Little Green Papers

I have the kind of life in which very little happens. It has settled down into a pleasantly dull routine that involves doing as little as possible for spells of time that vary from hours to weeks punctuated with intense bursts of manic enthusiasm. Of course this is obvious from my blogging. I do a bit and then rest upon my laurels for a month or six. Hell's teeth I even found an old school report that lauded my unexpectedly large improvement in grades during the preceding term but warningly also spoke of concern regarding my tendency to dwell upon my past glories. I hate to be so transparent. It is bad enough knowing that others have a low opinion of one's determination but it's utterly despicable of them to voice that opinion at every opportunity. Even if they were teachers.

The trouble with an uneventful life is that when events occur they sail by the window of consciousness and are too easily mistaken for humdrum passing scenery and they get — not so much forgotten — as overlooked. Either that or noteworthy events come tumbling along like a flash flood or an avalanche and one is swept away unable to keep a foothold on a semblance of a foundation upon which to set up base camp and begin the retelling: 'This is how it happened ...'. (That is my all time favorite opening for a short story and I am damned if I can remember who the author was!) The last few days have seen me flounderingly struggle to keep my head above water. I don't need this much excitement. It's not good for my blood pressure or my chronic anxiety condition. Especially not at time when I am moving house, which is the most stressful of life's little travails after bereavement and divorce — I know this because I read it in a Reader's Digest in a doctor's waiting room ... ooh two dress sizes ago.

In the last few days I have gotten involved in my country's legislative process. It's too much. Apparently I am not just expected to vote once every four years or so but now 'they' want my opinions about the laws before they make them. The whole process struck me as highly amusing in a Douglas Adams kind of way as I wondered if anyone would appreciate the joke if I enquired into whether anyone had conducted any studies to find out if people wanted 'well being' that could be anally inserted. There was an excellent lunch though and the conference facilities were very much in premier echelon of such places of corporate hospitality — which is an oblique way of referring to the football club that was our host. I forwent the opportunity to gaze upon the hallowed turf ... I've got way too much turf of my own and all of it is in direst need of a good scything. Maybe I could put it on ebay. Hay for sale: buyer to collect ... I'll just wait to mention the need for cutting it until the buyer arrives.

I have a very low threshold of tolerance for the humbug and bunco of politicking. Those traits may be great as entertainment but self-aggrandisment and axe-grinders and single-issue merchants mire down the decision making process in a welter of confusion. A period set aside for questions relating to a presentation (Powerpoint raises its ugly head again!) turned into a series of little set speeches promoting a single issue; but, O! Look how beautifully they were wrapped in glowing velvet praise of the presenter's sincerity, credentials and choice of cologne on such a hot day. It was good therefore that I had a elected to be chauffeured for the day by a co-conspirator who shares much of the same antipathy regarding fæcal matter of a bovine nature. We came, we ate, we buggered off. Leaving early we had no compunction in lambasting the others we saw who also scurried out like naughty children bunking off school on a day too balmy for double algebra followed by eng. lit.. We of course had good reason to bunk off: we were certified Looney Toons. They were wearing suits.

There's only one thing to do in England on a weekday afternoon in blazing June when the great white anglo-saxon protestant majority is mercifully trapped, sweating, in the hell that is the workplace. (Those Brits fortunate enough to work in offices with large number of computers are often lucky enough to get air conditioning; the rest just melt and stink.) For the lucky few with money to burn and time to burn it the blue skies demand that we seek a nice little pub with a garden. This can be a tricky task in a metropolitan area that is home to some three million multi-cultural souls, but not impossible. There are five or six within a 3 minute drive of my front door. I so rarely go into pubs these days that it is always a delicious pleasure to rediscover the odd grown-up-ness of a slightly dingy, low-ceilinged, Victorian or even Georgian English public house. The interior of the bar is dark on even the brightest of the longest days of the year; it is also refreshingly cool even without refrigeration technology.

My companion ordered a pint of the ice-cold lager while I chose a pint of the cold Guinness ... there's a drink to get your teeth into! We must have been thirsty. The liquid hardly touched the sides. We decided to have another. It was my turn to pay. My companion would not permit that and headed resolutely for the bar to have our glasses refilled. I'm reviewing the situation ....

