Windsor & Wii

We went over to Windsor this afternoon, following a wii surprise this morning in Kingston. Games had to be bought, so we thought we'd go and see what Windsor had to offer. It's a very nice town, and definitely getting in to the Christmas spirit! We had animatronic reindeer, carol singing butchers, the lot. The Queen's Christmas tree up at the castle was also a rather good effort I think!

Guildford fog

I had the day off today so we decided to brave to cold to go and pick up some new gloves, and do a bit of window shopping in Guildford. As we got further and further from Oxted, the fog descended. By the time we got to Abinger Hammer, we couldn't see much more than 5 metres in front of the car, and by Gomshall we had some kind of black bin bag attached to to the underside of our car, and stinking as it melded itself to something important.. lol, oh well!

Anyway we stopped off at Newlands Corner on the way, for some chips & mayo to warm up, and decided to take a few piccies of the fog! I think it looks sufficiently frosty.

Scary teen slang

Lol. I am starting to think that perhaps I am no longer 'down wit' the youth of today', and 'talkin' da lingo'. I just thought I'd post this funny link that Ruth sent me. It's a BBC quiz on modern teen slang, so you can see how many words you actually recognise. Apparently, according to a study by Lancaster uni, teenagers use just 20 words to comprise a third of their speech. Lol, and I'm quite sure I don't know any of them. (I managed to get 3/10 in that little quiz through pure multiple choice guesswork, is it just me?!)

I was also thinking this earlier in the week when I went up to Barnet again, for the team meeting/all day lunch, and one of my colleagues mentioned that her teenage son referred to his girlfriend, as his 'link'. Now that's a new one on me! Apparently it signifies an 'open' relationship, but the 'link' can only go out with other people that are linked in some kind of network.. it all sounds far too complicated to me!

It's crazy how quickly this new language has developed, it sounds to me a little like a McDonald's menu crossed with Nadsat, the language of Alex and his droogies in Burgess' 'A Clockwork Orange'. Eek, lets just hope the ultraviolence doesn't catch on too, or the jelly moulds come to that.



Here's a quick festive photo I snapped at Victoria, on my way back from London.. if you look really closely you can see a Christmas tree in there! I just thought it looked pretty..

Wow, fame!

This family history stuff is so interesting! Yesterday my uncle happened to mention that he'd been speaking on the phone to a relative of ours, and it came up in conversation that one of her uncles had been a famous art forger. Well, with a bit of investigation, I found him, his name was sitting right there in our family tree, with the profession of 'painter' listed! So it turns out that Tom Keating was my grandfather's cousin! You can read about him on wikipedia, see his work at the Bridgeman Art Library, more images here, and buy his work from the Sygun Museum of Wales Sale of Surplus Items on ebay. Wow, who'da thought we'd have someone famous in our tree. I love that his Dad was a painter/decorator!

Strange thing at Oxted station..

Well, I was going to write about this on Thursday, but we seem to be having terrible trouble with ntl at the moment that's making the Internet soo slow/uncooperative! Interesting problem when you work from home, lol! (I notice it has a particular aversion to Friends Reunited admin for some reason, although I'm not sure I can blame it! My laptop didn't like genetic algorithms either, hmm.. ;P). Anyway, blogger has been a definite no-no for a while, but just at the moment it seems ok, so we'll see how long it will last before another mammoth phone call to ntl India is in order.

I'm sure you used to be able to ring them up and they would reset your box remotely to magic it better. Now it seems they can't. They tell you to disconnect all the cables in your house, running back to the phone to report after each one, turn everything off, then plug everything in again. He then got rid of me by saying I needed to wait 5 mins before turning anything on again. I was on the phone the first time for about an hour and a half, and he effectively told me in a very laborious manner that I needed to reset my box. Which I'd already done before phoning, hmm... Needless to say, it didn't work, so I had to phone up again! This time I said which particular website was being slow, and let him know that no-one else at work was having trouble with it, and he replied with the very helpful response "Well, it looks alright for me, madam". Lol. In the end he just ended up telling me to change my proxy server address by one digit, which seemed to help for some reason, but the speed does still seem to be fluctuating, a lot. Well, I don't know..

Lol anyway, there was a point to this post other than ranting on about ntl..

On Thursday evening we wandered over to the Oxted Inn for supper, and spotted some kind of incident at the train station. I'd been wondering what was going on because of the unusual number of sirens I'd heard going past the house earlier. Anyway, when we got to the station there were three ambulances parked outside, all deserted, but with the doors left wide open and the lights flashing. We were going to have a look inside the station to see if we could see what the matter was, but just as we got there the ticket guy had just locked up the front door so no one could get in. What I found strange was that there were no police, and the place seemed to be deserted. I would have thought that anything that would warrant three ambulances would also require the police, but maybe they'd already left. I'd just really like to know what it was, nosy as I am. It did seem odd!