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	<title>Christopher Stocks</title>
	<link>http://www.christopherstocks.com</link>
	<description>Pebbles, perfume, poetry, features and books</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Tue, 20 Apr 2010 09:22:50 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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		<title>Feathered fiends</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Living by the sea it&#8217;s hard not to have a love-hate relationship with our commonest (and noisiest) neighbours, the herring gulls. Hate when you&#8217;ve just hung a white sheet out on the line and they crap all over it, or somehow hover en masse above your car to cover it generously from top to bottom [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.christopherstocks.com/feathered-fiends</link>
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		<title>Luxury on the cheap</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Much excitement in Weymouth, where the old Woolworth&#8217;s site has been transformed, in the last few weeks, into a spanking new branch of T.K.Maxx. Even more excitement yesterday when, on our first visit, what should Roy pluck from the trashy mass-market scents you&#8217;d expect to find in a discount outlet but a brand-new bottle of Osmanthus [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.christopherstocks.com/luxury-on-the-cheap</link>
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		<title>Stormy weather</title>
		<description><![CDATA[First sunny day for a week, but a high wind too, and drama on the beach: huge waves dumping thousands of tonnes of water on the shore, high tide, long swell, bad undertow, and there between the waves two swimmers thrashing about – at first I thought they must be surfers but if they did [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.christopherstocks.com/stormy-weather</link>
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		<title>Custard with everything</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Big day today: my father arrives home from the hospice. My parents&#8217; house has been filling with equipment since the middle of last week (electric bed, lightweight wheelchair, ventilators and tanks of liquid oxygen…) but now the day has finally arrived. Everyone&#8217;s quite nervous about it, not least my father himself, which is hardly surprising, especially [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.christopherstocks.com/custard-with-everything</link>
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		<title>Love and death</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Caring for someone you love who is dying is, oddly, a bit like being in love. There&#8217;s the same desire to spend as much time as possible together, but more than that, it gives you the same strange moments of heightened reality, when just looking up in the sky and seeing white clouds or a [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.christopherstocks.com/love-and-death</link>
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		<title>Radio silence</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Apologies to anyone who&#8217;s been checking my website over the last few weeks for the lack of posts: my father was rushed to hospital in the New Year and has been diagnosed with motor neurone disease, so life&#8217;s been turned upside down for all the family while we try and look after him as best [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.christopherstocks.com/radio-silence</link>
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		<title>In passing</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Driving across the causeway to the island this morning I nearly swerved off the road when a kingfisher suddenly shot past and flew alongside me, its short sharp beak and the rapid flapping of its wings instantly distinctive, more so even than its brilliant colouring in the dark, misty drizzle that&#8217;s descended on us today. [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.christopherstocks.com/in-passing</link>
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		<title>Shelly Christmas</title>
		<description><![CDATA[]]></description>
		<link>http://www.christopherstocks.com/shelly-christmas</link>
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		<title>Solitary pleasures</title>
		<description><![CDATA[One of the things that gives me deepest delight is reeking of perfume. Bottles of the stuff strew my house, and I could easily wear a different fragrance for every day of the week of the year. Perfume is like clothing, dressing up or dressing down, with different outfits for evening or day, summer, winter, [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.christopherstocks.com/solitary-pleasures</link>
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		<title>When the wind blows</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Living three miles out to sea has its advantages (more sunshine than average, later sunsets, cleaner air…) but when we get a south-westerly gale like the one that&#8217;s been raging for the last couple of days we really get it in the neck. Everything booms and rattles all day and all night, the salt spray [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.christopherstocks.com/when-the-wind-blows</link>
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