Wednesday, March 28, 2007

I couldn't resist. I spent far too long today trawling the web looking for Japanese Sock vending machines - and I didn't find one. I found lots of other things. Sock Glue' for instance (you're going to have to trust me on these or Google them up yourselves because I can't find the links from this pooter, Merriol is hogging the other machine drooling over pictures of pink washing machines - strange woman). Sock Glue is what Japanese schoolgirls glue their insanely baggy socks to their legs with (hmmm, suddenly Merriol doesn't seem so very strange...) And I daren't think what 'Gothic Lolita' is all about. But, eventually, I did find one! I found a sock vending machine! - in a bowling alley in the USA. Somehow I feel a great sense of disappointment, but smell a business opportunity...



Another cartoon today as well.

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Merriol and I started playing Myst IV - Revelation tonight. See you in a couple of months...

Monday, March 26, 2007

Daisy, I'm Going To Wipe Your Nose Because I Can't Paint Over Bogies.

Not much blogging done the last few days due to the fact that it has been Sunny and Nice and Springlike for the past few days. The annual wonderful gap between howling gales and horizontal freezing rain, and The Midges is here. (It's here now because we have relatives visiting next week and it is going to piss down all the time they are here and we will have to repeat the Highland Mantra - "Och, you should have been here last week, the weather was chust sublime!" And they will not believe us. Again. This happens every year.

So, for the past few days, Merriol, the kids, and I have been wandering around smiling at people we haven't seen for months and being amazed the sky is still blue. Look, the sky is still blue! Daisy just looks up and says "It's not raining," a lot in a puzzled tone.

As a consequence I found myself doing Classic Dad Thing number 34 today. Holly came from school and wanted to watch the box. "No," I said slipping into 'things I swore I would never say to my kids' mode, "it's a lovely day. Look, the sun's shining, go outside and bloody frolic."





I have also been contemplating the The Mathematical Impossibilities of Socks. (There's a doctorate just waiting to be picked up by someone here). I hate pairing socks. I'm sure I've blogged about this before - but the chore I hate mostest in the whole wild world is matching socks up with their mates. And I seem to do so much of it. Every day I pair up more pairs of socks than any four people could possibly wear in one day (unless they were professional sock filthiers of course - I'm sure there are such things somewhere in the world. Japan probably. I'm not going to look just in case I'm right, but I just had a vision of middle-aged Japanese businessmen buying professionally-soiled, white, schoolgirl knee-socks from vending machines on station platforms - oh god, I need to get outside more often.)

Where do they all come from? (Socks I mean, not weird pervy thoughts about Japanese Businessmen). There's some sort of Inverse Square law going on here; the further you get away from a pair of feet the more odd socks there are per cubic whatever. I'm sure we have a greater number of socks in the odd sock box than than we actually own in total. I'm sure if you added up all the odd socks in the world it would turn out to be some impossibly high number - possibly larger than the number of atoms in the Universe. How can socks disappear in such vast numbers? Socks in our house live in a closed cycle:

Feet > Laundry Basket > Washing Machine > Drying room > Feet

It is possible for socks to go through the whole cycle many times without leaving the house. At what point is it possible for Adult Socks to vanish from this virtuous circle? There isn't one. It's a closed loop. It's impossible. Where do they go? The kid's socks live by completely different and complicated life cycle. A typical Holly sock cycle might go something like:

Right foot > Welly boot > Bedroom Floor > Laundry basket > Washing Machine > Odd Sock Box

Left Foot > Welly boot > Back of car > Teddy Head > Down the back of the sofa (for weeks) > Living Room Floor > Laundry basket > Washing Machine > Odd Sock Box.

I would guess that in our house you are never more than three feet away from one of Holly's lost socks.





Today when I was fuming away in the Drying Room pairing up today's sock mountain I had the urge to justify the space taken up by the six hundred or so LPs in the living room - and actually played one for the first time in months - only to discover that though the syncopated style of Gene Krupa was happily belting out of the right-hand speaker, I was hearing the kid's Ceebeebies TV channel through the left. Somewhere in the insane tangle of electric spaghetti down the back of the TV / AMP /MiniDisc / VHS/ DVD / Tape-Deck / Record Player /Skybox / Playstation mountain - something had come loose. Luckily I have a lot of Mono records so I played them with the balance whanged over to the right hand channel.



I hate tracing cables more than I hate pairing socks.











