This extra post is especially for Complex Girl, who finally moved into her brand new house last month. Belated best wishes. I’m sure everyone who knows her, even if only through her blog, will join me in wishing her ever happiness and good fortune in the future. She deserves it. Emma and I are now in our seventh - and hopefully last - house, and we can imagine the excitement of moving into a new place. Of our seven houses, only one has been brand new. So new, in fact, that the paint was still wet and we were unable to close any doors or windows. I slept on a camp-bed in the empty shell, while Emma stayed with her father waiting for the paint to dry. Builders! Be happy, CG.

I often reflect how much pleasure this one digit used to give to two young people in our courting days. By rights, surely this ought to be the ring finger. An army sergeant of my brief acquaintance referred to it militarily as “your walking-out finger” - walking out being his quaint Yorkshire soubriquet for courting. (It was the finger you hooked through the trigger-guard to carry your rifle - hence his interest.) For years, this lucky finger spent so much time inside a teenage Emma Jane that it smelt permanently of pussy. Happy days. Holding hands, when more intimate contact was out of the question, one of us would secretly stroke the other’s palm with this finger, to suggest what we would far rather be doing. “Paddling palms” Shakespeare called it in A Winter’s Tale, which shows that this coded message dates back at least to Elizabethan times. We still do it, just to tease.

[I saved this post last month and forgot to publish it.] We were returning from Aberystwyth on the A487, where the road descends sharply to the Fawnog valley, and the Cader range fills the car windscreen like a huge mural. My sister-in-law was overawed. “What a fantastic view,” she said. “But I suppose you get a bit blasé about it, seeing it so often.” Never on you life. Every time I see it, bathed in new light, it’s like seeing it for the first time. One day, I’ll post a picture of the view, one of my favourites, and you’ll see what I mean. Meanwhile, back at the ranch … For comfort’s sake, because of my sprained ankle, it was Emma on top for a week. The reverse cowgirl position - a rare treat - gave me the opportunity to admire another of my favourite views. And I don’t get at all blasé about it, no matter how often I see it. This time the camera was out of reach, so here’s one I took earlier.

I took this picture last year, when Emma was clean-shaven, and we were preparing for a one-on-one photo session. It is a less than flattering pose (hence the filtering) but there’s a story of sorts behind it. To use a remote shutter-release with my pocket camera, I have to attach an intricate and flimsy piece of Meccano which I am sure has more moveable, adjustable parts than is strictly necessary. I am usually impatient to get on with the session, and that impatience sometimes leads to clumsiness and a certain amount of damning and blasting. At such times, I can do without Emma’s snide comments about my lack of multi-tasking skills and the obvious failings of my equipment. I’m sure she had no idea how brazen and inelegant she looked when I took this picture of her out of spite. But to my credit, I didn’t say, “Slut!”

Sometimes it’s difficult to take it all in at once, as the actress said to the bishop. [I wondered how long I could resist the temptation to mention that fictitious partnership. Two years must be something of a record. In the staff-room, we used to have both a swear-box and an actress/bishop-box, and the latter always filled up first. As teachers, we preferred the double-entendre to the straightforward profanity. But I digress.] Until her teenage boobs plumped up, and I became a dedicated tit-fan, I used to think Emma Jane’s legs were her best feature. Her legs aren’t at all bad now, but tend to get a bit neglected photographically speaking. If there are tits on view, that’s where I point the camera. So here they are in their full glory, with a bit of fuzz to whet the appetite. I’ll be climbing between them later, and she can wrap them round my waist.

How do retired couple pass the time when they don’t have tomorrow’s work schedule to think about? I can only answer for this couple. After watching the early evening news (which is compulsory) we tend to leave the television on as wallpaper - one of the music channels if there’s noting worth watching. Emma chats, and I listen attentively in case I get tested. Emma never actually objects to being touched in a non-intrusive way, but will not respond over-enthusiastically is she’s watching, say, a period drama. I can take the hint without taking umbrage. However, if she finds the subject boring (i.e. if there’s a documentary which takes my interest) she will encourage me in very subtle ways - like spreading her legs and making little groaning noises. It’s surprising just how hungry you can get ignoring television. There’s been so little on lately, I’ve eaten a lot of pussy.

