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A personal weblog with photographs and comments. Quiet ramblings, quite rambling...

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This is one of the speciality bookshops of Hay-on-Wye, with an atmosphere to match: outline on floor (above), cobwebs, mystery displays. I didn’t buy anything here but it was an enjoyable 45 minutes well spent. 

I wandered around various bookshops looking for Jane Harris’ The Observations, but ended up taking home another half dozen or so titles. As Paul Collins puts it in an old Guardian article:

Hay-on-Wye is not about the books you are looking for, it’s about the books that are looking for you.

Gratuitous link: elsewhere in the blogosphere Mandrake visited this bookshop in September 2006.

This is the inside of the famous Shepherds coffee shop, home of good ice-cream, among other things. It was packed in there, which may have something to do with the wet and cold weather outside.

Today we leave Hay-on-Wye, stacked with books, returning home for the New Year.

I woke up this morning next to this rather swollen river, and its peaceful sounds, accompanied by birdsong.

It’s almost a pity that one has to drag oneself out of bed, but at least the sun is shining today.

There is almost no mobile phone network here, so I’ll post this later when we get to Hay-on-Wye.

The local council (Surrey) has just resurfaced this busy road but failed to sort out the drainage problem that causes the road to flood in this spot every time it rains.

I guess that when they eventually get around to it (the problem goes back several years) they will recreate the bumps and potholes that they have just fixed.  Here is my previous picture of the floods in this spot.

Meanwhile, in Bethlehem, do they know it’s Christmas?

Well I seem to have survived most of the excesses of Christmas, and am heading off to Wales tomorrow for a couple of days.

Wishing you all the best over this period.

Apropos of nothing really (because I am unlikely to return there in the foreseeable future) but another thing I either will or won’t miss is the overpriced coffee counter at my client’s site.

I notice that one of the top read stories on the BBC news site today is Wild boar killed in French shop.  And as I pointed out before (almost four years ago now), the BBC uses the same photos of tame boar for every story they ever have about wild boar!  Annoying really. What’s next: a photo of a moustached man in a white and blue striped shirt and a beret every time they have a story about someone French?

I was at the cinema the other evening to see “The Golden Compass”. The film is not as good as the book, obviously. Coming out after the movie I saw this poster and immediately thought oh no, not another Loch Ness monster movie!

The cold weather continues this week as we woke to more ice and frost this morning.

I think everyone is hoping for snow. It’s cold enough but there’s been no precipitation to speak of. Let me rephrase that: I think everyone is hoping it will snow in 5 days time.

Something I hope to miss with my new job are the regular traffic jams on the M25. Where I do have to drive, the journeys should be considerably shorter.

As I enter my last week of work (this year & this client) I have been thinking about the things I will or won’t miss next year.  One of these has to be the fridge full of overpriced French lemonade. I’ve never seen anybody buy it, and I’ve never seen a single bottle missing from the fridge at the canteen, since they stocked it up about 6 months ago.

We had more frost this morning, and the forecast says it’s going to be cold again tomorrow.

Today is one of those days that I’m going in and out of London twice. This afternoon I am meeting bluemeanie at the Victoria coach station on her return from a ski trip to the French Alps. Tonight is a friend’s “stag night” in Covent Garden. (The inverted commas are to indicate that it won’t be a traditional men-only piss up).

It’s just gone 10 am here on Master Park, Oxted, and the air temperature is still 0 degrees Celsius. Last night must have been the coldest so far this Winter.

Going West to work this morning, this was the view of the sunrise (in the rear-view mirror).

Despite the ditty about the Shepherds’ warning, the temperature rose from -1 Celsius at sunrise to to 6 Celsius at midday.  I didn’t notice the colour of the sunset but tonight the gritters were out spraying the roads.

I spotted this guy outside London Bridge rail station last night on the way to my work Christmas party. At first (judging by the way he was popping in and out of a bar at the station) I thought he was doing some kind of promotion but then I decided he was on his way to a party too.

I’m on the way home from the work Christmas party. Ho hum.