Welcome to Felpersham...

Hereford is a dump.

It's a grotty, featureless hole, masquerading as a city on account of a (rather small, squat, dirty) cathedral.

You know you are in trouble when the Hereford City Council website offers you this:



...a wonky black and white scan of a map from many years back. You can spend many a happy hour trying to locate the Tourist Information Centre. Go on, try it. I imagine that when you get there, the Tourist Information they offer would be "Go anywhere other than Hereford".

(It is helpful, though, to have the toilets categorised into Male & Female; Male, Female & Disabled; Female & Female Disabled; Male.)

Having just come from Cardiff, which is lively and cosmopolitan, Hereford is like being stuck in the 70s. Nothing opens after 5.30pm. The only things that were open after that? McDonalds, a Pizza Express (which I imagine is the height of sophistication for people in Hereford - "if you're celebrating, sit in the window") and a Beefeater.

If you're Welsh and crossing the border into England for a bit of a day out, say from Abergavenny or Monmouth or Brecon or Llandridnod Wells (Google maps...!) then you are going to be very disappointed. Cerys was right - "Every day, when I wake up, I thank the Lord I'm Welsh..."; the little known next line perhaps being, "Because I don't live in Hereford..."

If I ever go there again it will really be too soon.

Urbi et Orbi...

Not your standard Papal Balcony affair, I'm afraid - just a few Easter things I need to get off my chest.

Stop moving it around...

It's confusing and inconvenient. Last Easter Sunday I was here...

(...where, coincidentally, it was also snowing)

...but that's not twelve months ago to the day - it was actually on April 8. Easter Sunday is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. This year it's about the earliest it can ever be because the spring equinox was on Thursday and the full moon was on Friday, so here we are. No wonder Tesco had to have their Easter Eggs on display by Boxing Day...

It was stolen by Christianity...

As we all know, the days used in the calculation - spring equinox, all druids and Stonehenge; full moon, all witches and werewolves and magic - are totally pagan things and nothing to do with the crucifixion or the resurrection. This is because Easter was happily going on for donkey's years before Christianity hit Britain - as a celebration of spring, new life, fertility etc... hence bunnies, eggs, chicks. It was a celebration of the goddess of spring and fertility Estre (or Oestre or Ishtar) and the word comes from her. As does the word "Oestrogen"...

"Do you wish to remove unused files?"

I went to Church of England primary school, so stored away in my brain, taking up valuable space, is...

There is a green hill far away
Without a city wall
Where the dear Lord was crucified
Who died to save us all.

We may not know, we cannot tell
What pains he had to bear
But we believe it was for us
He hung and suffer'd there.

He died that we might be forgiv'n
He died to make us good,
That we might go at last to heav'n,
Saved by his precious blood.

I will never need this for any useful purpose again in my life (ie. beyond blogging and quizzes)and yet I can remember it verbatim. I didn't look it up. Some kind of brain clean-up facility is needed, along the lines of the excellent example here...

Even at the age of 8, I remember being bothered about "without a city wall" because I thought that it meant it hadn't got one. It was only a green hill far away, why would it have needed one? Only as my grammatical understanding progressed did I realise it meant "outside the city wall..." (Makes mental note to use this construction more often in everyday speech to confuse people... "Where's Starbucks? Just down the way, without the front doors...")

I'm still bother'd by the whole rhyming of "forgiv'n" and "heav'n" and the sing-them-as-if-they've-only-got-one-syllable thing, both of which happen loads in hymns. I suppose it was because the tunes and the words were probably written by different people, maybe centuries apart, and someone had to crowbar it all together. Maybe if Rice and Lloyd-Webber had done it instead...*

Open the bloody shops...

Why are they closed?

It can't be to force people into church, because it doesn't work...
It can't be an objection to making profit, because all the little shops can open...
It can't be an objection to trading per se, because of car boot sales...

It must just be to remind us about suffering...

Sod health and education and social justice, in the next election I'm voting for whoever sorts the Sunday Trading laws out. Or moving to Scotland.


*Oh...

"Tell me Christ how you feel tonight
Do you plan to put up a fight?
Do you feel that you've had the breaks?
What would you say were your big mistakes?"

They did...

It must be the holidays...

...because emails with this kind of thing in usually go straight in the junk mail. And are usually from Tina. But on this occasion, thanks, Sarah, for wasting a considerable chunk of my Saturday morning! Baaaaa!



I haven't got above Bobbing Bobcat yet; I have only had one coffee though....

Whiteout...

The sun has come out now, but for the last couple of days it's been really cold. -6°C at its lowest and not much above freezing during the day. And foggy!

And this morning, although it hadn't snowed where my Dad lives, it had snowed a couple of miles to the east (closer to Russia).



Now, why couldn't it have done that at Christmas?

Don't try this at home...

...try it at someone else's home!

Happy Pancake Day!

31 down...

...335 to go.

I take lots of photos, but I'm not a good photographer. I have a medium range Canon digital camera, which I don't really know how to work unless it's on the automatic mode. Should I be required to take photos of fireworks, or on ski slopes (one of which I have done), it has built in settings for those. It also has "Night" setting, which doesn't really work. I've tried to take photos of floodlit landmark buildings (Eiffel Tower, Houses of Parliament etc) which always look fantastic in those shots taken by professional people, but always look over/under exposed, or blurred, when I do it. The nearest I've got to success is this...



Which is Grand Central Station, reasonably in focus, looking warm and comforting in what was about -2°C. I like it. Some more knowledgeable people than me would say the composition was wrong or the aperture/focal length/otherphototographyterm was rubbish. I don't care. At least it's not wonky... A classic case of "very expensive camera" + "photography course" + "subscription to Digital Camera magazine" ≠ "good photo"... But don't worry, she's my friend. At least she was until she read this... ;-)

SO. I'm now one month into Project366 (Normally Project365, but it's a leap year), which is a flickr group taking one photo for every day of the year. January has gone and I've not missed one yet...



