muuranker

Please consider (if eligible - UK residents and expats only) signing the petition to keep the  PAS (Portable Antiquities Scheme).  What's that then?  It pays 95% of the costs (well, 75% in Surrey) of the cost of a FLO (Finds Liaison Officer).  And that is? 

A bloke or woman who acts as a liaison between people who find antiquities (including, but not limited to metal detector users) and the 'system'.  So they identify things for people, and help them record them in the Historic Enviroment Record (if they want to) which will then mean that planning discisions can be made knowing a bit more about the historic enviroment.  They mostly work with people who wouldn't normally think of approaching a museum or county archaeologist. Good stuff. 

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/PAS-Funding/

I couldn't possibly comment on what the Government is proposing.

If you are going 'hey WHAAT' over the initial bit on the petition about Stonehenge ... well, that's a different issue. Equally disturbing.

Thanks to romancinger I am told:

You Should Have a Blue Christmas Tree

For you, the holidays represent a time of calm, understanding, and peace. You avoid family fights, and you don't get too stressed out - even when things are crazy! You like to make Christmas about making everyone's life a little bit better. You don't get caught up in greed or commercialism. You're too sincere for that. Your blue tree would look great with: Lots of silver tinsel You should spend Christmas Eve watching: It's a Wonderful Life What you should bake for Santa: Chocolate chip cookies

Personally, I think santa would prefer my spicey Dutch biscuits. It was dead right about what I should spend Christmas Eve doing!

We pay very high council tax here.  Like most people in a 2-tier council, we pay tax to the police, the county and the borough, but we also pay a high tax to the village.  So high, that they are legally obliged to tell us what they are spending their money on.  Which is a cemetery and street lighting.  And some other stuff, but mostly, it pays for a cemetery and street lighting.

Now, I don't mind that I don't use the cemetery.  Actually, I do use it a wee bit, as from time to time I've enjoyed (if that is not too positive a word) visiting and looking at the spectacular floral tributes with which our local Ethnic Minority decorate the graves of both the recently dead and those in the vicinity (and are quite splendid even without the tributes).

And I only mind a little bit paying twice for the street lighting.  Everyone in the borough pays for street lighting in the borough town, and we in the village pay again for lighting in the village.  I have sometimes used the lights in the town. 

No, what makes me mad is paying twice for something which we Have Not Got.

Outside our house, there is no lighting.  

Which (coupled with my lasar-damaged eyes) is why I failed to get out of my gate this morning, but instead walked straight over the wall dividing our house from our neighbors (mistaking, in the gloom, their gateway for our gateway).

Actually 'straight over' isn't quite true: I walked into, and then over the wall.

So now I can add 'hurt leg' to the current list of woes.

Plus, guilt over the crack in the wall.    Perhaps the neighbors won't notice.  Perhaps they won't associate me with the crack, despite the half-eaten slice of cheese on toast on their drive, which I dropped as I fell (and couldn't find in the dark).

And then, of course, leg hurts too much to walk the mile and a half to the doctors, to check what landing on my hands has done. 

They don't seem to hurt any more than they did before I let go of the toast and landed on them. 

I think I'm going to be a Bad Diabetic, and make myself a bacon butty with Waitrose's peccorino and pine nut dip for dinner. 

Recent SixApart stuff has prompted this post.

I have just set my 'content' to "safe for babes", which it is, in the sense in which SixApart mean it. But not in my mind. Because I write about Stuff that Happens, and I know from my childhood that this Stuff can be very disturbing.

I can think of just  three things which I saw/read as a child which really disturbed me.

The first was a definitely before-the-watershed BBC programme about the history of the treatment of mental illness. It spoke of the use of insulin. My poor parents had to peel me off the ceiling after they confirmed to me that this was _real_ (for those of you who don't know about this: the treatment involved injecting non-diabetics with insulin, so that they had massive hypoglycaemic episodes - in other words, take the diabetic kid's worst nightmare, and let her know that the grown ups in white coats made that nightmare worse than the consequence of disability and _deliberately_ subjected people to it, in the ?Mistaken belief that stuff which would drive the sane mad, would also effect the reverse.  It's rather like shock therapy.  And I've heard survivors of that explain that as horrific as these therapies are, the illness is worse.  I'm glad I was an adult before I heard those testimonies.

The second was Ian Serraillier's The Silver Sword.   Again, it provoked a strong feeling of personal violation. 

