Jasmine's blog: Laws of Feline Physics - Lesson 1

I stumbled across this and enjoyed it so much I just had to hang on to it and share it with anyone else who passes through. Enjoy: Jasmine's blog: Laws of Feline Physics - Lesson 1

Consider this part of my contribution to International Blog Day 2006.

Yes, Jasmine's Australian and yes this particular post of hers coincides with a theme I've touched on, myself, but Jasmine's blog is at http://speedcuber.blogspot.com/ and that title says a lot more about the focus of her blog than does this particular post. And I've never succeeded in solving Rubik's Cube, so I'm an unlikely visitor to her blog.

How did I find it? I was searching for references to Australian lollies (sweets or candy) and allowed myself to be distracted.

Neighbours

No not the naff telly program. Hugely and hugely inexplicably popular over here.

I mean the people living on the adjoining and nearby properties. Over time I've gathered up bits and pieces of information and they weave quite a pattern. For me, for remembrance, I've jotted this lot down.

They come in all shapes and sizes, a perfect cross-section of society. Two young couples in their early twenties. One buying and renovating, the other renting and biding their time. An elderly widow who is hard of hearing and arthritis riddled. A couple in late middle-age; their child or children gone off on their own, pottering about in their end of terrace cottage after downsizing their life. A bachelor in his forties who has his washing done by his mother, an elderly gentleman not good on his feet any longer who has the local taxi company ferry him to and from the local Conservative Club. More young couples either buying and renovating or renting and biding their time. At the end of one terrace Tony & Mark have their extended and immaculately renovated cottage and at the end of the other terrace lives Cat Lady, who is another elderly widow (or divorcee, in her case I'm not sure). Between Cat Lady and the Conservative live Judy and Mac.

They are in their eighties now, but unlike all the other wrinklies they are astoundingly sprightly in both body and mind. They now live half the year in our town and half the year on the other side of the world in Perth. Over there Mac teaches windsurfing. He's an inveterate builder of model planes with 20ft and longer wingspans that he takes out into the country side to fly. They acquired their home in Perth after becoming fed up with there previous 'winter' domicile which was Goa. The walls of their house here are covered in Mac's awesomely detailed paintings of scenes from Goa and the local flora.

As a couple they've always fascinated me, and partly for the simple reason that they are so alike. This might seem obvious but in their case the 'alikeness' is extreme and extends to their build, colouring, mannerisms and the cadence in their voices. Their vocabularies are almost identical and their enthusiasms are equal. They also row quite delightfully and unashamedly and I suspect that they enthusiastically kiss and make up afterwards. The worst thing either will say of the other is "you silly old fool", though in the heat of the moment those few words can be injected with quite an impressive amount of passion and venom.

Sadly they didn't have children but they've channelled their energies and interest into a wide and deep rooted network of good friends and acquaintances. They had a business for many years that they sold to fund their retirement and live well if frugally. At their age they've a whole range of skills and knowledge sets that most younger (including me) people can only envy. They also have experience.

Judy speaks fluent French partly because of her education and partly because after school she took herself off to Paris to work at one of the big old and famous hotels there. Mac lived on the left bank too for a while and presumably speaks French having made a living for a time from hawking something (which wasn't very clear) about the restaurants and cafes. For a time he lived in somewhat bohemian Notting Hill in London in a bed-sit that was effectively nothing more than the closed off end of a corridor. He was a lorry driver for a time before beginning to make headway.

They are the sort of couple who always know what's what. They know how things work, what represents good value for money, how to make do and mend, and all of this seemingly effortlessly. Yet superficially they are also quintessentially Englishly eccentric. Neither could give a stuff about the clothes they wear, though Judy can look fabulous when she sets her mind to it, or what others think of them in any shape or form. In return they assume their fellow man deserves respect until proven otherwise and adopt a stance at the same time of live and let live.

Judy and Mac took care of Monty while we were away. Initially the plan had been for them to come in and feed him, give him his last few tablets, keep him company and generally keep an eye on him. They'd been unsure that they'd be able to make their house 'Monty-proof'. But in the end they gathered him and all his paraphernalia up and took him back to their house, into which he very quickly settled. He spent the nights asleep on their bed between them and the days on the bench behind their kitchen table.

Not only that but yesterday Mac drove me over to the vets - not once but twice. In the morning we dropped him off so that he could be anaethetised, x-rayed and have his stitches removed. In the afternoon we collected him not entirely sans stitches and brought him home.

I'd already planned for and bought a bottle of champagne and a thank you card; the need for which became more pressing when Mac insisted on paying the last of the vet bills. Between us he and I can take out the last of the stitches on Friday (if this sounds unbelievable let me tell you that I've taken stitches out of my own arm and it is really a doddle; yes this is something you can try at home children).

Anyway I think these two people in their eighties are an inspiration. They are Carpe Diem personified. They've lived all over the place and done so much and they haven't stopped yet.

Not everyone at their age can be as physically or mentally active as they are. No one can say that Margaret who lives three doors from me and is in her early seventies would be in better shape than she is had she adhered to a better diet. She did the best she could, ate the diet she'd been raised on and is now all but immobilised by her arthritis. Walking from her door to mine can bring her to tears. She's all alone with nothing but a parrot and the TV for company for large parts of the day. Her two sons, their wives and their children do keep a very regular eye on her but the adults work and the children are all in school or doing further studies.

Margaret's an immensely kind soul whose husband was a complete bastard. For years he ran the local cinema and flaunted a string of mistresses about town. He broke Margaret's heart. She was a poorly educated girl from the North when he married her and nothing happened afterwards to give her the slightest chance of breaking free of the relationship and standing on her own two feet.

She quickly had two sons to raise and by the time she'd done that job she'd had the will to live beaten down too severely to be recovered. Instead her two sons rallied round and protected her to the extent they could.

Then her bastard husband became ill and by the time we moved here he was a broken shell of a man who on warm days would be shuffled from their house to a seat in their garden. He'd had a stroke that had almost paralysed him. Margaret continued dutifully to feed him and otherwise care for him until he died and then she cried.

By the she'd realised that things weren't entirely right in our house. She knew that I was the one working while he was the one lying about the house with hand down his pants all day (okay, she might not have known about the last bit, but she probably guessed). She knew that he neither worked, nor looked after our child, nor did any meaningful work of a maintenance/improvement nature about the house. So one afternoon not long after her husband finally died Margaret told me all about the affairs, the openness of them, the hurt she'd felt.

She's a good soul, with a kindness that soars above the pain she's constantly in, and I hope fervently that she gets her reward. I'm cross with myself when I'm impatient with her. She'll grab me as I pass her house and never for a quick word. Sometimes I'm fretful for the 'lost' time I've got a dozen things I could spend it on.

But Margaret doesn't have a malicious, vindictive or brutal bone in her body (unlike me) and the least I can do is give her a little of my time.

Specimens

The camp site we stayed at might not feature in the 2006 edition of UK camping and caravanning, but it still managed to be a sell-out over the long weekend. While some of the static tents (up all across the summer and owned) were vacant all the travelling pitches were occupied.

Even as we were registering the manager of the site was fielding calls from optimists hoping at the last minute to secure somewhere to stay. That night we became aware that those we were sharing the site with were largely large and well organised groups from Oop Noorth with a decided taste for red and white clothing. The following morning those same groups were up bright and early, decked out almost to a man, woman and child in brilliant white and bright red - St Helens supporters off to Twickers to watch their team beat Huddersfield (I think, my interest in Rugby League being extremely limited) in Rugby League's Challenge Cup final.

Good luck to them. Despite the convincing win they were admirably quiet coming back afterwards and left early the next morning to get home.

The family next to us on one side were already well set up when we arrived and were still struggling pack as we left for the last time. This was an intriguing set up with a very much older wife (mid forties I'd guess) and a partner who although absolutely immense can't have been much more than thirty plus an assortment of male children ranging in age from about twelve down to about seven, so possibly not all hers, and a female baby. It was never absolutely clear how many of the children were theirs as some of the children swirling about the tent might have been hangers on their children had picked up, as children are wont to do.

The first night the boys were delighted to be able to tuck into McDonalds meals brought in and we sniggered at their inability to set aside for even a few days the trappings of what they consider to be civilisation. The second night we had the opportunity to observe dad or step-dad's barbequing skills and made a rapid reassessment of the kids' position vis-a-vis McDonalds. Whether a conscious act or otherwise their demands for something cooked by someone else were nothing more or less than an act of self-preservation.

Haystacks (immense, shaven-headed and bearded) laid down fire starters then coals then a layer of fire-starter gel, lit the lot then immediately slapped on the food. The result was food (burgers) that was char-grilled on the outside and in all probability still frozen on the inside.

Some of our fellow site occupants are semi-permanent. One jovial jock lives in a two man tent from the time the site opens in spring until the day it closes in October. When he's sober he's almost incomprehensible due to his thick Scottish accent; when he's drunk (and he was, every evening we were there) he's totally incomprehensible. Happy but incomprehensible.

I've already mentioned the cheating site manager who wrote the quiz night questions then took part and the smug cow with her yuppie-mobile (actually one of the new model bugs).

The rest of the site population were exactly the sort of people you'd find on any camp site and pretty much indistinguishable from campers anywhere. Some people regard camping as an exercise in extreme minimalisation while others will travel with and spend an hour each morning using the make-up kit and the hair straightening tongs.

