pumpkinstrokemarrow

I was quite pleased though. My current shaver, a hand-me-down from I forget quite where, was starting to sound as if the windings of the motor were giving out and was certainly quite old. So quite nice to have a smart new one. Quieter, lighter and more effective. I have even taken the plunge and got one which involved batteries, something which I have avoided in the past, but which seems to be mandatory now.

Instructions not so nice. They come in four portions and cater for 22 different languages and 8 different models in one fell swoop. I list them in descending order of surface area. Something called important information, which appears to mean stuff that no-one bothers to read but which covers the seller in the event of a health and safety flavoured incident. The guarantee, in the form of a piece of what looks like recycled paper, the size of 3 sheets of A4 and printed on both sides. No-one bothers to read. The user manual, a short document which eschews language in favour of small diagrams, rather like the sort of things you get on road signs. A bad attack of unintelligible logitis. But they have saved themselves the bother and space of translating the diagrams into words. An advertisement for accessories in the form of a glossy bit of A5. All in all, pretty useless. It does not tell me, for example, whether the thing comes ready charged and whether I will damage it by leaving it on charge overnight. Plus, to keep things simple for themselves, the plug for the charger is a two pin job, like you used to get on shavers, rather than the three pin affairs used in the rest of the house. Just as well we hung onto our supply of adaptors. Just as well the shaver itself seems to work OK.

Visits of a different sort on the occasion of Epsom's heritage day. Which seems to mean that the owners or occupiers of various old buildings volunteer to have heritage folk tramp around them for the day, an activity which turned out to be an ambulatory version of a pensioner outing on a bus, with nearly all the takers being ladies of pensionable age, with a few sheepish looking husbands, yours truly included, tagging along.

We did three buildings and a church, which turned out to be more interesting than one might of thought. The oldest building was owned by a property company which was owned by the GP partnership which occupied the building. The partnership including someone with the first name of Vojka. The next oldest was owned and occupied by a nursing home and the newest was owned and occupied by the headquarters of a middle sized building society. The newest extensions to the oldest building dated from the 18th century and we learned that when the building was new, the windows counted as fittings. Tenants brought them with them when they came and took them away again when they went. Expensive items. The modern extension to the nursing home (which we did not get to see the inside of) was rather bigger than the original building and visits to the public rooms in the original building were fitted in around the residents. Perhaps the younger ones had pushed off for the day. Lastly, the modern extension to the headquarters completely dwarfed the original building but it was all very tasteful; they had done the heritage crew proud and you would not have known from a casual glance from the road. Senior officers got their own offices in the original building, the layout of which was properly cluttered, while the groundlings lived in the open plan areas in the extension. Gardens dug up to provide car parking space. Would the the world have been better off had they simply knocked the whole thing down and started again?

The church was an expression of municipal hubris. It seems that they made a bid to be Guildford Cathedral when that diocese was being invented and built the east end of the church on the basis that their bid would win. But they lost out to Guildford and the west end of the church was either left as it was or built on a much smaller scale. Leaving us with the two tone affair we have now.

PS: what is it about this post which makes Mr. Google tell me about '24000 Women Photo & Video Profiles Find Your Special One from Russia!'?