Wednesday 16 June 2010

Us Brits are not supposed to be jolly about Nap Bonaparte - we are better trained, when hearing his name, to suck air through our lips as though sucking lemon and assume a disapproving face.  But he is credited with a lot of terribly clever quotations.  And one I came across recently suggested that if someone attacked you, the only fair thing to do is fight back.

Hmm.  I LIKE that, you know.

Anyone who knows the mad lines in which we have recently lived will also know I have not been adept at this fighting back thing; more at Turning T'other Cheek until my head spins on its axis. However.  However.  Someone told me recently (and I KNOW this is dodgy ground, this "she said that she said" thing that goes on, but even so, bear with me...) that it had been suggested that I "never got anything finished". Because I am "disorganised".

Pause for growling yowl of anger.

I am perhaps more paranoid than is normal, having been at the receiving end of accusatory rubbish for some time, BUT if ANYONE is to call me disorganised, in the same way that if anyone is to call my dog stupid,  then only I, and I alone, shall be the one to say it.

It's not that it isn't true.  I am terribly disorganised.  Perhaps because I like to cloak myself in so many tasks that eventual drowning in them is the only option.  So this led to me thinking of what I have achieved in the last 24 hours.  And at the risk of bragging (this is after all my blog, so why not) I think it's actually rather a lot. And so I'm blogging it.  Because since it's only me who reads this, I might like to look back at this in a month or so and think "oh golly, quite a lot did get done after all and what a pat on the back for me". Horrid conceit and all.

So.  In the last 24 hours I have:

1. Prepared very interesting (yes it IS) 2 hour session on prosody and meta-language in modern British English.

2. Contacted 3 old friends in Japan with long newsy and chatty emails after several years delay.
3. Organised team of 12 for dragonboat regatta.
4. Organised training session for the same, though that is meant to be a secret.
5. Created proof-type mock up of school cookbook.
6. Weeded school garden, planted mini orchard, 6 pumpkins and 12 tomatoes.
7. Taken dog on 2 x 5 mile runs
8. Made fish-and-preserved lemon tagine
9. Made Tom Yum from scratch
10. Learnt words to Brigitte Bardot's Moi Je Joue after request from 4 year old, omitting inappropriate "oooh plus fort!" bit at end.
11. Taken 2 children through Baa Baa Black Sheep Using Both Hands on piano, 4 times.
12. Cleansed dog of foxy faeces.
13. Cleansed hall carpet of same.
14. Learned 4 phrases in Thai as part of dastardly plan to surprise cousin at wedding next month.
15. Learned Deutchland Deutschland on accordion in response to request from friend who wants it next week.
16. Washed and dried 4 lifejackets
17. Scolded slugs lurking in greenhouse and removed to next door.
18. Amused builders with unexpected witticism.
19. Gone through final proof of website belonging to soon-to-be-launched business.
20. Applied for RHS funding for school garden.
21. Rescued abused frog from clutches of dog.
22. Looked up precise role of Chuchi Gangdruk in response to request from 5 year old who couldn't find Tibet on globe.
23. Sourced clay and clay oven building plans for Father's Day present this Sunday. (Dad, if you're reading, don't worry - it's not for you - it's from the kids to R.  You're getting a book)
24. Cut sleeves off winter shirts in attempt to create summer wardrobe without having to shop.
25. Marked 5 papers of varying ability on Latinate forms in formal English.
26.  And finally...created International Music Library on CDS for nursery



Forget washing, cooking and the rest.  Who says I never get anything done?
Raspberries INDEED!


Afterthought

And no, of COURSE I haven't washed my kitchen floor.  Because when I could have been doing THAT, I wrote this instead.  Everyone needs a bit of pointless timewasting after all...

Friday 14 May 2010

Where have all the ridiculous things gone?

The problem with living fairly permanently in the firing line of someone else's hatred (actually, undeserved hatred - I can say that, can't I? It IS undeserved...) is that eventually it all begins to seep in.  And this can make you very tired indeed.

I miss irrepressible joy.

And since I am unlikely to be near my beautifully escapist boogie board for a while, I think perhaps to answer is to try and seek out the ridiculous, because it seems to me that when you feel like this, it stops finding YOU.



This is an old one, but it works every time.  Every time.

Sunday 9 May 2010

I couldn't resist it...

Bringing back a positive note to the blog, after my slight diversion into diatribe...

It will also be a test as to whether R really does read my blog or not.

If he does, we will soon have A Conversation on Unnecessary Purchases Towards the End of the Month...

And if he doesn't, I shall just pop it up on the wall one day this week and say "What?  That old thing?"

I think I deserve it.

Keep Calm Gallery. Lots of fun to be had.

Friday 7 May 2010

Stop. Please just stop.

The time has come, the walrus said...But not the walrus, actually.  Me.  The time has come, I think, to respond.

Years of constant abuse, harassment, lies, conjecture, tears, hysterics and yep, occasional violence (didn't you try to kick my back door down?) and what have I EVER done?  Nothing.  I have NEVER responded.  I have never answered back.  You have had nothing but my silence and my willingness to have you back in my life, time and time again, whenever YOU have decided that equilibrium can be restored.  I have never, not once, demanded apology, qualification or explanation. And do you know how hard that is?  After everything you have said and done? No.  Of course you don't.  Why would you ever know that?

But you must now allow me some brief response.

I have a file on my computer called HORRID.  That is where I store all your emails of poison and accusation. I know they are there and just seeing the file makes me bilious.  But I have never answered any of them.

But hey, lets look through them. Lets look at what you have accused me of.  Lies, conceit, viciousness and self-serving cruelty seems to be the common theme, and yet - oh -  there are no actual examples to back these up. Sluttishness, sloth, avarice and gluttony also crop up with amazing regularity. And attempted murder, once. You remind me with startling regularity how my friends hate me, how my family despair of me, how my husband fears and detests me and, oh delightfully, how my late mother would have been so very ashamed of me. Again and again and again.

