Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Arwel Parry's LiveJournal:

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Sunday, January 10th, 2010
5:50 pm	Phew! Well, after splashing out nearly £50 at Argos for a 2.4kW fan heater, and parking it in the bathroom at full blast for 12 hours, the cold water started flowing around 9 p.m. on Friday night. The hot water pipes didn't start running until this morning however, but it looks like there's no permanent damage to the pipes, which is quite a relief... Current Mood: relieved Current Music: Afro-Celts, "Seed" (Comment on this)
Friday, January 8th, 2010
8:27 am	That's not happened before... Well, leaving the heating on all night in my bedroom and the bathroom doesn't seem to have done much good - I noticed there was a little ice at the bottom of the bath this morning, but it was only when I tried turning on the shower that I noticed that the pipes have frozen! First time that's happened in the 21 years I've lived in this house. Just emailed work to tell them I'm taking the day off for the domestic crisis! And to top things off, I noticed my wristwatch was stopped at 2.20 a.m. - it's only the second time in 10 years it needs a replacement battery. It could have timed things better... Current Mood: stressed (Comment on this)
Thursday, January 7th, 2010
10:46 pm	Brrrr...! Oh my God - the local TV weather forecast is expecting the thermometer to hit -14C here in Crewe around 2 a.m. tonight. Another night with the oil-filled radiator in my bedroom on all night, I think! I'm not looking forward to the next electricity bill, and I just paid £91 for the last three month's gas, mainly keeping downstairs warm.... There's been more snow in Crewe this winter than I can remember any time since 1982... admittedly that's only a few inches, since Crewe seems to have its' own little microclimate - we're usually clear of snow even when all the towns round about are deep'n'crisp'n'even, but the pavements have been nastily slippery all this week. I think I can safely forecast that the council dustcarts won't make it to collect our general waste wheelie bins on Monday - which are already overflowing since the regular collection scheduled for the Monday after Christmas was put off until the following Wednesday, and they didn't come then either. Current Mood: cold (Comment on this)
Friday, January 1st, 2010
12:16 am	Happy New Year Happy New Year to everyone (my, it's cold watching the fireworks out in my back garden!). Current Mood: cold (Comment on this)
Thursday, December 24th, 2009
12:28 pm	Insurance rip-offs.... Last post before Christmas delivered my house and contents insurance renewal from the Halifax this morning - rather dismayed to see a 14.2% increase in the premium in these days of deflation, especially as my basic pay hasn't increased for 3 years, so I phoned them to complain and was very surprised to see the increase reduced to 0.8% !! I suspect Lloyds TSB/HBOS are trying to make up the money they have to repay the government from unsuspecting householders who automatically renew, so the moral of the story is don't take their initial quote for an answer! Just got to go down the road to the Co-op to make last minute purchases to see me over the weekend (milk and suchlike), then pig-out in front of the TV/computer for a few days - got a few new DVDs to watch: Inglorious Basterds and In the Loop. Current Mood: aggravated Current Music: Seth Lakeman - Solomon Browne (Comment on this)
Sunday, December 20th, 2009
6:20 pm	Seasonal activities Did the traditional Saturday-before-Christmas visit to Wrexham Crematorium yesterday to leave flowers for my parents and brother, and sundry uncles and aunts who've ended up there - my goodness it was cold there yesterday, I was glad to get the bus back into town after 45 minutes, so I could do a little shopping to warm up and get the train home! Up unusually early for a Sunday today, as I've seen all the hype for Avatar and looking at the online booking site for the Reel Cinema in Crewe, the later showings for the 3D version were quite heavily pre-booked. So up betimes, to deliver Christmas cards to my neighbours and then head off for the 11.00 a.m. show at the cinema. We had a dusting of snow overnight, which made the pavements a bit treacherous (though typically for Crewe it had all gone by the time the movie finished!). So, what did I think of Avatar? Well, it is undoubtedly technically a fine piece of moviemaking. Personally, I'm not particularly bothered about 3D - if I feel like seeing it again over Christmas I'll probably save myself £1.50 and go and see the 2D version, though I'm more likely to go and see the new Sherlock Holmes which seems to be getting good reviews. Storywise, it's OK - I don't think there's anything there that hasn't been seen in SF before, but it's a decently told story (if very long) - the final three-quarters of an hour fairly zipped past. The floating mountains (presumably levitating through the effects of unobtainium (seriously!)) and the mystic all-life-is-connected ethos put the movie firmly in the fantasy genre rather than SF as far as I'm concerned, despite the presence of space marines. You would have thought that in 150 years' time the marines' attack craft wouldn't look very like Apache attack helicopters with side-mounted