Review, Rethink, and React

I've had a rather unsettled time since my last post.  The world's political situation has been depressing me and my uretic stent has been causing problems which always scares me because of the possibility of sepsis. Over the years I have got to the stage where I can recognise the very early onset of sepsis. However sometime it occurs in the middle of the night and I can wake up in a very confused state. Fortunately the emergency services have so far managed to respond to my confused phone calls and I'm here to tell the tale.

Apart from that I'm okay but enough of health and negativity.

I'm getting to the stage when I find the international political situation beyond coping with. It's obvious that the USA is going to be a loose cannon until Trump relinquishes power which may not be any time soon. It seems entirely possible that he may alter the constitution to declare himself president for life.

I spent my professional career in local government and can say without fear of rational contradiction that the great majority of people working in local government had the best interests of the communities they served at heart. I'm talking about professionals. Politicians were a different kettle of fish. Some - probably the majority - did have the best interest of their constituents at heart. Some, on the other hand, were in politics for what they could get out of it. In the UK when I was working, local government politicians were UNPAID and just received expenses. Now they are professional politicians.

I am, by nature, a very positive person. So THIS WILL BE MY LAST NEGATIVE POST.

I've never been a daily poster like YP and many others of you but my absence from Blogland has been unsettling for me because it's been such a part of my life for so many years.

I'm very fortunate that in my 81st year I'm as busy as I ever was and sometimes busier. Despite so many of my pals having left this mortal coil others have filled the gaps. 

So I'm counting my blessings and hopefully I'll return forthwith to being an active member of the blogging community to which I have belonged for so many years. 

Clive John Edwards

It is with great sadness that I am telling you that Blogland has lost one of its earliest members who was known to some of my longer-term readers of this blog.

CJ, otherwise known as Scriptor Senex, my younger brother died peacefully in hospital last night having had a massive stroke earlier in the week.

CJ started started blogging over 20 years ago on a subject dear to his heart: insects and wildlife mainly in his garden.  The original blog, which unfortunately I have been unable to locate, was on Angelfire. 

Then on the 15 August 2007 he changed to Blogger and started the blog Rambles from my Chair. He also had various other blogs over the years.

More recently a message on his blog made it clear that he was using Instagram and Facebook a lot more  and sometimes they were replacing posts on the blog. In reality his poor health meant that in recent years he spent most of his time reading. He was one of the most voracious readers I've known. He had the advantage of being able to concentrate absolutely and speed read but also remember what he had read.

I owe my blogging career to CJ who introduced me to Blogger in its infancy in 2007.

Housekeeping and Spam: Mea Culpa

Dear Readers and Commenters

I apologise profusely. I thought that I was assiduous in checking my comments folder for comments awaiting moderation and for spam. It would appear that I am not. The principal reason I tend to check is that a lot of people's comments do not show up in my emails. I have never discovered why. With some (such as Rachel) they never appear. With others it is totally random - or so it appears.

Kylie has just made the point on my previous post that her comment had disappeared. It was waiting to be moderated! Why? Heaven (or Google) alone knows. Although I expect neither of them do. Fortunately Kylie persisted and her second comment (unlike a previous second comment by Neil) was published. 

A number of you have suffered similar fates.

I have now got rid of all the genuine spam and allowed all your previous comments that went to spam.

Please don't give up commenting. I will be more careful in future. 

Sincerely

Graham

Could Do Better

I'm not sure that I ever got those words on my report cards at school - do schools still issue report cards? - but if I didn't they would still have been very appropriate.  I never worked hard at school. I detested school. My parents were good enough to save on other things and sent me (and, later, my brother) to a small private prep school in Liverpool where I was born.  The discipline was ferocious. The preparation for the 11Plus was second to none and all but the most educationally challenged (in our parlance of the day 'the thickest') did exceptionally well in the 11Plus for the Grammar Schools or entrance exams to the many private public schools in the area (my apologies to anyone from the US who is probably totally lost in the terminology). 