I hadn't been camping since leaving Australia. My father was very keen on the outdoors and we did some camping en famille before he died. After that I did some camping after uni, particularly down along Victoria's southern coast. The thing that struck me was that the experience really hasn't changed a great deal in all that time (which let's face it is heading for half a century of past).

I'm glad we went away because I had a couple of days off work, out of the house, out of town, out of the county, on the road, doing something different that was comfortingly familiar at the same time. Would I do it again? Yes, I would go camping again.

The Fat Bastard walked Hadrian's Wall one summer (with someone who's word I trust, plus he has the certificate to prove it) and wants to get his Winter Certificate. All fired up by all this family activity he wants now to travel up to the border to do the walk this winter, with me and the Infant along for the ride (though possibly putting up in a B&B). His argument is that B will see 'proper' snow for the first time. My counter argument is that unless our finances dramatically improve we'll be spending our budget for next summer's holiday activities on something that's essentially an indulgence.

I guess we'll be up on the border in Winter.

Which is a shame really because our outing to Windsor and the time we spent pootling about on the Thames in our hired boat fired us all up with enthusiasm for a holiday on a narrow boat and that would require some serious effort to save money. Boat hire would run into about £150-£200 per person per week - comparable perhaps to a week in some grotty Euro-resort, but a lot more expensive than a week on a camp site.

Being optimistic I'd like to think that B and I could do it even if not with the Fat Bastard, but that would take some changes to current arrangements.

WeightWatchers rant

Haystacks (the dad/step-dad next door at the camp site) obviously saw the weekend as a chance to get in some fishing and he certainly had quite a lot of angling gear, and fishing as a pretext for some bonding with the older boys. About three of them were back and forth with boxes and rods all day every day we were there. What was uncomfortable about this was the sight of a young man struggling to walk more than a handful of paces without huffing and puffing; and the biggest of the boys was already struggling to walk normally with the weight he's piled on.

That said the family we were travelling with are all overweight, much bigger than the Fat Bastard. The girl of 15 weighs about that in stones and the mother weighs well over 20 stones. She's also forking over a fortune to the mighty Weight Watchers corporation in her efforts to shed some of that weight. But in the course of our three supermarket expeditions we purchased one punnet of peaches and one bag of grapes. And they were put in there by me because I couldn't imagine shopping for food and not putting in at least some fruit. On the other hand we bought plenty of sweet biscuits and chocolate and pudding and so forth.

I've never experienced the lifestyle of the almost morbidly obese before; though I've never bought the line that its glandular and always tended toward the hypothesis that the problem boils down to taking on too many calories. Having watched these past few days I now know that overeating is the heart of their problem. The mother is too large to exercise, the girl couldn't keep up with the men and me as we set up a pace slightly under that of a forced march on our way back along the tow path from Staines.

The only way she's going to turn her situation around is by changing completely what she eats, how she eats and the volume of food she eats.

Meanwhile Weight Watchers prey on her, seducing her through offers of WW sticky toffee pudding into believing that she can actually have her cake and be thin. Their products sell at a premium and do nothing to alter her mindset. The hard truth is that the mighty Weight Watchers corporation is out to make a profit, and the only people it can make a profit from are those who are, or believe themselves to be overweight. It follows that Weight Watchers' best interests lie in consumers of its products not actually losing weight and adapting to a normal diet that doesn't come at a premium.

WW behaviour is repellently parasitical. Ditch the WW pudding and buy some fruit and vegetables instead.

1215 and all that...

I've tried to write this post numerous ways; taking various approaches and adopting a variety of tones. But at the end of the day anything I write boils down to 'the English education system is crap'.

This is a theme I've touched on previously in connection with the failure of infant school (preparatory year and then years 1 through 3) to teach pupils to write legibly in print (pen craft) before introducing them to cursive script. And in connection with the failure of infant school to instil essential and fundamental arithmetic skills in pupils. And in the wasting of considerable valuable time on history and keyboard skills. I'm very nearly certain I'd be equally irate about flaws in the approach to imparting English language skills were it not for the fact that my daughter happens to have an awe-inspiring natural talent in that direction and has succeeded despite rather than because of the system.

The early years are those during which children learn 'times tables' by rote so that in later years 7x6 elicits an instinctive response. The early years are those during which pen craft is developed so that in later years those who do not go on to become medical doctors (the overwhelming majority) can function. The early years are not for plonking children in front of a computer. Should we really applaud to the rafters when little Johnny produces an 'A' on the keyboard but can't recite the 3 times table up to 12 by age 8?

My first hand and direct experience of the English education system comes in two forms; firstly and formerly struggling to coax something approximating standard English from university graduate new employees when I was a senior manager with a global management consulting practice. More recently and brutally my experience has come via being a spectator at my daughter's early years at school.

Had I any aptitude aligned with the requisite domestic arrangements I'd opt for teaching her myself in lieu of packing her off to my alma mater in Melbourne.

Each year that passes only serves to reinforce my anxiety about my Infant's prospects, notwithstanding her effortless upper decile achievements. Each year one teacher after another has told me (and the Fat Bastard) how well she's doing; how well she's progressing through the national curriculum - oblivious to the contempt I feel for said curriculum.

David Starkey may not be my cup of tea; I find him overly manner and besides he and I wrestle with a semi-professional dilemma - in his utterly professional judgement (and by my estimation) Starkey regards the narrow Tudor epoch as the fulcrum on which English history turns whereas I (in my entirely amateur judgement) would place said fulcrum earlier, in the latter half of the fourteen century. On television I find him irritatingly mannered. On radio I adore him and are as one with him (in the non-biblical sense) as to the deficiencies in the English education system.

So here's one to absolutely delight him...

Our first day excursion took us to a site of historic significance not more than a handful of miles from our camp site. The name of that place is Runnymede (or Magna Carta Island in the Thames, we visited both). In June of 1215 at one or other of those places the English Barons succeeded at least temporarily in bending the King of England - King John, to their will in forcing him to sign their list of demanded concessions. The document containing those demands and to which John's signature and the Royal Seal were affixed under duress is known as Magna Carta. If you need to know more about Magna Carta you can start here at the British Library.

As we tramped across a cow field and then down a muddy silver poplar lined avenue towards the river discussing quite why we were visiting this place it became apparent that the two 15 year old English just-done-their-'whatevers' in our party had not the foggiest notion of Magna Carta's significance in their country's development. Rote learning has its limitations and secondary school has role to play in developing students' analytical skills but I simply cannot be brought to believe that 30 or so years of tinkering with 'the system' has wrought even a modicum of improvement when a pair of average mid-teenage school students (and a pair with prospects) will protest, and unashamedly at that, that they've not heard of Magna Carta.

Later that night as we finished off last of the food we returned to the amazement shared by all the wrinkly (forty-something year olds) that the two teenagers could not place that document in its proper context.

Our conversation wended its way to English Lit. and I was inculcated in the modern method of teaching Shakespeare/Dickens et al.

In respect of Great Expectations (their set Dickens text) they watched the recent TV adaptation and discussed. In respect of Much Ado they watched the Branagh film (yes the one with the woeful performance from the usually thorough admirable Denzil Washington and with Keanu Reeves), read some selected passages and discussed. In respect of ... but I hope you get the gist.

If only I could I'd put B on a plane to Melbourne tonight. Old Egg had her deficiencies but at least I knew and could explain (after all these years) that Magna Carta was signed by KJ at Runnymede in the Thames in June of 1215 after he'd brought his Barons to a state of rebellion by his greed and ineptitude and his viciousness, and that this document was and still to some extent is a cornerstone of democracy wherever it exists. (NB his particular forms of viciousness were never spelled out, we had to go to a better library than that at the Old Egg to find out more.)

I tried explaining this to the two teenagers in our party but gave up about the time they asked me to explain exactly where KJ fits in. In the meantime and back at home I've pulled Alan Lloyd's bio of King John from one of my book cases and dipped into it for a contrasting interpretation of KJ's life and reign.

I suppose I ought to sign off with a bah, or an hurumph or an I Don't Believe It. I'm a fifty foot tall and very ancient Greek Goddess and I'm struggling to retain my equanimity in the face of evidence of pedagogic ineptitude, though deep down I blame the bearded sandal-wearers of Whitehall.

PS: We saw this too. The flora expert put it at 1000 years old. He was only out by 1000 years, or thereabouts.

Snap shot of four days

We went away and got back. Nobody died; no accidental drownings, stabbings or other inadvertent expirations.

Seven of us piled into a very big Land Rover (plug for LR’s capacity for hauling large numbers of people and their stuff about the country), pulling a trailer loaded with assorted tents, cooking, eating, sleeping &etc stuff. The couple we travelled with are old hands and equipped with most of the basic essentials as well as a daughter of their own.

B packed her favourite stuffed toy, their daughter brought a friend along.

The journey out consisted mostly of one motorway after another. I got a bit nostalgic for the days when I was free to jump in my car and move myself a couple of hours away just because I felt like it. I also got a stark reminder of a few reasons for giving up car after I started living with the Fat Bastard.

His incessant smoking and his insistence on smoking in the car, his preference for sailing along at 70 miles an hour with the windows right down. I, on the other hand have an intense dislike of being blown about. Even in the hottest nights I can’t abide a fan; I’d rather be hot. Give me an air-conditioned car one can (and indeed should) drive with the windows UP. Most of all though it’s his insufferable air of knowledgability in all matters motoring-related.

