A weery drudje rite (chiz, chiz)

Well, I'm well under the cosh... (Caution: This post includes middle-aged bloke whingeing)

The Small Object of Desire is out with her mates again, having coffee and cakes and a gossip while I'm left behind cat-sitting again. Cat-sitting at Railway Cuttings mostly involves being sat on by The Cat I Do Not Have, in between its being asleep and its eating. It saves going out for a romp* in the garden for three o'clock in the morning and the moment the breakfast toast is just starting to singe. Yelling at the door for me to let her back in is saved for four o'clock in the morning and the moment we're trying to leave for work at the latest possible moment because it takes The Small Object of desire about four hours to wake up enough to be safe to drive. Tonight I had to rescue the silly pillock† from the wash-house roof (because it's raining and it didn't want to get its feet wet). Stone me, what a life...

The Small Object of desire has been abandoning me to wanton Fate quite a bit lately. The other day it was to go to a Johnny Morrissey concert, the local stop in his I Opened Chester Zoo You Know Tour. She was there amongst the crowd waving their Linda MacCartney vegetarian sausages, which he made speak a quirky commentary with a series of unlikely voices from the corner of his mouth. He's a game old bird and she came home happy with her "Surly Brute From Stretford" T-shirt so all ended well.

Me, I'm just pootling along. There's a phenomenal load of stuff going on at work at the moment, to silly deadlines, so I'm pretty much crashed and burned before I get through the doorway. Which may pass as half an excuse for the state of both house and garden. Somewhere out there there's about six pounds of boysenberries to pick, once I force my way past the roses, geraniums and boysenberry runners. Much to my surprise, and probably due to the vile weather, the gooseberry bush hasn't been ravaged by sawfly this year and we got a pound or so off safely. The downside to the sawfly leaving the leaves alone is that I forget that the bush has inch-and-a-half-long thorns (that's forty six kilometres in the new money), which gave me the opportunity to teach the new goldfinches a few new words in basic Anglo-Saxon.

And aside from all, next to nothing's been happening lately.


* "Going out for a romp." As in: "I'll just scrape my shoe on your doorstep, I trod in a romp on my way here."
† The cat, not The Small Object of Desire. She hardly ever gets stuck on rooves these days.

In praise of gentle madness

I was going to write a tribute to the late, great Eric Sykes but Scaryduck has written a blinder.

One of the earliest Sykes scripts I know of was a monologue written for Frankie Howerd on "Variety Bandbox" back in the days when the Light Service ruled the wireless. In it, Howerd had got work in a zoo and the first job he was given to do was to deliver an elephant to an address across town. By bus and tube. Frankie Howerd milking the fits of giggles generated by the mental picture of his trying to coax an elephant up an escalator is a joy and I wish I could find a copy to post on here.

Instead, I'll offer up a piece of gentle silliness from the 1963 Royal Variety Performance:

I wonder if she did do that second house...

If it's raining it must still be Summer

Up with the lark, tra la! -- so long as someone had coshed the lark with a sock full of wet sand -- to minister to the breakfast needs of The Small Object of Desire and The Cat I Don't Have. It is not a morning for delicate masculine sensibilities.

Looking at the state of the bath I wonder, yet again, that The Small Object isn't bald.

"You could stuff a good-sized middle-aged man with all that hair," I said.

"That had been my plan," she replied.

Waving her off to work with a cheery smile (which prompted her to point out that there's nothing erotic in "a grimace and a lot of snot-filled grunting"), I turned to look at the hall. Railway Cuttings will never be an Ideal Homes photoshoot but even by my standards it's got a bit untidy so I took to giving the stairs a sweep with the hand brush. The look of disgust that The Cat gave me as she stalked out of the front door will haunt me till lunch time.