Swallow fledgling newly out of its nest this morning when this photo was taken.

Total distance travelled = 6ft.  Truly awesome that this young ‘life’ which can be held in the palm of my hand can, in just a few week’s time, cross the English Channel, fly over south western Europe, across the Sahara, down through the length of Africa, right down to the southern Cape. Then, next spring this same bird can retrace its route right back to the very nest it came from.

I’ve noticed that, as summer draws to a close, our swallows will disappear for 3 days and return, and I’m sure the parents are showing the youngsters the necessary landmarks ‘near home’ for their return trip next year. Because soon after, the elder swallows born this year will begin their own long migration south, just as the last clutch of the season is ready to fledge.

Over the years I’ve also noticed the swallows create a ‘no fly zone’ over the garden and will not tolerate magpies, jays, sparrow hawks or even buzzards coming too close to be a potential danger to the youngsters.

Today, we had ‘flying ant day’. They used to last all day and were quite a nuisance, but now they attract dozens and dozens of swallows from all over and the ants are gone in about an hour.

Barbara Walter’s of Televisions 20/20, did a story on gender roles in Kabul, Afghanistan – several years before the present conflict. During the course of her story she noted that women still walked five paces behind their spouses.

On a recent return trip to Kabul she noted women still walking behind their husbands, despite the overthrow of the Taliban regime. In fact she reckoned women were distancing themselves even further from their husbands.

Ms Walters approached one Afghani woman and asked “Why do you now seem happy with an old custom that you once tried desperately to change?”

The woman looked Ms Walter in the eye and without hesitation replied, “Land Mines”.

Time was, when the local telephone directory came in two halves, one for residential numbers and the other for commercial, each a couple of inches thick. Has it now got so thin as to be not worth having? Reckon so.

It’s great size and weight was often referred to in comic one-liners. Not any more. The rot set in when British Telecom (BT) copied the example of the Thompson format to produce a more locally targeted market. Thing was, Thompson was something of an ‘upstart’ – BT already produced the definitive publication – the Thompson Directory as it became known, being most used as a quick reference supplement.

This is a copy of the local Phone Book that dropped through my door the other morning, I took this side shot because the red line mark seperates the two halves of the phone book today – each is no thicker than a camera lens cover.

I suspect many people are like me, in that if they’re going to use a phone book it’s most likely to look up the commercial number of a business they don’t use regularly. I’m located around 35-40 miles from my nearest cities (Plymouth and Exeter) and neither is featured in the latest book because they’re outside the area covered. As a result, when I do need an unfamiliar number I find ‘Google is my best resource’.

How do you know your vehicle is over-revving? – If you’ve never heard an over-revving engine.
How do you know your car has stalled? – If you’ve never seen or heard a car stall?
We take so much for granted and most of the time we don’t even know it. Take my wife and learning to drive for example. – When we got married, Tanya didn’t drive, so one of the first things she did was to organise some driving lessons for herself. This proved to be a something of a disaster, because at the time I was driving a large Volvo estate, which is not the ideal learner-vehicle. ‘Safe’ perhaps for the occupants – but terrible for parking practice!

Tanya did pass her written driving exam in a foreign language with a 100% mark – something I’m confident I couldn’t do in the UK or back in her native Russia. Only her failure in the practical test was a surprise to Tanya. This highly intelligent woman with a ‘near-photographic memory’ had never ‘failed’ any test before in her life.  She immediately booked another test and promptly failed that too, complaining along the way that she needed more driving practice. Then everything was put on the back burner for six months when we moved to Devon.

After settling in Devon, Tanya decided to restart her driving lessons, only this time she was convinced to accept extra driving practice in the Volvo – no matter how far away the rear bumper was.

It’s all true about husbands teaching their spouses to drive! The arguments we had in that confined space! All but one were quickly forgotten, but that event was very memorable. – We’ were approaching a country bend at a fair clip. Here’s the essence of our exchange:
“‘Slow down before the bend”, I said. Only our speed didn’t alter.  “Slower still“, I repeated, with just a hint of concern creeping into my voice.

“I’m in third gear”. She replied. Her voice was pitched in such a way that the ‘like you said I should‘ was left unsaid but clearly heard.

I automatically glanced at the shift. She WAS in third gear. But the tachy was also heading towards 4000 rpm!

