Redirection

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Try over here.

Misunderstood

At Emerson College there is quite a heavy bias towards arts courses, with wood and stone sculpture, painting and pottery, as well as the performing arts.

When this weeks new students arrived on Sunday, I found myself sharing a table at lunchtime with 2 middle-aged guys who hail from Yorkshire.

Phil works at a Camphill community and has done a few courses at Emerson in previous years.

I asked him what course he was doing this time round.

“Clowning and maths”, he replied.

A forkful of green Thai curry came to a halt inches from my mouth.

“Clowning and maths”, I repeated, searching his face for a clue.

“Yes”, he said, as I looked to his colleague for confirmation. Dave was nodding.

My curry returned to it’s plate.

I looked at Phil, and back to Dave, to see if I was missing the joke somewhere.

“Clowning and maths ?” I tried again, slightly incredulous now.

Phil gave Dave a look that said “is he deaf or stupid?” and me a pitying look as he again said “yes”.

I laughed weakly and said “that’s a weird combination…….”

“Not really” said Dave “the mask helps bring out a more expressive side of the clown…”

“Oh! Clowning and MASKS” I said laughing……

I was telling this story at tea break today and several people nearly choked on their gingernuts. When everyone had recovered, the conversation got round to other misunderstandings.

I was reminded of a friend who was taking a group of builders to a site up in London one day very early in the morning. As they rounded a bend in a country lane, they collided with a deer. The battered Ford looked much the same as it had before the accident, i.e. as if it had been driven over a cliff!  The unfortunate animal also looked as if it had been driven over a cliff, and was killed outright.

Never one to look a gift horse hind in the mouth, my friend had his crew load the carcass into the van and they continued on their way.

When they arrived at the site, one of the builders was instructed to drive the van back to Sussex and put the deer in my friend’s garage.

On arriving home that evening, my friend was amazed to see that the normally quiet cul-de-sac where he rented a house, was blocked by police vehicles and lit up with floodlights.

The houses were set back from the road and a steep driveway led to the garages. The steep driveway to my friend’s neighbour’s garage was slick with blood, and several police officers were standing looking at a very dead deer. A visibly shocked old couple stood nearby being consoled by other neighbours…………..

Promotion

My boss is now travelling in France on his honeymoon.

Today was my first day fully in charge at Wealden Flowers.

My first job when I arrived at the gardens was to count how many flowers we had available to sell and contact one of our main customers, Hilary Moore Flowers.

Hilary has a floristry business with branches in Lewes and Forest Row.

There are a lot of weddings at this time of the year, Hilary supplied the flowers for 5 this weekend!

White sweet peas seem to be all the rage for weddings at the moment. Unfortunately, our 3 beds of sweet peas have been suffering under the onslaught of the rain and it is difficult to keep up with the demand. So filling orders is made more time consuming than it would normally be.

Eventually all the flowers were picked. As well as the sweet peas, today’s orders included Zinnias, Sunflowers, Dahlias and Sweet William.

After delivering the orders I had to take a tyre to the repair shop to have a puncture mended. I was quoted £18.50 for this! Seems very expensive, but I can’t remember the last time I paid to have it done, my friend used to work in a tyre business so I always got mine done for free. When I went back to pick up the tyre, I was told that it couldn’t be mended because a nail had punctured too near the sidewall. This means a new tyre. The shop only has Firestone in stock in that size -  £88!!!

The tyre in question was from an old wreck of a transit belonging to the college where my boss has his gardens. He had borrowed it to transport tables, chairs, glasses, crockery and the seemingly never ending amount of paraphernalia that is required to stage a wedding reception .

After we had finished rushing around tidying up after the party at the weekend, we loaded all the borrowed/hired stuff into the van and set off to deliver it back. 100 metres down the road we punctured, in the single track road that leads to my bosses house. This road is actually a bridle path and the only traffic ever seen on it is on it’s way to or from the few properties that are up there.

Of course, ‘Sod’ had invoked his law and a car came to a halt in front of us. 2 minutes later another vehicle appeared behind us!

After locating the jack and wheel brace, we couldn’t work out how to remove the spare. After much scratching of heads and a phone call to the regular driver of the van (no, he had never had to use the spare, so couldn’t help us) we finally worked it out.

5 minutes later and things got worse….the van fell off the jack!

Nobody was hurt, but I was beginning to wish my head had been underneath to finally put me out of my misery. I wasn’t being paid enough for this, in fact, I wasn’t being paid.

I ran back to the house and got the much smaller jack from the car I am using this week. We used this to lift the car enough to release the trapped jack that the van had fallen on. Then we put the original jack in a more sensible place, at my insistence, as nobody else seemed to have a clue what to do.

We lifted the van.

Fitted the spare.

It was flat – of course it was flat, what else did you expect!

Run back to the house and get air compressor.

Pump up tyre.

Deliver stuff in van.