Hmm. When one drinks but does not contribute financially to the transaction the situation is veering off-course into dating territory. Aw shucks. I am far too old for all that nonsense. Besides I like my own company far too much to begin sharing it ... again. On the other hand it takes more than a swallow or two to make a spring and I am no coy virgin either. All the same I have reviewed, with frantic mental haste, the foregoing hours. Replaying snatches of conversation looking for indavertent flirts. The beer arrives and I am like Homer Simpson sitting, blankly staring, thinking: "Message to brain: don't flirt, don't flirt". Doh! There's some devil in me that cannot help it. Wherever I am I take on a personna to fit the situation, like the time I flirted outrageously with a well inebriated pensioner in an East End London pub by slipping effortlessly into a pastiche of every barmaid there has ever been. Come to think of it that was an occasion when I had been to a meeting that became so dreary that I fomented revolution and led a sizeable contingent out and across the street into as perfect an example of London culture as possible. Londoners love to 'send up' up anything and everything including themselves. And I honestly didn't know that that pub held a male stripper night on that day of every month. Sheesh.

It's a good job that no one but me reads this because I have saved the most shameful thing until last. My drinking companion is one of that vanishing breed of men: a smoker. I smoked a couple of his cigarettes and frankly it wasn't that great ... but I need to be more cautious about restarting that habit than I do about becoming accidentally involved in any sort of relationship.

Island Mine

One hundred damn dollars US and I have lost it. How annoying that is! (Actually slightly less annoying than it would have been if the rebel scrip hadn't suffered such drastic devaluation of recent years but ... still.)

My father was a printer and although he was mostly involved in the 'business printing' side of things he nevertheless still came into possession of a considerable number of books. I am still in reminiscence mode and found myself wondering whatever had become of some of those books. Including some I am pretty sure are now hard to find. These were no classics, these books. Some of them were unreadable poop, others no doubt, were far too adult to be allowed into my possession. But there were always the odd ones that slipped through the net and those were always the most memorable for no other reason than because they had that je ne sais pas associated with forbidden fruit. Hey I was only 11 or 12. At that age I was supposed to be reading Moby Dick I did not finish it; I think I didn't feel much like calling anyone Ishmael and I thought that Moby Dick seemed like a silly name to give a whale. Kids!

I was more taken with dramatised biographies of people like Churchill; hell, we're talking about pulp fiction masquerading as fact. Nothing too demanding. I think I am a coward, I choose to avoid challenges because I might succeed.

Anyway I suddenly got into my head the idea that I should Google for the most outlandish of the titles that rattle around on the musty flagstones of memory's cellar floor. And so I came up with And To My Nephew Albert I Leave The Island What I Won Off Fatty Hagan In A Poker Game. Such a delicious title for a novel. Almost a novel in itself. It was, I remember, richly farcical in a highly singular British idiom as Albert's newly acquired island gains a pivotal international significance in the cold war while he haplessly clings a sliver of no-man's land in the middle trying his damnedest to lose his virginity. It was crude and vulgar and funny and although some of the jokes undoubtedly went over my head, there were many more that did not.

I don't have it any longer. I haven't seen it for decades. Even if I did still possess it I am quite sure that I would have hidden it away somewhere being too ashamed to admit ever having read it. I am over that now. I have no shame. Not even in posting the link above that shows that copies of the damned thing change hands for over $100. I let mine go to a secondhand book dealer for pennies.

And I still seek reassurance that I am in fact slighty nuts. Man I am loopy like a bouclé sweater!

Viennese Whirl

I got the bug for making puns out of titles from the writer John Brunner who was apt to head his chapters with far-too-clever titles like Roomie Nation in which we find the novel's protagonist in retrospective mood as he considers his domestic arrangements in the light of a trend — in the world of the novel — for people to share their living space with non-relatives. I like to take things a tad further and deeper and the meanings are, I suspect, apparent only to me, but that is how I like it because i write for myself and not for anyone else.

