This year, I’ve tried to hold myself to posting at least one post per month on this site. I’ve mostly, but not quite, managed it. Nevertheless, there have still been so few that at present, with ten posts on the home page, if you scroll down to the bottom you’ve gone back almost a year. The bottom post on the home page right now is this one from last August, about my summer holiday to Hastings.
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Keyword noise: holidays, Sussex, Hastings, St Leonards, Brighton, The Children, railway, miniature railway, Bottle Alley, Volks Electric Railway.
They say you can never go back again. Never cross the same river twice. The past is a foreign country, as the famous quotation goes. Sometimes, it can’t be avoided. Sometimes, though, it can be worth doing just for yourself.
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Keyword noise: holidays, Sussex, Hastings, St Leonards, The Children, Bottle Alley, railway, miniature railway, Romney Hythe and Dymchurch Railway.
CW: death. Another day, another funeral
Published at 8:37 am on November 4th, 2022
Filed under: The Family, Dear Diary.
It was a bright, crisp, autumn afternoon, the sun still high in the sky. I put my hand in front of my face to shade my eyes from it. Nobody else did, and I wondered if they thought I was saluting.
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Keyword noise: death, funerals, burial, The Mother, religion, cemetery, The Children.
Or, something from the depths
Published at 5:43 pm on May 1st, 2022
Filed under: Dear Diary, The Family.
I took The Children away for a week over the Easter holidays. Naturally, they wanted to go somewhere that had a beach, and naturally, they badgered to be taken to the beach nearly every day we were there. What did we find there, when we went? Jellyfish. Big ones.
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Keyword noise: Cymru, Wales, Gogledd Cymru, North Wales, wildlife, animals, jellyfish, sea, seashore, seaside, The Children.
Or, looking at the sky again
Published at 10:14 pm on November 22nd, 2021
Filed under: Geekery, Astronomy.
Back in August I talked about how Jupiter and Saturn were nicely visible in the sky, but not until well after The Children were in bed. Last night, though, we had a rare family conjunction of myself and The Children being in the same place, on a night when it was dark well before their bedtime, with a largely clear sky. So, the telescope came out.
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Keyword noise: astronomy, planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Orion, Orion Nebula, Betelguese, Pleiades, The Children.
And more than once, too
Published at 10:07 pm on April 5th, 2021
Filed under: Dear Diary, The Family.
As it was Easter weekend, we took a couple of trips out. “To the beach!” shouted The Child Who Likes Fairies, so to the beach it was.
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Keyword noise: The Children, Cymru, Wales, Aberogwyr, Ogmore-By-Sea, Afon Ogwyr, River Ogmore, Cwningar Merthyr Mawr, Merthyr Mawr Warren, Traeth yr Afon.
As I said last week, things are slowly opening up here once more. Last week we could travel locally; from today, in Wales we can travel for leisure anywhere in the country so long as we don’t enter or leave it. I was somewhat tempted to spend the whole day driving to Porthmadog and then back again, just because I could, even though it would be an entirely pointless and childish thing to do.
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Keyword noise: Cymru, Wales, Mynydd Maen, Mynydd Twyn-Glas, The Children, Benjamin Hall.
Astronomy fans probably already all know about the Nasa rover Perseverance, which landed successfully on Mars yesterday evening. The Child Who Likes Animals Space was greatly disappointed that the landing wasn’t going to happen until well past bedtime. “You wouldn’t find it very interesting anyway,” I told him. “All you’ll see is a bunch of people in a control room cheering. You won’t get the good pictures until later.” Indeed, although there was one slightly low-contrast black and white photo through within a few minutes to prove the lander had touched down the right way up, at the time of writing the good exciting stuff is due to be revealed shortly.
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Keyword noise: astronomy, Mars, The Children, Betelgeuse, Messier objects, Orion Nebula, The Moon.
It being a couple of weeks now since the house move, I feel surprisingly settled-in already, and a big proportion of stuff has now been unpacked and sorted out. At some stage I will write a fuller account of what happened on move day itself, and all the stresses that had to be overcome, but today is not that day.
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Keyword noise: paranormal, ghosts, ghost stories, The Children.
Or, photo post of the week by another name
Published at 10:24 pm on February 17th, 2021
Filed under: Photobloggery, The Family.
I was asked the other day to provide a photo of The Children for a family project. Nothing difficult, nothing complicated, just a photo of the two of them, together, both looking at the camera, such as you might want to put on your wall. So I spent a while one evening going through all the photos I’ve taken since the start of 2020, and did I find a single photo that matches that description? Just one with both of them in it, looking at the camera, not pulling a daft face? Not one. Zero. Nil.
