Yes, still here, ribs sensitive to the least nudge.
Spending hours a day typing but suffering from a puritanical aversion to the pleasures of blogging. You see, in the minutes it takes to scrawl a blog entry I might instead be sorting out some idea about something else. The tyranny of Opportunity Costs is inescapable. Warning: never ever be a freelance, not if you want to be able to switch off your obsessions at will.
So what have we been up to? Plenty. Highlights include attending the Chinese New Year parade last Sunday. We stood outside the National Portrait Gallery in - yes - burning sunshine to watch a panoply of silk clad people, some possibly Chinese, walk past banging drums and waving brightly coloured swatches of diaphanous material. Bish bash, drummity drum. All very jolly, and we even managed to find a table for SIX in a restaurant afterwards. In the interests of further cultural education we checked out the fireworks in Leicester Square. I was unsure what to expect, having never seem a firework display in bright sunshine before. Possible damp squib? Nope. Simply the loudest thing I have heard in many a long year. Louder even, I think, than The Who at Charlton in '76. Glad my stomach was full of absorbent Chinese Ho Fun or I might have shaken myself to pieces with a large resonant space inside me.
I also attended a jolly football match between Chelsea and Reading. So, so different from my formative years standing on banked cinders watching Carlisle United. Previous visits to Premiership clubs had demonstrated that the stink of urine has been banished. Now also the whiff of cigarettes. Funny, I can't stand the things but when I smell them in the open air it makes me feel nostalgic for those former sepia Brunton Park days. But one last bastion remains - the scent of meat pies. Glad the Abramovitches of this world have yet to crush all the old ways out of existence.
Meanwhile the waste paper recycling is getting out of hand again. I turn my back for five minutes and somebody sends me a pile of mail about three feet high. I had to spend a recent Saturday afternoon opening all the stupid letters I have been ignoring, tearing out the little windows from the empty envelopes and then... Well we have been shredding our waste for the last year or so, especially all the stuff with our financial details written all over it, but guess what - the shredder is knackered, recently deceased. It is now more of a toothless paper sucker, returning any inputs at original size with polite lines pressed into them. It has had to be replaced. Question, what do you do with a de-fanged shredder? How do you put it back into the Peckham ecosystem? The Salvation Army won't want it, even though it is a working model of Christian forgiveness and an uplifting mechanical sermon on the possibilities of resurrection. Is there such a thing as a shredder shredder?
The music computer has lain dormant since Xmas. I am mute. Perhaps one last beautiful song will emerge.
Two separate people have rung me in the last ten days to ask me why I haven't advertised my website on Google. The hundreds of good reasons that immediately sprang to mind seemed an embarrassment of riches, a windfall, an accidental delivery of eels in my swimming pool. I pursed my lips and decided to keep it short the first time. I kept it even shorter the next. I expect a third call within a week as they clearly aren't listening and my business is so obviously worth having. Perhaps then I will unburden myself. I hope my reply will be being recorded for training purposes.
A man came to the door and made me change our energy supplier. Cheaper, apparently, and not a moment too soon. For we are pioneering a non-destructive cat-flap. I shall explain. (If you've got this far - well done!) One of the previous occupants of this house was either a military engineer or a registered paranoid. Example: the back door has a piece of old dreadnought drilled onto it with burglar proof screws. Now, we need a cat-flap these days because of our ownership of a cat, and the fact that the door stands between the cat and her preferred toilet. But - installation of any kind of cat-flap would be a job for a skilled diver with limpet mine. Or possibly Stingray. Neither in Yellow Pages. Ad hoc solution has been to leave the door open a little with the curtain drawn across. Sort of works, from cat point of view. Sort of doesn't from a heating point of view. Roll on summer.