To blog or not to blog

It has been an challenging week or so since I last managed to blog, physically and emotionally, with some high points and a few severe dips too (literally as it happens). So sorry it has taken me a while to get over my bloggers constipation, but I think I have worked one out today though! It is fair to say that the last ten days I have been “up and down like Zebedee on E” and at times I’ve not known here from there, left from right or whether I was just looping back on myself. It all started with a trip to the hospital for my 6-monthly CT scan. The procedure is fine, but I detest the copious amounts of Satan Sick you have to drink for 24-hours beforehand. Waking up at 7 in the morning to face 1/3 liter of “Devil’s Discharge” is not the way to start the day and Beelzebub’s Bile in no shape suffices as an accompaniment to breakfast, dinner or tea! I hate these scans; not for the process which is painless except for the needle in your arm, and I’m not afraid of little pricks any more, but because they hold up a metaphoric mirror to the last year and the realist in me can’t help but consider how I would react if the cancer was shown to be returning.

Scan scanned, I scrammed, and that evening turned my attention to the skies, hoping to catch a glimpse of the promised meteor shower. I guess the middle of a major city, with cloud cover and light pollution aplenty makes for less than ideal conditions to see shooting stars and I was rewarded with a stiff neck and little else. And when I say cloud cover I mean thick cloud, none of your wispy stuff that might have broken to reveal a quick peek at the Pleiades. Let’s just say that pilots must have been having a bitch of a time navigating between all those silver linings!  But the next night was much clearer and I did catch one superb trail traversing Cassiopeia and confirmed by a few local people too. I wish I still had my telescope, which I foolishly give away, and through which I did manage to see the rings of Saturn in quite spectacular display. But I saw my shooting star and had a wish, which was all I really wanted to do.  I’ll come back to stars later… Oh, and the wish did come true!

My sister Jo, brother-in-law Gavin and two nieces, Sam and Shannon came to stay with us for a long weekend and I hope they had a good time although to be perfectly honest I was way out of my depth and for all I can tell they may have had a vile vacation. You see, if there is one subset of the population that gay men really never encounter, have no experience of dealing with and are scared to death of having to interact with, it is that of pubescent she-children. To us they are completely alien, and not even in a ‘Nannoo Nannoo Shazbat’ Mork and Mindy integrated-with-humankind sort of way. They speak a different language, they require different routines, and they behave in unpredictable ways. They are neither adults nor kids. Their emotions are about as stable as nitro-glycerine on a damp day in December, and just as explosive. They go from adorable to abhorrent and back again at warp factor eight and with far less provocation than Gizmo in Gremlins! They have to be entertained for 26 hours a day and a good book does not count, nor a DVD or any TV programme aimed at anyone aged over about 5 years old. There were more hormones flying around than in an over-staffed brothel which is a shock when you consider that our house is usually an oestrogen-free zone. Is it contagious? Can you catch female hormones? Are there detectors to tell you when you have had too much exposure (and I’m not used to exposing myself to women, honest!)  I’m scared. And as a gay man, am I more susceptible? Is there a vaccination? You know how they say that three women living together will eventually synchronise their periods, well, can over-exposure to oestrogen, make-up, hairbrushes, leggings and highlights start to rub off on you? Can one start to develop an unhealthy fascination for handbags? Because I saw this very nice Louis Vuitton clutch purse…

On the Sunday we all went to Alton Towers. Last year, when I had just come out of hospital, I promised the girls that we would take them to Alton Towers as soon as I was well enough to do so. It was their choice of destination and one I regarded as something of a challenge especially since six months ago I was still using a wheelchair but I have to say that we managed remarkably well. The park is very well organised for people with disabilities and we were allowed to queue-jump the rides which was fantastic and actually made the day a possibility. I don’t like being disabled. I don’t like the fact that I am in constant pain. I don’t like not being able to walk far but I do like joining the rides at the exit and not having to queue! There have been few advantages to what I have suffered this last year, but by jiminy that was one!  I would never have managed to stand in queues for an hour per ride and as I was allowed to take two ‘carers’ with me each time it meant we all pretty much got on the rides we wanted. (Or in my sister’s case, got on the ride she really didn’t want to go on – she ‘endured’ Air, suspended, shaking, and eyes firmly shut.) We even managed a couple of rides as a family, with Jo getting soaked on the river rapids and me managing to stay bone dry with barely a drip on me!

