marramgrass

There are probably many worse ways to spend late-afternoon on May Day
than being punted up and down the Cam with your brother-in-law doing
all the hard work.

It took some convincing to get me on to the river, and when I was
there I stayed firmly sitting down, but it was great fun.

The photo above shows something I never thought I’d see. There were
three punt-loads of men in maroon and orange, often crashing into the
bank and each other. It looked like they were having as much fun as we
were.

Maybe next time I’ll work up the nerve to have a go with the pole, if
I decide I can trust my balance enough.

I’m experimenting with using Flickr to post photos directly to my blog
from my phone. You could call this one a test.

During the week my wife tried her hand at making a pavlova. It was so
good she is reprising her masterpiece for our hosts (and me!). This is
a good thing.

When you’re not very disciplined at keeping your grass at a reasonable length, the self-propelled petrol lawn mower is one of man’s greatest inventions.

It is, however, tricky enough to control.

And when starting your brand new mower, it’s best to ensure that you are more than one elbow’s reach from the wall behind you.

A little frivolity for the first day in April.

MacBook + webcam (Xbox LIVE Vision, if you must know) + iStopMotion time lapse function + us out for the evening = the answer to something we had wondered: what does the dog get up to when we go out of the house?

(The stuff sitting on the sofa is there to discourage her from using it as a bed — not just because we’re a bit untidy :-)

I had a very strange evening yesterday.

I’m involved with organising an event that starts tomorrow (StreetReach Lisburn, if you’re curious — more to follow on that), and we had our final committee meeting last night. The pair of astonishing ear infections that blighted my Easter weekend have left me unable to drive until balance and spatial awareness are back to normal, so I was waiting on a colleague for a lift home.

He was providing a ride for another friend, let’s call him Al, who informed us that he had a mission to complete before we went home.

Al had been out walking earlier in the day, and being caught short had ducked down a side road into a field where he had come across a great pile of magazines of a certain type. Being a conscientious fellow, Al felt it wasn’t right to leave these publications where an unsuspecting innocent might stumble across them, so took us to load them all up into the back of the car for disposal.

That was the easy part. How would you dispose of a boot-load of suspect literature at ten o’clock at night, in an environmentally and socially responsible way? Could we find a paper recycling point? Of course not.

So there’s us in the car park of a large shopping centre, distributing piles of coloured paper between the various already-full bins, under the watchful electronic eyes of the security cameras. I’m sure we looked quite suspicious.

Very bizarre.

Al’s straightforward response to what he viewed as a problem was humbling. There’s a lot to be said for a man who sees something wrong and then, without thinking twice, goes and does what he can to put it right. More power to him, as they say.

Do you think the driver is relying on the sheer weight of the thing to keep his back wheels on the ground?

Spotted waiting to join the Westlink in Belfast (excuse the dust of my dashboard). I was stopped at a red light, you’ll be glad to hear. In my paranoia I also took the precaution of removing the keys from the ignition :-)

High ideals combined with a frugal attitude to spray paint.

(Spotted this yesterday on the fence outside the Ulster Museum — the museum is currently being refurbished.)

Technical modifications are strictly forbidden due to the inherent dangers!

It’s a coffee grinder. For now.

The weather today has been simply shocking — there’s lots of flooding going on round here.

Makes you glad to be inside in the warm. I think we’ll be lighting the fire tonight when some family come round.

My plans are well under way. We went to see Beowulf last weekend, and I caught The Golden Compass yesterday. They were, to different degrees, disappointing. I’ll come back to them when I’m not supposed to be writing something I actually get paid for…

The cool and interesting blog post I had envisaged for today may have to wait a day or two.

This is because today has been spent fighting with an assignment for this course I’m doing. The fight was a little one-sided, since my brain is slowed by the medication I’m taking for my once again messed-up back. The report beat me to the ground repeatedly. What can I say?