Flight School
After working as a rig geologist in the North Sea, I developed a real fear of flying. I really didn’t enjoy the helicopter rides and even fixed-wing aircraft rides scared me. If I knew I had to fly then I would worry for days before the flight. It was OK when I was working in the UK as flying wasn’t something that I did too frequently but when I moved to the USA, flying suddenly took on a whole new level of importance. Flying was viewed like taking a bus there. I knew something had to be done but what? As it turned out, there was an annual air show at Addison airport in Dallas. We decided it might be fun to go and we took our son. It was
Read More »Medium
There was a time growing up that I became interested in spiritualism. This was an interest my Mother was willing to share and we ended up taking a couple of trips to a spiritualist church in Hull. My Dad stayed home muttering something about ‘encouraging activity’, but was always interested in what had happened. He was, I believe, right. It both encouraged the activity in our house as well as made me more open to it. Attending a spiritualist church as a teenage boy was interesting. The first thing I noticed was that the vast majority of my fellow visitors where female and well over the age of 50. However, the mediums were often younger people I noticed. One evening, it was quite full as the medium was highly thought of
Read More »An Old Man in Scotland
Here is another true and strange tale of the paranormal. I will post a new strange true story each day so don’t miss them.This will be last until next Wednesday as its a long weekend public holiday here…. We were touring the west coast of Scotland for a day or two. We had set out from Glasgow that morning and fully intended to go back there that night but the day had been fun with lots to see and do and so by the time we entered Inverary it was already quite late. In fact, we had already visited Inverary jail that morning before motoring a bit further up the coastline so the idea of staying the night there seemed a good one and would give us more time to
Read More »Poltergeist
In the run up to Halloween, here is another true and strange tale of the paranormal. I will post a new strange true story each day so don’t miss them. up in my house was on the whole, pretty good. We had great parents, almost every weekend we were gone camping somewhere, we had two proper holidays each year and I have no complaints at all. Just a bunch of heartfelt thanks to my parents and a growing sense of awe as to how they did all that with three small boys and not a lot of money. When I was eleven, we moved. It was a good move to be honest from a terraced three up, two down in west Hull to a rather nice semi-detached outside of Hull.
Read More »Europe is on Vacation
August. Everyone seems to disappear in August. Usually by 2pm on a business day, I would have had close to 50 or so emails and I would be deep into multi-tasking a number of different activities. Today? I have had 1 email on my business account and perhaps 8 on my personal account. OK so the US is about to get to the office on the east coast and things may pick up but here in Europe – everyone but me is on holiday! Yes. The entire continent is on vacation for August it seems. On Friday, I sent an email to a list of contacts about a conference. I would say 95% returned an I am on vacation message! We also decided to spend the weekend at a spa
Read More »European Football Trip
I awoke yesterday morning with just a twinge of rising excitement. Later in the day, we would be off on a 200km road trip to watch Hull City in their European debut. Sometimes, you do get the feeling that events conspire against you though on days like this one and yesterday turned out to be challenging….. At around noon, as we made final preparations to leave, the skies opened. It rained so hard, Brno streets flooded within 30 minutes. Really, I have never seen so much rain here in the 7-years I have lived in the Czech Republic. If it was raining like this in Zilina there would be no game at all we thought. A check of the internet held out hope. The rain was more or less north-south
Read More »You Need A Degree For That
Once upon a time a degree was really something. Those letters after your name raised eyebrows especially if followed by the extra valued (Hons). Of course, when you went on and did the doctorate, well you could chose – letters after the name…. or before and then deliberately confuse people by changing that choice periodically. One minute you are Dr. XXXXX and the next you are incognito as XXXX Ph.D. Great fun! Actually, you could build up letters after your name by adding rather grand memberships of various societies too. In fact, you could wangle it so that, by joining the right societies, those letter actually spelled something meaningful – and sometimes you could make them spell something rude! Sometimes, over a beer or three, we young students would make
Read More »Reality Really is Weird
I am reading a book about the nature of reality. It has an interesting way of working its theme as it has you conduct experiments. This last two days, I was doing one of the experiments where you simply look everywhere and expect to see something. In my instance, I decided on a pink car. Don’t ask me why. It just seemed like something fairly rare…. I actually finished reading the instructions on my Kindle riding a bus to pick up my car from service on Friday. I decided, pink car and looked up. As my eyes refocused on the view through the back window of the bus I noticed another bus. It was white but…. it had huge pink stripes on it. I thought to myself “OK, thats not
Read More »Customer Service East of the Rhine….
I love living in the Czech Republic I really do. It is beautiful, relatively inexpensive (outside of Prague), full of very nice people and has great beer and food. One thing it lacks however is an understanding of what customer service is. When you live somewhere like the Czech Republic you really do begin to yearn for the American customer service experience. I say American because to be honest, British customer service isn’t all that great either…. but, its not this bad! Let me give you a small example. In an earlier post, I mentioned a bill for natural gas. The company in question is RWE, a major German energy company. You would think then that customer service would be high on the agenda of a company supplying energy to
Read More »That Time of The Year
Usually, as the cold leaden skies of February march onwards and inexorably towards spring, I find myself at the doctors. It could be a chest infection, some non-specific but painful ache or indeed any number of ailments. I know this because last year, my doctor noticed it. Every year, around March time, there is a spike in doctor visits from me. His diagnosis was that I suffer from SAD. Yep – Seasonal Affective Disorder….. otherwise known as seasonal depression. At first, I was a bit taken aback by this diagnosis but there it was right in front of me as the Doctor showed me how I am rarely if ever at the Doctor at all until the February-April period and then I am there frequently moaning about something. By the
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