Je ne suis pas #Charlie

#Je suis Charlie …safe to say pretty well everyone reading this will know what I’m talking about, and that the majority of you will have avowed the same via one social media channel or another. It’s swept through us like a wild-fire, and seems to have ignited imaginations in a way which rarely happens on […]

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Making Monsters

Funny how things nag at you sometimes, isn’t it? How some ideas, initially little more than the flash of a fin above the surface of the conscious mind, gradually gain heft and end up looming ever larger. Other things stick to them, and soon you seem them everywhere you look. As, for example, Monsters. Beneath […]

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Where the Wild Things are going

My good friends (and occasional employers) Festive Road, the Milton Keynes based Carnival company, have just finished playing host to the Carnival Network South East’s annual gala. In between cursing Powerpoint and a somewhat eccentric PA system (a role laughingly referred to as ‘Tech Support’), I was able to gather a few impressions… The evening […]

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The long way home

No matter how high the pile of tetchy letters demanding money, or how unlikely it currently seems that I’ll be ever be able to come even close to satisfying them all, there are some things that need to be done regardless. Like shopping (carefully, and never when hungry – that way disaster looms) and taking […]

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More than bread and circuses

I do really love a good street procession/festival, especially if it involves fire and/or fireworks. What I really want to do is join in – one of the reasons I run a street-band – but failing that I’ll very happily stand and watch. For hours and hours, if need be, in the freezing cold, crushed […]

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Walking back to…

It’s been raining steadily for days – so heavily that our well known pre-occupation with the weather has once again been elevated to the status of news, and no bulletin has been complete without flood-warnings. So it came as a pleasant surprise to see blue sky through the skylight this morning. (The skylight being more […]

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Sunday on the watermeadows

I was only going to get some cheese, as you do on a gray Sunday afternoon, when I was seized by a sudden desire for some green in my immediate field of view. You’d think, as Towcester is an old (i.e.. Roman and possibly older) market town, this might be in short supply apart from the odd […]

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The eye’s corner

There’s nothing like taking an alternative route to enliven a familiar journey. I must have driven through the Peak District to see my parents (who live just south of Manchester) tens, if not hundreds of times. I settled on what I now think of as ‘the way’ some years back – get the dull stuff […]

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One of those days in England 3 – Whistley Wood

see all the pix here I did eventually manage to find some woodland to wonder through. Pleasing both in that I’d correctly remembered that there was such a place just around the corner from Syresham, and in being so delightfully named. It’s true, and here’s the photograph I took to prove it.   Un-typically, I […]

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