What does Dorktown need?
24 September
Years ago I had the bright idea that there were two things that Dorktown
really needed. First one was a decent book shop; the second one was a decent café,
by which I mean a plain simple café where you can buy a mug of tea or coffee
and a bacon batch at decent prices, and open on Sundays as well as in the week.
You might be wondering why I didn’t do either of them, that’s simply really,
both need capital which I didn’t have.
Soon after that the Nuneaton Bookshop open its doors and that was one
filled. Again such a café opened in Abbey Street to meet the need I had seen,
or at least part of it. Apparently the council would allow it to open on
Sundays. Both of those two outlets have since closed; now we have a Waterstones
in Queens Road and so many cafes the choice is bewildering. What we don’t have
though is a second hand bookshop, although there is a stall selling second hand
books on the Wednesday market.
Our nearest such outlet is the Astley Book Farm (http://www.astleybookfarm.com/) which
is excellent. There’s another one in Atherstone too. However, you need to
travel to get to them and that can be a pain, Atherstone is fine to get to and
on a major bus route, Astley isn’t on any bus route and has limited parking.
But is there really a need for such a shop in town now? We do have something
like 15 charity shops in town, all of them selling books. However, when I’ve
been in any of them, there is always someone browsing the book shelves. So
maybe there is a need and all it needs is someone with the dosh and vision to
come along and open one – that counts me out cos of the dosh angle … ah well …
Kile arrived here yesterday as we sort of expected. This morning he sat down
to start his homework. He tends to do his IT work here because we have a
printer, at home he doesn’t. Anyway, his first task was to find and print a
complete article from a 19th Century publication, which he was
really struggling with, so I had a look to see what I could find. Oh dear, I
found loads of them, but they all needed to be paid for with the cheapest
running at £9.95 a month. Seeing as it is a one-off project, and we are unlikely
to use it again after today, we can’t really afford even that. How on earth do
these teachers thing all parents can afford these things on a regular basis?
Bloody people; my dad called them educated idiots – he wasn’t too off was he!
Fun and games with Mr Virgin again yesterday I’m afraid. It’s all down to
that TIVO box we have. It seems that the internal hard drive has failed. We’re expecting
an engineer to turn up today to try to sort it out. We both think that we will
now lose all our recorded films when the box or the hard drive is replaced. At
least we will catch up with everything then.
This morning my copy of Which?,
arrived and one of the major articles and tests is on the broadband packages that
are available. Virgin comes in second place behind PlusNet, bottom of the list
is Sky. Rather handy actually cos we have been talking about looking for a
cheaper deal just lately. But can we get a cheaper deal I wonder? You see, all
our comms/IT is through Virgin, landline, mobile, broadband and TV package. We
have been with Virgin since 1998/9 and have had very few problems with them.
And yet I read so many negative comments about them in various places like
magazines and social media. I can only speak about what I see and experience, and
so far, we haven’t had any problems with them. In reality, I can’t see us
moving from them.
Today’s photo …
city centre from the same spot I got the
Broadgate photo 5 days ago.
Today’s funny …
Office Boy: The boss is starting
to take notice of me.
Secretary: How's that?
Office Boy: This morning he asked me if I worked here.
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