Well, I've driven quite a few miles recently. Mostly using the sat-nav. And then, suddenly, it stopped working. I was in a pub car park, in Kings Lynn, about to head the 276 miles back to home.
I'd selected "My Address" and just wanted to zoom out to check the route it would take me.
Nada. Nichts. Nothing.
I twisted the COMAND wheel and the zoom didn't work. Reboot the system. Still nothing.
A failure, probably in the hardware of the satnav.
I had to scroll the route manually and diagonally on its 0.5 miles zoom view to check that the car was providing a sensible route.
Back at base, I checked Dr Google. It showed the control wheel and the small plastic shaft that can break inside the unit. It costs £10 to machine a metal replacement. I considered a home repair, but decided that this would be one bridge too far. To dismantle the car's console, then to dismantle the spring-filled Controller unit. Then to replace the connections that interfaced to the telematics of the car, and the digital signals that operated most of the car's components.
There are too many things that can go wrong with this ostensibly simple repair.
The COMAND wheel was the heart of the control system.
Instead, take the car to the dealer. Practice not inhaling too sharply when I'm told how much the repair will cost. Think instead of the tens of thousands of miles I've driven under the control of COMAND.
Complications. Thats what the Apple watch calls it.
Take today.
Suited-and-booted, I was travelling back from Bournemouth when the phone rang about an appointment that I need to change on Friday. Another suit day.
To my watch...Siri "Remind me about Friday."
"What do you want to be reminded about?"
"Things that need to change"
"Ok, added."
Then, homeward bound, another change of direction.
Literally doorstepped, "Could I take the canapés to the Museum?"
Who was I to argue? A speedy pickup and then off to the town. I could almost hear the Goodfellas helicopter.
I reversed into the single track lane by the side door of the museum and we unloaded the canapés from the car. Several bags and plates of home made items.
I don't usually venture as far as this in my car. Bicycle maybe. It's single track back to the Quayside and some of the drivers that use this route regularly will take no prisoners.
That old dodge where they'll pull up alongside and then see who can best extricate themselves without scraping anything.
It's always when I've clocked 100 or more miles and then meet local three mile drivers out in force that I'm extra wary.
MSM/PSL Hazards and all that. Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre/Position, Speed, Look
I haven't participated in NaNoWriMo for several years, although my heritage goes right back to 2007 and I've part written seven(!) novels in that time.
National Novel Writing Month began in 1999 as a straightforward challenge: to write 50,000 words of a novel during the thirty days of November.
Now, each year on November 1, hundreds of thousands of people around the world begin to write, determined to end the month with 50,000 words of a brand-new novel. That works out to 1,666 words per day if one is on track!
I feel it's about time to try again, although I will shake free from the characters I wrote about in The Triangle. That was written on Apple Pages and was a good experiment.
This time I'll use Scrivener and perhaps Dragon Dictate to help speed me through the word count.
"With a single leap he was free," goes the adventurers' storyline. Certainly there were no ditches to be seen on the television, and the conjurors had already moved on to a new trick.
As if proof were needed, I was able to crash test into a ditch quite successfully a few days ago.
We'd been using some rental bikes and were skittering along The Camel Way, which is a great little trail in Cornwall. We had a wide variety of bicycles - I had a 'sit up and beg' red Raleigh and accomplices had everything from a bike with a tow-passenger to a blue chopper Tricycle. The trike was interesting, being only powered on the right hand wheel (as are all trikes), which made it want to steer to the left.
Now the trail is an ex railway line, so you'd expect it to be pretty flat and fairly straight.
It didn't stop me from falling off - a slippery pedal and I was down. The ditch was quite soft. My companions kept going.
An impressive array of traffic warnings yesterday. I suspected the worst, which would be that all of the alternative routes would also fill up.
Sure enough, I found myself following a sat-nav diversion which took me through Gloucester. I knew it was a bad idea and am not surprised that others took to trains to be regularly replenished with food and drink.
Instead I had that effect where I didn't know where I was and then as each hopeful roundabout approached my cheer was soon dashed by yet another rush hour traffic jam.
I suffered my 90 minute time penalty on what was supposed to be a six and a half hour journey. My final arrival time was around 20:30, some nine hours after I'd set off. A day of the tentacle traffic cone.
It is always trickier being on the road and blogging. Sometimes it is the nature of hotel and other connections, or perhaps the device being used to blog.
A couple of interesting situations emerged. One was that something in my travel kit is intercepting location services to tell a phone service to call me with those unhelpful traffic management insurance claims.
Another is the continued emergence of spambots blasting my comments trail, in an attempt to improve their rankings. It was noticeable when one of those comments came in, because it had not filtered the comment script and I could see the entirety of the fake comments neatly arrayed, along with their parameter-substitute words.
The software to create these form of comments is readily available for around $35, and in a single pass it will identify 500+ sites and then bombard them with automatically formatted comments. Watch out for self-proclaimed Search Engine Optimisation specialists. Snake oil salesmen.
