Hearing this word more frequently these days, I asked Google what, precisely, it might mean: upcycle verb gerund or present participle: upcycling re-use (discarded objects or material) in such a way as to create a product of higher quality or value…
Category: Anecdote
The Joy of Editing
I don’t come by editing naturally. Rather, I fall in love with the words as they emerge, and feel loathe to mess with them thereafter. Always have done. But I learned, as a graduate student in the biomedical sciences, that…
Liz Conway, Bookbinder
Regular readers of the diary may recall the appearance of some pages of the tourist guide called ‘The Roman Wall District’ a couple months ago. A very tatty and bedraggled copy, we wanted to refresh it for convenient viewing by…
Very slow sloe gin
Okay, it could have been even slower, had we planted sloe berries, rather than the lovely saplings that came to us as a delightful Christmas present a few years ago. But just waiting for the first fruits to emerge from…
A Tea Set’s Journey
Richard Skinner from Allenheads was stimulated by my musings on crockery in an earlier diary piece, to pursue a developing story that began for him when he and Barbara met Dick and Hilary Dorward during a holiday last year in…
Poetry: Practice of Life
It’s often said that, like acting, you have to live in order to be able to write. I loved poetry in my youth, but then decided I needed a lot more living to be able to appreciate it. In fact,…
Cock Robin
While I was writing up some of the text for the little photo album we’ve been creating for our grandsons, Carrie shared a nursery rhyme with me that she learned as a child. No doubt older readers will remember the…
Jake the donkey
There’s not a lot to say about Jake, who lives next door, and sometimes gets out into the field behind us, except that he’s been adopted from his previous home in the hills above Wooley, and he has the normal…
Grapes of delight
Not something one usually associates with the bleak North Pennines, grapes can be grown in south-facing polytunnels, as long as the fermenter (us!) doesn’t depend solely on the natural sweetness of the fruit, but is prepared to add in extra…
A word about crockery
Many of us, perhaps especially on the male side of the gender balance, are happy to eat our meals on whatever holds the food conveniently. Utilitarianism is sort of our middle name. But there’s an aesthetic to eating socially that’s…