The proliferation of nuclear weapons is probably the most serious issue facing the world, with the potential for unimaginably horrific destruction and impairment of life. An American President is making progress, despite the inevitable setbacks, in the difficult and painstaking process of trying to stop proliferation and, ultimately, rid the world of the curse of nuclear weapons altogether.
Naturally, Obama’s critics and begrudgers are silent on the matter.
You would think, living down here in the sticks, that I would have been pretty much left alone on this campaign. Not so. If anything it has gone politics mad down here.
I have had letters from all of the big parties-we don’t do UKIP down here, not offended. They are all addressed to me personally, and are all promising the world. As the Zero’s crowd know I have a very attractive bright orange sign in my garden, asking one to vote for the lib dem’s, who have held office down here as long as I have been alive. It is not there through choice, but obligation. The bloke in question helped me to get this house, something that I am eternally grateful for, and as I did nothing but hassle him for a year until I got housed back in the villiage I grew up in, he now thinks that it is fine for him use our garden for any campaign that he is running. He won’t be getting my vote, but please don’t tell him that.
I have had locals and other’s coming around and knocking on my door asking me for my vote, it is everywhere you look and I am actually finding it quite exciting this year, for the first time ever. I guess that this must come with age, where as before I knew which party I follow and have voted for, but I always used to be quite blahzay about the whole process and think that it didn’t really matter who got into power.
(Not that I am going to rush to watch Question Time now, that is a bit much for me, but I can take a healthy interest from the side lines.)
xxx
Some of what’s flowering in the garden at the moment. Images are big so I’ve posted here to save clogging the front page.
It must be because it rains so much in the UK that we have so many words to describe the event. This morning it wasn’t the first tweet of a bird that woke me but the hammering of rain drops on corrugated roofs. I arrived in the hospital and as I stood dripping in reception waiting for the lift a student walked up and, after a moment’s hesitation while he stared at the floor and constructed the sentence in his mind, he turned to me and said “today, it is raining dogs and cats very much.” That’s the beauty of language, it doesn’t really matter if you get the grammar all messed up, the meaning generally gets through. And before you start sniggering at his mangled effort, how would you say it in Mandarin then smartarse? Or French?
Continue reading “It’s Raining”
On the wordpress frontpage I saw the link. Couldn’t help it.
http://noonionplease.wordpress.com/2010/04/13/turkish-sweets/
I don’t generally listen to Jeremy Vine. Something about his style grates and I usually change over to Classic FM, Radio 4 or even local radio. Continue reading “Death and talking about it.”
An oxygen tank ruptured aboard the Service Module of the Apollo 13 spacecraft, the third mission intended to land on the moon.
The accident occurred almost exactly 200,000 miles from the earth, and resulted in an almost complete loss of electrical power in the module.
This event produced one of the most misquoted lines of all time, what Jack Swigert actually said in reporting the event was “Houston we’ve had a problem”.
During the next four days the only objective of the mission was “get home safe” and became an exercise in creative use of a very limited set of resources. Just about everything possible was used in some way to ensure the survival of the three crew members.
A recent interview with Jim Lovell the mission commander (now 82 years old) revealed a man as calm and laconic as he was in 1970 when faced with what appeared to be an unpleasant lingering death. Asked if he ever thought they would not make it safely back to earth he replied “No, but we were not waiting around for a miracle to occur, if we had been, we would still be up there”
Patrick Mayne was born in Cookstown, County Tyrone, in about 1824. Patrick left his native Ireland and arrived in Australia in 1841. By 1846 he was in Moreton Bay, Queensland, working as a butcher at the boiling down works, Kangaroo Point. Moreton Bay is about 45 km north of Brisbane, and in 1841 was still a penal colony and a pretty rough place.
Years ago I bought a book called Word Games by Peter Newby, mainly because it cost virtually nothing … I’ve hardly looked at it since, but tonight I flicked through it and this caught my eye.
What party to vote for is of huge interest to our under age son. He’s 16, and really pretty clued up. He really wishes he could have the vote this May. At present I feel he is better informed than me about the differences in the policies. Just now after a tea-time discussion he sent me the following link so I can clarify my thoughts.
http://voteforpolicies.org.uk/
How do you fare on this?
Boadicea's Chariot 
You must be logged in to post a comment.