2009 — 29 May: Friday
Christa was very fond of her garden, and worked hard in it. Here she is in July 2007, surrounded by some of her favourite things and doing what she very much enjoyed. On this occasion, we were finishing the transmogrification of the garden's fish-pond into a much lower-maintenance bog garden:
This was taken the day before we saw Mr Chemo to assess progress after one full treatment cycle with the supposed "cancer killers". She never gave so much as an inch to the damnable disease, and who can blame her? I certainly didn't.
G'night.
Froxford?? try Froxfield Green
My camera-toting chum has gently chided me. You see, some people (myself included) lack a head for heights. Others (myself included) lack (my newly-invented term) a head for place names:
Or should that be "Grn"? (Grin.) Definitely time (08:47) for my first cuppa.
How the mighty (empire) crumbles
Vodka, in this case (no pun intended):
Is it possible that a titan of industry, operating amid imperial corruption and cutthroat competition, could adhere so unfailingly to what Ms. Himelstein describes as an almost noble sense
of fair play?
Certainly his playboy sons didn't. Feuding, gambling, pursuing dark-eyed opera starlets — all the great destroyers of family fortunes marred their lives, and whatever company assets
remained were seized in 1917 by the Bolsheviks.
I spotted this little fella (Alectoris rufa?) yesterday while we had paused to ingest our sandwiches. Mike failed to comment on the cloud of insects that (judging by some of the itches later) were also lunching (off me):
And if you're at all familiar with the artwork of the chap I mentioned here, (Jean Giraud, aka "Moebius") you might well see one of his characters in this tree:
Believe me, it's no fun having a brain that malfunctions in the way mine does. I've just been listening to Barry Humphries as this week's Desert Island castaway. I still have the marvellous collections of his cartoon character (Bazza McKenzie)...
This pair were my first encounter with the delightful chap, who's chosen as his "luxury" a book of the street maps of Melbourne. (To add to his library of over 23,000 others.) He regards books, he says, as a form of ballast that keeps him anchored. Neat.
Back...
... from the midst of the hordes thronging Sainsbury's in Eastleigh and Waitrose a little closer to home. The next batch of crockpottery magic is safely gathered in, plus a few further bits and bobs to help keep body and soul together for the near-term future. In the longer term, it seems, we'll now all be carried away by drug-resistant malarial parasites (if the swine 'flu doesn't get us first, of course).
I must say, being an MP named Bill Cash might predispose one towards more careful expense claiming, don't you think?
It's 13:19 and time for a calorie or two. I shall then nip over to Roger and Eileen later to pick up my portable DVD player (and maybe claim yet another cuppa).
Blood heat
According to the porch thermometer when I got back a couple of minutes ago, at 17:25 or so. I've doused the poor thing in a bit of water. A clear blue sky with a sun blazing down out of it. And that nice Mr Mandelson has just corrected the BBC chap who made the mistake of calling him "Peter". "Lord Mandelson," if you please. What a farce. I'd missed this little item. Stone me!
Now this is just mean!
Quite amusing, though:
More pixels
I was always taught that defacing a book is simply not done — ever. But when the results are as beautiful as these by Brian Dettmer, I have to wonder. From that site you can also find this gorgeous piece of 3D street art:
... and there are several further examples (by Kurt Wenner) here.
Late bit of movie trivia
I've just scanned the artwork for a film in which Jimmy Tarbuck plays a character called Norman Vaughan, and Norman Vaughan plays a character called (you guessed it) Jimmy Tarbuck.