Seaside postcards

I went to Eastbourne for my birthday.

Seagull on a post
Knitted postbox cover with a seal, crab, boat and something else.
Eastbourne pier

I’m rather liking the camera on the Google Pixel 6, it’ll never match what I can do with my SLR, but I don’t carry the SLR around much anymore because phone cameras have got so good.

The worst prime minister of your life

So far?

I heard on the radio the announcement of Liz Truss being selected, I was pottering in my shed on a day off work. I was making cider from some windfall apples. Will the cider last longer than the new PM?

Two glass demijohns, one with a funnel in, being filled with murky brown liquid from a white butt.
Draining the first stage of fermentation into some demi-johns to finish off fermenting and also to drop sediment

Tea and Cake

There’s a nice place in Kent, close to a castle and a palace, that’s very good for afternoon Tea. We go there a few times per year.

We went yesterday, and took the dog.

Afternoon Tea for three, the cakes were chocolate and cherry,
pear and ginger and coffee and walnut.
A happy Dog

August

I started August with great plans to post every day / every week / at least once. It wasn’t that I did nothing to write about, it’s just that I’m a lazy sod.

I’ve walked in the company of The Gentle Author, I’ve walked the mail rail loop, I’ve walked the financial district of London guided by a very newly qualified tour guide. I took lots of photos, but as I don’t seem to be updating Flickr these days either, you’ll probably never see these.

I have done some work on the back-end of this site, and the others I host on this server. In theory this will make it easier to keep things update and mean I can finally ditch PHP and WordPress. This will go live one of these days, the biggest noticeable effect should be my sidebar returning to the sidebar, and not a random tangle at the bottom of the page; a relic of last time I did any work on this site.

September starts with this post. Tomorrow I plan to travel to Kent for Tea and Cake. I might write that up?

Five un-blogged things I did in July

  1. Got interested enough in transistors again that I started writing a book shaped object. Said object now has three chapters and is how I’d have wanted to learn about transistors. Work has paused for now, due to items 2 and 3 in this list.
  2. Went to the delayed winter meeting of the anatomical society, held in Dublin. My first flight since January 2020. At the conference I presented some work I’ve been doing using x-ray micro-ct to image microscope slides containing valuable histological material from now extinct or engendered species.
  3. SARS?CoV?2 (COVID) finally caught me. I may have got it at the conference, at the very very busy Dublin airport on the way home, or given incubation times, I was probably infected the day before I flew to Dublin. I was feeling slightly rough on the 7th of July, but tested negative; a precautionary test before an in-person meeting on the 8th gave the long dreaded positive result.
    Fatigue, loss of smell and taste, fever, sore throat and general aches and pains. It really kicked my arse. I don’t ever want it again.
  4. Used my newly acquired, temporary, immunity to covid to go out and do some things I’ve avoided for two years.
    Saw and really enjoyed the new Rise of Gru / Minions film at a real cinema.
    Returned to the cinema a few days later to see the National Theatre broadcast of Prima Facie with Jodie Comer. I’m crap at writing reviews, so I won’t. Just go see it.
    Final bit of culture this month was a trip to see (hear?) Jay Rayner’s band at Crazy Coqs, Zédel, Soho. Again, excellent. Go to a show.
  5. Made a friend.
    This dragonfly landed on my hand as I was walking home. I carried it towards a patch of grass and it flew away.