10 Welcome to friends from Minsk!

This entry is a bit special. My good friend Valentina from Minsk in Belarus has asked recently started a club for people who want to learn to speak and write English, and is situated in the IBA Training Centre - one of the largest IT companies in Belarus. Valentina works as a lecturer in English as a Foreign Language at the University of Minsk. The members of the club are advanced students of English but wish to improve their use and knowledge of the language.

For some obscure reason Valentina thinks I can help!!


Valentina and I met some years ago through a charity called the Friends of Chernobyls Children based in Blackburn where I used to live. She came over to the UK as an interpreter for a short time, and we have corresponded since then.

She started the English club some weeks ago and has asked me to write a few words of welcome and explanation to the members of her club to try to introduce them to a real live Englishman. Well, I am he!

If you are from that club, I wish to welcome you to my blog, and hope that you will feel happy to correspond with me through these pages. You will find that I have a sense of humour which is a bit strange, but is very English. We are known throughout the world (well, the English speaking world) as people with a 'peculiar' sense of humour. I hope you will be able to follow it through these pages and that you will appreciate it.

So, first let me introduce some of my animal friends. As you will know, the English are great lovers of animals. Sometimes we like animals more than our children, and if you have ever met any English children or teenagers, then you will understand whey we like animals so much!!


This first animal who I share my home with is Katbit. She is a Rabbit, but when you push your finger into her stomach she makes a sound like a cat. So, my landlady, who was given Katbit as a birthday present, decided that as she was neither fully cat or rabbit, that she would be called Katbit.

She is sometimes very noisy, but more often than not, she keeps quiet. The only real problem I have with Katbit is that she steals my chocolate - often!

Maybe I should explain the dress and Tee shirt she is wearing.

Shortly after my landlady, Yvonne, was given Katbit she decided that a naked Rabbit/Cat was not going to be very happy without clothes, so we went to one of the local supermarkets, Asda, to find her some clothes.

Please believe me, I am not telling you a joke now, what I am going to tell you really did happen.

When I walked into the supermarket it was about five minutes after Yvonne had gone in there, so I walked around until I found her, in the children's clothing section.

She was looked at the little blue dress you see Katbit wearing in the photo above. Alongside her was one of the supermarket staff, a lady of about 55 years of age. They were both seriously discussing which size of dress Katbit should wear. The lady, not realising that Yvonne was talking about a Katbit said, "You would be surprised how quickly small children grow when they get their first clothes. I am sure that your daughter will soon grow into it. You will be surprised how quickly they grow"

Yvonne looked her in the eye and said, " I am sure you are right, but I think I will still take the smallest dress"

So. Katbit was bought the blue dress and tee shirt you see in the photograph, and I had to drag Yvonne out of the supermarket before the management through us out!

This animal on the other hand is Xiamen. (You pronounce it Shamen - it's the name of a very beautiful city on the coast of China).

She is real. She is a German Shepherd dog who is about six months old. A farmer was breeding her and other dogs for fighting. We got her from a charity who rescue cats and dogs who are being mistreated. Proof that the English do love animals I suppose.

We have had her for the past four months and she is growing into a very beautiful, intelligent and playful dog. I will tell you more about the other dogs, cats and rabbits I share my home with in the future.

In the meantime, I hope that for my visitors from Belarus that you will enjoy the silly things I write, that you will e mail me from time to time, and that you enjoy the tea I will send you from time to time.

Take care, work hard and be happy.
David

9 Krakow

These images are just a few of some which I took on a visit to Poland just before Christmas 2006. Amazing what a cheapo flight will achieve these days.Krakow is a very beautiful city - well the old part is. Unfortunately the older parts of the city are pretty dismal. Genuine old style Communist grey concrete.

Someone must have made a fortune in those days by supplying concrete. Most of the place seems to have been made of it.

The other images are of Birkenau and Auschwitz.

8 Murano and Burano

The following photographs were taken in 2006 on the islands of Murano and Burano which are both close together in the lagoon outside Venice. Inevitable that the one day chosen to leave a hot and sweaty Venice was the one day when there were some fairly spectacular thunderstorms.

Whilst it was a little bit chilly on the islands, the presence of the imminent storms did produce some really spectacular skies and colour combinations.

7 Rabbits

So, the almost dead rabbit was taken into the house in the middle of a late January Sunday afternoon and after a bit of cajoling decided that it would eat something. Carrots in fact, well everyone knows that Bugs Bunny thrives and exists only on carrots. And this one certainly seemed to thrive. They went down in no time flat.

And then came out the other end in a very round sticky mess, all over the stone kitchen floor. Along with the most foul smelling yellowish liquid which I correctly guessed was urine.


It was about that time I telephoned an expert, my daughter, who managed somehow to suppress her laughter long enough to tell me that rabbits 'poo' was guaranteed to be sticky if all it had was carrot. Thanks a lot! So, taking bits of her other advice we borrowed a hutch from a friend who had had a rabbit for a pet in the past and the rabbit (who responded to the name of "Rabbit" ) settled down for the night.

