Of Boys, Toys, JWs, Anoraks, and St. Augustine (or, The Coffee Maker, Part 2)

Sun, 18 May 2008 13:12:00 +0000

I always knew a few people who loved trains. I even knew one or two people who built model rail-ways at home, usually in some deserted far off loft or study.

I’ve suddenly discovered, much to my surprise, that this is not one or two isolated individuals, but in fact apparently a large percentage of the male population of this part of the UK.

I never expected to learn that.

They call themselves Anoraks, and about a third of the people I’m working with belong to this group.

OK, So trains can look quite cool, and I am working with the media and computers team of the company, so it’s no surprise, I suppose, that you find a higher pecentage of people here with high IQ / arcane / obscure hobbies…

But it’s not just little nerdy geeks with glasses wandering around with notebooks and flasks of tea getting all excited about 7.25" gauge K1 engines and 1937 liveries, it’s a lot of guys, of every background, upbringing, shape, size, character and personality.

We had finished setting up for one of those J.John conferences, and were hanging out round the back waiting for it to be time to start, when this anglican vicar looking bloke wandered up, and they all ended up chatting about trains.

And all the rest of the guys too: those few who don’t have a thing about machines that roll around the place on parallel tracks get excited by all kinds of other things.

There’s a bloke here who gets very excited about trucks, vans, busses, and other large automobiles.

When I say “excited”, I mean in the kind of “eyes light up, bounces up and down and starts talking animatedly and waving his arms around” kind of way.

And he’s not a tiny geek. He’s an (roughly) 8 foot tall construction yard manager from London.

I watched two guys across the room at a pizza evening last week. They were discussing the intricacies of the AT command set, and the fun to be had trying to fix router systems by logging in backwards through a modem to solve networking problems.

Let’s turnout to a diverging track for a few moments, and I’ll see if I can work us back to this rail at the next set of points.

I went out yesterday an bought a whole load of books at charity shops. I finally got a copy of St. Augustine’s confessions.

“Even now I cannot fully understand why the Greek language, which I learned as a child, was so distasteful to me… "

I found this sentence funny, in itself, but lets keep reading for a while, and a few pages later get to this:

“For I understood not a single word and I was constantly subjected to violent threats and cruel punishments to make me learn.

“As a baby, of course, I knew no Latin either, but I learned it without fear and fret, simply by keeping my ears open while my nurses fondled me and everyone laughed and played happily with me.

Of Coffee Makers and Consciences (part 1?)

Sun, 11 May 2008 19:50:00 +0000

One of the things I love about the “Peanuts” cartoons are the tiny little things that I love. If that makes sense. For instance, this one thing I love about the Peanuts cartoon, is Snoopy’s book that he writes occasionally “Has it ever occurred to you that you might be wrong?” as part of the whole debate thing with Lucy. I love those books.

Anyway.

Has it ever occurred to you that you might be mad?

It’s been of late the rather disagreeable experience of mine to have occurring to me with disturbingly increasing regularity the possibility that I myself might be in a somewhat insanitous state.

I challenge anyone to diagram that sentence, and send me the picture…

Insanitous sounds rather unhygienic, but it’s not. I just mean “mad”, in a slightly more complex way of speaking.

To take simpler mode of address, I’ll quote Freddie Mercury:

“It’s finally happened, I’m slightly mad.”

Anyway, the current evidence I have towards this conclusion is The Strange Affair Of The Coffee Maker In The Daytime.

I feel remarkably Adrian Plassish as I type this, in a “this is dead serious to me, but I get the feeling people will laugh at me about it, because it’s so stupid…” sort of way. Like his paper-clip story.

Settle back, gentle reader, and prepare thyself for an epic journey into the mind of one convinced that he is no longer all quite there.

It all began like this…

This house is great. I’m really enjoying living here. right now, I’m sprawled across one of the *three* sofas in the living room, with my laptop, and a pot of Earl Grey tea.

Seriously, how can life get more chilled out than this?

What could there possibly be to complain about?

Well, there’s no internet at home. Is this a bad thing? Well, kind of. But also, it does stop me spending inordinate amounts of time online, which I did over the whole furlough, to my shame. 3 months to rest and do anything, and most of the time I spent online. Silly. So, it’s probably a good thing that I’m not online here, and can just write emails that I need to write, and then send them from the Shed. And spend the rest of my time at home cooking, reading, playing clarinet, and exercising. Oh, and sleeping, of course.

Secondly. And far more seriously. There is no coffee maker here.

I say it again, for emphasis.

There. Is. NO. Coffee. Maker. Here!!!

Shocking! But true!

There is a kettle, and a teapot, and plenty of instant coffee, of the “Fair Trade” and the “Nescafe” varieties - both of which are vile - but a brewed mug of the real stuff? Not a chance.

So, how can I solve this crisis, I wondered, then had the brainwave: I can buy a coffee maker.

In the UK they have this really weird store called Argos, where everything is in this funny HUGE catalogue that you can get, and then you write down the item order numbers, or SKU or something, give it to the clerk, and it gets brought in to you via conveyor belt, or so. No browsing around the store, just the catalogue.

Standalone on Madprof's workshop

Of Boys, Toys, JWs, Anoraks, and St. Augustine (or, The Coffee Maker, Part 2)

Of Coffee Makers and Consciences (part 1?)