wool gathering

When I lived in Madrid, I had a friend who collected building façades.

These weren’t just the well known landmarks like the bright red bricks and decorative paintings of the Plaza Mayor, the imposing white, wedding-cake like tiers of the Palacio de Comunicaciones or the complex scrollwork of the Palacio Longoria (which was ruined, anyway, in those days, by ugly air-conditioning units.) No. These were the kind of façade you can find on any street – if you’re paying attention.
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greetings & valedictions

Years ago, I learned to type. As in, I learned to use a typewriter. And I learned the correct lay out for business correspondence, with the sender’s address at the top right, followed by the date and then the recipient’s name and address on the left.

Whoever the letter was going to, it always started with Dear, then a phrase with reference or topic, if required, centred above the body of the letter.
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pause for pedantry

Often, as I surf the internet, I find phrases, badly cropped headlines, verbal ambiguities, and punctuation failures that bring me up short and make me pause. When this happens, I tend to take a screenshot of the offending – or amusing – text and store it off to one side.

The intention is then to write about it on the blog, but sometimes I completely forget. Which is why the images in this post are from a whole range of contexts. While some of them are not particularly recent, I think they are probably still worth commenting on.
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signs of life and death

It seems as if August has flown by with little to show for itself. I try to update this blog at the weekend, at least once every week, but I’ve been very remiss recently and two complete weekends have passed with no word from me. If the updates happen at the weekend, and I’ve missed two weekends, that’s actually three weeks without an update. Nothing since the first of August.

Strangely, there have already been more visitors to the site this month than in any month since May 2020. Perhaps I should continue not to post.
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celebrating the harvest

It’s been a while since I mentioned the Modern Pagan Prayers project. But today is Lammas – the traditional First Harvest – and this week the third of the books became available to buy on Amazon, so I think it’s a good time to talk about the project again.

I’m really quite proud, as the publication of Turn of the wheel means we – my co-author Lucía Moreno-Velo and I – have managed to complete three books in little more than a year. It’s an appropriate time for us to pause and celebrate the harvest of this writing collaboration.
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