Mel has just brought home a calendar covered in handy household cleaning hints. It has one piece of marvellous advice for:
"If your dog has weed in the car".
We discussed this for a while and came up with a few reactions of our own:
- remind him he's only allowed to smoke it in his kennel
- make sure he doesn't pass it to you, unless you like dog slobber
- he probably ate your stash. If not reduce his allowance.
- you can take the dog out of Peckham...
So, what would you do?
Off to Derby today for a short stay with extended elements of my spousal family. It's raining and the Kaiserchiefs are thrashing away next door in the kitchen. The smell of chocolate cereal drifts listlessly past my nose, hovering as it does only inches above the blog grindstone.
In Hastings over the weekend we played Crazy Golf and Mini Golf. Zoe won. She's a very good straight putter over about two to three feet. This is a useful skill when it comes to winning free tickets to go round again from the machine lurking beyond the eighteenth hole. A good firm putt gets you over the obstacles and into free ticket heaven whereupon a bell rings. Virtuous circle.
No golf in Derbyshire. It'll all be walking up hills.
So. Since 1997 the Tories have tried youthful vigour, principled mediocrity and devious experience. Will they try electability this time?
Off to the south coast for the weekend. We've go a ticket to Rye, and we don't care.
Marshes, mud and the odd pub lunch, all next to Tom Watkins' huge white house and Paul McCartney's windmill. Perhaps another go at the tandems and definitely another round of crazy golf. It's too late for me but I still nurse the hope that Jake may keep us into old age with a career as a pro.
I meant to write about our summer trips, which were fascinating, but perhaps I'll get round to it soon. Meanwhile I'll leave the light on so that all you folks looking for the meaning of "Pass the Dutchie" can find your way round.
Life is patisserie
And death has pyjamas.
I used to take in songs, for money, in much the same way that women used to take in laundry many years ago. The original idea was to raise petty cash for the small record label I was trying to run at the time but I drifted into raising petty cash for children's shoes. The whole experience was not so much an eye-opener as a full blown skull-splitter, introducing me to a whole nether world of wishful wannabees, the sort of person who thinks they can write songs but who can’t do most of the basic things usually deemed necessary to record, perform or complete songs.
So, via my advertisement, a cavalcade of desperate, oddball stardom-seekers passed through my life. There were a few with more about them but the general standard was absolutely dire.
One very deluded individual became a regular. He wrote songs that went on for some time, line after line with the same tune, a tune that always resembled the Eurythmics' 'Sweet Dreams' in fairly close detail. He was keen and personally pleasant. He paid up without quibble. He thought I was a genius. Not true. All I did, after the first time, was to listen closely to what he was mumbling and record him very early on in the proceedings, with all the irregularities and eccentricities of rhyme scheme, meter and structure, without worrying about editing his work into a more conventional shape.
I did try the first time but my efforts only accomplished two things, both rather unhelpful. Firstly, it didn’t improve the material in any detectable way, while robbing it of such character as it had. Better, I thought, to let it be his work than to point out how little it resembled other earth-based song forms. Secondly it confused The Artiste. He was used to singing without accompaniment and the pauses sounded strange to him, so strange that he couldn't perform even up to his usual standard. That's a specialist area, the zone below abysmal, but now I know that it exists, and what it sounds like. Anyway, he came back a few times and went home happy on each occasion.
One day he was singing away in my work room and the children were eating next door, listening in stunned awe. I left my client to take shelter for a while and joined the audience in the kitchen in search of refreshment. Medicinal brandy was indicated but I made do with a cup of tea. The refrain of that day's song went thus:
Life is a mystery
And death holds no answers
Jake, then about six, has always had a flair for candour and he took up the ‘tune’ but with new words:
"He can't si-ing
And he can't si-ing", he trilled.
"Sssshhh!!!!" yelled everybody desperately.
So bath time that night was merry indeed, and over the years that song has gradually transmuted itself from base metal into a family heirloom. This is where you came in.
Life is patisserie
And death has pyjamas.
6:30 a.m. I was deeply asleep.
"Aaaagh!"
I heard a voice screaming. It was mine.
"It's your leg," said my brain, rationally. "Yes," I replied, irritated. "My leg is indeed mine and has been for some time. I also own a bed, and right now I intend to use it a bit more." Sarcasm is usually the first faculty to show up of a morning.
"Aaaaaagh!"
