My daughter’s partner, Owen, is doing a 10km. run to raise funds for MS Research. Any contribution would be most welcome!
Category: General
Headgear
It was mostly about headgear yesterday. Posh headgear. Not cycling helmets or berets or straw boaters or little transparent plastic rainhoods the like of which my nan always used to have handy in her bag in case of a sudden rainshower.
It was important that those little rainhoods were transparent. I mean, you pay all that money for a purple rinse so people should jolly well be able to admire it, even in the harshest of Welsh weather. Continue reading “Headgear”
Dungeness
A walk around the bird reserve, lots of birds but far to fast to photograph.
It is well past 6:00 pm on the 21st May
Well, it is in Queensland.
As of now, nobody has been sucked up into the sky – but that could be because there are no good Christians within sight of Bearsy and Boadicea’s back yard, I suppose. It is raining, but I have seen no arks.
Could Donald and Cuprum have been wrong? 😦
Creative Writing and Poetry Competitions
The Creative Writing and Poetry competitions are now suspended until the northern hemisphere’s Autumn.
Jackass
No, I’m not being insulting. This is apparently a new and dangerous game, a bit like “planking” but faster. According to this report in Nice Matin today, four crew members, described as Australians and New Zealanders, from a boat in Antibes decided after a night on the town to try this game demonstrated on TV by a couple of Americans. It involves riding a dustbin down a flight of steps. In this case a short, but steep, flight of stone steps with a nice solid stone wall on one side. I know these steps well. Unfortunately the emergency services had to be called when one lad ended up unconscious at the foot of the steps. He is very seriously ill. Let’s hope this puts other boys off this game.
Greys Court, South Oxfordshire
Not far from Henley on Thames and not very grand, but extremely interesting! The house was donated to the National Trust by Sir Felix and Elizabeth, Lady Brunner who bought the house in 1937. Walled courtyards, pretty gardens and its history begins in 1346!
The house today is very much a family home and has been virtually rebuilt; changed hands many times but it’s a fascinating hotchpotch in beautiful countryside.
An Evening Out
Last night Marion and I were invited out to dinner at Tapping House, the Norfolk Hospice, and were right-royally entertained for the evening. The staff, all voluntary, run it as Day Centre, and specialise in various forms of massage. There were about sixty guests, (thirty disabled, thirty carers), and the staff were in black tie and equivalent. I was struck by the number of ex-service people there; I suppose it reflects on the love of community life engendered in the armed forces. Looking round the faces after the meal, in every face I saw the determination not to be beaten by their disability, including a grand dame of 82, caring for her husband. She looked about 60, and was a dancer at the Windmill in her youth. After dinner, all five courses of it, a group of young country lads sang, rather like the Wurzels. The evening was most enjoyable, and very humbling in a way. To a large extent it restored my faith in human nature.
If interested, look them up on Google.
That Hat!
Well! We all had a laugh, but it seems that people are queuing up to buy Princess B’s titfer – even Wiggles an Australian children’s musical group!
Nouns as verbs.
I should really have made the title of this piece, ‘Proper,’ nouns as verbs because I don’t intend to discuss that awful American habit of randomly using a noun as a verb. A piece in the tech pages caught my eye the other day. It was discussing the measurement of commercial success of a brand by the use of the brand name as a verb. The obvious examples are ‘google,’ and ‘skype’ (Lower case initial letters when used as verbs.) What was interesting was an inference that this was a new thing. It seems that the writer had not made the connection between this idea and, for example, ‘hoovering,’ the carpet, ‘sellotaping’ something, or ‘(tele-) phoning someone. There is also the matter of brand names becoming generic terms – we use a biro to write something, for example. (In Serbian, a radio comms set is a ‘motorola,’ and in Romanian, a refrigerator is a ‘frigeder – say it with a Spanish pronounciation.)
I’m sure the charioteers can come up with other examples, but what interested me is the implied sense that nothing happened before 1970, or so. There seems to be a disconnection somewhere in which anything that happened before the cultural revolution is discounted – in the air-headed chatterati expression, is ‘not relevant,’ or is ‘out-moded.’
That might go some way to explain why the country is in the mess it is. (On the other hand, of course, it might not 🙂 )
Boadicea's Chariot 
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