Specially for Giulietta

Here are three pictures to satisfy any curiosity you might have had re my photographic amble yesterday. This one does not in fact show a stone age site of standing stones surrrounding a mystic tree but are the rather cool border of a path.





Which bridge is this over the Thames? I did put the chimney more upright in Picasa but it has not transferred.














"The Bee and the Buddleia". Enough said.

Hellos...and Goodbyes

It's Hello to Giulietta's country - or rather, Scottish - cousin, who has come to brave the muck and grime of the great metropolis for a few days, leaving behind the pure, clean air of the Clyde Valley.

And it's Hello to the voice that spoke in my ear as I was preparing this shot at 7.03 this morning. Now whom do you expect to see that you know at that unearthly hour? Only the youngest son, Dunadan himself, on his way to work out at the gym BEFORE WORK!!!




And it is Goodbye, la famille Erulin!

Well, it's off a-Gwada'ing for the Erulin family after a hectic few days and a nice mini-cab driver who laughed at Granny's jokes (Surely beyond the call of duty, innit?).

I puzzled over this photo as I could not see Joel anywhere. I am however reliably informed that he was in the buggy (why do they not call them push chairs anymore? Is there a significant difference?). Although Charis appears to be sitting in it, she is actually standing beside it, thus shielding the wee mite.

Mum was not as worried as she appears, I believe; she seemed to be having a friendly enough chat with one of the staff.

Shortly after this baby JoJo was frisked at the security desk to make sure he was not carrying suspicious packets in his nappy. (Any packet in the nappy is suspicious - Mum will always say, "Have you got a dirty nappy?" in the most incredulous tones.)


And finally, it is Goodbye faithful iron.

There was I, placidly doing some ironing, when a suspicious smell and an unexpected light prompted me to look down, and behold, the iron was on fire, just where its lead emerges from the protective tubing, and within micrometres of my hand. Hurriedly I stood the iron on its stand and switched off at the socket. I watched the flames - fortunately few in number and low in height quickly die away. Phew!

Later, as I entered the Tube station, I received a text from elder son. The following exchange occurred:
E.S.: Re the iron - Shocking!
Me: A flaming nuisance!
E.S.: Hot under the collar are u?!
Me: Let alone hand! (Going underground precluded further interesting comments.)

Yesterday's news

I picked up this charming little piece (I refer of course to the book) at a church bazaar recently, the location of which may serve as a blog in itself. It makes most intriguing reading and even though it was published away back in 1897, there are some surprising modern touches to it and I am barely a quarter of the way through it.

Opening statement: 'Can anything in the world be nicer than a really nice girl? She is full of contradictions and often "set with little wilful thorns," but where would her charm be if she were plainly to be read by all comers?'

Page 2. 'The happy girls of the century-end have not such good reason for wishing to be boys as their mothers, and more still their grandmothers, had in their young days.'

Page 4 ['The girl of to-day], very often ignores the needle of ordinary life, and her thimble knows her so little that it will not come when it is called. ..[On the other hand] the best and the nicest of our ...girls can use the needle quite as cleverly as they can wield a pair of sculls or handle the reins or manage a bicycle.'

Watch this space for more gems!

Thank you

A very warm and satisfied thank you to Heather and Malcolm for organising This lovely treat.

white spaces

A little bird has informed me that my last blog was hard to read because there are no white spaces.

I am reading a book about Web-building and it emphasises the importance of white spaces to facilitate reading.

This is because reading online is much harder than reading in a book.

However since my blog page has no white background anywhere it will be impossible for me to provide any white spaces.

Insted you will have to put up with cream spaces, as I don't feel like changing the design at present.

Anyway I only heard about it in a roundabout way, but I hope that others of you (if there are any) who have had reading difficulties will be able to cope with this current arrangement.

a little musing

The Independent had a headline on Friday declaring that Moslems in Britain feel alienated. They feel that they are ignored and unwanted. Whilst I did not read the article I can appreciate their problem. It is because of the First Law of the English - everybody is under suspicion until they have been living in the village for at least ten generations, and then one might deign to say hello. Is there anywhere else in the world where there is a word for the outsider who has come to live in a county from outside. There is in Devon and Cornwall. It is I believe the word Grockel. The Moslem leader who made the accusation has clearly not lived in the country very long and the insular attitude of the average Briton is a very deep-rooted one. It is not so long ago that no-one moved from a village unless circumstances enforced it. It is the reason why we are so poor at speaking foreign languages - our tongue is the best and it is the only one that is valid. And by that I don't mean our English language, but our local version of it. The Geordie, the Scouser, the Brummie, the Devonian, the Cockney, the Essex lot - each will say to all the others, "You talk funny". If this be the case among people of our own particular race, it is not surprising if those of a foreign extraction feel the sense of opposition. It is not that anybody else is abhorrent (except to the BNP), but rather that as an individual the average Brit feels him/herself perfect in comparison. There have been Moslems living here quietly for several generations, but the great and varied influx of immigrants from all corners of the globe hide them and make people tar everyone with the same brush. That some elements seem to be on a terrorist campaign does not mean all are, any more than disaffected knife-wielding teenagers form the majority of that age-group. However our inbuilt prejudices can provoke or exacerbate a situation which would not otherwise have arisen. Above all everyone who declares he or she is a Christian should be totally innocent of any such attitudes - yet in history regrettably it has often been the Church that has been at the forefront of promoting such attitudes. We have much to repent of.

Justin Case, that enigmatic fellow

Just in case you have been missing a new entry... I was walking down our street when I came upon this work of art. a man was loading up the lorry with branches from a cherry tree. All were cut to the same length of six feet, and laid in orderly tiers in the forward half of the lorry, up to a a height of some eight feet. It looked so neat and impressive, that I said it was a pity it was all going to dumped in the recycling centre (the Dechetterie as Giulietta and I always like to call that place from its French equivalent). It should have been preserved and entered for the next Turner Prize. Was there any significance that the man working on it was an East European? Certainly I have never seen anything like it before. (I am sorry about the over-exposre of the r.h. corner - I haven't mastered the art of eliminating it yet.)
Another time I passed the Blairs old church which has a lovely artistic feature which I will show sometime. Meanwhile the tower by the side of the main body of the building just looks like an enormous sharpened pencil, and was positively crying out to be viewed in a slightly different perspective(no offence intended to Dunadan and his friends). I was actually lining the tower up with the viewfinder gridlines.
On a second visit to a new hairdressers I sat by an open window and spotted that below passed the Overground Railway, so out came the camera and waited a short while. As they say, have camera, will snap. Looming over the local swimming pool at our local park is what looks like a giant effigy of Gandalf, or could it be Treebeard - or his cousin perhaps?