| Wed 1 | What happened today? Not a clue. Spent the whole day doing admin-y stuff. Yawn! |
| Thu 2 | Spent a large chunk of the afternoon trying to work out what in my life I want to monitor and/or achieve next year. All somewhat depressing, but I know if I don’t do it I’ll get nowhere. |
| Fri 3 | Yay! The supermarket delivery actually got everything right this week, barring the handful of items that weren’t available. And the chatty, friendly driver was well on time. |
| Sat 4 | Surprised that it was quite foggy in the middle of the nght; enough that I couldn’t see the top of the road from the bedroom window. But it was clear by the time I got up at 9. |
| Sun 5 | I should have photographed my desk this morning: it was an absolute riot of of muddy paw marks. It’s an enigma to me how a cat can come in, cross the kitchen, hall, stairs, landing and study (all carpeted except the kitchen) and still have wet muddy feet! |
| Mon 6 | Actually managed to look at some family history stuff this afternoon. I was looking at Austens in Tenterden and hoping to find a (very distant) connexion to Jane Austen. But no luck so far. |
| Tue 7 | I’m a terrible correspondent, so no surprise that it has taken me weeks and even months to get round to writing some letters to friends and family. |
| Wed 8 | Ho! Ho! Ho! Welcome to the new Christmas lockdown. But phased in over a week. FFS. Yet again much too little, far too late. |
| Thu 9 | 04:30. Sounds of cat(s) playing with something. Ah yes. Small dead wood mouse at the foot of the bed. Both junior cats in attendance; I wonder which is the guilty party? Boy Cat looks the more likely. |
| Fri 10 | Waitrose are selling their usual Crément de Bourgogne for £10.99 (it’s normally £14.99). It’s as good as many Champagnes (well it’s the same method, but not the right district). Buy 6 and get another 5% off. Good everyday fizz. What’s not to like? |
| Sat 11 | That worked pretty well. No chance of the usual literary society London pre-Christmas lunch again this year, so I organised a sort of party tea over zoom. More overseas members (mostly US) than Brits, and it’s great to see them. Seemed to be enjoyed by all. |
| Sun 12 | Afternoon spent writing Christmas cards, letters and wrapping presents that have to be posted. Finished the cards, but not the packages. |
| Mon 13 | So today, between two GP patient group meetings, we managed to get all the Christmas cards & presents packed up and in the mail. |
| Tue 14 | Someone left an unlabelled bag with tea bags & chocolate on our doorstep. Thing is one doesn’t like to assume it wasn’t left there by mistake, especially after several recent attempted deliveries of parcels not for us. But in this instance it turned out to be a friend playing “Secret Santa”. |
| Wed 15 | Did today exist? I suppose it must have done. But I’ve no way of telling as I seem to have done nothing – certainly nothing of any substance beyond a few minor website updates. |
| Thu 16 | Night was falling fast when N discovered a problem with the pond: it was nearly empty! Water drained down to ground level (top of the original tiny sunken pond). Water not spewing from hoses etc. so must be a hole in the liner. Too dark to do anything more than minimal damage limitation. |
| Fri 17 | A difficult day. Tom came round to help assess the pond situation. Tom & N rescued the fish; moved to cramped temporary accommodation – hopefully pending a better solution over the weekend. Didn’t like having Tom here, however necessary it was; I’m petrified of getting Omicron. |
| Sat 18 | A day spent waiting for a delivery that didn’t materialise. Gah! |
| Sun 19 | Up at 06:30 after a bad night and much too little sleep. No wonder I was cold, falling asleep, and good for nothing all day. |
| Mon 20 | It’s been a long day of bits & pieces; odd jobs; doorstep pressie swap with a friend. Couldn’t settle to doing anything. |
| Tue 21 | Trying to eat up the freezer to make room for Christmas meat. Tonight a couple of portions of frozen cooked chicken fragments; put together with leftover roast Mediterranean veg from Sunday and used to stuff some peppers. Tasty even if not fine dining. |
| Wed 22 | A day of two results. Goldfish finally moved to their new long-term temporary home. And tasty home made tomato soup for evening food; very thrifty using a quantity of over-ripe surplus tomatoes and stock from the freezer. |
| Thu 23 | An interesting day topped by a product recall on the goat butter we have in the fridge – all of it. So need to source more butter (goat or otherwise) PDQ. |
