Blogadoon - stop reading and run away

Sunday 26th August

I've spent altogether too much time recently catching up, belatedly, with the infamous bitchfest that is Naff Naff Queen Queen - where the milk of human kindness turns to cheese.

Catch it while you can: it may not be there for much longer (but then again, its already had more departures than Liverpool Street station).

Friday 24th August

Obituary Watch: Lieutenant-Commander 'Fairy' Filmer

Lieutenant-Commander "Fairy" Filmer, who has died aged 91, helped to sink a German cruiser in a dive-bombing attack; spent five years as a German prisoner-of-war; and later was a master of merchant ships in the South Seas.

Between April 12 and 26 Filmer flew five more sorties against German shipping and the Luftwaffe from Hatston in the Orkneys and the carrier Glorious. On the last of these he broke away from his flight of three Skuas to attack three Heinkel 111s, shooting down one but being caught by a burst of fire.

Blinded by spraying petrol and with his cockpit full of smoke, he ditched his aircraft in a fjord, but his torpedo air gunner, Petty Officer Ken Baldwin, was killed.

Filmer was ever afterwards haunted by the thought that had he waited for his flight to follow, Baldwin might never have been killed.

After the war Filmer flew again with the Royal Navy but retired in 1958, returning to his first love, the merchant navy, and within 12 months he was master of a ship belonging to the King of Tonga.

He continued for a further 16 years, based at Fiji, and sailing between Tahiti, Rarotonga, Honolulu and the Gilbert Islands, before retiring aged 69 to Durban.

"Fairy" Filmer, who died on July 15, never married. "Just as well," he said. "A wife would not have seen much of me over the years."

Thursday 23rd August

Kew Gardens, Spring 2007

Wednesday 22nd August

Allow me, if you will, another little administrative aside:

Given that blogs are usually characterised by a plethora of links to relevant sites, irregular readers (which is to say most of you, given my pathetic post-rate of late) might be forgiven for thinking Blogadoon unusual in not having such links.

Sure, you'll have seen the occasional scarlet word, and taken it quite correctly as some kind of portal to another place.

But I've always been wary of in-text links that draw so much attention to themselves that they more or less insist you stop reading and run away (like, you need encouraging to do that?).

So, for at least two years now, most in-text links on Blogadoon have been much harder to spot.

But they are there: difficult to spot but - I hope - not hard to find (as with this entire paragraph.)

Tuesday 21st August

Wentworth Street, Winter 2007

Monday 20th August

I wonder if you spotted the rather sudden swerve in photographic offerings marked by the picture below?

Believe it or not, I do try to maintain running themes with the pictures I post for you here, even though I fully appreciate that I'm usually the only one who appreciates the connection; sometimes, a run is short-lived (I only managed four Wrecks); often, it's over-extended (I think we can all agree that Flowers went on way too long).

But the most recent series was, I think, the longest running yet: thirty-five all told - as you could have spotted, in the unlikely event that you cared, by clocking the filenames.

I won't spell out the theme, such as it was (you need all the entertainment you can get). But I will, by way of mitigation, cite this previous post..

So much for that, anyway. I wonder what I'll think of next?