leap

It is SO annoying, when involved in a vaguely intelligent discussion with someone, when they begin to engage in verbal gymnastics such that suddenly, even the meaning of words are re-defined, and what should be regarded as questionable assumptions are taken as givens. Mostly I find this happens when talking to theologians or to people with an exaggerated sense of their own moral superiority. When this happened to me the other day I got exasperated and said 'I assumed the world was round, so I went round it, and it was flat, all the way round.'

This is another good response to that sort of person/argument/thing.

Happy Leaping Day

shake it shake it baby

So, there I am, lying abed reading about Soay sheep and sea stacks and puffins and what not, and the earth rocks at 5 point something on the richter scale (apparantly). Me? I feel nothing, zip, nada. It's dissapointing really. My conjecture is that the strata under northern lancashire is a sort of pink blancmange without the kirsch, or that Lancashire folk are just so hard that nothing under a force 7.5 would rattle our flat caps.

spronions

Oh, and I bought a jar of pickled onions today. A sure sign of spring on the way.

fowl ref

We were darn sarth during half term and took in a visit to the Domestic Fowl Trust in Honeybourne. This was an Ahhhh moment. As well as lots of Ahhhh moments there were quite a few CorBlimey moments too. I wanted to bring one of each, or even two of each of every breed home but of course didn't as they wouldn't have liked the motorway anymore, and possibly a lot less than I do these days. No use bringing any chicks back either as non of them had been sexed and sods law determines that any we chose would be male and therefore useless. *SWMBO nods in complete agreement*

This one is wired directly into my brain to increase my mental capacities by a 100%.

This Orpington was the size of a Sherman tank though there is nothing in the picture to scale it by.


Ben wanted that one, obviously.


..and he caught a runaway.


And how about you? Would you like to come live in Lancashire?

wtf

Maybe....wot's the grub like oop north?

We both fell for these dark lovely girls. A rare breed called, called.............oh, it'll come to me tomorrow.

glazed eyes

In between bouts of hibernation, Clodhopper & Son have been renovating this ancient neglected greenhouse that we have acquired. It is 30ft ish long by about 12ft ish wide and is well rotten in places; most of the base timbers are in need of replacement which is tricky. Luckily a fair amount of the glass was salvagable though most of the roof sheets had slipped and needed refitting. I have discovered that I am not very good at cutting glass and I could spend all day sitting in our local glaziers shop just watching him effortlessly cut sheets to millimetre accuracy with never a chip or a crack or anything really. I am told however, that glass brittles with age and is much more difficult to cut than the more modern pliable variety. Funnily enough, I don't find this knowledge terribly consoling as I watch yet another bit of reclaimed glass split at 90 degrees to my cut line. I will finish it in time for the season. I will, I will, I will.

D Day

Sorry. Clodhopper is in hibernation. Just waking up enough to wish you all a Happy Darwin Day *yawn*

Ooooo! The sun is shining. Is spring coming round...Yay!

You may, like me, not know quite what to do on Darwinday unlike StValentinesday when you send your beloved some inane message like roses are red, violets are silly, grease up yer flaps coz here comes my..........

Oh well here's a few suggestions for the day:

1. eat something you never tried before
2. Celebrate by trying to mate with individuals who display favourable survival characteristics. (genetic recombination)
3. go around dressed up as the creatures we have evolved from,
4. Hold interactive species learning 'seminars' etc.
5. Raise a cup of tea in his honour! (He married into the Wedgewood family, it seems only fair to salute with a tea cup!)
6. Take a beagle out for a long walk. Or if you see one, pet it. (better ask first if you may)
7. Get kids to ask their biology teachers about Mr Darwin, just to get things started.
8. If it is winter where you live, do not feed the birds but go watch them a bit.

Mr Micawber

Mr Micawber, our Muscovy drake is enjoying his Christmas spread while giving thanks that we had goose for ours this year. Oh, I really should become vegetarian again shouldn't I.