I’m still trying to understand why a Theme Park was the chosen destination since Gavin doesn’t like rollercoasters, Jo can only cope with the ones that have an excitement level akin to a cup of horlicks and a quick nap before bedtime, Sam and Shannon bottled it for any ride with a target audience above about 6 years old I am not going on Oblivion for all the tea in Tetleys! I’m fine with Nemesis, Air and the somewhat obliquely entitled “RITA, Queen of Speed”, which blasts you forward at speeds that would have cracked Scotty’s Dilithium crystals, then corkscrews you round with the ferocity of an epileptic washing machine stuck on the fast spin cycle and tumbling in free-fall about all three axis. Although you do feel the acceleration and the g-force gets you Right In The Abdomen! The last time we rode RITA, David and I had our photos taken, showing the rictus expression as your skin is pushed back on your face, your eyes sink back into their sockets and your mouth and nostrils gape wide, blown open by the force of the wind. Didn’t bother getting a photo this year; I look like that all the time now anyway!

We did all enjoy the new aquarium where you can have the dead skin plucked from your fingers by cleaner shrimps, something that David avoided as he has an extreme terror of shrimps, living or dead and has to leave restaurants if anyone in his field of vision is de-shelling prawns. It’s the eyes. He likes scampi; or rather he did until I told him they were prawns too – Dublin Bay Prawns to be exact.I can be a real bastard sometimes! But they are only tiny things, and no reason for abject terror. I guess that is what comes of being too young to have been raised on a ration of Finger Bobs. Speaking of children’s TV programmes, I don’t think enough is done to recognise Andy Pandy for being the quintessential gay icon that he was. Even in Black and White he made Quentin Crisp look butch! Hartley Hare in Pipkins was a screamer. Mr Benn’s shopkeeper was a peeping tom, only interested in watching his male cliental undress and Hamble from Play School was such a dyke she was known, when off-camera, to have a power-tool fetish and to try to do the dirty with Jemima behind the arched window. We’re talking a serious Seventies Scissor Sisters situation here! I shall say no more about Bungle, Zippy and George in Rainbow, or Tony Hart, bless him, with his pink cravat and obscure relationship with a lump of plasticine called morph (who grew up to be Wallis and Gromit).  Is it really any wonder I turned out to be gay?

Alton Towers was fun though, despite its ups and downs (see what I did there?) and we made it home safely in time for a night of in-house entertainment. Normally I am very careful with what I put in writing, but in this case I make an exception to the point that the next detail I shall reveal ONLY in writing, as saying it out loud could lead to persecution, prosecution and penalisation! That night I let my nieces have a good few hours playing with my Wii. Their parents had a go too, and so did David. I think that’s the most people I have had on my Wii in one evening for quite some time. I’m surprised I stayed up so long. My Wii isn’t used to such attention and to be honest it took quite a battering and nobody was being gentle, all competing against each other to see who could last longest, get their points up, come first, shoot the furthest, get it in the hoop or hit the centre of the ring.

David deserted for the next two days, making some feeble excuse about “having to go to work” so the male/female ratio in the house dropped further and I was in great trepidation that someone would suggest a make-over. When you have a shaved head, hair straighteners are a thing of mystery, as are brushes, bobbles, scrunchies and for that matter all the bathroom parafanalia associated with hair styling. My pubes don’t need conditioner, curlers or a towel wrapping round for an hour until they dry. You’ll notice it is Head and Shoulders, not Head and Crab Ladder – and I’ve never heard of a case of testicular dandruff in all of my 42 years! So I decided that public places would be safer than staying home, besides which, there is a limit to the entertainment value I can offer, even with my Wii fully exposed and available for gratuitous use. I try to be a cool Uncle. Maybe that’s the thing though. Maybe the really cool Uncles are the ones who don’t need to try.