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Keyword noise: photography, The Children, history, archaeology, Wayland's Smithy, outdoors, countryside, landscape, Glastonbury, Stonehenge.
“Is it cloudy or clear?” said The Child Who Likes Animals yesterday evening after finishing his tea.
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Keyword noise: astronomy, The Children, Elephant's Trunk Nebula, Herschel's Garnet Star, Alderamin, Pleiades, NGC 7686, Andromeda Galaxy, Messier objects, magnitude, Honores Friderici.
Some assembly required
Published at 10:22 pm on December 23rd, 2020
Filed under: Dear Diary, The Family.
One of the sad things about growing up, at least to my mind, is that when you’re a child the toys you get for Christmas are hopefully the sort of thing that you can open up on Christmas morning and start putting together on the front room carpet. A box of Lego, for example, or Meccano, or the sort of train set that’s amenable to running on the carpet. As you get older, that sort of present becomes rarer and rarer. They don’t necessarily disappear altogether—I remember one Christmas when I was small, when my dad received a sort of complex marble-machine clock that we spent all of Christmas morning and some of the afternoon putting together—but in general such things are relatively rare. Even if I do get some sort of model kit to open, it will no doubt need careful planning and purchasing of extra materials before I can start putting it together; I can’t just open the box and crack on whilst we’re still eating breakfast.
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Keyword noise: Yuletide, Christmas, Lego, toys, The Children.
If you have a day to spare at the tail end of autumn, and the weather is all damp and misty, what better to do than go for a walk in the woods? In this case, a Forestry England wood just outside Failand, Ashton Hill Plantation. At its centre is a stand of sequoias, looking suitably mysterious in the mist. For a moment you can start to imagine you’re in some sort of supernatural horror-mystery filmed in Washington State.
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Keyword noise: North Somerset, Failand, paganism, religion, autumn, The Children, countryside, England, folk custom, giant redwoods, green space, photography, rural, Somerset, woods, sequoias.
Or, something to read elsewhere
Published at 5:28 pm on November 29th, 2020
Filed under: Linkery.
Yesterday afternoon, sitting at my desk as dusk was falling, the skies were clear and I could clearly see the moon and Mars rising in the sky. As soon as I logged off from work, I scampered downstairs and went outside, and saw Jupiter and Saturn just visible above the rooftops at the back of the house. “Let’s get the telescope!” I said to The Child Who Likes Animals Space. “Before they set!”
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Keyword noise: astronomy, The Children, Saturn, Triangulum Galaxy, Andromeda Galaxy, Messier objects, magnitude, The Moon.
What happens after you die
Published at 9:53 pm on November 25th, 2020
Filed under: Dear Diary, The Family.
The other day I mentioned The Children have just turned seven. As The Child Who Likes Animals has spent quite a lot of time in recent months liking space instead, watching Brian Cox’s The Planets innumerable times, memorising lists of dwarf planets, Kuiper Belt objects, centaurs and so on, and learning the difference between a red dwarf, a white dwarf and a brown dwarf. We decided, therefore, that it might be a nice idea for The Mother to get him a telescope, as a suitably grandmothery sort of present. Not trusting The Mother to judge what might be suitable, I reached out to a few astronomers I know for recommendations, and found something that both fell into The Mother’s budget and had a reasonable chance of imaging the rings of Saturn. The number of times I’ve looked down a telescope myself before can be counted on the fingers of one hand; but if I was age seven, was given a telescope, and found that it couldn’t show the rings of Saturn I’d be terribly disappointed.
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Keyword noise: The Children, astronomy, failure, beginners.
Or, something of a lull, and the strange ways in which memory works
Published at 5:25 pm on November 20th, 2020
Filed under: Feeling Meh, Meta, The Family.
Or, another post on death, discussed somewhat bluntly
Published at 8:14 pm on November 10th, 2020
Filed under: Dear Diary, The Family.
I’ve written a few things so far about my father’s death, just over a year ago now. Some were recollections written recently; the post about his death itself was written down not long after it happened. I’m glad I wrote it when I did, because, in trying to write this post, on how it felt to “host” a funeral, to be one of the more prominent mourners at it, there is an awful lot that I realise now I don’t remember.
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Keyword noise: death, funerals, The Children, The Mother, The Father, undertakers, religion, belief, church.
Or, a true story of the paranormal from Cornwall
Published at 4:50 pm on October 30th, 2020
Filed under: Dear Diary, The Family.
As it’s nearly Hallowe’en, I thought it might be time to post a creepy story. And this is a true creepy story. I posted it originally on my Tumblr, six years ago, as an account of something that happened to K and I when The Children were both still only crawling and we took them away on holiday for the first time, to a holiday cottage on a farm in North Cornwall. It happened a few weeks before I wrote it down, more or less exactly as it is set down here, in the middle of the night just before we were due to leave. I haven’t edited the originally, so “about a month ago” should be read as “September, 2014”.
