life does not fill the gap of an empty personal life.

People with domestic relationships may not have felt the lack of being able to wander through the daily tide of people. Perhaps they even found it a relief.

I didn’t.

Catch-Up

At the end of August, I got a cold, followed by a cough that wracked my torso for a couple of days, and by about two weeks later, I felt physically better, but lacking a certain amount of zip and zest. Even in this fourth week, I'm still lacking get-up-and-go.

It got so bad that I drafted a farewell post - I mean, after not posting anything for four weeks, a blog is defunct, right? And it would be if I was doing this for money or reputation. But I'm not. I thought about the reasons for stopping (running out of ideas, feeling tired, run it's course) and for carrying on (gives me a reason to figure stuff out, to vent about the stupidity du jour). The best reason for keeping a personal blog is that it's a journal that's edited for public consumption. A journal isn't one's Morning Pages. Those fulfil a very different purpose.

So I am going to carry on. The posts from the 9th to the 23rd are part gratuitous filler, and a couple that I drafted during those weeks but couldn't commit to publishing.

However, this is one of those colds that puts an upper limit on my ability to plan ahead or produce long chains of consecutive thought. So there may be stutters.

In the meantime, here's a new track from Alix Perez, who practices the lighter side of drum and bass.

Making Normal

Most of the practical suggestions that psycho-hyphenates make are for people who are a) usually okay, but having a bad time, or, b) can remember a time when they were okay, but then something happened to mess that up.

Then there are people who, c) cannot remember being “okay”, and in fact wonder what the hell you’re all talking about.

Which is me. A long time ago, when I was in early recovery, my GP referred me to some NHS therapy sessions (those were the days): the therapist who triaged me asked if I could remember a time when I felt happy or “all right”, I said I couldn’t, and an expression flickered across her face. I didn’t understand what and why at the time, but it didn’t look like an “oh goody” expression.

C-type people, who can’t remember ever feeling “okay”, have to do something Dr Scott Eilers calls “making normal”. They need to define for themselves what “being okay” means, arrange their lives to fit that definition, monitor themselves for how well they are living up to it, praise themselves for doing well, and be gentle with themselves when they slip and need to get back on track.

Regular people, by contrast, just live. They don’t need to put any effort into maintaining their idea of how they should be living, of what’s “normal”. They don’t have any sense that how they live is a choice, whereas for C-types, everything they do is a choice, and nothing is natural. It’s all conscious. A construction. It has to be kept up by habit and effort. “Making normal” imposes a lot of overhead load.

How do you spot us? We're the ones who make lists of how we should live, even if it’s reduced to a slogan like Work hard, exercise, eat right, don’t drink too much, stay away from drugs, avoid losers users and abusers, and don’t buy things you don’t need with money you don’t have to impress people you don’t like.

Feeling Jaded About Taking Photographs

When I get ambushed by a really nasty cold and cough - the kind that means I need to sleep in a chair and gives me aching ribs from the coughing, so I can't mope on the couch because if I do, it will set off a coughing fit and have me hacking up.... okay, you don't need any more details - when I get one of those, the best thing to do is start a project that requires minimal physical effort, and not much intellectual effort either, along with a fair degree of repetition.

Like going through my photograph collection, marking up the bangers, deleting the duplicates and the boring stuff that makes you think "WTF did I take that?", exporting the "meh" stuff, just in case you want to re-habilitate something. Also filling in the locations, since the X-E4 doesn't do that.

This exercise made me realise how few days I took photographs, and how limited my range of subjects was / is.

The last time I did any travelling off my beaten track was three weekends in 2013, and three trips in 2011. 2011 convinced me that travelling / holidays are best done with others - unless it's an annual week out from the domestic relationship - and the 2013 trips were done with a little group from my gym. (Ah, those were the days.) Once I'd reached that point, holidays were just expensive ways of entertaining myself for sixteen hours a day without any of the resources I had at home.

