Would you.....

....apply for a job by email if your email address was (name)_is_sex@....? I never fail to be astounded. We are currently recruiting new staff and this was the email address of someone requesting an application pack. Wouldn't you just ring up instead if you had that email address?
I will be short-listing for interviews on Tuesday. Should be fun.

A little nostalgia

Plashing Vole's Friday conundrum was about what sort of leaves are the best for piling up and running through. I used to love doing this as a child and I still cannot resist the urge to kick a pile of crisp leaves, especially if someone else has tidily swept them up! I loved autumn... helping my dad collect up all the leaves in the garden and barrowing them to the compost heap (though the year I put the garden fork through my foot was not the best!), conker collecting followed by the conker fights, bonfire night. Now, just the smell of a crisp autumn morning can bring back all the childhood memories.
When I think back to all the things I enjoyed doing when I was young, it was invariably the things that cost no money that created the most pleasure for me- making perfume out of rose petals (smelled nice the day you made it but fairly rank once it had been in the jar a day or two!), making dens, recreating the Olympics in the back garden, playing 40-40 (a cross between hide-and-seek and tic with a base), putting on shows in each others houses, making things out of junk, ball games and skipping rope games, dressing up and role play games.
I loved bike riding and roller skating. Sunday mornings when I was about 10 were eagerly awaited as my Dad used to take me and my brother to the local roller-disco whilst mum was preparing the Sunday lunch...what could be better than skating round a sports hall in circles for an hour to the likes of Aha and Wham! In the winter (when winter really was winter) we made huge snowmen and igloos and we had a fab sledging field just down the lane- I used to get the same mix of feelings of excitement and anxiety the first time down the hill that in later years I got from going on a rollercoaster.
If you were to ask me what were my favourite things to do as a child, these are the sorts of things I would tell you about. What are your memories of childhood and the games you used to play?

Would I cheat?....

Good afternoon. Had a good weekend? I spent an enjoyable couple of days in the company of my good friend Aidan and it was also all the better for having an extra day off work. We went for a mooch round Dagfields’ antiques centre yesterday after a hearty lunch at an excellent pub in Madeley, near Crewe, called the Offley Arms (it is run by my brother so I am not in the least biased!)- you should try it if you are ever in that neck of the woods, I can highly recommend the steak-in-ale pie.
A visit to the second-hand book shop at Dagfields was necessary to give Aidan his daily fix of book-buying. It wasn’t the best bookshop I have been in, being highly disorganised and cramped, but I managed to pick up a couple of copies of texts that I studied for my Latin A Level- the poetry of Catullus, in translation, and Virgil’s Aeneid Book IV, in Latin.
It’s strange that I used to enjoy Latin verse so much because I’ve never been a huge fan of poetry. When I was at school they used to make us write poems, which I found really difficult- the mere mention of poetry homework was enough to make me break out in a cold sweat! I remember once being so stressed about having to write a poem and not being able to do it that my dad wrote it for me. Great!....Not. To my horror the teacher decided it was good enough to enter into the school poetry competition…I have never hoped so much not to win something and, I hasten to add, I have never cheated at anything since.