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Graham Binns posted a photo:

Three hundred and sixty-odd days of 2008, day 185

The ruins of St Benet's Abbey on the banks of the River Bure.

This is an amazing set of ruins. Not only are parts of the abbey still there, but there's also the remains of a wind pump that was built inside the ruins themselves.

Even better than that is the graffiti, carved into the stone. The recent stuff is nothing special - pen-knive scratchings on the soft brickwork of the pump tower - but into the abbey ruins, beautifully chiselled into the old stones, are things like "C.T. Alcock, 1902" and "W.B, 1912." The oldest one I found said, simply, "1895."

So many years of history, all in one place.

Graham Binns posted a photo:

Three hundred and sixty-odd days of 2008, day 101

A commemorative crown, minted in 1965 to mark Churchill's death, given to me by my Grandmother.

It's actually a fairly plain nickel job rather than some of the silver-heavy ones that my Dad has collected over the years, but under the lamp on my desk - and at a high shutter speed - it took on this lovely brassy tone. Shame I couldn't get my fingers out of shot.

I don't do memes as a rule, but this one's been doing the rounds on Planet Ubuntu, so I thought I'd give it a shot, too.

So, the results of the query are:

graham@bloodnok: ~$  history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " "}}'|sort -rn|head
93 bzr
66 python2.4
46 sudo
44 cd
39 grep
22 make
19 ls
18 vim
11 tail
11 lpvim

So now you know.

Graham Binns posted a photo:

Three hundred and sixty-odd days of 2008, day 70

This is one of the "Fairy Caves," the old, abandoned coke ovens of Aspen Colliery in Oswaldtwistle, where I grew up.

They're full of graffiti, rubbish and needles now, but when I was a kid they held a mystique that never quite went away - until I saw them in the cold light of a windy Lancashire day after wading through mud and dodging dog turds to get to them. In that light, they're much less interesting.

It was hard to get the balance right in this shot. The sky was going to be blown whatever I did.

Graham Binns posted a photo:

Three hundred and sixty-odd days of 2008, day 31

The entrance to the WWII pillbox at Castle Stede, near Loyne bridge, Hornby, Lancashire. It was built in the 1940s as a defence against a possible German invasion. There's a Norman castle - well, its earthworks anyway - just behind where I was standing; I'll photograph that another time.

Not too fond of the sky; a sort of uniform pale grey that no amount of footling about in the Gimp could cure. It was too bleeding cold and windy to do much else besides take some handheld shots with the wide-angle lens; I didn't really want to stay much longer as I'd lost the feeling in my fingers.