Monday, December 15, 2008

nothing doing

Don’t sit down till you read this. It seems the standard for office chairs may have to be revised upwards in the near future. The requirements for chairs assume that users will weight no more than 100 kg but nowadays they often have to cater for people weighing 150 kg (I think that's 350 pounds in the old scale).

With ever increasing numbers of people being classed as “obese” it looks like chairs will have to be made stronger if we want to avoid having them collapse underneath us.

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Today was Monday and to be candid I didn’t accomplish a darned thing today. And I won’t apologise for it.

The last couple of weeks have been so hectic I wonder when I would have found time to go to the office had I still been employed. I’ve eaten so much turkey I feel as though we’ve already had Christmas, since I’ve been to two different Yuletide functions in three days.

Not to mention the time taken up with learning the game of croquet. I even threw my back out one week, enabling me to claim (for the first time in my life) that I was suffering from a “sporting injury” !

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I did take time out to finish reading Alexander McCall Smith’s novel The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency. This novel, set in Botswana, has been a world-wide bestseller and the start of a series. Smith has a real feel for the dusty little nation of Botswana, though he doesn’t paint it as a utopia; it may be peaceful compared to its fellow African nations, but there are all the usual problems common to humanity.

There are a couple of plot twists that would be at home in a more traditional crime novel, but it’s the atmosphere and the characters that really draw you in.

I’ll keep an eye out for other books in the series.

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You have to hand it to those Wurlitzer boys (and girls - don’t forget Beccy Cole) for the variety of music they produce. How many instruments could play not only “Nessun Dorma” but “Let’s Go To The Hop” in the same show?

You can download that week’s show here

And the following week is here