It’s not really the whiteness, it’s more that it’s February and the end isn’t in sight. In Britain the rain has washed last week’s snow away whereas here the skiing season is getting into full swing.
You can see at the bottom of the gate below that we’ve got about two feet (60cm) of snow. It’s not quite deep enough to go over the top of my knee-length wellingtons.
Recently, I’ve been taking the dogs down the hill
and on to the lake.
It had just finished snowing yesterday when we went down there. Hardly anybody was on the lake except for the person you can just see in the distance, behind a kick-sledge. He always seems to be there .
This is the amaryllis in the kitchen. Dyveke buys one every year and I love it. Even though it doesn’t quite fit with the others, I didn’t want the picture to go to waste.
Oh, and here’s the snow-blowing tractor.
A Bad Guide 
Woof woof.
I see you like a flash of red in winter too.
the snow-blowing tractor, a geyser in the garden…
Jack is flying!
All the pictures are wonderful but the ones of Topsy and Jack are most wonderful than the others.
(“more wonderful”, isn’t it?)
Julia, the dogs say thank you. You have to say “even more wonderful”, otherwise I think it might sound like you don’t like the others.
Siganus, a snow geyser is a great idea. It looks especially good in sunshine. I’ll work out the details.
Dearie, there’s also a red geranium that’s been in the kitchen for about 15 years. We’ve had our money’s worth from that.
I’ll try to fix the background & masthead during the day today.
Make sure that your snow geyser is a quiet one. It would wreck the whole effect if it wasn’t done in a peaceful manner.
This reminds me of the damn machine the neighbours use to blow dead leaves every day of the week except Sundays. It makes a hell of a noise and in my view it is worthless as the guy is just moving the leaves from one place to another in a disorderly way. The good old rake — or a “coco broom” — would bring the leaves together. This machine just scatters them all around while smelling burnt fumes and making you half deaf with the noise.
It seems to me that the tractor is doing about the same thing: blowing the snow all around. Do you manage to really clear the place by doing this?
Thank you!
Thank you too, Julia.
Sig, I still love that coco broom picture. Actually the snow blower is very useful because it moves the snow entirely away from the road, whereas if you just keep pushing it to the curbside the available road surface ends up getting narrower and narrower. But you can’t blow snow all over the place in cities, and in Oslo they use bulldozers to put it in lorries. Last year, the lorries were dumping it in the fjord until they ran out of space. I think in the end they were saved by the thaw at the beginning of spring.
I agree those leaf blowers are horrible things.
Wonderful pictures! But is it already February in Norway? If so, do you have any stock tips?
Where I spent the weekend, that English rain came as snow. Monday was as in your pictures, at least in glimpses, but yesterday was warm and drizzly and the roads turned into slush. It’s still warm today, and the sky’s clear again. Which means that it shall soon be colder and the roads turn into solid ice.
I mainly wroye that because I wanted to try out the embedding function of a photo gallery outside of the site (outsite?), but I couldn’t figure out how to make it embed single pictures, and the whole album would be much too much. But what a boring comment without it. Here’s a link: .
Huh? Link?
Oh, you got the whole album anyway. That’s far too repetitive for the average reader.
Light on black? What a horrible idea. I can scarcely read it.
It’s only temporary, dearie. Think of it as scaffolding on a building site.
I had the new layout when I opened the post to write my first comment, but black on white. Then, when I reloaded before the next (I think), it took a negative tun. Did the blog’s colours change between my previous comments, or was there an error initially? Anyway, here on my mobile it’ s black on white again.
I see you’re right, Language. Technically it’s still in a sense January but I’m trying to balance the months. So I’m giving Feb. thirty days from now on just to see what happens. As for stocks: stick to horse racing, the outfits are better.
Trond, which one is you? I’m guessing the black finlandshatte, skimask, Balaclava…
No, that’s Lars. I’m the one with the shovel and the green hat. Didn’t the link to my picture in the signature work either? Seems not. And did you really wade through all those blurry photos?
It was Spring here in the middle of the day – mild, windy, sunny. I opened the windows in my study. Only winter flowers, though, so far: snowdrops and aconites.
Trond, it seems they were enjoying themselves and now we have a rough idea of what you look like: too young to be so knowledgeable, I’d say.
