Experimental Domestic Science

(Number 37)

Yesterday I decided we were going to have baked potatoes for tea.
We have a big bag of potatoes in the kitchen.
They are unwashed.
I hate washing potatoes.
We have a dishwasher...
(you can see where this is going can't you?)



It didn't work. Either I need cleaner potatoes to start with or a bigger dishwasher.

---

Hard day with the kids today. Nothing terrible, no tantrums, no screaming matches, just a long day. There was no school this afternoon for some reason and I was tired, the kids weren't and that is not a good combination. I had a bit of a break when Holly helped Pa wash the car for its birthday, and then this evening Merriol took them off into the Fort to see Father Christmas on the High Street (with REAL raindeer! Apparently the kids were totally unfazed to see the deer corralled in the car park when they arrived. It just meant they got a good look at them first without the crowds getting in the way. I don't suppose either of them wondered why Father Christmas would need to park his raindeer in a car park but they seemed to have had a good time. They returned home tired and happy, which is a good combination.


Merriol has asked me point out (her actual words were "Oi! You lying toad!") that it was she who bought the Phil Spector album. She's probably right (she usualy is*). It was a long time ago, years before we were married, or had kids - so I think it probably proved to be a wise investment.








*even when she isn't.

Every year for the past umpteen years it has been a sort of pre-Christmas traditionish that Merriol buys me a 'Christmas Album'. It started when I found and bought, much to Merriol's bafflement, a copy of The Phil Spector's A Christmas Gift For You, a true classic of high camp. I can't remember the order in which they arrived but over the years I have been given Christmas albums by Elvis, Sinatra, Boney M, Bing Crosby, James Brown ("Get on down, like a snow machine!"), The Partridge Family, Gene Autry, etc. etc. This year in a spectacular piece of barrel bottom scraping I was today presented with... Joe Longthorne's Christmas album.


Oh God!


On the upside today I ordered our new computer. I spent ages on the phone to a nice bloke at Dell (Delhi?) and ended up spending 30% over our budget - but I got something with lots of big numbers in it, numbers which mean nothing to me but sounded good and will, I hope, mean the thing goes faster than the cobbled together collection of hubs, caddies, and wires that I'm typing this on. (The second hard drive is held in place with a bent paperclip). Fingers crossed. This will be the first machine I have owned that doesn't have a 3.5" floppy drive. but it does have eight USB holes which means I can stop having hubs plugged into hubs which will mean the desk will be a little less knee deep in cables.

My brain is going soggy from all the rain. Three meters isn't eight feet four inches! it's nearer ten foot. I need a better hat.

The culvert up at the school is blocked and for the past week or so it has been raining as only it can around here. It rains a lot here - the annual average stands at about three meters (that's eight feet four inches in old money) - warm westerly air sails across the Atlantic, get very wet, hits cold mountains, dumps Atlantic on our heads.Bit of a bugger, but it's the price you pay for living in such a beautiful place (I assume it's still beautiful, I so rarely get to see it through all the rain). So! The culvert up at the school gate is blocked and overflowing. Water is streaming all the way down the road wearing huge pot holes in the side. Holly thinks it's great. She just stands there in the water in her wellies and the rushing water breaks over her feet like the water at the front of a speedboat.It is most peculiar. It looks like she is scooting up the road without moving. Needless to say she is usualy soaking when we get to school.



Today I realised that there was no need for all this water to be flooding the road at all. On the other, downhill, side of the school entrance is the ditch where the water should have been if it hadn't gone for a walk onto the road. All that was needed was some idiot with a mattock to come along and stand in the rain and dig a trench from the, very wet, side of the road to the, not very wet, ditch and all the water would be back where it belonged after being on the road for no more than a dozen yards. Being an idiot, and owning a mattock, I dug the ditch.



This evening was spent poking about the workshop trying to make some space in there. The place is an embarrassment. I've just been running in and dumping stuff then running away again for months now. It's a tip.This evening I bit the bullet and spent an hour in there trying to throw things out (hard). And moving things around (easy but pointless) and generaly trying to reassert my will on all the kipple. I hadn't been in there three minutes before I had tripped over the box of coach bolts I knew I had, and needed, last week but couldn't find even after a half hours searching. As it was, it turned out that I had missed finding them by much. They were buried under the first thing I had moved when I had started to look for them. As normal when I'm in there looking for something my first act had been to hide it.

That Slug Has Stripes; I think It Is An American Slug

Saturday. Merriol disappeared early this morning to finish off end of month stuff at the surgery - and she took the kids with her! A feeling of peace and inner contentment washed over me as I cuddled back under the duvet. Peace. Child free peace. Two minutes later Morag rang, looking for Merriol, and I felt so guilty about still being in bed that I immediately got up and did vast amounts of hoovering and other jobs best done without kids underfoot - including taking the deep fat fryer to pieces and shoving it in the dishwasher. When I clean, I clean.



Later I met them all, Merriol and our kids, Morag and her kids, down at the TIC and then everyone piled back to our house. Oh what fun! Mike is writing an essay and keeping the kids out from under his feet was the game today. After an hour or so of near bedlam I discovered we needed groceries and legged it to the Fort. It was nice getting in the car and being able to put on a CD that didn't have "The Wheels On The Bus" as a track.

---

I bought a couple of books last week. (This is news?) Tucked inside one of them was a letter dated July 1944 in some sort of foreign which turned out to be Danish. I found a site that will translate Danish to English but it's reading the handwriting that is going to be the difficult bit. If / when I get it worked out - and if it turns out to be in anyway interesting - I'll post it here soon. Remind me.

---

More on the Buffalo thing:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo



Thanks Kimberly, but I still haven't got a scooby...

Burglars Stole Our Pet Crabs

Madness! Madness! The world has gone mad. Merriol, glitter-frenzied woman that she is, has finally flipped. She has managed to find toothpaste with glitter in it. Our kids are currently brushing their teeth with strawberry flavoured toothpaste that extrudes from the tube in a star shape - and glitters!

I may have to go lie down for a week if this goes on.

---

I've been saying 'buffalo' a lot today. Someone over at palimpsest posted this on one of the threads:

Here is a sentence that is already grammatically correct, believe it or not:

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

Any guesses as to how this is so?

I was intrigued.

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo?

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo?

I spent several hours today happily doing the housework and playing with the kids - or so it would have seemed to the casual observer. Looked at more closely and you would have seen my lips twitching. A little closer still and you would have heard my muttering...
"Buffalo buffalo buffalo? buffalo buff-alo! Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buff-alo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo? ..."

Eventually I realised there were three meaning for the word. The animal itself, the verb meaning to overawe or outwit, and the Town in New York State. Finally I came up with:

Buffalo buffalo buffalo, Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

Meaning: (The animals called) Buffalo buffalo (or overawe or outwit other) buffalo, Buffalo buffalo (i.e. buffalo from the town of Buffalo), buffalo (other) Bouffalo buffalo.

I'm glad that's over; the kids were starting to look at me with even more pity than normal - and if this entry doesn't feature high on any Google search for buffalo soon I will be amazed. Buffalo.






Bouffalo n. a Buffalo with a beehive hairdo.

One of the problems with being old enough to be my oldest daughter's grandad (I just did the math, it's true) is the huge changes that have happened in the 43 years since I was her age. I remember my first encounter with a computer in school. I was 13. It was a teletype terminal linked to some huge valve operated mainframe in the council office basements the other side of the city. The class queued up and one at a time pounded in our programs line by line (Forth or Basic, I can't remember which) :

10 Do this
20 do that
30 sub routine this
35 put in the bit I got wrong last time
40 end

If it didn't do what you expected you went away and worked it out and got on the back of the queue to type it all it again. It must have been worth it, because one of the kids I stood in line with was Alan Dix now Professor Alan Dix, of the Computing Department of Lancaster University.

Holly, aged four, was doing stop motion animation on the nursery laptop last week.

This afternoon she started walking around stiff legged for a bit before announcing. "My legs don't work very well. I have an error message in my head."

The sooner we get this kid to ballet classes the better.

---

I went into the Fort this afternoon to pick up some shopping while Merriol went for a walk with the kids. As I was driving in, a motorbike overtook me. He passed the car in front of me a few moments later and shot off away up the road. A couple of miles on, on a particularly bendy bit of the A82, I spotted something at the side of the road. I had just worked out it was a crash helmet when I realised the mass lying on the grass next to it was the biker who had passed me a few moments ago. I couldn't see the bike, it must have been down off the road in the trees, half way to the loch. There was no way I could stop. I had a car right behind me. So I turned in the next lay-by (thus becoming one of those arseholes who do three point turns on trunk roads) and went back. By the time I get there he was on his feet and talking on his mobile. His face was covered in blood but he insisted he was all right. All of my life I have been convinced that one day I will find a dead body. I'm glad today wasn't it.

My Face Likes Dancing

said Daisy. To which Holly replied:

"My bum likes birthday parties."

I have no idea what they were on about.