I won my first choice and followed a couple of years behind the exceptionally talented and totally way-out John Lennon at Quarry Bank. Quarry (Motto: Ex hoc metall virtutem - out of this quarry came virtue) was an excellent and very small (680 pupils) Grammar School which concentrated on only one thing - getting pupils to Oxford or Cambridge. Anyone else was a failure and left to drift. I was never Oxbridge material.

My Mother had always wanted me to go to Quarry because she had gone to the partner girls school next door and had loved every minute and left with flying colours and very good academic results. 

I could have done better. But I didn't.....then. 

All that was by way of trying to say that recently my blogging record has been parlous and, although I have been reading some blogs, I'm feeling a bit out in the cold. 

So I'm going to try and do better.

This was the view from my window this morning: clouds dumping snow over The Minch and Mainland Scotland.

Blogging and Fun

As my older readers know I started blogging here and in New Zealand as a diary for my friends and family largely to save me dozens of repetitive emails. Over the years it's gradually morphed into what it is today: a vehicle for keeping up with blogfriends and for reading interesting bits about people's lives and where they live. Over the years I have made some really valued friendships through blogging and some of those have remained when they have long since stopped blogging.

Most of the people I follow have quite different blogs falling into various different categories. Some, like YP or Cro, make no bones about their political leanings but leave everyone to get on with their own views whilst having an occasional spat and then getting on with life.  Some avoid politics altogether .  Some, like David,  concentrate largely on one topic (in this case birds). Some like Tasker can blog on anything and, heaven alone knows what Bob will blog on next. Monica and Meike and the New Zealand blogs that I follow all eschew controversy. Adrian is Adrian. He and I have agreed to disagree about many things for about 15 years and we're unlike to change now. As most of his blog is devoted to stuff which is stratospherically beyond my ken that's rarely an issue.

So, in a nutshell, my Blogland is a tolerant one. It is going to stay that way. I, too, am going to stay that way. I have learned my lesson in entering into a discussion with someone on that person's blog  in the full knowledge that there is only one point of view allowed on the blog - that bloggers. I'll stay in my usual Blogland. After all, for me, blogging is about enjoying comfortable companionship.

Oddly yesterday the above Peanuts appeared on my Facebook page. It must have been serendipity.

I've just looked out of the kitchen window to see a couple of hooded crows seeing off a sparrowhawk. There isn't much that will take on a corvidae: even eagles beat a retreat when sense tells them to.

Google

All my computer and phone equipment is Apple. 

All my blogging is done on Google: Blogger, Google App, Gmail, and Chrome. 

I have multiple Google Mail accounts because I've always found it easier to have separate accounts for personal (family and friends) and personal (public), buying, travelling, blogging (for 3 separate blogs) and so on. This separation has worked exceedingly well until very recently.

Last week I noticed that Rhymes With Plague had a transparent grey layer across it. I could not access it for comments.

I opened it in Firefox and by signing in at the comment stage using  my Google Eagleton account. I was able to  comment. However ,  I had to go though verification hoops before I could do that and if I have to do that every time it will be tiresome. 

It would appear that Google now wants to synchronise every account on the same computer and 'owned' by the same person for the purpose of giving the user a better and more targeted service (including adverts when you use Google search).  In other words making sure that it knows as much about you as it possible can.

So far I haven't managed to sort out how I might ever use my iPhone and presumably my iPad to comment on blogs easily. 

The problem seem only just to have arisen. Is anyone else having any problems.

Thoughts on Release From Lockdown

I am amazed at how out of touch I feel when I have been away from Blogland for nearly a month. During lockdown Blogland was a place of normality for me. After all Blogland has seen me through a great deal in the last 15 years whilst I've been writing and reading blogs. Blog friends and acquaintances have come and gone (and stayed) but it's been there as a comfort blanket during my New Zealand life as well as life here on Lewis. It's seen me in France, Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany and Italy as well as Australia and touring New Zealand when I lived there. 

Blogland has been part of normality during lockdown too.

When we were in full lockdown for six months last year I rarely went out except for walks. I met people a lot on video chats and the good old telephone. Like everyone else social life and things like meeting to play bowls all stopped.

