Warning - no humour in this blog. And nothing about the dog.

Mini rant - which may evolve into a major rant - follows, and sorry, its not terribly funny ... more deadly serious actually.

Surely, there is something obscene in a massive Euro-lottery jackpot when hundreds of thousands of people in central Africa are facing drought and starvation. Their plight is hard to watch on our television screens - emaciated children in our living rooms, while we sit eating our dinner - the fact that we have living rooms, televisions and dinner, making us among the luckiest people on earth. And that's without winning the (monetary) lottery (we've won the lottery of life already)!
Hopefully, no-one will be brazen enough to keep such an enormous lottery jackpot entirely for themselves. I so want to see a headline saying "£100 million lottery winning given to ... " And if they do keep it all, they should feel real shame and I hope every mouthful of expensive, extravagant and unnecessary delicacy is tainted with the bitterness of greed, every designer garment burns their skin and every extra ounce of carbon, expended at the cost of excessive foreign travel, chokes their lungs. Realise I'm sounding a bit like the wicked godmother at the beginning of a fairy tale, but I do wish I had witching powers and could put a curse on them, or cast a spell to make them charitable.

We all need to do more. But some of us are given the opportunity to do more than others.

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Colour, Delacroix, flochetage and why don't we all have a go at inventing words

Yes - it is a real word. Flochetage. Well, a real-ish word. One invented by the painter Delacroix, when he found the dictionary cupboard bare and required a word to describe his technique of layering different coloured paints, using lightly pulled brush strokes to create texture and pattern and thereby enhance his base-layer colours (... lost? - stick around, read on and all will become clear. Or perhaps muddier ...). Flochetage implies both stringiness and threadiness. Apparently. And it sounds good - in a filling-the-mouth-with-sound sort of a way. Try it ... flochetaaaage. Not that I speak French. So I am probably mis-pronouncing it. Nor am I an artist. So what do I know about painting techniques - except that I think this one works. What I do like is the concept - you invent a new technique in whatever it is you do, hunt around for the vocabulary to describe it, find the dictionary is lacking, so make up a word of your own and announce to the world what it means. Delacroix isn...

Curlews, summer skies and walking in circles.

Summer skies over the Yorkshire Dales and my mind is set to rest mode. But that rest is not totally restful; there is a niggle ... a memory, a hint of childhood, something that unsettles slightly - a light brush stroke of discomfort; a gossamer breath of discombobulation and a 'Woah! Wait a moment!' moment of 'that's-not-right!' - we're about as far from the sea as it is possible to be in middle Britain and yet, I can hear the distinctive Peep! Peep! of oystercatchers and the piercing cry of curlew. Here - in the blue skies of the North Yorkshire dales and along the footpaths - and above the endless miles of drystone walls are birds that should be at the coast. Oystercatchers, with their distinctive red pliers attached to their heads feed on - you've guessed it - oyster beds. All along the coastline of the British Isles, their distinctive cry is the call of summer. Drowned out somewhat by the banter of seagulls but sharp and ...

Heaven clearly can't wait. Ranting and screaming inside. Growing old and lecturing ... myself, mostly.

What follows should come with a warning - it is a preachy rant. Stop now if you're not in the mood for a lecture. Or, if you're into procrasti-reading, read on and (hopefully) enjoy my latest piece of procrasti-writing. Apologies too for the reference to elderly leakages. And farts. And now, for being deeply irreverent. Sorry. Heaven can't wait. Meatloaf was wrong. Clearly the 'band of Angels' is impatiently putting together a gig. There's a party happening which we haven't been invited to. Yet. What a terrible year 2016 has been, so far. And we are barely dipping our winter-wrapped toes into Spring. Is it that the roll-call of those summoned to a higher place grows ever more poignant as we age? Prince was but a few years older than me. Victoria Wood, a meaningless number of years older still. Meaningless because what does age mean astride the long plateau of middle age before the eventual slide into decrepitude? A few years here, a few there - we...

Walking The Dog

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