Friday 25 July 2014

More odds and ends...

The Giants
The Giants are coming to Liverpool this weekend. Partner-who-loves-tea has been looking forward to their arrival for ages.  We will hopefully see them on Sunday and perhaps on Friday as well.  Grandmother puppet lives beyond the Big Bang and has to cross the Planck Wall to get here.  (The Planck Wall, named after physicist Max Planck who won the Nobel Prize in 1918,  is the limit of man's knowledge of the universe.) Grandmother  will tell stories of the 1914-18 War.  Hopefully I'll have some pictures to post when we get to see them. 

 Liverpool from the air


If you wish to look at some fantastic photos of the Liverpool area from the air, taken by the Police helicopter, please follow this link



Not all of Merseyside is built up -



The Garden
 Our garden is flourishing at the moment and if one ignores the attacking Bindweed and some slightly overgrown shrubs it needs little attention after I have spent two days out there.  Most of my activity was in the early morning and late evening when the temperatures were reasonable.  In the middle of the day it was 25 degrees C and that is too hot for me while working.  So I took what I could into the shade and carried on there.
We have bought some new garden furniture because the wooden seats we had are all beginning to collapse underneath us.

Buddha

“Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened.   Happiness never decreases by being shared.” - Buddha.

Photo by kind permission of Dustin Main 
Photographic Storyteller at A Skinny Escape ; 
Co-Founder of TooManyAdapters.com ; 
Professional Photography Services at Lightmoves Creative



More Questions

 Where and when?
I seem to be asking a lot of questions on my Blog at the moment.  Here is another one.
This photograph was among the photos of family members passed down to me by my Mother from her Mother and her Aunt.  Most of the photos were identified for me by Mum before she died but she didn't know who was on this one.  That is a question which will remain unanswered but what I would like to know is in what circumstances it was taken.  It was obviously a professional one since the quality is excellent.
Some of the men are wearing pith helmets. The earliest appearance of sun helmets made of pith occurred in India during the Anglo-Sikh Wars of the 1840s. Adopted more widely during the Indian Mutiny of 1857–59, they were generally worn by British troops serving in the Ashanti War of 1873, the Zulu War of 1878–79 and subsequent campaigns in India, Burma, Egypt and South Africa. This distinctively shaped headwear came to be known as the Pith Helmet or Foreign Service helmet.
I have always assumed it was photographed in South Africa during the Second Boer War (1899-1901) but have only a gut instinct to lead me to that conclusion.  Does anyone have a way of confirming that or of explaining where else it might have been taken.  Are there different nationalities among the combatants or do the different uniforms simply indicate they were from different units (artillery, riflemen, etc)?


The photo can be enlarged by clicking on it.   Help, please!


Saturday 19 July 2014

Odds, sods and rambles



Rules for a happy marriage
I have decided to start a set of ‘Rules for a Happy Marriage’ posts.  They won't be in any sort of order so here (Thanks to MumaLeary) is
Rules for a Happy Marriage #1 - 
If you have consumed more than half a £1 (120 gram / 4.2 oz) bar of Cadbury’s Whole Nut whilst your other half is out, you MUST finish the bar and dispose of all evidence before their return lest you are thought of as a) a total pig and b) very mean.

What would be your first rule??  Humorous or serious responses both appreciated. 



A fridge magnet
Earlier this year I decided I would like to collect fridge magnets of the cities in which my friends and acquaintances live.  (A slight hint there, folks.  Subtlety is not my middle name.)  Before I took that decision I had already received a few.  I have identified where they are of and who sent them.  With the exception of this one.   




Can anyone help by telling me where it is?  Once I know where it is I shall recall who was kind enough to send it.  Perhaps you read Russian (or whatever language it is) or perhaps you sent it?  


Golfing weather!






On Friday it was 25ºC.  Too hot.  The perspiration was pouring off me.




The British Open Golf Championship is being played just down the road at Hoylake, Wirral.  And for the first time in history they are teeing off at two tees at the same time.  We had two days of sunshine and heat and now this morning we had thunder and lightning in the early hours and they are concerned about making sure everyone gets their third round in today.  There are some happy ducks on the local ponds but the golfers and caddies are getting soggy.  It is traditional for the leaders to tee off at 3pm but they are so concerned about the potential for lightning delays that the leaders will be starting at one minute past 11am.  That will mess up the TV schedules across the world




 Leading at the halfway stage is Rory McIlroy, MBE (born 4 May 1989) - a Northern Irish professional golfer from Holywood in County Down who is a member of both the European and PGA Tours. He is a former World Number One and a two-time major champion. He won the 2011 U.S. Open, setting a record score of 16-under-par on his way to an eight-stroke victory. In 2012 he won the PGA Championship at Kiawah Island by a record eight strokes. 