However, unlike most of my friends, despite me being a social animal I did not miss socialising. I enjoyed having no commitments. I enjoyed waking up and looking at the weather and deciding it was a perfect day for the garden or a walk or writing letters or working in the workshop/garage out of the rain. 

I could well understand the angst of people living in a multi-storey flat cooped up with other family members with no space and probably having to work from home or home-school. I would have hated that.

Now that things are returning to 'normal' and my diary is full and I have to be aware of the day and the time I am realising just how much I actually enjoyed lockdown. I didn't just endure it. I truly enjoyed it.

Now, though, I will get on with enjoying life again and now that I'm home from hospital and getting back into my Island routine I shall, hopefully, also catch up with all my Blogland pals and find out what you've been up to.

Blogger's Block

I'm conscious of the fact that it's a while, even for me, since I posted. I've had Blogger's Block. It's not quite the same as writer's block because I write a lot of letters and emails constantly. The difference is that on my blog I have various 'don'ts': I don't do controversial topics (and almost every current topic is controversial); I don't go long walks in interesting places most days (so I don't have a variety of photos to post every day); I lead a busy life in my garden (not the greatest blogging topic in a garden like mine) and socially (definitely not of interest to anyone else) and whilst croquet gave me a great many interesting blogs in New Zealand and when I won the Scottish Golf Croquet Open but bowls is probably as boring a topic for blogging as I can think of (not that I've been bowling this summer with lockdown); and I don't generally blog about my family (my grandson is of great interest to me but many people have their own grandchildren). 

Do you ever do aides memoir for blog topics or anything else that happens to take your interest? I do all the time. Today, however, I found one that I'd put in my phone shopping list when I was out on Friday because I didn't have a paper and pencil handy. It reads "A stake through the heart is not a good way to die." The problem today is that, although the words are crystal clear, I have absolutely no idea what they are supposed to remind me of. That and many other things can join the 190 draft and partly finished and occasionally incomprehensible blogs that I have started and languish in the dashboard.

Despite the atrocious weather we've been having and despite the fact that I don't think poppies are generally associated with this time of year my poppies are still flowering daily:

Compressed Reconstituted Meat

Well there was no way I was going to use the 'S' word was there? That would really get the bot[toms]s going wild. So instead of the 'S' word I'm going to use CRM. I was going to use 'corned beef' but thought that was just a bit too silly even for me.

During the last couple of weeks I've had 98 CRMs posted to my blog. That doesn't count the odd ones that have been deleted when I've seen it on my phone first. Nor does it include the dozens and dozens which I have deleted in my emails because I have ticked the 'Notify me' box in the comments section of other blogs. I always click it because I like to know what going on. I know some people don't because you get a lot of emails and as someone once said to me 'Once I have commented on a post it's mental history. I never go back to that post'. I do and I know a lot of those who read the blogs I read do as well.

I have always had comment moderation activated for posts over 14 days old. That is mainly so that I could make sure that I don't miss comments made a lot later than the post. Nowadays I don't usually post more than once a week. I have noticed that most users of CRM and their bot[toms]s do not usually post to the current post. So to ensure that you, dear reader, don't also get inundated with CRM I have now reduced that. Not many genuine commenters will be inconvenienced but, hopefully, you and I will be spared the majority of the CRMs actually appearing (other than in the Blogger interface comments section).

On a happier note it's this time of year again. I've posted about the Damselflies before on several occasions with much better pictures, so I'll just leave this as a reminder.

The garden is doing exceptionally well at the moment because my social life was curtailed by lockdown. I rather thought that these orange lilies would bring a bit of cheer to the post too. 

Spam and Clouds

Today I noticed a comment from a Chinese blogger. It was a perfectly satisfactory and 'real' comment so I actually replied even though the person concerned runs what looks like a perfectly respectable and legitimate on-line shop and is, presumably, simply trying to increase whatever the on-line equivalent of footfall is. A while later when going through blogs I realised that this was a spammer  who was rather more subtle than others. A comment was often 'borrowed' from elsewhere in the comments and used. It was only because I recognised one of the comments that I realised it was a duplicate.

