Bum.
Oh, but HASN'T the weather been splendid for us here in UKshire?! Golly, I nearly went without my woolly tights and overcoat today. Arf. Actually, its been jolly boiling and fab and almost like we don�t live somewhere crap at all for the last few days.
Needless to say I now have a small patch of prickly heat burgeoning on my otherwise impressive frontage and my legs have changed colour from 'corned beef' to 'uncooked dough' which can only be an improvement, cant it? Incidentally, I have found a most splendid SITE FOR TRANSLATING UK SLANG , which has proper regional variations and everything! All the fucking stupid words and phrases you'll read here (and at shot-of-tea and at annanotbob and all other places where us Britishers like to write stuff like "he got a right cob on" and "I couldn�t be arsed" and expect y'all to know what we mean!) with meanings and contexts and origins and stuff � just like a real dictionary! Don�t worry, I'll wait while you go and look up 'corned beef legs'.
Friday night, L, Treacle and I went to a little party. Treacle's friend Hannahbanana and her lovely family are emigrating to Australia (Brisbane, to be precise) which is a bit of a bloody shame as collectively, the Stepfordtart-Shagnasty-Geetardude clans are rather fond of the Banana clan. Treac is finding a little comfort in the promise of free use of MSN and other weapons of keeping-in-touchness and was real truly horrified for me when she found out that, when I was a little girl, if your friend moved away you'd probably NEVER see them again. You could (*gasp of horror*) write a letter�..but that was about it. The phone was too expensive and everything else (Skype, email, webcams)�.umm�hadn�t been invented yet. Hell, I can remember a friend of mine moving away � letters from her were like communications from a far off galaxy; a subject of wonder and marvel. Where did she move to? St Albans. I remember looking at it on the map � a place so far off and foreign that it attained almost Narnia-esque qualities in my 8 year old mind. Ive been there since and, if Im honest, it wasn�t QUITE what I expected. Certainly less fauns than I imagined. Oh, and seeing as my friend's dad owned a chip shop when we were kids and had moved to St Albans to expand his empire, I was a bit surprised to find that nobody I spoke to had heard of him � even tho I explained VERY patiently "He's Angela's dad and he's got a chip shop. They moved here from Southampton about 35 years ago. Whaddya mean, you don�t know him? Surely there's been some mistake?"
The party was rubbish. L and I didn�t know anyone and the room was too big to make 'forced mingling' an option. We sat at the peripheries, feeling spare and a bit grumpy and left as soon as it was not rude to do so. Despite having a new dress on and a pair of �300 shoes (from my PAST LIFE � I haven�t been squandering my severance payments!) I ended up, back at the workies, collecting empty glasses, loading the dishwasher and mopping the bar floor as they were short-staffed. Cinderella, you shan't go to the ball!
Saturday morning, rudely awakened by the phone ringing. At 8.30. Im not sure 8.30 is actually a proper PART of a Saturday morning. I thought Saturday mornings started around 10.30 � Friday night ends about 4am and then there's a kind of jump (in which I lay comatose, and sometime still half-dressed, on my bed like 'Scenes from Paula Yates Re-enactment Society') and then I open my mascara-clogged peepers and when the clock comes back into focus, its 10.30. Ish.
Anyways, I lurched scampered across the hall and took the call in Smashie's bedroom the spare room, where there is a ridiculous "fun" phone in the shape of a pair of pearlescent pouting pink lips��.
*resists urge to even GO there with the smut, already*
��It�s a rubbish phone, it crackles and hisses and you cant hear what the other person is saying at ALL and you have to jam your finger in your ear to even have a chance of getting the gist of the conversation. This was a shame as it was the boss from the Mad Old Lady Consortium (feel free to come up with a pseudonym for it, wontcha? That took just TOO LONG to type), phoning to apologise for not ringing me before but�.
"�my son split up from his partner and its all rather unpleasant as there are children and my husband said I simply must get away for a few days so we're off in the caravan til Tuesday anyway I hope you enjoyed your time with us and Sharon's booked you on a course and I'll only be able to spend an hour with you on the Monday and then I'll have to go out as the accountants are coming but I'll be in again on the Thursday and you can always ring me at home that�s what everybody does and Im sorry that the salary isn�t higher but we can always review it again in a bit. Alright?"
