indian summer........

Despite my 'glass back' which is giving me so much pain just now. My dear mother expected me to visit her yesterday.

When I arrived I realised she wanted me there so she could fuss around me, cook for me and hope to make the pain go away........ the long journey was so worth it and appreciated.

She is in her late 70s and can't travel to me, so the way she sees it is that I go to her (despite cringing as I 'folded' myself into the car, after getting the pup in and delivering my teen to her dad's ... propped up and in no pain until I attempted to 'unpeel' myself out of the car again)

The sun was shining and I was at the sea side..... so I 'folded' myself back in the car and drove us down to the beach.......... Oh I am so glad I did.
We walked along the shore, getting our feet wet in the puddles left after the sea had retreated. My 70 years plus mum walked faster than me (which did her soul so much good), my niece ran with my pup (which did the pups soul good and my nieces too, she said how alive she felt running along the shore) and I watched all this (which made my soul leap)

random is as random does.......

As you may or not know..... I am laid up with a slipped/ prolapsed / herniated disc (what ever term they give it as the 3 decades have gone by... but by jove it still hurts the same like nothing you could ever imagine!).
In all innocence I was getting dressed to go to work yesterday and without any warning 'KA POW'.. that elastic band snapping between lower vertebrae happened. I didn't hit the floor this time so I think it maybe only 2 weeks recovery instead of 12 off work (well I bloody well hope so)

hey ho C'est la vie!!

As I am off I thought I would sort out this old groaning computer... but as ever whether I am sorting my loft or bookcase I get distracted.. I am so like Dory out of 'Finding Nemo'.

I came across a load of postcards I had scanned ages ago and thought 'my god how boring are some of these?'
So here we go ..... why would you ever send these to any one??

c'est la vie.........

I hadn't planned to post tonight.
But after a long old conversion with my 77 year old Mum tonight I felt I must.
My parents produced a family of 3 children. I am the last of the 3.

Our dad died very unexpectedly when I was 5 (sibling bro's were 7 & 11)
It would seem so many years later that the sibling 7 has issues with his child hood.
I being how I am have tried to explain (rightly or wrongly) to my mum the 'middle child' concept.
He sees it as the eldest Bro was favoured and I as a girl was also favoured and he missed out! Granny didn't help as she would give £1 to me and elder Bro but 5 shillings to middle Bro ... none of this I remember at all.. nor do I feel any advantage of being the only girl.. I am just part of the family..

My Mum, in her dotage, is now calling into question how she treated him/us, and I know she always treated us the same, she had enough love for all of us despite being widowed at 36 and in such despair ( but I must say I have learned the wrath to live with from elder Bro was 'such a one' & 'wayward'!)

It is not good for her now to start beating herself what she did, why she did what she did, what decisions she made ... god she was in such a haze I would never wish to imagine.

My dad came home from work on a Friday night then went out collecting 'pool coupons' (as he did to support his young family) .. came home inexplicably early with a raging headache and collapsed. The ambulance was called .. he had had a stroke aged 44 years. (my mum had folk calling around with money for their pools that dad had not collected so she then spent the night into the early hours sorting this out ... she was concerned in case someone may have won .. that is my Mum.. I how I am would have told them to 'go away' but not so politely... but not Mum)

My Dad ...he died on the Sunday.

Mum was all over the place (as you would expect) she took advice from neighbours and relatives and acted on it on auto pilot...... I was 5 years old and was told 'your Dad this morning, go to church, don't cry as Granny doesn't know yet!' ..she was told 'don't bury him it will cost too much' etc etc
On advice I was not allowed to go to the funeral or cremation.

For years I looked out of the front room window looking for my Dad to come home & he never did.........
It was only a few years ago that I accepted he had died when I saw the entry in the crematorium register from 1967. I don't blame Mum in the slightest ( I have told her this tonight) .. it was what was done best at that time


I dealt with it then but this today I am dealing with something new the honesty of grief from my Mother (my cousin told me how my mother would cry herself to sleep .. but put that at the back of my mind as it was 3rd party) who has never, ever opened up to me until today & why she did what she did at the time, my mother has just entrusted me .... & I am weeping so much now at her honesty... but maybe now I can now help my brother .........

