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Walking 🔗

Image of rough sea

[Originally posted on Facebook 2015-05-12] When I was a child, my family used to go out for walks at the weekend, usually after Sunday lunch. Seaford Head, Hope Gap, the Cuckmere, Friston Forest and on the other side towards Newhaven, the Tide Mills. I resisted such activity as it interrupted my reading, writing or guiding my plastic figures and animals on their adventures. (It may seem odd for sheep, pigs and cows to go on adventures — especially normal farm animals rather than the anthropomorphic cartoon variety — but these were fleeing from some evil villain or oppressor and had to brave the mountainous terrain up the radiator, down the wardrobe and across the chest of drawers.) However, despite my opposition to these outings, I benefited not only from the physical exercise but also the clearing out of mental cobwebs and the stimulus of my surroundings. My thoughts went to the wreckers who had lured unfortunate sailors onto the rocks, the smugglers who lurked in the Cuckmere estuary and, as a child, the abandoned Tide Mills sent shivers down my spine. The Seaford to Brighton trains may well pass through there during the day, but surely there were midnight ghost trains that stopped at the disused station! I miss the eerie call of the foghorn, I miss the sea and I miss inspecting the world of the rock pools. Although my knees don’t miss the downland ascents!

I always have excuses for not getting up and going outside, but it’s bad for me to sit in front of my desk all day long, so I’m trying make the effort to go out for walks. It drops the mundane clutter from my mind and helps to re-order and re-focus ideas. Norfolk has its own share of wonders, both natural and man-made. Ruins and oddities that whisper of a long forgotten age with forgotten people who were once born, lived and died, in essence no different from ourselves. We are brief dwellers in this place, but we cause ripples in the stream of time and leave our footprints on its banks.

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image of dickimaw parrot with cookies in cloudsOnce upon a time, a little parrot decided to migrate across the vast ocean to the cloud lands, with nothing more than a handful of cookies. The Dickimaw Books site has migrated to a new web hosting provider and this is the story of its journey.
Nicola Talbot 2019-09-15 📂 Site 🔖 Migration

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image of dickimaw parrot with cookies in cloudsOnce upon a time, a little parrot decided to migrate across the vast ocean to the cloud lands, with nothing more than a handful of cookies. The Dickimaw Books site has migrated to a new web hosting provider and this is the story of its journey.
Nicola Talbot 2019-09-15 📂 Site 🔖 Migration

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Book coversThe DRM-free ebook retailer SmashWords has a sale from 1st – 31st July 2023. My crime novel “The Private Enemy” and children’s illustrated story “The Foolish Hedgehog” both have a 50% discount and my crime fiction short story “I’ve Heard the Mermaid Sing” and cybercrime fiction short story “Unsocial Media” both have a 100% discount (i.e. free!) for the duration of the sale. Did you know that you can gift ebooks on SmashWords?
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Image of magnifying glass over a green bug.I was recently informed that dickimaw-books.com had a medium severity reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the version of cPanel this website was using at the time. I solved the problem by moving to a new web-hosting provider that didn’t have the issue. The security researcher used a non-invasive probe. No data was compromised.
Nicola Talbot 2023-05-22 (updated 2023-06-17) 📂 Security Site 🔖 Migration News Online Store
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