Sailing along, curled up in the middle seats I got the chance to watch many fine examples of bad British driving and admire the determination with which so many Brits continue to flout the exceedingly well publicised laws concerning driving while using a mobile phone. But nothing was as good as the lorry driver upending a bag of some snack or other to pour the contents straight down his gullet (temporarily blinding himself in the meantime).

I was slightly astounded to see a police notice strapped to some central reservation light posts at one stretch, asking for witnesses to an accident on that stretch on a particular date and at a particular date to come forward. We were sailing along at just on the speed limit (unlike those overtaking us) and I couldn’t get the fucking details. Of course as a driver I could have tried, but I’d almost certainly have caused a pile up. I think that the central reservation police notice was the dumbest thing I saw on my travels.

We changed motorways, crossed the Thames and headed into Kent before hooking west and entering Surrey; then made pretty good time until close to where we had to leave this particularly infamous British free car park (the M25, of course). We reached the camp site off, loaded the gear put up the tents, got things straightened and then went for a bit of a drive.

Our driver for the weekend often works in this part of the world and had somewhere in mind to take us. A few country roads and lanes away we parked up beside a derelict farm shed on a concreted over spot at the end of a rutted lane which had a bit of signage planted in its middle.

After a false start involving us tramping in the wrong direction (towards a private gated estate) we headed off across a deserted field, over a bridge and through some riverside woods until quite miraculously we stumbled across one of England’s 50 designated Heritage Trees. This one is a Yew (a species known for its longevity and for being found in churchyards). A little further on we passed the remains of the Priory in the former grounds of which the Yew stands. Beyond the Priory we followed the path through an avenue of Horse Chestnuts to the river and then followed it upstream a bit.

Leaving this heritage site we went shopping. A bill of £100 for one day’s food is not bad going. For seven people, of course, and it must be pointed out that two of those were not purchasing alcohol. Back at the campsite we offloaded the food, got that sorted, put on the evening meal, ate it and then went to bed. Exciting or what?

Actually we did have an illuminating conversation with the two teenagers. Quite a lot of light was shed by them on modern teaching methods, although I’d already experienced the ramifications at first hand. It rained overnight but the day was quite fine. Up and showered I was astonished to find that the Fat Bastard had already crawled out of his tent and been for the newspapers.

Cooked breakfast then off to Windsor, via Eton. I took my camera with me. The first sign of the school was its playing fields. Much quoting of Wellington, then the school itself. I resisted the urge to photograph anything. After all, it’s just a bloody school.

We stopped at a pub for a comfort break and the Fat Bastard managed to tear his pants, creating a hole in a pocket through which most of the money he’d brought with him fell, to be lost forever. He didn’t notice its loss until a couple of hours later, which left me funding our side of the weekend entirely.

We moved on to Windsor which is much bigger than I’d imagined and very much more given over to shopping. We had ice-cream from a shop near the Guildhall, of which building I’ve now tramped the portico. If you want to know what it looks like have a gander at the pictures of Charles and Camilla’s wedding.

From here, and completely ignoring the big old building on what was now our right, we crossed over and plunged down the hill in search of chemists and somewhere for me to purchase warmer clothing for B and me; bad (or just incompetent) mother that I am I’d under catered for this wonderful English late summer weather.

Shopped out we wandered down to the river and hired a motor boat in which we pootled about for an hour; being half an hour up stream then half an hour the other way. Lots of river, river bank, other boats, big houses can be seen from the inside of a small hire boat pootling about in the stretches twenty minutes either way from Windsor in Royal Berkshire. My fourth county in under a day!

After that we went back to the supermarket to buy more food. Amazingly this bill came to somewhat less than or in fact half of that of the previous day. No one bought any sun cream and some of the stuff that we’d bought the previous day hadn’t been used up. For example we didn’t get through all 15 eggs at breakfast (being slightly filled up with a large bloomer, a packet and a half of bacon, a packet of sausages, mushrooms, tomatoes). And we hadn’t used up all the kitchen roll, either.

By this time we needed to get back to the camp and cook, it being a bit late in the day.

The next day we went shopping early, just to break things up a bit. Actually that isn’t entirely true; we did shop early but not for that reason.

The previous evening we’d had a run in with the fascistic side of this particular site’s operating committee. I don’t know the ins and outs but the site’s been in operation since nineteen-0-something, presumably arising from a bequest with certain stipulations attached. The thing is run by a committee elected from within the body of members. There are rules. The most bizarre (and in terms of such sites, unusual) is that cars may not be kept on the site.

Cars may be brought onto the site to get you and your stuff to your pitch, but once you’ve off-loaded you must take your car and park it in the car park. Well that night we’d found the car park full. And we’d found the parking along the opposite wall (reserved for committee members) also full. And finally we found that the barrier to the nearby public car park is so low as to preclude a Land Rover such as the one we’re travelling in getting under.

One or other of us kept going back looking for a newly created space or signs of someone leaving as the deadline loomed. Finally someone in a people carrier moved out, as did the car next to it. But the little car next to the people carrier then drove back in, perfectly taking out both spaces. I remonstrated with the smug cow who got out and explained to her that while she and her little yuppie-mobile could slide under pretty much anywhere (and boy did I wish she would) we couldn’t get the LR in anywhere but in the camp car park. A decent human being would have offered to hold the place while we got the LR round after which she’d retire with what good grace she could muster to the public car park.

I was blanked. She sauntered off so I chased down, peg leg who’d been giving us grief over the LR still being on site and explained what had happened. After sending one of the teenagers back to get the car’s registration we watched in delight as the site manager’s mate reluctantly gave another committee member a ticking-off for double parking less than a couple of hours after the matter had been discussed in committee and an announcement reminding people not to do it had been put out over the speaker system.

It was pretty damned obvious that if he could have found a way of letting them have their way he would have done. But I’m bigger than him as it happens and he decided I suppose that discretion would be the better part of valour, at least on this occasion. The smug cow was dragged, spitting and scratching all the way, to her yuppie-mobile which she moved over so that we could get the LR in. We were left next to the gate to the car park. During the night someone slammed the gate into the rear mudguard. None of us are in any doubt as to who that might have been.

We went shopping early so as to be back before the car park filled. Having got back the energetic amongst us walked what turned out to be three miles down stream to the nearest riverside town only to find that it doesn’t have any river side pubs and also that the pubs it does have are either Weatherspoons make-over jobs (ghastly) or operate a strict Over-21 policy.

This might go someway towards explaining any trouble this town might have with its youth who having attained the age of majority and the legal right to consume alcohol, then do so on street corners in a mildly threatening and thoroughly anti-social fashion. Reluctantly we had a drink in the make-over before yomping back to site to put on the evening meal which, as it happens was a rather splendid roast beef with all the trimmings (some of the veggies and the gravy were not done of the barbeque).

That evening the weekend social for adults took place: a quiz. Another great British institution. We won the first round then lost the next three in part because there’s only so many rounds of those image puzzles (Thing Bats? Ding Bats?) any of us can do before starting to toss our toys out of the pram. I’m nearly certain that we won every round of general knowledge, but the general knowledge only ever made up less than half of a round’s points.

Not only that but the team that won the third round was the woman who’d set the questions. Possibly the fix was in.

Today we came back via non-Motorways. We travelled instead through some of Surrey’s greenest scenery and stopped for a quick drink at a pub offering panoramic views of Box Hill. And then we got home.

My application went in and now I’m on tenterhooks. Pretty much everything else becomes displacement activity for the anxiety I’ll otherwise feel until a decision is announced one way or another.

We collected Monty from the neighbours who’ve been taking care of him: they decided he’d be miserable locked up in our house so they took him back to theirs. Now he’s depressed. Maybe they should keep him. I certain don’t want him. I know that sounds mean, and I don’t actually wish him harm – I just don’t see him or want him as my cat.

We have to take him back to the vet tomorrow for a check up. If he gets the stitches out and the all clear he can be let out doors to make up his own mind.

This long weekend has been reasonably relaxing and enjoyable. I kept wishing though, that I was actually sharing it with someone. We were like two long-term acquaintances rather than husband and wife. At one point the husband in the other couple (who is the Fat Bastard’s best mate with the cable subscription, the great sound system and the even better music collection) said something that made me realise he too has seen through him but tolerates him.

In a way I’m rather admiring of his ability to treat so many people so badly (either with acts of bastardry or by dealing out lots and lots of small disappointments) and yet be held, at least in some quarters, in such affection.

Like me he (Top Buddy who is his Best Mate) has recognised the Fat Bastard’s propensity for what the generous hearted might call tall stories. I heard from TB some variations on some of FB’s cherished stories. One of them concerns driving. Specifically it concerns driving in the US. The Fat Bastard has never held a full British driving licence but he’ll tell you about how he spent some time in the US and did some driving. I heard one version (uncle who is or was a bishop in Florida) lending him a car; TB, it transpires, has heard another which involves driving a car from one coast to another for a relative. Note how the story has been worked on since he told it to me.

The truth is he doesn’t know enough about driving to have ever done much of it. The only words of real criticism of the Fat Bastard I heard the Top Buddy utter were connected with the Fat Bastard actually grabbing the steering wheel while Top Buddy was driving. That little revelation emerged after I’d explained that I’d given up the car in fear of killing the pair of us during a fit of road rage brought about by his instinct for side seat driving.

I’ve got an advanced driving certificate (for what it’s worth now) while he has a Learner Permit.

