Category: General

March Photo Challenge – The Winner

Yes, I know it’s rotten awful late but I have been busy with boat stuff, getting ready for Spring takes longer every year.

As for the pictures all three were good but I will always give extra points for wildlife shots (very hard to get a good shot of wild things, young kids and babies included).  So between Janus and Ara as finalists, sorry OZ that boar on the hoof may have made it.

Raptors are favorites of mine  (you may have noticed) so I will give Araminta the edge this time, the hawk was very special and that kind of opportunity comes along so rarely it makes it that much harder to take advantage and frame the scene.

Well done Ara, worthy of National Geographic.

There Will Always Be an England.

Departing Luxembourg improved my mood immediately. After the abject disaster of the past 9 months, getting on with it was a relief. Strangely, the skies over London agreed with me. My flight actually landed at the scheduled time and I crossed the UK border smoothly. I also didn’t manage to get lost once travelling to Bayswater. My hotel in London was adequate, if Spartan. I stayed at the Latvian Guesthouse on Queensborough Terrace. The room was tiny but clean and the service was competent, if inconsistently polite. The younger Latvian staff were courteous and helpful almost to a fault. The manager, in her fifties, betrayed a Soviet upbringing in her demeanour. Their breakfast was also adequate. A kindly older Latvian woman prepared full English breakfasts at no additional cost.
Continue reading “There Will Always Be an England.”

April Pome Competition

Thank you Christopher for this entirely unexpected honour.

I would like to thank so many people for making this possible, including my parents, my grandparents and my long term partner, my laptop. Of course I must include his parents, especially his father, Charles Babbage (even though the DNA tests have proved rather inconclusive so far) but without whom none of this would have been possible.

So to a new lyrical challenge.
Because I live by it, worked on it and look at it every day it is,
“The Sea”

Could be anything in it, on it or around it. Anything that floats in it or anything that doesn’t. Could also include any plaice near it, so cast your doubts aside one and all and have a go, just for the halibut.

As required by any one of innumerable EU regulations entries are best before 01/05/2015.

Easter was cancelled

Been somewhat harrowing round here of late.  We finally decided to move into town to our little house.  Five acres is just becoming too much to cope with.

Having put it on the market, one more time, we took one look and realised quite how much housekeeping we haven’t done of late!  Heaps of crap everywhere.  It took spousal unit 10 days to clear the office, to one’s horror, no filing had been done since 2009, oops!

Continue reading “Easter was cancelled”

Enough is enough

Dear Bearsy,

I realise that you Aussies want your revenge on the UK for sending all those convicts there. But last night on the leaders’ non-debate, I discovered your follow-up to Patsy Hewitt.  As soon as I heard the voice of Natalie Bennet, I rushed into the kitchen to wash dishes.  Please stop sending these women to us. Haven’t we suffered enough? And most of the convicts made good, but the same can’t be said for Hewitt or Greer or Bennet.

Yours tearfully,

Sheona.

Time and place

Originally I wrote this as a joke back back in the seventies, I had no idea that is might turn out still to be a bit closer to the truth than I had imagined, all these years later

“The time has come to end it all”
he said on looking down.
I’ll leap from this ledge fifty one floors up
Then blackness all around”
In passing by the thirteenth floor
A man leapt into space
A man of dark and flowing locks
A beard upon his face
A man who falling caught him up
And caught him by the ears
And yelled “This is a hijack man
Fly me to Algiers”