Where's the Groom

. . . or, What to Do When Your Secret Husband Dies Five Days Before the Wedding Celebration.

Very uncharted territory, this. You generally know the form when people get married, or someone dies, or is fired, or wins the World Cup. You shake hands, you hug, you go for a beer, you go for a beer. But a secret husband popping his clogs five days before the wedding breakfast? With people coming in from all over the place? And what on earth do you do about a present?

The reports from South Africa just kept gettting worse - my cousin Mark was not responding well to his chemotherapy. He had a stroke, and died. Li'l Sis and I flew out as planned, trotted along to the venue at the appointed time, and the whole thing went ahead exactly as planned. Except no groom. Not an inch of black to be seen, a breezy disco track for muzak, and a bride in all her finery. The speeches delivered by grown men who cried - not a bad tribute either.

Li'l Sis and I were seated with Mark's sons, both splendid young men just starting their legal careers, both articulate, beautifully-mannered and charming.

Later that evening we dined with Mark's sister, who filled us in on the relationship between the family and the bride, including the name-calling, the crockery-chucking, and the bride throwing her out of her house, yelling '... and Mark didn't leave his sons anything! I inherit it ALL!' Apparently on the grounds that they would just drink any money. Oh - and the secret wedding, four months before.

Unsurprisingly, Mark was only monied because, having been sunk deep into debt by child support payment for wife #1, and the extravagances of wife #2, it was wife #3 who pushed him into a better job, managed his finances and used her own money to help pay off his debts. She, however, proved faithless, leaving the way open for wife #4 to scoop the lot.

When I spoke to my mother about the disinheriting of the two extremely well-presented sons, she rather shocked me by agreeing with the opinion of the shrewish widow, and saying that this opinion was held by the majority of the older members of the family.

I swear, the reason we love all our family as much as we do, is that we live several thousand miles away. How on earth else can you do it?

But I didn't go all that way to come back empty-handed. Here's a couple of pictures for you - the first one in the best PUH-ssible taste. Hung in a jeweller's shop, I cannot honestly remember the last time I saw anything so crass.

And the second one hung outside a mall-cum-casino, all tricked out to look like a small corner of Venice, with fake houses, real restaurants, acres of real one-armed bandits, and a 'sky' painted to look like late afternoon - wait a minute, I've a picture somewhere -

(Li'l Sis said it reminded her of Las Vegas, only not so classy.) The sign outside said


I did have to stop and breathe quite deeply when I saw that one. I wondered what would happen if the opposite notice was hung inside - ' You are now entering a gun-ridden area - Gun safes are openly derided. Stick-ups will be carried out'. I think I'd still be inside.

Out of the mouths

It fell to me to do the Karate run the other day. (I occasionally tend to three children. Dull story.) The boys do the karate, and I keep the girl amused. No sweat. We happened to be watching the lesson, and she remarked on one of the boys (for the class was composed entirely of the little beasts) saying that it was the chap in the white shirt. Of which there being many, I asked for further classification. Look, she said, the one with the blue belt, doing the kick. I saw exactly the fellow she meant.

She was pointing out the only boy black boy in a sea of white.

It clearly didn't occur to her that this was a valid distinction, or if she even saw it, it was not worthy of notice. This cheered me up NO END.

Is it just them, or is it all of them?

There's this bloke in the village - pleasant fellow, tall, fair, nice looking. Pung, his name is.* He and his wife are independent barristers, they have two kids, a bunch of grandmas and a lodger. He is quintessentially English - courteous, unassuming, a self-deprecating sense of humour and - this is where it goes off the rails a tiny bit - he is an armchair Liberal Democrat.

Or was. He, it transpires, had been dallying with the idea of actually getting up out of his armchair, and actually standing (for parliament - this metaphor could run and run). What with election fever gripping the nation, for a few days anyway, our man hurtled into action, dishing out questionnaires and buttonholes and glad hands like a man possessed. And at every turn, well some turns anyway, he was asked if he was working with Tonk**.

'Tonk??' Pung would cry. 'Who he?'

'Dontcherno?' would come the startled reply. 'He's Ming's*** right hand man, his policy adviser, the speechwriter who inserts all the jokes that Ming takes out. He lives just round the corner.'

How about that then. A local bloke wanting to stand for Lib Dem MP didn't know that Menzies Campbell's chief policy adviser was living in the same village, and the chief policy adviser didn't know that a local bloke was wanting to stand for Lib Dem MP.

Is this just the Lib Dems, or the Labs and Cons too? It doesn't inspire confidence, it has to be said.

* No of course it isn't.
** Not his real name either.
***Nope, not his real name, but his real nickname.

Condolences

How on earth do you write a letter of condolence when you are pretty sure that the bereaved person is actually giddy with glee?

My cousin in South Africa had a marriage which had been going sour for a long time. She's 49, has two children in their early twenties, and a husband who was a model of unreconstructed afrikaner boer. Not interested in his growing children, he required a tidy house, a beer, a relax and hot food at the end of his working day, and sex every other day, regardless of how she felt. And as many affairs as he felt like. (Any male readers out there? NO. THIS IS NOT A CIVILIZED ATTITUDE.) She has been trying to get out for the last five years or so, but he has been - well, unhelpful. For the last couple of years she has been living in friends' houses, sleeping on sofas.

He died two days ago. His son found him in the morning, still in his tracksuit from the previous night's jog. He was 53. (And his name was Frikkie. South Africans have an outlandish idea of what is acceptable in a name for a male.)

Knowing that her e-mail address is a work one and not secure, and even though I bet she is probably doing cartwheels of joy, I had to go with the 'I'm so very sorry' schtick, when what she wants is an airline attendant called Sebastian in extremely tight leather trousers singing 'Ding, dong, the wicked witch is dead!'

Bleak House

The best thing about having a rattle-trap of a car (in them thar days. I drive a sensible car now.) was the sound effects. Or rather, what the engine noise did to the music.

I'm not much of a one for pop music. Late baroque / classical gets my vote, with the occasional nod to Late Classical / Romantic types like Verdi. So I'm talking about music with a lot of layers. Complexities. Dimensions. Stuff it actually pays to listen to -I mean it doesn't really do as aural wallpaper.

So, cruisin' an' playin' my radio, it became apparent that the engine noise was masking certain musical frequencies, usually the highest ones, the ones that played the recognisable tune. And what I was left with were the lower lines. Not helpful if I was listening to a sonata of any sort, or, say, one of Bach's cello suites, but a symphony? Wow. My head could fill in the missing parts but all of a sudden I could hear the music from a totally unfamiliar angle - the bass lines, the harmonies, the musical sub-plots - and my admiration and reverence for Beethoven and Haydn and Mozart and Verdi exploded.

Same sort of thing is happening now. I finally started watching the recent BBC take on Bleak House. I put it off for ages because the novel is one of my favourite Dickenses and I didn't want a disappointment (and I have fond memories of the last one they did). But Wow again - the adaptation is excellent, it looks gorgeous, the acting is top notch AND it's doing that thing that my car engine did. It's changed my focus on the book, and made me see structures and characterisations that I hadn't seen before. I never expected to feel a flash of sympathetic understanding for Tulkinghorn, or to despise Richard Carstone quite so heartily, or to see the malice seeping from Skimpole so clearly.

And best of all, it makes me want to re-read the book NOW. Can't say fairer than that.