The flip side of enjoying what I did enjoy about our holiday is that I had it brought home to me the extent to which my current existence is little better than that of a ‘resident’ in one of Her Maj’s Open Prisons. The open road, the leisure activities; they’re all stuff I’ve had to leave behind. The passage of time has acted as a kind of anaesthetic but the wounds are now smarting as they haven’t in a long time. Hopefully that will act as motivation.

‘Nuff rambling. Supplementary posts and corrections to follow.

Bananas ... and so forth

Little fact about me: I don't like bananas.

I'm about the only person I know who can't stand the things. I've eaten precisely 0 (zero) bananas over the course of my life, as far as I can recall. My mother tried to get me to eat them but I couldn't abide the taste or the texture. The mere thought would be enough to make me gag. She gave up after a handful of attempts that I can recall.

Now that I'm a mother I suspect that that I'd eaten them as a baby. Quite why I decided I wouldn't eat them is something that must remain a mystery.

I mention this because the Infant ate bananas as a baby, then stopped about the time she acquired the ability to construct sentences. I couldn't understand what was happening but suspected that it was toddler assertiveness ... that she'd find bigger and more important issues to fight me over (boys/short skirts/make-up/telephone/homework/housework and so forth) and get over bananas.

Other things that went the way of the banana included Rice. I love rice. I could happily live on rice based dishes. As a baby the Infant would happily tuck into a risotto or paella. Then suddenly, no more.

Fine. I'm happy to cook two evening meals a day in a three person household [hint: you're supposed to detect heavy sarcasm here]. And wash up afterwards. And put away.

Then three weeks ago the Infant was sent away for a week by the Mother-in-Law I can no longer describe as From Hell (because she might be seriously ill and under those circumstances such a soubriquet might be construed as Poor Taste).

What a shoddy excuse for a Greek Goddess I am.

A week ago we had Peking Duck - a kit our local supermarket sells that we all love. Usually I make myself a side dish of steamed rice. I was rather astonished when the Infant asked for some. I was even more taken aback when she actually ate it. What really got me was the way she explained without missing a beat, in response to my slightly sarky question concerning the date of her renewed taste for rice, "I tried it at SuperWeek."

Last night she was still up when I got home. Eating a banana!!. Damned SuperWeek. Damned kids. Meanwhile our house is in total turmoil.

• We have all the cat crap : food bowls (new), carrier (borrowed), litter tray (blue) and newspaper (old).
• We have all the camping crap - loads and loads.
• We have washing and ironing everywhere - too wet outside, no dryer.
• We have crap crap - largely this is his stuff crap. Books (mostly) but also other stuff that he's just had to acquire, though without having any purpose for this crap.
• We have toys - the Infant's (mostly) but also some of his toys such as weights.
• We have all the pictures taken down from the walls ahead of painting (not yet done) and propped up along the walls.

Ordinarily I'm a pretty shoddy housewife - what point cleaning when the Fat Bastard is a couple of paces behind me all the way, making things worse than before I started - but recently I've been frantically trying to do something about the state things have slipped into by working around all this crap. A lot of it is crap he promised me he'd take to the local charity shop, but that stuff is still around the house in the boxes I put it into.

Although I did say on Tuesday that I'd come to regard the prospect of a long weekend away with the Fat Bastard as attractive I'm now quickly working myself up into a state of "bugger it the weekend couldn't be worth all this stress".

In the midst of sick and stroppy cat, fat lazy bastard husband, sleepy infant, lousy weather (we're off camping so this was a given), I've also got to cram forty hours work into Monday-Thursday with a dodgy knee that's led to a dodgy back and sort out this mess with IND.

In fact I'm bloody fed up.

I can't wait

for this week to be over. Even the prospect of spending four whole days in close proximity to the Fat Bastard looks enticing after what's gone on so far, and it's only TUESDAY.

The cat's decided that he doesn't like the pain killers. Well that's fine. Except they're also anti-inflamatories so he really should be taking them. Silly sod. He's decided that discretion is the better part of valour and used the litter tray once or twice. Which constitutes progress of sorts.

The Fat Bastard was supposed to come up and get his photograph done using our photobooth but FORGOT even though this is crucial material for the visa application. MORON.

More problematic: I can't find his passport. The damned thing's been floating around the house, I'm sure I've seen it fairly recently but right now WHEN I NEED IT I can't lay my hands on the effing thing. Fortunately I have a photocopy. I have to hope that'll be good enough. I wasted a morning already trying to find it, turned the damned house upside down. Somehow I managed to hurt my knee.

This morning my knee had a twinge but as the afternoon progressed (and I was up and down and up and down sorting out one problem after another) it got worse and worse and WORSE. All the time I was walking in such a way as to ease the strain on my knee and that upset my hips which started to complain rather LOUD and then, finally, about 8:00pm my back got in the act. Bearing in mind how VERY OLD and BATTLE SCARRED I am it shouldn't be any wonder that I have a few aches and pains.

I broke several bones in my spine as a teenager and my lower back is prone to taking umbrage at being required to do THE WRONG SORT OF WORK. It takes a bit to bring tears to my eyes but by the end of my shift I was white faced and watery-eyed. I HAD HAD ENOUGH.

I left getting my own photographs done until too late in the day: the ones that came out of the machine were dreadful (and I'm not being the least bit GIRLY about this - they looked like images of someone who had her mind elsewhere, and mine was in the drug cabinet romancing the paracetemol.)

I'm off to bed now, perchance to sleep. (Apologies for the shouty bits.)

Congratulations Tony & Mark

The following post was knocked together in the early morning of Saturday, but for some reason Blogger chose to eat it. Since Tony's proved himself repeatedly a top drawer neighbor I'm posting it AGAIN. Blogger, do your worst.

Tony was a godsend in what is now yesterday's evening drama involving the cat that isn't mine.

He and his other half actually looked at the house we bought when they were looking to buy but ended up in the house around the corner so we've been here pretty much exactly the same amount of time.

He's the raucous half in his partnership and has been a godsend to me in the past (when the dog belonging to another neighbour broke through the fence into our garden and killed one of my cats for example). Conversation was a bit stilted on the way to the vet which was partly down to having a wailing cat on the back seat to contend with. On the way back though just after we'd set off he casually dropped "we're getting married in December" into the conversation and with admirable aplomb I eschewed the opportunity to say "don't do it".

Followed a long and thoroughly entertaining description of all the usual hassles involving dates, venues, menus, music, seating arrangements, obstreperous relatives and awkward friends. Tony and his other half have sat out the rush and waited while what he tonight described as 'all the old Queens' rush to the altar; he and Mark are making their own way in their own time. It goes without saying that I wish the both of them all the very, very best.

Monty (again)

A photo post, of sorts - a couple of befores (Monty stretched out on B's bed - Butter Wouldn't Melt etc) and some afters (the stitched wounds). He's not himself, which is understandable. He's not at all happy about the tray - so far refusing to use it but instead attempting to turn the key in the kitchen door preparatory to making The Great Escape.

Poor little thing. His back legs got ripped to pieces; the front of the left is worse than the right...

This is his left flank. The most grim looking injury though not even among the cuts that caused the most concern; they were the two on the front legs (which he wouldn't let me photograph).

On the other hand it is these wounds on the lower part of his right leg that are causing him the most discomfort.

Behaviour unbecoming

I know, I know. I'm a fifty foot tall Greek .... (blah blah) and this is thoroughly undignified.

WE are now the proud owners of a cat. That is to say the Fat Bastard and B have been over to the vet and collected Monty on whose behalf I have forked out what for us is a small fortune.

When I spoke with the vet this morning he was much happier with Monty's condition - no sign of respiratory distress suggesting that he had not after all torn his diaphragm. That in turn meant a less onerous recuperation. Freedom to roam the house, though he will have to be kept indoors until the stitches are out.

One stumbling block to us taking him back, and it is still a problem is that we are travelling en famille; this coming weekend is a long (Bank Holiday) weekend here in England. We're leaving on Friday morning early and getting back late Monday. The stitches don't come out until Tuesday (tomorrow week). Someone's going to have to care for Monty while we're away and that includes dispensing the antibiotics and painkillers. I must say though that he's not been at all difficult about the tablets much unlike our old two; who hissed and scratched and spat at the first sign of medication of any kind.

I've a couple of options, but the one I don't like is keeping him here cooped up in the house and having neighbours come in. For one thing he's going to tear the house to shreds left here on his own for three and a half days. In fact I'd be astonished if he didn't find a way out, even if one involving excavation, a wooden horse and all the usual WWII escape committee paraphernalia.

I'm hoping that we can dump him with Tony and Mark but I haven't yet asked them...

On Tuesday he has to go back to the Vet for another xray to check his chest and to have the stitches taken out.

The saga of the IND form continues. Now I can't find the Fat Bastard's passport and I need to include that with the set of documents we have to submit.

Tonight he (The Fat Bastard) closed his window to shut off that avenue and managed to break the pane of glass. Right now that's covered over with cardboard. When we get back I'm going to have to stick my hand in my pocket and get that fixed.

His mother's got to go back for a second colonoscopy for some reason or another and she's not reacted well to that news.

At the moment there seems to be no end to the amount of strife and I'm beginning to feel just a tad stressed ... I can't help thinking that a fifty foot tall Greek Goddess in a bad mood would be dangerous company.

I've just found Saturday night's lottery ticket - don't fancy my chances this week!

