Recognition

Last evening the annual Yorkshire Pudding Blog Awards ceremony was held in exclusive Pudding Towers - a secluded designer mansion in the leafy suburbs of Sheffield. These highly prized awards represent the pinnacle of achievement in any blogger's career.

Guests arrived to a Tetley's bitter reception and the music of Beyonce Knowles wafting live from the mansion's glittering south ballroom. Introductory nibbles included miniature snacks inspired by Spanish tapas but with a Yorkshire theme - fish and chips, bread and butter pudding, toad in the hole, Wensleydale curd tart and of course tiny Yorkshire puddings in rich beef and onion gravy.

Lord Pudding gave the opening address recalling several readable bloggers who appear to have fallen by the wayside this year - Arthur Clewley of "Arthur Clewley's Diary" who now dwells in a residential home on the outskirts of Richmond, North Yorkshire, Reidski who is currently working in a haggis factory in Ayrshire, "Retarded Rugrat" who is too busy enjoying her first year of married life in Vancouver to bother blogging any more and "Arctic Fox" from Huddersfield who now resides in Armley Gaol, Leeds for unspeakable crimes in public houses.

Lord Pudding spoke of the need to maintain high standards in blogging - "Blogging is a new art form with much wider possibilities than staccato tweets on Twitter or email banter between friends. Regular blog building creates both a window on the world and an ongoing opportunity to freely publicise the words you feel like writing on any number of subjects. You never know who might be directed to your blog or who might simply stumble upon it. Bloggers make friends - not quite like the friends we treasure in everyday offline life - but nonetheless people who come to matter to us because we have connected with them..."

The ceremony's main sponsor droned on in similar vein for half an hour or so. Some light snoring could be heard from the middle rows before the awards were presented. In summary:-

PHOTOGRAPHIC BLOGGER AWARD - Steve at "Occupied Country"
TOP GRANDAD BLOGGER - Sam at "The Golden Hill" (Hard luck Steve!)
PROMOTION OF STORYTELLING AWARD - Farida at "Saints and Spinners"
MOST HISTORICALLY AWARE BLOG - Hadriana at "Hadriana's Treasures"
TOP AMERICAN BLOGGER - Robert at "Rhymes With Plague"
TOP NEW ZEALAND BLOGGERS (Joint First) Katherine at "The Last Visible Dog" and David at "Arcane Enigma"
TOP WESTRAY ISLAND BLOGGER - Malc at "Edge of Nowhere" (Stiff competion for this award)
TOP COUNTRY LIFE BLOGGING AWARD - Debbie at "Ramblings" (Mopsa)
THE SUSAN BOYLE AWARD for THE TOP TRANSATLANTIC JET SET BLOGGER - Ian at "Retirement Rocks"
TOP WELSH BLOGGER and TOP DOG WALKING BLOGGER - Jenny at "Demob Happy Teacher"
MOST HELPFUL AUSTRALIA BASED BLOGGER AWARD - Michael at "In Sydney with an Old Leica"
TOP OLDHAM CLOGGER Steven at "Crofty's Blog"
TOP NORTHAMPTONSHIRE BLOGGER and TRAVELOG BLOGGER- "JJ" at "All Cobblers"
SOUTH EAST ASIA BLOGGER AWARD - Mr & Mrs Reginald Booth at "Bangkok Booths"

Last but not least the overall award for "Blogger of The Year 2009" went to Daphne from "My Dad's A Communist" (see photo right). The judging panel considered her blog to be "humane, humorous and honest using carefully crafted but accessible English". Wearing an emerald green sequinned evening gown from "Matalan", fishnet stockings and platinum stillettos, Daphne floated to the stage to collect her award, recalling her impoverished childhood in the mean back alleys of south Leeds. "I never thought I'd come this far," she stuttered.

All award winners are entitled to copy and paste this exclusive 2009 widget into their own blogs at no financial cost to themselves! Any bloggers who feel cheated of richly deserved awards may send £50 to Pudding Towers and your award will be sent by return of post.

Quiz

There's something about growing older that requires one's life to have more predictability, more routine and less randomness. Hence in my life, Monday is when we make spaghetti bolognaise for our evening meal with mushrooms cooked separately in butter and oil, a sprinkling of fresh parmesan and warm bread rolls. I always wash mine down with half a pint of milk - the only time in the week when I ever drink it.

