View From The Window

I am sitting awaiting a lift to the FIASCO wargame show in Leeds, as well as the clocks going back my early bird impression is also due to a throaty cough which has robbed me of most of my sleep the past two nights, why do these thing always get worse at night. Strange view this morning, it is damp with grey clouds but there is sun there, that watery sun I told you about, and it is showing the last of the green in a nice colour, as if the fields and plants have just been jet washed.

I am home alone again for a week and despite having given the impression this is exactly what I was looking for, rattling about the house on your own is, well, lonely. No dinner ready when the PO is closed, no coffee and a chocolate at 10, no one to listen to me vent my spleen at the News. But then again, no one to tell me how to prepare my soup, to remember and put the right bin out, discuss kitchen designs or write a list out for our visit south for Christmas; socks, toothbrush, seven dresses for three days, fourteen pairs of shoes, warm coat, cold coat etc. So on balance I will survive.

My lift is nearly here, scratch the above, it is now grey mist and pouring with rain, stay indoors weather really, brrrrr.

I'm back. You probably don't have a shop, but I do and it is not like the old days, when we went into a shop we did not touch anything, we stayed within command distance of my mother or father and dared not move. That dear readers has changed, what we have now is the mother either harassed or unconcerned that she has kids in tow standing at the counter saying "Don't touch Jayson" while looking at me and oblivious of what Jayson is actually doing. Normally that is picking up the greetings cards and putting them back in the wrong place or putting them in a neat pile on the floor with me glowering at him. Or maybe it is Chardonnay-Shiraz seeing how fast she can spin the card holders all the while ignoring the pleas from the parent at the counter not to do it, who again rolls her eyes at me in a "what can you do" kind of look. Well you can smack her for a start my look says back. Occasionally, like Popeye "I canst takes no more" and I shout at Jayson or Chardonnay-Shiraz only to face a look which could kill, how dare you shout at my angels! Well I do dare if you cannot discipline them yourself and I remain content that once they leave the shop that's it, but mummy or daddy have to live with them.

Chardonnay-Shiraz unhappy at something or someone.

Who exactly is the word unwaged supposed to help, at the show today you were either waged or unwaged as I suppose '£2 concession for the unemployed' is judgemental though true, but isn't unwaged just as bad, because we all know whoever asks for it does not have a job.

I chose a documentary on BBC iPlayer entitled 'The Forgotten Army' which was introduced by Griff Rees Jones, so naturally I thought this was about the 14th Army in Burma and Malaya, that turned out to be untrue, it was nonetheless a fascinating story of two West African divisions fighting for the British. What it failed to mention or brushed over was the other people in the title, the Indians, native allies and British who were also there. Again it rather pointed the finger at us as having done something wrong, the Africans were not treated well but nor were the rest of the 14th Army as the war ended no matter what their nationality. You cannot impose 21st Century mores on the past and his comment that he was afraid he and his generation had a fixation about WWII was rubbish, of course we had a fixation with it, five years of bloody warfare and a struggle to overcome two fearsome enemies. I still have a fixation for it and I am not afraid to say so.