The Bleeding Obvious

If you don’t want people to READ your thoughts don’t WRITE them down.

Hugs and kisses

U

Tampered

Am considering changing my blog name by one letter. Botch on the Blog.

Uggs and hisses yours,

U

Holes in the fabric

Greetings to the arsehole hacking my email account.

Just fuck off, will you? It’s cheap and it will get you nowhere. No, this is not paranoia speaking. That someone is hacking  me has just been confirmed by my internet provider itself.

Do not worry, have no fear: I work from more than one account. And if you don’t have anything better to do with your life than spy on other people and, once again, twice in a fortnight, wasting hours of my time trying to retrieve what is, partly, precious to me you should go and find a hut in the woods and become a recluse. Go and collect herbs. Dry them. Sniff them. Wear one of those scratchy shirts and your soles down.

Leave it.  No one messes with me. And that’s a promise.

U

Gold Star

The ever watchful Matron WordPress has drawn to my attention that I like myself. Yes? So? Obviously I like myself. Otherwise I’d go the lemming’s way: Off the cliff.

Don’t get me wrong, WordPress: You are a good platform for people who like themselves. But you can be a little patronizing. Still, at least you, WordPress, have stopped giving me a gold star for every post I publish. Telling me whether I have reached my quota. What quota? If you, WordPress, were a class at school and I were, say, for sake of argument, five or eighteen years of age I’d just walk out.

Have any of you, my readers, ever walked out of anything? And why?

One of my finer moments when that previously mentioned nemesis of my life, my Maths teacher, set us yet another test. Hushed silence. My friend (she later became a pathologist) sending me a besieging look across the room, signalling me to get the fuck on with it. Well, her effort came to nothing. I took one look at the question. And left the room. And then spent a very enjoyable 45 minutes in the loo smoking a cigarette. Feeling extremely pleased with myself.

Don’t smirk at the above. There is method in my madness. I could have tried to answer the question and made a complete fool of myself. Instead of which I exited nonchalantly – with not a stroke of my pen on the paper, yet with my dignity intact. My dignity being more important to me than being a dismal failure.

So, yes. I got the worst mark of my life. In red ink. On top of which my maths teacher was incandescent at my insubordination. Which reminds me:  Why, like Rumpelstilzkin, are short men either very funny (Woody Allen), amazing actors (Dustin Hoffman) or do make your life a misery?

You can tell, can’t you: If I had lived during the French Revolution I’d be dead by now.

Yes. Thanks for the above. I feel so much better for venting one of my many spleens.

Will now catch up with the ever charming Bill Clinton and some of his spoutings two or three weeks ago. Yes, charisma. You either have it or you don’t.

U

Living happily ever after in a lunatic asylum

Sweethearts, I’ll have to shut up shop. Am in meltdown. After a two hour soul searching phone conversation with my father, cut short by my batteries dying, I thought 40 winks before the Angel returns awaiting dinner would be the ticket.

It was the ticket. To insanity. I devised most perfect plot – on TV. Except when I opened my eyes the TV wasn’t even on. So now I’ll never know the end.

Am going mad.

Hugs and kisses,

U

Fiction

I live in a rather lively area of the city. In more ways than one. Upmarket.  A little wonky during the night. And on the way between town and the harbour. So apart from the restaurant trade there is a lot of through traffic. On foot.

Remember: I wake easily and I have a vantage point. No, I am not a curtain twitcher. Mainly because I don’t have curtains. But you can’t ignore people’s plight. The Angel has strictly forbidden me to go downstairs and intervene in any fights but call the police instead. Which I have done three times over the last year. Yes, that’s how exciting life is. The only time I didn’t [phone the police] was when a guy was beaten to a pulp, and I mean pulp, at four in the morning  and I couldn’t find the fucking phone. Still feel awful about that. I did follow it up but there was no report of damage either with A&E or the police. His corpse probably been concreted into the road works going on at the time.

By way of intro to this post the above is abysmal, and budding writers do take note: That’s not the way to get your readers’ attention.

I am not a lady in lavender but have recently taken to most questionable fancy: Watching, mostly British,  crime. Give me Poirot (David Suchet) and I am your Belgian truffle, melting in his hand. Give me Miss Marple and I wish I lived where she does. Or in Oxford: Lewis and the most gorgeous Hathaway (gorgeous not only on account of how a suit hangs so very well off him but because he is so educated, eloquent, witty, dry, let’s not get carried away). Where was I? Crime.

Here is a most vexing question: When all those detectives and prosecuting lawyers ask witnesses and suspects a question how come they always know the time and any other detail? And what was missing off the mantle piece or a wall.  I am a pretty observant person but I can tell you for a fact that I’d be useless. Absolutely useless. Who wore what when? Who ate what? Who spoke to whom? I haven’t got the faintest idea. Which – come to think of it – makes me an ideal victim.

Stab me now.

U

Critically yours

A couple or so years ago – can’t remember where – I wrote, on purpose,  some complete nonsense. As in ‘scientifically provable’ nonsense. Yet no one, but no one took me up on it. Not even those I knew would recognize, at first glance, that it was garbage.

To this day I sometimes ponder why this should be so. Surely it’s better to set someone right rather than just being polite? Is it kind to being let run round your folly without being shown the exit sign?

U

Layers

Damp squib of the day: If you don’t like it paint over it.

U

Mea culpa

The most delicious anecdotes are made of shameful secrets. Thus can’t be told.

It’s a pity. Jewels of our life’s narrative lost. At the price of pride kept intact.

Two years ago my son – post A Levels and two minutes later already in work – spent the summer in a student house. One city up from where I was packing up our home. Am now in two minds whether to tell you this abysmal example of my abysmal parenting: I receive a call. From him. A cry for help. If ever there was one.

To paint the scene: Five students. One, Jonathan, who I got to know well – oh, did he and I bond over hygiene, lovely guy, heavily into music – had no truck with his housemates (like my son) who couldn’t be arsed to do their own washing up. So when the Angel and one of his friends in the house swanned off to some soggy mudfest in the name of music, Jonathan put all their dirty dishes into a large plastic container and stored it in the understairs cupboard. Talk about tough love.

By the time the Angel and his friend returned there were maggots (where maggots materialise from in an understairs cupboard – in three days flat –  I do not know). The Angel does not like to get his hands dirty. Even when I was down with two broken arms in plaster, unable to do anything, it was his girlfriend who did my washing up. Unasked.

Don’t judge him too harshly. It’s all my fault. So him panicking over maggots (and not having a clean plate to eat off)  I told him to put the crate outside on the patio. Got myself on the next train, hosed down maggots, washed plates like the devil possessed. In the privacy of my own company. Yes, really. Don’t say anything. I don’t want to hear it.

Jonathan who had a more realistic upbringing only shook his head. As I did mine. What a failure of a mother am I? If the Angel had been a girl which thank god he wasn’t – since I prefer one son to a gaggle of geese – he’d been scrubbing the floor and everything else by age ten. As did I – no, no reason to enter violins: Knowing how to scrub a floor and how to avoid maggots is a life skill. One which, so far, I have not managed to pass on to the Apple of my Eye.

It’s a ploy of mine, a life saver: As long as he doesn’t know how to iron a shirt I can’t just lie down and die. Can I?

Brilliant. So proud of myself.

U

Winner

My eyesight occasionally plays up. Or is it my mind?

Just “read” on a money website, if only for a nano second: “Are you a woman or a loser?”

How amusing, I thought to myself. A question most definitely worth contemplating.

U