Accident in the Afternoon

“EEEVVVEEE-ning Chronicle!”

The newspaper vendors tried their best to be heard over the multitude of buskers, great and small, that carnivalised the pedestrian precinct. To help sell their wares at their mobile kiosks the street traders had special extras to entice Mr and Mrs Public into buying their news. Free Mars Bar with today‘s paper, screamed the headline emblazoned over the front of their wheeled booth. As offers you can’t refuse go this one was a fence-splitting four faulter: small size of bar, the chocolate will melt in the afternoon heat, probably out of date and it is not fried. The declining newspaper industry will have to try better than that. Who wants to pay for inky fingers when you can strain your eyes online for free? Continue reading “Accident in the Afternoon”

Reporting in…

Good evening all.  After my long absence, I think I have reached the stage where I am reasonably fit to be seen again in polite ( mostly…) company.  Where have I been?  Well, I’ve been right here in the salubrious suburb of East Acton all along.  I’ve been AWOL so long that I can’t remember where I was with my son’s illness when I slipped away and closed the door quietly behind me…

I’m sure I shared with you the fact that my son was suffering clinical depression? ( The good news is that he is well on the way to recovery. )  It was the fact that I’ve spent the last three years (good grief, it really is that long ,)supporting the lad through the worst of it that made me disappear from the radar.  I really wasn’t good online company as I found myself on an increasingly shorter fuse and every time I put pen to paper it turned into more than a bit of a rant.  I really didn’t want to subject my co-charioteers to that, hence the self-imposed exile.  I haven’t been entirely off-line, but confined my excursions to James `Delingpole’s blog in the DT, (and that old duffer Geoffrey Lean,) where I was able to rant at the CAGW Whackos to my heart’s content 🙂
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Shark Attack, with pictures. Not for the squeamish.

Well that’s what I’m telling people.
It happened two Sundays back about eleven in the morning.
I was working on the boat, tearing out and replacing old waste water piping. Most of the pipe is in the bilge, not the healthiest spot in which to spend time, and I was lying on the galley floor reaching into the void to thread some more pipe when I must have kicked the companionway steps. The steps are a heavy wooden four step flight that mount into clips on the bulkhead and have pegs that drop into holes in the deck. Having done what was needed below I needed to climb the steps into the main cabin.
Thinking only of the next job I was off up the steps, well I got to the top when they let go, sliding down the bulkhead and onto the galley floor. My left leg caught the left mounting clip, opening up an seven-inch gash from ankle to mid calf. It felt as if I had been hit in the leg with a hammer, and my first thought was “I’m going to have quite a bruise there”. Then I saw the extent of the damage, kind of like a busted watermelon. I took off my dirty gloves and pushed the wound shut with both hands to see if it was something I could fix with a few band-aids or some electricians tape, but it was clearly beyond that.  I took off my t-shirt and tied it around the leg and started off the boat, up the dock and into the house in a kind of Quasimodo hobble. Nobody home of course, and as far as I could see, nobody on the creek.

(There are pictures coming up, if you do not wish to see them STOP NOW.)

Continue reading “Shark Attack, with pictures. Not for the squeamish.”

Life’s a Beach

On vacation this week, borrowed a house from my rich business partner, on the beach at Lewes (say Lew-is), Delaware. Got here late Friday night via Delaware City, Delaware (more about which later). Raining today and windy with it, holiday innit?
Lewes (the First Town in the First State) was settled by the Dutch in 1631 in what was to become Delaware (the first state to sign the Declaration) so naturally it is home to the Zwaanendael Museum just a couple of blocks away from here, and perhaps a little more surprising home to the Kalmar Nykel, a replica of the Dutch ship that brought original settlers to Wilmington, Delaware (sixty miles North of here), however, they were Swedes, following me so far?
Here she is back in 2011 on the Bay.

Continue reading “Life’s a Beach”