| Fri 24 | Christmas dinner part 1 this evening: roast pork, baked potatoes, red cabbage, sugar snap peas, rainbow carrots, leek sauce and apple sauce. Washed down with some good cider. |
| Sat 25 | It’s Christmas morning. The rest of the house is asleep. But what am I doing? Working, of course; rewriting a document. Festivities later. |
| Sun 26 | A grey and soggy Boxing Day, which meant a lie-in, lunch of cold meat with bubble & squeak, and not a lot else done – as it should be. |
| Mon 27 | Anthony Powell sums up today rather well: “It was that prolonged, flat, cheerless week that follows Christmas. Those interminable latter days of the dying year create an interval of moral suspension: one form of life already passed away before another has had time to assert some new, endemic characteristic.” |
| Tue 28 | The first of this year’s Royal Institution Christmas Lectures on BBC4 TV. Very topical; all about viruses, how they infect us and how we test for them. OK I followed along easily, but I suspect many of the kids struggled with some of the bits that were glossed over or assumed. |
| Wed 29 | Today is the Feast Day of Thomas Becket, St Thomas of Canterbury. Saint and martyr he’s venerated by the Catholic and Anglican Churches. Having found conflict with Henry II over the rights and privileges of the Church, Becket was murdered by followers of the king in Canterbury Cathedral on this day in 1170. He is my patronal guardian and we have much in common: not least being a pain in the posterior. |
| Thu 30 | Last of the RI Christmas Lectures. They’ve been quite good in an understated way; no dramatics; and quite a lot assumed/not explained. But it’s hard to know how to make virology fun for 12-year-olds, especially when constrained to just three lectures. |
| Fri 31 | This old year is ending as it began … with us swimming underwater: we close our eyes, hold our breath, and keep kicking in a vain attempt to resurface. Here’s hoping we can resurface in 2022. HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE! |
Amusements of the Year, 2021
Here’s my usual round-up of things which have amused me during the year. Unsurprisingly this has not been a vintage year for amusement.
(Most of the images etc. are clickable to display larger views or source information.)
Product
There are three contenders this year, but the winner has to be these Danish Wine Gums (left below) and Salt Liquorice Pastilles (yeuch!).
The runners-up were this Ziplock Bag Thong with Goldfish Crackers …
… and a new (I think) product Waitrose Christmas Chicken Wing Lollipops …
Headline
I think this year’s winner has to be:
Motorist fined after CCTV confuses his number plate with woman’s T-shirt
But it was a close contest with these four runners-up very close behind the winner. (All are from the Guardian.)
Monkeys thought to have escaped private collection on loose in Cincinnati
Old Irish goats return to County Dublin to protect hills from wildfires
Twat of the Year
Leaving aside the whole Tory party in Westminster … the only serious contender for “Twat of the Year” has to be this disreputable scumbag:
I may not be the snappiest of dressers but I’d be mortified to leave home looking this scruffy. I wonder if they found the hole in the hedge before the sheep escaped?
Book Title
Oh dear, there really is only one serious contender this year:
Auction Item
Two superlative auction items stood out for me this year. First, from our local auction house, was this unprepossessing item:
It was described in the catalogue as:
A late 19th century Swiss Black Forest wooden musical coat hook, carved as an anthropomorphic dog with glass eyes, and with gun and powder flask bearing the Swiss cross, with chamois horn feet, fitted with a musical movement with 6cm cylinder numbered 12 223, with applied circular metal label inscribed “C. Spiess Schloss Laufen Patent 16870” and remains of paper label, 39 cm high
As a wonderfully desirable alternative eBay were offering …
Vintage empty tall RAT BAIT TIN … RACUMIN.
Size 8 1/2 inches tall, cardboard tube with tin top and bottom.
Made in WALTHAM CROSS, HERTS.
Not surprisingly it didn’t sell.
Nominative Determinism
Nominative determinism is where people end up in jobs which suit their name. There are many examples but these stood out this year:
- Will Welfare, Public Health Incident Director, UKHSA
- Marcus Scriven, journalist
- Prof. Roger Kneebone, a surgeon
- Superintendent James Pigg, of the Metropolitan Police
Organisation Name
The prize for the “Organisation Name of the Year” must go to the Old Irish Goat Society which you’ll recall was also implicated in one of our “Headlines of the Year”.
