Weekend Ponderings

Well, it’s Sunday 22 June and I haven’t posted in my blog for 2 months. I don’t really know why – I suppose I’ve been too busy with photography and housework. I’ve also gone through a wee bit of a depressive phase and I think that affected my mojo. Like many people in the UK I’m increasingly concerned about the recession, sorry “economic downturn”, “impact of the credit crunch” - I don’t know what Chairman Prime Minister Brown’s current buzz phrase is, but it sure as hell feels like a recession to me. Food prices are rocketing, all measures of inflation are rising, house prices are falling, unemployment is rising and I don’t even want to talk about fuel prices. My pay rise last year was 2% – below the rate of inflation, so it was essentially a pay cut. In fact, my pay rise was swallowed up by an increase in rail fares, and this year it looks like we’ll be getting the same again. I work in the public sector (we don’t all get huge salaries – if you look at the figures, a small number of highly paid jobs artificially inflate the average wage figure ) and life is starting to get very tough. Public sector employees are 20% of the workforce and we are being forced to take below inflation wage rises to stop wage inflation hitting the economy, yet private sector employees (80% of the workforce) are receiving pay rises of 3.8 -4%.  I guess we’re just an easy target, but it really sticks in your throat when you are working harder and harder just to get by (to paraphrase Barack Obama). We don’t even have a luxurious lifestyle, so we don’t have a lot of leverage to change our spending habits – we always cook everything from scratch, we don’t eat a lot of meat and we eat loads of pasta. My dad is just about to come back to the UK after several months in Thailand and it’ll be interesing to see what he thinks of prices.

I know that we are a lot better off than many other countries, but that is little comfort when your economy is going down the tube because of a megalomaniac prime minister. I have never, ever voted for the Tories, but I may have to at the next election to get this bunch of eedjits out, and that depresses me more that you could possibly know.

Ahh, Britain  – ain’t it Great at the moment?

 

Boo, it’s Sunday

I love Fridays – I hate Sunday evenings. I spend the day doing nice things and make a nice dinner for my family, but all the time I’m fretting about going back to work the next morning. I don’t even hate my work – I’ve just figured out that I’m a “work to live” type. The way I see it, work is the thing that I have to do to pay for the things I’d like to do.

My photo for today was taken in the woods (yes, really!). I need to lose weight and get fit again, so I’ve managed to persuade my poor, long-suffering husband to start walking again. Unfortunately he’s quite fit, so has to spend a fair bit of time waiting for me or listening to me grumbling about hills.

 

Woohoo, it’s Friday!

I love Fridays. I get in from work, demand a frosty dry martini, switch on Vic Galloway and start cooking an elaborate dinner. It’s fab! I have to have the cooking/ martini/ Vic thang or I feel cheated. Tonight Vic has “Crazy Horses” playing, we have chicken kebabs cooking and I have finished my delicious dry martini.

My photo for today is me looking at the clock tower and realising it’s 6.30 pm – Vic Time!

 

April 16th 2008

Well, my course was as dire as I thought it would be! One of our tasks was to identify the nouns, verbs and adjectives in a sentence [sigh]. However, the trainer was great and it was lovely to catch up with my friends - we had a good natter and swapped gossip. My photo for today represents how I felt about the course and is a bit of an unusual one for me, as I don’t normally do self potraits. I’m aiming to take one self portrait each month to try and get used to seeing photos of myself!

 

 

First blog

This is my very first attempt at blogging…

I have been on annual leave from work for a week and today is the last day before I go back tomorrow. I’m not looking forward to it because I’m on a course on Report Writing, as part of a work based qualification that I’ve been doing for a year now. When I looked at the pre-course booklet, my heart sank as it covers areas I studied at primary school (verbs, nouns, adjectives, punctuation and so on). I was quite surprised, however, when one of my (younger) colleagues said that she had never been taught any of those subjects at school. There are only 4 years between us, yet there seems to be a big difference in the way that we were taught and this appears to be common among the rest of the group too. Well, hopefully I’ll learn something tomorrow!

The weather was glorious today – crisp blue sky and bright sunshine, except for the minor hailstorm at lunchtime. My husband and I went for a walk in the woods late this afternoon to get some exercise and take some photos. Some days I go out with a very clear idea of what I want to snap, others (like today) I have no idea and hope that something inspires me. I don’t aim to take wonderful, techically perfect photos – my project is about recording a year in my life, so the photos I take are personal to me. Today, I snapped some telegraph wires against a beautful blue sky, which is not terribly interesting to other people, but I smile every time I see it.