*****

I had hoped to take lot’s more photos of these

but decorating got in the way and by the time I had finished they had all grown up and were nearly ready to fly away.

I did get some more shots but they are not good enough to publish. I also took some video footage on my battered digital camera, setting it up on a tripod close to the nest. The results were quite good, but when I attempted a DaddyP moment, the upload to YouTube was going to take a ridiculous amount of time and I don’t have video editing software as yet, so the Blackbird Blockbuster will have to wait.

Talking of the ‘old git’, I think he really may be coming down with something……..

Hecticity?

I’ve had a hectic couple of days.

Before all you really busy people scoff and say “huh! You don’t know what hectic IS!”, I should make excuses for being weak-willed and generally useless qualify that opening line.

I don’t do stress.

Not in the slightest.

Can’t handle it!

Turns me into a shivering wreck curled up in a ball in the corner.

Relationships? Parenthood? ‘Proper job’?

I’ll give them a swerve thanks if it’s all the same to you, too much decision making and long-term responsibility.

Conflict? Arguments?

Makes me feel ill!

Regarding hecticness (hecticity?), on a scale of 1 to 100, my preferred level would be about –17.

Given the above, I won’t bother you with my problems…..I just need a rest…..

White Horse?

I was commenting over at the 70sTeen blog yesterday about pub signs and it reminded me of this story.

There is a pub near Chichester that used to be called ‘The White Horse’. It  has now been totally refurbished and is called ‘The Fish House’.

When it was ‘The White Horse’ the pub sign showed not a white horse or one of any other colour – it was of a cat!

I didn’t know about this until there was an article about it in the Chichester Observer. Apparently, many years ago when the pub first opened, the owners asked a friend to paint them a pub sign. Their friend, a slightly eccentric lady, painted a cat instead of a horse because she ‘couldn’t draw horses’.

I thought this was so funny that I drove out there to photograph the sign. Sadly, I no longer have the photo.

The image above is of the original sign, thanks to purr-n-fur for that.

Some of you might wonder why this amused me so much.

At the time I was working as a taxi-driver at Yellow Star Taxis. When I was researching this nonsense, I found to my amazement that of the 5 main taxi companies in Bognor Regis, only 5 Star Taxis have their own website!

Our office back then was some way out of town in a little side street. They were a great bunch of people and we had some good laughs.

One day a cat wandered into the office and made itself at home. The radio operator on duty at the time was a young lady who was a big fan of cats and was soon buying food for it. Nobody knew where the animal had come from or who owned it.

So we had adopted an office cat, it got loads of attention and was well fed, the boss was pleased too, it was good for controlling the mice.

It was with us for a few weeks and then disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived, the girls were distraught! The drivers weren’t at all worried of course, in fact they were delighted because it gave them another excuse to wind-up the operators.

My Mother and Father were about to go to Jersey for a holiday and while standing in a queue at the local newsagents, I spied some postcards with cats on them.

The holidaying cat joke was born!

I asked my Dad to take a card to Jersey with him and send it to the operator who had made all the fuss over the cat, written as if from the holidaying puss.

This was the cause of much hilarity when the young lady turned up at work with the card demanding to know who had sent it.

We were always taking people to the docks or airport and the customers were only too pleased to be in on the joke. Soon, cards from all over the world were arriving at the office.

We kept it up for some months before the young lady discovered who the culprit was, luckily she had a good sense of humour. But guess who got all the ‘cat to vets’ jobs after that?

Sarah Outen

Congratulations to Sarah Outen, who has landed in Mauritius after her record breaking row across the Indian Ocean from Australia.

*****

On Saturday, I went to back to visit my previous Wwoof hosts and help them take their exhibits to the local village show.

I also entered one of the photographic categories – ‘A snow scene’ with the image that I use as my gravatar. As you can imagine, this photo looks a lot more impressive as a 10×8.

My photo won second prize, the first going to a rather ordinary shot that I would have been embarrassed to enter, in fact, the only thing it had going for it was that it had been taken by the gentleman who sponsored the category……………….

I got back to Forest Row quite late because the buses from Brighton were all delayed due to the traffic congestion caused by the Gay Pride march.

To get from Forest Row to Ditchling involves using 2 buses (2 different bus companies) and the return trip cost £8.30. I could buy a ticket with MetroBus that would take me all the way to Worthing for less than that! Why don’t people use public transport I wonder?

*

As you can see, I have finally found out how to change the ridiculous default font size that WordPress use, why they think that anyone wants to write/read a blog with script that small, I can’t imagine.

Also on the geek front, I have been using Google Chrome for just over a week now, and I must say i‘m very impressed. I got fed up with Firefox crashing all the time. Chrome looks very odd at first, it takes a bit of getting used to not having a toolbar full of stuff you hardly ever use.

9 of your most visited sites are on the homepage and you just click on them to bring them up in a tab. For instance, my page includes both my email providers, Google search, the two blogs I visit most often, the BBC homepage and all my bookmarked sites on delicious.com.

