Heh? How did this happen?

Joke

2008-07-28T00:48:00.002Z

Man: Doctor, Doctor, I can't pronounce my Fs, my Ts or my Hs!

Doctor: Well, you can't say fairer than that then.

Back soon.

Yup. That's what I thought.

2008-04-16T18:46:00.000Z

You Are a Great Liar

You can pretty much pull anything over on anyone.

You are an expert liar, even if you don't lie very often.

Are You a Good Liar?

Less of a celebration, more of a rip-off

2008-04-13T15:04:00.003Z

Lovely Significant Other, who couldn't be less interested, but knows I am, turned up with two tickets to the Doctor Who exhibition. So, come Saturday afternoon, off we traipsed to West Brompton.

I dunno, maybe it was the gap between expectation and fulfillment, but I was disappointed. (Possibly also the gap between moulded plastic and CGI, I dunno.) There were some good bits, like How To Build An Ood, and a static display of life-size Daleks that came VERY SUDDENLY to life, also setting some unsuspecting small children to crying ha ha ha ha, and, I guess, for those so inclined, the actual real true-life Waitress costume As Worn By Kylie, but otherwise -

Nah. The jeans worn by La Piper? A cat-faced nun? A Victorian telescope that looked just a leetle like it had been made out of a gigantic loo-roll and some sticky-backed plastic? And a Tardis with DO NOT TOUCH all over it, so the much-longed-for photo of Moi in its doorway is going to have to wait for my much closer acquaintance with Photoshop? And a shop where the minimum price-hike was 20%.?

And all over kids (not that I'm agin 'em in principle, you understand, but when they get in my way to this degree?) standing by the exhibits, looking gormless, and having to keep out of the way while Doting Parent takes a picture?

Again, Nah. I'll stick to watching it on telly There's only So Far one can take fandom, and with a grateful kiss to Significant Other, this was A Step Too Far.

Actually the Stone Angel was quite good, positioned in a suitably unexpected corner. And the Empress of Raknoss was BIG. That was good too.

All we like sheep . . .

2008-04-07T16:11:00.002Z

Far be it from me blindly to follow the crowd, and it does seem that a lot of bloggers are posting links to videos, but on the other hand I did find a REALLY GOOD PIECE. It's an a capella rendering of Bohemian Rhapsody by one of those College Boy Bands so quintessentially decadent East Coast. (Of the U.S. of A., I mean, not Essex. Or Kent.)

I shall be quite annoyed if this phenomenomenomenon isn't kept afloat by gay men. How irritating would it be to find a country where it's perfectly acceptable for talented straight men to dress tidily, have an extremely functional knowledge of music, and work hard enough to produce this little gem.

Oh, yes, the link - it's here.

Dangerous

2008-04-06T00:08:00.003Z

One of my favourite things ever is getting a comment from Reg. This is what it looks like in my hotmail inbox - all dark and brooding. Think storm clouds on the horizon, think the Reichenbach Falls, think Olivier playing Heathcliff. Think Reg.

In other news, 'Paradise Lost' is orf. Not enough interest in the village. I'm a bit gutted, aksherly.

Abdiel

2008-03-31T23:34:00.000Z

Look at this -

O Heaven! That such resemblance of the Highest
Should yet remain, where faith and realty
Remain not; wherefore should not strength and might
There fail where virtue fails, or weakest prove
Where boldest, though to sight unconquerable?
His puissance, trusting to th' Almighty's aid
I mean to try, whose reason I have tried
Unsound and false; nor is it aught but just
That he who in debate of truth hath won
Should win in arms, in both disputes alike
Victor; though brutish that contést and foul,
When reason hath to deal with force, yet so
Most reason is that reason overcome.

There's to be a staging of Milton's words in early July (not all of them. That would be mad.) and I auditioned yesterday. I said, of course, that I would just be pleased to be asked at all, but that's a LIE - I want Abdiel. I really really want Abdiel.

(Abdiel is the angel who initially was swayed by Lucifer's 'Non serviam', but thought better of it. That's the angel opposing Satan, who with his legions is assaulting the throne of Heaven. I may have to post some more of this later - it's FANTASTIC.)

See?

2008-03-31T01:20:00.002Z

If it's better to give

2008-03-29T01:54:00.003Z

then who on earth do the givers give to? This week, as 'appen, ME.

Lilies from Anisa, all tightly furled. One of my favourite things EVER is to watch flowers slowly burst into bloom, and lilies are spectacularly good for this - a miracle on my own mantlepiece. And, just as they reached full perfection, Significant Other asked, sobbing, if we could please throw them out.

Pollen allergy. Bah.

My mother, returning from a couple of months in South Africa, bore a box (shaped like a star, coloured crackly antique gold, with a BEJEWELLED top) full of shells.

And Rachael, who is an Autumn, occasionally buys Spring stuff by mistake, and then gives it to me.

I'm dreaming of a white . . .

2008-03-25T01:42:00.003Z

. . . Easter?

Makes a change, though, doesn't it? Daffodils peeking through the snowdrifts, long weekend picnic plans all awry because you weren't banking on snow, and Easter Egg hunts . . .

Oh, Easter Egg hunts in the snow. The outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible FIB. All those little darlings asking why, if the Easter Bunny really exists, each egg is hidden at the end of a line of size eleven trainer tracks.

PS I should have mentioned that this Easter Egg hunt took place in the churchyard. (Eostre must have been laughing all over her lovely green face.) It was a churchwarden's rather brilliant ploy to get the kids out before the next service. So there were all these lovely Christian folk defending the existence of a pagan God's totem. In the churchyard.

Valkyrie. Even Hippolyta would be better.

2008-03-22T02:18:00.002Z

I have mentioned before my appallment that 'Amazon' should be called 'Amazon', and not something starting with a letter a great deal further down the alphabet. Any letter, just not ~~bloody~~ blimmin' A, is all. ANYTHING that takes that line OK OK! THOSE LINES! Happy now?

Where was I before I got all defensive and shouty? Oh yes - anything that takes those lines down past the fold in the credit card statement, so they are not THE FIRST THINGS Significant Other SEES.

Which would be great, no? Unless - unless . . .

Yup. EVERY SINGLE LINE ON MY LAST STATEMENT.

Trades Descriptions Act

2008-03-14T09:55:00.003Z

This really should have been exciting, I promise you. I'd been led to expect fireworks of one sort or another - either a lot of Scandinavian berserking, or a fjord-ful of tears, arms around the shoulders and vows of eternal amity.

But no - another half-arsed solution to a half-arsed irritant. What is with them? So both men thrive on bitter, nagging relationships, fractured by wilful misunderstanding and patched up by the threat of losing their livelihoods if they don't work together - what do they think wives are for?

The honeymoon is over

2008-03-12T17:32:00.003Z

I believe I already mentioned accdentally calling Significant Other a incompetent fool all over the interwebthingy. When he really really is not, it was clearly an error in translation, somebody has swapped around all the keys on my keyboard for a joke and I knew not what I typed, or possibly (just possibly. By a whisker) the incompetent foolness of Insignificant Other. (If women are the fair sex, does that make men the unfair sex? If a man utters an opinion, and there is no woman to hear him, is he still wrong?)

