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In order to shelter from the rain we HAD to go and get a cream tea. This offering has to be the largest scone we have ever seen in all our years of cream tea hunting. Straight after the Pasty lunch this is a real mission of gluttony and the clotted cream has the potential just to make things worse.
A pot of earl grey tea and perhaps a bucket for Madame sil vous plait
Its been a manic few weeks since I came back from the bike ride. What should have been a reasonably well managed tranche of work has turned into a sprint to the line for the half term break. The two weeks of relaxed lunchtime meetings and catching up with working colleagues yielded four new jobs that needed to be designed and tendered for. Days spent surfing the net for suitable Landys and then taking afternoons out to go and test drive them halved my availability to work when I thought I had it covered. – WRONG !
Anyhow we are here in East Devon near to Lyme Regis the home of the Jurassic Coast. The mudstone cliffs yield up fossils of long past Dinosaurs (like myself) and attract beardy fossil hunters from world wide. We are here for a few cream teas and a few days of caravan confinement to recharge the batteries and family bonding. Despite Peters growing scepticism of the value of being penned into a 20 foot tin box with his parents he just about keeps a lid on his grumbles and plays along with his parental burden.
The added excitement of driving five hours in a Landrover was a great bonus (for us boys) and having arrived without incident we were delighted to tick another box of approval on my insane purchase justification sheet. In fact last night as the river Axe overflowed from the torrential rain and gale force wind we hit a 2ft deep flood that covered all 7 feet of the Landrover but we just sailed (almost literally) through. Already the snorkel and the beast have proved themselves – Hooray !
Having taken a week to research a whim I am now the proud owner of this Landy. I would love to say that the combination of good business profits, an aging Volvo, the need to pull the caravan, all coupled with the inspiration of the Steve Jobs speech led to a considered and well researched purchase - but that would not be wholly true.
This is one of those instinctive desires that suddenly surfaced and one that sets boys apart from girls (and all other politically defined gender preferences that appear on local government forms). Show a man or a boy a Landy and somewhere deep down something stirs, like the desire in bears to shit in the woods. These machines are the Dinky toys of mid life crises and creature comfort for the bored suburban man.
The shorter wheelbase, more family acceptable version was the first plan, attached to a modest budget. This new acquisition failed in all respects to meet any of the initial criteria being very large and almost new.
This machine has had one lady owner from Ascot who used it for the 7 seats and the daily school run. The only off road this vehicle has done is bumping up and down the curb as she failed to parallel park it four mornings out of five as little Sebastian and his public school mates piled out the back shouting “attack” which way is Sandhurst mummy?!
As much as I loved the soft roader Volvo it really did serve to show where my life was. Safe, comfortable, grey, and worse automatic. Perhaps because of all of these factors I am in a position to do this ridiculous thing and exploit this fleeting window of stability. I am back in manual and can go off road with impunity, genuinely SMH in the wild again.
Either way its done now and I am SO excited !
Steven P. Jobs has died at the age of 56 and even me as an Apple blasphemer can see the significance of the loss but I cannot sign up to the constant Apple Moonie wailing and gnashing of teeth like the passing of a great prophet (perhaps that should be next year loss of profit). An inspirational entrepreneur and serial innovator who was able to wrap this up in his own denim clad style claimed personal electronics back for the new affluent youth. Brilliant.
There have been plenty of mails floating around with Jobs 2005 Stanford University speech imploring us to live life to the full and be reckless before we become entrenched and it is very good copy and fun to read. The irony is that the closing parts of the 2005 speech are about his cure from the cancer that just a few years later finally returned to kill him. Set against the live your own life, heady optimism message of the speech the painful and merciless end from cancer adds a little black irony to todays news. Mother nature is still stronger than the mighty Apple corporation.
Today as I drank my coffee I wondered if the world mourn Bill Gates in the same way as Jobs when he dies? Will anyone remember the invention of the windows system, word, excel and PowerPoint that still dominate our daily communications and how I am writing this blog now ?
What about the insane amounts of money ($35.5 BILLION) Gates has endowed and mobilised from people like Warren Buffet for HIV aids, malaria, child mortality, and famine relief that will continue to dwarf governmental aid programs long after Bill, Melinda and Warren have passed away.?
Of course he will not be offered the same ritual outpouring from the world of the shiny white Moonies.
On May 26th last year Apple became worth more than Microsoft at $222.12 Billion (compared to Microsoft's $219.18 billion) and it will be interesting to see if an Apple Foundation in Job’s name emerges.
For me that really will make things better and the Job’s legacy will then be more than an army of people attached to shiny white slabs of technology that become redundant the day they are released. He really will be making a lifetime difference for someone - just as he said in his speeches.
What's the difference – Well it depends where your values are I guess