It’s potato harvest season again. As I mentioned last year, every ten minutes from dawn to dusk, a tractor with a heavily loaded trailer full of potatoes goes down the hill past my house, and returns later back up the hill with a heap of potato-free soil in the trailer. This goes on daily for […]
For the last few weeks, I’ve been spending my evenings studying Roman history online via a MOOC, that is a Massive Online Open Course. It’s not something I’ve done before, but my brother-in-law thought I would be interested, so sent me a link to Futurelearn, which offers access to a range of free, university-level courses […]
The Potato Harvest has come round again. It’s that time of year when a succession of tractors with trailers overloaded with potatoes crawls past my house. They start at dawn, and go past about every ten minutes or so until well after sunset. They don’t seem able to do more than 20mph down the hill, […]
This is an odd one……. I was contacted recently on behalf of a television company looking for people to take part in a new TV series! There’s a fair bit of interest in the media at the moment about returning to “traditional skills”, possibly as a reaction to Austerity Britain and the Credit Crunch. There’s […]
I’ve mentioned a few times that Malvern has a real small-town feel, and that I find it pretty much impossible to go around Waitrose without bumping in to someone I know. On Saturday I met a current colleague, an ex-colleague who retired a few years ago, and some close friends of my mother who have […]
Until very recently there was an independent greengrocers shop on the main street in Malvern. The fruit and veg there wasn’t necessarily as beautiful as the offerings in a supermarket – the potatoes often had soil on them, which would never be allowed in Waitrose! – but it was much cheaper. And Pete the proprietor […]
No, not in the Library with the Lead Piping, but rather skewing the search results for my blog. My sister did a bit of investigation following my recent post, and indeed her colleague’s husband has been telling people about how to get a comfortable post-operative night’s sleep using an old-fashioned method of arranging pillows he […]
When Chris set up this blog he subscribed to Google Analytics, which allowed him to see some basic statistics about how the blog is viewed. Not at the level of individual people – everything is totally anonymous unless you choose to send a comment – but aggregations and top-level statistics. I can’t actually make use […]
There were three of us oesophageal cancer patients out of the four on the ward, and the other two were first timers. I found myself telling them about a typical visit to the hospital for chemotherapy, and thought it might be of wider interest. The information in this post is specific to me, so please […]
I didn’t expect to be writing this from my hospital bed[1. Last time I was here, the man in the next bed had a 3G dongle that he was using to get online. I was astonished at how cheap it was to get mobile Internet, but it’s well within my budget, so here I am.] […]