Well He Has Had A Good Run. But he is The Golden Boy no longer. He had his chance, and made his mark, and carved his niche, but now the fun has to stop. The party is over, the easy wins are all won.

Poor fellow has been having difficulties with a local bloke in the Norwegian IT department (I know. What an exotic working life he has) and emailed his boss in Germany (it just gets more exciting, doesn't it?) to ask for a confab about said difficulties, and the German boss emailed back, copying Norwegian Man.

SO is coming back tonight from a brace of days there, and I dare say there is no way I can avoid hearing all about it.

On the other hand, it might be worth paying attention because it may be the next post . . .

Recipe

2008-03-09T00:37:00.002Z

Heat the oven to 180°C / 350°F. Brush a 20cm removable-base tin with melted butter, and dust with ground almonds.

Melt together 300g plain chocolate (min. 60% cocoa), 275g caster sugar, 165g unsalted butter and a pinch of salt. Remove from the heat.

Whisk five large eggs together with a tablespoon of ground almonds, and fold into the chocolate mixture. Bake for 35 - 40 minutes.

To cool, remove the base of the tin, carefully burning yourself on the forearm and tipping the entire confection onto the top of your gas hob, ensuring you get sufficient quantities into the hard-to-reach areas under the pan support grids.

Swear Significant Other to grave-like secrecy. Your secrecy, his grave.

Thanking the good Lord in Heaven that you cleaned your hob-top within living memory, pick out enough bits to fill four bowls, and put the bowls into the fridge. Put the remainder into a fifth bowl, and pick at this for the next two hours, while you are preparing dinner for your guests.

Hope that you got all the bits of last week's rice out, and serve with crossed fingers and cream.

(The ingredients and method are from the competely fantastic Green & Black cookbook. The presentation is all mine.)

(And I can't even blog this on my RL blog, because they will read it.)

Stardust

2008-03-05T16:22:00.005Z

. . . was charming, thank you. I very much enjoyed the comic when it came out, and was disappointed when I didn't get to a cinema to see the movie, so I treated myself to the DVD immediately it came out.

Charlie Thing was very good, Claire Danes miscast, Michelle Pfeiffer beautiful, Rickie Gervais predictable, and Robert de Niro a hoot. And I didn't mind at all the divergences in plot, except for the ending, which was awful. So much better in the comic.

But what I didn't get was why, out of all the favourable reviews, and there were quite a few, the DVD distributors decide to quote the Daily Mail* on the back, and, on a specially commissioned sticker on the front, the Sun**. Neil Gaiman himself was part of the production team, and surely he can't have lived abroad so long he's forgotten what these two newspapers are like?

I've always struggled against intellectual snobbery*** but for the life of me I can't see why the makers of this movie thought that the readership of the Mail and the Sun was an appropriate demographic at which to aim.

Shows just how much I know.

* The Mail is legendarily a bastion of knee-jerk right wing xenophobic prejudice, and even if it actually isn't, it's become a national stereotype, and 'a Daily Mail reader' is cultural shorthand for describing a knee-jerk right wing xenophobe.

**The Sun has a picture of a naked woman on page three every day, and no-one knows what is on the other pages. Or cares. And 'Page Three' is cultural shorthand for - well, naked woman with big breasts. All shot in the best possible taste. And anyway, these women enjoy it, and they are genuinely talented, and it's the first step on theit road to stardom. Or some such.

***that's a lie

A Week Without a Washing machine

2008-03-02T23:34:00.001Z

Yesterday saw an emergency dash to John Lewis as (did I really just type that? 'Emergency Dash to John Lewis'? How horribly middle-class.) our washing machine finally collapsed. Our painstakingly-researched (or possibly, 'Here's the first one in the row. WE'LL TAKE IT!) selected model won't be delivered until Friday. In the mean time, as we were due at SO's folks today to celebrate various birthdays, we packed up all the washing, both sopping wet from the busted machine, and fresh (HAH!) from the laundry basket, and ruthlessly exploited the in-lawful, and fully functional, washing machine. Twice.

All worth it to hear his mother muttering, 'Forty six years old and still brings his washing home. . .')

Oh, the pain

2008-02-28T13:11:00.002Z

There are two things I want from nanotechnology. Neither of them difficult, and both of them contributing significantly to the quality of life in this country.

One. I want a nanotech bug that eats nothing but Japanese Knotweed. I guess it would have to be activated by something local to here - maybe a signal broadcast from the mobile phone networks - so that if it got accidentally shipped off to Japan, it won't destroy the entire eco-system, but that can't be hard. And the only thing it's built to do is eat Japanese Sodding Knotweed. At our last home in Chiswick, never mind infesting our garden, it was in all the gardens in the street and the three parallel, all over the railway embankment and threatening the little wildlife enclosure. We moved out nine years ago - I haven't had the nerve to go back.

Two. I want a nanotech bug that eats nothing but PLAQUE. Isn't dentistry about due for some sort of revolution? I had a DEEPLY uncomfortable hour in the chair yesterday, and am due two more sessions over the next month. (Oh frabjous day, let joy be unconfined etc etc.) The activity seems pre-historic in it's sophistication - I doubt it has changed significantly in - well, ever, would be my guess. (And let's not forget the cost. Holy shoot.) Why on earth can't THEY design a bug that stays dormant in toothpaste, is activated by saliva and chews its way through the unwanted contents of your mouth. It would be desirable if it didn't crap there, so maybe once it was full, it would just stop. You would just swallow it and thereafter dispose of it in the normal manner.

Please? Someone? Anyone?

I'm back

2008-02-23T11:09:00.002Z

The cycling was lovely, the open fire cosy and the Scrabble set untouched. Caught up with Tempe Brennan and Robert Langdon (I was on holiday. Gimme a break) and ate tapas (in Wiltshire. I know) and swam. Well, messed about in deepish water. SO likes the pounding up and down of the lengths-swimming, me, I like a decent flume and a good Rapids. I was happy, he, not so much.

. . . and I am delighted and relieved to find that I missed a proper shower more than I missed broadband and a mobile signal.

Enough already

2008-02-18T01:42:00.002Z

I have come to the reluctant conclusion that, unless one has a spare room awash with sacks of fivers, a USB turntable is (currently) *sigh* the way to go. Yes,

it takes ages,
it's a pain, and
the quality of the resulting digital tracks is not all one could wish,

but on the other hand,

you do get to listen to all that lovely music,
you do focus on what LPs you do want to spend the effort on,
if one had ears good enough to be bothered by the slight drop in quality one be would be earning a damn sight more as some sort of fancy consultant for Deutsche Grammophon. That or the blind bloke on a boat in Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow.

There are, of course, people who will do it all for you, For A Price. The cheapest I could find was £10 an album, at which point unless one's collection was really obscure (Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band, anyone?) one really may as well just buy the CDs.

