Beelzepup in Full Glory!

The pond is still partially frozen. This doesn't seem to be troubling the ducks and geese at all. The dogs enjoyed snuffling through mounds of soggy leaves in the wood, of course. Horses have been brought to the neighbouring field, among them an adorable Shetland pony--chocolate brown with a caramel-coloured tail and mane. They thundered up to the wire fence to say hello. The dogs were on leads, of course, kept out of the reach of the horses' hooves.

Later I walked into the village for a few odds and ends from the supermarket, and to pick up Richard's prescription from the medical centre. He's been having a lot of migraines lately. They seem to go in cycles; he'll get a run of them, then they'll calm down again. The staff know him by sight, whereas I have only needed the doctor once since we moved to the area, eight-and-a-half years ago.

Earlier today I did more work on Turning Tides. I'd written it once already, but my old puuter ate it when it died. So now I want to re-write it again. I've given up trying to remember exactly how I wrote the first version--this is what's been holding me up with this story. So now I've decided that I'll just write it, and it'll come out however it'll come out. It would be a shame not to use the Ynys Mon historical research, anyway. I don't want to turn to the tale into an info dump--I've made that mistake before, with another story--but I do want to drop the odd fact into the plot, just to add a little weight.

Speaking of weight--she says, smirking proudly--I've lost three-quarters of a stone! Wipeeee!!!

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A Cure for Aging?

"All that we profess to do is but this, - to find out the secrets of the human frame; to know why the parts ossify and the blood stagnates, and to apply continual preventatives to the effort of time. This is not magic; it is the art of medicine rightly understood. In our order we hold most noble -, first, that knowledge which elevates the intellect; secondly, that which preserves the body. But the mere art (extracted from the juices and simples) which recruits the animal vigour and arrests the progress of decay, or that more noble secret which I will only hint to thee at present, by which heat or calorific, as ye call it, being, as Heraclitus wisely taught, the primordial principle of life, can be made its perpectual renovator...." Zanoni, book IV, chapter II, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, first published in 1842. Oroboros keyring - Spooky Cute Designs The idea of being able to achieve an immortal life is probably as old as human life itself. Folklore and myt...

Remembering Richie Tattoo Artist's Studio

Richard in the street entrance to his tattoo studio in Liverpool. The vertical sign next to Richard is now in the Liverpool Tattoo Museum. Yesterday, my sister Evelyn, Richard and myself stood outside Richard's old tattoo studio and looked up at the few remaining signs, whose paint has now mostly flacked away to reveal bare wood. On the studio's window are stick-on letters which read, "Art", where once it boldly announced his presence as the city's only "Tattoo Artist". I can remember him buying that simple plastic lettering from an old-fashioned printer's shop. This was in 1993, not long after he'd opened the studio and before he could afford better signs. After he'd patiently stuck them onto the glass we realised that from the outside the sign read "Artist Tattoo", so we had to carefully peel the letters off the window and have another go, laughing over having made such an obvious error yet worried in case we spoiled the letteri...

Dear Diary...

Do you keep a diary? Why did you start it, and, if you started one then stopped, why was that? What sort of things do (or did) you write about? I ask as, as a long-time diarist myself, there is an interesting piece in The Guardian today which talks about one woman's diary habit, which she began at the age of fourteen. I started a diary around that age too, but destroyed it after my mother accused me of using cocaine. A stern scene followed, with both parents perched ram-rod straight in their armchairs, while I was subjected to a heated inquisition. Where had I bought it, and who from? Didn't I know such things led to death and doom? I struggled to decipher their bewildering accusations, until Mum blurted out, "I read it in your diary!" To find my diary, Mum would first have had to rummage through my dressing table, obviously when I wasn't around to protest. Her intrusion on my privacy was assumed by both parents to be acceptable, and now, with this handwritten c...

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