by the magic of television

He scores! Sort of! And it’s in the back of the net! And the crowd goes wild!



The image link should lead straight to a QuickTime download (no audio). If there are any problems, let me know. I won’t be able to solve them, as I haven’t a clue what I’m doing, but it would still be good to know.


No, that's not a dress, that’s a Junior League football top on a rather small six year old. Brownie points for anyone who can identify the superhero transfer on the back of Zig’s splints (it’s not Spiderman; Spiderman graced the last pair, and will probably grace the next, if only because the Evil Nemsesist NHS does not provide orthotic transfers of baddies. Curses).

A couple of seconds of this or similar Ziggy footage (arf) begins a current BBC trail for Junior League football.

I don’t know what to make of it, really. Stand on a chilly faux grass field for an hour or so on a Sunday morning. Shoot , reshoot and shoot again a small boy with C.P kicking / missing a ball into / away from a goal. Shoot, reshoot and shoot again that small boy cheering and celebrating with genuine fona bide Junior Leaguers. Fiddle with it all for a while and voila: Zig scores a goal.

Got to be good, hasn’t it? Still, when I watch it I feel as mixed up, muddled up and shook up as a Kinks narrative voice.

Thanks Reg.



Things To Do

Cake: Soak fruit in booze; chuck all the stuff together and cook; voodoo with more booze; marzipan; ice; eat.
Pressies: buy; wrap; distribute (wearing stiff gauntlet to save fingers). addendum: forget to give Suffolk ones to mum when she visits.
Pressies from kids: buy; make; wrap; post / give out.
Cards: buy / make; give out / post.
Decorations: consider putting up; put up; take down.
Christmas dinner: yeah, right.
Booze: buy; drink; buy; drink; be bought; drink; buy; drink; buy; drink; scrounge; drink; drink; drink; drink; buy; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink (list in progress).

hoppit

I’m not a good partner. I’m grumpy and removed and not at all tactile. I frown and always have a better idea. I am not lightheartedly, quirkily, desirably at ease with my inability to keep a house clean or tidy. I do not use sex as a release from stress or a rumpshuss celebration of being together; rather, my libido is safely packed in three layers of bubble wrap until the day we land on a clean beach, with plenty of food, a promise of eternal good health for our children, a pleasantly appointed house where shore meets forest, which needs no repair or repainting, and no council tax bills. And no people. I am as prickly as an October conker shell.

I am solitary at heart. My superpower is a reddybrek glow of partner repellent ninety-eight point seven percent of the time, day or night.

But I do like the short phonecalls, the three word texts of abbreviated interest and concern. In Standard English only, please. I rely on them as lilypads across Monday to Friday.

And when it’s gone sixteen hours without a ring or a bleep from our capital city, I get a smidge unsettled. And glower from under my rock.


eta: ta


Things To Do

Cake: Soak fruit in booze; chuck all the stuff together and cook; voodoo with more booze; marzipan; ice; eat.
Pressies: buy; wrap; distribute (wearing stiff gauntlet to save fingers). addendum: forget to give Suffolk ones to mum when she visits.
Pressies from kids: buy; make; wrap; post / give out.
Cards: buy / make; give out / post.
Decorations: consider putting up; put up; take down.
Christmas dinner: yeah, right.
Booze: buy; drink; buy; drink; be bought; drink; buy; drink; buy; drink; scrounge; drink; drink; drink; drink; buy; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink (list in progress).

solve et coagula

I cheer up a bit when I realise how much magic I manage everyday.

Just made the second batch of rice krispie cakes this week, for the second kiddies’ Christmas party. How many kids, since the fabulous Mr Kellogg flaked some corn and puffed some rice, have had their cooking annunciation by stirring melting chocolate in a bain marie, shaking in however much breakfast cereal it can hold, and stuffing a spoon of the glop into a bun case?

That’s the magic I’m talking about.

The mystery of magic is the mystery of alchemy is the mystery of cooking: it’s the gaps in our understanding. Within this understanding, it’s a bit easier to melt chocolate in a bain marie that it is to bubble nigredo in a sealed alembic. I’m unconvinced, but my days are rushed and I’ve yet to find Prima Materia in the homebake aisle. Even in Lidl.

I turn into a right Hermes Trismagistus in the kitchen, but don’t reckon I’ll be rushing to add Jamie Oliver’s Emerald Tablet to my Amazon wishlist.

If I turned chocolate to gold there would be a class full of pissed off bling six-year-olds tomorrow.

In this way the little world was created according to the great world.

Pucker.



Things To Do

Cake: Soak fruit in booze; chuck all the stuff together and cook; voodoo with more booze; marzipan; ice; eat.
Pressies: buy; wrap; distribute (wearing stiff gauntlet to save fingers). addendum: forget to give Suffolk ones to mum when she visits.
Pressies from kids: buy; make; wrap; post / give out.
Cards: buy / make; give out / post.
Decorations: consider putting up; put up; take down.
Christmas dinner: yeah, right.
Booze: buy; drink; buy; drink; be bought; drink; buy; drink; buy; drink; scrounge; drink; drink; drink; drink; buy; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink (list in progress).

god rest ye irritating git

It’s not until I become irritated trying to rethread a bauble that I remember he died and was buried at this time of year.

I don’t have a shortcut to remembering the calendar details of his death and burial. I remember hanging the cerebral palsy angel on the tree, which means he died after we’d received Zig’s diagnosis; C.P angel’s legs were still tightly crossed that year, which means it was the first year we had her, which means it was 2000, which means he would have been 38.

Although I’ve got 36 in my head. Perhaps the edge to dieing suddenly, alone – allegedly – in bed aged 36, is dulled just slightly by its being 38. I don’t see it myself, but the drama of dieing young is a funny beast.

He would have loved the drama. The pathos. The grief of half a handful of women weeping at his coffin and his graveside. Which is one of several reasons I didn’t go to his funeral. The main one being I couldn’t be arsed, and felt irritated at having been asked.

Irritation was more than a floral top note of our relationship. Last night I wrapped (ignore that if the idea of wrapping pressies already gives you a bit of a panic) a stocking-filler for Zig: a pair of zeppelin-shaped magnets that crackle like the devil when you throw them together. That was our years together: a constant, electric, polar crackle.

Bloody irritating.

I was irritated at my assumption that I was self-aware enough at eighteen to find a true friend and lover for life. Irritated that I couldn’t chop off all the bits of my drives and dreams and personality that would make me the perfect fit for his. Irritated that he would want me to be.

He was irritated that I would never behave. Irritated that I’d question his absences, and then question and question again his lazy, careless, clumsy lies. He was irritated that nobody else smelled like me, and that I didn’t act the way I smelled.

I was irritated that his full chest laughter would have me laughing along, every time. Irritated that, although he liked big boobs, the black lacy bra he gave me one late Christmas was both padded and two sizes too small.

We were both insanely, underskin histamine inflamed irritated that somehow some glitch in the narrative made too hot, too cold, too big, too small, too hard, too soft, of what should have been just right.

He was irritated that I was Liz; I was irritated that he was Billy, and he knew that I didn’t want milk.

I was irritated that he was scared of growing old, and I wanted someone to grow old alongside. Irritated that when he learned that growing old was not at all bad; that being a faithful partner had a lot going for it; that being a parent was a terrible, ecstatic experience, it wouldn’t be safe to sit alongside him in a pub with a couple of pints of Thwaites and wonder about the wonder of it all.

Even though we has no shared friends at the end – although I only lived a couple of dozen miles from him, I was very careful that he never found out – I heard about his death on the day they found his body.

I put the phone down and howled. Screamed and stamped and wailed and rent and gnashed and and kicked and stomped and dripped gunge and all that. I thought I was sad that he would never learn that growing older is not at all bad; that being a faithful partner has a lot going for it; that being a parent is a terrible, ecstatic experience.

I thought I was grieving.

It’s not until now, today, feeling irritated by a bauble that doesn’t want to be rethread, that I recognise in the irritation a portion, a shaving, a whiff or a sniff or a ghost of this time five years ago, and realise I wasn’t grieving.

I was bloody furious.



Things To Do

Cake: Soak fruit in booze; chuck all the stuff together and cook; voodoo with more booze; marzipan; ice; eat.
Pressies: buy; wrap; distribute (wearing stiff gauntlet to save fingers). addendum: forget to give Suffolk ones to mum when she visits.
Pressies from kids: buy; make; wrap; post / give out.
Cards: buy / make; give out / post.
Decorations: consider putting up; put up; take down.
Christmas dinner: yeah, right.
Booze: buy; drink; buy; drink; be bought; drink; buy; drink; buy; drink; scrounge; drink; drink; drink; drink; buy; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink (list in progress).

q

The sort of queues I don’t mind … mum observed, in the car on the way to Bury, on the way to the tram, on the way to Manchester - I’m filling her suspenseful pause with this lengthy ellipsis … are the kind where you stand in a line.

It was about here – no, it was exactly here – that Gruff and I made plenty of room for an even longer ellipsis.

So we caught the tram to the city and had a mother daughter Saturday pre-Christmas thorough exploration of my mother’s queue preference.