I lied yesterday. I've been thinking about it, I did have an epiphanistic moment when my previous life went out the window. It was the moment Merriol told me she was pregnant*. Bam! that was it. Total life reversal in zero point five seconds.

Today was spent at a car boot sale in Kinloch where I didn't buy a lot, not because there wasn't a lot to buy, but because I didn't want any of it and, for most of the time I had Daisy clinging onto my leg. It's very hard to throw yourself into full blown, rubbish raking frenzy with a two year old glued to your knee. I bought a couple of CDs and a REALLY BAD SF movie which went into the DVD player as soon as everyone was in bed. That's another 90 minutes of my life Hollywood owes me.

In between times we went to a birthday party. A children's birthday party. Three hours of semi-controlled hell. It was like being caught in a dwarf's riot. At one point they all started blowing those party hooter things with the paper tube that unrolls** - it sounded, to quote our hostess, like a penguin colony in the mating season. Great description. I wonder how she knows.



*The first time.

**I have no idea what they are called and daren't look it up on Google because it would take me four hours and I would have joined the Inner-Mongolian Liberation Front's mailing list, and watched a lot of stupid things on U-tube on the way. I shouldn't be allowed to look things up on Google. You think this blog gets off the point quickly? you should see me trying to look up simple facts on the web.

Holly? Holly? I'm Shouting For Holly - Shout! Shout! Shout!

I took Daisy up to playgroup today up at the church hall. I was glad she was in one of her "Me do it on my own!" moods which meant we walked up. It was slow but it beats pushing her up that steep hill in her pushchair. The walk was especially slow today. Because it's autumn, there are an awful lot of interesting leaves lying around on the road, each one had to be looked at, picked up, carried for a few paces, then discarded as a more interesting leaf presented itself...

One of the first things I heard when we arrived at the hall was:

"Don't let any of the kids into the church. There's a coffin in there."

There was funeral later in the day and the body was already in place. We only knew this because one of the mums at the playgroup is the priest at the church and would be conducting the service later. Another of the Mums* is the village doctor. I really wonder how I got here. You see, time was - in my mispent youth, I used to drink like a fish, do all sorts of interesting chemistry experiments on my brain, conduct interesting physical exersizes (mostly horizontal) with all sorts of people, hang out with bands, artists, and all sorts of other people your mother wouldn't like - and here I am Xty years later watching my wee one playing with plastic food while I chat with the Vicar over a cup of coffee while there is a dead person in the next room.

Time does funny things.

All the certainties I had back then (not that I can remember any of them apart from the 'I'm never going to have kids' one) have all vanished. I've always been genuinely embarrassed by my younger selves. When I was a teenager I hated the child I had been. When I was a student I hated the teenager. And so on. My younger selves always seemed so gauche. Opinionated little nerks I was glad to outgrow.

I never had any blinding epiphanies where I cast off my previous selves with a cry of "I renounce thee!" but I always remember looking over my shoulder at myself thinking "did I used to think that? did I really used to like that band? did I really treat her like that?" You know the sort of thing; it's like looking in an old photo album (like Flickr, but in a book) and finding a picture of you wearing flares (or hotpants, ra-ra skirt, tank top, leg warmers or whatever. Imagine yourself wearing the most hideous fashion disaster to befall your generation.)

I've lost the plot...

....oh yeah! I realised today that I hadn't done that for a long time. Looked back and cringed at my previous incarnations. For one thing I've been too bloody busy for any self-indulgent introspection, and for another I seem to have been happy with myself and my life for quiet a long time now.

I just thank the gods I never had a mullet or wrote poetry.





*I say 'Mums' deliberately, not 'parents', because I am usually the only male over four years of age who goes. I have no idea where all the other men are. Out slaying mammoths or something equaly testosteroney.

Nipping down to the Co-op this evening to get a bottle of milk, I ran into Eileen who was heading to the public notice board. I guessed she was going to read the weird open letter our former doctor has posted there...

(Back story: there has been a long, growing rift* between our former GP and the GP who replaced him. As Merriol works for the new GP, and we count her as a friend, and as I have no idea what I have been told, in confidence as a friend, and what is public knowledge, I'm not going to go into the finer details, but this open letter put up on the public noticeboard is certainly making people think about the affair in a whole new light.)

So, (Get to the point!) Eileen was indeed going to read the notice but couldn't because of the poor light...

(More back story: the noticeboard down at the Co-op was cunningly constructed so as to be in total darkness after sunset and in midwinter the sun sets mid-afternoon around here. The overhanging roofy bit of the notice board which shelters you from the rain (on the rare occasions the rain comes straight down as opposed to sheeting in horizontaly which is the norm) also completely shades out the streetlight on the other side of the road. The thing was also cunningly placed right next to where the trucks delivering to the Co-op have to reverse round a tight corner and has been semi-demolished at least twice.)

Ilene couldn't read the notice so I backed up the car and switched on my headlights so she could see.

None of which is got anything to do with what I started out to say. What I started out to say was, as we were chatting, Ilene asked me how the 'dirty weekend' had gone and the first thought that popped into my head was "Didn't you read the blog?"

I need to get out more and socialise face to face and do real talking to people.




*'rift' as in Great Rift Valley

test of new PFF installation...

Edit: ...which obviously works.

PFF = Performancing For Firefox, which is the sit at the bottom of the window blogging tool I've been using for a while but, after I foolishly upgraded it, it stopped (and there you have me and computers in a nutshell).

Now someone has fiddled with something somewhere and it's up and running again. For which I am grateful. Thank you anonymous World Wide Interweb people for your tireless fiddling, and for making at least one of my Firefox extensions work again.

Not much exciting happened today so I drew a cartoon.

I'll get my coat...

Blah day. Cold but beautiful. It snowed heavily last night and there was snow down to the tree line. Dead calm this morning and a high tide. Real picture postcard weather.

It was one of those days in which nothing much seemed to get done. We went shopping in Oban and filled the car up with stuff from Tesco, Lidl, a couple of charity shops and home again, put the kids to bed and watched a movie. Well, started to watch one, got so pissed off with it we junked it and I fetched another off the impressive (in size, not content) 'Movies we have not yet watched' heap,

On the way down to Oban Merriol texted Morag to see if she wanted anything. Morag did, and because the kids were playing up and it was getting late I was delegated to run round Lidl and get the stuff for her. Have you ever tried to do someone else's shopping? I found it totally confusing.

Morag had asked us to get things we don't normally buy. It's very odd how quickly you get into ruts. I go into Lidl buy umpteen things, but they're always pretty much the same things. I notice new lines when they appear on the shelves but somehow I manage to tune out all the other stuff that has always been there that I don't normally get, so when I was asked to purchase some of this stuff I had somehow trained myself not to see - I just couldn't find it.

I thought I knew where everything was in the store (it ain't that big after all) but I just couldn't find the stuff she wanted us to get till I had walked past it five times and then asked one of the few and far between downtrodden workers. It was a very unsettling experience.

I Know! I Know! But My Legs Don't Understand.

An interesting day.

I cleaned poo off a carpet, bathed one of my kids, wiped milk off the stairs, mopped up a puddleful of water off the kitchen floor, and scraped gobbets of congealing porridge off the table - and all before nine in the morning.

In the afternoon I got offered the lead roll in a movie.

The movie is a lo-lo-no budget thing and it's five minutes long but "If you're interested the lead role is yours" are words every actor dreams about. Especially if it gets me out of wiping Daisy's arse for a few days.

In the evening Merriol and I took ten minutes to track down the rightful owner of the lost camera, a feat about which, we will have great fun telling the nice policewoman who has had the thing for the past three months. (Actually I will let Merriol tell you about that on her blog tomorrow as it was her brilliant deductive powers that broke the case - too much Miss Marple if you ask me.)

---

I found a pedometer of the kitchen floor during the morning (where does this stuff COME from?) . I zeroed it and clipped it on my belt.

I just took it off. It read 12753.

According to this site that is about six miles. I'll believe that. Most of it up and down stairs. No wonder I'm buggered at the end of the day.

---

Oh, and it snowed.

I Wish You Could Open Up Sunshine To See What's In It

I spent the greater chunk of today varnishing and assembling a couple of Ikea storage box things we bought on our shopping orgy in Glasgow. How sad is that by the way - I mean the fact that going shopping in Ikea is a big treat for us? This trip we did make the serendipitous discovery that going round Ikea on Friday night is a good idea. The place is practicaly empty. Most of the population of Scotland spends Friday night getting themselves plastered, or in hiding from those that are, not wandering around warehouses full of flatpack lifestyles. Sunday afternoon on the other hand, we went back to buy some things we decided we couldn't live without) and the place was packed, a nightmare - full of families with kids all moving at 0.1 miles per hour pushing huge fucking trolleys empty apart from a funky plastic toothmug and a £4 table lamp plonked in the middle. Beats going to church I suppose.