Dearie, I’m jealous. It was +1 celsius here today, which seemed lovely and warm.
This WordPress graphic redesign is all trial and error (mostly error). I think they must do it on purpose so that you’ll pay them to use the easy version. I’ll have to finish it tomorrow.
I never thought of Trond as a bearded man. I’ll have to reengineer my mindset.
Me too. I usually think of him as being as old as me and I hadn’t even considered a beard. Trond, did you go to university in Trondheim? It’s where they all go, the engineers.
Other times I’m too old to be so stupid.
Don’t reconsider. It came off Monday morning. I’m not really bearded, just an extremely lazy shaver, and this time I let the beard grow unusually long even for me because of the cold weather.
Yes, in Trondheim. It’ll be 20 years next Christmas. I wonder if there’ll be a jubilee.
Funny, for me it’ll be exactly 20 years in June (the end of it, and the beginning of the rest). Not in Trondheim though.
My daughter’s always telling me you have to be super smart to get in to Trondheim. You’re lucky you didn’t go to a US university or they’d be sending you begging letters every couple of weeks.
You have to have top grades to be accepted at the most popular departments, but Civil Engineering is not one of those. When I applied it was about average, but that’s heavily correlated with the business cycle.
I actually wanted to study physics, but I had to mark three choices in the application form, and put Civil second because my father was a geodetic surveyor and I liked that the photo in the folder contained surveying equipment. I could have applied again the next year after gaining extra points for military service, but I couldn’t be bothered.
Another wee burst of Spring at lunchtime: my wife has seen daffodils in bud but not in bloom.
It’s too early for Spring. I’m still waiting for winter. Those pictures of bearded Trond amid children and evergreens and deep snow are making me wistful, thinking of past years, when we spent long weekends in the woods in Vermont at this time of year. Also for two years ago, when there was plenty of snow — too much snow, some would say — right here.
We had some extreme weather yesterday. Some sort of cold front came through, after days of oddly warm weather, bringing not snow but dramatic clouds and mighty winds. I discovered mid-morning, first that we had lost electrical power, then that one end of our street was cordoned off by the fire department, blocked by a fallen utility pole. Reversing direction, I then found that the other end of our short block was equally impassable: a nearby tree had fallen, yanking some wires off some poles, one of which was dangling in the middle of the intersection. The firefighters who were standing there making sure nobody got hurt informed me that the dangling wire carried 13000 volts, and pointed out that it had already burned or melted a little hole in the road. They weren’t going to let me out until the electric company said that power had definitely been shut off. Eventually somebody said yes, you can go, I’ll lift the yellow plastic tape, just drive slowly under it, keeping to the left, I’m almost sure this thing is “de-energized”. We still had no power when darkness fell …
Ø, didn’t you have a similar thing happen on your street a couple of years ago? An ice storm, and the electrical cables came down like in the movie of the same name. I think it’s time for the electric co. to bury your cables. I expect it’s frightfully expensive, though. A couple of days ago I met a man in our driveway, he was brandishing a machete on the end of a pole and he wanted to know if he could cut down some cherry tree branches that were overhanging the electrical cables. I said (politely, because of the machete) no, he couldn’t, thanks.
Dearie, you’re three months ahead of us, in the daffodil dept.
Trond, Alma says that nowadays entry to civil engineering at NTNU is incredibly competitive. They might not accept Isaac Newton. Some of Alma’s school friends are applying; the parents and siblings of one special friend are all doctors, so she’s rebelling by becoming an engineer.
I was thinking about the idea of burying the cables. I just learned that at least one of our neighbors’ houses is fed by underground cables. I don’t know how that came about. But, yes, replacing the whole system of poles and above-ground cables, for power, phone, cable TV, and internet, by an underground system seems like an unbelievable amount of work.
Last year the power company replaced a number of poles on the adjoining street. Now that this other one has fallen over, of course we are all looking at the remaining poles and wondering how strong they are.
I don’t think our power company asks nicely before cutting trees. They might mail a nice letter to everybody saying “don’t be surprised when we come and cut your trees next month, and here’s why we’re doing it”, but you couldn’t stop them if you tried. Not that I’d want to.
Every time there’s a hurricane, I hear someone saying that American infrastructure is vulnerable because it’s strangely old-fashioned. Everything’s underground here and has been for a couple of decades, except in rural areas. The problem now is to get the different companies and public services to coordinate their digging.
