Category: Uncategorized
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When You Can’t Un-See Something
Street furniture isn’t something I’ve ever paid a great deal of attention to. Public seating, park benches and the like are just things that are there. Recently at Preston train station I sat on one while I waited for the 0600 to London Euston. It was good. It was just a bench on the platform.…
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The Gift Graph
Yesterday my 17 year-old son asked me, “How much is the right amount to spend on a gift for someone”. It’s my birthday tomorrow and he saw me eying up a 4.5kg Toblerone in Costco after we’d been to get his eyes tested! He elaborated on his question, “If you could spend loads of money…
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Happiness – One Piece at a Time
Today I crossed a line. An invisible line that for centuries has been a boundary between rivals. A boundary over which wars have been fought, wars which changed the history of not only the nation, but of the whole world. A bloody line drawn between members of the same royal bloodline. Where kings were made…
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When I Was Very Young
When I was very young – probably around five or six years old – I would regularly keep my Dad company if he went to work at weekends or during school holidays. My Dad was something called a company director. And from what I could tell his job involved driving round to see people and…
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Hump Day
Whenever you set yourself a challenge or a goal, particularly where there is a measurable element (such as time or distance) then there is invariably some stage where you reach the half way point. You reach the hump. The point where, having done the ‘uphill’ half of the challenge, you pass the middle and you…
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Reasons
Sometimes, regardless of our intentions, things just don’t go to plan. I made a commitment to a group of strangers a couple of weeks ago. I committed to writing something every day for 30 days and posting it online. It was a commitment I made without any real purpose behind it. I enjoy writing. I…
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Lessons from Logs (Part 2) – Magic Logs!
The logs that I had delivered on Friday were magic. They will heat me twice. The first time they heated me was when I moved them from the front of the house to the back and stacked them like I was Swiss! For that hour and a half I was very warm indeed! And the…
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Lessons From Logs (Part 1)
Years ago I used to climb in the Alps. When I visited, particularly when in Switzerland, what I tended to photograph – often more that the mountains themselves – were the immaculately stacked logs outside people’s homes. Swiss log stores are a thing of beauty. Each log carefully stacked by size, neatly aligned and with…
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Words
There are somewhere between 600,000 (Oxford English Dictionary) and 1,000,000 (Global Language Monitor) words in the English Language. With that many words to choose from you’d have thought that we’d have a word for everything. But you’d be DELULU if you did! Every year hundreds of new words come into use. And you don’t have…
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An Apology from the Dark Side.
I’m not sure I should write this. It might be seen as political. I don’t want it to be. I just want to have a bit of a rant. If that’s the right word. First off, I need to confess something. Something really embarrassing. I don’t work for a living! There. I’ve said it. It’s…