A silver lining....

There are some people in this world for whom there are no silver linings. Grumpy old men/women. Give them a piece of good news and they can find the downside. Give them a sandwich and there will be bit of mould on the crust (or no coriander), give them a £100 and they will grumble that it isn’t £200, give them big hug and they’ll say ‘gerroff, you’re hurting my arm’. You must know someone like that. We all do, and we can all be that person at some point in life, even if it’s only for five minutes. With some it is merely the mood of the moment and they are cheery again later but some are just ingrained negativoes (my own word there, I haven’t invented one for ages) who can’t see past their own cynicism and disgruntlement.

But anyway this is a society that thrives on dissatisfaction. Dissatisfied with the suction on your vacuum cleaner…..get a bigger and better one. Dissatisfied with your breasts……get bigger-is-better ones. Dissatisfied with your husband…………get a bigger, better one. We live in a throw-away society and the wheels turn on the dissatisfaction of our ‘meaningless consumer driven lives’ (quote dragged from ‘10 things’). So those members of society who are forever grumbling about things and seeking to improve the material world they live in are the very members of this particular society who are actually functioning correctly within it. Happy, tolerant and accepting souls (like me - mostly) are, quite rightly, criticised for their wishy-washy attitude to the important things in life. Live and let live is my motto and I am condemned for saying so.

In the words of Bobby McFerrin, ‘Don’t worry, Be happy’ - shoot me down in flames in you dare!

The story about the Japanese women who were duped into believing strategically shaved sheep were in fact a rare breed of poodle is not as unbelievable as it might seem. Hubby today opened a little box of chocolates that he had for Easter and offered them round - solid chocolate in various Easter related shapes – and he asked if we would like a bunny, a chick, an egg or a ……………poodle? The girlie gently pointed out to him that she thought the woolly looking animal might actually be a lamb because poodles aren’t really associated with Easter. Gently pointed out – as one might to an imbecile.

My internet connection is so freaky and unreliable atm I am totally frustrated and fed-up with it. I can log on to a website one minute and then the connection goes the next minute, and then stays out for a good ten minutes before coming back. I only get a minute or two of web and then I have to go twiddle my thumbs for a while. It is so disjointed that I throw my hands up in despair.

Earlier on I had a half hour tussle with a plant which was quite exhausting but obviously good entertainment value as the girlie came out to watch. A Cornish Palm that had become pot bound in a large tub which has a serious design flaw in that it has an inside rim which the roots managed to get in under. It was determined it was never going to leave the pot and I was equally determined it was – I won, but not without a long and bitter struggle and I lost the use a small trowel when it’s head got snapped off in the midst of conflict. The trowel lost its life in that battle and, as befits a foot soldier killed in the line of duty, was buried with full honours in the same tub - with a herb garden planted on top.

There was an open invitation at work recently for any of the staff to go for a coffee today as a surprise for one of the ladies for her 60th birthday. Of the couple of dozen that work there only six of us turned out – they can be a mardy lot where I work! But it was nice and cosy anyway.

In the afternoon though we had to get on with the very serious business of shopping. I had to change my trousers before we went out because the girlie didn’t want me to go out in ill-fitting trousers. So while we were out I bought a couple of new pairs – in a smaller size. I tried to look round the Wallis section in Debenhams but she said ‘isn’t this a bit old-lady-ish’ and when I tentatively mentioned that I am a bit older she said ‘yes but you don’t need to advertise the fact’. So I am sitting here in my new cropped jeans - skin-tight and trendy fit because I ‘have good legs and should make the most of it’ - and a whole of more self-esteem. Until of course a so-called friend tells me I’m too lardy to be attractive! Or maybe that won’t happen this year. Funny isn’t how the little knocks can linger in the back of your mind much longer than the compliments, or perhaps that’s just me.

My sister gave me several different varieties of squash and pumpkin seeds for Christmas and I have been gradually sowing and growing them. I still have another couple of varieties to do but I’m fast running out of places to put them and I have no idea where I’m going to grow them all. But they are such strapping things that it makes them such joy to grow. Huge fat leaves and stout robust stems. I suppose where I normally have pots of summer bedding I could have grow-bags of pumpkins instead. Dangling out of hanging baskets as well perhaps. Halloween should be good!