There are only so many shots I can take of the Barbican, the Thames, the West End, the City, the London Parks, and my "local area", before it gets repetitive. Same goes for pictures of autumn leaves lying around a tree, the Waterloo Bridge commuter peleton at 08:30, reflections of anything in any window, food, cups of coffee, cranes, building sites, long queues of red buses, little architectural features on the sides of buildings, people caught in the rain, crowds in markets, and so on and so forth. I started to get a distinct sense of the Been There - Done That's.

And I'm just going to say this. Anyone who says there's always something to photograph no matter where you are, has never lived in the suburbs, and never seen a potentially striking view obscured by trees that should have been hard-pruned four years ago. Large parts of modern towns and green spaces are simply un-inspiring and same-y. The UK can often be dull, dull, dull.

I admit, I'm getting old and more than a little jaded ("bored or lacking enthusiasm, typically after having had too much of something") and I know that a man who is tired of London is tired of life, but I suspect daily life was a lot more exciting in Dr Johnson's day.

On the other hand, out of 5,400 photographs, I have 390 Favourites, which is 7%, and that's not bad.

Happy Birthday To Me

I was 70 last month. I celebrated on the day itself by having a blood test (at 08:00!) to make sure I still had the necessary hormones and chemicals in the right proportions. Seems I do.

The month was filled with dentistry, osteopathy, and having my garden hard standing re-surfaced, so I was too busy to linger long on the symbolism of passing 70.

When I was a young lad, there weren’t many men over 70. Men died pretty briskly after retiring, mainly because they had been doing jobs that left them physically depleted and, as we now know, stuffed full of asbestos and other such damaging substances. For men, 75 was old, 80 was almost un-heard of, except amongst the very well-off and some Chelsea Pensioners.

70 doesn’t have any significance. It’s just one more post-retirement year marked by a slow decline in one’s energy levels. 80 is the new 60 - the age at which one can expect to live five more years (or not).

Ten years. When I was twenty, that was a lifetime.

Maybe it still is.

Health Report

 I have another cold. I am sure I caught it on an over-crowded train from Waterloo to Twickenham Saturday afternoon. I gather the match was quite spectacular. My head feels like it’s stuffed with cotton wool.

Wim Wender’s Perfect Day

I’m trying to remember when in the last twenty years I must have met Wim Wenders and why he would have been interested enough in my life to listen to me describe it. Up to some details - I have never cleaned up-market Tokyo toilets for a living, and I don’t have any relatives who have chauffeur-driven cars - the life his central character Hirayama leads is very close to the one I lead for a decade or more. The moments when Hirayama (aka, me, played by Koji Yakusho, who is far more distinguished than I) stops reading and turns the light off get the feeling wonderfully. Wenders understands it as the ultimate expression of the autonomy of the single: we decide when our day is done, we end it quietly, and sleep. No-one can suddenly start talking, arrive home late, fidget, throw a mood, or otherwise mess with our final waking moments.

We older single men have our routines, we take small pleasures in some of the moments of our days, we may read, listen to music and watch movies, go to the gym (Hirayama goes to a public bath) and have regular places to eat and drink, and from the outside it looks like a life, and on the inside it can feel like a pleasant routine, but it is paper-thin, and we have no links with the people in it other than our habitual economic relations. I do recall Wenders giving me an ambiguous look when I described it like that, and here we are those years later, and it’s clear he got the point perfectly.

The film is not a portrayal of the joys of the well-organised single life. The repeated morning- and after-work routine sequences create the sense that Hirayama is in some kind of emotional stasis. (See also All That Jazz.)

The film ends with Hirayama being asked, by her former husband, who has cancer, to look after the lady who runs his favourite bar. When asked, he demurs, and the husband, says that he is counting on him. The last we see of Hirayama, he has a tearfully smiling face, intensely staring through the windscreen of his van at the future. He has found, as far as Wenders is concerned, the chance of a connection with another person, and that is a source of both happiness and sorrow.