Things To Do

Cake: Soak fruit in booze; chuck all the stuff together and cook; voodoo with more booze; marzipan; ice; eat.
Pressies: buy; wrap; distribute (wearing stiff gauntlet to save fingers). addendum: forget to give Suffolk ones to mum when she visits.
Pressies from kids: buy; make; wrap; post / give out.
Cards: buy / make; give out / post.
Decorations: consider putting up; put up; take down.
Christmas dinner: yeah, right.
Booze: buy; drink; buy; drink; be bought; drink; buy; drink; buy; drink; scrounge; drink; drink; drink; drink; buy; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink (list in progress).

bob bob bobbins

When you’ve got kids, you can:

· Gather up your scrap pieces of Fimo™, stick them in a plastic bag, and keep them in your back pocket, squished against your bum, until they soften.

· Spend half an hour of therapeutic venting punching, pummelling, plaiting and pleading with the scraps to mix, until you get brown. Crap brown.

· Holler the kids, and with them rip the brown lump into thirteen smaller lumps, punch and pummel it some more, add little red, white, black and gold Fimo™ dabs to the brown, in approximately biologically appropriate places, and stab each through the head twice, with a pin.



· Cook them, string them up, and post them off to relatives who are contractually obligated to go oo and ah




· Give crap.





I’d like to assure anyone who might be concerned, that our robins will not be homed separately. They will travel to their new trees in groups of at least two, usually three. Robins being aggressively territorial, so this should be a laugh. Thirteen Fimo™ robins were pummelled, stretched, mangled, squeezed, rolled, pulled, poked with holes, baked, and strung up for the making of this seasonal art project.


Things To Do

Cake: Soak fruit in booze; chuck all the stuff together and cook; voodoo with more booze; marzipan; ice; eat.
Pressies: buy; wrap; distribute (wearing stiff gauntlet to save fingers). addendum: forget to give Suffolk ones to mum when she visits.
Pressies from kids: buy; make; wrap; post / give out.
Cards: buy / make; give out / post.
Decorations: consider putting up; put up; take down.
Christmas dinner: yeah, right.
Booze: buy; drink; buy; drink; be bought; drink; buy; drink; buy; drink; scrounge; drink; drink; drink; drink; buy; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink (list in progress).

the season for giving

A home day. Zig, coming down from the adrenaline of one dress rehearsal and two days of performance Joseph, has collapsed in a coughing, groaning heap on the sofa.

So Molster had a solo walk to school. One of the hefty responsibilities of life as a class counsellor is to go in a bit early on Fridays, to help chop all the gubbins for Fruity Friday – they like their Fridays fruity in Lancashire. It’s a simple walk, a few hundred yards up a single straight road.

As the sun was lower as it would be if she left at the normal time, I lifted a reflective armband down from the hall keyhook, and worked it up around her right coat sleeve. Changing my mind, I dragged it off, and hooked it back up on her left arm. She walks on a right-hand path up to the school, so the armband would be on the side of the oncoming traffic.

Mol reckoned the armband might be of more use on her right arm, all the better for unexpected oncoming cars to see her as she crossed the couple of quiet residential roads between home and school.

I pulled it down off the left and hooked it back up onto the right.

And off she went, with a kiss and no gloves and a hope for a good day, the sky pink and one-eyed around her.

She’s growing up. I’m paying out the cord between us: bright, white nylon, guy rope tough. Should I forget, or resist, wrapping it round my wrist and a rock while I reread a clause in my mother contract, she tugs and discovers it gives.

I’m useless against this. This give. When my nine year old suggests her reflective armband would be better on the side of the sudden, unexpected traffic, I mutely move it across.





Things To Do

Cake: Soak fruit in booze; chuck all the stuff together and cook; voodoo with more booze; marzipan; ice; eat.
Pressies: buy; wrap; distribute (wearing stiff gauntlet to save fingers). addendum: forget to give Suffolk ones to mum when she visits.
Pressies from kids: buy; make; wrap; post / give out.
Cards: buy / make; give out / post.
Decorations: consider putting up; put up; take down.
Christmas dinner: yeah, right.
Booze: buy; drink; buy; drink; be bought; drink; buy; drink; buy; drink; scrounge; drink; drink; drink; drink; buy; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink (list in progress).

teatowels

Oi, lady with the head.

I’m concerned that you sticking your head in front of my camera over and again might compromise your www anonymity. I’d hate for someone to snatch this photo of you, for use in advertising cheese, or bad hair porn. Your head has the random bounce of a parent in her first year of Nativity play attendance. That’s sweet, but I’m sure you won’t mind if this old hand of six Key Stage 1 Nativites in a row raises that old hand to flick your ear. This is my last Nativity play, you see. Now shift.




Oi, bloke with the head.

I know you. I like you. My son likes your son and your son likes my son. But when my camera auto focuses on your head because you are sat in the front row – and probably missed lunch to nab those three seats for yourself, your nice wife and nice mother, and didn’t think to save a couple more for my adequately lunched self and my husband, also your friend – that, I don’t like.

Ta for showing me your perfectly focused, unobliterated-by-mass-head front row shots of my son.

My son. Joseph. The one in front of your son. A shepherd.

Yes, you’re right, they’re great shots. And yes, I would very much like copies. Ta.

(Your neck looks fat. Just saying.)



Oi, ghost.

It's not big, and it's not clever.




Oi, shaky hands.

Damn you, shaky hands.




Oi, Joseph.



Nice dress.


Things To Do

Cake: Soak fruit in booze; chuck all the stuff together and cook; voodoo with more booze; marzipan; ice; eat.
Pressies: buy; wrap; distribute (wearing stiff gauntlet to save fingers). addendum: forget to give Suffolk ones to mum when she visits.
Pressies from kids: buy; make; wrap; post / give out.
Cards: buy / make; give out / post.
Decorations: consider putting up; put up; take down.
Christmas dinner: yeah, right.
Booze: buy; drink; buy; drink; be bought; drink; buy; drink; buy; drink; scrounge; drink; drink; drink; drink; buy; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink (list in progress).

distant drums

Highways Dept workmen have been messing around on the road outside for a couple of weeks now. Spreading half a dozen rectangles of orange tarmac, leaving it for a couple of days (the excitement, orange tarmac, what could it be for? Will it be an admittedly risky chessboard? A communal arts blank tarmac canvas project to lure the teenagers back to the straight and narrow with a brush and an invitation to Create! Flowers! Birds! Hills!? Have Bury MBC developed a yen for a bit of warm Mediterranean?) before returning to daub SLOW in white across the centre of each.

Gosh, thanks. Give it to them, they wrote each SLOW the right way round for the respective carriageway; there will be no bumps, prangs or scrapes as drivers strain to work out what WOIS is warning them about. WOIS? Wois a WOIS? Is it like a Woozle?

Drivers, go careful, drive WOOZLE.

As it’s getting near the end of the financial year there’s previously sat on chunks of budget to be used up sharpish on rivers of orange tarmac, oceans of white paint. Still, as a traffic calming measure it stinks: they haven’t given us bumps to make certain drivers going above 15mph will Bo and Luke it against the roof of their Corsa; they haven’t lowered the speed limit from the standard 30mph for built-up areas. They’ve given us a white word on an orange rectangle.

I knew when they were working, by the low, distant drumming of their generator. I heard it when I woke at 6:30 this morning, and thought they’d got an early start. Taking the kids to school I realised the road was clear, the SLOWs gleaming up through the frozen fog. I could still hear the generator, though, and shook away a Richard Carpenter image of ghostly, grudge-holding workmen slowly banging on each front door. Waiting, just waiting, until the awful moment when some fool will open, to be given an orange tarmac-stained mug of tea, as orange as ... tarmac, and a copy of yesterday’s Sun.

Sadly this was not to be. It would have been wonderful for house prices, and easy to get a foreigner done on driveway resurfacing, so long as you don’t mind orange. With a big WOOZLE across it in white.

The distant drumming is in my head. A brand new tinnitus tone, to join Barbershop Hum, Spincycle Whine, and 1970’s BBC1 After 11:30pm. It’s me that’s got the workmen in.

It might be that I’ve seen both Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Vanilla Sky this year, but I’m wondering how long it will be before they get busy. That woodland track we walked through Bradfield Woods in 1994: did we really step across that rectangle? That large, orange rectangle? Charles Bridge in 2002: beneath the Czech vendors’ stalls of enamelled pendants and wood carvings, could I really see that large S, a T, a bit of a P?

Nah, I’m being daft, these are workmen. They haven’t even had their second brew yet, not even glanced at the sports pages. My memories are safe.



Things To Do

Cake: Soak fruit in booze; chuck all the stuff together and cook; voodoo with more booze; marzipan; ice; eat.
Pressies: buy; wrap; distribute (wearing stiff gauntlet to save fingers). addendum: forget to give Suffolk ones to mum when she visits.
Pressies from kids: buy; make; wrap; post / give out.
Cards: buy / make; give out / post.
Decorations: consider putting up; put up; take down.
Christmas dinner: yeah, right.
Booze: buy; drink; buy; drink; be bought; drink; buy; drink; buy; drink; scrounge; drink; drink; drink; drink; buy; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink (list in progress).

eh? early morning discussion

Even though I’m different from everybody else at school because of my cerebral palsy, even though, if I didn’t have friends, know what? I think I’d be bullied.

…

If someone feels so unhappy that they want to bully someone, it doesn’t matter what the difference is. It could be that they don’t like your haircut; it could be that they think your nose is a funny shape; it could be that you speak in a different way; it could be …

… that you have three nipples …

… yes, perhaps you’ve got three nipples …

… or webbed feet …

… yes, or webbed feet …

The discussion went sort-of sideways from there.

more roaring greasepaint, more smelly crowd.

