Thread: End of an era

Today is our youngest's last day at school, this morning our last school run. Her big sister and she are well separated, big sis is about to start a new job in a directorship with linkedin.com, so we have beeen doing a school run just about every term time morning for about 30 years. Sleeping in will be nice if we can adjust.
The missus got a new car lined up with Seat and an offer from the insurance company, then, yesterday, when she was all ready to transfer funds, the internet went dead through about three villages all around here, she couldn't even pop round her friends with the lap top and do it. It all got a bit heated for a bit there but my assurances that they were not selling a lot of cars and would want her money turned out to be true. As it happens she has done rather well on the deal, or at least not nearly as badly as might have been, they wrote off her car and gave her £2,000 less than the new one will cost. The new one , however, has been used by Seat staff and is a year younger than hers with only 2,600 miles on the clock, her old one had 33,000. She drives a hard bargin my missus, good job some one in the family can.
The Olly Buckle plant protector has been doing good service keeping the pigeons off my brassicas but the blackbirds are unphased by it and I have been doing battle with them over my strawberries, they seem especially bold this year, coming right up to the back door (I put the plants in pots along the back path to pick in passing). I think Dave the cat is getting a bit old and slow, not the deterrent he used to be.

Well, that is a mixed bag if ever I saw one. Firstly, have there never been school buses in your neck of the woods? Secondly, why would a car maker become involved in what is basically a transaction between a policy holder and the insurer? And thirdly, unphased = unfazed.

Kudos for the plant protector, altho’ the first time through I read brassieres. But then I would, wouldn’t I?

Riley’s 2 ½ now, and getting wilder by the day. I need to wear gauntlets when in the same room, as he always wants to fight. I think he may be a throwback to a Siberian wild cat or something.

PS Just finished watching a doco on the telly about Hastings. Never realised there were so many multi-storey buildings jammed together at the bottom of those cliffs and along the seafront; there's not even room to swing a cat.

The older child went to school in Wadhurst when we lived in Goudhurst, the school bus ran from Lamberhurst. Now we live between Crips corner and Bodiam, and the bus runs from Hurst Green, (The 318 if you are into looking up bus time tables). Both of them needed a lift of about five miles to get the bus.
Fiat uk does not make them, it sells them.
Wait 'til the sea level rises, they built a shopping centre on a gravel bed washed up by a storm where the old cricket ground was.

Your garden drama sounds awesome, the birds attacking your plants. That's a great basis for a story. But wait, can't you just shoot them? Just get a shotgun or something? If not—if it's not legal to discharge a firearm in your backyard—you can always just go No Country For Old Men and get yourself a silencer! They do exist for shotguns, apparently, and then your neighbors won't hear a thing! And if they do, you've got this brand-new handy-dandy silenced shotgun! Guaranteed to quiet witnesses. And if you can't find yourself a silencer, I'm pretty sure there's resources on the Internet telling you how to make one. I think I saw someone in a movie once just hold a pillow over the muzzle; try that.

Similar end of an era over here. My little brother Adam, thirteen, just left Riverside Elementary which has taught me and my brothers continuously for seventeen years. Kind of strange to think we're entirely done with that place. I should egg it. You know—to commemorate. (I have never egged a building nor plan on egging my old elementary school. Not everyone can tell when I'm being wacky so just spelling that out a little hhehehheehhhh.)

Outside Japan we have probably the strictest firearms laws in the world Caelum. My back yard is big for Southern England, but it is still only 40 foot by 110 feet with neighbours each side, this is a crowded and ordered little country. In the last fifteen to twenty years we have started seeing armed police outside government buildings in central London and there are armed police response units, but the ordinary police still don't carry guns, when I was young they would have had to go to the police station and spend about half an hour signing them out in an emergency. Believe me I have thought of trapping pigeons, they are rats on wings, blackbirds are stealing strawberries at the moment but they also keep pests down and sing beatifully, especially in the evenings when they pick a high spot in the evening sun and sing their hearts out. The problem is that neither my missus or daughter would stand for it and, as you will learn, sometimes the ladies rule.

Set up more DVDs on sticks

Roof the patch with light-weight chicken wire and plant indeterminate spinach or something similar. You'll have a covered structure free from birds and a big lot of greens all the time.

I forgot. I think I already made this suggestion, with the note that the overhead greens provide shade, which you pointed out you don't need as much of as I do in the tropics. I have heard that some days in England are cloudy.

It seems a little strange that they don't let the cops have guns, Mr. Buckle. Part of me likes that idea, though. I've always found handguns an ugly thing. They're not for hunting, only for people. The less of them bouncing around a society the better, and who knows, maybe the cops not having them so readily will discourage criminals from having them. There's that escalation theory that goes something like this: if one side ups the ante, the other side will try to match them.

Originally Posted by garza

I have heard that some days in England are cloudy.

The man's a comedian already.



"How do you know when it's summer in England?"

"The rain gets warmer."

Originally Posted by caelum

It seems a little strange that they don't let the cops have guns, Mr. Buckle. Part of me likes that idea, though. I've always found handguns an ugly thing. They're not for hunting, only for people. The less of them bouncing around a society the better, and who knows, maybe the cops not having them so readily will discourage criminals from having them. There's that escalation theory that goes something like this: if one side ups the ante, the other side will try to match them.

There seems to be little logic in these things. After WW II when lots of soldiers brought guns home there were guns everywhere and plenty got in the hands of criminals, but the police had almost none. During the sixties there was an IRA campaign and armed police got a little commoner, but what has seen an explosion in police gun use has been a small number of West Indian gangsters who have fled here from Jamaica and a couple of Islamic terrorist bombing attempts. The "Yardies" are a problem, but mostly confined to small areas of Manchester and south London, but the chances of them meeting a cop with a gun are tiny, the policeman who was killed by them in Clapham North, for example, was a neighbourhood police man on a bike who went to investigate a disturbance and if he had had a gun it probably would not have saved him. The ones who are dealt with are dealt with by police receiving good information as a result of good policing, not by heavy tactics and the idea of shooting down a man wearing an explosive suicide vest ... I guess that is why they shot the Brazillian in the head eight times while he was held down at Stockwell, pity he was an innocent man.
I would be happy with no guns held privately except shotguns for land owners who need to control vermin and gun club members who keep them in secure premises at the club, Really heavy sentences for possession and simply throw away the key for people who use them, I am almost tempted to say death sentences but that's a slippery slope and I am glad we don't have it any more, so I am not even tempted by that idea when I think about it.

Makes me feel a little wistful, Olly. We've got several years yet, but it all seems to be going by so fast. A reminder of how important it is to savor the time when they're young and make the best of it.

You could apply that sentiment to your whole life Joseph, make the most of it while you have it.