Someone's smiling at the Holte End....

... but there are not many doing that these days. Unless of course at the thought of tucking into a savory meat pie of the kind Curly Al used to sell!

It is nearly 3 years since I last posted in the blogosphere but the dire events at Villa Park this season have compelled me to take to cyberspace once more.

After all how could I stand by when I can feel the disbelief, anger, outrage and despair of FreeLanceNerd. I can still point to the impressions in the wall of our back bedroom where he hammered his head in frustration after one especially bad result. And there was the European game under floodlights when he was so excited at the Villa scoring a goal his glasses fell off and he managed to stand on them in his delighted dance.

Bring back Deadly Doug. Please sell Mr Lerner - even to Donald Trump! Now that would bring FLN to the boil! What a delicious thought...

Mass Clean

This week the carpets have been cleaned in the Tardis. But at the same time putting at risk the accuracy of the weights used by Timelord for the vital business of weighing the ingredients for staple delights like apple cake.

As all good metrologists know weights can change with deposits from muck and other debris in the air and guess where all that carpet dirt has gone?  Teapot is careful not to risk the accuracy of these weights by disturbing dust through dusting but carpet cleaning is like a debris tsunami.

Teapot must now use her skills in the lingua franca to speak to the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures in Sevres near Paris. They are the custodian of a small cylinder of platinum iridium alloy weighing just one kilo. In  fact The Kilogram. The ultimate reference standard for all kilos. Yet over time pollutants add to its mass requiring a delicate cleaning operation.  Not just a bit of spit and polish but the touch of a chamois leather soaked in ethanol and ether along with a subtle application of steam. Dozens of replicas of The Kilogram are found around the world but all are shipped back to Paris from time to time to have the special authentic French cleaning treatment. Too gentle a clean leaves contaminants behind whilst too much of the elbow grease makes matters worse or erodes the metal itself.

So task one for the week ahead is for Teapot to search out the secret formula of this operation and gently restore the pristine quality of the pounds and ounces. No more cleaning. No more dusting until all is well with them again. Even if that means a trip to Paris......

What an incentive?!

Gun Law

On December 14 Adam Peter Lanza shot and killed twenty children and six adult staff members and wounded two others at Sandy Hook Elementary School in the Sandy Hook village of Newtown, Connecticut.

The horror of it all is only matched by a despair at the paralysis within the American body politic over gun control. We ought to be outraged at the pronouncements of the leader of the National Rifle Association Wayne LaPierre who   proposed that the "only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." All schools should have the "benefit" of armed guards just like banks and airports.

But its predictability numbs us to its stupidity. Yet who would bet against a shoot out in an American elementary school a year or so from now like a scene from a wild west film with the good guys shooting it out from behind overturned desks with the bad guys as their mental state deludes them into thinking the youngsters are hostile invaders from another planet.

An event like this screams out for a rant from FreeLanceNerd. Timelord remembers his return from visiting his great friend Ethnoquest in California in 1998. As soon as he entered the house he took out from his suitcase copies of magazines offering guns and rifles for sale. We were harangued  at length and more and more at length about the madness of our cousins across the pond.

FreeLanceNerd I can hear you now......

Plebs

Timelord wonders if there is any link between the recent verbal fusillade addressed by Andrew Mitchell at the police at the gates of Downing Street and the never ending labours of some of his constituents in Sutton Coldfield to resurrect the title of "Royal Borough"? More than you may think.

I have often suppressed a wry chuckle ever since we moved to this part of the Midlands in 1981 when faced with the pretensions to royal grandeur of the local newspaper and some of its residents led by the local Tory High Command.

The fact of Sutton Coldfield being part of Birmingham and potentially overrun by the great unwashed who inhabit all points south of Wylde Green has always been one that keeps the true blue ladies awake at night and forces real gentlemen to make sure their shotguns are well and truly oiled and loaded.

I am therefore confident that Mr Mitchell's antics had nothing to do with a hard day at the whip's office or an excessive lunch at his club or swanky London watering hole. No. It was the weekend drills and manoeuvres with the Royal Borough's Home Guard wot did for him.

