as above

also to be found here:

http://distractedastrologer.wordpress.com/

funk

Pah. It's work shadowing day for Mol. She chose to go with G, not me, although this involved getting up at 4:30 and she won't be back before 8pm. She began the day by meeting an astronaut on the breakfast radio show, and is currently being taught how to read the news by the presenters of the local news telly programme.

I could have given her a book about astronauts to put back on the right shelf, and she could have read to Year 1.

Perhaps one day she will learn to choose wisely.

cheater

Fuck you, David Chaytor. Just fuck you.

You claimed for a mortgage you'd paid, you paid your daughter under an assumed name, you employ your wife for an undisclosed amount, you falsify invoices for thousands, AND YOU SEND ME SPAM.

Mr Chaytor, you, yes you, will continue to get paid to represent me until the next election, when you stand down. Here, let my boot give you a hand with that.

Mr Cheater, that wasn't your money, it was ours. And now you've made me cry. Fuck you.

Green

The Today programme says current apocalypse warning is two horsemen and a velvet-soft pony nose.

Garden is full of sun, birds, strawberries ripening to pink, and taddies ripening to frogs.

Bump nose boy - victim of a cubs-related incident - back tomorrow, me with him. I forecast the low-key anxiety of NOT BEING AT MY TINY JOB will shred in a tumble of SEN maintenance and scattered library shelves.

sixteen

Note to self.

Look, just snog him already. And ignore the one with the Burnley postmark.

Don’t drop History. You like History, history likes you. Plant more things.

Carry on with the nerds, soon they will start to be called geeks and their t-shirts will get better.

Buy the red dress, cut off the buttons. Buy the red velvet trousers, and the red velvet coat. Don’t buy the rat, buy two. And walk dogs. Keep writing with a black fine line.

Walk the curve in Central Library. Listen to your footsteps.

You don’t have to pull pints in a pub off Albert Square in the summer of 94, but it helps.

It’s not your fault. It’s just not. Keep that one safe: push it down deep down inside a warm pocket. Give it back when you see me.

grey and lightly brown

Holiday here today, with a brown and loaded sky. We had the thrill of trying to find shoes to fit over splints.

Mol has a friend round; their idea of getting lunch while we were out was scarfing five bags of crisps and most of a giant bag of doritos. We were back just in time to save the party rings.

Mol has a new look on her face these days. A blocked teen look I'm feeling less than comfortable with. I've just realised it reminds me of the blank, unresponsive eyes of an unspayed tom at the bottom of your garden. The love hasn't a clue she's wearing it, the way the tom hasn't a clue he's just a spraying bastard.

I will drink St John's Wort tea and make fish pie to politely summon a metaphoric sun.

a failsafe method...

...of producing a look of frozen horror on a nine-year-old's face:


Boy [whispers]
We did Sex Education today.

Mum
Oh good. What did you learn, then?


*


Getting ready for cubs. An unfocused play in four parts:

hill.

Last night I dreamt I settled back to watch The Englishman Went Up a Hill and Came Down a Mountain.

Only it involved a large, brown yet airy, polish-scented library with two large escalators rising through the open-planned centre of its several floors. I've been to this library before in dreams (history is second floor left, by the big windows); it's usually attached to a college or university in which I'm struggling to study, Beyton Middle School, or both. Last night it was neither. It was where Hugh Grant worked, because Hugh Grant was still in the film.

Also involved were fleets of silver, streamlined, eagle-headed aircraft which screeched out earth-scarifying belchy death stuff.

The plan was for everyone to be wiped out whilst H.G was up the hill for a stroll. He'd come down the hill to find total obliteration, so much so that layers of ground-level earth had been rent from their fixings. Thus making the hill a little bigger. Thus making it a mountain.

Then it started to get tricky.

time and relative dimensions in prefabs

I stood in front of my first Year 7 class in 1993. I wasn't with them all the time, just long enough for a thorough dowsing in Danny, The Champion of the World, and to see that they were very, very small.

I taught them in a prefab somewhere out the back to the left of the main school; away and askew, even from the other prefabs needfully regimented to withstand Year 9.

They'd tumble in, this Year 7, pinballed through their new school, Big School, bruised, confused at how just eleven years on Manchester, England, Earth was supposed to have prepared them for the corridors, corners, tall voices, sharp elbows and several hundred shiny, new P.E bags and choices of High school.

Give them a few minutes to rattle down and relax and they allow themselves to be small enough to absorb every world in a story read to them. Universes of worlds, time beyond measure. Whatever I could creatively slip into the gaps in a tight syllabus. Surprising how big those gaps are from the inside.

