Ma Sac

You MUST get one of these!

They just fit inside the hand luggage tolerance limits on Ryan Air, Easy Jet etc, and mean that you don't have to wait in annoying baggage reclaim queues. (It also saves you having to pay the baggage charges now levied by the man).

Two have just turned up Chez Grum, and they are better than that!

my jones

Thanks to nick, I now know I'm addicted.....

My name's Chris, and I'm a blogger :$

flying boat?

Q; What do you get if you steer a "D" Class lifeboat at 25 knots towards the stern wake of a "tyne" class lifeboat?

A; A Flying boat

Royan 2007

some piccies from our visit to Royan this summer. If you would like to see more, you can view our Picasa web album Here

DIY vs GSE

Today was the day I rediscovered that I'm pants with the silicone gun, but red hot with the Black & Decker Smartdriver (every man NEEDS one). How on earth people ever managed to assemble flat pack furniture without one of these little beauties, I shall never know. Suffice to say they must have had sore wrists by the end. A shelf unit and a blanket box later and my chest is heaving with pride.

The Mission of the weekend has been to get the house to a tip-top saleable condition, so that when our buyer eventually decides to come and have a look, he/she will be unable to stop stumping up the full asking price, in readies, forthwith. Kim & Hari have been veritable cleaning dervishes, spinning through the house in a blur, cleaning all that comes in their way.

As much as I can understand the attraction of DIY for some people, the next time I shall propose GSE (get someone else) :)

T minus 12,06,38,45 & counting......

For my reader, a cool site for the Rugby World cup 2007. Enjoy!

Sale Away

our house is now on the market, with all us Howell's looking forwards to pastures new, and closer to Bish Comp.

Looks a bit like a rhino

Just finished Constantinople, the last great seige, so I thought I'd include my fantastic facebook sketch for you to smile at :)

I's funny, but I seem to be keeping up with Nick at the moment, having previously ticked off The Testament of Gideon Mack. I wonder if he has done 1000 Acres yet?

I'm now moving on to Crime & Punishment

Crackbook

The ever witty David Harcombe came up with the fitting pseudonym for facebook, the social networking application taking the net by storm.

Kim & I signed up a few weeks ago, and are still fiddling about the edges of the prog

A la recherche du temps perdu

5 years ago you could find us at Cavalaire Sur Mer , in the sunny south of France, en vacance avec la famille Matthews.

Dylan would have been about 1 year, and Hari was12 going on 13.

Summer 2002, Cavalaire Sur Mer

(n.b. bottle of 1664 on floor next to sunlounger)

The evolution of a logo

In the begining, there was:-

Then those witty atheists came up with:-
The God squad retaliated with:-






The final act seems to be:-



full story here

David, of el grupo sent me this lovely little link :-

England rugby

I heartily commend it to you

Darling or Luvvie?

Just back from London and seeing Othello at The Globe. As usual, the company put on a fantastic production, with a slightly thicker Tim McInnerny playing Iago beautifully. For my money, the murder of Desdeamona was superb, moving and chilling, done on a pure white bed, centre stage. The wit and warmth of the script still came across strongly, even in this, an "everyone dies" tragedy.
It was an original costume production, which works really well at the globe, with the troupe of contemporary instrument musicians fitting in seamlessly.
The programme raised the interesing question of what time scale did the play take, with the arguments for "long time" and "short time" being equally compelling. Perhaps Shakespeare wasn't bothered, as long as the play "worked"

The reviews?

