Devolve me!

This is me...hot stuff eh?.....I think my new nose is particularly attractive, don't you? ;o)


To be more specific and very thankfully it's not me now, though I am sure some of you will say there is more than an adequate likeness, it's me 3.7 million years ago, courtesy of the OU website!

As part of the site's celebration of Charles Darwin's 200th birthday this week they have a 'Devolve me' service, you just upload a current image of yourself and they morph you back over 3.7 million years of evolution.

Not for the faint hearted or vain maybe but quite amusing!

Devolve yourself HERE. :o)

Call me nuts....

....but I couldn't resist going for a walk on my own in the snowy darkness last night!

The snow began falling again in the mid afternoon and by evening everything was transformed back to the beautiful pristine whiteness of earlier in the week. As I ate dinner I pondered that the forecast suggested it would begin to thaw again almost immediately, and by morning there would remain again only a slushy mess. Something had to be done!

So do something I did, I scrambled into my boots and jacket and headed out of the warmth of the flat and into the dark and still heavily falling snow and went for a walk! It was fabulous, while the few people around were scuttling about grumbling and trying to get indoors as fast as possible I was wandering around finding virgin snow to make footprints in and loving every moment!

I walked into town and watched the snowfall under the street lamps, I walked along the quay with a swan slipping and sliding just ahead of me, I sat watching the flakes disappear into the river and I turned my face to the sky and felt the snow landing gently and silently on my skin. It was amazing, peaceful and beautiful and the perfect antidote to a horrible week.

Eventually the cold began seeping through and reluctantly I began pottering slowly back through the silence, headed for home again all the while trying to commit to memory the feeling of pure white tranquility against the darkness and choosing an untrodden path to hear the 'scrunching' sound of new fallen snow under my feet.

I arrived home, pink cheeked, covered in snow and wet. I made a cup of hot chocolate and sat by the window watching the snow continue to fall. Perfect.

Flooded!

Remember the snow pictures of a few days back? Well these images are all taken in the same places as those were. What a difference a few days make!

In actual fact it's not quite as serious as it might appear, we have a pretty funky flood control system going on in this little part of the world and when the water levels get too high all the fields are purposely flooded to save the nearby towns suffering. It is controlled to within an inch or two by a complex system of sluice gates and other paraphernalia that I have absolutely no understanding of! It works though, the water gets to within inches of us a few times a year and is then backed off. Pretty amazing stuff.

....and though I don't like to blow my own trumpet too much, I can't help but show off just a little that some of these pictures made it onto the local BBC website yesterday! Hey, it might not be Getty Images but beggars can't be choosers and all that! :o)






(Clickable)

Biting the bullet...again!

Yesterday was not a good day and today isn't showing much promise in shaping up considerably better thus far either but I'll get over it no doubt in a day or two, I usually do.

Yesterday was another in what sometimes feels like a long line of days of facing situations I either didn't want to or find particularly difficult. You would think after all the divorce, bankruptcy and housing issues over recent years I would be used to it, and I suppose I am in some respects, but somehow, at the point of impact it just doesn't get any easier!

This time it was the employment issue, or rather the distinct lack of it issue, that had to be faced and face it I did. After all the months of soul searching and moral dilemma I faced it in an hour and a half grilling at the local benefit office yesterday afternoon. I hate it! It's not the actuality of the interview that 'gets me' it's the whole issue of being stigmatised as 'benefit scum', the standing in line in a grubby office, the prying into every aspect of my life by a complete stranger and the being spoken too like a bloody idiot that really get to me. I promise you, if you haven't been through this it does damn all for your self esteem or confidence! I am not ashamed to say I drove home in a state of numbness, walked through the door and just sat down and cried and had my first 'oh so lovely' panic attack in years. Somehow, and I can't pull apart the psychology, but for me this is almost harder than standing in front of the judge being declared bankrupt ever was.

So, the outcome? I wait now for a few weeks to discover if I am to qualify for my paltry handout and for a time I'll have to get used to the standing in line and the rest of the whole demeaning, miserable carry-on. It doesn't matter how much I tell myself this isn't my fault and I should hold my head high, it still makes me feel like crap and I still know that there are people out there who judge me negatively by my employment status alone.

If there is anything positive to be taken from this it is perhaps only that at least I am now counted in Mr Brown's manipulated figures and I did come away clutching the details for a possibly suitable vacancy. And that perhaps is the only slight amusement in the whole sorry story....the position is to be 'one of them'.....a benefits agency front line interviewer!!! At least there's one growth industry!

It's not only me who likes snow....

...though I'm never as effusive in my appreciation or as energetic about it as THIS little guy/guy-ess!

