Today I am not here but here: http://www.powderroomgraffiti.com/love-it/books/the-emperors-babe-by-bernadine-evaristo.html
it's a book review of a wonderful work, and not very long. I won't be hurt at all if you don't go over. Not much.
Tuesday, 23 June 2009
Thursday, 18 June 2009
trouble in paradise (scones and sniping)
The gentle thrum of middlesummer rain assaults my ears, but rests my hayfever. Without my eyes to scratch out I’m at a bit of a loose end. I tell myself I would be weeding were I able to be. Silver linings in strange places.
The day before, Mrs Northern Posh had cleverly arranged for the sun to shine while 8 sundry ladies took tea in her most pleasant garden. We twittered over the geraniums, the roses, the pergola – a lovely Farrow and Ball blue – matching cushions were admired, as was the vine snaking up the house: incipient grapes perfect in miniature.
F10 wants us to grow a vine. I nearly bought one recently. He got quite cross with me. “NO! From a seed,” he said, “It’s got to be. Otherwise it’s cheating and what’s the point.“ He never cheats, of course. Mrs NP was silent on her own vine’s cultivation or quite how it looked so gaudy and good.
The Sexy Nurse kicked off, patting her cleavage, her clothes more off than on as is her wont. Since no men were present she had to import one conversationally and was soon in cheerful flow discussing her rather young gardener.
“But, tell me, Milla,” she said, “foxgloves ARE biennial, yes?”
“Yes-ish,” I said. “Yes in that they are, but they tend to come back every year. At least mine do.”
“And mine!” inserted Mrs NP swiftly, vying for the biggest gardening show-off spot. An authoritative arm waved towards the corner.
“Bugger,” said the Sexy Nurse. “Bloody gardener doesn’t know what he’s doing after all. He’s only gone and pulled the whole bloody lot out. I’ll have to speak to him!” She wriggled happily at the prospect and closed her eyes, slipping into a pleasure zone. Then, “The Post Office is having an Open Day, did you know?” she said suddenly, “Did you get your invites?”
Since the bizarre opening hours of the Post Office occasion us unfathomable hours of amusement, the fact that it was opting to have an Open Day was funnier than it could possibly seem to anyone else.
“What could they possibly do?” asked Mrs Northern Posh with a sinking heart, the enterprise doomed from afar, “Say, here’s the washing powder … bread over there … queue for a stamp here? It’ll be just like any other day.”
“Apart from that the Post Office bit will definitely be shut because it’s on a Sunday,” I said, “not merely probably be shut. Or just shut the minute you walk in. Anyway, no-one will go. It’ll be a disaster. Tragic.”
We discussed an Oldster in the village who nicks inserts from the Sunday papers from the Post Office. How low can you go? Down to the bottom shelf it seems. He slides them into his tartan trolley (a speciality of our village: I think it breeds them, spawning them and leaving them by immaculate gooseberry bushes) but is yet to be caught absolutely red handed.
It transpired that only the Sexy Nurse had actually received an invitation. “I’ll go!” she said, “It’ll be an outing. I’ll bring my own baps,” she chortled, slapping her cleavage again.
Mrs Sensible rummaged in her capacious bag for some sun block. Without a child there to boss about, she picked on one of us, “Mrs Gossip, you’re so fair, do you think you ought to borrow my hat?”
Mrs Gossip assured her that she never burnt, as it happened; she was lucky enough to have lovely skin which went straight to beautiful brown. Or words to that effect. She, too, closed her eyes and beamed at the sun.
It seemed that whatever people said warranted an eye shutting and closed-eyed session staring at the sun. I was quite tempted myself, but feared I would never wake up, that death would take me, and I’d have to be manhandled through the little back door and down the bumpy path at the front and stuffed all unseemly into the Sexy Nurse’s boot. God knows what my corpse would find there. Handcuffs and things. PVC.
Mrs Dull said “no” to a chocolate brownie. Her “no,” accompanied by the steady hand of a traffic policeman held in mid air, suggested that excess calories were the joy of the devil; it was an “oh no!” She further annoyed Mrs NP by wanting only half a slice of lemon drizzle cake. To have more would be very gross. While the rest of us greedily licked our fingers and slurped at things, Mrs NP had to upsticks from the wobbly chair a hostess must occupy to fetch a knife to halve a slice.
Meanwhile Mrs ExecutiveMum (normally found running a small country but on day release from the shackles of her desk), set to lamenting that she had discovered, by fuss-arsing around on Excel (one could have guessed it would end in tears, never trouble trouble …), that they (by which she means she) had spent £8,000 on presents last year. Again. Problems, problems. Déjà vu was unpleasant for she thought she’d cleaned up her spending habit. Seems not. Either that or she’s really crap at Excel and had done all that work only to bring up last year’s figures again. Possible. I could have suggested it; I also toyed with mentioning that scooping up 4 Tiffany bracelets at the airport as “stocking fillers” for her daughters and godchildren might be one area to trim in the coming months. But I stilled my busy mouth, partly because I couldn’t be bothered, partly because I probably know less about Excel than even her and mainly because I’m trying to curb myself from leaping in with pointless solutions or dangerous prattle: step away from a failing dialogue or awkward silence, it is not your responsibility, quit digging, stop lying; keep your mouth shut.
“You’re quiet, Milla,” Mrs Gossip said, her hopes of a little interjection of disbelief at £8K on presents! dashed.
“Just happy listening to everyone else,” I said, spoiling things further.
“T12 not picked for the cricket on Sunday?” she asked.
“Bad ankle,” I said.
“Oh,” she said, disappointed.
Mrs ExecutiveMum tried to re-gain ground with the poverty stricken proles with whom she was stuck for the afternoon by confessing that all her clothes (that day) were from Tesco. Of all places!
“Nice,” everyone said, nodding.
“Yes, their shoes are horrid, though,” said Mrs S&B.
“My shoes are from there, too!”
We all laughed. Kindly, of course. The Tiffany bracelets slipped into the past. Mrs EM relaxed: so this was what all this At Home Mom stuff was about. Weird.
Everyone moved their chairs about, metal scraping on the terrace, to avoid the very sun we had all been so very ardent to park ourselves in. Mrs Sensible fetched the parasol and I don’t know who screamed the loudest, her or the emerging-with-a-knife Mrs Northern Posh (who favours control freakery with regard to things like manhandling defunct garden equipment) when the thing cracked open and a million woodlice tumbled free. She all but went arse over tit over the badminton net guy ropelet thing which we had all been warned to avoid on our way through, occasioning a desperate squeal audible unto heaven.
Half a piece of lemon drizzle cake was off the agenda, a side order of woodlice not appealing to Mrs Dull. “Protein?” I thought but didn't say.
The Sexy Nurse had another fumble with her cleavage, this time with an excuse and a shriek.
I sneezed one of a million sneezes that afternoon.
Greenflies died floating deaths in our glasses of warming water.
Bloody summer.
It was a lovely couple of hours.
“This is nice,” I said, and meant it. Mrs NP looked a little ragged round the edges.
The news on TV featured piracy in Somalia. The camera scanned an exquisite beach. The voiceover breathily assured us that the ship in the distance, which actually looked quite nice, was a pirate ship. Very beautiful people swarmed in a sort of prison, the bars a distressed blue, of which Mrs NP would whole-heartedly have approved. All the clothes looked so lovely, so clean: random wild patterns matching in saturated colour. We were told that a rather lovely looking chap in a fetching pink top was a pirate. No Pugwash he, rather he resembled an escapee from some urban fashion shot.
The setting was very brochure; but not of somewhere you should consider going. Not if you wanted to come back.
Clearly always some sort of trouble in paradise. Here, there and everywhere. Just a different scale of pest.
The day before, Mrs Northern Posh had cleverly arranged for the sun to shine while 8 sundry ladies took tea in her most pleasant garden. We twittered over the geraniums, the roses, the pergola – a lovely Farrow and Ball blue – matching cushions were admired, as was the vine snaking up the house: incipient grapes perfect in miniature.
F10 wants us to grow a vine. I nearly bought one recently. He got quite cross with me. “NO! From a seed,” he said, “It’s got to be. Otherwise it’s cheating and what’s the point.“ He never cheats, of course. Mrs NP was silent on her own vine’s cultivation or quite how it looked so gaudy and good.
The Sexy Nurse kicked off, patting her cleavage, her clothes more off than on as is her wont. Since no men were present she had to import one conversationally and was soon in cheerful flow discussing her rather young gardener.
“But, tell me, Milla,” she said, “foxgloves ARE biennial, yes?”
“Yes-ish,” I said. “Yes in that they are, but they tend to come back every year. At least mine do.”
“And mine!” inserted Mrs NP swiftly, vying for the biggest gardening show-off spot. An authoritative arm waved towards the corner.
“Bugger,” said the Sexy Nurse. “Bloody gardener doesn’t know what he’s doing after all. He’s only gone and pulled the whole bloody lot out. I’ll have to speak to him!” She wriggled happily at the prospect and closed her eyes, slipping into a pleasure zone. Then, “The Post Office is having an Open Day, did you know?” she said suddenly, “Did you get your invites?”
Since the bizarre opening hours of the Post Office occasion us unfathomable hours of amusement, the fact that it was opting to have an Open Day was funnier than it could possibly seem to anyone else.
“What could they possibly do?” asked Mrs Northern Posh with a sinking heart, the enterprise doomed from afar, “Say, here’s the washing powder … bread over there … queue for a stamp here? It’ll be just like any other day.”
“Apart from that the Post Office bit will definitely be shut because it’s on a Sunday,” I said, “not merely probably be shut. Or just shut the minute you walk in. Anyway, no-one will go. It’ll be a disaster. Tragic.”
We discussed an Oldster in the village who nicks inserts from the Sunday papers from the Post Office. How low can you go? Down to the bottom shelf it seems. He slides them into his tartan trolley (a speciality of our village: I think it breeds them, spawning them and leaving them by immaculate gooseberry bushes) but is yet to be caught absolutely red handed.
It transpired that only the Sexy Nurse had actually received an invitation. “I’ll go!” she said, “It’ll be an outing. I’ll bring my own baps,” she chortled, slapping her cleavage again.
Mrs Sensible rummaged in her capacious bag for some sun block. Without a child there to boss about, she picked on one of us, “Mrs Gossip, you’re so fair, do you think you ought to borrow my hat?”
Mrs Gossip assured her that she never burnt, as it happened; she was lucky enough to have lovely skin which went straight to beautiful brown. Or words to that effect. She, too, closed her eyes and beamed at the sun.
It seemed that whatever people said warranted an eye shutting and closed-eyed session staring at the sun. I was quite tempted myself, but feared I would never wake up, that death would take me, and I’d have to be manhandled through the little back door and down the bumpy path at the front and stuffed all unseemly into the Sexy Nurse’s boot. God knows what my corpse would find there. Handcuffs and things. PVC.
Mrs Dull said “no” to a chocolate brownie. Her “no,” accompanied by the steady hand of a traffic policeman held in mid air, suggested that excess calories were the joy of the devil; it was an “oh no!” She further annoyed Mrs NP by wanting only half a slice of lemon drizzle cake. To have more would be very gross. While the rest of us greedily licked our fingers and slurped at things, Mrs NP had to upsticks from the wobbly chair a hostess must occupy to fetch a knife to halve a slice.
Meanwhile Mrs ExecutiveMum (normally found running a small country but on day release from the shackles of her desk), set to lamenting that she had discovered, by fuss-arsing around on Excel (one could have guessed it would end in tears, never trouble trouble …), that they (by which she means she) had spent £8,000 on presents last year. Again. Problems, problems. Déjà vu was unpleasant for she thought she’d cleaned up her spending habit. Seems not. Either that or she’s really crap at Excel and had done all that work only to bring up last year’s figures again. Possible. I could have suggested it; I also toyed with mentioning that scooping up 4 Tiffany bracelets at the airport as “stocking fillers” for her daughters and godchildren might be one area to trim in the coming months. But I stilled my busy mouth, partly because I couldn’t be bothered, partly because I probably know less about Excel than even her and mainly because I’m trying to curb myself from leaping in with pointless solutions or dangerous prattle: step away from a failing dialogue or awkward silence, it is not your responsibility, quit digging, stop lying; keep your mouth shut.
“You’re quiet, Milla,” Mrs Gossip said, her hopes of a little interjection of disbelief at £8K on presents! dashed.
“Just happy listening to everyone else,” I said, spoiling things further.
“T12 not picked for the cricket on Sunday?” she asked.
“Bad ankle,” I said.
“Oh,” she said, disappointed.
Mrs ExecutiveMum tried to re-gain ground with the poverty stricken proles with whom she was stuck for the afternoon by confessing that all her clothes (that day) were from Tesco. Of all places!
“Nice,” everyone said, nodding.
“Yes, their shoes are horrid, though,” said Mrs S&B.
“My shoes are from there, too!”
We all laughed. Kindly, of course. The Tiffany bracelets slipped into the past. Mrs EM relaxed: so this was what all this At Home Mom stuff was about. Weird.
Everyone moved their chairs about, metal scraping on the terrace, to avoid the very sun we had all been so very ardent to park ourselves in. Mrs Sensible fetched the parasol and I don’t know who screamed the loudest, her or the emerging-with-a-knife Mrs Northern Posh (who favours control freakery with regard to things like manhandling defunct garden equipment) when the thing cracked open and a million woodlice tumbled free. She all but went arse over tit over the badminton net guy ropelet thing which we had all been warned to avoid on our way through, occasioning a desperate squeal audible unto heaven.
Half a piece of lemon drizzle cake was off the agenda, a side order of woodlice not appealing to Mrs Dull. “Protein?” I thought but didn't say.
The Sexy Nurse had another fumble with her cleavage, this time with an excuse and a shriek.
I sneezed one of a million sneezes that afternoon.
Greenflies died floating deaths in our glasses of warming water.
Bloody summer.
It was a lovely couple of hours.
“This is nice,” I said, and meant it. Mrs NP looked a little ragged round the edges.
The news on TV featured piracy in Somalia. The camera scanned an exquisite beach. The voiceover breathily assured us that the ship in the distance, which actually looked quite nice, was a pirate ship. Very beautiful people swarmed in a sort of prison, the bars a distressed blue, of which Mrs NP would whole-heartedly have approved. All the clothes looked so lovely, so clean: random wild patterns matching in saturated colour. We were told that a rather lovely looking chap in a fetching pink top was a pirate. No Pugwash he, rather he resembled an escapee from some urban fashion shot.
The setting was very brochure; but not of somewhere you should consider going. Not if you wanted to come back.
Clearly always some sort of trouble in paradise. Here, there and everywhere. Just a different scale of pest.
Tuesday, 16 June 2009
in which an awful lot of brackets are used. (but i don’t bladdy care)
Back when I was a grown up, and not a mere dishrag of a person sporting light wounds (thorny bushes … stranded tennis balls), I coulda been a contender, I coulda been someone. (Well, so could anyone, I’m reminded by The Pogues).
I “worked with” (by which I mean lunched, drank, bobbed around in the background) names. You know, people you might have heard of, from Michael Caine to Ken Livingstone to Bob Flowerdew. Being a lip curling iconoclast, I naturally saw through the lot of them. Well, not Anthony Hopkins, what a sweetie, sigh.
Now I am reduced to boy-handling, dog-handling and glaring at the hoover – not much love lost there: it’s sullen, claiming under-use; I’m sullen, claiming the opposite.
I seem also to have accrued quite an impressive crop of enemies, from the already mentioned Mrs Playmobil and Nasty Troll Goat Woman to, in a quick shuffle around, the biggest of them all, the games teacher at F10’s school.
Here I can but quote the mad old Nan in Catherine Tate. What a bladdy cow. Fack me.
My own PE teacher was a terrible old bag – my mother had her, too. Two generations of non-optimum sports people occluded by the same sneer, scared rigid by sturdy thighs ‘neath a flapping skirt. Cold indifference and a belief in their legs must be something they learn at PE college.
Now, you know me, moderate and easy-going to a fault. And I would really rather my children were never picked for anything sporting, since being selected lands you as parent in a particularly nasty nest of anxiety – need I but say “goalkeeper” to any other mother out there? But F10 was selected, for the rounders, and was thrilled.
Normally the after school conversation goes something like this:
Me: Howdy, F10. Good day?
F10: Yeah, well, no.
Me: Oh, anything happen? (my maternal antennae casually a-frisk for Moments of which I Need be made Aware)
F10: No. Well, I scored.
Me: At lunchtime? Great!
F10: Yeah, it was nearly a hat trick actually.
Me: So you scored twice?
F10: No. Once.
With the day despatched, there’s then the happy trudge home through the field, a small paw slotted into mine, Lolly stuffing her snout into dubious damp patches of long grass. But this time there was the joyous news from F10 that he had been picked to play, and the cry of glee when he told me, his reliving the experience three, four times, all but broke that shrivelled little walnut I’m stuck with calling a heart.
So we go to the tournament and there I’m not best pleased to see that it’s presided over by Vile Bag Cow Teacher. What a slappery trout that creature is, unfit to be in charge of dogs (though I wouldn’t quibble if she insisted I hand over the lead). She hates me. My chum Mrs Northern Posh, whose child was treated badly by her last year, asked me to go to the headteacher with her, in protest. She knows me to be brutal (she kindly calls it articulate) and anti-bullying of any sort, and felt too wobbly to go it alone. In assisting a friend, I got my own card marked.
During the first match F10 and his classmate C10 are both subbed. Someone has to be, this is fine: 11 kiddies, 9 places; I’m mellow with this and it gets it over and done with. Although, it goes without saying, that if our team has to lose, it’s quite pleasing that they lose heavily. Bad luck everyone! Well played! Better luck next time!
Actually, I’m wrong, apparently they come second. “That’s silver,” the father behind me says. I shoot him a look.
F10 plays match 2. They lose again, though – can I be the only one to notice? – by a narrower margin than the first match.
We all remark on how enormous the children are from the other schools. The boys have beards, the girls maternity bras. F10 stands a head shorter than everyone there. He flicks me the thumbs up, his enthusiasm already the stuff of nostalgia, and readies himself with confidence for match 3, cavorting with the others.
But which foul creature is this with her clipboard? Why, it’s VBCT. Yippy-doo. She consults her notes. God? Aren’t the few facts already seared onto her small rabbit dropping of a brain? Seemingly not. She confers with her Sour Sidekick who nods the nod of the executioner. At one with the pain she causes.
F10 totters my way, his face a riot of suppressed tears. C10’s lower lip trembles. Subbed again.
The other children jump around heartlessly, fit with the confidence which the permanently selected find their due.
Hope then comes in the unlikely form of a stout lass, bearing another school’s colours, staggering over, “Not playing 4 girls,” she splutters.
F10 is reprieved.
2 girls are plucked from the squad and told to sit out. Yes, shifting arcane ruling dictates that while some games demand a patronising quorum of 4 girls, in others they can be kicked to the kerb. They sit and make daisy chains and talk about horses.
We win the game. Small stirrings of that odd emotion ‘triumph’ stir in my unimpressive bosom.
The final game, game 4 beckons. VBCT is surprisingly on the ball, attributable to the fact that there are no male PE teachers with whom she can flex her dismal flirting techniques (believe me, not a pretty sight). Her stumpy finger follows the little list of names, her lips moving as she struggles to read.
“Right, year 5, same team as game one,” she says.
She throws me a look, rife with fat spite. “Just rotating everyone,” she says. Although this is exactly what she is not doing. F10 crumples. C10 looks like he might give up and die on the spot. He clutches his asthma inhaler as alibi to his exclusion.
In the long run, it doesn’t matter, it’s petty. But if they’ve been selected, they should have a go, and a fair go. Otherwise resentment breeds (lessons given here). It’s not a nice thing to see, this ritual process whereby one or two children are always singled out despite being of much the same standard as the others. It is divisive and humiliating. For the parents as much as the child. At secondary school, one thing. Not at primary.
Had the tournament meant anything I would have understood. Had it been a Cup match, ditto. Had the other kids not dropped endless catches, botched throws, cocked up on making it to second, I wouldn’t have said a word. But, hand on heart, though he wasn’t the best player and he might not be a Rounders Ronaldo, F10 sure as anything wasn’t the worst. Bang slap in the middle. C10 was one of the best. VBCT must really hate his parents.
What’s a mild mother to do but go and concoct a wax doll? If it’s stuffed into a short skirt, possibly clutching a clipboard and smirking, would anyone really judge me as it burst into glorious flames?
Wednesday, 10 June 2009
where's my small ... boy?
F10 went missing last night. The classic props were all there – the open gate onto the back … the chain and padlock dangling from the hasp … a cricket bat tossed aside suggesting the stepping stone in the journey from garden to field to off, off and beyond.
The front gate was open too. This was wrong. It is always to be kept shut to keep the ghastly dog in, although it’s time I questioned the wisdom of this. Off you go love, the big road’s that way. Most poignant of all were a pair of scruffy little socks left scattered on the grass, clues to his final moments.
Which way to go? With panic building, I scanned the field, then faux-sauntered out of the front. The saunter was necessary to convince me that all was still normal. I strolled down to the right. And then back and to the left. A trot became a bit of a sprint (all terms are relative).
Given the recent shenanigans, various endings were playing out in my head. Had I given him a decent last half hour, a decent life being too much to claim. Yes, I told myself, we’d had a nice walk with the dog. We’d taken a cricket bat (he has rounders today, I thought that some practise might help), I had been throwing it at him, he’d been thwacking it. We had played catch. I had been kind and encouraging. I had said things like “oh, good throw” and “my fault, too high.” Angels were busy in heaven with my brownie points. Even when we had to tussle with the dog to let slip half a shagged-out blackbird it had all been quite pleasant. Relative terms, remember.
Then we'd returned home. While he stayed outside to play at bowling, I had felt I deserved a glass of wine. Some might like to pause here to ponder, with an admiring moue, on the late hour, 8.30, of the first glass of the day. We can forget the small but necessary gin at 7, too tiny to mention.
And here the reflections, all taking place in seconds, morphed into the imminent police investigation. If the road continued not to proffer up my son, I’d have to be on the blower, 999. The sirens, the heavy shut of the door, the swagger of the policeman hoicking up his trews, the belt loaded with cuffs and phones.
“So, Milla, you were drinking wine and you checked on your child .. when?”
“5 to 9,” I mumble in my mind.
The sarcasm is heavy. “A whole 25 minutes elapses, how extremely good of you, Milla, to remember him at all. Let me top up your glass.”
The sergeant and the constable exchange glances, sigh heavily. Lips are pursed. The At Risk register will be consulted, and amended.
My sprint intensified, which means that speed would possibly be detectable by an alert passer-by, an Old seized by a need to vacuum the car.