Well, high-voltage transfer lines aren’t underground, and that system is vulnerable here too, so new lines are being planned to have alternative supply routes, accompanied by a big and noisy debate on the building of new power lines through monumental landscapes.
In the garden beds on the south side of our house there are a few green shoots breaking ground. I don’t know what they are exactly. I don’t know if there are more of them out of sight under the dry brown leaves that we try to leave there until spring. I don’t know if this is an error on the plants’ part, brought on by the very warm weather we had a few days ago. I guess there’s a lot I don’t know …
All that new snow melted during the weekdays. Then the last couple of days have been cold again, with the roads covered by hålke, a buckly layer of frozen slush. Outside of the roads the snow is deeper and quite firm at the bottom. No sort of vegetable life will break through that any time soon.
Norwegians have so many words for snow!
Just like us.
But, Empty, how can the electricity company cut your trees? Are these trees very close to your boundary and do they tend to grow partly beyond it, over the street?
Having buried power lines is also dangerous for those doing excavation works in the future, but it’s safer for the general public since they can’t fall to the ground and no one could normally touch them by accident.
To the rhotically challenged, Hålke sounds very much like Hawker.
Norwegians have so many words for snow!
I think it must be a myth that Norwegians, eskimos etc. don’t have any more words for snow than say Pacific islanders do. Maybe not thirty, but it doesn’t make sense.
In Britain they recently had a competition (I may have mentioned this before) to design a new power-line pylon, the current* ones having been going since the 1920s. All the entries I saw were unsatisfactory, usually because they drew too much attention to themselves. The winner was ok, but nothing very special, I thought.
*(the pun was unintended)
Ø, if your shoots start coming out and then there’s a subsequent cold snap they can die from the frost. I expect you knew this, and it’s not very helpful.
Signatus, the local distribution of power in Britain is done with underground cables. The advantages are (i) that they aren’t damaged in the breeze, and (ii) they are not an abomination to the eye; the disadvantages are (i) they are harder to repair when they need it, and (ii) they often get damaged when people go digging to repair the gas pipes, water pipes or sewers.
Are these trees very close to your boundary
Yes, close to the street. It hasn’t actually happened to us. I have the impression that the homeowner does not have the same rights over the narrow strip between sidewalk (UK “pavement”) and street as he does over the rest of the plot. There’s a name for that strip in some parts of the US. I can’t remember the phrase.
so many words for snow
I wasn’t being particularly serious. It’s striking when a five-letter word in one language requires a longish phrase to explain what it means in another language, but of course English has plenty of specialized words, too. For all I know there may not be an exact Norwegian equivalent of “slush” or “sleet”.
shootsYes, you hate to see the poor plants getting confused about what time of year it is. Like me the day I dreamed the alarm clock woke me up, and got up an hour early by mistake. Tired all day.
In the great football game of life, Nature 200, Humans nil.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2272738/Distraught-couple-forced-remove-6-000-gallon-pond-garden-otter-ate-200-prized-fish.html#axzz2JnM0f5mt
I didn’t know they only ate the liver & kidneys. If those people had really cared about their fish they would have taken them to New Zealand with them on holiday. But what is this about:
It raises so many questions.
An easement?
It’s officially a parking strip, planting area, or planting strip, but there are many, many local terms, as you can see here.
I would call it “verge” or “reserve”. And, incidentally, I much prefer the word “sidewalk” than the word “pavement”, which sounds confusing to me since it can also be the hard surface of a road, or its structure (cf. “rigid pavement” or “flexible pavement”). Sidewalk or walkway are much better words as far as a trottoir is concerned.
“Tree lawn” is the one I was thinking of. I’ve never heard anybody say it, though.
An electric fence won’t keep the herons out.
Isn’t parkin a kind of hard toffee?
Apparently not.
Sig: I would call it “verge” or “reserve”.
I remember “verge” from my childhood in suburban England.
I’ve never seen “tree lawn”.
Sleet is sludd and slush is sørpe–
I wondered if I should add another word up there. The corny icecrust on the surface, especially of snow that’s melted in the daytime sun and frozen again at night, is called skare (dial. skara). It will hold your weight in the morning but sometime around noon the tips of your skis will go through it and (if it’s really solid) they’ll get stuck so you fall on your face and get cuts and bruises all over. A mock folk saying has it that “If the skara holds at Midsummer, spring will be late.”