Spammers are certainly going through a prolific phase at the moment and there will be times when I'm not in Blogland for a day or two when they will appear on my blogs for a little longer than I would like.

However I am not going to use comment moderation (unless comments are for a post over a couple of weeks old where I might otherwise miss them) because I think it ruins the whole conversation aspect of blogging. I don't want to comment in isolation and I'm sure that some of my readers don't either.

Nothing to do with the minutiae or mechanics of blogging I saw this cloud formation over the middle of The Minch a day or two ago. I'm not very knowledgeable about clouds except a select few like Lenticular Clouds. These over the Minch are, I think cumulonimbus capillatus anvil.

Blogger's At It Again

Unfortunately the latest Blogger update (they have, amongst other things, removed Open ID and third part app support)  has left many people, including me, with blogs that no longer provide notifications by email.  So without going to my blog and checking each post or the comments in the dashboard I have no idea who is commenting or when a comment has been made.

What is even worse is that I can't see comments on some of your posts without having to visit old posts all the time to find out what comments have been made. For some people that doesn't matter because they don't read other people's comments but for me that is an important part of the blogging experience. At the moment the only blogs I am sure that I am getting comments from are YP's, Cro's Monica's and Amy's.

There are lots of comments on the Blogger forum about the problem which seems unsolvable by users (or is the correct word insoluble?) and Blogger has so far made no comment.  Hopefully normal service will be resumed eventually but until then if I miss your comments please forgive me.

Be What You Wanna Be

Back in the '60s (1962 to be precise) I made the journey from Liverpool to London's West End Adelphi Theatre see a Lionel Bart musical called Blitz. It was my first London musical. I may still have the LP I bought at the time (I don't think it went with the hundreds that went to Oxfam recently). Mind you I bought the CD years ago and I still play it. It was a very uplifting musical as well as being nostalgic. It included the song 'Be What You Wanna Be'.

I was thinking about something recently and the song came back to me. The 'something' I was thinking about was Blogland and social media and the use of cellphones and the like to keep in touch. I think it was triggered by a newspaper article which suggested that we should wean ourselves away from our general enslavement to the god of social media  and our cellphones.

Of course the term cellphone or mobile phone is a misnomer now because they are generally used less for telephone conversations than anything else. In fact several years ago a quarter of mobile phone users never made a phone call. Bucking the trend I have now got rid of my 'free' weekday and overseas calls with BT (the landline provider) saving myself about £20 a month and spending £3 of that on 'free' overseas calls on my cellphone bearing in mind all my other calls are included in my monthly fee (which is considerably less than £20) anyway.

I digressed.

What I wanna be is back in Blogland. It is, generally speaking, a far more comfortable environment than the Real World. Why? Because you can choose the environment in which you want to live. I've been so busy in the Real World (including travelling between Lewis and Glasgow - where I am at the moment) that I keep losing touch and catching up gets harder. So I'm reading as much as I can on Feedly (I can do that on my cellphone when I'm in the airport or in a hospital waiting room) but it's difficult commenting. So I'm still with you all and I'll comment as soon as I'm able.

The Thinker

I've titled this 'The Thinker'. It was taken at Brunch where CJ and I sometimes have our coffee and a bacon roll. CJ wasn't sleeping. We were having problems with the last crossword clue. We spend a lot of time doing crosswords with our coffee.

I'm home. In fact I've been home since Friday evening. CJ and I arrived after a week's journeying from his home on The Wirral, via his daughter, son-in-law and grand-daughter in Exeter, thence to the Lake District, Anna's in Bishopbriggs (Glasgow) for a couple of nights and a night almost on Skye. 

Since then we've been catching up with some relaxation, coffees and crosswords at The Woodlands and I've nearly filled a wheelie bin with weeds from the garden. 

Before all that I spent some time in Glasgow and then a week with CJ and Jo when we went into Wales and Chester.

Three weeks. Such a long time. Such a short time.

However I'm hoping to be back in Blogland more now that the dust has settled. After all there's certainly plenty to write about as well as catching up with your blogs.