Recent boats I have missed

Why on earth bother to take out large ads telling me that John Lithgow (John Lithgow! Himself!) will be doing Malvolio at Stratford when they know damn well that the run lasts one more week and all the tickets have gone anyway? Just what is that supposed to prove? Is it some sort of bottom line thing? Measuring their success by my disappointment? And I was, you know. Gutted.

And the Terracotta blimmin' Army. Turn your back for a minute and all the tickets have gone. Pfft. Just like that. Well, apart from the two on eBay, and I can't go that day. (Why only the two on eBay? I'd have thought there'd be a roaring trade in them. No tickets at all for Twelfth Night. Just what good is eBay anyway? Can never find anything I want.)

Hmph.

You do the math

Significant Other and I have decided that, actually, it's quite rude to take wine when invited to a dinner party. It implies that one's host is either too poor to afford a bottle, or will provide rubbish wine, or, indeed, is too stupid to notice that you have brought a bottle of undrinkable because CHEAP vino di merda.

But you have to take something, neh? A little box of six handmade chocolates, a teeny posy of seasonal flowers, maybe organically cultivated, fairly traded pecan nuts wrapped in handblocked mango-leaf paper. You know the sort of thing. Which is all wonderful, but how do you carry it? How do you present it to your host? Especially when that box of handmade chocolates is actually quite teeny when compared with a bottle.

Well, you put it in a brown paper bag, don't you? Not just any old bag mind you, but something a little more classy, bit more up-market, know wha' I mean? Something with handles.

Google, bless it, came up with a number of possibilities. Comparison being the order of the day, and remembering that package and postage count, calculator at the ready, I found some good quality, well-constructed nice looking bags at seven pee a pop. Seven! What a great deal, eh? In went the order, Paypal did its thang, and here I am, awaiting delivery of 500 small brown paper bags, with handles, due tomorrow.

Hang on a mo' though. 500? Five? Hundred? OK. Just how many DPs do we get invited to anyway? Seriously. At a generous estimate, I'd say five a year. Including reciprocation, (where a brown paper bag with handles wouldn't count) that makes 10 social occasions a year - sounds about right. Which means we would use the final bag in 83 years and four months time.

Holy crap! I Just thought - how big is the package going to be?

My Mother-in-Law

or:

A Problem Shared is a Problem Doubled.

After much thinking, I've decided to use the words she herself used. You don't know the players, and the incident concerned is not, sadly, isolated. The woman under discussion, let's call her Jane, whom I have met a few times, is small and pretty and engaging and funny and generally charming. She has a feckless husband, three problem children and is prone to quite serious accidents. She is a friend of MiL's DD (Dear Daughter).

The scene: our dinner table, over cheese and biscuits.

MiL: DD told me that years ago Jane was assaulted and buggered with a bottle. No wait - it may have been the other end, but there . . .



My jaw still drops when I replay that conversation in my head. How could she do that?

Isn't it a wonderful thing to have friends? People with whom you feel safe enough to expose your frailties, who will love you anyway, and with whom the sharing of a problem is indeed a burden lifted. It is also a wonderful thing to have a mother with whom you can discuss pretty much anything, without fear of betrayal. No wait . . .

See? Right there. That's the problem with saying anything to anyone. They pass it on to someone they trust, who passes it on to someone else, who doesn't know you well, if at all, and suddenly The Thing that rules the dark corners of your life is the subject of after-dinner conversation among your slight acquaintance.

Hey, did you hear that Isabel had eight miscarriages? Eight! No, but I heard Joe was impotent. Hasn't been able to get it up in two years. Oh, and Steve still wets the bed! And he's twenty-nine! And Barbara can't stand her own daughter, who let's face it is a bit of a slut. Oh, and Jane got buggered by a bottle. Wow, that's really bad luck. Coffee, anyone?

Old Potatoes

See what happens when you leave stuff you should be cherishing and looking after and keeping up to date, or at least cutting up, boiling and eating, neglected for too long? It grows long white funny bits, and no-one wants to know any more. (Makes a pretty picture though, neh?)

On the subject of vegetables, the other day I found myself in tears while I was chopping the onions for supper. They were my own very first home-grown onions (an abundant crop - thank goodness I make terrific red onion marmalade) and it occurred to me that I hadn't cried over an onion in absolutely ages. Now, the thing about the huge supermarkets is that they are, to a significant degree, consumer lead. Did enough of us really get up on our hind legs, and whine that we didn't wike onions that made us cwy? Weally? And did the supermarket behemoths, in all their might and majesty, command an eradication of sulfenic acid? I mean, don't get me wrong, the tears I cried were oh-oh-that-burns-argh-ouch-bloody-hell-fucking-onions tears, right enough, but until that moment I had forgotten that that is what onions are supposed to do. Fucking supermarkets.

Golly, so much to say - the latest appallingness of my MiL, The Adventures of Mango in Wonderland, iTunes - Just How Far Behind The Times Am I?, FaceBook - Is It Just Me, Or Is It Really Rubbish?, the cultural indigestion caused by seeing HP5 and Downfall in the same week - where do I start?

Wow

I loved this. And this.

Blog? What blog??

. . . ah yes - this one.

What's to say? It rained, the sun shone, it rained again. SO got a job - did I mention that? Actually I did, elsewhere on the interweb-thingy, saying, approximately, that he had a new, exciting, slightly-over-his-head (but-in-a-good-way) senior senior job with (insert company name here) (AND THEN TURN IT INTO A LINK).

Oh No! I had completely forgotten the sort of software (see? I know it exists but I have NO idea of what it's called) that trawls the web looking for mentions of your website. One way of looking at it is that his new employers know I just called my Significant Other incompetent in front of the whole world.

OR, and this is the interpretation I myself prefer, the company is actually so huge that they probably don't run this software anyway.

Thank goodness my infinitely competent sister went vociferously for option b). SO much prefers to believe anything when I'm not the one saying it.

Also, well, I guess there were the Perseids - SO and I lying on the trampoline at eleven o'clock at night, not nearly well wrapped up enough, staring into the light-polluted sky and marvelling at the unparalleled beauty of the aeroplane lights - a major benefit of living so close to a flight path. Our viewing was totally undistracted by random shooting stars, thank goodness. They get so in the way of a decent bout of plane-spotting, dontcha find?

You win some, you lose some

We missed Audley End. Extremely irritatingly, it was shut. Three days a week! Ha - I knew we were right to join the National Trust. Those English Heritage dossers are an idle bunch.

To SO's delight, the next possibility was Duxford Air Museum (by that point I didn't care, as long as it involved lunch). Being as how the major exhibits are all aircraft, the place is huge. We got to see inside a prototype Concorde, and ride on an electric train from one end of the museum to the other.

I found myself profoundly disturbed by the Land Warfare exhibition, which concentrated on WWII and the Normandy Landings. (I know. At my great age.) I know we weren't in there for that long, and certainly didn't see absolutely everything, but nowhere in all the diagrams and pictures and video footage that I saw was there any mention of the lives that were lost. No idea at all of the scale of human destruction. Yes, I understand that small children would be quite unjustifiably frightened by graphic representations, but no mention of the dead at all? It seems such a blatant omission, and such a cynical one. I don't understand why veterans' groups don't make a bigger deal of this.