We went to the Imperial War Museum which is only a few miles away and was appropriate in that Sam is studying the Holocaust next year at school although the gift shop seemed to hold attention far more than any of the exhibits. Did you know you can get a pencil eraser disguised as a miniature tank? If ever we are invaded by alien mini-rubber people, we’ll be one step ahead there! Or, if the Germans try to invade us againwe can hold the rubbers really close to their faces and tell them the tanks are actually far, far away and really very big. You can also get ‘authentic wartime seeds’ – again a disappointment as it transpires they are not there to allow you to grow your own Heavy Artillery or air raid shelters, but are just common or garden carrot seeds in a brown paper envelope and at three times the price I can get the same seeds at B&Q – war time must have been tough but peace time is expensive! Sadly no peas though which is a shame as, considering the context, it would have been good if they’d opted to give peas a chance!

On the final day of the familial visit we went to MOSI, the Museum of Science and Industry because they have an excellent hands-on section there where you get to play with experiments, solve puzzles and generally learn without knowing you are doing so. And for free too. Well, by ‘free’ I mean subsidised by the exorbitant prices charged in the canteen and the gift shop’ (which again provided a good few hours of purchasing potential amid a torrent of total tat). I never knew I needed a wooden snap-together ant, a glass made out of recycled glasses (presumably the same ones as on sale, but returned broken because they looked about as ergonomic to drink out of as a buffalo) or some ‘MOSI environmentally sustainable food crops’ – yes, more carrots but this time in a green paper envelope.

It WAS lovely having the family here, despite the bitter, paranoid and desperate ranting of a ‘well past his sell-by date’ somewhat uncool Uncle. The girls are really very good and I love them to bits; they are a credit to their parents and the world would be a better place with a few more kids like them, intead of some of the guttersnipes we seem to be producing as a nation. We did get to celebrate Jo’s birthday and also Shannon’s (she celebrated on Sunday at Alton Towers and on Monday – her actual birthday – with a cake and candles). There’s also a party to be had for her school friends. I’m somewhat niggled that anyone should get THREE birthday’s a year! I mean, birthday-polygamy is supposed to be reserved for the royals and David and I are the Queens in this house!!

Wednesday, whilst seeing a significantly quieter and emptier house was no less fraught as I had to go to the Hospital for the results of my CT scan, the headlines for which are that the lymphoma is officially in remission, thank goodness. But, and in this case the but is a big butt, the scan did show a ‘thickening of the bowel wall’ and as a result they want to stick a camera up. That’s what they say anyway. I secretly think that this has more to do with the gastroscopy a few months ago where they stuck a camera down. I’m thinking maybe they left something in there – lens cap probably (I know I’m always losing ours) – and it has now shown up on the recent CT scan. So, camera up to locate where it is wedged and then, as is customary in these situations, I assume a medical team will be miniaturised, loaded into a microscopic submarine and injected up my jacksie. No doubt there will be an evil scientist hell bent on destroying the mission and added tension shoe-horned into the plot by the needless introduction of a deadline (cue ticking countdown clock – no, not Countdown, with (or without) Carol Voldermort, just a timer counting down to 00:00.01) at which point the sub and mini-me-medical-men will all expand to full size unless they can make it to my tear duct in time.  Actually, I’m wondering if they have the technology to stream the live feed to Facebook or link it via Twitter? We’d need a title – I’m thinking “Harry Potter and the Deathly Bowels” or “Harry Potter and the Chamber Pot of Secrets”. Well, even a camera up my arse will show less shit than the current Harry Potter film. Seriously, don’t waste your money going to the cinema to see it, instead, wait until it comes out on DVD and then don’t buy it!

I said I would return to the subject of stars. Yesterday was David’s birthday but also way back in history in 2AD (according to the astrologers who can calculate such things), on 20^th September, the planets Venus and Jupiter were in conjunction and lined up to form an incredibly bright star which we know as the Star of Bethlehem and, albeit the calendar is a few years out, supposedly guided the three wise monkeys to Bridlington, or something like that. Anyway, and pertinent to my beloved, the astrological alignment created what was also known by an alternative name as The Star of David. How perverse that my David was born on the anniversary of something known throughout history for the size of its twinkle.

