28 Apr 2009
Posted in People, Travel, Work at 1:40 pm by alby
Sore this week.
I was in Harrogate again at the weekend for another Pilates course. And my word it was a tough one.
Got there to discover there was an exam at the end of the second day. Then spent 12 hours doing Pilates and learning how to teach it better etc.
So for the exam I was already about done in.
We were split into 2 groups of 6 and then we each had to teach the others 3 exercises with the whole demonstrating/explaining/tweaking and helping out stuff. So if you went first you then had to watch 5 other people do better than you; if you went last then you had more time to worry. And whichever you still had to do 18 exercises over the course of the exam. A normal class would have maybe 10 exercises. So that was physically hard work on its own.
But there was some excellent light relief.
On the Saturday I’d arranged to go to York and stay over with Mamph in return for a curry and company.
Got there to find others had been invited and we ended up in a pretty decent curry house with excellent beer from The York Beer and Wine Shop (excellent place).
This was followed by a trip to a local pub where a round of drinks for 6 cost £7.50ish. Most impressed.
We all headed back to Mamph’s to finish off the evening.
But an early start wasn’t welcome, sadly necessary tho’.
Exam done – think I did ok.
More Pilates requests coming soon (probly).
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23 Apr 2009
Posted in Life at 5:35 pm by alby
I mentioned a few posts ago that one of my elderly relatives died recently.
When I visited my parents last time I was given one of her cookbooks. It’s from 1936.
It’s not in the best repair but it’s perfectly useable. So I shall use it.
It’s called
Radiation Cookery Book – For use with the “New World” Regulo-Controlled Gas Cooker
And there’s some wonderful language used.
Eg from the introduction:
All the oven recipes in this book have been selected for the Radiation “New World” Oven, with “Regulo” automatic heat-controller and single-oven burner.
This unprecedently efficient and economical oven is now incorporated in all the popular cookers made by the six Radiation firms, whose names have been for so long household words. No other ovens can give such splendid results.
The household names of these firms are: Arden Hill and Co, The Davis Gas Stove Co, Fletcher Russel, Richmond’s, Wilsons & Mathiesons, and John Wright and Co. So all household names then.
Oh yes and there’s a whole chapter of “Invalid Cookery”.
Anyway to the point.
I’m going to do a “Come Dine With Me” sort of thing. If you wish to come along then do let me know.
So far the dishes winning out are:
Starter – “Potato Soup”
Mains – “Mutton Pie”
Puds – “Prune Mould”
Although these choices may change if some of the locals find something they’d prefer.
Who’s up for it then?
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18 Apr 2009
Posted in Life, People, Work at 10:41 am by alby
Friday started badly after a night of bad sleep interrupted by my house alarm randomly going off at 3am and then followed by me having a dream in which my toenails got manky (if you’re Clurb then “mankier”) and I pulled them off. Great.
So to work early and then a full diary. Was a little tired throughout the day but people were the same as always.
Until the last patient. And not even my patient.
I was at the PC doing some paperwork and the locum physio we have asked me if I could fetch her patient a glass of water. I disappeared off to get one. On my return I see a worried looking locum saying “my patient’s collapsed”.
Oh great.
Went into the cubicle to see the patient on her side on the treatment couch, eyes closed but breathing.
Pulse taken and normal. BP taken and normal. Patient responsive to questions but “unable” to open her eyes.
So emergency practitioner called (that’s not just jargon, he was a specialist nurse not a paramedic). He re-checked everything I’d checked as well as blood sugar (also normal). Cue lots of talking and waiting and talking.
Some frankly bizarre responses from the patient led him to call an ambulance. And now me and the locum could finally get to write up our experiences for the inevitable “incident form” on Monday.
When the ambulance man showed up he asked the locum for some more details about what happened and then managed to upset her horribly by saying “It’s all your fault then” (assumedly in jest). Really a bad idea as she was worried that she’d done something to prompt this incident.
So after doing the notes and sorting the room out I then had to spend a good half hour trying to talk through the incident with the locum and coming to the conclusion that she’d done nothing wrong. Not sure she thinks of it in that way yet though.
Will have to chat to the boss first thing on Monday now and it’s not as if there’s lots of available time for me on Monday.
The whole incident did bring back bad memories for me. When I was a little physio I was with a patient who’d just had cardiac surgery. My role at the point in rehab was to get her out of bed and walking again.
All the notes were clear that she could get up and move. I got her up and walked about 5m with her. When getting back to the bed she went a little confused and couldn’t follow instructions. So I sort of pushed her onto the bed and then plugged her into the monitoring system. Nothing horribly out of place. Asked her some questions – no response. Called a nurse. After a few mins we concluded she’d had a stroke (confirmed later).
My supervisor found me an hour later (probably in the loo) worrying that I’d been the cause of this. It took her an hour or so going through the notes and my treatments with me before concluding that I’d done nothing wrong; it was just “one of those things”.