But, ~~dammit~~ darn it, now I'm all excited about exploring areas of technology hitherto distant dreams. Next Post - My New Electric Toothbrush. Don't hold your breath though, as SO and I are off to the wilds of Wiltshire for a few days. I expect my toothbrush to come in quite handy.

And the series of crushing defeats rolls on . . .

2008-02-16T02:42:00.002Z

I spent THREE HOURS a coupla days ago getting The Tango Project from vinyl to digital. I couldn't adjust the sound levels, I'd forgotten how short some of the tracks are, indeed how abruptly some of them end, leaving me nano-seconds to stop what I was doing to press the 'Next Track' button, missing it and having to start the session over again, SEVERAL TIMES

Sorry. More shouting. No swearing, though.

Just imagine my delight when I found an ad for a Teac GF-350. Insert a CD, set the record to playing up top, and voila! A CD with your record on it, all nicely broken up into tracks because the software recognizes track breaks. And only twice the price of the USB turntable we bought two weeks ago.

I was kinda relieved to find a lovely man in some US of A publication, who tells me it ain't necessarily so.

*sigh* this is turning into a techblog, and I don't appear to be able to do a thing about it. A techblog with the added additional extra of me not knowing what the hell I am talking about.

And The Tango Project? Having spent years deliberately not buying CD duplicates of my vinyl, because we were going to get a turntable ANY DAY NOW, I remembered earlier tonight that that was one of the EXTREMELY FEW I'd cracked and bought because I couldn't bear to be without that music one more minute.

I've given up swearing for Lent

2008-02-12T15:44:00.000Z

. . . and its bloody hard work I can tell you.

Dubbin

2008-02-03T03:47:00.000Z

Not the stuff you put on yer boots, alas. The thing you do, left, right ands centre, FOR THE WHOLE WEEK. And you can't do ANYTHING ELSE at the same time.

Phew. This is turning into a bit of a shouty post, and I haven't even started yet.

First off, that blimmin' turntable. Oh where do I start? With the nasty software that won't figure out from three seconds (that's a distinctly long time in record-speak) of scratchy hiss that IT'S A NEW TRACK. Nu-hoh, you have to tell it. It's kind of OK if you are transferring something symphonic on acccount of the tracks are about 15 minutes long, so I can set the timer and pay some serious attention to my book. But if it's (shudder) pop, you have to sit there, listening to Fleetwood Mac (good grief I'm old) with an attention that I never managed when I was young, in order to press the damn button in between each and every track. Then you get to label the track, and start on the next one.

And after a LONG TIME of doing this, you discover another button which lets you just mark a new track, and then you do the labelling in bulk at the end of the side. (And the cool thing is, occasionally it recognises what you just recorded, and fills in all the track details for you!)

Oh yes - and for some reason the software overrides the volume controls on the laptop, so you can't turn it down. And thats my concentration shot - never bin very good with background music unless I'm doing manual labour. If there's music on I'm hopelessly distracted from

Reading
Preparing Sunday School stuff (have you seen the time!)
Writing (well-overdue) thank-you notes
and BLOGGING

The whole business is a right pain. Turns out that my lovely record collection is lovelier in retrospect than prospect - faced with choosing to go through the grinding boredom of dubbing the stuff onto a hard drive, and NEVER LISTENING TO IT AGAIN . . .

And in between times, because it needed re-formatting, I was having to download stuff from the DVD hard drive, programme by programme. Again, not discovering the Bulk Dub function for an unnecessarily long time.

*sigh* - at least I can stop with the song lyrics, because I,LTV's back, hooray.

Lipsum

2008-01-26T02:39:00.000Z

~~It's not to be Bourne~~

~~Bourne Again~~

~~It was Bourne upon me~~

~~Bourne Free (Bourne Three?)~~

I dunno - there may be something there, but I can't get it. (Captain Jack, on the other hand (Aubrey, not Harkness! What sort of a girl do you think I am!) would smoke it. I'm just not in his league.) Did Ludlum choose the name for its possibilities? Hmmm . . .

Sorry. Not paying attention there. SO and I have just watched all three Bournes on three successive evenings, and we are drained - drained, I tell you. (And while SO went to bed I caught up with Torchwood. Sometimes I don't know where I find the strength.)

Actually I wanted to tell you about the eventual (its been years coming. Years.) purchase of a USB turntable. I'm rather hoping that SO and I can get together in the library (with the lead pipe. And Colonel Plum. STOP IT.) tomorrow night and set the little beauty up, and finally start translating our lovely lovely vinyl collection into tidy sets of noughts and ones, ready for actually listening to. I can't tell you how much (well I can, obv., but then I really really can't tell you just how bored you'd be) I've missed Jack Buchanan, The Comedian Harmonists, Al Bowlly, the Christopher Hogwood Messiah, and Simon and Garfunkel. To name but a few.

Thank goodness that wretched earworm has gone. *sigh* only to be replaced by this one . . .

Shosholoza

Ku lezontaba

Stimela siphum' eSouth Africa

Wen' uyabaleka

Ku lezontaba

Stimela siphum' eSouth Africa

The Three Rs

2008-01-21T19:35:00.000Z

There's this bloke, who is - well, I guess he's a dustman. He works at some rubbish dump, and what he does, as other dustmen do, is sift through the stuff people throw away, I guess in the hope of making an easy buck. Well, this fellow sells his stuff on eBay - calls hisself summat like 'Reduce-reuse-recycle'. He makes it quite clear where his wares come from, and also that he is operating well within the law - what he does confirms to every guideline going.

He sells odd stuff - vinyls, bakelite phones, cutlery, and on this occasion, a beaten-up guitar. My friend (who told me this story) said it was in pretty sad shape, but on looking at the photos she found herself wondering if the pattern around the sound-box hole wasn't real honest-to-goodness inlay, and not the transfer most of us live with.

She kept an eye on the item, and wasn't altogether surprised when, a coupla days ago, the bidding hit £90. Well, the auction ended today, and the guitar was sold to a German buyer for

£820.01.

I love stories like that.

Another bloody birthday

2008-01-20T02:03:00.000Z

January is a perfectly bloody month for birthdays. I've endured four already, and all with unnaturally high degrees of hands-on-ness demanded from me. Cooking and baking mostly (and the shopping before and the washing-up after and then the serving out and blimmin'eck more washing up didn't I just do some of this already?) .

And the present-buying, so soon after Christmas ha ha, except this year I discovered Amazon vouchers - now there's a present which says you care - well it would to me. (What on earth possessed them to call it Amazon? It's the first thing SO sees when he opens the credit card bills. Sometimes the second, third and fourth thing too. Now if it was called Valkyrie, say, it would be tucked neatly under the fold, and SO would have those monthly extra few seconds of his head not exploding. Again.)

