Days of Gratitude

Welcome to another rainy South Manchester as the UK is being tormented by a slow-moving ridge of low pressure that is making the weather really (and annoyingly) unsettled. Couple this with day 427 of Covid-19 restrictions and the frustration mounts even more. 

Still, I am nothing if not positive and, having now had my second Covid jab, I am looking forward to a hopefully more enjoyable summer.

Shall we dive into some silly questions from Sunday Stealing? 

I think so – here we go.

1. Name something in the room you are grateful for.

I am actually grateful for the room itself. I am currently sitting in what we call “the back room”, which serves many purposes which I shall try to list here and now:

(a) It is known as the “Warrior’s Arms” and in the dark winter months of lockdown it became the second designated pub in our house. Now that the weather is getting better we tend to sit in the lounge (“known as the Black Cat”) because it is light and airy whereas this room gets less sun and is more cosy in the winter months.

(b) It has been my office for the past 15 months. Due to Covid restrictions I have been working from home and will continue to do until September when I will return to the office on a part time basis.

(c) It is my entertainment room or my “man cave” as Mrs PM refers to it (despite the fact she spends time here too). I have a PS4, a large TV and music from my laptop played through a set of decent speakers as well as the place where I write stupid posts like this one. 

All in all – a great room.

2. Recall a favorite memory you are grateful for

Off the top of my head? A wonderful, entertaining and eventful evening in Wan Chai in Hong Kong  in 2013, two days before Mrs PM and I travelled to Japan for the first time. We had such fun, starting with a wonderful Chinese meal, followed by visits to a few bars and slight over-indulgence on both our parts. I love Hong Kong.

Here are some pictures:

A little progressive rock

Mrs PM and her pet baboon

Let's all dance on the bar

3. Who helped you today?

Mrs PM gave me another lockdown haircut today and trimmed my beard. This may be the last time she does this because I may venture to the barber next time.

4. What possession makes your life easier?

My smartphone. When I am out and about or travelling or whatever, it is there recording my step count, providing internet access and all that entails, as well as being a backup Kindle and countless other things. I hate to say this but I would be lost without it. 

5. What’s the best thing that happened today?

We are visiting friends later today so that will be the best thing when I look back tomorrow.

6. Name something in nature that you are grateful for.

Oxygen. Without it we wouldn’t be here.

7. What painful experience helped you grow?

All of them. I like to think that you can learn from such experiences, as bad as they are at the time. 

8. What is your best skill?

I am very good with most technical things. I interact with computers as part of my career and am pretty good at telling them what to do. For example, yesterday I created two servers in the cloud and configured them both not only to talk to each other but to shake hands and generally get on with each other, having each other’s backs should one of them decide to fail or become ill. I am not mad enough to given them human characteristics – I’ve just done so to illustrate what I achieved. After all, really what I have done is made sure that a lot of ones and zeroes are in the right place out there in cyberspace. 

9. What person in your past are you most grateful for?

Everyone who has ever been or continues to be my friend or a member of my family. I am not singling out any one person as that would be unfair. 

10. What risk are you most grateful for taking?

Every time I have had the courage to do something that scared the hell out of me. I am not that brave but on some occasions I have taken the metaphorical bull by his horns and decided to go for it, sometimes against my better judgement. I am risk averse so every time I take a risk it is a big thing for me. And sometimes they have paid off – not always though. I won’t elaborate.

11. Name something/someone that makes you feel safe.

My burglar alarm, double-glazed lockable windows and highly secure front and back doors. Every Englishman’s castle has to have defences. To be fair, I don’t live in a dangerous place (quite the opposite actually) – but better to be safe than sorry.

12. Name a challenge you have overcome.

Public speaking. I went through a phase of having to do training courses a few years ago. Some people perform public speaking for just a short while – an hour maximum – but for each course I gave, I had to do it for seven hours a day for five days. 

I have given course in England, of course, but also in the United States, Russia and China amongst others. The last one was about four years ago in Beijing, China in this amazing building:

I don’t have to do it now thank goodness because I hate public speaking, despite the fact I have done it so many times.

13. What small things are you grateful for today?

My cats, who watched avidly as Mrs PM cut my hair. I sensed that the question “What the hell is she doing to him?” was asked as they discussed the event. It was amusing watching them watch us.

