In the slimelight by Angela Caldin
When I was a child in the 1950s, we had various ways of passing the acres of unoccupied time, including cat’s cradle, jacks, yo-yos, marbles, plasticine and something involving an empty cotton reel, four nails and some wool which was called French knitting. This produced a long thin snake of woven wool which you could spiral round into little mats or even a hat if you went on long enough. Things were much less sophisticated in those far off days. Progress or not? French knitting is not unlike the recent craze of… Read More
Vimeo Killed the Video Star by Emily Smart
I went down to the video shop yesterday, and had a real ‘fuck I’m old’ moment. And have now just discovered that this is a real thing – see https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3hwisr/what_was_your_fuck_im_old_moment/ Anyway, video shop, videos. When was the last time you actually played a video tape? I found a video the other day: Toy Story 2 and just checked when it was released. It was 1999! So give or take a year or so to go from cinema ‘straight to video’ (you don’t hear that anymore) and that’s about 18 years ago. Flippin’… Read More
Baby gender by Susan Grimsdell
The Labour Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, is going to have a baby. She and her partner Clarke Gayford have known about the baby for four months, but chose not to tell us, the public. I don’t think anyone would question that decision, considering that it’s a private matter for a start, and also that a percentage of pregnancies don’t make it past the first three months. Gender privacy Jacinda and Clarke know the gender of the baby, but have chosen to keep that as a private matter too. I… Read More
Collected thoughts about Christmas by Emily, Trevor, Susan and Angela
The Christmas debate according to Emily I had a rather robust discussion with my three fellow bloggers recently about Christmas. My outtake from it was that the learned trio don’t believe in spinning the myth of the fat bloke in the red suit to kids, and that lying about it to children is wrong and will inevitably lead to disappointment. I got quite annoyed about it and tried my hardest to think of an argument to put forward to explain why I don’t mind perpetuating the Santa clause, which to my mind,… Read More
Always expect the unexpected by Angela Caldin
You hear a lot about retirement planning these days and I’d be the first to agree that it’s a good idea to put money aside to finance a comfortable retirement so that you can do, with luck, what you’ve always wanted to do. Global citizens But let’s remember that what we’re talking about here is financial planning which is all well and good, but what we can’t plan for is what life and our families are going to bring us. In our case, it is a life in two hemispheres – six… Read More
