We received this in a sort of “oh, by the way…”

She and us both. Uhhh, all three.

We got new passports. I say passports, HMG has taken to issuing bird spotters i-Spy books instead of passports. Each page has a picture of a bird on it. I’m not sure if there’s any requirement to match up with the national bird of the country you’re visiting. Very pretty though - much better than the old ones… except for one thing.

The pretty birdy pictures are obviously a come on to tempt people into having a biometric big brother friendly passport. They added another thing to quell the riots in Rhyll and protests in Peterhead. The new i-Spy bird spotter passports are tri-lingual: English, Welsh and some other dialect of Welsh than looks just as dangerous to speak.

I preferred it when we didn’t like the welsh and they burnt our holiday cottages down. Now it seems we all have to speak their language as if words like Cymmrodorion were sensible or even utterable.

No one would have believed in the last few months mortgage was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as Janis and Jerry busied themselves about their various bank accounts, they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency Janis and Jerry went to and fro over this Kyiv about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over housing and finances. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of Tiki as sources of financing, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of a mortgage from him as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other mortgages from Riki or Cort, perhaps inferior to Tiki and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Then across the gulf of the atlantic, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded our deposit with envious eyes, and slowly and surely draw their cheques against us. And early on Friday evening, just lat week came the great notification.

“Your Mortgage is approved”

I didn’t want this blog to descend into “Look at the crazy stuff in Ukraine” but, after yesterdays revolution, and surrounding political spat it’s just too tempting. I blogged before about the crazy houses. Today we went for a walk down the Dneeper and saw just how far this can go:

http://www.trianon-palace.com/ 3 bedrooms, indoor pool, no garage but double marble parking approach. Try a Bablefish translation but the drawings of the proposed interiors is the best bit. The weirdest thing though is the location. I have no idea how much Trianon Palace would cost - several million dollars as a guess and for that money, It’s halfway down a knackered concrete road and only about 200m from the next McMansion.

That said, Bablefish is a really nice part of Ukraine - lots of islands and sandbanks along Dneeper south of Kyiv. I wonder how long it will be before the whole of the dneeper is lined with Trianon Palaces. The real Trianon Palace is now a Westin Hotel. If you stay, you should get a room overlooking Versailles - so the internet says anyway.