Bookmark It

I think in my last blog I mentioned that we were changing our interweb provider and that I had concerns that the switch may not go smoothly. I have to take back any accusations I may have made on that front, and say that the transition from one ISP to the other couldn’t have been easier. I think we lost connectivity for no more than seven seconds. Brilliant! I stand corrected. That said, the service since then has been abysmal. Nightmare. Up and down like Cynthia Payne’s panties or Dr Jeckyll’s mood swings. We have a bi-polar router which seems to exhibit all the unpredictable moods of a manic depressive. One minute she’s fine, super-fast downloads, like a router on E, the next, she throws a strop and kicks us offline for no apparent reason then sulks for about thirty minutes, with a definite reduction of serotonin in her CPU. She’s a right temperamental cow and really does take several minutes of coaxing to let us back on line. We have to stroke her ego, telling her how wonderful she is, with slim, gorgeous lines, dazzling flashing LEDs, and a dongle to die for. Her hubs do NOT look big in that case; she’s perfect in every way. Usually it takes the promise of a candle-lit dinner and a box of chocolates before she’ll agree, with reluctance, to ‘give out’. And she IS a SHE. There’s no doubt about it.

The French and German’s have the right idea – they assign genders to all inanimate (and animate) objects. I think we should do something similar in the UK. Not to complicate the grammar – we don’t need different verb declensions depending on gender or familiarity. Just “He is”, “She is” and for undecided objects, “It is”. We do it anyway for many things – ships are always, “…and all who sail in her” Trains are male, such as “The Flying Scotsman”. Many vessels/vehicles are assigned the feminine gender as evidenced by such expressions as “Fill ‘er up” or “Take her for a spin”. The difference I’m suggesting is that WE should be able to dictate the gender of objects we own, depending on their quirks and personalities.

I’m absolutely not advocating that we need to classify every object with a gender, although that might be fun for the easy things, such as bassoons, bras, spades, doilies, fires, mountains, hoses, cabbages or wheels, but would get somewhat tedious when delving into the realms of chemicals and particle physics. Our European protagonists have it far too complicated anyway and besides, they don’t agree on the assigned gender anyway. For example, take the words for ‘the sun’ and ‘the moon’; in German it’s ‘die Sonne’ (feminine) and ‘der Mond’ (masculine), but in French ‘la lune’ and ‘le soleil’, the other way around. Does, “The moon, she is clear tonight” not sound more romantic? But there again, we assume there to be a ‘man in the moon’ which would imply a degree of masculinity. I assume there are panels of experts who sit and decide what gender should be assigned to every new word, or is it done via a vote? Maybe they let the word loose for a while without a gender and see which way it tends towards. Does it feel it’s inner woman or would it prefer to be a chap? What if it’s gay, or bisexual? Fine if it wants to be hermaphrodite – it can be an ‘it’ but what if it is a female word trapped in a male word’s body? What right do we have to impose gender on a word anyway? Enlightened families allow their words, I mean children, to grow up with whatever gender identity they prefer. Can a word be surgically altered to change its orientation? Can a ‘towelette’ get the snip to become a much more masculine towel? Surely that way lies chaos – or we’d not know whether to order a cheese and ham omelette or a mushroom omel! Maybe free-range words are not such a good idea and if a word HAS to have a gender then it is decided at birth. But what a job THAT would be! For example, would you like to suggest the gender for any of the following?

• Draculin – an anticoagulant found in the saliva of vampire bats.
• Olympiadane –  a mechanically-interlocked compound based on the topology for the Olympic rings.
• Psicose – (C6H12O6), a rare low-calorie sugar that provides 0.3% as much energy as sucrose.
• Cadaverine – a foul-smelling diamine produced by putrefaction of dead animal tissue.

