Ahem, A few days after I had, with all due ceremony, carefully poured twenty bright and bushy-tailed goldfish from a large transparent plastic bag into our rejuvenated pond, aware that the fish would be in temporary shock and hiding behind pond foliage for a while, Alli and I slowly began, quite separately, to realise that […]
Category Archives: Ahem
Words
From em dash to emojee
The existence of excessive em dashes in a text suggests that the text has been [...]
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2026 Ahem
WHIPPING MOB CELEBRATION: September 2026
Photo: Tom and Kate in Trinity College, Cambridge, September 2026 Ahem, With the multiple heatwaves [...]
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04
Oct
Oct
Uckfield Entrepreneurs
Save Money; Buy Quality! – Philip Eves
Uckfield Entrepreneurs: Philip Eves of PP Estates PP Estates is not only Uckfield’s but Sussex’s [...]
Continue readingJobs for Life
Campaigner, Britain in Europe campaign, April 1975, National Liberal Club, £20 per week (3)
Jobs for life: An autobiographical search for identity through employment The UK’s first ever referendum [...]
Continue readingUckfield Entrepreneurs
Local, Sustainable, Healthy : Lizzie Smith, The Oast Farm, Buxted
Uckfield Entrepreneurs After the Smith family bought the Oast Farm in 2014, significant changes [...]
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01
Apr
Apr
Ahem, Muttley was one of my childhood heroes (along with Rolf Harris). As an infant TV-watcher, I thought Muttley was a philosophical genius; he could summarise all relevant social discourse into three cardinal responses: a chronic wheezy snigger; a frustrated oath-laden mutter grumble; and impatient agreement by rapid head-nodding while rasping “yeh-yeh-yeh, yeh-yeh-yeh”. It inspires […]
05
Mar
Mar
Ahem, On the ninth day of the month, I travelled to meet my sister-in-law Julia and her long-time friend Christine at Heathrow to spend the rest of the month with them at the Toleza farm near Balaka in Malawi. Hitches, snafus, and hassles from previous similar journeys were much reduced, and we were driven to […]
04
Feb
Feb
Ahem, Jurrat, Jessie, and Jaxon (J3) came to Uckfield for a Sunday roast on their first visit since we moved into our new house. Alli cooked a pork belly with cracking crackling, which was pronounced delicious by all who had it. At the end of the month I joined Jessie and Jurrat, Ella, and Gwen […]
29
Dec
Dec
Ahem, Our first several days in our new house, perhaps predictably, were at once disorienting, exciting, and revelatory. Somehow we needed to fill each room with shared meaning culled separately from our individual lives in the Alsace, in the Cote d’Ivoire, and during the last four years of beguiling purgatory in Burgess Hill. We had […]
01
Dec
Dec
Ahem, It was night in the cold northern foothills of Dartmoor. The country sky was scattered with stars but the moon was hiding behind a black veil. I had brought my car soundlessly to a halt by an old five-bar gate opening onto a misty field of shadows that stretched down into a dark silence. […]
31
Oct
Oct
Ahem, My strongest memories of the god- or science-inspired extremes of the British weather have come from British seaside resorts such as Brighton, Blackpool, Bournemouth, Amlwch, Whitby, and several others. High winds not only happen in Jamaica. Hardly ever depicted in those eponymous seaside postcards is that buffeting, blustering weather, bilious as billy-o, the kind […]
30
Sep
Sep
Ahem, La Hune, our family house in south-west France, looks out proud and far across the Arratz valley, having achieved five-star ratings in all reviews in its first few months as a rental house on Airbnb. This makes my daughter Jessie a “super-host”, along with our neighbour Marlene, who looks after the house and receives […]
31
Aug
Aug
Ahem, “We’re on the home stretch” observed my great-niece Julia-Rose reassuringly as I clambered up a gradient clearly needing crampons for progress, my hands grappling desperately with dead branches and loose pebbles to heave my legs and body up and over huge Sumo boulders that bulked the “path” to the top of Zomba’s eponymous mountain. […]
31
Jul
Jul
Ahem, Jessie, our first-born daughter, and Jurrat, our first son-in-law, made their memorable vows to each other in an unforgettable wedding celebration under a blue cedar tree in the garden of Broad Oaks, following their civil marriage in Brighton last month. Jessie and Jurrat (J2) had between them arranged almost everything about the wedding celebration. […]