There really isn’t anything happening at the moment; and not a great deal to be done about this, until the weekend anyway. In the pub, our landlady feels the need to retract a statement presumably made over the Christmas period. The grammar is not mine, no complaints please.
Opening time at my local pub is 3pm on Tuesdays, and a nice thing about arriving early is that I get to light the well-laid fire. The lump of lava on the right is a firelighter doing its job: within a few minutes this whole construction will be alight. Sometimes the interest is in the details — such as the paper to the left, what series of numbers goes 3, 10, 50, 70, 100 I wonder?
One of those where the guy’s profile caught my eye, and the rest of the shot was whatever came into view as I caputred it.
A bit early for a working lunch perhaps, but if it’s good enough for Inspector Morse — a frequenter of the Turf Tavern, Oxford, in both the novels and the TV series — it’s good enough for me, and indeed for this gentleman. One thing about Oxford is that you do really feel the whole city centre, at this time of year at least, is engaged in some form of intellectual pursuit. The environment is wholly conducive to it.
Spent the whole day entertaining some visitors from Norway, so they should feature on the daily post. Johannes ponders his beer, Anita brings more, and Catherine seems happy that her luggage — thought lost in the system — has been found. They and their colleagues reminded me that Norway is a place I have not been to lately, despite it remaining the third-most featured country on this blog (after England and Australia); its last appearance was 26th April 2018, as I departed Tromsø airport for the last time (so far). If I made a good impression today, perhaps I will get an invite back…
There are, by now, a number of ‘digital ghosts’ that haunt this blog. I know of, for sure, seven people who have appeared on here who have since died: both of Clare’s grans, our former neighbour Richard, a professorial colleague at work, and three friends, of which Lynn was the most recent, passing away last month. Her last appearance on here was on 30th May. It’s possibly the only one, although I would be surprised if she didn’t also turn up in the background of some other shots: as, technically, she does here.
So what do the rest of us do….. A wake is the party that they hold for you, the one time they know you can’t come. And then we move on. Eventually everyone depicted on here will be dust, including me: I’m only two years younger than Lynn. Whether I will get the chance to let you know I’m on the way out, is as yet undetermined.
I have been looking at this sign for some months now, but only today really understood the implications. I’ve seen dog ice cream for sale, and in the Arndale centre in Manchester there is now a whole stall selling little doggy cakes and pastries. But dog karaoke? Methinks we are starting to pamper our little pooches just that little bit too much. Although I doubt the singing would be appreciably worse.
Of all the days over the two weeks since I effectively lost my access to photos, this was the dullest and least eventful. Getting a shot of C’s coat, left as she went to buy a drink, and somehow imagining that it looks like her shade or phantom, was about as exciting as it got. Sometimes Thursdays are like that. One cannot always get the hang of Thursdays.
“I dunno mate. It gets worse and worse. Look at these scraps.”
“Know exactly what you mean, Bob. You just can’t get the humans these days. Must be global warming or summat.”
“Well, let’s see what we can get out of it before that twat over there decides to muscle in.”
An abstract, but appropriate metaphor for life today. The signature on the glass says John Smith but the product is different. And, no, it’s not all the same in the end.
Being 42 