Up ahead a blur of blue. Some tuneless whistling reaches me. F10 strolling back.
“Oh, hi, mum,” he burbled huskily.
I scooped him to me.
“Where were you!?!” I said, my face buried in his ledge wig.
“Oh, you know, I was looking for my barbecue man.”
His barbecue man is, what? 3cm tall. He is from a Lego barbecue kit (featuring lights, a parasol and a leg of chicken, all eminently losable, naturally) and occupies a domain of joy shared with a ring, a rabbit …. He has developed a huge back-story and doles out chicken to all and sundry with impressive regularity. We’re all rather sick of it to be honest. Mmmm, more chicken. Yum. It had fallen out, he assumed, while off on the walk so he had gone back, in the gathering dusk, to search through long grass in three fields for his Lego man.
His childhood has been littered with such hunts. “Where’s my pirate’s foot … where’s my small mazagine” being perennial and plaintive cries from his early years. When a pirate’s foot belongs to a Playmobil man and the small mazagine is the instructions to the Playmobil man, no, we never knew where they were, but we measured out our hours in looking for them. The sticky possession of important items vital to his being. Sometimes the memory of them would echo in my head, lulling me to sleep. It’s become a catch phrase for anything misplaced nowadays.
“You know not to go anywhere without telling us!” I said.
“But my man …” Some things transcend rules.
Lego man was found among the socks. Thrilled he was. He squeaked. Then put it down. “And where’s the barbecue?” he said, heading towards the gate.
Give me strength.
The front gate was open too. This was wrong. It is always to be kept shut to keep the ghastly dog in, although it’s time I questioned the wisdom of this. Off you go love, the big road’s that way. Most poignant of all were a pair of scruffy little socks left scattered on the grass, clues to his final moments.
Which way to go? With panic building, I scanned the field, then faux-sauntered out of the front. The saunter was necessary to convince me that all was still normal. I strolled down to the right. And then back and to the left. A trot became a bit of a sprint (all terms are relative).
Given the recent shenanigans, various endings were playing out in my head. Had I given him a decent last half hour, a decent life being too much to claim. Yes, I told myself, we’d had a nice walk with the dog. We’d taken a cricket bat (he has rounders today, I thought that some practise might help), I had been throwing it at him, he’d been thwacking it. We had played catch. I had been kind and encouraging. I had said things like “oh, good throw” and “my fault, too high.” Angels were busy in heaven with my brownie points. Even when we had to tussle with the dog to let slip half a shagged-out blackbird it had all been quite pleasant. Relative terms, remember.
Then we'd returned home. While he stayed outside to play at bowling, I had felt I deserved a glass of wine. Some might like to pause here to ponder, with an admiring moue, on the late hour, 8.30, of the first glass of the day. We can forget the small but necessary gin at 7, too tiny to mention.
And here the reflections, all taking place in seconds, morphed into the imminent police investigation. If the road continued not to proffer up my son, I’d have to be on the blower, 999. The sirens, the heavy shut of the door, the swagger of the policeman hoicking up his trews, the belt loaded with cuffs and phones.
“So, Milla, you were drinking wine and you checked on your child .. when?”
“5 to 9,” I mumble in my mind.
The sarcasm is heavy. “A whole 25 minutes elapses, how extremely good of you, Milla, to remember him at all. Let me top up your glass.”
The sergeant and the constable exchange glances, sigh heavily. Lips are pursed. The At Risk register will be consulted, and amended.
My sprint intensified, which means that speed would possibly be detectable by an alert passer-by, an Old seized by a need to vacuum the car.
Up ahead a blur of blue. Some tuneless whistling reaches me. F10 strolling back.
“Oh, hi, mum,” he burbled huskily.
I scooped him to me.
“Where were you!?!” I said, my face buried in his ledge wig.
“Oh, you know, I was looking for my barbecue man.”
His barbecue man is, what? 3cm tall. He is from a Lego barbecue kit (featuring lights, a parasol and a leg of chicken, all eminently losable, naturally) and occupies a domain of joy shared with a ring, a rabbit …. He has developed a huge back-story and doles out chicken to all and sundry with impressive regularity. We’re all rather sick of it to be honest. Mmmm, more chicken. Yum. It had fallen out, he assumed, while off on the walk so he had gone back, in the gathering dusk, to search through long grass in three fields for his Lego man.
His childhood has been littered with such hunts. “Where’s my pirate’s foot … where’s my small mazagine” being perennial and plaintive cries from his early years. When a pirate’s foot belongs to a Playmobil man and the small mazagine is the instructions to the Playmobil man, no, we never knew where they were, but we measured out our hours in looking for them. The sticky possession of important items vital to his being. Sometimes the memory of them would echo in my head, lulling me to sleep. It’s become a catch phrase for anything misplaced nowadays.
“You know not to go anywhere without telling us!” I said.
“But my man …” Some things transcend rules.
Lego man was found among the socks. Thrilled he was. He squeaked. Then put it down. “And where’s the barbecue?” he said, heading towards the gate.
Give me strength.
Tuesday, 9 June 2009
hell is other people's mothers
There’s a frigid woman at school, startling white jeans, Playmobil hair and crossed arms clamped firmly across her chest. She is one of my arch enemies. I doubt she even knows my name. Why should she? I have merely driven her 2 hooligans from an after school class for a year without recognition, let alone reciprocation. It’s not that which I hate her for, and let’s not think hate’s too strong a word here, but that her nasty little son is one of 2 tormenters of F10. She's bred a brute, doesn't know it, doesn't care. As long as her Merc keeps going, life is sweet.
F10 is a complex beast. He does beautiful, intricate drawings, he is fascinated by nature, his mental arithmetic is startling. He dresses up in a suit, an Indiana Jones hat and my Jasper Conran elbow length gloves to watch ‘Poirot.’ Eccentric is the word, random. He can also be maddening, argumentative and with a wearing sense of his own rectitude. He aint your average 10 year old and is a quandary too far for many of his classmates. It’s not a good mix.
Mercifully many of T12’s friends love him; for them he is “The Ledge.”
“F10’s hair is ledge,” said W12 yesterday wistfully, ruffling his own black mess, “that’s what I aspire to.”
“What?” I said, “a crazy wig in need of a radical re-think?”
“Yes,” he said. “It’s ledge.”
Meanwhile white-jeans Mum (the original ice maiden who, when once she tried a smile had to spend a week in recovery), has spawned a toxic pram toy of a boy who squeaks malevolently and is chief toad in opposition to my F10. What he does not get he seeks to destroy.
His co-general is a squat lout with a plasticky quiff and the cold pale eyes of a killer fish, 4th child of a troll-goat (down to the purple hair and stumpy legs). The family have a genetic misfortune to look as if they have been thumped on the head with a hammer. I’m trying to work it into conversation.
Last week, for whatever misguided reason, F10 took to school with him his precious ring. Had I but known, I would have wrestled it from him, I would have undergone wounds from cross claws to keep it safe and out of sight.
I can only imagine that he had a very different outcome in mind when sliding it into his pocket. In his mind’s eye, he would have revealed the ring, expecting an admiring intake of breath. The ring would glow bright, drawing all near. Perhaps one boy would have dared to ask if he could touch it. F10 might graciously have conceded. An eager audience would have gathered, each craning for a glimpse of The Ring. It would be the talk of the playground.
He was wrong.
The scenario unfolded in a very different way.
Out came the ring. F10 nursed it tenderly, shyly.
“It’s crap,” squeaked Toxic Pram Toy.
“Yeah,” mocked Plastic Quiff Troll, “Crap.”
“Spazzy.”
A round of laughter at the heady wit.
“I bought it from the museum,” F10 said, rallying with the wrong rally.
“Should be in a bin.”
“It’s trash, rubbish.”
“Stupid.”
“Sad.”
“Stupid, ugly ring, crap.”
"Sucker."
They all joined in, thoughtless safety in the pack, careless power in numbers; it went on for some time.
For in addition to the leaders, as powerful as Roman Emperors within their fiefdoms – although as yet without the authority to confer senatorship on their gerbils – there are the hapless bystanders. A depressing lot, happy to gather in the skirts of the great, anxiety to be in with the core group bleeding from every desperate pore. One, an erstwhile friend of F10’s, is the Brutus of the piece. Brutus, but in smaller shoes. Another fond mother to avoid.
I'm not saying he must be cossetted. There will always be pushing and shoving, one cannot micro-manage. They have to learn to deal with the pack. The other kids don't have to like the wretched ring. But, six of them, against one? Again.
Gollum’s intensity of fervour would have wavered beneath this jeering attack. F10 clutched his ring the tighter, and said nothing.
The story leaked in bits and pieces over the weekend. He sobbed.
“Why didn’t you Tell?” I said.
“I couldn’t,” he said.
“Was Mr J not there?” I asked, meaning the headmaster, who always wants to know when there is a fresh “incident.”
“It’s not that,” he said.
What it is is the humiliation. He cannot, could not and will not Tell because to articulate the episode would force a new reality. If it hasn’t been said by him, he can convince himself it didn’t happen and keep safe his dreams. He has already developed what the school would call Coping Strategies which are far too sophisticated for a ten year old. Those of disembodiment, of effectively writing off his time there against when things start properly at his secondary school. But whenever we suggest moving him elsewhere he is distraught. It would smack of failure, of having been driven out, of the triumph of PQT and TPT.
His teacher is fantastic, and when she telephoned me to discuss it I detected a whisper of the warpath.
I do not believe for an instance in the innocence of children. ‘Lord of the Flies’ reinforces that. Sassy and wanton, vessels of corrupted morals, shot through with deep rooted unkindness and a huge sense of their own entitlement, yes. Or so my jaded condition convinces me now.
I am not alone. A sad father spills his own story when we’re out dog walking. Many of the girls in F10’s class seem as bad, with bitchy shifting sands of allegiance. Loyalty dumped for a sleepover. Promises abandoned in return for a fiddle with a mobile phone. Do they learn it from television? I don’t know. Too much too soon and none of it nice.
I don’t think I’m blind to my own children’s faults: I could list them here and it would take some time. I am not unrealistic. They complain that we are far too strict with them. We are hot on manners, harsh on dereliction of duty. I wonder what the parents of Toxic Pram Toy and Plastic Quiff Troll are told, why aren’t they on these boys like a ton of bricks? Is it just me left feeling the anguish, suffering the night thoughts, driven to fond fantasies of tragic road accidents: an ice maiden cut short in her white jeaned prime, a troll found squashed beneath the tyres of a friendly truck.
Chatting to other children’s parents brings a warped view. For many their children seem to be gadgets, accessories, objects of great wonder who can do no wrong. Perhaps they don’t see them enough. I’d be happy to fill them in. Until that joyful day, the day of great reckoning, they are free to chuckle indulgently at feral acts and enjoy the inflated sense of their kiddies’ dubious worth. They roll their eyes, “what can one do?!”
You are supposed to collude, to bill and coo. Kids, eh. I don’t. I avoid the school gates at the moment, sullen at the thought of encountering what Sir Alan Sugar would call the whole bladdy lot of them. Anger brings eloquence and I fear what I might say.
“Don’t take your rabbit in,” (Bunsy being up there with the ring), I said to F10 when tackling his wig this morning, chasing the curls with a busy hairbrush.
“I won’t,” he promised, ruffling them up again.
The ring I’ve not seen since.
F10 is a complex beast. He does beautiful, intricate drawings, he is fascinated by nature, his mental arithmetic is startling. He dresses up in a suit, an Indiana Jones hat and my Jasper Conran elbow length gloves to watch ‘Poirot.’ Eccentric is the word, random. He can also be maddening, argumentative and with a wearing sense of his own rectitude. He aint your average 10 year old and is a quandary too far for many of his classmates. It’s not a good mix.
Mercifully many of T12’s friends love him; for them he is “The Ledge.”
“F10’s hair is ledge,” said W12 yesterday wistfully, ruffling his own black mess, “that’s what I aspire to.”
“What?” I said, “a crazy wig in need of a radical re-think?”
“Yes,” he said. “It’s ledge.”
Meanwhile white-jeans Mum (the original ice maiden who, when once she tried a smile had to spend a week in recovery), has spawned a toxic pram toy of a boy who squeaks malevolently and is chief toad in opposition to my F10. What he does not get he seeks to destroy.
His co-general is a squat lout with a plasticky quiff and the cold pale eyes of a killer fish, 4th child of a troll-goat (down to the purple hair and stumpy legs). The family have a genetic misfortune to look as if they have been thumped on the head with a hammer. I’m trying to work it into conversation.
Last week, for whatever misguided reason, F10 took to school with him his precious ring. Had I but known, I would have wrestled it from him, I would have undergone wounds from cross claws to keep it safe and out of sight.
I can only imagine that he had a very different outcome in mind when sliding it into his pocket. In his mind’s eye, he would have revealed the ring, expecting an admiring intake of breath. The ring would glow bright, drawing all near. Perhaps one boy would have dared to ask if he could touch it. F10 might graciously have conceded. An eager audience would have gathered, each craning for a glimpse of The Ring. It would be the talk of the playground.
He was wrong.
The scenario unfolded in a very different way.
Out came the ring. F10 nursed it tenderly, shyly.
“It’s crap,” squeaked Toxic Pram Toy.
“Yeah,” mocked Plastic Quiff Troll, “Crap.”
“Spazzy.”
A round of laughter at the heady wit.
“I bought it from the museum,” F10 said, rallying with the wrong rally.
“Should be in a bin.”
“It’s trash, rubbish.”
“Stupid.”
“Sad.”
“Stupid, ugly ring, crap.”
"Sucker."
They all joined in, thoughtless safety in the pack, careless power in numbers; it went on for some time.
For in addition to the leaders, as powerful as Roman Emperors within their fiefdoms – although as yet without the authority to confer senatorship on their gerbils – there are the hapless bystanders. A depressing lot, happy to gather in the skirts of the great, anxiety to be in with the core group bleeding from every desperate pore. One, an erstwhile friend of F10’s, is the Brutus of the piece. Brutus, but in smaller shoes. Another fond mother to avoid.
I'm not saying he must be cossetted. There will always be pushing and shoving, one cannot micro-manage. They have to learn to deal with the pack. The other kids don't have to like the wretched ring. But, six of them, against one? Again.
Gollum’s intensity of fervour would have wavered beneath this jeering attack. F10 clutched his ring the tighter, and said nothing.
The story leaked in bits and pieces over the weekend. He sobbed.
“Why didn’t you Tell?” I said.
“I couldn’t,” he said.
“Was Mr J not there?” I asked, meaning the headmaster, who always wants to know when there is a fresh “incident.”
“It’s not that,” he said.
What it is is the humiliation. He cannot, could not and will not Tell because to articulate the episode would force a new reality. If it hasn’t been said by him, he can convince himself it didn’t happen and keep safe his dreams. He has already developed what the school would call Coping Strategies which are far too sophisticated for a ten year old. Those of disembodiment, of effectively writing off his time there against when things start properly at his secondary school. But whenever we suggest moving him elsewhere he is distraught. It would smack of failure, of having been driven out, of the triumph of PQT and TPT.
His teacher is fantastic, and when she telephoned me to discuss it I detected a whisper of the warpath.
I do not believe for an instance in the innocence of children. ‘Lord of the Flies’ reinforces that. Sassy and wanton, vessels of corrupted morals, shot through with deep rooted unkindness and a huge sense of their own entitlement, yes. Or so my jaded condition convinces me now.
I am not alone. A sad father spills his own story when we’re out dog walking. Many of the girls in F10’s class seem as bad, with bitchy shifting sands of allegiance. Loyalty dumped for a sleepover. Promises abandoned in return for a fiddle with a mobile phone. Do they learn it from television? I don’t know. Too much too soon and none of it nice.
I don’t think I’m blind to my own children’s faults: I could list them here and it would take some time. I am not unrealistic. They complain that we are far too strict with them. We are hot on manners, harsh on dereliction of duty. I wonder what the parents of Toxic Pram Toy and Plastic Quiff Troll are told, why aren’t they on these boys like a ton of bricks? Is it just me left feeling the anguish, suffering the night thoughts, driven to fond fantasies of tragic road accidents: an ice maiden cut short in her white jeaned prime, a troll found squashed beneath the tyres of a friendly truck.
Chatting to other children’s parents brings a warped view. For many their children seem to be gadgets, accessories, objects of great wonder who can do no wrong. Perhaps they don’t see them enough. I’d be happy to fill them in. Until that joyful day, the day of great reckoning, they are free to chuckle indulgently at feral acts and enjoy the inflated sense of their kiddies’ dubious worth. They roll their eyes, “what can one do?!”
You are supposed to collude, to bill and coo. Kids, eh. I don’t. I avoid the school gates at the moment, sullen at the thought of encountering what Sir Alan Sugar would call the whole bladdy lot of them. Anger brings eloquence and I fear what I might say.
“Don’t take your rabbit in,” (Bunsy being up there with the ring), I said to F10 when tackling his wig this morning, chasing the curls with a busy hairbrush.
“I won’t,” he promised, ruffling them up again.
The ring I’ve not seen since.
Monday, 18 May 2009
be careful what you wish for
The pub is under new management again. This is the fourth set of owners we’ve encountered in the 3 years we’ve lived here. Each pair bringing a fresh surge of hope, both theirs and ours, to be dashed all round within months. Still, one never quite learns that hope is over-rated.
We’d all chattered about the mooted takeover with the avidity of the easily-pleased, lamenting the fact that such a nice village continued to lack a successful pub. It was on the market for months with nary a tickle of interest. Until then, once the then-current landlord was carted off by the police for the third and final time and an injunction served, there it was, bought (presumably at a knockdown price) by Turn’Em Round Tone, a snapper-up of failing pubs, magic at his fingertips when it comes to restoring Hook Norton to the menu and flashing the welcoming smile. Something which had been in short supply for so long; smiles having been limited to the anxious-desperate and the surly snarl, depending on which you encountered, her or him.
There was a launch at the weekend, with a free pig roast and a disco. The usual barmaid, Lucy, (knocking 40, 3 kids: it shows) was phoned at 2 and told not to bother coming in.
We arrived at about 8 and could barely slide in sideways. It all but induced a panic attack in E and I wasn’t far behind in wishing I was anywhere but. Just anywhere. It brought back the horrors of nightclubs in my youth. When Boy George had designs on my boyfriend. I might love a party but I hate crowds, the squash of people, the noise, the fear frankly of mankind in pursuit of a good time.
However, we struggled bravely to the bar to be confronted by Lucy’s replacements. Sluts, basically. A baying, jeering gang of youths had materialised, lured by hormones to slaver at the pillowy soft tissue on bold display. The lads stood in the area previously designated a No Stand area: it seemed so brave, but the habitual proliferation of signs (don’t stand here, don’t park here, dogs here but not there, no footballs, no kids, keep your children by you, keep back) had all been whisked away. A solid barman was all that was thought necessary for the laydees. No Adonis for us. Tone’s marketing was at the men. The villagers tutted slightly, grumbled. We like a good tut and eye roll.
Upstairs, slowly dancing round her mobile phone’s tinny pulsing of “I Will Survive,” was Mel, the fourth gin of the day doing its stuff. Beaten wife and afforded an extension on get orf my land by Tone to give her time to move on, her defeat was made plain by blatant comparison. That night saw as many customers in one shift as they saw in their entire year stretched out. Somewhere the prescribed 100 miles away, her ex-husband, Pete, could possibly hear the ker-ching of the till, the beat of the disco, could all but see the car park chock full, the success that could have been his, and without plentiful signage. He wailed, nursing his bloodied fists.
OK, so I made this paragraph up.
Made glaringly apparent was the gap in expectation and reality, the brutal difference between what you want and what you get. Fuss, fuss, fuss, but no-one had liked the basic sullen resentment doled out by Pete or his permanent defiance of the rules of hospitality – he once had words for a friend when she said that her food was cold, “if you don’t like it, you can fuck off,” he said. Big mistake when your husband’s captain of the cricket, and the fingers of interlacing village gossip which spread like swine flu’s meant to, ensures that everybody’s heard by Tuesday, and passed on a distorted version.
But this?
A new landlord had brought the predictable new hope, so the village turned out in force, the Olds elbowing all others out of the way in pursuit of free pork. Doggy bags concealed in the folds of their blouson jackets, shamed not by the tell-tale spread of greasy spots. The music thudded. The bar was several deep. What could one do but stare wide-eyed in a sort of horror at the bestial scene.
My chum snagged me a bar stool which I clung to as if it were wreckage from the Titanic and my one chance of survival in a sea of alien bodies.
Lucy tipped up and bore it well, a glazed smile her brave understanding of her sudden redundancy in a world where youth trumps and old bags go home.
Outside in the garden, the relaxation of rules had led to a certain feral quality triumphing in all of the children. They were kicking balls again with hearty abandon, neighbours’ fences reverberated with the thwack of missed goals. The underage and the overage were stealing goes on the fort-playground (a strict and unenforceable age range had been the prior norm). New kids were there, too, drafted in from the rougher reaches and called Kyle. Squalid little tramps swung dead-eyed on the fronds of the weeping willow. My inner headteacher flinched. I longed for a whip, and handcuffs. This Boschian soup needed quelling.
We lasted barely an hour and crept off defeated.
“It’ll never last,” E said as we shuffled home.
“I do hope not,” I said.
Next night, driving past, it was comforting to see that the circus had packed up and crawled back to whichever part of the local Beirut from which they had scuttled. The carpark was pleasingly empty. Through the window one could make out the sluts, hugging themselves since no-one else was there to do so, cold in May with this much flesh on show.
We’d all chattered about the mooted takeover with the avidity of the easily-pleased, lamenting the fact that such a nice village continued to lack a successful pub. It was on the market for months with nary a tickle of interest. Until then, once the then-current landlord was carted off by the police for the third and final time and an injunction served, there it was, bought (presumably at a knockdown price) by Turn’Em Round Tone, a snapper-up of failing pubs, magic at his fingertips when it comes to restoring Hook Norton to the menu and flashing the welcoming smile. Something which had been in short supply for so long; smiles having been limited to the anxious-desperate and the surly snarl, depending on which you encountered, her or him.
There was a launch at the weekend, with a free pig roast and a disco. The usual barmaid, Lucy, (knocking 40, 3 kids: it shows) was phoned at 2 and told not to bother coming in.
We arrived at about 8 and could barely slide in sideways. It all but induced a panic attack in E and I wasn’t far behind in wishing I was anywhere but. Just anywhere. It brought back the horrors of nightclubs in my youth. When Boy George had designs on my boyfriend. I might love a party but I hate crowds, the squash of people, the noise, the fear frankly of mankind in pursuit of a good time.
