grumpyf1

I’m normally quite interested in the weather. Particularly so at the moment, as it’s free to wander into my house unimpeded by trivial things like a roof. Our quaint terraced house was built using local material, over 100 years ago. Just like a flesh and blood equivalent of the same vintage, it certainly has lots of character, charm and rich history, but some bits are similarly rather creaky, occasionally damp, and a bit... leaky. Our 7 years under its protective roof have highlighted the fact that it is indeed the bit over the top that is of greatest concern for a our future dryness, as the Cumbrian slate, whilst mostly sound, is being let down somewhat by the vintage cement that’s meant to hold it in position. Unfortunately, at the time of its original installation, no-one had got round to inventing the nice, waterproof, underlay that nowadays sits protectively between loft space and tiles. Consequently, a century of strong winds, frost and rain, has combined to alter the ...

The terrifying, high-speed, derailment of a train carrying ridiculously volatile nuclear waste this week, shows just how... wait, what... 5mph? Oh. On Monday, there was a slight derailment of a train somewhere between Roose (which I’m sure is what Jeff Lynne sings in ELO’s “Don’t Bring Me Down”) and Barrow. Travelling at a dizzying 5mph, the train was going almost twice the speed of the commuter trains that usually frequent the line. Although ‘frequent’ is something of a misnomer, as people have been known to miss their train, strike up a conversation with a fellow stranded passenger on the platform, fall in love, then go through a messy break up before the next scheduled train shows up. What made this near-catastrophic event even more fear-inducing was that it was nuclear train! And here’s the really scary part – it was entirely free of any nuclear material whatsoever. This is all starting to sound like a 70s disaster movie, isn’t it? Yes, the flasks on board the train were emp...

The wristwatch is dead. Only tell the time? Pah! All hail the Smartwatch! Once upon a time (sorry) we had wind-up watches with hands, which told you the time and maybe the date, as long as you didn’t mind spending half a morning winding it on by 24 hours when there were only 30 days in the month. Februarys resulted in owners turning up at Casualty with blistered fingers and wrist sprains. Then, some enterprising folks noticed that liquid crystal displays, when linked up to computer bits, a teensy battery, and a lot of cheap plastic, could also tell the time, in a particularly-hard-to-read-in-the-dark kind of way, as pressing the button for the light usually meant you could see the hour, but not the minutes. These had the ability to act as an alarm clock, playing tinny electronic renditions of classical tunes, chime annoyingly on the hour, and be suitably wrong that every school classroom circa 1981 sounded like it had been invaded by crickets for about 5 minutes either side ...

There are many good explanations as to why I have poor memory skills. Drinking. Smoking. Styling mousse over-indulgence in my early 20s. But there is one less obvious one... Whilst the march of time seems the most plausible, scientific scenario, the gentle decay of my grey matter is only a minor contributory factor in the great scheme of things. For sure, genetics comes into it too – my Mum had a similarly scatterbrained storage system, whereby important stuff like her bank card PIN eluded her, but what I wore on my 4th birthday was recalled with photographic detail. I’m utterly hopeless with road names and numbers. If I head to the tropical climes of the South, I know I use the M6 for the first bit, but I’m damned if I can remember any of the others. I know the name of my road in Arnside, and I recognise a lot of the other names if they’re mentioned, but can’t quite work out which name goes with what road. It would explain why I didn’t get that job as an ambulance driver. ...