All you can eat...

So, Wing Wa is the place to be.. an all you can eat Chinese buffet in Burton on Trent (and other places) with very attractive staff (male and female) and (last night at least) some very attractive clients... plus a great linein ice sculpture and sparklers.... and of course, food.. beginning with chicken and sweetcorn soup, moving on to crispy duck, and then picking two plates of sticky ribs, wings,pork balls, and seaweed, chowmein, beef in black bean sauce, fried rice, etc... pig out was the word that came to mind... finished eating at nine oclock last night, and only just starting to feel hungry... then onto Barracuda, which smelled faintly of sick, then Wetherspoons, which was packed... then to a strange, NFN foam party... then past Barracuda, which had either a big queue to get in, or a load of people temporarily getting out of the smel of sick... apparently it was going to be a walkabout, but the aussies took one whiff and decided to leave it to the South Africans....but there we are.. an interesting night... not least being called sweetheart by a very nice young lady in Wing Wa, and being asked by a japanese girl in wetherspoons if she smelt of curry.... but i digress.. have just refelted a roof, sold a van, positioned a phone socket, planted some gateposts, and am now waiting for my son to return from blackpool... but there we are.. aso until we are all you can eat, wisebeard salutes you.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Spelling and sheds....

Well, the shed is up, thanks to help from my lady friend's next door but one neighbour... who came up wiyh two handds and some long anodised screws... and a very good shed it is too... bit warped, but never before erected (ooh err) and an absolute bargain at free.... the felt only just fit, but never mind... and that brings me onto the subject of spelling.. someone mentioned that my speklling on here is atrocious, and put it down to my 60 words per minute being non too accurate.. and recommended the use of the spellchecker, something I have always mistrusted after discovering that I am a spelling mistake... but I digress.. there are no spelling mistakes at all on this site... alll apparent errors are in fact the makings of an avant garde poem that I have been working on for many years.... find them all, take the letters to the left and right, transpose them with their equivalents based on a bacckwards alphabet, find the rigt order to put them in (and the clues are all on here.....) and lo and behold..... anyway, until all poetery becomes as opaque as it is transparent, Wisebeard salutes you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

snow joke....

Well, just back from easter Camp.. arrived on Friday evening after work, to a camp already set up and under way... and cold.... but fun... hiked up to Bardon Hill (Leicestershire's highest point), encouraged the Scouts to build a snowman in the image of Spoon; its possible that the way things are going, it may be the last snowman they get to build... On saturday, I went into Melton Mowbray to pick up a shed for a very good friend of mine, who has agreed to possibly come on holiday with me this October.. which is nice... and carrying a shed on the roof rack of a 25 year old estate car in high winds and snow is no jioke, I can tell you.. back into camp on the saturday evening, in time for stew, and then sleep in the Alpine hut... would have been warmer in a tent! On sunday came a visit from my good friend Rob, home from the RAF, and the hike to Bardon... and today it was home.... to bed, roast roots and Brains Faggots.... tomorrow it will be time to put up the aforementioned shed.. weeks off are always so busy.... but there we are....also i've been told that i'm going out next satyrday... two friends of mine (yes.. i have friends!!!!) are insisting i go to burton on trent, the home of beer, and have a chinese meal... then go bowling (if the alley hasn't closed down!!) before going off to a bar somewhere.... I dread to think what's going to happen... but I shall put aside the fact that when I was 18 or so such a night would hold little attraction, and go for it with a positive attitude... but there we go.. my son is off to blackpool with his mum at the end of the weeek, so that gives me four days of an empty house.. but i'll find something to do.. model railway beckons... but i digress.. managed to put in ome work on my entries for bbc wildlife poetry comp and a couple of others.. based on an experience at work.. so until we find a rhyme for rythm, wisebeard salutes you!!!!!!!!!!

its that time again...

Tonight is the final of our Scouts District Quiz... and as Quizmaster I am nervous, not least because one of the teams is from my Scout Group... we've not got this far for a few years, and never while i've been setting the questions, so I'm quite chuffed, but part of me hopes they don't win... simply because there will always be someone who even subconciously believes that somehow being in my Group gives them an advantage... actually, Iknow my Scouts, and to be Honest, Appleby and Markfield will almost certainly beat them hollow.. sorry lads... but I'm always fair.. in fact sometimes i'm probably too fair, forgiving and understanding... but there we are... off to work.. and until after the quiz, Wisebeard salutes you!!!!!!

The Outdoors indoors....

So, today it was our trip to the outdoors show... at the NEC in Birmingham.... several of my fellow Scout leaders and my son went along, got lost in the labyrinthine set up, went on a bouncy slackline, did some climbing, caving and looking about, ate expensive sausage, and two of us completed the Guides Go For It challenge, gaining us certificates and folding frisbees..... got lots of brochures, chatted to lots of Guide Leaders, several Scouts from Bude (where we camped last year) and I possibly applied for a new job in Telford of all places... it was the idea of working two days on four off for two thousand pounds more than I already get for five days on two off that appealed, as much as the fact that working with children with challenging behaviour has to be easier and more rewarding than working with my current colleagues.... also while there I purchased several Sporks, a strange hybrid of knife fork and spoon, that seem like a good idea, but after plenty of thought seem less and less so.... it begs the question why hybrid tools are not more common.. good old black and decker of course do multi attachment tools, which are almost hybrids, but not quite... but why not a spade with a hoe the other end (the hade? the spoe?) or a wierd cross between screwdriver and spanner (the spandriver? the scranner?).... or how about the drencil, a drill with a pencil action... or the prouse, a printer that can be used as a mouse.... ??? then there could be the so-ike, a sofa that doubles as a bike... or should that be a bofa...??? the possibilities are endless... and very reminiscent of a joke i told at the Castle Rock school review, that had at least one teacher attempt to storm the stage to prevent the punchline....