That’s the Brownie play over for another year. 2005’s Dr Who and the Missing Christmas lacked a little of the sparkle of last year’s Panto Idol. Perhaps once you’ve had a six-legged pantomime cow anything else seems, I don’t know, muted, no matter how many [nine] Bahumbug aliens sneak onstage to nick Christmas. No matter the tardis sound effect; no matter the revelation that the man in red [who spat out her gum this week] and his [many] helpers are From Another Planet*; no matter the balloon whisk, sink plunger allusion to Dr Who’s uber baddies; no matter the sherry-soaked transformation of Dr to Dr.

It must be that six-legged pantomime cow.

Which is making an appearance this year at the Brownie pack up the road’s Christmas bash. Word’s getting round that there are some plays. For Brownies. With six-legged cows. Brown Owl Claire wants to send my plays off to the Guiding Magazine. Soon all Brownies in the UK will Find the Cow, have their chance to Be the Cow. It’s only fair.

Thing is, obliging though I am, I’m not certain how successful these plays will be in the coming years. The knack of a good Brownie play being, freak cows aside, to hook into the zeitgeist. Brownies love a good bit of zeitgeist. Last year I pipped the Shrek 2 DVD release to the post with Panto Idol, this year I’ve anticipated the Dr Who Christmas special.

That’s my talent, my gift, my curse. Oh woe. Oh sigh. Ah me. I get a tickle at the back of my nostrils that tells me the way to go, to show the shift before the shift shifts. If only I could make it pay. Reckon I’ve promised not to pre-empt the zeitgeist for personal gain.

It’s a right arse.

Of course, it can’t all be zeigeist; you’ve got to tip your hat to the classics. This year the narrators used that metre known technically as te tum tum te tum tum te tum tum te tum. The one from Twas the night and The Grinch.

The Bahumbug’s planet
Was dark, sad and grey
And Christmas was always
A planet away.

Away, high in the distance
Sparkled a star
With bright season’s greetings
But oh, so, so, far!

How they wanted to reach it
And share in the fun.
They started to study
How it could be done.

They read “The Grinch”
And saw how he got plenty
But their copy was missing
Pages thirteen to twenty.

The Doctor wanted to help them
And had an idea
Of how to give the Bahumbugs
Some real Christmas cheer.

For his idea to work
Doctor Who had to plan it
With the help of the
Bahumbug’s neighbouring … planet.

The star that sparkled
A bright Christmas light.
*Can you guess who they are?
You might just be right.

Thank you Thank you. I know. It’s my gift. My curse.

The Slade stayed.

Narrator 2 beholds Queen Bahumbug

and lo

zig mad hair day
Originally uploaded by glatisant.

guess who's up for joseph in the school nativity this year.

eau de thomas, mary, taz, ned, morrin, toby, spray and cee jay

Wedding anniversary. Seven years. We’ve been together eleven years since the 5th. So there are cards and gentle stuff. It’s a change time, so gentle is good: change of job for Gruff; change of stress pattern as mebbe cancer scare turns out to be water on the nad; change of jumper for me because I smell of pony.

That is, a change of jumper if I was a nice, honouring the anniversary by showering and smelling purty sort of wife. But I’m a cosy jumper, like the smell of pony, shower when I’m good and ready and start to itch sort of wife. Which is the best there is.

I’ve been volunteering at a local Riding For The Disabled school for a few weeks now. Molster and Ziggy have been going for a couple of months, paid lessons are provided for standard issue kids at the weekend to help cover costs, and we give a voluntary contribution for Zig’s. Molster likes the gentle, friendly, black Cee Jay, Zig – a little bugger for a little bugger – loves with admiration the obstreperous white ex show pony, Toby. He arrived as a loan, originally, whiter than white. After two weeks of rolling in almost vertical mud in almost vertical fields, they knew they could never get that colour back, so kept him.

Started the morning by grooming the biggest … when does a pony become a horse? Thomas must cross the line. Have heard he can nip a bit to search for treats, so treats have been banned. Also – ha - he likes to lean on you when you clean his hooves. However, he was a perfect gent: looked attentive as I rambled on with brush, currycomb and conversational monologue; lifted his soup plate hooves one at a time as requested, the better for me to pick out half a field of mud, leaves and horse shit; obliged me – as most do – with a long, companionable, hay top noted fart as I brushed the dust from his broad rump.

Then onto Mary, a piebald grandmother who can get depressed. The next largest. I whispered into her ear that she was Gruff’s favourite, but shhh, don’t tell.

And on along the ponies, brush and hoof pick, and dust clouds and filthy fetlocks, and oh those farts.

I rode Ned: slightly stiff of joints, honourable, not quick to trust, looks like Hitler. To the moustache. The first time up on a pony in over twenty years, and I’m proud to say I came off the right way. But, oh, the rising trot is a different animal these days. I don’t know what’s happened to my thigh muscles. Didn’t I used to have thigh muscles? Although not tenor lady material, I’m glad to be a lady with no water on the nad.

Fragment (consider revising)

Preternaturally warm morning. The sun arrived ready-baked, all spring, summer and autumn kneaded together and crispy from the oven.

Pots are parched, a bit of a withered invitation to the door. Mind you, not one for tidy gardening, specially not this year, when neighbours to the side of me, neighbours in front of me are embracing pattern imprinted concrete, conservatories and fencing. Our garden is untrimmed. A catchall for escapees. The bugs need somewhere to scuttle to. Or buzz off to. The hedgehogs need a hiding place.

The whole Unbreakable Vow thing, (which of course has been preceded by a former Unbreakable Vow which overrules the terms and conditions of later UVs rendering them null and void. And not just because I fancy Snape a bit) has got me thinking about the lovely things that JKR creates and then drops. How often in this book could we have done with Hermione’s time-turny thing? If I remember rightly, Prof McG warned against their overuse and took it back at the end of Azkaban, but still. Is it not tucked away in a cupboard somewhere? If it was thought suitable for one girl to thoroughly overuse for an entire wizardly academic year, could Mac not just dig it out from behind the juicer and breadmaker, for justice and righteousness, just once?

(Liking the idea of a breadmaker for justice and righteousness, I'm thinking of removing the last comma in the previous paragraph. The Panasonic SD253a, with dispenser for nuts, raisins, justice and righteousness. So you don't have to drag yourself up from in front of Eastenders when the programme beeps, and scatter it in yourself. That's such a nuisance)

I first typed the above as having a dispenser for nits, raisins, justice and righteousness. Think on.

Perhaps Mac's like me. Clutterbugging up her life with Justin Case for years, til rampaged by the furious ice-blast ice age of yearned-for minimalism and clear, white surfaces.

Perhaps that's what you get for cleaning out your cupboards. Maybe the boxed sandwich toaster I've Freecycled will give me a forehead slapping moment when I face the cheese and pickle toastie worshipping monsters of doom.

Damn.

toto, we’re not at summer school anymore

It’s very simple, Gruff. All you have to do is get up before me, and set a place at the table, complete with napkin and side plate, glass, cup and saucer, and jug of orange juice.

Place a generous bowl of fruit, plate of croissants, selection of boxed individual cereal portions and choice of yoghurts at the other end of the table.

I will come downstairs, make my selection from these, sit at the laid place and pour myself a glass of juice.

You will approach to politely enquire, Would you like any tea or coffee, Madam? Any toast? I’ll decide that I would quite like some coffee and, yes, some toast. Thank you.

You will bring this across, quickly. The toast cut into triangles and filling a toast rack… Sorry?.. Well, perhaps you could go out and buy one, then.

You’ll then enquire, politely, mind, Would you like a cooked breakfast this morning, Madam? I’ll ask for everything that is veggie, please. This you will bring. Quickly.

Oh, although speed and attention to detail is, of course, key to the smooth running of this operation, what makes the breakfast, the thing that without this the entire breakfast experience would fail, is that you are friendly. And smile.

Oh, and it also helps if you are young and full of the sparkle of anticipated relish and success in life that being an Oxford undergrad working through the holidays brings.

Okay?

Thanks, love.

Do you have any brown sauce?

tNE AQU 3rd squ nSA TA 6th

Waiting for a phone call, a text, about Hairykid.


Hairykid is the best dog in the world, ever. He is my mate, in English terms. He lives with my big sister and is ten and a half.



I like seeing Hairykid. He has long since tagged me as alternate Alpha Female. He jumps onto my lap and stares with triumph and disdain down his big, long, black and white Hairykid nose at my kids. Who love him. And cuddle him. He tolerates it.

I like Hairykid’s company. We spent last week at my big sister’s, so look after Hairykid and the cats while they tented it off down to Brands Hatch for bike stuff with each other, and down to Kent for beach stuff with daughter-niece and the other, newer, more typically doggy dog.

I had Hairykid’s company for a day or so. Sharing every chair or sofa, doggy smelly back to my front; doggy smelly belly exposed for tickles; big, long black and white Hairykid nose against my cheek. Snoring, snorting doggy breath.

A phonecall to my big sis, a phonecall to me, and we popped Hairykid along to his vet’s for a couple of days residency.

Hairykid had had a nasty bellyache a couple of days before, a nasty belly ache a couple of months before.

The blood tests were back.