That patient died a day later.
I think the current patient isn’t anywhere near as serious as that was but it’s still freaky when a patient you’ve touched goes “wrong”. Not good at all.
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16 Apr 2009
Posted in People at 6:49 am by alby
But not terribly surprising.
I wake up to the radio and this mornng the very first thing I heard in the day was that Clement Freud has died.
Not a good start to the day.
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14 Apr 2009
Posted in People, Rants at 7:17 pm by alby
Ooh I’m annoyed. I’m going to write this here rather than where it should be written as I don’t wish to be too “discoringing”.
There’s a newbie on rec.j. She sounds like a really enthusiastic young lass (she’s 12 I believe) and is regularly posting and wanting to participate. All well and good.
However she has THE worst spelling and grammar I think I’ve ever come across.
Here’s a typical message:
i would lkike to all of my kind sponseres and jenoures passand not far ers by who donated money to comic relife as i unicycled 4 miles and did a spot of street performing on red nose day i rased in total 70 poundes
Now I had no clue what “jenoures passand not far ers” means. After some debate, we came to “generous passers by”.
There have been one or two folk asking her to calm down a bit, maybe use a dictionary or spell checker and then to post.
But apparently that’s rude and “discoriging” (and sarcastic too).
Someone else rode to her rescue with this wonderful message:
“no need to feel so sorry. a spell checker is a good idea. i would be nowhere without it. but the real reason people post up all your spelling mistakes, which are clear as day what you mean, is because they feel they are the guardians of language. the level that people go into on this forum is a joke. most of it is in jest and quite tastefully done, but it dose change the subject far to often.
yes, get yourself a spell checker. its helps. but i think people should be more understanding. if someone spoke to you with a speech impediment you would not say “i will not talk to you unless you learn how to talk well”
Utter crap.
There have been a few occasions where I haven’t had a clue what this girl’s been talking about. There goes the “clear as day what you mean” bit. I don’t think I’m stupid but “jenoures” was one word I just didn’t get.
What about this effort?
“how do u no that were u that man who i met that also desighned that web page or r u the whoman that showed me some moves!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Or this one?
“i have been on here for a few months now and i have tryed to addapt to writing so the older people can read it,some people must realise it will take a while for me to ge the hang of it as strange as it may seem also
people have been sacasic about my puntuatoin and to encoriging for new members luckley im enfusyastic and it and it doesent bother me but others might be fritend off and also in chat i cant ussually understand what the
older people are talking about so they should addapt there langguage sllitally.”
What the hell? There are no full stops in there. Not a single capital letter either. But ignoring those minor issues. What on Earth has the age of the reader got to do with anything? Perhaps this lass thinks that teachers and examiners only mark grammar and spelling because they have nothing better to do. Maybe English lessons at school are pojntless because she thinks she can already speak English?
Apparently she feels that this shocking inability to articulate thoughts is in someway normal.
What the hell have the first 7 years of school been teaching her if not to “addapt to writing so the older people can read it”. Adequate English is not for “older people” it IS, however, for “people”.
I cannot remember being remotely as bad at writing as this when I was 12 and heaven knows I was hardly a model student.
And “sllitally”? What? “Slightly” maybe? Who knows?
I’m now a self-appointed “guardian of the language” now too. Well woohoo. It seems that being regularly unable to understand a native English speaker’s writing makes me an odious pedant now.
The point has been made that there are a lot of people on-line who don’t have English as their first language.
And also that if you mumble then expect people to ignore you. These are the only points being made. No-one (as far as I’ve seen) has been having a go at her just to show off their skills in the language.
The final point of this helpful soul who came in to give her a written hug was that
“i think people should be more understanding. if someone spoke to you with a speech impediment you would not say “i will not talk to you unless you learn how to talk well”
That’s a ridiculous argument. Speech impediment = problem not of your making. Such poor English skills = problem you can do something about. Unless of course you just can’t be bothered to. There’s nothing wrong with that course of action I should point out, just don’t be surprised if people mention that they can’t hear you.
I’d expect a stammerer gets annoyed by people not understanding. That’s where lots of their problems come in I’d expect as they get more frustrated at the lack of communication. But then the stammerer knows this so goes to speech and language therapy maybe to try and do something about it. And it works. SaL therapists get great results with stammerers.
But what then do kids who can’t be bothered to learn the basics of communication in the first 7 years of their schooling do? Whinge that old people do them down.
NO! Don’t whinge, just bloody do something about it! And start by crawling back to the English teachers you’ve ignored for the past 7 years and ask them to actually teach you something.
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10 Apr 2009
Posted in Life, People, Self-indulgence at 6:47 pm by alby
I’ve recently had a semi-distant elderly relative die. I didn’t really know the lady too well but I’ve currently visiting my parents and they have a bunch of her belongings at home so I’ve been having a bit of a troll through and finding out some more.