We have one of those stair baskets – so naff and twee I know but mega useful. This morning I thought ‘tis time to empty basket before the overflow obscures it altogether’ – actually I didn’t think so politely as all that, I probably thought ‘bl**dy basket’s full again’. As I reached out for it I realised on the stair above there was a mouse. Quite asleep (in the permanent sense) but surprisingly not damaged or dismembered in any way. I jumped from my skin - very chilly in the morning so I didn’t stay out of it for long – and I think I need to sit down with a nice hot drink for a bit. Well it’s a good excuse to do so!

I’m just waiting for the sausages to cool down, you know how it is.

Well I can’t leave them out all night and I can’t put them in the fridge just yet so I have to kill some time.

Yesterday when I was walking back from dancing – in the dark (Dancing in the Dark, isn’t that a film?) – anyway a lorry drove past, quite fast and the back-draught swept all the loose blossom petals from a nearby tree and rained them down on me. They swirled around me like a cloud as I walked, it was quite magical really. I was in a special place.

I am trying to sort out my iPod atm but there is just so much to wade through. When the computer crashed and died I couldn’t find all my tunes when everything was put back on so I am trying to compile as much of the stuff that I had as I can but it isn’t easier….or quick. Especially as I keep coming across things that I never had on there in the first place, and think they would be rather funky. Like The Monkees.

I know this is a little on the naughty side but……… http://jojospoems.blog.co.uk/2007/04/23/bad_poem_bad_thoughts~2149526

I don’t know what I was thinking of at the time….

Plot-lines.

Today I remembered one of the ads that bugs me. I have been watching out for them every day but every time I notice one I promptly forget all about it five minutes later. The concentration span of the modern generation!

Anyway it’s the Florence and Fred one. Or Tesco togs if you will. The one with the dippy girl riding a horse through the fields and woods to go to the ball (a little Cinderella-esque). She finds herself spattered with mud so she whips an identical but pristine clean dress from her saddle bags and hey presto she is ready for the ball. What irritates me about the ad – apart from the fact that Tesco are flaunting the fact that their clothes are ridiculously cheap and therefore their provenance can’t be anything but suspect – is that surely, surely her feet are still going to be caked in mud. We see her drifting round the party but you can’t help noticing that the camera stays well away from her feet, where she is presumably leaving a trail of whacking great mud-prints on the polished floor. What I would like to see in a following shot is the butler tut-tutting and doggedly following this potty princess round with a dustpan and brush, just to make sure there is some continuity of plot.

Mind you real life can be very strange at times so who’s to say what’s improbable. Yesterday hubby was late home from church because they had been having a book burning session. I immediately thought of the scene from IJ and the LC when Indy and his father are at a Nazi book-burning. Not that I think they are Nazi’s at his church or that there is any likelihood of Indiana Jones turning up there, more’s the pity, but it just seemed a touch incongruous , burning books at church.

I did a lunch today at work – something I do quite regularly as regular readers may or may not remember – and I introduced a new sandwich filling for them to try, Brie and Lavender Jelly. It was actually rather nice and those were the ones that went quickest so maybe I wasn’t the only one to think so. I do try to avoid going down the Mrs Cropley route but is very tempting to try and introduce some really outrageous combinations. Marmite and red cabbage, chocolate spread and coleslaw, that sort of thing. I can well imagine the looks of horror if I did – which only it makes it more tempting.

