Friday, May 06, 2016

An Open Letter To My Brother In Foreign Parts


This post is merely an open letter to my brother. Whilst it appears easily within the capabilities of modern technology for a group of junior school kids on the far side of Bradford to have a face-to-face question and answer session with Tim Peake who is hurtling around the earth in the Space Station, I am still finding it difficult to send an image to my brother who is a few thousand miles away in Dominica. So given that he can easily get my blog posts, I thought the best thing to do was to use the blog to send him the letter I meant to send him. As this will be of little interest to anyone else you can skip the rest of this post - although on mature reflection I suspect that a lot of what I write here is of little interest to anyone else, but - at the same time - who can resist picking up and reading a letter they find dropped in the gutter?

Dear Roger,
Hope you are well and have not been eaten by snakes or fallen down a ravine or succumbed to any of the other dangers that clearly confront anyone silly enough to travel further west than Todmorden. We are all fine here, although I become increasingly sure that my legs are going the way Uncle Wilf's went just before he had his funny turn. I was scanning some old negatives the other day and I came across this one of your good self and I was curious to find out whether you could recognise the location (and/or the date)? Have you noticed how my photographs and your image seems to have turned sepia with the passing of the years?
As ever, your brother,
Ali

7 comments:

  1. Great photo and intriguing letter. I hope he answers you.

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  2. I well remember you taking that photograph. The year would be somewhere in the early 1970's and the location, the Waterford Estuary, Southern Ireland. To be more precise, the harbour at Ballyhack. I still have the painting and I will post it on my next diary page.

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    Replies
    1. Cont'd...

      Funnily enough, I also had a funny turn the other day. I was hanging upside down trying to get to a fuel line my fifty year old Land Rover, when I slipped and cracked a rib. Whereas my funny turn is not related to Uncle Wilf you could say it is related to Lewis Carroll…

      “You are old, Father William,” the young man said,
      “And your hair has become very white;
      And yet you incessantly stand on your head –
      Do you think, at your age, it is right?”

      Delete
  3. It looks chilly. Don't Roger's feet get cold?

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    Replies
    1. You're quite right...I do remember my feet did get cold!

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    2. I thought as much!
      Presumably you don't suffer cold feet in Dominica?

      Delete
  4. I see it worked! He should wear socks with his sandals and write you more often:)

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