Anyway. These little wooden trunky things: wooden cubes made of open little wooden slats. Half way through shellacing them I was really starting to regret it but the thought of trying to clean felt pen or paint off totally untreated wood was even worse so I finished. It was one of those so boring it becomes hypnotic / addictive jobs. After the shellac had dried (which wasn't long, one of the nice things about shellac is that it dries very quickly and doesn't stink the house out, unlike polyeurathane) I assembled them and found myself the proud possessor of another two dinky little Ikea's self-assembly double ended Allen keys. There's one in every Ikea bit of Ikea Flatpack furniture. I have dozens of the buggers in my workshop. One of these days I will find a use for them (other than dismantling Ikea furniture) I will, I will. That or someone in Ikea will finally realise the scrap value of these things and start placing little boxes in every store for you to dump them in so they can be melted down to make 'Snott' kitchen roll holders or something equally weirdly named.

(Typing Snott and Ikea into Google gets 18,100 results... just in case you were tempted).

This evening, interrupted only by letting my family thrash me at Scrabble, I will be listing stuff on eBay. It's a chaepo day on Thursday and we need the cash now that I am not working again. We also need the space, given my predilection for buying crap (I only bought 14 CDs last week). This will be the first chance I have had to sell anything for a while, what with one thing and another and I am totally confused by the new postal regime. Until a few months ago the Post Office would charge you by the weight of your letter or parcel.

It weighs X grammes? You pay Y pence.

Simple. Easy.

It got a little more complicated when you took into account weight limits for different classes of postage. If an item was too heavy to post First Class it had to go either Parcel Post or Second Class. (Or was it the other way around?) But it was livable with. Like I said; easy.

Then, for some reason known only to themselves, they changed it. Not only do you now have to know how heavy something is but how big it is too. If it measures this by that and will slip through the handy plastic slot on the counter it will be charged at one rate, but if it this by that and won't go through the slot, then it's charged at another higher rate. If it is within a different, larger set of this by that's, and still goes through the slot, then it's another rate - and then there's a third set of measurements... after which I have no idea. They probably make you saw the thing in half and post it in pieces.

It is utterly confusing.

Time was, I used to be able to shove a heavy book in a jiffy bag, heft it in my hand, and think - 'that feels like about £2 worth of postage'. Now I have no idea.

Nor does anyone else.

I'll have to take everything down to the Post Office, see if it shoves through the slot, get it weighed, and have it priced before I can list it. It's stupid. I heard one Post Office official on the radio saying it was a system that worked well in Holland. That explains a lot. It was probably invented one Friday night by two stoned postal workers in an Amsterdam dope cafe and scribbled on the back of a napkin. Made perfect, almost mystical sense at the time, but in the cold light of day....?

I wonder if Dutch Ikeas are busy on Friday nights?

The Job is over and I am now gainfully unemployed. Hurrah! Full time house-husbanding again.

The day the job finished Merriol and I buggered off to Glasgow for a weekend without the kids. Posh Hotel - lots of shopping, not being woken up at 3.30 am by Daisy demanding a story.

Heaven.

Realising on the first night that I forgotten to take a book with me. No so Heavenly.

How can I have forgotten to take a book with me? I cannot normally move without at least one book somewhere within reach (on the Ferry over to Islay last Thursday I shoved three in my pockets before we set off (and this was five in the morning! I was hardly able to walk! let alone make thinkings) Toothbrush. Books. It's automatic; it's instinctive. I can't function without a book to read but, more importantly in this case, I can't sleep without a book to read. Something about the rhythm of the eye movements while reading is very hypnotic. So there I was, stuck in a hotel room wide awake, Merriol snoring away by my side. Nothing else to do, I plugged my walkman earphones into the socket in front of the bedside telly and flipped through the available channels. I landed on an interesting program about the late, great Ivor Cutler. After that finished I flipped on through the channels pausing only to wonder why anyone would want to watch cricket or wrestling at two a.m. when I discovered the - Free Porn Channel.

Woohooo!

I had a real Joey Tribbiani-like moment. Cooool, free porn!

Just a moment.

Dear God! save me from the badness of British Porn. The highlight of my brief stay on the channel was watching a well-endowed young lady bring herself to a 15 minute (OK, it wasn't that brief a stay) fake orgasm that made Meg Ryan's Harry Met Sally one look understated. Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Ah! Ah! Oh! ah AOOOH! AH!!! AHAHAHAAAH! Oh! Oh! OH! - and on and on and on she went and she didn't stop chewing her gum for one single second!
Chewing gum? Who the hell chews gum while having sex? Even with yourself?
What I found even more amazing was that her relentless chewing didn't match any other visible on-screen rhythm. Various parts of this naked woman were oscillating at various interesting speeds and in various interesting directions as she Oh! Oh! Oh!ed away at herself and yet none of them matched her chewing at all. It was fascinating. It was like watching a jazz drummer keeping some bizzare beat going. Did Gene Krupa write sex manuals? (Insert your own joke about paradiddling yourself here, I am not going to stoop so low.)

It was incredible. It was like she was lap dancing a Dave Brubeck number: Take Five or Unsquare Dance. It was the second best bit of acting I had seen all week.

The first best bit of acting I saw all week was, without doubt, me acting my way through the first part of the show on Islay despite being in some considerable pain. What happened was this:
The third scene of the show had me pretending to be 5 years old and throwing a tantrum because I couldn't get the toys I wanted. Thursday, it being the last show, I thought I would go all out and really throw the tantrum to end all tantrums. If Bob could overact mercilessly, why couldn't I? I worked my way up to it fine, got the dialogue out, built myself up with frustrated anger - then let rip, I jumped up and down, whined in the annoyingly high pitched sulky winge, thrashed my clenched hands around like I had done forty odd times before only this time I pulled out all the stops and really went for it - and whacked myself right in the testicles with my fist.

I managed to punch myself in the balls.

Stop laughing; it was agony!

The next few minutes were insanely hard work, acting as if nothing had happened and carrying on with the banal banter that followed, when all I really wanted to do was curl up in a ball and cuddle my nads - I must have been good because no one else noticed anything was wrong. I love actors. We're so sensitive.

Too Pooped to Blog

Not enough time free this weekend to do anything other that apologize for the lack of gripping installment this week.

And what a gripping installment it would have been too.

... trapped by landslides and fallen trees in a small one street highland town with nothing to do but read (I was paid to sit about and read all day. How brilliant is that?)

... drove for hundreds of miles and endure long ferry trips, to take the kids to Tobermorey, a town famous for being the location of a favourite kid's TV show, Ballamorey, and which smelled like a seaside bus station; that strange damp mixture of fish offal and diesel which you only find in fishing ports.

... endured the most awful bit of 'table wetting' ever in the history of crap service in the UK catering industry.

... sat in the pub for hours at the pub quiz and discovered the third unforeseen consequence of the smoking ban. Until this year all pub tables had ash trays. Now they don't. There is no where for anyone to dump the crumpled up bus tickets, chewing gum wrappers, old toothpicks etc etc.

... deleted twenty three million spam and got my email working again.

If I get a chance I will expand on all these and more next week.

The Stand-up From Porlock

It is a fact universally recognised that ripping off Jane Austen is a rotten way to start a blog entry but it is also true that within most people there is a frustrated artist trying to get out. Even only if that inner artist manages to escape when the host body is utterly blootered, and turns out only to be interested in expressing themselves through the medium of Kareoke, there is an urge to create within all of us. My inner daemon is a frustrated stand-up comic. Every now and then he just pops up from nowhere, grabs my internal brain stage's mike, and starts riffing.

And he's brilliant.

He's Lenny Bruce and Bill Bailey and Dylan Moran all rolled into one, and funnier than the lot of them. (He sounds a bit like Dylan Moran too.) Trouble is that, on the rare occasions when he does turn up, he won't stop talking. I just have to listen to him because he is so funny. By the time he's finished I'm simultaneously wetting myself with laughter and hugging myself with glee because this is the funniest thing EVER and it CAME OUT OF MY HEAD and it's mine! Jesus, I'm so fucking funny! Two minutes later when I try to write any of it down - I can't remember a fucking word. Nothing. Not a sausage. It's gone; he's gone, and he won't come back and do it again. He does his whole act and then just fucks off leaving me with the memory of a great gig but none of the specifics.

It's really frustrating.

He turned up tonight while I was soaking in the bath. All I can remember is a long rant about wind turbines. Fucking wind farms. Everyone complaining about them ruining the scenery. His solution? Put them underground.

It made me laugh.

I think you had to be there.

I've Got a New Smile to Show You!

Tomorrow I pick up the car again to go back on the road with the play on Monday. Tomorrow I must pack for a week away in sunny B&B land and pick up my copy of the script and see if I still remember it.

