Reality Multiplier II

Things are so slow around here. It's been a quiet week in Lake Woebetide. Today should be a Zen day. I need to recognise the pain that surrounds us before being able to transcend it. I should put everything into little boxes. I like boxes, especially art boxes.

I used to live near the Malvern Hills; my parents still do. We lived in an old house in the Shadow of the British Camp, so close in fact, that you could see its shadow rushing to meet you as the sun set. This is the view you get as you walk up from the car park.

The British Camp

(From http://members.tripod.com/roagain/photo_0107a.htm)

However, the way for us to reach the top was to walk directly towards the hill until you thought you would just end up in the woods which formed a barrier at lower levels. There was a very rocky path (sometimes it was a stream) which led through the woods, past the reservoir hidden in the lee of the hill and up to the Camp itself. Just before the path entered the woods it split with the lower path leading to Little Malvern Priory.

While looking for the Priory, I have just found this Panorama of the Malvern Hills which gives a very good impression of what it is like to live in their shadow, though we lived closer than this. Find the hotspots and you will know what I am talking about.

If you travel over the Malvern Hills into Herefordshire, you find huge swathes of country which belong to the Century before last. I can't remember whether I mentioned it, but once when My father and I went to find my GrandFather's grave at Breinton, which is only just outside Hereford itself, we were both struck as to how unaffected by the last 100 years the area actually was. Most of Herefordshire is like that. The thing that strikes me most, and it is obviously because I live in a City, is how few people there are. I love Hop fields and there are loads of them; you can smell them a mile off. I am afraid I am going to have to say it but I can still remember the Hop farmers using stilts to reach the top of the poles to re-string them. There are still many Oast houses in the area though I am sure that most Hop drying is carried out in electric ovens now. The ones I really remember are actually in Worcestershire and you can actually see them on the picture on this page. They are at the village of Suckley where we used to go walking to find fossils in the banks by the side of the paths. I don't think we ever found a whole one but we picked up plenty of pieces of Trilobites and loads of belomites and arthropods. We also found the occasional orchid though we never took any of those home. Suckley was near Elgar's birthplace though strangely we never visited it. Maybe one day.

I consider Herefordshire, the last great undiscovered area of England. I hope it stays that way. Maybe I shouldn't mention it here but then again no-one actually reads this do they so why worry? (I Still need that hypothetical question punctuation mark. See the list of hacker punctuation).

People are sheep. Occasionally in my organisation we send out an email to a large number of staff with one of the options set wrong so that when you reply to it, the reply goes to everyone to whom it was sent in the first place. If for any reason someone feels that they should reply, everyone gets it. And whats more replies to the replies go to everyone on the list. A massive recursive chain results. After a while, all the people who received the email get a bit annoyed and they start replying and telling people to stop replying of course replying themselves until the email system is clogged up with these replies. It could get so annjoying that even rational IT people (like myself - ahem) would start getting twitchy fingers and hover the mouse over the reply button. The company have learnt how to stop it happening now (though that took some time) but the recipients never learnt that they were part of the problem. The whole world must be like that. Shares, Queues, tacky TV shows. We ( and I include myself) never learn.