Advanced blokeish

My blokeish was severely tested this morning

 with the onset of the World Cup.

Thankfully I'd had time to acquire a few holding phrases

about the sacking of the Spanish manager

and I knew that Russia were playing Saudi Arabia today.
I also remembered to ask about the burnt out starter motor on his van.

Our roofer assured me that he would be home by 4 
to watch the opening game

but he was so voluble that I lost the drift after that 

and had to excuse myself with a parting shot about Robbie Williams.

Weak I know, but as I am also trying to learn some Japanese

for grand daughter's pre-school teacher this afternoon

my vocab is getting a little muddled.

The song of the moment on the roof is just the first line of 

Everybody Loves Somebody. On repeat.

O-skare Sama deshta

Rest cure

 Nothing to read here.

What a relief.

No signs.

No instructions.

No advertisements.

I find myself incapable of ignoring any lettering

however banal.
These days we are bombarded by messages,
but the habit of reading them all started young.

I remember feeling obliged to decipher the words

mesembryanthemum criniflorum

on the back of the loo door at home.

I can't have been more than five years old.

My father had pasted up some pages torn out of Amateur Gardening to

the panels on the door.

There was another sign in his spindly writing taped

to the geyser that heated the water for our baths.

It read,

Remember. Before lighting remove paper from chimney.

We read this nightly and eventually set it, somewhat bizarrely, 
to the hard-to-scan chorus of

In a feeble attempt to stave off this madness

I peel the labels from appliances

and products that cannot be mistaken for anything else.

This may yet be my undoing but so far it offers a little merciful respite.

How do you cope?

抹茶*

New taste favourite.

It does taste a bit like twigs and lichen.

But like moss,

it's growing on me.

* Matcha green tea

Meh

Drifting through January in a wispy sort of way.

Somewhat like this cloud.

Waiting for a shaft of light to illuminate

 a big (or even a medium-sized) idea.

Trying not to get too greyed out.

(This picture is in unedited glorious Technicolor.)

Trucking on like these purposeful

shingle shifters.

Their work is never done.

The tides rearrange the banks with untiring dedication.

I'm getting some new glasses.

Maybe that will help to refocus things.

How is January looking from where you are standing?

The Young Visiter*

 She is a lively and entertaining child

with a rich and sometimes accurate vocabulary -

'ess', 'het', 'cat', 'up tairs', 'iss', 'dat', vigorous head shaking 

and a fine line in imperious hand signals.

She is walking briskly at 11 months,

and acquired her first almost cartoon-like bump on the forehead 

to show for it this weekend.
(Bad POANG chair).

I wonder if Daisy Ashford* was somewhat like her at that age.

A summer's day

Inspired by this inviting scene at Gravetye Manor,

we decided that this was the summer we would acquire a croquet set.

It arrived today.

The mallets looked a little bit short.

The hoops no more substantial than bent wire coat hangers.

Our lawn?

Well let's just say that it presents

some interesting tactical challenges.

But the satisfactory crack of wooden mallet

on wooden ball played a perfect summer counterpoint

to the muffled shouts from Wimbledon

drifting through an open window.

We played until we couldn't see the hoops anymore.

And then we came in for tarragon chicken,

 strawberries and meringues.

Hell for leather

What with one thing and another

I completely forgot to have a mid-life crisis*.

I'm making a start on one now before it's too late.

There was a ridiculously beautiful supple leather 
biker jacket on sale in Sainsbury's today.
(My boutique of choice.)
I've never owned a leather jacket.
I stuffed it in my trolley with the butternut squash.

The woman at the checkout held it aloft and kept telling me
(and all the interested people in the queue), 
how much it cost, as if to give me a chance 
to come to my senses.
I gave her my stoniest stare.
Then she asked if I had tried it on.
I said no.
She asked, did I think it would fit?
I chickened out.
I told her it was for someone else.
She asked if it would fit them.
I said I hoped so, through gritted teeth.
Then she asked if it was cheap for a leather jacket.
I said I'd never bought one before.
She said, make sure you keep the receipt.

