My lovely local bar on Fore Street in Exeter will be calling last orders at the bar for the final time this Saturday. I have a lot of good memories of this place and fond memories of the people that I met within it and the friendly atmosphere and smiling happy faces the greeted me in it. It is my number one place to go to unwind and sing a tune at at the end of the week on their karaoke night on a Thursday.
For a few reasons with which I will never truly probably know the exact in and outs of it has struggled at the moment which has effected foot fall and in truth became a little bit of a viscous cycle of potential decline.
Damien the lovely landlord would at time struggle to hire staff to help him with serving drinks or keeping the place clean and that meant people could come into the bar without knowing whether their particular drink would be being served or wether the toilets had been cleaned and supplied with toilet roll that evening.
Damien is the handsome pirate dude on the right
I did fear this day would come and so have been trying to find a nice bar in Exeter to go into once a week but nothing comes close to the Arcade really, when I make my last trip out this week I must try and remember to get peoples phone numbers that are not on facebook and make sure I try and keep in contact with them.
The one consistent thing that never changes about life no matter how hard you plan, hope or pray it won’t, is that people and places continue to evolve and change. Whether through circumstance within or out of our control and the closing of this bar is just another one of those constantly changing things.
Damien is a young man in his early 30’s, mind you and he is very much looking to his next pub venture in Exeter and he does a man with white van service for those looking to shift some stuff around and earn him some extra cash.
White van man Damien
So this Thursday I am planning on going to the Arcade for their last karaoke night in their present venue and look forward to also seeing the lovely pub dog Checkers.
We celebrated my mum’s 70th birthday this week. We went to the Tom Cobley Tavern, which is a lovely pub in the village of Spreyton where I grew up. We all have such good memories of this place and Mum, Dad and Dad’s partner have not all been here for quite a few years and we have certainly not been here all together for a while too. We all had a lovely day with mum and Dad and Dad’s partner Shamen catching up with old friends from the village of Spreyton. There were 12 of us at the meal in the bar which Dad also used to work in and the meal was lovely and the cake that we had made for Mum’s birthday looked beautiful and tasted absolutely delicious.
I have just watched the following speech which I would definitely recommend you watch too about the power of words.
Mohammed Qahtani – The Power of words
I love to write words and speak them at times, to change or influence a point of view or perception on reality or life.
A friend of mine discovered or invented the phrase “a social hand grenade” as soon as I heard it I thought what a cool expression, what it meant was to throw a word or phrase into a conversation that would have maximum impact and if you did it to the right person or people at the right time to blow their mind too. I thought to myself what a great concept.
Over the years I have tried to put words into a conversation so as to have a positive impact on the person that I am speaking to rather than a negative. Although more often than not in the sad and disappointing times of my life when I have been sad and angry I have said things that still haunt me to this day.
More often than not to women that I thought had spurned me or decided they were openly no longer or perhaps never even had been in love with me. I remember to this day not perhaps the exact words that I said but the memory of a moment in which those words were said and though they can never be taken back nor the moment vanish from time I do hope I have learnt from those occasions so that in the future in a similar circumstance I do not try to feed my own ego by trying to bring someone else down.
If life has hopefully taught me any lesson it is the one that conflict through words and deeds just for the sheer sake of it bears as much fruitful as a cherry tree in the desert with no water.
Last week there were and still are a number of ongoing difficulties affecting people that I care a great deal about and there have been some real tragedies and sadness as well as financial difficulties and obstacles affecting friends in and around Exeter – some of those troubles might be sorted overnight some might take a lifetime to be worked upon (or what feels like a lifetime anyway).
I hope those of you going though difficulties at this time know that you are loved, respected and admired for doing your best and trying your hardest to do what you can do with all you have.
I just want to say you are not alone, have never been alone and with the friendship and family you have and with the strength and depth of your characters you can do and be what you choose to do and be.
My brother had a Native American spirit guide that would assist and guide him in both times of peace and chaos and I love the concepts that I read about Native American culture, philosophy and music and with that in mind I try to express how I feel about loved ones and friends today through there perceptions beliefs and below music too.
Yeha-Noha (Wishes of happiness and prosper) – Sacred Spirit
I went out with a lovely woman once for a time, who did not have a lot of money, but when she would get drunk on our way home from a night out, she would give money and spend time with the homeless on the streets of Exeter and talk to them. I though it to be the cutest and most revealingly thing about her true personality and absolutely adorable.
