topical – Page 13 – don't confuse the narrator

splash!

I guess the locals didn’t build enough snowmen.

(See the BBC story Can building snowmen really help to prevent flooding?)

It’s a long time since I was resident in the UK and there are things that catch my attention although I’m sure most people take them for granted. I giggled childishly, for example, at last night’s weather forecast, when they announced a “yellow snow warning”.

I thought Frank Zappa warned us about that decades ago.

discussing whether

When I’m in Spain I can go for weeks without watching or reading a weather forecast: que será, será and we’ll deal with it when it happens. In the UK, though, weather is a sort of national pastime, and I’ve known whole days planned around which TV channel is showing the weather forecast and at what time.
Continue reading

cheese dreams

Insomnia found me browsing the web when the headline Cheese fire causes traffic meltdown in Norway tunnel caught my eye.

As a cheese lover, how could I not be interested in a story that starts:

Some 27 metric tons of flaming brown cheese (brunost), a Norwegian delicacy, blocked off a three-km (1.9 mile) tunnel near the northern coastal town of Narvik when it caught fire last Thursday. The fire was finally put out on Monday.

Twenty-seven metric tons of toasted goat’s cheese: a turophile’s delight!

(I gather brunost is made either from goat’s milk or a mixture of goat’s and cow’s milk, though perhaps not from the breed of mountain goat whose rather hazy photo I snapped in the Sierra de Francia, Spain.)
Continue reading “cheese dreams”

from a railway carriage

In case anyone who read Boxing Day (posted on December 26th) might be envious of me enjoying glorious sunshine on an exotic beach, let me clarify that it was an old poem, and, as is usually the case, I am not the narrator.

To clarify further, this is a photo taken from the window of a train I was travelling on yesterday: