Happy festive season to all you folks who have nothing against the Christian holiday (or its pagan precursors)!
The house is still nowhere near finished (surprise) and we’ve all been working very hard on our respective duties (more of a surprise). That’s to say I’m spending a lot of should-be-asleep-time cuddling the laptop, theboy‘s pocket money is regularly over £5/week (he earns extra – on a sliding scale – depending on the quality and quantity of his schoolwork, and any particularly brilliant creations of art, Lego, science experiments or particularly impressive feats of ICT use or abuse), and thegirl is diligently growing (she, along with her associated life support system, is now a grand total of 10.3kg cosily cushioned into the front of my waistline). I just hope my spine is as strong as everyone believes it to be!
The only real disappointment I’ve had recently was a lot of goods I’d picked up from an auction in Bedford. I had not used this particular auctioneer (W H Peacocks) before. However, I had made use of the web service (i-bidder) and a sister site (Bid Spotter) a number of times previously and had been satisfied. Emboldened by the previous experiences, and the quality of the items as conveyed by the photographs, I gambled a modest sum on a number of items which appeared particularly promising.
My experience can be summed up in one sentence: “I will never use W H Peacocks again”. The items were artfully arranged in the photoshoot to cover up all sorts of faults: missing packaging (half a box, in one case), dirt, gouges, broken speakers. Not a single returns/faults item was identified as such. Items which had been identified as “end of line” were only such in the sense that they had come to the end of the line! As an illustration, the two DS consoles which theboy asked me to bid on are now part of his winter electronic project, “Fix the faults”.
The store itself was dirty, parking practically non-existent (and capitalised by a ditzy blonde conveying dusty worm-eaten wood furniture to her estate car, and a wild-eyed earringed mustachioed gypsy king with a beaten up flatbed truck). The foreigner of unknown lineage, whose job it was to retrieve the various lots from their shelves, almost left me without a couple of lots – though to give him credit, he tried to arrange for one of the items I was particularly dissatisfied with to go back on auction. And here is the bit that really rubbed me the wrong way: the auctioneer wanted me to sign up to Peacocks biddings for £10 before he would re-list the item, even though they’d already charged me £10.61 for Internet bidding via i-bidder. He also had a few choice less-than-complementary things to say about i-bidder. In short, the whole experience was of the sort that one chalks down and moves on from.
Thankfully, we’ve been spared the worst of the season’s flu. It’s been more of an irritating cold, with theboy making the most of being served tea and biscuits on a whim, and having to do nothing but watch his pick of Youtube. Here’s a quote from Richard Dawkins (The Greatest Show On Earth) which had me giggling for a good few minutes at tea break – “I’ve given money to preserve the tiger, but who would think of giving money to preserve the common cold?” He’s speaking of the “evolutionary arms race” – how every living organism has no purpose other than to replicate, the implication to my mind being that only viruses are truly successful: because they replicate prodigiously, carry no extraneous machinery (complicated bodies) and can cross between species (birds, pigs, humans). The flu/cold is probably the most successful, because it does not (on its own) kill the host organism. Which means we’re not really the top of the “food chain”. Something to delight theboy when we return to studying biology after the festive break. He has taken more easily to chemistry, as there is more to subvert – but thankfully he appreciates subversion of thought as well as of physical characteristics or processes.
Happy Christmas everybody!