Then, where the labour force is cheap, there's another way to do this. With click-farms, which connect dozens to hundreds of mobile phones together to 'like' a single post, or cultivate a presence.
The next election should be interesting when the combined forces of clickfarms and spambots support the various candidates.
We'd agreed to meet in Newcastle, by the Earl Grey Monument.
The clocks had changed, so it was already chilly and dark and we decided to head for a reliable Pina Colada spot - Browns- in Grey Street. Once we'd arrived, it was obvious that they'd closed Browns and put up an All Bar One instead.
It's an occupational hazard in Newcastle, with many of the chain restaurants closing and re-opening as a brand buddy of the original one. La Tasca closed on the Quayside and in its place was an Iguana, although there's already another Iguana about 10 minutes walk away. I suspect it is all spreadsheet driven, according to what appears popular?
We abandoned All Bar One, which didn't look anywhere near as buzzy as the old Browns and instead headed for a different new place- Banyans- (not really new, it replaced a Jamie Oliver back in March...see there is a theme)
It had a similar wide floor space format (to pack em in) and some pleasant tables around the edge. Mysteriously, the menu covered all options from Mexican, Italian, Thai, pies and burger.
I'd explained that I was hungry, so we hunkered down with 2 for 1 cocktails and some pleasant-enough pub food.
Then on to an aerial pub commanding the square.
Not the Botanist, which would have served us more exquisitely-priced cocktails.
Instead to the Charles Grey, which sits on the second floor opposite the Monument. I'm not sure whether shabby chic covers a description of the place. It reminds me of a set from something that Punch Drunk would imagine.
Friendly enough service even when the selected (Edinburgh) beer was around £5.40 a pint - which tops many London prices and is decidedly uncommon in Newcastle.
“It will be found .. that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.”
SPOILERS: Classic Disney magic, now over 25 years old.
We see Halloween Town as a fantasy world filled with monsters and supernatural beings associated with the time of year.
Jack Skellington, the "Pumpkin King” and prime minister of the town, leads the town in organizing the annual Halloween celebrations. However, privately Jack has grown weary of the same routine year after year and wants something new and diverting.
Wandering in the woods he stumbles across seven trees containing doors leading to towns representing various celebratory holidays, and opens the portal to Christmas Town.
Awed by the unfamiliar holiday, Jack returns to Halloween Town to show the residents his findings, but they fail to grasp the idea of Christmas and compare everything to their ideas of Halloween
They do relate to one Christmas Town character; a red lobster-like king who flies at night named "Sandy Claws".
Jack goes to his tower to study Christmas in order to find a way to rationally explain it, but cannot. He decides that it's unfair for Christmas Town alone to enjoy the holiday and announces that he and the citizens of Halloween Town will independently take over Christmas this year.
Jack assigns the citizens of Halloween Town Christmas-themed jobs, based upon the ones in the real Christmas, including singing carols, making presents, and building a sleigh to be pulled by skeletal reindeer. The tasks and outcomes may look similar, but they are not.
Sally, a beautiful rag doll that is secretly in love with Jack, experiences a vision that their efforts will end in disaster, but Jack dismisses this and assigns her the task of sewing him a red coat to wear.
He also tasks Lock, Shock and Barrel, a trio of mischievous trick-or-treating children, to abduct Santa Claus and bring him back to Halloween Town.
Jack tells Santa he will be bringing Christmas to the world in his place this year. Jack orders the naughty trio to keep Santa safe, but the children instead deliver Santa to Oogie Boogie, a gambling-addicted bogeyman, who plots to play a game with Santa's life at stake. Sally attempts to rescue Santa so he can stop Jack, but Oogie captures her as well.
Jack departs to deliver presents to the world, but the Halloween-styled gifts terrify and attack the populace. As concerns over "Santa's" behavior grows, the military takes action and shoots down Jack, causing him to crash in a cemetery.
While the residents of Halloween Town think he's been blown up, Jack has survived, and he bemoans the disaster he has made of Christmas, he finds he enjoyed the experience nonetheless, reigniting his love of Halloween.
Jack returns to Halloween Town and finds Oogie's lair. Oogie tries to kill Jack, but Jack pulls apart the thread holding his cloth form together, revealing a massive pile of bugs that fall into Oogie's cauldron and are killed. Jack apologizes to Santa for his actions, and Santa assures Jack that he can fix things and returns to Christmas Town.
As Santa replaces the Halloween-style presents with genuine ones, the townspeople of Halloween Town celebrate Jack's survival and return.
Santa then visits Halloween Town and brings them a Scissorhandian snowfall for the residents to play with, which in a way, fulfills Jack's original dream. In the graveyard, Jack and Sally declare their love for each other.
There's something disturbing about the kind of politician who writes two contradictory notes to the EU, whilst still clinging to the principle of "implementing the voice of the people".
