Month: January 2013

Are we “Rip Off Britain” ??

/ Tony / 1 Comment

     For sometime now, I have wanted a propelling pencil. I wanted one of the so called ‘old fashioned’ type, that you have to twist to move the lead out. I have a number of the more modern ‘clutch’ type, the ones that you click to move the lead. Whilst these have their uses, I often find that too much lead is ‘propelled’ with each click. This means that you only need to put the slightest over-pressure on the pencil and the lead will break. With the twist type, you twist out only as much lead as you need.

     I looked in the two main high street stores and a couple of specialist writing shops. The high street stores only had the clutch type, and the specialist shops had some, but they Pencilwere ridiculously overpriced. I then found one on Ebay at a very competitive price indeed. It was just what I wanted. I then realised that I would need some spare leads. Again a trip to the high street proved a waste of time. One did  not have any 0.7mm (not good Theo) and the other wanted £4.99 for a pack of 24. As this was more than the price of the pencil itself, I left empty handed. It was back to Ebay!!

     There were many sellers offering the type I wanted at various prices. I settled on one from Hong Kong who was selling the leads at £1.88 for a pack of 40 with free postage. As they the same make as I could buy in the high street, I bought them. Granted, it took about ten days to arrive, but at that price, it was too good to miss. They arrived this morning, by air-mail, well packed with a postage of $2.50HKD. A quick check with the currency calculator, showed that the postage converted to …………just over 20p !!!!

     Are we being ripped off ?????? Twenty pence postage from Hong Kong !!!! £1.88 against £4.99 !!!! I agree, there is always a risk with buying over the internet, but anyone with an unusable gift voucher for HMV, might think it’s a risk worth taking.

New theme applied

/ Tony / 2 Comments

     I have been toying with the idea of changing my blog theme for some time. But getting around to it, has been another story. Getting right and more important, readable takes a little bit of effort. This one is the fourth one I have tried today, and I think I will use this for the time being. It’s named “Twenty Ten” and I know it’s now Twenty Thirteen, but nobody has done that theme yet (well not that I can see) and until they do, Twenty Ten it is.

     What do you think?

Decisions decisions

/ Tony / Leave a comment

So what should I do ? Should I write up a blog post or should I just carry on with my story ? Well seeing as this post is is now on the blog, you can guess what I decided.

     My story, and I suppose it is a story, it at the stage, where I neither know where it is going next or how it’s going to get there. I have the bare bones of the idea, but when I make notes, it just does not seem to work. To be honest, I’m not that sure, that this is the story I want to write. This could be the problem. I think I need to have a more structured approach.

     I have finally subscribed to a magazine for writers. It’s called Writing Magazine. There appears to be a great deal of content, that will hopefully be useful to me. I’m also following a number of writers blogs (they know who they are) and the tips and resources are very welcome

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     The Christmas decorations came down yesterday. They are all packed away in the loft, ready for next year. We can now get back to what passes for normality in this house. I’m saying ‘all packed away’, there are bound to be a couple of items that have escaped our scrutiny and are sat somewhere, just waiting to be discovered sometime in February.

     Tomorrow, Mrs H is starting some kind of diet. I think it is going to be one of those diets, where the portions sizes are small and the alcohol is non-existent, well until the weekend anyway. We have done this kind of thing before, and we usually last a month, and when we see that there is no discernable effect, we give up. But we shall wait and see.

Welcome to another year

/ Tony / Leave a comment

     Well 2013 arrived, and the expected, and dreaded firework trauma did not happen. We had given R***  1mg of his PRN medication at around 23:15, as a precaution. But we had none of the usual ‘incidents’ that we have had over that past four or five years. To be honest, there was not as many fireworks going off around here, as we normally get. In fact, there were more on Christmas Day than last night. So the question is: why was he better last night than before? The “psych’s” will tell us that it was the drugs that settled him and they will try and use it to give credence to solutions. I rather think, that it was just the lack of the fireworks that did it. Whatever it was, it was 1000% better than previous years.

     I find it rather disturbing, that for a country that is in such a dire financial situation, we still have money to waste on the New Year Celebrations. The London fireworks lasted for 15 minutes. How much must that have cost ? There would be the actual cost of the fireworks (22,000 in total). Then the cost of the organisation and planning. Where did all this money come from ? And the scenes were repeated, albeit on a smaller scale, throughout the country. If we are a country with such a large deficit that we are cutting welfare payments to the most needy, do we really need to ‘burn’ so much money just because the number of the year changed ?