And I stood there, naked, hungover, shivering, with one finger jammed in my ear, trying to duck below the level of the window sill without joggling the stupid Lipsphone and making it even more crackly, filtering out the noise of L yelling "who the fucking hell is THAT?", and trying to make sense of the fact that I think someone just offered me a job.
Bizarre.
I think Im supposed to celebrate and Im not quite sure why I haven�t yet.
Once I'd finally got dressed, I walked into Chigley and got my hair cut. My hairdresser is a funny little chubby Chiglean teen. There are quite a lot of them in the salon and they're pretty much interchangeable in their distinct lack of knowledge about�umm�anything, really. That makes conversation quite tricky. It�s a jolly enough place, tho (and cheap!) so I generally just let the waves of inanity wash over me like so many overenthusiastic shampoos. Anyway, Chubby McSnipteen amused herself with exuberantly singing along to the radio whilst hacking away at my barnet. Then she just stopped dead, mid-snip and was looking at me in the mirror like something very VERY bad had happened.
Then she said "You teach singing, don�t you?" and I said "Yes", pleasantly.
There was another moment or two of silence and then ALL the other snippety teens joined in a rousing chorus of "BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA! You've been singing to a SINGING TEACHER!!!!!!!!!! Oooh, do another one, I bet she LOVES having you screeching away in her ear'ole. Yeh, sing up, Chubster!"
I thought it would be churlish of me to say that I hadn�t actually been listening and so couldn�t tell you whether she could sing or not. I said "Its alright, I don�t mind" but she still finished my coiffure in silence. I tipped generously in the hope it would take the edge of the piss-taking marathon.
Jooj's friend (the red-faced one from a couple of entries back) said Jooj's makeup looked like she'd "been paintballing". Aaah, that�s what friends are for, dear readers, unmerciless taunting and ruthless honesty.
Walking back from Chigley along a narrow footpath between the allotments and the back fences of a row of houses, I was stopped in my tracks by something very scary, blocking my path.
Not a big scary dog (although, you guessed well. It could easily have been!)
Not a gaggle of hoodie wearing ne'er-do-wells from the BWB (barefootruby, do they tag the shiplap fences of your neighbourhood, too, or do you have your own selection of future captains of industry?)
Not a big fat lady pushing a double buggy
Not a ninja
Not a scale model of the
Ark Royal made entirely from Babybels
No, gentle reader, it was a stag beetle. Roughly the size of a Morris Minor (well OK, maybe 60mm PLUS antlers!), and hovering at a height of approximately my eye level. I moved left, it moved left. I moved right, it moved right. I stepped back, it advanced. I advanced�.(stupidly thinking it would retreat)�it maintained its position and was now close enough for me to hear the drone of its wings like a bloody B52 and see its giant pinchy horn thingies, ready to snap of my pretty little head with one big SNIP!
As I am 42 years old, can box, can beat my husband at arm wrestling and am not scared of anything much (apart from big dogs. And flying ants.) I fought down the urge to scream and run away. Actually, I thought it might chase me � Im not good on the flying habits of stag beetles. Maybe they would follow you, in a spiteful kind of way, like wasps do, just for the fun of seeing you flapping your arms about and dropping your shopping and screeching "Its in my hair, oh god, its in my hair!". But I do know that they're an endangered species so I didn�t mace it or swat it to the ground and stamp on it. Eventually, as it seemed disinclined to swoop for my throat (nor to move out of my way � stag beetles can be fucking bloody-minded when they want to be), I made a distinctly Scooby Doo-ish scampering run UNDER it, whilst going "WUUUUUOOHAAAAAHHHH" in a panicky and uncool way and am pleased to report that it did not follow me down the path, nipping at my arse.
Things I love #746
That Anne Marie drives all the way to bloody Maidenhead, to a special proper Italian deli, to buy special limoncello pannetone (in the shape of a dove) for me for Easter. I especially love the way that the bloody things keep forever and so I can open them today (even tho its June) and slice a big squodgy lump off one of its cakey wings to eat while Im doing this. It looks a bit deformed now. I may have to eat its other wing and pretend to the children tomorrow that it is a special Italian Easter Limoncello-flavoured pannetone slug.
Im too tired to tell you about my wedding anniversary now. It'll have to wait. You'll be OK. There's nudity. And butterscotch sauce (but not together).
Later
S
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