This article was originally published on Hubpages in 2010. I'm going to slowly transfer all my Hubpages material to here. Pretty Ugly Pottery Overlooking the River Mersey stands a relatively new, spacious two-storey building once owned by Pretty Ugly Pottery. The ground floor offered a large pottery shop display area, a cafeteria, the Have-A-Go area where visitors could try their hand at making their own Ugly Mug, plus the production area itself. Everything was brand new, including the staff who spent a month travelling to Rhos-on-Sea in Wales to train at the pottery factory's original site on a small industrial estate. This older site had been making the world-famous Ugly Mugs for years already and was purely for production, fulfilling orders which were then sold at gift shops around Britain or shipped across to Europe and America. The Liverpool site attracted international visitors, school groups, special needs groups and coach-loads of tourists who could enjoy a guided tour

  This article was originally published on Hubpages in 2013. I'm going to slowly transfer all my Hubpages material to here, and this is piece the first of those. Making a DIY Frog Pond Is Fun! Garden ponds add a beautiful and peaceful focal point to any garden. They are easy to maintain and fun to watch, and if you have children, ponds can also be educational. Ponds allow you to do your bit for the environment. Certain aquatic plants are great for attracting moths, which are the perfect food for bats. Birds will bathe in the pool shallows. Water beetles will quickly move in and make themselves at home. And amphibians will prove to be fascinating, especially in spring when frogs and toads need ponds to breed in. Frogs and toads spend much of their lives out of water. However, they often prefer to be near water and will enjoy the shade provided by marginal plants. Building a Pond Building a pond is easier than you might assume. Amphibians need to be able to climb out of the water eas

I'm incredibly excited by this new publication, which has taken so long to come to fruition. Literally years lie between the planning and the forthcoming publication of this collection of 13 stories, edited by Raven Digitalis and published by Moon Books on March 1st, 2025. Take a look at the list of contributing authors:- 1. Candle Magic by Storm Constantine 2. Spanish Jones by Adele Cosgrove-Bray 3. 3:33 by Rhea Troutman 4. Entombed by Corvis Nocturnum 5. Fata Morgana by S.M. Lomas 6. Automatic Writing by Gabrielle Faust 7. The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe 8. Don’t Forget to Feed by Miranda S. Hewlett 9. The Night Everything Changed by Raven Digitalis 10. ReBound by Tracy Cross 11. Captured by Jaclyn M. Ciminelli 12. Red Gifts by Daniel Adam Rosser 13. The Iconoclasts by Mona Fitzgerald-King You can pre-order a copy now from Amazon using this link:- Pre-order Here! Black Magick will be available as a paperback and an ebook.

Christie enjoyed her luxury cruise, confident that her domestic robot would take care of her home. And it did - with horrific consequences.  

  The aquilegia have been glorious this year, bringing washes of colour to my small urban garden. A trip to Carr Farm Garden Centre, in Meols, yielded several new plants which I've already potted on. The clematis Westerplatte (dark red) and clematis Multi Blue (purple/violet) have each found homes in the wooden troughs-with-trellis that I bought last summer, one in each, and they're sharing those with some lavender. A sturdy Dicentra spectabilis, more commonly named as Love Lies Bleeding because of its dangly pink heart-shaped flowers, needed to be re-potted immediately as it had clearly outgrown the pot it was sold in. If all goes well it should flower every year for years to come. I also bought a small tray of pink pelargonium Zonale. Now, until last summer I wasn't keen on geraniums or pelargoniums, (don't ask me which is which!), as I always felt they were too obvious and safe a choice. But then  bargain price tempted me to buy some, and they went on to flower for s