Went to the pub last night. First time I have been for a very long time. In fact the first time all six of us Andy, Ilona, Eilene, Chaz, Merriol and myself have been in the boozer together since the last village panto ten months ago. Of the six of us, two are on the wagon, one is pregnant, one is on medication that precludes the imbibing of alcohol. I'm still trying to work out why we went to the pub.
Scotland has a total ban on smoking indoors, in any kind of workplaces and that includes pubs. Ireland beat us too it, and England are following relectantly behind. One of the more pleasant effects of this ban has been that you can now sit in a pub all night (not drinking and not smoking) and come home without having to strip off and shower because you reek like an ashtray.
Today was spent wandering the street of Fort William and another side effect became apparent. Scottish cafes have started putting out tables and chairs on the pavements (for the smokers) just like every other country in the world has been doing since drinking coffee and having a blether was invented. It was really nice just sitting at a pavement cafe watching the world go by. Oooh. Dead continental.

Naked Yoghurt

First of all the tedious length of today's blogging is because today is...

One Day In History... day

...and I'm going to post this there too. Though having got half way down the filling out the required details form and finding the pulldown "Where are you from" menu lists every county in England and Wales but just lumps the whole of Scotland as 'Scotland' I'm tempted to forget it. Fucking Southerno-centric bias. This is supposed to be the British Library after all.

My typical day by Liam aged 47, husband of Merriol, thirty-ahem!, and father to Holly, four, and Daisy two.

9 a.m. Breakfast of coffee (Lidl's finest brewed to a chewable consistency) and a handful of soggy Salt and Vinegar Pringles - I wanted to throw the tube away. Tea for Merriol, Tesco's ultra-cheapo. The kids have already raided the fridge and made themselves breakfast. Hate to think what, but there is cheese missing.

Started the washing machine going with the load I forgot to start last night, loaded the dishwasher, took a phone call with details of a tour date change. Opened the gates for Merriol to take Daisy to the Doctor's about the rash on her legs, brought in the milk (two pints full fat) . Started to drink the coffee and tidy up the kitchen. Merriol and Daisy returned from the doc's with a tube of 3 times a day steroidal gunk.

10 o'clock got the kids ready and trolled up the hill to playgroup while Merriol went off to work. 5 kids & 3 adults at playgroup.

Came home at mid day to find a female blackbird trapped in the hallway and a robin flying around in the living room. Finished my morning cup of coffee which was now three hours old and stone cold (there was no way I was going to let that much caffeine escape me) and eventually persuaded the birds to leave by managing to steer them through the open windows they were missing by inches. The kids meanwhile watched Yo-Ho Ahoy!

The Post arrived. 2 bits of junk mail, one computer cable bought on eBay, and a book from Amazon.

Lunch was Pasta a la Fridgese. Which today was tomatoes, palma ham, olives, and red pepper fried in olive oil.

Listened to You and Yours on Radio 4 while I cooked and said "wanker" a lot. I must stop shouting at the radio even if it is populated by smug southern gits.

1.20 p.m. Finished lunch and loaded dishwasher. Emptied washing machine. Holly helped (though for some reason best known to Holly we had to pretend to be policemen and communicate by Walky Talky as we did it). Hung laundry in the driving room . How can three people wear so much underwear in one week?

Holly played on her computer and Daisy dressed up as whatever Daisy thinks she is dressing up as when she rifles the dressing-up box. I nipped upstairs to check my mail. Deleted over 100 hundred Spam encouraging me to enlargen my penis, have multiple orgasms and "shoot my load" over 50 feet. (why?). Freeserve's spam filters have obviously gone on strike again.

Changed Daisy's nappy.

Got the kids all dressed up and into the big double pram to take them down to the library van in the village square. Stood there for ages. Library van did not arrive. Pushed them all the way back up the hill and called in on my parents with the loaf of bread my mum had asked me to buy. Daisy fell asleep on the way up so I left her sleeping in the push chair as I stayed for a cup of coffee and Holly danced the alphabet.

Home again. Put Daisy to bed. Not like her to sleep so long in the afternoon, but she was up at one a.m. and again at six. Continued the Sisyphean task of tidying the kitchen. Paused to brush Holly's hair (merely Herculean) and contemplated tea.

Tea evolved into corn on the cob followed by sausages (Morrison's best herby somethings) spuds, broccoli and salad. The girls, suspecting I would be writing this blog, ate the broccoli before the sausages! I sometimes wonder if they are really my kids.

6.30 went to lay down for half an hour and read a chapter of Larklight, Philip Reeve's latest Ripping Yarn. Jolly good it is too.

7 pm - 8 pm Bathtime and stories. Both kids went down like I had thrown a switch.

8 pm - 9 Blogging, Chuntering in forums (fora?) and trying to get Merriol's phone to talk to the computer via the new cable. (I finally admitted defeat and will have to read the manual).

9 pm-ish Watch some crap movie with space ships, large-breasted women, and explosions.

10.30 pm Wake Holly for a pee.

Somewhere between then and 3 am I will go to bed depends on how distracted I get by the web.

Those seagulls Are Falling Down

My first day's solo child looking after for 6 weeks.



I'm fucked.



It's HARD WORK!

Driving back from Oban this afternoon. Holly and Daisy were in the back pretending they were alarm clocks. I had to pretend to be asleep (while driving) and every few minutes, when they got fed up with saying "tick tock", they would make alarm noises and I would have to pretend to wake up.

After about the twentieth time of this, Merriol tried to head the game off into slightly less annoyingly repetitive territory.

Merriol:
Hurray! We're awake.
What's for breakfast?

Holly:
You tell me. I'm an alarm
clock not a fortune teller!

I wish I made this stuff up.

Unicorn Poo

Holly woke us up the other morning demanding she have a bath because a unicorn had pooed on her during the night.

"They are very small animals but do very big poos." she said.

We asked her why the unicorn had pooed on her and not in the toilet.

"Because it didn't want to disturb Daisy. Unicorns are the worst tip-toers in the whole world."

---

Merriol is going across country tomorrow to have a full day's pampering in a beauty spa place. A workmate of hers has a new boyfriend, firmly set on Impress Mode, who has stupid amounts of money to throw around. He bought her, "and a friend", a whole day's slap-up beauty workout in a posh slap-up beauty workout place.

Merriol is the friend.

He paid two hundred quid for EACH of them for the day.

Cough! Splutter!

That's some serious impressing going on there.

Merriol will be away all day and I get to play with the kids, feel vaguely inadequate, and practicing saying:

You look wonderful!

YOU look wonderful!

You LOOK wonderful...

...for when she comes back.

She's Gone Blind In The Ears And Can't Hear Very Well

Poking about in the counter again tonight (I'm supposed to be setting questions for the Playgroup's Pub Quiz but get distracted easily) I find that someone recently bumped into the blog while searching for 'mwahahahaha'. Why the hell would anyone be searching the web for 'mwahahahaha'only to find this? There are some very strange people out there. And I seem to be one of them.

Three weeks of the tour done and I'm home for the next two weeks before buggering off on the road for another three. The schools are on holiday for a fortnight and I am being paid a £100 retainer not to take a job in the meantime. Like the National Theatre is just HOUNDING me!

The tour has been a lot more fun that previous ones. A lot easier. I get on with the others and we seem to laugh at the same things but even so, after three weeks on the road this is a welcome break. I miss my kids. Daisy seems so much older, even after only a week away from her.

We spent the last week doing the schools in Morayshire We stayed the whole week in one Bed and Breakfast and drove to the gigs each day, returning to the B&B each night. The upside of this was we didn't have to pack up each morning and drive to a new place and get settled in again and find somewhere to eat etc. On the down side, Bob and I were sleeping in a windowless box. The owners of the B&B (the Willowbank in Elgin if anyone is interested) had obviouslyy measured their car and then measured the garage and thought: "We can get another room in that gap at the end". So they did. Walled off the end of the garage, knocked a hole through to the main house and called it a bedroom. It was appalling. No window, damp, cold. The roof was low and sloped. The bathroom was tiny and must have been plumbed in by a midget. (The shower head was about nipple height with no way of adjusting it any higher - you either had to sit on the floor, or shower one-handed. Not a skill I possess). We spent a lot of time staying out of the room.

The girls' room was OK but the place is no longer on the Theatre's approved list, not after Bob and I had our four pennies worth.

The shows have been fun too (especially the bit where Sarah wraps herself around me and tries to drag me off to bed - I quite enjoyed that bit) but the show has been getting longer and longer. As we have learned what works and what doesn't, and how to milk a laugh out of situations, it's grown about eight or so minutes. One of the things I have really learned this time is that sometimes audiences need time to settle into a joke. There's one line towards the end which always used to get a laugh last year but not a titter this time. It took me a good week or so to notice the joke was falling flat and a few days to work out what was killing it. It was just as simple as Claire coming in too fast with the next line. It made sense for her to come in quickly. It is how her character would react but by coming in so fast she didn't give the audience time to get the joke and laugh before their brains were being fed more information. All this may seem amazingly obvious but when you are doing it, franticly trying to remember your lines and which exit you are coming off next, thoughts like that tend to take some days to be completed. They are half-realized when the situation presents itself, then forgotten a moment later as a new problem turns up, half-realized again during the next show - and so on.

