Nick Griffin is in a difficult place, his anti-immigration agenda has been co-opted by both the labour and conservative party and the far right are too busy taking to the streets and holding rallies to care so much about electoral politics. Should Nick Griffin get to see the Queen? Should I care?
The two things that come to mind is that you have to believe that the monarchy itself has a certain amount of moral authority for it to Read the rest of this entry »
I am a girl. There are many things I do not understand – most of them to do with men, but that’s another story and a lot to do with teaching overseas and a guy named Pablo… – but the chief one I do not get right now is this: why are there so many tree surgeons doing the rounds right now? Seriously, this week four or five different ones came to my door hoping to find trees to slay. Read the rest of this entry »
That expression “don’t judge a book by its cover”: what a load of rubbish! What else am I supposed to judge a book on? The writing? No, don’t make me laugh! That’s the sad fact of it – we all judge things as we see them and very quickly, it’s just human nature. Make the wrong impression and it doesn’t matter how snazzy your cover is, you’re going to bomb hard.
Big businesses need to learn a thing or two Read the rest of this entry »
Just the other day I worked out, once and for all, why life is so very difficult. It’s obvious, really. It’s because, from the moment we are born, we are racking up things that oppose one another. In other words, we become hypocrites as soon as we leave the womb, and almost as soon as we have awareness of self we are trying to remember all the things we like / dislike, so as not to come of looking hypocritical. Read the rest of this entry »
I am a girl and my first pet was a budgie. At the time I despised my parents’ decision to procure a budgie as our first pet, but over time I have come to understand their reasoning. Much of it is to do with the fact that we did have a pet before Old Blue, and it met its end in a very unfortunate way. For this reason – and also owing to the fact that Little Fella didn’t survive more than a day – we have never really counted that little Hamster as a first pet. Personally I think it’s a psychological defense: if we pretend he didn’t exist then we (or I) don’t have to face up to the terrible thing that happened that morning–
This was back in the days before anti wrinkle skin care product ; and I was only two years old, so I don’t really think I can be held accountable. That would suggest that I find my parents accountable, and that suggestion would be correct. I do!
Little Fella had no more than set foot on our house carpet than he was placed in to a large plastic ’fun’ball. From there he was given free reign of the carpet. What a fun first day for Little Fella!
Anyway, so while my parents weren’t paying attention, my devious two year-old self set about a game of football. I don’t remember this, but it’s the conclusion that my folks have come to (from their hearing all of Little Fella’s bizarre shrieking) that I was kicking him about all over. When they found me I was on the floor wrestling the ball about, and apparently Little Fella was blasting all about the inside. And he was blasting. His little body was moving so fast that mum and dad couldn’t make out what the moving thing was. It took them a second to realize it had to be our new hamster Little Fella–
But still, you live and you learn. And you also keep hamsters away from small children, duh.
Marriage is a daunting thing for anyone, isn’t it? It’s as daunting as an orange bum bag is to a German who has only ever worn yellow. All the stresses and strains of modern life, and all that pressure to get along like a house on fire and not shout your heads off. It has to be hard, but still, isn’t that part of the attraction? That and the bond joining together to create real dedication to one another that Read the rest of this entry »
There are people in this world who don’t think dogs are clever. These people clearly have not seen what I have seen. If they had, they would have bowed down to the humble hound. They would, upon seeing a dog in the street, remove their jacket and lay it on the floor for them to step on.
Dogs are clever. Clever in ways that seem impossible. Take my dog for example: Jack, like all dogs, knows what a gun is and what it looks like–and he’s never even seen one! (I can’t be sure of that, of course. I got him from a kennel. But I find it hard to believe that the old woman who had him before me had AK47’s up in the loft–)
How I discovered this miraculous fact was this: one day, while Jack and I were watching Rambo, I made my hand in to a gun and pointed it at Jack. Jack had a good sense of humour, so I thought he might find this amusing. But low and behold Jack flinched, stared at my hand as if it were a lethal weapon, and hid under the sofa. It took me twenty-five minutes to coax him out. By that time Rambo had become emotionally unstable and was on the war-path. Jack’s eyes had become wet, and I noticed in the grim light that he really could do with eyebag surgery.
