You get to build your perfect space for reading and writing. What’s it like?
Reality is there is no perfect space, there are always irritants. The light is wrong, the boiler blew up , your perfect room has no heating. The red marker has exploded all over your desk and stained your favourite napkin which you use to wipe your lips after slurping your home made soup for lunch. Today you forgot to defrost the soup so not only is your bright white napkin covered in bright red blobs , but you have no lunch.
The battery on your lap top is dying, you have unpaid bills and your cat has just decided to poo in the corner as you forgot to clean out the litter tray downstairs.
The cleaner left in disgust three weeks ago and the windows are beginning to rattle as the frames are rotting due to condensation and the force 10 gale outside.
Your ideal writing space that once was, is desolation, however, there is one thing that will never change, you have a notebook and you are jotting down ideas. Now that is perfection.
Thanks to Nick Alipour, news reporter for Sky News Online, for the Headline.
My initial thought was I wonder where that is and I was surprised to read it was the Philippines. Yes a rarely reported fight between Maoist Insurgents and the Phillipino Government has been going on for 56 years with the numbered dead being 60000 as a result of the conflict.
Each Christmas Day during those 56 years they have respected the locals need for a day of Peace and have had a ceasefire. One year a period of four days was proposed, however, there seems to be a theory that either side can use the ” Christmas Peace” for propaganda purposes, the people on the ground whose daily lives are affected are by the conflict are so desperate to have peace that the protaganists use the “Christmas Truce ” to persuade the people that they “care” about them.
Once Christmas is over, however, it’s back to the fight for their beliefs and the conviction that they know what is best for the population and to fight is necessary.
The article explains that there are more “conflicts” going on in the World than anytime since World War Two. It’s a sad fact and I don’t need to tell you which one’s grab the Headlines. The Peace Research Institute in Oslo has identified 61 conflicts that were active in 2024 so most don’t reach the eye of the general public .
The pain and suffering for the populace in those conflicts, not covered by the Global Media Machine, may avoid sensationalism of the suffering of the population ; but are those that are not covered , not covered because it is not in the Global Interests to do so? After all who owns the media? The old adage follow the money works well here.
A rural skirmish which enables land , oil or mineral rights to be distributed elsewhere, or picked up at a knock down price may be the real reason behind not reporting the facts. Land that would otherwise be fertile and farmed with a good water supply may be cleared of people for the sake of mining. Rural farming is inefficient and we need to progress. We need growth, more than we need the people to grow.
These may be the Global Goals of enterprises who have long lost the promise of Empire and now rely on their business partners and interests to maintain the status quo. Using Global resources to fill the coffers of their bank accounts to have financial security and have a banking industry that will offer self- perpetuating finance to those whose next project/ fight is on their to do list.
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was a novel by Ian Fleming who also wrote the “James Bond novels” made into a film starring along with the Car , the now Centenarian Dick Van Dyke.
The Car took centre stage and would have to be my favourite automobile ever. Although Herbie the VW comes close.
Thanks to Emily Johnson from BBC News Online for this headline.
I’m obsessed by sausages today as it’s Christmas Day here and they need to be cossetted, wrapped in bacon and cooked. So this article caught my eye. A Classic Tale of a cyclists nightmare on a badly repaired path which with recent wet weather and maybe the momentary earth movement has caused a sausage like protuberance to appear on a cycling path in Yorkshire.
The Council have a name for it. It’s been caused by “clay heave”. Well I’d like to point that cycle paths are best made out of tarmac not clay and if the repair had been done properly in the summer when the cracks were filled in then the water would not have impregnated the clay and caused it to swell.
The locals have nicknamed the giant sausages on their path, but in truth they haven’t come up with any interesting names, so I’ll pass on them.
I have every sympathy with the cyclists, lets face it they aren’t expecting a cycle path to be an obstacle course. I hope they get some fancy machine in from America and tarmac the whole thing, while maintaining a camber for water drainage. Maybe a ditch either side would help too.
Merry Christmas to Everyone who Celebrates it.
Namaste and Thank You for Reading 🙏
Not quite the image I was thinking of but this made me laugh and maybe the cyclists in Yorkshire have scary dreams like this picture.
