Category Archives: General Rambling

For posts that just go on and on and on and on and ……

I am a truly grateful

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“So”, the voice queries, “how rich are you?”

It is, for sure, the most stupid fucking question to ask.

Worse still that I should ask it.

Even worser (yes, I know it’s not good English – it’s a joke) that the question is in my head.

And the worst is that this is inside my head – me asking this question of myself but as if I were someone else asking – not me at all.

Normal. My normal.

This morning was nothing different. On the way to work. And then I thought:

“Actually, I am a trillionaire.”

No, I don’t have loads of money. Instead I have my life, my perfect flat in the perfect street, my dogs, F, health, enough money to live on comfortably, a full-time job, I live in Italy and more specifically, Milan, I have good friends.

Yes, for sure, I am a trillionaire.

And, then I go and read this:

September 14
Was a complicated day – tried to get my phone to get bars so
Zach could talk to Julie. Finally got bars – one.

Zach called her ‘mom’ He sounded like he had prepared all
his words for days – honest – thoughtful. Calling her ‘mom’
when he could not hear her.

Julie raised her head the most she had all day. Using all her
strength that kept her living to talk with her son. Repeating her
words… she trembled – touched her face. She tried so hard to
be there in the last moments for Zach.

Zach said, ‘Thank you for having me…’

He told her that his favorite time with her was when she kissed
him on his head – he wants to be with her and never wanted to
leave – he loved her…

About a mother, dying of aids, speaking by phone to the one of her children, this child having been taken away from her when it was born and then put up for adoption and then found by the photographer who recorded, by photographs, the last 18 years of the mother’s life.

Read/view it (and you should ……no you must) here.

It makes you want to cry. How can we call ourselves civilised? Someone made a point in the newspaper that the USA should get a proper healthcare system. But, actually, they’re wrong. I’m sure you could do a similar photograph-documentary in the UK or, for that matter, anywhere in the Western world. And, anyway, it’s not just the healthcare that isn’t up to the job. It’s the state and the relatives and the people involved. It’s everything and everyone, even the person themselves.

And so, it reinforced my thought this morning. I am a trillionaire.

And truly grateful.

Lies, lies and more bloody lies!

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As I’ve written before, the danger with all the scandal over the undercover police ‘spying’ on the activists is that the focus is on the wrong thing.

At the moment, horror of horrors, it seems some of these undercover cops were getting a bit close with the people they were supposed to be monitoring. To the point where “Undercover policeman married activist he was sent to spy on” – except, when you actually read the piece, the implication of the headline and the facts themselves are at odds. He didn’t marry the woman whilst he was undercover – rather, after he left the work he contacted the woman a year later, TOLD her he had been an undercover policeman and only then did they get married. The headline isn’t exactly a lie, it just implies something different than the reality.

But, the big problem here, in my opinion, is not that they got too close. I mean, if you live and ‘work’ with a group, you get close – you really have no choice. The dividing line between the reality of what you are actually doing and what you’re supposed to be doing will blur. To be really convincing, NOT to have a relationship with someone you like would be the unrealistic and unreal thing – possibly leading to you being ‘found out’!

No, the real problem is the lies. The lies by the cops involved. The lies that must have been made in court. And then there is the lies made by the Chief of Police to parliament.

It’s the lies that are the worst of it. I mean to say, if you cannot trust the police to tell the ‘truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’ (since they are supposed to be the law enforcement group), then one has to wonder if there is any point in them?

And so, how can this be justified, when, as it was being said by a person that we are supposed to trust, he knew it was untrue.

“We had no plain-clothes officers deployed within the crowd. It would have been dangerous for them to put plain-clothes officers in a crowd like that.

“The only officers we deploy for intelligence purposes at public order are forward intelligence team officers who are wearing full police uniforms with a yellow jacket with blue shoulders. There were no plain clothes officers deployed at all.”

They are touting it as ‘false information’. False information! How dare they! Let us call it was it is. It’s a downright, deliberate lie.

