Ivor Binhad is in the building

Turns out that Rosetta Hampshire is a literary avatar for Cynical Ben. She's his alter ego (the nice one), and an exercise in creative writing.

'She' certainly had me fooled - I thought she was a feisty old dear with opinions and a writing style worth reading (as well as lots of supporting material). Who'd have thought it was the same person as young Cynical!

Mistle-thrush for dinner

Admit it, that's a tasty little dish that Rosetta remembers from her childhood.

Rosetta Hampshire: now that's quality blogging

Over at Rosetta Hampshire, the lady in question is showing us how to do it in style. By 'it', I mean summarising history and settling personal scores with named colleagues from the 1950s. We younger types could learn much from her, even if she does use the name of a vole's relative in a pejorative sense. A couple of excerpts:

...I'm not dead. Not yet anyway. That is a problem though isn't it? That if I don't write anything for a week or so people will think I have died.

I remember in particular a six month residence in and around Jasper, Alabama resulting from a disagreement about contour lines in residential areas. I think the politest thing I can say about Jasper, Alabama in nineteen fifty-five is that it was undergoing a period of social change.

I never trusted Joseph Angel at all. He was a stoat of a man: active by day and night, characteristic bounding gait, often stands bolt upright, solitary except in breeding season. Petty lies were far from being beneath him

And she eats at Go!Sushi. I'm not cool enough. Nor do I like raw fish. I'm not a water vole.

I stand corrected

Rosetta, who has started blogging at 90 and has clearly had a fascinating life, has bought over 400 hundred books this year! She's also a cartographer, and thus qualifies as an honorary member of our walking gang, the Map Twats (Caer Caradoc this Saturday: it has a hill fort and may have been the site of Caractacus's final defeat by the Romans). Book-buying clearly is competitive, at least in our corner of the web. We salute you! Cool dress, by the way.

Panoramic view from Caer Caradoc.