Your first bit of randomness for the year.
getting sucked into all the hype (or indeed the google search results) it would be easy to think that Liverpool is the European capital of culture for 2008 - but in fact there are two.
There used to be only one capital each year but with the enlargement of the European Union, they decided to have two a year, makes a bit of a mockery of the term capital (especially since pre 1999 it was the European City of Culture). anyway 2008 is the second such year of two capitals so lets not forget the Stravander Region in Norway which is also European Capital of Culture 2008.
No the postal strike is over, should start getting post any day now. not that we’ve missed it. It took a few days before we noticed, but it’s surprising just how quickly you learn to live without post - and just how the world doesn’t end.
We bank on line, all our bills are direct debits and if people want to tell us something they phone or email. So it’s not like we need mail. our blue bag/black box (for we live in one of the ’strange’ areas of Liverpool with odd colored recycling) is still full, mainly of pizza leaflets, it’s just not overflowing as usual.
In fact thinking about it I don’t want the mail to start up again, can we just block up our letter box?
Update: We’ve just gotten our first piece of mail in weeks - one letter, from SKY trying to sell us more TV and telephone lines.
Many years ago, when Kevin lived at his mum’s, an IRA bomb-making factory was raided, two streets away from their house. It was obviously very exciting at the time, because I’ve had the place pointed out to me on several occasions, and I suspect we’re going back about fifteen years or so.
Well, today, the police raided a house two streets away from us as part of the terror plot investigation of the week. No idea if bomb-making was involved, or if the local involvement was less hands on than that, but Penny Lane is littered with news vans (recognisable by their massive satellite dishes, if not by their livery), and it’s all terribly exciting.
Kevin, however, is not someone you want to live two streets away from - not unless you’re happy to live next door to a terrorist, and certainly not if you are a terrorist, unless you don’t mind being raided…
Look :
The Gaston Leisure center pool now open at 8:15 on a Sunday - who said I sat around all day doing nothing?
[Swimming Debacle]
It’s OK. We did sit out side for a bit after being mislead by the council website (someone should sort that out), but after a quick drive around South Liverpool to distract us from the fact that the Pool was shut, we got to go swimming.
It has been a shamefully long time since we took Daisy the swimming baths, mainly because she hated it, Not so much the water then but the changing rooms. For quite a while she’s had a thing about echoy rooms with no natural daylight. and when she was little it use to freak her out so much that we really didn’t like to expose her to that.
This time was much better, Daisy was widely excited when I suggested swimming this morning, so much so that I’ve never known her to get dresses so fast, and that’s why we where out the door by 7:30. All the way there I got tales of how we would go down the red slide, and how she saw the swimming pool with Granddad. I’ve got no real evidence to back it all up - and to be honest until we got there and the slide was indeed red. I thought she was making it all up.
Given Daisy’s confidence in water has increased quite a bit since the last time we went (paddling pools and standing up in the bath!), she was no trouble, and just bounded in to the pool, heading right for the slide of course. we went up and down the slide about 20 times, before we then decided to explore the rest of the [little] pool - bouncing is fun, as is jumping in off the side, although we are still a bit freaked out by the water jets in the floor.
As always getting out was a bit traumatic, but master stroke from Ruth, we took bananas and if Daisy has a weak spot it’s food.
All in all a great trip to the baths (once it opened). Daisy want to go tommorow, I told her I couldn’t take her because I’m going to work, so she said she would go on her own.
Kevin has just taken Daisy to the baths, which makes me feel like a good parent, vicariously. She is wildly excited (it’s been an awfully long time since we’ve been), and it’s all a bit unfortunate that the website with the opening times on appears to have lied to him.
It says, as clear as day, that the pool is open from 7.15am to 4pm on a Sunday. So arriving at 7.45am should present no problems at all - except that he’s just rung to double check, because the place appears to be shut up.
On investigation of other pools in the city, none of them are open this early on a Sunday, and all the way through the conversation I could hear Daisy in the background, trying really hard to sound reasonable in the face of Daddy’s apparent forgetting of what they’d gone out to do.
“Shall we go to the swimming baths, Daddy?”
“Let’s go to the swimming baths.”
“We could go to the swimming baths, Daddy.”
The poor child was obviously running a gauntlet between trying to get Daddy back on track, and potentially scuppering the whole trip by being told off for being rude. She will be gutted if he doesn’t find her a pool to play in, pretty soon.
Drat Garston Leisure Centre and their inability to maintain their own web page.
For an election where the environment is such a big issue, we do seem to be getting an awful lot of leaflets through the door. I do enjoy local politics though with all the ’smile pointing to something good’, ‘frown next to litter’ pictures. So I will be a little bit sadder tomorrow when this free form of entertainment stops coming through the door.
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