Category: UK

trains, travel & terminology

Many years ago I had a colleague who told me that she was concerned about her daughter’s English, as the family didn’t speak English at home. Without a second thought, I told her she should encourage the girl to read.

I didn’t think it mattered whether she was reading Jane Austen, Dickens, Woman’s Weekly, or simply the next Mills and Boone bodice ripper: my idea was that she’d learn grammar and assimilate new vocabulary from seeing language in context.
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bee aware

I’ve mentioned before KWP, the minister at the church my family attended when I was a little girl and the stories he used to tell. They were simple stories with morals, usually based around small domestic occurrences – like the Green Shield stamp that had lost its stickability and was therefore of little use. (The notion of “stickablity” as a value to be cultivated and encouraged has remained with me all my life.)

Once KWP told of having been in London with a friend who was an ardent nature lover. As they were walking, the friend suddenly stopped; he paused while the rest of the crowds surged past them, then turned and in a moment or two had located a tiny green grasshopper sitting on a kerbstone.
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knobs, knockers and bosses

I could just as easily have called this post “door furniture and architectural details”, “wall anchors, pattress plates and more”, “green men and bears” or a dozen other titles, but I’ll admit it: I’m childish enough to have taken pleasure rounding up a selection of local photos that I can post together under the title “knobs, knockers and bosses”.

In fact, as I’ve been researching what this set of photos show, I’ve learned that there are precious few bosses among them. Perhaps we’d better get them out of the way immediately, with this over-sized lego brick that I came across by the race course months ago. I have no idea what it was for, but presumably whatever its purpose, they really didn’t want people to sit on it.
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telling tales

Walking along by the canal the other day, I paused to take a photograph of what I initially thought was a bee.

This meant stepping off the path a little, and I waited to one side as a dog walker was coming along in the opposite direction. He could see that I was taking photos and told me to watch out for an orchid that was in bloom some twenty yards back along the way he’d come.
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ways and worlds

Tomorrow is the summer solstice, a time when the veil between worlds is supposed to grow thin.

I’ve read plenty of stories of people wandering unintentionally into the realm of the Fair Folk, but fewer that tell of deliberate trespass or offer instructions on how to find and open any of the doors between worlds.
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