However, what strikes me now, is that you have never, ever accused me of stupidity.

Why is that?  Why have you never thought to call me stupid? Are you put off by my languages, my instruments, my ability to cook and garden, the nature of my job?  The fact that I am not fazed by the states of America or the geographical location of Bhutan? Is it because you actually think that I am NOT stupid?

Because here I do not agree with you. Naturally I refute all the other accusations (with the perhaps exception of sluttishness around the house, but I am SORRY - I will not give my life over to housework). But - look! - there is a gaping hole.  You SHOULD add stupidity to the list.  Can you not see it?

I have been so glaringly stupid. Stupid in my failure to answer back, in my being so utterly mistaken in thinking respect for others is more important than defending myself. And most of all, MOST of all, prodigious, unmitigated stupidity in the hours of my life I have given over to worrying whether ANY of the vitriolic imputations you have launched my way could in any way be true.

To have allowed you into my mind? THERE is the real stupidity.

And so now you are calling my friends to inform them - (no WARN them, wasn't that what you said?) - of my perfidious, nasty, lowliving nature.  My lack of integrity.  My odious cruelty.  My ever-corroding mental state. And to regale them with a host of things you insist I have done but which we both KNOW have never been my actions, but yours. We could of course label this as blatant defamation, but lets leave that as a technicality for now.

What do you not understand?  They are my FRIENDS.  They are not going to be influenced with a rambling anihilation of my character .  They know me as I AM, and not as you so dearly wish I could be.

So here is an idea. Don't waste your time with all of that.  Instead, tell them this.  Tell them I am indeed stupid. Really, truly, indubitably STUPID. Tell them I have put up with you and your incessant bullying for years. Tell them I have kept much of it a secret because I believed you could not help it, and perhaps were not quite in control.  That I have clung to the failing shreds of sympathy that no one could be in their right mind to do what you do. Tell them how often I have turned my back on what I have KNOWN to be right, merely to keep YOU from flying into one of your campaigns of persecution, because they are so horrendous for everyone.


So indeed I have been stupid. Rip up the old list because it is so full of falsification, and begin anew.  I've even given you a start now.


AND NOW WILL YOU PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONE?

How many languages do you want that in?  (I have five.)

Tuesday 4 May 2010

"I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.” (Churchill)

I was part of a rather coxcombical conversation recently where everyone urged everyone else to Take Pleasure in The Moment, to Digest the Here and Now and to See Joy in Small Things. Etc. You can find happiness, gratification and comfort when you least expect it, went the general theme. It was, to be very truthful, not massively my kind of conversation,  but - fain to deny it - there is within its cliche a point worth the making.

In view of this, then, I can hardly describe the excessive happiness-gratification-comfort I found in one small moment this morning, on the school run, in the sight of the local recycling collectors in a knee-bent struggle with my friends' recycling box.  "Heave HO" one puffed, delightfully for me, as they staggered, weaving under it's clinking and clanking weight in a desperate zig-zag towards the truck, where the crashing cascade of a week's worth of wine bottles resonated up the lane behind me and my mirth.

There was certainly happiness to be found in the spectacle, but even this was outdone by waves of gratification.  Gratification that other people as well spend a fortune they probably haven't got on wine.  And yep, comfort too.  Comfort in the idea that when my pickled-pink liver and I shuffle sheepishly towards a frowning St Peter at my end (my premature end, as this government would no doubt remind me, while wagging a nannyish finger towards its haloed guideline of 14 units a week), then at least I should have a boozy buddy or two to meet me there.

So. Thank you to my supportively intemperate friends for jolly good 30 minute chuckle, which took me all through the stacking of the dishwasher and into a good ten minutes of Women's Hour.  Lovely.



(Cartoon from the rather super Jackie Fleming.  Always worth a look)

Thursday 29 April 2010

"The dog is a gentleman: I hope to go to his heaven, not man's" (Twain)

Some years back, an vehemently vigorous boxer came from the RSPCA to live with my parents, ostensibly as Housedog but more realistically as Houseguest, and a highly pampered one at that.

The reason for her arrival was justified, somewhat weakly, (my parents had always had dogs, after all, and were merely trying to be sensible by not getting another one) by the fact that some revolting little toe-scum had just burgled their house. With this in mind, the main job description of the dog was then, in actual fact, defence.  The dog herself  however was not troubled by such contractual detail and within hours of arrival had changed her duties to Lying Around and being Excessively Petted. 

She ingrained herself into the very heart of the family without real effort, sealing our affections with a tongue that wouldn't quite fit into her mouth.  We were all pretty much devoted.  Indeed one of my Japanese friends once noted, with unchecked horror, "You and R both walked in, fell on the floor with the dog and rolled around hugging her before you'd even greeted your parents!".  True, and I don't think any of us had found this unusual.

Anyway, after a while, my mother, who had pretty much turned a blind eye to this dog's mickey-taking on House Rules (which, frankly, would have had the souls of our other, more toeing-the-line pets spinning affrontedly in their graves) decided that the least this loafing canine could do to earn her keep would be to bark when the doorbell rang.  The dog disagreed with my mother on this, in the same way as she had successfully disagreed that Dogs Should Not be Allowed On the Sofa in the Dining Room. She would certainly shoulder-charge her 7 stone frame to the door and invariably get there first.  But then she would merely stand, wagging her entirety with irrepressible boxer-delight at thoughts of visitors, thick streams of excited saliva swinging from each grinning jowl.  But bark she would not.

