bignoseduglyguy

St. John’s Park is your typical inner-city park, where each renovation and regeneration quickly becomes careworn and frayed at the edges. Tribes of local kids play endless games of 5-a-side football or full-on body contact basketball. The older generations gather in clusters at the junctions of the paths or on the benches to swap gossip and moan about the kids. The dog walkers whistle nonchalantly, looking anywhere but in your eye whilst their pooch craps on the path, next to the unused pooper-scopper waste bin. Young mums and their children promenade in the latest casual wear, the mums puffing away on Silk Cut whilst the kids slug Coke and try to break the see-saw. Very occasionally, one will see the pasty-faced methadone addicts during daylight, swapping prescriptions and arguing over their bottles of White Lightening cider. This cast of local characters varies from visit to visit but, whilst it might not be wise to loiter here too long after the pubs turn out, the park never really feels threatening or sinister. However, it seems that not everyone shares my opinion judging by the message/warning that caught my eye as we left the park:

According to it’s scribe, this message implies that “I.O.D.” – long the three letter acronym for Isle Of Dogs – now stands for Isle of Danger. Presumably, this new appelation will mean regular visits from The Famous Five, The Secret Seven and The Hardy Boys, all looking for excitement, adventure and mysteries to solve.

A few odd snaps of the recent Cornwall expedition can be seen over at bignoseduglyeye.

I’d love to be a fly on the wall when this insurance claim gets filed.

As is often the case, Ian has beaten me to spotting Julie Daniel’s take on GTD email management and how it helps control the six types of email most folks have. Julie is a UK based accredited GTD coach. England 0 – Canada 1.

Eat – If you hear a faint groaning whilst reading this post, it’ll be my chair. Last night, the cravings became too much and I whipped up a bucket of baked buffalo wings for me and SWMBO, who had never tried them before. Accompanied by a green salad with blue cheese dressing and several beers, we proceeded to set about the pile with no small amount of gusto. Given that I couldn’t get hold of an authentic US wings sauce in my local supermarket, I laced the butter sauce with liberal amounts of Encona’s Cajun Hot Pepper Sauce, Nando’s Extra Hot Piri Piri Sauce, cracked black peppercorns and garlic powder. The results were pretty damn tasty. So what, you might ask, is the problem? Having demolished the whole pile, the 3-1 ratio of bones on my plate and SWMBO’s indicated that I had consumed 30 waistline-busting wings which left me feeling a tad bloated for the best part of the last 24 hours.

My Hat – Many thanks to this week’s hero, David Barlow of Cornwall who is volunteer at The Lizard Wireless Station, all round good egg and, most importantly, a fellow Tilley hat wearer. Having seemingly lost my weathered but cherished Tilley whilst visiting the station, I emailed David who offered to check for my hat next time he was at the station. He replied with the news that he could find no trace of the hat and asked if I had possibly left it elsewhere. I mentioned that I had maybe left in an ice cream shop or the car park. Two days later, David has not only checked the shop in Lizard village (where my hat was amongst 6 other lost titfers) but had it sent special delivery to arrive by lunchtime today – asking nothing in return save for the postage. All this from a chap I’ve never met (his colleague was on duty when I visited) and who knows me not from Adam. Much appreciated. By the way, the tongue -in- cheek style of the Tilley Endurables website makes it an interesting read – whether you browse the interesting testimonials, the company’s history or the dated but well-meant Y2K emergency advice.

