Just a week or so...

Just a week or so, back in Tenerife... . So, here's a song for us all... . http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bpbuqh12oj4

Mr B Keeper?

We had no map to guide us, but we knew where to find his house because we'd been told it was down in Kent.

The roads were busy and for some reason, possibly connected with the opening day of the London Paralympics, both the M20 and the M26 were at a standstill.

But why care about time? We were in no hurry, and our route avoided both motorways. Instead, we'd quite naturally selected the country lanes, including some that were among the narrowest lanes in England, with precious few wide spots to allow two cars to pass in opposite directions.

Alas, there was no Beagle to welcome us when we arrived, but we found the great man sitting by his favourite window...

It was while walking in the grounds that I managed to capture this photograph of one of his wonderful specimens...

And I couldn't resist taking this snapshot of the house from the garden...

Of course, he wasn't a bee keeper, although he did study bees for a period. He was interested in all forms of life. Can you guess who I am talking about?

:-)

Another Kent Walkabout

We visted another seaside town in Kent. Very picturesque! I get very absent-minded nowadays, but I did remember to take three photographs...

1. A Notice carved in a passage by the Town Hall...

2. A Cottage just outside the church on the hill...

 
3. A Metal Thingy in the pavement by my left foot...

4. But here is a better-known feature of the town...

5. And here is another...!

:-)

The Dan Mystery

On one of my recent walkabouts I noticed a mysterious footprint in an alleyway near my home. The footprint was set in concrete, and pointed slightly south of east, as seen in the photograph below. It seemed to me that the footprint had been made by a right shoe, so I compared it with the right shoe that I was wearing. There was no doubt - the footprint was exactly the same shape and length as mine. This meant the footprint had been made by someone wearing a UK size 9 shoe (or European size 43).
    

A cursory inspection of the surrounding area confirmed that this was a solitary footprint. Or was it? I decided to conduct a fingertip search  along the alleyway, whilst moving in a slightly south of easterly direction. My problem was that dusk was barely an hour away, and there was no street lighting in that section of the alley. So I had to stop when it became too dark to see. I used a chalk that I carry with me for such occasions to mark the spot where I temporarily abandoned the search. I knew I was onto something and was resolved to resume the search on the following day.

Shortly after dawn next day, my perseverance paid off. I encountered a strange grouping of 6 paw marks in a further section of concrete. The photo below shows these paw marks quite clearly, including the toe of my own left shoe. I was so startled by this unexpected discovery that I dropped my chalk. The white dot that the chalk made in the concrete is also visible in the photo.   

Well, I continued my fingertip search on my hands and knees for a further two hours, and halted when I emerged from the alleyway at the point where it met the local High Street. I was quite thirsty, but luckily there was a bountiful supply of water at hand. I chose the last of the four available sources shown in the three photos below.

Of course it isn't easy to get a small quantity of water from such a highly pressurised source, so some water in excess of my immediate needs ran across the pavement and spilled over the edge of the kerb into the High Street gutter. That's when I saw the writing in the concrete kerbstone. You can see the writing in the photo below. 

I quite like this final photo, because it proves I didn't waste too much water, and you can see a little more of my left shoe...
:-)

Why all this anker?

It's been ages and ages since we cavorted merrily together with Ceri Radford on the DT. Alas, when Ceri stopped writing about Constance Harding, I retreated to the Finance Section.

Here's a little MyT blog about what I found in the Finance Section....
:-)

--------

The character string anker has become popular in comments that appear on the main Telegraph website. In fact, anker appears most frequently in discussions about the Financial Crisis.

It is noticeable that people who use anker in their comments like to draw attention to what they are saying, by prefacing the string with an asterisk so that it appears as *anker.

There are also variations of *anker, notably the plural form *ankers and the abbreviated form *ank. For added emphasis, these variations are often followed by an exclamation mark, as in *ankers!

Now you may well be puzzled by all this.
But I truly believe I'm beginning to see the light.
The more I see *anker in DT comments, the more I think of it as a canker.

What's your opinion?

:-)

Fled to Wed in Scotland

In 1974, they changed many of the county boundaries in England and Wales. They did the same to Scotland in 1975. Sadly, many county names became defunct.

Alas, poor Westmorland! And alas, poor Cumberland! Both of these fine old English counties became part of a new and larger county named Cumbria. However, the residents of the small town of Appleby did manage to preserve their link with the past by the simple expedient of changing their town name to Appleby-in-Westmorland.

And would you believe it? For a while, all the postal addresses in the small town of Gretna (which is in Scotland) were altered to include the town name Carlisle and the new county name Cumbria (both of which are in England). However, Royal Mail did eventually see sense and removed these English place names from Gretna postal addresses, replacing them with the new Scottish county name Dumfriesshire.

But that small bit of bureaucratic nonsense didn’t stop many English teenagers from running away to get married in Gretna – sometimes with irate parents in hot pursuit. Scottish law permits young people aged 16 or 17 to marry without parental consent, whilst English law sets the bar higher at eighteen years. Gretna still conducts over 5000 marriages each year, and all of them are conducted over a blacksmith’s anvil.

Hoorah for Bonny Scotland..!

“How far, how far to Gretna? ‘Tis years and years away,
And chaise and four will nevermore fling dust across the day;
But as I ride the Carlisle road, where life and love have been,
I hear again the beating hooves go through to Gretna Green.”

Message to JW from Expat

From Expat:

JW said he would like to see my paperweights, and since I can’t post on the blogs, perhaps you could. It might give him a smile. Some of them are Scottish, from Caithness. What you see is about 2/3 of my collection.





I guess you know to click on the photos to enlarge them. They are brilliant!
:-)

Important postscript:
We've made some Pâté Sardinas de la Expat.

The first photo is a bit fuzzy.
(We are always a bit fuzzy when trying a new recipe for the first time). But you can see more if you click on the photo to enlarge.


And below is a photo of the finished sardine pâté, ready for munching whilst blogging. Thanks for the recipe, Expat!