Farewell, Marta

Well, we bade farewell to Marta at the office yesterday. She is one of the few bright lights there, and unfortunately, for family reasons she has to move back to her native Australia. The company, however, transferred her to our Melbourne office, and yesterday was her final day in our London office. We went to a bar around the corner and were very convivial--I had a martini with olive, which was marred only by the fact that the olive was unpitted, and I missed the pimiento. Goodbye, Marta! I hope that someday HWMBO and I will visit Melbourne and see you again, and I hope that your move goes well.

The juicer

A while back HWMBO was awarded £250 in vouchers to John Lewis for being a very good worker at his job. We've been debating what to do with it, and he had his mind set on a juicer. Now I'm not particularly fond of fruit juice, but I thought, "Well, it can't hurt" so we went to Canary Wharf today to get a juicer at the Waitrose/John Lewis store in the shopping centre there.

Even though I've been working at Canary Wharf on and off, I've never ventured into the shopping center. It reminds me of Singapore shopping centres: there are stores galore underground selling all sorts of things, food, clothing, jewelry, sports gear, and the like. I shall certainly be haunting the place when the final job approval comes through and I am working there regularly (although if the job interview I had last week brings paydirt, I might not have the opportunity).

The Waitrose is three floors of stuff, and we got a bathmat and a pillow on the top floor (not what we came for, but side effects of looking for juicers), some bread and muffins in the food area, and an espresso pot and the juicer in the housewares area. Our espresso pot has gotten pretty dingy both inside and out, and it's hard to clean it. So we got a new one, which works a bit better than the other one and makes coffee just as tasty.

The juicer we got is the Philips 1858. We put a bag of apples through it tonight and got a glass of apple juice each. I shall have to investigate recipes for homemade V8 and the like, as I think those have a bit more potential for me to like. And we will have to get industrial-size crates of apples or whatever to make any useful amounts of juice. So I'll be researching recipes for a while. But, if it makes HWMBO happy it makes me happy.

Getting the darned thing home was annoying, as it's quite bulky to carry and they only had a rather flimsy large bag to put it in. We coped.

The country takes an aspirin to quell election fever

This noon I got a call from the local Liberal Democratic party, of which I'm a member. They were asking me if, in view of the impending General Election, I would put a poster in my window or do various other things like canvassing. I said that I'd do as much as I was able to do.

Then Gordon Brown punctured everyone's bubble by ruling out a General Election this year, barring unforeseen circumstances.

What a let-down! The Tories and LibDems are now able to accuse him of wimping out. It may be that, like Jim Callaghan in 1978, Brown has just blown his electoral chances. Callaghan decided not to call an election in 1978, when Labour was relatively popular. By 1979, when "Labour's not working" was the Tories' cry under Margaret Thatcher, Milk-Snatcher, Callaghan lost in a landslide.

I wonder if Gordon Brown will do the same when he finally goes to the country. I suppose that if the polls are bleak, he may even do a John Major and wait until the last possible day under the Representation of the People Act to call an election.

And most of us remember what happened to John Major in that election.