Category: Blog Post

Yesterday started badly and quickly became much worse after a sausage, egg, baked-beans and toast breakfast avalanche.

Being a thoughtful and intelligent chap, I decided to save time and improve my productivity by taking my modest breakfast, a platter of: Cumberland sausages, eggs, black pudding, liver sausage, hash browns, potato waffles, bacon, fried bread, fried tomatoes and butter-fried mushrooms (strictly for health reasons) and toast, into the study so that I could eat at my desk and work on my precious iMac.

Continue reading A Breakfast Avalanche

I’m in the process of building an RSS Feeds list to provide my trusty followers with some up-to-date, serious and silly, news content from the Spy World. Take a peep at the world of lies, deceit, evasion and diversion, that is situation normal for Agent Bertram. See what’s going on in the world of finance and what the banksters are getting up to.

The RSS Feeds thingy will gather news snippets and push them to my RSS Feeds page for your delight and ridicule.

In the meantime have a good week, knowing that the lunatics are truly running the asylum and our politicians have less power and influence and are more corrupt than ever before.

Who is running the world? Find out here!… when I have grappled the apps and widgets into submission.

Autumn is without doubt, my favourite time of year.  This morning we were treated to our first hard frost of the season, after a night of clear sky where The Plough cut its furrow in the northern sky and Orion hunted in the southeast.  The Little Bear could be seen plainly and The Milky Way appeared as a streak of white running from Northwest to Southeast at the time of observation, before the cold forced me back in to the warm coziness of our log home.  So, I feel moved to copy for you, an update from the facebook page that I set up some time back, to warn of what Agent Bertram might be getting up to.

The update…

The sands of time that lured upon our house are now in the deep bosom of Loch Awe, buried… in the windmills of your mind, any way the wind blows…

Continue reading Another Autumn Update.

Life here in Argyll is pretty good as autumn wanders in.  It has been a poor summer if you look only at the weather but, if you live with the weather rather than fight against it, it’s been a lovely summer.  As The Big Yin (Billy Connolly) once said, “There’s no such thing as bad weather. Just inappropriate clothing.”  On behalf of struggling writers everywhere, my answer to Big Yin would be, “That’s fine for you to say when you are a millionaire Scotsman who can afford any amount of waxed cottons and Gore-Tex but for the rest of us the weather up here has been rubbish!”

Anyone who lives here would acknowledge that it has been short summer.  It started late after a very cold spring and now the autumn leaves are already well into their golden demise.  Our American cousins use the words The Fall to describe this autumnal change where the leaves turn golden brown and yellow and then drop to the floor covering everything and making life difficult for the infirm.  The Fall is such a well chosen phrase and, as far as I’m concerned, hits the horses nose bang on the nail’s… head’s… money.

A boy, in leaves.

I remember well, time spent as a lad, kicking through mounds of fallen leaves in the gutter along the appropriately named Bushey Road and Barnsbury Road near to my primary school only to find that some blighter had hidden within, a brick or a heap of dog shit.  Happy days…

Continue reading An Autumn Update for my chums

You may know that our hero Agent Bertram lives in Bloomsbury, London and works for The Sovereign Intelligence Ministry as the poor sap who has to keep Prince Philip out of trouble.  This used to be a full time job but it’s less so nowadays as Phil The Greek, as I call him, is getting a bit long in the tooth for hell-raising and now has to content himself with hiding in the closets around Buckingham Palace waiting to pounce on an unwary maid.   If he catches one it’s usually not a major worry as he can no longer remember what to do when he has caught her.  He usually forgets why he was hiding there and stands in the closet slowly gathering dust.  Agent Bertram often has to make a search for the Prince after The Queen reports him missing.  There are lots of closets in the palace.

Continue reading Positive Discrimination for Tadpoles

Last evening as the sun went down, behind a thick layer of cloud, Beloved and I marvelled at a Mummy Chaffinch as she darted back and forth feeding her young fledgling, Chuffy the Chaffinch.

Young Chuffy nodded his (or her) head up and down furiously to signify the need for more and more food, inspiring some measure of admiration in this Secret Agent author.  There was no sitting on the fence when Chuffy wanted to get the ‘feed me‘ message across to mummy!  (Actually there was a lot of sitting on the fence as Chuffy was in reality, sitting on our fence)…

Continue reading The Saving of Chuffy the Chaffinch

So there I was… I remember it clearly.  It was Saturday… I was lying in the ambulance trying to work out where I was, en-route from our house and the Hospital, a trip of twenty miles of extra bumpy roads.  I could see the headlights of our car following behind, so I knew that beloved was in hot pursuit. The ambulance crew, although very nice people, in the form of Susan and Neil, were only technicians and could not fill my arm with morphine so I had to make do with gas-and-air which was about as much use as a chocolate teapot.

Continue reading Secret Agent takes a dive… to hospital.

My life is never ‘straight forward’ and a recent trip to Glasgow proved to be the ‘exception-thingy’ that proved the rule.

Continue reading The great unwashed and hospital.

William Frederick – Hip but grounded!

If you had been in Amsterdam observing Agent Bertram’s antics, some of you may have noticed him walking with a pronounced limp. This is because I (William Frederick) have had for a long time, a dud left hip. Over a period of four years I gradually came to the conclusion that we renowned authors are not made to bear such pain. Following the finest tradition I tried to pass on the painful limp to someone else but my recipient, Agent Bertram, was having none of it.

Continue reading William Frederick – Hip but grounded!

A note from William Frederick, author and decent chap.

My Beloved received a phone call yesterday which turned out to be from her friend Jane. Jane and her husband Donald had stayed with us at our Argyll home for a few days before travelling north to catch the ferry over to the isle of Mull.  (They didn’t get to Mull but that is another story).

Continue reading The Living Doggy Poop.