We do have some genderised words in English, such as Actor and Actress, Master and Mistress, Niece and Nephew but these only go so far and are more misleading than evidence of a rule. We would, for example, not call a female consultant a Doctress or have a builderess advise on a new conservatory. Yet we make a silly distinction between blond (Masc) and blonde (Fem), depending on the gender of the person wearing the hair, even though the hair itself is pretty neutral in terms of its own gender. You wouldn’t say, “It’s a blond hair and I found him in my soup” or “It’s a blonde hair and I found her in my soup”, but “It’s a blond/e hair and I found it in my soup” is accepted, even though we have gone to all the trouble of defining the gender of the hair!  (and the first two examples are sufficiently ambiguous to leave you wondering if it was the hair or the owner of the hair that was found in the soup). It doesn’t happen with black or brown or brunette (surely brunette should be female?), so why do we need to give blond/e hair a specific gender? And if that particular colour refers to a wig, which could be worn by either gender, which word would we use? I guess we’d circumvent the problem by calling it ‘platinum’. Does blonde dye only work on female hair, and what colour does it turn male follicles?  In these days of equality and political correctness many female thespians are billing themselves as Actors – Dame Judy Dench does just that. The dictionary (Collins and others) defines an Actor as a person who acts in a play, film, or broadcast (note lack of gender), whereas an Actress is a female actor. Seems a bit unfair that! Women get to use either word whereas men are lumbered with one. Author/Authoress works the same way, and we do have many other words that imply gender:

But these all relate to people or things with a sex, rather than gender – in French, German and many other languages the sex does not necessarily determine the gender. For example Irish cailín “girl” is masculine, while stail “stallion” is feminine. For us, a pen is a thing, and ‘it’ and needs no ‘s/he’ form or verb declination. We don’t have to remember grammatical rules for declension of definite articles – I still remember reciting “der, die, das, die, den, die, das, die, des, der, des, der, dem, der, dem, den” in German lessons at school and that was just to be able to know the correct form of ‘the’ to use!

For most animals we have a choice of three options; he, she or it, unless the word for the animal is also gender-specific. So, a dog can be he, she, or it, with his, her or its bone, but a bull can only be a he or an it, because bulls are male. So if a cat can take the three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter [and what about a male dog that has been neutered?] the why can’t a doctor? We’d go and see him or her, but to go and see it would be very disrespectful. We have two male cats, one is prettier than the other, with a slim face whereas his brother is more blocky in appearance and heavier set. People often assume their gender based on their looks, which can be quite amusing, especially if the visitor wimps out and opt for ‘it’ which just sounds rude!

But my proposal is simpler, although probably very politically incorrect. We should simply refer to objects based on the characteristics they present. David’s car is (despite what he may tell you) very much a ‘she’. Nice car, bit quirky, and tends to suffer from whims and mood swings. She’s gold, quite slim, and can be a bit petulant at times. She’s jealous too – doesn’t always like it if I get in the passenger seat, and sometimes locks my door even when David has pressed the remote to open them. But she’s not ‘girlie’; more a woman of today who likes to inflict her personality but is always up for a good, hard, ride. Bit of a goer – likes club music, has a thing for mirrors too. If she goes wrong, she goes very wrong, like a crazed thing on PMT. My car however is a bloke. No doubt. Just gets on with what he is used to. Solid, doesn’t need much attention, reliable on a long journey – the sort of car you know would turn up at the pub for a pint, even if it were pissing down. It’d get you home, even if it had a broken leg, ‘cos your its mate and that’s what mates do.

iPhones are female. I will expand no further on that specific item.

Our kettle is harder to define – it’s male, I’m sure, quite stocky, brushed steel, clean lines, but more metrosexual. It has a filter and a blue light. Not enough to make it camp, but it’s letting you know it is in touch with its feminine side too. Mugs are male, cups are female.

Our new server is an interesting one – I’m going to plump for it being a teenage boy I think. Bit grumpy, quite reluctant to do anything more than just sit there looking a little pissed off with the world and its lot in life. You know not to ask it to do anything out of the ordinary. I mean, if it were an actual teenage boy, you’d not ask it to cook dinner for example – you’d end up with everything fried and burnt chips!