The police cannot be, nor should be in future, trusted to tell the truth. If the ‘top man’ can tell blatant lies then it goes to the very heart of the police – and it’s a very, very sad day. I remember when I was thinking of becoming a magistrate, that the most important thing was that you were to support the police and what they tell you. I believed in that, too, but if I were a magistrate now, I would have very serious doubts about anything the police were to tell me and I would tend to err on the side of the defendant. No longer would a policeman’s word be enough – in fact, I would have to question everything that they said that was not backed up by irrefutable hard evidence.

The police are liars and, if there were a confidence vote, mine would go against them. This is a shame for those of the police (and, surely, there must be some) who are not liars. But then, guys and gals, if your top man can lie so openly and brazenly, what chance do you have?

Euronics – yes! Darty – never, never, never again!

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I never did like Darty. Or Marcucci or whatever they were called before.

We bought our television from them when we first came here. It was the first ‘electrical’ shop we saw. They were, to be honest, quite unhelpful. As were their fitters. When part of the ‘system’ broke down I went back to the shop to try and find a fix. The staff were unhelpful, to say the least.

Then Darty took them over. I went back there, hoping that a change of ownership would improve the staff. It didn’t. I suppose it would have been like Fortnum and Masons taking over Woolworths – nothing could have been done about the uselessness of the staff. And so, nearly always, I go to Euronics and, over the last few years they have had quite a bit of business from me.

Not only are the staff at Darty unhelpful but they are also very rude …….. to me. I am mindful that it might just be me, though. Several people have mentioned going to Darty. I always try to avoid it. F suggested we look for irons at a Darty store at San Babila (as we went that way anyway). It wasn’t difficult. I wanted a fairly cheap iron and I wanted a Phillips since the last one had lasted so long.

I’m not really what you would call a ‘shopper’. I go in, see something I want and buy it. Unless I need a specific thing and am unsure, I don’t ask. I didn’t even know that this Darty store existed in San Babila! It’s not a real surprise for they have taken one of the entrances to the Metro and you enter into the shop that way.

Ah well, this is San Babila. Perhaps this will be different?

We go in. We find the area for irons. We see the Phillips brands on display. There isn’t much of a sale going on but there is one which has about 10 Euro off. I want that one. We check the boxes below and find the right model. OK, good. I find some new arial cable as well. We go to pay.

I pay but I think to myself that it is slightly more than I thought it would be. I check the receipt. The price is the original price and not the sale price. I call to the lady. She continues to walk away and ignore me. A man near her looks up. He looks like the store manager. He deigns to come over to help me. I explain that the price of the iron is wrong as it is shown at a reduced price on the shelf.

We go over together (including F, of course). As we start down the aisle, he asks a girl who works there about it. She also continues walking away from him, shouting over her shoulder that it was only the green one that was reduced. It was reduced because there is no box. I shrug and say OK, I’ll take the green one.

The girl switches direction and goes to get the green one from the display. As we walk to the cash desk, F gets involved.

I don’t understand all he has to say. There’s something about the ‘customer is right’ and that something is ‘not good education’ (our equivalent would be ‘not good manners’). This comes from both F and the ‘manager’ – to each other. There is some talk about giving us our money back. The argument is fairly short (a couple of minutes) and quite heated. The manager goes to a till and gives me money.

F is incensed. He explains all to me. Apparently he was not happy about me having the iron without the box and the instructions. He didn’t feel that it was right that is came without a box. The staff (including the manager) couldn’t have cared less what he thought. So he got me my money back.

He says he is pleased that he’s found out that they are not good. He will never shop there again. I explained that I knew this and never used them. He asked me why I hadn’t said anything and I explained that I thought it could just be me, being a foreigner and all. I was actually quite pleased that, with not a hint from me, he had ‘found out’ that they are crap.

And so we go to Euronics. This is out of our way. We ask someone about the cable as we cannot see it on the racks. The guy says that they have run out of the cable we want but there is a shop down the road that will, probably, have some. We find the iron section. I pay a few Euro more than the full price at Darty for the same iron. But I am happy with that as I feel Euronics, where the staff are always so helpful and the service is very good, deserve to have the money that Darty have lost.

I am now doubly sure that I won’t use Darty again, in future. F certainly won’t. All for the casual, unhelpful rude and indifferent attitude of the staff. So, don’t go to Darty, people. Go to Euronics instead :-)

Oh, look, so-and-so is dead at, wait …………… how old?????

