Nearly there ladies!

Nearly there ladies!

Not mentioned running lately but we're still at it. This is from the Two Hillforts race which involves 9 miles of tough stuff up the prehistoric hill forts of Penycloddiau and Moel Arthur. Here we are at about eight and a half miles plodding through the last fields but Vicky and June charged across the finish line together and were joint winners of the L60 bottles of beer. Well done girls!
We've also been Parkrunning and the previous weekend all did the Vale of Clwyd 5K, a very pleasant gallop round the quiet country lanes near Llandyrnog. The upcoming big one is the 15 miler Clwydian Hills challenge at the beginning of September. Watch this space...

It's a bug's life!

Here's something that landed next to the point pots at a pub we visited recently in Staffordshire. It's a Hawthorn Shield Bug, a member of the family of 'true bugs'. Bugs is a rather misused word but used in it's correct sense it excludes beetles, spiders, flies and colds and flu. Bugs are a fascinating order of the insect family and consist of a wide ranging variety of creatures - pond skaters for instance who use the Marangoni Effect to walk on water! Other bugs you may have come across include bed bugs (but I haven't met any!), aphids and Green Shield Bugs which are related to Hawthorn Shield Bugs and gave their name to Green Shield Stamps.

Washing machine for 185 books!

Green Shield Stamps, rather astonishingly, only disappeared in 1991. The Green Shield Stamp company changed it's name to Argos and stopped accepting stamps at that time - no-one told me and I still have 47 books full! Each stamp was worth a nominal third of a penny and it took 1,280 stamps to fill a book. Things started to get a bit out of hand when competing stores offered 'double stamps', 'triple stamps', and so on. Part of the reason for their demise was that Tesco suddenly decided with no warning, to drop Green Shield Stamps and use instead the novel different sales tactic of price cutting!

And I challenge anyone to see the connection between Charlie Brown, his favourite Genesis album and Green Shield stamps!