“SLOW DOWN!” I yelled, the instant before being flung hard against my seatbelt and the pillar. The car appeared to broad-side the rapidly approaching hedge, tyres screeching their torment and the brambles scratching the paintwork. But we’d survived the turn.

Afterwards, I realised my subsequent tirade was a result of the dangerous nature of the occasion, but equally it was also due to an outflow of relief that neither of us hadn’t been injured! Only a miracle had prevented our vehicle from rolling over. Tanya of course never considered the possibility. – Still hasn’t.

Yet only a woman could wait until her ‘driving instructor’ finished before replying, “But you didn’t have to shout at me”. And only a spouse would realise it was pointless to continue because when the wife is learning to drive. – You can still be right and still wrong!

Tanya jubilant after her first ever Porsche drive (Carrera S)

The event will forever be etched in my memory because when I brought up the over-revving engine her immediate response was.

“Whats that?!”

It made me think. And on the way home I learned that some car sounds which we grow up with are taken for granted. Think back to when you first heard, or rather felt, the sudden jolt that’s so synominous of the car stall. If you’re like me it was probably in your parent’s car when you were a youngster. At the time, your parents probably made a joke of the occasion and through the ensueing banter between them you learned what happened and how it happened. But what if your family never had a car? Your mother was a single parent without any relatives or friends who owned a car to share a lift with. And the same went for your friends and peers right through school and university. None of them had a car because public transport was so cheap and frequent that owning a car was made redundant.

Then you arrive in a country like the UK and find that a car of your own is an essential tool to get to work and for your leisure.

The following weekend we drove to one corner of a huge local car park, pointed the car up along the diagonal and I simply said “Floor it!” Over the next hour we could have damaged done untold damage to the greabox and transmission. But through it all, Tanya did learn and experience everything she needed to know about stalling and over-revving which she reckons helped her to pass her driving test at the next attempt.

Since learning to drive Tanya has become something of a petrol head. Top photo shows her in the Radical SR3 sports car – 1500 cc: 252 bhp. 158ft/lbs, 9,500 rpm in a car weighing just 500kgs! (0-60mph in around 3 secs) – Way t’go girl!

Two things happened back-to-back last week which together make both events memorable for me. The first was news of singer Michael Jackson’s tragic death, an event that will always be a beacon for the title of this post, which is the second item noticed on the following day.

It simply announces that all the income the UK Government receives from personal income tax throughout the whole year won’t be enough to cover the cost of the social security benefits.

Its stark, pretty bland and will doubtless be lost amidst the news and follow-up reports surrounding Michael’s death. But let’s consider the full impact for a moment because the reality will remain – that income tax receipts won’t pay for everything else. Like

The National Health Service
Education
Defence
The Road Networks
Public Order (Police, Courts)

This is a staggering!

(OK. I do appreciate the Government receives sizeable income from other sources like National Insurance and it does charge us crippling amounts for a drink and on fuel, etc etc).

Unfortunately, basic financial economics are as intractible now as they ever were. No one put it better than Mr Micawber who said, “Income sixpence, expenditure fivepence, happiness. Income sixpence, expenditure sevenpence, misery.” – The same is as true today as it was in Charles Dickens’ time.

For me the title shows, more than anything else, that the UK recession is very likely to be far lengthier and harder than was at first suggested to us by a Government that simply wanted us not to see it as the fundamental flaw which it no doubt is, but rather as a temporary and unfortunate blip on the country’s economic horizon to be viewed simply as an ‘economic downturn’.

And another thing:

Throughout the decade of Tony Blair’s Premiership at Number 10 Downing Street, we regularly heard how the nation’s treasury was in safe hands, that Chancellor Gordon Brown was considered one of its most capable Chancellors ever. The same Gordon Brown who is now in the driving seat at ‘Number 10′ at the Head of the Government.

It makes you wonder how bad the other guys were……..

The weekly supermarket food shop is a necessity in any urban environment -  we all do it.  Some, like myself, try to avoid it as often as we’re allowed to by our ‘other half’.  Typically, mine prefers to shop at her own pace, checking labels on items which are new to her without feeling under any obligation to speed on and possibly miss something. While I on the other hand, will happily go food shopping – but at my pace – provided there’s a shopping list! In my defence, I would add that on more occasions than I care to remember, my ‘impulse’ food purchase has resulted in multiple stock items in the cupboard on my return!