One of the wotsits is a long letter from someone to her. This someone was in the army with her husband and the second part of the letter is his description of an action they both took part in (her husband is the “Tony Plumb” mentioned). I believe the letter was received after his death in 1986.
It does give quite a human face to having to do something risky and it being something that just had to be done.
Anyway if you’re interested I’ve copied it, word for word beyond the clicky. Action takes place in the Reichswald battle.
Read the rest of this entry »
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07 Apr 2009
Posted in News, Rants at 1:10 pm by alby
Never!
A few years ago when the gov were debating banning fox hunting a regular refrain from the pro-hunters was
“The amount of time being spent on this on parliament is disgraceful. Can’t we talk about more important matters?”
Despite it being they who were dragging it out, thus demonstrating that their question was dodgy at best.
Well now. The Tories come along and, despite having their best chance for election since 1979, try their best to smack down any lingering doubts over their sympathetic qualities. You know some of us were hoping that when they’re elected they’ll actually turn out to be better than we fear.
But now we can see that there’s been no change in their idiocy. Apparently they’ll allow a free vote on the hunting issue if they win the next election.
Come on guys. Some of us aren’t going to vote for you but we know you’re likely to get in whatever. Don’t be idiots bringing up pointlessly divisive issues again.
And apparently the argument that there’s been too much legislative time spent on this issue no longer applies.
[shakes head and wonders why people think politicians are out of touch]
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03 Apr 2009
Posted in Reviews at 11:11 pm by alby
You may know that I’m not a great telly fan but a couple of things or so have come to my attention recently.
I occasionally browse the “Points of View” message board on the beeb to see what the loons are saying about stuff. Normally there’s a thread about most stuff wots been on and it’s fun to see what your average beeb viewer seems to think about odder stuff like “The Stewart Lee Comedy Vehicle” for instance (it’s patchy but mainly ace).
Yesterday evening I was wandered on there to see the board in vague meltdown over that evening’s episode of Eastenders. Loads of threads all basically saying “U fiwfh! Hah cahn you du that to-wer? Fiwfh!”
It seems that something of dramatic import had climaxed and your very average viewer really weren’t too happy.
This struck me as a little odd.
I see telly as a way to educate me, make me laugh and occasionally show me something new. I’m not a great one for using it as a method of anaesthetising myself.
But it seems, yet again, that I’m in a very small minority.
It seems a little odd to me that people should be upset by something surprising and nasty. It does appear that their slumber shouldn’t be disturbed by having their preconceptions challenged in any way.
What a dull world they inhabit.
Next telly show is Genius. Nicked straight off the radio (but somehow “I’ve Never Seen Star Wars” got there sooner).
I wasn’t sure that it would translate to the telly and I’m tending to think I was right. I’ve seen all 3 episodes so far and whilst the ideas are as good as ever and the guests have been ok (although the creepy taxi driver coming on to Catherine Tate was rather uncomfortable) I just don’t think the show needs to be on the telly. That’s not to criticise the concept, after all they tried Just a Minute on the telly as well – great show, didn’t need to be on telly.
It also doesn’t help that I’m familiar with the radio series and they’ve nicked loads of the ideas from that to re-present again. So far we’ve had, weighing scales in shoes, symmetrical Isle of Wight, the full face razor, the science of opposites and 98m high running shoes. Now that’s more than a full episode’s worth of repeat ideas. Not that they’re particularly bad ideas just that I’ve already heard them. And I reckon they didn’t go as well on the telly. The model of the 98m high shoes just looked like a model. The image was better on the radio.
The best bit has been the “Genius Bin” part where they read some ideas that were rejected for the show. Some of these have been brilliant. But even then it’s a straight nick from the “ideas suggested by the studio audience” that they always did after the main show on the radio. (“Woolen gimp masks for winter gimping” remains my all-time fave of these)
Not sure on this one. Hmmm.
Last one is “Spiral“. Looking forward to this. I’ll report back later.
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Posted in Work at 10:41 pm by alby
We occasionally get stuff at work that informs and educates but not often too much in the way of entertainment.
Today however we got the new edition of “Talkback“, the quarterly publication from BackCare – The Charity for Healthier Backs.
This is the only magazine I’ve seen at work that has included such lines as….
ooh I’m a tease. After the bump are some mildly mild NSFW wotsits.
Read the rest of this entry »
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01 Apr 2009
Posted in Blog at 6:32 pm by alby
Haven’t done this for a while but here are some recent search terms:
- menaderings monkey juggler
- why wont gp refer to physio
- juggling conventions clurb
- ï¼ï½%81ï½%8eï½%95ï½%85ï½%8cï½%81
- cos it just so couldn’t be
- what about germs
- have you ever shat yourself while passed out
- what do bulgaria do for fun
- did jasper get stabbed late at night at a party ?
- alby plastic 1/35
- therapies for hypercondriacs
- funny answer to what are your political views?
- sara jay juggles balls like a pro!
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