My Clever Socks

This is a somewhat detailed account of my first experience with a new pair of really high-tech socks. It is also something of an intelligence test, so I hope you will concentrate.

I should explain that this particular pair of socks has the embroidered motif ”Left” on the left sock, and there is a matching motif ”Right” on the right sock. The illustration above is only a basic model - my new socks are much more high-tech, as you will gather from the description below....

The ”Left” and ”Right” motifs are embroidered just above the sock toes, and each motif appears twice on each sock. Now you may wonder why each motif appears twice on each sock, but the explanation is really quite simple. You see, some people will look down at their feet to check that each sock is on the correct foot, and other people (like me) are in the habit of checking by looking in the mirror.

For this reason, each motif appears once on the upper foot facing the wearer, who can easily read it when looking downwards, and it appears again closer to the toes facing forward, away from the wearer. This makes the forward-facing motif easy to read in the mirror.

I think the chap who invented my socks must have been a keen driver, because the forward-facing motif ”Right” or ”Left” on a sock is written in exactly the same back-to-front and inverted way as the words “Police” or “Ambulance” on the front of emergency service vehicles. When you look at these words through a mirror, they appear the correct way around. Now that’s very clever, you may say.

But the really, really clever thing about these socks is that the motifs are embroidered with a bright yellow thread that is luminous. This is extremely useful for someone like me who tends to get up in the morning just before daybreak. Rather than switching on the light and disturbing my partner, I’d resolved to keep my luminous socks on my bedside table, where they would be clearly visible and easy to put on when I woke up. And I reasoned that I could use the luminous light that would be emitted from my socks to help guide me when I got up from the bed and started moving around in search of my underwear.

Well, you can imagine my consternation this morning. I was standing there in my socks in the dark, viewing the reflection of the luminous writing in my cheval mirror. And horror upon horror, I could see in my reflection that my socks were on the wrong feet!

But I hadn’t gone to all the trouble of buying these socks, only to find myself wearing them the wrong way round, had I? So I immediately sat back down on the bed, pulled the socks off, and put each sock back on a different foot.

Then I stood up to check my feet again in the mirror.

I was pleased to see that the socks were now on the correct feet. But the luminous writing had dimmed, and had a strange fuzzy appearance. Even worse, the inverted writing at the toe of each sock, which should have appeared in correct English in the mirror reflection, had magically been transformed back into an inverted format. And I was shocked to see that the writing was upside-down.

It must have taken five minutes or so of feverish intellectual turmoil, with me standing in the dark and staring at my mirror, before it dawned on me that I had pulled my socks off from the neck down. This had effectively turned the socks inside out before I’d swopped the socks around and put them back on again. So I had inadvertently inverted the inverted writing, and turned it upside-down. The writing on the socks had lost some of its luminous clarity because I’d exposed the reverse side of the embroidery.

So I sat back down on the bed, took each sock off in exactly the same way as before (thereby turning it inside-out) before replacing it on the same foot.

Then I stood up to check my feet again in the mirror. Yippee! I’d solved the problem!

That’s when a bedside light was turned on behind me. I turned and saw my girlfriend’s face grinning at me.

“Why have you got your socks on the wrong way around?” she asked.

I turned back to look in the mirror. “But I haven’t!” I exclaimed.

But I had. Can you figure out why?

:-)

A Sight for Sore Eyes... (Alter Ego)

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Have you ever been a witness?

Photofit is a technique used by the police for building up an accurate image of someone to fit a witness' description.

Photographs, rather than drawings, of individual features are used to construct an image of a suspect.

Below, you can see just a few of the Photofits issued by police in the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper.




Personally, I can't believe my eyes at these disreputable discrepencies. So much for eye-witness accounts, I say!

Meanwhile, here in Tenerife, the police have issued yet another Photofit mugshot.

This man is, by all accounts, seriously deranged.

Do you trust your eyesight?

:-)




:-)

Deliverance...

The Ancient Greek geographers described the islands west of the Straits of Gibraltar as the “Islands of the Fortunate” (" μακάρων νῆσοι “). They were referring to the Azores, Canary Islands, Cape Verde Islands, Madeira Islands, and the Savage Islands.

