Five

Greetings from South Manchester where the Autumn chill has been banished briefly by pleasant sunshine. It’s slightly windy but the temperature is perfect for a nice walk. It’s hard to believe that November is almost upon us, especially as the clocks go back tonight, meaning I can spend an extra hour in bed (which of course the cats will not allow). 

As predicted, the western world is preparing us for Christmas despite the fact that it is two months away. We already have Christmas movies appearing on various TV channels. 

Why? 

Christmas is okay but only in December in my opinion. 

I am not Ebenezer Scrooge by the way; I’m just saying that my birthday is nowhere near to Christmas and that’s when the tsunami of Christmas nonsense starts appearing in my life. 

I will try to answer some silly questions in order to distract myself from what could turn into a mild rant. As usual the culprit is Sunday Stealing. 

FIVE things on my To-Do list:

1. We’re off to Malaysia early next year so I have to make sure that I book an appointment to check whether Mrs PM and I need to be vaccinated. We may be okay but I like to check. Can I just add that I am glad that we don’t have a nutter like RFK Jr in charge of our health over here in the UK. What is going on in America? That’s a future blog post I think. 

2. I need to join Manchester’s library network. I read books on my Kindle but there are many other services that the library can offer to a retired person like me. 

3. My laptop is starting to show signs of age and Mrs PM has kindly told me that I can use her brand spanking new all-singing all-dancing one, which means that I have to set up a user and copy all my junk across to it. She hardly uses it but I am on a laptop frequently. 

4. I have a lot of box files full of papers, old photographs etc. that I really need to sort out. I can probably discard a lot of stuff in there but, when it comes to the photos, I should probably sort them all out, discard the rubbish ones and put the rest in a bunch of photo albums. This is definitely a winter task so I will aim to start this within the next month or so. 

5. Talking of photos, I have hundreds of them in the cloud and on my laptop so I need to do something with them too. I have considered creating a photo book from the best ones. Another winter task methinks. 

FIVE snacks I enjoy:

1. Cheese on crackers/biscuits. A nice little mid-evening snack if I’m feeling peckish. 

2. Almonds. 

3. Flame raisins.

4. Apples.

5. Dark chocolate.

FIVE places I have lived:

1. Walsall – a town about 12 miles north of Birmingham. I was born there. I lived there from 1962 to 1981. 

2. Liverpool – a famous city in the north of England, where the Beatles are from. I was a student there and I love the place. I am going back for a university reunion in two weeks’ time. I lived there from 1981 to 1984. 

3. Altrincham – a town in Greater Manchester about 10 miles south west of Manchester. I lived there from 1985 to 1998. 

4. Hong Kong – I visited there many times between 1993 and 1999 with work but in 1999 I lived there for about three months while supporting the system I had worked on. 

5. Manchester – 1984 to 1985 and 1998 to the present. I love this city and becoming an honorary, if not plastic, Mancunian. I don’t plan to leave. 

FIVE jobs I have held:

1. A newsagent’s assistant when I was at school I started off delivering newspapers, but after a year, I started doing more for the owner of the shop, including stock taking, serving in the shop etc. 

2. A postman. While I was at university I became a postman at Christmas time in Walsall to help with the massive increase in volume of post during that time. I actually really enjoyed it as a job. 

3. A software developer. This was my main job from the age of 21 until I retired. Basically I spent most of my career writing software for a variety of projects but mainly (certainly for the last 30 years) software in airports. You can probably see the fruits of my labour in several airports dotted around the planet. 

4. A development database administrator, which went hand in hand with being a software developer. I was regarded as the “database expert”, though I wasn’t a full time database administrator as such but I knew a lot about it. I wrote a lot of software around the database and generally sorted out  issues with the product database as they arose. 

5. A software trainer. I’ve travelled to a few places to train the people who use our software, including the USA, Russia, China, South Africa and a couple of places in Europe. Not my favourite part of the job by a long way and was an unfortunate necessity because of my knowledge of the system.