I’m sure there is a D.H Lawrence poem which includes the line “for she is all women” and something about continuing “to feed her body on yourself”. I tried Googling “she is all women” and got some wonderful esoteric references, which whiled away a pleasant afternoon. But nothing about Lawrence. Perhaps I’m mistaken. Anyway, that’s how I feel about Emma: she is all women. And vice versa. By now, she totally accepts my philosophical assertion that, whenever I ogle a beautiful woman, that woman is for me momentarily Emma herself. I’ve even managed to convince myself of its truth. I must admit it’s a convenient self-deception which gives me licence to ogle at will. But it is also a way of realising (making real) a favourite pass-time of mine - superimposing Emma’s features onto idealised images of beautiful women, especially goddesses and characters from mythology. The original of this montage is a beautiful image by Kimberley Kane, which I borrowed from Selina Kitt’s Blog.

For one who enjoys being petted and fucked, Emma is surprisingly inhibited in other ways, and seldom goes in for DIY. She can be persuaded to masturbate in front of the camera for my amusement, and because she knows it turns me on. But she wouldn’t finger herself otherwise. (Thanks to her puritanical mother no doubt.) From puberty, she tells me, she would “fuck the sheets”, but never pleasured herself using her fingers. Even when heavy petting became our favourite pass-time, it was exclusively something I did to her, rather than something she could do to herself. In the past I have often tried to tell her what she was missing, but she has never shown any desire to experiment, beyond occasionally stroking her elf absent-mindedly through her panties when we are relaxing in front of the television. Now, I ask myself why should I worry - as long as she enjoys getting me inside her pussy.

[Tuesday, 22nd July, 1958] Mother Hen went to reason with Mrs R. yesterday. Came home waving a piece of paper. I wish the silly old bat would mind her own business. The cryptic reference in this brief diary entry is to Chamberlain’s visit to Adolph Hitler. The PM returned waving a copy of Hitler’s assurance of “peace in our time”. World War II ensued. My mother, seeing how depressed I had become since Emma’s letter, and perhaps fearing another crisis, had called on Emma’s mother, all guns blazing. Mrs R. was at first uncompromising: “I didn’t have Emma Jane to get married. I had her to look after me in my old age.” When that cut no ice, she changed tack, and insisted that Emma - “at sixteen and still at school” - was too young to be in any sort of serious relationship. Gotcha! My mother had already accused me of cradle-snatching, after she first met Emma at fifteen. So the compromise was that Emma and I could “perhaps get back together when she was a bit older”. Some hopes now, I thought.

Reading other people’s Blogs has brought it home to me how seldom I write about Emma and I actually having sex - the inevitable result, I convince myself, of posting daily. To put the record straight, you may take it as read that we have sex far more often than not, and certainly far more often than I write about it. Not usually the athletic, long-distance sucking and fucking you see on RedTube, but the loving, gentle kind that comes with a long and happy marriage. Whenever one of us feels like it, the other can usually rise to the occasion (or open her legs, as the case may be). But on the odd occasion that Alfie’s libido is adversely affected by fatigue, alcohol, or the aches and pains of middle age (Middle? Who am I kidding!) Emma never feels neglected or unloved. And vice versa of course. That’s another advantage of a lasting, stable relationship.

Yesterday, I posted one of only a dozen or so pictures I have of Emma Jane wearing a beehive hairdo - a modest example by the extravagant standards of the day. I also came across a couple of photos showing her half-way through its construction. At this distance in time, I can’t remember the precise circumstances, but I guess we were preparing for a photo-shoot. That would account for the seamless background in the picture. She certainly looks disenchanted with the whole process, which would certainly not bode well for a successful photo-session. Perhaps that’s why I took so few pictures of her with the elaborate bouffant style. I can’t see Emma adopting the Marge Simpson look again. I doubt if she has the patience. In any case, the style was a definite hindrance when it came to love-making I remember. “The hair! Mind the hair!”

According to Saga Magazine (aimed at the over fifties) the beehive hairstyle is making another comeback - if indeed it ever went away. It attributes much of the blame for this not to Marge Simpson, but to troubled pop-star Amy Winehouse, whose “towering tumbleweed construction ”has become her trademark. Some of us are old enough to remember another star who favoured the multi-storey hairdo - Dusty Springfield, singing I only want to be with you as long ago as 1964. Emma Jane had a brief affair with the beehive around that time and still has her original tail-comb. She gave it up, not because the frenzied back-combing was giving her arm-muscles like Popeye, but because of the vast quantities of lacquer required to keep it in place. Having hay-fever, I was allergic to hairspray. Consequently, I only have dozen or so photographs of her with the handy-floss hairstyle.