Everyone and all the life that is on Earth and probably the Universe is creating all the time, cells are continuously renewing , so I’m just part of that package and it’s not a bad feeling.
Thank you to ZME Science and Mihai Andrei for the Headline
Why should I care about what happened to a 30 year old man, who was killed in a conflict at Sverresborg Castle, Trondheim Norway, approximately 800 years ago?
The Castle after being raided was left uninhabitable , as they threw an already deceased body of a man into it’s well and covered it with stones to poison the water supply. Good ol’ King Sverre Sigurdsson was away on a winters break in Bergen , so his unfortunate Castle Dwellers were the ones who suffered.
Today the myth has been proven, they found the skeletal remains of the corpse that was thrown into the well and they can prove his age , how he died. They even know what he ate.
Initially his skeleton appeared older than it was, but because he diet was mainly seafood they realised that their results had to be adjusted to allow for the fact that carbon from the ocean appears “older”. Once corrected the man’s demise was plump in the middle of the Sverresborg Castle siege.
What a good start to the day that a suspected Myth has been proven by good old D.N.A analysis. The Genes don’t lie.
So what are the biggest influences in my life? Are they who’s or what’s? I think they are both. They are both part of my D.N.A and also part of my experience.
But Little Hovel, is my home and it’s where I can be myself and not have intrusions or distractions that modern life thrusts upon us. Perhaps my D.N.A and my experience taught me that Little Hovel is where the heart is.
Thanks to Sky News Online for the Headline . ( think this article is AI generated, it states the facts as if the World was factual, which it is not, strange when writing about Art)
Banksy has given us a gift a Christmas Mural on an unsightly wall above some lockups in Bayswater in Central London. Lets hope there’s no asbestos in the roofs of the lock up owners as there will be a trail of people climbing up to take selfies who might cause damage to the roof , and unleash the deadly fibres on the unsuspecting user of the garage, or at the very least cause a leak.
The Mural or perhaps we should call it Graffiti is of two children lying together on the ground ,dressed in warm coats and woolly hats (perhaps homeless) , both looking up at the sky with one pointing up at the sky or perhaps at Santa’s reindeers way up above them carrying lots of presents for children more fortunate than they.
This is definitely not the Banksy Mural.
Heaven knows what Banksy wants the populus of London to think, though no doubt someone will want to make a quick buck, as these murals are worth a fortune. Still I wonder how many will say “thank you” to Banksy for his kind and relevant thoughts .
Are you kidding, do you think I’m going to tell( or share as you so empathetically put it) with an AI prompt my year of birth so you could can add it to your ever increasing digital database. What do you think? I was born yesterday? Well I wasn’t! And no I wasn’t born in the year that the wonderful Britney Spears had her hit record dressed as a schoolgirl , so don’t try to be clever. It just seemed a good title.
Thanks to Lauren Hadeed at BBC Online(Future Earth) for the Headline
Frankincense is the aromatic resin harvested by hand from the Boswellia Tree. As you can imagine it’s price in trade markets ( £4.2 billion) is determined by it’s rareness. It plays a role in many areas of “wellness” probably going back to ancient Chinese and Indian remedies and probably more recently for incense in Christian Churches.
One of the main geographical areas that frankincense is harvested from has been war torn for a number of years, Somaliland, Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan. When money is short , the temptation is to over harvest. As a result the trees cannot recover from” tapping”. The process of harvesting involves cutting the bark and letting the sap from the tree run out and form a crust which is the frankincense.
To counteract the danger of over harvesting , the growers of the Boswellia Tree are being encouraged to use a phone app which when they bring their resin to a central location and are paid a fair price for it ( cutting out the middlemen). The details of the resin are recorded, where it was harvested, the quality and the movement from the village to the warehouse ( ie. how many third parties were involved). Another app can be used to monitor the health of the trees and their sustainability.
Obviously, with famine and water shortages in the areas that the trees are grown , these situations along with the conflicts of war, threatens the survival of this industry. As a commodity it may become so rare and expensive that it will no longer be accessible to the markets where it is currently sold.
thenotsomightyom 