I am so lucky!  People like my blog!!  In fact, some people love my blog! See?

Here is my latest award - the ‘I Love Your Blog’ award, from my good blogging friend Babs, of Beetle’s Memories and Ramblings.   Thank you so much, Babs, I love your blog too, as you know.

Now, I have to share the love and nominate seven other bloggers whose blogs I love.  That’s beginning to sound like a tongue-twister, isn’t it?

Before I get too tangled up in words, let me introduce (if you don’t know them already) -

The View From This End  - ‘This End’ for Moannie, is the ‘end’ of life that she finds herself at now.  I very much enjoy her mixture of reminiscences, philosophy and humour.  Moannie, I love your blog!

The Last Visible Dog -  Katharine lives in the Bay of Plenty in New Zealand.  She is an artist, and a photographer, and she posts such interesting snippets about this that and the other, and she can be very funny.  Katharine, I love your blog, too!

Geri Atric - writes an intelligent and gently amusing blog about ordinary things, like Gatwick Airport, keyboards with sticky letters, automated supermarket checkouts and Omega 3 fatty acids.  She says what a lot of us think, only with more wit and style. I love it!

Midlife Misfit - A delightful mix of musings, funny stories, conversation and fun.  Janice is funny and sharp.  I think you’ll love it.

Holding Patterns - Extremely well-written tales of yore, usually side-splittingly funny and sometimes a little sad.  You may find yourself trying to cringe and laugh at the same time.  Sandi - I love your blog!

Life is All Cobblers - Interesting mix of human interest, rants, irony, politics, ramblings .. you never know what you’ll find when you visit!  I love it.

My Dad’s a Communist - A relatively new one for me, but I do love it.  A self-confessed middle aged woman with a .. what did she call it? … a ‘Girls’ Grammar School voice, and radiating respectability’.  But trust me, you’d never think it.  She is not stuffy, self-righteous or boring. Not in the least!

I went to a Girls’ Grammar School but I’m not sure I radiate respectability.  Not sure why I thought you wanted to know that, but there you go.

Anyway. I’m going to add my usual thing here.  I love getting these awards and I love to pass them along to my blogging friends when I have time, but I’m aware that some people find it difficult, or for whatever reason, don’t like to take part.  That’s fine. If you are one of those people and you don’t want to get into the whole blog award/linking thing, I won’t be offended in the slightest.  Feel free to display the picture if you want to anyway.

If you want to play by the rules, find seven other bloggers whose blogs you love, and let them know in their comments section that they’ve been chosen.

It’s odd, finding myself walking around my house once a week, muttering to myself as I try to find interesting objects beginning with a certain letter for ABC Wednesday, but it’s still fun, so I’m still doing it!

This week, it’s the letter ‘L‘, and I was a little bit surprised at how easy it was.  The first thing I found was that preposterous vehicle up there.  Okay, I actually found that in my picture folder, having taken it ‘just because’ the other day when we noticed it parked opposite our house. Funny how blogging does that to you, isn’t it?  Anyway, the funny thing about it was the when it pulled off and went to turn around, it hit our gatepost.  No damage to the gatepost, but we’re wondering if that Limo driver still has his job.

Talking of luxurious things, which I’m sure we were, here’s a picture I took of my delightfully soft leather jacket.  It’s just a piece of it, because sometimes detail makes a better picture that the whole thing, and one thing’s for sure, I am not modelling it for you.  Don’t want to go frightening people…

It’s a lovely jacket, but I don’t wear it very often.  I’m usually to be seen in a tatty old dog-walking jacket.  Warm, waterproof, and completely unglamorous.  But it’s nice to know that leather jacket is there for me, should I have a chance to wear it.

Talking of dog walking, take a look at this beautiful green velvet lead with brass fittings.

Just like my jacket, it’s far too good for walks across muddy fields.  This is one of the leads I use to take The Princess visiting on her PAT dog therapy visits. It’s part of her special ‘going out’ wardrobe.

And while we’re on the subject of fancy clothing -

How about these leggings?  Aren’t they something?  And displayed on their own little legs, too!  I found those in the brilliant sunlight of Venice Beach.

From the light to the dark … here’s an interesting object.  I wonder if you can guess what it is?

It’s a tiny lamp - only about three inches or so high.  It’s interesting because it’s a genuine antique Chinese opium lamp.  It’s silver, and I’m sure the glass would clean up and sparkle nicely, too - but for me, the fascination with antique objects is the patina of age and use that they have on them.  This has been well used, for sure, but not for some time.

That lamp has a tenuous connection with my next object, which is a letter opener.

You see, in ‘From Hell’, Johnny Depp’s character was the opium-addicted Inspector Abberline, who is seen using an opium burner similar to mine in the opening sequence of the movie.   This little letter opener is one of hundreds which were given away at the premiere.   If you look carefully, you can see the words ‘From Hell’ stamped on the handle.

These movies are all Depp movies.  ‘The Libertine’, ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’, and ‘Lost in La Mancha’.

And talking of Johnny Depp -

Here he is very kindly spending some time with a young lady in a lilac wheelchair, in Leicester Square, London, at the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory premier.

There. I bet you were wondering if I’d manage to work him in somewhere this week, weren’t you?

I went into town over the weekend and was kind of shocked to find that the place was absolutely crawling with police.  I mean ‘more policemen (and also, presumably policewomen) than I’ve ever seen in one place ever before in my whole life‘ kind of crawling.

I saw the first couple of patrol cars right up at the Magistrate’s Court, which of course isn’t a particular surprise, because whenever they have prisoners brought in from remand centres to appear before the Beak, the security is always high.