Thursday, March 22, 2007

Velux window upstairs which has been a gaping eyesore ever since it was put in months ago - one of the thousand unfinished jobs - looks a lot better and is a lot less draughty now I spent the afternoon whittling a facing to cover the sawn ends of all the boards in the ceiling and squirting insanely sticky mastic into all the cracks, (it's a varnished wooden plank ceiling. Victorian. It looks wonderful but is a sod to do any work on as whatever you do stands out like a sore thumb, there's no chance of plastering over your mistakes and then whacking a couple of coats of white emulsion over it before anyone notices like you can with most ceilings. Well, like I do with most ceilings.)

This evening I did the last Lochaber Youth Theatre session for a couple of weeks . It's just a fun and games thing at the moment but I dread the day when Ilona asks me to actually do any work with them.

I finished a cartoon tonight and posted it. And then finished another- twice. I don't know how many years I have been playing around with computers, but you would have thought by now I would have learned rule number one. Save regularly. Having a think? Save. Having a stretch? Save. Going for a pee? Making a cup of coffee? Doing anything that doesn't involve typing or mousing? SAVE! When will I ever learn? I spent an good half an hour fiddling with little fiddly bits getting them just so - and the application crashed. Pouf! Swearing ensued.

I'm off to bed before I start on another...







Tuesday, March 20, 2007

My whole day has been buoyed up by the utter weirdness that is Holly in the morning. I am so glad I keep a notebook by the side of the bed. Today I lay half-awake in bed listening to Holly and Daisy on the balcony playing with their dolls I heard:

"Barbie's nose is tiny! It's the biggest thing on your face, it's the smallest thing on Barbie's - she'd never get her finger up there!"
A few minutes later she came in waving a Barbie around her head and announced an amazing discovery.
"Daddy, Barbie can't touch her toes!"
It's true. I had never noticed before - not, I hasten to add, that I spend a lot of time playing with Barbie, Cindy, or even Action Man

This was the second thing I wrote down in the bedside notebook today. Earlier I had rolled over and scribbled down a fully formed cartoon idea. It was still funny this evening so I spent ALL night getting into the computer and annoying Merriol by asking her whether grey is funnier than blue, and other such imponderables. That will teach me for getting smug to soon. I'll post it in a couple of days - if it is still funny. I am going to have to put a lid on the toonery nonsense it's getting in the way of my bad movie watching nonsense.


Why do I like stuff like this so much? Austrian mashup. I'm sure I used to have a brain.
New 'Toon today. Quite chuffed with this one, not so much for the gag as all for the ease with which it came together, the penny finally dropped about how to do a couple of things on Illustrator and it all went very smoothly though, very annoyingly, I did find the button I REALLY needed after I had finished it and was fiddling around wondering whether to start on another.

Holly is, according to Sam, the headie up at the school, past the infectious stage of the chicken-pox and will be going back tomorrow. Hurray! Life returns to normal. but, with my usual luck, Daisy is probably erupting into a million spots at this very moment.

Sunday, March 18, 2007

A couple more moments of surreal household bliss from today. After a week at home with the kids Merriol is starting to understand a little why I get so twitchy and irritable when she is even only a few minutes late home in the evenings...



Daisy:


Mummy, Holly peed in the box.
Mummy, Holly peed in the box.
Mummy, Holly peed in the box.


Merriol:

What?


Daisy:

Mummy, Holly peed in the box.


Merriol:

In this box?... O my god she did!

Holly, did you pee in this box?


Holly:

erm... yes.


Merriol:

Holly, WHY? Why did you pee in the box?


Holly:

... it's a long story...


At which point I had to leave before I burst out laughing, so I didn't hear her explanation. Bet it was good though.



Later:


Holly:
(Proudly)
Liam, look what I've done!


Me:

Holly, you've Sellotaped a grape to a piece of paper.


Holly:

Yes.


Me:


Why?


Holly:

To lead the crab with! Hold it upside down and follow me...



A Tale of Bad Parenting (probably a better name for this blog)

What with one thing and another - only one of them being another crap Bela Lugosi serial chopped down to an incomprehensibly unwatchable movie - Merriol and I didn't get to bed too early last. The girls were up at 6. We weren't. After watching the telly on the landing for a while, then getting bored with that, the girls decided to play 'house-moving' which consisted of moving the entire contents of their bedroom on to the landing and vice versa. I, at least, was in bed half-asleep, half-awake and half-keeping an ear on proceedings but unable to actually get myself up. I was woken up at 9.15 by Daisy saying "I can't find Holly".

Panic.