However, my mother stayed very firm.  Thieving Scum Burglar types who rang the doorbell were to be left in no doubt - inside prowled a huge, gruff and not-to-be-irked dog.  So she decided to implement her own Door Training with the dog.  This meant, for some months, whenever you knocked, you had to wait. What you could hear, from the outside, was the skidding scuffle of joy as the dog headbutted the door to greet you, followed by the more sedate footsteps of my mother. There would be a brief silence, then an "oooh" of exertion, as my mother would bend to be at dog eye level. There then followed a whole array of my mother's woof-woofs- from insistent descant yelps, to low threatening growls, all interspersed with cajouling -  "come on",  and "like that", -  which became increasingly more irritated until finally  "oh I give up" would signal the end of the recital. Then sounds of my mother pulling herself up again, and at this point the door would  open, and  polite words of welcome would be completely drowned out by the throaty WAAAAHHHH of the dog's grateful greeting as she leapt delightedly with paws splayed towards your head, the slimy, splattering tentacles of spit gripping firmly to your face.  My friend L once said it could, quite possibly, put one off calling at all.  Fortunately, it was around that time that they invented Skype.

I'm not sure the point ever did get through, and whether this was down to pure obstinance on the part of the dog or simply the fact that she (the dog again) was not hindered by trainable wit, I don't know.  In the end, we all kind of just let her off because she was the daftest, most amusingly faithful company you could ask for.

As to why this particular memory has accompanied me on my journey around the dishwasher-washingmachine-and-tumble-drier track today, it's simply because I came across (or more truthfully, R showed me) this.  I think this Australian gentleman actually puts my mother's efforts to shame.  And I have even just showed my current dog, the very comfortable viszla, for her reaction.  But she has just looked at me and gone back to sleep (on the expensive beanbag we actually bought for the kids).

Monday 19 April 2010

Since we're all talking about planes...

I am not a fan of aeroplanes, though I do like the bit where they get you to somewhere else.  It's the part in the sky I don't like. I have a couple of friends who are pilots, and one of them is especially enterprising in finding clever ways to chuckle at me and my irrational fear. As a military-turned-commercial pilot himself, he naturally doesn't share my freakish nambiness about planes,( although a rather fun scenario if he did, surely: "Cabin crew prepare for take off, wooooooooo-aaahhhhhhhhh ... ".  He should fake this, on his last day.) I once phoned him in a blue funk just before boarding for a longhaul, and got told, with audible relish, "Hmmm, it WILL probably be fine - the only really dangerous bit is take off. And landing." Anyway, last summer, we sat over several bottles as he regaled me with stories of  "really scary flightpaths".  With full knowledge that I have to fly there every February if I want to ski, he went sly and decided the Scariest of them all was Definitely Innsbruck.  "It's a bit tricky to find a clear path through the mountains," he said, eyes alight with faked awe "Even the pilots who are specially trained to do it just close their eyes and hope."

Now.  Of course I know this isn't true.  But this year, as we screeched up through some vicious winds and skidded over the Alps on our way back home, his words replayed again in my head. I haven't told him yet, as I'm sure he would merely be wickedly delighted. 

On this particularly horrible occasion, the captain came over the intercom and said "Ooh, it might be a bit bumpy!"  and that is not what I want when flying out of Innsbruck.  I don't want a surprised sounding, young pilot using words like "oooh" and "bumpy". I want a relaxed-yet-serious pilot of almost fifty, whose voice reassures you of blue eyes and grey hair and a weekend tennis habit. He needs to be called James.  And he needs to use clever sounding adjectives, suggesting top level education and a well-read personality. I think this pilot said his name was Steve, and I'm sorry to all the Steves I know, but for me, that is absolutely No Good At All. (I mustn't even think about women pilots.  I still try to cling to the shreds of my  former feminist fervency, and they would not survive any admission that I would probably get off the plane ...).  All in all, I need to know the guy at the front in the slidy seat firstly fits my stereotype ideal, secondly really knows what he is doing and finally isn't going to do loops for a bit of a laugh.

You see, I can't be sure that all pilots wouldn't.  I'm not convinced that pilots don't have a very distinct naughty streak.  The ones I know certainly do. And on long flights there must surely be a lot of time for sitting back and scheming up japish pranks.   I've heard tales of a captain called Alistair who decided to announce himself more gutturally as Ali after 9/11 for "extra frisson". I know a pilot who sauntered out into the main cabin to pull up a bit of carpet and see whether the wheels were down, and then, after one of those brace-brace-brace landings (the ones they warn you of on those cards with the odd drawings of smiling people about to crash) he said he thought the passengers who'd talked to the press about their near-death horror flight must have been a "bit drippy".  So either pilots are cut from  much sterner stuff than us, or they are genuinely just rattling with loosened screws.

In any case, I can imagine my devilish pilot-friend-in-the-north doing something like this.  You know who you are.

Wednesday 14 April 2010

Clever mouse.

Dammit, I let Blog Critic get between me and my blog.  And the Easter Holidays too.  But it was mostly Blog Critic.  He caught me off-guard with a bit of slick sardonicism about the Manicured Promotion of Oneself via Blog, and I suddenly lost the urge.  I don't know why, because he's been saying it since it started, but anyway - somehow he caught me in an over-sensitive, overly introspective moment, brought on by who knows what.  Well, we all know what, but it can't be blogged and hohum to that. On top of that,  it IS difficult to think about anything at all when you are hiding eggs, gooing over lambs, building dens and refereeing squabbles; not to say that these aren't terribly valid acitivities, it's just that for a few weeks now, me and my blog have been ships that passed.  Which doesn't matter at all, at all, at all - it was only ever supposed to be  for, er, letting off steam that may have collected in Other Areas, and indeed as soon as I stopped, I found I have missed forcing myself to think.  It's certainly a way of, shall we say, controlling the demons. 


