21.5.03

This is a first for me. Dima came home from his successful French Oral exam today to regale us with the story of the young lad, clearly not so well prepared, who decided to try to 'Allo! Allo!' his way through his own French Oral exam by ... speaking English with a strong but assumed French accent! He heard that another young lad did the same last week but in his German Oral exam. Five years and what have they learned? Andrew Hooper sent me a gift this week: some Handkerchief Tree seeds. Andrew read my page on this topic last week and got in touch. Apparently they are a bit difficult to germinate but I will give it a go and then wait the required 10 years for the flowers to appear! Good one Andrew! I wrote to the 'Friends of duncanwil.co.uk' this week and got an encouraging set of replies: these are the people who have received direct help from www.duncanwil.co.uk over the last 6 months or so. There are lots of them and their messages and my replies run into hundreds. DW

20.5.03

Ever needed to do some eMarketing? Here's one man's review of how he did it and the trials and tribulations he went through: an interesting read. This is redolent of what I'm going through at the moment, too! DW

19.5.03

Do you like Jerome K Jerome? I do and I always have. Rereading Jerome's Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow reminded me of this from the chapter On the Weather: It always is wretched weather according to us. The weather is like the government: always in the wrong. In summer time we say it is stifling; in winter that it is killing; in spring and autumn we find fault with it for being neither one thing nor the other and wish it would make up its mind. If it is fine we say the country is being ruined for want of rain; if it does rain we pray for fine weather. If December passes without snow, we indignantly demand to know what has become of our good old fashioned winters, and talk as if we had been cheated out of something we had bought and paid for; and when it does snow, our language is a disgrace to a Christian nation. We shall never be content until each man makes his own weather and keeps it to himself. Bearing in mind that this book was first published in 1889, isn't it strange that we still think and talk the same way today about our glorious old British climate!? Then we have our own, still prevalent, view of ourselves, our habits and our expertise: Our next door neighbour comes out in the back garden every now and then and says it’s doing the country a world of good: not his coming out into the back garden, but the weather. He doesn’t understand anything about it, but ever since he started a cucumber frame last summer he has regarded himself in the light of an agriculturist and talks in this absurd way with the idea of impressing the rest of the terrace with the notion that he is a retired farmer. Sound like anyone you know? By the way, you can download this book free of charge from the Gutenberg Project: a fantastic resource for anyone looking into old and classic texts. Search for the book or author you are interested in and if it's there, it could be stored on your hard disk within minutes or even seconds. DW
I have no particular axe to grind over the war with Iraq but this report from the BBC left me feeling cold: working on the assumption that it's all true. I have always been suspicious of military types who want to rule the world and this doesn't help to assuage any of those feelings. End of social comment! DW