“An electric fence won’t keep the herons out”: actually a fence keeps out many birds – the ones which like a clear flight path, frexample Canada Geese.
“If the skara holds at Midsummer, spring will be late.”
I like that one.
To help you prepare for a Little Ice Age, Crown:-
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthpicturegalleries/9824470/Close-encounters-with-polar-bears-in-the-frozen-Alaskan-wilderness.html?frame=2461126
Very nice. The photographer seems to have been behind a glass barrier.
My wife went out this afternoon – the sky was so threatening that she took the chance on the way home to pop into a supermarket. She was in a blizzard before she got home. I think we may say that winter has returned.
So we’ll have heavy snow here tomorrow? Nice! There’s been some light snowfall on and off since Sunday afternoon, but just enough to cover the ice and make it even more dangerous.
I’m very pleased it’s not yet summer in Britain. Others should suffer, not just me. I don’t follow the weather forecast (weather “warning”, in Norwegian), but we’ve been having heavyish snow for several days here, Trond.
Warning: Tomorrow may be sunny and mild
I awoke to a dusting of snow, which is very pretty, and tomorrow we’re supposed to get another six inches or so.
Others elsewhere suffer from (humid) heat, which makes them grumbly and miserable. Things are so unevenly distributed in this world…
Is that why there’s a cloud over Mauritius?
No snow today.
A dusting of pretty snow in western Mass? What is the world coming to? I thought you must have a couple of feet.
Sig, another thing about cold snowy weather is that there’s very low humidity, the water having frozen and fallen out of the air, presumably. Any time you want to swap…
I skidded off the driveway this morning and the car was stuck in the snow all day. It was pulled out by a tractor this evening, but only after we had been digging and spinning the wheels for several hours. I would love my own tractor.
We’re supposed to get close to a foot later this week. I’ll keep you updated.
I just checked the next seven days at . Nice weather, not to cold, until Sunday night, and then snow for a week.
(I just say this so that I can mention how I love the name yr. It’s a dual meaning, two homonyms. One is yr n. “drizzle”, I’m pretty sure it’s a back-formation from the verb >yra “drizzle”, itself derived from Gmc. *ura- n. “water, moisture”, possibly a lost cognate of San. var “water”. The other is yr adj. “giddy, feverish, eager”, maybe originally from the same root as ‘aware’ and ‘worry’, i.e. something like “alerted”.)
At yr.no. Hrmph!
Whenever Dyveke talks about checking the weather at yr I say “What?” It doesn’t sound like a real word to me.
Their forecasts have different colours for ‘Rather certain’, ‘Somewhat uncertain’ and ‘Uncertain’. I want a definition of ‘Somewhat uncertain’. Is it the same as ‘Somewhat certain’?
It makes sense to me that the same people who refer to every forecast as a warning would tend to say “somewhat uncertain” rather than the synonymous “somewhat certain”.
On the other hand, maybe they’re not synonymous; over here we have “partly cloudy” and “partly sunny”. My impression is that these are not meant to be synonymous, even in the daytime.
We used to tune in to a special all-weather radio channel of the US Weather Service. They had an artificial voice speaking the forecast, and we called this fictitious person Lars because there was something Scandinavian-sounding about him, especially the vowels. I loved the way he said “patchy fog”.
the same people who refer to every forecast as a warning would tend to say “somewhat uncertain”
Yes! Does sorting the weather forecasts take up an hour of someone’s day? Do they use their judgment (“it nearly always rains right after I’ve watered the garden”) or go by statistical data?
even in the daytime.
I hadn’t thought of that.
I loved the way he said “patchy fog”.
In Britain there’s a real person reading the BBC Shipping Forecast, which always lists the exotic-sounding patches of sea around Britain in the same clockwise order (Dogger, Fisher, German Bight). Due I think to the repetition it’s appreciated by many people who otherwise have no interest in shipping or in gale-force winds that are backing or veering. (I have a feeling we’ve mentioned this before.)
Does anyone have trouble with this new layout? I find there’s something in the comment box that stops my typing from registering after (usually, but not always) a couple of lines, so I’m typing merrily away and nothing of the past 500 words has been recorded. If I were a touch typist I’d be looking at the screen as I write, so it’s probably a punishment for not having got that under my belt.
