I found this the other day and it amused me, so I thought I would share it:
If Peter Florence ran the British government, then the entire Whitehall bureaucracy would be pared down to about four blokes and a pencil sharpener. On the upside, Britain would enjoy an amazingly vibrant cultural life; on the downside, bad things would sometimes happen, like forgetting where we put the Royal Navy or losing the Isle of Wight”
Lifted from Toasting Napoleon.
It’s V’s Dad’s Birthday today. It’s also V’s ‘official birthday’. Just like the Queen! Actually born on the 18th of this month, but V’s passport and, therefore, all Italian documents, show today. The passport came with the wrong date and I don’t think either of us noticed until we came to Italy and it was a bit late by then. The only thing is that we have to remember, when quoting the birth date, to quote today, when we’re here.
Onto the main subject. I know some famous people. And I mean know, rather than saw or met, once. Some writers, journalists and broadcasters like Kate Mosse, Francine Stock, etc. Peter Florence, who runs the Hay Festival. Etc.
However, I have just learned that I know the Aberystwyth Hula Hoop Champion of 1984! How fantastic is that! I can say no more as they wish to protect their identity. I’m sure that, if people knew, they would be inundated with requests for autographs, etc. Maybe it would even attract stalkers.
However, I am really pleased to know the Aberystwyth Hula Hoop Champion from 1984.
I’m not the only one but, still, I feel guilty. It’s been 10 days since my last post! And, as a result, traffic is down. Not that traffic is so important, but it’s nice to know that there are people that read my blog (and I’m talking about the regular readers, here).
Don’t you just hate it when you have busy-bodies as friends. You know the sort. They come into your house and surreptitiously wipe their finger over a table to see if the house has been dusted properly. Or, maybe, as they sit down to dinner they pick up the glass and peer through it towards the light, looking for fingerprints or greasy smears.
Worse, they go into your bathroom, supposedly to use it but really to check that it has been hygienically cleaned.
Or maybe they ‘help’ to wash up, just to check that you do it properly and when they feel you are missing an important part of the process, they tell you all about how ‘they’ do it and why and why you should do it like that too!
Don’t you just hate those sort of people?
Which made me all the more amused by this story.
Yes, I know it’s a few days old, but I’ve been so busy that I just haven’t had time to post much, sorry.
However, my take on this was as follows:
Guy, who has told his friends that his wife and stepson are away visiting the stepson’s father, invites said friends to dinner. The women, of a certain age at the gathering, offer to help clearing away the dishes. Guy, who has had a few too many to drink, thanks them. As they are clearing away, one of the women (we’ll call her ‘the nosey old trout’ or NOT), feeling sorry for him and, probably, having already checked that the general state of the place is OK by doing as I suggested above, decides that she will put away some of the uneaten food in the freezer (and will also check that he has enough to eat whilst his wife is away).
NOT goes to the freezer and starts rummaging around to see what else he has there and, underneath a pile of food finds the bodies of the wife and son. She runs back to the kitchen to consult with one of the other ladies and they phone the police.
Then, they return to the dining room and carry on as if nothing had happened, waiting for the police to arrive!
Of course, it begs the question as to why he was keeping the bodies in the freezer, why he took the risk of inviting friends round when he had the bodies in the house, etc? Judith, an expat Belgian, living in Milan, says that a lot of Belgians are quite nosey and that Guy was quite mad to invite his friends round in the first place.
There! Who ever said that Belgium was boring?
Had a few problems over the last few days. As you may know by this post, I had the problems with ADSL. At the end of it, methinks, it was almost certainly Alice’s fault (Alice being the brand name for Telecom Italia’s ADSL service and not some random girl; it’s actually pronounced aleechay and not aliss).
Then, 2 days ago, I found I couldn’t send email through Outlook. This meant I couldn’t reply to anything unless I used the web mail site, which is not so convenient, to say the least.
Of course, the first thing I do is search the web with my error and I find that ZoneAlarm may be the cause. Recently it suddenly, without my asking, put a spam filter on my Outlook. Now, actually, I thought this was quite good and I quickly got over my initial reaction of ‘why are you doing something to my machine that I didn’t ask for?’.
So, I have been watching it rather closely since then to see how it goes. I had almost got to the stage where I was trusting it and then, I find, it may be the cause of the sending emails function to fail.
So, how to switch it off? Well the ZoneAlarm console says it IS switched off. A check on the forums shows that it was an accident with one of their updates and that it did cause problems with Outlook and provides a link to be able to switch it off.
So, that’s what I do. But there is only a slight change in the error message that I can display when it won’t send. But then on another part of the forum I find you have to also do something else. Which I do. And the error message changes again.
And then I remember that I read on one of the forums that a persons ISP had suddenly blocked port 25 (used to send mail) except for their own smtp mail function. So I try, just in case. And then it works.
So was the problem Alice or ZoneAlarm or, even, both at the same time?
Either way, I’m now thinking that I will try and find another Firewall product (I haven’t really liked ZoneAlarm since Checkpoint took over) and then, if Wind/Infostrada get their act together, I’ll let them move me after all.
Of course, that almost certainly makes me a little, no, probably completely, crazy, but Alice have annoyed me twice in a week now. Cazzo Alice, and ZoneAlarm is only slightly better!
Well, summer has truly started. Not only is it hot, and I mean hot all the time, even during the night, but the mozzies are well and truly back – big time.
In the UK, if someone suggests a trip out, where you were going to travel for two hours to get there and two to get back, you would tend to make a day of it. So, for instance, when we lived in Herefordshire and you decided to go to, let’s say Aberystwyth, you would set of at, say, 10 a.m., reach Aberystwyth, have lunch, enjoy the afternoon having a walk around and set off home at 6 or 7 p.m.
This could be subtitled ‘Essential words when you come to Italy’.
In this case there are two. Cazzo and Vafanculo. I hear them quite often. They are not such polite words but, it seems, essential to daily life here.
At least in my office. The Commercial Manager, in whose office I reside, came back from a three-day trip yesterday. He normally sprinkles most sentences with the odd cazzo and, very occasionally, the odd vafanculo.
But, yesterday, once Si had left, he needed to find some documentation. He couldn’t find it. I have never heard so many cazzos and vafanculos in all the time I have been here, as I did in two hours yesterday afternoon.
At one point, every other word in the sentence was cazzo. Really, I mean it.
I shouldn’t really take against it so. After all, my language is not squeaky clean, as people who know me will attest to, but, really.
It also seems that, last night, for some very strange reason, he switched round the battery cables on his car resulting in a burn-out of at least one of them. Something to do with his daughter – so maybe he was trying to get her car started. Anyway, he’s not in right now (hurrah) and the damage will, apparently, cost him €500.
It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy!
Yesterday morning it rained on my way to work. Not particularly heavy, but it would have made the roads potentially greasy. For that reason I tend to be a bit slower, try to give myself more time for braking by positioning myself further from the car in front, etc.
But why, I ask, that when it rains, people do the strangest of things. I mean, it’s as if it’s not raining when they pull out in front of you. This also happens when it snows.
