On a much lighter note, my hostess and I were invited by friends to visit them on Saturday and then go with them to the Callander highland games. There were of course the modern fairground attractions of nasty machines to make you chuck up your candifloss (cotton candy) and luke-warm Scottish attempts to make lager but we (mostly) eschewed these for watching the dog-show and getting an arena-side stance for the actual highland games.

What’s worn under the kilt
It seems that these games have become an international sport: competitors came from as far afield as Poland, the USA, the Netherlands and the Kingdom of Fife! The first sport was called ‘the McGlashan stones’: it involved lifting smooth spheres of stone, about 3 feet in diameter, onto barrels whose tops were about shoulder-height. This was done against the clock – I believe an american was the fastest in lifting all four stones onto their barrels.

This was followed by the sport most known – and joked about – outside of the Highlands: caber tossing. The caber appears to be about 18 feet of smoothed-off tree-trunk. It’s slightly tapered towards the end the competitors hold. Two helpers carry the caber back from where the last competitor has tossed it and lift it into a vertical position. The next competitor then gets his hands under the narrow end and lifts it so it is resting against his shoulder, approximating the ‘slope arms’ position. Once he has his balance, he then runs with it until he feels he has built up enough speed and then flings it so that the heavy end hits the ground and, ideally, the light end goes up and over so that it falls in a ’12 o’clock’ position relative to the competitor’s ‘6 o’clock’.

Very few competitors managed anything like an ‘end-over-end’: the best was a ‘5 to 12′. The commentator would have had us believe that this was due to the wind being against most of the competitors. Personally I prefer the obvious reason: such a lump of wood is bloody heavy!

Then two events took place simultaneously: the log lift, where the competitors try to carry a frame of two logs about 3 yards long and over 2 feet in diameter along a 50 yard course and back. Quite often they couldn’t manage the full course and so the officials used a huge tractor to lift the frame and take it back to the starting point. However, at least two competitors managed the full course so I presume the winner was the one who took the least time. The framework was left in the arena and so quite a few spectators tried to lift it: we all failed dismally!

Dangerously near this course was the ’56 pound for height’ throwing contest: competitors had to single-handedly swing and throw over their heads and over a bar above them a lump of metal of the aforesaid weight. The competition started with the bar at 13 feet. Most competitors managed that and all managed to avoid the weight as it came crashing down perilously close to where they stood and where other competitors were carrying logs!

Quite a few dropped out at 15 feet: they had three attempts at each height. It appeared not to matter if the weight hit the bar so long as it went over. All the way through the commentary encouraged the audience to encourage the competitors and we duly did so as a huge dutchman and an equally huge pole tried for 17 feet 3 inches. The dutchman’s self-encouragement (lots of cries of ‘yeah!’) had most folk rooting for him to succeed. This was no longer a competition between athletes but two competitions between the athletes and gravity because we equally cheered on the pole.

Unfortunately the pole couldn’t achieve 17 feet 3 inches but the dutchman could. He then tried for 18 feet 3 inches: more than the height of three average people. He didn’t quite make this but still managed to be pleased with his performance. The pole was the first to congratulate him on his victory. Good sportsmanship and a damn fine show, methinks!

I then succumbed to the lure of a ‘plastic cup of used bath water’ which made the crafts tent quite appealing. By then the afternoon had nearly worn away so we departed for Stirling’s nightlife: a curry and the Simpsons movie. All in all, a fine day’s entertainment and a wonderful antidote to my domestic news.

And the answer to the above question appears, from what was revealed during the ’56 pound for height’ contest, to be ‘lycra cycling shorts’.

After a while of nothing to blog, I have something to say but I rather wish I didn’t. On Wednesday night, my mother phoned me to tell me that the previous night my father had had a small, ‘warning’-type heart attack.