contra-rotating rotors! Some of the mining and forestry clearance machinery reminded me of the Crablogger from Thunderbirds more than 40 years ago. Oh yes, and there's an "impression" scene which would do Anne McCaffrey proud! I suppose an all-out battle between the evil corporate marines and the "noble savage" Na'vi makes for better cinema, but what the Na'vi really need to do is engage a good set of lawyers to assert their mineral rights. Overall, I'll give it a 4/5. Back to the office tomorrow for what may be my last day at work until the 4th - I was due to work Monday and Tuesday this week, but at our annual awards bash on Friday night my team got the "Team of the Year" award which I'm told carries an extra days' leave. The only problem is that I think they add it to this years' allowance rather than next years, which I'd prefer; I'd already planned my leave so that I take the 23rd and 24th off, as well as all next week, so I may have to take Tuesday off even though I've really got enough in my intray to keep me going. Anyway, in case I don't post again, I wish a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all my readers... Current Mood: cheerful Current Music: Seth Lakeman - Solomon Browne (Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
10:03 pm	New family addition Welcome to HannahHana Fleur Rogers Parry, a little sister for Jac, and a great-niece for me - born last Sunday at 9 lb 2 oz, and already home. Reports are that Jac was not terribly impressed when he saw her, and immediately went back to his toys! Current Mood: happy (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, October 26th, 2009
5:23 pm	The economics of ebooks Sometimes I wonder whether I'm cut out for a technological world. I'm a bit of a fuddy-duddy who is unlikely to upgrade to Windows 7 until Service Pack 2 is out (though I did install Ubuntu Linux on one of my old laptops at the weekend, and I'm astonished how much faster it boots up than it did under Windows Vista!). As readers of this blog may recall, a bit over a year ago I splashed out on a Sony Reader, and I've been working my way through a largish collection of ebooks I've bought from Baen Books over the last ten years or so, but today my flabber has been ghasted. I got an email from Waterstones advertising, among other things, Dara O Briain's new book, "Tickling the English", which piqued my interest. I was surprised, to say the least, to find that the RRP is £18.99 (hardback), and Waterstones are offering the ebook at 20% off - £15.19 (which is still a hell of a price to pay for a collection of binary digits which you can't sell on the second hand book market). However, as I looked down the page I noticed they're offering the hardback version for £11.79. Hello? Where's the incentive to save a tree here? Am I being unreasonably obtuse, or does the pricing of ebooks make no sense at all? Current Mood: Baffled (Comment on this)
Sunday, July 5th, 2009
3:43 pm	Narrow escape! I was thinking of going to Chester Zoo today, to experiment with my new DSLR camera, but decided to listen to the Wimbledom mens' final instead. Now I've just heard on the radio that the zoo's been closed and 5,000 people evacuated because the chimps have escaped from their island! I might have got some good pictures of them! :) Current Mood: cheerful (Comment on this)
Saturday, May 16th, 2009
7:25 pm	It seemed a good idea at the time... I've been chatting with my brother about our mothers' legacy to us. Back in the early 90s she was worried that she might end up in a nursing home and have to sell her house to pay the bills, so in December 1994 she transferred ownership of the house to us, though continued to live in it rent-free, of course. Fast-forward 12 years or so, so we were past the seven-year threshold for Inheritance Tax to claw back the transfer, and she eventually passed away as previously noted in this blog, but since she'd still been living in the house we had to include its value in the Inheritance Tax return anyway. Fortunately the total value of her estate was a lot less than the IHT threshold, so there'd have been no Inheritance Tax to pay anyway. The threshold was a lot lower, and closer to the value of the house, back in the early 90s. However, there's no such thing as a free lunch, and of course we'll eventually get a Capital Gains Tax bill on the increase in value of the house from 1994 to 2008, (though at least there'll be less tax to pay because of the decline in value of the house in the last year we owned it!). My brother's been talking to his accountant (since I only pay PAYE I've never needed such a person) and it looks like we'll each be lumbered with a bill of a bit more than £6500, which at least is a bit of a relief - I'd thought it might have been closer to £10K. So the moral of the story is, you'll always pick the wrong option when you arrange your finances! No doubt if she hadn't transferred the ownership, Mam would have ended up in a home and had to sell up - it just goes to show you can never predict the future. And that, unlike certain MPs, we're not afraid of paying our CGT... To get over the depression, my brother and sister-in-law are off to Kraków on holiday all next week :) Current Mood: resigned (Comment on this)
Sunday, May 3rd, 2009