Mr Micawber has had an air of sadness about him for a while now; I don't know if this is because his two companions have gone or because his owner has died recently. We comfort him as best we can.

Since I have to be at work tomorrow at 7am I thought I would say a little prayer for all the stressed out people that have to work in the hospitals and the fire stations and the coastguard and the police stations and the DFS and the B and Q and wherever else.

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I cannot accept and the wisdom to hide the bodies of those I had to kill today because they got on my nerves. And also, help me to be careful of the toes I step on today as they may be connected to the feet I may have to kiss tomorrow. Help me always to give 100% at work...

12% on Monday

23% on Tuesday

40% on Wednesday

20% on Thursday

and 5% on Friday

And help me to remember...

When I am having a bad day and it seems that people are trying to wind me up, it takes 42 muscles to frown, 28 to smile and only 4 to extend my arm and smack someone in the mouth.

Yuletide Waltz

A Merry Christmas to all who pop in to read my witterings from time to time. I hope you all have a happy and peaceful break from the Grindlestone of daily life.

SWMBO has written a Yuletide Waltz to share and she assures me there is a mistake in the writing out; but I confess I have not played it yet so I've no idea where the mistake is.

I am going to get my own back with a New Year Jig.

I've a mind to cook some porridge for Spiller and Chirpy as a Christmas treat. They love the stuff.

bit iffy samaritan

The truth about my back injury must be told..........

As I walked through town on the way to work, my eye fell upon one of those unfortunate, homeless vagabonds that are found in every city these days.

Wearing what can only be describes as rags, carrying every worldly possession in two plastic bags, my heart was touched by this person's condition.

Some people turned to stare. Others quickly looked away as if the sight would somehow contaminate them .

Recalling some long ago priest who made an admonition to "care for the sick, feed the hungry and clothe the naked," I was moved by some powerful inner urge to reach out to this unfortunate person.

Yes, where some people saw only rags, I saw a hidden beauty. A small voice inside my head called out, "Reach out, reach out!"


so I did!

























Serves me right I suppose :-(

back in business?

Haven't posted for a while: all my low back muscles went into meltdown and I couldn't move. I would love to tell you all it was while I was lifting a 3cwt fence section into place up on the allotment but I'd be lying through my fingers. The totally embarrasing truth is that I bent down to pick up a pair of knickers from the washing basket (well, they we're heavy knickers), to put up on the line and WHAM! Total back lockdown and agonising pain. But hey, it only took the Doc 4hrs to arrive so that's allright then. I can sort of move now and even type; you might empathise with the first and regret the second. Who knows? Mmmmm....more Diazepam please.

Branson Pickle

As promised, here is the evidence that Richard Branson, was/is one of the three wise men and finds himself immortalised in stone on the front portal of the Sagrada Familia.

It should therefore come as no surprise, given his background, that he has grouped his capitalist enterprises under the title of the 'Virgin Group'.

The urn, contrary to popular belief, contains two return tickets to London on the Virgin Pendelino train which, let's face it, as well as providing an exciting tilting experience, costs a crock of gold anyhow. Messiahs go free....up to a point.

Gaudi's Audi

We decamped to Barcelona for a week and gorged on Gaudi, of which more later. I took this picture to show that his designs owe everything to nature and nothing to supernature; though I suppose if any building in the world was going to convince you of His/Her existence, then the Sagrada Familia might just do the job. We also discovered that Richard Branson is not only a business mogul, but is also a very wise man. I will prove this over the weekend.

elementary Dr Watson

It is very impertinent and presumtuous of a self-confessed bumpkin to assert that one of the unravellers of the DNA double helix is just a bit thick, but I'm going to.

Now Dr James Watson has once again demonstrated his social ineptness (and had his lecture at the science museum cancelled), for his recent comments (in The Sunday Times) that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really". He said there was a natural desire that all human beings should be equal but "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true".