No apologies. I post this picture, taken eighteen months ago, for no better reason than to cheer myself up, and to remind me that staying indoors could yet have its compensations (as soon as Emma has finished the hoovering). And boy, do I need cheering up. We have seen precious little of the sun for weeks and we have all but given up hope of anything other than an Indian Summer. Definition: a period of fine sunny weather in late Autumn. Dream on! [And many Brits may be surprised to know that the expression Indian Summer comes from the USA and has nothing to do with the Raj. It derives from the fact that these weather conditions are more common in the western regions occupied by “Indians” than in the western states occupied by the white settlers. Here endeth the lesson.] Now, where was it I had to go?

All last week I was hors de combat, having once again sprained my ankle - an inherent and annoying weakness. Poetic justice, one might think, for cracking so many tasteless jokes about my next-door neighbour, who has been hobbling around on crutches for a fortnight, with his leg in plaster. For me, my injury has meant taking the approach to sex recommended to Victorian wives: Lie back and think of England. Mind you, with Emma’s tits swinging inches away from my mouth, it was difficult to think of England (or even of Wales). Yum, yum! Choosing a picture for this post, I was surprised how many of our one-on-one photographs feature Emma on top, cowgirl fashion. If ever our archives were opened to public scrutiny, it would be assumed that Emma had invariably been the dominant partner. I must take steps to redress the balance when my ankle is better.

Today is St Swithin's Day - a day on which people anxiously check the weather with fingers crossed. Tradition says that whatever the weather is like on St Swithin's Day, it will continue so for the next forty days. According to a rhyme well known since Elizabethan times.
'St Swithin’s Day, if it does rain

Full forty days, it will remain
St Swithin’s Day, if it be fair

For forty days, t'will rain no more.'
St Swithin (or more properly, Swithun) was a Saxon Bishop of Winchester and legend says that as he lay on his deathbed, he asked to be buried out of doors, where he would be trodden underfoot and rained upon. For nine years, his wishes were followed, but then, on 15th July, 971, the monks of Winchester attempted to remove his remains to a splendid shrine inside the cathedral. According to legend there was a heavy rain storm during the ceremony and on its anniversary. This led to the old wives' tale that if it rains on St Swithin's Day, it will rain for the next 40 days in succession, and a fine 15th July will be followed by 40 days of fine weather.

Bonne journée tout le monde. Oujourd’hui est la fête nationale française, qui célèbre le debut de la révolution. Bastille Day commemorates the storming of the Bastille, which took place on 14 July 1789 and marked the beginning of the French Revolution. Although the Bastille only held seven prisoners at the time of its capture, the storming of the prison was a symbol of liberty and the fight against oppression for all French citizens. It marked the end of absolute monarchy, the birth of the sovereign Nation, and, eventually, the creation of the (First) Republic, in 1792. As in the USA, where the signing of the Declaration of Independence signalled the start of the American revolt, in France the storming of the Bastille began the Great Revolution. In both countries, the national holiday thus symbolizes freedom and a the beginning of a new form of government. Vive la France!

I have already decided on the date, sometime in the distant future, when this Blog will, like Monty Python’s Norwegian Blue, cease to be. Always assuming, of course, that I haven’t fallen off my own perch before then. But when I go, I’ll be sure to let you know. I mention this because I have been tidying up my Blogroll of favourites, having sorted them neatly into alphabetical order. It’s always sad to remove a Blog that has become inactive with no explanation, or has gone ex-directory as it were, to be visited only by invitation, or which has disappeared without trace. I am always left wondering what could have happened. Was it something we said? Or more likely something we didn’t say. Every Blogger needs a little encouragement from time to time (Don’t I?) Saddest of all, however, is when a Blog is terminated because a once-loving and trusting relationship has broken down. If you are reading this, our thoughts are with you.

Are we going to have a summer this year in the UK? I’m not holding my breath. Twice this month we have had to turn on the central-heating, and most of the time Emma and I are dressed up as if it were October or November already. As it happens, it’s a sprained ankle rather than the cold wet weather which has confined me to barracks, but it certainly makes a depressing combination. After my brother’s quick visit, we were hoping to get out and about, enjoying the sunshine and the scenery - and perhaps getting a few outdoor shots of Emma with her tits out for the Blog. As it is, she will take some persuading to get them out indoors. In bed, Emma is still wearing her pyjamas. They would normally be safely stowed away by now. And this (see left) is the sight I would expect to greet me when I first open my eyes in the morning. I feel cheated.