However, we struggled bravely to the bar to be confronted by Lucy’s replacements. Sluts, basically. A baying, jeering gang of youths had materialised, lured by hormones to slaver at the pillowy soft tissue on bold display. The lads stood in the area previously designated a No Stand area: it seemed so brave, but the habitual proliferation of signs (don’t stand here, don’t park here, dogs here but not there, no footballs, no kids, keep your children by you, keep back) had all been whisked away. A solid barman was all that was thought necessary for the laydees. No Adonis for us. Tone’s marketing was at the men. The villagers tutted slightly, grumbled. We like a good tut and eye roll.
Upstairs, slowly dancing round her mobile phone’s tinny pulsing of “I Will Survive,” was Mel, the fourth gin of the day doing its stuff. Beaten wife and afforded an extension on get orf my land by Tone to give her time to move on, her defeat was made plain by blatant comparison. That night saw as many customers in one shift as they saw in their entire year stretched out. Somewhere the prescribed 100 miles away, her ex-husband, Pete, could possibly hear the ker-ching of the till, the beat of the disco, could all but see the car park chock full, the success that could have been his, and without plentiful signage. He wailed, nursing his bloodied fists.
OK, so I made this paragraph up.
Made glaringly apparent was the gap in expectation and reality, the brutal difference between what you want and what you get. Fuss, fuss, fuss, but no-one had liked the basic sullen resentment doled out by Pete or his permanent defiance of the rules of hospitality – he once had words for a friend when she said that her food was cold, “if you don’t like it, you can fuck off,” he said. Big mistake when your husband’s captain of the cricket, and the fingers of interlacing village gossip which spread like swine flu’s meant to, ensures that everybody’s heard by Tuesday, and passed on a distorted version.
But this?
A new landlord had brought the predictable new hope, so the village turned out in force, the Olds elbowing all others out of the way in pursuit of free pork. Doggy bags concealed in the folds of their blouson jackets, shamed not by the tell-tale spread of greasy spots. The music thudded. The bar was several deep. What could one do but stare wide-eyed in a sort of horror at the bestial scene.
My chum snagged me a bar stool which I clung to as if it were wreckage from the Titanic and my one chance of survival in a sea of alien bodies.
Lucy tipped up and bore it well, a glazed smile her brave understanding of her sudden redundancy in a world where youth trumps and old bags go home.
Outside in the garden, the relaxation of rules had led to a certain feral quality triumphing in all of the children. They were kicking balls again with hearty abandon, neighbours’ fences reverberated with the thwack of missed goals. The underage and the overage were stealing goes on the fort-playground (a strict and unenforceable age range had been the prior norm). New kids were there, too, drafted in from the rougher reaches and called Kyle. Squalid little tramps swung dead-eyed on the fronds of the weeping willow. My inner headteacher flinched. I longed for a whip, and handcuffs. This Boschian soup needed quelling.
We lasted barely an hour and crept off defeated.
“It’ll never last,” E said as we shuffled home.
“I do hope not,” I said.
Next night, driving past, it was comforting to see that the circus had packed up and crawled back to whichever part of the local Beirut from which they had scuttled. The carpark was pleasingly empty. Through the window one could make out the sluts, hugging themselves since no-one else was there to do so, cold in May with this much flesh on show.
Thursday, 14 May 2009
ps
Hoorah, have recently been, truly, the most rightful recipient of two lovely awards; one last week,
which I busily snaffled and shoved on the sidebar, but then ignored the etiquette of sharing. Oops. So, my blog is fucking fantastic and for once it’s not merely me saying it, but Potty Mummy, who is clearly a very wise woman.
Anyway, in order to warrant it, I have to list five fabulous addictions, being: reading, chatting,
my family (2 legged ones only, sorry Lolly, back in your basket), skiing (whimper) Sauvignon Blanc (yum)
Then I have to pass it on, obviously I want to give both of them to everyone, but the new 5 are:
Real life mates, Rottie and Exmoor Jane, nuff said in both cases
New find: The Cigarette Diaries
General good-eggery and as a Happy Anniversary: Carol and Chris
Disappearing trick: Ernest du Cugnac because he sent me a divine e-mail once but has since buggered off so he might not really deserve it. Hmmm.
Anyway, here’s what you have to do, Chaps: “1. Pass it on to five other fabulous blogs.2. List five of your fabulous addictions.3. Copy and paste the rules and the instructions below.Instructions: On your post of receiving this award, make sure you include the person that gave you the award and link it back to them. When you post your five winners, make sure you link to them as well. To add the award to your post, simply right-click, save image, then “add image” it in your post as a picture so your winners can save it as well. To add it to your sidebar, add the “picture” widget. Also, don’t forget to let your winners know they won an award from you by emailing them or leaving a comment on their blog. Easy peasey lemon squeezy.”
Right the other award, the Kreativ one
(I know, I know, shocking spelling issues), came from Carol and Chris and, this time the stakes are upped to include SEVEN things and SEVEN creative bloggers, so:
The first five loves are up there, the next two are, er, weekends and fudge, decent fudge, neither granular, slippery or chemical. Actually Tesco’s is surprisingly good and they are welcome to send me some any time.
My new recipients (and anyone else can nick it if they want) are:
Little Brown Dog for being so very readable
KittyB for her blog being so pretty (she looks like the back of a bus herself, poor love, but makes up for it in cake production and hen talk)
Pipany for being so talented and having an über-magazine life
Potty Mummy for earning half a pair of sunglasses from writing
Elizabethm for all that gardening stuff
Welsh girl for wit and wailing at rotten blind dates
Fennie for elegant cleverness and lots of juicy facts slid in among the words (that's fact with a "c" and not a "r")
(*LATE FLASH* KittyB is stripped of her title for gross cheek. It passes instead to glorious Dave for services to knuckledusters)
So seven things each, 7 new bloggers, let me know, and by Christmas we’ll have spread out across the world.
And now for one or two catch up things:
My parents have returned safely from their mega jaunt so the cross’s ownership remains unquestioned and Clare will get her books back. The ancient dog is blooming. A new hamster is mooted. Can’t wait, naturally.
F10 has a bruise you can possibly see from there on his shin from the little shit. But his teeth are repairing. He is sanguine about both.
T12 still sees the need for serious limping, apart from at cricket practice when, happily, it recovers. This is clearly very good news.
The asparagus was delicious, we had it yesterday for we went with the nippers to the pub on the night, seated high in the hills staring at rolling greenery. England at its best. Plus the woman gave us a bottle of wine free which is just how pubs should be.
And off for a little collapse now, all those links have done me in.
which I busily snaffled and shoved on the sidebar, but then ignored the etiquette of sharing. Oops. So, my blog is fucking fantastic and for once it’s not merely me saying it, but Potty Mummy, who is clearly a very wise woman.Anyway, in order to warrant it, I have to list five fabulous addictions, being: reading, chatting,
my family (2 legged ones only, sorry Lolly, back in your basket), skiing (whimper) Sauvignon Blanc (yum)
Then I have to pass it on, obviously I want to give both of them to everyone, but the new 5 are:
Real life mates, Rottie and Exmoor Jane, nuff said in both cases
New find: The Cigarette Diaries
General good-eggery and as a Happy Anniversary: Carol and Chris
Disappearing trick: Ernest du Cugnac because he sent me a divine e-mail once but has since buggered off so he might not really deserve it. Hmmm.
Anyway, here’s what you have to do, Chaps: “1. Pass it on to five other fabulous blogs.2. List five of your fabulous addictions.3. Copy and paste the rules and the instructions below.Instructions: On your post of receiving this award, make sure you include the person that gave you the award and link it back to them. When you post your five winners, make sure you link to them as well. To add the award to your post, simply right-click, save image, then “add image” it in your post as a picture so your winners can save it as well. To add it to your sidebar, add the “picture” widget. Also, don’t forget to let your winners know they won an award from you by emailing them or leaving a comment on their blog. Easy peasey lemon squeezy.”
Right the other award, the Kreativ one
(I know, I know, shocking spelling issues), came from Carol and Chris and, this time the stakes are upped to include SEVEN things and SEVEN creative bloggers, so:The first five loves are up there, the next two are, er, weekends and fudge, decent fudge, neither granular, slippery or chemical. Actually Tesco’s is surprisingly good and they are welcome to send me some any time.
My new recipients (and anyone else can nick it if they want) are:
Little Brown Dog for being so very readable
KittyB for her blog being so pretty (she looks like the back of a bus herself, poor love, but makes up for it in cake production and hen talk)
Pipany for being so talented and having an über-magazine life
Potty Mummy for earning half a pair of sunglasses from writing
Elizabethm for all that gardening stuff
Welsh girl for wit and wailing at rotten blind dates
Fennie for elegant cleverness and lots of juicy facts slid in among the words (that's fact with a "c" and not a "r")
(*LATE FLASH* KittyB is stripped of her title for gross cheek. It passes instead to glorious Dave for services to knuckledusters)
So seven things each, 7 new bloggers, let me know, and by Christmas we’ll have spread out across the world.
And now for one or two catch up things:
My parents have returned safely from their mega jaunt so the cross’s ownership remains unquestioned and Clare will get her books back. The ancient dog is blooming. A new hamster is mooted. Can’t wait, naturally.
F10 has a bruise you can possibly see from there on his shin from the little shit. But his teeth are repairing. He is sanguine about both.
T12 still sees the need for serious limping, apart from at cricket practice when, happily, it recovers. This is clearly very good news.
The asparagus was delicious, we had it yesterday for we went with the nippers to the pub on the night, seated high in the hills staring at rolling greenery. England at its best. Plus the woman gave us a bottle of wine free which is just how pubs should be.
And off for a little collapse now, all those links have done me in.
Monday, 11 May 2009
ow
Today E and I have been married for 19 years which must go to show that we mean it.
19 years has nothing of importance attached to it. The romantic listings on-line say firmly, in a Do Not Pass Go sort of way, that it has NO traditional materials or symbols or flowers attached to it. So that’s us told. But some more modern set-up, with an eye to a merchandising spin-off maybe, suggests Bronze, Topaz or Aquamarine. Perhaps these 3 sulked and got up a petition because they’re left out of the proper lists.
Whatever, I gave E a card I had knocking about, and he gave me one of a … cat we’d bought in readiness for F10’s Grade 1 piano exam. Think about it, how likely am I to be fond of cats? Exactly. He knows this; I know this; I feel mean for eye rolling; he feels worse for having lost the real card. I feel suddenly very mean indeed that there was a real card at all, lost or otherwise.
I’ll suggest that he keeps it, when found, for next year (but not in that fatal place, a safe place) for 20 years, the listings deign to admit, counts. China, apparently; dull, non? and not necessarily worth hanging around for.
Ever the romantic, my morning was spent in light chores: loos and basins and hoovering. Yum. Then, what next, what next? The washing? Oh, yes, pleasey. Up on the line it went, greedily snatched by a bossy wind, slapping a trouser leg in my face, the lot hopefully half way to Sweden by now. It recalled my wedding day when, with our slot booked at the Register Office for 2 pm, 1 pm found my father and I polishing the Jag. The caterers slouched by, “Looks like rain,” one said, thrilled, her tongue doing unspeakably smug things in her cheek.
Then, since the school is not allowed to administer that lethal narcotic, Calpol, I strolled up to dose F10 with it myself. We had to spend (say it quietly) £95 on an emergency dentist for him yesterday. The x-ray revealed an eye tooth jabbing at other roots. The bit where the inside, the skeleton, meets the outside, ie: teeth, freaks me out. It’s possibly been worse for poor F10 whose visceral screams of pain sanctioned the cheque writing. I'm horrid, but not that horrid.
The dentist furnished us with a bouncy blister pack of antibiotics, red and yellow, as jaunty as Willy Wonka sweeties. The blurb tells us sternly that the E-numbers can induce asthma, seemingly a legitimate by-product in pursuit of pill beauty. We’re also reminded that the capsules are not sweets, and must be kept from children. It’s all gone crazy.
I arrived in the playground just as F10’d been kicked hard on the shin by that nasty little sod who’s tormented him for years and years. They had to take it seriously with me hanging around although F10 growled gamely that it was an accident. Never in life, dear boy, deny the chance to bring a miscreant to book, fair or otherwise. The hooligan was scolded; I gave him a hard, blood-curdling glare, his sullen eyes meeting mine deadly from beneath his plasticky quiff. And then, joy of joys, on entering the office to “record the incident”, we found the headmaster lurking, so he had to say that he would have a word with the brute, too. An anniversary present indeed, quite to put the cat in the shade.
T12 was very surprised that F10 had planned to go into school at all. “Dead cert for a day off, that?” he thought. F10, being more of a studious bent, does not consider mere agony as obstacle to his learning.
Only lightly wounded himself, T12 had had last Thursday off, a day spent in deep hobble, with much gallant wincing, and then checking that all in a large radius had noted said wince and reacted accordingly. Preferably with chocolate, cushions, concern, and an earnest request that he run through the injury again, “Do tell, T12, and yes, please, start right at the very beginning.”
Brushes with medical authority are mercifully slim in our house and I hadn’t had to do a hospital run for 9 years. We arrived there at 8, a few minutes before it opened and despite being the only people there who weren’t staff, still had to endure an inexplicable wait while I overacted beneath the steady gaze of CCTV, a guilt-inducing beast if ever there was. The delay stemmed from malfunctioning equipment so in the end he couldn’t be x-rayed which was tantamount to tragedy.
Most displeased, T12 glanced around for hustle and bustle, admiring whispers; perhaps he might be made a case study of, for future generations to argue over. There was none of this. Just a sturdy lass, bolstered in stiff navy, who called me Mum and prodded and poked. Most miffed he was at being then despatched without much ceremony, having hoped openly for crutches, and silently for a wheelchair. He left his shoe at home (to increase limping opportunities and the need for Brave Faces) and, because it was raining at school on Friday, his poor classmates took it in turns to carry him. The saps.
It didn’t rain 19 years ago and it’s not raining now. Today’s triumph over the brute echoes my mother’s protectively sharp words with the caterers then. Time ticks on, the cast of characters morphs, but things remain largely the same. F10’s stoicism brings tears to my eyes; T12’s drama queenery, vying with his pout that the very limp he so adores meant that he was put in at no 11 in the cricket yesterday, makes me laugh like my father’s fantastic speech did way back then, cobbled together minutes before while he prowled the corridors in his socks, albeit not in search of crutches. 19 years might be mere bronze, topaz or aquamarine, it might have brought me but a photo of a bloody cat, but there’s asparagus and a bottle of bubbles in the fridge and things could be worse. Hoorah.
19 years has nothing of importance attached to it. The romantic listings on-line say firmly, in a Do Not Pass Go sort of way, that it has NO traditional materials or symbols or flowers attached to it. So that’s us told. But some more modern set-up, with an eye to a merchandising spin-off maybe, suggests Bronze, Topaz or Aquamarine. Perhaps these 3 sulked and got up a petition because they’re left out of the proper lists.
Whatever, I gave E a card I had knocking about, and he gave me one of a … cat we’d bought in readiness for F10’s Grade 1 piano exam. Think about it, how likely am I to be fond of cats? Exactly. He knows this; I know this; I feel mean for eye rolling; he feels worse for having lost the real card. I feel suddenly very mean indeed that there was a real card at all, lost or otherwise.
I’ll suggest that he keeps it, when found, for next year (but not in that fatal place, a safe place) for 20 years, the listings deign to admit, counts. China, apparently; dull, non? and not necessarily worth hanging around for.
Ever the romantic, my morning was spent in light chores: loos and basins and hoovering. Yum. Then, what next, what next? The washing? Oh, yes, pleasey. Up on the line it went, greedily snatched by a bossy wind, slapping a trouser leg in my face, the lot hopefully half way to Sweden by now. It recalled my wedding day when, with our slot booked at the Register Office for 2 pm, 1 pm found my father and I polishing the Jag. The caterers slouched by, “Looks like rain,” one said, thrilled, her tongue doing unspeakably smug things in her cheek.
Then, since the school is not allowed to administer that lethal narcotic, Calpol, I strolled up to dose F10 with it myself. We had to spend (say it quietly) £95 on an emergency dentist for him yesterday. The x-ray revealed an eye tooth jabbing at other roots. The bit where the inside, the skeleton, meets the outside, ie: teeth, freaks me out. It’s possibly been worse for poor F10 whose visceral screams of pain sanctioned the cheque writing. I'm horrid, but not that horrid.
The dentist furnished us with a bouncy blister pack of antibiotics, red and yellow, as jaunty as Willy Wonka sweeties. The blurb tells us sternly that the E-numbers can induce asthma, seemingly a legitimate by-product in pursuit of pill beauty. We’re also reminded that the capsules are not sweets, and must be kept from children. It’s all gone crazy.
I arrived in the playground just as F10’d been kicked hard on the shin by that nasty little sod who’s tormented him for years and years. They had to take it seriously with me hanging around although F10 growled gamely that it was an accident. Never in life, dear boy, deny the chance to bring a miscreant to book, fair or otherwise. The hooligan was scolded; I gave him a hard, blood-curdling glare, his sullen eyes meeting mine deadly from beneath his plasticky quiff. And then, joy of joys, on entering the office to “record the incident”, we found the headmaster lurking, so he had to say that he would have a word with the brute, too. An anniversary present indeed, quite to put the cat in the shade.
T12 was very surprised that F10 had planned to go into school at all. “Dead cert for a day off, that?” he thought. F10, being more of a studious bent, does not consider mere agony as obstacle to his learning.
Only lightly wounded himself, T12 had had last Thursday off, a day spent in deep hobble, with much gallant wincing, and then checking that all in a large radius had noted said wince and reacted accordingly. Preferably with chocolate, cushions, concern, and an earnest request that he run through the injury again, “Do tell, T12, and yes, please, start right at the very beginning.”
Brushes with medical authority are mercifully slim in our house and I hadn’t had to do a hospital run for 9 years. We arrived there at 8, a few minutes before it opened and despite being the only people there who weren’t staff, still had to endure an inexplicable wait while I overacted beneath the steady gaze of CCTV, a guilt-inducing beast if ever there was. The delay stemmed from malfunctioning equipment so in the end he couldn’t be x-rayed which was tantamount to tragedy.
Most displeased, T12 glanced around for hustle and bustle, admiring whispers; perhaps he might be made a case study of, for future generations to argue over. There was none of this. Just a sturdy lass, bolstered in stiff navy, who called me Mum and prodded and poked. Most miffed he was at being then despatched without much ceremony, having hoped openly for crutches, and silently for a wheelchair. He left his shoe at home (to increase limping opportunities and the need for Brave Faces) and, because it was raining at school on Friday, his poor classmates took it in turns to carry him. The saps.
It didn’t rain 19 years ago and it’s not raining now. Today’s triumph over the brute echoes my mother’s protectively sharp words with the caterers then. Time ticks on, the cast of characters morphs, but things remain largely the same. F10’s stoicism brings tears to my eyes; T12’s drama queenery, vying with his pout that the very limp he so adores meant that he was put in at no 11 in the cricket yesterday, makes me laugh like my father’s fantastic speech did way back then, cobbled together minutes before while he prowled the corridors in his socks, albeit not in search of crutches. 19 years might be mere bronze, topaz or aquamarine, it might have brought me but a photo of a bloody cat, but there’s asparagus and a bottle of bubbles in the fridge and things could be worse. Hoorah.
Wednesday, 6 May 2009
so long
My father, who doesn’t type but seems to manage his iMac well enough to read my blog, e-mailed. It would be erroneous to condemn this for terseness since I can picture the flattering time taken in its creation, “I’m fed up with eBabe. Please arrange an uplifting piece mid-May for my return. With thanks.”
Who says the telegraph is dead.
I hastily inserted the mememememe below, just in case, to provide the necessary buffer. See? What a good girl.
Then I phoned them. But the planned big goodbye, prior to their trip away, dissolved into a predictable, “I’ll get your mother,” from my father, leaving me talking to myself. You have to entertain yourself in my life.
My mother bustled onto the line. I could hear the busy sashay across the seagrass and quaked slightly.
“Now, darling,” she said, “I’m in the middle of doing your father’s lunch.” This is code for Make it Snappy, honey, you’re last in line.
But she was sad because they were just back from depositing big black dog in dog-hotel, dog being very much on her last legs so my mother felt guilty and wretched and was raw from an epic farewell, and I was up for playing Mrs Nice because I’m kind like that.
Tears bring briskness. I understand that. They’re meant to pop the coil at ten years old, not hang on, however beloved, until gone 15. Newfoundlands that is, not mothers. Or, wise up, Newfies, with the requisite capital N (which my spellcheck quite rightly queries), to those in the know. Which by association I am, although I assert my right to protest that I am but a parvenu, and only elevated thus far by dint of the Newfie before last, Rupert, being drafted onto me by my fond mama (fond of Rupert you understand, more than me) as my bridesmaid. Really. A red ribbon and all. And you wonder why I have a dog thing?
“Have you packed? Ready to go?” I tried to inject a little eagerness into proceedings, a little briskness of my own of the Encouraging and Moving Swiftly On variety.
“Yes, well, almost, just one or two last minute things, which might call for a trip out to the Mall.” Ahhh, yes, happy panicking moments dithering over sun-factor 30? Or 40? at Boots out at Cribbs Causeway. We’ve all been there: no holiday complete without, and often the highlight, although way back factor 30 didn’t exist and the idea of 40 would have been thought "silly."
“But, if we die while we’re away, the books on the hall table are Clare’s.”
“First things first,” I said, the brake on the sardonic: the holiday’s meant to be fun, yes, not a call to last rites. My mission had been to wish them well on their jaunt round Petra, Libya, Sinai and co and, if anything, I guessed she might remind me in which books she hides the tenners.
“She’ll want them back.”
I promised to make it a priority. To be honest, I wasted time nursing a foolish fantasy, should death-talk kick in, that she might say something gruff, something rough and ready like, “You’re not a hamster and God knows you’ll never be a Newfie” (splutter), “but, if we die, you’re, well, you’re not too bad. You’ll do.”
Instead, I muttered my new mantra, ‘hall books, Clare; hall books, Clare’ a couple of times to give it a chance of staying in my memory.
There was more.
“And the cross, by the bed, large Indian thing.”
“Yes?” I said, for me, for me, to guard against the devil…
“That’s for Andrew and Sarah, it’s written on the back so you won’t go wrong.”
“Fine, well, great, OK. Consider it done. Really, you mustn’t worry. Yes. Now make sure you have a fantastic time.” Half of me wondered which one of us would notice first that I was speaking as if to a 90 year old.
My brother rang. No 90 year old nonsense here. I asked him if he’d managed to speak to our parents before they went away.