Still preoccupied with the unseasonal dampness associated with the ridiculous heat and humidity and which has now caused my front door to swell and to stick I have gone to the deepest extremes to make my title extraordinarily dense. I came home today to find the kitchen window was host to an angry population of fat, black flies all buzzing mindlessly as they took to the fœtid air in short, aimless figure of eight sorties in search of a way through the impervious transparent barrier that separated them from the light. In an instant I knew that my resident serial killer, a cat by the name of Mirelly Lyra Zeelashisthra, had allowed another of her victims to escape behind the boiler and there to become maggot food. I long ago gave up hope of curing her of this sin; it seems ingrained in her genes and it would be a cruel crime against nature to seek a means of ending it.

I am hardened to the problem by now. The darned cat has been with me since she first wound her way, mewling piteously about imagined privations and hardships of a feline nature, when I called at a farm to ask directions. I left with a better idea of where I was as well as with a cardboard box — that had once held a Toshiba television set — filled to bursting with eight ounces of vigorous black and white fury. Before I had reversed my car away from the farm entrance and pointed it up the road the flap uppermost on the box jittered upwards and a tiny, bewhiskered face emerged. She stared around her new environment with disdain, clambered out with as much grace as she could muster (not much) and spent the next several miles attempting to sit in a demure manner on top of the box so that she could observe the passing scenery. It was clear to me that she had never before seen trees move with such reckless abandon.

All that was nine years ago. She is still the maddest cat I have ever known ... and I have known enough to be a fair judge. Mirelly — mostly known to me as Little Mad (which is short for Little Madam and not an insult) — is as nutty as a truck load of walnuts with a side order of pistachios. I even allowed her to play the field with local tomcat population in the hopes that motherhood would lend her some wisdom. Some hope. With the first kitten mostly out and clenched neatly around the neck she decided enough was enough and tried to run away from her own back end. Fortunately I was able to help the two get acquainted. Three more kittens followed the first and she became a model mother ... unless an inability to count is a fault because she moved the litter several times, each time moving three and leaving the fourth behind. I grew far too attached to the kittens in spite of myself but I bravely managed anyway to surrender them up to the various offers of homes that came once it became known that kittens were up for grabs.

As soon as the kittens were all gone Mirelly instantly reverted to her former condition of madness though now with an increased penchant for murder. Clearly, now that she no longer had a pack of dimwitted babies to learn-up in the tooth and claw jungle of hunting etiquette she could always make sure to keep her paw and eye in in case some more kittens should happen along. As if! She had been to the vet in the interim and had come home with that tell-tale postage stamp sized patch of fur missing from her right flank. Luckily she was too busy practising the art of bringing down a pigeon in mid flap to study up much in her biology texts. Over the intervening years she and I have enjoyed a peculiar sort of relationship. She hangs around because I do not set unreasonable conditions upon her; she lets me keep most of my skin because I make a neat place for her to sleep on. I also turn out to be a pretty cool object for getting annoyingly large quantities of rain out of fur when she gets caught in a hailstorm as happened a day or so ago.

So there it is. Imagine if you can yours truly doing a cross between the sailors' hornpipe and the tarantella as I try to avoid the twin hazards of getting my cuffs of my jeans soaked with wet cat and my ankle skin flayed by playful cat who thinks that the return to fashion of flared trousers is just so cool that playing with them is irresistable and you have half a scenario to fit the title: the whirl.

The sadly missed Leonard Rossiter was a fabulously talented actor, equally at home on stage in comedy and Shakespeare, as well as on the both the big screen and the silver. He is most memorable to me for his fabulous protrayal of the odiously comic slum landlord Rupert Rigsby in the TV series Rising Damp ... aha! A clue. Or as Inspector Clouseau might say: 'ay clure. Rigsby, of course, owned a cat. Naturally he did because scrofulous he might have been, but for a character to be endearing and ultimately lovable he needs to have at least one redeeming feature. Rigsby's was his cat.

In case you forgot, or else didn't know. Rigsby's cat was named Vienna.