And tomorrow is mine - Li'l Sis is cooking, huzzah, and to my immense relief SO has FINALLY explained to his mother the mechanics of the Amazon Wish List. Actually he did this before Christmas. How startled was I when, having opened her gift to me - which I normally do wishing desperately for a lead apron, a toughened-glass visor and extremely long tongs on account of having to unwrap, AND THEN FIND SOMETHING NICE TO SAY ABOUT, for instance a painting of such hideousness it makes vitreous humour leak out of your ears, or a hat, scarf and gloves set from Tie Rack fer Pete's sake - when has she ever seen me wear a - oh I get it. She thought I needed them.

Blast. I've put a full-stop now - two actually, if this was Word the screen would be all over green wiggly lines as the poor software looked desperately for a verb.

Be that as it may. This year, MiL's wrapping paper concealed Benvenuto Cellini's autobiography, and David Lodge's 'Art of Fiction'. BLIMEY! I thought. If this isn't the most amazing co-incidence! How on earth did she come to choose two of the books I really want to read! So I'm approaching tomorrow with that particular weight off my mind.

And with a nod to I, Like the View, here are the lyrics to my current earworm -

It's not easy having yourself a good time
Greasing up those bets and betters
Watching out they don't four-letter
If I can kiss you both at the same time
Smells-like something I've forgotten
Curled up died and now it's rotten

I'm not a gangster tonight
Don't want to be a bad guy
I'm just a loner baby
And now you're gotten in my way

I can't decide
Whether you should live or die
Oh, you'll probably go to heaven
Please don't hang your head and cry
No wonder why
My heart feels dead inside
It's cold and hard and petrified
Lock the doors and close the blinds
We're going for a ride

It's a bitch convincing people to like you
If I stop now call me a quitter
If lies were cats you'd be a litter
Pleasing everyone isn't like you
Dancing jigs until I'm crippled
Slug ten drinks I won't get pickled

I've got to hand it to you
You've played by all the same rules
It takes the truth to fool me
And now you've made me angry

I can't decide
Whether you should live or die
Oh, you'll probably go to heaven
Please don't hang your head and cry
No wonder why
My heart feels dead inside
It's cold and hard and petrified
Lock the doors and close the blinds
We're going for a ride

Oh I could throw you in the lake
Or feed you poisoned birthday cake
I wont deny I'm gonna miss you when you're gone
Oh I could bury you alive
But you might crawl out with a knife
And kill me when I'm sleeping
That's why

I can't decide
Whether you should live or die
Oh, you'll probably go to heaven
Please don't hang your head and cry
No wonder why
My heart feels dead inside
It's cold and hard and petrified
Lock the doors and close the blinds
We're going for a ride

Sorry, Cicero.

2008-01-13T00:29:00.001Z

Still haven't found out what happened to Grissom's squeeze, on account of all hell broke loose on another front. Well, when I say 'all hell', I mean someone else's irritation became my crisis.

One of the reasons I went all quiet, blogwise, for a bit was that I found a new toy - Serif WebPlus 10, to be precise. (Amazon sell it for £40, of course.) The last time anyone had had a go at a website for our Parish church it all ended in tears, so I offered to give it a go. It meant starting from scratch as the last person to try it had flounced off in such a huff that there was no way he was going to share any of the work he had already done (alas, for from the little I saw it was a nice job).

Knowing absolutely zip about websites and building them, it took me a bit of time to realise that the package we had (123-reg. Ugh. Horrible user interface, counter-intuitive site structure, ghastly instant-build options, answers to FAQs which tell you nothing apart from how to buy more of their services and a fantastically speedy and helpful support team. Bah.) was useless, then I had to work out what I could usefully use (WebPlus 10 - just lovely), and design the thing. The rector's brief was - well, brief. 'Orange and purple' he said. 'Orange and purple, with a picture of me.'

And then the content.

Ah me, the content. A while ago First Nations tagged me to to produce a list of ten authors who should be beaten with a bat until they STOPPED, and to my shame, Cicero was on there. (To my embarrassment, one of the reasons, and the specific reason for this apology, doesn't get a mention in that poorly-worded post.)

'Qui tacet, consentiret'. 'He who is silent, agrees.' Or, 'I'll take that as a Yes then, shall I?' Poor sod delivered his unarguably beautifully cadenced speeches to a houseful of Senators, not one of whom had the courage / could be arsed to express an opinion. Imagine. You take ages over a presentation, you write reams of words on subjects you know NOTHING about, because the person who does know, won't do it, and when, heaven forfend, someone does offer you some information you spend ages trying to turn the sow's ear of clerical prose into the silk purse of - well, something that makes sense, and no-one expresses an opinion. They just sit there. You ask, and ask, and ask 'Is this right'? 'Should I change this?' 'What do you think?' AND NO-ONE SAYS ANYTHING. Oh they might murmur the occasional 'Well Done', but contribute? Nuh-Uh.

I'm ranting, aren't I?

The point being, that two weeks before I'd planned to make the site live, Rector calls, all of a dither, saying he needs the site up NOW. So that's taken care of all the idle moments in the last three days, and I still don't know whether I've done it right. On account of, any changes to do with DNS take 24 - 48 hours to propagate across the net. I need the domain name to point away from the (ghastly) temporary page supplied by 123 (phtui) (that's spitting by the way) and at the actual domain where I've uploaded the site. I think. So by this time tomorrow, I'll know if I've delivered what I promised I could, or whether my name is actually Mud.

The Price of Integrity

2008-01-09T23:58:00.000Z

Who was it who was recently talking about guilty pleasures? Gosh - maybe it wasn't in blogworld at all - maybe it was RL. Ooh - if it was, that might be a fun tag.

Well, one of mine is CSI. The Las Vegas and Miami variations, anyway. LV because Gil Grissom has me ensorcelled by his wisdom and integrity, and Miami because Horatio Caine makes my jaw drop with the vastness of his self-delusion (and Calleigh Duquesne. My oh my.) And last night saw the terrestrial opener to CSI:LV Series 8, which I recorded and should be watching right now instead of blimmin' blogging, on account of the cliffhanger at the end of the last series was SO GREAT.

I read somewhere (Wikipedia this is not. You'll just have to take my word that the following is absolutely true) that the lovely Jorja Fox, having been promoted AT LAST to Main Squeeze, asked (gasp) for a MASSIVE payrise. And do you know what the series bosses did?

They put her character under an overturned car, leaking petrol, in the middle of the Nevada desert. The final shot of the last series was her slender arm reaching out and ever-more-feebly scrabbling in the sand.

HA! That'll show her.

Or will it? . . .

Excuse me while I go find out . . .

AIBU?

2008-01-07T02:45:00.000Z

Here's one I never met before. Undoubtedly something that everyone in the whole world knows except me, has done for ages and by now its so fuckin' passe that no-one uses it any more so I should just go get a life, ok?

Sorry.

I just hate when that happens - something pops up all over the damn' place and you have no idea what it means, and it takes you bluddy ages to figure out what everyone else is going on about. Well, not you, obv., I mean me, on account of you had it sussed ages ago, didn't you, you smug know-it-all git. Or else, like Betty or Reg you have absolutely no need of it AT ALL.

Sorry.

AIBU?