Spode like he can be seen in Sutton Park urging the boys to do their duty. "Friends Romans countrymen gird your loins. To the barricades! Repel the plebs and barbarians from the other side of the Chester Road." Our London Bobbies should have realised he was simply practising his rallying cry for the troops for the coming weekend.

Where then will we find a Mark Antony who will come not to bury our noble Caeser in the pages of the Sun but to praise him in the headlines of the Daily Torygraph? Answers to the Editor of the Sutton Observer.

Engraved on the palms of my hands

Here is FreeLanceNerd, (although no one knew it at that time.It was a name he adopted for his blog) We still have the photo of Teapot holding him which you can see in this pic and it sits looking at the fireplace in our dining area.

We saw his nephew Samuel,  or Sammy as I heard his mum say a few times, on Saturday and he would give FLN a fair run for his money in the smiling stakes. Funny that as Curly Al, his dad, was not quite at the races when the smiles were on.

 September approaches - the cruelest month - to ape TS Eliot. I was struck by Matthew Maynard who had given interviews last week at a memorial cricket match for his son Tom between Surrey and Glamorgan. Tom, a promising Surrey cricketer,  died in June after trying to cross a London Tube line and being hit by a train. His father now carries tattoos on his arms with words in memory of Tom.

Memories are engraved deep within us. And there are plenty I am pleased to say about FLN. There is something remarkable about the ability to bring the past into the present however imperfect that may be sometimes. I often bring those memories to mind in our church of an evening where he would come and take part and worship. We were finishing our series in the prophet Isaiah last night and I found myself turning the pages to chapter 49 where the Sovereign Lord says.

"See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands"

There is something deeper here than a tattoo. And for all of us for whom September is the cruelest month we are comforted immeasurably by the knowledge we are never forgotten, held always in the memory of the God.

A pair of spectacles

On this day when our most read newspaper self righteously publishes Prince Harry's photo in his birthday suit in the interests of the need to know press freedom and oh of course profit your blogger has decided on a more sombre piece.

Friday is the day the Economist drops on the welcome mat of the Tardis and one of its special features is the obituary page right at the end of the magazine. Here lives are remembered from all sorts of walks and backgrounds. Last week I read the story of Sir Bernard Lovell who died at 98 and forever linked to the Jodrell Bank radio telescope in Cheshire.

Today I read about Winnie Johnson the mother of Keith Bennett, the only child victim of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady whose body was never found on Saddleworth Moor, a wild lonely place not that far from Sir Bernard's telescope. Winnie died last week. Here is the article from the Economist, with another photo courtesy of the Sun.

http://www.economist.com/node/21560832

The last paragraph captures a haunting sadness of nearly 50 years. Although I have lost a son I can only touch the edge of the depth of the suffering and despair of this mother. I suspect Keith's remains will never be found.

A golden tardis

So the police have arrested a man for painting a post box gold in Lymington in honour of Ben Anslie the Olympic gold medal sailor who lives there. Apparently he was upset that the Royal Mail were going to paint a post box gold in Cornwall where Ben grew up but not in Lymington. Mr Smith was rewarded with a night in the cells for his pains.

Royal Mail spokesman Heulyn Gwyn Davies said: "We are extremely disappointed that someone has chosen to vandalise this particular post box."

In Doddington Lincolnshire a post box was painted bronze by fans of the British Hockey team midfielder Georgie Twigg. The Royal Mail announced they would repaint it red as soon as possible.Leave painting post boxes to our engineers said a spokesperson. 

Do I get the feeling someone is getting a bit above themselves? If the Royal Mail can afford to hire engineers to work as painters and decorators our first class stamps will soon be one pound and rising.Odd though I have not yet heard of any painting of post boxes in Yorkshire even with all those gold medals in the white rose county. You might have thought Sheffield would have an outbreak of them what with Jessica Ennis and all. All those law abiding Tykes may be? Or a shortage of gold paint? Or perhaps a little reluctance to splash out on the purchase of the odd brush?

Now where will the gold paint break out after the heroics of Mo Farah tonight? I will put the Royal Mail out of their misery right now by offering Mo's fans the chance to paint the tardis gold. And how will that look as it hurtles around the universe.