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There was Gerry Rafferty just the other day. Wonderful artist who made going down to London that bit more special with his Baker Street – although, to be honest, for a kid from the countryside, the going down to London with my first partner was a magical business in the first place.

But, he was in his 60s. And he had a problem with drinking. It’s understandable.

There was the guy that wrote the book that later became the film ‘Babe’, which we watched just before Christmas. No, it’s OK. He was 88, for goodness sake.

And then there was Mick Karn. Who? You may ask that. I wasn’t sure. Turns out he was the bassist from Japan that group that had, erm, what was it now – that hit or two in the 80s.

But, the thing is, as you get a bit older, you start to catch up these people who are dying left, right and centre. And Mick Karn? Well, he was my age. So was Michael Jackson and he’s gone already. So is Madonna (although she seems in the rudest of health).

But it makes you think. Well, it kind of stops you in your tracks for a moment. I mean, some of these dead people are my age or less. Or, if older, then not a lifetime older. Kind of makes you grateful you’ve survived this long, really, doesn’t it?

New Year’s stuff.

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New Year’s resolutions. Never believed in them myself and, so, I just don’t do them. To me, if you want to do something, then do it – don’t decide to make a list and then complete half of them or stop doing it before the end of January.

And, so, I have no resolutions. I have no things that I simply must do. I’m grateful for every day that I have and each one is the opportunity to do something new or different or just to live.

Today I have texted a few people to wish them a happy New Year and phoned one. For those of you who read this blog – then a very happy New Year to you.

Things that will/may happen in the New Year are as follows:

1. We shall go on holiday. F is already looking at places to go and he wants to book it now. It’s a thing I’ve never bothered about (booking in January) but if he wants to do it I really don’t mind. And the important thing is that a) he’s excited about it and b) it’s the future – together.

2. Rufus will depart this world. Bless him, he is just not well. He’s not in pain but so thin and ill so often now. But he is almost 16 years old! Amazing and I would never have believed he would get to this age.

3. We shall move in together. Actually, I really don’t know if that will happen at all. It’s really not a problem living as we do and I am very relaxed about it. I never thought it ‘wouldn’t matter’ but it really doesn’t matter.

4. I will get fat – if I don’t drink less beer and eat a little less food. Unfortunately, my age is against me on this and, so, if I don’t cut back the pounds will, not exactly pile on but, rather, slowly increase.

5. I will have to buy a new washing machine, iron and fridge. I’m not certain but I think all three are on their way out.

6. It will be a good year. Well, as I’m no fortune teller, I can’t really say that but, overall, every year has been a good year in one way or another even if I couldn’t see it at the time.

7. We shall get a new puppy. Well, obviously, that will be after 2 has happened.

8. I will find a new job; I will become very rich; I will become very famous; I will write a book. These are just pie-in-the-sky things but, who knows? Stranger things have happened. Or it may be none of these things but something else. I like the idea of the ‘unexpected’.

9. It will snow and make my investment in snow tyres worth it! Well, it better had do!

10. I will be very happy. And that’s a sure thing :-)

If you make resolutions, then good and I hope they all work out. If you don’t then I hope it all works out for you anyway.

Happy New Year!

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Looking back over 2010, it wasn’t all perfect but, really, it was a pretty good year – for me, anyway.  I know that, for some, it was not so good, even bad or dreadful.

In any event and however bad or good your year was – here’s to 2011 and may it bring you joy and wealth and, most of all, happiness and contentment.

Cheers.

“countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century”.

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“countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century”.

Of course, this is a quote made before Wikileaks posted cables from US embassies around the world. However, the USA government, it would seem, are putting pressure on all the organisations that ‘permit’, by use of their services, Wikileaks ‘to be seen’ by Internet users and, so I have read, US government agencies are restricting their employees from accessing the Wikileaks documents.

So, is it wrong to act as they are or not? Should the government be permitted to act as effective censors?

Well, according to quote, it would seem it is not a good idea.

And, of course, the quote came from Hilary Clinton, a slightly well-known American government official. Hmmmm. A touch of ‘do as I say and not as I do’ methinks.