Act in Haste

...and repent at leisure. 

I volunteer, when I can, to do a shift in a local community interest charity/opshop/thrift shop which has at its roots a desire to assist low-impact living. Perhaps I might blog about that another time.

Today a delightful couple came in for coffee and tea. She had local connections and she and I had a chat while he was otherwise engaged. He is a retired clergyman. He said they lived in Inverness.

On their way out there was a discussion about the fact that I was "not from here".  Although I suspect that I have lived here longer than they did given that I'm not far short of having lived on Lewis for half a century.

He then asked if he could preach me a short sermon. I declined the offer, gracefully I hope. There was an ensuing discussion as to why I'd declined his offer during which, of course, I refused to be drawn. He said that I had obviously seen The Darkness and not The Light.

Since that occurrence an hour or so ago I have been asking myself why I did that. What would it have cost me to just accept? I would not have created the possibility of him losing face in front of his wife. He could have gone away a happier man having felt that he had helped another sinner on his way to salvation.

"Act in haste and repent at leisure." is believed to have been adapted from the proverbial saying first expressed in print by William Congreve in 1692. It's been around a long time. I wish that I had remembered it earlier.

Punctuation Day

Today is Punctuation Day. 

Quoting from Brian Bilston's book Days Like These "Punctuation Day, which occurs annually on this date, is a day on which pedants come together to criticise the punctuation and spelling of others, as they do on all other days. Things can become rather heated in the process, with arguments often spilling over into violence. This has led to colons being extracted, infinitives split, bullet points fired, and commas inverted. And for the improper use of ellipses...

He follows that, as he does for every day of the year, with a poem. Today's is entitled "Greengrocers Apostrophe's: and other Punctuation".  It is an amusing read as are most of his daily poems.  

It made me think, though, that the subject of sloppy and just plain erroneous punctuation seems to have fallen off the agenda.  

I wonder if anyone these days even remembers Lynne Truss's book "Eats, Shoots and Leaves"?

Does anyone know if punctuation is taught in schools nowadays?

Does anyone care about punctuation any more? 

The Drive Home

Many of you may already have seen and even viewed the return journey from Gisla. If not, here it is.

If you want to avoid the bits you have already seen, albeit going the other way so the view is quite different, then at 11mins 30 seconds into the journey, when you come down into the first roundabout in Stornoway just after the 30 mile per hour speed limit starts, you can get the journey through Stornoway and out to my house in the sticks.

Blogger - Spam - Again!

Well I have caught Blogger well and truly this time.

I have become fastidious in checking my 'Comments' folders ever since comments I was certain had been posted and had not been there previously have suddenly appeared later. I have just completed today's check. It contained amongst other comments:

which is dated 23 August.  So I went to the 23 August post and found:

Which shows, pretty conclusively I think, that Blogger is now removing random comments from old/previous posts and placing them in 'Spam' and, presumably, heaven knows where else.

I've now removed the comment from Spam and, guess what, it's back where it belongs.