Music for pleasure

We really do have conversations like this while we're cleaning our teeth...

"Did I dream this or did Max Bygraves die recently?"

"I don't know. Are you sure it was Max Bygraves?"

"No, that's why I was asking."

"Was it the other bloke, the one with the jumper?"

"Val Doonican?" 

"No. The Christmas one."

"Perry Como?"

"No. The other one."

"What other one?" 

"Is Val Doonican dead then?" 

"I don't know. I'll have to look it up on the 'net." 

Curtain calls

There's a rich seam of drivel to be mined from the conversations people have at the end of the day when they're too tired to talk but still insist on having conversations. Actually, this is a good description of virtually any conversation between myself and The Small Object of Desire at any time of day or night but we could just be tired.

Anyway, this is how we became entertained by a children's television series called "Bladderpuss," the everyday adventures of a cat full of piss.

A lapse

The Small Object of Desire has a question.

"Did I really just hear you tell that cat that he'd like sardines because they taste like pilchards by sing better?"

Might have done.

Lessons unlearned

You'd have thought I'd know better after the episode with the quilt, but oh no…

Much to my — and the blue tits' — dismay, I've temporarily put a clothes line up in the garden so that I can dry a bed cover which has been drip-draining into the bath for the past 20 hours after I had a fit of bank holiday domesticity.

For those of you struggling for pub quiz questions, it turns out that a quilted blanket can hold eighty litres of bathwater.

Overcast

Looking at the state of the living room - those piles of books here, that pile of DVDs there, the layer of dust on the mantlepiece (I only dusted it last month, I don't know where it all comes from) - I wonder, yet again, if this place couldn't do with the occasional bit of attention by one of those strange chaps with the lumps on the front. Not to do the cleaning and tidying, well not necessarily anyway, but to look disapprovingly or to need to sit down somewhere, that sort of thing. I know how it feels: there have been times in my life when I could have benefited from somebody saying: "you're not going out like that!" or "I think you're over-thinking that one," or, more usually, "you know that thing that you said you were going to do? Did you remember to do it?" Of course, this would need to be said in a gentle and loving way as I don't respond terrifically well to nagging. Mind you, I'm told I don't respond terrifically well to such requests made in a gentle and loving way, either, though I suspect the personal agenda of the source of that opinion.

Anyway, it's all looking a bit untidy at the moment.

Evidently I've gone through some sort of mild depressive episode over the past couple of months. Which is strange as I haven't felt depressed. Tired, yes, but then I have been over-flogging a couple of dead horses. Pissed-off, certainly, but if being pissed off was a key diagnostic for depression then most of the country outside the City of London would be under the doctor for it. And yet... There are things depressives do and I've been doing them. Such as fretting about official letters that won't go away when you put newspapers on top of them and then just turn out to be sales pitches for new gas boilers or new ways of paying your electricity bill by selling your children to utility companies. Or worrying about the local train services - ha! I might as well worry about the state of the customs depot on Krakatoa. And somewhere in one of those four piles of books on the sofa is the book I think I'm reading at the moment. Odd little things that you don't notice yourself until they're dug in as habits but which somebody else might quickly pick up on and challenge. Or not, as the case may be (I've had feedback on that one, too!)

I'll just have to be more careful. All the evidence suggests that we're going to be entering a Winter of dismay, I'll just have to take care not to bring too much of it home with me.

Note to self: buy some Harold Hare comics and a crate of cream soda.

Transports of delight

A sign of just how out of touch the poor old CBI is getting these days is their call this weekend for 'radical' chnges to the daily commute for to alleviate rush hour congestion. Their radical solution is to stagger commuting times. Round our way, for the past couple of decades, the morning rush hour has stretched from about 6am to 10am and the evening one from 3.30pm to 8pm. And with scarce any effect on traffic congestion.

"The CBI would like to see the policymakers put the same amount of energy and vision into roads as they are doing on high-speed rail."

In that case the nation would be fucked. There'd be one motorway in Kent and the rest of the country would be served by B-roads that were laid out in the 1880s and re-metalled once every forty years.

Those that hadn't been grubbed up by Doctor Beeching, that is.

Puzzle

I've never understood this: people who get to the top of an escalator and stop and stand and stare. Dead ahead, usually at a wall or a mannequin. Or blankly into space.

I could understand it if they stopped to look at a direction sign or similar, though I reserve my right to be irritated by them, but some idiot stood standing staring into space is not what you want to be stepping out to when it's your turn to get to the top of the escalator. There were six of us behind one such idiot this afternoon, all trying to look like we were just about to reach the top step.

In the end an old lady prodded his hamstring with her shopping trolley and we all sidled through the gap before he could reposition himself.