Family homes

The Small Object Of Desire is settled into her new house and it's started to feel like a home (leastways, she's leaving her socks in the dining room). It's a nice Victorian terraced house; discussing it the other day we found we'd both come to the conclusion that it was like an old auntie. Much beloved and slightly disreputable in her way.

I asked what she thought of my house, which I've always seen as a barmy old uncle (perhaps projecting my own personality to the building). "Oh, it's a cheeky nephew," she said. "Its face is a bit dirty at times, but it's one of those nephews that you just have to love. You just roll yours eyes and think: 'bless'."

How nice.

Ladies, look away now

The new workplace (oh yes) has room in the gents for more than just the one lavatory bowl and a sink and it's a reminder to me of the etiquette of Office Gents'.

There are those people who will occupy a cubicle, with the door open, as they stand and have a pee. This is because they are Scared Of Somebody Seeing My Willy. Which is bad news at busy lunchtimes for those of us Scared Of Somebody Seeing Our Bottom Because We're Having To Shit In The Urinal.

Detective rules

"in all the detective stories I've read there is usually a good-looking and highly educated young officer who falls in love with a rich and beautiful girl and, after rescuing her every ten pages from a fate which is popularly supposed to be worse than death, marries her on page 366 and lives happily right up to the end cover."
— Edgar Wallace
"The House Of The Candles

Random acts of kindness

I live near a big shopping mall. Walking over there involves taking a short cut through an industrial estate and then nipping through an underpass to get to the approach road.

Walking through the underpass this morning I noticed a brilliant grafitto. There, in bright lemon spray paint was:

" Hello! I hope you have a really lovely day!"

More most we pissed...

Part the second of a very occasional series...

• The parting of the gravy
• It's not your birthday yeti
• You can tell it's real, it's got plastic fingers
• Sometimes the only solution to organisational failure is Dale Winton in a tutu
• The funeral was a gay affair and everybody laughed
• Thus do the wives of great men help save their husbands' modesty
• Two shakes of a lamb's doo-dah
• On hearing the first bunyip of Spring
• Waggling their MBEs
• The head of the herd was calling far, far away
• I have a spontaneously-combusting log
• A Corby Viking press
• A bed full of pamphlet pokers
• Bringing up "that clear thing"
  

Ties that don't bind

I have a red-and-white tie. It is a rather fetching red-and-black tie and I like it very much. Unfortunately, it doesn't go with any of my shirts. It doesn't even go with black or white shirts...

Jumpers for goalposts

Apparently, "Hurray For Santa Claus" isn't a good choice of bathroom serenade on a cold, wet June morning. Aside from that and the fight over the duvet and The Small Object Of Desire's too-strong protestations of innocence of the charge of lusting after Jeremy Clarkson (one of the subsidiary dangers of partnering a petrol head), Railway Cuttings' transition into sultry love nest is going remarkably smoothly. This is remarkable for two reasons: it's been more than a decade since I last shared any space with anybody at all (and quarter of a century since my last foray into co-habitant); and we're both natural curmudgeons of a high order.

There is, however, one dark shadow in this Elysian splendour. It is the matter of sex.

Luckily, we are both still capable in the arts of making love, with the aid of a walking frame and a box of safety matches. Unluckily, there is an issue about foreplay. Round these parts foreplay consists of a beery nudge after "Match of the Day" and the magic words: "How about it lass?" unfortunately, neither of us are beer drinkers (I don't drink at all, come to that) and we're not overly struck on "Match of the Day." We're both quite struck by how much Alan Hansen looks like Captain Scarlet but it's not enough to get the libido going.

We'd quite like the cry of: "Oh He'll, Mark Kermode's on the telly again! Switch it off!" to be the signal for romantic manoeuvres but we worry that this may be beyond the pale societally.

Ambition thwarted

It's a shame "Britain's Got Talent" is on before the 9pm watershed. I reckon my impersonation of Jimmy Durante could have been a contender.

Because it's Sunday

And because I've not gotten round to writing all that stuff I was supposed to be writing...

Sunday singalong

There is a view in this household that Joan Jett should be commissioned to rehabilitate the whole of Gary Glitter's back catalogue, this giving us back the excuse for a lot of road journey singalongs.

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.

28 Days Later...

The Small Object Of Desire And Moon Of My Delight woke up with a start.

"I've had a horrible dream," she said. "I dreamt that I was being set challenges. If I got the challenge right then a small disaster happened and only a few people died. If I got it wrong there was some sudden huge disaster and thousands of people died. And we were running round like mad trying to round up everyone we knew so that if anything else happened we'd know where they were and we could look after them and we wouldn't be having to keep going off to look for them.

"And you kept telling me off: we only had so much time to find everyone and if we didn't get back soon we might never get back so we might have to leave some people behind."

It's awful when work intrudes into real life.

Déjà vu

I think I need to start writing a blog about my workplace, to get some of the stresses out of my system…

The uncallings-for of Summer

There's no call for that, Summer days in Helminthdale or no Summer days in Helminthdale.

We spent ages trying to work out whether the elderly chap making his way to the bus station was wearing particularly disreputable Bermuda shorts or had forgotten his trousers.

One swallow doesn't make a relationship

We've finally(!) had a drop of rain. OK, then, a torrential downpour, but it's the first we've had since the beginning of April. We've been lucky with the bank holiday weather and took advantage to loll around the garden awhile. Taking care to ignore the neglects of Winter, when I was a bit preoccupied.

The damson, cherries and pears have all flowered and the scent of the rowan has gone over from fishy stickiness to bletted wonder. By the looks of things we'll be well-stocked with blackcurrants and cherries and the first few figs are happily swelling up. The borders are chockablock with hardy geraniums and iris and the shrubs are thick with sparrows, goldfinches and dunnock. We also seem to be hosting nestboxes full of great and blue tits and a blackcap has taken ownership of the sycamore on the railway embankment.

So there I've been, sitting around on the patio, sipping tea and reading The Hotspur. Meanwhile, the Small Object of Desire and Moon of My Delight has been chopping up the firewood and the garden is full of birdsong.

Life is pretty good at the moment.