*

I received this in an email from Chichester Harbour newsletter the other day:

OVER £1,000 OF FINES FOR SPEEDING IN CHICHESTER HARBOUR

Two fines totalling £1,083 were handed out to two boat owners who broke the harbour speed limit.

The first incident took place on a Saturday in May earlier this year. Mr S Hobbs of Dorking was stopped after his rigid inflatable boat (RIB) was recorded travelling at 30 knots. The Harbour speed limit is 8 knots. As the area was quiet at the time, Mr Hobbs thought he was not causing any danger to other vessels. Portsmouth Magistrates Court fined him £833 plus £250 costs.

In the second incident, on a Sunday morning in June, another RIB was stopped after it was recorded travelling at 18 knots. The offender Mr J Peters of Bursledon was travelling across Stocker Sands near the busy anchorage area of East Head. Mr Peters was ordered to pay £250 plus £500 costs by Chichester Magistrates Court.

Maybe they’ll buy a rowing boat now…..

*

Logically Friday

If you thought the last post was baffling, here is a logic puzzle that I found whilst grazing in Haywards Heath library.

A Skirmish

3 goblins travelling together chanced to encounter a giant, who was alone, and 2 ogres, who were walking together.

A skirmish broke out among them and all combatants suffered bumps and bruises. Their weapons included 3 clubs, 2 staves, and 1 sling, used for hurling stones.

From the statements below, which ones were the goblins, which ones were the ogres, which one was the giant, and what weapon did each use? (2 names were Rido and Sumo.)

1. No goblin used a staff, nor did Tor.
2. The 2 ogres used different weapons.
3. The sling was used by one of the goblins.
4. Som, who was not an ogre, used a staff.
5. Opi did not use aclub, nor was he a goblin.
6. Tor and Zeb used different weapons.

As soon as  a commenter gives the correct  answer, i’ll let you know.

Anthroposophy

(thanks to Megan for image)

Wealden Flowers , where I am a WWOOF volunteer at present, is situated within the grounds of  Emerson College.

The College is a centre for adult education based on anthroposophy and the work of Rudolf Steiner.

Despite having been here for over 3 weeks now, I tend to be mostly in the gardens, only venturing into the college buildings for meals.

So I probably know as much about anthroposophy as this beautiful sculpture

so here is a summary of what it’s all about

“In short, Rudolf Steiner’s concept of education has neither an ethical-philosophical foundation (as was

the case with Kant and Herbart) nor a socio-cultural dimension (as in Durkheim and Dewey) and also no

empirical psychological origin (as in Claparède and Montessori). It is deduced from anthroposophical neomythology

and has a metaphoric character. In the light of his interpretation of the microcosm, education takes

the form of growth and metamorphosis—the educator is a gardener and a person who moulds others. From a

belief in reincarnation stems the image of education as an aid to incarnation and spiritual awakening—the

educator becomes a priest and a leader of people’s souls. The theory of the four temperaments leads on to the

educational task of harmonization—the educator then being understood as a master of the healing art. With

these organological metaphors of leaving the child to grow and to heal, and with the religious metaphor of

awakening with these vérités à faire, Steiner built the levers that are still being actuated by teachers and

educators in his schools and kindergartens today.”

So, thank goodness that’s all clear now!

For anyone suffering from insomnia, the rest of the article can be found here.

All I really know about the place is that they produce some great examples of art,

and I find the BioDynamic Organic techniques very interesting, see the Carson Garden blog for more.

Oh, and the food’s amazing, and everyone is very friendly.

WWOOFing & Woolen Ferraris

I was looking for an image to illustrate what i’ve been doing for the last 2 days.

Instead of kneeling in mud weeding flower beds,  Arjen, my boss, asked if i’d help him decorate a room in his house.

All the images I found of  ’steaming wallpaper’ were pretty boring, but there were plenty of images of wallpaper, and I found myself reading a blog by a guy who designs wallpaper (for computers and cell-phones).

Before I knew it, I had blog-hopped to loads of other sites using the links on them.

So that is how I came across the above YouTube vid. It was featured on a blog that I bookmarked, with the intention of showing  70steen, ‘cos I know she’s partial to a bit of  this.

Anyway, all the steaming and scraping is now done thank goodness, any of you who have had to remove wallpaper from a ceiling with one of those machines will know how much fun it is! Today we start filling and painting………now I wonder what obscure site I can link to if I put THAT into Google Image search………..ooh look!

*

Last week Arjen decided we needed help to get on top of our weed problem, i’m sure that i’ll find a lost WWOOF volunteer from last year in the undergrowth one of these days!

So we drafted in one of the BD  (BioDynamics) students to help us.

It was while in conversation with ‘ex-rock star’  Claire that she said to me “so you’re a geeky gardener really then?”, hence the tagline on my title above.

Flora & Fauna

Sunday again, so it must be time to post more photos i’ve taken this week around the garden