I have just signed up for the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch. I do it every year and it always makes me laugh because when I say how many chaffinches I am looking at, the website always thinks I am making a typo when I say 50+ “Are you really sure you can see that many […]

Late last year I laid a new floor in our dining room. It was backbreaking work taking several days and I promised myself I would not be doing any more flooring work as although I am (reasonably) good at doing it, I don’t really have the right specialized tools for the job. But then at […]

I just can’t believe how much the birds are eating at the moment. They have two large feeders which hold about 1kg of food and they are emptying them at least five times a day. They would empty them a lot more than that if R and I let them. Unfortunately the delivery of the […]

We have at least four robins in the garden at the moment, and got a Christmas present of a nesting box for them. We put it up today, but how we can ensure that only robins (rather than sparrows or blue tits) nest in it, I do not know. It looks nice though. Let’s see […]

The picture is of Dobbin. He was my push on horse when I was a child, but some time in the late 70s he started to deteriorate after much love with his stitching coming undone. Also my brother in his wisdom decided to remove his wheels, so he was left with struts of metal protruding […]

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 […]