Laws

This is an interesting website Megans Law operating in California.
Observe the distribution of sex offenders in an area and the idividuals themselves, their location and offence record. See if you can find any common facial attributes and thus revive the scientific fortune of phrenology - who knows its demise might be soley down to political correctness. Try to work out how John Reid will promise this sort of thing but get out of delivering anything at all.
Personally I dont care whether they introduce it or not, I might find it amusing if they did. Reason is on the side of those that say 'No' , but then reason is dead.
I used to watch/listen to Question Time years ago. But now I cannot bear to hear it.
If through error I arrive , via my remote control, at;
1) Question Time
2) Bazuka that ferruca
or
3) The advert with the hordes of aggressive women marching into some city square demanding sanitary towells.
I immediately change channels.
I am not sure what the connection is between this stuff and the Megan's Law bit but since reason is dead there doesnt have to be one.

Fête

Just this minute returned from the annual Church fête at the vicarage.
Won a very small bottle of indian tonic water on the bottle stall and bought a bottle of home made elderflower cordial. Brecon Town band playing well.

Tea in the refreshment tent only 25p in a china cup and saucer. I gave them a £1 and told them to keep the change. Does that make me a Philanthropist?

Not too well attended while I was there but it began filling up as I left - I dont think the two events are connected.

Now Ive got to spend 3 hours cutting our grass and probably will have to go into the office sometime before Monday for another 3 hours to sort out my work. I have noticed recently that if I have a problem case I have this ability to 'walk away from it in my head' - I dont have to 'walk' very far before it is lost completely .

Pork Sushi

They say we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes.
I think I might just have.
My son at 15 marinated some chicken.
I came home from work as he was going out and he said to me.
“There is some chicken in the fridge you can have”.
When he’d gone I took out the chicken and ate some.
It tasted lousy but as he had made it specially I persevered but even so gave up half way through the dish.
When he came back late at night he asked me if I liked the chicken.
I lied ‘yes but I couldn’t eat it all’.
He went to the fridge and saw the remains.
“You did cook it?” he asked nervously , and I swiftly realised my error.
My sausages arrived from France at last.
I began eating a long thinnish one at the beginning of the week.
It smelled disgusting and wasn’t very pleasant but nevertheless I ate my way through about a fifth of it.
Today I fried the rest and it tasted quite good, quite civilised.
Here is a picture of the wrapper. I cant see anything to suggest that I shouldn’t have eaten it in its original form but I know more sophisticated pallets than mine occasionally drop by here so perhaps they could pass judgement.

Grandmaster

The shame of it - I wasnt going to show you this, and not just for aesthetic reasons. I went to the Gouesnou chess club and played this young chap (thats the one seated nearest the camera). I lost the first two games!! uuuugh!.I won the next 4 thank God and toyed with the idea of letting it be known that I had allowed him to win the first two.
The last time I played a difficult 10 year old was at Gwbert on Sea at least 10 years ago. He was very strong although it is possible that his feet didnt quite reach the floor while seated. I really needed a win but my position was deteriorating until the best I could hope for was a draw. I couldnt even be sure of a draw though and so I was obliged to adopt some shameful tactics. I lit a cigarette and gently blew the smoke towards him. I can still see him now, poor little chap, rubbing his eyes and looking like it was well past his bed time. I did get the draw though.

More excitement

3 weeks ago while hanging on the phone waiting for, first Norwich Union and then Legal & General to put me through to a human being I traced my mothers ancestry from my mother back to 1801 in Upper Heyford, Oxfordshire. All I had to help was my grandmothers maiden name Hudson, her year of birth 1880 and the annoying music coming from the Norwich Unions automated switchboard.

Iv’e got a life and this is it

For more than a year now, every month, I get a monthly statement from Citi- bank showing 50 pence outstanding on a credit card account I cancelled more than a year ago.
Businesses strive to increase their profit margins and I would like to increase my pleasure margins by taking the next paying in slip that they send and paying in 49 pence. This would reduce the balance outstanding to 1 penny. A bit like a kind of financial homeopathy the less there is the more potent is the effect . (so Im told)
I don’t want to trigger anything like an intelligent response that might cut off these letters though. Decisions , decisions.

Are they still up?

Searching the net for the whereabouts of Richard O'Sullivan , 'Man about the House' and occupant of 'Robins Nest' I find him resident in a nursing home having suffered by all accounts a stroke, alcoholism and manic depression.
While in bad taste Death List does at least reveal the names of some people you perhaps will be surprised to learn are still alive.
Lady Bird Johnson for example.
I think it was Lyndon Johnson who said something like, 'He has pissed on his last campfire' , which is quite a good way of describing my own attempted despoiling of the awful Pearl Assurance sales meetings I was forced to attend.

Call of Duty

We had the Mothers Union round to our house on Tuesday for a meeting.
This is a very good Christian organisation for women.
Unusually the leader of the group engaged in some kind of semi scripted exercise which involved asking the members. “What is the biggest gift you have received?”
Nobody spoke and so my wife Ann to be helpful replied ‘A bicycle’.
This was duly acknowledged and then one other of the group volunteered the probably more sought after answer “Well I suppose the gift of life”.
I was on the computer killing Germans while this was going on.

From your Dance Critic

Here is a picture of a Welsh Dance troupe that accompanied us on the ‘twinning’ to Brittany. They looked pretty good but the jigging didn’t strike me as ‘Welsh’ – not that I would know anything about it. It seemed to me rather like something contrived –‘this is how we would imagine Welsh dancing to be if there were such a thing’.The Breton dancing though really did feel as if it had been around for centuries evolving like one of Darwins finches in the isolation of an enclave.

The Ontology of the Sausage and other trivia

Captain Oates would never have turned up again a few days later stuck his head in the tent and announced 'I've just come back for a bit.'
Anyway I have returned but it may not be for long.
Here is a picture of a 'cheese and wine party' attended during the week.
Thats Lord Bingham talking to our vicar.
A few years ago I remember the vicar, worried about possible lack of attendance at the Church fête, saying. " Ive managed to persuade Lord Bingham to open it so at least the IRA should turn up".
On the subject of food I inadvertently left my sausages in Brittany last week.
Our host has arranged for somebody staying on for a further week to bring them back. I wanted to take a picture of myself with knife and fork at the ready and insert a caption along the lines of 'and even as he sat his sausage had set sail for the shores of Wales'. I wasn't sure about the expression 'set sail' and also 'even as' and so used the Yahoo question site to ask someone. A lady called Vaness said she was French and gave me the translation. However she pointed out that I should use the plural of the word sausage, as there is a possibility it might be confused with a penis. I was brought up on 'Carry on ' films and so I find such pathetic jokes hysterical and it is of course what I intended. I don’t know whether she meant this as a genuine correction or if she was merely expressing her contempt that I should think it was funny. By the way in this part of Wales the plural of sausage is indeed sausage. They don’t ask for a pound of sausages but a pound of sausage.
Although each sausage is unquestionably a separate entity the apparently illogical unity imposed upon these spatially separate entities illustrates a different way of thinking about it/them. He who says sausage and not sausages thinks of the world differently just as he who ends his sentence with a verb has a subtley different world view. Thats why I wish I could speed up learning French as I am getting a bit bored with the present perspective.