Lost Rambler

In 2004, Korea installed a high-speed rail link between Busan and Seoul. At the time, I said the following:

When a country goes shopping for a fast train they basically have two choices. Japan, a country located a scant few miles away from Korea, has the bullet train. France, on the other side of the world, has the TGV. Korea wanted a to buy a handful of fast trains. In some strange twist of business, politics, or just sheer spite, the Koreans chose the French train.

Well, it seems that the UK has the same statement to make about France. We just bought some high-speed trains for the 2012 Olympics. Did we choose trains from our close neighbour and European ally, France, or did we get Japan to put them on a boat and sail them half-way around the world?

I read in the local paper yesterday that the first of 30 Japanese bullet trains were offloaded in Southampton a few days ago.

It makes me wonder exactly how these decisions are made…

Two nights ago I slept badly. The son kept wandering into our room at all hours of the night. I put him back to bed three times, then gave up and slept the rest of the night on the very small sofa in his room. I got up stiff, tired and irritable.

Last night, I had barely fallen asleep when the son started crying. I went to check on him and found he was hot to the touch. I undressed him, gave him some paracetamol, sponged him down and rooted around in the house for our thermometer. He was running a fever of 39.2, and that was after I had worked for 20 minutes on cooling him down!

I still get freaked out when the kids get sick, so I took him to the local hospital’s A&E department. The triage nurse measured his temperature (38.2), gave him some ibuprofen, then sent us to wait in the children’s waiting room.

About three hours passed.

The son’s normal temperature returned almost immediately, and with it came his usual upbeat personality. He spent the whole time doing anything energetic he could think of. He ran around, pushed his pushchair, played with the toys, pressed the buttons on the vending machine, climbed on and over the chairs and pushed me around in a wheelchair, all the time making loud and happy noises.

I spent the whole time trying not to fall asleep.

When we were called through, the Doctor took the son’s temperature (perfectly healthy), checked his ears and throat (perfectly healthy) and said that it was probably a virus and just ‘one of those things that children get’. We were sent home with some ibuprofen.

We arrived back at about 3:30am, and I collapsed into bed and fell into a deep sleep.

The next morning, I was not awoken by the wife. She, sweetheart that she is, tiptoed around the house all morning. I was not awoken by the son, who is quite content if the TV is on. I was not awoken by the daughter, who is generally a quiet baby anyway.

What woke me up was the digging up of the road outside my bedroom window. There’s nothing like the sound of a pneumatic drill to shake away the cobwebs.

So, it’s 9:15pm, and I find myself once more sitting outside the son’s room waiting for him to go asleep. All that’s really on my mind is getting to bed myself, and the hope that the night will gift me with at least six solid hours of deep, uninterrupted, beautiful sleep.

Here’s the most recent video of the family, picking tomatoes in the garden and jumping around in the kitchen.

I’m livid.

I found out a couple of days ago that I need to extend my wife’s spouse visa due to an immigration error, just so that I we have the privilege of living in the country long enough to apply for permanent residency.

That doesn’t sound like a terrible thing until you consider the current charges for ‘form processing’. To extend her current visa will cost £395. To apply for permanent residency will cost £750. If you add into that the money that we originally paid for her visa (I don’t recall exactly, but it was in the hundreds - let’s say £300), you get a grand total of £1445. Here are some conversions for clarity:

Now, for most people - certainly for me - if this isn’t the money I take home after a month’s work, it’s most of it.

But what does this pay for. What am I getting for this?

This money is necessary to process the forms that will allow no action to be take against my wife.

Ultimately, the service I get from the government for a month’s salary is an assurance that the government will not break down my front door in the middle of the night, drag my wife from her bed, put her in a van, drive her to the airport and put her on the first plane to Korea.

There’s a word for this.

Extortion.

I may have been woken up by my son last night. I may not have. He’s been waking up a lot, and I’ve been putting him back to bed a lot. Sometimes I fall asleep on his bedroom floor while I’m waiting for him to go back to sleep. Then either my wife will wake me up and tell me to come back to bed or I’ll wake myself up and stumble, stiff and uncomfortable, back to bed.

The thing is, this may have happened last night, but I’m just not sure. It’s hard to work out which nights I do things on because they all blur into each other.

I guess I probably did, because I’m really tired today.

I drove to Northampton today for a business meeting. It was nice to get out of Southampton. I took my camera along with the intention of taking some pictures on the way home, but the only thing I found of interest was the Express Lift Tower.

This must surely be the home of a powerful wizard.

The wife and daughter came home from the hospital today. The son was as pleased as punch. He ran around the house being joyfully chaotic. I knew very well how much he missed his mummy, but it was extremely touching to see that he missed his little sister too. When the wife put the daughter down into the pram we keep in the kitchen, the son thoughtfully went into the living room, collected his favorite teddy and carefully placed it on top of her. He then climbed on a chair and tried to rock her to sleep.

It’s moments like that that make being a parent worth it.

Do you ever get the feeling that life is trying to swallow you up? Since the second baby came, life is so full that cleaning the kitchen has become relaxing time spent by myself. However did that happen? I used to put off cleaning, but now I look forward to it. I cleaned the whole downstairs today and it felt like I had cleaned myself when I was done. Is that normal?

Here’s a puzzle I came up with while working tech support at my very first job.

At 12:00 the hour and minute hands of a clock overlap. To the nearest second, what time is it when they next overlap.

There are two ways to solve this problem. If you understand the puzzle, it won’t take you long, but if you go at it the most obvious way, you may find yourself trapped in Xeno’s paradox.

Well, so much for my own time. Here I am sitting outside my Son’s door telling him to go back to bed every time he gets up. It’s now two hours past his bed-time and I’ve been sat here for over an hour.

It seems like the only way I can continue my web presence is to blog in stolen moments between putting the kids to bed and cleaning the living room.

Miracle of miracles, the son is asleep. As the wife and the daughter are currently sleeping in the hospital, that means I get to have a rare hour all to myself. I’m not sure what I’ll do with it, but I know what I’m not going to do with it. I’m not going to spend any more time at the computer….