I haven't listened for sometime but was just flicking through topics on You Tube and came across Toyah's At Home podcast from last week. It talked about a number of documentaries she had enjoyed on subjects such as Alanis Morissette and Pete Doherty. So I will have to look them out.
And she mentioned how people "get high" on various things and not necessarily the obvious such as drugs and alcohol. She "gets high" on colours. Yes colours with their vibrancy and, strangely, I can see where she is coming from. You only have to look at a rainbow and your spirits lift and there's nothing better than a bright display of reds and greens and blues and yellows - whatever context they are in. And it set me thinking about what my highs are from a very abstemious life. It's a tricky question. The obvious answers are good writing and wonderful music but I might try and go deeper than that. Good photographs, stunning Renaissance artwork, good football, brave people. They are just some of the things that sprung to mind. What would you add?
Toyah rounded off the podcast with video footage of her performance of Black Sabbath's Paranoid at one of her gigs. The backing wall of sound was sensational and of course included Mr Fripp. Now many moons ago I challenged two local musicians who may well be reading this to do an acoustic version of Paranoid. I haven't forgotten and I hope they haven't either.
Going back to Toyah, we had a tour of her garden which I know is in the Cotswolds and leads down to the River Avon. She showed areas of the extensive gardens under water and also their gardener had placed a brick at the point the water came up to while she was away.
"I've never seen the river behave this way," she said adding that she was now taking regular readings and making regular investigations into just what is happening. All part of our ever changing climate I fear.
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There are times I hate technology. First thing in the morning I check Facebook and e-mails for messages. Often I find messages and make a mental note to remember to answer them later in the day.
Yesterday I received a message from the local parish council asking for an advert in our Good News magazine. I'll deal with that later in the day I thought to myself. Mid afternoon I decided to do just that and guess what I couldn't find the notice anywhere. C'est La Vie.
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You know how hot I am on mental maths and how I enjoy doing "sums in my head." Every time I pass a sign on the way into Norwich with the number of car parking spaces available in the City I have to add them up, even if I'm driving. On Saturday it was pretty easy as there were 44 in one car park and 2 in all the others combined. So that's 46. Sometimes its tough though with hundreds if not thousands of places.
If I go into a church as I always do if I'm somewhere new I have to add up the number of the hymns in the hope that one day all the digits will be the same. I have mentioned this all before.
On Sunday grandson Elliot invited me to have a game of darts. He has a new board in his bedroom which is at the exact correct height and distance for match play. Much of my ability to add and subtract in my head is due to darts scoring. Elliot has the same ability with figures. But now it's not a piece of chalk and a blackboard or a pen and paper. No now there's an mobile app where you just put in the score and it works everything out for you including how many you have left, how many darts you have thrown, what your average is for each throw and it reads it all out to you. So another diminution of the mental process.
Had a good game though. I won the round the board game which consists of getting all the numbers in order followed by a double, a treble, an outer bull and an inner bull. He won the 501 game.
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If I'm approaching a road where there is a set of traffic lights controlled as a crossing point for pedestrians, should I automatically press the button or wait to see if there is a natural break in the traffic?
I only ask because I pushed the button to stop the traffic only to find a natural break. So I crossed and was well across and along the path on the other side when the lights changed to red and a stream of vehicles had to sit there with nobody using the crossing, probably saying "why are we sitting here when there's nobody crossing the road?".
Hope you enjoy today's photographs which are once again from our visit to Madeira and mostly from the town of Camera de Lobos which is on the way to the capital Funchal from where we were staying.