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Somewhere to put my thoughts and experiences as I wend my way through life. |
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If you happen to wander here, I hope you will stay and share a cup of tea with me whilst we watch the river of life pass by. Shirley |
Prompt for 16th September 2026: What is your favourite song? I don't really have a favourite song, but what I do have is a favourite song for each emotion I happen to be going through. If I am angry, I turn to this one - Bob Dylan at The Rolling Thunder Review in 1976, singing 'Idiot Wind'. Bob really spits out his anger in this song and when I am having a moment and when I am alone, which isn't very often these days!, I join in... +++ The next song is for when you're feeling lovesick. Maybe you've just gone through a break-up or something like it or maybe you are just wishing. It really touches the innermost parts of my heart. Pearl Jam - Black. +++ The third song I have chosen is to do with yesterday's post about the state of the world. I am choosing 'One World' by the band called U2. |
| Blog for 15th September 2026 Prompt: What has the world come to? I think we all acknowledge the world is in a mess, but is that because we know so much about it? We can get the news every minute of every day and in real time, videos included, so we know instantly when an earthquake or a tsunami occurs. It is all too easy to get obsessed with watching the news, dwelling on the bad because we don’t often see the good news, do we! As a result we tend to think that all is lost, but it really isn’t. Yes, there are bad things happening everywhere all the time, but if you can’t do anything about it directly, then perhaps it is better to turn your attention to something you can do something about because lots of little things can turn into a great big thing if we let it, like a snowball rolling down a hill. There is no doubt that power corrupts and it does seem that when someone gets too much power, they misuse it. I won’t name names, but I don’t have to, do I, because you all know the ones I am thinking about. There are games you can play and I don’t mean computer games, where people sit around a table and using cards and a board, trade with each other. It is a great way to learn how trading works. It does seem to me that unless you are ruthless, you don’t get on very fast in life. I don’t have that ruthless gene so I would be no good at it. One truth is that people don’t use their money for the benefit of other people. None of us feels rich enough. We all like to keep a little bit by for a rainy day, but if the rainy day doesn’t arrive, then we end up with more than we need and it sits in the bank helping nobody – not even yourself because it depreciates. If the rainy day does arrive, and most people do have rainy days, then the amount you have saved will probably not be enough. So what have we got so far? Too much money swishing around in the bank accounts of a few people with too much power. What will they do with it? They will play war games with other rich people and end up killing everybody. But Isn’t that what we need? Ooh, that hurts, doesn’t it. Nobody wants to die, but the planet would benefit bigtime if we all died. Our planet is dying and we are letting it because we all take too much out of it. Now lets look on the bright side…….? Shirley |
| Blog post for September 14th 2026 Prompt: "You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have." - Maya Angelou I umderstand that quote from Maya Angelou and I can link it to something that happened to me about ten years ago. My husband bought me a Japanese Midori Travel Journal for Christmas that year, not because I was intending to go travelling anywhere, but because I had seen a video on YouTube where someone was unboxing one of them. I became fascinated by watching that video. Firstly, I had never thought about someone making a video of unboxing something. Why would you do that? I watched the video and it was almost as good as unboxing something yourself. The lady carefully unwrapped the journal. I heard the tissue paper crisple (I made that word up). Inside was a narrow journal cover, made of some sort of black leather – I’m guessing water buffalo. With it were different packs of papers to go into it – a bit like a Filofax, remember those? Everything in the box was so stylish and beautifully packed. I was hooked. When my journal arrived on Christmas morning, I did the same. I unboxed it carefully, remembering the video I had seen a few weeks before and then the fun began. It was a creative endeavour – putting the paper packs into the journal. Finding a place for each of them – even a loop to put your pen or pencil in. I spent hours playing with it and then deciding how to fill it up. It wasn’t just going to be a written journal. It had papers for drawing