KrasAir clue

I was almost relieved to discover that the mystery traveller hadn't forgotten me. Along with my first post of 2009 comes this envelope, bearing the usual heavy type label and quite an old 2nd class stamp that must have been lying around for a while as the variety with the big fat 2 was dropped from sale ages ago.

The dear sender may have to apologise for breaking the sorting office machine as it looks like the contents got jammed in some works somewhere with most of the usual postmark identifiers at a weird angle and it's surprising the comb got through at all.

Anyway, at last I do seem to have something by way of a clue as KrasAir went out of business in late 2008 and also didn't exactly have hundreds of destinations. In fact, outside Russia, the airports used were few but did include Austria, Germany, Greece and Portugal so I'm looking for someone who has either been behind the Iron Curtain (which would whittle it down to one pretty unlikely person) or one of the other places. It really isn't the sort of airline you pick up from UK so someone has presumably made an internal flight and done so before they went bust. Luckily.

Or they bought some KrasAir combs on Ebay.

More when I think about who's been where recently. I love this. If whoever it is reads this and permits themselves a smug smile then it is thoroughly deserved. Happy new year unless you're a manic stalker and the envelope contains polonium. Oops that'll get spotted by the internet traffic observation boys. Oh well. Another chapter for the book, maybe.

MMIX

I suppose I should translate the previous post. Just use the keys to the left of those I typed and you'll get the message. And Happy New Year, readers and those of you who drop in because you searched for something completely different and, hey, guess what, landed on something completely different indeed!
I had a number of requests to minute proceedings when members of the Paddock Party Committee saw the MMVIII turn into an MMIX on their grandfather clocks. This I can do quite simply as there was absolutely nothing to report that is in any way associated with what will be Paddock Party Number Six. Quite how this could have occurred I am not entirely clear but it may have something to do with the comparatively large amount of wine and champagne consumed and an immense amount of food. However, all previous committee meetings have had similar accompaniment so the absence of Paddock Affairs is odd but has saved me considerable work.
Rather pleasantly, no New Year Resolutions were declared either. You know, the ones that either get broken within a matter of weeks or were suitably vaguely worded as to be reasonably easy to get out of anyway.
I mused whether to ring or wait to be rung. So much to do. So little time.
The first thing we did in 2009 was to play consequences, rather badly. One or two people made a valiant effort to contribute in some style so that the he said-she said etc. produced something worth reading but most were pretty painful and I'm sure it was better when I was 14.
2008 was a good year in many ways and with some great memories, firsts and what I think could be key developments. It ended pretty strangely, though, to say the least, which, of course it did.

Js[[u Mre Urst

O esd hpomh yp etoyr dp,ryjomh niy O vsm~y gpvid pm yjr lrunpstf dp O#, hpomh yp nrf omdyrsf/

More tea, vicar!

Delighted to see The Artist and SarahB scrunching up the gravel over the festive season but encountered a problem when offering some liquid refreshment. I'd just uncorked a bottle of something suitably alcoholic when Sarah wondered whether she could have a cup of tea.

Now a cup of tea really should be quite a simple request. However, in my case it presented two immediate problems: one concerned the matter of tea itself and the other the process of making it. You see, I've managed to avoid making tea for anyone for approximately six years but, well, it is Christmas and they had come bearing gifts so I thought I should make an effort.

From a recent visit to my aged mother I remembered that she'd emptied the contents of a hamper someone had sent her into various bags and given one selection to me in a kind of reverse interpretation of Help The Needy. In that bag I had spotted a packet of tea. I extricated that and was about to fish out a bag when I realised that this was actual tea rather than tea in a tea bag with string and stuff.

So now I needed a tea strainer and a tea pot. A sieve might serve as a substitute for the former but the latter might need some more thought. I definitely did have a tea pot. But where? Most of the cardboard boxes I have been living out of have disintegrated over the years and contents decanted into odd drawers, cupboards or longer lasting boxes and I did have a faint recollection of a tea pot being one of the objects I put somewhere and thinking at the time that that was a silly place to put a tea pot. Now, a kitchen cupboard would have been the obvious first place to look had I been anything approaching normal but as I'm not I looked in a broom cupboard and there, to my delight and some relief as the process was taking some time, was a nice comfortable-looking brown china affair.

I dusted that off and also blew the top layer of dust off some sugar. Swilled some hot water around and disposed of anything that shouldn't have been in a tea pot and was able to create a pretty passable cuppa or two without as much ado as I'd feared.

So now I needn't hide should the vicar pass by.

Beach Boy

Astcote, that's ASTCOTE, Northamptonshire

If you search for Astcote the only results that come up for this blog are two related to The Astcote Arms so it looks as though I need to mention the village in post titles to get noticed. Hopefully this will appear on Google page 1 after a while and if you've arrived that way then click the big button above to go to the beginning.

Those cards

All those people with birthdays late in the year. Most inconsiderate! I mean, as if we haven't got enough to do running around wondering what to do with Grandma for Christmas. So last minute cards have been the order of the day recently and the theme of ridiculous story + kids' writing seems to have worked surprsingly well. So much so that, by popular request, links to these are now available on-line.