They were my soft, sparky babies. Eleven years old in 1993. Now they will be doctors and vets, plumbers and checkout operators, marketing managers and military subversives. Across this country with its various askew prefabs, 1993's soft, shiny Year 7s have grown to be builders and parents, dissolutes, disparates, and decorators. Teachers, technicians, tutors, and a future timelord. Good luck to him. Fair travelling.

I am getting on a bit.

like 2.0

Mol brought her video of Angus down for me to share.

What I like is the embarrassing parents in this, she explained. It's so, like, real.

Intermission:

battle of the bulge

Cooked and demolished a marvellous New Year roast beef dinner, with every trimming. That's the last of the sprouts and the crackers.

Fed full and happy, I followed the roast with a traditional, festive sandwich. There's always room for one of these, and they're best when you're full. You'll probably know the recipe, but a reminder never hurts.

For the bread use something tasty and substantial: Gone With The Wind works well, or any James Bond. Disney at a pinch, if your taste runs to that, or if there's nothing else. Something substantial with Eagles, Kwai, Dambusters or Navarone are recommended. Today I used the classic sandwich loaf, The Great Escape.

The filling is a generous scoop of rich, sweet, sleep fluff. Spread it right to the edge of the bread, good and deep. Don't miss a corner.

Take it to the sofa, keeping your cracker hat just about on, and enjoy.

big ben

Have you ever tried to stand up straight in the middle of a see-saw?

There's not a day, or an hour of an day, a minute of an hour, a second of a minute, a … little bit of second when there's no choice to make. The crafted leap second between today and tomorrow is the space into which a flipped coin falls.

Head's up, or tail between our legs?

Nano, that's the word.

adapt or die

You know, I said to the group back in January, I'm looking forward to the last gasps of this transit being over. I would like my mind back.

That's if it comes back, replied the lovely Bernadette, merrily portentious (who'da thought those two words would fit together just so - not me, til I heard her).

It was the last time I'd think of a major transit like tablecloth or duvet cover – something thrown on for a period and then removed. It's more like Miss Haversham's bridal gown. On for eternity with an elegant, uncomfortable permanence of unreachable hooks and eyes.

I have to adapt with it. This year has been a numbed sort-of stunned greying dullness of gown. I've had a Haversham year, regretting, replaying the loss of my wits. With a dry, rhythmic rustle I haunt the corridors of old thoughts, scrawling a senseless morse of morphemes into the dirty windowpanes.

Adapt. Grab the Glo White™, the Stardrops™ while I'm at it. Hot water in a bucket, lace cuffs rolled up high. Scissors would make short work of these webby skirts, there's always thermals for my draughty knees. Red ones.

A lot of scrubbing and some sensible underwear. Let's try for a single, polished thought. Next year.

diagnosis

Thumbs up for the gammon. Not too sweet, surprising that, considering the gross annual dentist's income of cola it was cooked in. Not overwhelmingly wondrously good, but certainly edible. The Fortnum's Christmas chutney from dahling borrowed Uncle Bob helped.

Thumbs sideways and wavering for our gerbils. I hope and I hope that I'll be able to don that toga and give the gerbils a resolute thumbs up to live. We've had them since Saturday and took one to the vet today. The pet shop paid the bill, however they gave us the choice of vet visit or gerbil return. The gerbils have their tunnel here, remember. I don't know what would happen to mister sneezy red bogies (mebbe a cold, mebbe an allergy) once absorbed back into the pet shop monolith, so here he stays. He's a gentle soul. They are good gerbils, the vet concurred.

G took them for their vet visit, spooling the possible diagnoses tickertape into my distracted ears. I could hear the vet's faded scottish burr form the words G relayed to me, with his very syntax. I could see his dark to greying hair and his glasses, his confidence and reassurance, his prescription pad.

It wasn't until I went to smear Zig's eczemaed arms with his latest cream that I realised my head-vet wasn't our ginger, white cat-disliking vet at all, but our doctor. Well, their practices are on the same road, thought there is a little less poo in front of the docs. What's a species between patients?

nigella intervention

It's my annual seasonal Try a New Nigella today. They are a historical hoot. The woman herself is magnificently, fascinatingly, grotesquely beyond self-parody these days. Her recipes? Weeell, some work, some don't; some work sometimes, some work other times.

I have a lump of gammon needs cooking. Thought I'd have a go at her surely too simple ham in cola recipe from How To Eat's White-Trash Lunch For 6 (I kid you not). We have a bottle of tooth-furring, full-on full sugar cola for the purpose. That, with an onion, was to be that for cooking liquor, until, on Christmas Eve, G dropped a pricey bottle of cider destined for his uncle. (How many commas?) The lid knocked and the cider had a little fizzle to itself. Hmm, couldn't really give that, and since I haven't raised a cider to my lips since The Unfortunate Cider Incident Of 1990, a use for it had to be found. Gammon in cider, then.