Then I spotted a ’secure holding cell’ van plus an ordinary police van in Cathedral Square, and thought maybe the police had been holding an open day or something - you know, like the recruitment drives the armed forces have sometimes in town centres, complete with uniformed members of the army, or air force (not much call for the navy this far inland) and those large touring exhibition trailers.

But I was headed for the market right at the other end of town, and as I drew near, I was amazed to see about half a dozen mini-buses, crammed to the gills with police officers in yellow vests, plus three or four of those manically barking estate wagons that pass for K9 units these days.

There were vans and minibuses in side streets, noses pointing onto the main road, there were dark blue police transport buses parked on the side of the road, and  more headed up the street towards me - and there was a sizeable knot of yellow-jacketed uniforms huddled together on the pavement outside Tesco, all looking over at the other side of the street.

I took a few pictures, and no-one arrested me, so I headed round the back of Tesco, to the market, and did my shopping, and they were all still there when I got back.

What on earth was happening?  There aren’t really any high street banks anymore - well, okay, there are one or two, but not down this end of town - so it wasn’t likely to be an armed robbery.  It could perhaps be a hostage situation?  Maybe some bastard had holed himself up in the City Library, with six young mothers plus their assorted offspring and a sawn-off shotgun?

Or - here’s an idea - maybe they’d discovered a terrorist plot to blown up the city centre, and were about to swoop on a band of desperate ruffians once they’d all plucked up the necessary courage?

Or perhaps there was a drug factory in the shop on the corner?

Or three hundred illegal immigrants in a stolen lorry, all armed to the teeth with poisoned daggers, Kalashnikovs, petrol-driven chainsaws and cheap perfume?

No. None of the above.  Nothing so exciting!

When I approached a young officer (who looked about fourteen years old, by the way), and asked him what was going on, this is what he said:

‘It’s Leeds United.  They’re playing Peterborough this afternoon, and they’ve brought a few thousand fans with them’.

Sheesh.  And I never knew that was a crime.

So, what do you say, folks?  Is this kind of enormous pre-emptive operation a good idea, or a complete waste of precious police time?

I know what I think.

I went shopping this afternoon, and I came back hopping mad. I mean hopping.

You know how you can go out with a list and for one reason and another you don’t seem to be able to get anything you want?  I had one of those days.

One of the things on my list to look at, with a view to buying for OH’s birthday, was a Sony Reader - an interesting device intended to store up to 160 books and allow you to read them directly from the e-ink words on its little e-ink screen.  It comes pre-loaded with 100 classic books (ie, out of copyright, but not necessarily any the worse for that), and allows you around 7,000 page turns without recharging.  That’s probably enough for the average transatlantic flyer, no?

So I went into Waterstones, having heard that they are now stocking these things, and I asked at the desk, and a nice young lady directed me upstairs, where I was proudly shown the Sony Reader.

It was bolted into a perspex stand, which was itself bolted firmly onto the damn shelf of the display unit!!

Wha … ?

‘Can we take it off here so I can see it?’ I asked the sales assistant.

Her face fell and she poked half-heartedly at it.  ‘I don’t think so,’ she said.

And so it was.  Nobody in the shop has the authority to allow a customer access to a Sony Reader until they’ve handed over their two hundred smackers and left the premises.  Nobody.  There is No Way to Unbolt It.  It is a fixture.

Now, here’s the problem.

I’m around five foot four inches tall, and the thing was just a little above my comfort level for reading.   Not only that, but I wear varifocals and have a damaged neck.   There is no way I’m going to be able to see what this reader is like for actual, you know, reading, because to do that, I need it in my hands, so I can position it where I normally like to hold books - ie, at my preferred reading distance, and in the right area of focus for my glasses.  And surely I can’t be unique in that.

If I have to crane my neck up and tip my head so that I can focus on the screen, the answer to the question ‘would you find this device comfortable to use to read a book’ is going to be an unequivocal and resounding ‘No’ - a word which would probably be accompanied by various colourful and almost certainly profane adjuncts.

And I don’t know about you, but if I’m buying something which I’m going to use with my hands, I want my hands on it before I buy it so that I can judge whether it feels good to me, whether it ‘fits’, and whether I actually like it.

So the Sony Reader stayed on the shelf and I gave up on it, resolving not to buy one until someone was willing to let me handle one, and I went into John Lewis to buy a knife, because I tend to buy knives when I’m depressed* and because we actually did need one for a specific task - cutting cheese.

You know what?  They had just the knife I was looking for: perfect size and shape, and not only good quality but a thing of beauty.

It was packaged, ladies and gentlemen.  It was packaged tightly - nay, strait-jacketed - in the following:

1) A layer of thick, rigid plastic, sealed at both ends

2) A thick cardboard box with a window cut into it (at the back) through which the would be owner was allowed tantalising glimpses of the contents

3) A foam insert which half hid the knife itself

4) Those terrible, horrible, hideously frustrating, thick plastic tension ties.  These ones were so tight you’d have been hard put to slide a scalpel blade underneath them

So. This knife, this object of culinary usefulness, made to fit into and be used by a human hand, was totally, 100% inaccessible for me to try the grip and the weight and balance before I paid my money and took it home.

What are we going to do, girls and boys?  What are we going to do about this mistrustful Nanny State ‘we know what’s good for you’ attitude?

I know.

AAAAAAAAAAARRRGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

There.  I feel marginally better, now, thanks.

*A fact that perhaps some purveyors of nameless e-readers might do well to note.