Can't stop . . .

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

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

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

What did I miss?

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

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

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

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

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

WHAT!

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

Thirty Pieces of Silver

. . . or the digital camerical equivalent.

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

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

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

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

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

The sod.

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

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

Pirates of the Caribbean

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

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

Never mind. Die Hard 4.0 is out soon.

No, no and thrice no

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

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

Then things went to hell in a handbasket.

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

FUCK A DUCK.

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

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



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

Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hate being in the wrong.

Saraband, by Robert de Visée (1686)

A Quiet Weekend

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

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

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

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

Where Next? Or Not.

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


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

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

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

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

Space nappies

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

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

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

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

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

Yowza.

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

Zippity-doo-dah!

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

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

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


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

Ha ha ha ha I win!

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

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

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

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

Stuff I don't know

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

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

Does everyone know about this stuff except me?

Bridezilla

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

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

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

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

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

Re-creationism

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

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

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

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

But just what are these lovely play-actors called?

Sleeping on the couch

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

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

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

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

Some days I really have no idea.

Greed

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

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

But no.


Free plastic bags.

I kid you not.

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

10p.

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

Tulip Time

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

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

Editorial Policy

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

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

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

Tulips tomorrow. Especially for Dinahmow.

More T-shirts

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