Jim Webster's Blog, page 44

My Southern Exposure

Originally posted on Suddenly they all died. The end.:
With me today is a poet of some renown, the inimitable Tallis Steelyard, to talk a bit about poetry and adventure. :) I am, of course, a poet. None the less I am not biased and recognise that there are other fields of artistic endeavour which…

Requested to perform by a lady, a guest post by Tallis Steelyard

Originally posted on Daily Echo:
image: mfa I have always had a passion for the subtle language of the fan, often a lady’s most formidable weapon. In this instance, it was enough to bring the inimitable Tallis, a poet of some renown, to my domain.  Every once in a while you come across a writer…

It’s wet!

It’s been raining. When I say raining I really mean it’s been chucking it down. Even for Cumbria, it’s been wet. I was looking sheep this morning. I set off, in full waterproofs and the first job was to collect the Sal to take her with me. Normally she’s standing outside her kennel full of …

Card play

Originally posted on Tallis Steelyard:
? There was a time when I used to play quite a lot of cards. I look back and think to my self that I wasn’t a bad player, just handicapped by a paucity of funds and an anxious craving to eat at least two meals a day. But I…

Tis the season (to be offended)

You can tell it’s winter, there’s a chill in the air. It’s so cold that two brass monkeys knocked on our workshop door and asked if I did any brazing. In fact it was so cold that several ‘newspapers’ stopped printing pictures of topless models because it couldn’t find any girls willing to take their …

The essence of true humility

Originally posted on Tallis Steelyard:
I suppose there is a danger I will be accused of becoming obsessed with the fact that artists are inadequately appreciated. So I felt that I should perhaps give an example of the opposite. It could be fifteen years back now; Sarl Onwater had gained the Sinecure supporting the literary…

Funny what you learn

I’m going to have to be careful how I phrase parts of this blog or I could end up with the same sort of people reading it that I had when I wrote about how I was being haunted by Marks & Spencer’s knicker adverts. You see I was chatting to a lady who was …

Cutting the back office.

Various politicians have been saying that local authorities ought to cut their back office and still provide frontline services. It’s an interesting idea and the whole concept of ‘cutting the back office’ probably needs looking at. Firstly you could just put ‘back office’ stuff onto ‘front line staff.’ Let them do it. It has the …

A festival of drabbles!

At this point a fair proportion of the readership of this blog are scratching their heads and asking, “OK so what passing bandwagon has Jim jumped on now in a pathetic attempt to sell a few more books.” Obviously I refute that suggestion; I do not jump on passing bandwagons. I would have you know …

Grumpy old man, strike one!

An older chap, probably my age when I come to think about it, was being interviewed for a job. The interviewers were probably two generations younger than him, frightfully intense, frightfully correct, and there was a clash of cultures just waiting to happen. One interviewer then asked him, “Do you have any weaknesses?” It’s the …