Jennieworld Today

Yay! As of tomorrow (if all goes according to plan) I will be catching up with the modern age! Yes, that’s right, tomorrow afternoon, a very nice man (don’t know who he is, but I’m sure he’ll be lovely!) will be coming to install broadband and digital TV in my home! And not only will I have broadband, but it will be wireless! Which means that no longer will I have to sit in the coldest part of my flat whenever I want to surf the net or do my e-mails. And no longer will my husband be a laughing stock among his techy friends at work (he’s a techy-geek for an internet insurance company, so it hasn’t been a source of pride for him that we have been several years behind the times with our home IT capabilities). Also, I won’t ever have to miss another episode of Gavin and Stacey again! My best friend Maria introduced me to the first series by giving the box-set of dvds to my husband for Christmas, and now the second series is well underway and I’ve missed all of the episodes shown so far as this time they’re being screened on digital channel BBC3. Boo.

Anyway, I’ve really got to go and clear the way for the engineer to be able to access both the TV and the cable point on the wall, otherwise he may end up suing me for damages after tripping up on a TARDIS or a Big Rig Blaster! Oh, how fun my life is! Oh to be tidy! Oh (even more fervent wish) to have tidy children!

Some of my regular readers will remember that a couple of weeks ago I posted a blog about some council workers in Ceredigion who found a discarded bomb in a hedgerow. Those among you with good memories will also remember that I mentioned a story I remembered hearing from my Dad along similar lines. Well, he e-mailed me the story and has given me permission to post it here for you now.

“During the Second World War your grandfather (an Air Raid Warden at the time) acquired a German incendiary bomb of a type that had been dropped on England in vast numbers. Apparently it had been made safe and he used it as a paperweight on his desk. By the mid-1960s I had inherited the bomb and, on moving into a new flat in Nottingham, decided to get rid of it. Conveniently there was a Police Station on the opposite side of the road so I marched over there and planted the bomb on the desk in front of the Duty Sergeant saying “I have brought you a bomb”. Perhaps it was just as well that your grandmother’s Irish accent had not rubbed off on me or I might have been misunderstood at that point. However, his facial expression hadn’t changed even slightly from the moment that I entered the building. After all, total strangers were handing bombs to him every day weren’t they? It was nothing to get excited about.Instead he said “Right you are Sir, I will just type you a receipt” which he proceeded to do on an ancient upright typewriter. He then announced that he would put the bomb in a bucket of water and we parted company.While opening the door of my flat I began to have a nagging feeling that there was a reason for not putting those bombs in water. Did they contain phosphorus, which would react violently with water? I couldn’t remember but there was no time to lose theorizing. I just caught the sergeant on the phone before he finished filling the bucket. He thanked me and, a couple of minutes later, I saw the car pull out of the Police yard, blue light flashing, my bomb nestling cosily on the back seat. Did they drop it over the side of Trent Bridge I wonder? I will never know.