Argh

My Aralia Elegantissima

My mother-in-law's Aralia Elegantissima

Daisy, Daisy

Our friend Daisy, who is one week short of her fourth birthday, and has a twin brother (Current Thinking has it that, developmentally at this age, twins generally lag about six months behind singletons), has just mastered the art of riding a bike without stabilisers. (Which I think is bloody good going. There's one in the eye for for Current Thinking.)

While her parents stood in the garden chatting, Daisy rode her bike straight into the back of her Dad's legs, and fell off. Bouncing up, hands on hips, she berated him 'DAD! You MUST learn to look where you are going!

Under his breath, Daddy retorted 'Hmph! Women drivers!'



We are off to visit the parents-in-law for a few days. Weep for me.

We're Back

Two whole days ago, and we've been having a well-earned rest after the rigours of the holiday. On the left, a picture taken on our first, and on the right, a picture taken on our last day. Ha flippin' ha, eh? Well, I guess it was bound to happen.

We went to the Blue Reef aquarium in Newquay, which is the most charming aquarium I've ever visited - small, but perfectly formed. This by way of an excuse to show you my favourites, the jellyfish.

And we saw the Green Flash! It was quite, quite perfect. (SO didn't believe me, a) that it existed, and b) he banged on about latitude and atmospheric conditions and blah blah blah. Imagine my intense irritation when, on the first possible evening, I had my camera to my eye, and missed it, AND HE SAW IT. Aaaarghh!) I learned my lesson the next night though, and was privileged to see, for a fraction of a second, the most beautiful green.

Our way home, on a very beautiful and warm day, took us through Lacock, where part of Harry Potter had been filmed. The Cloisters, and the rest of the Abbey, are indeed fascinating, but the item that caught my eye was the Monastic Drain.



What?

Nearly halfway there . . .

I'm bloody EXHAUSTED. Every time I forget that, while on the whole our holidays together are a success, SO's and my approaches to our joint time off differ in one or two key aspects. Well, one aspect really. He is SO BLIMMIN' UP-AND-AT-'EM! Can't have five minutes go by without hearing 'So what are we going to do today?' My favourite answer, always bitten back, is 'Bloody NOTHING! Why can't we just read our books for a bit!'

Especially as, oh yes, did I mention it's RAINING? (OK, not the entire time. Yesterday was quite nice, but that meant that Watergate Bay, which is indeed very lovely, was extremely crowded. Still lovely though.) Lovely weather for finding somewhere comfy, with a ready supply of good coffee, and reading.

Not a chance in Hell.

Day One - a cold, windy beach, Day Two - A cold, damp and VERY windy day mooching around Newquay, NOT finding a decent cup of coffee, a pair of Crocs that didn't make me look like Donald Duck or even a half-way decent boat in the harbour to look at. Bleurgh. Day Four - Watergate, and lovely. Day Four - ah. Now this was great. We visited Trerice again. It is SO PERFECT. If we could, we'd buy the place off the National Trust and set up home there. The grounds are laid out with a perfect balance between decorative, working and recreational, and the house itself is small (for an Elizabethan manor) and elegant. Go see this place. It's balm to the troubled soul, and to the weary, peace.

Dunno why I'm posting, when I could be reading Rankin Davis' 'Hung Jury'. So far, so gripping.

We're off. See you in August.

Book Meme

Ten Writers who Need to be Beaten With A Bat Until They Stop.

I'm going to have to stick with seven, because - well, because I can't think of any more. Maybe I'll do the other three later.


1. Thomas Hardy. (Read a lot because I had to - Eng.Lit A-level, then a degree.) The man was an unrelenting doom merchant, so up to his eyebrows in the tragedy of the Common Man he couldn't see the sun shine. (Unless he bent over, of course. No, that was gratuitous.) Jude the Obscure! How penny-dreadful can you get! I can't tell you in detail, of course, you may read it and you really shouldn't be forewarned. The Mayor of Casterbridge - now that was a laugh a page. Like 24 without the mobile phones.

2. Ernest Hemingway. (Read half Death in the Afternoon. Really really coudln't get any further, and I don't give up easy.) Everything First Nations said. Every page reeks of booze and self-justification.


3.Stephen Donaldson. (Read two tomes. Where did my life go!) Thomas Covenant! This should have been so good! Huge sprawling canvas, hero with an interesting flaw, cast of thousands, in-fighting, out-fighting, you name it. But you know what they say - good on paper, lousy in bed. So boring I can't remember how boring it actually was. Still, a page or two and I was sound asleep, so it did have its uses.

4.Cicero. (Latin A-level.) Oh, Cicero. Golden Age of the language, a man right at the heart of the Mightiness That Was Rome, mover, shaker, not given to losing his head. (Or his hands.) But Oh. My. Gosh. All of that fabulous vocabulary, the elegant sentence structure, the meter, the rhythm, and all he could do was character assassination. I'd have voted for Catiline. Mind you, I have not read Imperium, or seen Rome II yet, so there is a chance that years and years and years after leaving school my opinion might be changed. I will, of course, keep you posted. Because you are aching to know.

5.Paul Coelho. (Veronica Decides to Die. No actually, it's Mangonel who badly needs to pop her clogs.) What is it with this man? He has a HUGE following in South and Central America, every time he farts he must earn a squazillion Oreos, or whatever the local currency is, and The Man. Writes. Pap. Earnest, crap-mystical, feel-good PAP. Life's not like that - it's nasty, brutish and short, and he needs to get that into his rich glass-half-full head.

6.Torey Hayden, Dave Pelzer et al. (None. These guys should be top of my list, and I haven't read ONE.) Look at the list of subjects Wikipedia gives for Hayden - autism, Tourette syndrome, sexual abuse, fetal alcohol syndrome, selective mutism. It makes me so sad and angry that people's hideous experiences should be turned into after-dinner conversation. I don't care that they know what they are talking about, they should have the professional responsibility not to turn suffering on this scale into voyeuristic schlock.

7.St Paul (Galatians, Ephesians, Colossians etc.) Or maybe he should be top. The others exposed human misery, he imposed it. On a colossal scale. Now, I know that what the man achieved is world-shaking. (He was the bloke who broke with the Disciples, who wanted to preach exclusively to Jews, and took The Word to the Gentiles across the known world. Himself. HUGE.) His place in history is assured. But my problem with Paul is that he was writing out of the belief that the Second Coming was due in his own lifetime. All his prescriptions and proscriptions had an acknowleged shelf life of about 50 years. He SPECIFICALLY counselled against social change, because the Kingdom of God was at hand. And 2,000 years later we are still cribb'd, cabin'd and confined by strictures 1950 years past their use-by date. The big trouble I have with any theodicy is that it always reflects what Man wants, not what God wants. And Paul was the bloke who started it. (And no, by 'Man' I do not mean to include women. 'He for God only, she for God in him.' Milton, I know, and beautifully phrased, but poisonous nevertheless.) *

COMING SOON!

8, 9 and 10.

I tag Betty, because. She knows why. And Dave - judging by the books appearing in his sidebar, we have very similar tastes in the good stuff. But do we hate the same crap?

*Dunno why I went with a Milton quote, when Paul himself would have done just as well. Paul did, after all write beautifully. Well, at least according to King James he did.

In the meantime . . .

Here's a story from my friend E. She can't post this because she blogs real life, and the subject, or an acquaintance, may find it. So I'm going to do it for her!