I do remember Wenders suggesting that maybe I might find a relationship even in those my later years. He seemed to think it would be a Good Thing. Hard to explain the draw of bachelorhood to a man on his fifth marriage, so I didn’t.

“Perfect Day” is the most-misunderstood song. The day isn’t perfect because of what the singer does, or who he does it with, but because he is able to forget what a lousy person he is, or perhaps, what a rotten opinion he has of himself. (I think it’s a drug song, but then I would. Others think it’s a song about being with another person.)

This is where it gets interesting. Perhaps all Hirayama’s “perfect days” are a way of forgetting something that he did, or how he was, at some time in the past. In which case, we have a movie about a man hiding from his past in work, culture and routine.

Which would mean Wenders really did understand my life back then.

Leaving only the question of when and where we met.

Health Report

Regular readers will remember that about ten or so months ago I was having pains in my right shoulder and arm. I thought this was caused by bad posture playing guitar, but it turned out to be the bad posture of some of my neck vertebrae. Smart readers went long osteopathy and were not disappointed. 

I had a reasonably pain-free autumn and was okay until the end of December when I must have done Something Stupid which set the pains off again. I’m not getting the fizzing and buzzing down my arms, but I am getting persistent aches in my shoulder and neck, which are turning out to be so distracting that I can’t really focus on anything for long. I’m swallowing ibuprofen with intermittent paracetemol when needed, because the second time around a pain is much less bearable. 

I am long osteopathy again. With luck that will work, and isn’t a sign that my vertebrae have got worse.

In the meantime, I will carry on with the music posts. The real world looks way too shaky right now and I can’t focus on it.

Let Us Now Give Thanks For Small Things

Apple have updated iOS 16.5 to 16.5.1 so that camera adapters work again. This means I can stream from my iPad over USB, as God (or Steve Jobs) intended.

Fujifilm have produced an improved app to communicate with their cameras. It's still miles off what they really need to do, but it's a start. It's called the Fujifilm XApp. They have also updated the firmware on the X-E4 to 2.01 so that the two can work together. I don't get screen freezes on the phone anymore.

(But why do I still have to re-flash the camera from a data card? This is 2023 Yo.)

I found somewhere that sharpens rotary mower blades.

And a cleaner that does repairs.

Teenage girls seem to be just as good at winding-up the weak teachers as they were when I was a lad. I'm pretty sure teenage girls used to identify as cats when I was sixteen. Just to see what your reaction would be.

Happy Birthday To Me

I am now 69 years old. I prefer the round decade birthdays. The 9-ers are a bit of an anti-climax

I have worn discs in my neck vertebrae

I have to take ibuprofen to get a reasonable night's sleep as a consequence

I'm having private osteopathic treatment to help manage it

I take lanzoprosole for a hiatus hernia

Last week, I was putting antibiotic on my lower eyelid to get rid of a sty

My blood sugar is a little iffy

My skin is losing its elasticity

I have a discreet chicken-crop at my throat

It's hay-fever time and I'm fall asleep if I remain in the same position for more than forty seconds

On the plus side...

The osteopathic treatment does seem to be working

Everything else works

I still have all my teeth (*)

I was sober yesterday, and the day before, and the day before...

Proudly representing for lifetime bachelors

I live inside the M25

God bless the Freedom Pass

The car has been thoroughly serviced and repaired and is ULEZ-compliant

I'm getting some decent tones out of the Les Paul + Katana

And when the ****ing sun shines again, I will take some good photos with my Fuji



(*) You need to be pretty old to remember that one.

Health News

So it's time to follow on with the shoulder problem, which I thought was due to poor posture and adapting to the narrower body of an electric guitar, and or some pulled muscles in my back from doing something silly when turning a heavy mattress.

Yeah. Not so much, it turns out.

