keswick, burneyside [a], the A6 (the Great North-Wet Road) in places, including just south of shap, and seemingly worst hit of all, cockermouth - unless you count seathwaite, that is, where they managed to shrug [b] off seven inches of rain in twelve-fourteen hours... [c]

[a] - suburb/satellite village of kendal;
[b] - well, most old settlements in cumberland & county westmorland's fells are designed & built to cope with water descending from above - leastways, those settlements as've survived long enough to be considered "old" are;
[c] - seathwaite is reputedly the inhabited settlement receiving the greatest precipitation in all england [yr hmbl srppnt. does not know whether the statisticians concerned for these purposes accounted wales a part of england]

we get a day's respite, then the next storm in the current chain is due in. i hope there's time enough for the saturated peat (&c.) to have started draining out into the burns, becks & rivers, before the next lot of water commences falling in earnest: the kent wasn't very far off the tops of the undersides of its (stone) bridges' arches, yesterday morning, and levens bridge was just about completely under water by noon.

- fingers, eyes - yes, kaiserdad, and optionally legs - crossed...

...since the starter motor died, and yr hmbl srppnt.'s been without the accustomed convenience and advantages of being able to depend upon little grey ghost...

i know this is nothing at all, compared with what some of my friends (and my friendslist *g*) have to put up/cope with, but it makes this ppint. feel distinctly lonelier.

altogether now: "- awwwww..."
- "tuogh!"

?(yllaer gninrom siht ylrae llew) thgin tsal uoy rof sdrawkcab ylf emit did

?neeb evah esiwrehto dluow uoy naht regnuoy ruoh na uoy era

...(taht lla dna) wonk ot ekil sdnim gniriuqne

roobarb would appear this morning to've done more than her bit towards the spreading of whirled pease and therefore, by all accounts, eligible for nomination for a nobel prize...

'cos the past few days have been
"glorious autumnal sunshine (with the occasional downpour)"
- a chance to get the wooden door and window-frames on the front (and weather) side of the cottage (repaired where necessary and) repainted, in time for lashings by the storms of winter, and a reminder, which shouldn't've been needed but was, of quite why this has always been my favourite season: here's hoping it lasts 'til i've got all the outside jobs done, and had a couple of hobbles up the hill.
and that's here in the north-wet;
how're thnigs down your various ways?

i'm of course properly grateful to whomsoever at nokia may accept responsibility for awarding me several of their annual awards of £250,000.00, but slightly puzzled as to why they'd choose to attempt to notify me via mailboxes at i-m-t i've not used to send or, normally, receive email for several years - indeed, for a decade in one case - sometimes ever; and it must be down to big businesses' penchant for locating their call centres et sim. in hot climes, that the advisory emails were apparently sent from an indian address - mustn't it?

be such things as they may, however, it struck me that, if several such awards had indeed been made to yr hmbl & by no means spectacularly obviously deserving srppnt, it was likely that some of you all out there in the great, electric blue yonder, might also've received nokification of comparable good fortune: and i wondered quite how much might've been promised - and whether it mightn't, in these straitened times, prove so much as to give lappse to the awarding company - and perhaps sufficient to finnish them off...

about caught up from getting back from driving down to winsley saturday night, seeing nancy for the first time in ?three? years, trowbridge inn sunday afternoon (but didn't stop), westbury sunday afternoon-night, seeing jonathan'n'jan for the first time in about the same (anyone care to open a fanfund for jonathan's teeth?)(it's badly needed), winsley again sunday night, brizzl-ol monday morning (saw chhando for first time in ~15 years as she is visiting this side of the planet), taunton monday afternoon (delivered chhando to very nearly the right place), winsley again monday evening, and back to IMT tuesday by 4pm, opened the shop 'til 7:30pm, and finally back home by 10pm yesterday. puffed.

as i said to start with, i'm about caught up on sleep'n'energy substitute.

has anyone else noted - or even noticed - that wholesale modern road resurfacings, other than those where the whole road is banked on a curve such that the outside of the curve is slightly higher than the inside, are now pretty much never properly cambered; the crown of the road surface is no longer domed slightly higher than the edges (or hedges, where appariettily), but left near-as damn it silken-smooth - and astronomically flat - ?

one of the unfortunate results of this change in roadbuilding practice is to help generate ginormous clouds of spray when heavy traffic and significant rainfall coincide on motorways and fast-flowing A-roads, reducing visibility to a couple of yards or less at times, as the new roads no longer shed water the way (tar-)macadamised roads were designed to.

