P is for Position Still Open!

Bit of fun . . .

You were right who-ever-it-was - I will get better! There's going to be some changes around here in 2018!

PA is for Position Available!

My personal assistant is providing no assistance whatsoever; her mind wanders from the job, she insists on playing with the exhibits, growls at the merest sign of forthcoming admonition, takes endless extended breaks far in excess of the European Working Time Regulation guidelines and wanders off without so much as a 'by your leave'?

 Case the joint

 Check flanks

 Aaaaannnnd . . . . . . we're in!

 Oh! What's this?

 Ooops, spotted! Close your eyes and he'll go away!

 More room needed in this otherwise bijou residence!

 That's better!

 It's that dragon again?

Are these things edible?

Anybody wishing to apply for the post should do so through the usual channels.

F is for Follow-up to Henbrandt

So, I've managed to track down some more of Henbrandt's little pocket-money parcels, and we'll have a quick shuftie at them now.

There was a new coral-reef, plant-animal, polyp-based, life form, coral thing (plantimal?) which will be as useful as the one we looked at the other day for alien backgrounds! This hasn't been there the previous few visits, so others may turn-up in the future . . . there's clearly a big box of this stuff 'out the back'! Or - is it supposed to be an anemone?

I don't know if these are part of the reef set, or a separate set of fishes, I have managed to miss a few, which they had had the other week (buying a medieval set instead!), but they keep topping the tray-up so they may yet reappear? Also these were in the carded blister-set MTC shots Brian Berke sent to the blog almost a year ago.

The alien got his fingers caught in the bagging-machine "Unexpected item in the melty-crushing area!" and is clearly related to the capsule toys we looked at ages ago from some Dutch import/wholesale outfit, so he too is probably findable elsewhere as a gum-ball capsule toy? The funny thing is - if you opened him carefully, with a hair dryer on hot, his hand might spring-back into shape?

While the dog is the only one to turn up and they've had several of the same pose, so does he belong with the 'Wild Animal' set we looked at last time (mammals), or is he the (pun alert)  tail-end (groan) of a dog set? I suspect the latter as he's larger than even the elephant and hippo of the previous set?

S is for S'tu-hot

Gimme shelter, I'm dying here!

Yeah? You weren't alive in '76 dude! That was too hot, this is mildly over-inclement!

The downside of having built-in champagne-coloured insulation!

P is for Pink Buds of Spring

Well, we nearly had a nice day yesterday, which would have made three [days] in five weeks! But it just couldn't find it in itself to be that little bit warmer.

The blossom is struggling, the wild cherries have been flowering for a few weeks now and some have almost finished, but with few bees or other pollinators flying, there won't be much fruit again this year, the Mirabelle next door lost all it's blossom after a couple of the colder nights...

Frodo has decided that Spring is still 'months' away and has returned to the fireside, where he is clearly in seventh-heaven, only opening an eye occasionally to say, more logs - NOW please!

D is for Death...comes to smallscaleworld

Actually, death comes to all of us...

This is little Jasmine, she was eight years old the other day, not that old, even for a cat, but sadly she breathed her last today. I had hand-reared her when she was a kitten and wouldn't follow her siblings on to solids, she had been her Mothers first, and she (her mum) didn't get the hang of it until the second one and a bit of non-veterinary intervention from me...like I can teach a mother cat anything!!

Anyway - while I seemed to teach her mother how the deliver the subsequent three, the first was never quite the norm afterwards and would have starved if I hadn't fed her from a syringe. She lost her eye about two years ago, it just marbled over, so the vet took it out, but she was already getting white hairs in her otherwise perfect witches-familiar uniform black!

Then a couple of days after the above shot was (29th September) taken she got ill again and while the vet was sure it wasn't cancer (and sold us two courses of totally useless antibiotics), I knew different as my mate John lost his little cat Charlotte to the same thing...anyway we did the best we could until the inevitable, which came this afternoon with a quick injection.

She's now on the far right (no bullfighting! Although the odd mouse 'got it'), with 7 of her fellow felines to play with...I know - there are only six headstones - but life being stranger than fiction, one of the graves has two cats in it; neither of which belonged to us, they happened to be 'returned' to us by neighbours within hours of each other - both traffic related, and we never found the real owners so laid them together.

In time she will - of course - get a hardy Jasmine trained  up the fence-panel behind her, despite usually being called 'Blackitt'! But a silver-lining (if there are any) in pet cat deaths is the fact that unless you've called it something really silly like Moon-unit Dweezil the III, you can normally find a Shrub-rose to match, as we did with John's Charlotte the other year (a nice yellow standard). Not a trick that works quite so well with Rover or Fido, which is why gardeners should have cats, not dogs!!