Why does God care so much about my typing? Hasn’t he got better things to do? I’m glad I’m not paying his salary.
I think I’ve heard that the godess Justitia preferred Braille.
This area — Eastern (us) and central (Asa and Hat) Massachusetts — has a lot of snow coming tomorrow and tomorrow night. They’re saying two feet, maybe three. Schools have already announced that they will be closed tomorrow. There’s a festive feeling in the air, along with anxiety about whether the power will go out. High winds, too.
It’s a case of two storm systems coming together: one from the Great Lakes area and one from way down the Atlantic coast. This superstorm is called “Nemo”. They like to name the big winter storms these days, like the hurricanes. I think it helps with the hype. It’s ludicrous, the special way the TV forecasters get so excited about a storm that’s coming. I heard one guy using tenses in a strange way that I associate with sports commentary.
One TV guy, pointing at a moving image on a big screen, said “It looks like this storm is a little bit behind this one, but that’s all right.” I think he meant “don’t worry, it will still be the kind of big disastrous storm that we love to talk about”. The way these guys love to give bad news was very much to the fore.
Goat runs wild in Bedford-Stuyvesant, eludes NYPD.
I think that’s one of the South African goats that are bred for meat. I’m glad they’re letting it go, of course. Goats don’t belong in the city except maybe somewhere like Central Park. I’m sure they’d love Central Park, it’s perfect for goats.
Any snow yet?
It started falling barely noticeably just at 7 AM, when they predicted it would, and is now (quarter to 11) falling very gently but enough to coat the driveway and lawn with white (though the street still looks black).
Falling more heavily, but still not enough to shovel. Also, no goats in sight.
Same here. I could shovel a bit before dark, just to have less to do in the morning, but I’d rather wait.
This is excellent snow for snowballs: the kind that sticks together (is there a Norwegian word for that?). I was outside with Amadi a few minutes ago, and I made the first third of a snowman, a ball almost two feet in diameter. I put it up on a table so that it wouldn’t be covered up by morning.
The governor signed an executive order making it a crime to drive on the roads after 4pm today. After announcing this, he also added a word of caution about the dangers of playfully flinging oneself into a pile of deep snow and colliding with an unseen hard object.
A handy adjective: kram: Snøen er kram. Vi lager snømann!. No single-morpheme noun. The noun kramsnø is formed with the adjective.
I think I’ve mentioned I once found a hard object buried in the snow at the main gates to Columbia at 116th & B’way. It was a bottle of good champagne. No doubt it had been forgotten by its owner, one of the rich undergraduates. Nowadays I can’t remember why I was playing in that snow by the subway entrance.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there were dialects with a word kramma or some such for that sort of snow.
Cold and clear here. -15°C at night.. No moon, so the stars are unusually visible, and there may even be northern light. I just drove my daughter out in the forest to sleep out.
As you see, we still have power. But so much snow fell overnight we literally can’t open the front door; we have to go out through the garage. Not that there’s anything to go out for.
I looked at the Hadley web cams that Paul mentioned and it looked pretty snowy.
Trond, I know from old Christmas cards that kram n. is hug in Swedish. I’m not sure if it is Norwegian too, which makes me wonder why I haven’t had cause to use it. – Yes, of course I have, it’s klem.
We lost power last night, but only for a few hours. I’ve had a jolly time outside with the shovel this morning, and now Tesi is making pancakes. I’ve put some (fairly boring) stories about the storm at voidplay.
I think it must be rather nice to be forced to stay at home, not be allowed to drive anywhere, especially while the electricity poles are crashing down.
I saw some crocuses out today. We’re promised a nasty snowfall on Tuesday.
I think that a lot of those green tips of things that I’ve been seeing in the flower bed on the sunny southern side of our house are tulips. At this point they are under many inches of snow. I hope they haven’t made a big mistake.
Soon I will go out on the flat low roof and push a great deal of snow over the side. We worry about its weight, and we also know that when it melts it will try to find its way into the house.
It seems awfully early for tulips. They come out here in June – of course we’re extreme. Anyway, snow’s supposed to be better than frost. I think it’s some sort of protection.