It really is a very strange process this acting lark. You stand there talking to another actor in front of a hundred or so people, saying these things that you have learned, thinking all the time about how you are saying them, making yourself believe you are saying them for the first time ever, and trying to think about what it is you are saying, and trying to make it real, while at the same time part of your brain is going:

Now what was that thing she does with her hand in the next bit? You meant to mention it to her after the show all last week butbutt forgot.. Ah, right! that was it! I must mention that to her afterwards... wait a minute! I've usually got the drink in my hand by now, why am I still standing here when I should be over there. He forgot that line again never mind turn around and walk off that way... I wonder where we'll get lunch today? I can'trememberr what the next scene is. Crap! I haven't got a clue! Fuck! Wait a minute! if I'm standing here... and Bob's over there... wearing the hat... then.... OK !I know what my first line is when I walk back on. Haven't got a clue what's after that but that's enough. It'll come back to me...

Anyway we seem to have added eight minutes of silence to a forty-five minute show and made it funnier as well. It does mean we have less time to do the workshop afterwards but that's hardly a tragedy. That never was much fun.

I jus hope I can rememberr ANY of it when we go back out in two weeks time.

Aha! This is genius! The best idea I've had since I attempted to make a solar-powered barbecue out of an old Sky satellite dish and some baco-foil. At least once a week I lose at least one of the remote controls required to drive the Telly/DVD/Skybox combo (the VHS remote died years ago and we just get on our hands and knees and try and remember what the buttons on the front used to do before the logos wore off. Luckily it is old enough to have buttons on the front). Last night I would have watched a movie that was playing on Film 4 but for the fact we had lost the TV remote and the set was jammed on the 4:3 aspect ratio while the film was being broadcast in 16:9. I can't stand watching films like that, with everyone squished up. When I go to the cinema it takes me at least three goes to get the right seat. Dead center with eye level in the centre of the screen if poss. Merriol just waits in the aisle till I have finished fannying around and have found the right spot. Then she joins me. The only way I could have watched the movie last night was to have stood on a stepladder and peered down at the screen from above. Not comfortable.

So tonight's genius idea. Everyone I know has at least three old mobile phones that they don't know what to do with. And when you misplace your mobile phone the simplest way to find it is to phone it from another phone and follow your ears. So...

Next time you can't find the remote, dial the outdated phone you have taped to it and there you are!

Gad! I'm so brilliant I scare myself sometimes.

Merriol just muttered the words 'sad git' and went to bed.

Sunday. Sarah is on her way up from Glasgow. We meet up and then drive to Fort William to pick up Bob, then rendez-vous with Claire 'somewhere on the A 96'. Then we drive for 2 hours through the more pictureque (though invisible in the dark) bits of the Highlands and arrive at our B&B at about Midnight. We do the show in Aberlour first thing in the morning, all 90 odd minutes of it - then drive all the way back again.

At least I get to sleep in my own bed 2 nights this week.

Chips are not Salad

Well that's week one done and dusted.

Dornoch, Kinlochbervie, Thurso, Wick and Golspie out of the way. 7 shows down fourtysomething to go.

One of the things I rediscover while touring is that, after a few days, I start to look at this place I live in like a total stranger. I become a tourist in my own country. And a very strange place it is too. For instance, I find the bizarre practice of table wetting really weird. It seems to happen in every place you sit down to eat these days (well any place that hasn't got tablecloths - and itinerant TIE actors can't afford to eat in places with fripperies like that). You walk, in sit down at the only available table, move the two empty cups and a plate with a half-eaten meal, left by the previous occupants, to the edge where the harrased staff can most easily get at it. You start perusing the menu. Don't care. As long as the coffee is OK anything with chips will do me.

Everyone has just about made up their mind what they want when one of the harrased staff comes and removes the dirty crockery, disappears without taking the order, then returns a few seconds later with a damp cloth. Everyone at the table picks up their newspapers, mobile phones or whatevers and the the harrased staffer wets the table. Just wipes the wet cloth over the table and disappears again. If you are unlucky they have a spray of noxious table steralising gunge that they sray on the table first which leaves a punge that lingers well into your meal and makes everything taste of hospital. And no one says a fucking thing. We just sit there and let them do it. Every time. Over the last week I have stared at more damp formica waiting for it to get dry enough to put my elbows back down than I think is good for any man. So fuck it. Next time I'm going to say 'No'. I don't want my table wetting. I don't mind having a few crumbs and a thin smear of, what I hope is, tomato ketchup on the table. Just go get me food.

Ballachulish is a wonderful place. I love it to bits but sometimes I regret not having moved somewhere more remote. Then I go there and change my mind. Don't get me wrong. I'm sure Kinlochbervie is a great place to live but I don't think I could handle the remoteness. I don't understand Kinlochbervie. It's a small cove in the middle of nowhere with a HUGE quay lined with sheds and vast numbers of refridgerated lorries outside. I guess they land fish there. The only other building is the brand spanking new High School (2nd worst acoustics of the tour) and that's it apart from a small hotel, a local shop for local people, and about 3 houses. Where do all the kids come from? Maybe they live in the sheds, or comute in by trawler, I don't know. The Fisherman's Mission does a good fish and chips though.

From there it was a 3 hour drive to Thurso along the worst A Road in Britain. 95% of it is single track with passing places and ocassional flocks of sheep and carloads of oncoming tourists. The sheep were usually smarter. Then onto Wick.

Wick wasn't as bad as last year but is still a depressing dump, and, after been stung by a wasp in the only pub in town that doesn't go quiet when strangers walk in or make you think of An American Werewolf In London and The Wicker Man, I was in my bed at 8pm sipping a cup of tea made on one of those stupidly small, 3 watt kettles that British hotels laughingly describe as 'tea making facilities' I lay there in a damp bed, half-reading trying not to listening to the boy racers mowing down pedestrians outside. Bob meanwhile watched some cop show on a 4" TV bolted to the far wall of our room with the sound down and the subtitles on. Life on the road is just great.

Next day Bob got stung by a (different) wasp during the show.

The weather was nice though.

Came home to find it had been bucketing down all week and there had been a huge landslide in the hill behind our house. So much rain that part of our neighbour's garden went for a walk.

More next week.

It's my birthday. Happy birthday me.

Fuck.

As of two and a half hours ago I'm forty-seven.

When he was my age Mozart had been dead for twelve years.

I need to start writing.


.

Did the show for the money this afternoon. Everyone was a little nervous. Energy levels were good during the performances but the wheels came right off the show at one point. Claire and I stood there doing goldfish impressions in front of the people who were paying. Somehow 10 minutes into the performance Claire had timewarped us forward 30 minutes to the end of the show - and neither of us could figure out how to get back to the scene we should have been in. Sarah whispered the line Claire was flailing for from offstage and we were back on track but it was a horrible few moments. Came home knackered. We still have some serious work to do on this thing. And we have tomorrow to do it in.

Got home to find Merriol had had a rotten day; including the news that the company that took over the hotels a few months ago (ie her employers) have just gone into 'Administration'. I have no idea what 'Administration' means in this context but the fact that it was reported on the national news doesn't bode well. She went to a staff meeting this evening where various grades of managers told everyone not to panic and stop stealing whatever wasn't nailed down.

Have You Got A Round Thing I Can Put A Stick Through?

Last couple of days of rehearsal. We are off tomorrow up to Inverness to let the people who are paying for all of this see the show and work with us on the workshop that follows it. We did a couple of good runs at it this morning and spent the afternoon tweaking bits that needed tweaking (IE adding more acting.)

Now with added acting!

Even having done the show last year I feel terribly under-prepared. I suppose one of the advantages of being stuck in a strange town with no compny but the script, as I was last year, is that I got time to learn the bugger. This year I was initialy very happy to be rehearsing close to home but it's turned out to be a bit of a hinderance. I just don't get any time to sit with the script and get the thing bashed into my head. Yesterday for example, Dan had some sort of seisure/spasm/fit in the afternoon and ended up being taken into A&E. He was gaving a session with his speach therepist when he "felt a bit funny - and woke up in the ambulance". Mum got a call to say he was in the hospital and since my Dad had had a couple of beers and couldn't drive, I took her in. By the time we had seen him (he seemed fine when we got there, sitting up in bed having a coffee and a slice of chocolate cake), been round to his house to check everything was switched off and locked up (it was), and phoned his home helps to tell them what had happened (they already knew, and had done the locking up and switching off) it was gone 10 and I was knackered. Last thing I wanted to do (could have done) do was sit and memorise lines. I just wanted to go to bed. I went to bed.

I got made 'Team Leader', despite trying to hide under the table when the decision was being made. This means I have the final word on what happens when the inevitable fuck-ups happen ("I say we swim for the shore and alert the Coastguard!") I hate responsibility. I wonder how much I can deligate?