“Yeah,” he said, “load of stuff about what’s ear-marked for Janet.” Janet being the cleaner.
“Oh,” I said, “I didn’t get Janet, I got Clare. Did you get Clare?”
“No,” he said, “Who’s Clare? Clare can fuck right off.”
“They’re Clare’s books.”
A telephonic Gallic shrug. “Et?”
“Did she say she loved you?” I asked, buoyed by the distance between Gloucestershire and Paris to venture bravely into intimacy land.
“No?” he said, surprised. This surprised me, him being ole wonder boy. “But she wouldn’t, not unless they actually did think they were going to die, that’s when you say that sort of thing. Afraid you’ve a long wait, old love, dream on.”
“Oh,” I said. “OK, there seems to be this cross.”
“Yeah, he said, “Andrew and Sarah…”
“Yes,” I said, remembering my semi-fervent promise, that which had fought with a need to remind my mother of Eliza Doolittle, the drunken aunt and the hat pin (My Fair Lady for the shaky of reference-getters) and been overcome. “What did you say.”
“I said I’d bear it in mind,” he said. “Best I could do.”
Quite why he remains her favourite baffles me.
Who says the telegraph is dead.
I hastily inserted the mememememe below, just in case, to provide the necessary buffer. See? What a good girl.
Then I phoned them. But the planned big goodbye, prior to their trip away, dissolved into a predictable, “I’ll get your mother,” from my father, leaving me talking to myself. You have to entertain yourself in my life.
My mother bustled onto the line. I could hear the busy sashay across the seagrass and quaked slightly.
“Now, darling,” she said, “I’m in the middle of doing your father’s lunch.” This is code for Make it Snappy, honey, you’re last in line.
But she was sad because they were just back from depositing big black dog in dog-hotel, dog being very much on her last legs so my mother felt guilty and wretched and was raw from an epic farewell, and I was up for playing Mrs Nice because I’m kind like that.
Tears bring briskness. I understand that. They’re meant to pop the coil at ten years old, not hang on, however beloved, until gone 15. Newfoundlands that is, not mothers. Or, wise up, Newfies, with the requisite capital N (which my spellcheck quite rightly queries), to those in the know. Which by association I am, although I assert my right to protest that I am but a parvenu, and only elevated thus far by dint of the Newfie before last, Rupert, being drafted onto me by my fond mama (fond of Rupert you understand, more than me) as my bridesmaid. Really. A red ribbon and all. And you wonder why I have a dog thing?
“Have you packed? Ready to go?” I tried to inject a little eagerness into proceedings, a little briskness of my own of the Encouraging and Moving Swiftly On variety.
“Yes, well, almost, just one or two last minute things, which might call for a trip out to the Mall.” Ahhh, yes, happy panicking moments dithering over sun-factor 30? Or 40? at Boots out at Cribbs Causeway. We’ve all been there: no holiday complete without, and often the highlight, although way back factor 30 didn’t exist and the idea of 40 would have been thought "silly."
“But, if we die while we’re away, the books on the hall table are Clare’s.”
“First things first,” I said, the brake on the sardonic: the holiday’s meant to be fun, yes, not a call to last rites. My mission had been to wish them well on their jaunt round Petra, Libya, Sinai and co and, if anything, I guessed she might remind me in which books she hides the tenners.
“She’ll want them back.”
I promised to make it a priority. To be honest, I wasted time nursing a foolish fantasy, should death-talk kick in, that she might say something gruff, something rough and ready like, “You’re not a hamster and God knows you’ll never be a Newfie” (splutter), “but, if we die, you’re, well, you’re not too bad. You’ll do.”
Instead, I muttered my new mantra, ‘hall books, Clare; hall books, Clare’ a couple of times to give it a chance of staying in my memory.
There was more.
“And the cross, by the bed, large Indian thing.”
“Yes?” I said, for me, for me, to guard against the devil…
“That’s for Andrew and Sarah, it’s written on the back so you won’t go wrong.”
“Fine, well, great, OK. Consider it done. Really, you mustn’t worry. Yes. Now make sure you have a fantastic time.” Half of me wondered which one of us would notice first that I was speaking as if to a 90 year old.
My brother rang. No 90 year old nonsense here. I asked him if he’d managed to speak to our parents before they went away.
“Yeah,” he said, “load of stuff about what’s ear-marked for Janet.” Janet being the cleaner.
“Oh,” I said, “I didn’t get Janet, I got Clare. Did you get Clare?”
“No,” he said, “Who’s Clare? Clare can fuck right off.”
“They’re Clare’s books.”
A telephonic Gallic shrug. “Et?”
“Did she say she loved you?” I asked, buoyed by the distance between Gloucestershire and Paris to venture bravely into intimacy land.
“No?” he said, surprised. This surprised me, him being ole wonder boy. “But she wouldn’t, not unless they actually did think they were going to die, that’s when you say that sort of thing. Afraid you’ve a long wait, old love, dream on.”
“Oh,” I said. “OK, there seems to be this cross.”
“Yeah, he said, “Andrew and Sarah…”
“Yes,” I said, remembering my semi-fervent promise, that which had fought with a need to remind my mother of Eliza Doolittle, the drunken aunt and the hat pin (My Fair Lady for the shaky of reference-getters) and been overcome. “What did you say.”
“I said I’d bear it in mind,” he said. “Best I could do.”
Quite why he remains her favourite baffles me.
Wednesday, 29 April 2009
memememememememe
the last to be asked, sob, but here it is:
What are my current obsessions?
finishing off making curtains, as have done the fun bit of creating sort of circles and have the dull bit left of sewing the circles on to material and then making the curtains themselves, all the tiresome stuff of measuring and dealing with 24’ of material. Hopefully it will be better than the frankly ghastly-sounding thing I’ve made it out to be. It resides partly still in fantasy land which is just how I like it. Reality makes me anxious.
Which item of clothing am I wearing most?
hate shopping, but a long black top bought in the Animal sale last year. God, it’s had some wear. Whenever I get a new best thing to wear, I can never work out what I used to use.
What’s for dinner?
ah, well, here I come into my own. Pasta (home made, sigh), with some sort of wholesome sauce and little brown rolls and then a couple of salads, tomato and seeds and rocket. Angels will weep.
Last thing I bought?
plants. Don’t tell Edward
What am I listening to?
the self-important huffing and puffing of the computer. Be quiet. We’ve all heard you.
What would I say to the person who inspired me to do this post?
don’t let the bugger get you down
Favourite holiday destination?
skiing. Waves imaginary pole crossly at the sky: why is it so expensive!!!
Anywhere I would like to visit before I die?
India. Not merely for the grub, though my little paw will drift to yummy platters as and when.
Reading right now?
God’s Own Country by Ross Raisin. Have just finished it and it’s great. A first novel which convinces. Toxic, short, witty, lots of white spaces and full of lovely words. Will probably follow it up with some embarrassingly trashy thriller. Me, that is, not him.
Guilty pleasure?
buying books and plants. Smuggling both in. Far-away expression on face, Oh, that’s been there for ages. That sort of thing.
And reading trashy thrillers.
And, best of all, the fantasy with the dog ... the lorry ... the slipped lead. (Had promised self not to mention the dog, and she is the only "copy" I have so should show her some respect, but who can resist??)
Best thing I ate or drank lately?
I blush to say that it was the most delicious little canapé things made by, er, me for a chum’s party. An asparagus, pea and parmesan thing on little rounds of bread and an aubergine, chilli, garlic and prawn one ditto. With a glass of warm champagne in the other mitt. Yumtastic.
Care to share some wisdom?
how long have you got?
If being sensible, and perhaps a little bit American (sorry, Frances!), I suppose I’ll go for don’t tell lies and that includes being true to yourself, too.
Is there a television programme that I enjoy at the moment?
does ‘The Wire’ count? It’s on DVD as the BBC has only just started showing it.
Thing most looking forward to?
Holidays, always holidays, although what from, please don't question. But to be off with the ones I love, free from the tyranny of routine, can't wait!
Everyone else has done this one (small, bitter moue of the mouth), but for any other unloved souls out there who are kind enough to call, consider yourself tagged.
What are my current obsessions?
finishing off making curtains, as have done the fun bit of creating sort of circles and have the dull bit left of sewing the circles on to material and then making the curtains themselves, all the tiresome stuff of measuring and dealing with 24’ of material. Hopefully it will be better than the frankly ghastly-sounding thing I’ve made it out to be. It resides partly still in fantasy land which is just how I like it. Reality makes me anxious.
Which item of clothing am I wearing most?
hate shopping, but a long black top bought in the Animal sale last year. God, it’s had some wear. Whenever I get a new best thing to wear, I can never work out what I used to use.
What’s for dinner?
ah, well, here I come into my own. Pasta (home made, sigh), with some sort of wholesome sauce and little brown rolls and then a couple of salads, tomato and seeds and rocket. Angels will weep.
Last thing I bought?
plants. Don’t tell Edward
What am I listening to?
the self-important huffing and puffing of the computer. Be quiet. We’ve all heard you.
What would I say to the person who inspired me to do this post?
don’t let the bugger get you down
Favourite holiday destination?
skiing. Waves imaginary pole crossly at the sky: why is it so expensive!!!
Anywhere I would like to visit before I die?
India. Not merely for the grub, though my little paw will drift to yummy platters as and when.
Reading right now?
God’s Own Country by Ross Raisin. Have just finished it and it’s great. A first novel which convinces. Toxic, short, witty, lots of white spaces and full of lovely words. Will probably follow it up with some embarrassingly trashy thriller. Me, that is, not him.
Guilty pleasure?
buying books and plants. Smuggling both in. Far-away expression on face, Oh, that’s been there for ages. That sort of thing.
And reading trashy thrillers.
And, best of all, the fantasy with the dog ... the lorry ... the slipped lead. (Had promised self not to mention the dog, and she is the only "copy" I have so should show her some respect, but who can resist??)
Best thing I ate or drank lately?
I blush to say that it was the most delicious little canapé things made by, er, me for a chum’s party. An asparagus, pea and parmesan thing on little rounds of bread and an aubergine, chilli, garlic and prawn one ditto. With a glass of warm champagne in the other mitt. Yumtastic.
Care to share some wisdom?
how long have you got?
If being sensible, and perhaps a little bit American (sorry, Frances!), I suppose I’ll go for don’t tell lies and that includes being true to yourself, too.
Is there a television programme that I enjoy at the moment?
does ‘The Wire’ count? It’s on DVD as the BBC has only just started showing it.
Thing most looking forward to?
Holidays, always holidays, although what from, please don't question. But to be off with the ones I love, free from the tyranny of routine, can't wait!
Everyone else has done this one (small, bitter moue of the mouth), but for any other unloved souls out there who are kind enough to call, consider yourself tagged.
Wednesday, 1 April 2009
eBabe
Unless you were shouting at your own children at the time, you quite possibly heard me roar “EIGHTEEN POUNDS!!!” last night, loud enough to bring tears to the ears of all in the vicinity.
Through some fuckwittery, where I had left the eBay account open while trying, unsuccessfully, to find a dog basket of all things (such cruel reward for attention to that hell-hound), F10 had scuttled on to the computer. While I was washing up, he, in his own words, had “got carried away.” With the consequence that we were the lucky winners (the term sticks in the craw) of a Match Attax card of some tosser of a football player. Cristiano Ronaldo possibly.
I’d gone upstairs to review dog basket options and so the first I knew of the other arm of our eBay activity was the cheery ping in the inbox and the enthusiastic announcement, “Congratulations, You are the current highest bidder …” At that innocent point, the bid sat at £12 which was enough to cause major freak-out. I'd look back on that halcyon amount with fond envy.
I thwacked off a panicky e-mail to the seller, trying to retract the bid.
Ping! Went the inbox. “Congratulations, You are the current highest bidder …” and the chilling climb to £14.50.
What all this was telling me, my frazzled brain worked out, was that some other dozy sod out there was actually bidding against me – aaargh, what am I saying, against me? against him!! Salvation lay in his desire edging crazily higher even than “ours.” The seconds were counting down in that way that thrills when the wondrous thing might just be yours and that horrifies when, well, when the wondrous thing might just be yours. Needless to say, Salvation failed to give a toss.
Every cheque we write seems to be for the children as it is without factoring in frenzied sessions on the computer. Shoes, piano lessons, piano exams (£43 for T12’s Grade 4, an exercise in stress I’m too near to to relate but will settle for reporting that it was All Alright On The Hour and a bad dress rehearsal need not mean curtains). Then there's ju jitsu, ju jitsu grading, karate, karate grading, clarinet lessons, residential trips, Robin the Bloody Storyteller coming to school for a bloody Workshop, football, rugby. A cheque for next year’s school bus sits on the side not quite written – well, at £740, would you? And then there are the cars, March bringing longer evenings but also both lots of insurance, tax, MOTs and services.
Somehow this eBay money held the full weight of the current financial crisis. Crisis and impotence in a demonic marriage. Cash in one way freeflow. The builders may have gone, but another set of gannets flocks in, hovering for scraps. The demands are endless.
I rang eBay, my fingers skittering like fat sausages over the tiny keys. The menu option enraged, as you can imagine, until I was put through to someone with the requisite scant English who insisted on reading the full Welcome guff. We tussled through the conversation, my half being frantic to convey “retract! retract! retract!” his centring tiresomely on “username” and “postcode” and “first line of address”. Somewhere around here, E had to be dug out to “give permission” (God, I hate data protection) for me to speak to eBay which was an irritating irony and nothing but a time-spinner. For somewhere else around here, the bidding closed and we were merrily informed by eBay that the closing amount was £18. Plus 99p post and packing. Congratulations!
I flipped.
The seller woke up, now that it was all too late, and sent a barely literate response to mine littered with meaningless "...."s. Are these indicating thinking time, surely not; who knows:
“i have no right to remove it, this system is contorlled by ebay. i will ask bidder 2 whether he wants it. if he do not want it....you may be have to pay or you can contact ebay...because i have to pay the final value fee to ebay, i do not want to lose money....”
Yeah, right, lose money. Bless. Needless to say my reply featured more syllables, relentlessly middle-class to the end, Full Sentences R Us. Fighting an urge to scream, “lose money, you greedy bag! You’re getting £18.99 for an outlay of 40p, a stamp and an envelope, all because I was stupid enough to think the dog needed a new bed.” I sounded instead contrite and grateful for whatever help she could give me.
F10 was on the floor. He had rummaged in his money box and prised out a Christmas twenty which he forced on me.
He sobbed.
“I got carried away,” he said again, “I feel so ashamed.”
What can you do to a response like that but say, “It doesn’t matter. It’s only money.”
It’d better be a shit-hot card though.
Through some fuckwittery, where I had left the eBay account open while trying, unsuccessfully, to find a dog basket of all things (such cruel reward for attention to that hell-hound), F10 had scuttled on to the computer. While I was washing up, he, in his own words, had “got carried away.” With the consequence that we were the lucky winners (the term sticks in the craw) of a Match Attax card of some tosser of a football player. Cristiano Ronaldo possibly.
I’d gone upstairs to review dog basket options and so the first I knew of the other arm of our eBay activity was the cheery ping in the inbox and the enthusiastic announcement, “Congratulations, You are the current highest bidder …” At that innocent point, the bid sat at £12 which was enough to cause major freak-out. I'd look back on that halcyon amount with fond envy.
I thwacked off a panicky e-mail to the seller, trying to retract the bid.
Ping! Went the inbox. “Congratulations, You are the current highest bidder …” and the chilling climb to £14.50.
What all this was telling me, my frazzled brain worked out, was that some other dozy sod out there was actually bidding against me – aaargh, what am I saying, against me? against him!! Salvation lay in his desire edging crazily higher even than “ours.” The seconds were counting down in that way that thrills when the wondrous thing might just be yours and that horrifies when, well, when the wondrous thing might just be yours. Needless to say, Salvation failed to give a toss.
Every cheque we write seems to be for the children as it is without factoring in frenzied sessions on the computer. Shoes, piano lessons, piano exams (£43 for T12’s Grade 4, an exercise in stress I’m too near to to relate but will settle for reporting that it was All Alright On The Hour and a bad dress rehearsal need not mean curtains). Then there's ju jitsu, ju jitsu grading, karate, karate grading, clarinet lessons, residential trips, Robin the Bloody Storyteller coming to school for a bloody Workshop, football, rugby. A cheque for next year’s school bus sits on the side not quite written – well, at £740, would you? And then there are the cars, March bringing longer evenings but also both lots of insurance, tax, MOTs and services.
Somehow this eBay money held the full weight of the current financial crisis. Crisis and impotence in a demonic marriage. Cash in one way freeflow. The builders may have gone, but another set of gannets flocks in, hovering for scraps. The demands are endless.
I rang eBay, my fingers skittering like fat sausages over the tiny keys. The menu option enraged, as you can imagine, until I was put through to someone with the requisite scant English who insisted on reading the full Welcome guff. We tussled through the conversation, my half being frantic to convey “retract! retract! retract!” his centring tiresomely on “username” and “postcode” and “first line of address”. Somewhere around here, E had to be dug out to “give permission” (God, I hate data protection) for me to speak to eBay which was an irritating irony and nothing but a time-spinner. For somewhere else around here, the bidding closed and we were merrily informed by eBay that the closing amount was £18. Plus 99p post and packing. Congratulations!
I flipped.
The seller woke up, now that it was all too late, and sent a barely literate response to mine littered with meaningless "...."s. Are these indicating thinking time, surely not; who knows:
“i have no right to remove it, this system is contorlled by ebay. i will ask bidder 2 whether he wants it. if he do not want it....you may be have to pay or you can contact ebay...because i have to pay the final value fee to ebay, i do not want to lose money....”
Yeah, right, lose money. Bless. Needless to say my reply featured more syllables, relentlessly middle-class to the end, Full Sentences R Us. Fighting an urge to scream, “lose money, you greedy bag! You’re getting £18.99 for an outlay of 40p, a stamp and an envelope, all because I was stupid enough to think the dog needed a new bed.” I sounded instead contrite and grateful for whatever help she could give me.
F10 was on the floor. He had rummaged in his money box and prised out a Christmas twenty which he forced on me.
He sobbed.
“I got carried away,” he said again, “I feel so ashamed.”
What can you do to a response like that but say, “It doesn’t matter. It’s only money.”
It’d better be a shit-hot card though.
Thursday, 19 March 2009
rip
My mother phoned. Death was in her voice. Such sorrow could mean only one of two passings: dog or hamster.
The dog is a 14 stone (guessing here) Newfoundland, whose tail sends tellies rocking and who is currently keeping the vet in Porsches; the hamster’s a ping pong ball of fur. In Pixar or Disney, these two would be great chums off saving the world and learning heart-warming things about friendship. In reality, one hogs the raft of dreams (a dog bed bigger than most people’s sofas), but still retains superior rights to the sofa, kicking into touch those of peripherals like daughter and grandchildren; while the other scurries around with a feather duster keeping his glass palace spruce. The hamster’s pad could happily feature in Country Life sporting its keep fit area, lounging/relaxing zone and intellectual gym.
I held my breath.
The hamster it was who died.
I felt sad, not as sad as my mother, whose sorrow was painful, but sad still that this little scrap that could mean so much in its life was meaning so very much more in the losing of it.
For those who are new to the hamster, I’m going to insert at this point, a blog I did when my mother bought the thing which was 2 years or so ago:
--------------------------------
my mother, her hamster and me
My mother confounded me by phoning to announce that she had just bought a hamster. If I had had to write a list of several thousand things which she might say to me, having bought a hamster would not be on it.
“Why?” I asked.
“He was very cheap,” she said.
“How cheap?” (visions of my inheritance were being sucked into a hamster cage and getting messed up with straw)
“£2.50.” (it still seemed a possible, crashing waste of money). “And very sweet.” (this last was said with feeling).
Luckily I had nothing else to do that hour, for I was all but having phone sex with the hamster come the end.
No slouch that hamster.
Very bright, but how could I have expected anything less?
Russian. I should have guessed. Nothing prosaic for my Ma. She wanted Russian names from me: Otto? Pushkin? Blini?
Since then, our conversations have been slightly more hamster-led than I would necessarily have chosen, but Ma is immersing herself fully in her new project. Every book on the subject has been bought and read. She will have written to the authors suggesting changes for the next edition, the print run of which she will oversee. She’s that sort, the last time she wrote to the Telegraph, someone contacted her, inviting her to go and stay in their castle in Scotland.
So she joined the Hamster Society.
“’Association,’” I said firmly, bringing her down a necessary peg. “Or ‘Club’. Hamsters don’t have Societies.”
The silence on the other end of the phone suggested that they might. In the near future.
Meanwhile, my father has wisely insisted that all her Hamster Literature be kept well away, in her study. That’s her various membership papers, rules of association, dates of hamster shows, entry forms and a ‘handsome’ (her term) turquoise and gold hamster badge.
“All this for a tenner,” she says proudly.
We saw the hamster.
It was very small, and I would question whether she got her full money’s worth. As a little girl, I wasn’t allowed a hamster – something about foxes getting them although, on reflection, memory tells me that few foxes trotted through our kitchen.
It means that I have been confusing hamsters and guinea pigs all my life. We only had a budgerigar, and that was merely for an afternoon, too. My mother returned it to the shop, lying, saying that it frightened me. I think it was a certain clattery quality, thrashing about in grit, something clearly quite absent in a hamster, that king of beasts.
The king of beasts was sweet enough, I suppose. But the betrayal incipient in that phrase makes me quiver with disloyalty. I will have to re-phrase: “astoundingly sweet, of a sweetness altering the dawns of days to come, to knock the world from its staid old path, to make laureates ditch young girls as muses and take up hamsters instead… That sort of sweetness.”
Possibly bright. I’ll have to take her word for it, as with so much.
Plans for its future? As gloves, perhaps, for a mouse. Something I quietly imagined, through to the patenting process on a pair of baby gloves fashioned from a hamster, while Ma waxed proudly about its bedding-dragging prowess.
I could do that, I squeaked internally, I could hang by a paw and hide in a corner, and flop on my back looking exhausted. But she was still admiring hamster-face and I rather think I was blocking the light.
Then she e-mailed yet more guff about hamsters. Really, I have come to dread the ping of the in-box and the trill of the phone.
My father had freaked her out by saying that if she died, she’d have to make arrangements for a next of kin for the hamster, since it wasn’t his bag. (if my genes are his genes then all is not lost.) I feared that future correspondence would inform me of my reluctant new status in her will as Hamster’s Sister, but when I mentioned this to her, she looked embarrassed and said that she had a little list of suitable friends lined up. Indeed, when they went on holiday one of these insane creatures was charged with looking after the thing and, get this, e-mailed photos to my mother on a daily basis. Truly.