Well, after many visits to the Canary Islands which began in 1979 and which increased in frequency over the years, I became one of “the Fortunate” – and started living here in Tenerife, which is the largest island in the Canaries.



Four or five years ago, there was a wave of illegal immigration by the Less Fortunate from West Africa into the Canaries. They arrived in open boats, known as "Cayucos", which looked like large canoes, and which were typically powered by a couple of 40HP outboard motors, carrying up to 150 people at a time. They came from countries like Morocco, and from countries even further away like Senegal and the Gambia in the south. There were smaller open boats too, the "Pateras", which could carry up to 30 people.

I saw many of these fragile craft arriving, usually being towed into harbour by a Guardia Civil patrol boat after having been intercepted on the high seas. The condition of the would-be immigrants was, more often than not, utterly lamentable. Some had spent two weeks at sea, and were suffering from exposure and dehydration. Many had died en route.

Then they stopped coming. The Spanish government, helped by the European Union, stepped up its maritime patrols and negotiated deals with West African governments to prevent the would-be immigrants from leaving the continent.

Life here in Tenerife returned to normal - until one day two weeks ago. That’s when I took an early morning walk, far along the sea shore, beyond the man-made tourist beaches.

I’d left my car at the end of a dirt track, and started my walk by clambering over the breakwater that separates the last beach from the big Atlantic Rollers that attract so many surfers here. I’d been along this stretch – the rough surfer stretch - before, but this time I wanted to reach the headland point, and see what was on the other side.

It was slow going, picking my way step by step along the narrowing seafront, with the towering cliff on my left, and the sea swelling closer and closer on my right. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t particularly dangerous, just slow and careful steps. You wouldn’t want to slip on wet volcanic rocks and fall and possibly cut yourself.

As I said, it was slow and careful going. But I got to the headland point and worked my way around into a small cove. And the first thing I saw was a Patera, on its side, its bow smashed and wedged up on rocks that would have been below the water line at high tide. Apart from a couple of jerry cans, the Patera was empty.

Then I saw them, two forlorn figures, sitting on a patch of sand at the far side of the cove. I yelled and waved to attract their attention as I made my way over to them, but they just sat there, side by side, eyes downcast, staring at the ground before them. As I drew closer, I could see they were two young girls, without a single possession between them, lost in a world of their own.

I pulled out my mobile phone, but decided against calling for help. Instead I used it to take a photo of the scene, whilst deciding - for the first time in my life, to take pity and do the right thing on my own. I took them back, to my place, where I’ve been caring for them ever since.

I’ve included the photo in the space below.











Photo below...











:-)

Old Angers (1)

:-(

Sorry, in my dreams last night I recalled one of my many angers.

My history teacher at Grammar School was an Intelligence Agent in WWII. He was a hero. He’d even married a Scandinavian Princess.

His trick, with eleven to fifteen-year olds, was to grip the hair of one of the seated boys before him. He gripped the hair just above the ear, and twisted. The idea was to force a boy's forehead down until it hit his desktop. The pain of having your hair twisted and pulled like that is excruciating.

Passive resistance hurts like hell. My head never moved, and, surprise, surprise, by the time I was an older teenager, over 6 foot tall, with lots of bone and muscle, he was as nice as pie to me. I can laugh about it now, and say that's the explanation for my slightly receding hairline.

But now it's nearly 50 years later. Why do I sometimes dream about it and wake up angry?

How strange, the way the subconscious works.

Double Dippy Doldrums

Can anybody here tell dippy old me if the second dip in a double-dip recession is likely to be better or worse than the first dip?

I met up with my old mates Frank, Max, Joe and Charlie yesterday. Like me, they’d flown back to the UK from their winter homes abroad to catch up with family and friends. Of course, a major topic of conversation was the financial crisis. And each of us had a horror story to tell about the way in which the recession had affected our lives.

Frank told us he’d had a terrible time so far. He’d piled into the Stock Market when the FTSE plunged below 4000, and then sold out after it soared well above 5000. Gosh how I feel for him, because the poor chap doesn’t own a single share in anything now.

And Max had a hard time too, when the government gave him and his girlfriend £2000 each to swop their old bangers for brand new cars that cost far less to run. How sad; the poor souls really loved their old cars.

