Grabbin Some Grammar, Innit 🤟

Sometimes I am inundated with advertising which states I need Grammarly. So, I tested it with a few paragraphs from the Masters 😉

EH6670P 1930s Ernest Hemingway sitting on a dock next to the Pilar, 1930s. Photographer unknown in the Ernest Hemingway Collection of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.

The first paragraph from The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel came up with a score of 86/100 with two commas missing and if I go Premium there are a further 3 alerts, including 2 Potentially Sensitive Language issues and another punctuation error.

The first few lines of Atonement, Ian McEwan, the Observer cites it as one of the greatest 100 novels ever written. It gained a score of 96/100. I was asked to remove the ‘a’ before ‘lunch’ and if I pay for Premium they will tell me why it has ‘hard – to – read – text’ lol.

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen, still used in UK schools as part of the GCSE curriculum. The first paragraph gained a miserly score of 87/100 with 5 alerts of misspellings, although to be fair 4 were full stops after Mr or Mrs which we don’t do anymore. But if I pay for Premium they will explain the problems with passive voice misuse and intricate text.

Finally The Overstory, Richard Powers’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel 2019. A score of 90/100, 4 alerts ascertaining to, missing comma, incorrect noun use and 2 spelling mistakes. If you pay for Premium there are a further 6 alerts – Word choice, passive voice misuse, punctuation and 2 monotonous sentences.

Monotonous?? It’s a Pulitzer for gawd’s sake 😂😂

I put this post into Grammarly and my score is the same as Hemingway’s, so Pulitzer here I come 😘😘

Now I wonder if the young lady on the telly who tells us we need Grammarly to write a really good novel is… possibly wrong. 🙂

It Could Happen Saturday Night

If you’re thinking ‘Date Night,’ you’re going to be disappointed. It’s a kind of follow on from the age thing. I am going to a 60th Birthday party. The issue being, it’s my nephew and I remember the night he was born. I was laid in bed with his sister, no stop right there. I was four-years -old and she was two. We were reading the Radio Times (it was a BBC T.V guide) I have no idea why and as we were feral kids on a farm, it’s quite possible we weren’t reading it. But I guess I’m going to have to come to terms with the fact he is actually sixty.

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As soon as he could walk we had him out on the farm. He made a great test pilot. We once built a boat, or found a log, same thing when you’re five years old. We’d been warned to keep away from the lake. The adults called it a stagnant pond, but what do they know? One thing we didn’t know was the logs roll in the water. It took us quite a while to fish my two-year-old nephew out of the stinking quagmire 😂

Another place we were warned to keep away from was my brother-in-law’s wood pile. You can see a theme here can’t you 😉 One day we built a homestead on it. Some may say it was shack, hut or den but we were pioneers of the West. Rawhide, Cheyenne, Bonanza… you know that sort of thing. As he was the smallest it seemed sensible for him to enter first. After a loud crack and a scream we thought it prudent to take a look. He’d fallen through the floor and was surrounded by four foot nettles. All I can say is thank goodness for dock leaves and Massey band 😂

Anyaways, he survived those times and some more. So it should be a fun night. Have a great weekend folks 😘

Do You Ever Feel Your Age

Billy Connolly once said, “One day you bend over and you groan, you never did it before, but you always do it from that moment on.’

It’s funny how age creeps up on you. But I believe you can think yourself old. I try to think myself young. Which means that I have to listen to some people ask me, ‘Aren’t you a bit old to do that?’ 😂 But I am very, very lucky as I haven’t got any health issues (yet!) I guess genes have something to do with it? My 6 uncles lived to a ripe old age. One was running marathons until he was 82 and another was horse riding until he was 80. The seventh son is in the photo granny is holding as he’d emigrated to Canada.

My dad was the only one who didn’t make it. (Far right) He had a brain tumour at 58. But that was apparently caused by the noise of the guns at El Alamein, so we can book that down to Adolf Hitler.

I have found though, that I am doing a lot more than I used to and that’s an age thing. It’s a race against time. I’m trying to fit in as much as I can, the clock is ticking, ‘tick, tock.’ I’ve got 91,000 words of a second novel written. This one is a love story and I might offer a refund to anyone who doesn’t cry after they’ve read it 😂 Now there’s a sales gimmick.

So, do you have any tricks you use to stop yourself ageing, I wonder?

