Random Meeting in a Cemetery

On a unplanned trip recently to take pictures of headstones recently for my family tree research I came across a lady looking at headstones across the cemetery also. At one point I was taking a picture and the lady came near me. The person with her commented on one of the headstones "he could be one of your relations". I happen to hear and said "if he is one of yours I know he is one of mine". After a bit of a conversation and a little bit of information from her a lot of what she said was familiar.

I returned home to find that we did have a connection way back in 1740. People always say it's a small world. How true that is as this situation of meeting a person at random related to our family from so long ago has now happened to me twice.

Litter picking spring clean

I had some time spare again as I have the week off so after the disaster of going to get some new tyres to find our mechanic had our locking nut in his worshop(a quick run around to fetch it) I thought I would do a bit more voluntary community work on our estate.

I don't know whether it was because of the bad weather and the authorities hadn't had chance to go around cleaning properly but boy was there a lot of litter around.
Yes, it is a bug bear of mine and I don't like it but I'm sure I have a few people for company, at least I know of Bill Bryson anyway.

Three bin bags later and a lovely walk on a lovely sunny day the place looks alot cleaner.

I didn't get some funny looks though. It seems that this activity seems out of the ordinary for a normal person and I did get looks that people thought I was a weirdo. I dressed what I thought was relatively smartly for the process I was undertaking. Maybe the looks I was getting was of shock that some people still do care about where they live.

I will probably never know unless I ask them. I may do that next time.

Oh, it only took about an hour today, just think if everyone did their 2 minutes what a lovely clean country we would live in.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/4957531/Call-to-revive-Saturday-litter-pick-to-save-trashed-Britain.html

Volunteer Work

I decided last week as the relevant powers probably had more pressing maters on their hands that I would do a bit of clearance work on some of the garages on our estate where parts had become a little over grown. This was a couple of hours good hard manual labour which can be a little hard going sometime for an office bloke like me but continue I did.

I was quite proud of the outcome given the limited resources at my disposal. I was a little perturbed as I was doing the work several people passed and whilst not doing the work for any credit about 3 of them comment on whether I was getting paid for doing it. No I wasn't but doing it for the general good. Is it too hard to believe nowadays that some on might do something like this and not look at you in shock and winder if you have lost your faculties.