Apparently dad had sat down to watch a TV programme about the Grenadier Guards at 8pm, noticed a pain in his chest and was, thanks to mum’s insistance, in hospital before the programme ended. Within a day or so, I’m told, he was looking a lot better: ‘fit to cut the grass’ and just bored and in some discomfort from the shunt in the back of his hand. From my experiences in Kolkatta, I can really sympathise.

Last night dad texted me to ask how to say ‘good morning’ in malayalam to a keralan nurse. (I didn’t know but later found out later that night from a keralan waiter at a curry house that most people simply say it in English anyway. However, the formal Malayalam is transliterated as ‘suprabhatham’ and pronouned something like ‘suprabadam’.) This morning Dad texted me to say he’d been dettached from the monitors, etc, and so could have a proper shower!

Some time next week he’ll be taken to Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth hospital for an angiogram but he’s staying put for the moment because the first week after a heart attack is apparently the most dangerous and so for now he’s better off in a hospital than in an ambulance. Because he was raised as an engineer on imperial measurements, I think he should ask for just under a 28th of an angio-ounce.

My brother is in fairly frequent contact from Iraq by email and has phoned me from there several times since I first emailed him this news. He also frequently contacts his girlfriend by internet chat and has primed the compassionate leave set-up to take messages from us and to be ready to get him home quickly if needed.

Dad apparently also forbade me to come to Worcester precipitately: mum’s interpretation of this is that Dad would fear he’d not been told the truth about his condition if I appeared suddenly. I also know he’s normally self-effacing and anxious for the family to get on with our normal lives, careers and duties. He insisted that mum and Sue go as previously arranged to a scout jamboree today because they’d never get another chance to go to such a world-wide gathering of Scouts. He also got mum to give his Treasurer’s report to the Worcester Scout Fellowship on Wednesday so that as near normal service as possible was provided. I’m not sure I’d be that organised/dedicated under similar circumstances. Still, I have a suitcase packed and ready to go and have told my managers at work that there’s some chance I might need to go at very short notice.

Anyway, I’ll be going to Worcester next weekend for a pre-arranged visit. Meanwhile, despite the better news, the following lyrics (snatched from this entry’s music) seem vaguely appropriate:

I want my dad and I want my mum, a sherman tank and a load of guns.
…
I know the following smut should be censored, OK,
but ‘this shit is fucked’ as they say in the USA.
And they say it in Mexico, London and Jericho,
Berlin and Birmingham, Belfast and Tokyo,
Amsterdam, Vietnam, Iran, Afghanistan,
Disneyland, Narnia, former Yugoslavia!
…
So just say three ‘hail Jesus-and-Mary Chains’ and two ‘how’s your fathers’,
…
and say goodnight, Jim-bob.
‘Goodnight Jim-bob.’

My hostess and I ate at the 9 Cellars on Edinburgh’s Queen Street. We shared a starter of bhel puri and for our main course had a masala dosa each, while sharing a portion of tadka dahl (slim, wide yellow lentils in a rich and tangy sauce).

One taste and I was back in India: the crispness of the dosa, the lightly spice filling, the sambar, the coconut chatni: all so magical and tasty, without any burn so that my hostess could enjoy it too. If you can’t get to south India, you’ll find the next best thing here.

Well it turns out that my sister had been overpaid Tax Credits in 2003-4 and 2004-5. Somehow HMRC understood that she was receiving the highest rate of the care component of Disability Living Allowance and so was entitled to the ‘severe disability’ element of Tax Credits.

Fortunately, she’s not disabled enough to receive the highest care component of DLA, merely the middle rate. However, this means she was only entitled to the ‘ordinary disability’ element of Tax Credits. So it seems fair enough that HMRC should want the severe disability element back.

Indeed, when I reread her TC award letters for 2003-4 and 2004-5, I saw that HMRC had said ‘We’re paying you the severe disability amount – please check to see if you still qualify.’ No-one did, and I missed it when I first looked into this situation in January 2006.