There's this place called Mumsnet. Not my sort of place at all really - a parenting forum for those who dunno what to do when little Samantha won't stop biting the heads off lizards, or baby Sebastian who is only three but is halfway through the Narnia series and wants to learn Greek, what shall I do! Bleurgh.

Except every so often, a whole bunch of them completely go off on one. Someone starts a thread and it spirals out of control, and my friend who actually does seriously visit the place sends me a link - like this one, and I end up with aching ribs and a runny nose from weeping with laughter. Dang, these women can be funny.

And here was where I found this never-before-seen abbreviation. I did make the (IMHO) reasonable leap that it hadn't been invented solely for this particular thread, and is to be found in general usage on the rest of the site. Is this a particularly parenting thing? A defence mechanism to use when you know you are, or a rallying cry from a lone voice of reason in a topsy-turvy world? It cropped up an awful lot, and I was left wondering whether parenthood turned otherwise reasonable people into needy passive-aggresives riddled with self-doubt?

Or Am I Being Unreasonable?

I'm with Moses

2008-01-04T02:16:00.000Z

In the dark. Something is wrong with the fuse for the kitchen lights, they haven't been on all day, and I can't see a damn' thing. So cooking is chancy, washing-up decidely sub-standard, and blogging totally out of the question.

But look what I found in my library book! I saw the dedication first, and wondered that such a gift would have found its way, clearly unread, into the county stock. And then I notced the autograph, and I can't help feeling that this is some terrible mistake, and out there is some anguished William really wanting his book back. The way I see it, I have two options - a) tell a librarian, or b) pay the lost book fine, and change my name to William by deed poll.

Hmmmm . . .

Where's the Groom

2007-12-31T01:50:00.001Z

. . . 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

2007-10-15T17:03:00.000Z

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?

2007-10-07T03:34:00.000Z

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

2007-10-04T16:38:00.000Z

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

2007-10-03T02:45:00.000Z

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

2007-09-28T23:46:00.000Z

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

2007-09-25T14:29:00.000Z

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

2007-09-21T23:58:00.000Z

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

2007-09-17T00:29:00.000Z

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

2007-09-03T15:34:00.000Z

I loved this. And this.

Blog? What blog??

2007-08-20T13:26:00.000Z

. . . 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

2007-08-10T01:29:00.000Z

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

2007-08-08T02:51:00.000Z

My Aralia Elegantissima

My mother-in-law's Aralia Elegantissima

Daisy, Daisy

2007-08-05T01:41:00.000Z

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

2007-08-03T02:25:00.000Z

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 . . .

2007-07-25T21:29:00.000Z

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.

2007-07-21T13:12:00.001Z

Book Meme

2007-07-20T10:04:00.000Z

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 . . .

2007-07-19T00:15:00.000Z

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

2007-07-17T23:40:00.000Z

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?

2007-07-15T11:12:00.000Z

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 . . .

2007-07-12T00:25:00.000Z

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

2007-07-05T14:25:00.000Z

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 . . .

2007-06-29T16:37:00.000Z

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?

2007-06-27T23:44:00.000Z

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

2007-06-22T00:39:00.000Z

. . . 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

2007-06-19T00:10:00.000Z

. . . 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

2007-06-15T19:46:00.000Z

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

2007-06-14T10:43:00.000Z

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)

2007-06-12T00:19:00.000Z

A Quiet Weekend

2007-06-11T11:47:00.000Z

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.

2007-06-08T11:03:00.000Z

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

2007-06-05T00:36:00.000Z

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!

2007-05-31T00:22:00.000Z

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!

2007-05-28T22:19:00.000Z

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

2007-05-24T00:49:00.000Z

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.

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.
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

2007-05-21T13:08:00.000Z

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

2007-05-15T13:32:00.000Z

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

2007-05-03T12:38:00.000Z

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

2007-05-02T07:30:00.000Z

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

2007-04-30T07:45:00.000Z

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

2007-04-28T23:19:00.000Z

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

2007-04-26T23:24:00.000Z

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 . . .

2007-04-25T12:49:00.000Z

. . . 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

2007-04-23T23:47:00.000Z

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!

2007-04-17T22:44:00.000Z

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

2007-04-15T22:47:00.000Z

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

2007-04-12T22:37:00.000Z

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

2007-04-12T03:34:00.000Z

. . . 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

2007-04-11T03:51:00.000Z

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

2007-04-09T23:47:00.000Z

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

2007-04-07T23:47:00.000Z

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

2007-04-03T23:09:00.000Z

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.

Yesterday

2007-04-02T23:59:00.000Z

It was Palm Sunday, which meant that we got to Process. The congregation congregated in the Surgery car park, was handed palm fronds and hymn sheets, and off we went, Choir Mistress, Band, Choir, He-priest and She-priest, and Uncle Tom Cobbley and All. Up the hill, down the dale, over the road, past the duckpond, across the green and into the church, all singing like mad things. Because no-one could hear anything, the back of the procession was anywhere between three bars and an entire verse behind the front. But hey ho, Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam and all that. Then the children turned their palm crosses around, holding them like swords, and started a fight in the church. Argh. No wonder there's a very vocal faction within the church community which doesn't want the little beggars in church at all.

UPDATE I forgot to say, Yvonne (a grandmother deeply loved by the entire flock) read the first Lesson, telling us it was from Paul's Letter to the Filipines. I had no idea the early church was so far-reaching.

Back in the saddle

2007-03-31T01:43:00.000Z

I usually do SO the courtesy of waiting until he is out of the country before watching a horror flick, but having lost my nerve so badly earlier this month, and he needing to work in the kitchen all evening, I figured two stout walls between us would do the trick.

This time it was Ghost Ship. Salvage crew finding a luxury liner derelict these forty years, no apparent reason why, gradually being picked off one by one by . . .

And I was fine. Time to admire the inventiveness of the opening scenes (eeuw! very bluggy!), to enjoy the splendid art direction, to envy some of the stunts that Julianna Margulies got to do, to jump at doors inexplicably slamming shut, to gasp when, instead of seeing his own reflection in the mirror, he sees something else, to shudder at the . . . you get the idea.

I'm so happy I have my nerve back! Just look at the time, I'm the only one downstairs in the single pool of light cast by the monitor, and I don't even feel the need to, just in case, check over my shoulde . . .

Ya gotta love the underpants

2007-03-27T11:47:00.000Z

Of course I enjoyed it. Frank Miller graphics, a risible telling, and a complete misrepresentation of the facts. Yum.

No kidding though, the thing was wonderful to look at. The slo-mo, the fast-mo - obviously a quote, if not a direct steal, from the Green Wing technique. Some images of violence glossed over, some, especially a couple of head shots (!), lingered over. The dialogue of the 300 themselves very snappy (as per the original comic), the dialogue of events back home jingoistic and semantically null. Queen Gorgo (GORGO! No wonder no-one actually spoke her name in the nearly two hours of movie!) did a splendid job of looking like Lucilla in Gladiator. And Xerxes was divinely decadent.

