Hundreds of Things

I’d like to wish a happy and healthy new year to all my family and friends, and to everyone else who stumbles upon this blog. One of my resolutions for 2009 (one of many…) is to post more often, and to post more often on tea.
It’s a big year for us: Jill and I [...]

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I’ve been listening to the Weather tonight, and for a large part of this week in fact.
By that I mean I’ve been listening to the fruits of the Space Weather recording session last Saturday in Glasgow. The line-up was as it is now and ever shall be, amen: Alistair Crosbie (electric guitar), [...]

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We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod,
–They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.
Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles solved years ago;
And some words played between us to and fro–
On which [...]

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I received a giant parcel from the great Scott Wilson at Yunnan Sourcing today. The main bulk of this order is a set of seven pu-erh beengs of the Menghai classic recipes 7542, 7582, 7512, 7532, 7262, 7572 and 7592, called Six-Famous-Tea-Mountain (I love that hyphenation and awkward singular/plural!).
The whole caboodle comes in a [...]

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Here are my first efforts with this camera. The film is Ilford Delta 400 and these are scanned from prints, which were developed locally. They’re straight scans, without any processing or cleaning.

I’m not sure I like the tints which the developing process has added to some, although not all, of the five I’ve [...]

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I’ve always enjoyed what I consider—no doubt pretentiously—to be rather unusual musics. There, I’ve said it.
At school, I came across a group of strange individuals performing under the name Ring. There’s very little about them on the great interweb, perhaps reflecting how individual and obscure their music was at the time. They [...]

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I’ve just received a beautiful new (well, really quite old) FED-2 rangefinder camera made in the former Soviet Union some time in the 1950s. The FED-2 was the first and very successful attempt by Soviet camera makers to improve upon the original and vastly more expensive Leica II and IIIg designs.

The camera above is [...]

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It’s a fact that no matter how small the boxes are which arrive in the post for me, both of our cats will attempt to park themselves inside them when they’re empty (and often as they’re being emptied). Here’s Hamish happily ensconced inside the box in which I received an order from Puerhshop yesterday. [...]

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Well, in a twist on the title and content of a slightly earlier post, I’m delighted to say that Spring definitely seems to have sprung around these parts. The temperature and sunshine over the last few days has been consistently good. Maybe I’m speaking too soon, but it is May, after all…
Perhaps I’m [...]

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Well, I’m not, as a matter of fact, a cat but I have recently been reading a book with that title by the Japanese author, Natsume Sōseki, written at the turn of the Twentieth Century.

Originally published in ten instalments in the literary magazine Hototogisu between 1905 and 1906, I Am a Cat is a [...]

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