Essex

During my college years I once had a summer job consisting of six weeks picking strawberries and raspberries on a farm near Ardleigh. Since then, Essex has meant for me primarily the area north of the theoretical Witham-Clacton line.

A few months ago I’ve seen at least two BBC programmes ‘about Essex’ and was astonished to see that for their authors, the county seemed to hardly extend far enough from the immediate London vicinity to reach said hypothetical line. 

In fact, I still find it hard to digest the fact that the county town is Chelmsford (which I’ve never been to), rather than Colchester.


 (originally published on WordPress)

Terry Pratchett: The Fifth Elephant

There’s dwarf bars all over Ankh-Morpork, and they’ve got mining tools wired to the wall, and there’s dwarfs in ’em every night quaffing beer and singing sad songs about how they wish they were back in the mountains digging for gold. But if you said to them, fine, the gate’s open, off you go and send us a postcard, they’d say “Oh, well, yeah, I’d love to, but we’ve just got the new workshop finished … Maybe next year we’ll go to Uberwald."

(Sam Vimes, p 224) 

I can understand this, because I knew Poles like that in Scotland. Scotland sucked and Poland was the best country in the world, but when you asked them why they didn’t return there was always a ready excuse.


(originally posted on Tumblr)

Kindle Keyboard

At the turn of the month my first Kindle died at last. (More precisely, it’s screen did.) It’s been with me since 2011, and I used it a lot, so it’s no surprise (in fact I’d bought a Kindle Voyage as early as 2016 to have a spare one just in case this happened), but it took some time to get used to not being able to use it all the same. After all, eight years is a considerable time for an IT product to use on a virtually daily basis; it’s been with me during my 3 years in my homeland; and then again, while an older model, it was in general as good as the new one, either having some features lacking in the other.


(originally posted on Tumblr or WordPress)

23/7/19

Boris Johnson may have won the leadership-cum-premiership contest, but it was Duncan Scott who Britain could be most proud of yesterday.


(originally posted on Tumblr)

'89

1689 – the so-called Glorious Revolution in England.

1789 – the best known of all the so-called French Revolutions.

1989 – the so-called Velvet Revolution in the then Czechoslovakia.

What is it about ‘89 and ‘Revolutions’* and how come there was none in 1889?


(* put inside quotation marks as two of these are outside the scope of my definition of the word)


(originally published on Tumblr)