POST SCRIPT: Now I've checked the ticket; not a penny. Oh well. Thanks to 'Me' at My Life at Full Speed I've been reminded of another completely crappy development today, though it turned out ok in the end. Gas and Electrickery are supplied by the same company who sent me a statement about a month ago. We're substantially in credit on the 'trickery side but seriously not in credit on the gas side. So I asked for a new Direct Debit arrangemetnt and the stupid woman on the other end said she'd send me a new form to sign. Fine. The matter slipped my mind for a week or so but when I remembered I phoned back and asked them to send me a second copy (the first having it seems been sent but gone astray in the post).

That turned up finally on Thursday and I sent it back on Friday. So I was a bit surprised to get a threatening letter demanding the immediate payment of £506 pounds in arrears. After initially fraught conversation I was able to sort the whole bloody fiasco out by altering the direct debit over the phone. Why that couldn't have been done in the first place is a mystery I can't be arsed to attempt to solve.

Farewell Monty

I called the vet this morning to confirm arrangements for collecting him, really expecting them to tell me that they'd stitched him up and he'd bounced back from his scare.

Instead I got a lengthy explanation of their investigation thus far, the further treatment required, care and prospects. Monty was hit by a car, in all probability, and the x-ray has showed up a blur around his diaphragm which suggests a small tear. That tear - if indeed it is a tear, could prove fatal if he isn't kept indoors and effectively caged while the tear heals itself.

While the cuts have been stitched up he needs fairly intensive care for the next couple of weeks, including a further trip to the vets that will cost at least another £100.00

To be really blunt that's £100.00 I cannot afford. Had he been my pet I would have insured him and wouldn't be facing these bills. After consultation with the other neighbours who've known him including Mark and Tony it has been agreed that the RSPCA step in to make arrangements for finding him a permanent home and preferably one away from main roads. Monty will never be a house-cat so he'll have to go somewhere safe and away from main roads such as the one at the top of our path.

The vet has been very sympathetic and promised to keep us informed of his progress. If we were to win the lottery tonight I'd say "we'll keep him" without hesitation even though at times he has aggravated me beyond belief. The vet's told me that the RSPCA will pass on details of his resettlement and I'm sure that they'll take care to make sure he goes to a good home. He's a good looking cat, fun, cute and in the prime of life. Once he's recovered he'll make someone a lovely pet.

In fact he's turned on the charm for the vet and the nurses who seem to have taken him to their hearts and I'm quietly hoping that one of them will make some private arrangement for his placement.

In the meantime this has all been too difficult for us. I knew after our own two cats died in such awful circumstances that we'd be better off not getting into such an emotional arrangement again. Also if I'm going home the last thing I want to be saddled with is a pet we either have to then leave behind or try to take with us. The Fat Bastard has no sense and encouraged Monty to adopt us; the upshot of that particular stupidity is that I now have a distressed eight year old who is struggling to understand that when I took Monty away on Friday that was the last time she'd see him.

I feel like shit about this.

Monty the Mouth

I came back after today's marathon session at the shop to no sign of the cat. Monty (not his real name) adopted us shortly after the death of the second of our two cats (of old-ish age). Previous posts about Monty can be read from here.

Monty is the neighbourhood stray, belonging to everyone and no-one. He has a lot of street smart about him and a strong streak of independence. He's capable of being incredibly cute, but also an intense irritant because his perception of the balance of power in the relationship is so at odds with mine (it's a cat thing).

A little after us he came in, moving with difficulty, obviously very uncomfortable and very unhappy. My first thought was that he'd gotten into a fight as male cats will. He clearly wanted to be upstairs but was struggling to climb them so I helped him and when he sprawled on the bathroom floor I could finally see that he'd been injured but not, I thought, in a fight. The fronts of both his front legs had gashes in them as did his left flank. To my untutored eye they looked like cuts of some kind.

A trip to the vet was clearly called for. Fortunately there's one a few minutes walk from us so I sent the Fat Bastard to check they were open. He came back with a cat carrier into which we bundled Monty to get him there. The vet took a look at him and confirmed that the injuries were not the result of a fight but rather getting tangled in wire or even, possibly hurling himself through glass in fright.

The vet though (and this is a branch of a chain) isn't equipped to deal with injuries. It doesn't even have anaesthesia facilities. With B in floods of tears and the Fat Bastard not quite sure what he should be doing about anything I went next door and got a friend Tony to drive me and the cat to the nearest emergency vet. I'm now £300.00 poorer. The cat might have been hit by a car so needed to be x-rayed as well as knocked out so that the wounds could all be stitched and sutured. He's there overnight on a drip to get fluids into him and then there'll be antibiotics. Expensive little fucker - and he isn't even my cat.

Today in the shop

[APOLOGIES BUT THIS POST IS VERY MUCH TANGENTIAL, BUT IT ALSO HAPPENS TO BE MY DAY, TODAY].

I got up in time to discover that Monty the Mouth had developed a limp but being male he didn't want any fuss made. He so didn't want any fuss made that he made his way out through the cat flap and disappeared while I was making breakfast.

Today's been that day of the week I spend working in the local charity shop. The charity is a local cancer charity, raising funds for research and also to provide help (including respite care) for families dealing with someone being treated for cancer.

I got involved in this kind of volunteer work about two years ago after I stopped working in the city. I was motivated by a number of factors, including curiosity. Plus I've a particular interest in books (as distinct from literature) although I do read a lot and I offered the manager of the shop when it was being run for another national charity some time per week to help with the books.

Shortly after I started helping her the landlord abruptly cancelled the lease. Not long after the doors were closed for the last time stories started to circulate about town that 'the woman who used to run the X shop' would be reopening the premises in the name of another charity. That's what happend. The manager before the one I'd worked for (who'd been retired/sacked or something depending on who you listen to) did indeed relaunch the premises in the name of a cancer charity that had been set not so many years ago by the consultant who'd treated her.

So far so very laudable.

I found the woman a bit odd but I'm old enough to know that people come in all shapes and sizes and I prefer not to rush to judgement. That said the flaws in her set up were pretty quickly quite obvious. Her genius is in the area of rousing everyone to get something started. Whether it's grounded in a very short attention span or something else is irrelevent: she has no follow through. She isn't one of life's Completer/Finishers. Which leaves all those people she's roused in the lurch. Furthermore, she'd reached back to all her contacts from her old days of managing the shop and I found myself the youngest person in the shop by about thirty years.

What had been meant to be a couple of hours a day at most became

Serial posting

Astute / regular readers will have noticed that I've not posted about the hole in my back garden recently. This is because it is still a hole in my garden, with a pool frame and liner in it that now contains, in addition to 6" of (stagnant) water, quite a collection of leaves, twigs and dead insects. Ughh.

For fans of serial posting the Home Office Immigration and Nationality Directorate steps into the breach in timely fashion.

I have to get an application for Further Leave to Remain in and accepted by said directorate by 10 September at latest. The directorate won't accept applications submitted more than 28 days in advance of the cut off date. Once they've accepted my application and given it the once over to make sure it is complete and on the correct form they'll send me a letter (theoretically within a week) confirming acceptance of my application and that my existing Visa will then remain in force while a decision is made on my new application. My current employment contract ends on 10 September because that's the last date, as things currently stand, I can legally live and work in the UK.

Fine. Last week one of their simpletons was advising me to use Form X to make my application for permission to stay on in the UK. I laboured to complete the form, puzzled because so much of it seemed so irrelevant to my circumstances. On Monday of this week I took it upon myself to call HOIND to confirm one last time that I was using the correct form and the simpleton on the other end of the line said first Yes, then No, then Maybe, then Let Me Check With My Supervisor.

The Supervisor to my not very great surprise said NO I should be using Form Y. Could I have a couple of copies of Form Y sent to me then, please.

Yes. No problem.

Yes, Problem. After waiting days, and days, the letter from HOIND finally arrived yesterday. And guess what? The HOIND simpletons have sent me Form Z. Which is as much use to me as Form X.

These people fuck around with other people's lives with a casual insouciance (if that isn't tautological) that takes my breathe away. The Fat Bastard could take lessons from these people.

I work for fools (the post script)

This is the post script to what happened at work on Wednesday which I wrote about here or a couple of posts ago...

I worked the afternoon/evening shift again yesterday, walked into the office at 1:00pm to find there was some kerfuffle over the 'favour' I'd done someone during the previous evening. I've been left wishing so much that what I'd done at the end of Wednesday I'd done deliberately but alas it was merely the inadvertent consequence of their tediously ill-mannered behaviour.

Right...

Recap is that all sorts of problems arose because some peasant called in and without the courtesy of identifying himself had me doing all sorts of boring running around and I later pointed out so someone else (who commiserated with me at length) that if the Peasant hadn't been so rude a whole lot of misunderstanding wouldn't have happened.

Later another call came in asking that a 'favour' be done, again by someone who couldn't be arsed to let me know who I was dealing with. Well I did the favour requested for the Peasant.

Well... yesterday morning my colleagues were left running around sorting things out because the person who'd wanted the favour done hadn't received the information I'd compiled and emailed to him ... because I'd made the mistake of assuming that the person making the request was the same peasant I'd been dealing with earlier. But I was wrong. The second peasant was the same person who'd commiserated with me over Peasant No. 1's behaviour.

As I said I do wish I'd deliberately sent the info to the wrong person to make a point, but I didn't.

