Miscellany

The Lucky Dip section
The Lucky Dip section – assorted random thoughts

This is the catch-all section for articles and small pieces that don’t really fit into our main website areas of Photography and Literature. We’ve joined together to make this space as interesting as we can … the topics covered interest us (of course) and we hope you’ll enjoy dipping into the ‘lucky bag’ and find something thought-provoking and/or amusing.

M E and me

May 12 2019 was ME/CFS and Fibromyalgia International Awareness Day. I’ve been a sufferer since the 1980s, and have had to learn (the hard way) how to manage the condition. mostly the medical profession in the UK prefer to deny its existence, so help is largely to be found in support groups, and increasingly online! This is a little look into my own journey – written in the hope that it might help others.
Author: Elisa Liddell
I post to the photography website Flickr, and my upload for the event is here

Bow Fiddle Rock

We live in the North East of Scotland, and the geology of the coastal area is fascinating – and wonderful to photograph too!
The Bow Fiddle Rock is quite an attraction for photographers, and I visit it whenever I can. But recently I’ve been finding out more about the story that the geology of the actual rocks tells is about ‘Deep Time’ – the many millions of years that the earth has been developing. I was curious to find out why so many of the rocks along the coast are slanted steeply downwards – and finding the answer to that question lead me on a journey of discovery about how the landmass that is Scotland once met the landmass that is England – and a clash of two continents ensued.
Author: Elisa Liddell

Keyboarding As Sport

This is a whimsical piece I wrote for a dear friend who fell very ill several years ago. It argues that the many typing errors we make when sitting at our keyboards can be ‘rescued’ by formulating them into a pseudo-academic discipline with its own jargon and with an imaginary international regulatory body seeking to validate such errors by offering a set of descriptors explaining how they came about. Total nonsense, but great fun to write.
Author: Mike Liddell

Football: The Great (Dictionary) Game

Starting with a quote from Lewis Carroll this piece essentially continues his interest in words and how they are used – though from a much less serious perspective for the most part. Indeed, it is a journey based on the freedoms offered by the full name of the game in question – Association Football – being little more than a series of associations and word-play that take us from Lewis Carroll via Dr Johnson and others until we end up with the Reverend Spooner. Once again, total nonsense but great fun to write.
Author: Mike Liddell

The Canon Selphy CP1300

Looking at my search for a way to print my own photos, and achieve really good quality results.
I use a series of small notebooks (A6 and a little smaller) to keep my own photography-related notes, quotes and observations, and it’s here that I want to place my own printed photos. The Canon Selphy prints postcard size and smaller, so it was a good printer to look at. Reviews all agreed the quality of the prints was excellent, so I took the plunge! Was it an expensive gamble, or a great investment?
Author: Elisa Liddell

Going Bananas

This piece was inspired by two things: the news that the default banana species – the Cavendish – is proving susceptible to a new strain of disease and may well soon disappear from our diet; and by the deliberately untrue statements about the role of the EU as it ‘oppressed’ British business that were spewing out of the mouth of possibly the greatest political charlatan we have suffered in generations – especially by comments made about EU regulations imposing shape restrictions on bananas.
The political gullibility of the population is a direct consequence of the deliberate decision not to educate children in the machinery of local and national government and institutions – presumably, on the basis of the well-known ‘mushroom theory’, whereby people are kept in the dark and subject to regular helpings of … ordure. Coupled with the wholesale abdication of any serious journalistic integrity that is such a feature of the modern mainstream media in the UK, this failure to underpin what passes for democracy has resulted in one of the most depressing eras of political mismanagement and narcissistic behaviour in my lifetime.
Since writing the piece we have stumbled into a dangerous mindset whereby it is acceptable – apparently – to watch constitutional tinkering of the worst kind without any serious reasoned opposition.
Perhaps I should have signed it ‘Cassandra’.
Author: Mike Liddell

All articles are copy-write Mike and Elisa Liddell.
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