14. What smell are you most grateful for?

The smell of bacon. We usually treat ourselves to bacon on Saturday and Sunday mornings either with a full English breakfast or just as a bacon sandwich. The smell of bacon cooking is one of the greatest smells on the planet and I have vegetarian friends who sometimes reconsider their life choice when they smell it. 

15. What is your proudest accomplishment

I am a humble man and I don’t like to boast. But there have been a few. 

Extraordinary Penpals

 

Welcome to day 139 of the lockdown in Manchester. We are still under additional restrictions with the situation being reviewed every week. The timing of this is terrible because next week Mrs PM and I are off work for a week to celebrate her 50th birthday on 18th August. We had planned a few birthday get-togethers but sadly it seems unlikely that any of these will be allowed. Thankfully at the moment, restaurants and pubs are still open so we will be able to pop out for a meal and a beer in a socially distanced environment. It won’t be the same without friends and family there but I guess there is nothing we can do about it so we may as well just accept it.

The weather is quite pleasant today and we have already been for a five mile walk in the sunshine. After I have written this post I shall sit in the garden with Mrs PM to enjoy what is left of the sunshine.

Shall we dive in with some Sunday Stealing questions? 

Actually, the theme of Extraordinary Penpals is quite a good one. I dabbled with penpallery when I was a kid, writing to a German girl for a while, mainly to practice my German. It was quite tough – she wrote in English and I wrote in German and it kind of fizzled out. My German nowadays is poor but I am slightly better at Spanish and French. Penpallery might be a good thing to get into now because of modern technology, social media and the internet. Perhaps when I retire.

Enough idiocy - let’s get on with it.

1. What are your plans for August?

I mentioned them above  - take a week off work and try to have some fun for Mrs PM’s 50th birthday. Apart from that – nothing different from the lockdown routine we have been repeating like Groundhog Day since lockdown began at the end of March. Of course, we have more freedom and there are more things we can do but it isn’t good. 

2. Review the first half of 2020

HA HA HA HA HA! The first half of the year has been a total disaster thanks to this nasty coronavirus that seems to want a place in our lungs. As I said above most days have been like a nightmare version of Groundhog Day. I have had to cancel two holidays, one to Italy and one to Spain, as well as abandon plans to travel to Belgium for a long weekend in Brussels and Bruges, and ended up basically confined to my own house, unable to see friends and family apart from via Zoom or Whatsapp on a laptop or phone. Walking has been a treat but boring because I have tramped the same routes over and over, avoiding other people, their dogs, joggers and cyclists and treating everybody else and being treated by everybody else as if we are all zombies in the middle of an apocalypse. I’ve been called a “stupid bastard” by a 70 year old woman who thought I was violating the social distancing rule when I was almost 15 feet away from the paranoid old dear. I had to bite my tongue to stop myself from reacting (I am a nice guy but I don’t like being sworn at by a total stranger even if it is an old woman).

To summarise: the first half of 2020 has been utterly crap and that incident with the old woman sums it up nicely.

3. A place you’d go if money were no object

I would travel the entire world. In my heart of hearts I think I can still do this, visiting as many countries as time and money will allow, even if I have been there before. 

Watch out world – I’m coming to get you hopefully.

4. Who was your childhood best friend

I guess it was probably my old mate Wally (not his real name). We were best pals from the age of about 10 to 19 and we drifted apart when I moved away from Walsall to Liverpool.

5. The city or town you love most

I would have to say in the UK it is my adopted home city, Manchester (or the Kingdom of Mancunia as I like to think of it). 

Outside the UK my favourite city is Hong Kong. I think I have mentioned this a number of times.

6. How do you spend hot days?

It depends where I am. At the moment in the UK, I like to go out for a walk or sit in the beer garden of a pub or sit in my own garden. 

If I’m abroad it depends again where I am. I will for example stroll around a foreign city or if I am by a beach I will spend some time on the beach or in a convenient swimming pool.

7. Are you a skilled cook or baker?

I have baked simple things with the kids when they were younger, such as cakes and biscuits and mince pies at Christmas. I wouldn’t say I was skilled but I can follow a recipe. 

The same goes for general cooking. I can do it but I don’t like doing it.

8. One thing you wish you could currently do.

Retire.