Housework

The interminable saga of the tip that is his bedroom: he decided a few weeks ago to dispense with the double bed (formerly our double bed) and put a single bed in his room. Notionally this was about creating more space in his room for tidying up. My suspicion would always have been that for him this space is as a handbag is to a woman. Space to be filled.

Yesterday and somewhat to my surprise he actually did dismantle and dispose of the old bed and put up the new one. He even made it, by which I mean he put a couple of sheets on it as well as a duvet with a cover and added a couple of covered pillows. Which just goes to show that he does know how to make a bed. Not well done, granted but made nevertheless.

He did this during the afternoon/evening while I was at work. I found out about it only when he came to my office to ask for the key to the dumpster. This is the enormous rubbish receptacle into which we place everything for compacting and carting away by a contractor. He'd not managed to finish the job in time to dispose of the remains of the bed at the municipal tip and so wanted to off-load it onto us. When he came back with the key he confessed that he'd not actually been able to fit the bed in completely.

He promised that he'd get in early and fix the problem, which is to say have another go at getting the damned thing further in or at least covering it with a sufficient amount of the sort of stuff that's supposed to be in the dumpster to disguise the presence of a rogue double bed.

So I wasn't expecting to find him still getting ready for work at 7:20 am this morning, which is about an hour and twenty minutes after he's supposed to be there and quite a bit after he'd need to get there to do a bit of surreptitious rubbish burying.

If the proverbial hits the fan over this I won't be in the least surprised. If he's threatened with dismissal over this I'd have to admit to being able to see the boss's point. That latter outcome is unlikely but only because we're shedding staff like nobody's business at present and he's as close to indispensable as a person can be right now. In the short term we really would struggle to cover his hours and duties.

So we've trouble looming on that front and meanwhile back in the battle zone that is his pigsty bedroom, we're making progress like the allies made progress on the Somme. We measure advances in inches. The fact that I can see the floor only means I can see more clearly how filthy it is. The mounds of clothes are there, the drawers of the chest are all open and overflowing and it is all to clear that the drawers are largely full of things other than his clothes (which are all over the floor). The wardrobe is so full it can't be closed and meanwhile he has several shirts hanging from the curtain pole and underwear draped over the radiator (presumably to dry).

A couple of glasses are still on the side table, the contents reduced by the passage of time to a dried crust. Loose change lies everywhere, among the clothes, the books, the CDs, the gadgets, the scraps of paper, the food/cigarette wrappers and so forth. I could go on (and on and on) but I can't be bothered.

I work for fools

Someone at work who is paid about twice as much as me didn't do something on Monday that she was supposed to do. This afternoon head office caught up with that oversight and asked me to fix the problem by sending to them the document my colleague had forgotten to send.

The document forms part of the set of documents generated once per week detailing and summarising the week's trading and financial figures. So the obvious place to look for the document was the box at my feet with the relevant week number and also the magical words that are the title of the missing document. Except that the document I wanted wasn't in there.

So I called another colleague who sometimes does the Monday work hoping she'd be able to tell me where I might find the missing document. No answer. I decided to wait a short while and try again.

In the mean time another fool from head office called to let me know that the bank had reported a shortfall in our cheques for one day during the previous week. Normally this involves a rubber cheque, but on this occasion it seemed the problem might be different; an instance of someone making things up. So I hauled the same box out from under the desk and flipped through the same set of papers for last week and confirmed the cheques we'd taken through the tills on the day in question.

They matched the banks figures but not the figures we were claiming we'd banked.

Problem is we bank another set of cheques from one of the franchise that don't go through the till and there was the discrepancy. So it appears that the bank has lost one of the cheques. The fool young lady from head office asked me to fax over a copy of my documents. I agreed, photocopied the flimsy and tried twice to get the damned fax machine to send it to her.

Loads of buggering around, in other words and all so that I could stick that copy in the post to her.

At this point, just for one brief moment, I allowed myself to believe that I'd weathered the storm but then some peasant (male) from head office called to ask where the waste report that had been requested earlier had got to. The conversation was long-winded and decidedly one sided and in no way involved an exchange of names from him to me. I did think I recognised the voice but I wouldn't have been prepared to swear to an identification.

I made another call to the colleague who'd been unavailable earlier and who fortunately now was answering her phone. She pointed me to where the document is kept (not with the rest of the week's data but somewhere else completely) and also where I could find an electronic copy which I could send by email. Less than a minute later the document had been sent on its way by me and purely as a matter of courtesy I called the young lady who'd first requested it to let her know I'd sent it.

This led directly to the only thoroughly enjoyable moment of the afternoon. You see I'm a sucker for a good voice and the guy called Guy on the other end definitely had a Good Voice. But he had no aptitude for the switchboard which he'd happened to answer in passing in the absence of anyone else. But he undertook to take a message. I've no idea what he looks wearing a twin-set, pearls, simper and sling-backs but he takes a mean message. In little or no time someone, but not the young lady I'd first spoken with was calling from head office in response.

Now this particular fool started by explaining that what-ever-her-name-is finishes at 4:30 (lucky thing). I explained that my call was a courtesy one to inform her that the document she'd been after had been e-mailed by me since our fax machine is a pile of crap - actually I did put this slightly less inelegantly, but only slightly.

I went on to point out that I'd had a follow up call but since the person who'd called hadn't had the manners to identify himself (and yes, I did put it like that) I hadn't been able to call him (or even send the damned document directly to him). The fool on the other end of the line suggested an identity for the caller that matched the identity I'd have given the caller. He went on to commiserate with me on the uncouth colleagues we're burdened by (and undertook to 'have a word with Mr X') but continued by pointing out that the whole sorry saga of this afternoon would have been unnecessary had the thing been done right first time.

I agreed with him but pointed out that the person in question wasn't around to get a clip around the ear hole from me. He expressed a certain touching confidence in my ability to deliver said clip around the ear hole which I deftly parried by suggesting that either the person in question is abnormally tall (bear in mind I'm really a fifty foot tall Greek Goddess but he doesn't know that) or I'm abnormally short.

The call ended with us on surprisingly (at least as far as I'm concerned) good terms.

About, oh, ninety seconds later the phone rang again. By this time I' given up all hope of getting my job done and I knew, deep down, this would be more hassle from head office. In view of what follows I have to suspect that the peasant was in the room with the fool when the most recently recounted conversation took place.

It was the peasant again. This time, however, his approach was along the lines of "Good afternoon, ..., its Head Office Peasant."

Great start, shame about the follow up: "I understand there's some problem with [the document]. I patiently explained to him that there was no problem, that I'd called as a matter of courtesy and blah blah and would he like me to send him a copy?

"No don't worry", he replied. Then a couple of minutes of desultory conversation and then a repeat (stupid, stupid me) of my offer to copy him the document in 'the next little while', this time accepted.

I honestly thought that would be that. As it happens all kinds of IT issues blew up right about then and I was rather distracted. So a little while turned into about half an hour and then the phone rang again. And it was The Fool once again, calling because The Peasant had expressed concern to him that I hadn't sent the document he'd been so un-anxious to receive. The fool and I had another conversation involving much delicate trashing of those around us. The minute the receiver was back in the cradle I was at the PC sending a copy of my earlier email to the pair of them.

Once more I was lured into thinking I was done with the lunatics who run this particular asylum, but they had one more treat in store for me.

The phone rang and it was the Peasant again, reverting to type in failing to identify himself but launching instead straight into some half apologetic half demanding 'request' that I do him 'a little favour'.

Seems we've had a new range of products sent to store and not one of the nitwits at head office involved in that exercise has taken the time or otherwise had the wit to record our own internal codes for these products. So could I please find the time during the evening to go out onto the shop floor with a list he's about to fax to me and hunt down these products and let him know what our codes for them are.

In between the phone line that carries the credit/debit transactions crashing (something that led to pandemonium) and some dodgy engineer tinkering with the cash machine on which we were suddenly so dependent, and dealing with aimless feckless floor staff who can take half an hour to empty a box onto the shelves and the moaning check-out staff who can't last two hours without a break (and then need a loo break half an hour later) ... I did manage to get those codes for the Peasant. But I'm not holding my breath in anticipation of a thank you.

His mother's son

I'm sure that she was grateful for the call she received today, the day after the procedure she underwent to remove a tissue sample for biopsy. At least I'm assured that he did call his mother to find out how she's doing, just keep in contact with her in lieu of a visit. I got back in at a little after 9:00pm pottered around a while, made myself some salad and in passing asked if he'd called his mother. He was, he assured me, about to call her. This was at about 10pm. He ducked out of the house with a drink in one hand a packet of fags in the other. He makes his calls from the lane because "he can't get a signal in the house". Hmmmmn I can can and our mobile phones are on the same network.

Anyway, I'm sure she appreciated being disturbed by the call from her thoughtful caring only child.

More confusion

No work for me yesterday so after a lazy morning catching up here and about the house and lunch B and I went out to the park with football. Due to a combination of circumstances (inappropriate footwear, short attention span, lack of willingness to knuckle down) that didn't last long. B is of the 'if at first you don't succeed, then wail about how hopeless you are and try something different' school. It doesn't matter how often I've suggested that she give something a little time, she can't get the hang of practising.

We went off on a bug hunt but the day was quite overcast and with quite a stiff breeze coming off the river also quite cool. We found a cluster of ladybirds and a shieldbug and spotted a couple of butterflies at a distance.

