The blog of the Ancient Mariner

 As I'm getting older, so the inclination to 'spill my brains' (to borrow a phrase) has diminished and my preference for quiet a...

I don't really expect that to mean anything, but a little mystery is a good start for a blogpost.  We've been here in France almost ...

Shut the blog (by inaction)? Don't shut the blog. Shut the blog? Don't shut the blog. And if not, why not? Life has reached the poin...

 Is the other way round for the weather here in France.  When we arrived at 5am French time it was 15 degrees, and by the time we'd arri...

 Is a line I recall from Fungus the Bogeyman - an amusing book that might give small children nightmares. And so I find mayself awake far to...

 We have seasons.  These days I don't feel much like talking to the world, or in fact people in general. Things are not as they were, an...

 Not the year when I get release from things - rather the 12 month period when the websites I've been using for a long time finally disa...

I've just spent an hour sorting through family photos - a task I'd promised to do as part of clearing the flat, and seeing my parent...

 As I'm getting older it feels more and more difficult to talk, to communicate. Some of that is possibly thanks to trying to learn Frenc...

 Sometimes one just needs a break. There had been lots of good intentions to post at various times, but when it came to it, there just wasn...

 Though for how long, we wonder. Near the end of August we had been looking forward to a solid 2 weeks at the house in France. The weekend b...

You would have been 34 today. The years seem to have gone by so quickly, yet taken forever. 

 Is it goodbye to Ello? So many years ago now I was given an insider invite to the Ello network thanks to my good friend Randall . It had a ...

I have come to the conclusion that there are only 2 kinds of computing professionals these days: those whose job it is to protect systems an...

 The week before last we were back in France again, working hard, getting tired, making progress. It was successful: the kitchen papered, ne...

 But I put some images into a zine - see here for an online version. The print run is very limited - just 10 copies - partly because it...

 Ben finally had surgery on his arm yesterday after several visits & rounds of X-rays. I collected him from the JR in Oxford yesterday e...

The primary disconnection has come from needing to replace my current laptop - a Dell XPS15 bought in 2014 as a work machine and replacement...

 Chris has a cold, and now so do I. Slept from 11.30 to 1.30, then on-and-off until 3ish, after which it was not at all. Gave up at 4am and ...

  Today I received a curious email, purporting to be from blogger, telling me that a post from 2004 broke their conditions of use.  The obvi...

 Considering how many films are available through Amazon Prime, it can feel like a bit of a wilderness sometimes when you want something to ...

I was sorry to read that a fellow blogger - Fernando Gros - lost his mum last year. Seems to have been a bad time for parents. In his own i...

It's curious, post covid, because so much has changed in the last couple of years. My mother is dead. Our son is (temporarily) home. The...

 First time we'll have seen him up-close in 3 years. I wonder if he'll stay longer than the few short weeks we had between Whistler ...

 And we still haven't identified an alternative church to move to. But, in the words of the song "I don't wanna go back to Egyp...

You would have been 33 today, probably a mum by now with kids at school and all the tears & joy that goes with this stage. 

 We negotiated a 3 month break from church back at the end of May with a view to a little time out, possibly to look around, only for my mot...

 For those who drop by occasionally wondering what's going on, my mother's funeral takes place next week - details here .  In my las...

Covid - not the long variety, but certainly an extended variety has been hanging on. Energy levels are back more now than a moth ago, but no...

 Well it's good to be post-covid.  Chris recovered within a couple of weeks, but I'm still not there yet even now. There's a let...