on, papers for sticking things on, pockets for putting tickets or credit cards in, but it was much more artistic than a Filofax. Oh and the smell of that leather was wonderful too and very tactile. Over the next few weeks and months, I filled up the journal with all sorts of interesting things and it got fatter and fatter. Then one day I was watching YouTube again and I saw someone making a journal from scratch. It didn’t look too difficult so I thought I’d have a go and soon I was making my own, my first Junk-Journal. There are a lot of roses growing in my garden, so I decided to give the journal a rose theme. I had lots of photos of roses on the computer so I printed some of them and used them in the journal. It is a very creative hobby and it grows. Believe me it grows…….. Here is a link to my own YouTube channel, where you can see my rose junk-journal for yourself: https://youtu.be/ciuUXvYuOn0?si=cscPNwr1qbu_OVPl Shirley Word Count 449 |
| Blog for September 13th Prompt: Would you date yourself? What a question! The answer is: it depends on who’s asking. Considering that I know myself better than I know anyone else, of course I would date myself. That’s because it would be easy to please me because I would know exactly how to enjoy my company without doing or saying something that I might find objectionable. It’s been a very long time since I played the dating game and it’s very different now to how it was when I was last involved in it. So long as the person made an effort to understand me, I would be an easy, cheap date because I’m not impressed by wealth, possessions or speed. If I was dating myself (what a thought), I would take me somewhere quiet where I could hear the birds sing and watch the clouds passing by. All this feels very self-centred to me. I’m following the prompt, but I’ve really never, ever thought about this as a topic before. I feel embarrassed talking about myself in this way. Shirley |
| Blog for 12th September 2026 Prompt: How should society govern deep fakes when video evidence is no longer trusted in courts of law? The issue of Deep Fakes is an ever present danger in today’s Courts of Law. Video evidence is no longer a trusted medium and is now the subject of much debate. There are three options:- 1) Accept the video evidence as it is, but corroborate it with previous methods of checking e.g. chain of custody. 2) Attempt to establish the truth in the provenance and if that is not possible, then eliminate the evidence all together. 3) Deny the use of video evidence all together. It seems to me pretty obvious that if you can’t trust something, you’d better not use it and if someone’s life depends on it, then unless you can be sure the evidence is real, it should be put aside and not used. AI is still in its infancy, but it is learning exponentially and soon it will be impossible to tell it from the real thing. In a recent episode of ‘The Jury’ on television, a CCTV video clip of two young people, walking up a street in the dark, was shown to the jury to illustrate the fact that the two young people were on their way to murder their stepfather; the inference being that the young people were two brothers who were on trial for murdering their stepfather. They had accepted the fact that they did the murder, but their defense was that they had lost control and therefore the grounds were diminished responsibility. The prosecution argued that if the boys had returned to the house with intent to kill, it showed they had not lost control. The video was blurred and it was difficult to see if the two people were indeed the brothers, but the jury were shown it nevertheless. There was no question that the video was a deep fake on this occasion, but the point of me mentioning it here is that it showed how important video evidence can be, so should not be dismissed lightly. Since the deep fake videos are becoming more prevalent and more difficult to identify, it behoves society to speed up the reliability of AI detection models. It occurs to me that the solutions to many problems only cause more problems. I'm sure there will be many people today who write a better blog about this subject than I have done. However, I wrote this myself, without the use of AI, LOL so I am proud of that. +++ Word count 429 |