Books From Blogs - The Book

In my post on  12 June I discussed some alternatives for  converting blogs to books. I decided to try out Blook. I now have the book and an ebook in three formats which should cover any ereader. The book has 154 pages and covers the first three months of blog posts for my first blogging year in New Zealand (which, unfortunately, was not my first year there).

.

Advantages: It took very little time and is very simple to do. The quality is good.
Disadvantages: There is little flexibility and if a post has one word (one of mine had a heading: 'Paper Wasp' and a text 'R.I.P.'.) then it still occupies one page. Only softback is offered.
Cost: The cost of the paper book alone was £49.31. The cost of the ebook at £3.44 (standard rate regardless of size). The cost of carriage worldwide was £6 (regardless of size).

Having done one I will certainly do more. My next one will enjoy a 15% discount.

I anyone want to have a go then the first person I introduce who produces a book will get a 30% discount. (as would I).

I may also have another try with Blog2Book which, last try, met with technical problems.

Post script: Since writing this several commenters have pointed out that there are no dates on the posts in the book. I hadn't noticed! Silly me. That is quite a serious disadvantage. I shall investigate.

Books From Blogs

In the comments on my last post Cro wondered if I had considered printing my blog. As it happens I had but, today, I decided to explore the matter further whilst it was in my mind. I discovered that I had tried several times before to do that very thing. 

Blurb (which I have used for photobooks for people) turned out to have a major problem because the editing would have taken me a lifetime and there is a limit on the number of pages one can download with no apparent way of using dates to limit the number. 

Blog2book seemed to tick all the boxes but I kept getting the message that there was a problem, that their engineers would look at it and then it all crashed - repeatedly.

I ended up doing a trial run for the first three months of my NZ blog (of which there are about 60 months of posts) with Blook. The advantage is that it's very easy. The disadvantage is that there is no editing and every post starts on a new page. The first three months cost £63 (but one gets a free eBook version).

I will report upon the results in due course.

Ten Years

I started blogging 10 years ago today. In that time I have written two main blogs: this one when I was/am not in New Zealand and A Hebridean in New Zealand when I was living half each year in that wonderful country. In all I have published 3170 posts (and written a lot more that I never published). That's a pretty sizeable portion of my life if one takes into account the time used to take and sort the photos added to the fact that it usually takes me a while to write a post. As an aside I often wish that I'd had the mind of a journalist and not the mind of a bureaucrat when it comes to writing.

The principal reason that I started blogging was to keep friends in the UK au fait with what I was up to in my 6 months during the New Zealand half of my life and vice versa when I was back in Scotland. I thought that it would save me time on emails. Little did I know what it would blossom into and the beautiful friendships it would bring me and the wonderful places I would see through those friendships.

It had been my intention to trawl through the blogs and see if I could identify a post or two that stood out in my affections or the affections of you, my readers, but the task is beyond the time I have at my disposal given that I've already spent the best part of a day in total on it. That's not to say that I haven't been doing some reminiscing on my blogs. I have. It brought back so many happy memories and astonished me that I had forgotten so many things. If I am fortunate to arrive at old age then I shall be able to live again through those memories. I shall be sad sometimes but I shall also be happy.

The first image on this blog was a view from the house over the Minch to the Scottish mainland. It's a view I've shown many times since.

My first photo on the New Zealand blog was of The Handbag. It was my trusty steed  in that country for nearly a decade

 

I'm sure that over the next while (what a vague statement) there will be some reminiscing on this blog but I shall leave you with my enduring view of the hills of Hawkes Bay

Working: And Enjoying It

It's a beautiful morning - again. We've had a few recently but I've not been able to take full advantage because I've been working at the house that my son is building 15 miles away. It's in the very final stages and he's hoping to have it almost ready for the cleaners to be called in during February so that the carpets can be laid and it can be called home. Even the groundworks outside are taking shape. 

It's a long time since I worked an 'organised' six-day week and I am thoroughly enjoying doing physical labour (even though a lot of it cannot be called strenuous). However Gaz said the other day "I'm looking forward to the day when we can retire Dad." [Just from doing the house full-time you understand]. I echoed the sentiment. Gaz returns to his ship in about 10 days so we are having a final push. Having said that we are off to Inverness on the early ferry tomorrow morning to get things for the house and have a one-night mini-break.