This decade has been a weird one so far if I am honest and this year in particular when people talk about inflation rocketing up, I and many others are really feeling the pinch this year. Cash goes out of my account these days quicker than I dare to imagine it ever could. I am fortunate in that I have a reasonably steady job on the highest wage I have ever been paid and they plan to hopefully continue to increase my wage year on year, it just takes the bosses and unions a long time to each agree what that pay rise will be. But I am finding things a little challenging and costs come into your life that you were not expecting and things have to be bought.
I had someone come back to my house after an evening out a local bar back in July and it made me feel a little embarrassed about how old and tatty my lounge furniture is, I have had it all for about 12 years and the furniture was second hand from a charity shop when I bought it new to me, so I have been thinking of getting rid of it for a while.
So I finally bit the bullet and splashed the cash and I am getting rid of my old sofa and chair this week and having a new one delivered next week. The following week will feel weird having no sofa or lounge chair to sit until the new one is delivered. Also my dad is moving to Taunton to live with his partner in October and so I am always hoping my place is welcoming enough and clean enough for family to stay here when and if they need to. So it’s a sofa bed that I have bought that hopefully friends and family can occasionally make use of if they need to stay.
As well as the odd unexpected large item to buy, I do really notice this year more than most how utility bills and food bills have just rocketed up this year. Some of my friends are on benefits and out of work for a variety of genuine employment and health reasons and I do fear for their finances more so than my own. The government is not nor has it ever been geared up to help and support people in any great capacity it merely assists many that cannot work through employment or health reasons to survive and not actually live.
I will always do my best to stay in work, maintain my own health as best I can and look after myself and my work colleagues due to the simple truth that I cannot afford to be out of work. I am so privileged to have a housing association property that keeps my rent down, but there are many bills that we must all pay the same for. If I was on benefits and out of work I have no idea how I could pay for both a mobile phone and Wi-Fi at home. Both very much staple necessities of a modern life but how you pay for them on benefits I just have no idea.
The idea of being in my home 24/7 with no work, phone or Wi-Fi really is a scary poverty fearing potential reality for me if I ever were to become unemployed in the future. Both my parents love me very much but neither are in a position to financially support me if I were to get in trouble and so I very much do my best to support myself.
Though this should in no way be a poor me post, I have my health, a job that I enjoy that pays enough to keep the wolves from my door and a little bit more.
Not quite an epic Lord of the Rings tale to tell more of a searcher of the shops internet sale. I ordered a coat back in January 2023, and somehow it turned up on my door step today for the second time! I had been searching for a good, waterproof winter style coat in my size. How hard could it be to find something like that you might think and say. Well I’m a big feller and so my size for a coat is a UK XXXL that not a Chinese size or American or European size but UK. I have been this size for over 8 years now and though I would love to shift some weight I am also struggling to try and make sure I don’t put any more on.
So I had been using the digital ecommerce unholy trinity of Amazon, Google and Microsoft to try and search and purchase a new coat, again waterproof, warm and the right size and my efforts resulted in me purchasing what I thought was a US made and sized coat that looked nice on the advert and also allegedly on sale for what I thought was £70 so not cheap but not too expensive either.
When the coat arrived I knew straight away it was sadly too small and also not great quality. So was either going to donate it to a charity shop or return to sender? After discussing the issue with my ma we both though I should send back to supplier. So I emailed them and found out how much it would cost to send back to them and the address I needed to send it too.
I posting it back to China for £26 and including the £19 I was charged for postage and insurance originally this venture has cost me about £120 so it was not a not unusable coat to purchase for me. But I would be prepared to pay that amount if I could actually wear the darn coat in my size and not have to post it back to get my £70 back.
I posted it back to China with a very exact and detailed postal address and also a small letter inside stating my name and address and order number so as not to avoid any confusion to ensure I got my refund. The item was posted international royal mail and arrived in china within a week or so but then sat in the depo awaiting collection buy the business that I had purchased it from. I contacted them sending evidence of where the coat was in China and by April this year I got my £75 refund for the coat. Job done I thought and that was that.
Well that is until this morning when I get a knock at the door from the postman and he has a parcel in his hand for me from China, it’s the exact same parcel I posted to them back in February this year with a little Chinese label on it saying it had been refused to be accepted by the people that I had purchased it off. So it looks like it is still going to the charity shop as a donation after all.
It just so happens I have a charity collection here this Friday to pick up some clothes and a chair so they will be able to have the coat at the same time, its unused and should make someone a nice gift (so long as it fits them!) Even thought this coat has yet to find an owner it has already done more travelling around the globe than me, travelling from China to me and then back to China and back to me, in its short little lifetime its done quite a few miles. I’m a little jealous of its ventures but also quite impressed.
