out on a limb

I was wondering: do adults still ask small children what they want to be when they grow up? And if they do, what are the popular answers?

When I was a little girl, boys still wanted to be train drivers and girls wanted to be ballet dancers. True, one of my brother’s friends was reported to have said he wanted “to be a computer”, but then, we’d always thought he was a bit odd.
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bobcat

Well, no, not a bobcat, a tricolour cat.

Perhaps a tortoiseshell, or perhaps a calico; it probably depends on which side of the Atlantic you live. And if you live in Spain, you might call it a gato mariposa – a butterfly.
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colours & sounds

English summers bring such a mixture of weather and colours. I admired this cousin to the dandelion not just for its cheerful yellow sunlike flowers, but also for its clear determination to hold tight and grow despite the odds.

This borage flower had rather more water and soil to aid its growth, and from the look of the sky, there was more water to come.
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running late

It’s been a beautiful day and, for once, I’ve spent very little time at my computer.

It’s the local folk festival this weekend and there has been music and a general festive air throughout the town. At the end of the road, groups played Led Zeppelin and David Bowie covers, neither of which count as folk to me, though I admit I enjoyed them rather more than I did the Morris dancing.
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things forgotten

It’s quicker and easier to look things up online than in the weighty volumes of the Oxford Universal Dictionary over on the bookshelf, so I’ve just found the definition of “apostrophe” on dictionary .com and it pretty much sums up this blog:

a digression in the form of an address to someone not present […]

After all, you who are reading this are not present, and that first paragraph is itself a digression: I intended to start here at the Old School House –

old school house – and continue by commenting that when I wrote yesterday’s post apostrophising and being (dia)critical of the local school leavers’ fête and the sad inadequacies of modern education, I had forgotten that my original idea was to write about St Swithin’s Day, which had passed unremarked the day before.
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