Browsing category blogging

advice to youth. on unloaded firearms.


Therefore, just the same, don’t you meddle with old unloaded firearms; they are the most deadly and unerring things that have ever been created by man. Mark Twain Only four days ago, right in the next farm house to the one where I am spending the summer, a grandmother, old and gray and sweet, one

walk the plank


Everything you could ever want in the world is just outside your comfort zone. The first flat I ever had was a teeny little place where each room doubled for the next. A two hundred year old, not-exactly-kept, terraced house converted into upstairs/downstairs apartments. I lived on the top floor and caught the draft from

who’s your literary crush


Legal niceties permitting, The Guardian wonders which literary character you’d marry. At present, I’d have to say Arthur Clennam. But that’s mostly to do with Matthew Macfadyen. Other than that, my favourite literary characters tend to be a bit troubled. Diseased even. Not really the sort you want to hop in bed with. Take Flannery

tug takes woman


The wife of Estel Thomas, foreman of a Tug River Lumber Company mill, and her three-year-old child were sleeping in their home in the Dry Fork of Tug River when the stream flooded the house with three feet of water. They were still inside, when “a huge drift came by, striking the structure which forced

perspective


“I fixed Ernest’s roof and he said I could have all the peaches I could crawl up there and pick. He didn’t know I liked to climb trees.” – Pa A few weeks ago The Euro and I crawled into the West Virginia mountains to visit my grandparents. We sat on the porch and Pa

beach


I’ve never been a beach person. I’ve got four pale, pasty limbs to testify to the fact. But I’m enjoying it in a really primeval way right now. I feel the same sitting in front of a fireplace during the winter. It’s the cave man in me.

no place


Pa may be seventy-two. But he still feels like he’s seventeen. Not in his bones. Or in his muscles. Or maybe even in his mind. But in the part of him that makes him…him. It’s like the last fifty odd years just happened around him while his being stood still. And that being..that thing that

sensational


“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.” — Oscar Wilde S and I took a train to Bath to check out Bladud’s pigs and buy jewellery. And to take a stack of photos of general touristy things for a travel article I’d forgotten about. I

see buff run


Three weeks ago I decided to train for a triathlon (the normal-folk kind…ironmans are for crazy people) even though running and I are mortal enemies and I have exercise induced asthma. But a friend of mine did one on a whim last year (Okay, maybe not so much a whim. He trained for three months

victoria’s shadow


Steph and me at the end of a pretty awesome day. Not that there’s an apprpropriate or adult way to use the phrase “totally awesome” but I seem to do it in the most inappropriate places – like, in a crypt. Not sure if I’m chanelling Bill and Ted or Cartman-ala-Reginald. But I just overheard