'Re the ****** rector. I have been collating a list of stories evidencing his ‘eccentricity’. The latest is that from an occasion when there was a visiting children’s choir from Lithuania. They were scheduled to have drinks and nibbles at the Rectory as part of their visit, and arrived, were shown to the drawing room by Mrs Rector, and thence out through the French windows into the garden. In the garden, the Rector waved merrily to them from his task, and said, “With you in a moment!”. Gasps of horror from assembled Lithuanian kiddywinkles, as he was engaged in disembowelling a deer, and was red to the elbows. In his back garden. And actually I think the technical term is ‘gralloching’, and I don’t even know how I know that.'

Ain't country life grand!

The dog is eating my homework

First Nations tagged me to produce a list of ten writers who, in my opinion, need hitting with a bat until they stop.

It's proving unexpectedly difficult. Of course I can think of some, who can't, but ten? Thing is, I don't on the whole remember chapter and verse of writers that make my eyes bleed - I get them out of the way and move on to the next thing. I suppose I could pad the list with generics like 'extreme right-wing authors, such as the architects of Apartheid, the authors of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and Leviticus' but I have a feeling that would be cheating - I think I have to Name Names.

I'm up to seven, and I want to get this over with by Friday, as we leave for Cornwall over the weekend. (Just outside Newquay, since you ask.)

Oh oh oh I forgot to say, the reason I don't know exactly when we are going away, is that SO is in Moscow for the week. Tee hee! He buys a deeply lovely little car, then goes away for a week, and the minute he is back we head west for ten days, not in the car!

Mid-life crisis? What mid-life crisis?

A test drive! That's where he said he was going! And did I want to come too! As 'appens I was busy, and came home to find THIS on my doorstep.

'I didn't think you'd mind' he said. 'It's an Audi.'

How well he knows me.

If it walks like a duck . . .

I thought I'd better see for myself what this Second Life hoo-hah was all about. This in spite of not being awfully interested in pop music of any stripe, not madly interested in fashion, and not even slightly interested in, God forbid, Meeting New People. But hey, it's the same basis on which I once read a Barbara Cartland novel - I wanted to know what I was talking about. A rare enough stance for me - normally I'm perfectly happy to deliver lengthy opinions based on little more than headlines read from other people's papers, and them usually upside down. And it meant another detailed questionnaire. I love them - so probing.

A pretty cool bit was Choosing a Handle. Well - half of it was cool, because I was always gonna be Mangonel Something, wasn't I. The uncool bit was that they don't let you choose your own surname - well they do, but it's from a list of about 100 presets, of varying degrees of coolness. 'Aabye'? 'Barzane'? 'Cioc'? After to-ing and fro-ing up and down the list a coupla times, and declaiming the possibilities out loud (in front of a mirror. With a hairbrush for a mike. 'Ladeez and Gentlemen! Heee-ee-e-eee-re's Mangonel Etchegarayyyyyy!') I settled on a beautiful name.

Mangonel Anatine.

Isn't that lovely? It has internal alliteration, it's duodactylic, it feels good in the mouth. It has umami.

I signed myself up. I thought to myself, 'What a cool name! Wouldn't it be even cooler if it actually meant something? Yeah sure, Mangonel I'm pretty happy with, but Anatine? I know! Let's go Google!'


An´a`tine - (Zool.) Of or pertaining to the ducks; ducklike.





Well.

I said No. NO WAY. Uh-huh. Not me, no sirree Bob. I refused, withdrew my service, and cancelled the subscription.

And then changed my mind. (They say men's minds are dirtier than women's. Women change theirs more often.) I decided hey! Ducks are pretty cool! Especially shredded, with spring onions and plum sauce, wrapped in a pancake. The thought of that gives me a warm fuzzy feeling, why not share the joy?

And then changed my mind when they wanted a WHOPPING $9.99 to reactivate the account I'd had for 14 seconds, and had cancelled about a minute and a half before. $9.99! So now I have to wait until 31st August before I can try again. But I will. You betcha. Quack.

It was lovely, thanks

We passed unscathed by the mares of Diomedes, and greeted the Three Sisters. Quite an exciting walk, all in all.

And in Northleach to pay my respects to my C15 Uncle John Fortey, found Christ Risen.













Rivergirl proposed a bijou blogmeetette, as Burford is in her neck of the woods. There's very little I would have liked more, but I don't know how I would have explained her. You see, SO doesn't know about this little hobby of mine. (At least not to my knowledge he doesn't. I haven't told him, and I'd know if he found out - he is crap at keeping stuff to himself.) So telling him I have an imaginary friend, and then actually introducing this imaginary friend, may pop a fuse or two. (Or may not. Don't wanna find out right now. Maybe another time.)

RG - raincheck?

Can't stop . . .

We are away for the weekend, just the two of us, at The Lamb in Burford. It's by way of a celebration, as SO, that complete paradigm of manliness, has not only got a job, he has paid off the mortgage.

He wanted to book Cliveden, and when I demurred on the grounds of expense, he shrugged in a very devil-may-care manner, on account of He Has A Job! Money Is No Longer An Object! Then he found out how much it cost.

I don't care. For the weekend, someone else will be cooking, clearing, washing up and making the beds.

What did I miss?

I select the charity shops I give stuff to based on whether I can park right outside them.

I am never in a million years going to be organised enough to run that particular errand every time I have collected enough to fill an easily portable plastic bag - nope, I have to fill a Large Box with clothes and homewares and the occasional curtain, and then I have to have the box in the car next time I pass a charity shop I can park outside. It's a very delicate chain of circumstance, I can tell you.

It didn't quite come off yesterday, when, in the rain, on my third pass round the go-round I still couldn't find a space. But what the heck, I thought, I'll double park. All I want to do is dump the box and run. How long can that take?

So I 'parked' the car - well, more 'stopped in the middle of the road', wrestled the box out of the back and made a dash for the Shaw Trust doorway. All this made even more exciting by the presence of a Small Child in my car. (Magic for getting a primo parking space at the supermarket, I can tell you. And then of course they want to push the trolley, play with the scanner all the time, even when it's your turn - y'know, the magic runs out pretty damn quickly. Forget I spoke.) But The Little Treasure in the back seat meant I really had to get a jerk on.

The woman in charge, on the phone at the time, managed by dint of flourishing her eyebrows and waggling her fingers to make me understand that she wanted me to hang about. Which I did. You try hopping nervously and impatiently from foot to foot while carrying a large and heavy box. Go on. When at last all her attention was bestowed on me, stap me if she didn't start picking through the contents of the bloody box. With a 'hmmmm' here and a sad shake of her head there, she informed me that, apart from the odd piece of clothing, she wouldn't take anything I had brought, as 'none of it will sell'.

WHAT!

How on earth does a charity shop get to pick and choose? 'None of it will sell', I ask you! (As 'appens, the minute I got home I hit Freecycle, and half of the stuff is already gone. OK, for free, but it really wouldn't have cost too much in the flippin' shop.) When did charity shops get so damn sniffy about what they stock? Surely clean and operational and no duct tape is enough! Not these days, it seems.

Thirty Pieces of Silver

. . . or the digital camerical equivalent.

