Category: Uncategorized

This never used to happen…

A Carex hand soap dispenser, unexpectedly dripping.

Climate change benefits – number 94.

Nowadays, storms are worse than they used to be. Fact.

As a result, they have lower barometric pressure at their centres. When the storm gets close to you, the pressure drops, and the air in the hand-soap bottle pushes the soap up and out of the pump nozzle.

Climate change deniers will, of course, say something stupid now…

Time to reflect, before we carry on.

My Mum and Dad liked children. At least, I suppose they did, because they had five of us. They did a good job of teaching us many important things, including compassion, thinking carefully about things, and cookery. Once, when I expressed pleasure that some unusually revolting public figure had died, Mum told me off. “He was some woman’s son”, she said.

The building site next door has been quiet today. They have been given the day off, because today is the fiftieth anniversary of the Aberfan Disaster. I was 17 when it happened, and I wept for hours. Thinking about it today, it is still hard to hold back the tears.


The slip of waste coal killed 144 people, including 116 children, who were in the school next to the tip. A hundred and sixteen children. A fund was set up to help, not that there is any way money can compensate for the loss of even a single child, let alone a hundred and sixteen.

Today, fifty years on, as people here quietly remember this disaster, we have millionaires who own tabloid newspapers, and pay truly horrible journalists to write pieces in which they mock the drowning of children fleeing from wars, and claim they were “staged”. When we help refugees, they write demanding the children be X-rayed to prove they are children.

It is not easy to cope with the vicious, right-wing, unpleasantness that is now so common in the UK. It is very depressing to see what so many of us have descended to, after being the heroic nation that helped to save Europe from fascism. But I shall not give up. I shall continue to urge politicians, above all, but everyone else as well, to be decent. 

Comments are off because, sadly, I am only too familiar with the sort of response that thugs make to articles of this kind. 


It’s Madrid, innit?

The first day we were there, we went for a walk… click on the pictures to see larger versions. Offer me money if you want the full resolution ones…

This is a scene in Calle de Gran Via. There is a lot of traffic, but where it was hiding while I took this, I do not know.

Another impressive building, with what I suspect is a modern addition on the top.

This is the Town Hall, I think. I rather liked the “Refugees Welcome” sign on it.

I‘ve no idea what this building is, sorry. It has a sort of anonymous, Ministry of Certain Things, look to it.

The central parts of the city have a very pleasant, well kept, feel to them.

This is the main library and museum, which we visited another day. 

The city has quite a lot of public art, including this stunning bronze frog. 












































More soon…