Imagine my irritation when, as is my custom, staying in my seat until the last credit has rolled, I spot credits for 'Transsexual 1', 'Transsexual 2' and 'Transsexual 3' WHAT! I missed them! Now there's nothing for it but to buy the DVD the minute it comes out and go through the thing in slo-mo. This could take a while - maybe I'll get a take-away. Oh - and the much-vaunted girl-on-girl action? Half hearted, half baked, half arsed. Nothing to fax home about.

Go see it.

TNG

2007-03-26T23:59:00.000Z

It is my . . .how shall I put this (there's this line, see? Between not causing offence and downright dishonesty) fortune? Lot, Fate, Doom? to be peripherally involved in the raising of some children. Three of them, BBG, 8, 4, 3. (Between you and me, I suspect the G might very well have been a tad unforeseen, but hey, she's cute.) Every so often their mother feels its all a little much, and I get to take a turn.

But oh my, how rubbish am I at children. You'd think I have a lot of interests and skills that might usefully be passed on to the next generation, and I do. Gardening, music, basic carpentry, not to mention Reading, Riting and 'Rithmetic. Today, Easter Egg making.

I had moulds, three colours of chocolate, icing syringes, and pastry brushes. Oh, and an overwhelming lack of patience. The little blighters just wouldn't do it right. Honestly, I didn't mind not getting to the pan of boiling water because some pre-school pate was in the way, or spitty little fingers poked into the melting chocolate (I did quite enjoy the yells of pain though - honestly, if I've told them once, I've told them a hundred times . . .) or even a certain randomness in the thickness of the layers of chocolate. But somewhere in the vicinity of the mould would have been nice!

I kept tellin' 'em, Not like that, like this! I kept tellin' 'em, watch how I do it! Then I told them to bugger off. In a nice way. The younger generation? There's just no telling them. Ptcha.

I did buy quite a lot of Geomag (it was on half-price sale) on the grounds that a) it is fun to play with, b) if they swallow a ball it will come out the other end no problem, and c) if they swallow a bar it will show up nicely on the X-ray. But guess what? They don't even know how to play properly with that.

300

2007-03-22T02:15:00.000Z

Some movies just have to be seen NOW. Not next week, NOT on DVD (though you know you will pay full whack for the DVD the minute it comes out) and most certainly not on telly. Ugh. And this is regardless of the reviews they have had.

I've been a fan of Frank Miller for a while now - All the Dark Knight stuff, Ronin I thought was great, and I was grabbed by Sin City until I started wondering whether he had gone just a tad overboard. Does this happen to all comic greats? They stay anchored in their early days while writing for existing characters, but as soon as they cut loose they go all weird? Alan Moore for example? Watchmen and V for Vendetta scaled fresh heights, but Lost Girls sounds a bit dubious to me.

Though it has to be said that my acquaintance with the world of comics is madly out of date. I used to be fed choice tidbits, given the cream of the crop, without having to wade through all the garbage, until I discovered that my old friend and supplier had been cheating on my even older friend, his wife. This all came out about ten years ago, and I still can't look him in the eye. So my knowledge of comicdom is stuck around the mid-nineties.

But I digress.

Joe Queenan wrote a cracking review of 300 which makes me want to see the picture all the more. It seems the movie makers have wandered from Herodotus even further than Miller did in the comic, so I don't know whether to rejoice that the events at Thermopylae will have a whole new audience, or cry that the original story has been so thoroughly hi-jacked for dubious political ends. I don't know what they did to the text, but I sure hope they bought it dinner first.

ps Yay! Threshers are doing it again! The coupon is only good until 1st April though, so hurry along here for your copy.

Just a Quickie

2007-03-20T14:13:00.000Z

Can't chat long, I only have half a mouth. Dentist. Ptcha. Was it in 10 that Dudley Moore did the thing with the two wine glasses, one to drink from, and the other to catch the dribble? Maybe Arthur. Oh, and just how did I lose that filling? Flossing, that's how. So, when the dentist, temporarararily filling the Gaping Void, said 'Don't floss', oh how I laughed.

ps I borrowed the bloody book and finished it in the early hours of Monday morning. Phew. So yesterday it was back to Chasms for me. Anybody got something for cultural indigestion?

pps Google, it say 10.

Desperation

2007-03-15T16:26:00.000Z

I have been waiting and working towards this climax for six weeks. SIX WEEKS! I kid you not. It's been hard going - I've had to concentrate on this to the exclusion of all else, and to be quite honest, I can't remember any other book taking me quite so long to finish. Tomalin's biography of Sam Pepys, it was. Actually, and the reason why I am gnashing my teeth with desperation, still is. Having got to within striking distance of the end (and the good thing about a well-researched piece of non-fiction, is that the end comes a good deal sooner than you expect, because of the references! Took up a good half-inch at the back of this book, they did), I carried it with me wherever I went, just on the off-chance of reading a sentence or two.

ANYWAY. Pepys's health fails, he moves out to the country (Clapham!), he snuffs it! (Ahhh). He's autopsied (ugh) and the provisions of his will are explained, and . . . .

Dunno. Lost the bloody book, haven't I.

Severance

2007-03-08T23:48:00.000Z

So, SO was in Bucharest at the beginning of this week. (All that way for a two-hour meeting, but he gets to charge them for two days of his time. I know - madness.) My pleasure, when he is out of the house, is a good horror movie. I bought myself Severance, and settled down, late in the evening, alone in the house, for a rare treat. I lasted twenty minutes.

Twenty. Minutes.

I bottled. Totally funked it. Twenty minutes! The screeching violins had barely got up to speed! A few moments of handheld camera (cue creepy music) from inside the bunker, and I hit the off button so fast I still have the bruise. I may never play guitar again. (Well, that's actually true, but mostly because of not practising because of idleness, not my over-dexterous use of the remote control.)

I clearly needed broad daylight for this, and preferably an inappropriate hour. So, yesterday, by 9:30 I was sitting on the sofa in front of the TV and d'ye know, I really enjoyed it. Oh yes, it was indeed drenched in gore, and I had to watch half of it from behind the sofa, but the funny bits were very funny indeed. Tim Macinnerny did his usual hapless tosser, but this tosser was far more than usually hapless - splendid performance. Laura Harris I've only seen twice before, once in 24/2, where she metamorphosed from Demure Essence of Femininity to steely-eyed ruthless terrorist from the Middle East, and The Faculty, where she metamorphosed from Demure Essence of Femininity to gigantic drippy-toothed alien from the planet Hell. This time around, DE of F to machete-wielding balls-for-breakfast go-to gal from the office next door. She does it so well.

The only reason for my state of utter funkhood I can think of is that this movie was populated by people I recognised. Movies like Wrong Turn, (which I saw a couple of weeks ago, on my own, late at night, no problem) where shiny American teenagers wander into the wrong house / forest / country and get sliced and diced, subscribe to the natural order of things. We've seen it a million times before. But not Him from the office down the hall with his leg in a mantrap. Or Her from the fourth floor tied to a tree and . . . Nah. Go watch it.

