Personal Blogs

I knew it then, but still went off to sea.

Do not weep for your frail roses. come

Come away with us now.

To our crystallised world

Where flowers live for millennia. come 

Where the pain will be slowed. come

It's a tradition in our family that none of us eat coley on the last Monday in August. We call it "ban coley day".

"I had the outside toilet removed", Tom said luridly.

The word is found in Old English, but it's not of Germanic origin, in fact no origin is known. Where "dog" occurs in other languages it's borrowed from English, describing types or breeds of dog, in the same way we have dachshund or Irish wolfhound.

Of course we also retain the Germanic word "hound" which is used in some contexts, but most of the time a dog is a dog is a dog.

There are several words from Old English that

• End in "G"
  
• Have unexplained origins 
  
• Refer to animals

Think of "frog", "hog", "pig", and "earwig".

As an aside, "hound" is from the same origins as Ancient Greek "kynos", and Latin "canis". And "kynos" is where Diogenes and the "dog philosophers", the Cynics, took their name from.

Hugh dunnit?

Where I shall go,

I cannot know.

What I shall be,

I cannot see.

How I shall travel,

I cannot unravel.

Why I shall go away,

"So, have you ever seen the Aurora Borealis?", asked Tom politely.

I was made redundant. Before that I'd just been dundant.

"Can we forever live", came then the cries.

"Of course, of course my dears", soothed the replies.

"We simply wait for more supplies,

Of the Elixir of Lies."

You may have read in the press, that newly published letters reveal the poet John Milton travelled to Florence, and while there met the great Galileo.

Other documents, recently discovered, point to Milton having been an addictive gambler during his time in Italy. Apparently he always carried the necessary equipment with him, but was often careless with it. In a typical entry from his diary, he wrote

Pair of dice, lost.

After successfully leading all the rats (and as a presumably unintentional side effect, children) out of Hamelin, the Pied Piper was recruited by West-Of-England farmers to do something similar with badgers.

You seldom hear about this though, because it was somewhat of a culled following.

My cousin, the historian, has just written an article challenging the whole concept of the medieval castle. Apparently it's quite fort provoking.