It's funny when the thoughts strike though.  Yesterday, R was all in indignation.  A particularly devious mouse, it appeared, has been sneaking into the greenhouse and nicking the seeds out of his newly planted pots without leaving any trace of the crime.  This last point, I think, is what gets R's gander most.  He can understand that our wildliving friends will garden alongside us, but he doesn't like to be tricked by what is vermin. Poor mouse is for it now.  The greenhouse is awash with lurking traps and hidden poison. I can't bring myself to go in, as to be confronted by the squirming remains of an ex-mouse doesn't strike me as very Eastery and, in consequence, the poor seedlings are now victims of both trickery and drought.

There is a thought-link from all this however. Slightly a tenuous one but still a link of sorts.  Because it brought me back to Mao's Sparrow Cull. I am always intrigued by the bizarrer parts of Mao's grip on poor China, and I do wonder whether his campaign against the four pests was perhaps the Crown Stealer of them all.  I once met an elderly gentleman on a train in Hunan who once told me he had taken part in the Great Sparrow Cull and had been smacked for not killing enough. He even demonstrated the smack for me - a great ringing clap across his cheek. I was fairly stunned and so we drank beer together. Anyway, in brief: Mao decided early on in the Great Leap Forward that there were four pests in China which were being especially naughty; rats, flies, sparrows and mozzies. Indeed, the sparrows in particular were showing real capitalist roader instincts by sitting around all day eating the workers' crops. So, the whole country was sent out to Kill the Sparrows, which they did with guns, catapults and generally the banging of saucepans under trees until the poor things crashed down in exhaustion.  People then paraded their little feathery corpses to the town hall and were publically praised for a good killing (Good Communist!) and denounced for a poor show (Possible Capitalist or Imperialist Bastard!) The upshot of which was, of course, that the locusts sat back and rubbed their little locust feet with glee before Feasting Unpecked with pesty relish on all the crops; at which point everyone said "Whoops" and began to starve. Except Mao, natch.

And, what do you know, of COURSE footage of this is on youtube!



Sure, it's not funny, not in any sense, but it is mesmerising and definitely worth seeing.  Maybe I'll show it in the garden too.  Bit of a warning.  That sort of thing...

Wednesday 17 March 2010

Mr Khil Kills Me.

Ok, I know I'm behind the times, and The Times, so slow have I been to catch on to this.  Annoyingly, R put it on Otterzen last week, which means I am also laying myself open to some very satisfied comments on, for example, my willingness to follow his lead.

But I can't help it. It's so, so funny.

I was chatting with a Slovakian gentlemen this week, who was of the firm and tearful opinion  that that damn perestroika was the beginning of the end for the Eastern Bloc.  The Soviets weren't perfect, he said, but they were better than this lot (reference to current Slovakian government, about which I know absolutely nothing) and we had a lot more fun.  Since one does not often hear Soviet-style communism credited with fun (at least, for those outside of the joint-jumping Kremlin), I was surprised.

But now I'm not.  If they had people like Eduard Khil lololling across their screens every night, I too would have spent the Cold War in absolute stitches.

According to The Times, Mr Khil has been pleasantly surprised by his new-found fame and is certain that the "rich orchestral arrangement" (which they'd used to distract from a complete lack of lyrics, this being the easiest way to get things past state censors) is the secret of its success.

Hmmm.  I'm not entirely sure I noticed the rich arrangement at all.  But in any case, it IS good to know it wasn't all doom and gloom behind the Iron Curtain, isn't it?

I defy you not to laugh.


Tuesday 16 March 2010

Natsukashiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

A friend of mine, who doesn't own a huge ginger mastiff, recently brought one round for supper.  We were chatting hard enough not to notice that it had wandered upstairs and had eventually found its way into the bathroom, where R had absolutely not been expecting it.  The memory of his yell has kept me going in uncontrollable chuckling for weeks. 

However, when I was still giggling into the fifth week, someone gently reprimanded me for my "puerile English humour".

I'm not sure that English humour can be described as a single concept, nor whether it be truly fair to call it puerile.  But if it is, then we are in good company with the Japanese.


What price occasional puerility at the end of a day?! I miss Japan.

Monday 15 March 2010

Mothering Sunday: what a super idea.

Who says it's wrong to be smug?

I was delightfully spoiled for Mothering Sunday yesterday: by ten o'clock I was perfectly Eggs-Benedicted up and sitting in the school church to see the oldest sing at the Mothering Sunday service.  It was a beautiful spring morning and the pews were full of the beatific smiles of mothers who hadn't had to cook breakfast.

The children had been busy; they had firstly learnt a song which went "Don't be grumpy, Don't you spoil the fun" to a jolly, rhythmic little tune, which does stay in your head (though I've heard it quite a bit this week- the youngest has been singing it with casual pointedness after any remonstration).  But anyway, looking at them lined up in their uniforms, faces creased with determination to remember the words and sing their best, it was a perfect song and you really couldn't imagine being grumpy with them ever again.

But sometimes, you can't help it; the tiniest dash of wry cynicism can come nipping into any occasion.

"Thank you God for Mummies..." it began and the congregation heaved a collective Ahhhh.  Really very sweet.  But the next verse made my eyebrows sit up a little.  "Thank you God for Nannies..."  it went on.

Hmmm... 

"They do mean grandmas" my pew neighbour reassured me in a whisper.

I'm sure they did. You never know though.  This is Surrey, after all...

Friday 12 March 2010

"Ugly goes clean to the bone"

 No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly. Oscar Wilde


I am spitting proverbial chips.


We have in our little friendly town a  healthclub.  The constant push for new members displayed on banners outside is testament to the fact that healthclubs and recessions are not the best bedfellows; indeed, it seems to have met the economic downturn in the fashion of Oops-We're-Getting-A-Bit-Grotty. Still, the posters insist all is, apparently, Better Now.  The swimming pool has had a lick of paint. They've removed the lacerating tiles from the showers.  That sort of thing. Lovely.

However.

