5th Sept 2009

I’m not saying it has been wet but on Thursday I had a stream running down the hillside in the garden from an overflowing culvert at the top of the slope. It was quite a torrent as it pushed piles of leaves into large mounds creating a little water course. Working in the pouring rain and a spade has hopefully cured the problem for now. But boy is it miserable...hope the holiday in Sussex shortly will be a bit warmer. I wonder if we’ll get a spell of dry, sunny weather before winter sets in. I took this photo from the kitchen window and it says it all. Also one of the deck area, which can hardly be seen now...but what a great tangle of growth. (Shame about the Geraniums though.)

Got a busy week at work with 3 assessments...sorry haven’t posted much lately. Hope you’re well and have a great weekend.

How’s Britain this week? Well, still wet and pretty violent if you are following the news. It’s not very encouraging and sometimes it seems we are fast becoming lawless and probably pretty much bankrupt into the bargain almost like a third world country. I wasn’t going to post this as it’s depressing, but it’s such an awful story. Thankfully they rescued the guys but you can bet they are going to have issues for some time to come. A daylight kidnapping in England...words fail me and the sorriest thing is we are probably going to get more of this type of thing coming along.

Six men have been found guilty of kidnapping and falsely imprisoning two shop workers in handcuffs for over a week while demanding a ransom of £75,000. The two shop assistants, one of them a friend of pop star Lily Allen, were approached by the gang of hooded men as they cashed up at the end of the day's business last summer. "They were beaten up, dragged into the cellar store room, tied up and handcuffed while members of this gang ransacked the shop and filled a lot of big laundry bags with stolen goods," said Brunt.
"But that wasn't the end of their ordeal because, in a rather bizarre twist, the gang then frogmarched their two victims out of the shop in broad daylight into cars and took them away." The hostages, two men aged 18 and 25, were taken to one of the gang’s home where they were kept handcuffed and blindfolded with duct tape at all times. They were kicked and punched, continuously threatened with torture and serious violence and told they would be killed.

Officers, who were watching the flat, intervened in the early hours of August 9 last year when the victims, still wearing handcuffs and black plastic bags with hoods on their heads, were taken from the flats to two parked cars. Brunt said: "The victims had been showered and stripped, they were wearing black bin liners and they were put into the boot of a car.”At that stage the police were convinced that the gang were about to kill the hostages so they moved in, arrested the gang and rescued the hostages."