"hello," I said, in my white lab coat... " I'm a famous scientist, and i specialise inthe crossbreeding of birds, mainly pheasants... This morning I crossed a pheasant with a robin... I call it phobin... then I crossed a pheasant with a sparrow.. I called it pharrow... Then I crossed a pheasnat with a duck.. (scraping of chairs as Mr Miller figures it out!) and I called it Nigel..." massed relief from teachers... howls of laughter from school..... glare from Mr Miller....

But it was a good joke, as all things should be.... life is a joke... but, as The Comedian (heads up Watchmen fans...) admitted.... "I never said it was a good one..." and to be honest the punchline stinks, and most people just don't get it... but a joke none the less... I've often felt that nothing much matters, not really, and nothing that has happened to me has ever disavowed me of this... lets be honest, as Rick said in Casablanca "the problems of two little people don't amount to a hill of beans.." and the problems of our world amount to nothing on a universal scale.... lets be honest, we can reverse climate change, save the whale and the tiger, and still in ten million years there will be no one who remembers what a tiger was, let alone that we tried saving them... lets be honest, no one alive can remember the napoleonic wars....let alone the dinosaurs... it is humanities greatest attribute that we can bring ourselves to seem to care about such ephemera as the survival of the red squirrel... one hundred million years ago there were no squirrels.... eventually there will be none again... but what else is there for us to care about... we don't know about the big things, even if they exist... lets be honest, most of us are happiest believing that no one outside our immediate sensory reference even exists, even if that person is someone important to us.... for centuries well meaning people have tried to make us care, but eventually we allfail to care... how many people out there pretend to care simply because they see it as how they should behave.... and then sag inside because they don't care.. I think we'd find that those people are probably in the majority... few people care, the rest pretend they do in order to fit in, just as people smoke, drink or beat up racial minorities to fit in... not because its what they want to do, but just because someone else is doing it... but I digress.... I leave you with this... the Turing test.. what did the self aware computer say when it looked in the mirror.... ? answers on a postcard please... until we all realise that nihilism is the truth, Wisebeard salutes you!!!!!

I wonder......

I was wondering.... something that struck me a while back.. apart from mee, does anybody actually read this blog.. ?? I know at least three people did a while back, (yo to Clarkie, Shelley and Angie!) but did anyone else ever have a look.. and is anyone looking now??? If anyone is there, could they please leave a comment, even if it is just "don't ask me to leave comments, you weirdo..." feeling a little insecure at the moment, and it would be nice to know if anyone is out there.... on the other hand, if i feel i have an audience, its possible i may break out of my current wave of apathy and self pity, and actually start posting on here again... so you pays your money, and you takes your choice.. if anyone is there, Wisebeard salutes you!!!!!

a long time ago.. in a galaxy made of chocolate...

Is it really July since last I wrote?? Not really sure why I haven't put finger to keypad.. probably simply my general disappointment with life.... so.. what ghas been happening in the last seven months or so? Is anyone really interested.?? Who cares.... lack of interest never stopped me before, so I shall carry on!!!! Firstly, my third ever relationship (really.. and thats counting the one everyone says doesn't count) fizzled out not long after a trip to Snowdonia... it was a strange weekend.. wet, windy, surrounded by people I didn't really get on with, and feeling for two days as if I'd failed some important test... it carried on for a short while after, but really it had ended about then... I was asked to slow down, and did, but where I decellerated, the young lady braked hard, and that was that... so far she's the only one of my (admittedly not-numerous) exes that I would go back to, and that despite a promise years back that I would treat over as over forever... to be honest, we had very little in common, and (as with most of my relationships and pseudo relationships) it was doomed from the start... but its my own fault.. I should have stuck with trains... we still went away together in October, despite having been finished fro a few months by then, and although strained for the first weekend, we got on quite well, a bit like not-too-close mates who've made the mistake of living together... companionable, but slightly distant..... but still a fun week.... Wisebeard still sees her weekly, and still wishes her well..... but there we are... the whole episode got me thinking, however... I've found that I've never been that upset whenever a relationship has ended... sorry everyone... twice I've been relieved, and once it just fizzled out gently... but strangely I feel upset about not feeling upset.. I sometimes feel my emotions don't work properly... as I was explaining to a close friend last weekend... on a similar vein, I tend to get more upset when I hear that the ex in question has found another chap, usually a few months later... which is nothing strange, I hear you say, evcept that I'm not upset because I want her back, but upset that other people seem to be able to find relationships of whatever nature very easily, yet for me it takes years... rationally i know the reason why.. its because I have always(as I'm sure I've mentioned) been a loner... I don't go anywhere or do anything that involves meeting people of a similar age... but thinking about it, I'm not sure if I'm happier being alone.. the whole relationship thing seems a bit ephemeral... and, to be honest, a bit pointless.... partnerless I have more time to do my own thing.. there's less compromising, less hassle, less anything really... less sex, true, but to be honest, i'm starting to think that's overrated... watching an old Alan Partridge episode I was slightly dismayed to find myself agreeing with Alan that his son Fernando was wasting his Sunday afternoon lying in bed with a woman... not that that side of my relationships wasn't good... far from it.. I think I've been very lucky in that both the ladies I've been that involved with were very good in that area... but it still stopped me sorting out the attic... but I digress... to get back to the point I wasn't making, if you want a good read, you could do a lot worse than Troy Town, by Matt Merritt, author of the blog http://polyolbion.blogspot.com/ ...... check it out.... until I can find it in my wrist to do this again, Wisebeard salutes you!!!!!!!!!!!!!