CAPTCHA

This is the unpronounceable and unspellable name for the unreadable device composed of weird letters and numbers that pops up when you want to subscribe to something on the Internet. All squidgy and interlaced these images are intended to prevent machines from imitating people and receiving emails. They appear in a little box and you have to copy them accurately. It seems only humans can do this. The problem is that I can't. I try and fail repeatedly as they give me ever easier versions (or, sometimes, more difficult ones) until a backward monkey on a bad day could do it. Clearly this is very worrying in two ways: I cannot always access my Facebook page and get an apologetic message which shows they DO know who I am in fact. But more disquieting still is what it says about me. Am I somewhere suspended in a cyberspace chain of evolution, neither human nor machine? Am I a kind of missing link between homo sapiens and a robot?

Weather

This is NOT a gripe about what the sky is throwing at us right now - climate is what you expect and weather is what you get! (Mark Twain? Misquoted?) I like weather and missed it when I lived in California for six months and experienced climate - so boring that I longed for a British "showers with sunny intervals" or "sunny intervals with showers" scenario.

Our postman

Five ticks for our postie! He is tall, blond and Norman - not his name but his ancestry. He knows how to leave my (daily!) Amazon parcels in a specially appointed dustbin at the back door. He then turns the pointed stone on top so that it faces outwards not inwards as a secret sign he has left something. Ooops - not so secret now, I suppose!

Water

Water is clearly A Good Thing and deserves its maximum five ticks - but why oh why is it always in the wrong place? Far too much of it is down my neck when I am out hiking and not enough in parts of Britain where people are suffering hose-pipe bans. They can have some of mine for their cabbages if they like!

My Kindle

I love it and have bought it a lovely red leather case (not the one with a light) which opens like a book. I gather that most people buy light reading matter for their Kindles and show their hefty classics on the bookshelf. But I am the reverse: my Kindle is full of free Jane Austen and Balzac and my shelves weighted down with Bill Bryson and Jilly Cooper!

Digital TV

To protest about digital TV seems rather like objecting to the invention of the wheel! I am sure it is fine for city dwellers but in this small town in Wales we have loss of signal and pixillations all too frequently. There am I in dressing gown and cocoa (if you see what I mean) ready for the ten o'clock news and what I get is a screen of dancing squares like a crazy art installation and a background of strangled sounds. Why did they have to turn off the analogue signal? I do not need channels called Rabbit - or worse - I just want Dad's Army!

The Sea

I love being by the sea in a small cove in North Pembrokeshire where the water is clear and cold. But sometimes, in other places, I get:
Mal de Mer
It's calm tonight, like some old smelly dog
tongueing my ankles: rotten seaweed fronds
curl round my big toes; ice-cream papers clog
the space under my foot arches; beyond
float lumps of scum, dead ducks on a millpond.
And now a gale blows up: foul brown spume flies
into my ears; salt grit invades my eyes;
two rubber things, unspeakable, attack
my knees and bloodless, blue, goose-pimply thighs;
I'm felled by an oiled clump of bladderwrack.