However, nothing to do with Tax Credits is ever as simple as it should be. The amount HMRC asked to be repaid in the phone conversation is over £100 less than what they said was overpaid at the end of 2005 and 39p less than the amount for which they sent demand notices in early 2006.

So, after a fairly strenuous* weekend back in Worcester during which I verified I had copies of all of my sister’s TC, DLA and other documentation and checked that she had received the amounts HMRC claimed she had, a letter saying ‘I now understand why I have to repay you: please tell me in writing how much and please confirm this will eradicate all overpayment for 2003-4 and 2004-5’ is on the way to HMRC by recorded delivery.
*I also backed up and reinstalled my dad’s PC from scratch, sorted a problem with my mum’s mac and extricated my G4 ‘quicksilver/wind-tunnel*’ mac from my parents’ loft so it could come north. It’s now nestling in my hostess’ desk-unit, blowing raspberries at her PC.
**The quicksilver G4s were noisy to begin with. Adding in two extra hard disks and a zip drive hasn’t made Freddie any quieter.

So far, I haven’t had to delve into 2005-6. That year’s TC may be marred by the now-overturned dismissal and the subsequent cessation of TC payments. Until about halfway through this year, TC was paid via employers. My sister has kept all her wage-slips and it’s easy to see how much TC she received this way. However, TC is now paid direct to the recipients’ bank accounts. My sister has a passbook bank account. When money is paid into it, the passbook entry simply says ‘BGC £23·99’ or similar. The bank claims that they can’t trace where such payments come from. I can’t understand this and have challenged them about it several times but they have stuck to this story.

So there appears to be no way of telling which deposits are wages, which are Tax Credits, etc, without a very laborious trawl through every entry in the book, comparing entries agains wage-slips, DLA documents and the like. Also for 2005-6, there is no TC award letter at the beginning of the year saying ‘this is what and how we intend to pay you for this year – we’ll square up at the end of the year.’ (They start by assuming a recipients’ wages will be the same as the previous year. When the recipient’s earnings for the tax year are known, this is declared on an annual review form. HMRC then use this information to calculate the initial payments for the year that’s just started and make any payments owing for the year that’s just finished.)

So without this initial award letter, I haven’t a hope of checking that my sister has received what HMRC say she should have. I’m so relieved I don’t need to – yet!

2006-7 and 2007-8 are OK – I’ve been involved with every step and I’m confident that my sister has received what HMRC say she should.

I’m concerned for the many folk in my sister’s situation who don’t have someone numerate and with a reasonable understanding of HMRC-english to help them. I’m also a bit embarrassed I didn’t appreciate this side of my sister’s needs before a year or so ago.

On a positive note, some of the ‘babies‘ are blooming. The gerania, in particular, have beautiful pinky-red foliage that gladdens my heart. Pix to follow as and when…

You may recall that my sister was in some distress at the beginning of 2006 because HMRC were trying to get back over £1000 of Tax Credits from her. Their reason was that she hadn’t replied to a letter asking her to prove that she was still disabled. This entry gives more detail.

I thought we had seen this off while I was in India. However, on Friday HMRC phoned our parents’ house, asking to speak with my sister. She was at work and HMRC, understandably, wouldn’t talk to our parents about my sister’s affairs. Instead, they left a number and asked her to call them later.

She did so on Monday, with our father listening in. He described the conversation as follows:

This [conversation] was to inform Sue that the appeal for Tax Years 2003-4 & 2004-5 had failed & that she owes £1,646.03. The bod said that the reason for failure was not stated in his notes, just that the appeal had failed.
In response to me stating that this was not satisfactory he said that Sue should contact the Tax Credit Office to obtain further information & also to discuss details of repayment.

According to HMRC’s website

The Appeals Service will give or send you a copy of the tribunal decision notice as soon as possible after the appeal hearing. This briefly explains the appeal tribunal’s decision. They will also send a copy to us.

As far as I’m currently aware, there has been no such written communication. Bah!