I was given, for my birthday, a voucher to use in the spa.  Now, it is not the useful kind of spa, where you can have fun in mud and plunge daringly into icy pools, but a beauty spa.  Where they paint your nails and rip your hair out and stuff. I am not really a beauty spa kind of person, surprising at that might seem to those of you who know me for my dedication to glamorous grooming (lets be clear - I write this in jeans and welly socks, with compost streaks across my hands and no doubt under my nails too and it genuinely doesn't bother me that much, really). And my beauty-spa-reluctance is not not just for financial reasons (how MUCH to rub salt into me?) but also because I find it somewhat eerie to spend an hour to the soundtrack of something panpipey. On top of that, you know, they actually do scare me a bit, these places. So I find I approach them with the same trepidation that I approach mechanics; knowing with dread that they are going to ask me something I absolutely don't understand  and roll their eyes, ever so faintly, at my ignorance.

But finally, (I shouldn't say it, I know, but I can't resist) in the case of this particular spa, I baulk somewhat at putting my appearance into the hands of "experts" who squint blankly at you from behind orangey skintones and clumpy eyelashes and tappy nails.  As a composite whole, it does not, I feel, bode well. A bit akin to a restaurant trying to attract custom by advertising rotten food. Or me trying to encourage my students by speaking to them in, say, Turkish. Miaow, I know, and, before anyone says it,  since my nails are now having a gleeful and unexpected outing,  it's almost a shame they are not manicured. But, anyway,  I digress.

I received a voucher for my birthday for said spa and I DID have every intention of using it.  After all, it would be something a bit different and for every panpipe moment you are in there, it is a moment you are not being shrieked upon and that, in itself, should make for a rather super hour.

I dug out said voucher today and noticed, horror of horrors, that it expired yesterday.  I thought it was 6 months from my birthday but no.  Yesterday.  "Don't worry," R said "You're a member who's spent a small fortune in there over the past 6 years.  They'll understand. It's only a day."

Of course they would, I thought, sensibly and gave them a call.

I got a receptionist.  She sighed.  "It's past its date, " she said.  "It's expired, like."

I was polite.  "It only expired yesterday and to be honest, we've had a few tricky months. And I am a member.  Is there anything you can do?"

I got sighed at again.  And then silence. I waited.

She eventually said, after another sigh, that she'd Ask the Spa Directly.  She Asked the Spa Directly and came back to tell me the Spa Said No, Directly.  I said, still politely, that I'd rather like to Ask the Spa Directly too, and received my 4th sigh. 

But she did at least put me through.  Where I got puffing sigh number 5.

"It's past its date," said Spa Manager, after I'd explained that it was, er, past its date.

"I understand that, but I thought it was six months from my birthday so..."

"It's past its date." (How does one write accent in Roman?  "Spast its dai'"  Like that, anyhow)

"Well only by a day. Is there nothing you can do?"


Sigh.  Tut.

"What's the reference number?"


I checked.  "There isn't one.  It's been left blank."

"SO 'ow do I know when it's been bought then?  If you 'aven't got a reference?"

"Sorry, do you mean it's ME that should have written a reference on this voucher when I, er, received it as a present?  A reference for your records?"

Tut.  And huff.  And another sigh



Patient Voice.  "Look. It's past its date.  If you take a voucher up Tescos and its past its date, you wouldn't get anyfink so why should we give you it?"

I pointed out that I do not actually pay Tesco 50 pounds a month; that I have not spent a small fortune over the past 6 years on creche and coffees, personal training and swimming lessons.  I have not recommended friends to spend THEIR money in Tesco and I am not someone Tesco should be keen to hang on to, while they sweat out a period of time when people really have no cash for their particular luxury.

"All right, Debenhams then."

I'm sorry?

I could go on here, but there's no point - the rest of the conversation continued in the same vein, with Spa lady being rigidly unhelpful and me scratching my head trying to understand WHY anyone would treat any customer with such blatant, basic derision.

Because it WASN'T the words she used or her bizarre comparisons to Tesco/Debenhams that made me so spikey under the collar.

It was the tone of sneering boredom. The agressive choice of "Look" as a sentence adverbial.  The tuts.  The sighs.  The slowing of speech in implication of my thickness. The fact that she made no apology for inflexibility and not one jot of effort to be friendly.  And, with my own tone of somewhat dumbstruck politeness maintained throughout, I hadn't even been rude.  Grrr to the woman.  Really.



I know we are not, as a nation, famed for our customer service, although granted, that depends on where you come from: I have American friends who despair of our unhelpfulness and Turkmen friends who profess themselves delighted by our eagerness to please. (Note to self - ask Turkmen friends where on earth they go shopping and go there myself)  But on a personal level at least, shouldn't one be ashamed to be so, well, bloody horrible?

"If we did it for you, we 'ave to do it for everyone" was her final unconsidered response.

Dear girl. I urge you.  DO, please do.  Do to everyone what you did to me.  Speak to all your customers like that. Treat them all as committed cretins on the scrounge for a free deal.  Huff and puff and tut and sigh at them, as you have just done to me.

Because there's a lovely little place in Virginia Water called TOTAL BLISS.  (2 The Parade
Trumpsgreen Rd, Virginia Water GU25 4EH 01344 842643) They are terribly nice in there, they don't sigh at you and I've never yet heard a panpipe.

You would, I'm sure, be doing them a great favour. And it's good to be kind to people.  ISN'T it?

Afterthought
GOOD Golly.  Fancy ME recommending a Beauty Salon.  Who'd have thought.

Monday 1 March 2010

Manslaughter, mental damage, slovenliness and hypocrisy...all before bedtime.

All hell broke loose in the bathroom tonight.  I had nipped out of the bathroom oh-so-briefly to hang school uniform on the radiator in a newly aquired smug-habit of Readiness for Tomorrow, when my ears were split by a  hollerscreech of fear, closely followed by the sound of scrabbling and splashing and the arrival of two wet, terrifed children, and one wet, astonished dog.