Speaking of electronics, our Sky box is male too, but not a “bloke”, not “one of the lads”. More your kind of low-achiever that had potential but ended up getting some bimbo pregnant at the age of 16 and has never really amounted to much since then. Can’t really be relied upon, certainly can’t multi-task. Forgets where it is and what it is supposed to be doing. Ask it to record a programme and it’ll probably forget, or record a different one. Or just get bored half way through the recording and go to sleep with its slippers and a Horlicks.

We had a food blender (well, we still have it, but it is relegated, dismissed, banished and otherwise abandoned) which was extremely idiosyncratic and had more human characteristics than I care to recall. Temperamental is a good starting point, and things got worse from there. I’m thinking spoilt child of the Veruca Salt variety (See Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for more details). Sometimes it wouldn’t start, then when it/she did it/she spat and screamed and moaned and generally refused to cooperate on every level. ‘She’ was fine with the things she liked, like fruit or even making breadcrumbs, but would she blend anything to make a soup? Wouldsheheckaslike! You had to slip a tea-towel over her, so she couldn’t see what you were doing, then whistle nonchalantly, looking the other way, whilst secretly sneaking up to stab at the ‘pulse’ button and force the lid down hard with all your might lest she throw it, and her contents, in a projectile vomit of leek, potato and stock, several feet in the air in something akin to a mushroom cloud!

I know, this is anthropomorphism taken to the extreme but it works for me, and it did Walt Disney no harm (dancing brooms in Fantasia, talking mice, even more recent outings in such endeavours as Toy Story), nor Beatrix Potter (Peter Rabbit et al), Lewis Caroll (Alice’s encounters with the white rabbit and talking playing cards) or Aesop and his fables! This idea of assigning animal or inanimate objects with personality or human characteristics goes back way beyond the days of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” or “Itchy and Scratchy” and is the basis of many of the oldest religions.  I’m thinking the Egyptians with Horus the falcon, Anubis the Jackal or Ra the Sun, although technically this is Anthropotheism – ascribing human form and nature to gods, or the belief that gods are only deified human beings. If one were to be of a theological bent (not just bent in other ways) one would say that we anthropthemise the Christian God, making Him in our own image (or was it supposed to be the other way round?) – did God make us in His image, or do we make God in our image? I guess that is down to belief and I concur that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but if I were a God, making a new race of people, I think I’d make a few design improvements of the current blueprint!

Whilst meandering down the semi-theological backwaters of my mind I also wonder about the examples we have where we’ve just ended up smashing together human and animal to produce a wonder of Therianthropy (joining together of part man, part beast) – the Centaur, half human, half horse (yet a gentle and tender lover) and represented in modern astrology by Sagittarius, who’s human part is that of an Archer (bow and arrow, not Radio 4 farming family). There is also the Minotaur, half man, half bull and of course not to forget the mermaid/merman. There’s Pan too – part man, part goat, with his pipes and an image not dissimilar to the cloven-hoofed iconography of the Devil, although I prefer a slightly less satanic depiction, as per this sketch I did many moons ago.

We do this sort of thing all the time, and it isn’t just animals or food blenders that get the treatment. We do it to concepts too. We’ve all seen images of the wind blowing, with HIS chubby cheeks and wavy hair, (and to maintain the theme, how often is God likened to the wind in that “You don’t need to see it to feel its effect” – it seems we have a need to provide an anthropomorphic visualisation though). We do the same thing with the concept of death via the Grim Reaper.

Terry Pratchett uses the phrase anthropomorphic personification in his Discworld series, with his recurrent character of Death as the most popular example. (Personification is a literary form whereby human characteristics are given to objects – the sun hid behind the clouds – rather than the full anthropomorphic treatment of the sun where it is treated as if it were a human:

The sun has got his hat on
Hip, hip, hip hooray
The sun has god his hat on
And he’s coming out to play

Time, of course, is male (as in Father Time) and lives happily alongside Mother Nature.

I don’t think I have ever picked up a slug and thought it to be female – all slugs are male in my eyes (hermaphrodite by biology and dead if there were any justice in the world).