Everything you ever needed to know appears to be in this wiki

While some of the outdoor plants my hostess and I installed last Sunday are not doing so well, most thrive and the bulbs are beginning to push their shoots above the soil. I attribute the thriving to her enthusiasm and talking to them. I don’t think my attempts to communicate telepathically with them while visiting the balcony for my own nefarious purposes have had any effect.

Meanwhile the indoor basil and oregano are germinating nicely. We have babies! The basil’s in the front left of the picture and the oregano’s, er, not very visible in the back right.

On Friday, my hostess and I, along with friends Ian, Jane and Wilma, went to Murrayfield Stadium for Party on the Pitch. I had been somewhat apprehensive about tribute bands anyway and Murrayfield’s failure to deliver our tickets had only served to deepen this apprehension. In the end, my hostess had to go to Murrayfield Stadium on the day of the event, trog more than three-quarters of the way around the stadium to the ice-rink ticket-office and yibble at the ticket-sellers there. They were quite calm and offered her more tickets than we’d paid for. However, our chances of touting them were minimal.

We gathered at the Mill in the early afternoon and headed over in the cold afternoon air to the stadium to find that there was no sign of where we were meant to queue to go in. Still, more walking round the stadium could only have been good for us. Inside the stadium were a few early-birds but the audience were few and far between, as you can see here. So many people were saved from hearing the utter ghastliness of Led Astray. I walked out when the guitarist strapped on a double-necked guitar – covers of Stairway to Heaven give me the pure boke.

I rejoined my companions after the sacrilege was over and the perps had been taken back to the cubes in which they could fondly imagine that anyone at all would want to listen to them. After a interval marred by two gibbering clowns from Radio Reykjavik South Central or some other to-be-avoided-at-all-costs station, a mob called Killer Queen took the stage. Despite the obvious wigs and “Freddie” ‘s painted-on mustache, they were good at what they did, the general mood livened and a few people started to dance in the stands. Even your curmudgeonly reporter enjoyed himself and shook such of his stuff that hadn’t been frozen off or dissolved in the plastic cup of used bath-water he had been sold in place of beer.

I didn’t see much of The Bootleg Beatles, mostly because I was queueing for hot drinks (the beer-queue had become surprisingly long, considering the venue was less than a third full) and fly-agaric doughnuts. However, what I heard and later saw showed that these lads knew how to do a show and I felt sorry for them and the other bands (Led Astray excepted) that this venue was so noticeably empty. I can’t comment on how good they are at recreating the Beatles’ songs because I am pushed to name a Beatles song I like. However, my companions passed very favourable comments on them, so I am happy to pass on their recommendation that you see them if you want, ideally in a smaller, warmer and above all fuller venue. I found great amusement in the serruptitious scousers’ performance of All you need is love while uncontrolled children knocked lumps out of each other with inflatable guitars.

The highlight of the evening came in http://www.bjornagain.com/‘s set. They had performed some Abba songs to a pleasing standard and the girls had snuck off-stage for a costume change when “Björn”‘s darker side was revealed in a crowd-pleasing version of Rocking all over the World. Encores were Dancing Queen and the la-de-da-de-dum song.

Overall, a good, fun afternoon and evening: my attitude is marred by the absence of a dear friend at this event. More pictures are here.

Speak To Me/Breathe – Pink Floyd

OK, now I know I’m over 40. My host and I spend bank-holiday Monday buying flowering plants and planting them out in boxes on her balcony and I really enjoyed it.

There are 4 Geraniums, big Geraniums, a Passion Flower, a Delphinium, a Contoneäster, a Fuchsia, a Scented Pink and 20 Dutch Irises (just the bulbs so far). Indoors we have planted seeds for yellow sweet peppers, oregano, sweet basil and red chillis.

The outdoor stuff looks like this.

Not sure that I want beer to replace other relaxants but if you do, this is the kit you need.