Odd one out

It was as I was drinking a cup of coffee at a pub the other evening that it dawned on me that I may very well be something of an oddity.  Not because I was drinking coffee in a pub, which is not that unusual these days.  It's not all that many years ago that such a remark would have caused people to raise their eyebrows, I grant you that, but nowadays pubs are a bit more upmarket than the spit and sawdust bars of yesteryear where one could buy beer and other alcoholic beverages and the only food on offer was packets of potato crisps or pork scratchings.  Maybe salted peanuts if you were lucky.  These days probably more than 50% of most pubs' turnover comes from the sale of food; specifically, full meals.  That was the case the other evening.  The blind club had fixed a hog roast at a village pub - and very good it was, too.  I enjoyed a glass of wine with my meal but after the meal I enjoyed a cup of coffee.  No, belay that:  I drank a cup of coffee but there was little about it for me to enjoy and that was when I realised that I might very well be something of an oddity.  At least, something of an oddity here in England.

Come to think of it, there is another reason why I might be one of the odd men out.  I know the words of both the first and the third verses of the national anthem.  (There is a second verse but it is never sung and nobody actually knows the words off by heart.  Or if they do, then they really are oddballs!)  Perhaps I was a little optimistic in claiming that I know the words of the national anthem.  You see, (and I have to explain this for those who land on this blog but don't have the advantage of being British) the third and seventh lines of the first verse are almost identical.  I think I know which way round they go but I might be mistaken.  I think the third line is "God save our Queen" and the seventh, "God save the Queen".  Anyway, if you listen very carefully when our national anthem is sung en masse, you will hear that some people sing one version while others sing the other and yet more just mumble.  But when it comes to the third verse (which isn't sung very often) the majority of people don't know the words.

I can hear the question being asked, "What on earth has all this got to do with drinking a cup of coffee?"  Truth to tell, not a lot.  But there is a connection - me.  And me being an odd man out.

I did say that I drank a cup of coffee but didn't really enjoy it.  And that happens so often when I have a coffee after a meal in this country.  The problem is - or rather, the cause of my problem is that most other English people seem to enjoy coffee that tastes very much like dishwater.  Nobody makes a good, strong cup of coffee the way they (usually) do in France.  And those places that do make the coffee almost strong enough most often use beans that taste pretty awful, like Starbucks, Costa Coffee and Cafe Nero.

I have drunk coffee in England, America, Japan, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Malta, Portugal and Italy among other places, but only in France (and occasionally in Belgium and the Netherlands) have I been served with coffee that tasted right to me and in the right quantity.  In Italy the cups are too small but are delightfully strong, whereas in America the cups are far too big and the coffee too weak.  No, give me French coffee every time.

I thought there was a quote about coffee being a black as the Earl of Hell's waistcoat but I can't find that one, so well just have to accept what Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord said, "Coffee should be black as the devil, hot as hell, pure as an angel, sweet as love".

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With the dismal weather we are enduring at present here in sunny (hah!) Sussex, I might wish I was here in Menton in the south of France.

Feeling smug

Yep, that's me.  It is not very often that I have an excuse to feel smug but such is the case today.  Or maybe it isn't really the case but I feel smug anyway.  Now, let me assure you that I know full well that you may very well have no interest whatsoever in why I have this feeling of smugness.  If that is the case I suggest you leave the room now, or simply move on to the next blog - which will, in all probability, be just as yawn inducing as this one.  But if, on the other hand, you are like me and are sufficiently curious to want to know what happens in the lives of other people, then read on.

I do, I really do think I have some justification for feeling smug.  I have finished writing the minutes of last Monday's zone meeting of the Lions and sent copies to the presidents and secretaries of all the clubs in the zone.  OK, so that last little bit was just that - a little bit.  As I have the email addresses in my contacts as a mailing group it didn't take very much effort to send the minutes out.  Along with an updated copy of the zone diary.

The other job I have managed to complete is also Lions-related, specifically Brighton Lions Housing Society.  Did I mention that earlier this year we discovered that we have, albeit inadvertently,  been in contravention of some of the rules for about 50 years?  Anyway, the chairman and I, in my capacity as secretary/treasurer, decided we should get the rules amended so that we are no longer ultra vires.  I have now read through the entire rule book and drafted the necessary amendments.  These have been sent to the chairman for his comments before the next meeting of the management committee.

And on Monday I mowed the lawns front and back, including the verge.  Just as well, I did it on Monday as we have had showers both yesterday and today.

