Hogan plus Vowles

Declare him an Outlaw This is Salah Abdeslam who is the eighth gunman in Paris. The civilised world should declare him an outlaw. Long ago if a person was declared an outlaw then he was withdrawn all legal protection, so that anyone was legally empowered to persecute or kill them. Outlawry was thus one of the harshest penalties in the legal system. In those early times in northern Europe the death penalty was quite conspicuously absent, and outlawing is the most extreme punishment, presumably amounting to a death sentence in practice. It was more than that, it was a living death because the outlaw was outside of everything that mattered in life, the milk of human kindness, the comfort of home and friends, the solace of the church, and food, water, & wine. He was dead, he was lonely, it was awful, the ultimate punishment for the most heinous act. When one examines this process I find one thing stands out and that is that the outlaw had clearly chosen to perpetrate that h...

Have you ever thought of how a dog got a name? No, I don’t mean Fido or Rover, the kind of usual name we tend to give dogs in England, I mean the breed name that appears in the Kennel Club’s official registers or say Crufts. You know, dachshund or basset hound etc. Well the dachshund is originally from Germany and the word means “badger dog” and it was used to hunt badgers, and other burrowing animals as its short legs enabled it to get into holes. Meantime in France they had another short legged dog that was handy in rabbit or hare hunting plus its long ears enhanced its scenting its prey. This dog is called a basset hound, The name Basset is derived from the French word bas , meaning "low", with the attenuating suffix -et , together meaning "rather low". My story is about how this all might come about, this naming a new type of dog, and how we missed an opportunity to have a new breed of working dog. This tale starts in 1983 shortly after the sad ...

The definition of a vignette is a short impressionistic scene that focuses on one moment or gives a trenchant impression about a character, idea, setting, or object. I am never bored. Quite the opposite, the world and all that is in it, is wonderful and interesting. When Tina was a patient in the Bristol Royal Infirmary and the only way to get there was a bus ride and then I could take in all that is happening around me. [Driving a car takes full concentration.] I have already given you one encounter , Beetlejuice and his lovely dog, and here are some more vignettes on bus journeys to/from Weston-super-Mare to my beloved Tina every day. Anne from Kenya. I met Anne, a widow from Kenya, who was waiting to board the W1 departing 2100hrs one dark autumn evening. She was a care worker going on shift a home for "vulnerable young persons" in Weston. In other words a home for recovering addicts. Anne is one of those African women becoming an intense threatening gran...

You will be aware that these past months have been very difficult with Tina suffering from a collapsed lung. The complexity of her illness meant that Weston General Hospital could not cope with its management and she had to be transferred to the thoracic unit at the Bristol Royal Infirmary. Now parking in Bristol is a nightmare so that is why I visited Tina by taking the bus for two weeks and that is how I came to meet Beetlejuice [or his double!] on a Bristol omnibus. When I told Tina and Velia, our daughter, that I would be using the bus to go to/from Bristol they were distinctly nervous. Their thought was 'Dad let loose on a bus, late evening, weekends, OMG not a good scene!'  If you read my blog "Cut of their Jib" then you will see why they were nervous. They made me almost take an oath not to even look at scallywags, lads with baseball hats on back to front, potential wife beaters, persons with droopy jeans, and other persons of that ilk. So I used the two bu...