Merry Gingermas

My friend George from Down Under sent me this yesterday. It’s for all gingaphobes.



How’s this for a Christmas card?


My ‘brother-in-law’ Perry, for want of a better name (brother-in-law, not Perry), set up his camera on a tripod in the garden on a long exposure. Hay’s sister, Michelle, then took two lit sparklers and very quickly wrote Merry Christmas in the air. They then used the resultant image to make Christmas cards for all their family and friends. Neat idea, isn’t it? Apparently it took them several attempts to get it right. If you look closely at the right hand side of the image you can just make out a ghostly face above the final S of Christmas. ‘Shell called the picture ‘Playing With Fire’. That’s what you get when you cross an artist with a photographer.

We’ve ordered a larger wood burner so we don’t have to keep stoking up with wood every 30 minutes - it has a proper door instead of a 5 inch hole, meaning it will accept whole logs. It has the added advantage of being multi-fuel. Hopefully it will arrive today and we should have it installed by next week. It’s my Christmas present to us both. Well worth the £320.

The building progresses apace and we now have the scalpings filling the mud bath inside the house walls. Bricks have arrive for a 3 or 4 tier layer, following which we’ll call it a day until the weather warms up.


Feel like having a go at climate change sceptics? The Daily Express yesterday published a list of 100 reasons why climate change is a natural phenomenon. I wouldn’t mind, but most of the so-called ‘reasons’ have bugger all to do with the causes of climate change. Read this rebuttal in the New Scientist. It’s an excellent example of why you shouldn’t allow journalists – especially bad ones - to inform your choices.