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.

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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!

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* 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

No Laughing and No Bending Down! But Smiling is Allowed

Oh it's a good day for spotting things: This from here

In 1801, Thomas Young elegantly demonstrated his double slit experiment. The experiment showed that light also behaves like waves, because it interferes with itself.

Ohh-err Missus!

and this mindbogglingly obvious piece of advice from the intructions on a box of Early Learning Center face paints:

Using Face Paints
You can paint your own face or that of a friend. If you are painting yourself you will need a mirror.

No shit Sherlock! Who writes these instructions? I thought it was patently obvious that anyone who had managed to master the concepts of face painting and reading would be aware of the difficulties of painting your own face without being able to see it. Idiots!


Merriol and the kids and I are off for a few days down to the Fleshpots of Ingerland. (I hope they get knocked out of the Wurld Kup or whatever it is called soon because Ingerland in full patriotic We're backing the boys, Gawd bless yer Ma'am, earwig oh, earwig oh, earwig oh! Kraut, Argie, Wop bashing frenzy is as one of the Inner Circles of Hell to me.