We know he is a mischief maker. His attempts to undermine the EU from his times as a journalist confirm this.
That he misrepresents things. From the platform of the red NHS bus.
That he can't be trusted. Any number of private/personal events illustrate this.
That he'll use bluster and handwaving as a cover-up. The million to one chancer and his ditch hyperbole demonstrate this.
But he's got a good script-writing team. The dark strategist, a partner in PR and a club of Old Etonian hedge fund managers.
It makes it easier for middle-folk to follow and replay the sound bites. "Get it done", "Get on with it", "Over the line", "Take back control", the platitudes foam easily and fit placards well. Throw in a few serious looking softly spoken henchmen, and the blend is complete.
Of course, there are other placards too.
This opportunist wilfully ignored the chance for re-negotiation, preferring pretence whilst building a blame case. Then, as the water became rather hot, he substituted a few pages from Theresa May's deal around Ireland and borders, reverting to one of the prior attempts at a resolution.
He's also rebranded the paper. It is not Theresa's paper (4th Attempt). Now it has egotistically become Boris paper Mark I.
Many people ignore that the Withdrawal Agreement just gets Britain out of the EU, along with that payment of £39 billion. Call it a divorce settlement.
It's the Political Declaration that sets the non-binding aspirational aspects of life after Brexit. All of it will need to be negotiated. After it has been costed.
The EU don't regard it as commitment. Everything in it will be up-for-grabs in the months and years succeeding the so-called deal.
I started to watch Giri/Haji (duty/shame), which is a gangster series set in Tokyo and London. At the centre are Kenzo and Sarah (Takehiro Hira and Kelly Macdonald) who are two broken, lonely, people. There's unexpected crime and gangster moves almost from the start and a few drifts into Manga comic-telling.
The story moves from Tokyo to London, which gives a few "Crocodile Dundee" style fish out of water moments and some fun with the subtitles as the story-telling is in Japanese and variously accented English.
Throw some noir, grit and plenty of rain into the mix and then add a few epic story telling moments about saving face, honour and reputation and the series has the makings of an atmospheric few hours.
The same goes for the characters, which have been purpose designed to provide for the most colour and texture. Some might say it has the usual tropes, a cockney geezer running a London night club, a ruthless female fixer, the wayward daughter of the main Japanese cop, various suited Japanese henchman. The list goes on and just as the series reaches a climax in Episode 4 there's another whole heap of goodies tipped into the mix to sustain interest for the other half of the series.
A few scenes run long, when the characters are chatting about life and the universe, but there's enough quirkiness to keep things moving with a light knowing touch.
It's a tad experimental in places, with monochrome, spilt screen and contemporary dance blended into the mix. I didn't mind in the least, it made for a trippy dippy experience.
“This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle.
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, this other Eden, demi-paradise.
This fortress built by Nature for herself, against infection and the hand of war.
This happy breed of men, this little world.
This precious stone set in the silver sea, which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house, against the envy of less happier lands.
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”
Well, that is how Richard II saw it, according to Shakespeare.
Richard II didn’t have it all easy though, what with Baron Bolingbroke and the Duke of York always plotting. Bolly became King Henry IV after Richard's surrender. At Henry's command Richard was carted first to London for display and then to Pomfret Castle, where he was starved to death on Henry’s instructions.
Not that Richard II had a tidy life. He was involved in the Peasants' Revolt, and the murder of Wat Tyler. He later married the teenage Anne of Bohemia as a way to rally Germany against the French.
Then he tried to raise taxes for an army but the Wonderful Parliament said nay. A gyration of Britain to whip up support for an army, but his card was already marked by John O' Gaunt and the Lords Appellant. Roll on the Merciless Parliament where Richard’s previously supportive chamber Knights were condemned and executed.
Richard reestablished control with the volte-face 'moderation' of John O’ Gaunt(above). Consultancy 101: Never trust an advisor who enjoys standing in the shadows.
Richard could blame his erstwhile councillors for the choppy conditions. As a 29-year old he soon let loose, and after the plague took Anne, he decided that to maintain peace with France he would marry the then six-year-old Isabella, daughter of Charles VI of France.
We are just entering the tyranny phase of the King, who sought to eliminate his rivals from earlier years. John O’ Gaunt was using his direct influence to manipulate Richard and to set up the duketti, his private fawning courtiers.
Now Richard could summon his packed Parliament to Shrewsbury – known as the Parliament of Shrewsbury – and there to declare all the acts of the Merciless Parliament to be null and void, furthermore to announce that no restraint could legally be put on the king.
This had the effect of delegating all parliamentary power to a committee of twelve lords and six commoners chosen from the king's friends, making Richard an absolute ruler unbound by the necessity of gathering a Parliament again.
And all the time manipulators could whisper little commands in Richard’s ear.
I sense some parallels with the influencers and fawning courtiers of more recent times.
“Things sweet to taste prove in digestion sour.” ― William Shakespeare, Richard II (act-i, scene-iii)