Joe told us how he’d been forced to stock up on lots of goodies when the VAT rate was reduced to 15%. Then Joe broke the sad news about his son, who had bought his first home after the threshold for stamp duty was raised, and after the purchase price fell to a level where the tax was not payable.

And let’s not forget Charlie, whose fixed rate mortgage of 5.09% on his London second home expired and reverted to a standard variable rate of 2.5%. Shocking, isn’t it?

I’m down in the dumps too. Last December I exchanged 10,000 Euros for Pounds Sterling, after which I waited until June when I exchanged the Pounds back into Euros. And would you believe it, in that period of time the Euro per Pound rate changed from 1.09 to 1.21.

Alas, there’s nothing I can do about it, so tomorrow I’m leaving the UK and heading back to the Canary Islands – with my 11,100 Euros of spending money.

I wonder if the second dip of this double-dippy recession will be just as dippy as the first dip for dippy old folk like me and my mates…

:-)

My Big Bang

For some people, the Big Bang is a theory about the beginning of the universe. For other people, it's all about 27th October 1986, when the London Stock Exchange changed its rules and embraced the electronic age. But for me, my Big Bang was a quite different event; one that changed my life forever.

I’d just finished my first year at University, and what a hard year that had been. My step-father had committed suicide because of mounting gambling debts, leaving my Mum as our main breadwinner. Her stepmother had become unwell and had come to live with us. And I’d been working evenings and weekends as a factory delivery driver to help put food on our table.

So I was astonished when Freddie, an extremely wealthy fellow student, asked me if I’d be his co-driver on a journey to Madrid. The deal was that we’d share the driving in his car, he’d pay all expenses, after which we’d part company. He was planning to spend the summer with his fiancée, who lived in Madrid. I’d be left to make my own way home.

Well, the prospect of a free ride to Madrid was irresistible, especially as Freddie wanted us to start the journey when the factory that I worked for was closing down for a fortnight. I reckoned I could hitchhike my way back home easily enough. So I accepted.

The drive was fun. And so was Freddie. Yes, he’d been born with a dozen silver spoons in his mouth; he was rich, intelligent, good-looking, debonair, multilingual, and a brilliant raconteur. He certainly kept me amused on that drive. I guess it was all the laughter that made us miss a turning somewhere outside of Pamplona, and we got hopelessly lost in miles of winding tracks, with not a building in sight.

It was quite late in the evening when we spotted a grand-looking Hacienda high up on a hill. Freddie was driving at the time, and made a beeline for it. I stayed in the car whilst Freddie knocked at the door to ask for directions. After ten minutes or so of conversation with a lady who opened the door, he returned to the car with the good news that we were invited to stay the night.

Freddie explained that the lady had recently been widowed, and could not allow us to stay in the main house. But she had given him a set of keys for a nearby caballeriza – an empty stable block with extremely comfortable overhead staff sleeping quarters, and a hot and cold water supply. That’s where we stayed the night, before continuing our journey to Madrid the following morning.

It must have been around nine months later when I received the letter. It was written in Spanish, from an Attorney in Navarra. I got the general gist of the letter with the help of a Spanish-English dictionary, but just to make sure, I had it professionally translated. It took me a couple of days of quiet reflection to work out what had happened.

I met Freddie at College shortly afterwards, and asked him if he remembered the young widow at the Hacienda. And I asked him if he’d popped back to the Hacienda during the night to thank her for her hospitality. He grinned, and confessed he had.

But what really amazed him was when I asked if he had given her my name and address, instead of his. He turned bright red with embarrassment, and said “How on earth do you know that?”

All I could do was smile.

You see, the letter had informed me that a certain widow in Spain, the Condesa Maria Echeverria Corriente Delgado, had died. And she had left me her considerable fortune in her will.
:-)

Midsummer's Night Madness

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I’ve just rediscovered an old script for Midsummer’s Night Dream in my bookcase. Yes, I’ve done a bit of acting in my time, but what a disaster that production was.

I played the part of Lysander, and I remember being onstage with Demetrius, Hermia and Helena when I completely screwed things up by repeating a line that I had previously delivered in the earlier part of our conversation.

The conversational sequence was Lys: Dem: Herm: Helena: - at which point I repeated my earlier line Lys.