The big har-de-har in my household is How I Can Never Remember My Own Anniversary. I can tell you more-or-less the month, but detail any finer than that eludes me. In actual fact, after many years of wedded bliss, and much jeering, new synaptic paths have had no choice but to form, and these days I can actually give you the actual date, two times out of three.

And this year was one of them. This time I was ahead of the game. Ready with the carefully selected oak-aged hand-decanted single malt. Well yar boo sucks to you, I thought. I've got my rabbit up my sleeve, my trump card in my hat. Present me with any gift you like, I'm ready. Do Your Worst.

Well ha bloody ha to me then, because this was the year that SO forgot. We co-incided for about two minutes that morning, time enough for him, all rumpled and aghast, to tell me he'd only just realised what Day it was, and for me to thunder up the stairs, retrieve the whiskey, thunder back down again, push it into his nerveless fingers, before belting out of the house. Not even time for a quick 'nyer nyer nya-nyer nyer'.

And where did that leave me? In possession of The Moral High Ground, that's where. TMHG. A very strange experience for me, as TMHG is SO's natural habitat. Later that day he was agonising about what he could possibly get me (Why? What the hell are Amazon Wish Lists for?) when I told him that a) tenancy of TMHG, however fleeting, and b) the absolute right to crow over this, FOR THE REST OF OUR LIVES, were of themselves gifts beyond price.

So today he goes and ruins it all by presenting me with the sweetest little camera* I ever did see. It is so cute, and so easy to use, and fits so handily in a pocket. It's a relatively recent model, so the budget will have yelped a bit.

The sod.

But hey - TMHG gave me altitude sickness, and crowing makes my throat sore.

* (The mobile on the left is for scale. Pay attention.)

Pirates of the Caribbean

. . . pronounced 'blecchhhh'. Really, really don't bother. Don't buy the DVD, don't rent it. Watch it on telly, if there's no drying paint, or your eyeballs don't need gouging out.

I'd complain about the plot, if I'd been able to understand enough dialogue to get some sort of handle on it. But Geoffrey Rush had such a bad attack of the ooh-arrrrs that, come the the day when the Flying Spaghetti Monster manifests as the One True Religion, he will be Pope. Chow Yun-Fat and Jonathan Pryce were unforgiveably wasted, Keira Knightly is still not attractive and Orlando Bloom still can't act. And even a screenful of Johnny Depps doesn't make up for it.

Never mind. Die Hard 4.0 is out soon.

No, no and thrice no

Yesterday evening was mildly appalling. In a very girly way. Sometimes I just hate being a girl - it's just so embarrassing.

The evening started out promisingly enough, sitting outside in the pub garden with a large glass of a fairly decent rosé. I grovelled and apologised with sincerity - I had, after all, treated our relationship with a casualness bordering on the unkind.

Then things went to hell in a handbasket.

But it turns out that we didn't have a relationship, we have a Relationship. Seems my dilatoryness in answering emails and making us miss lovely concerts is symptomatic of something deeper. What exactly did I want from our Relationship? A Relationship based solely on small talk was all very well, but shouldn't we be aiming for a deeper level? It seems I am emotionally closed off, evading any discussion of Issues, that I am constantly holding her at emotional arm's length. I Don't Let Her In.

FUCK A DUCK.

She's a GROWN WOMAN! She has a husband and children! How does she still get to come over like a 19 year old? All I want is the chat, some music, the occasional lunch! I am staggered that any bloke puts up with this. Is the sex worth this level of crap?

It was exactly this sort of thing that kyboshed me and my last (and only) girlfriend. Sometimes I really, really hate being a girl.



P.S. We left it that everything was patched up, that we were still OK, and that we would meet for another drink soon, BECAUSE THIS ONE HAD BEEN SO MUCH FUN. I can't wait.

Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa

Humble Pie for supper tonight - one of my less favourite dishes.

I have succeeded, through laziness, with a dash of incompetence, and a smidge of abandonment issue (but mostly laziness), in hacking off a friend. We used to see each other a lot - our schedules brought us into contact frequently, and we used to get together once a week to play guitar duets.

Thinking back, the hacked-offedness may have started when I got insistent about her seeing a proper teacher, as the technique she was developing all be herself was seriously poor. Nagged - that's the word I'm looking for. The Repetition of Unpalatable Truths. (She did, and he was very helpful.)

But stuff got in the way - major house renovations in both households, new jobs, different schedules, meant we have hardly seen each other at all over the last few months. A couple of times I suggested meeting, but got turned down (hence the abandonment issue). She then e-mailed, suggesting a trip to a concert, (to hear Emma Kirkby. Talk about cutting my nose off to spite myself.) which, relying on seeing her around as had been our wont, I failed to reply to. She tried again, and again I was too late with my reply for there to be any tickets available.

So for the past few weeks we have both found reasons not to coincide anywhere at all.

But hey - it's a pretty small village, and there's a limit to how long this can go on, so we are meeting tonight for a drink, and for me to abase myself. Grovel. Eat DIRT.

I hate being in the wrong.

Saraband, by Robert de Visée (1686)

A Quiet Weekend

The garden party we attended, celebrating ten years of the Browns' marrriage, had about 150 guests, all old friends, all chatting away like mad things. You could hear the buzz of the bees in the sunlight, the quiet music accompanying the entertainment and the tink of stirring teaspoons. At least half the guests had BSL as a first language.

About ten years ago, we were invited to see English National Opera's production of The Damnation of Faust (Willard White as Faust. Wow.) by these deaf friends. If you are deaf, ENO will sell you tickets at a huge discount. Every opera in the season's repertoire has one performance which is signed, and this was the one we were lucky enough to see. The young woman was beautiful to watch, as she translated the entire opera - I would say single handed, but BSL needs two hands - on her own. It was a graceful, hypnotic performance, and she, quite rightly, took a bow with the principals at the end.

Our friend Mrs Brown told us that Norma Major, during her husband's tenure as PM, had attended one such evening, and had subsequently written to the ENO management, expressing her horror that an evening of opera should be ruined by such a distracting presence.

Sometimes I struggle with the Tories, and sometimes I really struggle.

Where Next? Or Not.

SO is between jobs at the moment. Has been for a year and a bit now, actually. Everything is fine, he has picked up enough consultancy work to keep the wolf at a very respectable distance from the door, thank you very much, but he does hanker for something rather more reliable. (And when he hankers, I hanker. 'Where thou hankerest, I will hanker' Book of Ruth? Dunno. Sumpn like that.) And it's not just that, it's what this is now doing to his CV, and how rusty his skill set is getting, and the contacts he just can't maintain in quite the same way, usw.


The trouble is, jobs in his area (he is in the oil business) can be found all over the place, and he is quite keen on the idea of a job abroad, while I, since a comparatively peripatetic childhood, have been very content to find a home and stay there.

So, after much internal debate and wrestling, I finally came round to the idea that living in foreign parts is not in and of itself A Bad Thing. In fact, who knows, we may quite like it. I've insisted that it has to be somewhere I want to go. I draw the line at Libya, for instance. Saudi Arabia. Algeria, nuh-huh. But Jakarta? Possibly. Singapore? For all its peculiarities, yeah, why not? SO has mentioned Vienna and Madrid too. (I'd adore Hong Kong, but SO says that is one place there are actually no oily jobs. Boo hoo.)

This was last night, and by now my feet are getting noticeably itchy.

But then, it's never going to happen anyway.

