My Year on the Blog

.....started off badly, and has improved, steadily, since.

I didn't think I could do it - didn't think I wanted to do it - but I've got my head back into Rocky Outcrop mode, which is a reassuring place to be.

Aims for 2013?  To stay alive, mainly, and, hopefully, well.  And to find some form of writing-related "income generation", no matter how minor.

I hope to grow some leeks this year, and I'd like a different car.

Resolutions? None. 

Thank you to all who have purchased my books.  I hope you enjoyed them.  I hope to produce more, in due course.



That is all.

Christmas Dawn 2012

I Believe in Father Christmas

Terrible sound quality, but it is the original version.

Wishing all blog readers, past, present, and future, a merry, magical Christmas - and a Brave New Year.

"May all anguish, pain and sadness
Leave your heart and let your road be clear."

Jethro Tull Rare Promo Vid for Solstice bells 1976

I blog this every year - because it's my favourite.  Happy Solstice!  light a gigantic fire, mull some ale, roast someone you don't like on a spit....rejoice, at the returning of the sun!
Beats going to Markies.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - Interview (the only COMPLETE version)

Hadn't seen this before.  I don't like the recent spin-offs, devised by other people - just doesn't seem right, at all.

The Solstice Strangers...........

"GAUDETE GAUDETE KRISTOOS IST NAH-TOOS...."

As we approached the blazing inferno that was Tupfnder Towers, we could see a circle of people dressed in white, wearing crowns of mistletoe and ivy, all swinging their arms and singing at the tops of their voices.

"Tuppy, who ARE these people?" said Geoffrey anxiously, fumbling in his new khaki, combat-style bumbag (an early Yuletide gift from his distant aunt Jemima) for his brass telescope.

"They're Strangers Geoffrey."

"Yes they are Tuppy," said Geoffrey, screwing up one eye and peering through his telescope, "They look like they're from Overthere.  I remember the fat one with the ring in her nose from the check-out when we were Overthere three years ago (see e-books for MUCH more  detail), on our epic search for the oracle in the coracle.  And I'm sure that one with the pink hair and the tattoo on her neck is the nurse from the compulsory health screening centre."
"That's called body art," I corrected absently, "A completely different thing to the tattoos of whales and sailing ships and "MOTHER" to which we're accustomed.  I read about it in Bad Trip Advisor."  I was appalled.  We don't like Strangers round here, with their fancy different ways.  We're inbred, and we like to keep it that way.

"Will we have to - " Geoffrey hesitated.

"I'm afraid so, Geoffrey," I said shortly, "We've little option.  We'll have to send them Over the Top, just like we did the last lot.  Come on.   Let's get back to the Outcrop and think of a plan."

Meanwhile, as the jets of water from the Bay did their work, clouds of steam rose high above the dully-glowing embers of Tupfinder Towers,  and the muffled voices of helpers running to and fro with buckets of this and that faded behind us in the mid-winter twilight.

"Shouldn't we stay and help, Tuppy?  It seems wrong not to. After all, the T-G and Mrs T-G are our dearest friends."
"No Geoffrey. Lots of things seem wrong, but they aren't really when you sit down and think about it.  It's all under control now.  No point in wasting our energies."
And I hastened along the homeward track, trying to blot out the mental image of the contents of my pipe smouldering away in the waste paper basket in the library of Tupfinnder Towers....

AMAZON PAGE

Quote of the Day - Merleau Ponty

"There is nothing to be seen beyond our horizons, but other landscapes and still other horizons,  and nothing inside the thing but other smaller things."

From The Phenomenology of Perception.

King Crimson "Islands"

King Crimson - 21st Century Schizoid Man

I do like a gatefold sleeve.

Here is a link to a great photo of a storm over Saturn's north pole, taken by the NASA spacecraft Cassini, in National Geographic http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/11/pictures/121130-best-space-pictures-224-saturn-storm/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social&utm_content=link_tw20121208news-spacephotossaturn2&utm_campaign=Content
Cassini has been orbiting the Saturnian system since 2004.

Quote of the day: from TS Eliot's The Journey of the Magi

'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey,  and such a long journey:
The ways deep, and the weather sharp,

The very dead of winter.'

I nearly get crushed by a ceiling in the Starship BUM

.....the ceiling appeared to be patterned by a series of black and white dots, which, as the whole thing descended with a hideous metallic clanking and grinding, I recognised as tiny newsprint.
I glanced to my right.   The hand-written sign "Arrivals Lownge" and the portrait it concealed were vanishing with a splintering of wood and glass.
I glanced upwards again.  I could now decipher the letters.
There were only three, repeated in a relentless pattern that had a strangely dazzling, yet hypnotic effect on my eyes. BUMBUMBUMBUMBUMBUMBUMBUMBUMBUMBUMBUMBUMBUMBUMBUMBUMB
BUMBUMBUMBUMBUMBUMBUMBUMBUMBUMBUMBUMBUMBUMBUMBUMBUMB
BUMBUMBUMBUMBUMBUMBUMBUMBUMBUMBUMBUMBUMBUMBUMBUMBUM
Despite my appalling predicament viz a viz the ceiling that was about to flatten me into some kind of awful Spam, and although I sensed that I'd be saved if only I could find out what BUM meant, or stood for,  I felt my eyes grow heavy and the idea of having forty or indeed fifty winks became irresistible.....
"Tuppy!  TUPPY!  WAKE UP!"
"Wh-what?"  I muttered thickly, "Oh good!  has this all been a horrible dream, after me having over-eaten my supper-time cheese on toast again?  Am I really at home, by my own fireside, tucked up by a roaring blaze with my favourite rather smelly but cosy tartan knee-rug and a glass of steaming Madeira? Pass me the Black Bogey and a - "
"No," snapped Geoffrey ,(for it was he), " It's all true, and real, and here I am, come to rescue you.  I managed to wedge the space doors open with a crowbar and hacksaw my way into the Arrivals Lownge -  if you're quick - "
"Geoffrey!" I sobbed.
"No time for that now," said Geofrey crisply. "I know you're naked, and shocked and everything, and I know this isn't your particular forte, but Keep it Together Tuppy.  Come on - follow me."

But to where - and how?  And where was Tuppence, the cause of my doom?  And what did BUM stand for?  More Later.