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Another mot juste I heard the other day.  I'm told this is an old Finnish saying.

Grandchildren are the dessert of life.

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ABroad mentioned in a comment that she wants to visit the Royal Pavilion here in Brighton.  I have posted pictures of the exterior before but never of the interior.  Photography inside it not permitted, so here is a picture of a postcard showing the banqueting room.

Must share this

Worrying won't stop the bad stuff from happening, it just stops you from enjoying the good.

Scratching the itch

I mentioned the other day, or maybe it was only yesterday, that I have always had itchy feet.  I never wanted one of those jobs that would see me flying all over the world only to see the destination airport and the inside of a hotel, either of which might as well be in Los Angeles, Berlin or Delhi.  No, I wanted to see the world, not just 4-star hotels which are the same everywhere.  I was, I suppose, fortunate that in my last job before retirement I was able to scratch my itch, albeit only very slightly.

That job was with a national newspaper here in England, a religious newspaper which catered for a specific church.  The church held an annual convention and the editor of the newspaper, along with several reporters and a photographer, always attended to report on the proceedings.  I always tagged along for a day or three - not because I had any great interest in the goings-on themselves, but it was politic to at least show my face.  The newspaper party, not unnaturally, stayed in hotels in the various towns across England where the conference was held.  It was after I had been in the job about three years that the hotel selected for our party to stay in - it was in Cardiff, I think (which is in Wales, not England) - proved to be a disastrous choice.  The editor was furious with himself for having chosen that hotel, more or less on spec, and in discussion with me agreed that we should change the way the hotel was selected each year.  This would involve somebody visiting the town a few months before the conference to check out the hotels, negotiate a rate and make a booking.

So, I got to visit several towns and cities across the country and spend a little time in each, thereby having an opportunity to see something of the sights.  I spent time in Newcastle Upon Tyne, Southport, Blackpool, Derby, Scarborough, Leeds, Bolton, Huddersfield, Halifax, Edinburgh (yes, that's not in England either) and Norwich, among other places.

But there was always one thing that surprised me.  I was always in those towns and cities at the time of year when dusk fell at about 6.30 or 7.00, just as I was wandering the streets, possibly checking out restaurants in case I would be able to negotiate a better deal by letting staff eat away from the hotel.  As I strolled the streets, lights would be coming on in the windows of the houses I passed and I was allowed glimpses into other people's homes.  I would see those people going about their everyday, domestic tasks and a strange feeling would come over me.  It was almost as though I felt lonely or homesick.  The feeling only ever lasted a very few minutes, but it was there in almost every town I visited alone.

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Yesterday I posted a picture of an Indian gate to be found in Hove.  There is another Indian gate in Brighton, the more downmarket part of the city of Brighton & Hove.

One of the most famous buildings in Brighton is the Royal Pavilion, the seaside palace built for the Prince Regent, later King George IV, in the Indian style.  During part of the First World War, the Pavilion was turned into a hospital for Indian troops injured on the Western Front and after the war, it was decided to erect a new gateway to the Royal Pavilion grounds from the south as a permanent memorial in Brighton to the use of various buildings in the town for Indian soldiers wounded in the First World War.

The India Gate is a gift from the people of India to the inhabitants of Brighton and Hove as a thank you for caring for their sons.   It was unveiled on the 26 October 1921 by H.H. the Maharaja of Patiala.

The inscription reads:

“This gateway is the gift of India in commemoration of her sons who – stricken in the Great War – were tended in the Pavilion in 1914 and 1915. Dedicated to the use of the inhabitants of the Brighton, B.N. Southall, Mayor”.

In replying His Highness said. “For many of those who had returned to India he had heard expressions of fervent gratitude for the attention and care lavished upon them by ‘Doctor. Brighton’, whose fame and skill as a healer and health restorer were talked of in many hundreds of remote Indian villages.”

The inscription has now faded and was replace by a wooden plaque in 2007.

Traveller or tourist?

There are very few times when I don't return home after a holiday (or when we have been over in France, which doesn't always count as a holiday)  without driving down the A23 to Brighton.  There comes a point along the road when we round a bend and there across the skyline dead ahead is the bold, bare line of the South Downs.  Pretty much in unison, the Old Bat and I exhale, "Aah!"  For some reason that seems to me to be inexplicable, we are always glad to see that sight, a sight that means we are getting near to home.