Hairykid stayed with the vet until Sunday afternoon, and offered me his belly on return. Stuffed his big, long, black Hairykid nose into my hand. We left the Hairykid and drove the couple of hundred miles up, across and home.

Hairykid is having more blood tests today, but, from what I understand, they are not necessary.

Pacreatitis, acute necrotizing pancreatitis, means that his enzymes are eating him away from the inside out. There isn’t a cure that has worked.

Love you, Hairykid.

what spell...

... did Harry Potter use to reach the roll of ancient parchment from the top shelf in the library ... ?





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.

Hooe's on first

I have address envy. Just posted a book (a rather bad book, which helps me feel just a little better) to a woman in a small town in Devon. A woman who lives on Yonder Street.

I want to live on Yonder Street.

ork and chips

G: Zig, Do you want to come with me when I help out at Molster’s Brownies? We’ve got owls coming to visit, and perhaps a hawk.

Z: A HAWK?.. Like in Lord of the Rings?.. Coming to Brownies?..

G: …
…
No Zig, that’s an Ork. If there was going to be an Ork at Brownies tonight I don’t think I’d be rushing to help out. Unless it had really good tattoos. This is a hawk. A bird. With wings. That hovers. And eats mice and stuff.

[Later. At Brownies]

Owl Lady: Can anyone tell me what the owls eat?.. Yes… Yes, that’s right… Hmm… not really anything that big… Yes, all the birds here eat mice and rats and day old chicks.

Z: They eat day old chips?

Today, we’ve moved on. Today, after the excitement of holding a Great Grey Owl that was about as tall as him on a gauntlet longer than his arm (picture to follow, I hope), he has other things on his mind. Apparently, it’s not right that willies don’t have bones, however, it’s good that air is see-through or we wouldn’t be able to find the chocolate biscuits.

glass houses

If your curtains pong of months of joss stick. If the pong slices the top off fresh, new summer (Summer! Now Fresh and New!!). If this doesn’t exactly help you not feel trapped, trapped, all is suffocating, will I never clear this torpid smother from my house and heart, it’s all ooze, it’s all ooze and smothering, suffocating, vile, endless, lifeless drear and drudge.

Then it might be an idea to pop them in the washing machine.

If then there’s a small, dense indiarubber thunk against the window, it might be a small garden bird, believing it can fly right on through from curtainless back window to front, and you might reach it just as its beak stops open-shutting and its heart stops trembling, and you might even though it's dead find it a box with some hay and lay it there before it cools and keep it on the shelf above your computer for the entire day and try to block the indiarubber round calls of the bird’s mate / parent from the garden, and you might curse the joss and the curtains and the windows and the torpid, smothering, suffocating, vile, endless, lifeless drear and drudge of being here and whose bloody idea was this life and joss and curtain cleaning thing anyway?

And a few days later you might be up at three, again, and typing away and tea slurping away you might reflect that really it was one of the better parts of the week.



Hulk Visits the Eden Project: Grrr, use hemp and make fetching strawberry growers from old grain sacks or I'll get really, really angry.

VIP

We spent yesterday’s Mars Uranus conjunction suitably enough. Four unexpected VIP passes to the first Paralympic World Cup (I’ve just had to add ‘paralympic’ to my Word dictionary; get it together, Microsoft.)

VIP passes = free breakfast buffet and unexpected neighbours. You know that half-glazed staring thing you do when you wonder if you know the woman walking past from the school playground or the chemist. Sometimes it clicks when the woman clocks your half-glazed stare and gives a grin that would keep the chaps at Aardman busy for weeks:

Me: Molster, the Prime Minister’s wife is just over there
Molster: Who’s the Prime Minister
[Wups. The girl’s nine. She needs enlightening.]
Me: Well, he sorta would like to think that he is in charge of running the country. He’s not, but he’d like to think so. That’s his wife. She’s a judge, like you’d like to be when you’re fed up with being a pop star.
Molster: Is she the one who came to see us at Brownies… or was that the Mayoress or somethin’
Me: The Mayoress or somethin’, Mol.

VIP seats are not of gold, but standard blue plastic, neither do they have even the humblest cushion for buttock relief to impede the regulation flip-up seat. They are altogether different in every way from the blue plastic flip-up seats to the left and right, however, as each one has a 3 by 2 VIP sticker on the back rest.

So that’s all right.

Taking piks of paralympic track events with a digital camera with a frustratingly delayed shutter action is… interesting. A click as the athletes run or otherwise propel themselves past gives you this:



Or, if you’re lucky, this:



This learnt, I pressed the shutter while Tanni Grey-Thompson was still a smudge in the distance. And got this:



The lovely woman is 11 Paralympic golds fast, after all.

And there was this marvellous chap from South Africa. 18 years old and, well, bionic. I pressed the shutter for this shot…



…shortly before he was conceived.

(Good pole.)

I feel happy in ways that seem to jiggle outside the shape of the word, that Zig has sat in the sunshine with Professor Gangrene and watched people in chairs and with prostheses and guide runners and, most pertinently, cerebral palsy run and jump and throw in a serious competition. With medals, and cheers and television cameras



and just the right attitude.

He now wants to throw the javelin. Time to hide the pencils and the cats.

A day when even the shadows were technicolour:

there's an alien here inside...

When your child has Gemini Sun Mercury conj in the 9th, it can take a while to brush their teeth.

So many new ideas that need to be shared now with the captive audience of the brusher.

This morning, in between, around and through electric brush buzz and spray splutter of Colgate fuzz, Ziggy expounded that:

All lost balloons floating up to space could be caught by their string by aliens. Who would then have a balloon and be happy aliens.

We are all aliens coooooozzzzzz, coooooozzzzzz, aliens live on a planet in space, and we live on a planet in space.

Just before I hauled him into his chair for the walk to school, he spelled out I love my mum and dad in magnetic letters on the filing cabinet.

When your child has Aries Sun conj Pisces Mercury Mars and Saturn in the 9th, she might remove her brother's my as superfluous.

The meaning's the same.

for his beltane birthday, we gave him...

...The Forced Root Vegetable Of Darkness, below, a hunk of space debris that landed in China yonks of centuries ago, and a fisheye from these chaps.

We skipped off on our won holiday weekend (Now With Added Hotel Pool).

To Leeds Castle, onetime dowager home of the widowed queens of England. Now the wellest of well-oiled heritage machines and, um, behind me somewhere.

And other places where we saw apple trees and that it is spring.

And we saw cows.

And a cockerel in a box saw us.

But we didn't see our fishies

Or our cats.

Cos they were at home.

And a jolly good time was had.

partay

Jack!

Hello C!

Lovely to hear from you. Yes please, I'd like an extension form.

Jack has not done me in; I do like the chap. I've had to prioritise
some paid work, business plans and the like.

I *have* mired myself in the form of the exercises, despite your excellent advice. It's learning scales, isn't it. Am pushing myself to complete these exercises thoroughly, so that the form becomes subconscious, if you get my meaning. It's a good discipline, but my head will wriggle through the gaps in the text, take off its socks and go paddle and splash. However often I order myself to sit and work the work workishly, dammit – and the Exercise 6.d document is open on my comp all the time – it's so much simpler to watch birds through the window and download Rufus Wainwright than it is to try and stir the necessary sludge of the format to find the gold.

I'm keeping my goal in view. I'll get there.

Have been doing a lot of playing around with charts as narrative. It's something that's just tingling away in the corner of my head; something I'd like to develop in the future. It dissolves Word tables.

Am very much looking forward to Summer School. Had my name down for a workshop with Melanie Reinhart in my old home town this Saturday: 'Revisioning Jupiter'. However, Jupiter decided that he would rather be in practise than theory right now thankyouverymuch, and his backing up into Uranus gave me an unexpected competition win of an all-expenses family weekend in Kent. (Kent?). We'll have a top time doing all things… Kentish, I won't be churlish, and it is ole Beltane husband's birthday on Saturday, but still, I'm so thirsty for things such as that workshop – reckon that's what the tight square between Cancer Moon in the 5th (conj SA) and Libra Jupiter in the 7th in my Solar Return chart is all about. Great stuff either way, but not both at the same time.

Still – Sun, Ur and ME are conj in the 1st, and with just 5' between the latter, I've no doubt that by the end of the year I will be a fair way further toward my goal than am I now.

Hope all's well with and for you. Am glad it's taking an extension to complete Mod 3, as I do enjoy having you as my tutor.

Bests
Gin


On 4/26/05, C wrote:
> Dear Ginny
>
> I just thought that I would write because I hadn't heard from you for a while.
> I fear Jack has done you in!
>
> In fact, your 6 month tuition period runs out on 2nd May, and please accept my
> apologies for not being on the ball and reminding you sooner. How are you
> getting on with Jack? Is there anything I can do to help? Let me know if you
> need any input of any kind from me. Also, if you would like to extend for
> another 6 months, let me know and I will forward on an extension form to you.
>
> I hope things are well with you - looking forward very much to hearing from you,
>
> All best wishes
> C

the king is dead

It’s a marvelous day for a solstice.

(Now get out of my brain, Van Morrison. And stay out. You lie, you lie: unlike your fellows -Tesco (boo hiss), Sainsbury and selected Waitrose and Asda - you don’t offer home delivery, transport or not.)