We never seem to forget our pets, they fade, as all things do (except Alexander the Great, Caesar and Genghis Kahn!) but fond memories always remain, so just wanted to say she was much loved, is sorely missed and won't be forgotten.



Normally I wouldn't be quite so publicly sentimental, but I've had a mare of a day on another front and death has been an aspect in the background this last few weeks.



A chap most of you have probably never heard of; Clive Fairweather (Telegraph Tribute) passed away the other day, I only met him once or twice myself, but thought I'd add my only anecdote...

My brother and I were about 12 or 13, and had been holidaying in Europe with dad, when Clive who was at the time connected with the Honourable Artillery Company (HAC), a territorial unit of some historical significance (not least - that they are older than the Ancient and Honourable Artillery Company of the US Army...by a hundred years!! - it's a friendly rivalry) who had been exercising in Southern Germany with me and my brother tagging along like a couple of annoying little tykes (because we were!). Anyway: the unit travelled up to Wildenrath by coach at the end of the course from where they would fly back to UK. Our father was flying with them, but Clive and a future Lord Mayor of London, had decided to drive.

Well when we got to Wildenwrath to meet the 'plane, all the troops were given the list of stuff they couldn't take on the flight, and started dumping vast quantities of hexamine fuel blocks, lighter fluid, cigarette lighters, book matches and the like in the ash-trays (little did  I know a few years later I'd be stubbing my own camels out in the same ash-trays!). Now...my brother and I had developed a taste for all things 'compo', being soldier's brats, and ran around collecting all this stuff up, in the end we had a sandbag full of highly of combustible, flammable, explosive material which the lovely Clive then helped us smuggle through customs in his Mercedes...we'd never been in a Mercedes either. He also stopped at the services to buy breakfast when we said our parents never stopped at the services!

I met Clive again at my Father's 80'th, and he still remembered the incident and even managed to remind me that my brother and I had climbed into the luggage racks on the coach to sleep (and escape from soldiers boots!), something I'd forgotten and I have a good memory! He was in short - a nice man.



And then this week, Clive Dunn (Corporal Jones in Dad's Army) passed away and the obit's revealed a man who was far more interesting and complicated than you would ever have guessed from his role as the famous veteran of colonial brush-fire wars in some indeterminate period that seemed to preclude WWI!

Another good man.



Now - actor, cat or friend of parent? They all enriched the world in which they lived, and their passing diminishes the present a little, spare a thought for them, or someone/something you've lost recently.

Normal - cynical - service will resume shortly, although this close to Christmas it's only a matter of time before I get maudlin again!

Happier Times - although still a bit thin!

I suppose I should just mention that also this week sometime, bigoted, right-wing bible-belt Republicanism apparently died - almost by accident, so while diminished slightly in the short term; the world is a better place already. {June 20th 2021 - fatal last words - four years later the Republicans would give us Trump for four years of dark madness . . . }

The Tale of Bilbo the Rabbit

Once upon a time there was a Rabbit, called Bilbo, who found himself billeted on the big house at the end of the village,

now; it happened that Bilbo was accustomed to traveling light, and had therefore only two thirds of his house with him when he arrived! However the gardener knew where he could lay his hands on the base of a bed from a certain Scandinavian furniture manufacturer, and grabbing a wine-crate in passing along with a piece of roofing-felt, had - within the hour - produced a suite of rooms which adequately met Bilbo's not-so-great expectations.

Bilbo moved in immediately, and soon discovered that his arrival led to some excitement among the junior members of the local populace who quickly had him drowning in carrots, dandy-lion and lettuce leaves, crab-apples and all manner of Rabbit-fare!

Here we see Bilbo working his way through a pile of lush greenery, it's an arduous life; being a 'kept' Rabbit!

Unfortunately, a certain Sandy-Whiskered Gentleman had got wind of the new resident, and thought to have a close chat with him, about this and that, mostly about red-currant jelly, and decided that through the wire was not as close a chat as you could have if - for instance - you were to get under the wire...

It has to be said, that much as Bilbo liked his rooms, he preferred not to bothered by unannounced guests, especially at 3 o'clock in the morning, digging! So alternative non-daylight hours accommodation had to be provided at rather short notice. So thanks indeed to Messrs. Fortnam and Mason for the wicker hut in which Bilbo now resides after-dark, in the wood shed!

Here we see Bilbo licking logs, he likes licking logs, he also likes licking hands, sleeves, the outside of his water-bottle, noses...in short; he'll lick anything within reach!