I hadn't banked on SO actually being in the house at that point, watching me watch telly at 9:30 in the morning, and I've been trying to persuade him ever since that this is not how I usually spend my mornings..

I ♥ Essex

2007-03-06T14:13:00.000Z

No, I really do. Not urban Essex, but out towards the coast. The roads are pretty poor, but that means that not many people go there. The countryside is not remotely pretty (we have Surrey for that. Personally I've always found Surrey unbearably smug) but it's - I dunno, purposeful. It does a job of work. It's not kindly. And of course it's fuller of history than an egg is full of meat. Romans at Colchester, Saxons at Triplow and Vikings at Maldon. Oh, and Beth Chatto gardens there.

It was Maldon this weekend. The docks are so interesting, and if you aren't in time for an actual trip on a Thames sailing barge you can usually blag a scramble over the deck. If you don't fancy the coastal path (which does need stout shoes) the promenade is a gentle stroll. At at the end of the promenade, at last, hurrah hurrah, is the John Doubleday statue of Brythnoth.

Golly, don't the English love a loser. This idiot had an invading horde of Vikings penned on an island off the coast, reachable only by tidal causeway. All the Anglo-saxons had to do was sit there. But oh no, the vikings ask please to be let off the island, because otherwise it isn't really a fair fight now, is it? And this twit says, OK then.

WHAT!

How the subsequent slaughter and total bloody DEFEAT of the Saxons gets turned into literary gold is a trick only an Englishman can pull off.

Oh and? Nowhere on the statue can you find who it is, or indeed who made it. Go figure.

ps talking about losers, last night, as SO is in Bucharest, I thought to treat myself to Severance - not SO's sort of movie at all. It was 20 minutes before I bottled. Couldn't do it. Maybe I'll finish watching it tomorrow morning, about 9:30ish. Or maybe not.

Blasphemy, Blasphemy, they've all got it . . .

2007-03-01T03:19:00.000Z

Bugger, no, that's Infamy, isn't it. Never mind. I thought I'd wrap up last post's anguish by recycling the comments. (Neat trick, huh? Bet no-one's ever thought of it before.)

It seems to me that blasphemy is only possible under a limited set of conditions. For a start, you can't blaspheme if you believe. Contradiction in terms. (Could you do it if your relationship with God was so bad all you wanted to do was diss the Deity? That might work.) And neither can you blaspheme if you don't believe. Belief systems become just more stories, as likely to be satirized as any other. (Well, more so, natch, because the reaction is likely to be more pronounced.) I think you could do it if you once had a faith and then lost it. Which would be me, not that anyone in RL knows this. And I suppose you could do it by accident - y'know, one man's enquiry into the nature of faith is another man's blasphemy.

Tim said talked about irreverence, irony, sarcasm and self-deprecation as defining characteristics of British culture. He's right, of course, and the thing about all these is that, in order for them to be understood and appreciated, the audience has to have an understanding of what is being poked fun at. F'rinstance, rhe more you keep up with current events, the funnier the News Quiz is. I used to get a bit fascist about The Sopranos, and wanted every potential viewer to take some sort of test, to make sure they got it, and didn't take it at face value. Therein lies a danger - anybody without a grounding RE hearing a blasphemy will take it at face value, and their understanding / potential faith will be skewed or destroyed. Children would be particularly at risk.

I've only seen a bit of the site in question, but there was one illustration, ironically the one the rector's wife sent back as one which made her laugh immoderately, which struck me as hilarious, but also made me slightly uncomfortable. It's this one. I don't want to blaspheme, I really don't, so I guess if I'm guilty it's because I peddle the stuff rather than cook it up myself.

Yup, still going to Hell.

PS - Dave, where did Jesus use humour, exactly? Absolutely nothing springs to mind.

I'm going to Hell

2007-02-23T04:04:00.001Z

The subject of Lego cropped up chez Patroclus. (Again. If Sitemeter counted the number of times a subject gets raised, the counter wouldn't be big enough.) One commenter mentioned the Brick Testament, so I high-tailed it over there, and found myself chuckling like a good'un.

I thought it might amuse some church-type friends, so emailed the link around. (I do this regularly - the Church of Aeth and Augustine are recent enjoyments.) One friend who is routinely on the distribution list is our rector's wife, an intelligent, beautiful woman, who bears a couple of crosses with humanity, and always has something interesting to say. However, our senses of humour don't often intersect. And this offering went hideously awry.

Initially, to judge by her email reply, she found the site very amusing, but in a subsequent phone conversation she had come to the view that it seemed to her blasphemous.

I spent half an hour googling 'Blasphemy for Dummies', looking for something with which either to fight my corner, or to understand her point of view, and came up with Irreverence. Ohh yesssiree Bob, that site sure is Irreverent. But do we still go to Hell for that? I know we used to, and if that's still the case, the rector's wife is going to have a lonely time of it in Heaven.

So there you have it. In my corner, half an hour's research on the Interweb, in hers, an adult lifetime's studying the Bible and a strong faith sorely tested. Is it possible to have a moral compass so compromised I don't even recognise that it is damaged?

Has this ever happened before? Not to me . . .

2007-02-20T01:41:00.001Z

Here's a turn-up for the books - blogging as displacement activity. Usually it's sheets. I have the tidiest linen cupboard in the western hemisphere. Everything folded so that external folds are to hand, everything in its place, shelving all labelled, Single sheets, Double sheets, Big towels, Medium towels, Little towels and Comedy towels, Big duvets and Little duvets, all with their pillow cases tucked inside.

Occasionally SO takes something from a shelf, decides its the wrong thing and just shoves it back.

This makes me unnecessarily upset.

But then I realise that I really ought to post something, and am instantly drawn to the linen cupboard, soothing brows, righting wrongs, drawing order out of Chaos. (Should I pun on posting and 'writing' wrongs? Nah. Can't be arsed.)

This time, however, Chaos remains unresolved under my ministrations. This time, Noteworthy is defeating me, and of all the things I HATE, I hate the most feeling this stupid. Oh, and being STABBED IN THE BACK by a piece of software I loved and trusted.

I wanted the chords for 'Wide, wide as the ocean', and found them at The Cyber Hymnal. To my joy, not only did the site provide the chorded score, it was all done in Noteworthy, which I happen to have and love. Used to love. Used to think was a fabulous little piece of software, and cheap! Still cheap, mind.

So when I decided that the key was wrong for us, transposing the score from C to G was its usual doddle. Another easy set of chords, as well.

But I cannot for the life of me figure out how to change the chord letters on the score. They've not used a lyric line, but entered the letters as text expressions, I think. Short of recreating the whole thing, note for note, in a new file, and adding new chord letters, I decided to blog about it. That'll get the job done.

Whosis's Axe is still up there

2007-02-17T16:06:00.000Z

I know, I know, the Tyrant of Syracuse, but buggered if I can remember his name. Damon? Pythias? It'll come to me.