The funny thing was that none of us noticed my mistake. The other three actors had all learned their lines by rote, and so Demetrius responded to my cue by repeating his earlier line, and then Hermia responded on that cue, as did Helena, after which I repeated my mistake. We were trapped in a closed conversational loop, in which everybody repeated their earlier lines.

It took us about five minutes of repeating ourselves before it gradually dawned on us that our conversation was going nowhere. I still shudder now when I remember the growing sense of bewilderment, confusion, and sheer panic that beset us. We were caught in a conversational time-warp, and none of us could figure out who was to blame (me) or how to break out of our predicament.

I think it took another 5 minutes of us repeating ourselves, and our audience dissolving into laughter, before our director had the good sense to temporarily lower the curtain.

At which point the audience started to cheer – and demand an encore….

:-)

Sperm

Nowadays my mind wanders ever more capriciously. Yesterday it happened again, whilst looking up the definition of a Spenserian Stanza in the Concise Oxford Dictionary.

It was while pondering this definition that my eye fell upon the run of subsequent entries in my beloved dictionary. The entry for Spenserian is followed by an entry for Spent, and then, by happy happenchance, with another entry for Sperm.















So it followed that at one moment I was thinking about Spenser’s stanza in the Faerie Queene, with eight iambic pentameters and an alexandrine, and in the very next moment my mind was absorbed in Sperm.

Did you know that the word Sperm is either singular or plural? Or that sperm contains spermatozoa, which is the plural of spermatozoon? And that a spermatozoon begins its life as a spermatogonium, after which it develops into a spermatocyte before becoming the mature motile sex cell that looks and moves like a tadpole?

Gadzooks, I thought! All this extraneous information! My mind was swimming. I imagined myself as a spermatozoon, swimming like a tadpole. Suddenly, I rediscovered my erstwhile interest in genealogy, and I realised I had missed a trick. We are all descended from tadpoles, aren’t we?

But not any old ordinary tadpoles, mind you, but winning tadpoles, by which I mean those precious few; those who create the world’s population; those who succeed where countless zillions of others fail.

We should therefore be far more proud of our immediate ancestor – that special tadpole - than all the ancestors that we normally think of. And I think that the humble yet winning spermatozoon (?) should really be given a name of its own, and be known as the spermato-ZOOM.

Credit where credit is due, that is what I say.

Three cheers for the spermato-ZOOM!
Yippee!
Yippee!!
Yippee!!!
:-)

PS
Yesterday, my girlfriend’s youngest daughter announced her first pregnancy. We were the first to know, and I am due to become an honorary granddad again. And in seven months time, I hope to rediscover the extraordinary delight of cradling a new-born baby in my arms again. We'll have to travel back 2,000 miles from our winter retreat to do that, but I’ll probably be browsing my dictionary en route...

PPS
Here’s the opening verse from the Faerie Queene:

LO I the man, whose Muse whilome did maske,
As time her taught, in lowly Shepheards weeds,
Am now enforst a far vnfitter taske,
For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds,
And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds;
Whose prayses hauing slept in silence long,
Me, all too meane, the sacred Muse areeds
To blazon broad emongst her learned throng:
Fierce warres and faithfull loues shall moralize my song.

Argint Cell fur Hilp!

Hilp!!! :-(

Es yua cen sii, O’m hevong truabli typong un my cumpatir. O thonk O mey hevi pat sumi uf my elphebitoc kiys beck oncurrictly eftir O tuuk thim uat tu govi thim e clien. My kiys eri rielly shony, bat ivirythong O typi os luukong solly.

Pliesi hilp – end bi sarprosid - loki O em.

Thenks! :-)

I

I know I use the word I a lot when I write. I think I do it because I is such a simple character, and so am I. As a child I found I could write the character I well before I could write any of the others in the alphabet. And I found I could write the sloping I easier than the upright I.

Gosh, I used the word four times in each of the four sentences above, and I think I avoided using inverted commas by using I and I, so this sentence has five.

I think I like I and I even better than I like I, which is six.

Do you have a favourite word or character ?

The Crack of Dawn

All this adventuring I do is very tiring, especially when it gets me out of bed at ungodly hours. You see, I’m an inveterate sleepwalker, and lots of my adventures happen at night.