"EastEnders" comes on at eight o'clock during which time nobody is allowed to call me and if they do I am most definitely "out". At twenty past nine, it's time to wander up to one of our locals - "The Prince of Wales" where Monday is the "Fun Fortunes" quiz night. I meet up with two Michaels as I have done for the past twelve years. There's Mick the former warehouseman who lives with his aged mother in a surburban semi that is little different from ours and there's Mike the folk singing English teacher exiled from Oldham which, rumour has it, exists in that strange world called Lancashire over the Pennine hills.

We have a good laugh and a natter, arguing the toss over the quiz questions and enjoy a bit of banter with the bar staff and other regulars like the gang from "The Grouse Inn", the dentist and his wife, Clive, Ian and Anne, Gordon and Wendy. Familiar faces. Lecherously, the two Michaels will often ogle shapely local beauties sidling up to the bar which is a tendency I find quite offensive - I mean some of those young ladies are old enough to be their daughters!

Over the years we have done quite well on the "Fun Fortunes" quiz, many times winning the top prize of eight beer tokens and often winning four tokens for the best team name. Mike came up with tonight's name -

"Well Christmas day has been and gone

And memories are growing murky

But can someone please tell me what to do

With all this bleeding turkey!"

Four tokens in the bag worth at least £10.

A typical question in the quiz would be - "Give the names of five world leaders who were considered evil". There are two marks for the top answer which was of course Adolf Hitler and one mark for the next four answers - giving a maximum total of six points. After Hitler you think Mussolini, Margaret Thatcher, Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Robert Mugabe, George W. Bush and you decide the best four.

Trouble is nowadays you see some quiz teams using mobile phones, texting, accessing the net to gather their answers. It never seems quite fair. But in spite of that threat, Mick, Mike and Mr Pudding regularly come out on top and have the last laugh. It's a good feeling when the landlady Becky or her assistant Abby count down possible quiz scores - "Has anybody got forty five or higher? No? Forty four? Forty three? Forty two?" and we yell "Yep! Over here love!" for the umpteenth time.

Tonight I wandered homewards with William, our next door neighbours' son, who is in his late thirties and gradually recovering from a major brain operation. The pavements were still slippery with the icy remains of last week's snow and a Sherlock Holmes mist had descended over our prosperous Sheffield suburb. Same again next Monday - how very comforting.

Score

So here we are at Christmas 2009. The harsh reality show has been underway since 2001 so what is the score as we look towards a new year? Well obviously in first position comes the USA with a total of 938, next the United Kingdom with 243, followed by Canada with 134. It has been like a snowball rolling down a hill. With each passing year the numbers increase exponentially.

Of course, I am referring to the horror that is Afghanistan. Those numbers are the death toll - mostly young men with their lives ahead of them. As more money, personnel and resources are pumped in, the casualty figure grows. But nobody is telling us about the killing of "insurgents" or those who are classified as "Taliban" fighters. We ought to know but is anyone counting and why is Taliban strength growing instead of weakening?

Ask the man or woman in the street why we are in Afghanistan and they will be hard-pressed to answer. It's something about preventing terrorism - but is this the way to go about it? And what guarantee have we got that all this investment, all this killing, all this hurt will ever achieve the desired aim. Talking, hands of friendship, agreement, mutual understanding - surely that should be the way ahead. Jaw jaw, not war war.

I have said it before and I'll say it again - BRING OUR BROTHERS HOME! More of us should be saying it. How many more coffins and body bags before Christmas 2010? Have we learnt nothing?

STOP PRESS Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (23) suffered third degree burns when he attempted to blow up a Christmas Day Delta flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. Oh dear! Personally, I would be all for executing this pathetic excuse for a human being after pouring vinegar over his burns. Endangering the lives of a plane load of innocent civilian passengers is both heinous and cowardly. But what has this got to do with Afghanistan? Should we send troops in to Nigeria or perhaps London where the evil creature was an engineering student? It will be interesting to see, as the days pass by, whether or not he had ever been to Afghanistan. Even if he had been there, his thwarted attempt at mass murder proves that air terrorism is an international phenomenon which knows no borders. Killing the "Taliban" and innocent Afghan citizens could surely never have stopped Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

Greetings

Another Christmas! Merry Christmas to all who have visited this blog over the last twelve months - long time blog friends and new. Let's hope we are all safe, well and happy when Christmas comes along next year.

When you were little, did you ever visit Santa in a department store?

Here are just a few happy kiddies who paid him a visit. Afterwards, they would no doubt have eagerly awaited Santa's famed nocturnal visit. Creeping into their bedrooms with special presents in his sack while his panting reindeer tried desperately to grip the roof with their cervine hooves. Good old Father Christmas - making children's dreams come true!

