Be The Jam

I have got a bit behind with what is going on lately so here is a quick update, hopefully things will get back to some sort of semblance of normality after this.  

It is a little annoying that most of my time and effort of late has been spent dealing with modernity rather than learning new and funky survival tricks and getting fit. I have, however, come up with a plan to  deal with the mass of red tape that now threatens to engulf me.

 I call this plan Operation Ignore It (OII)

Received wisdom dictates that ignoring official looking letters and the like is not a good thing and there is a lot of ground in this argument but there comes a point when only OII can help. For example I have spent a great deal of the last three weeks in the bank trying to sort a problem out - I now forget what the original problem was - and all I got out of it was stressed and angry. I would go to the bank, wait, wait some more, wait, get bored of waiting, wait some more and then get to speak to some one. After explaining the problem three or four times they would finally grasp that they didn't have a clue what I was talking about and tell me that I would have to talk to someone else. This would usually involve more waiting. When I finally managed to speak to someone who seemed to understand what was going on we would come to an agreement and I would leave feeling quite happy and a little bit guilty for thinking them to be completely incompetent earlier in the day. A day or two later I would discover that rather than doing what they had agreed they had done something else completely and so I would have to go back to the bank and start the whole process again but this time when speaking to the, different, person who seemed to know what they were talking about I would have to explain not only what had gone wrong this time but also what had gone wrong before that in order to arrive at the point where things went wrong again. After the seventh or eighth trip to the bank I began to forget what had happened in the first place. I realised recently that all I was getting out of going to the bank to complain about thing going wrong was that I was getting to go to the bank to complain; I have better things to do with my life then point out to the bank that there system is rubbish and they don't know what they are doing. So this time when they messed up I didn't go into complain, sure they still have made a mistake but at least I don't have to get stressed out about it or go and shout at anyone. The decision not to complain was made all the easier by the fact that for the first time they were not trying to charge me for their mistake, at least not yet. It seems then that there is a time to "let it go".

Not, I'm afraid to say, that OII can be applied to everything. Sadly there are a couple of organisations that I have done work for that have decided to ignore my requests for payment and I rather suspect that a cunning application of the principles OII will have little chance of getting money out of them.

 Gadgets

It started with a watch, I found an old watch the other day and started to wear it, apart for a couple of weeks in the spring this is the first time that I have had a watch or any kind of time piece about my person for nearly three years, it's quite useful. Then I found a compass that fits onto the watch strap, that had to go on, it's not very actuate but there are times when not very actuate is much better than walking around in circles. Then last weekend things went truly high tech, Rob gave me his old phone and a sim card. I haven't had a phone for, again, nearly three years and I was immediately hooked, the five pounds credit on the card went almost immediately on texting people to tell them that I now have a phone. Since then I have been inundated with text messages from Vodaphone encouraging me to join this price plan or that, it's almost as if they are trying to encourage me to spend more. Now that I have a phone with a camera I c an start to take photos of things and post them up here - just as soon as I can figure out how to get them off the phone and onto this world wide web thingy.

Rescuing my possessions from the storage facility on Wednesday was a bit of a shock, all I had was two rucksacks and two suitcases full of stuff - where did I put everything else? Looking through I discovered 6 mobile phones, some photos, lots of audio cables, a couple of changes of clothes and a few things to go on eBay. That was it, oh and a waterproof rucksack liner, why it never occurred to me that I might need a waterproof rucksack liner when going to live in the woods for a year I don't know. 

When I got back to the woods yesterday it seemed to be a good time to sort through all my possessions that I have there and try and get life in a bit more of an ordered state. I'm glad I did, I found a bit that has been missing from my jetboil so that will work as soon as I have picked up the new gauze from my parents. Jetboil have a 12 month guarantee to replace anything that wears out, I will take some photos of mine so you can see how worn out it got in just three months in the woods. I haven't been able to use it for ages as it got so worn out after those three months as to be unusable. I will be glad to have it working again, it will be like having a kettle - much easier than having to light a fire just to make tea in the morning.

The next gadget I found was my old Sigg petrol stove, it was this breaking that caused me to go buy the Jetboil. At the time it broke down I diagnosed that the pump on the fuel bottle had broken and as Sigg no longer make stoves and the pump was all incased in plastic it seemed as though that was the end of it. Yesterday I found the stove and bottle and soon realised that the bottle was half full of petrol. Petrol is fun. I attached the fuel hose to the bottle and, just for the sake of it, pumped the bottle up to add some pressure then turned the fuel tap on a little. To my delight petrol started to spurt out. There is only one thing to do with petrol spurting out of a hose. After a couple of minutes playing with my flame thrower it occurred to me that there was nothing wrong with the fuel bottle, it must be the stove that was broken. Indeed it was. Half an hour later the stove was taken apart, cleaned up, put back together, taken apart, put back together properly and then in an almighty fire ball it was working again. I'm not sure that it is supposed to create a ball of flame three feet high upon being lit but it did and it was exciting so I don't mind. So now I have  a jetboil that will soon work again and a petrol stove, this is going to make life quite a lot easier, some times when it is cold, dark, it has been raining for days on end and it is very late all I want to do is have a cup of tea and a bite to eat and go to bed. Spending half an hour coaxing a fire into life can in these situations be a little depressing.