By this time B was also fed up with carting her football about so we went home to drop it off. She wanted to go to the playground and play on the swings and climbing frame. The Fat Bastard was back from work by this time and we explained that we were on our way back to the park via the library where we'd renew her library book which she'd taken out as part of this summer's Reading Challenge.

We didn't mean to stay at the library, but B got her nose into a book and I got my nose into a book. B finished her book and took out another one ... and before we knew where we were it was half past six and she'd read and reviewed enough books to complete the summer reading challenge.

She was feeling pretty smug about this all the way home; I was feeling a little puzzled that he hadn't swung by to dig us out of the library but not particularly alarmed. My mobile phone, which I'd left behind, was going off like crazy with missed calls and messages. The grumpy sod wanted to know where we where and clearly wasn't in the mood to be entertained that we'd spent the afternoon tucked away in the library.

This is the same Fat Bastard who could happily spend his life in the library, rarely answers his phone even when he has it with him and has never bothered in all the time of our marriage to take the trouble to keep me informed of his whereabouts and plans.

But if there's one thing the Fat Bastard doesn't believe it's that 'what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander'. That I can live with. Casting a pall over his daughter's natural jubilation that she's completed the Reading Challenge is quite another matter and what really pissed me off with yesterday evening's performance. He hauled himself out of his sullen mood long enough to join us at the dining table, then went outside for a fag and to call his mother.

The previous evening he'd announced late that his mother had been to see a specialist about suspected colon cancer and had a tissue sample removed for biopsy. I guess he must have forgotten what he'd told me because last night, again, he told me that she'd had the sample removed in the afternoon after enduring a barium meal the previous evening.

So now I'm confused as well as pissed off. Anyone want a confused and pissed off fifty foot Greek Goddess?

Anatomy of a manipulation

I have decided I'm not a forty something year old unhappily married woman, mother, daughter, domestic servant, paper-shuffler and general door mat. I am in fact a fifty foot tall, very old and blood thirsty Greek Goddess...

He's in trouble and he knows it. He knows that I'm a very long way from closing the book on his most recent stunt. He's lost a lot of ground and his way of retrieving it is to put me on the back foot. This is how he does it.

First of all he waits until I'm tired. Yesterday I was up at 5:30 to make sure he got to work in reasonable time (which means late but within his usual degree of lateness). I left work (the afternoon/evening shift) and got home at about 9:20pm. I was tired by this point, hungry and therefore potentially vulnerable.

I want to whip up a quick bite to eat and then sit down and eat in peace, but I won't get the chance.

Things kicked off when he asks about progress with my visa extension application. That isn't going as well as I'd like and I'm not in anything like the financial position to seek professional help this time around. I spoke with someone at the Home Office yesterday and received advice that flatly contradicts the advice given by me last time I spoke to someone there on the question of which form I should be using. Which is typical of Home Office-type government department help lines.

There isn't much I can do besides include the name of the HO staffer who advised me to use the form I use when I submit my application (which is now delayed by days as a result of this set back).

In order to explain the next step it is necessary to understand that at one point my 'immigration status' was 'irregular' which is a delicate way of saying I was at least technically an illegal immigrant. An interesting predicament for an essentially law abiding person; married wholeheartedly to someone with a law degree (or so at the time he claimed) who'd sought professional advice (or so he claimed) as to the best way forward for us when we married.

This was an instance of him telling me what I wanted to hear (that he'd obtained professional advice and we were doing the right thing) rather than needed to hear (that he hadn't done anything and hadn't a clue as to what was best).

No need to tell me I should have checked independently. I hadn't his measure in those days. But when I began to see that he couldn't be relied on absolutely I began to track back over the things he'd claimed he'd done and soon realised what he'd done.

To be fair the IND has been generous in letting me fix up the mistake but not quickly and not without delivering a slap at the same time. I have to reapply every two years and every two years applying means jumping through an elaborate arrangement of hoops.

The sorting out was finally done with professional assistance organised through legally qualified colleagues of mine and a professional immigration advisor.

This is ancient history - it stretches back over nearly 13 years.

Last night 'everything' was my fault by proxy because the legal advice of colleagues at a firm I joined in 1998 (yes, that's 8 years ago) was wrong in some nebulous way. Somehow he thought he could argue that a problem that arose 13 years ago would not exist but for advice I had obtained from my colleagues. Importantly I did seek professional advice, and I did get the mess cleaned up.

This is his way of attacking me: he drags something tangential from way out in the rough where it has been lingering for years and flings it at me. His problem is that I've become accustomed to these attacks. Once I would actually attempt to pick apart and argue methodically. Now I know that there's no point. He will writhe and latch on to isolated factoids and ignore chronology in his endeavour to bamboozle me into losing my grip on the central argument. Once I could actually be driven by these tactics to wondering if I wasn't after all mistaken and even possibly losing my mind.

Now I know better. I keep documentary evidence and when in doubt I take it out and study it. I have the evidence of his asset stripping (some of which required him to forge my signature), I have the evidence of his theft. I know that he lies and steals, and I can hold onto that knowledge when I'm under siege as I was last night.

He has a back up tactic for putting me on the wrong foot and he deployed it fully last night. After retreating to the garden for cigarette and a think he returned to the dining room where I was waiting for some peace before eating my meal.

His mother's doctor, he announced, thinks she has cancer of the colon. Now this, if it is true, is terrible and I said all the appropriate things. This, if it isn't true, is contemptible. But notice how he's put this. His mother's doctor thinks she has... He can't lose with that one.

He had told me she was off to see the doctor yesterday, but I was sure he'd said she was off to the foot doctor. I said as much. He explained that she'd actually had two appointments. (So he'd told me about the foot doctor but not about the second one - the one involving a biopsy sample being removed from his mother's colon.)

I'm beginning to feel a little confused and off-kilter, but I plunge on: I suggest he go over to spend some time with her tomorrow (ie, today) which is entirely feasible as he finishes work at 1pm and I don't need him to take care of B at all. But he says no, no; he'll go and see her when she's got the results. I'm slightly stunned. He's an only child, she's a widow rattling around on her own in a large house in London - and he's not going to take the first opportunity he has to go over and spend some time with her in the period between the sample being taken and the results coming back.

It is quite possible that we're about to plunge into a major crisis involving his mother's health that will require all of us to put other problems back onto the rear burner. For me to insist on anything else (like a divorce) would be callous in the extreme.

But I'm a blood-thirsty old fifty foot Greek Goddess and behavioural norms are so passé.

And one for his mother

Hell, while I'm at it let's blame his mother for all of this (I'm on a bit of a roll this morning) which I can do since he was 32 years old before I met him...

Teeth gritted I concede from time to time that he's intelligent. Except that isn't quite true. He's hugely, vastly, immensely intelligent. Defectively so, but nevertheless man endowed with an IQ that's comfortably within MENSA bounds. If he were some dumb-arse the personality faults would be obscured. As it is the combination of high intelligence and low motivation/self-esteem allied to an propensity for procrastination and a habitual posture of ineffectitude* has driven everyone he's ever come into contact with to distraction.

He's the hugely intelligent only son of older parents, and in particular a very driven determined woman who burdened him with her hugely inflated expectations of him and cooked him in a succession of prep school/jesuit public (ie, private, fee-paying, boarding) school.

The sort of family/school environment where a fat kid in spectacles could only assert himself by failing, against all the odds; a habit he got into early and hasn't the self awareness to set himself to shrug off.

There are lots of ways in which we can control our lives and the environment around us. He found one early that worked and since he's never grown up he's never found a grown-up alternative.


* I may have made this word up. It belongs with ineffective, ineffectively, ineffectiveness, ineffectual, ineffectually and ineffectualness in the same way that decrepitude (a personal favourite) belongs with decrepit, but I have to admit that it isn't in any dictionary I have in the house.

One for the fool in Philadelphia

Passive-Aggressive Personality Disorder doesn't exist. Officially. It is just a fancy-dan label applied by people who need to sound smarter than they are to individuals who would more efficiently and effectively described as 'a pain in the arse'.

But as a meaningless assemblage of attributes of someone suffering a non-existent condition, that list is compelling.

In my struggle to articulate the challenge of living with the Fat Bastard I have focussed on the absence of any sense of responsibility towards or respect for himself or others, the lack of self-discipline, the lack of ambition, the lack of common sense. The manifestations of this non-adult state include the lying, the deceit, the poor academic and employment records, the financial crises and the narrow stagnant social circle.

One site I found cited alcohol abuse as a recognised 'complication'. There's no doubt he consumes too much alcohol too frequently.

Anyway he dealt with me saying NO (repeatedly, firmly and unambiguously) to B going away on camp in text book fashion. The day before the start date he turned up at work to tell me that "he'd got the dates mixed up and it starts tomorrow". This is the thing I'd said NO to in January and in May. This is the thing his mother cooked up in the first place and took it upon herself to book MY daughter on to. No information provided, no research conducted, no preliminary visit, no personal endorsements or recommendations from anyone I know and I was being expected to send MY eight year old only child off for a week.

Me saying no had meant fuck-all as I'd pretty much expected all along. But the day before the start of this camp I found myself confronted by a determined father (quite determined to take absolutely no account of my point of view, that is) and the child he's told will be going away to camp for a week on the following day.

