I think it's the warm weather and the long summer evenings (both of which I really can't be doing with) which have resulted in my house becoming a haven for wildlife. (Again.)
This doesn't bother me much - I am not mottephobic - but there is a big difference between moth being at rest and still, and moth being flappy and confused and fast and in your face, trilling away like some tiny, winged pneumatic drill.
It looks a bit like they are building IKEA in Southampton like most people build IKEA furniture.
In other words, they're ignoring the instructions completely, not checking they've got all the bits and going with a bit of gut instinct and hoping for the best.
This can be the only reason they've put the name up on one side before they've finished building the other side.
Or perhaps they are taking the obvious marketing opportunity of getting the sign up early to suck people in with anticipation. As if the several million square metres of blue wall didn't give you the clue as to what it was.
...people do person does read this blog, which is all very encouraging and spurs one on into making a bit of an effort.
With this in mind, I have invested time and coffee in producing the very nascent map below.
It shows the basic route and main destinations and its creation, in that it was bloody hard to do, gives the lie to Google's corporate "do no evil" philosophy (see number 6) and drives a cart and horses through most of its design principles (especially number 3).
(You can zoom in pan about and look at an aerial photo of Heathrow, if you wish...)
I intend to add those groovy little place markers in various colours and styles to bring some actual tourism to what is currently only flights, and they may (or may not) appear on this map (see number 5).
With only three days officially left at work now (but probably about seven or eight left unofficially) and with some other people (who had sensible Easters actually at Easter) having finished work for the summer completely, I thought it was about time to start looking forward to the holidays.
The last time I did this properly was in 2005 when I went off to New Zealand and it's been really good to look back at the blog and the photos from them to remember what we did and saw, what with memory failing through age, early onset Alzheimers etc.
Being as I'm going nearly as far again this time, I have decided to "temperately"* interrupt this blog (no imposition as I haven't written on it since April and no-one reads it anyway...!) and produce a self-contained "interactive postcard" of...
(I really spend too much time on the computer...)
There are several good reasons for this:
It's cheaper than phoning people;
You don't have to master any foreign language to buy stamps for real postcards (in this case, Australian...);
It's a good back-up for all the photos in case the memory card goes tits-up;
It saves making a real scrapbook like I used to do when I was little (my OCD meaning that I would only ever buy John Hinde postcards...);
It will give Ann Crocker something to read (I still have a dog in my boot that's hers... fluffy, not real, so don't phone the RSPCA...);
It will divert attention away from the fact that I have failed Project366 (but kept going longer than some...).
..."it's bad enough having to read most of the crap that's written, without 'avin to look at a photo of the bastard that wrote it..."
Well, now it's poultry with egos too...
All I can say to Tesco is that I feel it's ethical enough to buy the locally sourced, Shiny Happy Farmers Free Range eggs, without 'avin to look at a photo of the chickens that laid 'em...
To create the crack, Doris Salcedo had to destroy the floor, so it can't be moved or installed elsewhere. Mending the floor destroys the art work. Destroy to create, create to destroy... It's, like, totally an aesthetic paradox and that....
It does, however, appear as though they are mending it with giant duct tape; which seems to be from the same school of civil engineering as the repair of the Huka Falls footbridge with a tile adhesive gun...
I think it was all a bit too clever for its own good. At least with the slides you were meant to fall down them...
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.
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?"
...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....
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).
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 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...
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