Over the following weeks we placed notices in the house windows and enquired of neighbours about the identity of our house guest. No one came near to claim him (we found out later that it was a "him") and then one day in February a friend suggested that he had been dumped by someone who had given it as a gift at Christmas. So, because of this and the fact that he continues to 'dump' all over the kitchen floor - where he has free reign during the day - he has become known as Dumper.

As the weeks wore on Dumper proved to have quite a character of his own, and the biggest pair of gonads seen outside a male human. We took him for a visit to the vets to have him neutered one day. This meant an overnight stay for the operation to be carried out under anaesthetic, and the following day we collected him from the surgery, somewhat subdued and feeling a bit sorry for himself.

But, I am jumping ahead of myself a bit as there is more to this story than this.

No 6 Dogs, Rabbits and Kittens

When Willow died last year there was a period of mourning, and then in early January a friend told my landlady that she had a kitten for her.

My reaction was predictable and instant. A kitten is the last thing I want to live with, but as it is not my house I had to temper what my needs were with the rest of the house. In fact, come to think of it, I was dead lucky to get away with being allowed an opinion at all! But there you are.

Anyway, this friend kept on telling my landlady that the kitten was growing and would be fine to come and live with us by the time it was about ten weeks old. I kept biting my lip and saying nothing yet hoping that the bloody thing would go away. It didn't go away though, and I became resigned to the fact that the peace and harmony of the household was going to be destroyed by some razor edged moggie which would climb curtains and my legs with equal ease.

Then at the end of January I was just about to get into my car when I noticed something lying under the back wheel of the car. It was a light tan coloured rabbit. It was tiny, shivering and almost hypothermic. I couldn't very well leave it there now could I? So I took it into the house. More later...

No 5 Cats

Some people like animals, and I have to confess that I am one of them.

Where I live my landlady and her brother have had a succession of cats over a long period of years. Until September last year there were three of them. There is Daisy, who's full name is Dirty Daisy Dumpling. She is a tabby sort of thing and five and a half years old. Very sharp creature with a vocal opinion on most things. Quick as a barrel of monkeys and sharp as a box of knives. Catches most of what she eats outside in the woods at the back of the house and occasionally brings little live gifts back home for anyone else to eat. Kind sort of cat. This is a picture of Daisy after she has just updated a web site she was working on. Clever cat at the best of times, and sometimes downright brilliant.

Then there is her twin brother Forest. Full name is Forest Gump. So called because he is very kind and wants to make friends with everyone, but is not the most quick witted cat you have ever seen. In fact, Forest is a bit thick. He thinks a lot, and after a while forgets what he was thinking about and that worries him.

Last week I started to talk to him about Albert Einstein, and that really freaked him out. He just could not get his head around Black Holes and stuff like that. After half an hour of sitting thinking about them he gave up and settled down in the red cat house for a sleep. He does that quiet well really.

Finally there was Willow. I say 'was' because she died in September. She was a long haired American Ragdoll cat, and a bit of a character. In fact not to put too small a point on it, she was a pain the the bum at times. But she did not have a bad nature to her, very demanding but also very easy to read what she was thinking as well. We were all quite sad when she died. This is a picture of Willow resting.

Willow was a great one for ensuring that everyone in the household kept to good time for meals etc. About 6pm each evening she would round people up from the various parts of the house and then go and sit on them to make absolutely sure that they stopped what they were doing and feed her. Not a stupid cat was Willow, not a stupid cat at all.

No 4 New Buildings for Old

Seems strange to suddenly be in April. It appears to have sneaked up on me a bit, maybe I'm getting old.

Took myself off to Southport today, which used to be rather quiet refined seaside resort on the west coast of Lancashire. Brother how it has changed!! It's becoming more of a Blackpool type of place with Kiss Me Quick hats and sticks of rock with the name of the town through the middle of it.

On the plus side there is a rather nice residential development apparently nearing completion on the sea front. I believe it used to be an old hospital dating back to 1882 - if the inscription near the roof is anything to go by - and now there is a large attachment on the back side of it which appears to have at least doubled the size of the place. From the outside, and this is what I am particularly interest in, it looks to have been constructed in exactly the manner as the original building, with the same lintels and roof ornaments in place. Looks terrific to tell you the truth. More power to the elbow of the architect who designed it.

Comparing that to the many new properties being thrown up all over the place I wonder why the planning authorities allow some of the rubbishy monstrosities to crawl their way up from the slime. We allow developers to get away with murder in this country.

Compare these building with the ones put up by Spain - I'm thinking mainly of the ones in Barcelona like Antonio Gaudí. They are fantastic looking buildings. I sometimes think that in the UK we are too easily convinced that second best is good enough.