I was getting pins and needles down my right arm, waking up in the middle of the night with a shoulder that felt like I'd been abusing it for hours, and otherwise a tonne of pain. This, I was told by my regular osteo, was a trapped nerve at C6/7 (because the pins and needles went to my thumb and forefinger, but not the others).

I went for some regular treatment, and while it improved, I felt it had reached a point where I'd have a good day and two bad ones, and it had settled into a painful equilibrium. After a very uncomfortable and abandoned attempt in the hygenist's chair, I wound up with a recommendation to a different osteo, and Allah or someone be praised, managed to get an appointment two days later. He preferred to get an MRI before starting on something like I had, and the next day I was gritting my teeth in an MRI scanner. He had the results three days later.

West End private medicine. (No, I am not a millionaire. I don't spend money on foreign holidays.)

The radiologist's conclusion was "moderate degenerative disc disease, most marked at C6/C7 with foraminal narrowing and multilevel neural impingement (bilateral C4, C5, C6 and right C7)." So basically my neck vertebrae all all slightly out of whack. Everything else is good: spine is okay, spinal cord is unaffected, and my bone marrow is fine. (MRI can see that?)

I'm now in for a once-a-week treatment, at the moment by electric pads on my back. Pressure-based treatment like massage isn't what's needed. It seems to work. I'm in for probably another three sessions at least and maybe some more after that. But as long as it works... 

I also take the ibuprofen and / or paracetamol. I'm still AA and I don't like to take any kind of drugs if I can avoid it, but a) medical people are suggesting it, and b) it's not mood-altering.

I have to remind myself that the pain is not where my brain / body is telling me it is: there is nothing wrong with my shoulder that moving my neck about carefully won't cure. The nerve is getting pressed and sends all sorts of random signals to the brain, which then thinks I need to massage my shoulder. I don't.

Train, tube and bus seats are especially good at putting me in a posture that impinges the nerve, and I can't sit at a table for long either. I have to sleep on my back with some very carefully set-up pillow support. No raising weights above my head, so shoulder-presses are out.

I can play the guitar, and it is not causing any problems to do so. I have to stand up. Doing that for over an hour a day has worked wonders for my leg strength.

This kind of neck problem happens to much younger people, but as far as I'm concerned, this makes me officially old. Young people don't have to think about their bodies (diet, weight, exercise, sure, but not whether you carry a full watering-can in your left or right hand), old people do.

Lockdown: The Third Anniversary

On this day in 2020, the British Government made it illegal for people to leave their houses without excuse, shut schools, closed hospitals for regular operations and consultation, shut down small businesses, kept families from visiting their elderly relatives, and spent billions of future taxpayers' money on the failed Track-and-Trace project, sub-standard PPE, and furlough payments and business loans that were often fraudulent.

To enforce this it filled the media and news with fear-mongering propaganda, confused the public and the Police with ever-changing conflicting and vague instructions, and provided incomplete and misleading statistics based on implausible definitions. At one point, it reached the absurdity of outlawing sex between people who were not living together. Not one of its policies was based on facts. Even more absurd was that just under half the UK workforce was still leaving the house five days a week to go to work, even in the Spring 2020 lockdown.

And then in February 2022, it vanished into thin air.

Leaving behind troubled children, spoiled educations, ruined businesses, a backlog of medical treatment that will beggar the NHS for years, creaking public services, massive debts, and double-figure inflation.

The Daily Telegraph has been doing a good job of bringing all the issues to the front pages. The WhatsApp messages it obtained prove that the Government and civil servants were making up rules in an absence of facts, to promote a policy that was only made possible by improvements in the internet infrastructure since the mid-2010's. Working from home would have been impossible in 2010 at the FTSE 100 company I worked for.

I was not scared of the virus. Even by the end of March 2020 we knew that almost everyone who got it survived, and the few who died were very old, obese or had a number of other conditions. Some people would go on to have long-term effects. That happens with any viral infection.

