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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I am not a dog lover. I find them needy, melodramatic and hierarchical: some of the features that I try to avoid in humans.

    I work in an office around one day a week which often has more dogs than humans - since one of the regular staff has two dogs. In general, however, they aren’t much of a problem. One frequently nudges people’s elbows to get attention and howls whenever a phone rings. Another gets in the way of the door an awful lot - resulting in the owner installing a child gate at an inner doorway, and another has been traumatised in the past and needs to be taken out whenever a fire alarm test is due. However, this is not more that the needs and quirks of other people, really, and is fairly easy to work around.

    I am glad that I do not have to work in that office all the time, but overall it is not a big deal.


  • I’m going through Robert Brightwell’s Flashman tales: prequels to George MacDonald Frasier’s Flashman book, featuring the original protagonist’s uncle.

    They are very well researched (as were GMF’s) and generally engaging, but having just finished Flashman and Madison’s War, I found it to be the waekest so far - lacking a strong narrative thread to tie the scattered, episodic historical events together. The next in the series is Flashman’s Waterloo, which shouldn’t have that problem.

    I am very pleased to see how Brightwell has updated the original conceit - taking the bully from Tom Brown’s Schooldays and using him as a mouthpiece to entertainingly deconstruct the Victorian boy’s-own colonial genre - to fit a more modern audience, whilst retaining the spirit of the originals.




  • I did get out and do a bat monitoring session last night - part of the national waterway survey in August each year - without getting wet. There were a few pipistrelles about and a couple of noctules and serotines passing by, but no Daubenton’s which is what this particular survey is looking for.

    Today will be getting the chores out of the way then - if the rain shows any chance of dying down - out to an open air Shakespeare this evening. It will be ‘Exit pursued by a very damp bear.’ I expect.

    Tomorrow: third attempt to get these shelves up. It has been postponed twice so far.