Tea pots are male, and gay. (If you need me to explain why, you are far too young and must have been brought up in a time after the BBC banned a certain nursery rhyme and accompanying actions).

Interestingly David tends to apply things slightly differently. He still assigns human characteristics to inanimate objects, but almost always in the neutral form, not gender specific. And usually when said item has done something wrong. We get a lot of that in our house; objects that misbehave. Good examples are the times he tells me, “the drink spilt”, “it snapped”, “it fell on the floor”, “it ripped” etc – all things that these items seem to manage to do to or by themselves without any provocation or assistance. We have some very talented items all of which could probably star in their own contemporary version of “Bed-knobs and Broomsticks” which would be supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!

Bookmark It

It’ll be nothing short of a miracle if you are reading this today. We’re changing our Interweb provider and so the chances of us still having access to ‘da net’ by the time this is written are hovering around sub-zero odds and I have very little confidence, despite George Michael’s advice that faith is what you ‘gotta have’. David tells me that it should all happen automatically, and all I will need to do is swap a couple of cables from one flashing box to another. He hasn’t factored four key elements though: 1) the chances of someone at the exchange making the correct changes to the hard wiring; 2) the chances of the new account being set up correctly, ready to accept us, 3) the home network actually managing to authenticate itself (David HAS configured this, but remember, we’re talking Microshit here and just because Bill “annoying little American Twerp” Gates says something should work, that doesn’t mean it will); 4) me – He’s over-crediting me with the ability to re-wire his dongle via the thing-a-me-bob into the flashing gizmo by means of the parallel interface manifold, without sending out an inverse tachyon pulse through the main deflector array and destroying humanity as we know it! I’m not sure I’m that enterprising! I think I’ll have to go sniff some Play-Doh just to calm my nerves!

If you are reading this, you can assume that somehow, by luck rather than design, we have either successfully migrated to the new ISP, I’ve posted before the change, or (my money is on this) I’m uploading to my blog via the iPhone.

We had a great weekend which started off well and got better. Having baked a loaf on Friday (in my new oven – all praise be to Hotpoint and the Gods of convection), I decided I’d get the necessaries to bake a cake, so we went to Sainsbury’s to get some cake tins. I never knew that cooking departments were so perverted! Apparently turkey basters are freely available, off-the-shelf items; I’d thought they were either a myth or at least the remit of lesbian sex shops or [fe]mail order catalogues! I tell you – one could equip a full fetish dungeon with the clips and probes and skewers on those shelves! Oven gloves are little more than bondage mittens and they had a rotary cheese grater that the Marquis de Sade would have killed to get his hands on. The device for removing the stones from cherries could be lethal in the hands of a trained practitioner and there was a screw-down nut cracker which, one assumes, does exactly what it says on the tin! But my favourites were the S&M cake trays, which offered a challenge that even I think would bring tears to the eyes: 7” Sandwich Tin / Push up bottom! We got two!

We went in to Staples too – amusingly, I thought, to buy a stapler and some staples. I bet that doesn’t happen very often. I mean, when did you last buy footwear from Boots, a house from British Home Stores, fruit at the Apple store (or Orange store for that matter), a seat at Bench, a Korma at Currys, cocaine at Superdrug, or a Scots clan at McDonalds? Somehow we ended up spending the major chunk out of £200 – ink for the laser printer seems to be made from ground-up precious metals and gem-stones if you look at the price of toner cartridges! Maybe red really is ruby and green is emerald! Business expenses though, and we have to be able to print. To be fair, 99% of all our printed output is for the club night we run, the other 1% being the occasional letter to mother or listing of my latest drug regime!