Thursday 17 July 2014

I’m back



I’m back
I hope !
Posts may be a bit infrequent for a while but with good fortune and a following wind Scriptor Senex has the writing bug again.

  
A banana a day keeps the doctor away…
For fifteen days at the end of June, start of July, I lay in bed and hardly moved.  I didn’t read. I didn’t listen to music.  I just lay there, in pain, exhausted and depressed.  Gradually over the last few days I have picked myself up again.   But this is what it feels like.


And the steamroller stays on you.  It just lies on top of you defying your every effort to move until you finally give up and accept you aren’t getting up again.  Somehow the basic instinct not to wet or dirty the bed survives (thank Heaven) and you pull yourself along the wall to the toilet when you need it.  I tried having a bath a few times to see if that would enervate me but just ended up back in bed.

Then one day I went out into the garden in the early morning.  I was dizzy and disorientated, being up for the first time for over a fortnight.  I can’t recall how I managed to get up and ended up in the garden.  But the sun was just rising, the birds were singing and the garden was flourishing with flowers that hadn’t been out when I my body packed up in June.  I sat on the patio and dead-headed some of the flowers in the pots there.  Partner-who-loves-tea arrived with a cup of tea and life suddenly seemed a bit more copeable with.  (I know there is no such word as copeable, thank you Spillchucker, but it suits me to invent it for this purpose!)

 Since then I have een my counsellor.  I have had coffee out.  I have been to a garden centre and bought some plants and bird foods (retail therapy!).



 Passion Flower and Solanum – 
climbers for the new arch through the natural hedge.

And, more importantly in terms of contribution to the household, I have put a couple of washes on and dried the clothes in the garden on our new rotary airer.   Who knows what I might get up to tomorrow?

Richard was happy to cook me a dinner every day and although I did try to eat it I just found the effort too much on many days.  A shame after his kindness and hard work but I ended up living on bananas.  They are so easy to eat.  No effort involved though I did (seriously) find it hard to peel one of them!  I have now discovered that according to a recent survey undertaken by MIND amongst people suffering from depression, many felt much better after eating a banana. This is because bananas contain tryptophan, a type of protein that the body converts into serotonin, known to make you relax, improve your mood and generally make you feel happier.  An article in The Mind Unleashed in February 2014 gave a lot of other ways in which bananas can benefit your health.  It’s a shame that Jo is allergic to them!  Especially since Richard uses the juicer to make a super ice-cream-like dessert that is composed purely of banana.

Best wishes
During my time off-line I have had many good wishes in many forms from friends far and wide.  Postcards have arrived with cheering themes and messages.  Who could not smile when this arrived from Katya in Ukraine?



E-mails arrived and although most were not read until a day or so ago I already knew the people writing them would have done so.  It’s very humbling that folk from as far and wide as Barbados and Bulgaria were thinking of me.

And Washington Bear arrived.  He joins Teddy who has no name other than Teddy but is a much loved chap who sits on the landing watching us pass to and fro.   Teddy was a present from Jo a few years ago after I had commented that I had always wanted a teddy and could not recall ever having one.  This is Washington.   



As Washington’s donor said ‘Who can look at a teddy and not smile?’

He sits on my chair downstairs and helps me read the postcards.  At first I was a bit concerned that he couldn’t read properly but we’ve since discovered he’s slightly short-sighted.



One of the e-mails that affected me most is self-explanatory –

Dear John,
You don't know me. I just discovered your blog "Rambles from my Chair" while researching the line "Twould ring the bells of Heaven". I'd been re-reading the Armand Gamache series by Louise Penny, a Canadian writer, who used it in one of her books. (I learn more new things this way!)
Anyway, I subscribed to your blog and was sorry that my first receipt was "I'm Offline." I can't pretend to know what you are going through. We all go through "it" but the forms vary and you are visiting some hard times. I just wanted you be aware that I wish you well and will hold you in my thoughts. The world is such a rough place both physically and psychologically. But remember that our world is also in a state of constant flux so bad times change (eventually) into something else. Compassion and caring are out there.
No need to reply. Just wanted you to know that someone in the US is wishing you well.

Just reading that again as I put it in this blog posting makes my body tingle.  There are some very caring people out there!


So thank you everyone and I shall try not to worry you again for a while…

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