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...

My beloved boy, how lucky I have been

It's an odd thing that when we are waiting for someone to die ... and I say someone here even though the one in question was a dog - but to us he had character and a place forever in our hearts and was more of a familiar someone than some of the people in our lives. So, I'll start again - it's an odd thing that when we are waiting for someone to die, our senses go into overdrive. We notice things that normally would be part of the background of our every day. We breathe more - or rather, we don't but what we do is notice our breathing more, as we watch his. We pause. We think. We listen to ourselves and our inner voices speak. Memories flood our dreams ... though sleep is fitful. Why am I telling you this? ... ... we lost this beautiful boy today And in the hours before he went, I saw perfect spheres of dew on blades of grass - little orbs holding micro-images of our world; a bumble bee drunk on nectar, yellow-dusted with pollen, resting in a crocus; ten - yes, ten! ...

Temptation, virtual strawberries and a pretty useless tooth fairy

Littlest in the car on the way home from school: "What does tempted mean?" "And determined - isn't that the same?" Somehow, we got onto strawberries and in particular the last strawberry sitting, lonely, on a plate. "So, if I'm tempted to have the strawberry that just means that I'd really like it. And if I'm determined to have it, then I'm jolly well not going to share it, and it's mine, no matter what." Think she got that one! She's also tempted to sack the tooth fairy who has forgotten every night for the last 2 weeks to deliver payment for her tooth and if I might speak on behalf of the tooth fairy, there is equal determination on her side to remember. Maybe.

Walking The Dog

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