David Morris – brassedoff.net

Yes, I know I’m a bit late catching up on my French excursion from last week, but wait no longer, dear reader (all one of you!).

Item #1. Things I never expected to see in Paris.

You know what it’s like when things have to be explained for the locals? I doubt this was aimed at any English visitors in the gardens of Versaille. After all, if there’s one thing we English do well, it’s queue.

The palace gardens are huge and beautiful. They stretch pretty much as far as you can see off into this distance in this picture. Unfortunately, the weather was lousy, so I didn’t really get to see them at their best. I dare say that in the right conditions, it’s a fantastic view. The other thing is that it’s free entrance. If you work in the area, I bet it’s a great place to go for a stroll at lunchtime with a baguette and some smelly cheese and onions.

Of course, the French have a reputation as a nation of food lovers, and they can’t pass up the chance to do a bit of gardening there as well as witnessed by the vegetation growing out of my mashed potatoes. I also found out that they’ll eat just about anything. On the menu in this restaurant was tripe, marrowbone with salt and veal brain. I had smelly cheese for starter, deciding that it wasn’t my day for offal.

Where ever I am, I do like to have a look around the odd church, and there were a couple of nice examples near where we were. Despite the fact that I hadn’t got my ‘big’ Canon EOS camera with me, I fancied trying to get a decent picture of some of the stained glass windows. I don’t think I did too badly. This one was in the Church of Our Lady (Notre Dame) in Versaille (not the Notre Dame).

I also forked out a couple of Euros to light a candle for absent family and friends. I’m not a religious type, but it somehow seemed appropriate…

Despite the lousy weather we’ve been having this year, there have been some high points in the allotment. Beans for instance. Anyone (apart from those who’ve had their plots under water) should be able to grow beans; we also inherited several nice apple trees; the sweetcorn has escaped the attentions of Mr Mouse; my ‘under glass’ carrots are looking promising.

Guess what we’re having for dinner tonight!

For the record, there are french and runner beans in there, two different types of apple and my first ever attempt at carrots.

The write-up about Paris and Versaille will probably have to wait until tomorrow. For the time being, just savour the fresh vegetables…

I left out the potatoes because they were pretty much full of wireworm. I also left out the big can of paraffin. You can have fires on allotments to burn off the waste. Let’s face it. There’s a little pyromaniac inside every male. If it had been left to the opposite sex, we’d probably never have invented barbecues.

I’ve also sown another row of carrots today in the (vain) hope that they might come in time for Christmas. The (brussel) sprouts are  looking promising and the chillis are coming on really well. Despite a slow start, there should also be a decent crop of sweet peppers if we can ever get through the whitefly infestation.

After work last night and before dinner, we went for a walk around the Palais de Versaille. Needless to say, I took loads of pictures. Needless to say, it was raining, wet and miserable. My card reader is in another bag at the moment so I’m not going to upload loads of photos now. I am flying back to good old Blighty today tho9ugh, so with a bit of luck, some time over the weekend I’ll be able to share the sights with you. Until then you’ll just have to imagine what a former royal palace looks like in the rain. One observation I would make is hat when Henry VIII sacked all the churches in the 1500s he was moving England from a Catholic to a Protestant state and in doing so, destroyed possibly many works of art in the process. When Citizen Robesperre (sp?) did it in the 1700’s (?) in France, they stayed Catholic so they still have the architecture and artworks. The Revolutionaries probably sat down around a croissant and a coffe one morning and discussed whether they were going to stay Catholic when hey revolted, had a vote and decided by a small majority that they liked the local stained glass windows.

…And posting using my Blaclberry because I’m not paying 3 euros for 20 minutes WIFI access in the hotel. Sheer daylight robbery. If you’re interested, I’m 5 minutes walk for the Palais de Versaille in Paris and it’s raining. Just to be bloody minded, it’s nice and sunny at home :-)

I was reading the Sheffield Telegraph this morning whilst having a bagel and an espresso for breakfast (not that my breakfast choice has absolutely anything to do with this). I was reading about the plight of childrens’ entertainer Tony Turner aka Barney the Clown who has been banned from performing a large part of his act by Tesco in Leeds. What is this large part of his act? Balloon sculpture.

Apparently, because balloons contain latex and latex has been known to cause an allergic reaction in some children, he has been banned from doing this part of his act on health and safety grounds.