Space nappies

We visited the Science Museum this weekend, basically because it's there. Stayed mostly down in the new (to us, anyway) Space Flight stuff, which is seriously cool, and answered some, though by no means all, questions I have had for a long time.

Peeing was, of course easily managed. The 'product' was summarily jettisoned. The 'hard stuff' involved a little more thought. It required a loo with a metal bar for swinging across your thighs, or falling foul of Newton's Third Law (For every action, there is an equal and opposite . . . you get the picture.) The results were bagged and taken back to earth for analysis.

And for EVA, there were nappies. I kid you not, Astronaut Nappies. They looked vaguely re-usable, but my guess was that they needed to be substantial enough to be wrapped securely in the event that they had *ahem* been pressed into service.

What the guys in the Apollo 10 module, practically immobile for ten days, did, I never discovered. Pretty cool to see the module, though.

In other news, SO and I watched Trading Places yesterday. (I could put in a link, but honestly, who the hell doesn't know about Trading Places?) and discovered something SO and I have in common - a Thing for Lady Haden-Guest. Every time she appeared on screen identical and barely supressed moans escaped our numb lips.

Yowza.

UPDATE: Hi Dave. Also, thanks to Karen in the comments, I missed a fabulous trick by not saying that it was Newton's Third Law of MOTION. Ha ha ha ha ha!

Zippity-doo-dah!

My ticket to South Africa is booked! Let joy be unconfined! I am so excited, I can't begin to tell you. Of course, it is six months away, this trip, so I have plenty of time to get jaded and blasé.

Back in the day, they used to have segregated park benches. Chiseled across the back rest would be 'Whites Only' or 'Nie Blankes'. I wonder what they've done with them? A first guess would be that they dug 'em all up and burned them. But what if they didn't have the money to replace them? If they were left in place, oh joy, we would have legions of black bums sitting on 'Whites Only' seats.

But what about future generations? The ones who, if they don't learn from history, are condemned to repeat it? Maybe they will have kept one bench, and cordoned it off, or maybe built a plexiglass protective enclosure and pumped it full of inert preservative gases, where The People can come and be reminded of the idiocies of yesteryear.


ps What exactly is an 'historical imperative'? Fabulous phrase, but I have no idea what it means.

Ha ha ha ha I win!

Look at my lovely beanpoles! You could argue that's they are the happy resolution to a series of purchasing disasters, but I prefer to think of them as the culmination of a series of horticultural experiment.

Having missed the window of opportunity for planting seeds, I caved and bought baby plants of sugarsnap peas and french beans. (And got very annoyed at having to dispose of the expanded polystyrene containers. Bah.) Knowing that these legumes climb, I also bought very fancy one metre high poles for them to do so.

Well. My mother informed me, luckily before I had done any planting, that the beans would grow to six foot, and the peas would only reach 18 inches. She recommended bamboo poles, which she has, and very charming and rustic they look too. So off I went, back to the garden centre (AGAIN) and found these completely wonderful spirally jobs. Six quid for a pack of three, but just how beautiful are they! (And a pack of six very fancy 50 cm metre high poles for the peas.)

When my mother heard how much I had paid for these things of beauty and joys forever, she was aghast. Aghast, I tell you. 'WHAT!' she wailed. 'But that's what my bamboo poles cost!'

Stuff I don't know

This could, of course, be the longest post in history, so I will confine myself to things I have found out in the last couple of days.

1. The first David Tennant Dr Who series is WONDERFUL. Really fab. (Well, the first three episodes anyway, but I can't imagine the others aren't going to be great.) Cassandra body-hopping and being given such a good send-off, the Victorian were-wolf and the plots within plots within plots, and the lovely Sarah-Jane Smith provoking some rich emotional layering, and Anthony Head getting quite versatile in his old age.
2. Back, Crack and Sac. I was considering this as post title, but the whole idea makes me squirm. Apparently this is a standard waxing package offered to men. Eeuw. Really, eeeeuw.

Does everyone know about this stuff except me?

Bridezilla

Filing systems and I have always remained on cordial, if distant, terms. Not that I have anything against them per se, but I know that as soon as I file something, it's as good as gone. I'll never find it again. So if it's something I need to remember, I sticky-tape it somewhere. Sometimes outside cupboards, sometimes in. All of this is post-new kitchen. Pre-new kitchen was heaven - if I needed to write something dowm, I wrote straight onto the wall. (Of course it ended in disaster - was I organised enough to copy the data off the wall before the decorators arrived? Was I Hell.) (This cupboard is representative.)

And then look what arrives! Not a weddng invitation, but a reminder that a wedding invitation is on the way. And I don't have to tape it anywhere, because it has - wait for it - A MAGNETIC BACKING. So I can put it straight onto my fridge* as a reminder that, in the fullness of time, I will be receiving a wedding invitation. Not only that, when it reaches the end of its useful life, and I throw it away, it won't recycle! It will sit in landfill for ever!

By profession, the bride is an Event Organizer. So here we have the magnetic You-Have-Been-Warned, apparently there is also A Swatch. And not a wristwatch either, but a fistful of scraps of material, with which our outfits have to tone. I can't wait for the next thing.

On the upside, the wedding is in Johannesburg. It's looking extremely likely that I will be allowed to go.

* My fridge is one of those built-in numbers, so it has a wooden front. Never mind, I can always sticky-tape the Advance Warning up.

Re-creationism

That's not the word I want, but I mean those folk who pretend they live elsewhen - yomp about in genu-wine handstitched footrolls of authentically uncured sheepskin, wear vast layers of extremely draughty clothing held together by the latest in tablet-weaving technology, and get to fire off REAL cannons and muskets and mangonels, even if they ammunition-of-choice for todays go-getting recreationist (or whatever) is a grapefruit.

We had them at the Open Air Museum - Normans, this lot were. Dressed in yards of what looked like fat, dirty bandages, and wielding bloody great not-very-sharp swords. Dunno which frightens me more - a very sharp sword, or a not-so-sharp one. I read that when Henry VIII had some bishop's head off (Cranmer? Cromwell?) he gave the job to a 15-year old boy who had practised the night before on a dead pig, and whose axe was not very sharp. Maybe there are occasions when sharp is good.

Anyway, they also had this thing called a perrier, which is yer basic person-powered mangonel (I know! Yeah! Exciting, eh?) with which they slung grapefruit a goodly distance. Said grapefruit exploded upon impact very satisfactorily.

So they had the maiming and killing pretty much covered. But the stuff they didn't have, and which is my favourite, is the medical stuff. Infinitely more maiming and killing to be had in a doctor's bag then, I'll tell you. True, they had some winners like maggots and sphagnum moss, but mercury as a treatment for constipation? Oh yes. The foot-long screw-operated tweezers used to take the bullet out of Henry V's brain when, at 16, he was shot in the face? I guess he had to be held down. U-uurgh.

But just what are these lovely play-actors called?

Sleeping on the couch

My SO and I don't fight. More accurately, can't fight. No, no, that's not right either. What we will not do is spend a night apart. Out of our own bed.

Aaw! Doesn't that make us sound cute! Nope. What that makes us is the the owners of one - count'em, one - Tempur mattress. (If you followed the link, that's SO and me in the picture. And our bedroom. Uh-huh.) Neither of us is prepared even remotely to spend the night on anything else. Spare bedroom? Couch? NO WA-AA-A-AY!