ANYWAY. No mention of SO or leakage or other damaging info in the trades at the end of last week, so SO, who doesn't borrow trouble so much as has a permanent lend-lease arrangement on the stuff, now wonders if the next thing is to be a solicitor's letter on our doormat, and the reason it's not here yet is half term, and everyone is away.

Great. At least with the publication thing, we had a potential full stop to this sorry episode. Now we have to dread the postman. Every darn day.

A SWORD! Of Damocles! Yay! Honestly, call myself a fan of the Rocky Horror Show . . .

Valentine's Day for real

2007-02-15T02:08:00.001Z

I know, I know, I'm clearly not snuggled up in the arms of my beloved this Valentine's Day night. Truth is, SO had a really crap day. Started with an early phone call from a client asking how come rumours about the sale of client's company, with SO's name attached, were doing the rounds. Seems SO had what turns out to be an extremely ill-judged conversation over a pub lunch with ex-colleagues, who took what SO said, spun it around a bit, and called a trade paper. Ugh. Especially as SO had signed a confidentiality agreement. I suggested a visit to a lawyer, and wondered how much our house would sell for.

Poor SO returned slightly heartened (better than shaky and heaving, I can tell you) and with just enough oomph to pour me a vodka and tonic (delicious!), open a very decent Pomerol and cook me the promised steak au poivre, which we savoured over L4yer Cake, neither of us having the heart for original conversation. I offered to wash up so SO could go straight to bed - poor thing is exhausted.

The trade paper is published on Friday.

NO CHOCOLATE

2007-02-13T13:51:00.000Z

Please, please, there was supposed to be No Chocolate in the house. None. Nada. Zip. Every so often I get desperate, and truffle wild-eyed through the house, looking for some, anything that looks like it, anything at all I'M DESPERATE.

And I found the most unexpected stash. In the pantry there's a box, about a foot square, that you can tell doesn't see the light of day too often. It's full of cake making stuff - little bottles of coloured ink, a couple of syringy things, some little vials of vanilla essence (probably the real thing, as I sniffed and swooned) and this.

Four compartments, each filled with tiny bits of a different chocolatey treat. Snap the appropriate lid open, upend it into your waiting (and sweatily shaking, it has to be admitted) palm, and thence into your mouth. No, MY mouth. Get your mouth away, I found it, it's MINE.

*groan* I'm in bad shape.

Y'know, the fact that the sell-by date is Feb 2005 only adds to its savour.

Two compartments down, one to go. (The fourth one, for those of an unnecessarily pedantic turn of mind, is filled with something milk chocolatey. Ugh. I recently tried to persuade Jill Twiss of the virtues of a good plain chocolate, even going so far as to offer to send her some examples if she gave me an address, and she thought I was stalking her. Puh-lease. As if.)

UPDATE - My blogging skills are vestigial at best. Only on reading ILTVs comment did I realise that when I say 'chocolate', I mean top-end, 70% minimum cocoa solids, made with properly roasted beans. It's an definition so central to the way I live my life, that I utterly fail to appreciate that not everyone else does.

So when I say 'Weetos. Now I'm eating fucking WEETOS' you know how far I have fallen.

Sorted

2007-02-12T03:44:00.001Z

Well, it was always going to be Connery, wasn't it? Scotland forever, and all that.

And here's the thing that decided me. I noticed that the Connery collection offered by Amazon lacked Never Say Never Again, so when I saw said movie on sale in Woolies for £4 (Four! Pounds!) I took it as a Sign.

*sigh* what is it about cheap DVDs? I can't stop myself. Unless what's on offer really is crap. And it's not even as if I watch the stuff, as I would rather spend the time surfing. It's no good for lending, as by the time it's got that cheap everyone has already seen it.

I found myself on the verge of buying another copy of Donnie Darko because is was on sale at £2, and the one I already had cost £6. For a brief moment it actually made sense. (And no, I haven't seen it yet.)

I did buy a duplicate once. I have two copies of that splendid movie Serial Mom. Luckily I had the presence of mind to leave one in its cellophane, in the event that I need an emergency present. Dunno for whom tho', as I'm the only person I know who rates John Waters.

Valentine's Day

2007-02-08T02:02:00.001Z

Hoo-bloody-ray, more presents. Christmas, my birthday, Valentine's Day, SO's birthday early March and then we are DONE. Phew.

Thank goodness for Amazon wish-lists, eh? SO pretty much cleaned mine out for my birthday, bless, (though I remarked the absence of the 10 DVD+RWs - SO has no sense of priorities. Serves me right for not having categorised 'em myself) so I thought I might reciprocate.

Valentine's Day proved easy (Bringing Up Baby, a couple of Gervaise Phinns) but birthday is going to be a little trickier, not to say more expensive. Because SO has also not categorised either, I have to work out which James Bond SO fancies most. Oh, the pressure . . .

I thought I might slide a Firewire cable into the order for li'l ole me. What larks, eh Pip?

Bloggers from the Dawn of Time

2007-02-06T01:14:00.000Z

Last night I finally got around to watching my recording of Victoria Wood's Housewife, 49. The play was moving, uplifting, informative, Threlfall excellent etc etc, and Nella Last was a very early blogger.

The Mass Observation project, started in 1937, wanted to record the daily lives of British citizens, largely in the form of diaries kept by volunteers and sent in to the central office. Nella Last started her blog - sorry, diary - in 1939, in response to an advert. I gather this was far less in response to the outbreak of war than to her own impending (at least second) breakdown. In a very closeted home life, dominated by husband and sons, she had no-one with which to share the details of her life, and so put them all into this diary, which she sent off to Mass Ob.

And blimey o'riley if it didn't turn her life right round. She found the courage to stand up to her husband, practically take over the WVS and bridge the class divide between those who had telephones and those who *gasp* didn't.

First Nations has talked eloquently about the difference between a diary and a blog, and how blogging has changed her life. Nella didn't have a 'comments' button, but just knowing she was going to be listened to made all the difference.

It's. oh. so quiet.

2007-02-04T03:28:00.001Z

Bloody Nicodemus, tip-toeing around like that.

*sigh* Sunday School ~~tomorrow~~ later today. Being as how I 'teach' the three to four year olds (translate that as 'try to keep the lid on'), whatever the subject, the teaching involves a lot of running around and shrieking. It is, after all, their preferred mode of expression, and they are going to do it anyway. So - Solomon building a temple, 'And how did the people worship? YES! By dancing around wildly and yelling loudly! PRAISE THE LORD!' Elijah was a good couple of lessons - 'King Ahab was so angry with Elijah that Elijah had to run away really fast yelling! HELP ME GOD!' And the priests of Baal were a gift - 'How did they pray to their god? By dancing wildly around the altar and yelling! 'BAAL LIGHT THE FIRE!' Give 'em back to their parents good and knackered, say I.

But not this time, oh no. Yours and my favourite member of the Sanhedrin, more than his job's worth to be seen with flavour-of-the-month rabble-rouser JESUS, yes let's hear it for NICODEMUS! has to go visiting in the middle of the night, as quietly as poss., whisper a conversation with The Man, and then sneak back home to have a Good Think.

I'm doomed.