Recycle

My one and only resolution for 2014 will be to recycle more, to do just a little bit more for our precious environment.

With this in mind, I'm recycling this image from 2009 LOL.

I wish everyone all the very best for the coming year.

December Blues

December has been a disappointing month for Royals' fans; Reading will finish the year outside the promotion play-off zone.

7 Dec Reading 1 - 2 AFC Bournemouth
14 Dec Huddersfield 0 - 1 Reading
21 Dec Reading 1 - 2 Wigan Athletic
26 Dec Leicester 1 - 0 Reading
29 Dec Middlesbrough 3 - 0 Reading

Perhaps the New Year will bring better fortunes. Reading will host Nottingham Forest this coming Wednesday 1 January.

Getting Stoned*

*or Damn Those Girls And Boys In Marketing.

Anything with a Union Flag.

For Snow Globe lovers everywhere.

My Mate.

Some people know me too well LOL.

Answerphone

While checking an old telephone/answering machine, which I thought had never been used, I came across a message Mum had left in 2007 a year before she died. Wasn't exactly expecting that, it took me unawares and I had a little cry.

How it got to be on there I will never know but you can be assured all twenty-five seconds of it has now been safely saved in a more secure location. You never know when I might need to hear her voice.

Merry Christmas

Best wishes for the season, everyone.

Closing Down

Within a few days, Christmas Eve to be exact, well known local department store Jacksons of Reading  will shut up shop, citing falling sales and high maintenance costs on their Kings Road site.

This family owned business (officially E Jackson & Son Ltd) was opened in September 1875 as a gentlemen's outfitters (such a lovely old fashioned term!) by Edward Jackson. One Hundred and 38 years later his great grandson Brian Carter is the last Managing Director of this iconic shop, which has remained at the same location throughout those years. In my lifetime it has been renown as the place local parents visited for all their children's school uniform needs, for its extensive choice of up-market ladies and men's clothes and huge range of cross-stitch and related craft supplies. But of course what most people will likely remember is the pneumatic pipe system for transferring cash between the sales desks and the accounts department. It seems impossible to imagine how every customer transaction would involve an invoice and cash payment being sent via this system to the accounts department and then an awkward wait until the handwritten receipt and change would appear back in the tube. Very old fashioned service but that was the Jacksons way.

Jacksons has been overtaken by more modern ways of shopping on the high street and by the internet age. Nevertheless it will be missed.

One Sunday in May 2013, happier times for Jacksons although closure had already been announced.













Update:
Things haven't really changed...

Five For Silver, Six For Gold

Many are familiar with the rhyme* involving Magpies but what do I get for counting over twenty at one time?

Trust me by the time I got my camera, they were taking it in turns (in small groups) to do circuits above my garden.












*One for sorrow,
Two for joy,
Three for a girl,
Four for a boy,
Five for silver,
Six for gold,
Seven for a secret never to be told.

Direction-less

While in the music and dvd section of a well known supermarket today (where "every little helps"), LL proudly announced he didn't like One Direction.

Good boy.

Deck The Halls

Every year I try to buy one new Christmas decoration. Do you like this one?

Not My Birthday...

...but why is the birthday girl or boy expected to provide the cakes for the whole office? Or buy the drinks in the pub?

Shouldn't it be the other way round? Just a thought.



23 Nov Blackburn Rovers 0 - 0 Reading
29 Nov Nottingham Forest 2 - 3 Reading
3 Dec Reading 1 - 0 Chalton

Marketing

I am such a sucker: those girls and boys at Tate & Lyle's branding and marketing department must have seen me coming a mile off LOL.