Never Give Up

That’s one of those things that are easier to say than do, sometimes. But my favourite quote is: “You only fail when you quit.” Again you have to take it in perspective. If you break a leg climbing Mount Everest, is that quitting? 🤔 I’m one of the lucky ones, I think? I find it very difficult to give in. Although, it’s been said I am ‘aggressively competitive’ 😂 I like a gamble too. My mum once said I would bet on two raindrops racing down a window pane.

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This week there’s been two examples. My dear friend and running partner needed to stone her garden. Now, with the hips being a tadge iffy and the sciatica unhappy at the thought of shovelling for two days it wasn’t going to be easy. But the end result is always worth the pain 😀 There’s something very rewarding in completing a task and it’s even more rewarding when it was hard work.

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She had an old washing machine and a pile of bricks in the garden. The machine was for the skip, the bricks? Well she said she was going to build a fire pit. Now that set me thinking. Another friend told me she stripped her old washing machine down to make a fire pit.

Eight years as a motor mechanic is no preparation for stripping washing machines! There were some cuts and quite a bit of cursing. My friend offered some advice, ‘It’s okay, Charlie, leave it, I’ll use the bricks.’ I remembered, you only fail when you quit. So two hours later and, tadaa!

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All I can say is, an aching back, aching legs and a few cuts are nothing compared to a job well done and the smile on a happy girls face. Have a fab weekend people 🥰

I need your help. Please share far and wide.

I know how amazing you all are and now I’d love it if you could help a friend of mine. The story will be told in Nigel’s own voice and I won’t edit a…

I need your help. Please share far and wide.

Swim Like a Brick? So Let’s do a Triathlon

I figured sooner or later you might get bored listening to me rattling on about running. So I thought I’d start training for a triathlon. The slight hiccup in the plan is that I don’t really swim. I know… I hear you cry… But what about all those diving posts? Ah, well, there are differences between the two. Namely a wetsuit and very long fins as opposed to a pair of trunks and bit of rubber they call a hat, or is it a cap 🤔 Anyway it’s a bloody nightmare trying to get it on.

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  This isn’t me, by the way 😉

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  Courtesy of https://www.coastwatersports.co.uk/blog/history-evolution-wetsuit-2/

I think it’ll be a while to my first competition so, there’s no need to block me just yet. The crawl that has eluded me all my life, is now passable… if you only watch my arms. My legs want to do the breast stroke, so I resemble a kind of demented frog.

Anyway… moving on, there has been an outcry from chums on Facebook asking if Sooty will be making a comeback? Well, two people mentioned it but when you are a Z status celebrity any enquiries are welcome. The answer is, that he has returned home, and so I don’t know. The reality is, I ran out of ideas. I should say ideas that were really funny. We had a Zoom meeting yesterday and considered current affairs, But in all honesty there wasn’t a lot humour to be gained from the position of Afghanistan or storm Fred at the moment.

The only other news is that I ran the 7 hills last night. With a very good friend of mine. For anyone who isn’t familiar with running jargon thats a route that has 7 hills on it 😉 It’s an interesting route if only for the reason that it resembles a Sperm 😂😂. Have a fabulous weekend my friends xx

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Home Sweet Home

I wonder how many times this has been used as a title for a post? 😂 The NC500 is well and truly over and I could say, ‘Huh, it’s back to work on Monday,’ but as my work is so easy… I can’t. I probably have the easiest job in the world and they pay me well. And parkrun is back!! As if you didn’t already know? We seem to have heard nothing else here for weeks. It’s strange, since the pandemic small things now appear so very important. Such as inviting a friend into your house for an evening’s entertainment. Who would have thought it?

The Olympics are over and didn’t we do well? Apart from most of our top track athletes getting injured and C.J. Ujah suspended for possible drug use, it was a good result and now we can start looking forward to Paris. Anyaways… back to the plot. We had a wander down to the Beck and out onto the pastures. It’s about a 10 minute walk from home and flat! 😂

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I finished my book ages ago and have been searching for possible agents. The Siege of Mr Khan’s Curry Shop has now been submitted to nine of them. So in eight weeks time I will be able to report nine rejections. But it’s okay I have 261 agents to go.

I have a ten mile race tomorrow so really looking forward to getting back out there and the dancing lessons have started again. We we’re considering contacting the Guinness Book of records as I’m so bad at it they kept us in the beginners class for the second year. Now because of Covid we’re still there.