Day four of rehearsalising. Blocked the end of the show and then had a run through. Just to finish off the day, we did a line run which very quickly collapsed into a 'Let's see who can make their lines sound as smutty as possible and put everyone else off' session. Oh we had fun. It took weeks last year before we were at this level of stupidity. It's almost like the sort of cabin fever mentality that sets in towards the end of a long tour and I can't quite work out what is going on. We are either going to get on like a house on fire and just have a great great time with this, or they will find all our dismemebered bodies strewn around an abandoned car in the middle of the moors. The last surviving member of the team clutching a bloody tyre lever and babbling incoherently. Could go either way.

First day of rehearsals. I arrived early to find the hall we were supposed to using full of high school kids doing some kind of drama workshop with the National Theater of Scotland. Ilona arived and after much consulting of diaries it turned out the hall had been double booked for the whole day. We retired to a smaller room and started a read through. The door opened and an elderly lady poked her head in. "Oh!" she said and left the room. She poked her head back in again bridling with wrinkley indignation "Are you going to be long? Because we've got an art tutor!" she snapped.

Having no arguement against that kind of logic we scarpered to Ilona's house for the rest of the morning.

The evening was spent down at the village hall listening to The Scottish Ensemble, a 12 piece string group playing pieces by Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, and Mendelsohn. Audience of 50 or so. Realy nice evening. I forgot how much I like seeing music performed live. Sound apart, and there is nothing quite like feeling cellos and bases resonating in the same room, I had forgotten how much I enjoyed watching the interplay between the players. The little nods and smiles that pass between them. And the joy. There were some players really enjoying themselves last night, you could see it on their faces. It was infectious. loved it. A great evening. The only bum moment came when one of the audience, sitting off to my right, started to fumble in his pocket for something during a very quiet passage. I'm not sure what it was in there but it sounded like a paper bag full of dessicated hedgehogs. The music got quieter and quieter and he didn't stop, just tried to get whatever it was by being even more careful which just stretched out the agony and made it worse. Twat.

Second Day of reheasalising. Having my usual. 'What the fuck am I doing thinking I can act?' thoughts again. We had a lot of fun today played around with things, threw things in, took things out messed about, tried to see what worked and what didn't. The others are still working out who their characters are and I'm trying to make Steve less of the boring sanctimonious little goodie goodie two shoes than he is on the page (and as I played him last year). A good idea. Unfortunatly this involves making him a little more complex and means I might actually have do some acting. Dammit!

It will all work out in the long run but at the moment I'm just happy that we all seem to be getting on well. There's a lot of giggling and silliness. We're going to be stuck with each other on tour for weeks. So far so good.

Monkey Lobsters Don't Like Penguins So They Won't Come Here

Flopped on the sofa last night and watched Star Trek VI: the undiscovered plot. Jeezo, what a steaming pile of dog crap! Spent till far too long into the night fulminating about it on IMDb: here. And have been half asleep all day.

Why? Why do I keep watching Star Trek Movies? I know they are going to be crap and yet I keep coming back for more. My capacity for crap movies in near boundless but there is something about Star Trek movies that makes me angry and irritable. I think it is because they are fat and lazy. Most truly bad movies are either made by earnest wannabees who, when it comes to it, don't have a clue or professionally cheap production line, nobody cares about anything but making a quick Dollar, schlock. Coreman, Nu Image, Troma - that bunch. The Star Trek films have no excuse. They have shitloads of money, attract decent cast and crew, above average SFX, and yet turn out stinker after stinker based on stupid scripts riddled with plot holes and people doing stupid things just to keep the story going. I think it's because they don't have to try. They don't have to impress anyone. They have a secure market. The gazzillion Trekoids will buy anything, and then spend years posting crap like this twaddle on the boards:

"the alien Kirk kicks in the "knee" (during the hand-to-hand at Rura Penthe) is either a Jem'Hadar (from DS9) or a close relative? There are slight differences-- Jem'Hadar are gray-skinned, not so big, and (apparently) have no sexual organs. They also speak English very well. Is it possible that the Founders visited Klingon space and picked up this guy's family?"

It's a Fucking Movie! Grow up! Have sex with someone other than yourself! Get a Life!

(I'm shouting at the computer? I need to go to bed.)

Anyway, I guess it keeps them off the streets and fiddling with each other in public.

---

Len and Sue arrived today and the kids were delighted to see them. I start rehearsals for the play on Monday. I suppose I had better look at the script. Only joking, Ilona! (I have to find it first.)

Took Daisy up to playgroup today. She ignored the mayhem of 12 other children crashing about and played quite happily by herself in the Wendy House arranging and rearranging cooking pots and play food in the toy kitchen.

"Me making pancakes," she announced.

She held up a miniture toy tin of dog food: "Apple sauce."

"Why has it got a picture of a dog on it?" I asked.

There was a long pause as she looked at the tin.

"Dog sauce!"

The Scaffolding is away! The end of the house doesn't look like a disaster/lawsuit waiting to happen! I am so happy! (I haven't had the bill yet!) I will continue to be happy till I do!

We went to Oban on Saturday to buy stuff; food mainly, and kids clothes. Merriol foolishly let me out of her sight (or vice versa) because I succumbed to my lack of willpower and bought LPs.
For months now I have manfuly resisted looking through the tatty boxes of tatty Bert Kaempfert, James Last and Sidney Devine albums that lie on the floor in every charity shop I go into. I do not need any more crappy LPs. I don't. I have 600+ of the things I never listen to as it is. I don't need any more and I had thought that was one strand of my Junkaholism that I had conquered. (I just download crappy albums now and clog up the hard drive with MP3s I never listen to).

On Saturday my curosity got the better of me and I peeked into a box - and ended up buying: a Talking Heads album I had never heard of, but probably already own, a KC and the Sunshine Band album, and something which may (or may not) turn out to be orchestrial Ragtime - I couldn't work out what the hell it was from the sleeve notes but it was in pristine condition (always a bad sign- means it was played once and then ignored for years) - and it was only 50p.

I hid them in the back of the car and met up with Merriol in Tesco's. Merriol in my absence had bought twice her own body weight in yogurt. When we got back to the car she spotted the LPs (my cunning tactic of hiding things in plain sight, as if they had been there for ages and were therefore not worth commenting upon, obviously needs some revision).

Merriol:
What are those?

Me:
Erm... LPs - three of them.

Merriol:
You've already got over six hundred!

Me:
Well... Well... Well now I've got over six hundred and three!

(Well that's what I should have said. In reality I think I just mumbled something about them "only being fifty pence each" and continued stacking crates of Yoplait into the boot.)

Anyway. The whole point of this is that I managed to get to play the KC and the sunshine Band album this afternoon. Holly was at school; Daisy was taking a nap. I put it on as I was doing the laundry. There I was hanging up socks and knickers in the drying room singing along, belting out

"Hey, hey, hey/Yeah/Babe, I love you so/I, I want you to know/That I'm going to miss your love/The minute you walk out that door/So please don't go/Don't go/Don't go away/Hey, hey, hey/I need your love/I'm down on my knees/Beggin' please, please, please..."

and I'm giving it the full pub karaoke adenoidal welly when I notice Daisy has woken up from her nap on the sofa (not suprising really) and she is giving me... The Look. The "Dad, what ARE you doing?" look. This suprises the hell out of me. I mean she's only two. She shouldn't know about The Look at two! She could at least have had the decency to wait till she was a spotty teenager and I was dancing at a wedding with her boyfriend's mum or something really awful before discovering how to do The Look. I may have to stop listening to music around the kids altogether - though Holly does like The Scissor Sisters and Moby. There is hope for me yet.

Roof nearly finished. The scaffolding goes tomorrow after Fraser finishes the last of the leadwork. Hurray! I will have my yard back. Things will get back to normalish again - well, after I have gone over and over and over the ground beneath the scafflding making sure there are no nails left lying around, because the scaffolding is plonked just where we usually park the car and, in the normal way of things on building sites, everything that was in the way up on the scaffolding - including loads of, old, bent, or dropped nails just got swept, dropped, or kicked out of the way to fall just where the car would be if we hadn't been parking it elswhere for the last couple of weeks. Last thing we need is to have a puncture. So when Fraser has all his stuff out of the way I'll have to go over the whole area with a fine toothed comb and find all of them all again. I'm trying to work out some way of turning it into a game for the kids. Magnets may be involved. Magnets on bits of string...

I realised today that I don't have long to enjoy being with the kids before I'm away slogging around the country thesping at adolescents (and thank you Phoebe for reminding me of Legs Akimbo - I really needed that!) so today was spent playing and housework and being Mr Mom.

This evening, because Merriol made me (when I say 'made me' I mean she sent me the URL), I have been spending wayy to much time here downloading electronic cheesy listening onto my phone, including such delights as Henri Mancini soundtracks, batchelor pad bongo music albums and Meco! (remember the disco version of the Star Wars theme? - No? Well, if you are as old as I am you do. Tut! Youth of today? Don't know what they're missing.) ... anyway, Mr Meco also 'did' The Wizard of Oz. A disco version of the Wizard of Oz! How can I have lived so long and not known? I mean just how gay IS that? Hang on, I'll just wire it up to the trusty old gayometer and find out... Zoing! Off the scale! The needle shot over to the pink and stayed there.