It transpires, in further leakage of my inheritance, that she has bought a new home for Hammy, which she calls The Glass Palace, and which has the added advantage of being approved by that august body, The National Hamster Council. Or Club. She filled me in, as if she were an estate agent and I were interested. Seems it has a log cabin, which she calls his weekend cottage, a balcony and 3 platforms. All this, in pursuit of feeling like a Professional Hamster Owner. Which, it seems is necessary to the confused. I mean, my mother.
I rang her up.
“About this glass palace.”
“Yes, much more suitable. The other one” (slightly irritably, as if I had purchased it in the first place, not she) “was very small, far too small. Not enough for him. This one’s 36 foot.”
“Wow! That’s enormous.”
“Oh yes,” (airily, still the edge of irritation with me and my substandard Hamster Home ideas). “He needs it.”
“But that really is very big, where are you keeping it?”
“Where the old one was, on the drinks trolley.”
D’oh! “You mean 36 inches, Ma.”
“That’s what I said, you’re thinking of metres now, being that bit younger.”
“You might have meant 36 inches, you said 36 foot.” How swiftly a phone call can degenerate, but sometimes a point just has to be pursued.
“Of course I didn’t, darling.”
Darling is a word which is open to abuse. From my mother’s mouth it can chill the soul. Unless you’re a hamster when it’s said with love.
“Sometimes,” she said, “I think you’re mad.”
Yes, well, we all have our opinion on who should be in charge of that particular sentence.
-------------------------------------
And now he is dead. I’m really rather sad. Only don't tell Lolly. She'll get ideas above her station.
RIP Rudi.
The dog is a 14 stone (guessing here) Newfoundland, whose tail sends tellies rocking and who is currently keeping the vet in Porsches; the hamster’s a ping pong ball of fur. In Pixar or Disney, these two would be great chums off saving the world and learning heart-warming things about friendship. In reality, one hogs the raft of dreams (a dog bed bigger than most people’s sofas), but still retains superior rights to the sofa, kicking into touch those of peripherals like daughter and grandchildren; while the other scurries around with a feather duster keeping his glass palace spruce. The hamster’s pad could happily feature in Country Life sporting its keep fit area, lounging/relaxing zone and intellectual gym.
I held my breath.
The hamster it was who died.
I felt sad, not as sad as my mother, whose sorrow was painful, but sad still that this little scrap that could mean so much in its life was meaning so very much more in the losing of it.
For those who are new to the hamster, I’m going to insert at this point, a blog I did when my mother bought the thing which was 2 years or so ago:
--------------------------------
my mother, her hamster and me
My mother confounded me by phoning to announce that she had just bought a hamster. If I had had to write a list of several thousand things which she might say to me, having bought a hamster would not be on it.
“Why?” I asked.
“He was very cheap,” she said.
“How cheap?” (visions of my inheritance were being sucked into a hamster cage and getting messed up with straw)
“£2.50.” (it still seemed a possible, crashing waste of money). “And very sweet.” (this last was said with feeling).
Luckily I had nothing else to do that hour, for I was all but having phone sex with the hamster come the end.
No slouch that hamster.
Very bright, but how could I have expected anything less?
Russian. I should have guessed. Nothing prosaic for my Ma. She wanted Russian names from me: Otto? Pushkin? Blini?
Since then, our conversations have been slightly more hamster-led than I would necessarily have chosen, but Ma is immersing herself fully in her new project. Every book on the subject has been bought and read. She will have written to the authors suggesting changes for the next edition, the print run of which she will oversee. She’s that sort, the last time she wrote to the Telegraph, someone contacted her, inviting her to go and stay in their castle in Scotland.
So she joined the Hamster Society.
“’Association,’” I said firmly, bringing her down a necessary peg. “Or ‘Club’. Hamsters don’t have Societies.”
The silence on the other end of the phone suggested that they might. In the near future.
Meanwhile, my father has wisely insisted that all her Hamster Literature be kept well away, in her study. That’s her various membership papers, rules of association, dates of hamster shows, entry forms and a ‘handsome’ (her term) turquoise and gold hamster badge.
“All this for a tenner,” she says proudly.
We saw the hamster.
It was very small, and I would question whether she got her full money’s worth. As a little girl, I wasn’t allowed a hamster – something about foxes getting them although, on reflection, memory tells me that few foxes trotted through our kitchen.
It means that I have been confusing hamsters and guinea pigs all my life. We only had a budgerigar, and that was merely for an afternoon, too. My mother returned it to the shop, lying, saying that it frightened me. I think it was a certain clattery quality, thrashing about in grit, something clearly quite absent in a hamster, that king of beasts.
The king of beasts was sweet enough, I suppose. But the betrayal incipient in that phrase makes me quiver with disloyalty. I will have to re-phrase: “astoundingly sweet, of a sweetness altering the dawns of days to come, to knock the world from its staid old path, to make laureates ditch young girls as muses and take up hamsters instead… That sort of sweetness.”
Possibly bright. I’ll have to take her word for it, as with so much.
Plans for its future? As gloves, perhaps, for a mouse. Something I quietly imagined, through to the patenting process on a pair of baby gloves fashioned from a hamster, while Ma waxed proudly about its bedding-dragging prowess.
I could do that, I squeaked internally, I could hang by a paw and hide in a corner, and flop on my back looking exhausted. But she was still admiring hamster-face and I rather think I was blocking the light.
Then she e-mailed yet more guff about hamsters. Really, I have come to dread the ping of the in-box and the trill of the phone.
My father had freaked her out by saying that if she died, she’d have to make arrangements for a next of kin for the hamster, since it wasn’t his bag. (if my genes are his genes then all is not lost.) I feared that future correspondence would inform me of my reluctant new status in her will as Hamster’s Sister, but when I mentioned this to her, she looked embarrassed and said that she had a little list of suitable friends lined up. Indeed, when they went on holiday one of these insane creatures was charged with looking after the thing and, get this, e-mailed photos to my mother on a daily basis. Truly.
It transpires, in further leakage of my inheritance, that she has bought a new home for Hammy, which she calls The Glass Palace, and which has the added advantage of being approved by that august body, The National Hamster Council. Or Club. She filled me in, as if she were an estate agent and I were interested. Seems it has a log cabin, which she calls his weekend cottage, a balcony and 3 platforms. All this, in pursuit of feeling like a Professional Hamster Owner. Which, it seems is necessary to the confused. I mean, my mother.
I rang her up.
“About this glass palace.”
“Yes, much more suitable. The other one” (slightly irritably, as if I had purchased it in the first place, not she) “was very small, far too small. Not enough for him. This one’s 36 foot.”
“Wow! That’s enormous.”
“Oh yes,” (airily, still the edge of irritation with me and my substandard Hamster Home ideas). “He needs it.”
“But that really is very big, where are you keeping it?”
“Where the old one was, on the drinks trolley.”
D’oh! “You mean 36 inches, Ma.”
“That’s what I said, you’re thinking of metres now, being that bit younger.”
“You might have meant 36 inches, you said 36 foot.” How swiftly a phone call can degenerate, but sometimes a point just has to be pursued.
“Of course I didn’t, darling.”
Darling is a word which is open to abuse. From my mother’s mouth it can chill the soul. Unless you’re a hamster when it’s said with love.
“Sometimes,” she said, “I think you’re mad.”
Yes, well, we all have our opinion on who should be in charge of that particular sentence.
-------------------------------------
And now he is dead. I’m really rather sad. Only don't tell Lolly. She'll get ideas above her station.
RIP Rudi.
Friday, 13 March 2009
that'll do nicely
The race-goers peppering the village are as recognisable to locals as plain clothes policemen are to TV low life. It’s a roundness of tum, a certain kind of tie, a slope of shoulder (similar to my avatar) indicative of too much time spent hunched over the Racing Post. That, and a proliferation of Bentleys, and the fact that the skies have been alive with the sound of … choppers. For this is Gold Cup week and despite fewer helicopters than of yore, the rich are still at play (no silly banks to go to, sigh). Today, even the Queen’s due to pop in, bless her.
Every denizen in the geographical fallout of Cheltenham Racecourse is out to fleece the racers somehow. Friends do B&B and count the cash. Cheltonians go on cruises for Christmas, or are half-way to China, on the proceeds. Driveways are dusted off and called car parks; limos fill lay-bys; opening hours are rapidly extended: normal old breakfasts at cafes are called Racing Breakfasts, and charged accordingly. Everything, temporarily, becomes Gold this or Racing That.
It might add a buzz, but if you’re not profitting from it, you’re buggered by it and traffic means that we are effectively marooned this side of Chelters. It’s not that I would normally want to go, but now that I can’t, I feel aggrieved: even a Country Liter has shopping needs to meet. So I went just now, fool that I am, to the Post Office, to stalk out a few creme eggs and get in some Match Attax (sic) cards. Don’t tell me my education’s been wasted.
A string of racegoers were aimlessly wandering around the shop – tum, porkpie hat, tie, debris of disgusting breakfast festering in the café corner (don’t ask).
Post Office Man was – his words – “made up.” “All that booze they buy!” he hissed confidentially, “Each night! We get more in.” He did that pursed lips kissing the window thing he favours when making a point.Such is the mighty power of his whisper, so much more audible than the normal ebb and flow of his disappointed speech, that every race goer’s head turned to eyeball him.
I gave a stiff dead smile, cringed, and turned my best, dim, Lolly-like attention to the chocolate stand.He shook his head at the giddy commerce of it all. The thrill of the till, clanging shut on crisp Irish twenties (not village 20ps grudgingly counted out); the unexpected extra visits to the Cash & Carry; the sheer enterprise represented. He nodded a reproving nod at me and bounced off to tidy his bafflingly large birthday card racks, as if now jostling for Richard Branson’s place on The Rich List.
Witness to POM’s idea of self as successful entrepreneur, not washed-up weirdo with a penchant for driving ducks to Spain was not something I wanted to be.
I prowled around the tatty bit normally frequented by 10 year olds, where the Match Attax cards should be … but weren’t. POM has no idea of supplying to meet a demand, hence his unfathomable interest in the wrong sorts of cards, endless birthday ones. Profits lie instead in the greedy, shifting, desires of 10 year olds (and their desperate parents, eager for behaviour/treat leverage). Greasy cards shuffled fervently in grubby little hands, mini book-makers in the making, every one of them. We are all fluent in Italian midfielders.
Having made the effort to trudge across the road, and risk the conversational ambush of an encounter with POM, to be then denied my reason for being there was just outrageous.
“Still not in, national shortage,” POM said with something approaching pleasure in his voice. He’s moved on from locals, he hobnobs with race-goers now. “’ve been up since four,” he purred at one in a trilby, “No time for sleeping. Not in this game.”
Mrs POM, a study in defeat, was kept busy, the long minutes I was in there, debating the minutiae of a paper bill with a pensioner whose gloved hand was determined to remain triumphantly clasped round coppers. The paperboy – “he always walks on the grass!” – was being ripped to shreds.
It is a fearful thing the village Stores’n’Post Office being held afloat so arbitrarily, and by one who never sleeps. Post Office work, with its stingy pay off per “swipe,” brings something like £2.50 an hour. The many many greetings cards remain unsold, testament to a plan gone sour.
The Match Attax cards meanwhile might retail at a mere 40p a pack, but they disappear under the locust swarm of small children’s hands. Blink and they’ve gone. At the moment, they’re gone. And, with the imminent defection of the racers, if the national shortage continues, married to that capricious whim of fickle children whose interest in the cards will melt like butter in the sun the day his mis-judged double order comes in, then it could be Bye Bye Post Office.
Not for nothing did my boss call me Cassandra. Doomed ever to tell the truth but never to be heeded.
It’s a bit like musical chairs. Round of cuts: remove a chair: close a branch; take the big utilities from the Post Office: profits fall; remove a chair: close a branch.
We’ve survived the random chair removal so far, and our little sub-branch is still here. Match Attax could be the only thing standing between him and disaster. Feeling suddenly mean for laughing at his dreams, his misguidedly heavy investment in greetings cards, and being Queen of the Unnecessary Purchase, I grabbed indiscriminately at some over-priced rice to buy pro tem and scarpered.
“They’re on order,” he added wistfully, as the door clanged to.
2 years ago, it was Dr Who cards, another tense time with fluctuating availability. Then we had to stump out £1.50 for a mere 9 cards. I'm sure POM has a job lot out the back from when the demand plummeted.
Times change, and there’s nothing you can tell me about value for money.
Lolly is back to full prance and, I’m glad to report, the bill was small, meaning that it’s worth having a stern word with vets. I almost tipped her in my gratitude. Almost. Silly to give her any ideas.
For:
an 8 hour stay on the day of reckoning, including (shudder), shaving, draining, pus collection, leak-seepage management, keeping an eye on
a course of antibiotics
a new yellow squadgy lead
2 follow up appointments (admittedly brief, but one of them involving 2 vets)
I was charged ….… £35.08.
Even I couldn’t baulk at that.
Indeed I’ve been recommending them all week so their portals will soon be bursting with skinflints bearing maimed pets.
Every denizen in the geographical fallout of Cheltenham Racecourse is out to fleece the racers somehow. Friends do B&B and count the cash. Cheltonians go on cruises for Christmas, or are half-way to China, on the proceeds. Driveways are dusted off and called car parks; limos fill lay-bys; opening hours are rapidly extended: normal old breakfasts at cafes are called Racing Breakfasts, and charged accordingly. Everything, temporarily, becomes Gold this or Racing That.
It might add a buzz, but if you’re not profitting from it, you’re buggered by it and traffic means that we are effectively marooned this side of Chelters. It’s not that I would normally want to go, but now that I can’t, I feel aggrieved: even a Country Liter has shopping needs to meet. So I went just now, fool that I am, to the Post Office, to stalk out a few creme eggs and get in some Match Attax (sic) cards. Don’t tell me my education’s been wasted.
A string of racegoers were aimlessly wandering around the shop – tum, porkpie hat, tie, debris of disgusting breakfast festering in the café corner (don’t ask).
Post Office Man was – his words – “made up.” “All that booze they buy!” he hissed confidentially, “Each night! We get more in.” He did that pursed lips kissing the window thing he favours when making a point.Such is the mighty power of his whisper, so much more audible than the normal ebb and flow of his disappointed speech, that every race goer’s head turned to eyeball him.
I gave a stiff dead smile, cringed, and turned my best, dim, Lolly-like attention to the chocolate stand.He shook his head at the giddy commerce of it all. The thrill of the till, clanging shut on crisp Irish twenties (not village 20ps grudgingly counted out); the unexpected extra visits to the Cash & Carry; the sheer enterprise represented. He nodded a reproving nod at me and bounced off to tidy his bafflingly large birthday card racks, as if now jostling for Richard Branson’s place on The Rich List.
Witness to POM’s idea of self as successful entrepreneur, not washed-up weirdo with a penchant for driving ducks to Spain was not something I wanted to be.
I prowled around the tatty bit normally frequented by 10 year olds, where the Match Attax cards should be … but weren’t. POM has no idea of supplying to meet a demand, hence his unfathomable interest in the wrong sorts of cards, endless birthday ones. Profits lie instead in the greedy, shifting, desires of 10 year olds (and their desperate parents, eager for behaviour/treat leverage). Greasy cards shuffled fervently in grubby little hands, mini book-makers in the making, every one of them. We are all fluent in Italian midfielders.
Having made the effort to trudge across the road, and risk the conversational ambush of an encounter with POM, to be then denied my reason for being there was just outrageous.
“Still not in, national shortage,” POM said with something approaching pleasure in his voice. He’s moved on from locals, he hobnobs with race-goers now. “’ve been up since four,” he purred at one in a trilby, “No time for sleeping. Not in this game.”
Mrs POM, a study in defeat, was kept busy, the long minutes I was in there, debating the minutiae of a paper bill with a pensioner whose gloved hand was determined to remain triumphantly clasped round coppers. The paperboy – “he always walks on the grass!” – was being ripped to shreds.
It is a fearful thing the village Stores’n’Post Office being held afloat so arbitrarily, and by one who never sleeps. Post Office work, with its stingy pay off per “swipe,” brings something like £2.50 an hour. The many many greetings cards remain unsold, testament to a plan gone sour.
The Match Attax cards meanwhile might retail at a mere 40p a pack, but they disappear under the locust swarm of small children’s hands. Blink and they’ve gone. At the moment, they’re gone. And, with the imminent defection of the racers, if the national shortage continues, married to that capricious whim of fickle children whose interest in the cards will melt like butter in the sun the day his mis-judged double order comes in, then it could be Bye Bye Post Office.
Not for nothing did my boss call me Cassandra. Doomed ever to tell the truth but never to be heeded.
It’s a bit like musical chairs. Round of cuts: remove a chair: close a branch; take the big utilities from the Post Office: profits fall; remove a chair: close a branch.
We’ve survived the random chair removal so far, and our little sub-branch is still here. Match Attax could be the only thing standing between him and disaster. Feeling suddenly mean for laughing at his dreams, his misguidedly heavy investment in greetings cards, and being Queen of the Unnecessary Purchase, I grabbed indiscriminately at some over-priced rice to buy pro tem and scarpered.
“They’re on order,” he added wistfully, as the door clanged to.
2 years ago, it was Dr Who cards, another tense time with fluctuating availability. Then we had to stump out £1.50 for a mere 9 cards. I'm sure POM has a job lot out the back from when the demand plummeted.
Times change, and there’s nothing you can tell me about value for money.
Lolly is back to full prance and, I’m glad to report, the bill was small, meaning that it’s worth having a stern word with vets. I almost tipped her in my gratitude. Almost. Silly to give her any ideas.
For:
an 8 hour stay on the day of reckoning, including (shudder), shaving, draining, pus collection, leak-seepage management, keeping an eye on
a course of antibiotics
a new yellow squadgy lead
2 follow up appointments (admittedly brief, but one of them involving 2 vets)
I was charged ….… £35.08.
Even I couldn’t baulk at that.
Indeed I’ve been recommending them all week so their portals will soon be bursting with skinflints bearing maimed pets.
Wednesday, 4 March 2009
the dog it was
A beautiful day, one in which the irony of death was primed to present itself. The sun shines bright and beautiful creatures go tits up. For when I felt the huge hard lump under Lolly’s throat, and paired it with the lethargy and lack of appetite of the last few days, I fast-tracked her straight through ‘tumour’ to ‘inoperable’ to ‘dead by tea-time.’
Following her walk – the one thing in which she still shows vague interest – I phoned the vet.
A bored girl fumbled with the pages of the diary. I described the symptoms to kill time and she said, “Can you make it 10.15? it sounds like you should come in straightaway.”
I glanced at the clock. Time just enough to scoop up the furry beast.
“Yes,” I said.
My heart pounded.
Poor dead Lolly, only 2 and I didn’t make her a birthday cake. How mean is that!
Her bed could catch the rubbish collection next day.
The sun gleamed in my eyes, a feature of driving east, as we wended our way to the vet, me trying to make the most of this, her inevitable last journey. Hello sun, hello birds, bye bye Lolly. Brave lip-biting hurt. Chin up old girl.
I lifted the baggy thing onto the table. She looked at me, confused, hunched, thinking blandly maybe that I looked familiar.
The vet busied herself with Lolly’s dubious end and a rectal thermometer, yum, and pronounced her temperature to be 104.5.
A rummage in her pink undercarriage found that her heart was fine.
“Why do you check her heart?” I said.
“To see if she’s strong enough to be sedated,” she said.
Turns out it’s not a tumour. We are not in death’s waiting room, after all, so I can take my caring face off. It’s an abscess. Probably got from chewing on a stick (yup, that figures, stick chewing is her one and only skill).
“We’ll keep her in,” she said.
Not so fast, I thought, images of a perfectly fine but totally dim dog now given to malingering, lounging on a velvet cushion having dog-grapes peeled for her as the meter on her bill went crazy. They’re not used to dog owners like me. Round here it’s all co-ordinated dog coats and talk of puppy-pilates.
"It's not that I don't love her," I said, patting Lolly in a way that I hoped convinced, "Only we've not got insurance."
So, steady on the extras, trim the room service, missy, no talk of Sky TV.
I phoned just now. They’d drained the abscess and madam was fine. “We’ll keep her a bit longer, you won’t want her on your best carpet.”
When do we ever, I thought, but didn’t say; although aware of the meter ticking fast as Lolly's stay lengthened.
“There was a lot of pus, she’s still dripping,” the girl continued.
"Well, my son has got a football match," I said carefully, "I don't like to think of picking her up and then having to abandon her to go and watch him. Doesn't seem right. Perhaps she'd better stay with you a while."
It wasn't my alter ego, St Francis, at work here, it was that word 'dripping.' It was 'pus,' as in 'a lot of.'
Why DO they tell you things like this. 'Drained''s never been a word I want to think about too deeply, but now 'dripping' is contaminated, too, to be conflated ever after with pus and rectal thermometers and louche dogs running up big bills.
“She’s all yours,” I said weakly, deaf to the meter, alert to pus and reaching for my credit card.
Following her walk – the one thing in which she still shows vague interest – I phoned the vet.
A bored girl fumbled with the pages of the diary. I described the symptoms to kill time and she said, “Can you make it 10.15? it sounds like you should come in straightaway.”
I glanced at the clock. Time just enough to scoop up the furry beast.
“Yes,” I said.
My heart pounded.
Poor dead Lolly, only 2 and I didn’t make her a birthday cake. How mean is that!
Her bed could catch the rubbish collection next day.
The sun gleamed in my eyes, a feature of driving east, as we wended our way to the vet, me trying to make the most of this, her inevitable last journey. Hello sun, hello birds, bye bye Lolly. Brave lip-biting hurt. Chin up old girl.
I lifted the baggy thing onto the table. She looked at me, confused, hunched, thinking blandly maybe that I looked familiar.
The vet busied herself with Lolly’s dubious end and a rectal thermometer, yum, and pronounced her temperature to be 104.5.
A rummage in her pink undercarriage found that her heart was fine.
“Why do you check her heart?” I said.
“To see if she’s strong enough to be sedated,” she said.
Turns out it’s not a tumour. We are not in death’s waiting room, after all, so I can take my caring face off. It’s an abscess. Probably got from chewing on a stick (yup, that figures, stick chewing is her one and only skill).
“We’ll keep her in,” she said.
Not so fast, I thought, images of a perfectly fine but totally dim dog now given to malingering, lounging on a velvet cushion having dog-grapes peeled for her as the meter on her bill went crazy. They’re not used to dog owners like me. Round here it’s all co-ordinated dog coats and talk of puppy-pilates.
"It's not that I don't love her," I said, patting Lolly in a way that I hoped convinced, "Only we've not got insurance."