The other night I happened to wake up with my head sticking out of the bedroom window. I haven’t the faintest idea why my head was sticking out of the window, because my short-term memory switches off as soon as I awake. But I was greeted by a wondrous sight.

It was daybreak, and my head was turned facing the rising sun. As it rose, the sun passed behind the peak of a small mountain and then came into view again on the other side. I’d never noticed this “double dawn” phenomenon before, but then I’d never had my head trapped under a fallen sash window before.

Anyway, as soon as I managed to extricate myself, it occurred to me that I’d never actually witnessed the absolute crack of dawn. I realised that my bedroom window might be the ideal vantage point, provided I was awake a little earlier the next morning with my head turned in exactly the same position as before.

Well, I spent an exciting day making preparations for the crack of dawn. There were lots of logistics to sort out, including thinking up a plan that would ensure my presence at the window at exactly the right time in the morning. The key issue was to ensure I would not be somewhere else - sleepwalking.

I came up with an ingenious idea. I wound up my alarm clock, set it to the right time, and strapped it to my wrist. Then I got a pencil and paper and listed all the places where I had previously woken up after a bout of sleepwalking. I got a local map, and carefully drew a circle around each of these places. This enabled me to identify the location that was furthest from my home, which happened to be the police station. Remarkably, and for reasons that are beyond me, I seem to wake up there quite frequently.

So off I went, to the police station, where I took a careful note of the time on my alarm clock, and then walked back home. On my return to my bedroom, I again noted the time on my alarm clock. I then set the alarm to ring at sunrise minus the elapsed time taken by my walk.

I reasoned that this would ensure my arrival back at my window in good time for the crack of dawn the following morning. I had even taken the precaution of wearing dark sunglasses on my trial walk back from the police station, to simulate the real night-time conditions that I was likely to encounter.

Well, to cut a long story short, the plan, which had left nothing to chance, worked brilliantly well. I can proudly say I was there. I actually witnessed the crack of dawn. And there were two cracks, not one.

I had propped up the sash window to prevent any further accident, and was knelt down in position at the very moment when the sun appeared. And as it appeared, I rose up in excitement, and heard the two cracks of dawn.

And would you believe it? One crack came from my left knee, and the other from my right. But my girlfriend, who always begs to differ, insists it was my head cracking against the bottom of the open sash window that woke her up.

Ho-hum. It is difficult for me to reason with her, because she says I was comatose at that precise instant in time.
:-)

Farewell, dear Blogs.

It’s not much fun switching on your laptop, following your bookmark to your blog, and seeing that all your posts have vanished. A whole bunch of emotions well up inside you – disbelief, denial, desperation to do something, anything.

You come out of your page, retrieve the bookmark, and click again. Same result. You power down, restart, and repeat, with the same result. Then you follow your links, to the blogs of people you like on the same website, to see if they are OK. And shamefully, you half hope they aren’t, that they are also afflicted by a universal problem, which would be a problem shared. You find they are OK.

Except for one thing – you can’t see any images, like avatars, photos, U-Tube clips, that you know are part of these other blogs. You read a comment about your missing posts, and then another comment about missing images. So there is something wrong with the website! It’s not just you!

Aha! You add your own comments, trying to be happy, hoping that things will be sorted out. And to an extent they are, because later, all the missing images reappear. A temporary glitch!

But your own posts don’t reappear. They stay vanished.

I’m going to skip giving details of my torrid journey through Help facilities. I guess you have experience of these, and maybe you have views that are similar to mine. Somehow, the glorious precision of the English language is lost, and is occasionally replaced by black comedy. “Help! My kitten had crawled over my keyboard and deleted stuff – how can I get it all back?”

Over the next couple of days, it gradually dawned on me that nobody else, kitten-less like me, was screaming about their missing posts. I was alone.

Then, at least I think so, the penny dropped. I remembered using a newly installed internet "café" in the reception area of my apartment block. Just for fun, I’d popped a couple of euro into one of the slots and tried it out. I’d accessed my blog, and hadn’t bothered to sign out, expecting everything on my session to close down when the money ran out.

I’m thinking my session stayed alive after I left, and someone came along and deleted my stuff. Just like the kitten, except I wasn’t around to witness it.

It’s my best guess. And whether I’m right or wrong, I’m a complete nincompoop. :-(