Alec John Moore

pillage

I've just used the word "snaffled" in a PM on this very forum in reference to something that had been offered and taken quite quickly. It just came to me and seemed the right thing to say, honest.

Here's the link for finding out where your nearest Big Lunch is this Sudnay. Hope to go to our nearest on Crystal Palace Road. The forecast is for 25C and sunny intervals! http://www.thebiglunch.com/map/find-a-big-lunch.php Alec

mithering is a northern form of dithering which may be Scottish. I've been daan saff so long I get confused. So, I no longer use jings, crivvens, help ma boab. Hitherto I might have used, hitherto.

burn

mollusc

Swedish

Gooseberries are more painful to harvest than blackberries IMHO. We've had a good crop of purple berries this year - enough for me to attempt to make jam this w/e! This despite the leaves being stripped from the bushes by gooseberry sawfly larvae. We picked them off by hand - scores of them - and fed them to the chickens.

pastry

smegma

s'faraway

I read English Passengers, by Matthew Kneale, last summer and it was the best read I've had in ages. Funny, thought provoking and a narrative that whisks you along it concerns an expedition led by a slightly deranged Victorian English curate to find the Garden of Eden. He believes it is located in the centre of Tasmania. The ship they use is crewed by a band of Manx smugglers and the play with language is really intriguing since it involves seafaring slang and the aboriginal English of the antipodean protagonists. I hope I'll find something equally enjoyable this year.

deride

vision

just had two blackberries from the bush in the garden that we've allowed to grow freely. The question, how do you define a weed, springs to mind. I heard a blackberry farmer - that's one who grows them not one who communicates with the device of the same name - on farming today on Radio 4 a few months ago predicting that this will be a bumper year for blackberries given the hard winter. The blackberries we ate today were slightly tart but definitely black.

mary

prevent

picnic

turkey

eden

end

thumb

feeder

Worm

If you twist my arm I'd have to settle for Joni Mitchell. Just because it is so hard to settle on one songwriter whose words have penetrated your consciousness in a telling way and she has such lyricism. However, that was a long time ago and far away. Currently? I'm listening to Elbow and some of their words seem quite apposite: "There's a hole in my neighbourhood down which of late I cannot help but fall." Could that be EDF? I feel a new thread coming on.