Up. Merriol, Daisy, and I ran round the house looking for her. Or rather Merriol and I ran round the house shouting for her, looking in and under things - Daisy sat on the stairs and 'phoned' people on the old totally unfunctioning Bakelite phone which lives on the sideboard; I guess she thought she was helping. This house hasn't got many rooms but it's a big place to search if you are looking for a small child - who may be hiding. I was managing to generate the start of a real panic when she came out of the kitchen looking guilty.


And on the Breakfast Menu today we have Brioche layered with a slice of chocolate spread and blackcurrant jam topped with a hefty sprinkling of little silver-ball cake decorations...

She had just started to add some piped icing when she was interrupted.






Thursday, March 15, 2007

As new obsessions go the toonery is lasting longer than most of my recent compulsions. I got two done today. The first one got me out of bed at 4 am! A small part of my brain just kept needling me till I got out of bed and did it. Which does raise a question; given that everything looks like total shit at 4 am (4 am is, according to statistics I just made up, the time of day when people are most likely to realise the futility of existence and the meaningless of life - Jean-Paul Sartre apparently only wrote for quarter of an hour a day 4 - 4:15 am. There's no way even a Frenchman could have written a sentence like "Consciousness is consciousness of itself insofar as it is consciousness of a transcendent object." on a day when the birds were singing, and the sun was shining, and beautiful shag-happy French girls wandered the streets in summer dresses - that's 4 am type thinking).

So, the question: Is something that you think funny at 4 am still funny in the light of day? I dunno. I think so, it still struck me as amusing when I looked at it later - but then again Phoebe has been poking about in my head with a spoon, so what do I know.

The second one came to me this afternoon when I was round at Mike's being hypnotised by him explaining his latest essay to me (he's doing a Master's in English Literature). He uses me as a sounding board and it's fascinating. I don't understand half the concepts he is talking about, and don't recognise a lot of the words he uses either, and even then I have to translate the ideas he's playing with into movie terms before I can get a glimmering of what he's on about. (Today for example I managed to grasp some difference between Wordsworth's poetry and Keats' by playing in my head the shower scene from Psycho, and the scene where Anna Massey watches the movie in Peeping Tom. Something to do with the implicit and explicit. It made sense at the time.)
I guess if Mike can explain things to me he stands a chance of getting them down on paper. Though his evaluation of Matthew Arnold, considered by many to be the Victorian Age's third greatest poet, as " a boring cunt " might not make it into the final draft of the essay.


.

Wednesday, March 14, 2007


Reading bedtime stories last night


Me: On Tuesday he ate through two pears, but was still hungry (Daisy helped me turn the page)... On Wednesday he ate through three plums, but was still hungry... (Daisy helped me turn the page) On Thursday he ate through four strawberries, but was still hungry...
Holly: ...but very healthy.





.

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

A strange day. I spent most of it stuck in the airing cupboard painting it white. Merriol is off work for a week - or something (I'm sure she has told me no end of times how many days she isn't going to be working this month but my brain just doesn't retain facts any more - unless they are to do with Bela Lugosi movies) so I get to do heroic things like finish all the jobs I started over the previous four years and abandoned for a variety of reasons - most oftenly to start another unfinished job.

Oftenly? Did I just type 'oftenly'? Oh god... That's the kids. I am forgetting all the grammar I ever knew, forgetting how to construct simple words too. They are leeching it all out of me. They have built some sort of brain sucking device from Lego blocks and Barbie parts and point it at my head while I'm not looking. I'm sure as hell loosing the ability to do joined-up thinking.

Tonight to give my brain a rest from the tedium of standing on a small ladder in a tiny room an painting white paint on top of white paint I flopped in front of a Bela Lugosi movie. I love Bela Lugosi flicks, he is such a wonderful ham and appeared in some really dreadful films. (The only drawback to watching them though, is I tend to talk like the Count from Sesame Street for days afterwards: "One machine with lots of electrical sparks... Two machines with lots of electrical sparks... Three machines... The fools! The fools! I wil haf my revenj upon tem!"
Tonight's offering from the deeply shit box of 50 all time unwatchable tosh was The Phantom Creeps - which, after a bewilderingly incomprehensible first few minutes soon sank down into a level of unwatchability I have rarely encountered before. Nothing made ANY sense whatsoever - I abandoned it. (Gasp!) Yep. It was THAT bad. Turns out what I was attempting to watch was a 265 min (12 episode) Saturday morning serial edited down to an breathtakingly messy 78 minute feature film. No wonder people kept arriving at the same door over and over again and there was a car plummeting over a cliff every five minutes - sometimes the same car, quite often the same cliff. Nice to know though I still have some will power and critical faculties left after Holly and Daisy have syphoned off most of my higher cerebral activity via their Brain-Suckotron.

