Toilet duck...

The first moments of watching Father Jack, were taken up with Father Ted berating him for partaking of the comestible, commonly called Toilet Duck!

From then on we were totally hooked on the humour, the fun, and the idiocy of the whole programme, which was originally meant to be serious, apparently!

Goodbye, Father Jack!

'Feck off', comes the standard response...

Bugger - again...

Fecking gearbox decided to give me and Mrs Scroblene enormous grief today!

New Scrobsmobile beckons; probably a German car, as they don't strike like we all used to have to put up with! Old memories die hard - eventually...

Number 9; number 9; number 9...

In Scrobs's more irrational - even sombre and thoughtful moods, there occasionally pervades a feeling that when he tips over the edge into infinity, all the electrical impulses that kept him alive, might join up somewhere else, and create some sort of energetic momentum for others to use in their daily toil.

I'm not really sure of my grounds on this, (I'm only a humble builder), but it's a consideration worth keeping alight, as everything needs to be positive these days, even if the runes coming from the politicians, the banks, the insurance companies - in fact every business where they have to exist in enormous buildings in capital cities -  are stacked against a peaceful time for all normal ordinary citizens!

So imagine this...

Scrobs has left the planet, and his living forces are being used by someone else. These manifest themselves in some order, clearly to be utilised in some way by the grandchildren first, and even the daughts to a certain extent, although they've done so well for themselves, I'm learning from them even more now!

So these rays are also bouncing around the stratosphere, along with all the others from other citizens, and a good time is being had by all, unless you live in Syria, or Wolverhampton. The sparks are forming and new ideas are being filed for future reference. And it's these files which I want to look at more closely!

I use a computer quite a lot, for all my spreadsheets, the book I still haven't published, blogs like this etc, much the same as most people do these days. A lot of the information is kept in a 'cloud', presumably somewhere like Arizona, and the various gigabytes of information are stored safely - one hopes - for use again whenever they're needed.

Now, if Scrobs is no more, what happens to all the files in Tucson, or Phoenix? Will facilities have to be extended more and more, as the banks of storage chips fill up with photos, spreadsheets, emails etc? Will there be a back-up if the whole lot gets bashed by the Russians? Will they invent even smaller chips? (SIL once gave me a tiny chip which holds four Gb of info, and it's no bigger than JRT's dew claw. That's the equivalent of 2,857 floppy discs)!

Perhaps one day, all Scrobs's information in the cloud will somehow join with his own passed-on electrical persona, and create another cloud, maybe to be inspected by others, and laughed at - especially the pictures, and probably the bank statement, maybe the book...

(Why Number 9 you may ask? Well, The Beatles did a song called 'Revolution 9', during which some bloke came on and kept repeating 'Number 9'. So it became 'Cloud 9' for the purposes of this post, which has been created with the help of a large mug of Tesco's Finest Assam, and not a tincture in sight)!

Finding my kit for HQ...

After some considerable work in understanding the odds, I have worked out that I would be the two-hundred-and-nine thousandth player to receive a call from Eddie Jones, to join the England squad at Twickenham!

It's not an easy time, sitting by the telephone, waiting for the call, which would mean that I would have to rush out and buy some new boots, some thermal vests, a reinforced jock-strap, and, a new leather scrum cap with chin laces, to replace the one my dad used. I'd also have to get up in the roof, to see if indeed, Mrs Scroblene had sent my shorts to the dustman!

I'd have about three hours to dubbin the boots and file the nails in the studs, but pride of pride, I'd still have my own blue and white socks from my playing days at Hastings and Bexhill! They were used for years and never wore out, such that both Yd and ED had them for Father Christmas's numerous visits, and they still bear the loops stitching from being hung on their beds! I still wear them in my wellington boots, so Mrs Scroblene might have to do a power wash and perhaps an industrial bleach!

It's an exiting time, and while the call-up may be a little time away, I'll still wait near the landline (he hasn't got my mobile number for some reason), and wonder where I'll put my glasses when I pull that white shirt over my greying head...

Delicatessen search...

What happened to these delightful places?

Mrs Scroblene and Scrobs can hardly be described as foodies, but we still enjoy non-junk food, especially as we've grown a lot of it ourselves.

Several years ago, there used to be a fabulous shop in Rye High Street, known as Millers. We vaguely knew the owners, who both worked hard behind the counter, and my dad would spend ages in there, drooling over the great displays of hams and cheeses. He once bought a half-stilton, and religiously fed it with port until the Christmas celebrations started, and most of it had gone by the New Year...

These days, you have to search hard to find a place where you can buy the real thing, rather than a pre-packed, tasteless object with some silly name. We now find that it's quality rather than quantity which is the norm. Gone are the days of a big steak or a fat burger, so we search high and low for the best we can afford, and buy just a little of that particular comestible, and it seems to work too!

There is a new genre of farm shop appearing in various places too. Locally sourced groceries and fresh bread and fish all come at a premium, but at least it looks good, and just a couple of slices of this, and a small piece of that is becoming a bit of a habit these days.

I often wondered what our shopping habits would have been like had we stayed in Rye. Millers has long gone, and the Budgens is dire, so it would mean a car journey to Jempsons in Peasmarsh for the next best thing!

Or a good country farm shop...