It turns out that there had been a spider in the bath.  But, as the two battled desperately for sanctuary space on my lap, I was made to understand -  NO ordinary spider had he been.  He had, apparently, been a spider of "the very worst sort, Mummy", a spider who used our skiing break last week to go on exercise in our bathtub, with the sole intention of the perfect attack. How it had lurked, sniggering, behind the shower head and waited until they were both engrossed with their rubber shark game and how it had dropped, "cackling a witch laugh" into the water where it had "torpedoed, Mummy,torpedoed along the bottom of the bath", - yes, there's more - "with jaws snapping and fangs gnashing and arms waving like a wild beasty thing" (this was all coming from the 5 year old - the 3 year old merely hiccuped and sobbed and nodded insistently along, with saucer-eyes of doom).  It had then leapt with a roar onto to knee of the older one, "dug in its nails to heave itself out of the water to chomp them in THEIR THROATS..."

I stopped it here, and went to rescue the poor little creature. And while it wriggled resignedly and drew its final spider breath in the shampoo cap lifeboat that had arrived too late, I explained that, here, in England, we don't have to be scared of spiders.  That, I told them, is for people like J and B, in Australia.  Here, spiders are Our Friends.

The dog sighed at me.  She always thinks she knows better in these situations.

"But Mummy, " came the response "it WASN'T an English spider.  It must have been SENT, Mummy, by the Taliban, or North Korea or Germany."

It's an interesting point.  How on earth does my 5 year old know enough about this big bad world to  have registered  the Taliban and the North Koreans as a vague threat to his safety, and why, WHY, lob them in with the poor Germans?

I asked him, casually, what he thought the Taliban, and North Korea were.  North Korea, he told me, is a horrible place where you can't get away and it has a (hushed voice) SECRET police.  Pretty spot on, and probably my fault.  (Blog Critic has already accused me of an "unhealthy interest" in the DPRK and I may well have talked about it in the range of small twitching ears, especially with the delicious arrival of my new Barbara Demick book on the same, just this morning, but more on that later).  The Taliban, he said after a while, are baddies from...he wasn't sure.

France,  insisted the 3 year old, the Taliban are from France and France has some good people like her nursery teacher but the rest are Taliban.  They sing a song about it at nursery; that's how she knows.* 

*NB I probably won't follow this up.  She told me once she'd learnt  an"Engleesh pig dogs" song from nursery school, but it turned out, thankfully, to be the influence of Horrible Histories instead)

The 5 year old scoffed.  The Taliban do not live in France, he was sure of that - they live in Talibanistan and they are bad because they want to steal all the flowers.

Hmm.  Poppy fields?  I don't know.  But I was worried.  They surely shouldn't be fretting about such things at their age - at THEIR age, they should be stressing about ghouls behind the bedroom door, and monsters under the bed.

Stupidly, I said as much.  They stared.

"There are m-m-m-m-monsters?  Under my BED?!" the eldest wailed before dissolving again.  "And GHOSTS-behind my DOOR?" the youngest followed suit and clung to the dog, who gave me a Look to say she would not have been so daft herself.

It took a  long time to settle them tonight.  And I had to crawl under both beds, twice, with the French policeman's truncheon that we have lying around, for precisely these monster-hunting moments, it now seems.

And HECK, there's a lot of dust under those beds.  So today, I have once again failed gloriously on all fronts, it seems: motherhood, housekeeping and spider rescue.

And I didn't even get to ask them about Germany.


AFTERTHOUGHT
I have also been a bit of a fraud.  Because as I insisted, somewhat impatiently, that to be scared of spiders was actually rather silly, and that they would just have to learn to deal with it, (I know, I know, but they had swung the lead way past their bedtime and my serenity had expired along with the faceful of dust) I had to remember how, only yesterday, I had practically sumo-wrestled a valium tablet from A on the tarmac at Innsbruck airport.  If anyone had told me then that my fear was a bit "silly" and I should just learn to deal with it, I probably would have punched them.

Oh well, they may know about the Taliban but it'll be a long time till they'll understand the word hypocrite. One hopes.

Tuesday 26 January 2010

Yes, but what IS shabby chic?


"Will it be the same in the future? Will the prized treasures of to-day always be the cheap trifles of the day before? Will rows of our willow- pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the years 2000 and odd? Will the white cups with the gold rim and the beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown), that our Sarah Janes now break in sheer light-heartedness of spirit, be carefully mended, and stood upon a bracket, and dusted only by the lady of the house?"
Jerome K Jerome, Three Men in a Boat (1889)




I'm far too tired to think much today but I was slightly diverted by driving past a Posh Shop in a Posh Village nearby which had a blackboard loitering casually outside with the words "We Can Make Your Furniture Shabby".

Really? And for how much?  Some questions burn into your brain if they go unasked, so at the risk of Being Late For Everything today, I popped in.

The woman behind the counter appraised me, decided, rightfully, that I was not an Interiors' Savante with a Hedgefund Hubby and went back to reading Psychologies.

So I looked around the shop.  The emphasis was delightfully odd.  "Vintage Jelly Mould - Once Owned!" shrieked one sign. "Genuine 1970 tea-towels" gushed another, sitting above a pile of white tea-towels emblazoned with the word GLASSCLOTH, just like they used in the church hall when I was a kid.  But oh, very prettily tied up with a ribbon, and, er equally prettily priced.  And then, my absolute FAVOURITE - "Vintage garden string!".  Which was a ball of, yes, string in a dusty looking wooden box, labelled (sit down) £15.00.

Now.  What's going on?  What DOES "Vintage Jelly Mould - Once owned!" actually mean?  Because to my un-designer ears, it sounds rather akin to "Second Hand."  Which is fine.  But when the price tag has been increased five-fold due to its terribly fashionable "Once Owned" status, I rather feel that, somewhere around, there struts a rather chilly and gullible Emperor.