If only I could lurn to use it's powerr for myselv. I could maik miselv Invincible! I could efen rule Te Worlt!

Mwahahaha!



And another Cartoon - which is slightly funnier than yesterday's, but that wasn't difficult - Guilt! Phoebe Southwood! Guilt!

Monday, March 12, 2007

Another new toon today. A bit of a quickie because the one I laboured over for hours last night just looked like unfunny crap when I came to look at it again. Partially I think because Phoebe described my stuff as 'wonderful' over on her blog. As I react to praise like a slug does to salt I am now paralysed into inactivity. Guilt! Phoebe Southwood, guilt!

After last night's mammoth brain rotting session of three fucking-awful movies (Flight to Mars - a cheap 1951 SF based on a novel by Tolstoy* from a company more used to making westerns. The Lost World - the first 1925 silent version, which contained a weirdly disturbing white actor in black face with 'Yes bass I gwine do dat ting' captions and no sign of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle making an appearance as himself as promised by the IMDb, and This Is Not A Drill - a 1962 Cold War no budgeter that could have been a lot lot better (but was still better than the sum of its parts) I restricted myself to just one tonight, an inept Italian/Spanish horror movie set in Britain starring a Kiwi and a Swede which featured the most boring and pointless 'chasing a monster through the sewers' sequence ever shot -God it was boring.

I have watched 33 movies so far this year. Most of them utter shit. I need to carve my New Year's Resolution into a piece of three by four and hit myself over the head with it.

*Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1883-1945) not Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) who wrote Anna Karenina, Warren Peas etc. I don't think he wrote any SF. There, you learned something. My watching this drek isn't a total waste of time...

Sunday, March 11, 2007

Last night I spent far too long for my own good watching footage of spaceships on Stumblevideo. Not pretend spaceships from TV shows and movies (I'm not that sad) but real spaceships - loads of NASA footage of the shuttle taking off and people doing Saturday morning science in The International Space Station (OK, I am...).

A couple of the films really stood out for me, not because of what they showed but because of the voices on the soundtrack. What they showed was pretty spectacular. In both cases they were films of unmanned rockets blowing up moments after takeoff. In the first movie a US military rocket blows up just as it clears the tower. There is a massive explosion. A gazzillion tons of rocket fuel and several billion dollars worth of hi-tec stuff just explode in a HUGE Hollywood style mid-air fireball. Enormous chunks of burning crap fall, hit the ground, and explode again. There is a moment's silence before the cool, dispassionate female voice of Mission Control comes on "...we have an anomaly on the launch pad."

"An anomaly"... that's one way to describe it.

At the other end of the scale was the amateur footage from a field somewhere in Russia. It's night, there's a cloudy sky and in the distance a Soyuz launcher sits on a pad. There's a flare of orange light and the rocket slowly takes off, a glowing plume of light reaching into the air then - WHAM! the whole sky lights up. A gazzillion tons of Russian rocket fuel and several billion Rubles worth of probably slightly less hi-tec stuff just explode in a HUGE Hollywood style mid-air fireball.

Up till this point the amateur cameraman had been chatting to other people standing around in the field in what? Russian? Hungarian? Polish? I don't know, some intensely Slavonic language.

"Dobri-slonski whatsiti whatsiti do-dahski Do-dahski!"

The Rocket takes off...

(Excitedly) "Dobri-Dobri-slonski!"

And up...

(Awed) "Dooo-Daahski!"

WHAM!

"Fooky - nell!" (pause) "Fooky-nell! Fooky-nell!"

English is truly the international language. When ships at sea, whatever their nationality, get in trouble they send out a Mayday distress signal, I have no idea what 'Mayday' means* but everyone yells for help in English. It now seems that everyone reverts to English when faced with imminent catastophe of any kind.

Fooky-nell!




New cartoon




*actually it's French (M'aider is the infinitive form of the reflexive verb "help me") but I'm not going to let mere facts get in the way of a cheap joke.

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Been fighting off a migraine all day, I woke up this morning with the sparkly lights right in the middle of my field of vision - I know they have a real name but have no idea what it is. Not a good start to the day. I don't get migraines often but when I do they are horrible. Today I seem to have avoided the worst by taking lots of painkillers and sleeping for a chunk of this afternoon when Mum and Dad looked after the kids. I've been walking sideways a lot all day - or feeling like I have; it's very peculiar. My vision is very funny too, everything seems flatter than normal. I didn't attempt anything difficult today. Just a quiet day looking after the kids and putting the bathroom back together.