Although I try to eat healthily and am exercising a great deal more than I used to, I do have a fondness for a number of ‘heart attack on a plate’ dishes – most of which I have discovered whilst on business trips to the States. Business travel is far from glamourous and, more often than not, decent meals with new colleagues or old friends will be more than outnumbered by the lonely meals, comprised of crappy food, eaten in glum hotel restaurants. A basket meal thrown at me by the surly bartender in the sports bar in the Dulles Hilton was especially dire, as I recall. However, I have also enjoyed some excellent nights with friends and colleagues and these will have invariably been in the sort of chain restaurant I’d never frequent back home. The popularity of elasticated pants and stretch sportswear as the No.1 casual clothing choice in America is almost entirely due to some the chain restaurant dishes I have come to love and cherish. There’s Chili’s Awesome Blossom, which is basically an enormous onion which has been sliced, battered then fried and served with an artery-clogging sauce – sublime. A visit to a Virginia franchise of Don Pablo’s, a chain that actually sells a deep fried ice cream dessert (yes, really) introduced me to the gargantuan delights of the ‘combination platter’, which is the answer for those who are spoilt for choice when reviewing the menu. The Conquistador combination platter banishes all worry of choosing the wrong dish by serving up pretty much all of them on one outsized salver. $10.49 got me and a Vietnamese friends more beef taquitos, chicken flautas, skinny enchiladas, beef burritos, crispy beef tacos and soft chicken fajita tacos than we could finish. Limey seafood lovers like me wince when getting the bill for a meal in the UK because of the price of quality fresh fish – so walking into Joe’s Crab Shack is like finding Nemo and Nirvana all in one place. A few years back, I almost ate myself to death in the Joe’s Crab Shack in Buckhead, Atlanta. Along with Bert, a redoubtable Dutchman and Papa, a crazy Senagalese, I basically tried to eat plates of each of the five crabs available followed by each dish on the grilled and broiled seafood menu – all laced with lashings of Frank’s Red Hot Sauce. Urged on by a very attractive waitress (who, I was convinced, loved me as much as I loved her until she said she was moving to Hollywood to become a scriptwriter), we ploughed through the approximate equivalent of Seaworld on a plate. No amount of light beer, or the antacids we picked up at the drugstore on the way back to the hotel, could put out the flames that raged in our bellies. However, the current objects of my culinary desire are buffalo wings, whether Frank & Teressa’s proclaimed and much fabled wimgs served up the Anchor Bar in Buffalo or those 3 Mile Island hotties stacked high at every Hooter’s. Unless anyone knows different, one of the London outposts of the US based Texas Lone Star chain appears to be my best bet for getting a fix of good ol’ Stateside grub in large portions. As for me, I’m grabbing a taste-alike recipe from one of the many sites providing such things so I can rustle up a batch at home anytime the cravings call. Those with similar cravings for US foodstuffs should check out this handy list of UK importers. In this way, you too can get the same authentic taste, the same authentic waistline, the same authentic infarc and the same authentic early funeral that surely awaits me if I keep succumbing to this cravings.

The minute I clapped eyes on Rob Storey’s How and Why Wonder Book collection, I lost 30 years and was back in my room reading my own copies. Strangely, whilst the covers of many of the US versions are familiar, I don’t recall any of the UK versions, so perhaps mine were gifted via someone stateside. Either that or I really grew up in America but was brainwashed and relocated by the Secret Service after I was involved in some clandestine activity or other.

Having recently spent an evening and a good part of the following night driving on our overstretched motorway and A road system (30 miles of motorway closed necessitating a 70 mile nose to tail detour), I am ready to consider alternatives. Whilst searching online for something else, I came across an essay entitled End of Traffic Jams: A Transportation System for the Future, which is concerned with dualmode and automated highway systems. Whilst little more than an overview, this essay points the way towards a possuble solution to combining the freedom of personal transport with the speed, ease of use and safety of a mass transit system. However, a wander through the various ongoing projects linked at the bottom of the page shows that these types of initiaives are not just pipe dreams.

Upon arriving home, we were greeted by a pile of post over 12 inches (30 cms for Zoe and the other Euro folk reading this) tall, which I have just worked my way through. The mail awaiting my personal attention included not only the usual junk mail and detritus but also:

1. A credit card bill.
2. A London Congestion Charge Penalty fine.
3. A second London Congestion Charge Penalty fine.
4. Yet a third London Congestion Charge Penalty fine.
5. A Conditional Offer of Fixed Penalty speed camera fine.
6. A letter from my employers concerning increased healthcare benefit costs.

Talk about timing. The Congestion Charge Penalty fines are bullshit as I registered the car concerned as a temporary vehicle whilst my usual car was in the body shop. When I called to straighten it all out, they told me I had to call back the relevant department on Monday – despite the fact the they couldn’t find any fines levied against the car concerned. The speeding fine is probably legit but as the camera is located on the slowest stretch of my daily commute, I am a touch naffed off at getting a fine and points, when I normally couldn’t break a sweat, let alone the speed limit, on that road. My employers want me to pay into a dental plan that will cost me more than my annual average bill with my current dentist – and he’s not cheap – which is why I got the credit card bill. It’s just as well I haven’t just been and spent all our money on a holiday for SWMBO and the sprogs then, isn’t it.

Sigh…whimper…snivel