(this is the only photograph I have of my dad and me)

god I have an important meeting tomorrow & am so going to look like a red eyed frog!!

la princess.........

Liverpool. this weekend, was visited by 'La Princess' a 50 foot robotic spider.

I can safely say that I would never have named a spider 'princess'! In our house spiders are usually called 'Oh My God' or simply 'arghhhh!'

It is all part of my city's accolade of being European City of Culture this year.. there are some great photos on their flickr site of some of the events that have gone on this summer.

Yesterday, my friends, my teen and I went to pay La Princess a visit

The weather was not what you call brilliant but hey what do we expect in the UK ... sunshine?? That would be a first !!!
We wandered down from Lime Street station

winding our way down to the Cunard Building on Liverpool's waterfront...... there are some great buildings around my city.... such impressive architecture.




Also noticeable are the images on buildings which remind us of the 'dirty wealth' that paid to build these magnificent monuments so long ago

Down on the waterfront is where we got our first glimpse of the 50ft spider... she was sleeping with a layer of snow that had soothed her to sleep the night before.

My did it rain then .............

We knew that she would be doing a tour of the city later in the afternoon so we strolled about the city, visiting Mathew Street and grabbed some lunch

We decided to pitch our camp on Lord Street up towards Derby Square to get a good view of the princess on her walkabout. My oh my it was busy ....

& then she appeared amongst gallons of water being sprayed into the awaiting crowds... it didn't bother anyone as we were all soaked anyway...

I love these guys they look like little model men

& there she was gone followed by her orchestra and many fans

just my luck............

If I could say that in French I would .. as it would sound so much better.

A long old while ago I posted this pure magic of human creation. I was so in awe at its presence.

I got a 'whiff' that it maybe coming to Liverpool as part of the City of Culture 08 celebrations... and my sources weren't wrong. Indeed the chap and chapesses have arrived with their creation to ignite Liverpool's streets.

I have waited... I have researched.. I have wondered what magic is to bestowed on us?.......

Then I learned what the creation was that would wade through the streets of my home city..... it is bloody spider!!!!!

WTF.............. did nobody tell them I have arachnophobia ???
There is this mechanical spider beast awaiting me.

I will go and I will face my fear .. but I did so hope for a tiger or some such other animal, maybe a mere cat? .. instead it is an insect .. c'est la vie ;-)
I do have 'inside' information and the show does look 'tres' fabulous

I will let you know how fabulous it is .. do visit their web page it is great :-)

Booksong..........

I saw this list on Bill Blunt's blog and thought

'mmm? Interesting!'

I love books and take after my father for that. The thought of throwing books away fills me with sadness. I have attempted to do this in the past and not succeeded.

Thankfully my niece is a bookworm too so I can pass them on to her now.

I have banned myself from going to the enormous Waterstones in Manchester as it like entering a time warp.... suddenly 2 hours have passed and I only went into get a specific book.

So back to the list. Apparently most people have only read 6% of the top 100 books on this list compiled from BBC's Big Read. I found that astonishing. I know a lot of the books listed are oldie books now but certainly in my youth, at school and beyond, I read them with pleasure. There are also some excellent books not on there that I would gladly put in the top 100 such as Engelby~ Sebastian Faulkes, Winter in Madrid ~ C.J. Sansom & The Russian Concubine ~ Kate Furnivall... I could add more but I won't.......

However, here are the instructions

1) Look at the list and embolden those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Books you love change to highlighted in blue
4) The books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated change to highlighted in red
5) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who've only read 6 and force books upon them.

Some I have left with nothing denoting them as I don't know the books so don't know whether I would read them or not!!!

So, including a couple of red 'I was forced to read and hated books', I have a respectable 43% ... not as respectable as Bill's 58% however but hey!!

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma - Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte's Web - EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

what is happening out there?.........................

This is the World Clock................ it does come with some 'rider's' with it but it is amazing all the same!
almost 6.7 bn people
80m births to 34 m deaths (mm the balance is out of hand here )

25m cars produced, 65 m bikes and 50m computers
wow there are 1.1 bn internet users .. how cool

but scarily to keep this growth going there is over $ 720bn invested in the miiltary

must venture deeper into this website!!