The mater and I were out the other day. A garden centre trip – no surprise there – and she picked up a Daily Mail/Express to look at while we had our refs in the tea room (anything is better than chatting to me!) Amongst all the tripe in there was a quiz to determine what class one is – reference to the Kate Middleton affair (or lack thereof). One of the questions was ‘To what do you listen when you wake in the morning?’ The options being Radio 4, Radio 2 and Radio 1 – you can work out the class pertaining to those I’m sure. There wasn’t an option for ‘birdsong’ which would be my preferred choice so I came to the conclusion that there is no class for me to fit into and therefore I have no class. This will come as no surprise to those that know me! Another of the questions was ‘How would you describe the WC? As a toilet, a lavatory or a loo. I use all three terms and quite a few other euphemisms as well, depending on current trends. ‘I go to make toilet’ being one that derived from something on TV. My co-worker and I decided we would find a new one to use and came up with ‘Visiting the Cabin’ – as in log cabin, please don’t make me spell it out – well….it passes the time.

I’m stuffed. Full of Indian. Meal that is - I don’t think I ate all that much in fact but I couldn’t manage another mouthful if I tried.

Today we had a trip out to the Bluebell walk at Arlington.

http://www.bluebellwalk.co.uk/

The picture sums it up – but only the visual. With a video facility on my camera I can even capture the sound of the peace in the woods and the birdsong with the view of the endless blue of the flowers but I want a camera that also can capture the heavy heavenly scent of the bluebells and the flutter of the breeze on the skin. It is an incredibly peaceful and tranquil experience. I try to go every year and I hate it if I have to miss a year because only in the flesh can you appreciate the scent and the atmosphere. Mellow moments.

For some reason I having feeling very mellow lately altogether. Unfortunately this has a down side in that it is playing havoc with my creativity levels, my concentration and my drive. Not that I’m big on drive anyway. On the drive maybe. Not any bigger than I am anywhere else though………Rambling incoherently now.

So I’ll just pop a few pics in.

Well that was a surreal finale to the evening. Sitting listening in horror as members of my own family no less talked about teddy bear mutilation – in the most grizzly of terms, haha. It is for a prop for a play where a teddy bear is used to hide some valuables but even so it seems just so wrong to take a teddy bear’s head off. I think my sensitivity dates back to when my own teddy bear had his head viciously ripped off by a not-very-nice child. His head had to be surgically replaced and he has had to wear a supporting neck brace ever since in the form of a rather natty little bow tie arrangement. How can anyone even begin to calmly and cold-bloodedly consider how best to hack something apart - that has eyes!

The girlie and I had witnessed another bit of sordidness in the utility room earlier in the afternoon. Up on the velux window a spider was rolling a live fat waspbee (I don’t know which it was) up in it’s sticky string and we had to endure the agonising death screams for some time. Nature red in tooth and claw – or in this case, web.

The girlie went along to an audition yesterday and got chatting to a bloke – I will have to speak to her about this kind of thing – a newish member who is quite keen on special effects and set design etc. We need people with a practical bent as there are plenty of egos – sorry, actors – already. But his areas of interest were a little, erm, colourful. He discussed with her at some length about an effect involving a dog running into a box and then the box exploding. Jeez – what next.

Perhaps it’s just me but there seems to be very ghoulish element in the air lately.

It’s just crazy atm. I either have nothing to do or everything.

So I am having a break from the everything I should be doing this weekend and spending a wee moment in the ether.

I had to escort the girlie into town this morning to help her choose a birthday present. And also look for a costume for her play. I have noticed that some of the charity shops are making an effort to overcome that charity shop smell by scenting the air in a pleasant way. This must come as something of a relief to charity shop regulars who must tire of having to wash clothes several times before the fusty dusty smell is eliminated from their bargain purchases. I didn’t find anything for myself but then I’m not in clothes shopping mode just now, if it doesn’t have leaves and roots I can’t get tooo excited about it, although I did pick up a video of US Marshals (with Tommy Lee Jones) for later. Ok so he isn’t the greatest actor in the world but he does play very rugged, very male characters and now and then a girl likes a bit of rugged masculinity to watch in the early hours. But I have plenty of other stuff to get done and out of the way before I can relax.

There was just enough time before lunch to take out some of the smoke tree - Cotinus Coggygria for those who like a little Latin thrown in. A cross between pollarding and coppicing I suppose – or pruning if you prefer – or as hubby puts it, when he is wielding the saw, ‘hacking bits off’. It didn’t come close to slaking his thirst for ‘hacking bits off’ and the glint in his eye as he looked round the garden for more opportunities to destroy living things was frightening and disturbing. Thank goodness he has gone to work for a bit.