When Gaz goes back to his ship I'm off gallivanting to Glasgow again.

I'm telling you this just so that you know that I haven't abandoned Blogland and I'll hopefully be back writing and commenting soon. In the meantime I'm still reading blogs when I can.

In the meantime I'm trying not to get depressed by the most unusual happenings in world affairs.

It looks like spring is on the way but this is Scotland and anything could happen in the next few months (and it probably will).

2017 So Far

It's 14 days since I posted on my Blog.  I think (though I could be wrong) that is may be the longest time since I started blogging  that I haven't posted on this or my New Zealand Blog. I haven't run out of topics nor have I run out of photos (although I haven't taken many for a while). I just seem to have succumbed to a mental greyness which is rather like the weather here when it's not blowing a gale or storm force winds.

In the days before my New Zealand life started I just hunkered down in the winter and did winter things. The long nights and 6 hours of daylight didn't put me up or down. Then came nearly a decade with no winter. Last year I had a 6 week break in New Zealand just about now to look forward to and that glorious 6 weeks and a Lewis summer kept me going....until a few weeks ago. Then my current house projects completed and Christmas dinner over (the first one I had ever cooked) and a break from working at Gaz and Carol's house have seen my mind slip into a sort of grey area longing for New Zealand, the sun and croquet. It's not that I haven't got lots of things to do. I have. Being physically active isn't a problem. However I'm finding being mentally active very hard.

I wrote a New Year post only to find that I wrote the same post last year. I couldn't believe it. What amused me, though, was that two of my regular readers (you know who you are) would immediately have remembered my previous post even though I hadn't.

For a lot of reasons I am not contemplating a New Zealand trip this year. That makes me very sad so I try not to think about it.

On the plus side I have been writing far more letters and cards and planning my next couple of projects. Before too long I shall be making another trip to the City where it is possible to ride the Clockwork Orange (although I rarely do), meet up with friends and enjoy the Scottish Symphony Orchestra. Perhaps when I return I shall be more alive and ready for Spring.

I'm Still Alive

This may have been the longest gap in my blogging  for a long time: perhaps since I started. I've been so occupied with changing the decoration of parts of my house so thoroughly that I've had little time for anything else. I've learned a lot though. If you remove seven doors in order to paint them it takes a long time to get to the end. I paint them in my workshop when they are horizontal. I can only do two at a time. Each door has to be sanded down and an undercoat applied and then two top coats. So that is three days for each side of each door (to allow the paint to dry between coats) and assumes that nothing poops on your paint from above (which something, of course, did). Anyway it's all over now bar the clearing up and the new curtains being hung. Hopefully I'll be spending a lot more time back in Blogland.

We have had some bizarre weather here in the UK and, although we've not had the heatwave those further South have experienced we've had some cracking days (as in Yorkshire cracking à la Wallace and Grommit) as well as some, how shall I say, less cracking days.

Some of the sunrises have been spectacular:

More soon!

Home

I've been home for a week. Anna came up with me from Bishopbriggs and, despite the poor weather until Monday, we managed to have a good time drinking plenty of coffee as we did our crosswords at The Woodlands and various other coffee shops in Stornoway. On Monday we spent the afternoon in the garden trying to bring it under control after the wet 'summer' which had encouraged rampant weeds whilst I was away. Tuesday morning at the crack of dawn I took Anna to the ferry for her journey home. What a fantastic morning and day we had. I spent most of it in the garden and the evening preparing the living room for a makeover.

So I have not spent as much time in Blogland nor on Facebook recently. I'm hoping to catch up soon. However as I'll be working in the garden on good days and decorating my living room as well as, hopefully, being some use out at Grimshader my Blogland exploits may be limited to coffee breaks (like now) when the temperature is 21℃ and I need to be indoors out of the heat!

Tuesday's sunrise around 05.30

Livingston Daisies love the sun too