I was scared of getting quarantined. I would have starved, for one thing. I don't have two week's supply of food in the house, and the supermarket delivery services weren't taking on new customers. So I took all the actions and inactions necessary to decrease those chances.

I was scared of a Government and State that had clearly lost its grip, if not its mind; of the powers devolved to unaccountable local councils and other bureaucrats, who could (and did) make up rules from thin air; and of the license it gave to every snitch, crazy person, control freak and busybody. It was a crisis that many, many people could and did exploit, from swindling the Government to re-igniting family feuds.

I did not want to find out that anyone I respected actually believed any of it, because they would be lost to me. Falling for the Lockdown propaganda was a litmus test: if you did... well, there's that.

My deepest fear was that I had fallen for the hype, and was just putting a defiant face on it. After all, look at how I behaved. Did I go along with the Lockdown? What choice did I have? There was nowhere to go, except for a thirty-minute walk round the local park. The job kept me indoors, or in the garden, since the weather was fine. Outwardly I was behaving like a True Believer. Inwardly, and after June 2021 outwardly, when I finally revolted (!) and declared myself mask-exempt, none of it ever made sense. As we get further from it, Lockdown will enter into history as another Extraordinary Popular Delusion and a Madness of the Crowd.

To this day, I'm not sure about why everyone rolled over for it at the start. At the time, I suggested that life in 2019 had become ridiculous for many people: too crowded, too expensive, too hectic. They saw the chance to take a break: after all, it was only three weeks to flatten the curve. What they did not know what that the Minister of Health and the Civil Service had other plans. Those three weeks turned out to be a bait-and-switch.

There are many people who assume that the 2020-22 Lockdown has proved itself so awful in its consequences that it will never happen again. On past form it will, and sooner than 2041. Every year potentially deadly viruses appear, mostly in animals, and every year there is a brief fluster about what might happen if this one crosses over to people. Any of these could be promoted to Lockdown status using the same techniques used in 2020. All that's missing is the money to pay for it, and the wrong people in the wrong jobs making the wrong decisions.

Not sure? 1914-18 was supposed to be the "War to end all Wars". Which is why they had another one twenty-one years later in 1939-45.

Servicing / Repairing The Car

I took the Fiat for a service recently. I used to go to a local dealership in Hounslow, which this time seemed reluctant to answer the phone, so I drove by and found it deserted (the Internet was quite sure it was still open). I found out later that Fiat pulled the franchise. So off to an enormous place on an industrial estate off the Great West Road I went. When it was over, they muttered something about oil leaks and a rusty exhaust bracket. There was a list of work that needed doing, one of which was the timing belt, and some of the others were "stuff happens" fixes. Then there was £350 under "oil leak". That was for the investigation, not the repair. The repair would probably cost a lot, said the counter staff, not worth doing, assuming that I appreciated as well as they did the age (10 y/o) and near-zero trade-in value of the car.

I went looking for a second opinion at the local garage that does my MoT. The local mechanic found the leak within two minutes of putting the car on the lift, and his indicative price had way less overhead in it.(*)

For the kind of supermini / hatchback I drive, a low-ish mileage four year-old costs around £10,000, and should have ten years in it. I'm not one for driving massive mileages. My decision amount using the one-quarter rule (**) is £2,500 for the remaining life of my current car. That's for exceptional repairs, not stuff on the service schedule or consumables like brake pads and tyres.

I went through the list of things on the service sheet, picked the important ones, and asked the local garage to do them. The bill is going to be around £1,000, which is way cheaper than a replacement, and leaves some over for the next few years.

I got this car cheap (and it turned out to be cheap for a reason) and have put about £1,000 into it for exceptional repairs so far. The total is still way less than a "good" one would have been, so if these repairs simply carry on the programme of bringing it back up to standard(!), I'm fine.