"Erm, your sign" I asked frosty shop lady who didn't answer.  I dared further; "What do you MEAN exactly?"
She breathed audibly at me.  "We re-allocate style to a piece of furniture in line with the recent trends" she said.
"Which are...?" I ventured
"Glorious," she replied, and added "IF you understand style", while writing £25 in beautiful itallics on a creased brownpaper package label, probably destined for a genuine 1970s retro HB pencil, Used By A Real Child...

Glorious indeed.  And since I have recently found myself rather more in need of cash than before, I think I too should, shall we say, make more of an effort to, well, understand style.

And with this in mind, I've come over all entreprenneurial. Firstly, I plan to speak to my Dad about starting a shop in his loft.  There is plenty of Genuinely Used Vintage stuff up there, and in REAL 1970's dust too. And secondly, I will be painting my own sign, offering to "Make Your Furniture Shabby".  Trust me, this is going to be cracking deal: you won't even have to do any moving.  All I will do is lend you my children, my dog and their friends for a weekend, and Bob's Your Uncle:  genuine shabbiness, for a price we can decide when I've worked out your household income.

She was right, you know, the woman in her shop.  It IS glorious, WHEN you understand.

And it IS odd to find yourself re-living something originally written by Harry Enfield...




PS If I HAVE offended anyone with my ignorance of interior design fashions, may I apologise and smooth the waters by pointing you to these 12 "weathered terracotta pots" sold on the Jamie Oliver site.  They are DOWN from 75 whole pounds to only 37.50! That's HALF price!!!  But if you get there too late, don't be overly disappointed; they do also sell them in the antique shop around the corner from here for 50p a pop...





Tuesday 19 January 2010

Blog Critic, welcome back to you...

My Blog Critic has been quiet for a while but today he was back, with the air of one falsely aghast.  "I've been avoiding your blog since you were talking about dead chickens," he lied (and correction: hypnotised chickens, not dead - the proof is here) "but yesterday I braved myself, yes, BRAVED myself, to come back on and what do I get?  Shrunken heads. Horrific.  I was eating tea; a jacket potato actually.  About the size of a shrunken head.  So I couldn't eat it.  YOU spoiled my tea."

Blog Critic does enjoy his tea so I was momentarily apologetic.  I explained I wanted to write about something completely different to the weirdness of recent circumstance.

He launched into his well-rehearsed impersonation of Blog Critic, Outraged.

"YES, and about that!  All that wiffling about being tired and things being strange. I was bored! Get over it!  Blogs shouldn't be for sharing your soul - they should be informative, educational and exciting. I TOLD you that at the beginning. What on earth could be happening that would warrant other people wanting to read about your life?  Moan, moan, moan - that's what everyone does on a blog. I TOLD you" he added, with gleeful triumph "I TOLD you that you'd slide down the slippery slope into self-obsession..."

So I cut in and explained, briefly, what has happened over the past few days.  At the end of it, his phone got cut off.  Blog Critic has a busy life: he needs to watch his fish, and potter about a bit, and complain about my blog and he doesn't have time for charging mobiles.  But I did get a text.

"Bloody hell!" it read. "You should blog that..."

Monday 18 January 2010

NOT in need of a shrink after all...

I just read that Knut Haugland had died and so in today's dog-walking reverie I was thrown back to the Kontiki and Thor Heyerdahl's absorbing account of the entire adventure.  I love the Kontiki Expedition,  although you know the outcome before you even start to read, and I always pretend that I would have jumped at the chance to be on board (this is a sham-thought, because even an Easyjet hop scares me into drink).

But there was one passage which particularly stays with me, and that is the brief reference, before they set off, to the jungle head shrinkers.  Thor and Herman are in Ecuaduor, looking for balsa for the raft, if I recall correctly; their Spanish guide warns them of the headshrinkers still lurking in the jungles they want to pass through, and tells them how his own friend had had his head shrunk.  I know it's a grisly subject but can you really not smile at this bit?

"One day this friend was killed in the jungle.  Jorge tracked down the murderer and threatened to shoot him.  Now the murderer was one of those who were suspected of selling shrunken human heads and Jorge promised to spare his life if he handed over the head at once.  The murderer at once produced the head of Jorge's friend, now as small as a man's fist.  Jorge was quite upset when he saw his friend again, for he was quite unchanged, except that he had become so very small.  Much moved, he took the little head home to his wife.  She fainted when she saw it and Jorge had to hide his friend in a trunk. But it was so damp in the jungle that clusters of green mould formed on the head so that Jorge had to take it out now and then and dry it in the sun.  It hung very nicely by the hair on a clothes line, and Jorge's wife fainted everytime she caught sight of it."
Thor Heyerdahl - The Kontiki Expedition,  (Flamingo 1992) p47

Of course, head shrinking really did go on. Heads were scraped out and filled with hot stones to reduce the fat.  Hot sand was poured into the hard-to-reach crevices, and so the head would shrink while maintaining all it's characteristics.  It really does turn you into a mini-you. Although it was originally done to ensure the soul of the enemy would remain in abyss and not be narked at you from the grave, it became quite a business once they realised tourists would pay money for these little heads of victims and take them home for, well, the mantlepiece, one assumes.

And guess what?  National Geographic have "genuine footage" of the head shrinking process, that you can watch, right now, from your kitchen table!   I'm not putting the actual film here because although I'm thinking about this today, I don't plan to think of it tomorrow, as, surely, to think about such a subject regularly would be very strange indeed.

However, back to the video, now I was beginning to worry.  I can think of someone who, currently, would quite possibly be rather partial to my head, shrunk, and it is not too comforting to see there are videos showing how to do it.   I was reassured to see, however, that they DO add a warning that this should not be tried at home. In this litigious world, I guess that is important.


If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you...
Rudyard Kipling


Oh how true.