You might infer from the foregoing that my wife and I are home-loving birds, never happier than when we are on the inside of our own front door.  Well, yes, we are very happy living where we do, and I delight in being able to wander across the fields on the South Downs.  But to describe us as "never happier than when we are on the inside of our own front door" would be false.  We both enjoy exploring new parts as well as being thoroughly content to come back home afterwards.

I have always had itchy feet and have yearned to travel.  While I am very happy to do the tourist bit by visiting all the usual sights such as the Eiffel Tower in Paris or the Leaning Tower in Pisa, I have always had a nagging feeling of regret when I have been in those far-flung (or not so far-flung) lands, a feeling that I am missing something.  That missing something, what would be the je ne sais quoi if it wasn't for the fact that I do very well sais quoi, concerns people.  Specifically, the people who live there.  It is all very fine and dandy to see where they live, but I want to see more; I want to see how they live.

We never manage to stay for more than a week at a time in our house in France, but over the years we have managed to feel, at least in a small way, that we are a part of the local scene.  We shop as the French do - or we try to, anyway - using the independent, local shops or the stalls in the market.  We have been lucky enough to have been invited into a neighbours' house on many occasions and have become, for a short while, a wee bit Frenchified.  We have also been lucky enough to stay in private houses in America and have again managed to imbibe a little of the culture of the land, seeing at closer than usual quarters how people live.

Of course, in western Europe - at least, in most of western Europe - as well as America and, no doubt, other places around the world, things are no so very much different from how we live in England when one considers the enormous differences between, say, the Indian or Chinese culture and ours.

But I still want to know how the other half lives even if the other half is only across the Channel.  I want to be a traveller as well as a tourist.

That is one of the benefits of the blogs that go under the umbrella of City Daily Photo.  OK, we don't really get to learn much about how people live in those cities, but they do sometimes show fascinating little bits that throw a gleam on local life.  We are - or rather, I am going off on something of a tangent here, but one of the quirky sites I like features pictures of bollards.  Take a look at Bollards of London and see for yourself.

And while on the subject of travel, here is a picture I took in Hove last week.  The Jaipur Gate stands in the grounds of Hove Museum.  Here's what the Council's web site has to say about it:

The Jaipur Gate formed the central portion of the eastern Exhibition Road entrance to the Indian art-ware court of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition held at South Kensington in 1886.  The exhibition was opened by Queen Victoria on 4 May 1886 and attracted 5.5m visitors.
The gate marked the entry to the Rajputana (now Rajasthan) section of the exhibition. The Maharaja of Jaipur paid for its construction. Although carved and assembled by Indian craftsmen, the gate is a hybrid construction designed by two Englishmen, Colonel Samuel Swinton Jacob and Surgeon-Major Thomas Holbein Hendley.
The inscription on the front, in English, Sanskrit and Latin, is the motto of the Maharajas of Jaipur ‘where virtue is, there is victory’. The gate was donated to Hove Museum in 1926 and erected in the garden.  It formed the backdrop to the visit of the current Maharaja of Jaipur in 1986 when he visited Hove to mark India’s independence celebrations.

This must be a view of the back as the inscription says nothing about virtue or victory.

First? Or last?

Sunday, I mean.  I'm never sure if the week starts or ends on a Sunday.  If we take the week as defined by all those who print pocket diaries, Sunday is the first day of the week.  On the other hand, we are told in the Bible that God made the Earth in six days and on the seventh, he rested.  And Sunday has for centuries been considered the day of rest.  Except for members of the Jewish religion.  For them, Saturday is and always has been the Sabbath.

All that is simply my usual way of meandering into what I really intended writing about, which is a comparison of the week ahead with the week just finished.  This week coming up certainly has the look of being a great deal calmer than the week just finishing.  (You might note that I have been hedging my bets over whether last week has finished already or whether next week has already started - and if you are not completely confused by now you need another drink.)  Last week (or this week, depending on your point of view) was not exactly manic but it did seem to be pretty much a constant stream of errands of one sort or another to be run.  This week (or next week), on the other hand, is looking almost like outer space in comparison.  There are, at present, just two things, apart from shopping trips on Tuesday and Friday.  On Tuesday also, I am duty driver for the blind club so will pick up the two members who live in Brighton and take them to the hog roast arranged at a pub in Ringmer.  Then I must not forget to collect my granddaughter from school on Thursday!  I hope I might find time to finish the minutes of last Monday's zone meeting and at least make a start of redrafting the constitution of Brighton Lions Housing Society where we have been in contravention of at least two rules for something like 50 years!

