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Apparently this blog has declared summer. It took us by surprise – we weren’t expecting it, but a week or so ago it just decided to stop, just like that. So there we are. I’ll be off now for a while – in the meantime you can entertain yourselves by looking at some old posts. See you on the other side. Kirk out

I had a day of rest yesterday, hence no post. Everything was getting on top of me and I was feeling totally frazzled so virtually all I did was sit in the garden and read and then watch the tennis. There were a couple of women’s semi-finals including a stonking match between Coco Gauff and Karolina Muchova which the latter won on a close-fought tie break; Jamie Hewitt, the British No 1 wheelchair…

It’s hard to know what to say first about Farage’s latest ego trip. God, the front of the man, making a ‘speech to the nation’ like a Prime Minister resigning, and wailing about press victimisation! When, as the Guardian points out today, the press made Farage, and his unmaking – if that is what’s happening – is entirely his own fault. As if it wasn’t enough to take massive donations from dodgy…

https://www.poetryformentalhealth.org/my-mental-health Poetry for Mental health is a magazine I’ve contributed to before and this time I have not one but two articles in it; one under Liz Gray and the other written as Sarada Gray, the second one being reprinted from an earlier episode. This edition is totally prose unlike most which are a mixture of poetry and prose, and blimey! after reading…

I found this book so compelling I finished the 380 pages in two days; I could not put it down. Facebook have scored a real own goal here, because if they hadn’t tried so hard to suppress it I, along with millions of others, might never have come across it. As it is, sales are through the roof and last year it went to No 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. But I’m getting ahead of…

Today’s will be a short post because I woke late and I’m going swimming shortly, but also because I can’t stop reading Careless People. It’s 2020 and she’s thinking of leaving Facebook (not before time, I think, but I guess it’s hard to leave somewhere if you’ve put a lot into it (the sunk costs fallacy) and also America is a brutal place for people without jobs; you lose your health care and all…

At the moment I’m reading Careless People by Sally Wynn-Williams; subtitle, A Story of Where I Used to Work. Facebook isn’t mentioned on the cover but there’s that signature blue square with a couple of synchronised-swimming-type legs coming out of it, signifying (I guess) someone drowning by trying to keep up with the rest of the troupe. Synchronised swimming is a weird thing… Anyway, the book…

Last night I watched Serena Williams play Maya Joint of Australia. There was tremendous excitement about Serena coming back to Wimbledon after a career break and at the age of 44: normally if women have a career break it’s in their twenties which gives them time to get back in the game. If it were any other player I wouldn’t have given them a chance, but Serena is not just any player. If anyone…

Wimbledon starts today; a fortnight of tennis which links all my summers, right back to 1968 when I was eleven. I’ve only missed a few; a couple of years when I was unemployed and didn’t have a telly, and the two summers I spent in Madrid. But apart from that I’ve watched it every year. I can’t explain, even to myself, why I don’t watch other tennis tournaments, but I don’t. I think there are…

Being a few miles from the coast, we have a lot of seagulls here. They crap on the cars and their mournful, atmospheric cries can be heard from sunrise to sunset. On the whole I like seagulls though I’m a little wary as they’ve been known to dive-bomb people; and at the moment we have a seagull nest on the top of our roof, right in between the solar panels. It has a couple of young and sometimes…

Inspired by Beetleypete, I’ve been thinking of songs I hate, and here are a few of my all-time worst. I’m not a fan of musicals and Grease struck me as the cheesiest sort of musical; the song Summer Nights is not too bad in itself but has a grating ending which I can never hear without covering my ears. Radio One used to have a slot where you could phone in and request a record to be ‘blown up’…

It’s hot here so I’m definitely going for a swim. Don’t worry, I’ll be cautious, not plunge into freezing water and drown or have a heart attack; I’ll slowly wade in so I get used to the temperature; not that I think the water will be that cold after all the sun we’ve had. Up to now Scotland has been cooler than the rest of the country but we’re rapidly catching you up and today it’s supposed to…

Well! Any ideas what these might be? We’re still trying to understand… The Guid Nichborrs festival, which happened at the weekend, is also a bit of a mystery. Part community event, part beating the bounds, it’s a combination of horse-riding, parades, speeches, live music and kilt-wearing, culminating in the coronation of (what else?) the Queen of the South. The itinerary starts at 7.30 a m when…

There is a Victorian homily which goes: Lost! One golden hour, filled with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered, for it is gone forever. Actually I think Katherine Mansfield might have made this one up as it’s in one of her stories, but it’s very typical of the age. I find it annoying, partly because it’s judgmental, and partly because I don’t think it’s true. Yes, in a literal sense…

I have to confess, I haven’t been to the dentist in phlllblllilll years. This was initially because of my dislike of people fumbling around in my mouth, sticking needles in my nerves and whiningly grinding away at my teeth while talking about their golf handicap and exchanging mysterious mantras such as ‘buckle, three’ or ‘upper right quadrant – mystical’. But I later wished I had overcome those…