The Lull Before The Storm

I was going to title today's blog "Headless Soldier Found In St Andrews" but thought better of it as I don't want to cynically manipulate my visitor stats by luring readers here under false pretences. It may have been a cynical heading but it was at least true as the remains of this vintage lead guardsman was amongst the pocketful of junk that I unearthed while out with my metal detector this morning. I've not had a great deal of luck with the detector so far this year. Three trips have yielded very little and all I have to show for six or seven hours plodding up and down a ploughed field this week is this.

Plus a headless soldier of course.


So, instead, I titled today's ramblings "The Lull Before The Storm" as that's very much how life feels at the moment. Here in the caravan in Fife, it's peaceful with a capital P. The owners of the nearby mobile homes only seem to turn up at weekends so we are extremely chilled and relaxed watching the hordes of rabbits and listening to the birdsong. But unfortunately, however chilling and relaxing the break is, we can't ignore the fact that when we get back we've got a pretty nonstop schedule lined up and, with our minds working overtime thinking about that schedule, we aren't sleeping brilliantly.


After Mother's Day we've got a decorator coming to tidy up the paintwork around the house in preparation for putting it on the market; then we have to put it on the market. We've sold Marion's Mum's flat so we have to empty that out and sort out all her furniture and belongings next week. We're buying a house in Suffolk and are planning major alterations so have to travel there in ten days for a site meeting with the architect. Then we have to plan kitchen, bathrooms and everything else. Then we have to hope that our house sells as we don't really want to own two for more than six months. Hectic? I think you'll agree there's plenty to keep the cogs spinning.

At least one of the planned jobs has been completed and the caravan is now fitted with a substantial deck . I downloaded a brilliant new iPhone app called Camera  Awesome that allows you to add all sorts of clever features to the iPhone camera. I used it for this photo. Okay, so what's the point? Well there isn't one for this particular picture but there are so many great features on the app such as selective focusing and exposure and I'm sure it will greatly improve my iPhone photography. 

We saw The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel at the New Picture House here in St Andrews yesterday. It's quite a sweet film but the small screen that it was showing in was packed and I could only see three quarters of the picture due to the bloke sitting in front. He wasn't particularly tall it's just that the rows of seats are almost at the same level with very little elevation above the row in front. As a story about growing old, it attracted an old audience and we were amongst the youngest. There are some good performances from Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson and Celia Imrie but for me Penelope Wilton stole the show with a brilliantly observed performance as a frustrated wife in a loveless marriage. Bill Nighy was, as always, Bill Nighy and Maggie Smith was Maggie Smith; Nighy with his twitches and stutters and Smith with her raised eyebrows and elastic expressions but Wilton looked a natural whilst her illustrious colleagues looked like actors. At 124 minutes the film is 24 minutes too long but, it's a gentle enough diversion and the OAP audience seemed to love it.

YouTube Unseen

Being a huge fan of YouTube (i.e someone with plenty of time on their hands), I thought last week that instead of clicking on the most viewed videos and those sent to me in emails and tweets, I would trawl through some of the hundreds of unseen little films on the site and see if I could discover hidden treasure.


I was quite pleased with myself when I clicked on a video imaginatively titled "Blind Lorry Driver" and saw that I was the first viewer. The CCTV footage showed a grain truck, it's driver unaware that his trailer was raised high above the cab, travelling at speed along a foreign motorway and demolishing a large glass enclosed pedestrian footbridge. It was what might be termed an "Epic Fail" and I embedded it on the blog to share with my enormous readership and see if it would become viral. A couple of minutes later I clicked on the link to check that it worked OK and watched in horror as I realised that there were at least two pedestrians on the bridge as the collision happened and at least one of them fell from a great height with the bridge then falling on top of him. Not wishing to be responsible for posting links to what might effectively be a snuff movie on my blog, I took the link down and added a hasty apology to those who might have seen it (about four people according to the statistics).


I did some research and found to my relief that the pedestrian was not killed (very lucky) and that the clip, showing a Turkish bridge being demolished, had been uploaded to YouTube last year and been seen by a couple of hundred thousand people ....Phew.


Taking this as a salutary lesson, I decided to repeat the exercise today with care and I can report that there is a hell of a lot of rubbish out there. I limited my browsing to clips under 60 seconds long in the comedy category and must say that the brief dictionary definition of  comedy as "funny entertainment" has been wildly misinterpreted by most of those doing the uploading. Cats and dogs and babies are uploaded at the rate of about five every minute and, whilst some of YouTube's all time classics have featured these subjects I can't really say that the films I saw of dogs barking, cats looking at the camera and babies dancing (kicking their legs involuntarily once in 30 seconds whilst music happens to be playing in the background) are ever going to be willingly shared on line.


I've seen school ground videos, on the way to school videos and on the school bus videos and yes, today's kids are just as unfunny as they were when I was a kid but unfortunately they now have the cameras to prove it. I've endured the unsavory sights of a bloke peeing into the snow from a cable car, a "ghost" dancing to the shoop shoop song and a lad and his disabled companion in a video with the unbelievable title of "Tickling a Spastic".


I've come to the conclusion that in future I'll wait for others to send me links to funny stuff. I did my utmost to find something worth a look but the only vaguely remarkable one that I found in over an hour's worth of uploads was another traffic accident Here's a young man with remarkable reflexes (and absolutely no casualties this time).









I'll stick to longer films in future. It's Orange Wednesday so we're off to see Black Swan followed by the Orange two for one offer at Pizza Express this afternoon.