Jim's Site

We Brits are fickle about the weather. 

We complain when it’s too cold, too windy, too wet or too hot. We complain especially when the country’s main weather provider, the Met Office, is unable to predict our changeable weather from one day to the next. I reserve special animus for this forecaster’s tactic of getting it all wrong, again, then updating their site on the day in a shameless attempt to pass it off as though they had known it all along. 

It’s been over a year since I last posted and so much has happened that I couldn’t possibly catch up. Or it would be such a long post as to make it unreadable. Instead I have tried to encapsulate these strange times in
in a poem- Made in China…

A Christmas Star

2020 has been a very difficult year for many. In a sense, of course, every year is difficult – it is subjective. In 1992 the Queen spoke publicly of her own ‘annus horribilis’ after the breakdown of her children’s marriages and the fire at her Windsor home.

Newton Abbot – December 2020

Yesterday I read that one of the first people in the United Kingdom, indeed the world, to receive the new Pfizer coronavirus vaccine, was a man named William Shakespeare. 

In a narrow window of bright sunshine at the low morning tide, we decided to walk on the local beach. 

Yesterday Michelle and I made the familiar journey down the long country lane to lay flowers at my mother’s grave. 

Reignbow woke at 6am to the bark of a neighbour’s dog. 

A morning slack tide and I begin a lazy paddle in the late September sun. 

I love this time of year; It has a rare and precious quality that all of summer’s long days cannot match.