The following day we took our daughter in to London and put her onto a coach at Victoria in the company of a small group of people about whom I knew absolutely nothing. God help me. I didn't eat for four days, not sick with worry about B because the odds always were that she'd be fine (and she is), but sick with anger at myself and my predicament and my continued inability to extricate myself and put this sort of thing behind me.

His argument is that by me saying NO I'm taking no account of his feelings - as though there's some equivalence between my concerns and his determination to fall in with his mother's plan. In essence he trusted his mother to have found out about a perfectly safe holiday camp. He didn't visit it, check up on it in any other way.

We circled around one another for the entire week. Others at work knew of my feelings and to them he conceded that I was still in 'a bad mood' if asked. Towards the end of the week he got sick of me continuing to feed my anger and decamped to his mate's house (it has several advantages over ours such as 500 channels of porn, a serious stereo system and the music collection to go with it).

My repeated demands that he finally pull his finger out and clean up his room have fallen on deaf ears and it is this behaviour specifically that got me exploring the passive-aggressive behaviour and led me to see that this is a pattern that fits not only his life since we met but all his adult life, based on what I know of it.

The question a counsellor might ponder at this point is whether recognising the pattern of behaviour could constitute a first step towards recovery - not of me but of the marriage. And the answer to that is no. The lies and the thieving and the squalor might all be part of a syndrome with an established and recognised label but they're still corrosive behaviours and I'm still holed below the waterline.

If as the 'perts have it this condition is something that responds to treatment then I advise the Fool in Philly to put him in therapy pronto should he ever take up her offer to resettle in the States.

Oh and by the way the shafting me over the holiday camp mentioned above is the piece of bastardry to which I've been referring frequently over the past twelve days but not been able to deal with directly. So that's that done now.

Sometimes I slay myself

Well when you're a fifty foot tall Greek Goddess with attitude these things are inevitable. But in this case I have to 'mit to being a tad slow off the mark. All those thousands of years (it only feels like it) and the light has only now gone on.

I've been reflecting on his passivity. Ironic really considering how much fear he can instil. But it's there, and it always has been, and it has always been apparent too. The whole thing's only clicking into place now which is a damned nuisance as I've hauled myself finally into a position wherein I ought to have the luxury of not having to think about him at all. But there it is to worry about when the house is silent and I really haven't anything better to do.

So I've been contemplating his tendency to let life happen to him, events to wash over him, experience to envelop him without ever actually touching him, exciting him, enervating him. He just is ... a big vacuum around which life swirls. I've been contemplating this passivity and then the light bulb went PING!

Because passivity is half of the equation as the following list (not definitive) shows.

Occasionally I love lists. Someone showed me an article once which was headed something along the lines of Twenty Tell Tale Signs That Your Boss Is A Psychopath... I read the list and realised that I could tick off about seventeen of the twenty evaluated against my husband The Fat Bastard. Funny really as it was the Fat Bastard himself who'd shown me the article. I'm pretty sure that lacking empathy and an absence of self awareness were in there somewhere ....

Anyway back to being Passive-Aggressive .... this is the list:

• Ambiguity
• Avoiding responsibility by claiming forgetfulness [CHECK CHECK]
• Blaming others [CHECK]
• Chronic lateness and forgetfulness [CHECK CHECK CHECK]
• Complaining
• Does not express hostility or anger openly [CHECK]
• Fear of competition
• Fear of dependency
• Fear of intimacy
• Fears authority
• Fosters chaos [CHECK]
• Intentional inefficiency [CHECK CHECK]
• Making excuses and lying [CHECK CHECK CHECK]
• Obstructionism [CHECK]
• Procrastination [CHECK CHECK CHECK]
• Resentment [CHECK]
• Resists suggestions from others [CHECK CHECK]
• Sarcasm [CHECK]
• Sullenness [CHECK CHECK CHECK]

The Poodle is toast

I've tinkered, and having tinkered I tinkered a bit more. Now I have a Weather Pixie for here on the main blog and a Melbourne Weather Pixie on the other blog (the one that is My Other List).

I can't say how comforting it is to now know that the temperature at shortly after midnight in Melbourne in the middle of winter is slightly less than the temperature here in the south-east of England during the middle of the day in the middle of summer. Mind you it is wetter here.

This is all, of course, as a direct result of attempting to put a pool in our garden.

As several smart-arses have been heard observing since the ban on using garden hose pipes was introduced by water companies some weeks ago: the drought continues to fall from the sky. Yes indeed.

I am seriously considering putting the heating back on and I actually did wear my Thinsulate boots yesterday. Still I would be colder yet if I were back home.

The Poodle

I don't have time to tinker with it now but that particular weather pixie is going to have to go... I absolutely will not have a poodle. Nice wardrobe though. Shame really. She should be starting to strip off soon, too ... the sky is blue, the breeze is light and we're in for a lovely day in these parts.

Another perfect day

The first thing I do when I come downstairs in the morning is put on the kettle. The second thing I do is put on the radio. I always have the radio on in the background.

I grew up in a radio family. I have an abiding memory of my paternal grandfather slight of frame and stooped with age standing at the large work table in the centre of his kitchen, the week's newspapers spread out before him, a glass of whiskey in one hand and a cigarette (Kent, soft pack) in the other. Always a lit cigarette and a glass to sip at.

At his back the antiquated range and next to it the equally old refrigerator, against the wall to his left the ice box that had preceded the 'fridge but never been evicted from the kitchen. Opposite him some cupboards and a bench on which he kept his radio.

In general he preferred not to be troubled by children, believing that they should be outside and exercising or indoors and studying (or asleep). But he never believed more strongly in the adage that children should be seen but not heard than for those few moments each day when Blue Hills was being broadcast. The Archers is the British equivalent. I've no idea if there's an American equivalent but somehow doubt it. All I can recall now of Blue Hills is the evocative theme ... after all it was the signal for us to make ourselves scarce.

Blue Hills ran for 27 years from 1949 to 1976 daily, and in so doing it become the longest running serial in Australian radio history. Blue Hills' success seems largely to have been due to its very rural content and appeal; television arrived later in the bush and as a result radio endured until a later date in rural parts of the country as the primary source of information and entertainment. It was broadcast during the day when people listened to the radio while doing other tasks, rather than at night as other serials had been.

Incidentally the same woman (Gwen Meredith) wrote every single episode and if this biography is still accurate she's possibly off fly fishing somewhere, and at 98 years of age that isn't bad going either.

My grandfather was born up in the North East to a man who'd been forced from the land by the rabbit plague and the financial crash of the 1890s; the bush remained in his blood until the day he died. For him Blue Hills must have been something like a brief daily visit home.

We had the radio on in our house and one of the signatures I recall vividly is the introductory music for weekly radio program Singers of Renown. It was a very long time before I could appreciate this hourly showcase of great voices.

The football was always on during the winter on Saturday afternoons, but that was back in the days when the VFL was all, and it comprised 12 teams; six games played each Saturday afternoon - and a choice of highlights/panel discussions on TV afterwards.

Ash Wednesday happened or more accurately began on 16 February 1983 (on my sister's birthday as it happens). I was in my first job, working at the bottom end of town near Spencer Street railway station (now called something else). My boss offered to drive me home on what was a dreadfully hot day so I accepted. The cars were all kept in a basement car park directly beneath us so we didn't see the outside world until we drove up the ramp and out onto Little Collins Street. I had a pair of glasses with photo-chromatic lenses and as we reached the outdoors I said something to the effect of "gee, it's brown with these on!".

Yup it was brown alright but it had nothing to do with those lenses. The death toll from the fires was 73. All in all those fires burnt out over a million acres of land in Victoria and South Australia, resulting in devastated crops, stock and wildlife. Bob turned on the radio which was tuned to one of the commercial stations. We were just in time to hear them transfer to South Australia and we listened in horrified silence as an Adelaide journalist Murray Nicholl broadcasting live-to-air described the destruction of his own home in the Adelaide Hills.

Radio has a capacity for delivering such moments which TV can rarely match. In fact the only equivalent I can think of off the top of my head is the destruction of the space shuttle Challenger. Radio has a flexibility which lends itself to dealing with emerging and fluid situations.

Today has been a case in point and actually what prompted this series of reminiscences. The morning began with me telephoning The Fat Bastard (but not before putting on the kettle and the radio) to let him know he should be awake and at work. He'd fallen asleep over at his mate's yet again, not a bad thing in some ways but I'd rather he didn't lose his job just yet.

And while I waited for the kettle to boil I began to take in that something of a National Security nature was kicking off. My first reaction was a warranted cynicism: yesterday John Reid makes a speech warning Her Maj's subjects that they'll have to give up some [more] of their rights and freedoms for a while as their part in the War on Terror; today we've apparently got a Security Spectacular to underline the need for that War and for the surrender of those rights and freedoms.

I'm all for a good conspiracy theory over my first cup of coffee but...

As this story has unfurled it has become apparent that this Security Spectacular involves far too many people for it to be nothing other than a cheap stunt by the Home Office designed to convince Brits of the need to live in something resembling more and more a Police State. For TV to achieve what radio has achieved this morning in communicating this story as it has taken shape all normal programming would have to be suspended (except in the case of 24 hour news channels).

Radio on the other hand can integrate an emerging story with normal programming and has done so with aplomb.

I'm now going to switch over to the Frogs for a bit; I'm now thoroughly bored by reports of congestion at and around Heathrow. I got that point a couple of hours ago and I can recite by heart the list of things people are currently permitted to take onto a plane with them.

Off to work this afternoon, so must go get ready.