Me and Dad in a bar on Ragland Road in Tramore Ireland August 2018 I love this photo of my dad, in this picture there is a white sign which reads ‘Parents are responsible for their children at all times” I think we both looked after or acted responsibly or irresponsibly in equal measure on the holiday.
When we travelled to Ireland for the holiday we stayed in Wexford, Tramore, Dublin and Leopardstown. One of the reasons we went to county Wexford was because it was where Dad went on his holidays by the beach as a boy. We also stayed at the Faye Guest House in Wexford Town and then travelled by train to Tramore and went off to see the horse racing there too.
Entrance to Faye Guest House – Wexford
It was the first time me and Dad had gone on holiday to Ireland together and there was a little racing, drinking, eating and also a chance to see one of my all time favourite bands called the Waterboys sing whole of the moon on a moon lit night in Leopardstown.
Waterboys Band
It just so happens that it is my dad’s birthday tomorrow the 13th August and when we were in Ireland we planned the holiday so that we were there for his birthday too.
I am such a huge fan of Ireland with the music, the people and company and culture. As well as the food, drink and hospitality. They love to party and enjoy the company of good people as well as a pint of Guinness and a punt at the horse racing – what is not to love.
South West Water was formed in 1989 when the water industry in the United Kingdom was privatised. It is responsible for the supply of the region’s drinking water, the treatment and disposal of sewage, and the protection of inland and bathing waters. You would think something like water would be a great industry to be involved in, potentially profitable for those running it while also being a public good where customers benefit from clean water in the tap, in their rivers and at the beaches.
Sadly that is not the business model that exists and it make me think if a human capitalist organisation can fail to run something as simple and beneficial as the water that you drink then what other private companies also failing to run or do damage to our eco systems when operating. I know that to exploit an individual whether customer or employee is to produce profit, it therefore logical to assume that many organisations do inflict damage on the environment as a means of making money and generating profit.
Pollution in the UK waterways is a major problem and at a time of increased global climate change and damage and degradation to eco systems, the pollution pumped into our local waterways by the water industries is continuing to cause damage and illness to living organisms.
Earlier this year South West Water was given a £2.1m fine for pollution offences which is the largest ever fine imposed for environmental offences in Devon and Cornwall. Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) a marine conservation charity working with communities to protect oceans, waves, beaches and marine life. It was created in 1990 by a group of Cornish surfer’s. According to Surfers Against Sewage the issues causing the sewage pollution crisis are that the UK’s antiquated sewerage system is woefully inadequate. Water companies have failed to invest to protect the coastal and river environment. They instead rely on a network of around 18,000 licensed sewer overflows to routinely discharge raw sewage into rivers and the ocean. In 2021 alone sewage discharged into rivers and seas 370,000 times for a total of 2.7 million hours.
Polluters have simply been profiteering from polluting. Water companies have paid out an eyewatering £60 billion in dividends to shareholders over the last 30 years. And CEOs are often granted six figure pay packets every year. And to make things worse, the government are now allowing water companies to self monitor their environmental performance resulting in ever increasing abuses of the system. In 2021, Southern Water were fined £90 million for serial misreporting and the Environment Agency and Ofwat have launched the largest ever investigation of water company behaviour after water companies admitted they may have illegally released untreated sewage into rivers and waterways. The weak enforcement of existing regulation from consistently underfunded and under resourced environment agencies means there is no effective driver to ensure water companies change their behaviour.
And as if the stench of the sewage stink could not get any worse, the current water quality testing regimes designed to protect water users and the environment are set up to fail us. Evidence shows that we have a water quality testing regime that wilfully discounts and ignores the worst pollution events in the country and thus misleads the public about the safety of the waters.
South West Water PR gurus seem to be a million miles away from the reality above while pumping sewage into our water systems they are also pumping out press releases asking their customers to urge to conserve water and save the planet! If only SWW could take their own advice.
One thing about capitalist ventures that often fails an eco system or environment is that you cannot quantify the profitability or loss to an environment when you fail to look after it. There is no loss in earnings to having a failed ecosystem merely ever decreasing resources that you then pay more for. Regulations of a safe and sustainable system is not at the heart of how to run a profitable capitalist good or utility and yet effective regulation in a capitalist venture that ensures effective management, clean waters and the risk of having the ownership of the business taken away if the company is clearly failing to do the one thing it was created to do which is provide clean water. There is a huge risk with capitalist ventures that they merely risk putting into their calculations an amount of money put aside for paying for pollution breaches rather than using that money to prevent them in the first place. This does a disservice to the ecosystems that the water companies have been created to clean and protect and also demonstrates where capitalism is failing at the expense of our living environment.