How do shower curtains get dusty?

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

My Feet Are Giggling

With the kind of ironic counterpoint, without which my life would be much less interesting, after yesterday removing vast amounts of liquid from the bathroom floor I spent a great chunk of today sticking liquid onto the bathroom ceiling. A few days ago I was having a shower and looked up; I could have sworn that ceiling was white. It wasn't. Nowhere near. It used to be - about 15 years ago. Somehow over the years it has dinged into a mid- dark grey (varying from Pantone 14-4 102 TPX to 17 4405 TPX in places). It is now white again, and the top of the tall cupboard doesn't have a 7.5mm layer of felt on top of it. It must be ten years since I was on a ladder tall enough to see the top of the thing. On the top I discovered a dense layer of greyness, a ten year accumulation of bathroom fluff. It was like a blanket. I tried to wipe it off but it wouldn't come - so I ended up rolling it up and dumping it. The bathroom now has an echo.

I recently upgraded / moved / whatevered the blog over to the Improved! All-singing! All Dancing! with THX Surround Sound! (on selected computers) NEW! ("no longer beta") Blogger*. As a result my counter doesn't work any more so I have installed a new one. Not very interesting but true...



*I liked 'Beta Blogger'. It sounded like a blood-pressure medicine with a cold.

Google thinks there are more important sites than Google?



.

Monday, March 05, 2007

Not a lot happened today so I drew two cartoons. This cartoonery thing is turning into another of my (possibly short term - like so many of them) obsessions. I'm getting faster though, my periods of staring at the screen in blank stupifaction wondering what it was I just did, or periods of intense puzzlement as I try and find the tool I KNOW IS THERE! are getting shorter and shorter. I haven't shouted at the computer all night.

When I say not a lot happened today, I did make the discovery that my bathroom floor isn't as level as I though it was. Not that I have given it a lot of thought for the past 15 or so years since it was put in. The assumption that floors are level is a pretty basic assumption after all. Unless your plates are sliding off the table you somehow assume that the thing you spend so much time walking around on is flat.

Today Holly decided to wash one of her toys. She put the toy in the sink, put the plug in the plughole turned both taps on full - and then went off to find something else to do while the sink filled up (which it probably had done before she got to the bathroom door). When I came into the living room a few minutes later she was flopped watching the telly and there was the sound of a small waterfall coming from the bathroom.

I have no idea how much water went under the floorboards but it was an inch deep at one end of the bathroom and a lot less than that at the other. I find it slightly worrying that presented with a flooded bathroom, water going god knows where, possibly getting into the wiring and blowing up the washing machine or electrocuting me and all I can think is 'Hmmm, the floor's not level.'

After a few futile and frustrating minutes trying to get up all the water up with the mop, a task which it became patently obvious would have taken ages, I launched plan B. Plan B was to dump the entire contents of the (very full) laundry basket, which luckily included a couple of towels, onto the floor, and walk about on it till it squelched then throw it all into the bath.

Not subtle but it worked.

Saturday, March 03, 2007

Apart from shopping not a lot happened today so I drew another cartoon. This one has been hanging around in a notebook for several years. It's good to get it out of my system. I guess that's why I called the cartoon blog "Scatching My Itch"; a lot of what is going to get put up there will be reworkings of doodles on scrappy bits of paper that have been knocking about for ages annoying me waiting for me to do something with them. Today's was rediscovered in a notebook that fell out of a long unworn jacket pocket the other day. It was part of a long bunch of doodles I did one night in Barcelona - about six years ago - that started out with me wondering what would have happened if fish had been into disco.

Mummy, What Does "Shake Your Ass" Mean?

Wednesday. I was hired to drive a van for Ilona and the Lochaber Youth Acting Drama Whatever they are called Group. Another one-night production of the Strictly Scottish play I had built the set for last year. I spent last Sunday tarting up what was left of the set, and replacing bits that had vanished and on Wednesday I borrowed my dad's car and picked up the Van from the van hire place in the Fort*. Parked the car round the back of the hire place in the customer parking and drove to Kinlochleven, picked Ilona and 'stuff', drove to the Clachaig to pick up Andy who was doing the lighting and as much of the heavy lifting as I could arrange before he cottoned on, then to Ballachulish to pick up the set (and more 'stuff') and then to the Fort where we set up the show and fretted about whether all the cast were going to turn up.

