Murray ᛘᚢᛦᛦᛅᛁ > Recent Status Updates

It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.

Bilbo Baggins 👣 👣 👣

‘My dear man,’ Ross said, ‘I like you and have an interest in your welfare. But for all it will affect me you may find your way to the devil by the shortest route. Fortune can provide lands and family but it can’t provide good sense. If you wish to throw away what you have, then throw it away and be damned.’

It's my life
It's now or never
I ain't gonna live forever
I just want to live while I'm alive

My heart is like an open highway 🛣️

Bon Jovi

Abandoned by a God in whom many of us believed, we lay prostrate and dazed in our demi-tomb. We felt like lost souls, who had forgotten that men are made for something else, that time exists, and hope, and sentiments other than anguish; that friendship can be more than ephemera, love can sometimes occur, the earth can be used for something other than burying the dead. We were madmen, without thought or hope.

'I love you, he said, 'and am your servant.
Demelza, look at me. If I've done wrong in the past, give me leave to make amends.’

So he found that what he had half despised was not despicable, that what had been for him the satisfaction of an appetite, a pleasant but commonplace adventure in disappointment, owned wayward and elusive depths he had not known before and carried the knowledge of beauty in its heart.

"The most dangerous form of blindness is believing that your perspective is the only reality."

- Friedrich Nietzsche



…. A pitfall which copious & diverse reading can help you avoid 📚

In the dim light only portions of the room showed up, surfaces and sides, curves and ends and profiles. The table had just been cleared of the evening meal of tea and barley bread and pease pudding: a wet circle showed where the ancient pewter teapot had leaked. At the other end was a scattering of crumbs left by the two youngest girls.

How pretty her shoulders are. I ought to take this opportunity of telling her everything; but what right have I to imagine she would be interested? Besides, I would tell it so clumsily that she’d be affronted at the first words. How clean her skin looks; she’s like a westerly breeze at sunrise, rare and fresh, and good to get into your lungs and your heart.

in vino veritas 🍷

The most staggering work! I feel like if I opened my door I’d walk into the world of Ancient Rome with Julius Caesar having been assassinated only weeks before. Williams’ river of words has carried me away like the Tiber.

Amazon on a book: 4.5 average rating
GR: 3.7

Amazon on another book: 4.6
GR: 3.8

Amazon: 4.8
GR: 3.6

What’s with that?

Then one day Amazon: 4. 7
GR: 4.4!!!!

Buy the book now 🙌🏼🙌🏼🙌🏼😮😮😮

I called on all my reserves of strength to get up and run. I had covered about a third of the distance when the Russian planes attacked, shooting rockets into the buildings, which disintegrated like matchwood. Then we could hear the engines of the planes fading into the distance. Everyone who was able stood up again. No one spoke. We stared at the flames, at the sky, at the reddening heaps of human remains.

I can remember very distinctly the first deaths I encountered in the war. The thousands upon thousands which followed are blurred and faceless: a vast, cumulative nightmare which still haunts me, in which atrocious mutilations appear side by side with figures who seem to be peacefully sleeping, or with others whose eyes are opened astonishingly wide, stamped by death with an uncommunicable terror.

Now it was that the conqueror was surrounded, the men of the battalion alone among silent enemies, and no man might relax his guard for even a moment. If he did, he disappeared, and some snowdrift received his body. If he went alone to a woman, he disappeared and some snowdrift received his body. If he drank, he disappeared 💀

🌓 🌒 🌑

This is a reread.

“The Moon is Down had extraordinary impact as Allied propaganda in Nazi-occupied Europe.

“Despite Axis attempts to suppress it (in Fascist Italy, mere possession of a copy of the book was punishable by death) thousands of copies circulated throughout Europe, bearing witness to the power of ideas in the face of terror.”

the editors

I thought afresh that a nice cat washing his face by the hearth gave extra comfort to a room


I have felt cats rubbing their faces against mine and touching my cheek with claws carefully sheathed. These things, to me, are expressions of love.