Eventually I regained Jack’s trust. A hard thing to do for a dog that has lived with the constant smell of lavender and wee, and oldness in general. Once he’d come out he stared me in the eyes with the look I knew to mean: Don’t you ever, ever do that again, otherwise this is over. We are over.
That’s how I learned about dogs. I suggest you tread carefully.
I don’t get soup spoons. There’s just no reason for them to exist. Soup spoons, to the few uninitiated of you out there, are the Channel 5 of the spoon world. Cumbersome, annoying to use and far too big (not to mention they can cut the side of your mouth with ease, unless you’re blessed with a mouth like the Blackwall tunnel), Soup spoons infected my dreams as a youngster. Ever since the first encounter with them they gave me nightmares–
In the most common recurring nightmare a Soup spoon—or, as He came to be known to me, Mr Soup Spoon—used to chase me around the house while trying to flash light off his body and direct it in to my eyes. It wasn’t the being chased by him that I minded particularly (I was pretty sure I could fend off a spoon, seeing as I had hands and feet to attack with and all it had was a freakish grin and an attacking nature: plus, it was a dream…), it was more the way he’d try and crawl in to my mouth at any given opportunity, which was something I was prepared to go to great lengths to avoid. For that reason I was forced to scream my head-off with a closed mouth, which, if you’ve ever tried it, you will know is not only very difficult to do at any volume, but extremely weird as feelings go. (As well as the fact that it does actually feel like your head is about to be blown off, which, dream or not, is entirely unpleasant.)
The nightmares eventually subsided when I was twelve, but by then Mr Soup Spoon had exerted a five year reign of terror upon me which saw He and I scaling mountains, floating in outer-space, and generally playing cat and mouse—or spoon and child—as I tirelessly fought to stay away from him.
So do your children a favour: stay clear of the soup spoons…
Right before I log off, I need to relish in a new purchase. I have just bought the greatest newton running shoes that I have ever owned. LA Marathon, here I come!
I am going to be ruthlessly honest: as a child, growing up, I didn’t listen to my Granddad. Or, more accurately, I did listen, but I didn’t take it in as I should have done. Why? It’s obvious: I was young, and this was not young stuff, I had decided. His words seemed comical to me, overly depressing and cynical. Words about war, words about a time gone by that seemed full of things that couldn’t be true, that couldn’t have really happened like he said. Words that I really didn’t want to know about—they put a damper on my young day and they just weren’t fun, that was the point. If it wasn’t fun then I didn’t want to know.
It was only many years later, during a conversation about skin lesions and the horrors of war, that I understood what my Granddad had been through. That was the moment I got it: I realized why he had needed to talk about these things to me. Speaking about these things in his calm, mature voice was his way of exorcising the demons of the past. By turning them around and around in his mind he was able to be at peace in the here and now. And so I felt terribly sad to know this. I felt guilt, shame and that I’d hurt somebody I loved a great deal. So after that day I made a point of asking as many questions as I could. And I really started to learn things. Things which I was privileged to know.
We are a mobile generation. You no longer have to stand still to talk to someone (those silly scooter things; definitely a big help when you don’t want to speak to said someone, though), drink a pint of beer (in Germany they’re encouraging those weird beer-wagons even more in the modern age, the ones you sit and pedal and drink on), or throw a sickie. Instead you can be anywhere you so wish doing whatever it is you wish, providing you can put on a suitably gravelly voice to trick your boss into thinking you are dying in your bed. But mobile does not suit all things, of course. And Tea, probably the greatest invention since sarcasm, has suffered gravely for it.
I can’t handle seeing somebody drinking tea while walking. It’s disgusting. It’s wrong. And passive-tea-watching is, although many are unaware, one of the leading causes of global depression: watching someone walking and drinking tea is exactly the same as trying to read a good book while on a high-speed train. It makes you feel nauseous, disgusted, and bitter to the point that buying a Chris De Burgh greatest-hits album doesn’t seem like a half bad idea.
Why are there no laws to protect us passive tea watchers? Good question. Right up there with ‘why do you never see celebrities fall down the stairs on Big Brother’ or ‘who decided it was a good idea to take the Wispa chocolate bar off the shelves?’ It amazes me that smoking has been banned, yet passive-tea-watching is still not recognized as the massive problem it indeed is. Go to any train station or even resorts in the land and you’ll be able to catch these criminals. It simply must stop for the sake of us and our children and their children and well, I’m getting carried away now.
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