The Maigold rose

Last week ended on a high note with the Brighton Lions Club charter night celebrations yesterday.  I managed to win first prize in the raffle - a selection of half a dozen bottles of wine - so I was not unhappy.  Plenty of spit and polish during the day as I was driving three other attendees as well as the Old Bat so I hied me to a car wash and then finished it off by hand and vacuumed the inside.  That's not something that happens very often.

It has turned cold again, with a stiff north-easterly wind.  I even resorted to wearing a fleece to walk the dog after breakfast this morning.  But the Maigold rose which is usually in bloom for my brother's birthday finally came into bloom yesterday, exactly a month later than usual.  Now if only Skip could send some of his heat over here . . .

"Yesterday . . .

. . . all my troubles seemed so far away."  If only!  That may well have been the case with the Beatles but not me; yesterday all my troubles seemed right on top of me.  OK, so it was a day of frustrations rather than troubles.  Being Friday, the Old Bat had a session booked at the MS treatment centre for hyperbaric oxygen treatment.  This involves sitting in what is basically a diving bell for an hour breathing oxygen pumped in at pressure.  For some reason, the session overran by half an hour so although I had finished the supermarket run in plenty of time, I had to kick my heels for about 3/4 of an hour, which meant that I had no time to switch on the computer before lunch.  (Yesterday's post had been written and scheduled the day before.)

We arrived home to find the post had been delivered, including a letter from my doctor's surgery telling me they had the result of my recent bone scan and asking me to make an appointment with the doctor who referred me to discuss this.  I don't actually like the doctor who referred me and I rather suspect I'm not alone in that as when I rang to make an appointment I was offered a choice of three times yesterday afternoon.  That never happens with "my" doctor.

As I switched on the computer later in the afternoon, the phone rang.  But the extension in the office packed up and by the time I got downstairs to the main phone, a message was being left on the answering machine.  But I somehow cut off the message and failed to speak to the caller.  Luckily, I recognised the voice so was able to call Pete back and he told me that one of the charter night menus had the name spelt incorrectly (his fault) and as it was the Mayor's consort, was there any chance of a reprint?

My computer was able to let me do that, but could I access the internet?  Could I heck!  Somehow it transpired that I could read my emails, but there was no way I could get onto Blogger - or my bank's web site where I wanted to transact business.  Somewhere along the line I diagnosed the problem with the phone as being rechargeable batteries that had failed to recharge and after a bit of scrabbling around I managed to locate a couple of replacements which did start charging up.

So, off to the doctor, who informed me that my bone density is low and I apparently have osteopenia, which he told me is a sort of halfway stage between "normal" and osteoporosis.  He prescribed calcium and vitamin D tablets, one to be taken twice a day.  On top of the statins prescribed by "my" doctor earlier in the week as my cholesterol level is high, partly as a result of the rheumatoid arthritis.  So, since Tuesday, I have switched to semi-skimmed milk (and I much prefer the full cream version), cut out cheese (and I do like my Cheddar) and switched to a margarine-type spread instead of butter.  But if all this keeps me on top of the turf for a while longer I suppose it might be worthwhile.  While I was picking up my new medication I also bought a battery charger in the hope (probably a vain one) that I can avoid future problems with the phone.

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Brighton Lions Club charter night tonight, the club's official birthday party.  When I joined the club all those years ago it was expected that gentlemen would wear dinner jackets and ladies posh frocks.  It is still the case that most of the men wear DJs rather than lounge suits, but cocktail dresses are usually worn by the ladies.  It is an evening of speeches and toasts after dinner and before the dancing starts.  The programme is:

The Loyal Toast, proposed by the President.

The President then proposes the toast to Lions Clubs International and District 105SE - but makes no speech at this point.  The response to the toast is from the District Governor, who concludes by proposing a toast to Brighton Lions Club.  The President responds, and this is her opportunity to make a speech.

Then one of the Lions proposes the toast to the City of Brighton and Hove, the ladies and our guests (we are still sufficiently politically incorrect to include "the ladies") and there follows a speech in response from the Right Worshipful the Mayor of the City of Brighton and Hove.  Last year I was asked to propose this toast but fortunately I have no speech to make tonight.

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I had occasion to make a trip into Hove (that's the posh part of the City of Brighton and Hove) in the week and I walked down George Street where I took this phot of what was at one time the Hove fire station.  That, presumably, was in the days of horse-drawn fire tenders.  The old coat of arms of the Borough of Hove is proudly displayed.