We as a country just seem to be getting closer and closer to the Americans. This ruling about the balloons is probably less about the actual allergic reaction that may occur as the fact that Tesco don’t want to find themselves on the wrong end of legal action when some money grabber realises that they can make a quick few £000’s. OK, I freely admit that there is such a thing as an allergy to latex. Indeed, Epipen suggest that between 1% and 6% of the US suffer some form of allery (although Epipen could hardly be regarded as an academically independent source considering they are manufacturers of the injection ‘pen’ that can be used to treat severe incidences of anaphalactic shock). When I was a kid, we didn’t worry about latex allergies. We didn’t have hyper-clean houses. We didn’t have HEPA filters on our vacuum cleaners. We didn’t have the range of detergents, work surface disinfectants etc that we are plagued with every time a TV advert comes on. We used to make ’slop-dosh’ pies in the garden with mud and water.

Of course, as well as the hyper clean environments we all have the opportunity of living in now, we have the “no win no fee” phenomenon. Marauding teams of legal specialists offer to take on our cases against the corporate bullies who let our nearest and dearest come into contact with all sorts of danger. It won’t cost us a penny because if we win the case, their costs will be taken from the award, and if we lose, well, presumably that’s a gamble they have to take. I’m sure it’s only a coincidence that the adverts on daytime TV seem to alternate between high strength cleaning products and organisations offering no win, no fee services. Some elements of the population seem only too keen to take advantage of the no win no fee services on offer, often it seems (especially if the adverts are to be believed) when they’ve been downright irresponsible themselves.

Can you blame Tesco? I don’t. I blame society. I find myself increasingly at odds with the way society seems to be heading… and don’t even get me going on the erosion of feelings of mutual respect and the like. Perhaps I’m turning in to an old git?

There’s no future for me :-)

The canal trust operates two trip boats. Usually I work on the Seth Ellis out at Retford, but yesterday, I was asked if I could crew the John Varley which is based at Chesterfield. The canal is breached just outside Chesterfield so we can only run trips on the top pound from Tapton Lock. The trips from Tapton are free at the moment. It’s more about letting people know we’re still there despite the breach. Donations are always welcome though!

I was working with Des (right) and Jim. The experience of the day was… interesting. Whether it was me or not I don’t know…

I will continue to be available for working the Chesterfield side of the operation as well as at Retford though. Let’s wait and see how things develop.

I’ve just heard through a fairly circuitous route of the sudden and untimely death of a former US boss of mine. Todd Hage was on his way to a fire alarm activation in his capacity as a volunteer firefighter in Union County, North Carolina when the vehicle he was driving overturned. My thoughts are with his family and friends at this time. There’ll be a lot of people around the company both sides of the pond who will remember Todd.

A bit of a catch up post, this one. On Sunday, Dan and I went out for a walk around Rother Valley. We took Dan’s scooter. To be honest, I forgot just how un-scooter friendly the far side of the lake is (stones not suitable for small wheels… I wish he’d get his bike riding off!). Anyway, there was an ice-cream promised at the end of it, so he had to scoot or walk all the way round to the cafe. Who says the art of bribery is dead?!

I always like to watch the dinghy sailors at the park. Sometimes it can be a bit of a laugh and Sunday was no disappointment. I should come clean at this point and admit that I’ve got RYA levels 1 through 4 for dinghy sailing. Mrs Woolforbrains has levels 1 and 2; we both did one and two at Rother Valley a few years BD (Before Daniel) and I did three and four when we were on holiday in Turkey and Greece some years ago (again, BD). Hence, I think I’m qualified to criticise ;)

Well, I don’t think this couple had realised for one that the boat actually had a jib. The park boats usually have spring-furled jibs… release the tie, pull the sheet and out comes the job. It also means they reef easily. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the camera out a few seconds earlier as they nearly ran the thing aground on the rather muddy edge near where were where, and a couple of times they nearly accidentally jibed it. Unfortunately for us onlookers, they then seemed to get the hang of things. Maybe next time?!

When I got back to my Mum’s house on Monday evening, feathers were spit and rude words said. I’d got a flat tyre. It was easy to spot. A screw had gone up the tread wall. True to form, I had to getthe AA out again. Not this time because I couldn’t get teh wheel off, but because the cheap ‘orrible Peugeot wheel brace was in danger of shearing. That ‘nice man’ ™ came out and did the job. I slipped him a fiver for his troubles.