(*) Main dealers charge more partly because they have way more overheads than your local garage. Those overheads include the nice people at Service Reception, and reassuring paperwork. Not everyone feels confident talking to mechanics first-hand while standing in a workshop. So they pay for the comfort of dealing with Service Reception staff.

(**) See next post

Diary

I've just finished another batch of egregious backdating.

I've been distracted by my shoulder and right arm.

If I sit at a table and eat, let alone try to write, pins and needles shoot along my arm down to the thumb and forefinger.

If I put my head too far forward / backward / to the right, also pins and needles, and discomfort.

If I play the guitar, the elbow end of my right tricep feels really... odd.

Sitting down on a chair leads to discomfort. I fidgeted a lot during a couple of concerts recently. Trains and tubes can lead to more discomfort.

If I lie on my left side to sleep, pins and needles shoot along my arm, and for a while.

If I lie on my right side, that's uncomfortable, with tingles.

I've been sleeping on my back for the last six weeks.

Which means when I wake up, that's it. I'm stiff and ache-y. Pulling the duvet up and curling up for an extra hour is not possible.

I've been having walks at 06:00. In this weather.

I have been taking action.

I've had three sessions with my osteo, and a massage from someone who knows how. Each one has lead to an improvement.

There are two problems.

One is a probable trapped or inflamed nerve in my neck. That was from trying to flip a heavy mattress, something, I've done many times before without a problem.

The other is muscular tightness from adapting to the electric guitar.

Neither was helped by having a back that has been described as "like a turtle".

For a while I could not sort out which symptoms were coming from which cause.

I can now.

A wrist brace above my elbow helps with the guitar playing. I suspect I will adapt to that.

The most I can do is have massages to keep my back from tightening up. My osteo likes the idea of pulley-rows and face-pulls as well. I can do that.

I'm now waiting for the nerve in my neck to sort itself out.

Everyone says that it will remit, but it will take time.

Guitar-Induced Shoulder Ache

There is nothing like having a clenched muscle in my right shoulder to make me feel like resigning quietly from all forms of human interaction and activity. It’s a permanent reminder that something is wrong, that I haven’t fixed, as well as that I did something dumb, that I don’t know what it was.

Yes, I’ve had a massage. The poor girl had to take a break from digging her elbows in to the concrete slab that is my back if I leave it too long.

No, the massage didn’t make it go away. It was only a couple of days later I realised what had brought it on.

I’ve been playing the guitar standing up. With a strap. And I’ve been tightening a muscle in my right shoulder to stabilise my right arm, which is the one attached to the plectrum. That’s what suddenly went clench at the weekend. It’s a sod to get to, and was just one of many tight muscles that the masseuse was dealing with.

There are reasons for standing up and playing an electric guitar, mostly to do with access to the frets above the twelfth. When sitting down, the body blocks the left arm from reaching the higher-octave frets comfortably.

The trick is to learn how to hold one’s right arm without clenching any muscles, and also to get the right hang height and angle for the guitar.

The angle matters. The more towards the vertical the fretboard, the greater the difference in distance from the bridge one picks the strings: the 6th E string will be twangier than the 1st E string.

It also affects the angle at which the left arm and wrist need to be to make barre chords.

And you thought this was simple. You know, pick up my guitar and play.

Losing My Passport and a Trip to Consular Services

I had checked in online with KLM. Packed my stuff and gathered together my documents.

Passport.

Passport?

Passport!

After looking everywhere, nope. Gone.

My friend stopped me from panicking.

I had to apply online for an emergency passport. https://www.gov.uk/emergency-travel-document

The application process is straightforward, you don't need any details about your lost passport, and pick up the passport yourself from the Embassy. (Courier takes an age.) It took a couple of attempts to get an acceptable photograph, but the computer seemed to be happy to wait.

There's an irreversible point where you push a button to continue and the cancel your lost passport. Take one last look around before doing that.

It costs £100. What choice do you have?

