A great Christmas was had by all. We had a Lebanese buffet on Christmas Eve (unfortunately my picture of it did not come out). Tora wore his bow tie. Then we had a Christmas competition which R ended up winning slightly ahead of N. On Christmas day we had presents (R bought me a Surface […]

I’ve read more than my fair share of 19th and 20th century novels. Quite a lot of them are unnecessarily verbose – but for real verbal diarrhoea – you can’t beat Charles Dickens. This for example is the opening page of “Bleak House”. The synopsis is at the bottom, and I must say that with […]

I’ve noticed that 1970s/80s food seems to be making a comeback. Actually as far as I am concerned, it has never gone away. N and J are coming over today and we are having prawn cocktails for lunch (note that there are only three as R will not touch anything with prawns in it). Then […]

R and I finally managed to get out for a walk today after it had poured with rain all week. There were three separate days this week when we individually had as much rain (around 7cm) as we had in the whole of April. We were walking down by the school when we saw a […]

Yet another rant, but our Internet is being ruined by stupid ignorant people. First of all we have this “do you want to accept cookies” nonsense. Here’s the thing, and I will say this as someone who professionally deals with websites on a daily basis. Most websites don’t work without cookies. Obviously the intent was […]

Tora was to be honest not too enthusiastic about his reindeer themed Christmas jumper. I managed to get the main part over his head, but when I tried to insert his legs into it, loud growls and meows started and I had to give up. Can’t say that R was of any great help either. […]

There is going to be a food bank for the Cowal area with some pickup points around Lochgoilhead. I think it is a crying shame that people would not have enough to eat at Christmas. Although I am pretty well off now, I went through a bad patch about 30 years ago and ended up […]

I’ll take a poll on the worst way to wake up. I’m not counting things like hearing bombers overhead or seeing a man in a hockey mask standing over you with a blood stained knife – but just ordinary moderately bad things. Friday 4:30am – freezing cold cat comes into bedroom, goes under the duvet […]

Bitterly cold today at -5 first thing this morning. I am reminded of the Christmas Carol “earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone” as I had to run the birds’ bowl of water under the hot tap for ten minutes as it had frozen solid overnight. I refilled it with warm water at […]

Thank God for being finished with that. The floor is complete, but has taken me twice as long as I expected, partially because my back and knees are not up for more than an hour or two at a time, partially because the light fades at 4pm, and partially because of the activities of Tora, […]