Love is…
Explaining "The Double Deckers" to a loved one while she is having a shower.
And doing the little dance.
Never mind the woman or the dog, look at the songs. Can you imagine going the twist to any of them?
"The Yellow Rose of Texas"
"Tea For Two"
and best of all: "The Indian Love Call."
Nelson Eddie: you've gotta dig that pussycat!
The booklet cost £2.50 and I gave the lady at the desk a £5 note. A proper one with a picture of Dame May Whitty on the back of it. The lady at the desk rummaged in the coin tray for a considerable time. A good half of the tray was covered in pound coins and there was a mound of fifty pence pieces just to one side. But still she rummaged in the coin tray for a considerable time. Reluctantly she palmed a fifty pence piece then rummaged a bit more. In the end she gave me an assortment of 10p coins, some 5p coins, a twenty and the fifty pence piece. Scores of pound coins to give as change and she gave me two hundredweight of half-chewed threepenny bits. You have to wonder about some people.
I'm almost ashamed to think about the long list of artists and writers I swiped from in the course of a decade's worth of King of the B-Movies. (See if you can spot the self-portrait!)
Some more post titles lost to the mists...
Judging by the state of the The Cat I Don't Have the growing season is upon us, which is a tad premature given that the Daily Express is promising us another Ice Age and all the musk oxen you can eat at your local MacDonald's. At the moment it is 55% by volume fur, 10% garden debris, 5% exotic fauna and, optimistically, we'd like to think the rest is cat. I'm happy to take it on trust, I'm not going in there no matter how insistent the invitation.
Last weekend we were ripped from our slumbers by the most appalling caterwauling. The Small Object of Desire sat bolt upright, looked at her watch, realised it was not quite yet noon and said things Not Fit For A Sunday. I looked outside and saw that it was cat. She was sitting in the rosemary bush yelling like The Banshee Who Stood On Some Lego at Frankie Howerd, the cat from two doors down. They are not friends. We call him Frankie Howerd partly because he looks like the late Frankie's last Irish but mostly because he has the same vocalisations. It's quite unnerving to be lying there in the footstep hours of the night listening to something outside going: "Oooh... No. I'm down to my last titter." If he ever encounters the collared dove that sounds like Lesley Philips we'll be having Elstree on the doormat asking for royalties.
I've just noticed that these underpants have a label saying: "Keep away from fire." There are whole avenues of human experience that I've left unexplored...
We'd decided - finally! - to go on our first proper holiday, as opposed to the occasional day out and that week we spent in bed. We were a bit tentative as we're both picky sociopaths so we decided that we'd best move about a bit, just in case. So we did a lightning visit to the pointy bit at the bottom of the country. (Alas, too fleeting to give a shout to them nice Pat and Scarlet.) After a few nice days we pootled back home, taking a meandering track that would eventually get us back hereabouts...
There was a giant flea Market at Newton Poppleford. Imagine our dismay to find that they were, in fact, selling giant fleas.
The gents lavatory at Bridgewater had advertisements for Easter eggs, which is wrong on so very many levels
Egad!!! I am sure I bumped into Armand and Michaela Denis in the Book Barn at Hallatrow on the way over to Mummerset. They were filming the habits of two middle-aged ladies who were complaining that the Shell Guide to Gardening wasn't in the conchology section.
"I've never read a Jilly Cooper book, have you?"
"I don't know that I have."
There's no call for that, Summer days in Helminthdale or no Summer days in Helminthdale.
So there I was, walking through the park when I noticed a couple of these things in the children's play area. I have no idea what they are. Essentially, they're a funnel on a stick a metre and a bit high (four foot in old money). Inside the funnel is five holes; I can't work out why or where they go. There are two of these; one at each end of the park but don't face each other: they're oriented 30° to each other.
Wotizzit?
"You'll have to watch out for yourself," said my mother. "It says here that homes across the country are going to be invaded by sex-crazed spiders."
I wonder what song my niece thinks she's singing when she trills:
The bells ring for Tim,
The cat is bald,
King of the wild frontier!
I blame the father.
It occurred to me on waking up this morning that it's over thirty tears since I last used a box plane. I've spent the rest of the day wondering why I'm upset about it.
I'm tired and scratchy at the moment and I'm seeing the world without all the usual filters, pretence at civilisation for the use of. I sometimes do this on purpose when "I'm being creative," which can be interesting and useful. It's a bit unnerving when you find it happening of its own accord.
Mid-evening, on my way home from the nightmare factory, post-tea-time so the street's quiet. Or relatively so: two streets down a car alarm is going and someone, somewhere is playing an Abba compilation. The first jarring note came at the corner: I don't recall having seen that somebody had jemmied that garage door. The family's in the house, though: one of the kids is yelling up the stairwell at somebody or other. So that's OK then I suppose. How come the crisp packets you see blowing round the pavement are never any that you see in the shops? I happen to know that down this street there lives a ginger tom, a silver tabby, a sort-of-tortoiseshell with ginger ears, two silly-looking things with wide eyes and an excess of hair in the ears, and a Persian cross that looks like a Merseybeat wig on a bad hair day. Today all I see are black and white cats with Hitler moustaches, five in all. At first I thought it was one and the same, but then I saw three of them together, sat sitting on the front lawn like so many china shepherdesses. The new slates on the roof of the first terrace make a perfectly-regular lozenge. The discoloration of the slates on the next house spells 'Lido' in Palatine type.
And there's a deckchair in the middle of the road...
The past few weeks on my daily commute through Manchester I've been tripping over little suitcases being pulled along on sticks by people of both sexes and all.
Who are these people? They can't all be Avon ladies.
I know there's a degree of hypocrisy in this, given how much time I spend with what Boyo's minder calls 'imaginary friends," but...
I was passing through unfamiliar territory on the bus today and I noticed one house in particular. It had a huge picture window. So far so good. The window was literally filled by a ginormous plasma television. Utterly baffling.
Prudence, Caution, Deliberation.
The Hermit points to all things hidden, such as knowledge and inspiration,hidden enemies. The illumination is from within, and retirement from participation in current events.
The Hermit is a card of introspection, analysis and, well, virginity. You do not desire to socialize; the card indicates, instead, a desire for peace and solitude. You prefer to take the time to think, organize, ruminate, take stock. There may be feelings of frustration and discontent but these feelings eventually lead to enlightenment, illumination, clarity.
The Hermit represents a wise, inspirational person, friend, teacher, therapist. This a person who can shine a light on things that were previously mysterious and confusing.
I must have been doing the cat's shoelaces
when this lot came a-calling.
What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.
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