Notes from another also ran . . .

     I tweaked the sidebar. Did you notice?. This is an attempt to organize the growing list of blogs I  have marked to follow. I was a boy who used to start the school term with a beautifully tidy desk -  the old fashioned kind with the sloping lid  - which by mid-term was a hodge-podge of text books, exercise books, pencils and papers. My room still gets untidy and I now have so much more stuff to unorganize. When I look for a book I usually remember the shelf it's on. I run my fingers along that row of books until I find it.  If I don't find it I then satisfy myself that at least I have touched it and that my eyes were too quick to see it. And then I find the book in blue covers not the red I had imagined. This was always so when I went looking for dad's copy of  The Ingoldsby Legends. No good me trying to be a librarian. Oh, yes I have heard of the alphabet and the Dewey decimal system; doesn't mean I have to use them at home.

     The side bar is tidy compared to the mess of blogs I have listed under the dashboard. What criteria to use when deciding to follow a blog? Is it the page design? The pictures or the writing? Is it about a subject of which you are particularly fond? Is the writing authentic, that is, from the heart? No time to read more. Time to copy the URL or hit the follow link. Quick! follow publicly or hiddenly (Huh?) .. er .. how about covertly?

     The list under the dashboard grows until one day you try to follow a blog and blogger says, "You already follow {title of the blog}." So that one must be worthwhile if I think it's worth following more than once. Isn't it? Or I link to a blog I marked to follow and a month has gone by since the last post. I begin imagining all sorts of gory* endings to a life;  or under what circumstances one might cease blogging. One might have just got tired of it and stopped. Didn't I read somewhere (probably on another blog) that the majority of blogs last no more than one year? My sceptred isle blog lasted just the duration of the trip, and a couple of addenda. There's another category: travel blogs . . . I feel the need to go tweak some more.

     Family blogs, sports-fan blogs, cliques of memes, tagging . . . oh, like the real world it gets very messy.

*I resisted punning on Gorey and gory. No I didn't. I just did.

Friends reunited . . .

I met with an acquaintance yesterday whom I hadn't seen for forty years. We ate lunch and chatted about our common experiences at school. About the people we remembered; the plays and musicals; the pranks and punishments. We talked about our lives since leaving school and how we came to be living in the USA. I was the only person who had responded to the emails he'd sent to various classmates on Friends Reunited.

Thursday Kathy collected this beautiful urn which contains Zoë's ashes.

Kathy's parents are visiting for the week-end as we were to have visited them in New Mexico but the events of the week disrupted those plans.

Why thrup'ny bits?

I just like them and just happened to have a couple to snap. Sorry the quality of the picture is so poor. The twelve-sided nickel-brass coin on the left was introduced in the 1930s.
Silver threepenny pieces remained in circulation but became much less common. 

I started a second blog (This Sceptred Isle . . .) to record my forthcoming trip to England. I last visited England in 1998 before my father died.

The primary purpose of this visit is to attend my niece Clare's wedding in Colchester on the 25th April . . . but I expect I'll ring a few bells and down a few pints of real ale; catch up with dear friends and do a bit of sight-seeing (play the tourist). Oh, and I'll be going to a matinée of Oliver!

Now I wonder if I'll be able to get to Upton-upon-Severn for the folk festival?