| Blog for 11th September 2026 Prompt: Working on my biases! Unfortunately, I am a bit too much on the ‘biased’ side. I think it comes with age to a certain extent because I have had many years to get this way, LOL. Ways of doing things, which I learned when I was growing up, have become entrenched in my life today and I don’t suppose anything will change now. For example: I learned to say ‘aitch’ for the letter ‘H’ and now it seems to be ever popular to say ‘haitch’, which I don’t like. To me it sounds common when people say it that way. I know that language is ever-changing and it should be that way, but to someone like me, full of years, it sometimes sounds strange, odd and unfamiliar. For example: when younger people say their sentences with the intonation going up at the end of the sentence. To me that is something the French do, not us in the English-speaking world. Another curiosity is the use of ‘amount’ and ‘number’. For example: if I am talking about sheep in a field, I would say ‘the number of sheep in the field exceeds the number of dogs required to corale them.’ I would not say, ‘the amount of sheep’. I keep ‘amount’ to a pile of grain in a barn, for instance. So, I would say ‘the amount of grain in the barn is less than it was last year, owing to all the dry weather we’ve been having.’ It’s surprising how many people get that all mixed up. But! I shouldn’t be so judgmental, maybe. That brings me to the use of ‘But’ and ‘And’ at the start of a sentence. These days it seems to be acceptable to start sentences with ‘But’ or ‘And’ and I see it done an awful lot. I hate it. I even catch myself doing it sometimes. ‘But’ and ‘And’ are joining words, to explain it simply. They join clauses together. For example: ‘I love the hot weather, but it is exhausting.’ It shows conflict when you use ‘but’. On the other hand, you use ‘and’ if there is no conflict. For example: ‘I love the hot weather and I hope it stays a bit longer.’ Talking about ‘but’ and ‘and’, there is another thing that I am biased about, because I learned it this way: if you are going to use ‘but’, showing conflict, there will be a comma before the ‘but’. If you are going to use ‘and’, there will be no comma. Then there are commas. Sometimes I see commas where there should be no commas and sometimes, I see writing which has too many commas. I was taught that the best way to decide whether to put a comma in is to read the piece out loud. If you find yourself pausing at a certain point, you put a comma in. So, it follows that if you are writing something and you don’t intend to read it out loud, then you don’t have to put so many commas in. I’m biased in lots of other ways too, but I’ll keep them for another occasion. +++ |
| Blog Harbour Prompt #255: Describe the best birthday you can remember, even if it wasn't yours. Whose was it, and what made it stick with you? The best birthday celebration I can remember, or the one that immediately popped into my mind when I read the prompt, was my ex-husband’s 50th. He is a sociable type so he has lots of friends and he was really looking forward to his 50th birthday so I said I would organise something special. It was 1998, an annus horribilus for me in many ways and so as it turned out, this event was the best thing that happened that year, for all of us. I decided to hire a local village hall, one with a stage! and invited everyone I could think of who he would like to see plus my friends too. The guest list grew like Topsy. I invited friends he hadn’t seen for years, friends from school, friends from his work, friends from his quiz teams, pub friends, football friends and my friends. It ended up with about 150 people. I’d never organised a family event like that before and it was quite daunting. Sending out the invitations, collating the replies, making lists, which made their own lists. Catering figured large, of course. I asked the cook from the school where I worked, if she would like to do the catering and she agreed happily; so I invited all the dinner ladies and kitchen staff too LOL. There was a room off the main hall that we could use for the catering tables, so they were away from the main throng and it was more hygienic. I knew the food would be lovely and it was. Then there was the music. Of course there was the music. Lots of music. All three of our sons were in bands at the time, so that was sorted. Plus one of J’s friends was in a jazz band so they wanted to come along too. I say all three sons, but the youngest one had never played on stage before so he was extra nervous about it. I asked him what he wanted to play and, as a fan of Cream and as he is a bass player on the guitar, he chose ‘Sunshine of your love’, the song that made Jack Bruce so famous. D practised for hours to get the intro etc. just right and one of J’s friends said he’d video it for us. People came from all over, including Holland and Switzerland so there was hotel accommodation to find. I ordered helium balloons with plastic weight to put on the table. There were already plenty of chairs and tables. They just needed to be put out on the day. I bought a new, long, velveteen dress. It was midnight blue with one shoulder strap. I loved that dress. Of course I wanted to look my best so I went to the hairdresser in the afternoon and had my hair put up on top. I had a tattoo of a black puma on my shoulder – the bare one and that completed my look. In the afternoon we all went to the hall to set it up. Lots of our sons’ friends turned up to help move the chairs and tables and by 6 pm we were ready. Of course there were a few things that went wrong. What I remember most of all was the video of D playing his bass on stage for the first time. When we looked at the video afterwards, D wasn’t on it. What would have been the best bit didn’t happen. The friend who had offered to video the band completely missed off the bit where D was showcasing his talent. I was furious! I thought when the friend had offered to do the video that he would at least know how to do it. Obviously, I realised later, he didn’t have a clue how to video a musical band. You have to video all of it not just the first five minutes and you have to home in on the person who is featuring their best bits, not show the singer when the drummer is doing their solo or the drummer when the guitarist is into their riff. We would never get that moment back again. Luckily, all the rest of the activities on the stage were videoed perfectly by my cousin’s husband. Thank God for that!!! Another thing that went wrong concerned the balloons. One of our friends decided it would be great fun to detach the balloon strings from their plastic weights and allow the balloons to drift up to the very high ceilings, where nobody would be able to get them down. I was very annoyed about that! The balloons weren’t cheap and were intended to make the tables look lovely. They did until they were released. I had a word with her at the end… The catering was superb and most of the food got eaten, which was a relief. There was a cake and that was gorgeous too. J went up on stage at the end and made a speech to thank everybody for coming, me for arranging it all, the boys for their musical contributions, the caterers for the delicious food, friends for making their journeys and we all went home happy. When I became 50, I didn’t have a party ☹ Word count: 907 |
| Blog post for 9th September 2026 ‘What is Art?’ Art is a physical representation of an artist’s thoughts or a physical representation of an artist’s visual subject. That begs the question – what is an artist? Well, we are all artists in some way or other, aren’t we. It depends on the way we express ourselves and the tools we use for that expression. Some people use a pencil, others a paintbrush. A lot of people use a camera. Creative people use anything that comes to hand, for example: painting a tree on a canvas using a small twig from that same tree, dipped in paint. I’ve used a sponge, a marbling tray and a gelli-pad. One day, whilst walking in the woods nearby, I saw a trail of painted stones. Each stone had been decorated by a different child and then laid on the trail. It all depends on your imagination. Of course, children make the best artists because they are uninhibited. Every painting that a child does is good because they have done it (smile). The subjects are endless. Perhaps a landscape on canvas using paint and a brush or a picture of your dog on a drinking glass using ink. My personal favourite is still life. I love to see pictures of objects arranged on a table. There is so much scope. Let’s look deeper into that one. The background needs to be chosen, then the table, the cloth, the items on it, like a vase or a clock or some fruit or all of them. Since I am not a minimalist, the more items on that table, the better I would like it, but I would also like to see just one or two items, painted really well. I have to mention modern art. I love modern art. It takes me into the world of dreams. To me, real art is something that a camera cannot catch. Consider the paintings of Klimpt or Picasso or Dali or Van Gogh. They are all so very different and instantly recognisable. A camera captures what is there. A modern artist captures what is there on the other side of the mirror! An artist can take an image, created by a camera and turn it into a masterpiece of originality. With the introduction of computers, it was no longer necessary to go to the expense of buying brushes, paint or any other media. It was all available inside the computer, even a computer stylus instead of a brush, capturing every colour you could think of to create on screen a vision of your landscape, family or your dreamworld. Now that we have computers, we can ask them to make a picture for us. Because that area of art is in its infancy, the computer programmes still make mistakes sometimes, but they are learning all the time and there is no limit to what they can do. I can only watch in awe as a picture materializes in front of me on the screen with only the fewest prompts. Two of my sons are artists and the other one should have been. They studied graphic design at college and University, six years each and now earn their livings from it. I am amazed at what they can do. I would have loved to study art to a high level, but my path in life was a different one. |