I have designed the banner I was asked to design. And I’ve planned the lunch I had to plan for Monday. And I’ve got up-to-date with all the printing of posters and flyers and newsletters that I had to do.

So I think I shall go and play in the garden for a little while.

We were just on the point of beginning the dance when the boy dropped the cheese on the floor. It happens. Just when you think you are in control of things you go and drop your cheese. It’s a metaphor for life probably.

Yesterday I met people with freckles. Quite frankly if you didn’t have freckles there would have been no danger of bumping into me and chatting in the street as I was only doing that with be-freckled people. It wasn’t deliberate on my part of course, I don’t categorise people to bump into en passant. The recent sunshine has obviously brought them out on faces like spattered drops of brown rain. The freckles that is, not the people.

I get quite irritated with the lack of plot continuity in adverts on television but of course I can’t think of one right now that bugs me in that way. However, the Picture ads are really driving the girlie and I to distraction just by being there at all. Can someone just give that bloody woman 25 thou and give us all some peace. What she wants it for I really can’t imagine, the house looks fine, although clearly they need some dedicated scooter space. The girlie’s particular pet hate is the uSwitch ones with the oh-so-fake gospel singers. She can descend or ascend from any part of the house to cut them off in mid-stride-nce. She snarls and grinds her teeth and jabs at the remote like a thing possessed. Calm down dear, it’s only a commercial.

I had another trip out to the garden centre in my lunch hour today – I think this might become a weekly institution – and this time I had to take my manager to show her the way. Apparently another couple of staff members are also looking into making the little trip out there as well; I’ve really started something now! I can see me setting off one day with a little crocodile of ladies like a school outing. I’ll need a clipboard and a register. What larks.

I think I preferred the other end of the day when I was winning the lottery better than this end of the day when I am clearing up cat puke….again! I seem to be doing that an awful lot lately.

It wasn’t a big win or anything but it was a nice start to the day. Nicer than coming home in the evening to several piles of puke.

Anyway that’s enough of that already, moving swiftly on.

Don’t get me wrong I like a spot of sunshine but it has been a little over-warm for April – it’s a worrying sign of the times. I shouldn’t be getting great cracks in the earth at this time of year. The sunshine will do, the extra heat isn’t called for and there are rosy patches on my shoulders too. I must look a right state at the moment anyway with my arms a mass of bramble slashes and even my nose got caught by a thorn and torn – and my hair still has leafy bits in. The parents invited us round to enjoy a spot of light gardening at theirs. Yards of brambles. Actually it was very therapeutic - after a day spent in……….the garden. For a couple of seconds I toyed with the idea of chucking in my job and starting a gardening business. It was a momentary lapse of course; I know full well I would lose interest in gardening if I actually had to make a living at it. It’s just the Sunday syndrome, I never want to go back to work on Monday when I have had a weekend playing in the garden. Oh well, it pays for plants.

I had a wakeful night last night – indigestion of a most unnecessary nature – and as hubby is away for a few days I was able to sit in bed and read. Usually I have to go downstairs and sit and read or more usually lie in bed fretting about not being able to sleep….and then going downstairs to sit and read. I read about Offa of Mercia, Ivarr the Boneless, and a few other ancient ‘royals’. What triggered the subject (for reading about) was a reference earlier in the week about Offa. Sitting on the West Hill after the egg rolling the other day one of the musicians was talking about Offa subduing the folk in this area and building a kind of fort in Hastings long before the castle and indeed the town that is there now. It intrigued me but I need more in-depth reading material than I have. However, Offa did, apparently, subdue a local tribe called the Haestingas who were probably more familiar with the Bulverhythe area. Haestingas is reputedly used as a Christian name and means ‘violent’.