Tomorrow Merriol is taking the day off work (presumably to pack) this will be let me spend the day hammering long lumps of metal into interesting shapes and nailing flat rocks onto the roof.

Spent all day with Fraser working on the roof . Merriol got a haircut.

That's it.

PawkyPawkyPawky

PawkyPawkyPawkyPawkyPawky

I've had a word stuck in my head all day. Just like an annoying, or catchy little tune that won't go away, I have had the word 'Pawky' going around and around and around in my head. PawkyPawkyPawkyPawkyPawky. What the hell is Pawky? I have no idea what Pawky means. It's an adjective, I know that but that's all. I came across it last night when I flopped in front of the box and after a few minutes channel hopping landed on live concert of Schostokivich's 13th symphony*.

'That'll do,' I thought.

Knowing bugger all about Schostokovich - or his 13th symphony - I pressed The Big Red Button on the remote to access the BBC's program notes. They were hillarious (OK, mildly amusing) written by a demented musicologist in a velvet jacket with a thesaurus rammed up his capacious arse.

"The flutes now take up the yearning motif from the opening of the fifth section reminding us of the pathetic conclusion and eagerly preparing us for the majestic reversal of the inverted theme that follows. Surely the most poignant moment of Schostokovich's masterpiece, the Viols, Cellos, and Vasco de Gambas cry out in bewilderment. Schostokovich himself was suffering from piles in the weeks before the first performance and composed this section standing up at his piano which he had raised on blocks."

That sort of thing.

Towards the end I read that:

"The small bassoon now joins in with a pawky little tune"

I was too flummoxed by the word 'pawky' to actually listen to the music. Pawky? Pawky? PawkyPawkyPawkyPawkyPawky... my head stuck on that word like a faulty CD. PawkyPawkyPawkyPawkyPawkyPawkyPawkyPawkyPawkyPawky.

I'm afraid to look it up.

---

Here's another annoying little pseudomeme that won't let my brain go:

Nestle Instant Cappuccino. I have a packet in front of me (it was free with something). On the outside of the packet there is a little panel which says:

68 calories per mug with 200ml water

All I can think is: How many calories would it have it was made with 300ml of water? or 500? or a whole bathful? How many calories are there in hot water? I had always understood water was.. well, water. H2O. No calorific value whatsoever. What do Nestle's lawyers know that I don't? I'm worried.


Somewhere during the day, inbetween trying to get this stuff out of my head, Fraser and I (mostly Fraser) got side one of the roof slated. Half-way through the job!

---

* You can see why I don't have any catchy little tunes going around in my head, can't you?

Nice hot sunny day spent sawing chunks of rotten wood out of the next bargeboard and replacing them with nice, neat, new, not rotten wood. That's it really - that's about all that happened today; I did remedial woodwork and cursed my habit of buying delapidated Victorian buildings. This is number three. I swore after finishing number one that I would never do it again but, hey, I guess I've just got an addictive personality.

Went to a total strangers wedding today. Ann Beech who used to live in the village until a couple of years ago invited us to her son's wedding in the Fort. Neither of us had ever met him or his fiance. It was slightly surreal,watching two people you don't know getting married. The reception was at Vic's, Ann's partner, house and even there we didn't know many of the people but the kids had fun and I didn't have to wash up afterwards.

What's That Pear Doing on the Trampoline?

Work in Progress

Woke up this morning to the sound of rain. Sometimes in summer, after a long dry hot spell or a long hot muggy day this is is a nice noise, a welcome noise, a relief from the heat and stickness. This morning was not a good time for it to be raining. Because of some cock-up at the builder's yard, the roofing felt wasn't delivered yesterday as it should have been and my roof had been left, slates off, open to the elements all night. The felt was delivered this morning and, though the rain was not bucketing down - it wasn't like being out in a monsoon, it was persistant. Working up scafolding in waterproofs is not my idea of fun at the best of times. As soon as Fraser and I had got the last piece of roofing felt stapled into place it stopped raining and the sun came out.

---

I have a new realizable life ambition! Something to keep me going when times get tough. My first realizable life ambition was to go to my grave with all my fingers still attached and intact, (both my father and his father both lost fingers to circular saws), I now have formed the realizable ambition not to have any form of disease named after me. I can do this. I know I can!

Poking About

The scaffolding is up round the end of the house. Never put up 'grown up' scaffolding before, only scaffold towers. It's heavy stuff! Because of the layout we had to errect it around and over Merriol's shed which was a bit of a pain. Plan A (take the shed roof off and plonk an upright into the middle of its floor) was not really a starter. Once all the scaffolding was all up I took a look at the roof of the house. It's a miracle the barge boards have stayed up so long. There is nothing holding them up. The wood (what is left of it) is rotten and crumbles as soon as you touch it, like a prop from some crappy 1950s 'Return of the Mummy Vs. Jesse James' type movie. The nails holding the slates are rusted to nothing and the main wall plate is dust. All that is stopping the whole thing from crashing down is the weight of the lead. It's too heavy to fall down. I know that sounds paradoxical but there is no other explanation.

Tomorrow Fraser and I strip the rest of the slates back and I get really depressed.

---

Poking about in the counter thingie for the blog, as I do from time to time, I find it has been visited by people searching Google for 'English "free to air movie channels"' , 'Who was "daisy smurf?"', & "Bronwen Jones".

Well, I thought it was interesting.

Snot.

I spent most of the weekend in bed suffering from sinuses filled with putty, a toothache you wouldn't believe and a head with internal G clamps. I got the man flu. It's like normal flu but bigger and hairier. Iron John Flu. Grrr! Snot!

This happens to me everytime I play with kids. Play with kids = get sick. It's a simple cause and effect. Children are just little plague monkeys running from one place to another efficiently distributing the latest fashion in rhinoviruses. I have come to the conclusion that the recent traunch of rules and regulations and guidlines about how and what and where it appropriate, or not, to touch children is less to do with protecting the little buggers from saddos and perverts but more to do with protecting the adult carers from weird random sweatfest illnesses like the one I've just got.

As I said, I spent most of Saturday in bed, asleep, occasionally waking up to read another chapter of the Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by PK Dick, which I was reading for the bookgroup over at Palimpsest. Much as I love Mr Dick's earlier funnier books I will readily admit I haven't got a clue what is going on in most of them, even after several readings. Tackling the 3Stig of PE while half asleep and in a demi-delerium didn't make things any clearer.

So, sleep patterns all buggered up, I wasn't surprised to find myself waking up at 3 am and reaching for the bedside note book to scribble down half-formed stupid ideas that arrived in my sleep.

This is what I found the next morning:

"Several Reasons Why Great Literature is Not as Good
as Playing With Your Willy (or Lady Bits)"

It was 3 am. Raskolnikov dreamt of Death and Cruelty, Coleridge dreamed of Xanadu, I dream up knob jokes.

---

Fraser arrived this morning and announced that due to some cock up he could start work on the roof tomorrow. The plan is to completely scaffold the gable end, strip the bargeboards and leadwork, pull all the slates off for at least a meter back from the edge. Rip off all the sarking. Replace at least 2 roof timbers (possibly more), re-sark, re-slate over new leadwork and replace the existing bargeboards, which are original to the building and in not that bad nick for 122 year old bits of wood. He reckons he can do all this in under two weeks. It's going to take all the house repairing budget for the year but it needs done. To be honest it needed doing at least 3 years ago. Everytime we have a gale round here I expect to hear the whole lot rip off and land in the garden. I doubt if it would stand another winter.

Mummy, We're Going To Sell Daisy On eBay!

That's it for another year.  My annual working with kids for money stint is over and now I'm suffering from my annual post working with kids for money cold.  Kids are great but they are the vectors for every known form of snifflebug known and unknown to man.

In two weeks time I start rehearsals for the annual touring round the high schools of Scotland delivering A MESSAGE to the assembled spotty yoofs.

Another weekend has flashed by. What happens? This weekend we were mainly...

Saturday ... going to the continental Market in the High Street and spending way too much money on stinky cheeses and dry-cured wild boar, and duck sausages all covered in that strange white powdery stuff that foreign sausages always seem to be covered in - what is it? (That was a rhetorical question by the way - as I get older I find the less I know about what I'm eating the happier I am.) The kids loved it and ate vast quantities of sweets.

Sunday ... going for lunch down at the TIC * and then having a walk in the quarry with the kids and finding a lizard - actually Holly found the lizard - I think she peed on it.

Monday ... getting paid to play with kids again. Ilona got stuck in Birmingham. She was on holiday in Aberystwyth (a town 'famous' for The Aberystwyth Electric Cliff Railway, "the longest electric cliff railway in Britain") but due to some fuckup on the trains (I know, it's hard to believe, isn't it?) she missed her flight back north. This meant I had to run the first set of workshops today by myself. Panic. Responsibility avoidence technique number one (ie find, and defer to, a more competant female) was now redundant. I coped.

