The garden is full of poppies at the moment – it seems that the recent sun after the heavy rain earlier is just the sort of conditions they like. Most of them are small yellow Welsh poppies which grow like weeds. In fact, let’s be honest, they are weeds. At least, they’re entirely self-sown and […]
I spent this morning through to about 2pm at Eastnor Pottery again, practising my throwing technique. I wasn’t making anything to keep this time, but rather throwing pot after (nominally identical) pot, and cutting each one in half once I’d thrown it to check the thickness of the base and sidewalls. I tried to keep […]
I was asked last week if I was succumbing to Torch Fever, by which was meant over excitement at the thought of the once-in-a-lifetime experience of having the Olympic torch pass briefly through Malvern on its travels round the country. Well, no, in fact I can’t say that I was. But since I then found […]
A week or so ago, I wrote “I suppose it’s always the same – when one has specialist knowledge of something, one can almost invariably pick holes in a written description of that subject, whether it’s inaccuracies in a news story that one knows about first hand, or a technical subject that has been dumbed […]
I’ve been feeling rather low recently so I decided that I’d better make an effort and do something positive and proactive this weekend, rather than sitting around at home feeling sorry for myself. So I ate out for lunch and then went to the matinée performance of Educating Rita at the Malvern Theatres. I had […]
Usually when I invite tradesmen around to provide a quote for doing work on the house, they are practically falling over themselves to suggest things that I could or should get done. So I was rather surprised yesterday when, for I think the first time ever, the chap said it wasn’t worth having any extra […]
A friend asked me over lunch in the canteen yesterday whether I’d managed ten tradesman-free days. Well, the answer yesterday was “Yes”, but today it’s “Err, no!”. I’m sitting at home waiting for a tradesman to turn up, though he’s phoned to say that he’ll be late, so I needn’t have come home early from […]
I’m reading a very interesting novel at the moment, a murder mystery called “Every Contact Leaves a Trace” by Elanor Dymott. In fact it’s more of a psychological thriller than a standard police procedural whodunnit. A woman gets her head stoved in, in the first chapter, in the grounds of an Oxford College, where she […]
I understand all the arguments about the need to replenish ground water reserves after some anomalously dry winters (though it didn’t feel like that when I was snowed in!) but the fact remains that this has been the wettest drought I’ve ever known. Malvern seems to have had weeks of incessant rain. It’s actually a […]
Christopher’s Flickr photo-sharing site is the only one of his social media accounts I haven’t closed, mostly because I get very few nuisance emails from it. I haven’t kept up his subscription to the premium service, and it’s getting increasingly out-of-date, but it’s still there. This week he (or rather, I) got a rare email […]
