Category - General

One of the most popular topics on this blog is my DIY kneeling chair. It has had thousands of hits.

I was amused that it got 8 hits the other day on the search term "knelling chair". That just had to be the same person – I can't see 8 different people searching for that. Well, not unless there is something called a "knelling chair"!

I've said before that the way Google finds things is impressive. This is another good example.

I have also noticed quite a few hits on other stories on search terms involving spurious punctuation marks and very strange spelling. You also get people visiting the site who can't possibly be looking for what they find, but they have used ambiguous search phrases or single words.

I doubt, for example, that the person who searched for "pine" (with quotation marks around it) was really looking for the story about the guy who allegedly inhaled a pine seed and it germinated in his lung!

Over the last few weeks I have lost count of the number of pupils who’ve got in my car with some sort of lurgy (or cancelled because of more serious lurgies). So far, I haven’t succumbed – but it’s only a matter of time.

In fact, I’ve been sneezing the last day or so, and I just feel like something is coming – you know how it goes this time of year. What’s more, over the weekend my tongue decided to cosy up with a couple of those mouth ulcers.

While I was in Asda, I decided to buy some Listerine. After all, anything that is antibacterial can’t do any harm, can it?

Now, I have never used Listerine before. I’ve used other mouthwashes, but I thought I’d get some of the stuff that makes out it is the Big Daddy of mouthwashes on all the TV ads. But it wasn’t that simple: standing in front of the Listerine (and other mouthwash) shelf is like being in an off-licence. You are spoilt for choice.

I used my innate male expertise on these matters. The green one? No – that must be spearmint, and I hate spearmint. The orange one? Well, that would be minty orange, wouldn’t it? That’s right out. The blue one? Yes, that must be peppermint – I’ll take that one.

My God, Listerine tastes bloody awful.

I’m going to use it to creosote the shed. Or it’s going down the sink without going via me. I haven’t decided yet.

I’ve been a bit quiet on the posting front of late. There is a reason…

A bit of background. I used to play a lot of squash – once a day, at least, but sometimes twice. Squash is quite a demanding sport, and I played it to a reasonably high level for teams in both the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire leagues. This stopped on 1 December, 2001.

I was playing a doubles match that Saturday, and I went for a dropshot. I felt something give in my leg – it was somewhat more uncomfortable than a normal sports-related sprain or tear, but not agony or anything. I had a job walking that night, but although it got a little better over about 6 weeks it was obvious it wasn’t going to get properly better. I went to see my GP and he immediately discovered it was a torn Achilles (almost – but not quite – a complete tear). I won’t go into all the details of the operation and subsequent infection, but from the moment I did it I went from doing all that exercise to doing absolutely no exercise at all. I wanted to start playing squash again, but having moved into this job there was no way I could risk doing it again and not being able to drive. So I just stayed lazy – and sedentary.

I also get occasional bouts of eczema and slight early-season hayfever (from tree pollen). To help alleviate some of the symptoms I had been taking Sudafed (pseudoephedrine hydrochloride) capsules.

Anyway, just over a week ago I had a mild headache. Paracetamol and Ibuprofen didn’t do much to help, and the headache persisted for 3 days. That’s not especially unusual, but for some reason I decided to measure my blood pressure for the first time in about 2 years. I nearly had a heart attack there and then: the machine displayed “EE” (error), but it worked perfectly when I tried it on other people. My blood pressure was basically off the scale!

The next day – Friday, which I’d booked off work, planning to get some other stuff done – I called my GP and went in to see the surgery nurse. She couldn’t get a reading either – eventually, one was recorded at 210/120 or something like that. For anyone who doesn’t know, that is bloody high. She called in one of the doctors, and I was immediately referred to the Acute Medical Unit at the hospital. I spent the whole day there having blood tests, ECGs, and x-rays.

My GP’s worry was that I might have malignant high blood pressure, or that damage might be caused to my vision. However, he was also pretty sure that it was the pseudoephedrine to blame (I’d looked it up the night before, which was why I told him I was taking it). He was even worried about letting me drive!

Fortunately, I didn’t need to be admitted to hospital and all the tests proved negative. I was given some tablets and the next day my blood pressure was back down again (albeit slightly elevated). It gave me a bloody great scare, though – so I am now on the Mother Of All Diets and getting back into exercise again (although I was told NOT to exercise until my blood pressure was down, which it is, so I’m all right).

So, the advice there is:

• keep fit
• keep your weight down
• don’t take pseudoephedrine as if it were M&Ms

Having got all that sorted, I was out on a lesson on Sunday afternoon when the car made a rumbling sound and refused to go anywhere. It was either the clutch or the gearbox, but either way I had to cancel the rest of Sunday’s lessons and arrange a replacement car. I eventually got it first thing Tuesday – but not before it had cost me in the region of £200 in lessons (admittedly, I moved two of them into a couple of free slots over the following few days, so it wasn’t as bad as all that).