Animal
Every year we seem to encounter strange, new (to us) animals. This year we’ve met:
Occupation
Just one winner here this year:
Paper Folder – “People are amazed I fold paper for a living, then they see it”.
Sport
Top of the tree in this category is something I would never have thought of, let alone considered a sport.
Apparently it can take years to create the art on a single camel.
Epigram
Two, almost priceless, epigrams popped up this year.
The first is from the Irish Goats again:
And secondly from Emma Beddington who was caught describing our expected Christmas excesses as:
I couldn’t disagree with either of those descriptions.
Marketing Slogan
Earlier in the year we came across a brilliant piece of the advertisers’ art; I can’t call it “marketing bollox” as it is but a simple slogan for Fox’s biscuits:
It seems they’ve been using this slogan for quite a few years; I’d just not noticed, but that doesn’t make it any less good!
Word
Our “word of the Year” (which could equally well be “Food of the Year”) comes courtesy of @WhoresofYore on Twitter. It is:
Described as (19thC) A hot gin-based drink drunk from a jar, in the morning to warm yourself. Piss-quick contained a mixture of gin, marmalade and hot water.
Folk Custom
Thanks to two modern artists we’ve discovered a folk custom which was previously not known to us. Called Hat’s On, Tits Out and it appears to happen in random places (and often unannounced) most summers. The artists have even provided us a couple of illustrations.
First from tilloodesigns on Instagram:
And secondly from Peter Collins (1923-2001):
Medical Discovery
In a surprise discovery, medics have found that we’ve had both male and female genitals wrong all these years:
Public Service Announcement
And the winner here is a poster reminding us that it is forbidden to season the pigeons.
Photograph
We have three winners in the “Photograph” category.
What must be the Worst Sofa Ever …
Some absolutely brilliant Zombie Munch Cakes (© Waitrose Weekend paper; 28 October 2021) …
And a strategically placed European paper wasp colony on a wayside shrine in the South Tyrol.
Trivia
I’ll leave you with our final “Trivia” category where we have perhaps the best comment this year on the UK’s appalling government:
You’ll want to click the image and appreciate it full size.
All of which leaves us scratching our head in bemusement.
We’ll be looking out for brilliance again next year; contributions are always welcome. Let’s see if we can make it a really vintage year!
Meanwhile remember Yogi Berra’s words: If you come to a fork in the road, take it..
Monthly Links
So here for the last time in 2021 is my compilation of links you may have missed the first time.
Science, Technology, Natural World
The simplicity of Occam’s Razor was seen by a medieval monk. [£££]
Chemists are finally beginning to get to the bottom of marijuana’s skunky scent.
It has become recognised that plants are interconnected via a network of underground fungi, and now there’s a project trying to map that network.
Scientists investigating a restored coral reef in Indonesia have recorded many sounds (not yet tagged to specific species) to a backing of snapping shrimp.
Still with fish, the tiny Batman River Loach* (Paraschistura chrysicristinae, above), long thought extinct, has been rediscovered in SE Turkey. [* It’s named after the Batman River!]
Meanwhile back on dry land, scientists working on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi have identified 14 previously unknown species of shrew.
Between 2014 and 2018 there were many cats found dead especially around south London, and the perpetrator was long thought to be some warp-headed human. However research by the Royal Veterinary College has shown the cats died due to a variety of causes and were subsequently scavenged by foxes. This had long been suspected by some of us, despite being vilified by vigilante groups.
Art, Literature, Language
Artists have long been doing battle with the censor (in many forms) over the depiction of pubic hair and nudity, and photography is no different. [LONG READ]
Those much-loved kids TV characters The Clangers were not a anodyne as we all thought.
Here’s a video about an incredibly fragile instrument: the Glass Armonica, invented by Benjamin Franklin. [VIDEO]
Writer Alan Garner talks about books that have been important to him.
This lady makes a living folding paper: it is sculptural, absolutely incredible and way beyond origami. [VIDEO]
History, Archaeology, Anthropology
Palaeontologists have found some ancient footprints which suggest that there were at least two hominid species living alongside each other in East Africa around 3.6m years ago.
Really quite modern by comparison, a 5700-year-old tomb in the Cotswolds has revealed a surprising family history of the occupants.
Around 700 years later a start was made building Stonehenge, the subject of a 2022 exhibition at the British Museum.
There is now evidence that some while after the building of Stonehenge there was a mass migration into Britain which accounts for around half of British peoples’ genetic make-up.