6:52 pm	Amazing Fan movie I've just been watching "The Hunt for Gollum", a fan-made 40-minute online movie, and I have to say I'm most impressed at the ability of this group of fans to achieve the look and feel of the Peter Jackson trilogy - and apparently on a £3,000 budget. They found a pretty convincing Viggo Mortensen look-alike to play Strider, and how on (Middle) Earth did they manage such a good Gollum? I must admit that at one stage the Nazgul's horse struck me as being a bit pony-ish, but there's some very convincing orcs (I liked how Strider managed to skewer a couple of them to a tree :) ). Highly recommended. Current Mood: impressed (Comment on this)
Saturday, March 14th, 2009
8:46 pm	For your attention. Just spotted some funny signs as shown in the Daily Telegraph's "Sign Language" feature in recent weeks: Plain warning in New Zealand and one for intelligent London dogs. Current Mood: amused (Comment on this)
Saturday, February 28th, 2009
9:23 pm	This has all happened before, and will happen again Watching Sky News tonight, I'm struck with a strong sense of deja vu or, as Battlestar Galactica has it, "this has all happened before, and will happen again". It's about the banking crisis. Apparently the government are planning to use Northern Rock, which they own, as a "mortgage bank", NatWest/RBS as a "small business bank", and to set up an "investment bank" and a "savings bank" which they may give to the Post Office to run. Am I alone in remembering the old Post Office Savings Bank which became the Girobank in 1969, and was then sold off to Alliance & Leicester? One does have to wonder whether the Post Office actually has the expertise to run a bank, just as it's not possible to now resurrect British Rail as the experienced staff have now dispersed, retired, or died. I get the impression that the clock is being turned back to the 50s and 60s when things were generally better run - financial institutions, at any rate. Hopefully the banking industry will be run responsibly until about the 2070s or 2080s, when people who remember the current debacle will have died off, just as the industry didn't go crazy until people who remembered the 30s had disappeared. I am, however, incensed at how tens of billions of public money is getting thrown to pull irresponsibly-placed banking chestnuts out of the fire, and the people who put the chestnuts there are retiring with massive pensions. If only governments had actually allowed some of these idiots to go to the wall, it would have been a salutary lesson, but of course too many innocents would have suffered with the guilty. A thoroughly unsatisfactory situation all round. Current Mood: discontent (Comment on this)
9:04 pm	Speed's not all it's cracked up to be... Now that Network Rail have finally finished rebuilding Rugby station, we now have a weekend rail service on the West Coast Main Line which is actually usable (which it wasn't for virtually the whole of 2008, what with train diversions, and whole sections of the route usually decamping all the passengers onto buses). Today I went down to London for the first time since the Christmas break - we now have a 3-trains-an-hour service from Crewe, admittedly one is routed via Stoke and Northampton and calls at virtually all stations to Watford, so no-one in their right mind would take it for a journey all the way to the Smoke, but the other two are Pendolino's or SuperVoyagers which are scheduled to do the 158 miles in 1 hour 35 minutes, or 1 hr 40. By journey time, London's now not much more than 50% further away than Birmingham, though physically it's three times the distance. Going down this morning my Pendolino ex-Manchester actually arrived 7 minutes early, and thereby lies my grouse - on the old 2 hour schedule I could read all the interesting parts in a Saturday newspaper, but with the new faster timetable I'd just be throwing money away with the unread paper! :) Another nail in the coffin of British journalism... Mind you, how long this fast service will last is a bit up in the air - I was reading a few days ago of a plan to spend nearly half a billion pounds speeding trains up through Stafford so that there can be an end-to-end London to Glasgow timetable of less than four hours, which it's reckoned will draw a lot of business away from the airlines, but of course while all the construction work takes place trains won't be able to run in the meantime... and if they dig up the tracks at Stafford I wouldn't even be able to go to Birmingham instead of London... Current Mood: thoughtful (Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 14th, 2009
11:55 pm	Patrick McGoohan Sadly, Number Six's number has come up. I have the impression that I first saw The Prisoner when it was first broadcast in the late 60s - I don't think it had a consistent broadcast time on the whole ITV network, but I recall watching it early on Sunday afternoons on Granada TV - back in those days my parents would go to bed for a couple of hours nap on Sunday afternoon (and maybe something else, but what did a nine year old know...?), and I had the sole control of the TV channel selector (although, of course we only had BBC on Channel 2, and Granada on Channel 9!) between 1 and 3 p.m., so I could watch what I wanted. I loved the theme music in particular, and it's great that so many versions of it can now be easily found on YouTube. No doubt a fair bit of the storyline went over my head at that age, but I had another chance to see it in the late 70s when Anglia TV repeated it while I was at UEA in Norwich - as treasurer of the UEA student TV service which timeshifted the programme for the students' benefit, I was able to rewatch the tapes several times before we needed to reuse the tape to record the next episode. R.I.P. Patrick McGoohan, clearly more than just a number. Current Mood: contemplative (Comment on this)