Speaking of which, I’ve now not been sick for a whole week! The new pills I have started taking are making SUCH a difference. Touch wood. Fingers crossed. It is a travesty that I have had to suffer for a year and end up back in hospital before anyone took me seriously and actually believed that the previous pills were doing damage, making me sick and generally ruining my life. But it is a tough call, to complain about side effects of tablets that are otherwise keeping you alive! I’m happy now though and starting to get an appetite back. I have my 6-monthly CT scan next week (the one where you are consumed by a giant metal doughnut) to confirm that the lymphoma hasn’t come back. And more blood tests tomorrow at my monthly check-up with Dr Do-Little who washed his hands in respect of my nausea (not literally, I didn’t vomit ON him, that’d be sick), so I’ll end up with puncture wounds in my arms where they take several attempts to get a needle in a vein. I usually come away bruised and looking like an intravenous drug user. I know it is necessary and it is good that they do take regular tests, but must they play ‘pin the tail on the donkey’ with me every time?

I said we had a good weekend and that was largely down to the party we went to on Saturday night. We seldom get invited anywhere and of course over the last year we couldn’t have gone anyway. It was wonderful to go out for a proper social night for a change – the first time we have been able to do anything like that in over 14 months. We are quite heavily involved in the gay community in Manchester, running our club night and helping with other events where we can. You’d think that would mean that we would get lots of invitations to various functions, but sadly that isn’t the way it works. Maybe people don’t invite us because they think we’ll be busy. Maybe we are somehow unattainable. Maybe they just don’t really like us that much! We’ve always said that we do what we do to give back to the community, although it does feel a bit like all we are doing at the moment is making deposits; a withdrawal from time to time would be cool too! So Saturday night was a veritable treat and so lovely to be somewhere where we were not on duty, not having to keep an eye on things, not responsible for making sure that everyone else was having a good time and not having to behave like the perfect hosts! Bliss! We love running the club nights, but we don’t enjoy them in the same way a punter can and we never really relax. So thanks for the invitation and giving us such a good time!

On Sunday we finally managed to mow the front lawn and scythe the back pasture – that sounded like it should be a euphemism, but not intended as such! The back lawn was a good foot high in grass and weeds, but with the weather we have had of late it has just been impossible to cut it. As it was, we more ripped it than cut it – it is NOT less bovver with a hover – and we were in grave danger of coming across the BBC Natural History Department deep in the undergrowth, making a documentary about the indigenous wildlife of the British wilderness. On a positive note though, slugs, when encountering a fly-mo, have a tendency to come out like Sushi – revenge is a dish best served cold, although I understand that slugs are good with salt on them too! Die you slimy infuriating little bastards!

I also did some tidying of various potted vegetables and sewed a few more quick-grow items such as salad leaves, radishes and so forth. We actually have some pea pods forming, which, considering how late we planted them, is a miracle. The sweet corn is filling out nicely and we are cropping carrots and potatoes, both of which are grown in tubs.  I’m pleased with the spuds – not bad for a few shop-bought potatoes, bunged in an old crate as a silly experiment. I’ve probably taken up about a quarter of what we’ll produce, but I don’t care if we only get a tiny crop – that isn’t why we did it. It has been good for me to have something like that to give some attention to, and David is keen now to dig a proper plot so we can have, as he says, “free range potatoes”! I suppose they come from the same place as the free range cooker, advertised if you buy a Moben Kitchen – not sure I could be arsed with chasing down a stove every time I want to cook something. I know what he means – grown in the garden and not confined to a tub, but what a lovely expression – free range potatoes! The plot, if we dig it for next year, will run along the left fence, coming out about 6 ft (or the width of the shed) so probably 6ft x 20ft or thereabouts, with half of the 20ft length being the damper area. It gets sun, but that wall is to the North East, so the bottom end doesn’t get the full sun until the mid-late afternoon. Here’s hoping we can find the right stuff to grow. We have the compost which has been ‘brewing’ for the last year so that’ll be dug in (David doesn’t know what he’s letting himself in for!). The top soil is quite good – looks like they imported a decent layer when the houses were built. We’re not quite contemplating The Good Life, but we’ve taken to this home produce malarkey and want to do a bit more next year, if only for interest. Somehow I think I’d prefer Margo Leadbetter as a neighbour to the Chinese ones we have at the moment – and she’d not stand for Chinese-woman-over-the-road’s uninhibited display of knicker gussetage.

Bookmark It