They prayeth best that loveth best all things both great and small.

There have been times in my life when, confronted by black and hopeless circumstances, I have discovered in myself undreamed of resources of courage and resolution.


AS I CRAWLED INTO bed and put my arm around Helen it occurred to me, not for the first time, that there are few pleasures in this world to compare with snuggling up to a nice woman when you are half frozen.

If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans.

A farmer once told me one of the greatest luxuries of his life was to wake up early only to go back to sleep again.

I seem to have spent a good part of my life - probably too much – in just standing and staring.

The peace in the silence and emptiness of the moors filled me utterly.

I’m chuffed. The actor who plays Herriot in the new series, Nicholas Ralph, is doing the reading in his native Scottish accent, he does all the accents of the farmers and townsfolk in a smashing manner, we just helped a cow 🐄 with a very difficult birth indeed and I’ve had a brand new suit in high quality tweed gifted to me. I’ll have my pint 🍺 and it doesn’t get much better.

This is a series about war between CAN and the US. The first volume (INVASION / 700+ pages) came out a year ago in July and this prequel (considerably shorter) was released at the same time. The first book is now a bestseller. Unquestionably the unprecedented tension that currently exists between the two nations has something to do with readers dipping into the series. I’m here to see how well written it is.

audiobook narrated by the actor who plays veterinarian James Herriot in the new television series

Herriot mostly gives us upbeat stories and only rarely the inevitable tragedy. This collection appears to begin with the latter and I was dreading it. But there was a brilliant turnaround and the first story leaves us with smiles all around 🥹

Lee could see the piles of boxes, the neat stacks of cloth bags, wooden crates. He took a step forward, saw the car was packed with powder, munitions, shot and shell for the big guns. He looked at the man, said, "This is just one car. The others, there must be ..."

"No, sir. All like this one."

Lee stared ahead, “How are we - we cannot feed the men. They knew that and they sent me gunpowder."

No matter how I go about connecting with GR friends and trying hard not to overdo it I always get cut off before I’m finished 😔 que sera sera 🙈

On the front lines the joy of the soldiers was swept away now by shock. There would be no peace, the deadly spaces between the lines would remain. The men stared across the open ground, one long look at those men, over there, the men so much like them. Now they began to crawl back into their dark holes and huddle below the frozen earthworks in stunned silence.

That these men would fight, and fight so well, was a surprise to many. But Grant saw it in Lincoln’s face, there was no surprise at all, Lincoln had believed from the beginning that war was color-blind. Grant let the troops move past him, a wave of blue uniforms, the sea of black faces pushing forward, the cries and the joy and the tears filling the air, flowing up and around the smiling face of the President.

Stuart seemed to focus, suddenly came alive, abruptly saluted, said, “Oh, General Lee, yes, quite well, sir. Forgive me … I was … sleeping. The fire … there is something in the fire.…”

He paused, looking back down into the low flames.

“Something peaceful, as though God is holding something open to you, some small bit of Himself. It is comforting.”

But there was also the last day at Gettysburg, when he’d felt God beside him as he waved his men forward through the smoke and brilliant flashes of light, and waited for the smoke to clear knowing they were up and over the Federal lines. But when the smoke cleared it was not like that at all, and those who had survived came slowly back across the field, shattered and beaten, and God was not beside him.

The disturbing thing about today … what shocks us is not that we killed men in blue uniforms, but that it was so … easy. The order is given, the muskets are fired 🔥

I used to rule the world
Seas would rise when I gave the word
Now in the morning, I sleep alone
Sweep the streets I used to own

One minute, I held the key
Next, the walls were closed on me
And I discovered that my castles stand
Upon pillars of salt and pillars of sand

~ Viva la Vida ~ Coldplay ~

Some days it seems like 1860 out there

I’ve read his father’s novel on Gettysburg entitled The Killer Angels and that is a masterpiece.

I’ve fired a black powder musket at reenactments so I know the thunder and the smoke though not of 20,000 at once never mind cannon fire.

“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."