{"id":1991,"date":"2021-03-18T20:28:02","date_gmt":"2021-03-18T20:28:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/?p=1991"},"modified":"2021-03-18T20:47:51","modified_gmt":"2021-03-18T20:47:51","slug":"thursday-18th-march-2021-day-367","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/2021\/03\/18\/thursday-18th-march-2021-day-367\/","title":{"rendered":"Thursday, 18th March, 2021 [Day 367]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today was quite a mild, cloudy day but no rain was forecast. We\u00a0<\/span>are a little\u00a0delayed as we often are on a Thursday morning as the\u00a0Waitrose<\/em> order had been\u00a0delivered and we needed to put all of the provisions away before we set out on our walk. Having collected our\u00a0newspapers, I could not resist telling our newsagent a joke that had been running through my head for the last day or so i.e. ‘ How does an agnostic, dyslexic, insomniac spend their time?<\/em>‘ to which the answer is ‘They lay awake all night, wondering whether or not there is a dog<\/em>‘ I know it’s a crap joke but it is a little quirky. \u00a0After we had\u00a0picked our newspapers, we needed to go into the town to send off a\u00a0condolence card following the death of one our oldest academic mentors and friends in Spain. – so we needed to go to the Post Office (now housed in W H Smiths)<\/em> to get this posted. On our way, we passed a little ‘ecological’ shop that sells all kinds of sustainable products and we purchased a little bar of\u00a0soap, complete in its tin.\u00a0Actually, if the truth be known, I only actually wanted the tin because I had spotted it some time beforehand and I thought that it\u00a0might make a suitable heatsink to help to keep an external\u00a0disk drive cool.\u00a0This is because\u00a0according to my\u00a0researches, disk drives might only have a life of about 5 years (although I have several considerably older than this) and excess heat is one factor\u00a0that\u00a0could\u00a0well shorten their life. Having completed\u00a0our little foray into the High Street, we made our way into the park and coincided as we almost always do these days with our University of Birmingham friend. We had two very long and interesting but not-connected conversations. The first of these was a\u00a0discussion of a video that Meg and I had stumbled upon by the classicist Mary Beard on the subject of ‘whiteness’ (with\u00a0reference to skin colour) in Roman society. \u00a0I said that I would hunt out the video link as we had only watched it\u00a0recently which I did later on in the afternoon and then sent it on. Then we got onto the topic of the statistical connection\u00a0between ‘O’-levels and ‘A’-levels \u00a0and academic progress in\u00a0degree courses. I had\u00a0researched and then written up a\u00a0couple of papers, one dating to my time in the (then) Leicester Polytechnic and the second written when I was at King Alfred’s College in Winchester. We were so delayed by our extended conversations that it was\u00a0terriblly late when we got\u00a0home for lunch being\u00a0practically 2.00pm in the afternoon so we had to raid our store cupboard for a tin of quality\u00a0stewing steak which we employ when we need to get an instant meal in about two\u00a0minutes. After lunch, I\u00a0thought I would see if I could hunt out the couple of papers I had written and by some kind of miracle, I managed to locate them after about one minute of looking for them (one paper was 30 years old and the other was 20 years old so I impressed myself with my own efficiency – or good luck!) Anyway, I will pass these on to my friend to read to see if the findings from the students that I taught all of those years ago had the same degree of applicability to our friend’s students.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

After lunch, I needed to make a lightning visit into town to return a defective disk drive\u00a0back to Amazon (it worked for about a week and then refuse to format) I had got a QR code on my phone and so, in theory, I could go into one of the shops that are an agency which will scan my phone, print off the label and then return the\u00a0item to Amazon. The first shop to which I went and which I had used before shut its doors about 10 seconds\u00a0before\u00a0I got there. So then I went off to a\u00a0<\/span>newsagents that I know had a system of\u00a0Amazon lockers but they didn’t have the label printing facility. So I went off to a third shop but they\u00a0were only agents for Hermes carriers and not UPS so\u00a0my QR code was not recognised. They recommended me to another shop at which I also drew a blank. Frustrated I came home for a consoling\u00a0cup of tea and consulted the web as to which shop in the area I could use for an Amazon return. I found an off-license that accepted my parcel back (and gave me a receipt) and the ironic thing is that this shop was the next door neighbour\u00a0but one to the first shop I had tried. All I have to do now is hope that the refund systems within Amazon work the way they should (they have aways worked superbly well in the past,\u00a0I must say)<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today was quite a mild, cloudy day but no rain was forecast. We\u00a0are a little\u00a0delayed as we often are on a Thursday morning as the\u00a0Waitrose order had been\u00a0delivered and we needed to put all of the provisions away before we set out on our walk. Having collected our\u00a0newspapers, I could not resist telling our newsagent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1991"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1991\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1997,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1991\/revisions\/1997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}