The application was done by 11:00 or so on the Monday, and I was told I should hear within two days.

About 15:00 on the Tuesday, I got a mail telling me the passport was ready for collection, between 10:00 and 13:00 Monday-Friday, from the Consular Services office at the Embassy.

Wednesday morning, we set off to The Hague from Utrecht Central at about 08:30 on a train that was only a third-full. Navigating between the station and the Lange Voorhout by map turned out to be more confusing that we thought, and a kind lady on a bicycle put us in the right direction. We had overshot the left turn we needed by some distance.

The Lange Voorhout is where a lot of the Embassies are, and it's less than a hundred yards from the Dutch Parliament. All very tree-shaded and historical. Consular Services is on a side street. We got there about 09:45.

I was expecting a line, if not around the block, then at least up the Kliener Kazernestsraat. Even by 10:00 we were the only people there. Clearly, losing one's passport is not a thing that happens a lot.

Just before 10:00, a jovial man appeared, wished us a good morning and asked if we were for the Consular Services. I said I was, and he let us in, asked my name and vanished into the offices.

About five minutes later, a woman called my name from behind a customer window, and talked me through the emergency passport.



Yep. It's bright blue. Nobody on passport control anywhere is going to miss it.

The page you show passport control looks like a normal passport. The document number will be accepted by online check-in systems, and it is good for one journey to the UK by "any available route", and expires months into the future. The rules say there's a limit of five intermediate countries, and you should check if they accept UK emergency passports, but that may only be an issue outside Europe. It took no more than five minutes: no interview, no interrogation, no sermons.

Travelling the next day, the Dutch passport control (on leaving the country?) asked if I had lost it in the Netherlands.

When I arrived in the UK, the Passport Control officer took the passport from me, and asked where I had lost it and how much it cost. I wondered if the latter was a test question, but I think he didn't know. He gave me a you-won't-be-doing-that-again smile and waved me through.

I was impressed by the whole process.

The only bit that wasn't easy to take was waiting for the e-mail. That really is being in limbo.

How did it happen? It had been three years since I had travelled anywhere, and I had just lost the habits of travel, including putting the passport in the case (or room safe if you're in a hotel). So I'm going to look for a neck wallet to carry it next time.

Thirteen Years of Blogging: 2009 - 2022

The first post on this blog is dated 29th April 2009.

That's thirteen years. Which is pretty good going for a personal blog.

A while ago, one of my rare commenters remarked that this blog seemed to be mostly about me getting things off my chest.

Fair comment.

I think that's why I started doing it.

I'm certainly not in it for the money.

Every now and then I wonder about being more professional about the whole thing.

Being more professional would require that I choose a subject and offer a consistent view of the world around that subject.

I would have to produce content for the clicks.

I'd start caring about views and engagement.

I'd have to do SEO (which I think is voodoo anyway) and other such stuff.

The financial and personal reward for all that would be?

Zip. Nada.

Sounds like a decision to me.

Decorating Project - How To Look Like A Pro

 Get yourself one of these...

As seen on You Tube decorator videos. The big semi-circle is for scraping paint from the roller back into the paint tub, but maybe my roller was too knackered to give up the paint when I used it. Sure took long enough to wash it out.

Decorating Project - Background

It's called `building', not `precision engineering'. A conventional two-storey brick-built house is basically four brick-and-mortar walls holding up two wood rafts. Those walls were laid by hand by men who knew what they were doing, and used a spirit level frequently, but we're not talking laser levels and automated mortar-laying. My house does not have one straight line or right-angle corner in it. The rafts are made of joists running from one side wall to the other, with planks of wood nailed to them to make floors, and boards nailed to the underside of the upper raft to make ceilings. Those planks were cut straight on a machine, but laid by eye. Gaps in the front and back walls were left that were roughly the size of the window frames ordered by the builder. Add in some more-or-less square stairs, a couple of internal walls, and there's a lot of gaps, slack and empty spaces in a perfectly sound and strong house.

