WHAT ATTRACTED YOUR ATTENTION TODAY?

[Stanley]

I've just had to turn BBC news off. Constant badgering of 'experts' about things that can't be answered, what we have to do is wait and see.... I shall go for a walk!

[Marilyn]

Emails....I will get round to replies eventually...I am a very busy woman. ( had to backtrack to correct, as I wrote “busty” by mistake! )

[Stanley]

A lovely detailed dream in my last hour of sleep this morning. No obvious trigger in my life, it looks like a completely original creation. Every detail is crystal clear. I should write it up as a short story......

[Stanley]

How heavily we rely on Ian and Tiz for their contributions.

[Tizer]

Aw, gee, thanks...here's another one...
Continuing from my post above about the earthquakes in Iceland and the predicted volcanic eruption...well, they were on the ball, it's happened. It isn't dangerous, at least not immediately, even though it's only about 20 miles from the capital. Here's a news article about it: BBC

Now look at the map in the article and then at my map posted below. You'll see that the volcano is the red triangle bottom left and it sits on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge where the American and European tectonic plates are splitting apart. So it's no surprise that you can get so many earthquakes there. One day Reykjavik will be in America!

[PanBiker]

It looks like it runs right under Keflavik where the international airport is now. Built originally by the Yanks for staging when bringing the heavy bombers over to the UK in WWII. My dad and his mates in the Dukes concreted the domestic airport and held the regimental record for laying the most concrete in a single day.

Thingvellir just above Reykjavik is a fascinating place. It sits at the head of a valley opening into a flat plain and has a raised man made mound at the top. A man projecting his voice from this platform can be heard over 10 miles away. And if you blow a horn from there it can be heard over 30 miles away. It was the meeting place for the early tribal leaders who would be called by the horn and the site of the first parliament.

[Big Kev]

Aldi's salted caramel and Belgian chocolate hot cross buns, I know I shouldn't but I had one with a cup of coffee for lunch. Definitely need a good walk now

[Big Kev]

This rather contradictory statement 'reporting from the anti-lockdown protests, said the atmosphere was "animated" and a number of people appeared to be angry about restrictions on peaceful protest'

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56469687

[Stanley]

My thought is that they should look at the news coming out of Europe and recognise that not clamping down and relaxing too early is what has caused their third wave. We were lucky in the war, the problem was clear cut so we didn't protest at our over five years of 'lockdown'. (I include the post war shortages.) The situation is no different now, we need to keep our heads down for the last lap. Did you hear the warning yesterday of a third wave next winter if we let variants in this summer by relaxing air travel?

[Tizer]

The epidemiologists have enough data now to show that the UK waves last year followed the ones in the main European countries. They expect the pattern to happen over again now as those countries go into another wave. The presence of newer variants will also muddy the waters and are another reason we should forget foreign travel and keep strict control over who comes here.

[Tizer]

I forgot this morning to report our excitement yesterday afternoon. I was indoors and Mrs Tiz was in the garden when, at about 14.55, we both heard a very loud boom sound. It reminded us of the sonic boom we used to hear in Somerset at about 16.30 each afternoon back in the days when Concorde flew out over the Bristol Channel and went supersonic over the ocean. There hadn't been any sensation of an earthquake and it seemed to be a loud noise from a long distance away rather than a lesser noise locally. We soon noted reports from elsewhere in the county as well as Dorset and Devon but the police had no explanation and the military said `not us, gov'. We concluded that it was probably a meteor of significant size which had reached a temperature at which the lower boiling point minerals had suddenly volatilised and caused it to explode - a bit like the one in Russia that we all remember because it was caught on many car video cameras. Here is the BBC news article: Meteor

[Big Kev]

A pandemic and meteors, the conspiracy theorists will be wetting themselves

[Marilyn]

Maybe it was a “new variant” coming in?

[Stanley]

What an exciting place Somerset must be. All we get is walls falling down....

[Tizer]

Don't forget we had an earthquake recently with its epicentre a few miles from where I live! We're thinking of naming our house `Groundzero'.

I found one bit of uplifting news this morning. I think we should put the officer in charge of a project to employ furloughed workers to restore our towns and cities. Filling all the potholes in roads and pavements would be a good start...
`Bedfordshire: Army officer restores WW2 'secret garden' at Chicksands Priory' LINK

[Cathy]

Gosh what a shock this would have been.

4A162ECA-9E61-4A70-86EA-AFE8213872CF.png

Found ‘Barlick Then and Now’.

[Stanley]

Cathy. Notice the date of that crash, December 1946. That was the start of the worst winter I can remember apart from 1962/63 which was a strong contender.



We used to have a view out into Yorkshire from our back street but now we have this bleak prospect. The old corrugated iron back wall of David Hoyle's carpenter's shop will go soon hopefully.... I wonder what will replace that?

[PanBiker]

It needs a nice mural of rolling distant hills painting on that house wall.

One thing to be thankful of is that you don't see it from your shed or back room, only when you come out into the street.

[Tizer]

Send for Banksy!

[Stanley]

That's true Ian....
Tiz, if I was living further down the row I would be keeping an eye open for ground movement. There's a big drop the other side of that wall. Come to think a wall has already fallen down. I think I'll have a walk down there and have a furtle.....
Later... Have a look at THIS BBC report of the problem of one of the biggest container ships in the world, the Ever Given, Taiwan owned and aground in the Suez Canal blocking it to traffic.
One of the reporters referred to the ship as 'carrying hundreds of shipping containers' in the Guardian report. I don't know where he or she has been hiding but the ship is carrying almost 20,000 containers.

[Marilyn]

This guy was “picking up chicks” during the New South Wales floods...

[Tizer]

It's flooding on a Biblical scale... LINK

[Stanley]

What's the next level?
The container ship Ever Given is still blocking the Suez canal. 200,000 tons not wanting to budge. Not good. Watch the stock market price of oil.

[Tizer]

The images in this story are great. Volunteers restoring family photos badly damaged in a Japanese tsunami...
`The Memory Hunters' LINK

[Stanley]

Wonderful. The bloke from Fuji didn't form a committee or generate an enquiry. He hired a car and did something. There's a message in there somewhere.