* * * * 'The play suits the Globe better than any I've seen' Time Out

'Desdemona (Zoe Tapper) is perfection - the best I have ever seen... Tim McInnerny has been brilliantly cast as Iago... Lorraine Burroughs is sensational. A good production of Othello should leave you shattered in a way that no other Shakespeare tragedy quite does. And this one did' The Observer

'Full of pace and energy... Eamonn Walker brings to Othello dignity, grace and a fine sense of the contradiction that leads Othello to lament "the pity of it" even as he prepares to murder Desdemona' The Guardian

'Walker cuts a charismatic and brooding figure. He charts the hero's descent into murderous jealousy with a vivid physicality... As Desdemona, Zoe Tapper is enchanting' The Independent

'Walker memorably captures the character’s initial decency and dignity, and the gradual unravelling of his mind' The Telegraph

'The seriously disturbed side of Tim McInnerny's portrayal is riveting, with his pushiness morphing, in soliloquies, into a manic fury' The Independent on Sunday

We have had quite a dose of Shakespeare recently, after seeing McKellen's Lear @ the RSC, and reading "one thousand acres" as part of el Grupo, we fought shy of seeing the complete works in 97 mins. However, I still fancy seeing Patrick Stewart play Macbeth this autumn, and I quite fancy ran by Kurosawa, director of one of my fave films recently listed in my Facebook entry

A Dougless Kirk

Thanks to Nick for noticing that one of this sessions el grupo reads is to be broadcast this week on the radio

The Moving Finger

Just remembered:-

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on; nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

(Fitzgerald's quatrain LI in his 1st edition)

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

A Short History of america

By R. Crumb

Which you can buy from The Official Crumb Site

Dramatic Look Bond Remix

la phare du cordouan

During our hols @ Royan this summer, we took a boat trip out to Cordouan Lighthouse, a stunning edifice plonked down on a sand bank in the entrance to the Gironde estuary. A stunning piece of architecture, and the oldest lighthouse in France (it even has a chapel inside!)
If you fancy testing your french, cliquez ici!

Celt or Basque?

Read an interesting article today about our cultural and genetic heritage, which suggests that we are all Basques rather than Celts. The author says:-

Everything you know about British and Irish ancestry is wrong. Our ancestors were Basques, not Celts. The Celts were not wiped out by the Anglo-Saxons, in fact neither had much impact on the genetic stock of these islands

Stephen Oppenheimer then follows up this article with another, here, to expand his ideas further. Interesting stuff indeed.

Thanks prospect magazine

300? £7!

You can now buy "300" for the princely sum of £7.00 @ victory-horse (?!?)

Crazy name, crazy deals!

A Welsh Born Legend?

It seems that those nice people at rate my teachers, who formerly rated me nice nuff , have now revised their opinion and now I'm a "Ledge"

Medieval demography

Another window opened today on the subject of Medieval demography thanks to Wikipedia.

Whilst noodling around the topic of the history of France, I came upon this topic I had not heard of before, i.e. how the population of Europe rose and fell, then rose again.

Fascinating stuff.

Betty's Meadow

We've just come back from 51°33'10.61"N 4°11'0.84"W, or Betty's Meadow, as it's known, now the latest habitat of the lesser spotted Swansea Moose.
(google earth it).

Blondie now owns the bungalow you can see there, the acre sized fiend at the back, and a long barn obscured by foliage in the picture, which he plans to convert into a holiday let.

Good luck to him, I say!

Pub, Pub, Pub..........

The story of the holiday for me was a small tale of castle building. The kids disappeared for a while, and when we looked, three castles had been built. Ben went to investigate. When he got to Dan's he asked what the various parts of the castle were, and was told earnestly, a keep, a motte and bailey, three farms, a school, and a church. (see piccie above). He then quizzed Owen to tell him ablut his castle. Owen replied a castle for the soldiers, some towers, and a football field.

Ben then turned to Dylan's effort, which consisted of six little piles of sand dumped in a random fashion. On asking what this was, he was told:-

Pub, pub, pub, pub, pub, and training centre.

Oh, how we laughed!

(ps. training centre = Swansea college's sports hall, where Dylan recently had his 6th birthday party)

Taking the Pisidia?

Thanks to the BBC for an interesting link to a story about a colossal statue of Hadrian uncovered at SAGALASSOS in modern Turkey.

"Systematic exploration of Pisidia only started in 1982, with the British Pisidia Survey Project (Swansea College and The British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara), which aimed at studying the remains at the surface of all ancient sites in the region"

Well done Swansea uni! read all about it here and from the BBC here