Damp Squib

I don't like it when the weather turns all heavy and oppressive. Temperatures above 80°F combined with high humidity cause me to become a giant vegetable. Not to beat about the bush here, I become a bloated and sweaty inanimate object. Bloated because I comfort eat, all the while consuming copious quantities of fluids from which my skin filters out all the toxins before spreading liberally over my wrinkly hide. It's not a pretty sight.

What I most dislike about humidity is the dampness. I hate being damp. This probably harks back to when I was a child and my mother had what was practically a fetish for seeing that no clothing was issued unless it had met her exacting standards for moisture content. Clothing shall have no moisture present within its fibres before it is donned. This shall include atmospheric humidity. A complete non-sequiteur in the great but soggy British climate where if it you can't see the horizon it means that it is raining and if you can can (see the said horizon) it is, in fact, about to rain.

The month of flaming June conceals my birthday. Until I skidded, more or less out of control, into my teen years I had considered that June was the best possible month for a birthday. There being no possible way for relatives to combine Christmas and Birthday gifts and regarding parties ... what better time of year for a party than high summer, when the outdoors is open from dawn to, well, dawn, I guess. Unless, of course it rains. Luckily June is the one month when rain is unusual and so birthdays washed-out by rain just don't figure in my rose-tinted memories.

Anyway, my birthday has been and gone and while there was no precipitation there wasn't much in the way of solar radiation either. Which is a pity because I read the other day, in Sharon's fabulous blog that summer had come to her neck of the woods and that it was both damned hot and damned humid. How I smiled. We don't get heavy weather like that in England until much later in the summer. June is the perfect month for everything in the UK. The schools are still 'in' and the biggest kids are mostly involved in school exams so the shops and the tourist places are pleasant places to be. It is heaven on stick.

Then things took a turn for the worse.

For days the weather forecasters were promising a heatwave. Yeah! Like that is believable. Our island climate is not best suited to predictions ... totally unsuited to be accurate. Anyway, yesterday — as if to prove that anything that is forecast for long enough will happen eventually — the heatwave arrived. Which would have been OK were it not for the fact that I am in the middle of moving house.

My home for the last eight years — the longest I have stayed under one roof — is half packed up and my new place is mine already but in need of some urgent remedial cosmetic treatment. Of course, speaking as a time-served specialist in the art of procrastination, I am well behind schedule in the redecoration stakes. Paint that should be on walls is still in the plastic tubs that pass for paint cans these days. Paint brushes that should be clagged to the roots with clots of congealed vinyl silk emulsion are still in their risqué see-thru acetate sleeves, baring their hairy extremities to an uncaring environment with coquettish brazenness.

Never mind, I thought, with blasé equanimity. I can just go over and chill out, maybe watch some TV, drink a cool beer, or even that oddity that we Brits turn to in times of heat prostration ... a nice hot cup of tea. Yes. I have installed a fridge, a TV and a camp stove in my new premises. The first two are new and had to be delivered somewhere. The latter is more or less essential survival equipment. A fridge I can live without but give me a kettle and a fry-pan and somewhere to make those two get hot and I can live anywhere. I also had a good reason to be "in" at my new address yesterday afternoon. I was expecting a visit from an engineer to hook me up to cable ... erm, everything.

I have been resisting the march of technology for some years now. I am still wedded to the silver jump suits and robots I was promised by Raymond Baxter back when I was still just 'thinking' about owning a bra. I am not technophobic, I love technology and I love all things scientific. But science and technology is pointless unless it does something. Cable TV didn't do it by my reckoning. I can get five channels for nothing with a cheap TV and a bent coathanger; why on earth would I want more than that? I love the internet because it does what says on the tin. It works ... well most of the time, it does.

But times change and so do people and (luckily) the free-enterprise capitalists are very much aware of that and they change their stance too, the better to unscrew the cash from our pockets. I am moving home and I am lazy. Two pretty much inconsistent conditions. Laziness means that I stick with the status quo long after it ceased to be a value for money situation. I may be lazy, but laziness (by my stipulation) requires a certain degree of miserliness. That is why I love the internet; bargain hunting takes so little effort. I've been with my current ISP for quite a while now and they pretty much take me for granted. So much so that they recently cold-called me to offer me a free mobile phone. It was at that moment that it dawned on me that I was maybe paying a little too much for my telephone and internet access to the world.