After pouring away the gammon's soaking water today and adding the cider instead, the liquid level was far too low. Water and aromatics would top it up. As would cola, wouldn't it. In all my time as an excellent bar person I never served cider and coke, but I never had a gammon waving a tenner at me. So, I topped up the cider with a good litre and a half of evil cola, popped in an onion and some peppercorns, and simmered it gently for a couple of hours.

The kitchen air became a fairground of hot sugar, hotdog, and onion, the cider initially adding an authentic tang of vomit which eventually sweet-surrendered to the evil cola.

Then out came the gammon, off came the fat. I lattice-scored the remaining white blobble, studded it with cloves, rubbed in some hot mustard and dark brown sugar (not Nigella), and finished it off in the oven.

It's late, even for supper. We were going to pick at it with some crackers and cheese but this seems somehow disrespectful while it's hot; I fast-tracked potato peeling duty and dug peas from the freezer.

And that, dear reader, is where I am at. The spuds are boiling, peas are waiting, and the rub is caramelising into the gammon fat. I'll tell you tomorrow whether queen Nigella and a cider intervention is thumbs up or down. Now, where's my wine?

home

We all have a place we feel at home. I have three: bed, Suffolk, and my deep, dark corner of our elderly sofa. I rarely go back to the middle one, as nothing screams Home quite like the spikey, dysfunctional tumble of people I left there nineteen years ago. I manage to visit the other two homes daily.

Although there have been times when my bed has been my sofa and times when my sofa has been my bed, I've always had at least one touchstone. Somewhere that recalls a primal, bone memory of cave or hole where I, or the thousand thousand bits of others that make up me, rested and fed, warm and relaxed after the hunt and the harvest.

Imagine I never had. Imagine I had never curled under a heavy duvet, rootling a down pillow into a head-sized brain nest. Imagine I'd never tucked my feet under my bum just about exactly in my corner of the sofa where my feet are tucked up under my bum right now.

And then imagine that all of a suddenly I was given both.

Today we went on a fair to moderate quest, at the end of which lay a hard choice for our Mol. There were four alert, interested, lively and engaging young men, only two of which she could bring home. Coins were tossed, conversations held in corners, walks taken to clear minds, more coins. Eyes were checked for brightness, gonads checked for gender.

She thought, we discussed, she thought some more. Finally she made her choice and carried her two young men home. During the journey noses and whiskers appeared at small holes. In a silent, friendly, confidential gerbilspeak, a silver young gentleman with a white patch on his head introduced himself to her as Harvey, his reddy brown companion with the biggest, blackest eyes you ever did see, as Ron.

They came from the petshop, they knew, and a breeder beforehand. A series of cages with a couple of centimetres of sawdust to kick around in. What they didn't realise until the second we gently introduced them into their new gerbilarium, with its deep, warm substrate and subterranean tunnel, was that they or the thousand, thousand gerbils that make up them, come from the desert. And that they burrow.

Be patient, Mol; be patient, camera. You'll see them some more tomorrow. They have a tunnel, and it's home.

presciencearium

We gave the girl her present. It was empty. The girl cried some happy tears.

It's not much of a riddle, the why of the happy tears for an empty present. It doesn't take the back-scratching of an Odin, a Mercurial backflip, or the slaying of a sphinx to work it out.

It's not what it is but what it will become. This is our Mol's empty present. Tomorrow the quest to fill it begins. Tallyho.

V for Ve

ry Happy Christmas.

positions

By the time I finish this Eve will be out of light, our Close a baby Blackpool blitz of bulbs.

O Come All Ye Faithful is on its final, huge, Carols from Kings verse. Cha cha cha.

An hour and half ago a solo boy with a solo verse ripped my doing head apart for just a few seconds, leaving my eyes all stingy and my cheeks wet. He gets me every year, the git.

I wupped the hand mixer on full when some other poor public school puppet chanted some stuff about snakes, sin and suffering. Extra rum for the iced rum sauce.

Oven is warming, the star cutter is as sharp as the angel; veggies are piled to peel, pare, prepare.

Egg whites chilling, pomegranates ready to spill.

There's a bottle or four to open, or so a couple of oranges and a scatter of cloves have told me.

Smoked salmon, gammon, turkey crown, all know their lines though their parts might be new.

The bacon remembers to wrap a sausage scarf, the choccies to shrug off their coats.

Satsumas and stockings make their rendezvous. They would giggle if they could.

recycling

We caught one in seconds.