Just time for a review of last week. Just time, that is, before there is another week, which would run the regular SAAP risk of not being recorded either. So, to work.
It has been seven days of extensive World Cup watching and much soreness on my right side. I shall tell you for why.
Last Sunday Jake and I spent some time in a local cricket net which someone had tipped us off about. This seemed a better arrangement than the park, which is bumpy, runs the risk of the local tough eggs joining in, and has been the scene of at least one lost ball when Jake tried his patented Early Leg Spoon shot. This suicidal stroke appears to be entirely his own invention and has a 100% return to the pavilion written all over it. It also has a pretty good percentage of going into other people's gardens. A proper net was meant to help my long term project of returning to the house with all the things we set out with, particularly spherical things.
Well, the net was truer of bounce and entirely free of tough eggs, but it is a lot longer than our usual wicket in the park. That meant that 1) Jake couldn't really bowl in it except starting half way down the wicket, and that therefore 2) Daddy did all the bowling at 3) much greater physical effort than usual. After about half an hour of medium pace from me I was exhausted and sweaty, and large bucket loads of blood had decided to remain in my right hand and throb. Mutinous blood was simply too much for me and I declared Jake to be Not Out and demanded a return to home, a can of beer and a comfortable chair for the England-Trinidad game.
As we drove home I reflected sadly that cricket had become yet another of those games in which Daddy does all the work and Son gets all the fun. This is a major category of child entertainment these days and includes anything which comes as a kit or with batteries or with neutron deflector-shield packaging. The other category of child entertainment, unfortunately, is the one where Daddy does none of the work and still gets none of the fun. This category includes standing around in playgrounds while offspring spring off tubular metal fun structures. This less active category is acceptable during the warmer months, especially in the beer gardens of nice pubs with landlords who have identified their target market segment as beer-loving static parents in possession of crisp-loving mobile children. It's much less acceptable sans beer or in colder weather. I used to dread the onset of winter when visits to playgrounds would be extended exercises in marrow chilling.
Sooo, anyway, the rest of the week has been less onerous physically but quite busy on the music front. I delivered a piece of Chinese hip hop, a genre in which I probably have a global lead. Yes, all right, the Wu Tang Clan got halfway there. Chinese-y name but where oh where was there a gong or a wu (one string fiddle) or a pipa (one sound guitar)? I think the oriental element in their approach was probably restricted to the way they used their bare hands to hit people. Drive by drop kicks - that sort of thing.
A fascinating and unfamiliar smell wafted out of the kitchen on Wednesday evening. "What's that?" I asked Zoe, who had put her head round the door to see if I had finished with the computer. "It's my homework." she replied. "Oh," I said, playing for time, not quite understanding, because cookery is not on her current syllabus. The draught she brought in with her brought stranger news, an update of the delicious smell. Somehow something which had seemed to be promising deliciousness had gone wrong. Zoe disappeared at some speed and a great deal of, frankly, quite recriminatory shouting ensued.
"Mummee-uh!" shouted my daughter and co-heir. This is a non-specific admonishment and is heard fairly frequently around these parts. Curiosity whetted I left the computer, determined to investigate. It was indeed homework, but it was now burnt homework. Zoe had had to write an advertisement for a mediaeval medical cure and the masterstroke was to be a little ageing in the oven, to brown off the white Xerox paper to a satisfying parchment caramel. Sadly caramel had been passed at speed and Dr Zoe's brochure was now treacle black.
Fortunately the work was not actually a unique manuscript and had been produced not by days of work in a scriptorium but about half an hour on the computer. So another was quickly shuttled through our new HP Photosmart 2570. (I wonder if I'll get searched for that as much as I do for Millwall's F Troop, whom I mentioned only once and which has since become a firm favourite of the entire search engine community.)
Shortly afterwards, in what could easily have been Act 2 of an unadventurous sit-com, the next brochure failed to stop at Caramel Junction too and woke up in Charcoal Sidings. A third attempt was mounted and declared successful. By which time the reek had rather deprived us of our appetites.
The arrangements for the care of my father-in-law continue to worry Mel. It is difficult to know what to do with people who resist all attempts to be helped at the same time as refusing to help themselves. My f-i-l is particularly difficult and my analytical brain has a grip on at least part of the problem. There must be a special part of Hell reserved for those among us who are highly manipulative, yet also deeply pessimistic. I'm not sure the two really fit together very well.
And so it goes on. Life, that is. Yet more purchases have been made as our needs change and the crappy things we buy wear out. This time it was a printer.
So, with the sun scorching down on us we set off to PC World this Sunday lunchtime. We eventually found a parking space in amongst what seemed to have become a United Nations-backed open day. Flags of many countries indeed, all of them magically sprouting from cars, clamped between window and top of door. I used to know my flags back in the 'I Spy' days but a good few of them had me beat. The Jamaican one with a black star on it turned out to be Ghana. I didn't think of that because, to my shame, I hadn't realised they had qualified for the World Cup.
