Be ceiling you

Shortly before Christmas, a hole appeared in the ceiling of our porch, which was goodness knows how old and possibly original to the building  The hole looked a bit like this, only smaller.


Then it grew to look exactly like that; then it grew to look like that but even bigger. Each fall stabilised it a little, until the edges of the new hole succumbed to gravity and fell. You can see an incipient dangly bit next to the light fitting.

But no more. The entire old ceiling now looks like this:


… and its replacement like this.


Drying out nicely, which sadly means we’ve missed the chance to do some interesting Sistine Chapel-type frescoes in the plaster. Probably just as well.

Snow angels of Abingdon


The snow is all but gone but in Albert Park the remains of the snowmen linger on, scattered around the grass. It’s like something Anthony Gormley might have installed when he was very young.

Hello, world

I just thought I’d announce that at some point today the planet will have orbited the sun exactly 44 times since I first opened my mouth, took a deep breath of fresh Northern Ireland air and howled my protest at being evicted from my nice warm home of the last nine months. We’re shortly off to see Slumdog Millionaire, which is probably something we’d have done anyway but for the sake of argument is officially the Birthday Treat.

In other news, Far Frozen North CID have been in touch again; there are a further 12 eBay accounts linked with the gentlemen under investigation and it’s thought he may have profited by about £50k over the last three years. That’s a lot of Galactica boxsets.