| Blog post for 8th September 2026 Prompt: If you could eliminate any one disease or illness from the world, what would you choose and why? Hello friends, welcome to my Blog today. I would eradicate DEPRESSION from the world today because it touches so many people and causes so many relationship and family break-ups. I hasten to add that, although I have had my share of bad fortune, I have never had depression, thankfully. I have been sad, lots of times and very sad, sometimes, but so far, no depression. It is such a curse for those who have it. Depression is something I do not understand, I must admit. I don’t think anybody does, unless they have experienced it themselves, but I have suffered it through a member of my family, who gets it from time to time and is badly affected by it when it comes upon him. There are tablets for it and counselling, if you can get it, but really, it is up to the sufferer. It goes when it goes and it comes back when it comes back. I cannot begin to tell you the trouble it has caused in my family. It is impossible to say when it started and it is difficult to get the person to talk about it. The more questions I ask, the more blank looks I get. They really don’t know why they get to feel like they do and they are powerless to get out of it. One of my three sons suffers with it. Why, why, why, I wish I knew. In his youth, he was very accomplished – no problems at school – found learning easy – musically gifted – very good looking – kind – loyal – on and on, BUT then there were the days when he would just stay in bed all day – didn’t eat – couldn’t sleep – didn’t want to talk – just couldn’t function, even the smallest things were beyond him. It is so exasperating to be with someone like that. You want to say ‘snap out of it’ and I have to admit I’ve said that myself when I got really fed up trying to cajole him into being enthusiastic about something. In the end you give up! It is so hard when you, yourself, are working all day, you come home and someone is sitting on the sofa, under a blanket, looking fed up but doesn’t know why, no energy etc. not fed, not washed – awful. You wonder why they can’t see how hard everybody else is trying to get them out of it. You walk on eggshells, you don’t mention certain things because if you do, they just storm upstairs or out and that all makes it worse. If they turn to drink or drugs, that intensifies the picture. Drink in our case – him not me. So, it’s depression for me. Get rid of that and the world will be a better place – please! |
| Blog post for 7th September 2026 - WDC26th Curiosity – are you a curious person or not? Do you notice what other people are doing or are you only concerned with what you are doing yourself? I am a curious person. Every scenario is a possible story for me. Consider this:- One morning you notice your neighbours are up earlier than usual and you see them getting into a taxi. They have luggage with them so you assume they are going on holiday, but you start to wonder where they are going. They didn’t ask you to water their plants or keep an eye on the house so you have no obligations in that regard. You are just curious. Two days later you are in the front garden, watering your plants in the border when you notice that one of the bedroom windows next door is wide open and the curtains are flapping about in the breeze. You think it’s odd, but dismiss it. Maybe someone in their family has been tasked with keeping an eye on their house while they are away. Perhaps they are just giving the house an airing. You go inside. Next day you go to put your dustbin out for collection just before you go to bed. It is twilight. The bin has to be put on the perimeter of your property so you have to go to the end of your drive to do that. You can’t help looking up at next door’s house and you notice that the window is still wide open and the curtains are still flapping in the breeze. ‘That’s not right’ you think to yourself, but you go in anyway, not wanting to be thought nosy! You go in, lock the door and go into the kitchen to make a nightcap. You are still thinking about the neighbours. ‘They haven’t put their bin out’. You wonder if you should put it out for them. After all, how nice it would be if they came home to a clean, empty bin. You decide you will put it out, so out you go again with a will to help. You’re not just being curious, you are being helpful, right? You put your own door on the latch this time. After all, it is now dark and you don’t want it to snap shut while you are being neighbourly. You walk next door and drag the bin to the periphery of their drive. It feels really heavy. ‘What on earth have they put inside it?’ you wonder. You decide to lift the lid and take a peek. OMG you shout as you slam the lid shut. ‘I wish I hadn’t done that!’ +++ Word count 442 |
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