and i suspect, but do not know, that another effect is to greatly increase the chances of emergency braking turning into aquaplaning (not to mention the risk of vehicles with bald or near-bald tyres aquaplaning even under only moderate braking forces); does anyone know whether this is indeed the case?

as a result of the highly improbable coincidence in space and time of an error in procedure in a certain sheffield hospital phlebotomy department, the failure of a male contraceptive implant, and the malfunction of a tardis-cum-exit booth temporarily camouflaged as a hospital broom-cupboard, combined with his unerring flirting fluence upon ~86% of the female population,
we're being implacably advanced upon by a highly-motivated and deadly serious (if somewhat less than 100% coherent)

shambling corps[e] of kaiserdads!!!

courtesy of the independent (the heinzes newspaper):

http://www.wychwoodfestival.co.uk/independent/

- of possible interest to eclectic electric folk (and rockers) as have reasonably good download speeds...

nirvana - the real nirvana -'s "tiny goddess" was more than just a turntable hit - a single that was chosen as a favourite by a dj or three and it gained popularity with at least a part of their audience, but didn't quite make it to the top of the charts; in "tiny goddess"es case, it was chosen as one of the last discs of the week on radio london by john peel (if i remember correctly, johnnie walker also played it most enthusiastically), and i think made it into their top thirty: but it was not picked up by auntie beeb's new radio one, and without continuing airplay slipped slowly away into undeserved obscurity.

if they are remembered today, it's primarily for their charting second and third singles, "pentecost hotel" and "rainbow chaser" (which was probably the most effective over-enthusiastic use of the new technique of phasing ever *g* - but not really typical of the group). the more beautiful "all of us" was - like "tiny goddess" - perhaps too understated, too restrained, and too musical, to appeal to radio one's controllers, who'd signalled precisely the style of empty-headed commercial pop music they were building their station around, with the single they chose to launch with.

nirvana's two lps for island were not commercially successful, and chris blackwell dropped them (their third album eventually surfaced on pye [pye international, iirc, for some reason] with a less than entirely complimentary reference to him...); "the story of simon simopath" was not helped greatly by its amateurish (though striking) cover art, and that for their second was monochromatically subdued; and after a brief period of availability as deletions, they became quite pricey "collectors' items"; but they have been transferred to cd: imcd 301/980001-0 (both the stereo and the mono mixes, which differ significantly, plus single b-sides and a previously unreleased track) for "the story of simon simopath", and imcd302/980001-1 (plus a late single a-side and b-sides) for "all of us".

so; two albums well worth investigating if you don't already know them, and at an affordable price, now they're remastered to cd; not all the tracks are brilliant (nor are they all baroque pop; "requiem for john coltrane" was quite a surprise, when i played that single b-side forty-odd years ago *g*), but there was no-one else quite like them, and their best was superb.

the beeb's radio news round-up/headlines've been darkly foreboding, regarding the state of the "thatcher", or pound coin (sterling): apparently, coin-testers sampling the intake of vending-machines have reported that one coin in twenty is a dud, fake or forgery.
the beeb's take on this is that one in twenty pound coins in circulation may be forgeries.

but half a mo', auntie beeb - is this quite the right way to spin this particular golden thread?

should you be so unfortunate as to notice a dud pound coin in your change [a] too late to refuse it, what can you do with it?

legally, you are required to surrender forged notes and coins to the bank of england (normally via your own, or another, bank or post office); the bank's receptionist or teller should thank you for your public-spiritedness, though this is optional, and accept your private-enterprise thatcher.
which leaves you out of pocket or purse one pound - or more, depending.

alternatively, though not legally, you may attempt to pass it on in turn, by spending it. however, should they discover your malfeasance, your victims and, for some reason, hmq lizzie II, her ministers and officials, including the police also take a dim view of this, and it was historically an offence - one which sir isaac newton found to be of great gravity - and subject to the death penalty.

not only might feeding slot-machines and one-armed bandits with them seem somewhat safer, therefore, and less liable to immediate execution of sentence, but it's also potentially quite lucrative, if that which is obtained from the may be sold on for significantly more than the cost of the forgeries..



the more likely correct interpretation of the statistic is surely

"at least 95% of all pound coins in circulation genuine"



[a] - they're generally made of lead, which doesn't take so sharp an image, so they tend to be a bit "blurry" in detail; and the brassy colour is but a very thin skin: so a scratch will reveal the initially grey-silvery base metal below (though this oxidises to the duller grey of litharge)