There were seven in the cast. The girls all lived locally but the boys were hot-footing from all over Scotland just for the one show. Paul from Aviemore, Grant from Dundee and (mind gone blank insert name later) was coming up from Glasgow. Paul arrived and helped set up. The Girls arrived. (Mind gone blank insert name later) phoned to say he had missed his train but it was all right he was on a bus! Grant arrived at ten past six. The show was due to start at seven. (Mind gone blank insert name later) phoned to say there was an accident and the road was blocked and he was hitch-hiking back to Glasgow to try and get up another way. There was no way on earth he would make it in time. Ilona looked at me. Would I go on instead, with a script in my hand and read (Mind gone blank insert name later)'s part? There was no way I could say no. We quickly ran through the show (or at least the bits I was now in). - "Ok, Come on that side, Sit down. Go off there, do this, do that, do the other, laugh at him then, be sleazy there...". I frantically wrote all over the script I had borrowed.

Twenty minutes before the show we found out the costume fitted me - kilt, shirt, waistcoat, and jacket followed later by a bad periwig and a very real sabre.

The show - I don't remember too much about. I was too busy trying to remember where the hell I was supposed to be, where my props were (all 2 of them), and trying to work out how to get my voice to reach the back of the steep raked seating while looking down and reading a script. I managed to fuck up at least twice - even with the script in my hand - but we got through. Then we reached the final scene. We walked on. The play is set in a cheap interactive tourist attraction - we were playing the actors playing the parts of historical characters. Scottish History for tourist (I was playing a guy who played Bonnie Prince Charlie). In the final scene it's the end of the season and all the actors in the tourist trap have just put on the final show and are about to go their separate ways. There's an air of finality and sadness. It was only at this point I realised that the last direction Ilona had given me on the run through had been "get changed into your civvies." seemed reasonable. The scene is set in the changing room but... wait a minute! I'm on stage! (downstage yet) in front of a whole bunch of people who have paid to be here - and I'm supposed to take my clothes off? I considered ducking behind the bit of scenery the girls were changing behind - while popping up and down delivering their lines - but they were girls. Girls I don't know that well, teenage girls getting changed on stage in front of friends family and paying public... erm... as a boyhood fantasy it might have been entertaining, as a middle-aged man it was big scary "oh noooo - don't even think about it!".

Fuck it.

I took off the dress-shirt and quickly pulled on my t shirt. Okay, that was painless. How do I get my kilt off and my trousers on without - oh bum! I remembered I was wearing pretty loose baggy boxers shorts, the type with a fly... Okay, trousers on UNDER the kilt first - then take the kilt off! Brilliant! but I couldn't get the trousers up all the way and ended up doing the most ungainly bandy-legged wriggling as I managed to hold up my trousers (mostly by will power) while using both hands to unbuckle the kilt. Meanwhile I think I lost a cue and the whole scene went a bit very wobbly. We got to the end though. No one threw anything and people were complimentary afterwards.

The set was struck and in the back of the van in 20 minutes.

The set and 'stuff' was delivered to Kinloch and Ballachulish. We raced back to the Fort to:

1. pick up Ilona,
2. fill up the van with fuel,
3. leave it at the hire place and
4. drive home in Dad's car.

Parts 1 and 2 of the plan were pretty painless. We arrived at the hire place about 11pm - there's no one there but we were to lob the keys through the letterbox. We got out of the van. I locked it. I said "Are we sure we have taken everything out of the van? Because I'm going to put the keys through the letterbox." Nothing in the van says Ilona. Right. I lob the keys through the letterbox and walk round the back of the building to find someone has parked their car right behind my Dad's. We're blocked in. I've just posted the keys to the van, and the last bus left town about 20 minutes ago. We can't get home - and it's raining.

I say "Fuck". A lot. Very loudly.

Thank god for power steering. I said we were 'blocked in' not 'boxed in'. There was, thank you gods of the Theatre, an empty space to the left of the car. With Andy out in the rain peering at the very small gaps front and back, Ilona relaying his signals to me and me doing a lot of steering while driving VERY slowly backwards and forwards we managed to get out.

Home at midnight.

Still, it's better than working for a living.

Missing CD? Contact vendor

Free CD
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in removing from cover.

Copyright (c) 2004-2007 by me, Liam Baldwin. That's real copyright, not any 'creative commons' internet hippy type thing.

(this copyright notice stolen from http://jonnybillericay.blogspot.com/)

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