The Decline and Fall

Ken writes:
As Dot said earlier today, it seems obvious that the current situation is the end of European and North American preeminence in the world.
I won’t try to justify that statement, because I really don’t know enough about politics and economics and economies and financial markets and so on to make it convincing. Maybe [...]

Cells

Dot writes: here’s an interesting weird thing from a book on pregnancy that I’m reading (A Visitor Within, by David Bainbridge). Apparently, although unfertilised human eggs do sometimes start to divide, the pregnancies don’t progress because in humans (and other mammals) genes from the sperm are required to form the placenta. But in 1995 a [...]

Cars, back-packs and spoons

Dot writes: I spent rather a lot of yesterday sitting in the Motor Tax office at Nutgrove shopping centre, waiting to swap my British license for an Irish one. They have one of those ticketing systems where you take a number, compare it with the number on the screen, do a rough calculation based on [...]

The company a word keeps

Ken writes:

‘A word needs to be very careful about the phonetic company it keeps’
C.S. Lewis Studies in Words, p. 141

Lewis is speaking about the propensity for words to change meaning through interference from similar sounding words. He explains the point using `sententious’ which originally meant Full of meaning; also, of persons, full of intelligence or [...]

Hugh plays ball

Dot writes: Ken thinks I’m taking over our blog and turning it into a ‘boring baby blog’ (I quote his very words). But I’m not, because our baby is not in the least boring but on the contrary exceptionally interesting. To wit, he can now play ball. Dad and I were playing a game with [...]

Marie Celeste in the Midlands

Dot writes: on the way back from Connemara we again planned to break the journey so as to allow Hugh to escape his car seat for a bit. This time I suggested Clonfert, a very small cathedral on a site associated with St Brendan, quite near Clonmacnoise but the other (western) side of the Shannon. [...]

Photos from Connemara trip

Dot writes: what a boring title for a post. Still, the weather on our trip was beautiful and many of the pictures are consequently attractive, even when they have us in them.
We broke the journey at Clonmacmoise on the way over to Connemara. This picture was taken by Mum (actually, quite a lot of the [...]

Connemara Sunny Shock

Dot writes: we’ve just come back from Connemara, where some friends of ours own a cottage (in fact a generous-sized house) that they very kindly lent to us. More pictures to follow, but here’s Hugh on the tiny little beach near the house on Wednesday evening:

The ones that may get away

Dot writes: most of my regular blogs seem to have hit pause over the last week or so. Maybe everyone is busy looking for the Higg’s Bosun. (I thought a bosun was something to do with ships, especially tall ships and pirate ships, but I am rather behind the times.) (Ken points out that kind [...]

Circumnavigation of Howth

Ken writes:
The weather in Dublin was absolutely stunning yesterday, so we grabbed our chance and took the Dart out to Howth. Our goal was to do the cliff walk; before we’ve always made for Howth summit. As is usual for us these days, it took much longer to get ready than it should have. We [...]