So, steady on the extras, trim the room service, missy, no talk of Sky TV.
I phoned just now. They’d drained the abscess and madam was fine. “We’ll keep her a bit longer, you won’t want her on your best carpet.”
When do we ever, I thought, but didn’t say; although aware of the meter ticking fast as Lolly's stay lengthened.
“There was a lot of pus, she’s still dripping,” the girl continued.
"Well, my son has got a football match," I said carefully, "I don't like to think of picking her up and then having to abandon her to go and watch him. Doesn't seem right. Perhaps she'd better stay with you a while."
It wasn't my alter ego, St Francis, at work here, it was that word 'dripping.' It was 'pus,' as in 'a lot of.'
Why DO they tell you things like this. 'Drained''s never been a word I want to think about too deeply, but now 'dripping' is contaminated, too, to be conflated ever after with pus and rectal thermometers and louche dogs running up big bills.
“She’s all yours,” I said weakly, deaf to the meter, alert to pus and reaching for my credit card.
Friday, 20 February 2009
all I really want
“I’ve decided what I’m going to be when I grow up,” T12 said.
“Oh yes?” I said.
“Yes. An actor. Or an architect. Or a lawyer. Or a prostitute.”
F10 lay on his back, in his dark glasses and dressing gown, an elephant glove puppet slowly stroking Catty’s head. Catty looked understandably alarmed. I forbore to ask F10’s plans for his future, his present is weird enough.
“We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” I said, scuttling downstairs awash with anxiety. Careers' guidance seems not to be what it used to be.
When I worked full time (clothes firmly on), I was always baffled at how busy everyone else appeared to be. I worked at a number of Big Places people have heard of, which was considered a good thing amongst the parents of friends. Nowhere is safe anymore. Maybe prostitution is the only reliable answer. I was tip top at my job, perhaps because I had virtually nothing to do, or nothing I couldn’t polish off in a couple of hours and then swan off for coffee. Those were the days, no question of tasking really, let alone multi-tasking. Heady promotion meant that I rota’d others, so I knew full well the extent of their under-employment, too, but, blow me down, there they were strutting about all stressed. So, unless I was neglecting whole swathes of my job (possible), or was just naturally brilliant (unlikely), or the others were virtually remedial (moot), or better at faking than me (unthinkable), then something was seriously awry. I never got it.
Suffice it to say that the bin was my friend in those days, filing being the biggest F word of all. I had a jacket pressed into action on my chair, there to imply that I was in, or in-ish, and not just chatting in the canteen. Meanwhile I stared, puzzled, at the rest of them, striding by, Busy Busy Busy, muttering under their breath; or chained to their desk in an unfathomable frenzy of activity and bluster. Perhaps they were doing all my work as well as their own?
Yesterday at the supermarket, the till boy had been glummer than usual. He swung on his chair, too large for it and restless. They have to wear big idiot badges now, with their name, what they do, when they joined and an Amusing or salient point as an optional extra. This lad had joined last year. There was no frivolous bon mot, his normal shtick was, I read, Assistant Trolley Liaison Assistant. Or something like that.
“Is this a promotion, then,” I said, gesturing the checkout.
“Supposed to be,” he said. “Don’t like it, though.”
“No?”
“No, I like it out there.”
I stared into the snarling gloom of the car park, following his wistful gaze.
Greasy fish and chip paper danced round unfortunate ankles, more grim slime than American Beauty.
Hoodies were circling the litter bins on tiny beat-up bikes (age appropriate to younger, presumably bereft, siblings or strangers). Their hands darted, oafish, primitive grapplings with pramface wannabes - their lips stubble-burnt, smelly hands in dyed WAG-straight hair. “Gerrroff”s and “Fuckoff”s and delighted outraged squeals tore the air. Kisses tasting of shandy, and cheese and onion crisps.
Mothers, tugging reluctant offspring from staring at this Hogarthian stew, steering them by the hoods of pastel bright coats, trotted sharpish in away and out of the cold.
Cars edging round like sharks hunting the prey of the freed-up space.
Another sullen lad, having lasso’d the strays from trundled-into corners, leant into a chain of trolleys, forcing them uphill. His hi-vis-jkt flapped in the wind, his hands blue-cold. He unleashed the trolleys and sent them clattering, loud enough to shock, obedient into their bay. Ranch work for small town cowboys.
It’s got to be said, it didn’t look a Must Have spot, no obvious centre of the universe that. Nothing Utopian.
Ambition, eh.
“Yeah,” he said with love in his grunt, “you can disappear. Take your time. Know what I mean?”
“Be in charge of what you do?” I was beginning to get his drift.
“Yeah.” He nodded. “Not like in here. Gotta chat and that.”
“Ah.” I finished my packing in silence. I've never needed to be told twice.
There’s not many jokes begin, “There were these 3 trolleys…” and I can’t see the canon of such being swelled anytime soon.
The dog bounced out when I got in, wrong way traffic against my struggle with the carriers. She sniffed the air, seeking freedom but frightened to find it. Age has lowered her horizons. She could take the back wall in one bound like she used to, and fly off into the field. Could, but no longer does, though E continues to nurse vain hopes - fly, dog, fly; run, run, and don't look back, let the wind be in your fur. Perhaps she senses the barbed wire lurking the other side: Trouble in Paradise. Always some bloody fly in the ointment.
She doesn’t escape much anymore to the nearby building site either which is sort of sad.
Just the Olds continue to be favoured. I fear for the smell in their airing cupboard when the door's next open, when the stench released from her rank pelt, weaving itself about the dangling contents of their triangular clothes’ drier, has matured. Items left out with good intent which it would have been better to let rot and spare encounter with dread dog. I ducked to watch Mrs Old, a mirthless smile creased into her static face, unwittingly folding her sullied blue towels with a depressing, erroneous confidence.
Mulling corrupted youth prospects and despairing of elderly innocence, we overloaded on TV (Masterchef, Bleak House on DVD, Skins and Question Time: a heady mix) and were looking forward to bed. I had changed the sheets earlier and was anticipating that glorious moment when you scissor your legs in new bedding.
But, what was this?
The bed was hijacked by F10, still in dressing gown and glove puppet, sprawled across the middle, while the prostitute-in-waiting clung to the scrap allotted him on F10’s left. A similar tiny strip, which should have been flattering but was just annoying, was left for me on the right. E took one look and legged it, heading with insulting delight, to the spare room. I tucked myself in, and dreamed uneasy dreams.
“Oh yes?” I said.
“Yes. An actor. Or an architect. Or a lawyer. Or a prostitute.”
F10 lay on his back, in his dark glasses and dressing gown, an elephant glove puppet slowly stroking Catty’s head. Catty looked understandably alarmed. I forbore to ask F10’s plans for his future, his present is weird enough.
“We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” I said, scuttling downstairs awash with anxiety. Careers' guidance seems not to be what it used to be.
When I worked full time (clothes firmly on), I was always baffled at how busy everyone else appeared to be. I worked at a number of Big Places people have heard of, which was considered a good thing amongst the parents of friends. Nowhere is safe anymore. Maybe prostitution is the only reliable answer. I was tip top at my job, perhaps because I had virtually nothing to do, or nothing I couldn’t polish off in a couple of hours and then swan off for coffee. Those were the days, no question of tasking really, let alone multi-tasking. Heady promotion meant that I rota’d others, so I knew full well the extent of their under-employment, too, but, blow me down, there they were strutting about all stressed. So, unless I was neglecting whole swathes of my job (possible), or was just naturally brilliant (unlikely), or the others were virtually remedial (moot), or better at faking than me (unthinkable), then something was seriously awry. I never got it.
Suffice it to say that the bin was my friend in those days, filing being the biggest F word of all. I had a jacket pressed into action on my chair, there to imply that I was in, or in-ish, and not just chatting in the canteen. Meanwhile I stared, puzzled, at the rest of them, striding by, Busy Busy Busy, muttering under their breath; or chained to their desk in an unfathomable frenzy of activity and bluster. Perhaps they were doing all my work as well as their own?
Yesterday at the supermarket, the till boy had been glummer than usual. He swung on his chair, too large for it and restless. They have to wear big idiot badges now, with their name, what they do, when they joined and an Amusing or salient point as an optional extra. This lad had joined last year. There was no frivolous bon mot, his normal shtick was, I read, Assistant Trolley Liaison Assistant. Or something like that.
“Is this a promotion, then,” I said, gesturing the checkout.
“Supposed to be,” he said. “Don’t like it, though.”
“No?”
“No, I like it out there.”
I stared into the snarling gloom of the car park, following his wistful gaze.
Greasy fish and chip paper danced round unfortunate ankles, more grim slime than American Beauty.
Hoodies were circling the litter bins on tiny beat-up bikes (age appropriate to younger, presumably bereft, siblings or strangers). Their hands darted, oafish, primitive grapplings with pramface wannabes - their lips stubble-burnt, smelly hands in dyed WAG-straight hair. “Gerrroff”s and “Fuckoff”s and delighted outraged squeals tore the air. Kisses tasting of shandy, and cheese and onion crisps.
Mothers, tugging reluctant offspring from staring at this Hogarthian stew, steering them by the hoods of pastel bright coats, trotted sharpish in away and out of the cold.
Cars edging round like sharks hunting the prey of the freed-up space.
Another sullen lad, having lasso’d the strays from trundled-into corners, leant into a chain of trolleys, forcing them uphill. His hi-vis-jkt flapped in the wind, his hands blue-cold. He unleashed the trolleys and sent them clattering, loud enough to shock, obedient into their bay. Ranch work for small town cowboys.
It’s got to be said, it didn’t look a Must Have spot, no obvious centre of the universe that. Nothing Utopian.
Ambition, eh.
“Yeah,” he said with love in his grunt, “you can disappear. Take your time. Know what I mean?”
“Be in charge of what you do?” I was beginning to get his drift.
“Yeah.” He nodded. “Not like in here. Gotta chat and that.”
“Ah.” I finished my packing in silence. I've never needed to be told twice.
There’s not many jokes begin, “There were these 3 trolleys…” and I can’t see the canon of such being swelled anytime soon.
The dog bounced out when I got in, wrong way traffic against my struggle with the carriers. She sniffed the air, seeking freedom but frightened to find it. Age has lowered her horizons. She could take the back wall in one bound like she used to, and fly off into the field. Could, but no longer does, though E continues to nurse vain hopes - fly, dog, fly; run, run, and don't look back, let the wind be in your fur. Perhaps she senses the barbed wire lurking the other side: Trouble in Paradise. Always some bloody fly in the ointment.
She doesn’t escape much anymore to the nearby building site either which is sort of sad.
Just the Olds continue to be favoured. I fear for the smell in their airing cupboard when the door's next open, when the stench released from her rank pelt, weaving itself about the dangling contents of their triangular clothes’ drier, has matured. Items left out with good intent which it would have been better to let rot and spare encounter with dread dog. I ducked to watch Mrs Old, a mirthless smile creased into her static face, unwittingly folding her sullied blue towels with a depressing, erroneous confidence.
Mulling corrupted youth prospects and despairing of elderly innocence, we overloaded on TV (Masterchef, Bleak House on DVD, Skins and Question Time: a heady mix) and were looking forward to bed. I had changed the sheets earlier and was anticipating that glorious moment when you scissor your legs in new bedding.
But, what was this?
The bed was hijacked by F10, still in dressing gown and glove puppet, sprawled across the middle, while the prostitute-in-waiting clung to the scrap allotted him on F10’s left. A similar tiny strip, which should have been flattering but was just annoying, was left for me on the right. E took one look and legged it, heading with insulting delight, to the spare room. I tucked myself in, and dreamed uneasy dreams.
Thursday, 12 February 2009
jam jam everywhere, nor any drop to eat
Having bought some reduced stuff at the supermarket, I had to find room for it in the freezer. Once home - as so often happens - the lustre had faded from my bargains. It dawned on me that never would I want to eat any of it, however cheap, particularly shrouded in ice. To boot, the packaging will crack, thanks to my sturdy forcing, and the label will come awry. A wintry anonymity of deep unattractiveness is doomed to settle on them. The boys will be told to eat up without complaining.
Solid and frozen however, these will be a problem for me to encounter way in the future, as were the three punnets of raspberries, optimistically-purchased last October, which were jettisoned to create the necessary room for this batch of odd decisions.
I decided to make jam of them. I needed jam (Marie Antoinette would understand in a cake / jam way) but it ended up taking 2 days which no-one, even in the wilder throes of mis-placed optimism, is going to say was time well spent.
The pursuit of a cheap thing can be time-heavy and, although I dread to confess it, expensive. The jammy offerings of Tiptree are appearing to be spectacularly good value in comparison. Plus they actually are jam, whereas my efforts cannot be said to be anything other than slops.
“Sauce,” my mother suggested when I told her, “for your porridge.”
“Coulis,” I said sternly; this IS the Cotswolds.
The trouble is I didn’t want coulis, and I certainly didn’t want sauce. What I want is jam. And I don’t eat porridge, so having plugged a gap which wasn’t there, I am still left with a jam-shaped hole.
We entertained chums at the weekend. It worked so well, and that despite a smorgasbord of dietary peccadillos to navigate, that I could crow with gloaty delight. One friend said I should open a restaurant (I do love praise) and that she would play Mrs Overall, shuffling round as cardi-clad waitress. The idea appeals, but not much. Have you seen Masterchef? Do not those sessions in the “pro kitchen” inspire you to promise never, ever to complain, even under your breath, in a restaurant? A circle of hell, but eagerly aspired to by the culinary mad.
I do like cooking, but on a low-key level although I must (must you? yes) shoehorn in an unnecessary boast that my mayonnaise is just delicious. It takes less than five minutes to rustle up and is genuinely, cross my heart etc, worth doing. It is less expensive than “proper” mayonnaise and I couldn’t even walk to the post-office-cum-shop to buy some in the time, let alone factor in the inevitable painful trapping of chat with the Post Office man (teeth, medication, ducks, Spain, hedges in Spain, post office regulations).
Pasta is moot. It's good, better than shop bought, but it is incumbent upon me to confess that I could walk to Tesco and back, even down an icy, winding road in a horrid blizzard, in the hour or more that I spend sending myself crazy sending the dough through the machine.
But as for the jam, I could stroll to Waitrose, friends, which is 5 miles away. I could dawdle in the blissful aisles, hand pick the smartest jars, stay for coffee, read the papers, stay for lunch, stroll back and still be quids in, both time and cash wise.
Saving money is not all it’s cracked up to be, particularly when it means the fridge is full of substandard sauce. But still one persists. And el credit cruncho has resulted in some crazy wheezes peddled by desperate newspapers.
My mother told me of a Handy Tips booklet included with a recent Telegraph where one of the suggestions concerned saving that vital fiver in cocking a snook at room service if you were to reach the hotel after the restaurant was closed.
Yes, latest wisdom is that you can toast your own cheese sandwich.
What is entailed is the cunning inclusion in your packing of some pre-made cheese sandwiches wrapped in silver foil. Once in the privacy of your room, break into your suitcase, extract the sarnies and iron them. Yes, iron them: ta-da!
This they call an “instant tasty hot snack.”
But there are so many issues skirted over. Not least of which the inadvisability of popping a sweaty cheese sandwich in among your clothes in the first place: the pfaff, the potential for error: the suitcase inadvertently being left by a warm radiator, while you get pissed on the mini bar. Then there's the assumption that your room will have an iron, and the folly in expecting that it will be anything approaching “tasty”.
We all know that the bread will remain steadfastly soggy and limp, while the cheese will manage to break free and leak oily globbets on a shirt, plus you’ll have a scorched chest of drawers on your hands to hide from the chambermaid: there’s only so much concealment one can reasonably expect from artfully discarded sachets of Nescafe.
They attempt to pre-empt this last, by suggesting bringing along a bundle of old newspapers – truly – to fashion an impromptu late-night ironing board. By the time one’s packed a tasty snack and a heap of old newspapers you might feel it was easier to stay home and eat it there, rather than Go Tramp in a smart hotel ruminating on your failure to run to the hotel’s offerings.
It doesn’t stop there, and many a use for 'denture cleaning tablets', too, crop up, providing you have such things handy, which so many of us from the Colgate generation just don’t. Otherwise, which is true of many of the tips, you might as well go out and buy the thing that's meant to do the job you are buying the alternative for. Much as I love my superior mayonnaise, it’s to be eaten with salad, not popped on my head as hair conditioner.
And the suggested uses for marshmallows - again, not a permanent feature of my cupboard - would make your eyes water. Let's say home pedicures feature.
Jam-tired this made me, I’m all for eyeing the 100% shop-bought Marmite with interest. Whistling insouciantly, my hand stretched into the fridge, brought forward three sullen jars of nasty sauce and hurled them to the bin. A certain lightness settled on me.
Solid and frozen however, these will be a problem for me to encounter way in the future, as were the three punnets of raspberries, optimistically-purchased last October, which were jettisoned to create the necessary room for this batch of odd decisions.
I decided to make jam of them. I needed jam (Marie Antoinette would understand in a cake / jam way) but it ended up taking 2 days which no-one, even in the wilder throes of mis-placed optimism, is going to say was time well spent.
The pursuit of a cheap thing can be time-heavy and, although I dread to confess it, expensive. The jammy offerings of Tiptree are appearing to be spectacularly good value in comparison. Plus they actually are jam, whereas my efforts cannot be said to be anything other than slops.
“Sauce,” my mother suggested when I told her, “for your porridge.”
“Coulis,” I said sternly; this IS the Cotswolds.
The trouble is I didn’t want coulis, and I certainly didn’t want sauce. What I want is jam. And I don’t eat porridge, so having plugged a gap which wasn’t there, I am still left with a jam-shaped hole.
We entertained chums at the weekend. It worked so well, and that despite a smorgasbord of dietary peccadillos to navigate, that I could crow with gloaty delight. One friend said I should open a restaurant (I do love praise) and that she would play Mrs Overall, shuffling round as cardi-clad waitress. The idea appeals, but not much. Have you seen Masterchef? Do not those sessions in the “pro kitchen” inspire you to promise never, ever to complain, even under your breath, in a restaurant? A circle of hell, but eagerly aspired to by the culinary mad.
I do like cooking, but on a low-key level although I must (must you? yes) shoehorn in an unnecessary boast that my mayonnaise is just delicious. It takes less than five minutes to rustle up and is genuinely, cross my heart etc, worth doing. It is less expensive than “proper” mayonnaise and I couldn’t even walk to the post-office-cum-shop to buy some in the time, let alone factor in the inevitable painful trapping of chat with the Post Office man (teeth, medication, ducks, Spain, hedges in Spain, post office regulations).
Pasta is moot. It's good, better than shop bought, but it is incumbent upon me to confess that I could walk to Tesco and back, even down an icy, winding road in a horrid blizzard, in the hour or more that I spend sending myself crazy sending the dough through the machine.
But as for the jam, I could stroll to Waitrose, friends, which is 5 miles away. I could dawdle in the blissful aisles, hand pick the smartest jars, stay for coffee, read the papers, stay for lunch, stroll back and still be quids in, both time and cash wise.
Saving money is not all it’s cracked up to be, particularly when it means the fridge is full of substandard sauce. But still one persists. And el credit cruncho has resulted in some crazy wheezes peddled by desperate newspapers.
My mother told me of a Handy Tips booklet included with a recent Telegraph where one of the suggestions concerned saving that vital fiver in cocking a snook at room service if you were to reach the hotel after the restaurant was closed.
Yes, latest wisdom is that you can toast your own cheese sandwich.
What is entailed is the cunning inclusion in your packing of some pre-made cheese sandwiches wrapped in silver foil. Once in the privacy of your room, break into your suitcase, extract the sarnies and iron them. Yes, iron them: ta-da!
This they call an “instant tasty hot snack.”
But there are so many issues skirted over. Not least of which the inadvisability of popping a sweaty cheese sandwich in among your clothes in the first place: the pfaff, the potential for error: the suitcase inadvertently being left by a warm radiator, while you get pissed on the mini bar. Then there's the assumption that your room will have an iron, and the folly in expecting that it will be anything approaching “tasty”.
We all know that the bread will remain steadfastly soggy and limp, while the cheese will manage to break free and leak oily globbets on a shirt, plus you’ll have a scorched chest of drawers on your hands to hide from the chambermaid: there’s only so much concealment one can reasonably expect from artfully discarded sachets of Nescafe.
They attempt to pre-empt this last, by suggesting bringing along a bundle of old newspapers – truly – to fashion an impromptu late-night ironing board. By the time one’s packed a tasty snack and a heap of old newspapers you might feel it was easier to stay home and eat it there, rather than Go Tramp in a smart hotel ruminating on your failure to run to the hotel’s offerings.
It doesn’t stop there, and many a use for 'denture cleaning tablets', too, crop up, providing you have such things handy, which so many of us from the Colgate generation just don’t. Otherwise, which is true of many of the tips, you might as well go out and buy the thing that's meant to do the job you are buying the alternative for. Much as I love my superior mayonnaise, it’s to be eaten with salad, not popped on my head as hair conditioner.
And the suggested uses for marshmallows - again, not a permanent feature of my cupboard - would make your eyes water. Let's say home pedicures feature.
Jam-tired this made me, I’m all for eyeing the 100% shop-bought Marmite with interest. Whistling insouciantly, my hand stretched into the fridge, brought forward three sullen jars of nasty sauce and hurled them to the bin. A certain lightness settled on me.
Wednesday, 4 February 2009
tell the rats that it’s now the year of the ox … but never the year of the dog
My mother was born to a 44 year old widow, and a sister of 17. This sister’s first husband committed suicide, and she is now ensconced, in her 80s, in cold comfort farm, deep in the bowels of the countryside, tending to her second husband. G. He takes all day to eat breakfast, and, on finishing at 6 in the evening, finds it is only time to get ready for bed again. A repetitive business.
Recently, somehow – and, frankly, the mind boggles at the practicalities attendant on such an excursion – these 2 went on holiday. I can’t remember where, and it will have been somewhere most people wouldn’t consider. Bird watching would have been factored in, and swimming in January tides, “So bracing, Milla.”
They asked what time breakfast finished and the innocent waitress informed them that it was 9.30.
"Aahhh," said G.
She'd learn.
Small disappointments hardly break the surface of my aunt’s brand of optimism when in her element, one which is characterised as being fundamentally bleak, whether on holiday or back home, a once lovely house crumbling with defeated neglect.
Postcards note events such as, “we heard that seals bask there quite frequently. We waited all day but none showed up. Clearly busy elsewhere! G commented that the wind was bitter, but I imagine it’s worse in Siberia; we missed lunch, but no matter,” that sort of thing, accompanied by a little drawing of a coy seal. She enjoys deprivation and takes comfort in the certainty that however bad things are now, they will be even worse tomorrow.
