Happy Easter

Scrolling back through my blog I see it was last Tuesday - LESS THAN A WEEK AGO - I was about to go out and buy my tenth electric kettle since being here.    I didn't expect it to last long, but I certainly expected it to last at least a week.    Am I being naïve here, thinking I would turn it on, read the last few pages of my book,  by which time I expected it would have boiled and turned itself off, and I would make a cup of tea. I've been doing this all my life, ever since electric kettles became an everyday kitchen appliance.   But no, it didn't turn itself off and I got there when there was just an inch of water boiling away at the bottom.

 

I am just so hacked off with the shoddy goods in this country (and apologies to any American reading this, I don't mean to cause offence) but why can't American companies pay decent, living wages to Chinese workers so that they can turn out decent products?   It can be done, Chinese imports in Britain are of good quality, and electric kettles have a decent life span, a lot more than five days.

 

Anyway, enough of my rant.

 

I haven't been watching much television lately since Obama announced his deal with Iran, and I came to the conclusion that we are all going to hell in a hand basket.   I heard it said - and I hope I've got this right - that it is possible to have a bad deal with good people, but it is not possible to have a good deal with bad people.

 

While typing the above I wondered how the phrase 'hell in a hand basket' came about, and looked it up.   This is what it said -

 

It isn't at all obvious why 'handbasket' was chosen as the preferred vehicle to convey people to hell.

 

One theory on the origin of the phrase is that it derives from the use of handbaskets in the guillotining method of capital punishment. If Hollywood films are to be believed, the decapitated heads were caught in baskets - the casualty presumably going straight to hell.

 

So I've taken to reading instead, at least for a little while.   And discovered an interesting new genre of fiction - novels based during the second world war, and in particular in a boarding house on the heavily bombed south coast,    The town has a fictitious name of course, but the author lives in Eastbourne, and it sounds like Eastbourne from the descriptive bits.   

 

There are a lot of air raids, and shelters, smoking, and Spam sandwiches, so I am identifying with it all.    As most of you reading this knows, I was born just months before war broke out and spent my earliest childhood in my grandma's air raid shelter.  It wasn't the south coast, but it was on the edge of a heavily bombed airfield, and my aunties often talked of rushing me down to the shelter at the bottom of the garden - I can remember it, I learned to walk down there.   And everybody in those days smoked, it wasn't the socially unacceptable habit that it has become in the 21st century.  And as for spam sandwiches - do you know, I actually bought a tin of spam when I was out shopping today.  Looking at it, before dropping it into my trolley, it occurred to me that it would not be something the food police would approve of.

I hope all of you, dear readers, have a very blessed Easter Day.


Thought for the day.......

Failure is an event, not a person