Have a fabulous weekend my friends 😘

NC 500 The End of the Road

It was time for the final part of our journey and so we aimed for Culloden to see the place where the Scottish, well the Jacobites to be specific, stood against the English for the last time. You can’t really call it an English victory when the Jacobites numbered 5,500 men and the English around 7,500. I guess the numbers are debateable. But it wasn’t a pleasant sight, it must have been a dreadful day for all the men there.

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We decided to stay overnight near Inverness rather than drive the 417 miles home in one go. But the real reason was that we wanted to see the Kelpies at Falkirk. Standing 100ft tall they are the largest equine sculptures in the world. They represent the lineage of the heavy horse of Scottish industry and economy, pulling the wagons, ploughs, barges and coal ships that shaped the geographical layout of Falkirk. Apparently the name represents the mythological beasts that possessed the strength of 100 horses.

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The weather on the drive home was beautiful, but of course this is the UK so it would be. I managed to arrive back for 3pm and start a cross-country run at 4pm. Although it’s 500 miles around the north coast of Scotland we managed to clock 1,400 miles, but I guess we forgot to take in the 834 miles from the start and the finish and at least we managed to get new brake discs and pads out of it. 😂 Have a great weekend my friends.

NC 500 Day 6+7 The Road to Gairloch

The road to Gairloch can be fraught with danger. Especially if you don’t keep to the path. We decided to visit the Corrieshalloch Gorge. “The thundering River Dorma plunges 100ft down through the most impressive slot-gorge in Britain.” Run by the National Trust for Scotland it’s free to visit😁 As far as drops go it was pretty impressive but the Princess wasn’t overly happy at the end of the viewing point 😂

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After the gorge it was time to hit the road to the hotel. I was desperate for a run and to get out of the mountain clouds/mist or as I had been informed ‘rain!’

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The hotel was a welcome relief as was the sunshine and the beautiful bay. Looking forward to 2 whole days of this.

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We walked up to a waterfall, which we couldn’t see because of the flora 🤔 and it rained, I thought we’d climbed into the clouds again but I was corrected 😂 It was interesting to see a tractor and lorry being swallowed by nature too.

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Covid is still around even up here. We have to wear masks in the presence of other humans. It feels wrong putting a mask on before I enter a shop especially without a shotgun 😂 At last I got a decent run in, without getting soaked. Hope you’re all safe and well 😘

NC500 Day 5 Out of the Mist

“It’s not rain,” I said. “Rain falls from a cloud, we’re driving through a cloud, so it’s not rain. We’re part of the rain, part of the cloud, we’re at one with nature.” I was feeling philosophical.

“Bollocks,” the Princess said. “It’s raining.”

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I’ve already posted this once but between the hotel internet and WordPress inability to update between devices sometimes, it’s gone! were heading out to Ullapool. Let’s do the cave at Smoo, cried the Princess. You’ll like it there. I’m wondering if this is because it’s beautiful or she’s hinting at my Neanderthal tendencies 🤔

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As caves go, it was rather special. I have a 13 second video of the waterfall but unless I “update,” I can’t put it on here. I don’t recall ever seeing a waterfall in a cave before and there was a convenient hole in the roof to let the rain sunshine in 🤩 It has actually stopped raining for a while and as we drive out of the mist and get ever nearer to Ullapool I wonder what scenic wonders will be revealed tomorrow. Have a lovely weekend my friends 😘

NC500 Day 4 and Tongue

Dear Lord, Sid James would have a field day here 😂 The sciatica is loving the long car journeys and thriving upon them. The ankle just adores being idle and then walking around, 😂 so, need some serious Yoga and long runs. But the trip is going well now we have brakes. We stopped off at Thurso on the way here, the Tesco does an amazing £3 meal deal… dried up chicken sandwich and a bag of crisps with a bottle of Irn Bru. But the church was nice, they have a bridge and a rather dubious looking nightclub. 🤔

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Someone mentioned birds, as you know I’ve always been fond of birds and as the nightclub was closed I decided to head for Dunnet Head, which is more northerly than John O’Groats. There’s loads of birds there and by the state of my shoes, sheep too. It was quite eerie with the mist and rain but still spectacular.

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Arriving in Tongue I noticed a castle which we decided to walk up to the next day before we moved on. We booked into our bothy (Princess says it’s an abode, used for itinerant workers 🤷🏻)

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The walk to the castle looked further than it was. Personally I’d say it was a keep, but it’s their building so they can call it what they like…

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Now for some reason WordPress has stopped allowing me to load photos in a gallery. So I’m stopping there. Tomorrow we hit the North Atlantic… I hope you’re all enjoying your summer 😘