By the way, on Monday we are supposed to get a rainy warm day. So it’s going to be an incredibly wet mess, and then I believe that on Tuesday night the puddles and mud and the slushy remainder of all this snow will freeze solid. Fun!
Maybe they’re tulips. But I don’t think they’re snowdrops or crocuses.
I meant maybe they’re not tulips.
Fun!
Hålke!
Yes! But it’s not so much buckly layers of frozen slush that I’m thinking of; it’s also smooth expanses of plain old ice.
I think maybe those things I was talking about are daffodils.
The format of your blog as I see it is really weird now. The column “Recent Comments”, which used to be at the right hand top, is now below the comments themselves on the left, which defeats the object of seeing at first glance who has made a new comment. Will you be able to make any changes?
Hat, Empty, yesterday on its homepage the BBC was talking of a historic snowstorm blanketing the United States. Funny how history unfolds nowadays, and how the adjective historic is being used.
It’s interesting that “the worst since records began” now means “really quite bad and a chap will be along in a couple of days to point out at least four occasions when it has been worse”.
P.S. Just at the mo’ the Comments Counter reads “10”.
Bruessel, sorry about the layout. I probably caused it by putting the goats down the left hand side. I can’t be bothered to look at it again now, though. I’ve spent hours on the damn thing already.
I can’t account for the comments tally. I wish I knew how much of this blog is on my computer and how much in outer space.
When I went for a walk just before sunset yesterday it was still cold and clear. When I decided to take another stroll around midnight to look for stars and northern light, it was milder, the sky was overclouded, and it had just begun to snow. It’s been a light snowfall during the night and day, not really enough to shovel, but enough for the roads to hide their true nature beneath a shining surface when I go to pick up my daughter
I had to blow the snow off our driveway today.
While I was at the BBC looking up the ‘Historic’ snowfall, I found this interesting penguin video:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21393173
“interesting”? It’s intriguing, beguiling, fascinating ….
But perhaps less amusing than
Quite right. I’m just a little tired after the snow blowing.
The counter went from 99 to 10 several comments ago. I am guessing it will keep saying 10 until the true count is 110 and then it will say 11.
We’re not entirely dug out yet: there are hours of work still to do, if I’m good about it. This morning I spent a few minutes carving out part of a mound that I created yesterday by pushing snow off the low flat roof, to free up the vent of the clothes dryer, then did the same where another mound was piled up against a little-used door (I put that hyphen in for you, dearie). And made good progress toward freeing up the outdoor car, which has been patiently waiting its turn while more more urgent matters were seen to.
Oh, thanks for explaining.
If it’s all going to turn to slush and then freeze you ought to get rid of it now while it’s still powdery and easy to move. But I’m sure you know that, it’s just that that was how our car got stuck the other other day.
dearie, I don’t think I’ve seen Scott of the Sahara before. That looks like the same penguin.
Yes, the car will be freed shortly. The real question is how much I will do about the roof(s).
Don’t do too much. I think you are (one is) supposed to put your legs up right afterwards, to avoid straining your heart.
Now it says 11. You were right.
I’m not trying to do it all at once.
I think the most important safety guideline for me from here on is “Don’t fall off the roof”.
The main road was salted, so there’s not much drama to report. Not from the road and not from the cold night in the forest. The girls had come back in at midnight to sleep in the basement, and when I came they had cocoa and fastelavnsboller.
Fastelavnsboller.
I’ve been posting from my phone all weekend. Back on my computer I see that it says “11”, but my phone has “116”.
(I was posting the previous message from my phone in the kitchen. In addition to fastelavn it’s mother’s day in Norway today, so we’ve made Mum’s favourite course for dinner and even more boller after we came home.)
If it’s not very cold, couldn’t you stand at a window and spray it with hot water from a hose?
I didn’t know it’s mother’s day.
I didn’t know either, but somebody gave me a hint about looking up (from my phone, incidentally) and reading the posters at the mall yesterday.
I probably caused it by putting the goats down
I can’t believe you did that. You must be joking.
We woke to snowfall. According to the Daily Mail “The heaviest snowfall was in High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire with nearly 5inches – 12cms – falling overnight”: it’s yer frost hollow, innit?
Darn it, I forgot to link to this goat news.
http://www.desertsun.co.uk/blog/?p=1636