That said, even with the lure of that wonderful mattress, to which the lovely warm sleeping bod of SO comes an not-very-close second, for the last eighteen months I have been sleeping like crap. I don't get into bed until sometimes four o'clock, I'm awake by eight, and survive on the occasional cat-nap when I can. It's no fun, I tell you.

So how come, last night about 10-ish, I caught up with CSI (Keppler died. Grissom's back. You gotta love that beard.), curled up on the sofa (two seater. and I'm 5'6".) under a blanket and fell fast asleep. Didn't budge until seven and woke perfectly refreshed.

Some days I really have no idea.

Greed

Actually, thinking about it, I don't know whether this is greed at all.

Last Friday, my usual shopping day, Sainsburys was heaving. (In Beaconsfield. Not an unaffluent part of the Home Counties.) Unusually so. Really, really full. I wondered if there had been some emergency notification that I hadn't heard, and maybe people were stocking up. Flood warning? Hurricanes, Tatars massing at the gates, a flock of giant flesh-eating zombie ants? A Bank Holiday that had passed me by?

But no.


Free plastic bags.

I kid you not.

The usual flimsy orange numbers were absent, and the checkouts were offering the sturdier version zippily titled 'a Bag for Life'. (See what they did there? Not only will the bag last for your entire lifetime, it also affirms the general goodness of Life Itself. Wow. These marketing people are clever.) (Oh, and as soon as your Bag for Life wears out, you swap it for an absolutely free replacement.) The thing is, these Bags for Life normally Cost. Yesseree Bob, they cost money. You don't get to display your Committment to a Better Life for All, for Cleaner Water for Disadvantaged Children, Universal Franchise and Making Poverty History, without paying.

10p.

Once again, no kidding. Ten. Pee. People were queueing round the block for bags that normally go for TEN P A POP. How many bags would you need for one shop? Seven? Nine, ten maximum? Let's say ten bags, it makes the maths easier. Ten bags, ten pence - yup. People were rescheduling their days, clogging up the roads, don't even think about the extra petrol, buying stuff they didn't need (ooh! that tin of larks' tongues, maybe 100g of that newt eyes / frog toes combo from the deli might just push me over into another bag! Yess!) to get ONE POUND'S WORTH OF FREE STUFF.

Tulip Time

I live near Chenies Manor which is famous for its tulip beds - see?

It also has a wall, facing London, with no windows. This was designed to stop the plague. And chimney stacks. Oh come on, you know what I mean.

Editorial Policy

This was the big thing a few months ago. The thing I remember (and right this instant I don't remember too much, for reasons which will become clear) is that Patroclus (I am not worthy, I am not worthy, I am not worthy) started off this discussiona about editorial policy. I remember hers. Not blogging about blogging, and no blogging about sex. (Huh! she hasd this thing abot Marimekko! Chenck out her blog if you don't believe me.) I used to have no editorial policy. Any post is a good post, I thought. Especially when it gets something down for the day.

Well here's a thought. How abnout NOT WHEN YOU ARE DRUNK? Ont he other handm, how else is one supposed to enjy a movie like OUTBREAK? Preposterous. Preposterous. Preposterous. Preposterous. Preposterous. . (See? I can still ctrl-c with the best of 'em.,)

Really really reallly., Is this supposed to be a metaphor for the Cold War? that's supposed to be over but clearly isn't? Unknown virus affects small N. american town, and the powers that be (Donald Sutherlang *groan* *no in a how-does-he-stay-so-HOT kinda way) have to bomb the town into OBLIVION or else their SECRET BIOLOGICAL WEAPON is compromised util Dustin Hoffman (tres small, tres cute) find s the anti-whotsit and saves EVERYONE including Morgan Freeman who discovers hois own humnanity JUST IN TIME) and the only reason this movie makes any sense is if you get progressivly MORE SPANNERED on your own margaritas (did Imention I make the BNEST MARGARITAS in the western hemisphere?) and then TWO CHHERS FOR DEMOCRACY o hell now I'm channelling G. Orwell. Buigger.

Tulips tomorrow. Especially for Dinahmow.

More T-shirts

My sister is back from ten days in Las Vegas. She came round for our bi-weekly House-fest, bearing tall stories and T-shirts. She said that there is absolutely no natural light in Vegas, none at all. That you never, ever leave your hotel. Because everything you could possibly want is there, in the hotel. Cocktails, chemists, clothes, 'coffee' shops. That, drinking their 'coffee' and eating their muffins on touching down from the helicopter ride to the Grand Canyon, and having been SERIOUSLY warned by the pilot NOT to feed the wildlife, they were surrounded by a ring of chipmunks three deep. Clearly bent on saying Hello, and harbouring no expectations of muffin crumbs from the grockles, none at all. And of course no decent coffee to be found, not even for ready money.

Not quite . . .

. . . the post I had in mind. Got most of it written, and looked for the picture to accompany it, and -

I have no idea where it is. I guess it got deleted in some sort of flurry. Bugger, eh? I think I may have a little lie-down. With - I dunno - maybe a book? It's been so long I've forgotten how.

Oh, the pressure

My friend Lin is of Singaporean extraction. That is, her parents are both Singaporean, she was born and brought up there, but studied medicine here, practises here (STDs. Ugh.), married an Englishman (ok, Lithuanian Jew. But seriously English.) and raises their son Matthew. They live in a lovely bit of Chiswick. Some four years ago hubby was offered a prestigious post in Singapore - Lin's theory was that she herself was a major factor, on the grounds that she would so love being 'home' again she would persuade hubby to stay longer than the two years he had agreed. Ha - fat chance.

ANYWAY. She found what she thought was a lovely nursery for Matthew, where he seemed happy enough, until she eventually got round to buying the required uniform T-shirt, and promptly removed him from the school.

Isn't it FANTASTIC? I reckoned that if I had made up a batch and hawked them around W4 I'd have made a killing.

HA! I knew it!

I quote from the Observer, April 1st 2007* -

'. . .(Donald Rumsfeld) was appointed to run an ailing pharmaceutical company in Chicago (in 1976). The company's one ray of hope was that it had the patent for aspartame, the artificial sweetener; the problem was that the Food and Drugs Administration suspected the company of falsifying its trials and feared that aspartame could cause brain cancer.

Rumsfeld duly brought in various cronies with whom he had worked in government and who knew nothing about drugs but everything about the inner workings of the corridors of power in Washington. Before long, the FDA magically approved the use of aspartame and the fortunes of both the company and Rumsfeld were sealed.'

You remember that stunt that John Selwyn Gummer pulled, with the hamburger and a small child (HIS OWN)? I have visions of Rumsfeld spooning the stuff into his face in front of the FDA chiefs, who bestow approval just to get him to STOP.

* I know. I really don't think it's relevant.

Rob

Rob was in church today. He's the bloke getting the church website up and running, and he helps out at the youth club. He's about 32, slightly built and quietly spoken. He turned up this morning sporting a new beard and two new kidneys.

His own failed him in his early teens, since when he has had dialysis twice a week. He's been catheterised for all this time. He has lived with almost constant pain, and been strenuously advised against taking painkillers, as they would mask symptoms of other, serious conditions. Death has, on a number of occasions, been uncomfortably close to claiming him.

