It was a beautiful autumn day this Friday. I managed to capture this magic moment when the sun just caught the weathervane on the clock tower at Wimpole Hall.

The name 'Wimpole' is an interesting one. In Domesday it is spelt 'Winepole' = Win's Pool and the pool in question is still there, although it is more of a lake. Of Wina nothing is known but perhaps it is the same name as Wynn. At the time of Domesday, 1086, there were only 13 households, a small place even by the standards of the time. The Lord was Count Alan of Brittany. Pre-conquest it had belonged to the rather poetically named Edeva the Fair.

If you try to steal my wine, you’d better watch Shiraz.

I tried hard to shift Grandad from pounds and ounces to grams and kilograms. But I never got anywhere. He was just too set in his weights.

They laughed when I checked my ruler against a head of broccoli.

But I explained; I need to calibrate, see?

‘Hippopotamus’ has three Ps in it. Can you think of a word with 4?

I am a skilled negotiator.

You know how to strike a deal.

They are corrupt.

I saw a sign that said, “Drink Canada Dry”. So I did.

I wanted to brighten things up for the winter so I bought some pansies online. 20 plants ready to flower came beautifully packaged and with proper care they will be in bloom right through to April 2023. Here are some of them. Things need tidying a bit, so it's not a terrific photo, but you can see they are flourishing quite nicely.

I wondered where "pansy" came from so I did a bit of looking up and found it's from French pensée = thought, according to Wikipedia because it symbolised remembrance.

In the OED I found a nice quote from 1771

"On that fair bank a Pansy grew, That borrowed from indulgent skies A velvet shade and purple hue."

J. Langhorne Violet & Pansy in Fables of Flora 32   

Nobody knew of

Our dance in the polling station

where they held the secret ballet

How many glottal stops are there in “bottle tops”?

Narwhals 1 - Humans ?

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Solzhenitsyn, based on his experiences in a Soviet forced labour camp in the 1950s. 

The most chilling quote so far

“Prisoners are not allowed clocks”.