- Snow in Russell
- An apple for the teacher
- Nostradamus and 2012
- New Year pleas
- Old isn’t always bad
We know it’s been a wild ride this summer what with earthquakes, floods and all but the biblical pestilence, but surely not snow in that warm little place Russell? See for yourself – loads of it. Strange though that it all landed in the forecourt of the local pub… ********** So is this the modern day equivalent of an apple for the teacher? This Christmas a teacher at a private school received from her pupils and parents an apple – ipad2! ********** Okay so it’s a New Year. Yippee – or not. Sometimes it pays to tiptoe into its folds because that old seer Nostradamus still preys on our minds. Check the Net and you’ll see that this is the year we’re all going to die. Details later… The BBC reported that after the 9/11 attack, bookshops and wholesalers reported a significant increase in the sales of John Hogue’s 976-page Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies; Peter Lemesurier’s Nostradamus in the 21st Century, and John Powell’s The Nostradamus Prophecy.
The same editions appeared on the Top Ten bestseller list of the internet bookseller Amazon.com. It added: ‘Now, amid fears that terrorists may have planned to use crop-dusting aeroplanes to spray US cities with anthrax, among other biological warfare agents, Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies has been relegated to number 51 on the bestsellers list’.
So tiptoe gently - or party as if the doomsayer might just be right!
********** There must have been squillions of New Year resolutions for 2012. Here’s a few more: - No more automated, multiple choice answering machines referring us to their websites for much more comprehensive information when all we want to do is talk to a human.
- Would the media please wake up. Celebrities are less stories than news fabrications at a time when we desperately need to know what’s really going on out there. What’s the impact of the Food Bill? Will we get milk that all of us can afford? What’s the state of the rivers we once happily swam in ?
- Could rugby administrators just look out the window. Yes it’s raining, but it’s summer and some of us have had more than enough ruggers buggers.
- And a plea to the void: Could those seismic shudders just stop and let Cantabrians get on with their lives?
- Finally, a wish that our politicians realise that in the land of milk and honey, the market matters less than our people, and that in Godzone, no child should ever, ever go hungry.
********** New or very nearly new cars are such an everyday feature these days that an old – okay,a mature lady of the road becomes either an object of curiosity or something to be run down on roundabouts. Boomers of a certain age might remember we all had cars which to a greater or lesser degree were old English rust-buckets. Now everything swishes past, super-charged and equipped with power steering. Our 35-year-old has none of that, but on the open road being in the slow lane and without power steering there is a forgotten advantage: You get to see the country - your eyes, resting on little details never seen in the rush of modern cars – and those crash scenes which look as if the same cars are made of tin foil. |
