When I was a child my favourite food was my mother’s casserole. It was essentially a beef stew with carrots and onions, topped with potatoes and slow cooked in the oven. My only problem with it as a child was that I could never get enough – for some reason Mum never made enough for […]

There was an article on the BBC website this morning about adolescent male killer whales being dependent on their mothers until well into adulthood. I liked the quote about how “if a man’s mother cooked dinner for him every night he would never leave home”. At the risk of sounding contentious I can think of […]

Days are getting a bit longer and commensurately our solar generation is improving. As of 5pm we’ve made more than 9kwh and it is still not quite finished for the day. Having said this, it was moderately sunny today as against yesterday when it was really really dreich and we made nearly nothing. This means […]

I read an article yesterday which simply amazed me. The original Winnie-the-Pooh book is now in the public domain in spite of the efforts of the Disney Corporation to keep control of it. “The house at Pooh Corner” and associated content, including Tigger will not come out of copyright until 2026. But Disney still own […]

R and I took the decision when we got the girls that they would have free range of the garden during daylight hours – but the flap would be closed when it got dark. This is partially because we are nervous about their interactions with badgers and martens, but the main reason is that the […]

Saphy just loves J. He has been over here for a few days and she has been sitting on his knee a lot. When she is not coorying up to him she is sitting on my craft bench or on her special cushion gazing at him adoringly. I think R is a bit upset because […]

I had my family over for a meal at the weekend and as is our tradition we had some fun activities. This year the theme was “Asia”. We had :- Quiz about Asia Noodle grabbing game Asian Poem Haiku writing. These were the Haiku people came up with – I won’t grace my mother’s “effort” […]

When we put the sound insulation into the wall between the two offices (needed to muffle the noise of R’s meetings) – we never replaced the radiators in the two rooms. Basically they had never worked properly because they were on a different thermostat from the rest of the house. The idea was that in […]

Saphy discovered Amber’s clones – Bumble and Casper today. For a young and lithe pussy cat who is so good at catching prey items – she is surprisingly clumsy, always rolling off chairs. What she lacks in one respect however, she makes up for in another – she is a champion ottoman destroyer. I have […]

I make the mistake of reading the news – sometimes I wish I didn’t. Everything seems to be in a sad decline. I wouldn’t wish to comment on peoples’ customs so I will stick with the times part. I grew up in 1970s in a village near Carlisle. My father was a mid-ranking Civil Servant […]