I submit that it is a scientists duty to DEMONSTRATE reality to us regardless of notions of political correctness but Dr Watson here is not demonstrating anything at all; he's just shooting his mouth off (again). He has previously claimed that beauty could be genetically manufactured, saying: "People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would great."

QED. The man's stupid. Come back Holmes. All is forgiven.

Obe Wan Bacon Butty

Isn't it great? Every day the media comes up with something else I've got to worry about. Now I've got to fret about obesity costing the NHS circa 7 billious pounds now and around 46 billious pounds (is that every year?) in about 40 years or so. A looming catastrophe, I am informed, potentially as great as global warming. Smeg - just when I was beginning to relax a bit too. OK, I know I can gaze gloomily at the digital readout on my bathroom scales which just sais 'to be continued' and yes, I know my body mass index is a bit on the high side but dammit, I am a middle aged man, we are supposed to be a bit pear shaped and anyway, shagging a skeleton (size zero I think they call it), holds no prospect of pneumatic bliss.

Also, my bony readers, when the Atlantic Conveyor turns off the gulf stream and Britains temperature plummets, you will not survive the bitter cold of winter as you will have no reserves of fat to call on and will be unable to make the necessary climatic adaptations required because you will be dead already, and in the meantime, we fatties are getting valuable fitness training carrying an extra 30 pounds of fat around all day long. Ergo, natural selection will kick in, and we will get shorter, fatter and happier. It is well known that fat people are just more smiley, happy go lucky, kinder, more forgiving, relaxed, gentle, better lovers.... and we don't get Anorexia either. It will be clear to my readers by now that I regard allotments as the solution to just about every evil from rap music to global terrorism. So if the govenment would care to throw some of that money my way, I will gladly give up my job sitting in front of a stupid computer in a stupid office all day and go and work up on the allotment more, thus lessening the risk of me making it all the way into the obese category.



I thinks it's called progress or something. I'll pass on that for the time being.

7 minutes to midnight

Martin Amis (Independant - Fri Oct 12), thinks there is something wrong with the Islamic clock. Of course, we all know to what he refers: that they have become stuck in a Koranic mindset that is antithetical to such wooly notions as freedom, democracy, equal rights, progress etc etc. Their clock has stopped at 00:00, at eternity, the martyrs fast tracked eternity in paradise, the infidels guaranteed eternity in hell.

He has a point but it needs to be taken further. Sure, there is something wrong with the Islamic clock, but it needs to be said that our clock is equally fucked up. Our clock has been hijacked by the corporate AGM, the FT index and the Dow Jones. By the spring sales and the summer sales and the autumn sales. By the 5.9% APR and the DFS sofa on interest free credit (offer ends monday by the way!) and sit on your arse and pay nothing for two years. By the e-mail that demands an instant response. By the celebrites preening their feathers in Heat magazine and by our bad, sad, fat, gadget obsessed, anxious, depressed and over-stressed children who are being tested to death.

My point? My point is that there is (or was anyway), once a natural clock. By it, we felt it time to sow the seed and water it. To tend the delicate seedlings with patience and love and in due course to give them their place in the sun. By it, we felt the pulse of the earth quicken in spring. We watched the birds return from their over wintering, or we felt the chill in the air as we watched them depart again. By it, we plucked the rosy apples and the humble blackberry and roasted the sweet chestnuts over the fire. By it we watched our children damn the stream and climb the tree and romp in the meadow while they worried about precisely nothing.



So Messrs Brown/Bush and Bin Muppet - plough up all yer Guantanamos and yer jihadi suicide training camps and turn them into allotments and lets get the clock ticking again shall we?

Marcus Brigstock sais it better than me and what's more, he's funny too. (scroll down to the u-tube version - priceless)

big nips

Look at that monster! And it wasn't at all woody. We experimented with making some parsnip chips and it worked sort of allright but you wouldn't want too many of them and they're better roasted really. We also made a parsnip soup....I like lots of pepper on it me.