Our local supermarket is located 10 miles away and the weekly food shop can typically take around 2½ hours in total on a Saturday before lunch, and I reckon our example is fairly typical across the UK and Europe.

But even our worst supermarket nightmare pales to nothing when compared to the late night food shopping experience of Kostya and Irenie in Moscow.

The couple live in what’s known as the North East District of the city with their two boys, some 30 kms from the centre and about 9kms from the Moscow orbital ring road or MKAD which they must cross to reach the biggest and most popular supermarket offering everything under one roof at the best prices.

The MKAD has got to be seen and experienced. It’s vast! Even with a diameter of 102 kilometres it’s not even on the perimeter of the city like London’s M25. The MKAD was built with 6 traffic lanes in each direction and was originally considered to be more than enough for the city’s needs. But that was before the authorities discovered the city gains half a million additional vehicles each and every year. The extra vehicles have to go somewhere. And when you see 8 lanes of traffic squeezed in to those six lanes you know the answer. Inevitably clashes are a foregone conclusion, one that’s exacerbated by the Russian requirement that all drivers and their vehicles involved in an accident must remain in position until a police officer ‘writes up’ the accident. Quite how a police vehicle reaches any accident scene through 8 lanes of congested traffic on a six-lane highway remains a mystery……

Anyway, Kostya and Irenie’s local supermarket is called the ‘Metro’. It’s just 15kms from their apartment which makes it about 30 minutes journey time when the traffic flow is much lighter – normally after 11pm. After commuting home they find it’s much easier and quicker to delay going shopping until after 11pm to avoid the horrendous MKAD congestion. Last December (the 28th to be exact) with the New Year festivities approaching, they once again delayed their shopping trip until after 11pm to save time, and after spending an hour of shopping arrived with their loaded trolley at one of the 45 cash tills at half-past midnight. Everything was going smoothly.

They then waited in line for an hour without reaching their till. There saw no point in switching to a faster line because there wasn’t one, every till had a similar backlog.

At 2am, they had already waited 1½ hours in line, when they received a call from the boys who were now wondering were they had got to. Had they been in accident on the MKAD? “No” – they were in line queueing for the till!

The couple didn’t abandon the trolley and leave everything behind because they felt they had already invested enough time getting there, filling the trolley up and anyway there was no other place quite as big, or as cheap with everything under one roof as the Metro that was still open and within easy reach. They were stuck with their choice.

By 3am, after 2½ hours waiting in line for the till the hungry boys rang once again and this time were told to go to bed! Mum and Dad would return as soon as they could. Meanwhile, all around the couple shoppers were sprawled across their own trolleys in a vain attempt to snatch some sleep as best they could. Some people even began celebrating the forthcoming holidays with festivities of their own by drinking and sharing their shopping with others around them and simply arriving at the tills with empty half-empty bottles and empty boxes of chocolates.

At just after 4.00 am Kostya and Irenie arrived at their till and by 5.00 am they were back home putting the key in the door. Irenie went straight to bed after unpacking the shopping. Kostya didn’t bother, he had to be up for the 6.30 am commuter train back to the city to go to work! They haven’t returned to the Metro since.

Here’s a very easy method to keep all your stainless steel kitchen units clean for months!

My acidic skin easily tarnishes everything I touch. Without thinking I used to leave tell-tale fingerprints wherever I went,  especially on the brass finger plates above the door handles in my parents’ Victorian home. I’d hear about it first when my mother called me to account. Of course, ‘little boys being little boys’ I would instantly deny any wrong doing. I would even deny that I ever touched the finger plate and return indignant to the ‘crime scene’. Whereupon I was faced with the undeniable evidence of my transgression. The small boy-like pink fingerprint marks as clear as day on the brass. I can even recall matching the prints on one occasion to my own embarrassment!

The same thing happens with stainless steel and glass to this day.

Simply rub ‘Johnsons Baby Oil’ on to the stainless steel surface using a kitchen towel or cloth. No need to rub hard or deep, just rub the oil lightly in to the surface for finger-print-free stainless steel kitchen units. The results last for months.