Anyway. In the photo, at the bottom behind the snowman, see that cat? That’s Ten Lives. Until June, Ten Lives lived at the very, very bottom of a floor-level display cabinet. He was very, very dusty, half-hidden and ignored.

Not in itself reason for the granting of an extra life, although Dave The Git cat would counter that being half-hidden and ignored would, in this house where my toe tends to catch his bottom when he’s being his name, would up the cat lives ante considerably.

However, that floor-level display cabinet wherein Ten Lives was at the very, very bottom and very, very dusty, half-hidden and ignored happened to be in a small, low-lying shop, beside a fast-running river.

In Boscastle.

This shop, as it happens.

jenny

Twig trembler. Circle of a bird,
Spoked with beak and tail. Improbable satellite
of the brown under-hedge, hidden home of a lost Super Bouncer.
Size of the ball. Twig bouncer.

Softly open front door,
Slipper-pit path snow to the hedge.
Hang a netted suet ball from obliging bendy twigs.

She watched; I watch her from the window.
Melting snow damp chilling my back.
Twig trembler, twig bouncer to the net.

Goal.

stocking fillers

Ziggy has just announced what he would like for Christmas:

One billion and nine rhinocerous beetles.

Just when I thought we'd about finished shopping. I'll stick them on the list, after satsumas.

O R

Just tried out the Molster on my remembered version of Goldfish (each has their own, like fruitcake recipes and body odour).

She pouted and frowned, then gave a grudging smile when the penny dropped.

A B C D Goldfish.

M N O Goldfish.

O S A R. C D B D I's.

O R, Goldfish.

I thought we’d agreed not to mention canada

Grumpy.

Grumpy, grumpy, grumpgrump.

Hooked sleep off the string last night, after several Black Books and a couple of glasses of something Chilean and oaky cab savvy.

It came quietly enough, then leapt off the bed sharpish at 3:30. Don’t know where it’s got to, however I heard the cat flap bang, so reckon it’s off on its prowls. There was lots of yawning and eye-rubbing going on in the cars I passed this morning. Thought I’d warned it to stay away from the roads; will it listen?

Grump:
Digging at the back of the wardrobe shelf for a long-sleeved top, groaned to see a bag I know too well. Kris – am very sorry, but have forgotten once again to post you the top. (Found a top yonks - no, make that Yonks, it was that long – ago, that made me bounce on the balls of my feet for the glee of sending it to Kris.

Then I forgot. A lot. )

I will, will, will send it when the Christmas post glut is over. Am putting it at the tippy top of my inevitably teetering and tottering to oblivion New Year’s list of doo goods.

Yes. You can only keep a good Canadian merry on a promise for so long.

Grump:
Wearing the perfect pair of purple cords for the first time, and having to use the strike tags on the first pee word.

Being a bit of a short arse, with plumptious buttocks yet a waist, finding trousers to go on and stay on is not simple. Found the perfect jeans were Levis, 29'w', 30l hipsters. Therefore, when my Manchester rootlings dug out the only remaining pair of 29'w', 30l Hennes purple sale cords, I was a happy puppy.

Putting them on this morning for the first time, I had an uneasy prescience they would end up halfmast halfway along the walk to school. I know - they are hipsters. I know, I know. For added glee, not only do they fall, the bottom's backs, which I’d tucked up at the back because of puddles, unrolled and caught up under my trainers, making the school walk a bounce along on soggy sponges.

Hipsters are never a great idea for me anyway, simply because as they’ve lowered the waist of available trousers, they’ve raised the bottom hem of available tops. Okay if you’re smooth and sixteen, not so good if you’ve got the mad surgeon slashings of both appendectomy and caesarean and, being by far one of the more fluffy members of your sex, tend towards the Hasselhoffian below your blue sparkly belly ring if you’re not 100% alert.

Grump
It being the last day of term, all the kiddies walked in with their favourite toy. Ziggy’s favourite toy of right now is a talking Captain Black action figure, with three merry phrases.

Who is still in a toy box somewhere to my left, because, of course, the Take A Toy message didn’t get to me. Arse.

Grump
Then, Captain Blackless and cords akimbo, I had to hand a bottle of promisingly fine Chablis I would really have liked to keep for ME ME ME over to Ziggy’s SSA, as she’s had a tough term and it’s Christmas, by bloodybuggerbollocks.

This is the voice of the Mysterons.

We will take our revenge.

Everyone will die.

g’night.

counting chickens

Old and good friend has given us chickens for Christmas. So the card says. Ten of ‘em.

Would be a bit of a worry: the ergonomics of coop placement; logistics of egg retrieval; timetabling snacktime for the fox so it doesn’t interfere with small-animal-blitz time of the young, enthusiastic and calamitously untrained Staffie up the road, or the hard-wondering-stare-with-occasional-leap-to-grapple-with-chicken-wire time of Tommy Stupid and Dave The Git.

None of that worry is ours, however, as the chickens have been given to someone who could use them more. If you’re struggling for a pressie idea, there are still three days to order chickens in time for Christmas. Or a goat. Or a boat. No turkeys, though.

I like our not-our chickens so much I’m going to give not-give old and good friend ten right back.

~

Was up most of last night looking for sleep. Buggered if I could find it. Wouldn’t you know; just caught sight of it out of the corner of my eye. And I have nowhere at all to put it until this evening. Today is a day for planning and preparing, for inviting the chortling unexpected of 2005. For being very much awake.

I will hang the found sleep over the string, between Christmas cards, and remember it later.

to me

(written around 3:30, while blogger's pulishing was down.)

Perhaps the meanest thing my git of a husband has ever done was pull Molster to one side, confidentially, during Children’s telly, and persuade her that her mum fancied the littlest Chuckle Brother.

That was a few years ago. I have cleared up most of the mess, and silenced the playground conversation, yet niggly little bits of upset remain, disquieting glass-shards-on-the-kitchen-floor-that-get-stuck-in-your-feet-after-you’ve-broken-a-tumbler-and-oh-so-carefully-swept-and-hoovered-and hand-cleaned-the-lino of maternal / child trust and respect.

The git.

Today we were in Manchester, tying up Yule-type shoppy bits and bobs in Chinatown. Walking back to the beeb, there he was, I saw him, newspaper in hand, he passed us. Modest of height, large of conk, flat on top. Appearing in panto, I believe.

Gruff caught hold of my hand, ever so slightly:

calm yourself.

As I’m typing this, he’s bounced off to pick the kids up, and I’ve just realised the reason for his alacrity.

The git.

Does he not know there is some childhood trauma from which it’s nigh on impossible to fully recover?

Mind you, these days Molster understands a little more about the chemistry of attraction. The mathematics of comparable probability. Hopefully she’ll remember that her mum rather fancies Mighty of Dong (large of hand and earthily competent) and that Captain Hook. Hopefully she can finally lay that demon possibility that her mum could possibly fancy the littlest Chuckle.

And I will never, ever mention that, in fact, the biggest Chuckle uncannily resembles the dad of her mum’s dead, bastard ex.

soup

I smell of soup.

Good soup, but still soup.

Was about to add, like an old lady. Stopped. What part of me is it that thinks there was an old lady out there who smelled of soup?

Am almost certain it's not part of my inner processes; no dark and scary yet somehow reassuring psyche old lady who darkly scared yet reassured me with her very own personal soup smell. Nanna made soup. Good soup. Pale soup of floury potatoes and chunks of carrot, onion cooked to a pulp to soothe the allium-wary child. She'd serve it up during illness and power cuts. The smell filled the house, but never stuck to her.

Which makes it an outside thing. Somewhere, somehow, at some time, I've been told or have read of an old lady who smelled of soup. Told it, or read it. Anybody?

Soup.

Me. Am not yet old. Next year I become officially mid-thirties - which I've just been nudged into realising by a journal I'd love to link to but is sadly locked at present because of psycho ex-boyfriends in sales activities - can be almost worth pulling a face about. Mid-thirties is different from early thirties. A couple of years, a few hundred episodes of Coronation Street and two Summer Schools different. Ne'ermind. Just a hop skip over that particular hillock and I'm in Jupiter return country.

Not yet old, yet smell of soup.

Good soup, but still soup.

I could really do with toning up my handheld blender arm.

there and back again

Suffolk is simple. There is land and there is sky. Sometimes there are trees to ruffle the middle. Usually, though, trees and sky.

To a simple soul this is reassuring. Since leaving Suffolk in 89, the places I’ve lived have all had disconcerting humpy bits hooching up chunks of sky. The sun takes longer to rise not just because I’m now on the West side of the island. Dawn is not just tardy; when she finally arrives there’s some hulking great chunk of land blocking her out, leaving her nothing more than a polite herhumm behind the Pennines.

Whenever I go back to Suffolk I exhale. Land. Sky. Thank you.

Thing is, there is so much land and so much sky, where do you take a picture? What the ratio of solid stuff to airy stuff? At the bottom of mum’s garden it worked out 50/50:



[editor's note: really, that's more 40/60, innit. short photographers, tsk.]

I can understand how some find this land / sky thing unsettling. Some - gasp - even a tad dull. Me? It’s the third bowl of porridge. I come over all Akenfield.

With a scarcity of streetlights, when that blue stuff darkens, every of the many stars pointillist prick out their old stories. You can arc-sweep your eyes and read them in. This is when the sky rises.

A December day gives pale light history. A ploughed field all’s well. And let’s not ignore the delight of jumping up and down, yelling SOD SOD SOD SOD SOD SOD SOD.



