Merry Christmas! Let's discuss your death and cremation!
What do I get through my front door? I may get a few birthday cards in July, and a few Christmas cards in December. Twice a month I get free Club magazines. There's a constant, but not overwhelming,...
View ArticleHow the other half lives - posh tiki bars for the garden!
Yesterday, having shot Storm Bert rampaging at Newhaven Harbour and Seaford, I dropped by at Paradise Park, where there is a dinosaur garden for kids and a rather good garden centre for adults. Rather...
View ArticleHe thinks I'm young, confused and struggling
Substack is an online platform for writers who wish to target potential new readers with intriguing free content - news, opinion pieces, essays, and life-experience articles - and then get them to...
View ArticleA horn for Christmas
Christmas Markets have long been very popular. I quite like them. They are so atmospheric, especially once it starts to get dark. And opportunities to take great photos abound, whether it's pictures of...
View ArticleMaybe I need not worry about the Windows 10 support withdrawal
Only ten months now before Microsoft turns off support for Windows 10. MS has been hustling every user of Windows 10 (and earlier versions of Windows) to upgrade to Windows 11. I gather that the latest...
View ArticleMam Tor and the Broken Road
I was in the southern Peak District in late September, pitched at the Carsington Water Club Campsite, just above Carsington Water itself, a large reservoir filling a valley, with a long wide dam topped...
View ArticleAn encounter with AI on misty Stanton Moor
Another Peak District tale from last September. I had parked Sophie, and was looking for the entrance pathway onto Stanton Moor, an area of high rough heathland north-west of Matlock. I was on the...
View ArticleNew sunglasses
I haven't in the past been one of those people who are always wearing sunglasses, as part of their standard 'look' perhaps, like Anna Wintour, the Editor in-Chief of Vogue fashion magazine. Here she...
View ArticleNew hat
Hats used to be worn by absolutely everyone, for every occasion, indoors or out, but during the last century, and particularly after 1950, most people gradually gave up wearing them. They remained part...
View ArticleHat blown off in a cloud of smoke
A line from the song Flash Bang Wallop in the early-1960s musical Half a Sixpence, starring Tommy Steele - referring to the kind of old-fashioned flash photography used with a large studio camera on...
View ArticleBrownsea Island - the voyage there, and my arrival
Poole Harbour is a large expanse of sheltered water named after Poole, the ferry port in East Dorset, close to Bournemouth the famous resort. It's protected from the open sea by two sand spits with a...
View ArticleBrownsea Island - school ordeals and Lord Baden-Powell's lasting achievement
Let me say at once that I was never a Girl Guide, nor aspired to be one. Service and adventure? No thanks. The entire idea of learning outdoor skills, camping out in rough countryside, and jostling...
View ArticleBrownsea Island - natural beauty and red squirrels
The main reason I'd wanted to visit Brownsea Island was because it was a stronghold of the red squirrel - our native squirrel - in southern England. I'd never actually seen a red squirrel in the flesh....
View ArticlePresident Trump's menacing signature
Glancing at the BBC News app, I started reading an article about President Trump's first Executive Orders, and there was a picture of him signing one of these Orders.He was using a big marker pen, so...
View ArticleI'm on Wikipedia!
Any search on Google or elsewhere using my name will throw up numerous hits - my Blog and my Flickr photos of course, but also some other references and credits. I suppose that will be true for anyone...
View ArticleHoods and street photography
I don't like hoods. I don't like the feeling of my face being hemmed in. I especially don't like having only a front-facing view (tunnel-vision so to speak) and not being able to see what is going on -...
View ArticleFour ways to fail
I'm following the first weeks of President Trump's reign as the new King of America with keen interest. It's so dismaying. And I'm puzzled how, given that the US Constitution is supposed to have...
View ArticleCustard pies and days out in Calais without a passport
Only one post in February! I have to go back to April 2009 to find a month in which I wrote so little. The constant happenings in America have distracted me. King Donald has been chipping away at...
View ArticleI wonder if I could have your personal point of view?
Have you ever been stopped in the street by someone with a microphone, and asked to give your point of view on something topical? It's happened to me only once. It was in August 2016. I was at...
View ArticleDeath in Paradise: one for those who are not afraid of something different
Two nights ago I watched - on my laptop, in the caravan - the last episode of Series 14 of Death in Paradise. It's the one in which the 'new' detective played by Don Gilet (a football-loving Londoner...
View ArticleBeards
I'd better be careful about what I say in this post. I might give offence (potentially dangerous in these hyper-sensitive times). It's about beards, those hairy growths on men's faces. And when I say...
View ArticleFuture posts
I've been writing here since February 2009. The earliest stuff was taken down in 2018, as it didn't cover the subjects that most concerned me from 2015, when my income increased, my social life took...
View ArticleDriving Licence Blues
Not a Lead Belly song from the 1930s. It's about that sinking feeling when you think you may have been caught - yet again! - by a speed camera. But first, the good news. Being over seventy, and...
View ArticleHoy or Westray?
I depart for Orkney mid-morning on 28th April - only sixty hours away now - and will actually reach the place mid-afternoon on 6th May, after a very long haul in stages to Scrabster, near Thurso, on...
View ArticleNo flights available
I researched Loganair flights from Kirkwall to Westray without delay. The planes they use for inter-island services are only ten-seaters and of course they fill up quickly. I would be in Orkney only...
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