Then as if the Universe was quite determined 
to make me see the folly of my purchase
the alarm went off as I tried to exit.
The security guard took me to one side.
He took the jacket out of the bag
She hadn't taken off the tag.

I produced the receipt.

It was there between rice noodles and gingernuts.

He took it back to the till and waved it around a bit more
for everyone to see.

Then he brought it back and smiled.
It's a nice jacket he said.

Somehow, it had lost some of its allure.

*The expression was coined in 1965 and analysis showed 

it could start anytime between 40 and 60

but it is thought to start much earlier now,

which is odd when you think of our increased life expectancy.

Reflecting

on this book :

A new attitude to stuff and
what to do about it.

Sweet

Sweet rationing ended shortly before I was born.

And after that, we couldn't get enough of the stuff.

Two sugars in tea, sugar on already sweetened cereal,

sugar cubes pushed into blood oranges to suck,

a little paper twist of sweets each morning for a snack,

sixpence to spend on sweets every Sunday,

pineapple chunks, Smarties, Jelly Babies, chocolate éclairs,

Spangles, Refreshers, Fruit Gums, 

Cadbury's chocolate, two lumps for break at school,

Turkish Delight, Maltesers, Rolos, sherbert lemons,
Lucozade to pep you up after an illness,
(doctors and nurses recommend it)

a Golden Delicious apple every night in bed

after I had brushed my teeth,
Mint Polos,
(the sweet with the hole/s)

and a mouthful of mercury fillings.

I have endured many hours in so many dentist's chairs,
often at the hands of a dentist called I.Screech,
sometimes without anaesthetic.

I am not convinced that all of those fillings were even necessary

despite the sugar onslaught, 

because dentists were paid per filling and would even fill milk teeth.

The latest programme of repairs to old fillings

has just finished and I am nursing an empty wallet and a sore jaw.

But now, I am going to watch this

to see if I should wean myself off sucrose and glucose, 
which still lurk, in admittedly more respectably disguised forms, 
in my diet, even if it is too late for my teeth.

Well I've watched the programme and, how interesting,
it's not just fat, and it's not just sugar,
it's the fatal combination of the two that lies at the root of the problem.
Luckily, I don't much like doughnuts,
but it looks as though meringues and cream
are off the menu and I'd better prise myself out of this chair
and build some muscle.

The Play of Light on Domestic Objects

A small part of my portfolio 

in support of my application 

for a prestigious new position.*

The Professorship of PLDO is my dream job.

It will be a challenging and high risk role

but I think that I am ready to make the leap

back into full time employment.

The five years I have spent

blogging away in the foothills 

have not been wasted.

Some turned their hands to 

quilting hot water bottle covers,

others to knitting snoods for financial gain,

but I resisted the lure of monetisation.

Now the world of academia, hitherto closed to me,

has come just in the nick of time,

to claim me as one of their own.

Oh dear

she's put up pictures of her washing. 

Could do better.

Could be fitter too.
My Pilates teacher expressed surprise to see me
attempting an Intermediate session this morning
after a short break.
I'm thinking of taking up gymnastics.
It can't be too late can it?

The faerie glen

In a further defiance of my

risk averse persona,

I suggested that we should duck under a fence

in the dapply woods,

which had an invitingly worn footpath leading

away from it

into a ravine.

We followed a trickling stream 

down to the cliff edge.

Wonky horizon indicates the precariousness

of the footing.

There were comfortable tussocks 

and slabs of rock to sit on,

not too far above a sheltered cove.

We were not quite alone.

A young creature suddenly materialised,

seemingly floating up from the sheer drop.

He had very long hair,

a very long beard,

a curly waxed moustache

and was wearing,

well,

a sort of dress,

a short stripy dress,

flip-flops,

a bowler hat decorated with large white daisies

and carried a shiny pink satchel

messenger style.

We chatted amiably for a few minutes

about the inadvisability of our

climbing down to the beach

and then he carried on his way,

up the ravine.

There he goes.