Just me then?



Sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine

Years and years and some more years ago, sixth form Eng Lit, we ‘did’ Hopkins. Hopkins was done. Slippery sod himself, his paper was my lowest mark. We were taught all the techno terms for the way he flilliped around an image, intricate origami creatures to transport his soul’s delight. I just didn’t learn them.

I could read his lines, grumble with the rest about having to read the tangles of some Jesuit priest, but secretly know his heart and give a double thumbs up. This I could do. I could not, would not stake them out with literary terms. (A hint even then that praps English teacher wasn’t a perfect fit for me future? Just cos being, I feel, a perfectly valid answer to many English exam questions. Fortunately I learnt to fill the gaps with over-evident waffle, but waffle is all it ever was and will be.

Just cos.)

The weekend also had croup for Zig, who is home with me in the loose cough and loadsa bogies stage; the finding, repotting and decorating of a tiny Christmas tree into a fabulous and accomplishedIthankyou bird-feeding tree for Nanna and Grandad’s grave; and people, some of whom walked past a copse I once peed in and stung my bum.

See how the trees lean.



I have a mum who sticks her arms in the air. Just cos.
A biggest sis who points back at me. Just cos.
A middle sis who stares. Just cos.
A husband who will never quite be Jean Reno. Sigh. Just cos.
And a daughter who hides in the ditch with her Unky Monkey. Just cos.


And a house full of washing that needs carrying and lifting and folding and drying and washing and putting away as is and ever will be world without end.

Just cos.

liszt

Thursday – Sunday:

pack

wrap champagne pressie for wedding we're missing

stop craving afternoon champagne

kids

carols

pour approx 300 glasses of parental wine

home in straight line

repack

rice krispie cakes and sausages on sticks

drag Gruff to garden centre

find something just right for the grave. Without crying.

pack packings into Jeffrey

remember children

reverse

pack presents

reverse

wine

reverse

feed cats, pig and fish

drive to Suffolk

see mum and s-dad

ahh at the sky

see southend sister

rescue Zig from dogs

see wtf sister

hide from wtf sister

rescue Zig from dogs

put world to rights

show Zig how nice dogs are when they’re not bowling him off his wibbly legs

rescue Zig from dogs

visit grave

tissues

swap known pressies for unknown

drive back to Rammy

ballcock

I'm holding up my ballcock with an elastic band.

And it still won't stop dripping.

Yes. Think on.

north of manchester

You’d think they were talking about shifting to Bolivia.

Honestly.

Sat here in my Ramsbottom living room, a tad short of thirty miles from Manchester, a good half of the voices reaching me over the past day have been Media.

And oh so many of them have been broadcasting out from London, talking in veiled, shuddering terms of the proposed shift of BBC departments from London, to gasp, Manchester …

… that’s … the North, isn’t it ..?

Hello. Mr Ms Media Person … we can hear you, you know.

And we can understand, in spite of the accent.

Husbandthing is employed by the BBC and is based in Manchester. He [mostly] leaves in the morning and returns [mostly] in the evening. Hang on, this morning he left for London … he was going to catch one of those new-fangled flying machines from the place where they keep so many, just outside Manchester. It reaches the bright lights of capital city in less than an hour. Tomorrow he’ll catch another one back in the late afternoon, returning home, the other side of Manchester, in time for his daughter’s early evening carol concert.

That’s right, ye veiled shuddering broadcasters, the new fangled flying machines travel in both directions.

However, should you choose to travel up by automobile, take care. Don’t be like the BBC person who sent an urgent package for BBC Newcastle to Husbandthing in Manchester, assuming he could just pop it across (I kid you not).

Listen carefully – drive up the country, and when you reach the M62, turn left.

All right, I know, there are serious considerations to uprooting, but for heavens sake, the moves aren’t going to happen for five years. If you’re not happy, that’s 60 months to find a different job beneath another of capital city’s bright lights.

I am not talking with smug complacency here. Husbandthing’s job is not entirely safe in the cutbacks, however, he is the veteran of several redundancies and the package that goes along with these ones would go a long way to help boost the deposit we are saving for the move to a home with sufficient bedrooms for both flavours of children.

And in honesty, were he made redundant, he’d pick up another job (yes, we have more than one fine job here in the North) and then move back to the beeb and up into a space opened by someone who decided that a move to the North would explode their brain with the altitude (something, strangely, that has yet to happen on any of their many winter skiing holidays).

Yes, please, if you have any feelings that a move to the North would be insufferable then please don’t do it. You would be insufferable. Stay in London, where I can avoid you.

And if you do decide to slum it terribly, if you pack your ridiculously huge 4 wheel drive and your nasty, double-parking-outside-schools-because-your-children-are-the-most-important North London attitude, don’t come to Lancashire, don’t come to Ramsbottom.

There is a place for you. It’s called Cheshire.

Oh don’t worry, you might see me. I’ll pop down a couple of times a year to glean from your charity shops and buy your Alderly Edge bakery out of Florentines and those giant stuck together chocolate bomb things.

You’ll notice me, if you listen carefully. I too have a Southern accent, but I don’t talk through my nose.

Or my London.



Postcard of 'The River' by Hetty Chapman and Karen Allerton, that’s tacked above my computer chair. Click to see better

holly

Our holly is loaded with scarlet berries. A sign of a hard winter, they say, the berries and the flocks of waxwings burring across from Russia, into Scotland and East Anglia.

Our holly is full of berries, I answered Molster’s coo at the tremble of white lights tacked across nextdoor’s house.

We stepped into the sharp, dragon breath dark and her voice rose:

Now the holly bears a berry as white as the milk,
And Mary bore Jesus, who was wrapped up in silk:
And Mary bore Jesus Christ our Saviour for to be,
And the first tree in the greenwood, it was the holly

Now the holly bears a berry as green as the grass,
And Mary bore Jesus, who died on the cross:
And Mary bore Jesus Christ our Saviour for to be,
And the first tree in the greenwood, it was the holly

Now the holly bears a berry as black as the coal,
And Mary bore Jesus, who died for us all:
And Mary bore Jesus Christ our Saviour for to be,
And the first tree in the greenwood, it was the holly

Now the holly bears a berry as blood it is red,
Then trust we our Saviour, who rose from the dead:
And Mary bore Jesus Christ our Saviour for to be,
And the first tree in the greenwood, it was the holly.

She sang it through as we walked along the path to Brownies. I was silent. I had no idea she knew it.

We heard the song last December, in the grand hall of a medieval castle. A Yule concert we’d been invited to by a friend from long, long ago. There were fires in the hearths, and just the right instruments and people that, if you scrunched up your eyes and forgot the mulled wine was non-alcoholic and in plastic cups, the borders between hither and yon could shimmer like heat haze.

Every now and then, when the false barriers between then and now are lifted, when a toll is not demanded, when the dark allows, we can feel how it was when the stories of Jesus first touched Britain. When there was no We Are Right And You Are Wrong, when the hope in a man who wanted good could build a church which the Green Man would guard. When the potent totems of Mary and her son were evergreen.

I like to believe.

aunty...

First, a commercial break.

You want free, invisible, real-time stats? These are your chaps.

They have pretty pie-charts and everything, and whenever you click on a magnifying glass icon you get up close to the details of whomever has linked. For someone unused to the bright lights and glamour of full-on stats, their detail is headturning.

Which is how I’ve come to have a little mystery on my hands. Not as tricky a mystery as Blue Chamber, which I’m buggered if I can do. I’d reckon it’s on an easy-peasy par with ‘A bloke is hanging, dead, in a locked room. The room is completely empty apart from the man and a pool of water below him – how did he die?’ sort of thing.

Here we go:

A woman sends a link to her journal to a person working in a big company, to their company address. There is nobody apart from the person in his office at the time the link arrives; he sends the link to nobody.

The woman’s stats show that the person clicked the link twice; the host name given is the servers of the company.

Shortly after the first click, and around the time of the second, the same company’s host name shows up next to search engine entries for the specific name of her journal, which was contained in the link sent to the person.

The person to whom the link was sent only clicked on it, they did not use search engines, they did not have to.

Could I just say, that if the search engine user feels they might be passing my house earlier than the person to whom the link was sent, on an evening when I send them a shopping list through their company email, feel free to pick it up and pop it over.

You’d be helping.

I know the Greater Manchester / Lancashire border might seem a tad far for you today, but it could look different soon.


...or big brother?

b.i.t.s, bits.

Can you spell like 13 (I think) year old Gayathri?

I loathe, loathe, loathe Eamon Holmes and in avoiding his fatuous fat-cheeked smug-arsed self avoided the programme; however, in my relatively stress free living room I got one wrong (no, I’m not saying, but I thought there was an em where there is an en).

Well done Gayathri – and a bigger well done for not wanting to use your free holiday of choice to go to bloody disneyland (that’s three times now the spellcheck has capitalised that place of horror, fear, dread where I will never, ever tread nor never, EVER capitalise). Nope, our hero wants to go to either China or South America, as she’s fascinated by the history of both. Wonder if she wants a chaperone … or a spare mum …

In other news, had a dose of the ghost of Christmas post this afternoon. (There’s definitely a poem there.) Can you guess which of the eighteen people in front of me in the snaking (tired image but true as the queue was as slow as a snake in winter) Post Office queue smelt of dirty bits?
Was it the woman with the cough and the dandruff?
It was not.
Was it the man with the seventeen parcels?
It was not.
Was it the couple who needed charts, diagrams and a full-blown Powerpoint presentation to understand that although you buy the stamp and receive your Airmail sticker at the counter, you stick them on and pop the card to Canada in the box yourself?
It was not.
Rosemary the telephone operator?
Nope.

