the one and only ellen ROSE forward 

the nicest kind of journey

i took a train to wiltshire where my daughter ellen rose cooked a real good lunch & presented me with a fine porcelain bluebird

here they are

colin berry performs sweet music for an audience of one

the trumpeter colin berry

... i got on a train & he was practising in the corridor ... honestly !

you'll never hear sweeter notes !

just look at that magnificent bicycle 

the loved one & i arriving in the big smoke 

hoarders bring country back into nine elms 

let sleeping dogs lie 

cognitive dissonance or do i mean semiotics ?

the tiny emblem on the tate and lyle treacle tin has more than one way of looking at us

i always imagined it showed a sleeping lion surrounded by buzzing bees after he'd eaten the treacle

having been born under a sweet sign, myself, i wanted to adopt the image as an emblem

however, my lovely spanish friend laura says she thinks it is a dead lion surrounded by buzzing flies

my first NEW camera 

Dear Linda,

Dear Linda,
Having just cycled home from a very hard day at work, followed by an especially materialistic diversion to Sloane Square, ( the sordid details will follow lower down this page ), nature was taking it’s usual course & I was absolutely bursting, but / &, your letter was laying irresistible & inviting upon the door mat & so I read it with instinctive urgency upon the toilet, thus experiencing two incomparable & simultaneously synergistically energising pleasures; truly, O Wise One, the best things in life are free ! And before you ask;

a) there were 88 words in the first sentence, and
b) I tend to use my right hand for just about everything.

At Sloane Square in Chelsea there stands one of this noble country’s greatest monuments to what Saint Karl Marx called the cult of Commodity Fetishism, the Peter Jones department store.

On Friday afternoon I went there furtively to buy … an Olympus C70-Zoom, I'll put in a picture when I learn how ! ( see above )

Yes, Mother-Superior, absolve me whilst I confess that I have mortally transgressed & have abused my sacred credit card big time ! Now don’t point that pretty finger this way, or even waggle it that way ! The very last straw that drove me to the brink of insanity was when you mentioned a yearning to take some pictures, so it’s mostly if not absolutely all your fault & I can still make an effort to sound almost reasonable when I refute any suggestion that I might have been greedy & / or materialistic; I’m just a silly & suggestible soft touch ! Now, all because of your damned intrusion into my sanity, I’m going to have to spend hours reading the manual because digital cameras are not half so simple as good old fashioned film cameras. Amazingly, you only get a little instruction manual in the box, because the proper one comes on a compact disc, all 190 pages of it, as does the software for downloading & then filing & editing the pictures that you want to put into your computer. I’ll just leave off from writing here for a few moments ( hours ! ) to see if I can master that basic task. Perhaps I’ll go out for a little while & actually take a few pictures ! After all, why else should I want to own a bicycle ? // This morning I woke with a shout from an all too vivid dream. I was walking along a dockside, wearing a grey suit, bare footed, & carrying a pointed shovel, when a gust of wind carried me off, away from land & higher & then higher. Looking down, I realized that the water was too shallow for me to survive a fall, which was when I cried out so loudly for “HELP !” At least I didn’t bang my forehead on the wall this time ! // STOP PRESS ! The Loved One & I have booked a flight & three nights in a four-star hotel in Lisbon, flying out on the 17th February. She is already knee-deep in guidebooks. If you have already been there, do feel free to make suggestions about cheap thrills. I’m going to stop now & catch up on domestic duties.

XXX each from Tristan

mon repos

my next home will probably have this sign outside

CHEZ MICAWBER

blow blow thou winter wind

one of this winter's new pleasures is cycling home in brilliant sunshine past battersea power station, with its attending yapping dogs home, along the riverbank in the park past the peace pagoda, infested with joggers, across the lovely albert bridge to the chelsea embankment, with its egyptian-throne style benches beseiged by house-boats, etc, etc

however, it seems that not everything in the loved-one's conciousness is fully illuminated ... i said that if she really loved me, then she'd have anticipated my imminent arrival & been waiting on the doorstep in her best underwear

she made no comment

then i found the thorntons oriental ginger chocolate bar she had left for me next to the keyboard

but if she really loved me, she'd have bought three, then remembered my weight problem, put one back, & brought home two ! Q.E.D!

one way of maintaining contact

"If you knew how sensitive i am, you would have e-mailed me months ago !"

Saturday at dawn, I suggested to The Loved One that she might be having difficulty getting to sleep at nights if she was trying to make a mental list my virtues.

She said that she had indeed struggled to get up from zero to one, but would possibly make it from one to two, if only I could

i) get out of bed right now

& ii) brew her a cup of Earl Grey.

joe bialik says ...

the best two low-down dirty emotional blackmailers cliches he can think of, after a fine education, are:

"you've really let us ( the school, the headmaster, the staff, the caretaker & cleaners, society in general ) down rather badly"

and

"now look what you've gone & made me do"

which is probably out of the original laurel & hardy primer

day one between sneezes

"There are seven deadly sins ... & the eighth & worst is EMOTIONAL BLACKMAIL"

I began our early conversation on Sunday morning, baking-hot beneath two duvets, before we had opened our eyes, with this gambit:

“If you really loved me, you’d have taken my bicycle before dawn, & cycled, still in your pyjamas, with a machete clenched between your teeth, to the tropical hot-house at Kew Gardens to shin up a palm tree & bring me a fresh coconut.”

The Loved One, obviously fully alert, but sounding very bored;

“I think I’ll have to eat those last two astonishingly delicious Anton Berg strawberry & champagne chocolates myself this morning.”

Myself, badly deflated by her expert counter-punching;

“You’ll miss me when I’ve joined the Foreign Legion.”