The girlie and I had a day out in London the other day for the specific purpose of doing a tour of the Globe (for her drama work). When I grumble about work I shall try to remember how lucky I am that in the course of my daily duties I don’t have to try to drum up trade in a smelly stairwell while being pissed on as the ‘ladies of the night’ there were obliged to do, poor things. The highlight of the girlies day however was the old gentleman with blue hands and his eccentric party catching the train. That and Gilbert and George at the Tate Modern.

Snatches and glimpses.

I don’t know why I never tried it before but I did today – there is a garden centre ten minutes walk from where I work but because it is technically in another town it seemed like it was out of reach. I decided though that it was worth investigating and it was sooo nice to be able to amble round at my own pace and read all the labels. And luckily because I have to go on foot I can’t indulge in too many purchases.

I bought daisies. (Leucanthemum rather than Bellis)

I hate just frittering away my lunch hour when I can do something useful with it. I go swimming in it on Fridays but once a week is enough because I get dopey in the afternoon after swimming - which doesn’t matter quite so much on Fridays, I just ask anyone around in the afternoon to prod me if I’ve dropped off.

What a glorious weekend – so much sunshine, and chocolate.

I hope Easter was good for you all – it was delicious for me. No shortage of time spent in the garden. I have three veggie beds in order and looking very spick and tidy. I have to construct elaborate devices to try to distract the various interlopers in the garden from messing in my beds. It never works and I have a summer long fight over territory. The cats, foxes and the badgers insist it belongs to them and I say it is mine. I currently have lots of Christmas baubles dangling over one of the beds so it looks very jolly. I did a kind of cats cradle effect over another in garden twine and Sylvester takes great delight in showing me how easily he can work the ground in the small gaps between the string.

There seems to be such a lot of toads this year. The frogs are always around in vast numbers in February and March and the toads take up residence a month or so later but not usually as many as there are out there at the moment. Toads are quite different from frogs in their character and I have a special affection for the toads.. They are much less brash and noisome. And I just love the way they walk. Frogs jump, toads walk.

I also enjoyed lots of cooking this weekend. I made these humongous hot cross buns which were pretty yummy and I made chocolate lollipops to give people.

And then there was dancing. Spent a splendid day out in Hastings yesterday dancing. We started opposite the Standard, then across from the Hastings Arms, then in the garden of the Stag, and after that opposite the Albion. We can’t be too far from beer selling establishments. Then we toddled up the West hill via the funny peculiar railway to roll our eggs.

I have looked up the five day forecast for this part of the country and it shows five fat little suns. Not sons, I only have one of those and he is more strapping than fat. Five round yellow beautiful suns. So I aim to spend the day outside tomorrow pottering in the garden under a huge fat yellow sun. There are a lot of exciting things to do out there.

Seeds to sow and potatoes to bury and loads of weeding – and a small mound of sand to re-distribute. The mound is fast disappearing, it’s possible someone has been knitting it into socks or something because it has diminished since I last looked at it.

Stats are funny things aren’t they – I used to be quite bothered when I first started keeping my blog that there were days when the numbers dropped lower but now I simply watch the fluctuations with a rather detached interest – being an auditor of data and figures it is something I do with a professional interest I suppose. Jeez that sounds very pompous and like I do something really swanky and important – not so – but monitoring trends and movement in data is what I do. Whenever people ask me what my job is I never quite know what to say – it isn’t like a butcher or a baker or even a candle-stick maker with a neat name, it is an amalgam of functions for which no one word or title is sufficiently descriptive. The word I would choose above all others though is facilitator because I feel my chief function really is simply to be helpful and useful.

Anyway as far as the stats go I was rather bemused the other day when they dropped off the edge of normal to the extent of barely hitting double figures. Almost as freaky as when they go up exponentially. Crazy stuff!

Good grief what is the world coming to – three posts in one day. It’s either boredom or need of distraction.

I was reading an article called the Mystery of Consciousness

http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=8612

An intellectual piece as you see. I feel the need every now and then to tease and tantalise the old brain cells, mainly for the purpose of flexing the vocabulary a bit, sentence construction etc. So that when I write: my own small contributions, they read. Better. And as you can see I take not the blindest bit of notice anyway but the article is elegantly written and worth looking over.