There is no truth in the malicious rumour that only former Irish priests of the Catholic persuasion are entitled to apply for seasonal Santa posts. Santas shown below are Sean McGuire, Patrick O'Hoolihan, Dermot Riley, Michael Casey and Seamus O'Rafferty.

Images

Does anybody know the origin of the saying "the camera never lies"? I'd like to think it was coined in the middle of the nineteenth century when photography was in its infancy and when it seemed that after clicking camera buttons you simply got what you had seen. Nowadays the notion has been well and truly flattened and any Tom, Dick or Harry can manipulate photographs in order to improve, enhance or alter what was seen originally - in other words to "lie".

I spent a little time playing around with my HP Image Zone. Above you can see what I have done with a segment of the swan photo I took last week in Lathkilldale. It has almost become an abstract design statement. Below left there's the original photo and then the same photo after I had cropped it and slightly enlarged the swans.

I rather likes this "litho" version of one of my Easter Island moai pictures. It's as if clipped from some nineteenth century adventurer's printed account.

But here's the original.
I remember that the bright light that afternoon was against me. Obviously the best time to take good photos of the moai on the south eastern slope of Rano Raraku would be mid morning. Here's the same moai with image anhancement via HP Image Zone - altering the ambient light, flipping it and playing with "contrast" and "filters":-
Hey, I'm no expert but images mean a lot to me. It's how my brain works. You'll notice that every blogpost I have ever produced has contained at least one image. With digital photography available to us all, it's fun and gratifying to be able to manipulate the images we produce. Remember past years when you'd send a roll of holiday film off for processing? You'd wait eagerly for your prints to come and often when you ripped open the Kodak or Max Spielmann package you'd be disappointed. Now we have control over our pictures - no longer spoilt by careless labs or cheap printing methods.

Ginger

Earlier this week, a certain news story hit the TV and press - it fell into the category of "human interest" and caused some smirking, ironic sideswipes and gasps of despair from several dark, blonde or grey-haired news reporters.

Essentially what happened was this. Mrs Davinia Phillips aged thirty of York spotted a particular Christmas card in her local Tesco store. It poked fun at people with red or ginger hair. As it happens, Mrs Phillips is the red haired mother of three red-haired daughters. She complained to Tesco and in a commercially skillful act of magnanimity, the monstrous supermarket chain promised to remove all examples of this card from its stores. Here's the card:-

Was Mrs Phillips right to complain or was she just getting her knickers in a twist over nothing? Personally I am 100% behind her. Although I am not ginger-haired myself, as a teacher I often witnessed ginger-haired children being teased. On more than one occasion I had to comfort the upset victims of this "harmless" banter. And I can remember two or three ginger-haired teenagers who dyed their hair black to ward off the hurtful name-calling.

As Mrs Phillips rightly said, if similar cards were made to mock Muslim, black or disabled children the nation would be in uproar. Accepting others for what they are and seeing differences as enriching and healthy is fundamental within a democratic society. Red hair will often speak of a distant Celtic heritage and there have been many high-achieving and attractive red-haired people. Being ginger should not be a subject for cruel mockery so I say well done Mrs Phillips - not just on behalf of ginger haired children everywhere but for the progress of civilisation too.

Herbalife

Tupperware, Kleeneezee, Amway, Avon. What have these organisations got in common? Yes. You at the back... That's right. They are companies that have promoted and sold products in a different way from more typical organisations that present their products in stores or supermarkets.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw an intriguing classified ad in a magazine called "Teacher". The ad gave no clue as to what the product or service behind it might be. Anyway, I rang up and this morning drove to the Totley area of Sheffield to meet semi-retired couple Gillian and Mike who are well-ensconced in a company called "Herbalife". They gave me a "Herbalife" energy drink and a nutritional snack bar. Their home was spotlessly clean and I could see their cat waiting outside their spacious conservatory to be let in.

Until this meeting, all that I knew about "Herbalife" is that they sponsor David Beckham's current club - L.A. Galaxy. It seems that like the other companies I mentioned, "Herbalife" doesn't work through shops. It has the sort of construction we associate with pyramid selling whereby if I decided to join up and somehow sell a few products, a chunk of my commission would go to Gillian and Mike.

I have never been one for vitamin products, energy drinks or diet formulas and my life philosophy is more about enjoying my time on this planet, eating and drinking what I want rather than becoming religiously health-conscious. So I am already thinking that "Herbalife" hardly fits with who I am. However, I am not yet going to dismiss the "opportunity" completely. Before doing so I thought I would ask visitors to this blog what they know about "Herbalife". Has the company touched you in any way or have you heard particular stories about it?