All that coping, skirting boards, filling plaster and other such decorating-and-finishing is to fill up or hide the gaps, make everything look neat and tidy, as well as stopping small things from falling below the floors, or, for that matter, coming up from the earth under the ground floor.

The structural load is carried by the side walls (which are solid in a terrace) and the joists, with a bit done by the front and back walls.

None of the finishing work is structurally significant.

Now that may seem obvious when it's said, but I'm not a builder or a decorator, and I was never quite clear on whether (say) tearing out skirting board would result in the collapse of the wall.

Okay. Laugh. I deserve it. It's not what I trained to do. Nor my father before me, nor either of my grandfathers.

But I'm doing some of it now. And I need to understand this stuff or I don't feel comfortable.

Why do we get cracks in plaster and between finished work? Was it badly done?

Nope. It's because you don't want precision-joints.

Some of that slop between the parts has a useful purpose.

The ground your house is built on expands when there's rain or a lot of moisture in the air, and contracts when the sun stays out for long enough to heat the ground up. That means your house moves slightly. In different directions every year.

The same temperature changes that affect the ground, also affect the materials in your house. Everything moves slightly all the time.

You move the furniture around, and that changes the load on the joists and hence the supporting walls.

Have some vigorous, errrm, married life and the load shifts around on the joists supporting the bed, and that pushes at the ceiling boards in the room below.

That's where all those hairline and other cracks in the plaster come from. If everything fitted precisely, there would be more cracks, not less, since everything would be connected to everything else.

So hairline cracks are a consequence of the features, not a bug.

That's why it's okay to plaster a hairline crack over, and / or slap a good think coat of paint on it.

By `plaster' of course, I mean Polyfilla or decorators' caulk.

Other gaps need silicone, which everyone says has some bend and flex in it, so shouldn't crack. (Instead, somewhere near the silicone will crack instead.)

Large gaps and holes need filling with foam, and then a final coat of filler for the paint.

And no, the filler or the tape will not `resist' further cracking. Any force large enough to shift a chunk of wall, ceiling or floor a fraction of a millimetre is going to laugh at a bit of adhesive tape.

And the bit where I use tape or some careful work to get a good sharp square edge on the corners and edges?

Have you seen my house?

10 Things I Can't Live Without

Here was a quick-and-easy post idea I couldn't resist. Search the title on You Tube and you will get a number of videos. Some are vaguely troubling. It turns out a lot of people can't live without pocket knives. Really?

Infrastructure stuff like Amazon, trains, electricity, gas, running water, not being mugged on the way to the station, my house, gas cookers, the Internet, dentists, doctors, friends and family, my glasses, and in my case, the entire Apple ecosystem... is all taken as read.

So here's the list...

Sony WF 1000XM-3 earphones. These are as good as everyone says

Music. From wake-up music to falling asleep music and every moment in between

De Longhi Dedica Espresso machine and Lavazza Red coffee. 'Nuff said

Exercise. Currently a Bosu ball and home weights

The Car. When you need a car, you need a car. Not a cab or a bus

Foyles and Fopp. There is no substitute for browsing for books, DVDs and CDs

To-Do List. Currently in a Moleskine notebook. I find To-Do lists have to be handwritten

A good Thai massage service, and osteopath. Because I have lousy posture and eventually that turns into aches.

Scarves and gloves in winter. Man do my hands get cold fast now.

The Freedom Pass. Age has its privileges and not having to worry about if you can afford to use public transport is one of them.

Oh how mundane! But then, I'm a Brit, so a Glock and a military-grade locking knife are illegal. I left out the wallet because this isn't an EDC list. Where's the Air Miles membership, because I'm always travelling? I'd love the exercise to be a fancy West End gym, but I can't afford those kind of prices. The local David Lloyd centre is pretty damn pricey as well.