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.