Bogs and Poop and Dinosaur Fences

2009-07-01, 10:51 p.m.
SEVENTEEN DAYS!! Seventeen days since I last updated! That�s astonishing � I don�t think Ive ever left you on your own for that long before. Were you OK? Did you remember to eat properly and change your knickers every day and brush your teeth and stuff?

I'd love to say Im now going to tell you about all the utterly fabulous things that have been keeping me away from you for so long, but�ummm�..there isn�t really anything. Ive just been busy doing a fuckload of nothing, to be honest!

Well, there have been one or two things, I guess. My job is still odd and weird and kind of good and kind of frustrating and everything but I have, at least, got cracking on my project. I went on the training course I mentioned last time and it was astonishing. I spent three days with some wonderful, kind, encouraging people from all kind of charitable organisations across the country and they were brilliant. In fact, they were so encouraging and helpful and inspiring that I scored 93% on the assessment at the end of the course (the second highest of the six people from my organisation that have taken the course so far)!! I went back to my office on the Friday fired up with enthusiasm and self-belief and started kicking some charity arse in a corporate stylee (the poor loves, they didnt know what hit 'em � one or two people actually said "WOHH" in a slightly scared way) and I start facilitating the training courses myself on 15th July.

Tomorrow Im off to the New Forest to speak about the course to a group there and then Im back on home turf on Friday doing the same. I wouldn�t say I love my job just yet, but Im starting to kind of get to like it a bit, which is a start I suppose.

Right. On to the proper stuff. We're having our bathroom re-done. This means (because we are skinflints) that we are doing some of the preparation ourselves. Knocking down walls and hacking off tiles, stuff like that. Because Ive also been working stupidly hard to finish my NVQ (I will have a 'degree equivalent' in about two months � Yay me!), L has been doing quite a bit of this sort of stuff, specially if it means he can use a wide variety of large heavy noisy power tools and generally be all macho and butch and sweaty.

I was beavering away at the laptop, in the conservatory, and L was upstairs in the bathroom making a fucking stupid amount of noise. All was well. Then, a six inch square ceramic wall tile fell out of the bathroom window and bounced (twice) on the glass conservatory roof, just above my head. The conservatory cost many thousands of pounds to build and it would, presumably, cost a reasonable proportion of that sum to replace a conservatory roof that had been smashed by�ummm�.say something like a six inch ceramic tile?

A sweaty little face appeared at the window as I looked up. "Umm, shall we shut the window, d'you think?" I called. "I think that might be for the best" he said, doing just that.

I might take a picture once we're down to the bare shell. The bathroom fitting bloke says it'll take about a week to install the new bathroom so all those who have been to my house may now take a few moments to laugh their heads off at how Family Stepfie are all going to keep themselves hygienically clean by washing our various sized bodies in that teeny little basin in the downstairs lav. Maybe I could sit the kids in the kitchen sink, like I used to when they were babies.


On Sunday, Shagnasty phoned me. Shagnasty doesn�t phone me unless its something to do with the kids so, as the kids were with him and he started the conversation with "I need to talk to you about something", I thought he'd had another one of those 'too much eyeliner' fights with Jooj. Then he said "Paki died".

Paki was a friend of ours from when we were together. Despite his apparently racist nickname, he wasn�t from the Indian subcontinent � his surname was Pack. He was called Paki in the same way a Jones might be Jonesy.

When Shagnasty and I split up but were still sharing a house until we could sell it, Paki used to let Shagnasty go and stay at his house every other weekend (I stayed at my brothers in a similar arrangement) so that each of us could have the house to ourselves sometimes and consequently not kill each other before the divorce was finalised. He was a good friend and Im kind of disappointed that this is the best Paki story I have:

Paki worked for New Forest District Council as a kind of handyman � going out to council properties and fixing stuff that the tenants couldn�t do, or couldn�t be arsed to do � putting up garden fences, fixing broken windows, fitting kitchen cupboards, stuff like that. He was also responsible for routine maintenance to any other kind of property that the council owned � bandstands, community centres, public loos.

One day he got a call to go to Barton on Sea � which sounds very English. And is. Its not much of a resort, but there's a bit of a beach, and the sea and some public loos and a cliff. The cliff's about 40' high � hardly Dover, but still. Here's Barton:

barton

Paki drove to Barton in his little NFDC van and went to investigate the blocked loos. Running straight up the cliff between the loos and some sort of waste treatment/pumping station thingy, is a big fat pipeline, maybe a foot or so across. It has stopcock thingies at either end, for isolation purposes. Anyways, to fix the loos, Paki had to isolate the big pipe, so he turned off all the stop cock thingies and got to work. When he'd finished, he re-opened the stopcock at the bottom of the big pipe��.only he hadn�t reconnected it properly to the plumbing and�..

12" x Π x 40ft = 12 x 3.142 x 480 = 36195 cubic inches � 1728 (cubic inches in a cubic foot) = 21 cubic feet of poo

21 cubic feet of pooh takes approximately five seconds to force itself, at high pressure, out of a pipeline and onto a maintenance man from New Forest District Council, who is holding a coupling in his hand and knows there is no way he is going to be able to turn the valve off to stop the tide. In any case, he is in a public loo of all of about 5 foot square, and there's nowhere to run.

He just had to stand there and wait. When the poonami stopped, he calmly recoupled all the stuff that needed recoupling and went outside.

On the beach at Barton on Sea is a little outdoor shower that you can use to rinse sand off your feet and stuff before you get back in your car.

Paki took off all his clothes and threw them in the bin. Then he stood under the icy cold shower, buck naked, and washed himself clean. Then he got in his little van, still naked and dripping wet, and went home.

Last week Paki was on holiday in France with his girlfriend and he had a heart attack and died. That�s it. Im not sure how old he was � I think maybe 50. Too fucking young, anyways. I cant get too worked up about Michael Jackson's death � I never was much of a fan - but I feel for his kids and the rest of his family. RIP to those who die before their time.


I watched a bit of Jurassic Park 3 with Treacle. Once somebody got eaten she didn�t want to watch it any more so we went out. As we were driving along, we drove under some power lines and Treac turned to me and said "Mum, you know those big electricity things? Pylons? I know what they're for now cos we did it at school, and all loads of stuff about electricity. We-ell, when I didn�t know what they were for and I was really little and then I watched the first Jurassic Park film����ummm���then I saw some of those pylon things afterwards and I�..umm��I thought those pylon things were to keep the dinosaurs out."

When I stopped laughing I asked her if she hadn�t ever wondered where the dinosaurs were, as we obviously drove in and out of their enclosures as we drove under various power lines along the Hampshire countryside.

"I think I thought they were all asleep. Or hiding." She said

Watch out for dinosaurs, dudes!

dinosaur fences!

Later
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