I shall endeavour

I don’t know why I don’t seem to have actually completed an entry here for days. I have several half written bits. It’s Monday 15th, and I shall endeavour to complete this entry.

This weekend we went to the Bristol Balloon Fiesta. the boy and the dragon love this event. It can be good, but I confess, I am nearly always left disappointed. The balloons so rarely actually fly due to wind or some other problem. I have been many times and only seen one balloon flight. Also the sheer number of people makes the traffic horrible. This year the balloons stayed firmly earth-bound again. We did see two or three inflated, but they were tethered. On the plus side the Red Arrows were there and, as usual, they were worth watching. They did a long display that was suitably spectacular.

The dragon says I should not go there expecting balloons to fly. She’s right of course, there are many other things to see and do. I still get disappointed though.

We were intending to do a car boot sale yesterday, but since the balloon fiesta was on and the Red Arrows were only going to attend on that one day, we decided to go there instead and try the boot sale next Sunday.

I think our boiler is on the blink again. I may have to call the man out.

We received a card through our door last week telling us that there was a package for us from Taiwan, but we can’t have it until we pay £25 duty. That caused us some issues because neither of us could work out who it might be from. I called Parcelforce to ask them what the package was and they said they would tell me what the customs description was. However, the description was in Chinese so they couldn’t. However, they very kindly faxd it to me so the dragon cold translate and it turns out to be books and sweets from a friend who we actually thought was in Hong Kong. Anyway, I paid up and we will have it delivered this week.

I see in the news that Anders Breivik, the Norwegian fruitcake, has been taken back to the scene of his crime to help stage a reconstruction. He was evidently tied to a security guard with a rope to stop him from running away. There are some really horrifying pictures of the guy looking relaxed and re-enacting his massacre. Seems odd to me that they let him do that.

I’m interested in David Starkey’s comments on the causes of the riots in London last week. I personally don’t think his race comments are very helpful, but I’m not going to get into that argument. What I would say is that his comments on street culture, and the language it seems to have generated is thought provoking. We all know the street language to which he refers. It seems to require “innit” on the end of every sentence. Starkey infers that this language is a fashion and that people choose to use it. He claims that it’s an offshoot of Jamaican Patois, and he may, or may not, be right. It’s interesting to me however that it is a language of the youth. No one over 40 uses it. Where did it come from? It isn’t regional and it isn’t passed down from generation to generation. I had never thought of this until I listened to the Starkey interview.

Cathay Pacific seems to be in a slightly embarrassing position after pictures emerged on the internet last week that appear to show a Cathay flight attendant performing oral sex on a pilot in (ironically) a cock pit. This type of picture does appear from time to time and of course they’re always embarrassing, but Cathay is finding this particularly awkward since it was about to launch a new marketing campaign with the tag line, “meet the team who go the extra mile to make you feel special”. They are now considering delaying the campaign. It occurs to me that Cathay is getting quite a lot of free advertising out of this incident. I’d be tempted to run the campaign and milk it.

And January Girl, thanks for the note, no there were nots near us and we are fine.