Nearer and more urgent.
Somebody or something was tearing off the back of my leg. Either alligators or cramp. Lying as I was in a bed in Peckham I was able to narrow things down a bit. Shooting a hand under the duvet and, reassured by the lack of blood, I moved on to the next decision. What to do? Get help? Or stand up?
"Help!" I shouted, decisively taking the easier option.
Mel appeared, lovely as anyone can when newly out of the shower. Down among the seaweed something stirred.
"What? What is it?" she asked. "Is it your back?"
"No," I replied as calmly as I could. "It’s my leg. It hurts. It's cramp. Push back the toes!"
She did, dainty as a pastry chef.
"No!" I cried. "Push!!"
She stepped up her efforts, from pastry chef to poodle parlour shampooist.
"Bend the toes back!" I screamed.
"Which ones?" she asked.
"Any of them. All of them. There isn't a ballot in progress. Just push."
Mothers can push. Mothers can push for England. But someone else's toes are not the same as one's own pelvic floor. No feedback. So, not wishing to hurt me she pushed two toes back in a movement indistinguishable from a caress.
"Oh, never mind," I said and rolled off the bed, wildly searching for a hard surface within a calf's distance. I eyed up the chest of drawers but the geometry seemed wrong somehow.
My pain-addled brain recognised the floor as the better choice. I would be unlikely to push that out of the window, I thought.
"Aaah," I sighed, body tilted forwards as I pushed forcefully down. My leg gradually regained its normal sensation of straightness as the part of my brain that deals with body image calmly returned to its desk after a psychotic episode and a brief obsession with bananas.
I sat silent and still for a while, appreciating that a spot of dullness is not always unwelcome, at least not when excitement is so painful. My leg looked all right but I was nervous. It was like standing in front of a window when you suspect that rats have eaten all the putty out of the frame. Instinct told me not to interfere. Straightness restored: functionality pending.
After some cautious prodding I put some weight on it, checked that the muscles worked both ways and limped downstairs, exploring the outer limits of gingerliness. Not the start I was after. How to avoid in future?
Yesterday morning we trooped off to the park to play cricket; me, Jake and our opposite neighbours, father and eight year old son. A good contest followed. I was looking poised at the crease when the eight year old bowled me with a straight skiddy one. He yelped in triumph and ran off to fetch his little bat. I took it sportingly and comforted myself by dealing him a painful blow in the ribs with my third ball, a Harmison-style lifter off a good length. If I could bowl like that on a flat, rolled pitch then an England career is still not out of the question. If.
Yeterday afternoon we attacked the front garden. More specifically I undertook to finish a job I started several months ago, namely the removal of two shrubs. I had reduced one of them, an elder, to ground level in July before admitting defeat, leaving it grovelling in half a hole. It was the work of moments, albeit scratchy, painful moments, to reduce the second opponent to a similar servile condition.
A short break followed, for breath and high level planning, but soon I was back to the first stump wielding axe, fork and spade. I tried a variety of siege strategies, having rather lost the element of surprise by then, while it gradually became apparent that Stump One had put the respite since July to good use and had managed to connect itself to the centre of the earth.
I came in from the sides like a well drilled eighteenth century army attacking some fortified town in the Low Countries. I tried mining like a good thirteenth century siege master faced with the square keep of Rochester Castle. I tried swearing like a trooper. After another short break I tried opening a second trench like Time Team’s Carenza. All to no avail.
The sweat was dripping off the end of my nose and my hands were becoming bruised. Mr Nice Guy retired; I reached for the axe. No doughty dwarf warrior had swung so mightily with feet full planted and sinews stretched, deed doer, root chopper. No lay or tale of ancient minstrel had seen the very like of it as the blows rained down, the hardest rain to fall in these parts for some time. No Elven smith of the Eldar had wrought so mighty a work as the hawks gathered and the ringing of fell steel rose skyward, especially when I hit the railings by mistake.
In the end the stumpy citadels fell, as fall they had to, and I was left to contemplate the wreck of my beautiful hands, scratched, bleeding, throbbing; hands so pink that, come the revolution, one look at them would have me decorating a local lamp post as quick as anyone could say ‘proletariat’. As an eighteen year old I did six months as a gardener’s labourer, so it took me back some way to wrestle with root systems that tough. My back didn’t appreciate the excursion. I seem to remember we used to get them out with grenades. Or was that a dream?