... getting offered and accepting another acting job. Same show as last year (maybe same part? almost certainly the same money) but several weeks work driving around Scotland arriving in a school doing 45 minute play, 45 minute workshop go to next school, repeat, then go to pub, restaurant, or whatever. Mucho time to do reading of books.

It's gone midnight and I should have been in bed ages ago but I'm sitting here writing this and waiting for Daisy to wake up. She's been having these strange crying fits in the middle of the night for the last few nights, Usually around midnight. Last night she was inconsolable. She just screamed and screamed. She was really terrified. Whether these are night terrors or just bad dreams we don't know but, fingers crossed, she hasn't woken up tonight.





* I would like to make it abundantly clear I had NOTHING to do with the 'design' of that web page.

I used to drink. A lot. But then I stopped. I don't have a problem with booze at all any more, just as long as I don't drink any of it.

But...

I realised last night that I have developed a substitute brain-wrecking addiction. Midnight last night after a long and sweaty day I was running a bath. I flip through some of the free to air movie channels as I waited for it to fill. Then I stopped flipping went to the bathroom and turned off the taps, flopped on the sofa and watched Return of the Killer Tomatoes till three in the morning.

I took my bath in an advert break. Dived in, did my pits and tits, and out again to watch the rest of the movie wrapped in my dressing gown.

I think I may have a problem.

At least I didn't have a hangover this morning.

It Hurts Like a Bee Standing On an Elephant

Last Monday returning from the Fort after a hard day's playing with the kids I stopped and gave a couple of hitch-hikers a lift. A man and a woman. They were heading for London where they were catching a bus to take them back to somewhere in Slovakia. We had a bit of a chat but their English wasn't great and my Slovakian is non-existant. They had been fruit picking and had climbed Ben Nevis. I dropped them off at the Glencoe crossroads and pointed them in the general direction of south. We waved goodbye.

On Tuesday Merriol found their camera in our car.

How do you trace two foreign hitchhikers? I didn't even know their first names. We handed the camera in the the police (after carefully making sure the bag wasn't stuffed full of hash, I mean we didn't want to get these guys into any trouble). So, if you were the hitchers, or you know who they were, mail me and I'll get the camera back to you. If it isn't claimed in two months we get to keep it. which doesn't seem very fair but, if that happens, we can then see if there are any photos in the camera and put them up on the web. Maybe someone will recognises them.

Flash! A- Haaaaaaaa!

Spent most of this morning filling out my tax return online. Every year I haver, and dither, and put it off, and put it off, and put it off, only to find, when I finally do get round to it, that the process of filling the form out is nothing like as horrendeous as I remember. Then I remember it not being as horrendeous as I remembered last year and wonder why I hadn't remembered that earlier.

Now I've filled that in, we can go on and fill in the Insanely Complicated Tax Credits Renewal Pack and hope we still qualify. If we don't we shall have to sell one of the children - in which case we might qualify and have enough money to buy her back. (Maybe we could just pawn them...)

Tonight I flopped on the sofa and fell asleep watching Flash Gordon, a film I remember seeing at the movies when it first came out. What an enjoyable piece of junk! I'm sorry I fell asleep. It had everything I admire and look for in a movie: wooden acting, corny dialogue, cliched set pieces, dodgy SFX, scantily clad people being tied to things and whipped in an unenthusiastic manner... oh I'm easily pleased.

how can you not like a movie with lines like:

"No! Not the bore worms!"

or dialogue like this:

Hedonia:
(Offering the captive Dale a drink)
It has no name. Many brave men died to bring it
here from the Galaxy of Pleasure... It will make
your nights with Ming more... agreeable.

Dale Arden:
Will it make me forget?

Hedonia:
No, but it will make you not mind remembering.

Got up, went shopping, came home, watched a bad movie, went to bed.

That about sums the day up.

It rained.

I went back to the doctors today to discuss the saga of the miniturised submarines poking about in my brain; the discussion boiled down to the simple facts:

If I have the scan and they find something worth operating on they will want to operate (why else do the scan?). There will then be a 20% risk of something happening. 'Something happening' being anything from me having a mild, recoverable stroke, to being 100% irrecoverably dead.

If I have the scan and they find something and I don't have anything done about it there is a 10% risk of the same 'something happening' in my lifetime. ie anytime between now and when I die, from whatever cause, which could be anything up to 40+ years from now. (Optomist)

If I have nothing done there is nothing I can change about my lifestyle that will make a blind bit of difference. If it is going to happen it will happen. All that will change if I know about it is I will be concious of the fact that I have an aneurism and all the attendant worries that will bring.

I think I am going pass on having the scan. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss. The maths has convinced me that this is one of those sometimes.

I Had a Sausage Sandwhich for Lunch; I'm Not a Vegetarian After All

I'm being paid to play with kids again. Great fun. As part of some Highland Council money spending scheme I get to spend 4 days this week playing silly buggers with a whole load of 5 - 11 year olds. Nominaly they are called 'Drama Workshops' - but it's playing. I'm only assisting this year, which is a great relief, avoidence of responsibility being a really big part of my entire adult life, but it does mean I'm not getting £20 an hour which I did last year - less that a third of that in fact. One of the best bits about it though, is getting a break from Holly and Daisy for a few days. It seems perverse, playing with other people's children being a welcome break from playing with my own, but it is, and I am grateful for it.

This blog will be a year old next week, the longest time I have kept any form of diary in my life. I'll bake it a cake

I've Been Glued to The railway Track by a Dragon! - Quick, Get Your Dragon Glue Disolver!

I spent most of today laying concrete paving slabs around Mike and Morag's oil tank - something to with it being a condition of sale of their house, I'm not sure exactly why I was doing it but I promised I would, so I did - and I enjoyed myself. Today was the first time I have been away from the kids for a whole day, for ages, I can't remember how long it is since we had a rest from each other. I love my daughters, I really do, but lately things have been getting a bit tetchy between Holly and I. No one can spend 12 hours a day 7 days a week, for weeks on end in somebody else's company and not get a bit fed up with them from time to time - even if they are four and easily distracted.

Holly and are getting like that. It's hard. 'Living with a four year old', as someone smarter, funnier, and almost certainly better looking than I am once said, 'is like living with a psychotic dwarf.'

I'm working all next week and then again a couple of weeks later. I hope the break will do us both good. I love Holly very much but sometimes lately I have found it hard to like her very much. It hurts.

I Don't Like the Tomato - Go Away Tomato!

It is hot and sticky here at the moment as oposed to just plain hot like the rest of the UK. Down in England roads are melting and whole areas of the country are using water faster than the water companies can pump it to them. Here it is humid and I think that makes it worse. We're all wandering around like Tenesse Williams characters, fanning ourselves with whatever comes to hand and watching each other sweat.


It's too darn Hot.

Back from holiday!

Only took 10 hours to drive back and, as Merriol is going down with the snottynesses and not feeling to good, I drove the whole way myself. Furthest I have ever driven in my life. It is now several hours since we arrived and I still can't stop moving. I'm totally jittery. Everytime I shut my eyes everything comes rushing at me. It's a bit freaky. So, the kids are in bed, Merriol is in bed and I'm wandering around reclaiming my territory. Metaphoricaly peeing in the corners and pacing the bounderies growling at the other beta males. That sort of thing.

Grrrr.

Eleven hours to get to Sheffield - eleven sodding hours. Three quarters of one of them was spent stuck in a 'move five meters then switch off the engine for a bit, then move another five meters, nose to tail, type traffic jam on the M74. We could see the line of traffic appearing and disappearing over the hills away into the distance. We're in the center lane. It's hot and sticky real thunderstorm weather. Right on cue Holly says "I want a wee wee".

The thunderstorm broke as we arrived at the rented cottage high in the hills on the edge of the Peaks.

Huge flashes of lightning light up the sky. Thunder cracks. Wherever the lightning is hitting it is pretty close. Rain suddenly pours out of the sky in unbelievable quantities as Merriol and Len scurry backwards and forwards getting stuff out of the car and into the house as fast as they can. I have copped out of the getting wet game and stay in the house try and organise the incoming luggage out of their way, as soon as they lob a bag through the door, I whisk it away into the kitchen, living room or the bottom of the stairs.

At last everything is in. Merriol changes her trousers which are sodden and clinging to her in a very attractive, but uncomfortable manner and we flop on the sofas. We open a couple of beers. We are on holiday! After all the travelling, and driving, and keeping two hot bored kids amused in the back of a car we are finally on holiday.

We raise our beers in a toast, and as we do so there is a final Godallmighty crack of lightning outside and the electricity dies.

0 - 0

The power of thought. Engerland are out of the Whirled Cup and with British 'hopefuls' getting themselves thrashed out of Wimbledon as fast as they can it is now safe to go down south.  Unless of course the Tabloids come up with some 7 year old sporting wonder kid in the International Tiddlywinks friendly with the Faroe Islands.