Most of my time has been robbed by work commitments.
All of my sense of humour has been robbed by Comet's total inability to move beyond telling us that the parts they bring don't fit.
In hope of better times.
Hello everyone. (Voice echoes alarmingly.)
I've decided to declare this post a Guest Week because:
a) the surroundings are unfamiliar
b) everyone else is doing it
c) I need some sort of ploy to convince you all that this will be worth reading.
So in brief here are the main points.
Queued behind a young woman in Safeway on Sat whose trousers, I mused, stretched up towards her cropped top somewhat as the earth stretches up towards the sky, condemned never to reach it. Her clothing was surely not meant to put me in mind of the Creation myths of antiquity but nevertheless I spent an absorbing ten minutes treated to a view of her lower lumbars crossed by the T shape of her thong, probably saved from Burberry only by its exquisite thinness.
I was also privileged to read the word she had had tattooed there, short and utterly to the point. 'Lee' it read. This led me down several idle byways of thought. The first was to remark to myself what an odd place it was to write anything. It was probably the flattest part of her body but this seemed a poor reason. Perhaps like the founders of Sodom and Gomorrah she had been unduly influenced by the advantages of flatness, only to regret it later. Secondly I wondered if this was, in fact, a helpful instruction and whether she had 'Windward' tattooed similarly under her navel.
Thirdly, I wondered how she would cope with the possibility of separation, however unforeseen, from the object of her inky affections. Who could sensibly follow Lee onto such a public platform? I thought of Bleep from Bleep and Booster and Sleepy from the Seven Dwarves before it was my time and I stepped forward to concentrate on prising open the required number of supermarket bags. Your thoughts?
Unfortunately the washing machine still sits in silent mockery like an abandoned Babel, a monument to the vanity of language. And the hopeless incompetence of Comet. Perhaps they are called Comet because they are seen infrequently and are entirely beyond our control. The last engineer turned up on the appointed day and as usual had brought the wrong part. He had also unaccountably left his red nose and baggy trousers behind too. He did his best to promise any old thing to get out of the house without being physically assaulted, which they all seem to be much better at than actually fixing anything. He did his best to be affable but I could not find it in my heart to aff him the least little bit.
Too busy, really. This blog was never meant to be about white goods or work, so I’ll leave it there for now.
Blogging has been nearly all fun for me: to write, to read, to be read, to comment, to be commented unto. Recently for the first time some sadness has come into it for me because I have been unable to keep regular hours here and try as I might I do feel an obligation, an urge to put up some material occasionally - material worth reading by my lights, that is.
I would love to have volunteered to guest at Uborka a while back. Best not if one can't even write on one's own site.
Now I read the wonderful stream of top quality posts on Naked Blog and for the first time since the playground I look across a space at others having fun and I wish to join but know I cannot. A small space, but wide enough. Great stuff guys, and I know it will keep coming. And I'll be reading. Which is my only likely contribution to the blogworld for the near future.
I started this blog in a quiet professional moment, at a time when the wolf had not only invited himself in but was warming his toes by my fire, having walked insouciantly over all the bills on the mat. Right now the situation is different and I have as much to do as i can and probably more, with offers of more to come. Not optimum blogging conditions as I understand it from the writers of the blogs I've known best and liked most.
So, save yourself the time and the RSI. Drop in once a week. I'll try.
And no, they didn't fix the bloody washing machine.
What? Could this be a spare moment? It's been so long I'm not sure what they look like up close. Yup, reckon it is, so here goes.
Triumphs: Jake was superb as Much the Miller's Son in the school production of Robin Hood. He was quite captivating and glowed throughout with what only the churlish could fail to acknowledge as talent. My sole reservation was that his natural enjoyment at holding the attention of a hundred or so adults didn't help him with the fear he should have been portraying at the imminent prospect of having his ears cut off by the wicked Sherriff of Nottingham. Grinning from ear to threatened ear tended to undermine a moment of such acute tension.
I hinted at this loss of intensity on the way home. He replied curtly that actually the whole thing was make believe and that he had never really thought his ears were about to be removed, and that neither the trees at the back nor the bows and arrows were real either. Fortunately a confrontation with his sister over the last of the Chocolate Buttons intervened in the back seat and further unpleasantness was avoided. Involving the front seat, anyway.
Failures 1: the turf in the garden. We were given some spare pieces on the weekend; I laid it but it didn't take. It started out resembling a weird vegetarian noodle dish but then curled up like amateur Melba toast and ended its short life imitating dismal coconut matting of a sadness I hadn't seen since Primary School gym lessons. So the garden retains its Reverse Brazilian look, well grassed at the edges and bare straight down the middle.
Failures 2: the continuing inability of Comet to fix our washing machine.
We bought it from them because of an Interest Free Credit Period. Bad mistake, comparable with that of the citizens of Troy who thought they were getting that horse as a bargain too. The freedom from credit we enjoyed has since been avenged by a regular freedom from the ability to wash anything. So we have been arguing with them for some time now, principally about the exact nature of the 'repairable - irreparable' spectrum.
Our Guarantee terms allow for replacement of the machine if it is 'irreparable', and they are still insisting that our machine is 'repairable'. I point out that it hasn't in fact been repaired in any way and that it is still operating as a large square white kettle which might be of use to some but not to us. We wish to wash clothes and have them come out roughly the same size and colour; we have no plans to make tea for the whole street.
Last week I insisted that 'repairable' implied that someone is actually able and willing to repair it and that therefore the word should not be used lightly. I compared their laxity to that vainglorious boast of the playground/terrace/art gallery “I could do better than that!” which is so intensely irritating because the speaker knows full well that they will never be called upon to prove their assertion. I told them this was effectively what they had been doing, sending men round here just to stand and look at the machine and say “Huh! I could fix that... if I wanted to”. I left them in no doubt that 'irreparable' should properly apply because our washer hasn't worked for a month now despite three visits from them, none of which has resulted in their staff doing any discernible repairing, except perhaps to the pub for lunch.
In sum, I think 'repairable' does not properly apply if you are either not trying or can't actually achieve any repairedness. Surely limits must apply to this word, as they do to other important words with a time frame contained within them, like 'young' or 'new' or 'interesting', and those limits I insist have been reached.
“If it is 'repairable' then bloody well prove it by REPAIRING it,” I said with both reason and restraint in full force. “By your fruits shall I know ye,” I said. When that seemed to bounce off my tele-adversary I moved on and jibed that Comet was just W*nk with a T on the end. No Chocolate Buttons came to my rescue at this point and we parted on bad terms. Sorry Kelvin, it wasn't personal; it was just business.
Visit Four is penned in for this morning.