The debonair Basil Marigold's

Christmas eve and we were a couple of presents down, so I headed into town. The weather was cold and grey and I walked into the superstore and bought three chocolate bars; nice ones, not your bog standards. I then walked home. My job had been done! I returned home with my haul and placed the bars on the table. The children were sat at the table doing something. I went upstairs to the little boys room. By the time I had come back down the stairs and got into the dining room the children had taken the executive decision to parcel out the caramel and dark chocolate bars and had begun to eat them. Well, one child had! The other one had begun the process of unwrapping the other bar. The phrase I believe is 'flipping my lid'. Within seconds they were getting their shoes and coats on! As the light was fading and the day was becoming darker and colder we headed back to the superstore to replenish what they had wrecked. The irony being that we passed the person for whom the pres

I notice that it has been a very, very long time since I last posted. It has most certainly been an interesting one, especially as we move towards the end of the year. Hey-ho. 2019 has been an interesting. It has proven to be a continuation of the political stasis since 2016. Only in December has there been some resolution on this front, but maybe not for the best. Time will tell, but there is only a bleak view from my point of view. However, the children seem to go from strength to strength and, ultimately, it will be them that faces the consequences in the long term. This is always the toughest part as they have no influence over it. Let us fro example take a look at the new Ashfield District Council leisure centre being started in Kirkby. This will appear in the next few years and walking past the notice boards I hadn't clocked the absolute idiocy of the graphic designer who was envisioning the future of Kirkby's swimming goers. It looked innocuous enough. It'

It has taken a few long evenings, but I have now mostly caught up with the DVDs of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. I have found them very interesting. If you were to just watch the films and never read the books (but, why would you do that?) then you would probably enjoy them too. You would however be witnessing things that never happened in the books and these aren't merely minor things either they can be enormous plot changes. They have removed an entire ending plot from the book that involves Saruman. As the wizard who turns to the darkness of Sauron, Saruman is defeated by Treebeard and the Ents and his tower is taken. Treebeard takes pity on him and releases him into middle earth. At the end of the book when Sauron is defeated and the hobbits return to the shire to see it has been ravaged by a man called Sharkey. This turns out to be Saruman. The Hobbits revolt and finally defeat Saruman. You don't see this in the films because Saruman is killed by his henchman and

So, after many years I have been, finally, persuaded to watch two sets of films. They are the Hobbit & the Lord of the Rings. Oddly, as a single book, the hobbit has been transformed into three films. The LOTR was a set of three books converted into three films as well. However, the LOTR is a vastly larger book and had the film been produced last (the Hobbit was made last as a film, but it is set about 60yrs before the events in the LOTR), it would have been about nine films, or maybe more in fact! Considering all films are approximately 3 hrs long it’ll take me eighteen hours to watch them all: it is quite a challenge! I have loved these stories since I first read them when I was about 13 years old. I first bought an omnibus of the LOTR in a bookshop in Brixham called, the book warren. It cost me £5. It must have taken about a year to go through the entire book! It is long, it is complicated, and as Tolkien created a whole new language, some of the words were virtually unpronounce

I drive through a snowstorm to get home tonight. It’s odd, but I assume geographical that there can be greenfields from the M69 to Junction 22 of the M1, but whenever you go from 22 to 23 (what I think of as the Coalville/shepshed area) it had already become a winter wonderland of white snow. And of course, once past Junction 23 the green fields returned! It’s like a band running across northwest Leicestershire that gets the bad weather.  This always gets me every time. How it can be so localised.

It turned out to be a rather eventual last 6 months of 2018. We moved house in November, but the initial process began wat back in July, at the height of what was a lovely, hot summer. When we moved in, finally, it was dark and cold.  The most immediate benefit of this was having a substantially larger property to live in. With more bedrooms, a garage and a larger garden you could say we have space to burn and by any stretch of the imagination I have begun to utilise this space. To my hearts delight I have been able to move my books, my precious books, from the loft and now, into a place of prominence: where books deserve to be.  In this case, to hide some especially unappealing wallpaper the decision was taken to cover this with bookshelves.  So, after a trip to ikea and much lugging about with heavy packages and then, the obligatory, faffing about with flat packs the shelves were ready to be secured to the wall. The wallpaper began to disappear as they went up. It took quite some tim