The same old sun will shine in the morning

just over the week
05 March 2016 18:10

No Eastleigh parkrun last Saturday, so I touristed to Southampton again. I picked a poor stating position – too far down the queue, and too much in the middle of the pack. Consequently I had my progress impeded by slower runners in front of me whom I couldn't get past for most of the first km. Despite this, and despite having a shoelace undone for half the run, I recorded a PB of 26'10''.
Incidentally, on my cycle ride last Friday I investigated the tunnel I thought I'd found under the motorway. It turned out that it wasn't there at all – the new tunnel I thought I'd seen was merely the existing tunnel viewed from a different angle.
I had a go at some simple two-stage arithmetic problems just for fun. Cos that’s the way I roll. I made a mistake on one question but couldn’t see how – each time I did the calculation, I got the same, incorrect, answer. The error was in my handwriting – I’d drawn a 4 so that it looked like a 9. Still, it could have been a worse outcome. It could have been a fire engine that was supposed to be a dustcart. Does that make sense? Only if you had the same childhood literary experience that I did.
Following my successful culinary exploits on Friday evening, I was entrusted to make shepherds pie on Saturday. I may have gone a bit overboard on quantity – there was enough for Saturday and Sunday dinner, and a bit of snacking in between. The mince mixture itself came to the rim of the oven dish (the largest I could find). "Oh never mind" I thought, and piled on the small mountain of mashed potato regardless. I'd forgotten about displacement. As the potato floated on the surface, large quantities of mince overflowed onto the worktop. "Why didn't you use two dishes?" asked CGF, who came in to supervise at that precise moment. "I didn’t think of that," I replied.
At work, the canteen dishwasher has broken down and we are being issued with disposable plates and cutlery. Polystyrene bowls are not very good for soup – they are not rigid enough, and spill as you carry them. The other interesting (and probably slightly obvious) effect is that they are better insulators than china. I scald my mouth on the soup because I am not used to its retaining so much heat betwixt serving and eating.
How far do you travel of you're not travelling anywhere? Sorry, that sounds a bit of a bizarre question, so I better explain. A question in the office daily-but-not-done-every-day quiz concerned the veracity of the statement that a mouse can run for 15km in a mouse wheel. I suggested that if a mouse were running round a wheel, it wasn't actually travelling any distance at all.
The guy in front of me at the checkout spent £7.10 on his shopping. This struck me as an odd amount, seeing as it was in Poundland. Eventually, like the man who stayed up all night wondering where the sun had gone, it dawned on me. He must have bought two carrier bags.
Another store had the obligatory notice about plastic bags: “DEFRA [Department of Elimination of Farming and Rural Affairs] rules mean that we must charge 5 pence for single-use plastic bags”. OK so far, but this was followed by the hashtag “#reusablebags”. Surely if you reuse your plastic bag it isn’t single use. If I take my 5 pence bags back on a subsequent visit, do I get a refund?
I suppose the charities aren’t getting as much as they hoped from the plastic bag levy, as so many people are avoiding them. You can spot the tight fists from a mile off, as they struggle to carry an array of shopping in their hands because they are too tight to spend 5 pence on a carrier bag. It never ceases to amaze me how people will spend several pounds on beer, cigarettes and junk food yet baulk at an extra five pence to make it easier to carry. People are odd in how they value items. “It is better to pay a lot for something that is useful, than little for something that is not” is the moral of a short story by Edward Lear about blind people and frying pans.
“Fire Engine by Mistake” is a book by Leila Berg. When the works manager wrote the codes on the vehicle chassis to show what vehicle they were to become, his poor handwriting meant that what was supposed to be a dustcart was interpreted as a fire engine. Consequently the vehicle didn’t have the courage of a fire engine, and at the first major fire it took fright and drove off. It ended up in a field where it was discovered by a tramp who had been a firefighter in his working days, and who used it as a home. One day they heard a call over the radio for an extra fire engine, and found the courage to race back and help and were heroes. And all lived happily ever after.

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