BWM's Blog

The quietest voice gets the girl.

The peace of the upstairs room at Boston Tea Party is diisturbed by the group, three boys and a girl, on the sofa and chairs opposite. It is the volume and the emphatic "listen to me" tone of their voices that disturbs the peace. She talks mostly to the boy diagonally opposite her, the boy with quietest voice, who leans forwards, makes eye contact and dominates her attention.

A 50 MegaPixel Camera

The PS3200 is a flatbed scanner with a transparency attachment, capable of 3200 dpi scans on 35mm, medium format and 5x4 negatives and transparencies. I recently bought one when I discovered that there are now affordable scanners for medium format negatives, the lack of which had previously, and stupidly, limited my forrays into digital photography.

A red sky in the morning and a red sky at night

This is a view across Ullswater in the English Lake District, from Side Farm campsite towards Glenridding. The water reflects the bright pink colour of low clouds lit from below by the rising sun.

I am not usually awake before dawn, let alone up, dressed and out admiring the view. The ground at Side Farm is hard, the rock under my hip bone harder, and getting up for an early morning stroll preferable to lying awake on both. As I watched the progress of dawn, a flockof geese flew by, landing noisily in the water a hundred metres north. More serenely, a family of swans, a male, a female and six cygnets swam warily past.

Sunday Afternoon, Blackwell's and Boston Tea Party

I have loved visiting bookshops since I was a teenager when I stood for ages before the shelves of blue penguins in the Dundee University bookshop, wondering which to buy. My bookshop experiences were enhanced considerably by the Printers Ink bookshop in Palo Alto, which, at the time I first discovered it, had a rather seedy coffee bar within. That it was seedy didn't matter, because it was a quiet, intimate place, with unusual people and served good coffee.

Anniversary lunch

The 5th of August is my wedding anniversary. This year's is our 25th.

On my eldest son's 21st birthday we had a small ceremony in which we wished him well for life and gave him some gifts as symbols of the things we value that we hope life will bring him. I did the same for Jena on her, recent 21st and on that occasion, wrote down the speech I gave as a letter to her. Janet liked it, so I decided to write a letter to her on our anniversary. I gave it to her at our celebratory lunch. This is the text of the letter.