Well pop-pickers and friends, by the time we get to the end of this month the clocks will have sprung forward and Easter will be upon us.
Travelling about the way I do and staying in hotels, I get to see and use a lot of bathrooms.
For the benefit of my US readers when we say “Bathroom” in the UK, we are talking about a room with a bath in it. I know that Stateside you call what we call a “Toilet” a “Bathroom”. It always amuses me that a nation that is mostly armed to the teeth and probably has one of the highest murder rates in the world can be so genteel about calling a toilet a toilet.
And I must say my preference is really for a bath, not a shower. I just find getting into a bath at the end of a day a bit more relaxing. But sometimes you don’t get a choice, In fact, I would say the vast majority of hotels nowadays have showers. So I just have to grin and bare it, so to speak.
What annoys me with hotel showers is they very often don’t have instructions how to use them so you end up getting alternatively scalded and frozen until you work out what does what. And I’m not very keen on those showers that have those rounded fronts with roller doors. I can’t help but think they might get stuck while I’m in there and I’ll end up like Jeff Goldblum in “The Fly”.
So where has Teddy B been this month? how about this:
Beccles (Near Lowestoft) – Packaging equipment manufacturer.
Milton Keynes – Marking & Labelling manufacturer.
Tonbridge (Near Tunbridge Wells) – Laboratory ventilation equipment
Portland Bill (Weymouth) – Generator service supplier.
Yate (Near Bristol) – Coffee machine service engineers.
Crewkerne – Dairy maintenance dept.
Bristol – National Composites Centre
Burnham-on-Crouch – Animal feed producer
In an earlier blog I spoke about clients providing tea and coffee etc. Thinking about that now seems a long way removed from my early days at work where unless you brought a flask, tea on a building site was often made in a white enamelled bucket. Everybody chipped in 20p a week and this funded the bucket.
And this is what makes me laugh when I’m in the queue at Starbucks. Do you want a Cappuccino, Latte or a Mocha Lokka Fokka wotsits? Back on site in the seventies you dipped your mug in the bucket and had tea. With everything in the bucket. Tea-bags, milk and sugar (whether you had sugar or not). No fairies back then.
But isn’t Tea a funny beverage? You can make twenty cups with the same tea, same milk and it just tastes so-so. Then, once in a blue moon it tastes brilliant. It tastes so nice you knock it all back in a couple of gulps, make another because you really enjoyed that one, and guess what? The next one tastes like crap, again.
Cos I’m on a low fat diet at the moment it is a pretty bland business. However, one of my current occasional treats is strangely enough, a hot Starbucks cheese and marmite mini-ciabatta. Now that has surprised me cos I don’t really rate Starbucks very much at all!
I had a mailshot the other day from a well known instrument manufacturer flogging their equipment, and stating that GS38 (Standard for Electrical Test equipment, published by our old chums the HSE) said the multi-meters could not be used for proving isolation as they employed a selectable range and could therefore be “prone to incorrect settings or dependent on user-selected ranges”.
Well my flabber was gasted, I can’t remember seeing that in GS38! So I spent yonks looking through GS38 and still couldn’t see it. When I mentioned this to a good friend of mine he set about searching for it, couldn’t find it in GS38 either but eventually found it in HSG85 which is a Guidance Note for EAWR. This actually states: “The instrument to do this should be properly constructed to protect against electric shock and designed to prevent short circuits occurring during use. For low voltages, proprietary voltage detectors such as two-pole voltage detectors, test lamps, or voltmeters with insulated probes and fused leads can be used (see HSE Guidance Note GS38). The use of multimeters, which can be set to the wrong function, is not recommended for proving dead on low-voltage systems, neither is the use of non-contact devices such as ‘volt sticks’ (note: in coal mines the use of appropriately certified non-contact devices is permitted).”
So a bit naughty to quote GS38 when that is not actually the case. And it also only says “Not Recommended”, not “Thou shall not”. At heart the instrument manufacturers sales team are still salesmen who need to sell so many boxes of crisps a day to earn their commission.
In my “Music Spot” for the month I’m sure that some people will regard what I’m going to say next as heresy, but I don’t really think that many of the so-called “Greatest” guitar players were really that great. Jimi Hendix just seemed to make a lot of bloody noise as far as I could make out. Although you probably shouldn’t take much notice of me, I’m just like the average bloke in an art gallery - “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like”.
With that in mind, a guitar player I had and still have great respect for is Janice-Marie Johnson. Have a look at her performing here:
NEW * Boogie Oogie Oogie - A Taste Of Honey 4K {Stereo} 1978
“Listen to my Bass now” Fantastic.
There were some groovy dance moves in there as well 😊
As an aside to this, the group’s name “A taste of honey” is a tribute to Herb Alpert’s track “Taste of Honey”. I still listen to Herb Alpert and love his Tijuana brass style.
Herb also did a lot of work with Burt Bacharach, another one of my musical heroes who I was lucky enough to see perform back in 2018. Burt was like his music, very smooth and very professional. A real gent.
Herb is still going strong, performing live and drawing massive audiences. Bloody good luck to him he is a real artiste.
I can’t help stifle a laugh though when you realise the Herb Alpert’s full name must be Herbert Alpert. I’ll never get to heaven will I?
But Herb, if you're reading this I still love you.
Prepare to saddle up and ship out folks, and remember don’t squat with your spurs on…