9. A time when you learned your lesson

At university, I went through a period when, due to circumstances, my relationship with one of my mates became strained over a period of a month. He really liked a female student and confessed to her how he felt when one of his other friends played a practical joke on him by sending a Valentine’s card to him from her. She was a sweet girl so she promised him that they would be really good friends even though she wasn’t interested in him. There as a big event coming up when she would have the opportunity to invite him to a ball as her guest. He was convinced that his little confession and her guarantee that they would be close friends meant that he would be invited.

She invited me instead. I know why and it wasn’t because she fancied me. We were good buddies and she had asked me the previous year if she could be my guest to another ball because she really wanted to go. We had a good laugh and she felt that because I had taken he, she would reciprocate. 

My mate went ballistic and in a heated exchange, he urged me to tell her that I couldn’t go in the vain hope that she would ask him instead. I refused and told him to grow up. Our relationship soured and I went to the ball with her as a platonic friend. 

For the next couple of weeks after the ball, he was very short tempered with me and I got really pissed off with him. Other niggly things made it worse and by the end of the four week period it had got to the point where I had to react. 

I found myself slagging him off to a group of friends (for Americans that means “Bad-mouthing him”) and I went a bit too far, telling them he was pining for this girl so much that he was making a complete dickhead of himself. 

What I didn’t know was that he had overheard me.

The other thing is that we actually shared a house too – so you can imagine the tension. 

It all came to a head when he exacted his revenge.

I woke up one Saturday morning to the sound of somebody banging the front door. When I opened my door, I was confronted with a massive bin full of water that had been propped up on a chair leaning against my door.

It fell and emptied its entire cargo into my room, in a tsunami that was shocking because (a) there was so much water, (b) it was freezing cold, (c) it soaked my clothes that I wore, (d), it soaked my newly laundered clothes that were in a basket that I hadn’t put away yet, (e) it filled all of my shoes that were by the door. 

Water gets everywhere and everywhere was soaked. I knew immediately who had done it. I ran to his room and hammered to door screaming his name, telling him I was going to kill him. He had gone out.

He came back about 6 hours later and I saw him and just said “You utter bastard!”. “What?” He said trying not to laugh. “Come with me,” I said. He followed me to my room and sniggered as soon as he saw a tiny amount of water on the carpet outside my door. I opened my door to reveal the full horror of the prank. 

I was ready to punch him but his reaction stopped me in my tracks.

He saw the deluge, saw the soaked carpet, saw my shoes hanging to dry alongside my other clothes, saw my bed tipped up so that I could clear out all the wet detritus underneath it and he laughed. He laughed so much that he couldn’t stop. He fell on the floor and gasped for breath, rolling around in such mirth that, he later told me, he almost wet his pants. 

I saw his laughter and started laughing at his laughter.

Our feud was over. 

We mentioned it again on a university reunion last year and we all laughed at it again. 

We are still best mates but I learned to be very careful when you are thinking of talking about somebody behind their backs.

10, What consistently makes you laugh

British comedy. We are the funniest people in the world.

11. Routines that bring you calm and peace.

I like to listen to calming ambient electronic music like this:

12. Who annoys you the most?

I don’t know where to start. 

The human frog that is Nigel Farage, the human weasel that is Dominic Cummings, the clown we have as Prime Minister, Piers Morgan, the Orange Goblin in the White House, and many others.

13. Describe some of your favourite household items.

My CD collection, all of my gadgets, my bed and my cat. 

14. What have you gotten better at?

I am trying to mellow as I get older and try to listen to people to listen to their view on things in a bid to understand them better. 

15. Share a random memory.

I think I probably wrote too much for question 9 so I will allow that question to double up as a random memory too.

16. How many pairs of shoes do you have?

Not many.

17. Who do you go to for encouragement?

Usually Mrs PM.

18. References you make that others don’t get.

I am always quoting comedy shows – I seem to have a good memory that kind of thing.

19. What are 10 things you consider essential for you?

Phone, iPod, laptop, Kindle, clothes, shoes, glasses, passport, WiFi, beer, 

20. Is there any accent you wish you had?

Not really. I can do a passable impersonation of some accents. I guess a southern Irish accent might be a good thing to be able to impersonate – it is quite difficult though.