Once home they returned to a rat inundation. In the kitchen, under the stairs. They have come in from the cold and opened an account on my aunt’s house.
“Oh,” my aunt said airily, “everyone in the country has rats.”
“Can’t you get a man in?” asked my mother.
“Oh, no. Not round here.”
My mother relayed this to me and I squeezed a genteel shudder and said, apropos of the inevitability of rats in the countryside, “I don’t think so!”
We probably laughed.
But a scant fortnight later, tit’s given for tat, petards have been hoisted and we have taken a tumble both. My mother is on the phone.
She had seen a fat rat strolling around outside her back door while I was main-lining sal volatile since the casual scrapings aside of gravel leading to a hole under the side of the house had been confirmed as a rat run. Real rats, not merely bad tempered commuters stealing a march by racing through housing estates.
I snagged the Ratman in the post office. I think he was relieved to be rescued from a chat about the Post Office Man’s teeth (him of the “Bits. Dropping from meh. Like ice from a glacier”) and scuttled out all eager, clutching his barbecue beef crisps in one paw.
I showed him the hole and he nodded eagerly, and then changed the conversation, just like that, to his dyslexia, and that of his wife and his four children. I found it interesting, to be sure, and offered my trademark kind advice, but would rather have continued on warfarin and neosorexa.
He advised that we concrete in the hole and, when I persisted, told me what it would cost to distribute poison. The quote deterred me, but I paid for my meanness in 18-certificate fear over the weekend, during which time the sounds in the walls grew. I’ve seen ‘Ratatouille’ and am now realising what a big mistake that was. I thought I had no imagination. I was wrong.
Ratman came back and took to his task with a torch. He wriggled in the loft, and “fresh” droppings were found. It’s not at infestation level, no “tail swish” was found in the sawdust – t’ank feck – and pleasing, industrial amounts of poison have been laid. Ratman is firmly in the diary, a date more eagerly anticipated than any teenage tryst, for next Monday. Death had better be widespread. I’m thinking holocaust, species cleansing, annihilation. Call it a massive failing, but I don’t subscribe to the ‘they were here before us’ mentality. We’re here now, and they can fuck right off, however intelligent and clean. I’m brighter, I’m cleaner.
Meanwhile, our neighbours, The Olds have vermin, too, of a different but depressingly familiar sort: Lolly.
Rather than finally earning her keep – I could hire her out, earn a few quid if she would but just grab this chance to shine and be useful in doing what terriers should do: catch rats – she has instead been breaking into The Olds’ garden.
She has zilch taste, for it’s a dull patch: small, frighteningly well-tended, each blade of grass personally known and accounted for. There are boring slabs (which I pray haven’t yet been crapped on) and resin weasels with handbags. Every corner of it is highly visible from just about every window in their house. Since The Olds, when not outside pinning up endless laundry in their garden or trimming shrubs by that vital centimetre, are inside up step-ladders polishing their windows or giving the nets a busy shake, the chances of our Getting Away With It are slim. In fact, they keep a lead just for returning Lolly to us, grim-lipped. And although they go out bothering other oldsters quite frequently, for tea and to watch Countdown en masse (flat-capped and car-coated in their pristine Micra),the snow has not aided my pretence that Lolly is under any control whatsoever.
I let her out yeseterday, hoping she’d rat-catch, but she disappeared like a junkie after heroin next door, the dread tell-tale trail of the addict’s pawmarks heading into the gap in the wall. Their wall, their gap, actually. I must remember to drop that into future conversation, thus steering things away from Dog Crimes.
“Lolly!” I hissed, hoping she’d detect icy fury in my voice and come a-trotting. Yeah, right.
I went further into the snowy garden and, through the Ceanothus that separates them from us, I saw the foul hound, looking frightfully pleased with herself jumping stiff-legged on their lawn. I whisper-bellowed at her, and she bounced some more, thrilled, and then ran round and round, flurries of snow flying from her paws, her trespass laid bare in documentation. There was no way I could hope that they’d think that this was an over-active robin or a break-dancing squirrel. At any moment there would be the careful returning roll of Micra wheel on gravel and fresh out of excuses I would be caught. It’s bad enough being told off for your own shortcomings or those of the children, but on account of the dog? Per-lease. Eating humble pie for a disapproving oldster catches terribly in the craw.
One problem scuttles away, another takes centre stage. As the rats recede, the bigger pest makes hay.
Recently, somehow – and, frankly, the mind boggles at the practicalities attendant on such an excursion – these 2 went on holiday. I can’t remember where, and it will have been somewhere most people wouldn’t consider. Bird watching would have been factored in, and swimming in January tides, “So bracing, Milla.”
They asked what time breakfast finished and the innocent waitress informed them that it was 9.30.
"Aahhh," said G.
She'd learn.
Small disappointments hardly break the surface of my aunt’s brand of optimism when in her element, one which is characterised as being fundamentally bleak, whether on holiday or back home, a once lovely house crumbling with defeated neglect.
Postcards note events such as, “we heard that seals bask there quite frequently. We waited all day but none showed up. Clearly busy elsewhere! G commented that the wind was bitter, but I imagine it’s worse in Siberia; we missed lunch, but no matter,” that sort of thing, accompanied by a little drawing of a coy seal. She enjoys deprivation and takes comfort in the certainty that however bad things are now, they will be even worse tomorrow.
Once home they returned to a rat inundation. In the kitchen, under the stairs. They have come in from the cold and opened an account on my aunt’s house.
“Oh,” my aunt said airily, “everyone in the country has rats.”
“Can’t you get a man in?” asked my mother.
“Oh, no. Not round here.”
My mother relayed this to me and I squeezed a genteel shudder and said, apropos of the inevitability of rats in the countryside, “I don’t think so!”
We probably laughed.
But a scant fortnight later, tit’s given for tat, petards have been hoisted and we have taken a tumble both. My mother is on the phone.
She had seen a fat rat strolling around outside her back door while I was main-lining sal volatile since the casual scrapings aside of gravel leading to a hole under the side of the house had been confirmed as a rat run. Real rats, not merely bad tempered commuters stealing a march by racing through housing estates.
I snagged the Ratman in the post office. I think he was relieved to be rescued from a chat about the Post Office Man’s teeth (him of the “Bits. Dropping from meh. Like ice from a glacier”) and scuttled out all eager, clutching his barbecue beef crisps in one paw.
I showed him the hole and he nodded eagerly, and then changed the conversation, just like that, to his dyslexia, and that of his wife and his four children. I found it interesting, to be sure, and offered my trademark kind advice, but would rather have continued on warfarin and neosorexa.
He advised that we concrete in the hole and, when I persisted, told me what it would cost to distribute poison. The quote deterred me, but I paid for my meanness in 18-certificate fear over the weekend, during which time the sounds in the walls grew. I’ve seen ‘Ratatouille’ and am now realising what a big mistake that was. I thought I had no imagination. I was wrong.
Ratman came back and took to his task with a torch. He wriggled in the loft, and “fresh” droppings were found. It’s not at infestation level, no “tail swish” was found in the sawdust – t’ank feck – and pleasing, industrial amounts of poison have been laid. Ratman is firmly in the diary, a date more eagerly anticipated than any teenage tryst, for next Monday. Death had better be widespread. I’m thinking holocaust, species cleansing, annihilation. Call it a massive failing, but I don’t subscribe to the ‘they were here before us’ mentality. We’re here now, and they can fuck right off, however intelligent and clean. I’m brighter, I’m cleaner.
Meanwhile, our neighbours, The Olds have vermin, too, of a different but depressingly familiar sort: Lolly.
Rather than finally earning her keep – I could hire her out, earn a few quid if she would but just grab this chance to shine and be useful in doing what terriers should do: catch rats – she has instead been breaking into The Olds’ garden.
She has zilch taste, for it’s a dull patch: small, frighteningly well-tended, each blade of grass personally known and accounted for. There are boring slabs (which I pray haven’t yet been crapped on) and resin weasels with handbags. Every corner of it is highly visible from just about every window in their house. Since The Olds, when not outside pinning up endless laundry in their garden or trimming shrubs by that vital centimetre, are inside up step-ladders polishing their windows or giving the nets a busy shake, the chances of our Getting Away With It are slim. In fact, they keep a lead just for returning Lolly to us, grim-lipped. And although they go out bothering other oldsters quite frequently, for tea and to watch Countdown en masse (flat-capped and car-coated in their pristine Micra),the snow has not aided my pretence that Lolly is under any control whatsoever.
I let her out yeseterday, hoping she’d rat-catch, but she disappeared like a junkie after heroin next door, the dread tell-tale trail of the addict’s pawmarks heading into the gap in the wall. Their wall, their gap, actually. I must remember to drop that into future conversation, thus steering things away from Dog Crimes.
“Lolly!” I hissed, hoping she’d detect icy fury in my voice and come a-trotting. Yeah, right.
I went further into the snowy garden and, through the Ceanothus that separates them from us, I saw the foul hound, looking frightfully pleased with herself jumping stiff-legged on their lawn. I whisper-bellowed at her, and she bounced some more, thrilled, and then ran round and round, flurries of snow flying from her paws, her trespass laid bare in documentation. There was no way I could hope that they’d think that this was an over-active robin or a break-dancing squirrel. At any moment there would be the careful returning roll of Micra wheel on gravel and fresh out of excuses I would be caught. It’s bad enough being told off for your own shortcomings or those of the children, but on account of the dog? Per-lease. Eating humble pie for a disapproving oldster catches terribly in the craw.
One problem scuttles away, another takes centre stage. As the rats recede, the bigger pest makes hay.
Thursday, 29 January 2009
it's good to talk
Last night I went on a girls’ night. We talked about how much we talked. How men (generalising wildly) look to provide a basic solution to an issue. (Don’t like someone? Tell them. Or ignore them. Don’t agonise. No need to mention it again. Sit down and read the paper.) They don’t do the endless circling of waffle around a subject, niggling and needling and reassessing, which for us is the means of distillation and of arriving at a solution we probably knew was there all along.
Just as E will buy the first pair of shoes he sees, if they fit and he likes them whereas I feel an instinctive horror at not exhausting every possibility at least twice. Round and round the shops, in trudging indecisive horror, to arrive back where I started three hours later.
A waste of time, perhaps, but at least you know. He says he doesn’t need to ‘know’, or doesn’t need to prove that he already ‘knew’.
And then it gets complicated.
I don’t, though, have much trouble with service. My experience, as a kind and caring individual, tells me that it’s those who invite it who always get the surly waitress, the offhand Postie, the Bored Saturday Shop Girl.
Besides, I’ve worked in shops and bars and, God, does the time drag. So, if a reluctant menial is a bit arsey, I tend to be grateful that it’s mere disdain coming my way and not a session with an Uzi because, let’s face it, day after day folding jumpers or looking in the back for a “Capri” in “heather” in a size 5, and having it drilled into you that the poxy customer is always right must do your head in.
The florist, however, had perfected rude brevity; I was both shocked and impressed. The haiku would be a tedious epic poem to her. Her grudging articulations of sound, vowel-less txt spk, were wrapped in cushions of cross silence, pauses I felt obliged to pack with foolish guff.
“So you do make button-holes?” I was on the phone to her and had got nowhere.
“ …….ys …….”
“And, er, is it better to order them, or just turn up on the day and hope …”
“ ….rdr ….”
“OK, um, is there a book, or photos, I could look at, before I decide and …?”
“…. N ….. ‘s rss r c’nashns.”
Mr Ambassador, you spoil us.
I drove to the shop, giving her the benefit of the doubt, that she might be a phone-phobic princess, and also intrigued to see if she really was as bad in person as she was on the blower. She was.
I decided not to buy and felt quite rebellious. Normally I am so well-behaved that I feel obliged to stump up just because I’ve walked in.
I asked if she sold florists’ wire and tape.
“ ….n ….” And then, in an uncharacteristic splurge of speech but still hammering home the Can’t Sell Won’t Sell stance, “Tks p 2 mch rm.”
A sign saying “Keep the Village Alive, Support Your Local Traders” banged on the door on my way out.
So I took me to the Garden Centre and, between such horticultural necessities as puffy hot water bottles and ceramic hedgehogs in amusing poses, I encountered a little display (tkng p v ltl rm actually) boasting all that the amateur florist could need.
And then I did my Little Red Hen act and came up with these.
Being impecunious, and flushed with success having made some bizarre curtains for the sitting room in strips of silk (the lighting's a bit odd here),
I have decided to have a go at another set.
This time for the garage.
(“You must stop calling it the garage,” said my dog-walking friend, “you must call it the library.” This is a woman whose idea of fun is 3 fitness classes on the bounce, so ‘garage’ it is).
They need to be 12’ across, and since I can’t begin to compute what a professional would charge for such monstrous curtains, I took myself off to the fabric shops to spend a fortune in saving money and doing it myself.
Cheltenham soon proved itself to be pretty dire. The big place has a new boss which has resulted in all the old staff being near to tears and snippy with each other, indulging in a “me, sir, me sir” jostling of one upmanship.
“Carol!” said one guy loudly and reprovingly, “Rolls!” he indicated with a bony finger the endless rolls of fabric left behind by Carol in pursuit of furnishing me with various quarter metres (I have “ideas” for these garage curtains which is calling for much crossing of fingers and purchase of quarter metres).
“’m with a customer, Jonathan!” Carol pointed out tartly, ‘customer’ clearly scoring over abandoned rolls.
Jonathan pursed his lips and ostentatiously set about reducing the discard mountain in a ‘we’ll say no more about it’ sort of way.
Carol rolled her eyes and stabbed at the till buttons.
But this was only scraps. I needed more, the base material.
So I found a shop with my favourite word in the window, “Sale.”
Inside I was ignored, not even a flicker of boredom inched my way. This suited me fine. But what was passing amusing was, on drawing near the desk, to realise that I had been so roundly ignored because the two assistants were bitching about ‘the warehouse.’ Whatever THAT is.
“Costs nothing to say hello,” Big and Brunette was saying, wide-eyed, scarcely able to countenance the bad manners of others.
Old and Knackered Colleague shook her head in a would you believe it sort of way, “Manners don’t cost,” she agreed. “That Fiona! Honestly!”
“Just oils the wheels,” said B&B smugly, hoicking up her impressive busty substances. “Dun’t take much.”
I tried to fix them with a bit of a Look, but it wasn’t going to happen, not to a mere customer. Not when there was someone to slag off.
It was clear that I needed to go down the M5, batter the purse and kill a couple of hours in John Lewis.
I popped the dog in the boot and set off.
Upstairs I found more bits and pieces, and a woman in the queue, baffled by my random selection, asked what I was up to, so I explained, and she seemed interested, and then we discussed the pink and yellow bags she was making for her granddaughters. Twins of 4, very hard work. And then the till woman laughed that she couldn’t sew for tuppence, and stabbed herself on a pin-cushion as if in illustration and laughed again, only more manically and looking around anxiously for a plaster.
Downstairs, in what they call Fab F, I finally found my base material, not perfect (obviously) but it will do.
As the short and stout maiden, with the tape measure slung busily round her neck, made the shearing scissored cut – somewhere around 15 metres in – I said, “Not that I’m going to, but what would happen if I said I’d changed my mind?”
S&S frowned.
“I mean, would you call Security, or what?”
“We trust our customers,” S&S said bleakly. Then, despite herself, “Why d’you ask that?”
“I just wondered,” I said, “well, just making conversation.”
“We have all sorts of customers,” she said, “I’d put you in the patient category, I saw you standing there, waiting. You should see some of them. Men usually. Won’t wait when you’re measuring. Get cross, threaten to complain. I take no notice, but I tell them, I say, ‘I’m busy,’ I say, ‘you’ll have to wait.”
I felt unduly flattered at having secured her approval. You don’t get comment, let alone something one could fashion as praise, however dull, as an adult and it’s always strange to realise that you have been noticed and categorised.
A young lad staggered out to the car with my rolls of material. We chatted about his spider collection (27 glass cases; first one bought when 7; spiders cost £20 when small, £150 when big; they live for 9 years. He let one out. Once. )
“Have you got a girlfriend?” I asked.
“We’re about to move in together,” he said, “I’ve got to get rid of the spiders, re-home them.”
“Don’t look at me, I said, “In fact, I wouldn’t have let you even touch the material if I’d known where those hands have been.”
He gave me an empty ‘my girlfriend’s like that’ look. His long spider-lite life lay ahead of him.
I got home and smuggled the material in. E was there so I launched into a distraction chat, planning how I could pretend that the material had Always Been There. He cleared his throat, cranking his vocal chords into action.
“I haven’t talked to anyone all day,” he said.
“How come?” I said puzzled, wondering if he had a bit of florist in him, “It’s impossible not to.”
He shrugged. “No one came down my end of the office.”
Just as E will buy the first pair of shoes he sees, if they fit and he likes them whereas I feel an instinctive horror at not exhausting every possibility at least twice. Round and round the shops, in trudging indecisive horror, to arrive back where I started three hours later.
A waste of time, perhaps, but at least you know. He says he doesn’t need to ‘know’, or doesn’t need to prove that he already ‘knew’.
And then it gets complicated.
I don’t, though, have much trouble with service. My experience, as a kind and caring individual, tells me that it’s those who invite it who always get the surly waitress, the offhand Postie, the Bored Saturday Shop Girl.
Besides, I’ve worked in shops and bars and, God, does the time drag. So, if a reluctant menial is a bit arsey, I tend to be grateful that it’s mere disdain coming my way and not a session with an Uzi because, let’s face it, day after day folding jumpers or looking in the back for a “Capri” in “heather” in a size 5, and having it drilled into you that the poxy customer is always right must do your head in.
The florist, however, had perfected rude brevity; I was both shocked and impressed. The haiku would be a tedious epic poem to her. Her grudging articulations of sound, vowel-less txt spk, were wrapped in cushions of cross silence, pauses I felt obliged to pack with foolish guff.
“So you do make button-holes?” I was on the phone to her and had got nowhere.
“ …….ys …….”
“And, er, is it better to order them, or just turn up on the day and hope …”
“ ….rdr ….”
“OK, um, is there a book, or photos, I could look at, before I decide and …?”
“…. N ….. ‘s rss r c’nashns.”
Mr Ambassador, you spoil us.
I drove to the shop, giving her the benefit of the doubt, that she might be a phone-phobic princess, and also intrigued to see if she really was as bad in person as she was on the blower. She was.
I decided not to buy and felt quite rebellious. Normally I am so well-behaved that I feel obliged to stump up just because I’ve walked in.
I asked if she sold florists’ wire and tape.
“ ….n ….” And then, in an uncharacteristic splurge of speech but still hammering home the Can’t Sell Won’t Sell stance, “Tks p 2 mch rm.”
A sign saying “Keep the Village Alive, Support Your Local Traders” banged on the door on my way out.
So I took me to the Garden Centre and, between such horticultural necessities as puffy hot water bottles and ceramic hedgehogs in amusing poses, I encountered a little display (tkng p v ltl rm actually) boasting all that the amateur florist could need.
And then I did my Little Red Hen act and came up with these.
Being impecunious, and flushed with success having made some bizarre curtains for the sitting room in strips of silk (the lighting's a bit odd here),
I have decided to have a go at another set.This time for the garage.
(“You must stop calling it the garage,” said my dog-walking friend, “you must call it the library.” This is a woman whose idea of fun is 3 fitness classes on the bounce, so ‘garage’ it is).
They need to be 12’ across, and since I can’t begin to compute what a professional would charge for such monstrous curtains, I took myself off to the fabric shops to spend a fortune in saving money and doing it myself.
Cheltenham soon proved itself to be pretty dire. The big place has a new boss which has resulted in all the old staff being near to tears and snippy with each other, indulging in a “me, sir, me sir” jostling of one upmanship.
“Carol!” said one guy loudly and reprovingly, “Rolls!” he indicated with a bony finger the endless rolls of fabric left behind by Carol in pursuit of furnishing me with various quarter metres (I have “ideas” for these garage curtains which is calling for much crossing of fingers and purchase of quarter metres).
“’m with a customer, Jonathan!” Carol pointed out tartly, ‘customer’ clearly scoring over abandoned rolls.
Jonathan pursed his lips and ostentatiously set about reducing the discard mountain in a ‘we’ll say no more about it’ sort of way.
Carol rolled her eyes and stabbed at the till buttons.
But this was only scraps. I needed more, the base material.
So I found a shop with my favourite word in the window, “Sale.”
Inside I was ignored, not even a flicker of boredom inched my way. This suited me fine. But what was passing amusing was, on drawing near the desk, to realise that I had been so roundly ignored because the two assistants were bitching about ‘the warehouse.’ Whatever THAT is.
“Costs nothing to say hello,” Big and Brunette was saying, wide-eyed, scarcely able to countenance the bad manners of others.
Old and Knackered Colleague shook her head in a would you believe it sort of way, “Manners don’t cost,” she agreed. “That Fiona! Honestly!”
“Just oils the wheels,” said B&B smugly, hoicking up her impressive busty substances. “Dun’t take much.”
I tried to fix them with a bit of a Look, but it wasn’t going to happen, not to a mere customer. Not when there was someone to slag off.
It was clear that I needed to go down the M5, batter the purse and kill a couple of hours in John Lewis.
I popped the dog in the boot and set off.
Upstairs I found more bits and pieces, and a woman in the queue, baffled by my random selection, asked what I was up to, so I explained, and she seemed interested, and then we discussed the pink and yellow bags she was making for her granddaughters. Twins of 4, very hard work. And then the till woman laughed that she couldn’t sew for tuppence, and stabbed herself on a pin-cushion as if in illustration and laughed again, only more manically and looking around anxiously for a plaster.
Downstairs, in what they call Fab F, I finally found my base material, not perfect (obviously) but it will do.
As the short and stout maiden, with the tape measure slung busily round her neck, made the shearing scissored cut – somewhere around 15 metres in – I said, “Not that I’m going to, but what would happen if I said I’d changed my mind?”
S&S frowned.
“I mean, would you call Security, or what?”
“We trust our customers,” S&S said bleakly. Then, despite herself, “Why d’you ask that?”
“I just wondered,” I said, “well, just making conversation.”
“We have all sorts of customers,” she said, “I’d put you in the patient category, I saw you standing there, waiting. You should see some of them. Men usually. Won’t wait when you’re measuring. Get cross, threaten to complain. I take no notice, but I tell them, I say, ‘I’m busy,’ I say, ‘you’ll have to wait.”
I felt unduly flattered at having secured her approval. You don’t get comment, let alone something one could fashion as praise, however dull, as an adult and it’s always strange to realise that you have been noticed and categorised.
