Skip to main content

Farewell to the Village People

After 13 years of living in a village, with all that implies, we are about to move to somewhere more urban in feel.

It's a move with mixed emotions. I'm going to miss the friendly conversations in the Post Office and the near-impossibility of walking down the street without saying 'hello' to at least one person you know - I'll miss the community. I'm going to miss a house that has become like a comfortable piece of old clothing. And I'll miss the instant country walks.

On the other hand we'll have shops and cafes in walking distance (which would have included Borders until the swines closed it down), a very different atmosphere, new places to walk - and we will be constantly popping back, as we're only 15 minutes drive away.

Because of the move, this blog will be rather intermittent for the next two to three weeks. Bear with me. Normal service will resume again. But for the moment, who's for a rousing chorus of YMCA?

Comments

  1. Moving gives me hives, so I wish you smooth sailing amongst packing boxes, lost underwear [or am I the only who has problems with this?], and kitchen utensils that always seem to migrate to Japan. Living in an urban setting, the village life sounds intoxicating.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Two questions -

    Might one ask why you are leaving the rural idyll for Babylon?

    Please may I be the biker?

    ReplyDelete
  3. I saw you more as the Indian chief.

    We're leaving for multiple reasons including teenage children, cheaper accommodation and the ability to get everyday essentials (such as pizza) without driving.

    We see at as a sort of transitional house between 'bringing up the family' and 'now what do we do?'

    ReplyDelete
  4. I wish you good luck with the move Brian though why you'd want to trade in the British countryside for High Street Britain absolutely defeats me.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's recent gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some ex

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Which idiot came up with percentage-based gradient signs

Rant warning: the contents of this post could sound like something produced by UKIP. I wish to make it clear that I do not in any way support or endorse that political party. In fact it gives me the creeps. Once upon a time, the signs for a steep hill on British roads displayed the gradient in a simple, easy-to-understand form. If the hill went up, say, one yard for every three yards forward it said '1 in 3'. Then some bureaucrat came along and decided that it would be a good idea to state the slope as a percentage. So now the sign for (say) a 1 in 10 slope says 10% (I think). That 'I think' is because the percentage-based slope is so unnatural. There are two ways we conventionally measure slopes. Either on X/Y coordiates (as in 1 in 4) or using degrees - say at a 15° angle. We don't measure them in percentages. It's easy to visualize a 1 in 3 slope, or a 30 degree angle. Much less obvious what a 33.333 recurring percent slope is. And what's a 100% slope