A stoat loving the snow and caught on video last week in a back garden somewhere in Wiltshire.

Love it!

To Twitter or not to Twitter!

Today I thought I would post my own few words in defence of the latest in a long line of that which is the latest of the virtual-social-networking-phenomenon, 'Twitter'.

If you don't Twitter this will probably sound like double dutch to you, but if you do, chances are you do it for little more than a bit of fun and to make a few virtual friends....and that is my point, what is the issue with that?

There will always be high brow intellectuals standing on the sidelines ready to denigrate anything but that alone is not a reason to assume something is completely worthless!

Twitter, if you have never got to it yet is simple, you choose to 'follow' other individuals and are 'followed' yourself, by whoever chooses to do so, from there on in you get 140 characters to say what you are doing at that moment.

All sound a bit inane? Well you would be right, it is, it is just truncated conversation but as Charlie Brooker of The Guardian says in his column today it is "strangely compelling".

We Twitterers are a diverse bunch and include everyone from the Jane Doe's such as myself to the rich and famous such as Stephen Fry, Jonathan Ross and The Dalai Lama....and for me that is where the interest is, 'meeting' people, I otherwise wouldn't ever get to meet. I don't necessarily mean the celebs among the twittering fraternity, though some are very interesting, but the normal people, going about their normal lives, who quite quickly become friends.

This may all sound suspiciously like a 'chat room' and once you have a group of friends set up, it does have a tendency to veer from purely tweeting 'what I am doing' to more 'conversation' but thus far it differs greatly from the old chat rooms (and believe me I am a self confessed ex-veteran of IRC, I know what they could be like)in that those that Twitter seem mostly to be professional articulate individuals (ok, that's me out), as opposed to odd-bods up to no good! Sadly I suspect as time goes by the odd-bods will find a way in, as the spammers are already beginning too, but that unfortunately is a part of life that we have to deal with in all areas. Twitter does differ greastly though in that you can choose for only those you wish to, to see your 'Tweets', it's not necessarily open to all-comers.

The old argument which has always been levelled against all forms of virtual social networking (and I'm not a fan of all, Facebook for instance I really quite dislike but that's another story) is of course that these aren't 'real' people but I beg to differ. I may not be able to look them in the face or hear their voice but at the end of a line of text there is of course another human being sat at a keyboard, just as I am and I believe, certainly as adults, it's not terribly difficult to tell quite quickly if someone is being less than genuine. Add to that, given that both my partner and my best friend are people I first met virtually through blogging, it would be hard for me to have faith in the 'these are not real people' train of thought.

No, social networking is not going out and meeting people face to face it's true, in the main I will never actually get to meet most of these people but as long as we keep a perspective and balance why should that be a bad thing as opposed to just a 'different' way of interacting and why is it that the intellectuals appear to assume that anything that is 'just fun' is to be criticised? Almost everything has a negative side if we look for it, football for instance, something which in this country is almost a 'religion' for many, but is in fact ostensibly just a game, costs the NHS a fortune in cruciate ligament surgery and has a tendency to attract violence here and there but there is no doubting it also makes many people lives much more pleasurable!

Yes, like many things I'm sure Twitter can be distracting and perhaps a little addictive but that's not a new phenomenon, it's the case with many things, good and bad, but one thing it certainly is for those of us that enjoy it is fun, entertaining, quite often informative and sociable and in my humble opinion that isn't a bad thing.

Like the inimitable Stephen Fry, he who has over 100,000 followers and 'tweets' hilariously is quoted as saying, "some people just don't get it"...and that's fine, we are all interested/entertained by different things but what aggravates me is why those that don't 'get it' feel they have to criticise it almost on principle! I could go into all kinds of psychological theories and principles on that aspect but I won't bore you any longer! If you don't 'get it', that's cool but don't critisise us who do, purely because we do!


....and incidentally, if you are interested my Twitter I.D is 'gemmak500'. All comers welcome :o)

The lights are out....

.....today!

Very late night, suffering, nothing to see here, move on please! ;o)

Women drivers and mad bikers!

Nothing has made me laugh so much as this first video for along time, albeit it does nothing for the defence of women drivers. Watch to the end for the previously mentioned (here and here) Cambridge rising bollards!


And this one is for anyone who has ever ridden a bike. Again, watch to the end or you'll miss the gtruly demented best bit....and hold on to your hat, or should that be helmet!

Bring on March!

I know, I know, I'm not supposed to be wishing my life away but March this year brings with it a pretty exciting event, one of the best in fact!

When the same thing happened last October I thought it likely would be a 'one off' or at the very least a rare occurrence, time, money and logistics considered but I was wrong....on March the 19th Lisa will arrive from the U.S at Heathrow again in the wee small hours, for another weeks visit!