Sunday, January 11th, 2009
2:00 am	One week survived - four more to go! Well, I see young Mark got through this weeks' public vote on Eurovision: Your Country Needs You! - thanks to everyone who voted. I see my brother Emyr and his family made it to the studio in time - in the audience shot 90 seconds into the show the three people in white t-shirts are him, my sister-in-law Joyce, and my nephew Peter, though the BBC artfully positioned other audience members so the cameras couldn't see who the t-shirts were advising to "Vote for..."! I shall have to phone them when they've had a chance to recover, tomorrow. Current Mood: happy (Comment on this)
Friday, January 9th, 2009
7:19 pm	I almost hesitate to ask... I wasn't watching much tv last weekend, so I was rather surprised when I phoned my brother tonight to discover that I have a tv star, or at least an asteroid, in my broader family. Yes, I'm referring to "Eurovision: Your Country Needs You"! I know the whole Eurovision thing is as cheesy as Cheddar Gorge, but if my readers in the UK could see their way to voting for Mark on the BBC1 show tomorrow night (1840-1945).... Mark's my brother's nephew - his mum's my sister-in-law's sister - and has actually been making a bit of a reputation for himself on stage in recent years, he was one of the leads in the Hammersmith production of High School Musical earlier this year, and he's been in the West End production of Spamalot. I'm told there's a peoplecarrier full of family making its way from north Wales to Shepherd's Bush tomorrow afternoon for the show (4 or 5 hours each way), and depending on how things go, this could become a weekly trek. Current Mood: surprised (Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 24th, 2008
3:41 pm	Last rush before the break... Starting my winter break today (no work until the 5th... yay!), I was just doing a bit of last minute shopping - well, treating myself really, since the sales seem to have started early. Caught the 1111 train from Crewe to Manchester, and despite Virgin warning that they've got "boarding controls" at Euston over the holiday period this train (probably about 0940 from Euston) wasn't in the least busy - and I'm not just saying this because I was the only person in one of the first class coaches, standard wasn't very full either. Central Manchester wasn't terribly busy for the last day before Christmas, I'd say it was just "comfortable", unlike Birmingham a few weekends ago when you could barely move for the crowds. Was a bit surprised at the number of people wearing wooly hats or even Andean Indian style hats, and generally looking like they're venturing into the Arctic. I took out the fleece lining of my jacket yesterday because I was uncomfortably warm, and didn't zip it closed at all today. I always thought I was a bit nesh, but I seem to be the epitome of hardiness in comparison to many! The weather was actually quite pleasant in Manchester - bright, with lots of blue sky with high cloud, though just a few miles from Crewe we're back into an overcast grey Christmas. Heard on the radio this morning that Zavvi's gone into administration, which is a pity - I didn't buy from them that often, but the advantage of visiting a physical CD/DVD/Blu-Ray shop is that you can browse the shelves easier than you can online, and spot something that you'd like to buy. Today they were offering 2 Blu-Ray films for £25, which is a more reasonable price than the usual Blu-Ray price, so I bought a few despite only being able to play them on one of my laptops. Back home with my last few treats in the fridge by 1440, so now to pig out in front of the tv for a few days! Merry Christmas to one and all. :) Current Mood: cheerful (Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 16th, 2008
12:35 am	High speed travel London to Glasgow in five minutes courtesy of the BBC. If you get off the train at the stop at 1 minute 7 seconds, you can walk to my house in about 8 minutes... The station stops are Crewe, Warrington Bank Quay, Wigan North Western, Preston, Lancaster, Oxenholme, Carlisle, and Glasgow Central. Current Mood: Dizzy (Comment on this)
Thursday, December 11th, 2008
8:34 pm	You don't see that every day... I was walking home from work tonight, along Crewe's Nantwich Road (visitors may know it as the road Crewe railway station's on) when emerging from the darkness at a junction I spied a rather unusual motorbike and sidecar combination on the trailer behind a van. I was astonished to see it was no ordinary sidecar, it was a hearse, and rather tastefully turned out too. I've never seen one of those before but a quick read of the towing van told me it was the property of Motorcycle Funerals Ltd, who seem to have a small fleet of them. You don't see one of those every day. Current Mood: cheerful (Comment on this)