A little searching revealed that for half what I currently pay, the local cable firm will give me the same deal and throw in 39 channels of shit for nothing. Well hey! I may be an infrequent watcher of TV and 90% of that 39 are so banal they actually require a stronger word (or do I mean 'weaker'?) to define their feebleness in the entertainment scale. Its all to do with way I do maths. The 90% I speak of is a floating proportion; it isn't always the same channels that are beyond the pale. Howver when you have a choice of five, 90% is inevitably going to involve half a TV program. Yes it is true. I actually do sometimes watch half a TV program but only because half is entertaining and I turn off when when I stop being entertained. Oh dear! I feel I am beginning to spout utter rot!

Time to get to the point. The telephone man arrived yesterday afternoon. Looking slightly harrassed and sweaty. He fumbled with his ID with what may have been embarrassment as he introduced himself. Maybe he was psychic. After we had gone through the "where do I want it" routine he departed to get his tools ... (this a strictly male thing, I have noticed. Men set out to do a job without a single item of equipment, they then proceed to examine the said task, suck their teeth, make faces and extravagant gestures and then return to safe base to collect — almost — all the tools and material they will need). He returned with a screwdriver and a little grey doo-hickey and unscrewed the cover of the main junction box and clipped the doo-hickey to the wires within. It made a noise like a budgerigar with an inflamed cloaca. I left him to his devices and attended to the haus frauly business of making the workman his tea ... 5 sugars naturally.

Some minutes elapsed during which time the telephone man was like some kind of djinn. It was a case of now you see him, now you don't. Mostly it was a case of his little grey doo-hickey making its oddly strangled parakeet warble; a sound that I found resistant to direction location. I was beginning to wonder what earthly use was a noise that could not be localised when I caught sight of 'my' man. He was talking into his sleeve. I sidled closer to hear what was being said. The news wasn't good. I quickly gleaned from his conversation with "base" that 'my' cable isn't in one piece. A new one needs to be pulled through. So saying, he packed up his little grey doo-hickey, screwed the cover into the place on my junction box and with a cheery wave he departed after assuring me that the cable-pulling crew would make contact first thing on Monday. A whole crew! Goodness. Is my cable to run uninterrupted all the way from Chateau Trillian to Cable Central? That sounds like like just too much of a bargain.

After he had gone I fell into a miserable introspection centred mostly around the fact that the east-facing (and thus the coolest rooms) in my new mansion had acquired a fine sheen of condensation on the undecorated cold surfaces. It was at that point that I heard my mother's voice warning me against dallying for too long in a damp atmosphere and so I beat a hasty retreat, breaking my journey halfway back to what still passes for "home" to pick up some Argentinian sirloin, a baguette, a bag of Italian salad, a small wedge of ripe brie and the inevitable bottle of Oz shiraz because cooking for one is a total bore but even a peasant knows how to introduce a slab of cow to a very hot griddle for a few minutes while uncorking the wine and drizzling some extra-virgin olive oil over the greenery. (I ate half the bread while I waited for the bus having forgotten it was Saturday and the buses run a totally screwed up schedule.)

Whilst I chewed the delicious crusty French treat (resisting the urge to break out the brie as well, because then I might have to get out the beef and just jerk the bastard stuff under the mid-afternoon solstice sun) I gained an admiring audience of pigeons but they didn't look as hungry as I felt. I am so mean!

Tagging Along

I was honored to find that wonderful Sharon tagged me into this amusing little bit of vox-poppery.

But first the rules to this meme game:

Remove the blog at #1 from the following list and bump every one up one place; add your blog's name in the #5 spot; link to each of the other blogs for the desired cross pollination effect.

1. Ivy Tied Up
2. Presentstorms Corner
3. Blog, Blah, Blah
4. Adventures of a Domestic Engineer
5. Crazy Like A Zircon

Next: select new friends to add to the pollen count. (No one is obligated to participate).