So anyway, that’s why I haven’t added any new stuff for a few days.

I was recently approached by another website to allow my curry recipe to be used on their site. I was more than happy for that to happen – until I read the comments of one (and then several) of their members!

This website is about driving and driving instruction. I add a few of my own thoughts and opinions as the fancy takes me. I like curry and cooking, so that also features. It is a blog .

blog – definitions

• a regularly updated website wherein texts or articles of one or more authors are shown in a reverse-chronological order, meaning the first one is the latest one. Authors conserve the right to post works they consider pertinent.
• is a short form of “web log”. Log means a diary or journal, usually a notebook where you write regular reports of what you did or thought. Every ship has a “captain’s log” in which the captain records details of the ship’s voyage day by day.
• A “web log” or online diary. Blogs have been identified as an increasingly popular source of online publication, especially regarding political information, opinion publication and alternative news coverage.

The other website is a forum about curry (and takeaway recipes generally). Forums are often frequented by trolls:

troll – definition

Forum trolls are users that repeatedly and deliberately breach the netiquette of an established online community, posting inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages to bait or excite users into responding or to test the forum rules and policies, and with that the patience of the forum staff. Their provocative behavior may potentially start flame wars (see below) or other disturbances. Responding to a troll’s provocations is commonly known as ‘feeding the troll’ and is generally discouraged, as it can encourage their disruptive behavior.

This is specifically why I have comments on this blog turned off. On the rare occasions I have turned them on, I have immediately been spammed or trolled by the likes of those who posted the comments I refer to on this other website. I mean, why? Why turn a simple “can I use your curry recipe” into a pathetic – yet typical – forum war? The guy who started it is specifically the kind of person who gets frequent mentions on this blog. It really is a shame that forum owners and moderators don’t keep the mental cases under stricter control!

What I choose to post on this blog is my business (just like it would be if I kept a journal or diary). People can take it or leave it as they choose – and if that means behaving like prats and trolling other forums, that’s fine. But they can’t do it here, because I won’t let them.

The website which approached me already has people questioning the recipe. There’s too much garam masala, there’s not enough garam masala, too much this, too much that, etc. One deity opines “it looks familiar”! Why? God only knows. Just try the damned recipe, and either like it or don’t!

The recipe is there for people to try if they want to. They will either like it, or they won’t like it. The decision is theirs – not some berk who thinks he knows all there is to know about curry and can tell what it will taste like just by looking at it!

Mind you, although the number of hits I get on this site is quite large – driving instructors (not wannabe curry chefs) frequent it – this childish little episode has sent it a lot higher.

I dropped a pupil off this afternoon in the Broxtowe Estate. I was struck by the sudden proliferation of trainers hanging from telephone wires.

In the space of about 200m there are three pairs on phone wires from three adjacent telephone poles.

About a year ago someone at the council had to go around removing them – there were dozens hanging all over the place. It always happens in the places where you’d think people could ill-afford to lose expensive pairs of trainers like this.

Why do they do it?

An update: A reader informs me it is used by gangs to mark their territories!

In Broxtowe, they can’t be very bright – if you come from Nottingham you already know that, of course – because there is a pair hanging off three adjacent poles. And how on earth they can tell the difference between one pair and another is also beyond me. It’s even more stupid that the rolled-up trouser leg thing they also use.

I can’t see why they don’t just mark their territories like other animals do.

Google is quite intelligent – which is fortunate, because it helps certain people find the blog via search terms like “[www].dairyofanadi.co.uk”.

Well, either that – or the recession is making instructors branch out into other areas.

Other interesting – but still successful, thanks to Google – routes to the site recently include “fiet adi”, “free franchies for adis” (do McDonalds sell those, or do you need a pharmacist?), etc.

The ones that crack me up, though, are those where the search terms would actually be completely random strings of letters if it weren’t for a few well-placed vowels.

My Focus got a broken offside wing mirror this week (I haven’t a clue how it happened, but it looked like a stone might have hit it). I noticed it at 5.30pm Wednesday.

Ford Logo

I called up the Ford dealer and booked it in for 9.00am Thursday – it was important because I had a pupil going to test today (she failed, unfortunately), and had to get it fixed by then. The person on the phone said they couldn’t be sure if the part was in stock because the parts department had all gone home. I kept my fingers crossed.

I took it in at 9.00am Thursday and said “if they’re only replacing the mirror, should I wait around rather than go home?” The guy who took my keys said they didn’t have anyone to fix it there and then as they were all on other jobs, but that they’d have it done by the previously requested 12.00pm. I got a taxi home.

At 11.30am, I got a taxi back. I could see my car hadn’t been moved as we drove in, and looking at the mirror I could see they hadn’t replaced it.

The guy in reception said that they’d ordered the correct part, but what was inside the box was the wrong one. The part no. was correct, but the part wasn’t. I was not happy – I explained that I had already lost one lesson and two taxi fares (around £70). He told me the correct part would be in by 1.00pm. Fortunately, I had a free 90 minutes that afternoon, so I said: “I can bring it in at 4.00pm – can they fix it while I wait?” This time he was very definite that they would do so.

