In April, my friend J and I will be walking the Camino pilgrimage from St Jean de Pied Port to Santiago de Compostelo. Actually we will be slightly cheating because although J is a gentleman of leisure, I have a business to run and can only spare three weeks for it which means that I […]

You have to laugh. The powers that be put this stupid sign up over six months ago. I’m not sure why the trees here are any more or less dangerous than anywhere else you could wander to in the woods – unless there are some ents in there that we don’t know about. Anyway, this […]

I had a difficult challenge the other day. R doesn’t and never has eaten seafood. My brother N has suddenly decided not to eat any kind of processed meat. To me all this stuff is scaremongering by the media, and as long as you don’t live entirely on bacon sandwiches you are probably at minimal […]

I think I have mentioned before that R has a theory shared by a number of people on the Internet that spring begins on 1st March. Not sure I entirely agree with this as last year March was the coldest month of the year with stacks of snow. It killed any chance of getting plums […]

We have loads of squirrels this year. I saw eight at one time on the feeder yesterday and we are seeing loads both in the woods and going through the village I’m not convinced of the ultimate viability of the red squirrel in this area as I have heard nasty rumours that greys have arrived […]

R was pointing out yesterday that Tora is rather fond of watching “movie for cats” style videos. This is true, but I have to say that with one exception when he went searching for a squirrel behind my Surface, that he has very Catholic tastes. He will sit and watch everything from Marco Polo to […]

If you are not to some extent a geek – stop reading right now. If you are – carry on and be prepared to be amused…. R and I are IT Security testers. One of the main products we use is called Wireshark – basically it analyses the traffic between a local PC and a […]

Very unusually we have had no snow on the mountains at all this year so far. This bodes ill because very mild dreich winters tend to lead to midge infestations in summer the following year. But today for only the second time this year it was below freezing and there was quite a bit of […]

I am obviously getting old because I have to say I find some modern practices quite disgusting. Beards are bad enough (I told R that the day he grew one was the day I would be leaving him), but at least those are a temporary condition which can be undone. But these tattoos which are […]

Well, I didn’t think any organization could conceivably be more useless than Vodafone, but to their credit, EE have managed it. I moved to them the year before last, simply because they had a 4G signal on (some) of the hills and around our house. No signal inside the house though, but because I was […]