Window Tax

Today is the anniversary of the imposition of the Window Tax in 1695. Perhaps if it was brought back, we could price those monstrous Tesco stores out of business. Visit Evesham to see what I mean (but don't linger - it would be too depressing).

"I've always wanted an Airfix kit"

This statue to Charles Stuart Rolls stands in Agincourt Square in Monmouth, Wales. He was born in London in 1877 but his family seat was in the town and he is buried nearby. He met a sad end in 1910 when he became the first Briton to be killed in an aircraft accident.

The town of Monmouth is a pleasantly situated place although infested with clone shops. This is balanced by the presence of both a Waitrose and a Marks & Spencer Simply Food (see, I get my priorities right).

(The title for today's blog was supplied by a passer-by)

Getting the Needle

Monica came across a charity shop in Evesham today that is not allowed to sell knitting kneedles. The reason? They could be used as 'dangerous weapons'!

Take care, folks. The lunatics are running the asylum!

Ice

In the course of just a few hours, the weather in Worcestershire has changed from dull, cold and icy to dull, mild and wet - oh, the glories of the British climate.

The picture harks back to the last few days when we have experienced a real taste of winter, the sort of weather that always takes the authorities and the public in this country by surprise. We have become complaisant.

Fortunately I was able to take the photograph indoors in the warm. The object is made of glass not ice. The art of illusion.

Bearing Up

We have exchanged the pre-Christmas madness for the post-Christmas version. Shops are discounting all those perfect presents that we bought at full price only a week or two ago. Why do we do it? Why can't we call their bluff and hang on? We could give our friends and loved ones IOUs on the 25th or, better still, move our own Christmas celebrations to some random date, in February, for instance. Then we wouldn't need to get involved in the Christmas rush at all and we could buy everything in the January sales (which started in Laura Ashley around mid-December).

Hang on. That’s not a good idea, I didn't think it through; physically shopping in the sales (no doubt referred to as a 'person present transaction' in modern jargon) is akin to listening to Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley - why would we want to do it? No, a better bet would be to visit the sales on-line. Then we can have the pleasure of waiting in all day later in the month for a carrier to turn up - or not (a recurrent theme).

Still, all in all, it's not a bad time of the year. We get to spend quality time (what an abysmal phrase!) with friends and family, we can eat foods that society declares off-limits throughout the rest of the year, like Christmas pudding, and we get the pleasure of giving and receiving. On balance, I think we bear up fairly well in the circumstances (new entry in the 'tenuous link to picture' category).

Zebras

So someone's stolen a bun that resembled Mother Teresa from a museum, sold a toasted sandwich that looked like the Virgin Mary for $28,000 on Ebay and found a fish finger that bore an image of the 'Son of God'. I'm not sure whether it's more worrying that people saw these things in the first place and believed they were significant or that the media felt such a compulsion to report them. We have just got to find a way to speed evolution up, at least as far as the human race is concerned!


Fortunately some of the things we see in images are less scary. My daughter, Louisa, commented on the zebras in today's picture. Not that many of them come down to the Avon to drink of an evening – we were just lucky.

An Evolutionary Dead End?

According to an article in 'The Times' today, 343 adults were injured falling out of trees in the UK last year. As if that statistic alone doesn't show that a fair number of the members of the human race are a few pictures short of an album, 43 of them were pensioners; wisdom comes with age - I think not. More interestingly, 21 people ended up in Casualty because of accidents involving pyjamas - nasty vicious stuff, nightwear, turns on you when you least expect it.

Some animals have no choice when it comes to injury. They suffer as a result of human selfishness. An example; A precise figure for the number of swans and wildfowl injured by fishing tackle in Britain is not known but is thought to be at least 2000 a year. Does that sound reasonable? And is it avoidable? Unfortunately I don't think so, not if we can't get one leg into a pair of pyjama bottoms without falling over. Still a bit of evolution to go yet, I think.

(Apologies to Bob for yet another bird picture)