I'd sent out an expedition the previous day - during the man-free zone of the England game - to pick up something new and exciting and printery but the scouting party had come back defeated. All too complicated, claimed Mel. The stuff on the box was like a foreign language she insisted. "Yes it was, Mummy," claimed Zoe, who had read the box too. "The bit you were reading was in Slovenian."
So the Daddy had come to sort it out and as we walked across the multinational car park Mel exacted her motherly revenge by mutterering to me that Zoe had insisted on changing her clothes on being informed of today's expedition because she didn't want to be seen on CCTV in the same outfit twice. "Mummeee-uh!" wailed Zoe, who looked delightful in a floral print, which suddenly didn't match her red face.
The printer was duly bought - a Hewlett Packard Photosmart 2570 - and the only problem that remained was trying to get past the man on the till who absolutely insisted we must buy a special guarantee. Only £20. Irresistible, he thought. I thought that £20 represented a full extra 20% on top. For what? By not buying it I'm basically gambling that it won't go wrong in the two years after the manufacturer's guarantee runs out, and that it will go wrong after that when something newer and better will have appeared at round about the cost of getting the old one fixed. PC World are gambling too, of course. In their case the bet is that it won't go wrong at all in its second or third year of life. I bet the odds are in their favour.
I didn't give the till man the full benefit of my reasoning - I have some humanity, you know - but it served me as a supporting frame around my thinking, as robust and functional as the fine Victorian wrought iron structure that held up the original Crystal Palace. "No thank you," I said. Repeatedly.
Well, all right. Fine wrought iron structures be damned, he annoyed me and the post-reptilian donkey strong parts of my brain came into play and I decided I would not budge. "No thank you," I repeated as my stubborn lobes hummed and throbbed. He hadn't done himself any favours by greeting me with the line "Good printer, that," and I had taken him at his word, thinking that one part of being good was not breaking under the strain of the weight of a sheet of A4.
Anyway, we got our new printer home safely, and jolly nice it is too. Easy to install, it looks like a large pie with a silver crust instead of the more traditional Swiss roll shape. In addition it doesn't spray black ink all over the left hand side of the paper. What's more, colour images come out without lots of interesting horizontal lines in them, making them look like they've been photographed through barbed wire or a slatted bathroom window. Progress indeed.
A selection of our local developments.
1. Zoe had two teeth out yesterday, for orthodontic, long view reasons. Long view, short bite sort of reasons. The tooth fairy has had to step up a gear and is now opening the sheaves of letters I get every day offering loans.
2. Jake had bought a Sonic Screwdriver. In Woolworth's. So I expect it isn't quite as versatile as the one owned by Doctor Who. He has not been deterred by this and has tried locking me in the loo several times since purchase. On the upside I bet the Doctor's doesn't write in invisible ink which only becomes legible when you point the glowing purple end at it.
3. I have worked very hard, for a change, and don't much like it.
4. We strongly suspect that our neighbours are thieves. Our parasol (Woolworth's, £9.99, now faded to a patchy camouflage green) disappeared from its base some time between the middle of last Friday and Sunday morning when Mel noticed its disappearance, in much the same way that Smaug noticed the theft of one teensy weensy jewel in The Hobbit. A search of our extensive grounds failed to locate it. I was baffled by the thought that anyone would want to steal it, and could not see how anyone would be able to get in and out over our fences with it.
It had definitely still been our property mid-Friday, erect, proud and still not dry enough to put away. Mel eventually spotted it in our neighbour's garden on Sunday, clumsily concealed under a tarpaulin behind their garden chairs, which they were occupying at the time. This glimpse was only possible from our first floor half landing. The neighbours noticed us pointing at it and began gesturing. I came down the stairs and walked out into the garden. Oh, they said, they had found this umbrella on their lawn on Thursday, just lying there. They seemed to assume very readily at this point that it was ours. Must have blown over the fence, they suggested. Yes, I agreed, inwardly figuring that it probably hopped over in that enormous, short lived northerly hurricane we unexpectedly experienced in Peckham on Wednesday night.
What an idiotic thing to do. Stealing something from your neighbour is a very high risk business anyway, never mind pinching something with no second hand value and which you could only use if your neighbour was either a) too polite to mention it or b) too busy or rich to notice that an individual, functional item had migrated three metres across a fence. And to leave the swag in view just seems foolhardy. They throw the cricket ball back when it strays - it is on holiday over there at the moment. It's probably more useful and actually more valuable that the parasol.
The next door man person has always been very civil. I suspect the lady person, who seems a bit slow. She is big enough to have reached over the fence and lifted it out of its metal base (without which they would have to dig a hole in the ground to anchor it). So, a moment of weakness, a moment when they coveted not their neighbour's oxen but their smelly old umbrella? Or am I doing them an injustice?