The UK is littered with failed utilities and public goods from the 1980 and 90’s selloff and cull of public services we were peddled the view and principle that profits are good and ownership by the state bad. If these water companies were still run as a public owned utility what is happening today would be a political scandal but seeing as its a private company, the morality of the situation is just written off as a fat cat boss profiteering at the expense of its own customers and the environment, it’s what capitalists do so who really cares.
If and when historians look back on Trumps time in and outside of office it will be with great shame and distain and yet in America it appears at present the more that prosecutors reveal about the former president and the more he shouts out that its all lies and their all out to get him like the commies that they are, the more people love and support Trumps point of view over that of members of the judiciary.
I hope and like to think that if this sort of circus had happened in the UK (which to some extent it did with Boris Johnsons proven incompetence at the time of him being in office during Covid-19 that we would have ousted him out of power (which we did, eventually). Where as in America the populace seem to be hell bent on putting Donald Trump back into power. Almost as a means of cutting of your political nose to spite your face.
I sometimes read on WordPress the views of people that at times I have followed their blogs closely or had my blog followed closely by, saying that the lefties are in some way unchristian (verging on satanic at times) to true Christians’, and this form of worship and belief appears to have appeal and widely spread across Christians who are Republicans across the USA and that those that support the left are to belittled and condemned as not true followers of the faith. This to my mind is in fact a most unintelligible or right wing republican indoctrinated position on the teachings of Christ.
‘And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the money changers, and the seats of them that sold doves, And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.’
I am not even a Christian and yet I have far more faith in the above teachings of Christ than I do a republican in the US today. I love Christ, I accept his teachings as a historical figure, but not as a god or as the son of god. All teachings should be put within the context of the time they were brought into this world and how they can and do impact on a society and a person within that society within the context of today, Christ could not teach on global warming as in the context of his time on earth it did not exist.
To me the ethics of Christ are to say do not exploit the teachings of god as merely a means to make money and cast aside the true meanings of Christ that of love of all and being charitable to your fellow man and women and not casting others aside to suffer for the sake of your own greed and need. Christ is not a Republican and in my mind the USA should not be telling its people they must continue to breed because it is ungodly to have an abortion, even when they cannot afford to raise their next child, or tell the lone gunman to keep buying those guns to go on and kill because it’s a profitable industry of which the death of further citizens, is just a by product of and of course the solution to those deaths is to buy more guns right.
Global warming is bound to be in the line of fire for republican law makers it is just a question of time and money. Republicans seem to vote at the altar money and profitability and greed consistently (described as being ok because it’s a capitalist ethic right) at the expense of even greater suffering and the demise of America as a once great nation, while the world watches on in despair on the side lines. Is the American dream now a long forgotten thing that to many has become a nightmare and like the rise of all great nations such as with the Roman Empire with its eventual decadence and demise is America blindly preparing the foundations for its own fall by re-electing Donald Trump into the White House?
Faith No More – Epic [Official Music Video], Full HD (Digitally Remastered and Upscaled)
So I went to karaoke last Thursday and sang some songs that I had never sung before, I also sang a song that I had sung before but did it much better this time. Due to a number of reasons I had a mixture of emotions while singing but I hope I did the songs justice. Sadly Sinead O’Connor had just passed away a day before, so I tried to sing ‘Nothing Compares to You’, a song in honour of her passing.
Two of the most empowering and awesome female singers in the world and from Ireland are now no longer with us that is Dolores O’Riordan former lead singer of the Cranberries and also of course Sinead O’Connor, they and their sweet sounding musical talent will be sorely missed and I also sang for the first time ‘No Need to Argue’ by the Cranberries which went down well too. The bar was quite, which I like when it is like that I feel like I’m singing to friends on nights like that.
I never got to see the Cranberries or Sinead O’Conner sing live, I assume that they have not sung in the South West of England that often or if they did it would have been at Glastonbury in a year I was not at the festival. With regard to Irish bands that I have seen though I got to see The Waterboys briefly sing at a race course on the outskirts of Dublin once, they even sang ‘Whole of the Moon’ with the moon out and visible, it was a really special time to be there too.
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