1. Kristal
2. Chameleon
3. Dave Rupert
4. Mingling & NotSo
5. Kitty

So ... the challenge is to list the five things I miss most from childhood. First I took sneaky trackback through previous offerings and discovered a broad vein of slighlty shmaltzy misty-eyed nostalgia for what sounded like a halcyon American distillate of idyllic childhood consisting, in the main, of beloved cousins and camping weekends and fishing trips. In an instant I was overcome with a nauseating mixture of jealousy and ... well, nausea.

Jealousy because there is still a part of me that harbours a little envy for anyone who was lucky enough to be raised in a part of the world where the plumbing worked and also where it was possible to find somewhere to live that was within easy travelling distance of wild territory. The nausea? I am no fan of shmaltziness and sugar-coatings are for wimps.

All of which, by way of preamble, is probably going to look rather sad in the context of my five items; a list that needed some thought to compile. I am not especially case-hardened; much of my laconic rhetoric is more a disguise for a too easily bruised ego than evidence of urbanity. However I mostly keep my sentimentality to myself, choosing to share it with only the closest of friends ... so if you don't know me from Adam kindly leave the room now, because I am going to expose myself.

Number one on my list has to be my teddy bear, Charles. (What an odd name for stuffed toy ... wasn't I ever precious when I coined that name!) My mum burned him because he stunk. He was a cheap old thing and washing was out of the question ... I know because I tried to wash my last boyfriend's childhood friend and the sawdust stuffing dissolved and dyed the threadbare plush of a mostly grey panda an alarming shade of burnt orange. The erstwhile owner was last seen crying as he stuffed his bags into the back of his car .... Of course Charles had become a stinky thing because he'd been used by me, mostly, as a pillow. There's a limit to how much infantile drool one bear can adsorb before ... well never mind. I still haven't forgiven my mother for her heinous crime, though. Forty plus years later it still rankles.

Numero deux would have to be my mum's cooking. Mum was never a 'fancy' cook, although it would be a mistake to think that label means she was untalented. She likes to tell the tale of the occasion she made a cheese soufflé; the soufflé was perfect, unfortunately we kids (and my father) were far too unsophisticated to appreciate it. I miss mum's cooking because it symbolises all that is precious about my childhood. A full belly, comforting company at table, the sheer miracle of food appearing as if by magic with no effort required on my part. One's mother's cooking is pretty much a metaphor for 'mother love'. I still have the latter, but i don't consider it selfish to continue to miss the former.

It starts to get difficult. More than two? Come on! I can list hundreds. How is there a way to place one above another? I decided to leave people out completely because the brief that I read seemed to specify 'things' rather than people. So number three is my bedroom. Meaning my first bedroom. The first one I had all to myself. It was the smallest bedroom in the house, even though I was the eldest. For some reason I never queried that decision. The room that I had shared with my sister became hers and I got my own (more grown up) room. I shall never quite forget the slow, almost glacial, build up of my excitement as my dad sealed himself inside the little junk room and began the mysterious task of converting it to a bedroom. OK so the process mostly involved paint and wallpaper, it was hardly alchemy! But my dad had a way of making the most mundane seem like something else and of course in missing the thing I miss the man as well. (I realise I am slipping people into my list by Machiavellian stealth ... but, hey! If make a rule, I shall determine the protocol for breaking the bugger.)

Four would be Radio Caroline. I decided that childhood had to be encompass the whole of my minority. I first heard pirate radio when I was eleven. We were travelling through Kent en route to visit my paternal grandmother (who was then on her third and final husband ... she was bride and widow three times and all in the right order) and I copped my first listen to Radio London playing something decidedly un-BBCish and all done with commercials too! How terribly Bohemian! Mostly I miss the feeling that came from number five ...

I miss Tomorrow's World the Beeb's weekly magazine programme that presented the latest in the cutting-edge of technology. Specifically, it isn't the television programme I miss so much as the lovely comfy feeling I got from watching it. I was comforted (strictly as a gullible child) that come the twenty-first century we would have solved all of humanity's problems. We could take holidays on the Moon, robots would do the housework and any sort of disease would be a bad memory like the Black Death.

That's it.

I regret that our planet has completed ninety degrees of its solar orbit during my ill-mannered silence. I have an excuse.

I am a lazy bitch!