It wasn’t my plan to wake up at six. I planned to sleep in, but there was that stupid rubbish bin full of garbage the council didn’t pick up on Wednesday (just like two weeks ago) so we were to put it out this morning and they’d collect it (so they said). The Goblin set the alarm for 7:30, which was why I couldn’t fall back to sleep. So there I was half comotose, staring at the dusty chandelire over the bed (we sleep in the dining room) wishing I could go back to sleep stressing out over the garbage being picked up and Star Trek came to mind. I started thinking about how Star Trek stories has affected my life. And then I started to think about all the stories I’d read or heard as a child and how they’d shaped me. It occured to me (feel free to disagree) that each of us is a sum of the stories woven into our lives. [Read more…] about A Story in the Bin…
I've been thinking
Fotheringhay is too beautiful for the dead…
While I was in Aldeburgh last Saturday I found a book called The Haunted South, by Joan Forman. In it the author drives around the South of England through all sorts of little villages and notes any documented cases of ghostly encounters. In the book the author mentioned in passing the church at Fotheringhay, Northhamptonshire and that it “…carries echoes of the fourteenth century in the sound of drums and trumpets from within the building.” Fotheringhay isn’t very far from where I live. I visited the village last year with my sister, though we didn’t go into the church. It started to snow as we crawled into the car to thaw out and neither of us felt like getting out again to see a freezing church. My desire to visit was renewed!
I mentioned to the Goblin that the church was supposedly haunted with ghostly music and hinted we could go take pictures and see the church. [Read more…] about Fotheringhay is too beautiful for the dead…
Cameras and Cookies Don’t Mix!
Have I accomplished anything today? Not yet, not unless you count airing the house while I sat outside reading Lydia Syson’s Doctor of Love and eating chocolate biscuits to celebrate my forthcoming future mega-healthy eating plan. To the right you can see part of the outfit I wore to church yesterday. My favorite colour a la moment is red, but I LOVE red stockings. I waited years to find these and then I paid a lot for them. (They cost more then the rest of the outfit put together, though admitedly the shoes were second hand and I made the skirt from fabric I found at the market.) Red stockings bring to mind Louis XIV (one of my favorite dead-Frenchmen). He wore them for several paintings so I like to think of him parading about with red legs tout les temps, only his legs were covered with silk and mine with spun plastic…minor details. What you can’t see is how fat I am. [Read more…] about Cameras and Cookies Don’t Mix!
The true genius who changed the world…
If you tried to list all the people who changed the world, the list would long and inevitably incomplete because we’ll never know who invented the wheel or the genius who figured out how to make soap, however, can even Einstein or Newton even remotely compete with the genius who invented “The pillow” ? I don’t think so! Because without a decent nights sleep, would Einstein and Newton have been able to do their thing? Au contraire! This morning I had a Eureka moment. I’ve been sleeping for months on this pillow which I thought was good for me because it’s a special neck supportive pillow only as the months passed my poor neck has been feeling decidedly unloved and the last few months I’ve been waking every morning with an aching neck and an aching lower back that I have to stretch out before I can do anything. I’m not Einstein, (obviously or I’d have bought myself a new pillow months ago) but I knew there could only be several reasons for this change; the mattress had died (it was guaranteed 20 years and we’ve only had it nine), my stress level is so off the scale that I’m going catatonic (stress over what?), the rubbish chair I sit in while obsessively writing has caused me repetative strain injury (definitely a possibility so I’ve stopped being lazy and now wheel the Goblin’s superior chair into my room every morning), I’ve been abducted by aliens every night and used as a guinea pig or my poor neck…and this seemed most likely…was being ruined by my evil pillow.”
Reading the paper is good for the heart-unless you’re a Gnome
The other day I bought a copy of The Daily Telegraph. I don’t read the paper for the boring depressing world news…I read it for those small seemingly insignificant articles that feed my love for the weird and bizarre. I wasn’t disappointed. When I think of Bath, England I think Romans…I think Georgian architecture…I think the Smirke family (an extended family in my mental Regency world). It brings to mind many things, but garden gnomes are not one of them! However, in Bath (Yes Jayne Austen’s Bath) Garden gnomes have been banned from cemeteries. [Read more…] about Reading the paper is good for the heart-unless you’re a Gnome