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Keyword noise: Cornwall, holiday, panic, paranormal, ghost stories, fog, mist, cottage, The Children.
The Child Who Likes Animals is a great devourer of television, particularly documentaries, and can recite great swathes of the hours of television he has watched. Usually this involves things about his usual interests, such as animals, or palaeontology, or Brian Cox talking about planets. Recently, though he’s rediscovered a CBBC series from a few years ago that has recently been repeated: *Absolute Genius with Dick and Dom*, in which said presenters learn about great STEM figures from history. He was rather taken with the episodes on Darwin (naturally), the Herschels, and Delia Derbyshire;* but became particularly obsessed with the inventor of the photographic negative, Henry Fox Talbot. In that one, Dick and Dom build a pinhole camera out of an industrial-size wheelie-bin, making it into a binhole camera; the episode is worth it for that pun alone. The Child Who Likes Animals, naturally, wanted us to build our own.
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Keyword noise: The Children, photography, pinhole cameras, Dick and Dom, BBC, analogue, camera, film, film photography, papercraft.
Yesterday, after the rain had stopped, we went for a walk around Greenbank, the local Victorian garden cemetery. It’s a lovely place to visit whatever the weather, but on a cold day, after a rainstorm, with drips coming from every branch and all of the colours having a dark rain-soaked richness, it is a beautiful quiet place to wander around. Even when the children are pestering you to turn around and head back home so they can have some hot chocolate and watch TV. “It is a very hot chocolate sort of day,” said The Child Who Likes Fairies.
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Keyword noise: Bristol, local history, Greenbank, Greenbank Cemetery, heritage, Easton, cemetery, history, maps, death, The Children, weekend.
So it didn’t snow. I was back on the railway yesterday, and everything went rather well. None of the equipment failed, I didn’t do anything stupid, and I didn’t drop any tokens, which is always my biggest worry. It was a relatively quiet shift; I sat in the big armchair with the coal stove roaring away next to me, handwriting a diary piece about how sitting in the big armchair with the coal stove roaring away next to me and the clock ticking on the wall reminded me of visiting my grandmother’s house on winter Saturday afternoons when I was small. I was the first person to arrive at the station; and by the time I left all the station staff had already locked up and left too, it was getting dark, and all the lights were on. Although it didn’t snow, it felt all day as if snow was potentially on the menu.
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Keyword noise: winter, weather, snow, The Children, volunteering, childhood.
In which we are sitting in a dangerous ocean
Published at 9:18 pm on February 7th, 2016
Filed under: Dear Diary, The Family.
In one way, today was a completely unproductive day. But in another way, completely unproductive days are themselves a good thing, if you’ve managed to relax.
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Keyword noise: The Children.
Or, a free-ranging post
Published at 9:37 pm on February 3rd, 2016
Filed under: Dear Diary, The Family.
In which we explore past times
Published at 9:27 pm on January 25th, 2016
Filed under: Dear Diary, The Family.
As soon as we got up on Sunday morning, The Child Who Likes Fairies made it very clear what she wanted to do. “Museum! Museum!”
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Keyword noise: The Children, Cymru, Wales, Caerdydd, Cardiff, museums, National Museum Wales, Amgueddfa Cymru, dinosaurs, Palaeolithic, Ian Allan.
In which I say whatever inane thing is on the tip of my tongue
Published at 10:17 pm on January 12th, 2016
Filed under: Dear Diary, The Family.
Or, things not fitting together
Published at 9:52 pm on January 10th, 2016
Filed under: Dear Diary, The Family.
Saturday: we went out to the pub for lunch with friends. Our local pub does very nice pizza, and nice beer, and moreover whenever you go in there on a Saturday lunchtime it’s full of children running about the place going crazy, so our own children generally aren’t actually the worst-behaved in there. We caught up on all the local gossip, whilst the children threw toys at each other and other people’s children screamed and cried around us. At bedtime we asked The Child Who Likes Fairies what she had done today, and she replied “People. Food. Baby sad. Pizza! Mummy walk hop-up.”
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Keyword noise: The Children, Bristol, museums.
Or, doing more than I should
Published at 8:26 pm on January 8th, 2016
Filed under: Dear Diary, The Family.
Yesterday, I did a full day at the office, went home, then an hour later went back to the office and did another 6-7 hours. Bed at 1am.
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Keyword noise: overtime, work, The Children.
Or, the sights of Bristol
Published at 8:51 pm on January 1st, 2016
Filed under: Dear Diary, The Family.