Philosophy, the practice and pursuit of, seems a charmingly decadent way to spend one’s time. It’s such a beautifully ambiguous subject, a bit like wallowing in chocolate in the mind.

Actually I wouldn’t mind wallowing in chocolate – in fact I might call in sick tomorrow and fill the bath with melted chocolate and get in and have a wallow. A delicious, if somewhat impractical, thought - especially as I would need a stupendous amount of chocolate.

So I’d better just go to work then really - and what treats lie in wait for there I wonder. Still after that I have six whole days of not being at work so whoop whoop woo. Just get through the day, head down, nose to the grindstone and all that.

The only trouble with giving and not counting the cost is you get dumped on – a lot.

Very stressful day yesterday – don’t ask.

Moving on.

Every now and then I come across a desiccated hazelnut that has had the chocolate sucked off round it. I know who is responsible – me. I can’t eat hazelnuts but no-one else likes them either so I eat the chocolates with a whole hazelnut in them but leave the nut and if I’m doing this when I’m talking to someone I tend to forget what I am doing with the waste. The other day I found one in a plant pot that had been there since Christmas.

I should really be moving my leggy pumpkins but that might have to wait until later because it’s windy and I’m really not in the right frame of mind for wind. There are a lot of things I should be doing, like going to work but I’m slow to start this morning. What I really feel like doing is – nothing.

At the moment I have that Grace Kelly song going through my head and it’s driving me nuts, I’ve listened to it three times this morning already. Perhaps it’s just that it’s a bit eccentric and I like eccentricity.

Oh go on then just once more……

I could be brown
I could be blue
I could violet sky
I could hurtful
I could purple…………

I was on the train yesterday and as I was alone I could indulge in a bit of eavesdropping on other people’s conversations – a favourite pastime of mine (perhaps because I am a poor conversationalist myself!).

There were two young lads nearby discussing cars. One of them, clearly taking a sensible enough stance, was telling his friend about his car-purchasing plans for the future. He would start with a Corsa, or similar model, and would stick with that until later in life he might have saved up enough to buy a Porsche. The other lad, a more reckless and flighty type, stated his desire to buy an Audi TT because as he put it ‘they turn me on’ and ‘no, they really turn me on’. I think he has a problem there but then I have never understood the glamour of the car - I cannot discern any sexual association myself - though of course if he does get himself a nice little Audi he can get inside her any hour of the day and have a good time. However, to me it is a functional and outrageously expensive piece of equipment whose only purpose is to transport A from B to C. Although I lie there, it is not functional to me since I am not licensed to drive the things. I used to just say ‘I can’t drive’ when people asked but I try now to say that I don’t, not that I can’t because it isn’t true, I can – I just haven’t passed the test yet. Anyway when I have been in the driving seat I am more thrilled by the movement than the metal box. But men are funny that way about cars sometimes.

As they are about other things. I have a male friend who will persist in the fantasy that I have lesbian tendencies. Presumably so that we can share some male-bonding ritual of eyeing up anything in a skirt. Unfortunately the only thing I would be likely to fancy in a skirt would be a strapping Scot in a kilt, with good strong thighs and hopefully a look of Harrison Ford about the face. It is tempting sometimes to indulge him in his delusion but I don’t think I could pull it off, actress or not! My sisters and I were discussing one day what manner of man appeals, sexually that is. And while we were all three of us mindful of the aesthetic qualities of the likes of the Deppster and Keanu we would all prefer to take something more rugged and masculine into the fantasy boudoir. The older two with Harrison Ford in mind and the younger with Tom Selleck (but only in his Magnum incarnation) – which then led to a lengthy session on the internet looking for a clip of Magnum PI, in underdressed mode, which once found enabled us to concede her point. We can but dream!

Sadly I think middle-age must settling in as in truth I would turn down an afternoon with a glistening, half-naked Indiana, with or without the Audi TT, in favour of a blanket in long soft grass in the middle of summer, a large box of chocolates, a good book, perfect peace, and endless sunshine. However, if a large, rippling Celt in a kilt hove into view of the blanket I would of course budge up a bit……