The third was a book which I wish I could identify.  It involved the killing of a rabbit, and a chase across heathland, and would have been published in 1972, at the latest.  The main character(s) were children, so it can't have been Watership Down.  I can't remember what upset me, but I can remember that I cried myself to sleep, and felt unable to tell my parents why I was crying.

I also remember being saddened, but not disturbed, by Ishi last of his tribe and something similar with a female heroine, set on the coast of British Colombia (or Alasak, or Washington?), in which a girl ends up as the final and only speaker of her language. 

The place I would like to visit:


I put in the term 'Dutch India', and this is the image I picked, but it is actually Jakarta, Indonesia.  The photo was taken in 1940, two years before the Japanese invasion ended hundreds of years of Dutch colonial rule.  The headline: INVAL IN HOLLAND records the fall of the Netherlands to the Germans.

While Jakarta <i>is</i> one of the places on my 'to visit' list, finding this photograph made me think also about answering this question in terms of time, as well as space.  Jakarta in 1940 would be a very interesting place to visit. (interesting times are 'nice places to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there')

Reflecting on the images I chose : I realise how many of them are text-based, or incorporate text.  I have, partly as a result of this meme, and this realisation, but mostly because the antibiotics are making me so nauseous today, spend a lot of time on flickr.

There are some sites, you've just got to recommend:

http://www.beerintheevening.com/crawls/gen.shtml generates pub-crawls (go to the home - http://www.beerintheevening.com/ for more specific recommendations). ExMemSec says he used this to get the pubs for Norwich seminar (and we know how nice the Adam and Eve was - with the wherries sailing past and all!)

Just used it looking for pubs near the maisonette in Woking. Think I may open a pub.... there is nothing which does not come with a 'poor version of a Beefeater' or 'you will be beaten up' warning. Actually, it's a nice area. Honest. Ringed by poor pubs.

Conversely, apart from the allegedly *dire* Knavesmire, the York house is within staggering distance of a lot of good pubs. But no Nepalese restaurants.

Tonight we had a celebration (not yet a launch) for ESP: www.exploringsurreyspast.org.uk. Hurrah. Up at last.  You may have heard of it 10 years ago as "Shazam!" (exclamation mark italicised, 2pt larger than text), or five years ago as "SurreyScape".  Two years ago, we persuaded the utterly lovely Heritage Lottery Fund that yes, it could work.  

Update: link fixed!

Kiwi has gone nuts. Broggy is just very anxious. What has got into our cats?

Take last night. Ok, we did something to upset them. For the past 4 or 5 weeks, I have been sleeping upstairs with Broggy on the bed, ExMemSec has been sleeping downstairs with Kiwi (sometimes, she comes and goes). But last night I felt well enough to sleep all night, and as ExMemSec was preparing to get into bed downstairs, so did I. Broggy got on top of my feet, and we all went to sleep. Around 2am, I woke up. Kiwi was on the mat beside me. Broggy woke up, and hissed at her, so Kiwi went under the bed. Broggy proceeded to hiss at her, and discovered that he could claw her through the bed-sheet hanging over the bed end. She discovered she could inch back a bit so that he did not actually hit her, and she could just hiss at him. He continued, however, to swipe at the sheet and call Kiwi names.

After ten minutes of this, I decided that I needed pain killers, and that ExMemSec needed to go to sleep, and so went upstairs. Broggy came up, looking askance at his sister, and proceeded to tell me how much he thought lying in bed with me was lovely, great.

Kiwi just continues to act nuts. She seems to want attention. She even purred when I picked her up just now (to separate her from another fight with Broggy). But she doesn't want stroking/brushing/feeding for long, and wanders off, then comes back, climbs to a high place, and wowls for attention.

If they are this bad when everything has been very normal, very stable, for the last six weeks _what_ are they going to be like when we move???

As seen on alex_holden's journal, who in turn got it from hermi_nomi'  who got it from rickfan37.  I thought that some of you would like it as a meme,

Copy and paste the text of the following letter in a comment to this entry and fill in the blanks.

Dear Pat,

I _____ you. You have a nice _____. You make me ____. You should _______. Someday I will _____. You + me = ______.


We should __________. If I saw you now I'd _______. I would build a _______ just for you. If I could sing you any song it would be _________. If I could I'd give you ___________.


We could __________ under the stars.


Love,

_______________




(P.S. ______________.)

The meme from alitalf , but this time with (I hope) Disable Auto-formatting off, and html edited, as alitalf  advised...

Just heard that our offer on a house in York has been accepted. 

It isn't quite a windmill, but does have views
This is the view from the dining room window:



And the third bedroom:



For those of you who know York, the park is the Little Knavesmire.