Post 393.RIGHT! BACK TO NORMAL THEN.

RESCUE ME FROM ROBOT VOICES.

ALEXA IS TECHNOLOGY ENOUGH.
I quite like Alexa. She is the robot voice that only speaks when spoken to. She conjures up music when asked and generally seeks to please. She is not that irritating little party in the car who tells you to 'turn left now!' when you are on a forty mile stretch of unbroken motorway with nothing but fields beyond it: nor is she that robotically welcoming young woman who answers any call to a business with the words: 'This conversation is being taped for training purposes.' Do you believe that?
The telephone has become a monster within which lurk Bombay Welsh voices seeking to con you out of your bank card details and tiresome petty dictators directing you to press button 1,2 or 3 in response to a voice recorded on a machine. I seldom use the bloody thing now. Growing old and still being able to put one foot in front of the other is, in the view of one currently that fortunate, privilege enough in this country today,
Times have changed since, just over forty years ago, the government more than halved our money with the introduction of decimalization. Little of it has been for the better.

THE LATEST THREATS are the compulsory transference of all gas driven appliances to electricity, the introduction of driverless, electrically powered, motor cars, purchases of lord-knows-what-weight goods carried by drones, the inexorable upsurge in the management of our lives by soulless robots, and the ghastly realization that political and media control of the country is now largely in the hands of a coterie of amoral public schoolboys.
Let us start with the gas/electric thing. Isn't that going to be just like the diesel/petrol thing? How many times can well-meaning voices cry global warming wolf? I'd like to think it is government listening to experts, but am more inclined to the view that it is government listening to its number who are electricity company shareholders.
Trust not the moneyed few, they always want more. They will be pleased to see you up to your neck in hock for the replacement of a serviceable gas appliance or petrol/diesel fuelled vehicle, with an electric alternative. They will label it progress. The word that better describes it is greed.
Whatever the label, it will be sold under the guise of 'saving the world' and will be accepted by the same servile public that failed, decades ago, to firmly advise local authorities and suchlike public service providers that they are the employed, not the employers, and could stick any form of tax-related extortion, other than the basic one on income, precisely where the sun does not shine.
So far as I am concerned, people in influential positions should be reminded that power is there to be used, not abused. As it is, the rule makers up there get away with far too much without being brought to book. Always have. Always will.
That's the monthly grouse done for.
Enjoy your bank holiday.

Hang up on any voice you don't know. 

Post 392. THE DAY IS DONE.

ROZ HAS BEEN CREMATED.

IN THE MIDST OF LIFE....
Our Roz was duly cremated on Thursday 20th May, 2021. A fine selection of her friends, many of them  former and current colleagues, together with a determinedly available proportion of kin, gathered in a cold wind to be admitted, late, into the crematorium which, it transpired, lacked the up-to-date technology necessary for a planned slideshow of Roz moments to be shown during a playing of  Madness's It Must Be Love, one of her favourite discs. Pictures and song together would have been so much more effective. I gather suitable protestation has since been made to the authority concerned. The outcome of the hoo-ha it caused was that the on line ceremony screening  came to a premature end, too. Not at all the way it was meant to be. Ah well.
Young Ellis, her son, looked good in his suit.

The ceremony went off well. It opened with The Mamas & The Papas singing Dream a Little Dream, which encouraged those who cry in public (and some of us who don't) to shed their tears early on.

Celebrant Sue Edwards then welcomed the mourners and initiated the proceedings with Loving Memories of Roz. 

This was followed by a moving Tribute to Mum from her daughter, Jess.

Madness then did their stuff (sans slideshow) and the ceremony ended with Closing Words  which included an excerpt from Roz's poem:
Loss & Gain.
Roz Barnden

I lost my hair
I lost my mind
I lost my tits
I was what remained of this

I lost my twinkle
I lost my spark
I lost myself
I became leftovers on the shelf

I lost my confidence
I lost my oomph
I lost my self esteem
I was just a person in between

BUT

I gained strength
I gained power
I gained resolve
I never knew I could be so bold

I learned to deal
I learned to face
I learned to cope
That's what eventually brought me hope

With resilience and positivity
She came back, what once was me   

AND YOU'LL NEVER BE GONE FROM US, LOVE.

Though I can't convince this chap of that.
Take care, friends.