That's the trendy montage, all the photos are here...

I'm ignoring the themes in the project, which the rules say you can do, because I'm setting themes alternately with Chris, who I used to work with. Complicatedly (?), we have decided to change the theme every six days, because 366 divides neatly by 6, so 61 themes for the year.

What is much more interesting than I thought it would be is looking at a selection of photos taken on the day from hundreds of people around the world. It's a real snapshot of... well, the lives of a self-selecting, flickr-using, digital camera owning, possibly OCD-suffering group of people.



I'll let you know if I make it to December.

Did I miss the pancakes...?

Only just been born, but in Tesco (which seems to have taken over my blog...) He is already dead.

And don't forget the Cornflakes...

I think it's about time there was some widespread defiance of the Sunday Trading laws. Again.

Years ago, when it was still illegal to open your shop on Sunday, the shops opened anyway. So many of them opened, that it was not practical for the local authorities to prosecute them and so, despite the self-righteous bleatings of collected "family" and religious groups, the laws were changed to mirror practice. Well, almost.

Only six hours of shopping allowed, though, so that I still have time to go to church and watch the Antiques Roadshow. Otherwise the fabric of society might crumble. In enlightened Scotland, I could be in John Lewis for ten hours and B&Q for twelve.

Anyway, back to Tesco earlier today, and I would like to say a special Christmas thank you to the woman who let her five year-old son do the scanning at the self-service checkout, even though there was a queue ten deep, and then looked surprised when she had to pay, dithered for five minutes more, reached into her jeans pocket for money, carefully unfolded the notes one by one and tried to feed them into the slot, which steadfastly rejected them because they were too mangled.

I would have gladly sacrificed Clubcard points for security to ship her off somewhere like Aber-bloody-deen, where she and her son would a) be a long way from me and b) have between 6am and 10pm on a Sunday to do their shopping.

That said, Tesco in Mansfield is good if you need breakfast cereal...

Christmas Repeats....

Penguin...
Reindeer...
Owl...
Polar Bear...
Penguin...
Owl...
Reindeer
Polar Bear...
Polar Bear...

One would have assumed that, with a John Lewis advent calendar, one was investing in quality and, perchance, a little bit of variety.



Seemingly not.

Oooooh!! Ahhhhh!! (A Little Bit More...)

I'm not sure the fireworks were any better this year than last...



...but we were standing closer...



...and I have a better camera...



Plus it was loads warmer, which was a bonus.

Immerse yourself in the atmosphere...



And now...

Not all it's Cracked up to be..

Right, I can't claim to understand all modern art, and I'm from the same school of aesthetic criticism as are many people from the Midlands, (chief amongst them my sister and Paul), where we speak as we find. ("Well, in't it just some bits o' metal and teabags?")

But I do try. After all, I have a degree, and so by law I must spend some of my down time being cultural and nodding sagely at stuff.

And so here is Shibboleth in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall, an installation by Doris Salcedo.



It's a big crack in the floor. Quite deep, and running the length of the building, it starts off very thin...



...and widens...



...splits...



...goes off down dead ends, presumably to get that woman's shoes...



...and finally disappears under the wall at the other end.



It's meant to make us think about racism and colonialism. Which it really doesn't, because it's exceptionally easy to step from one side to the other, in precisely the way that I imagine it's not if you're on the receiving end of racism. It was, of course, impossible for anyone in a wheelchair to cross it at certain points, but she doesn't claim it's about that.



Maybe I missed something.

What it was making people think about (me and all the snatched conversations I heard while I was there) was exactly how she did it. Pneumatic drills? Moulds? Poured concrete? Screeds? (and how will they fill it in again afterwards?)

And of course, if it is supposed to say something about modern society, what it really says is "How stupid are people these days that an army of guides has to hand out leaflets telling them not to fall down it?"



And how to get your camera back...

At last!

Wishes can come true...

Long, Long Ago in Sherwood...

I suppose I'd be looking grumpy too if I'd been on pause for 14 and a half days...



My Sky+ obviously has issues and clearly I have a lot of catching up to do before I can watch X-Factor...

A Choice of Spiritual Experiences...

Having looked at the Nottingham Arena website - not for any particular reason, just because it was less than three random clicks away from something I really was looking at - I now have to decide which of these events I want to go and see...

But hang on...

Does one of them seem like the odd one out? Has one of the over-25s gone solo? Perhaps one of them will help me understand my higher purpose in life? *

If so, I think it's more likely to be Bill Bailey than any of the others.

* Apparently, 50 Cent realised his higher purpose in life after being shot in the face nine times. I didn't get as far as reading what it was...

Back at the Bison...

...but this time as a Panther!

And also this time with Paul and Nikki (who are fellow official Midlanders who had been promising to come along to the blood-and-violence-fest for a couple of years and have finally got around to it...) and Tina and Chris (who aren't, and hadn't...)

My sports reporting is not brilliant and not really knowing the few rules there appear to be don't make it all any easier to understand, but anyway, first there was an almighty punch-up between two of the players, then they scored and then we did. That's how it ended, and five minutes of fairly fast and furious extra time made no difference, so it was down to penalties. Of which we got more in than they did and that's how you win.

You can't take pictures while they're playing because they move faster than the shutter does and the photos look like this:



...but if you wait till they've won and they get presented (for some reason) with their honorary pack of Fosters, you get them to stand still long enough while they look smug and victorious...



...to get a photo of the whole team.

* Well, the whole team apart from the one who punched a member of the other team in the face and had to go home. Good, wholesome fun.