June04

Near the beginning of the month the clouds graciously parted to give us a view of a daytimne astronomical phenomenon: a transit of Venus. Try as I might, I can't honestly say that the passage of the planet across the face of the Sun was all that spectacular, but I suppose it reminded us that we're just a little speck of dust going around a star.

Before I get too mired in cliche, the opposite is an artist's impression of the event , put together by my highly-trained team of Korean animators. I've had to subcontract this work in order to cut my costs.

As I'm not really
feeling all that creative
at the moment, I thought
I'd just bring you a few
photos from this month's
long weekend trip to Jersey, where Duncan is now Number-mangler-in-chief for the island's government. It really does have quite a bit of beauty packed into its nine by five miles, and
                                              contrary to all that black
                                               propaganda in that documentary,
                                               Bergerac, no-one tried to murder
                                               me, even once. Click on the
                                               photos for a clearer look, but

the beaches were mostly
as beautiful as the top one,
and benefitted from the
fact that hordes of day-
trippers are unikely to
descend on them from
the mainland at the slightest beginning of a glimmer of the Sun.

There's a fair bit of historical interest in the place too..below left is one of the Martello towers constructed in defence of the island
                             in the face of the Napoleonic threat. They
                             didn't exactly deter the Nazis, though, some
                             of whose gun emplacements remain in situ.
                             Oddly enough, the islands' liberators (who
                             didn't arrive until
                             the day after the
                             surrender everywhere
                             else on the continent,
                             threw the pictured
                             gun over the cliffs
                             as doubtless the
                             islanders wanted
to forget the whole business of the occupation, and the passive
collaboration that had to take place during it. Forty years later,
the Channel Islands Occupation Society dredged it up from
a watery grave, so everyone jolly well can't help being reminded of it now.

Is that very tactful? I'm not so sure..worse was the comment I heard from an admittedly very young, apparently local guy who
                                                            worked in a preserved
                                                            bunker museum. As a
                                                            portrait of the Fuhrer
                                                            looked on, he put on
                                                             a Wehrmacht uniform
                                                            as he opined that the
                                                            "Germans were the
                                                             best government the
                                                             island ever had as
everyone could leave their doors unlocked and not worry."

It's hard though, to get a feel for the way locals think after such a short stay. At a guess, I suspect that Jersey folk might be as inward-looking and self-protective as most of the UK would be if we were as well off as the average Jersey islander. But I could quite easily be wrong. I normally am.

Liberation Square

Somehow, June has slipped by. Freed of the discipline of the Daily Mikeograph,
I have arrived at the end of the month with only the scrappiest of self-obsessed animations and some photographs to populate the latest Monthly Message. I really shouldn't worry- I don't yet attract many surfers, and only a couple of them have threatened to sue. I even have a couple of friends who refuse to look at this website at all. In all honesty, they probably know me too well...

There are a few more Recent Reads to peruse, though just in case you're still awake.

EX-FLATMATE
NEWS ROUNDUP

Here's a pic my ex-flatmate Nicola sent me of her greeting Mrs Mountbatten-Windsor at a VSO project in Nigeria. Inevitably, she started her E-mail "I'm not a royalist, but..". By my reckoning, this means I am now only five handshakes away from Adolf Hitler, courtesy of Nicola, HMQ, Churchill, and Chamberlain. By way of Nic, Liz II, Dubya, and Donald Rumsfeld, I am only five handshakes from Saddam Hussein. Click here to see the shake.....they look kind of cosy, don't they? It must have been taken before Saddam became an evil monster.

A final view from the plane:
Guernsey and Herm. Rivalry between the islands is so intense that you're not allowed to walk from one to another.

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Website of the month:

www.skyscraperpage.com

If you're like me, and have slight anorakite tendencies, then you might find this site interesting: some wonderful diagrams of buildings all over the world, charts, history, discussions- that kind of thing.