Author: penny

  • Options for Austin, Tx

    I’ve just come back from several weeks in Austin, Texas. This wasn’t a holiday as such, but I was mostly free to please myself and do whatever I fancied.  I had various guidebooks, and there is an array of websites with suggestions.  The big tourist things – Lady Bird Park, the State Capitol building, the […]

  • Autumn Shirt Reshuffle

    This is my experience of my autumn seasonal swop of my clothes: specifically how this year’s swop is spurring me to get rid of things. It helped that we took our annual summer holiday in September, missing much of the summer to autumn transition in the UK. I had a week at home, before a […]

  • Monday Thought

    You will never be younger then you are right now.

  • Coloris Colour Numbers

    Coloris is a multicoloured DMC embroidery thread which the manufacturers describe as “combining four complimentary colours in each skein of six stranded cotton”. They are very pretty and you can do interesting things with them. What I hadn’t seen in any of the publicity was that the colours in each Coloris thread match to a […]

  • Voting Remain in spite of the campaign

    I was in the middle of writing this when the news about Jo Cox’s shooting broke.The official campaigns haven’t re-started yet. One can hope for a kinder politics, but will the leopards change their spots?  Way back in February, Question Time was due to be filmed locally to me in Poole.  It was just after […]

  • HS2 Vacancy Ahead? – Chair of the Board

    This is the article I wrote for Stop HS2, but it was never published, because it turned out this was only a bit of the story – and Higgins wasn’t planning to be off at all, it was other people who may have decided it was time for him to go. For more, see Is […]

  • On waffling….

    Lord Tebbit (Con): I am grateful to the noble and learned Lord. Will he just come to the point and meet the point that has been ably expressed by a number of noble and learned Lords? He is just waffling. Is he trying to talk it out until 11 pm? Lord Davidson of Glen Clova: […]

  • My thoughts on Ada Lovelace Day and HS2

    As a former computer programmer, I’m fully behind the idea of Ada Lovelace Day.  I think it is great to remind people that women have been involved in STEM careers for centuries. I find it amusing that the first long distance drive was by Mrs Benz to her mother after an argument with her husband, […]

  • Representing West Moors WI at the WI centenary

    In 2015 it was West Moors Women’s Institute’s turn to send a delegate to the National Federation’s AGM. It was the centenary of the first ever WI being formed, so this was going to be a special AGM, and I was the very lucky person to be selected to go to represent West Moors. It […]

  • Flexible autumn

    I write this on a blustery June day when someone has tweeted “is it this winter or next winter?” Whether June is this winter or not is a bit like saying that an HS2 event is supposed to happen “in the autumn”. Various pronouncements were made yesterday along the lines of the Phase 2 announcement will […]