It was the man behind me. Who crowded me, sliding nearer, his hand reaching past me to grip the rail across my hip. The man who brushed against my shoulder and - despite my desperate attempts at Big Old Circle Of White Light manifestation – breathed in my ear.

All the way through the countdown from eighteen to zero.

Yep, that was the chap who smelt of dirty bits.

Shower and Echinacea, then.

And another shower.

"mummy, thinking"

mix and stir

For the best part of a month the best part of a big bottle of marsala has slowly been slurped up by a bloated and increasingly syrupy pot of raisins, sultanas, currants, dates, prunes and figs.

This afternoon the mixture variously met butter, sugar, cherries, hazelnuts, ground almonds, flour, baking powder, my secret ingredient, pith and juice of an orange and a lemon, the best part of half a dozen eggs (complete with chips of shell – Molster’s secret ingredient for healthy bones) and five-and-one-for-luck tablespoons of brandy.

My largest bowl nearly overfloweth. As did my largest baking tin.

We all stirred and wished (I don’t cook puds so the cake gets the wishing) a shh-for-secret wish, lifted, eased and poured.

Into the oven with a bye bye cake and a pink piggy timer for the temperature change.

Then set to with the licking. Molster, who has dabbled her fingers into my single malt since she was in nappies, is showing a steady hand with her greaseproof paper tracings.

Ziggy, a novice, charged around making jungle noises, bouncing off the furniture (this is usual, remember the cerebral palsy) and licking his sister’s back.

Now he’s flopped, prone onto the rug to watch Fungus The Bogeyman, with a third kifter glaze to his eyes.

and I don't know why

I drank beer.

It tasted nice.

Which helped the trauma.

Read, listen, you’ll understand.

Last night I found out that the uncle of the dad of Zig’s best mate - keep up - was, in the 1970s, a tailor for Slade and Wizzard.

He had, in his flat, wardrobe after wardrobe stuffed with these clothes.

When he died

they.
were.
thrown.
away.


There are some losses from which you never fully recover.

On the other hand, although the father of Zig’s best mate wasn’t able to completely validate the kipper tie story*, as he says, You want to believe it, don’t you

You’ve got to believe it.


*The Kipper Tie Story.
In the 70s, Noddy Holder was in a boutique trying on clobber. When asked Would you like a kipper tie he replied, yes please, two sugars.

discobabysexybabyhot

Now with added pussy.

cinders, you shall go to the school christmas disco

Whether it’s down to the early Slade saturation during Panto Idol, or the two-voice carolled howlings since late October as the kids rehearsed their school’s seasonal CD over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over an…

… sorry…

…this year I’ve caught a dose of Christmas. And caught it early.

Even though the box of deccies has been blocking my wardrobe door for three weeks, since dragging it out of the loft in search of tinsel sacrifice for the dress rehearsal; even though, yes, it’s still commercial and no, I’m not a Christian; even though eBay sales of my secondhand gleanings dribbled to drippings and have been abandoned til late January; even though, even though, even though, d’ya know

I’m enjoying getting quietly Christmassy.

Being a bit smug helps. Knowing that the huge box on top of the wardrobe rustles and squeaks with all the bags and boxes that surely should be in Lapland right now, or at least on a chartered Amazon jet to Lapland. That helps. The 50 49 bottles of wine, yes you read that right, damn wine clubs and all their freebies, credit notes and ‘Festive Offers’. They help. And will keep on helping. Daresay. Searching for naval jewellery for my youngest niece and finding myself staring into the eye of a doubly-pierced willy doesn’t exactly help, but it breaks the monotony.

Bringing out The Shirt also helps.

It’s the school Christmas Disco tonight. Not what you’d consider the highlight of a busy and popular, beautiful and competent 30-something’s (what do you mean, ’who’?) festive calendar.

But they have a bar. And jacket potatoes, oh yes; a hefty portion of which are raw and unwrapped on my kitchen table – note to self for later, BAKE THEM. And a load of the parents who are going are lovely.

And I get to bring out The Shirt. The one I found in Afflecks one summer for a couple of quid, and being The Clut Hoarding High Priestess Of It-Might-Come-In-Handy having foresight, I bought it and shoved it in the wardrobe, where it quietly hums Jingle bells to itself for 50 weeks of the year, completely pissing off the grumpy sequined Whistles vest top that’s ne’er seen the light of day.

Hang on, my camera has got one of those swivel screen things that lets you see what you’re taking a pik of, I’ll stick the shirt on … let’s see …

[much time passes]

Oooookaayyyyy… not as easy as I thought it would be. I haven’t a clue how that camera took half of those angles, even though I was staring at the screen This one’ll do:





Shirt! Bet you want one. Oh yes, I am the queen of exquisite taste, and refinement nonpareil. My santas go upside-down, rightside-up and side-to-side.

What the pik doesn’t show are the rather splendid, wing-like fold-back cuffs.

My recent habit of swapping a butterless banana butty breakfast for brownies and bikkies means I can’t comfortably button the shirt over The Ladies this year without Unseemly Gape. So swapped Gape for Gap (sorry rocketeer, but needs must when the devil wears pink pyjamas) and am wearing it half-buttoned over one of their ever-so-handy stretchy tops.

So that’s today’s glamorous, fairytale future. For now it’s shirt off, jumper on, and let’s get scrubbing that loo, then finish off a piece about John Cleese’s lunar nodes.

Which are not as painful as they sound.

fatale

The eyes are poisonous, you know.

clear

It's a clear, brittle glorious December day and this fills me with glee.

So much so, this stinky semi-pagan dragged the vicar's email address up from the depths of google and sent him a big thumbs up.

strings

dahling

It was a triumph. The Brownies were top and I am very, very proud of them indeed. Indeed. What a wonderful group of kids, and how heartening to know they are will-be grownups. Even Dame 4, who was scared to terrified tears and quite unable to go on, was smothered in cuddles, they covered the muddles (hey, a poem) with trouping professionalism, much backstage stage-whispering and an inside-out six-legged cow suit that showed to all just how the two udders were stapled to the Ikea bedspread.

Much money was raised for hospice and children’s prosthetic limb charity thingy. Many balloons were stomped, and Zig was so knackered his head stabbed as we left the school hall and he was asleep by the time his chair reached our doorstep.

Brownies aside, our Molster is getting her first dose of unpleasant girl dynamics, by which I mean unpleasant dynamics with a girl, not dynamics with an unpleasant girl. A new girl started in her class in September. She seemed rather reserved, so Mol (as was almost every girl in her class, you can bet) was given the Make Friends With The New Girl talk over potato waffles and beans. She looked up at me with a Well, duh expression – friendly is our Mol.

A couple of weeks ago she told me that new girl and an old, good friend of Mol’s are Best Friends [capitals essential]. Mol grinned, happy that her old, good friend now had a special friend the way Mol has had for a couple of years in her Best Friend.

Keep up.

Yesterday, Molster was in tears at the end of the day. It seems New Girl wants ALL of old, good friend, pulls her away from Molster, and has even instructed her not to talk to Molster at Brownies (where New Girl has no influence as she doesn’t go). Old, good friend has a strong, forthright head on her shoulders, and doesn’t want this, but still New Girl plugs away, shooting Molster the nastiest of slidey looks

– hint for all insecure, would-be 8-year-old old, good friend-snatchers: best to leave the nasty slidey looks until Mum’s not around. Kay?

Poor Molster; until now she’s had a big group of friends who play together, talk together and get along. They are in parts Friends, Good Friends, Special Friends and Best Friends, but they are always, always, Friends. An open invitation to New Girl was offered - in girl-tongue (some language I never quite grasped, even when 8) to dive right in. It’s still open and offered, and I just hope she sees that to have a Friend at this school doesn’t mean they have to be taken away from other friends.

We talked a lot about it last night. I bit my tongue, and smothered my rild, kick-her-arse side under a big pile of dirty school uniform in the bathroom hamper.

We’ve decided, Mol and I, to try and ignore New Girl’s attempts at old, good friend snatching, and go along as normal. We think that should New Girl tell Molster again that she doesn’t like her, a good response might be Well, I like you.

Leave the channels open, and see how it goes.

In the meantime, here’s a random found toy shot.





Don’t tell him, but he needs all the rest he can get before Doc Oc arrives later this month.

Talking of the big day, thanks to Bev for reminding her notify list that today is indeed December. Do you know that sense of completion and calm you get that warns you you’ve forgotten something? I was relaxing into that this morning, a la spidey into lilac slippers, as I sipped a cuppa and caught up on email before getting the kids up.

Leapt up (lots of ‘up’ action here, isn’t there; well, you’ve got to to get down, apparently) with an underbreath word most filters would purse their lips at, ran upstairs as quiet as pos, turned out the bedroom cupboard until I found the old Frosty advent calendar somewhere at the bottom back [note to self: cupboard contents still scattered across bed] grabbed a couple of chocolate coins hidden behind the clean sheets in the same cupboard, back downstairs – luckily the old Frosty calendar hook is still twisted into the unit – hung up Frosty, straightened Frosty, stuffed the coins in number 1, re-straightened Frosty, then back up the stairs two at a time, into the kids room with a hearty It’s the first of December – guess who’s been!.