I was faced with getting a new tyre fairly quickly though because I was due to be in Birmingham today. I remembered that one of the guys that works for me recommended eTyres, so I decided to give them a try. I reckoned that with no notice, my regular tyre dealer would have to be charging me around £110 supplied and fitted, so I was delighted with eTyre’s quote of £85 all in. The other good thing is they’re mobile. I decided to work from home and arranged for the fitting.

The guy that came to do the fitting was from a company in Rotherham who amongst other things have the local eTyres franchise. It took him no more than 20 minutes to take the old tyre off (including, I noticed, the use of a clip-on rim protector to save damage to my alloy rims), fit the new tyre, balance and fit back on the car. Top service, at home, great price. Give them a try (Anna, they’re probably a bit too far away for you!).

Whilst I was working from home, someone local must have been naughty because we had a visit from the local police helicopter (that big lens again…!)Normally, we get South Yorkshire’s chopper, but I don’t think this is theirs. They used to have McDonnell Douglas NOTAR job which is quite quiet when it’s parked over your house (especially at 3am!). This isn’t a NOTAR and was noticeably noisy for the 15 minutes or so it was parked above our house. A quick search reveals this one to be a Eurocopter belonging to Derbyshire Constabulary (sorry – I couldn’t find an adult page!). According to SY Police’s Air Support page, they are in a mutual aid consortium’ with West Yorkshire and Humberside forces. Why couldn’t they go with Derbyshire as well and convince them to get a quieter helicopter?

OK, I know I’ve been pretty lax recently about posting. I’ve had a pretty dire week at work which hasn’t helped. It started out with someone taking out our mail server by plugging in a PC with an identical IP address. It got worse when our NAS storage server reported a failed disc in the RAID array then whilst we were running diagnostics on it, a second drive failed and defied all attempts at recovery. Rather than wait for the Dell engineer, we ended up down at the local PC World buying a handful of SATA drives to replace the failed drives. After 8 hours reinitialising the array, the data reload took another 12 hours after first failing due to a bug in the backup and restore software. Is there any wonder I’ve not felt like blogging? Oh, and to cap it all, I’ve succeeded in lousing up my local Subversion repository for the Geograph JUppy project when I let my Java IDE rebuild the project. It completely wiped a subversion-controlled directory and I’m faced now with working out how to fix it without buggering up the staging server when I commit the changes I’ve got outstanding.

Anyway, yesterday was fun. It was a boating day – a private charter for someone’s birthday. It was new territory for me, heading out towards Clayworth. Only one lock – Whitsunday Pie lock which brought its own unique set of problems… a gap between the bottom of the downhill gates you could get your hand in. This means for the non canal afficienados out there that it then becomes a bugger to fill. As the lock gets nearly full, it fills less quickly and there’s such a head of water that the water that’s already in there comes out with some force and you end up almost in a steady state position with water coming in almost as fast as it’s going out the other end. Time to put the kettle on!

The weather was nice though and the planters that Terry’s put on the boat roof added a splash of colour.

When I get to the boat in a morning, the first thing I like to do is give some of the brasswork a polish. After all, we’re taking paying passengers and they deserve to see a clean shiny boat, so the tiller arm and pin usually get a going over with the brasso!

I had a smile as well yesterday. I was bringing the boat in to the Boat Club building at Clayworth after Pete had turn it around. To be honest, I did cut the approach a bit fine (!) and there were one or two comments from the bank. I suspect they expected me ramming either the bankside or an adjacent boat. A bit of careful steering and some nifty throttle work ended up with the boat gently alongside without a scrape or bump. Sometimes you just want to thumb your nose at people :-) (I didn’t though).

Well, the sun’s shining and there seems to be little prospect of rain in this neck of the woods today, so we might end up going somewhere. Let’s see…

Finally for today, another enhancement to the blog! If you’ve never explored the rest of this site,  you may not have come across gardencam. Gardencam has been running for years. It’s a live image capture of our back garden taken from a network-attached camera in the study. Something I thought of a couple of days ago was to create a live thumbnail of gardencam and stick it in the blog sidebar, linking to the main image page, so that’s what I’ve done. It’s up there on the right above the calendar.