My understanding is, that for each kidney a hospital acquires, they elect two potential recipients. Of course the closest match gets first dibs, but in the event of, say, even a slight cold, then there's a backup recipient. On the day of the operation, all three others disqualified themselves, and Rob was given both kidneys. Apparently he's set some sort of record for shortest stay in hospital. Five days does seem pretty short.

And now, his biggest concern is that, often and often through the day, he has to stop what he's doing and pee.

I don't know the gender or how the donor died, but spare a thought for the parents of that two-year-old, who cared enough to make the death of their child mean life for someone else's.

The best laid plans

Oh, sod going green by managing my life better. How about just going into the garden and watching God do it for me.

Last year I had this fantastic scheme for a tulip bed, based upon the beautiful Princess Irene. Isn't she lovely? This picture doesn't do her justice - the orange is good, but the streaks are a much deeper purple. So I put together a bed of solid purples, orange Ballerinas and these Irenes. I would so love to show you what it looks like, but whaddaya know? The purples, which are significantly shorter than the oranges, ha ha, are seriously past their best just as the oranges are looking beautiful. Princess Irene, on the other hand, is still abed, a tightly wound green bud whose intended playmates will all have packed up and gone home by the time she decides to show.

Current state of play:

Still OK if you don't look too closely. But if you do look closely, you notice that one of the Ballerinas has flared. You win some, you lose some, eh?

It makes sense if

. . . a) I tell you that that humming noise you heard in the background was the dusted-off breadmaker, and b) you look at how late it was. I was really very tired. Oh look - I still am.

Waste Not Want Not

It gave me quite a turn to hear, the other day, that we in the UK throw away about 30% of the food we buy. I had recently noticed in my own household that an awful lot of food gets chucked, so to hear this horribleness made official made me look at what exactly happens chez Mangonel.

Adopting the Pareto Principle, I figure if I can control Bread and Vegetables that will be 80% of the problem solved. Bread is such a big deal, partly because it's so damn cheap. (I'm not talking about anything which has its price quadrupled just because it has sunflower seeds in it.) I buy big because, ooh, once or twice we've had guests, or actually that week we've just happened to eat a lot of bread. The result of this statistically unsound buying method is an embarrasse du mouldy riches by the end of the week.

Vegetables are, of course, an Outward and Visible Sign of my pious approach to Good Eating. But the end result is the same - a binful of unidentifiable green spongy bits.

Irritatingly, there are fixes for these symptoms. My compost bins for one, and the Green Bin for the other. Here in Bucks we have a separate collection for anything food related. Separate bin, separate garbage truck, separate destination, to wit a high-temperature composting facility near High Wycombe. Apparently landfill use has dropped by something astounding like 35%.

But that's not a cure, is it. There's a man called Mel Bartholemew, whose Big Idea is Square Foot Gardening. Basically, vegetable growing by the Square Foot rather than the Long Line. Not only is he extremely sound on veg. patches, he also gives recipe suggestions which, if you cook them in the right order, and a little more than you need so you freeze the leftovers (all in one great tub), by the end of the week you get a delicious and perfectly balanced meal for two ready for defrosting. And he's got a beard.

(And now I've started thinking about the ethics of bread so cheap, and wondering if there's a case to be made for the harm it does society. And why the hell I don't par-boil and freeze vegetables before they rot. I'll never get to sleep now.)

Chocolate

That's Easter over and done with for another year, then And what have I learned this Paschal tide? That while it might say 85% on the wrapper, it may very well not do.

Those bloody eggs. Having lovingly put the patterns in different coloured chocolate, and filled the moulds with careful layers of the plain stuff, ON MY OWN, it was time to put the eggs together. The little ones popped out of their moulds very easily, and it was the work of moments to paste the halves together. Well, it would have been moments if I hadn't had to keep washing my hands.

I'd used blimmin' cooking chocolate, hadn't I. All organically grown and fairly traded and all, but the stuff, as indeed it's supposed to, melts at a breath, never mind body temperature. The little eggs are all smeared messes, and the two big ones, destined for my mother and my sister, JUST WILL NOT COME OUT OF THEIR MOULDS. Without breaking into tiny little pieces, obviously.

Though a big upside to all this has been my discovery that as a method of taking and storing clearly defined fingerprints, cooking chocolate is second to none. I'm going to write to Gil Grissom. Maybe he'll want to discuss it over a bottle of wine . . .

Craft(y) Fair

I do enjoy a good Craft Fair, me. From the beautifully made walnut console tables to the garishly-blotched 'Your name painted FREE!' childrens' coat pegs, the artisanal bread to the production line stuffed olives, the mouth-blown glass lamps to the wine-glasses decorated with that dreadful glass paint. Negotiating that tricky line between needing to have a look at some fresh horror involving hand-twizzled clay fairies and tea-lights, while avoiding the eye of the maker sitting behind the stall. The shocking needlessness of the be-ribboned plastic egg cups, the shocking prices being asked for some very average cuff links, and the total gorgeousness of a child-sized wooden motorbike on rubber wheels.

And the story I heard of some people setting up a stall with jars, with hand-written labels and gingham-covered lids, and priced outrageously, filled with jam bought for £2 a ton at CostCo.

Book List

What I am Reading Now is The Fortune of War, by Patrick O'Brian. Within the first 50 pages, our heroes have one ship sink under them, another shot out from under them, and are now held prisoner by the fledgling US of A. Phew. This is the sixth book in the series, and I'm already getting anxious that there are only 13 to go.

What Made Me Cry? Most recently, the pair of deaths at the end of The Subtle Knife, by Philip Pullman. I'm talking wailing aloud, rocking back and forth, tear-sodden face here. Really, really crying. Closely followed by the death of Jo the Crossing Sweeper in Bleak House.

The Book That Made Me Laugh most recently is the O'Brian - there's a dry chortle every couple of pages. The most laughing out loud has to be Tennyson's Gift by Lynne Truss. Funniest. Book. Ever. Closely followed by The Diary of a Provincial Lady. A blog by any other name . . .

I Raged at The Bookseller of Kabul, by Asne Seierstad. She lived with an Afghani family for a few months, and her account of the treatment of everyone not the male head of a household made me weep for the sheer bloody waste of human potential.

What Book Made Me Crap My Pants (I'm so sorry, I think that unfortunate phrase is mine . . .) has to be The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James. For months I couldn't walk up any stairs for fear I would see Peter Quint looking down at me. Still makes me shudder. Miles was well out of it, I reckon.

The Most Impact On My Life would be The Road Less Travelled, by M. Scott Peck. It's the only self-help book I have ever read, and I only read it because the most astonishingly diverse range of people recommended it. The only thing I can remember from it, is his injunction not to lie. Never, ever. It's a betrayal of the soul. That's not to say I have never lied since, of course, I'm just very conscious of it when I do. And sometimes I turn not lying into a game (a not very honourable game) by saying something which will be taken to mean something else. Occasions for this might be how to phrase a response to a particularly hideous new baby, or a meal badly cooked by the Mother in Law.

What Book Ought I To Have Read, But Haven't? Boringly, I'd have to go with Ulysses, by James Joyce. For a graduate in English Literature, that's actually quite an admission. Here's something even more shocking - I don't feel even the slightest urge to make good the omission.

If Realdoc, Dave or Wyndham pass this way, I'd love to hear what they have to say.