Don't get me wrong, I love the festive season but commercialism seems to dictate that Christmas starts midway through October.
It seems to get earlier and earlier each year.
I certainly don't want to think about Christmas fully until well after Remembrance Sunday which is a particularly important day for me. It's the day when we gather round the Hethersett War Memorial to remember those from the village who died in the two world wars. Their names are read out and the Last Post is played. This is the day I also especially remember the 97 who died in the massacre in Le Paradis. Our book on this won't be out on time for this year's Remembrance service but certainly will be in time for next year.
As regular readers will know our parish church is named after St Remigius.
St Remigius - it's an unusual saint to have a church named after. Over to friend John Head tomorrow who has dug up some interesting facts about a St Remigius Church that no longer exists and another place in Norfolk I therefore need to visit. All will be revealed.
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Our new bus service comes into affect today and I will be trying to make some sense of it by making a few journeys over the next few days. It all seems rather complex at the moment.
I hope you remembered to put your clocks back. It never works for me. I delight in the thought of having an extra hour in bed only to find I'm awake and get up even earlier than usual. Around about 6 pm I will say something like "it seems to have been a rather long day and hasn't it got dark early?"
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I mentioned yesterday that we came last in a quiz at the golf club but we did win a free round of drinks by being the closest team to answering the question, how many words are there in War and Peace?
I have read the answer to this in the past but couldn't recall it so set about working it out based on two factors.
One was how many words roughly I write in a year of diary and blog writing. How on earth does that help I hear you cry? Well strangely it gives me some kind of crazy yardstick. If I write 1000 words a day for those two things combined that makes an obvious total of 365,000 for the year. Working on the principle that War and Piece is more epic than my diary and blog, that means there are more than 365,000.
Then I got a bit more scientific, working out an answer using the basis of a 60,000 word book having about 200 pages give or take a few. War and Peace must have between 900 and 1000 pages and the type would have been much denser.
Taking all these things into consideration we came up with an answer of 580,000. The answer was 587, 287. Not a bad estimate me thinks.
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Finally today the photos of Colchester Zoo. We tried throughout the day to remember the previous time we had been, taking into account how time really does fly. We remember taking Elliot. He fed the Elephants and Giraffes but we couldn't work out how old he was. Then the other threequarters came across the photos of the previous trip and it was in October 2015. Elliot would have just had his third birthday. We got the train from Norwich to Colchester and a bus to the zoo. I remember Elliot being really well behaved and us playing cards on the train there and him falling asleep all the way home.
Now Elliot is 11. Poppy would have been just eight months old and was too young to come with us. Now she is a beautiful eight year old.
One thing that has changed is you now have to book in advance to feed the giraffes and elephants. I guess there might be a fee involved as well. It looked as if the greenery was given to the giraffes using a long stick like pincer instrument. Back in 2015, they took the food from your hands. I remember them being very gentle hence the fact they've been my favourite animal ever since.
We enjoyed our visit although for the first half an hour we did seem to be playing a game of spot the animal. The gardens, the park and the landscaping are lovely but I felt there was a distinct lack of species and the number of animals was low. Perhaps it was just me. Let me know if you've been to the zoo and whether you agree with my assessment. Some of the photos are not quite as sharp as they should be because 1/ they were taken through glass and 2,/ I'm not a great photographer.