I got there at 4.00pm, and settled down expecting to read a few dozen magazines, and drink a gallon of machine coffee.

Ten minutes later, they brought my keys back. They’d done it. Ten bloody minutes, and it cost me 5 hours of my time.

For quite a few years I have been suffering from intermittent eczema (or something that fits right in with the description of eczema). One minute I’ll be all right, the next my skin feels like the surface of an orange and is itching like mad. If I scratch, it gets sore.

I usually get it on my forearms. It can also appear on my right upper arm (rarely my left), my stomach or groin, my hips, behind my knees, or on my shins. When it’s really bad I can feel it on my back. It doesn’t usually occur in all these places at once – it moves around!

When I first went to my doctor, he gave me some anti-allergy tablets but that was all (he didn’t diagnose eczema or anything else). After some time I stopped taking them because they didn’t seem to be working, and I just put up with the bouts of itching. But more recently I had been noticing that the smell of my clothes after washing seemed to correlate to the itching starting. In one particular case, I could associate the smell with a distinct feeling of being sunburnt.

Pure Soap Flakes

It occurred to me that it might be detergent-related – and after looking it up, irritation due to biological detergents did seem to be an issue.

To cut an already-long story short, I bought some soap flakes from an online store (they weren’t easy to find locally) and started using these instead of washing powder.

The intense itching cleared up almost overnight.

There was one hiccup, where I put on a shirt which had been washed with washing powder some weeks ago (all hell broke loose on my arms again), but after washing everything in the wardrobe… so far, so good.

There’s another bonus, too. They work out at around £2.00 a pack, after postage (or £1.50 if you can get them from a shop). Something like Ariel costs nearly £4.00. You use a hell of a lot less, so the pack lasts a lot longer. All you do is put a small amount in hot water and dissolve it with a whisk, then put it in the powder compartment of your washing machine.

White vinegar works as a softener (to avoid using the commercial softener, which I also suspected of making me itch). A drop or two of lemon oil or lavender oil (from an aromatherapy shop) adds a slight fragrance.

When I was in the rat race, one of the many things that was really getting on my nerves towards the end was how my department thought it could do away with professional services and do things itself. All to save money, of course.

'Balls' Advertising Campaign

As far as not using design services goes, using Microsoft Office clip art is as transparent as water when it comes to saying “I think I know what I’m doing, and I really believe that I’m good at it, but obviously I really don’t have a clue”.

My manager (well, my manager’s manager’s manager) was putting together a group-wide presentation to explain the importance of Teamworking® to the future of the department and the rest of the known Universe. He had come up with the idea – I don’t think I could ever work out, even then, what this was about (that’s another thing about design: you have to have a logical motif that everyone else understands) – that the whole concept of Teamworking® was like juggling a lot of different balls in the air.

It’s important to understand that this guy was one of those people who had just ‘discovered’ computers, partly by virtue of having to use one every day for email and other stuff. He was a technophobe who had decided he was a technophile. It’s also important to bear in mind that in the late 1990s/early 2000s Microsoft’s Office clipart was both limited per se, and limited to American themes. The presence of a soccer ball in the library was as British as it got.

Anyway, this manager came up with a logo almost exactly like the one above (again, bearing in mind that clipart then was not to as high a standard as it is today) using an American football, a baseball, and a soccer ball (i.e. in ‘English’: a rugby ball, a tennis ball, and a football). The whole thing – clipart and presentation – took him months, and he was incredibly proud of it. That aside, I warned him that when he did the presentation to the already-cynical shopfloor, they would say it was “all a load of balls”. He didn’t listen, and the shopfloor responded exactly as I’d said.

So, the point I am making is that the kind of advertising you would expect to see nailed to a tree or tied to lamp post requesting information about a missing cat or advertising a church jumble sale can easily be misused by cost-cutting bureaucrats, and become elevated to the level formerly dominated by Saatchi & Saatchi. It happens when you give an important design task to someone who isn’t skilled in  the art.

Nolls Bus?

So, when I saw the new design for Le Cirque du Nottinghamshire County Council’s bus services, I can honestly say it took a while for it to sink in.Without a word of a lie, I had to see the thing over several weeks for it to click that there wasn’t a new company called ‘Nolls’ who had taken over many bus routes. It was, in fact, an extremely poor logo advertising ‘Notts Bus’ – obviously created in-house using the most basic of resources.

It appears to be mandatory if you work for a Nottingham-centered council to have an arrow in your name somewhere (maintains the link with Robin Hood, of course). In this case, the arrow is about 50% too high to make any sense – it looks like something a 4 year old would write when they are learning how to do ‘t’s!

I should imagine the council saved tens of thousands of pounds by not having it done properly. Of course, they also wasted thousands of pounds by doing it badly instead. They’ll change it soon, I predict.