There are downsides to living in the middle of bloody nowhere: one such is that the phone comes to us over a good few miles of oldfashioned poles and cable rather than new-style underground conduits, and last Friday, there was an electrical storm which scored a direct hit on the phone line and melted […]
Miss Dog (‘a gay man trapped in the body of a female dog’, as the Papyrologist unkindly observed) is in seventh heaven, because we have a house full of tall batchelors: apart from Dr Biswell, we have Nigel the Free (builder and philosophe), Ganimedino, Prairie Boy, and the Man from Maryport, so she hardly knows […]
The word ‘canny’ has been a rare visitor to the Geordie Ambassador’s household of late, and his missus has got a face on. Some little time ago, the GA appeared to find out if, via the Internet, I could locate a chest freezer at a price he considered reasonable, and what with Kelkoo, Pricerunner and […]
Sorry to be neglecting you all, but life in the far North has been a little complicated: many books are being written in different corners of the house, and various delightful birds of passage have blown in from here and there, including the Canadian Professor, so all the household’s spare time has been absorbed […]
For the first time in my life, I have been the paparazzi, which was quite fun for a change. The Geordie Ambassador is preparing Winston the giant Clydesdale for the Turriff show, with deadly seriousness. He intends to win the heavy horse event hands down. Winston, for his part, after a couple of years loafing […]
Dr Biswell brought home a Daily Telegraph the other day, because they had published one of his reviews, and I spotted something completely extraordinary on the front page: the leader of some species of confederation, or conspiracy, of estate agents suggesting that members of the parent community had a moral duty to release equity on […]
There is something about an eight-foot-long petrol-driven brush-cutter which makes even a mild-mannered, overweight lady novelist start playing at being Dirty Harry. I was out with this dangerous looking implement this afternoon, cutting down nettles, rosebay and docks nearly as tall as I am. It’s just a little bit wonderful; the kind of weeds which […]
I am now able to blog under my own name – thank you, Jonathan. An embarrassment of subjects suggest themselves, but perhaps the first is that the Geordie Ambassador has started slapping concrete on the horrible garage and is making of it a curious, artisan baroque masterpiece. Once it’s all been limewashed it will look […]
One of the odd things about Miss Cat is that she is almost completely silent. Once every two or three weeks she says ‘Mrrr’, without emphasis, and we look at her in mild surprise. This explains why, when I tried to get her in at midnight last night and became convinced that I could […]