"Spiller, call security at once! There is a strange man in our shed."


We have harvested the remaining sweetcorn because of the increased risk of frost damage now. Some have gone in the freezer and the rest have gone in our tummies. SWMBO refuses to believe me when I say a cob is ready to eat after only 3 minutes boiling. Will anyone back me up? How long do you boil yours for?

chez clodhoppers

tonight is sweetcorn, runners, spuds and tomatoes.

The spuds (sante main) were grown in a rubble sack. You just pop the tubers in and pack up with more soil as they grow. I'm not sure it's worth repeating it on an allotment really, but if you're short of space it's not a bad technique.
The corn cobs are just amazingly sweet and delicious though some of them are only 50% formed. These are better at about 90%. We grew a larger stand of them this year and if I had my way I'd give over half a plot to sweetcorn I love it so much.

The tomatoes look so vibrant in the fall sunshine, it's hard to resist just gobbling them up.

conference season

"As elected spokesperson for the National Union of Chickens (NUC), I must let it be known that our members have voted on composite 419 placed before conference and having passed said resolution am obliged to inform employers that upon the ambient temperature falling below ten celcius between the hours of 5pm and 8am, that all members shall receive not less than 800 extra calories in their rations during the proceeding 24hrs pecking period and that should the employer fail to provide such rations then sisters may lay to rule and ballot members for the consideration of an escalation to full scale industrial action."

...

..............

........................

Blimey! Tagliatelli........ that will do nicely.

opportunity box

Ben made this nesting box which I tied up in the tree at the bottom of our garden in early spring this year. I wondered why no little family of blue tits had snapped up this des res.

Should I put it higher up the tree or have strong words with the cat, or both?

for madeline

I love Portugal lots. We go and play music there fairly often and always have a great time and enjoy being there. At the festival we play at up near Sao Pedro do Sul, we lost Ben once when he was about 3 or 4 I think. He'd just wandered off and in a matter of seconds was lost. Within five minutes I was frantic and went to artists reception and told the young girl what the problem was. She didn't seem to understand; maybe I wasn't making much sense to her, so I went to find one of the festival organisers who spoke good English and explained the situation. Being a mum herself, she immediately understood and contacted all the festival workers by radio with a description and to keep an eye out for him. We're fifteen minutes into lostness by now. Serious, stomach churning, sweaty, anxious panic is not far away and I am desperately struggling to remain calm and logical. We wait. I'd already done the 100yd dash between the office and festival site twice, the craft and food stalls a blur of meaningless colour when all I wanted was to see one fair head and one pair of blue eyes, eyes like Madeline's really tho hers aren't blue, innocent, unworried, trusting. 30 or 40 minutes into lostness a lovely Portugeuse mama from the village comes walking into the festival site with Ben walking happily by her side holding her hand. He'd just wandered into her house and explained that he was lost and she didn't understand a single word he said; but she knew he'd be one of the gringo's children from the festival and walked him back up. The relief was indescribable. I'd hoped against hope that something like this would happen for the McCanns but I knew it wasn't going to. If Ben had stayed lost I swear I would've torn that country apart looking for him.

I've been trying to remember if we ever left Ben alone ever at a similar sort of age. I can only think of once when we'd gone for a family get together dinner at a hotel somewhere and gone downstairs for a meal with everyone, leaving Ben asleep in the room. He was a baby then really and we'd put a monitor in the room and had the other one with us. We've never left him alone as a toddler, not anywhere, not without a sitter anyway. You just don't, do you? Not if you're not in the same building anyway.

I've seen it in other countries amongst continental officialdom. You push and you push and eventually they lose patience with you and snap. Specially if you're making them lose face and look incompetent or worse. It's a tough line to walk. I don't really believe they had anything to do with it; it just doesn't add up. I don't know though, how can any of us know? I don't know how they can bear what they're going through. I just hope against hope that that beautiful little girl is still alive somewhere and can one day be reunited with her family.