AFTERTHOUGHT
If I do disappear and turn up, petite, in a fleamarket, please do buy me. I want pride of place on a mantlepiece somewhere.

Friday 15 January 2010

Just when you think it's safe to go back into the water...

...you find it isn't.

It's been a long, long day.  I think I probably will get round to talking about what has just happened, at some point and in some regard, but tonight I am shattered.  A different shattered to where I was when meningitis was in full swing, I must say, because I have concentrated on the idea of keeping perspective in a wider picture, and it does actually work. We are fine.  The kids are fine. The dog is fine.

But it has been a day to teach you that things you quietly bank on having can - CAN -  suddenly be taken away by, well, shall we say Nasty-Gnomes?  That some people honestly, seriously, wish you ill.  And that the ill that they wish upon you can be completely unexplained and undeserved.  And and AND... that there is not a jot you can do about it.

And does it matter? In our case, no, probably not, actually. We are not, after all in Haiti.

Sometimes I crave the stabilising effect of a certain piece of music but tonight Jerome K Jerome has come rushing to aid.  Now if there was EVER a ghost to have a pint with in the pub, for me, it would be him.  With George and Harris and a canine-ghost of Montmorency at our feet.

We had this read at our wedding.  And today I think it has waxed more relevant than ever before.

For those of you I've bumped into today, I Am SO sorry for looking grumpy.


"George said:‘You know we are on the wrong track altogether. We must not think of the things we could do with, but only of the things that we can’t do without.’

"George comes out really quite sensible at times. You’d be surprised. I call that downright wisdom, not merely as regards the present case, but with reference to our trip up the river of life generally. How many people, on that voyage, load up the boat till it is ever in danger of swamping with a store of foolish things which they think essential to the pleasure and comfort of the trip, but which are really only useless lumber.


"How they pile the poor little craft mast-high with fine clothes and big houses; with useless servants, and a host of swell friends that do not care twopence for them, and that they do not care three ha’pence for; with expensive entertainments that nobody enjoys, with formalities and fashions, with pretence and ostentation, and with—oh, heaviest, maddest lumber of all!—the dread of what will my neighbour think, with luxuries that only cloy, with pleasures that bore, with empty show that, like the criminal’s iron crown of yore, makes to bleed and swoon the aching head that wears it!


"It is lumber, man—all lumber! Throw it overboard. It makes the boat so heavy to pull, you nearly faint at the oars. It makes it so cumbersome and dangerous to manage, you never know a moment’s freedom from anxiety and care, never gain a moment’s rest for dreamy laziness—no time to watch the windy shadows skimming lightly o’er the shallows, or the glittering sunbeams flitting in and out among the ripples, or the great trees by the margin looking down at their own image, or the woods all green and golden, or the lilies white and yellow, or the sombrewaving rushes, or the sedges, or the orchis, or the blue forget- me-nots.

"Throw the lumber over, man! Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need—a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.

Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K Jerome


Thirst IS a dangerous thing indeed.  Now, whose idea was it to have a dry January? Dramatic sigh. 

Monday 11 January 2010

The hills are alive, with the sound of tutting...

See?  SEE?  Music will always ALWAYS make you feel better!

I have just stumbled on the phenomenon of the Complaints Choir. And it's a fascinating thing.  It seems that all you have to do is get together with a few tra-la-la-ing friends, a piano (or accordion if you are east of Prague), find a bit of space in a street, on a roof top, in a theatre and so on...and then you all sing heartily about things that annoy you.

I have found quite a bit of diversion this evening in looking around the performances of international complaints choirs, and discovering what's bugging them.  The Germans are annoyed by a road and complex tax calculations. The Russians about queues and salaries, the Finns about trees being chopped down for loo paper (when there STILL isn't enough loo paper, they warble) and the Chicagoans about all the single men being insane.  The Hungarians seem to me to be having the most fun with their rousing recitals about the annoyingness of Hungary (and why us foreignors use the word goulash. Well, hold on a moment here,  I thought it was Hungarian; it sounds Hungarian...maybe I'll write a song about sneaky words which sound Hungarian and aren't, and sing it right back atcha...) but that the Hungarians would have the most fun is no surprise, as I have long been of the suspicion that the Hungarians ALWAYS have a lot more fun than us (and that's another post).

Of COURSE we have one here and of course it's in Birmingham.  I wondered at first whether that might be in Alabama, but no, the first line of Sung-Brummy makes it very clear where they are... They don't seem to be enjoying themselves - Birmingham's changed, you know, and they don't get paid enough, they sing-  but I hope they are having some fun really, as the whole thing strikes me as a splendid idea.

So much is being said recently about the physical and psychological benefits of singing, and herewith a triple whammy.  You get together with a whole lot of other people (check), get to sing your head off with no real requirement for Talent Proper (check) and you get to let a few moans out into the open (check).

All I need now is for a Proper Psychologist to say it's a great thing, and I'd try and get one going myself.  Why does my milkman sometimes come at 9am when it's too late for cereal and coffee?  Why does he sometimes come at 5am and clash around and  make the dog bark?  Why do people get prosecuted for fighting off burglars in their own homes?  We didn't vote for Gordon, why is he there?  Why does the place round the corner think it can charge 4 quid for two foul tomatoes stuffed with a lump of feta and doused in tabasco?  And so on and so on...

Am off to the piano to compose.

Saturday 9 January 2010

I haven't had a minute to Blog Properly and I risk repeating myself here with this link, but I can't help it. The whole El Sistema story has rather inhabited my distracted mind of late.


Do you ever have the feeling your brain is reaching for something and you just can't quite get there? I do hope I work it out soon. This, then, is a very pointless post indeed, for after all, whoever wants to hear someone else thinking aloud in such a pithy fashion?

This film, however, looks like being the complete opposite of pointless. If I could only find somewhere that sold it.