pumpkinstrokemarrow

Deprived of my daily fix, hobbled as far as the shops instead. Which took me about as long as it takes FIL. Odd how tiring it is. Then today, found that clearing snow was a lot easier than walking, so we now have a very clean side walk out front. All made much easier by having the proper gear: besom yard broom (with the socket joint which holds the head onto the handle reinforced with mild steel wire stays) and a builders shovel. I noticed that many of the volunteers shown clearing some school in the DT were into garden spades. Not the thing at all. Also despite all the chuntering about community values which goes on in suburbs such as ours, well under half the houses bother to clear their share of side walk. A young woman, sounding a bit eastern European, suggested that back where she comes from, snow clearing was a community activity. Lines of eager suburbanites wielding brooms to a time kept by the local broom-major on a kettle drum. Maybe a career opportunity here for all those bossy Blair babes who are going to be out of work next spring.

The DT also suggested that on the afternoon of the recently flopping coup d'etat, our leader had spent his time penning an article, for the DT itself no less, on the burning topic of supplying broadband out to the starving countryside. Perhaps he is very alive to the needs of all those MPs with second homes out there - and not nearly so alive to his retired servants in the suburbs. I am not able to confirm this suggestion, in the sense that I have not seen the article in question. Nevertheless, I think the DT has a point. What is our leader bothering his head with such stuff for? Isn't he supposed to be saving the world - or at least those of us here in good old Blightly - from imminent doom?

It rather sounds as if he has fallen into a common trap for those with both energy and grey cells. They think that they can manage everything, they poke their noses into every saucepan in the kitchen and find it hard to delegate successfully. I have read that the Clinton menage had this problem, while the seemingly less gifted Reagans and Bushes (junior) are much better at listening to their advisers - and maybe get more done in consequence. Whether one cares for what they get done is, of course, another matter.

Brown notwithstanding, the most notable event of the day was the quick brown fox strolling across the back lawn with a wood pigeon in his mouth. Plus, I had not really checked before, but I find that the famous sentence starting with that phrase does indeed contain every letter of the alphabet, but also contains some of them more than once. There is even a duplicate word. How do I get Mr G. to tell me of the neatest, shortest sentence which uses every letter? Is there one which uses every letter just once? Apart from that, good to see that the urban foxes of which we have far too many do do something other than scavenge for our left overs. Maybe they help with the rats.