Still in Britain, and gradually coming closer to our time, archaeologists believe they have now found physical evidence of Roman crucifixion in Cambridgeshire.
Lastly in this section, Historic England present highlights of captivating historic site listed in 2021. [LONG READ]
London
London blogger Diamond Geezer reminds us quite how big London actually is. Well it needs to be to accommodate almost 10m people!
Food, Drink
Clare Finney in the Guardian explodes some of the biggest myths about cheese.
And in a similar vein (ouch!) Alison George in New Scientist looks at how microbes create the flavours of cheese. [£££]
Lifestyle, Personal Development, Beliefs
It seems that in these plague-ridden times there’s a thriving cottage industry in dream analysis.
And finally, I leave you with the magical and restful miniature world of the terrarium.
To Keep You Amused …
Just in case anyone is at a loose end over the holidays, once again we bring you one of the year’s great events: the King William’s College General Knowledge Paper 2021-22.
According to Wikipedia: Since 1904, the College has set an annual general knowledge test, known as the General Knowledge Paper (GKP). The pupils sit the test twice: once unseen on the day before the Christmas holidays, and again when they return to school in the New Year – after spending the holiday researching the answers. These days, however, pupil participation is voluntary.
The quiz is well known to be highly difficult, a common score being just two correct answers from the list of several hundred. The best scores are 40 to 50 for the unseen test and about 270 out of 360 for the second sitting.
The quiz is always introduced with the Latin motto Scire ubi aliquid invenire possis, ea demum maxima pars eruditionis est, “To know where you can find anything is, after all, the greatest part of erudition.”
You can find this year’s GKP on the King William’s College website at https://kwc.im/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Questions-2021-22.pdf.
As usual I shall not be getting 100% as tonight’s bedtime reading.
Happy Christmas
Happy, Healthy & Restful Christmas
and a
Calm & Prosperous New Year
to all our family, friends and followers
(watercolour, c.1980)
Click the image for a larger view
Advent Calendar 24
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Images by Japanese Cult Street Photographer
Nobuyoshi Araki
you should follow the link to each for further information
Advent Calendar 23
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Images by Japanese Cult Street Photographer
Nobuyoshi Araki
you should follow the link to each for further information
Advent Calendar 22
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Images by Japanese Cult Street Photographer
Nobuyoshi Araki
you should follow the link to each for further information
Advent Calendar 21
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Images by Japanese Cult Street Photographer
Nobuyoshi Araki
you should follow the link to each for further information
Quotes Monthly
So here we go with the last of this year’s round ups of recently encountered quotes.
As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.
[Noam Chomsky]
According to Frog, dogs must sit on logs and armadillos on pillows; and, while cats could once relax on mats, a recent rule change dictates they must now repose on gnats.
[Blurb for Kes Grey’s Oi Cat!]
The winter solstice time is no longer celebrated as it once was, with the understanding that this is a period of descent and rest, of going within our homes, within ourselves and taking in all that we have been through, all that has passed in this full year which is coming to a close … like nature and the animal kingdom around us, this time of hibernation is so necessary for our tired limbs, our burdened minds.
[Dee Laliberte, on Facebook]
Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.
[Charles Bukowski]
In any case fashions of one generation, moral or physical, are scarcely at all assessable in terms of another.
[Anthony Powell, Hearing Secret Harmonies]
All fungi are edible, some fungi are only edible once.
Cultivating compassion is not a religious practice focused on ensuring we go to heaven or a good future life. It’s about living a good day-to-day life here and now. It’s about being a happy person. Warm-heartedness is a fundamental good human quality.
[Dalai Lama]
Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That’s part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads – at least that’s where I imagine it – there’s a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in a while, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you’ll live forever in your own private library.
[Haruki Murakami]
What is most serious for the health of our democracy is that [Boris Johnson’s] lies aren’t just made to the media but to Parliament, making it impossible for MPs to do their job of holding the Government to account. The Prime Minister is driving a coach and horses through the Ministerial Code with impunity because the person ultimately responsible for upholding the Ministerial Code is … the Prime Minister.
[Caroline Lucas MP, Metro, 15 December 2021; online at https://metro.co.uk/2021/12/15/boris-johnson-10-reasons-why-the-prime-minister-needs-to-resign-15777201/]
Understanding is a wellspring of life unto him that hath it: but the instruction of fools is folly.
[Proverbs 16:22]