Last time we had an absolute ball, it was just so fab to be able to actually spend time with she who has been my closest friend for over five years, the person who has been there through all the up's and down's of those years and who probably knows me better than almost anyone else. We have had a constant, many times daily email conversation going on for all that time and to actually be able to talk face to face was just amazing!

So, in March, more of the same, Leffe, pancakes for breakfast, hilarity, chatter and the pleasure of being able to hang out for 'real'!

I can't wait! Yayyyyyyy! :o)

SNOW....I got SNOW!!!!

Happy, happy, happy!

So my Tesco delivery has been cancelled, do I care? Nope! I have chocolate, coffee and snow, what more could I want! :o)

(Images clickable)

Swinging the lantern

Occasionally we read or hear something that pulls us up short and makes us examine our priorities, bringing life, and how horribly fragile it can be, into crystal clear focus!

Why one piece of information or story really 'gets' us as opposed to another I don't know, lets face it, we aren't short of stories of personal tragedy or world crisis, we see death, destruction and disaster in such copious quantities in the media it may even begin to have the opposite effect on us as our minds become desensitised in their effort to cope with such a dismal overload.

So perhaps one item connects in our minds because of simpler things, the way we hear of it, the way it is written or spoken or perhaps because as in the piece of writing I am about to direct you to, because it's written by someone real, someone we know, a normal individual who lives a normal life just like the rest of us but who contrary to most of us has faced situations in the course of that life that the most of us just can't imagine.

Balderdash and piffle, a blog I only recently began reading, carried one such piece of writing yesterday, the post is long but it is one of those you will find yourself glued to. Alex, it's author serves in the RAF and was directly underneath the very first launch of a Patriot missile when it shot down an Iraqi Scud in 1990, during the Gulf war. THIS post is his account of that experience and I promise you, it will make your blood run cold and you will thank your lucky stars, that no matter the politics of a conflict, that whilst the pundits and politicians sit in the comfort of their offices 'considering and criticising', we have service personnel with the fortitude to manage situations most of us wouldn't even care to imagine!

Snowless and sulking!

Really, I am beginning to suffer a serious case of snow paranoia!

Whilst most of southern England ground to a halt under up to a foot of snow yesterday, here, nowt, well almost nowt! Ten miles away in any direction they were up to their knees in the stuff but my little patch of the UK? Well, see for yourself, This was as good as it got, most unimpressive!


We have more forecast for Friday, theoretically even more than should have been yesterday but from now I am ignoring all things snow.... and sulking! ;o)

Sod it!

As ever it seems, sods law has prevailed and the promised heavy snowfall is yet to be seen here! We have a light dusting, pathetically light and that's it, nothing worthy of boots or a sledge. Pah.

It's a funny thing me and snow, when I lived in London, it snowed in Scotland, when I lived in Scotland it snowed in London, when I lived back near London, the significant snowfall was back in Scotland and now, having moved to Cambridge, the snow is in London! I'm beginning to think sod's law is gunning for me!

That said, the snow has given me much entertanment over the last twenty four hours, if you are a snow-a-holic like me and you Twitter (surely you Twitter?!)check out the thread #uksnow, moment by moment snow reports, news and images from likeminded mad people snowlovers around the UK. :o)

So, it's back to hoping, the forecast still promises more today, though less than it did and again a very significant fall for Friday......maybe sod's law will sod off just this once in my area!

Just maybe....

.....this time the forecasters have got it right and the predicted significant snowfall may actually materialise! I am waiting with breath suitably bated, the temperature is good, the pressure is good, the wind is picking up and the clouds are forming suitably.

Midday is the approximated time for the commencement of the first 'delivery', I've been chart watching for days (yes, I know that's a little suspect) and unusually, those who purport to know about this stuff appear to be pretty close to the mark for once. Everything is set, it's all looking good to go!

So, whilst I get back to charts and gazing out of the window for the first flake I'll leave you with a probability chart and a few words on the snow subject courtesy of one of my favourite shows, Northern Exposure.

"Oh the snow the beautiful snow filling the sky and earth below. Over the house tops and over the streets, over the heads of people you meet. Dancing flirting skimming along. Oh the snow the beautiful snow how the flakes gather and laugh as they go. Whirling about in their maddening fun it plays in its glee with everyone. Chasing laughing hurrying by it lights on the face and sparkles the eye. And even the dogs with a bark and a bound snap at the crystals that eddy around. The town is alive and its heart in a glow to welcome the coming of beautiful snow. Bon Hiver."

*UPDATE - Bang on midday and the first few flakes have started to fall! :o)