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Author archive:

Val

Review: The Nicholas Cases

The Nicholas Cases: Casualties of Justice by Bob Woffinden In 2006 I was the editor of a tiny astrological magazine and one of my regular contributors sent in an article about the Lady in The Lake murder. Briefly: teacher Gordon Park was convicted of the murder of his wife Carol; she had disappeared in 1976 […]

The Strikeback

Groping women is in the news right now, so I thought I’d share my experience. It was around 1968/69; I was 18 or so, living in London, working in an office, travelling by tube every day. Getting touched up on those crowded commuter trains was a fairly routine experience for women in those times. It […]

Wot I Did Yesterday….

So yesterday, I had one of my cataracts fixed – a novel experience. B had his cataracts done a couple of years ago and assured me it was a cakewalk – just a minute or two and it would be all over. Er no, for me it wasn’t. Three or four years ago, I had […]

How I Fell In Love With Dr Joe

Last Friday was a bit of an adventure. It started off at 7:30am with one of my usual tachycardia attacks. After an hour it was clearly not going away, so me & B abandoned our plan to spend the day doing our monthly shop, and I necked a couple of betablockers and settled into bed […]

New Fledgling On the Block…

As you may know, we have had a raven residing in our garden for the last couple of years. To be accurate, he resides in a beech tree just across the road; from there he is lord of all he surveys, which is a large swathe of fields and hillside along with our third of […]

Review: Coffin Road by Peter May

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD Ever since I read May’s Lewis Trilogy I have looked out for more of his books, hoping to find more gritty, absorbing mystery thrillers. But I always seem to end up a little disappointed; they’re good books all right but just not up to the standard I was expecting. Entry Island invoked […]

The Great Scottish Vote-Rigging Jamboree

So here we go, another conspiracy theory to add to the hundreds already floating around on the internet. There’s been any number of academic treatises written about how and why people latch onto conspiracy theories; there’s at least one website examining the psychology of conspiracy theories. So I’m not going to go into that here; […]

Time, time, time, see what’s become of me….

Yes, it’s about time I wrote something here. Been busy with the new house, redecorating, DIY, taming the huge garden…. And trying to get on with putting next year’s Elfin Diary together. Money’s short of course (when is it not?); so I’ve decided to try for more web design work. So, anybody wanna website, go […]

Review: Serif WebPlus

I’m a big fan of Serif software – I’ve been using their PagePlus DTP program since v2 – which came out sometime in the mid-90s. Since then I’ve also added two other Serif programs, Photoplus and Drawplus. I’m happy with the performance of all three and use them all the time. But until now, I’ve […]

On The Move….

Looks like I might need a new title for this blog – we’re moving house. “Turn left at the bridge” is actually part of the directions for finding our current abode; from the end of next month, it’s going to be something like “Keep straight on, we’re the first house on the left.” Which is […]