A young lad staggered out to the car with my rolls of material. We chatted about his spider collection (27 glass cases; first one bought when 7; spiders cost £20 when small, £150 when big; they live for 9 years. He let one out. Once. )
“Have you got a girlfriend?” I asked.
“We’re about to move in together,” he said, “I’ve got to get rid of the spiders, re-home them.”
“Don’t look at me, I said, “In fact, I wouldn’t have let you even touch the material if I’d known where those hands have been.”
He gave me an empty ‘my girlfriend’s like that’ look. His long spider-lite life lay ahead of him.
I got home and smuggled the material in. E was there so I launched into a distraction chat, planning how I could pretend that the material had Always Been There. He cleared his throat, cranking his vocal chords into action.
“I haven’t talked to anyone all day,” he said.
“How come?” I said puzzled, wondering if he had a bit of florist in him, “It’s impossible not to.”
He shrugged. “No one came down my end of the office.”
Friday, 23 January 2009
not for me
Catty languished on the pillow. Flu, apparently. F10 was most solicitous. He and Catty’s New Best Friend, a lambswool ceiling duster from IKEA, bore down heavily on the patient. Crowding him, some might say. The san was growing claustrophobic. F10 announced that he had to stay off school to look after Catty. Catty, a stuffed toy of indeterminate colour looked quite desperate; if his whiskers hadn’t have been chewed off in an earlier session of tough love, they would have twitched.
I intervened. I said that ill cats had to swim to Japan to get their medicine (where DO these lies you tell come from?) and that if F wanted to go with him, then he wouldn’t be back in time for karate. F10, while sensing a con, trudged off with the ceiling duster to get ready for school and Catty gave me a big fat thumbs up and prepared for a day’s dossing. We cancelled the swim to Japan.
I dumped the lad, his clarinet and karate suit, all 3 at school and took me into Cheltenham. Mrs Northern Posh had made a killing in the week at Per Una, snaffling a three piece outfit for £7 and a fine jacket and scarf for a fiver. I had high hopes which, in the way of all high hopes, were doomed to be dashed. The sale rail was in a far and inauspicious corner and fear became fact when it was found that the rewards for the tardy bargain hunter were few.
A bikini bottom, jade, size 22. Even the £2 price tag couldn’t tempt me down that particular road of madness.
Nor could the lone bikini top, in a cheerful Hawaiian print and shaped in an optimistic bandeau style. Size unknown but, to the untutored eye, about 56 MM. It was not to be mine. Everything else was oddly slippery and seriously undesirable, so I queued instead for 20 minutes to return a jumper I’d bought for T12 which had lasted all of 2 days. I then spent an hour in search of a groovy but cheap backpack for him and sort of triumphed in Animal but it was a dull morning made duller still by the chill memory of Mrs NP’s crowing.
The only thing which comes even half way near to being called a "win" was snaffling a load of pooperscooper bags free from the library. Libraries multi-task these days.
If shopping is an utter waste of time, then so is catering. First it was peanuts on the naughty stair, then kiwi fruits were public enemy number 2 and suddenly, Heimlich manoeuvre was being worked into every sentence. A note came back from school urging us to cut grapes in half. Indeed it was worded in a “for the very few who don’t already…” sort of way. It seems that grapes choke, chaps, and the tyranny of the lunchbox is made more tortuous still, slaloming round the banned list and now the cutting up of grapes. Careful with that knife, Eugene.*
It’s only a matter of time before they demand of us parents, carers and guardians that the food is all pre-masticated and from there but a step before it’s liquidized or mashed into tablet-form.
But it’s not just at junior level that the fun’s been sucked out of food.
I had had the meeting of my second book group last night. It was a massive waste of being a host when I could have been the driver since E and I don’t drink in January, but I got in a load of wine for the others and was stunned that between them they got through but one bottle. Yes, one bottle. Surely my temporary sobriety cannot alone account for the quartering of consumption? The apple & mango and cranberry & pomegranate were hit hard though which all seems a bit dismal and I rose bright and beady (safe from Catty’s flu) rather than semi-destroyed and wondering, with a Magda** gloom, if my wild days were behind me. Battling with a tetrapak not being the same at all as cheerful grappling with a corkscrew. Still, the thing is, it’s so easy not drinking. Something, up there with “Let’s get another puppy,” that I thought I’d never say.
Last night was the first time that I fully realised just how annoying they all are. That’s the absence of rose-tinting wine for you.
Remembering that at least one was a vegetarian, I had cleverly ensured that all the small bits and pieces on plates, canapés if you must, were meat free. The room we sat in is stygian by night, meaning a minefield of stray sausage rolls, however amusing the reaction, was always going to be a no-no. So, there were olives and smart crisps and then I assembled little smoked salmon and cream cheese on blinis and some half price cranberry and brie pastry things. Lolly showed a fine interest, bustling near, an ill-chosen bridesmaid, eager but incompetent, breathing hell-hound fumes on all and sundry. Bearing my laden plates, I anticipated an eager clamour and the unseemly reach of greedy human paws. Instead of which, little hands of horror were being shown, small traffic warden stop signs placed up to ward off the evils of my offerings.
One, it transpired hated cheese (what!), another hated fish, a third wouldn’t eat on Thursdays***, and only Mrs NP and I were what I would call normal, a pairing which shows that things have come to a pretty pass. So she, me and the vegetarians and Lolly ate the lot and I tried not to roll my eyes excessively.
It concerns me sometimes how intolerant and fierce I can get. I think it boils down to laziness. I want the chat bit without the pfaff.
In a few days time, we have a dinner party with another lot of foible-heavy friends. Dearest people all, but another vegetarian, naturally, casting a meat-free blight on proceedings, and across the table from her will sit another fish-hater. I thought it was a woman thing all of this, but no, one of the men has murmured that he hates pasta. How can you hate pasta? Not that I’m an unsympathetic soul, I think you know that by now, but it only remains to get on the blower to the coeliac and the one who’s dairy-intolerant (whatever the fuck THAT is) to have a full house of dietary unstables boasting a shared interest in quinoa. I'm not beyond the odd reasonable fad myself: never will I be in the queue for lights, brains or knuckles, for instance, and I flinch at the thought of the foul filth clatter which is quaintly dubbed seafood, but I force it down if it's put on a plate in front of me. I even say thank you. I've slurped soup and chomped on lamb, liking neither but one, erstwhile, friend actually puts in orders: don't like this, don't like that. Fuck Off, I think, while creepily complying and then having to self-loathe for being so wet.
Catty’s got the right idea, loll on a pillow and fake illness, even if an occupational hazard of being a stuffed animal in this house might involve swimming to Japan.
-----------------------
* I know it should be “Careful with that AXE, Eugene.” But, don’t be silly, you don’t halve grapes with axes
** Magda is a sullen cleaner in “Lead Balloon,” next to whom Eyeore exhibits a certain joie de vivre
*** Joke
I intervened. I said that ill cats had to swim to Japan to get their medicine (where DO these lies you tell come from?) and that if F wanted to go with him, then he wouldn’t be back in time for karate. F10, while sensing a con, trudged off with the ceiling duster to get ready for school and Catty gave me a big fat thumbs up and prepared for a day’s dossing. We cancelled the swim to Japan.
I dumped the lad, his clarinet and karate suit, all 3 at school and took me into Cheltenham. Mrs Northern Posh had made a killing in the week at Per Una, snaffling a three piece outfit for £7 and a fine jacket and scarf for a fiver. I had high hopes which, in the way of all high hopes, were doomed to be dashed. The sale rail was in a far and inauspicious corner and fear became fact when it was found that the rewards for the tardy bargain hunter were few.
A bikini bottom, jade, size 22. Even the £2 price tag couldn’t tempt me down that particular road of madness.
Nor could the lone bikini top, in a cheerful Hawaiian print and shaped in an optimistic bandeau style. Size unknown but, to the untutored eye, about 56 MM. It was not to be mine. Everything else was oddly slippery and seriously undesirable, so I queued instead for 20 minutes to return a jumper I’d bought for T12 which had lasted all of 2 days. I then spent an hour in search of a groovy but cheap backpack for him and sort of triumphed in Animal but it was a dull morning made duller still by the chill memory of Mrs NP’s crowing.
The only thing which comes even half way near to being called a "win" was snaffling a load of pooperscooper bags free from the library. Libraries multi-task these days.
If shopping is an utter waste of time, then so is catering. First it was peanuts on the naughty stair, then kiwi fruits were public enemy number 2 and suddenly, Heimlich manoeuvre was being worked into every sentence. A note came back from school urging us to cut grapes in half. Indeed it was worded in a “for the very few who don’t already…” sort of way. It seems that grapes choke, chaps, and the tyranny of the lunchbox is made more tortuous still, slaloming round the banned list and now the cutting up of grapes. Careful with that knife, Eugene.*
It’s only a matter of time before they demand of us parents, carers and guardians that the food is all pre-masticated and from there but a step before it’s liquidized or mashed into tablet-form.
But it’s not just at junior level that the fun’s been sucked out of food.
I had had the meeting of my second book group last night. It was a massive waste of being a host when I could have been the driver since E and I don’t drink in January, but I got in a load of wine for the others and was stunned that between them they got through but one bottle. Yes, one bottle. Surely my temporary sobriety cannot alone account for the quartering of consumption? The apple & mango and cranberry & pomegranate were hit hard though which all seems a bit dismal and I rose bright and beady (safe from Catty’s flu) rather than semi-destroyed and wondering, with a Magda** gloom, if my wild days were behind me. Battling with a tetrapak not being the same at all as cheerful grappling with a corkscrew. Still, the thing is, it’s so easy not drinking. Something, up there with “Let’s get another puppy,” that I thought I’d never say.
Last night was the first time that I fully realised just how annoying they all are. That’s the absence of rose-tinting wine for you.
Remembering that at least one was a vegetarian, I had cleverly ensured that all the small bits and pieces on plates, canapés if you must, were meat free. The room we sat in is stygian by night, meaning a minefield of stray sausage rolls, however amusing the reaction, was always going to be a no-no. So, there were olives and smart crisps and then I assembled little smoked salmon and cream cheese on blinis and some half price cranberry and brie pastry things. Lolly showed a fine interest, bustling near, an ill-chosen bridesmaid, eager but incompetent, breathing hell-hound fumes on all and sundry. Bearing my laden plates, I anticipated an eager clamour and the unseemly reach of greedy human paws. Instead of which, little hands of horror were being shown, small traffic warden stop signs placed up to ward off the evils of my offerings.
One, it transpired hated cheese (what!), another hated fish, a third wouldn’t eat on Thursdays***, and only Mrs NP and I were what I would call normal, a pairing which shows that things have come to a pretty pass. So she, me and the vegetarians and Lolly ate the lot and I tried not to roll my eyes excessively.
It concerns me sometimes how intolerant and fierce I can get. I think it boils down to laziness. I want the chat bit without the pfaff.
In a few days time, we have a dinner party with another lot of foible-heavy friends. Dearest people all, but another vegetarian, naturally, casting a meat-free blight on proceedings, and across the table from her will sit another fish-hater. I thought it was a woman thing all of this, but no, one of the men has murmured that he hates pasta. How can you hate pasta? Not that I’m an unsympathetic soul, I think you know that by now, but it only remains to get on the blower to the coeliac and the one who’s dairy-intolerant (whatever the fuck THAT is) to have a full house of dietary unstables boasting a shared interest in quinoa. I'm not beyond the odd reasonable fad myself: never will I be in the queue for lights, brains or knuckles, for instance, and I flinch at the thought of the foul filth clatter which is quaintly dubbed seafood, but I force it down if it's put on a plate in front of me. I even say thank you. I've slurped soup and chomped on lamb, liking neither but one, erstwhile, friend actually puts in orders: don't like this, don't like that. Fuck Off, I think, while creepily complying and then having to self-loathe for being so wet.
Catty’s got the right idea, loll on a pillow and fake illness, even if an occupational hazard of being a stuffed animal in this house might involve swimming to Japan.
-----------------------
* I know it should be “Careful with that AXE, Eugene.” But, don’t be silly, you don’t halve grapes with axes
** Magda is a sullen cleaner in “Lead Balloon,” next to whom Eyeore exhibits a certain joie de vivre
*** Joke
Friday, 14 November 2008
less is more
“As long as we’re alright for cheesy footballs, Ian, we can do without Twiglets.” A stout and purposeful arm, clanking with gold bracelets, which poked from a raggedy purple cardigan, stretched forward and toppled 3 tubes of cheesy footballs from the shelf into the basket on her knee, crushing a bumper pack of Wotsits already nestled in the bottom. There was a serious cheese-food-type-stuff deal going on here. This was a woman who knew what was what and was happy to speak her mind. “No-one goes a bundle on twiglets. Not these days. So that’s a no, Ian. Cherryade.”
I longed to linger, and feigned an alibi of interest in the wholesome biscuits on the dull side of the aisle, the one which no-one in our Tesco’s bothers with much.
Mr Wheelchair pusher, Ian, was about to enter the fray. It looked like he wasn’t ready for cherryade yet, indeed that he had a thing or two to say about Twiglets, and their place at the modern party; that, frankly, he was fed up with the whole Empowerment thing. Push your own chair, witch.
But I’ve noticed I’m not so good as I think I used to be at loitering unobtrusively. I’m afraid I stare, slack-jawed in fascination now. That fantastic certainty. It’s only a matter of time before I bring my own chair, or am actually squatting there, begging for the low-down, chipping in my tuppence-worth. My dark glasses are only so good as a disguise, they’re not quite the invisibility cloak I fondly imagine.
While I was down that end of the store, reluctant as I was to tear myself away, I thought I might as well get a present for T12’s friend, whose party it is tomorrow.
Ever the dilemma: to spend absolutely as little as possible while making it appear generous. To this end, I have tempting tussles with unsuitable items which attract but merely fulfil the cheap bit: Teach Yourself Typing DVD, anyone? or, venturing further afield, what’s more appealing than a bumper pack of sellotape for a pound, or value toner for the printer (dented packaging), or who can resist 3-for-2 on ankle socks? So what if they're pink; get over it. Surprising gifties perhaps for today's 12 year old boy, but, hey, I don’t know him. That's secondary school for you. All I do know is that I can’t mention it to Mrs NP since her boy’s not invited (the pressure, the potential for tears) and that this party represents 30 of the 90 miles E and I have to drive to and from Gloucester tomorrow. Rugby take. Rugby collect. Party. Hang around and wait. Sigh. I lament the good old days when all they cared about was the wrapping paper. Tears and tantrums and torn tissue.
It takes hours saving money, steering a path through the dross, but at least I can park. Although now I sound like my grandfather. If he wasn’t showing a touching interest in where we’d slung the motor, he was desperate to know when we were leaving; the two topics segueing into each other at close quarters, clashing clumsily like dodgems, leaving not much time in the middle to validate ones arrival. If we were feeling very cruel, we’d say, “Car? Can’t remember.” His sense of panic was palpable.
The football coach had trapped us at the school gate this morning, banging on about time management. Too late to get away, hampered by politeness, never quite sharp enough to turn a pause in the conversation into a gap big enough to leave in, I stood trying not to catch anyone’s eye. Manners are a pain in the neck.
“Only 168 hours in the week,” he announced, rocking on his heels. “Richard Branson doesn’t get any more. Never has. Doesn’t waste time on the EIRM, the Electronic Income Reducing Machine in the corner, see. The television,” he added, sensing our failure to get with the program. “40 hours a week the average person spends watching TV.”
“Well I do watch ‘Spooks’ AND ‘Top Gear’ on a Sunday,” the kind, dim mother offered anxiously.
He’d been on a course. The coach, not Richard Branson, or, God Forbid, DumbMum. Time Management. Loved it. He must be the only person in Britain happy on courses.
Nice but dim mother was frowning over the 168 hours bit.
"?"
“7 days x 24 hours,” I hissed helpfully.
Her frown deepened. “When?” she said.
“It’s all about HPOAs,” he said, warming to his theme.
We all looked blank.
“High Pay-Off Activities,” he explained. “Rather than,” he counted on his fingers, “LPOAs.”
We could all guess that one. Well, apart from the really dim mother, who cocked her head like Lolly.
Lolly was struggling with all this, too, mainly our inability to grasp bollocks when we could be out striding through horse shit, swapping one load of excrement for another. She could spot a Low Pay Off Activity before her nose, see time slipping through her paws. I feared she might start humping me, her idea of time well spent. Since being spayed, she has gender realignment issues. The carpenter suffered greatly yesterday.
“Basically you’ve got to delegate. Sort your goals, and delegate.“
There’s not much delegation goes on when you’re bottom of the food chain, where ‘goals’ boils down to Buy Oranges and Hang Up Washing. It’s chaps what go on courses and who learn to add up that get to grasp the right end of the delegation'n' goals stick. Still, a girl can try.
I mocked a handing over of Lolly’s lead to him, Sassy Welsh Mother from the PTA did the same with her bag of gubbins: 95,000,000 Pudseys to be cut out for Fun Activities this afternoon.
“Can’t hang around here chatting,” he said, demonstrating most admirably both closure and the refusal to be delegated himself.
I settled on a boxset of 3 DVDs for £6. Vaguely Boysy and one of which, ‘Happyness,’ was being sold separately for £8. Bargain. £2 saved, and just the 20 minutes wasted. That’s an episode of The Simpsons when it was on the BBC part of the EIRM.
I stood in the queue near enough to peer over at Ian and Mrs Purple Cardi. Cheesy footballs were spinning on the conveyor belt, jostling with hulking bottles of Cherryade. Despite the triumph of the passable DVD, I was made inexpressibly sad to see that no twiglets had made it.
----
The Maund is Dite means, of course, The Basket is Ready. Full of cheesy footballs and primed to party.
I longed to linger, and feigned an alibi of interest in the wholesome biscuits on the dull side of the aisle, the one which no-one in our Tesco’s bothers with much.
Mr Wheelchair pusher, Ian, was about to enter the fray. It looked like he wasn’t ready for cherryade yet, indeed that he had a thing or two to say about Twiglets, and their place at the modern party; that, frankly, he was fed up with the whole Empowerment thing. Push your own chair, witch.
But I’ve noticed I’m not so good as I think I used to be at loitering unobtrusively. I’m afraid I stare, slack-jawed in fascination now. That fantastic certainty. It’s only a matter of time before I bring my own chair, or am actually squatting there, begging for the low-down, chipping in my tuppence-worth. My dark glasses are only so good as a disguise, they’re not quite the invisibility cloak I fondly imagine.
While I was down that end of the store, reluctant as I was to tear myself away, I thought I might as well get a present for T12’s friend, whose party it is tomorrow.
Ever the dilemma: to spend absolutely as little as possible while making it appear generous. To this end, I have tempting tussles with unsuitable items which attract but merely fulfil the cheap bit: Teach Yourself Typing DVD, anyone? or, venturing further afield, what’s more appealing than a bumper pack of sellotape for a pound, or value toner for the printer (dented packaging), or who can resist 3-for-2 on ankle socks? So what if they're pink; get over it. Surprising gifties perhaps for today's 12 year old boy, but, hey, I don’t know him. That's secondary school for you. All I do know is that I can’t mention it to Mrs NP since her boy’s not invited (the pressure, the potential for tears) and that this party represents 30 of the 90 miles E and I have to drive to and from Gloucester tomorrow. Rugby take. Rugby collect. Party. Hang around and wait. Sigh. I lament the good old days when all they cared about was the wrapping paper. Tears and tantrums and torn tissue.
It takes hours saving money, steering a path through the dross, but at least I can park. Although now I sound like my grandfather. If he wasn’t showing a touching interest in where we’d slung the motor, he was desperate to know when we were leaving; the two topics segueing into each other at close quarters, clashing clumsily like dodgems, leaving not much time in the middle to validate ones arrival. If we were feeling very cruel, we’d say, “Car? Can’t remember.” His sense of panic was palpable.
The football coach had trapped us at the school gate this morning, banging on about time management. Too late to get away, hampered by politeness, never quite sharp enough to turn a pause in the conversation into a gap big enough to leave in, I stood trying not to catch anyone’s eye. Manners are a pain in the neck.
“Only 168 hours in the week,” he announced, rocking on his heels. “Richard Branson doesn’t get any more. Never has. Doesn’t waste time on the EIRM, the Electronic Income Reducing Machine in the corner, see. The television,” he added, sensing our failure to get with the program. “40 hours a week the average person spends watching TV.”
“Well I do watch ‘Spooks’ AND ‘Top Gear’ on a Sunday,” the kind, dim mother offered anxiously.
He’d been on a course. The coach, not Richard Branson, or, God Forbid, DumbMum. Time Management. Loved it. He must be the only person in Britain happy on courses.
Nice but dim mother was frowning over the 168 hours bit.
"?"
“7 days x 24 hours,” I hissed helpfully.
Her frown deepened. “When?” she said.
“It’s all about HPOAs,” he said, warming to his theme.
We all looked blank.
“High Pay-Off Activities,” he explained. “Rather than,” he counted on his fingers, “LPOAs.”
We could all guess that one. Well, apart from the really dim mother, who cocked her head like Lolly.
Lolly was struggling with all this, too, mainly our inability to grasp bollocks when we could be out striding through horse shit, swapping one load of excrement for another. She could spot a Low Pay Off Activity before her nose, see time slipping through her paws. I feared she might start humping me, her idea of time well spent. Since being spayed, she has gender realignment issues. The carpenter suffered greatly yesterday.
“Basically you’ve got to delegate. Sort your goals, and delegate.“
There’s not much delegation goes on when you’re bottom of the food chain, where ‘goals’ boils down to Buy Oranges and Hang Up Washing. It’s chaps what go on courses and who learn to add up that get to grasp the right end of the delegation'n' goals stick. Still, a girl can try.
I mocked a handing over of Lolly’s lead to him, Sassy Welsh Mother from the PTA did the same with her bag of gubbins: 95,000,000 Pudseys to be cut out for Fun Activities this afternoon.
“Can’t hang around here chatting,” he said, demonstrating most admirably both closure and the refusal to be delegated himself.
I settled on a boxset of 3 DVDs for £6. Vaguely Boysy and one of which, ‘Happyness,’ was being sold separately for £8. Bargain. £2 saved, and just the 20 minutes wasted. That’s an episode of The Simpsons when it was on the BBC part of the EIRM.
I stood in the queue near enough to peer over at Ian and Mrs Purple Cardi. Cheesy footballs were spinning on the conveyor belt, jostling with hulking bottles of Cherryade. Despite the triumph of the passable DVD, I was made inexpressibly sad to see that no twiglets had made it.
----
The Maund is Dite means, of course, The Basket is Ready. Full of cheesy footballs and primed to party.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