Four eyes open, two FROSTY!s.

Seems last year I was wrong. You’ve still got to hide those strings.

still

The last day of November. The last day for the first stage hard pruning of Nanna’s buddleia. A beautiful day that would snow were the cloud thicker. Set to with the secateurs and cut back around 7 or 8 foot of browned ex butterfly bliss, leaving around 2 foot or so of thicker stems to saw back in March.

Have done it, Nanna. Thumbs up. Sudden sad stab of thought that the parent bush will now have been dug up and mawl mangled. Daresay there are foundations of new houses already across what was Nanna and Grandad’s allotment. Miss them though I do, with regular, sudden, surprising midday tears and a sort-of gape in the belly, I am glad they have not seen this. Glad it was just the buddleia that caught it.

My copy of Nanna's favourite rose, Josephine Bruce, has its last two flowers of the year; one
for Nanna, one for Grandad.





Brushed by frost. Gently regal.





Turning around, saw the watcher was being watched.





There’s a warm radiator below that windowsill. You can see Major Tommy’s contempt for damnably foolish humans who stay out in the cold.

Mercury Retrograde from today til the 20th. A lot of fluster and nonsense about how it snarls up the system. I’ve found that working with it – using the ‘re’ to rethink, rework, reconsider – pick your re’s to suit – makes Me retrogrades some of my most productive thinking and working times.

That said … it’s the play tonight. The fabulous Mr Mercury rules, among other things, communication, commerce, kids and schools. Tonight I’m directing 35 Brownies in a play that’s part of a Christmas Fair – to sell stuff for children’s charities. In a school.

Wonder what Neptune’s up to. Must go and peek.

popcorn

Joined an online DVD hire club thing a few weeks back. Spent far too many hours building up a list of would-like-to-rents.

You know how it works; when they receive your watched discs back, whatever they have in stock that nearest the top of your rental list gets sent back to you.

Sometimes there is a rightness of time and content; this weekend Around The World In 80 Days and Men In Black 2 sat, nudged up beside the box. Saturday Jackie Chan and alien joy for the Molster and Ziggy.

Sometimes, however, your sends spark responses from such different parts of the brain that it all clangs and jangles around in there.

Clueless and Unforgiven.

junior entomology

Ziggy, on being asked why he was wobble-walking across the laminate on hands and feet, with his bum stuck high in the air:

I'm not Zig, I'm an arse-faced bug.

piff paff poff

Nicked Ziggy from school yesterday afternoon to have a look at Kidz Up North. Why the zed I’m not sure. Are only the Up North kids Kidz? Is it Kids Darn Sarf? Dunno. Anyway.

We nicked him because it’s very nearly time to admit he’s too big for the lovely, light and bouncy three-wheel buggy (close to collapse) and drag out the heavy, spine-shuddering Pixi chair for every journey. The chair we fought for and had to pay towards, as we live all of about 15 miles away from a wheelchair service that talks nicely to the distributors, and that is wonderful in smooth, urban environments I don’t particularly spend much time in. Great for Manchester Museum, pants for Ramsbottom.

The chair he climbed into to look around Kidz Up North, an annual exhibition of equipment for children with disabilities.

We found a perfect three-wheeler. With a ticklishly well-designed insert that has beanbag beads and inflates to mould around the sitter (how top is that? A snip at £199), it’ll come to around £750. Fingers crossed that when Zig’s vouchers run out next summer, the wheelchair service will recognise that having an all-terrain fantastic-mobile is essential for full, fun and functioning family life.

Of course they will.

Oh yes.

Had time after for the Bolton Toy Saurus. Somehow just managed to wheedle his splints into the trolley seat’s leg holes (not for much longer, then it’ll be fun). It was about half-past-two, so there wasn’t time enough to get him back to school, but it did sort-of occur to me that Toy Saurus wasn’t the legitimate reason for taking him out of school, and moreover that he was wearing a jumper with his school name embroidered on the front >nonchalant whistle<.

Still, we had Important Business. Zig wants to give Molster a magic kit for chrimbo, which is a top idea and all his own. We sadly had to pass the box of revolting magic tricks, complete with fake poo, as Mol is easily discouraged and poo just might be a tad advanced. Settled instead for standard Marvin beginners' box with plastic cups and sponge rabbits. The important thing was that it was large enough to secrete a Wolverine action figure from the little chap in the trolley seat. He does like his Wolverine.





And the joys of making a virtually indestructible man-made steel alloy which does not occur in nature and whose exact chemical composition is a United States government classified secret claws from fun foam.

[Insert standard entry of headbanging frustration about the holdup in the checkout queue at Toy Saurus. If you haven't written one as yet, give it a couple of weeks. You will, I say, you will.]

Picked up a proud daughter later. Her class is going swimming every afternoon for a month. Nearly three weeks in she was bouncing to say she’s made it to 25m, And I Need £1.20 For A Badge Mum Mum Please Mum.

I’m so very proud of her. Not for the 25m, but of course for that, but not just that. But for the fact that although being aware that most in her class have had swimming lessons from being tiny and whiz and whoosh and dive and (in one case) butterfly, my own 8 year old sweetpea doesn’t seem to give a jot that lessons were waylayed due to baby bro popping out early with much prolonged hoohah. She is just enormously chuffed that here and now she’s reached her 25m.

Magic. Can't get that in a box from Toy Saurus.

Can you?

cow

So, perhaps not tinsel then.

Balloons, yes. Tinsel, on reflection, no.

Dress rehearsal last night. The Ugly Sisters rapped about how much they liked Cinders. Sharon Osbourne was late. The cow did indeed have six legs and two pink rubber glove udders. Jack had his Heinz. The Giant was tiddly, with big presence and a strong voice. The goose’s egg was still drying on top of my cooker, but the pink balloon stand-in was magnificent. Dames Aloud looked splendid; their jokes properly terrible, if a bit quiet. Puss was in socks. Aladdin had her magical kettle. Snow White brought along the many non-dwarves, forgetting their buckets, which is right for next year.

Noddy Holder was edited and loud, and the tinsel got bloody everywhere. All over the library, along the corridor, across the stairs and around the hall. Tinsel carnage. As though tinsel had been pitted against tinsel, red against green, blue against silver with gold tips. To the death, shredded down to their strings.

Balloons, then. I’m not saying balloons will be problem-free. With around 35 Brownies there will be at least a couple of explosions from the wings, but a damn sight less clearing up afterwards. Say this about Brownies, when there’s clearing up to be done, they Do Their Best To Love Their God And To Be Kind and Helpful. It’s in their contract.

When I’m loaded, stinking and filthy (oh, how the euphemisms show the problems the British have with the wealthy) and in need of staff, I won’t bother with a cleaning lady [sic]; I’ll keep a pack of Brownies and feed them on chocolate fingers and blackcurrant squash. That should work. The monthly prit stick and paper shapes bill might be hefty, though.



I like a little company while I work

john peel and benjamin britten fisticuffs in a bath of baked beans

First snow last night. Mr Radio says all sorts of roads were closed. Piffle, I said, there’s no snow down below. It’s all further up, on the lumpy bits, turning Holcombe Hill into a 99, with Peel Tower for a flake. Take that, you thrusting Victorian thingummy.

Talking of Mr Peel, Robert, not Ken John Peel or much-mourned John Peel (whose funeral service last week was, incidentally, just next door to where we held Nanna and Grandad’s, in the slightly bigger, slightly posher Cathedral. Have yet to talk to mum about it - am betting on a drawn-out story about how Gladie was hampered in getting to Shoefayre because of the size of Elton’s wreath), by now Molster and Zig should have shaken hands with Robbie The
Bobby, Bury F.C’s mascot. Inevitably. Who’s moved out from behind the desk into community policing for the day to shake hands with as many kids and Asda shoppers as possible. Children In Need and all that. As we are the northernmost-tip of the borough, he was due to shake up our kids early, around assembly time.

Husband near York doing ‘Team’ stuff at some acting college that can’t spell its name properly. (All actors are illiterates, did you not know that? Oh yes, hell it was at Bretton Hall, all those years ago; we, the studious, bookish English students patiently suggesting to every future Macbeth, Heda Gabler and Tommy Steele on the Drama B.A that as the sign said ‘Push’ it might be an idea to gently apply their weight to the door.)

York not so very far really; M62 and Sally-car willing, might even get to see him this side of The Simpsons. You’d think that, working where he does, there would be some kind of contractual obligation – a chirpy bewigged Irish half-Nelson – to get up to Children In Need-type antics. Really, I think BBC staff probably do less of the Baked-Beans In Bath, Man In Mascot Suit Scaring As Many Kids As Possible In One Day sponsored stuff than we normals.

Me? I’ve donated all of £2 so far. Kids have taken a quid apiece in for Children In Need, for the pleasure of stuffing their hair full of goo and colours. The kitchen’s still a toxic no-go area. Reckon that lump of ice outside the window, dripping in the sun, hasn’t fallen from the roof at all but is the last of our nearest iceberg, puddle-zapped by the combined aerosols of Mad Hair Day in Ramsbottom. If there’s no longer an Aldeborough, we apologise to the Suffolk coast.