View from the Potting Shed

Professor Dick Henry at John Hopkins University in the US has proposed a new, revised calendar that would mean that every date falls on the same day of the week each year.

So, for example, my birthday (11 November) would always fall on a Friday, year after year after year, and Christmas Day (25 December, just in case you’d forgotten) would always fall on a Sunday. Now I’m beginning to warm to that idea!

As well as a revision to the calendar, Prof Henry also wants to standardize time to GMT. This would mean that if it was 1pm in London then it would also be 1pm in San Francisco, regardless of whether it was in the middle of the night or not. You can see his point: “Phone me at 10pm” would mean the same thing no matter if the call was from Edinburgh to Selkirk, or Edinburgh to Sydney.

You can check out his Common-Civil-Calendar-and-Time (C&T) calendar at http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/ccct.calendar.html.

His plan is to get universal, world-wide approval of his ideas by 1 January 2006. I feel a Y2K+6 Bug coming on.

Today, I rearranged my desk. That’s just how exciting today was!

Actually, I put up my old TV wall bracket. Twice.

We found the bracket in the garage in our house in Inverness, and since nobody had claimed it within six months — and it was too small to balance the car on in the garage — I kept it, screwed it to the wall and it safely held my 14″ TV above the filing cabinet in my study for a couple of years.

Needing a bit more surface space I decided to once again employ the particular skills of the AVF (that’s the make) TV bracket. I found it in the cupboard in the spare room. Held it against the wall, marked the holes, drill, bang in the rawlplugs, electric screwdriver, and job’s a good ‘un.

For about five minutes.

The whole thing… the WHOLE thing came off the wall, bounced off my filing cabinet and landed on my desk, rather like a weird, square, plastic Professor Yaffle stepping down from his lofty perch. Remarkably, the thing still works! Undeterred I banged-in larger, meaner-looking rawlplugs. The kind of rawlplugs that are probably banned in three star systems (and probably not even made my Rawl).

A couple of hours later and it’s still up there. Here’s hoping.

Jane’s radio-alarm woke me up around 3:45am this morning. Radio 1’s early-morning film-review show was on. Within a few seconds Jane reached over and blearily hit the snooze button. “I was listening to that!” I protested. Jane laughed and ignored me.

My radio-alarm kicked into life around fifteen minutes later. And Jane got up. (Maybe we should swap sides in bed!) Ninety minutes later — once Jane had packed her small rucksack, unpacked, packed everything into a suitcase, unpacked the suitcase, and finally re-packed everything into her small rucksack once again — I dropped Jane and her older sister, Pauline, off at Edinburgh airport, en route for a four-day break in Prague, Czech Republic (as opposed to the Prague just outside Birmingham!!?).

I was telling Mum on the phone last night that Jane and Pauline were heading off to Prague today (although on the phone I used the word “tomorrow”, as it was yesterday when I told her that).
“Why on earth is she going to Prague?” Mum asked.
“Why on earth are you going to Prague?” I asked Jane, who had just walked into the room.
“The markets,” she replied. And she was serious. Jane and her sister have flown halfway across … the, er… flown halfway across twice-the-distance-between-Prague-and-Edinburgh to go shopping. At a market. Like the ones you get at Kinross, not 30 miles from here. (Although, to be fair, that is technically a car-boot sale, and not as picturesque as Prague.)

Girls, eh! Shopping! Hasn’t she heard of the internet?! I can’t think of anything I’d want that I couldn’t get from Amazon. Honestly…!