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.