Category: Uncategorized

Kit Chinwag Tale: Fridge, Gegs and Scrambled Equations

fridge (n.)shortened and altered form of refrigerator, 1926, an unusual way of word-formation in English; perhaps influenced by Frigidaire (1919), name of a popular early brand of self-contained automatically operated iceless refrigerator (Frigidaire Corporation, Detroit, Michigan, U.S.), a name suggesting Latin frigidarium “a cooling room in a bath.” Frigerator as a colloquial shortening is attested by 1886.

Dear Reader, this week I’ve encountered the word ‘fridge’ four times from different online chums. The first was a conversation between Red Frank and TNT over at MEROVEE…

frank-mentions-fridge
Clicky for Fridge touchdown Superb Owl XX

The following day, Leggy’s significant other, Poppy mentioned it during a girlie Twitter DM convo…

poppysweetpea-mentions-fridge

Later that evening, Hugo and I were chatting on Twitter DM about the back cover artwork The Underdog Anthology. He has two stories included.

the-underdog-anthology-front-and-back

I mentioned the importance of the number nine in Norse mythology and Hugo replied with a we-key link to the plot of a book I’ve never read…

Dirk Gently, who calls himself a “holistic detective”, has happened upon what he thinks is a rather comfortable situation. A wealthy man in the record industry has retained him, spinning a story about being stalked by a seven-foot-tall, green-eyed, scythe-wielding monster. Dirk pretends to understand the man’s ravings involving potatoes and a contract signed in blood coming due; when in reality, Dirk is musing about what he might do if he actually receives payment for his “services” – such as getting rid of his refrigerator, which is so filthy inside that it has become the centrepiece of a show-down between himself and his cleaning woman. The seriousness of his client’s claims becomes clear when Dirk arrives several hours late for an appointment to find a swarm of police around his client’s estate. The aforementioned client is found in a sealed and heavily barricaded room, his head neatly removed several feet from his body and rotating on a turn-table. While at his recently deceased client’s house, he discovers that his client had a son. However, after Dirk disconnects the television set the boy had been watching, the boy promptly breaks Dirk’s nose.

Nearly incapacitated by guilt, Dirk resolves to take his now-late client’s wild claims seriously. During his investigation, Gently encounters exploding airport check-in counters, the gods of Norse mythology, insulting horoscopes, a sinister nursing home, a rhino-phagic eagle, an I Chingcalculator (to which everything calculated above the value of 4 is apparently ‘a suffusion of yellow’), a god who gives his powers to a lawyer and an advertising executive in exchange for clean linen, and an attractive American woman who gets angry when she can’t get pizzadelivered in London.

Finally, yesterday afternoon, Cade included the word and the importance of chilling in one of his Sync Miss For Him scribblings…

cade-mentions-fridgecade-recommends-chilling

 

*I know, Clicky… I don’t know what it means either, but you put a link to ‘Fools Gold’ in our Calendar Girl post at the start of this week…*

*******

THURSDAY EVENING

“What are you looking for?” I asked Thing 2’s backside upon entering the kitchen. The rest of him was concealed behind the open fridge door; a common enough sight these days that it’s practically a fixture.

“Nothing,” Kit Kat grunted in reply. Closing the door he turned to face me, and I wondered, not for the first time, at how a tiny little baby could turn into the hulking teenager stood before me now. He popped his backside up easily onto the kitchen worktop. “I’m doing maths homework,” he said.

“Really? In the fridge? I’m gonna make your father some scrambled eggs on toast. Would you like some?”

Kit Kat tried to play it cool but the ‘Food!’ sparkle in his eyes gave him away. “Erm…alright then.”

The response from Thing 1 upon being asked was entirely different. “Oh yes please. Thank you Mum!” Loopy said brightly before turning his attention back to his game. “Okay Deadly, do as I tell you this time and we’ll get ’em for sure,” he barked into his microphone.

Returning to Thing 2’s favourite room, I decided to enlist his help. “You know the fridge?” I asked him.

“Yeesss…” Kit Kat drawled. “I am familiar with the appliance.”

“Can you get me the eggs, butter and milk from it? I’ll cook the eggs, you do the toast and you can tell me about your homework.” I bent down to pull the toaster out from the cupboard under the sink.

Amazingly he returned with everything I asked for and set about toasting the bread. I cracked nine eggs into a mixing bowl, added a dollop of milk and a pinch of salt.

“We’re doing quadratic equations,” Kit Kat informed me as I set about beating up the mixture.

I stopped my beating to melt the butter in a pan. “Algebra?”

“Yes,” he replied and then starting reeling off a bunch of gobbledygook containing a lot of ‘xs’, ‘pluses’, ‘overs’ and numbers that made no sense to me at all, except to evoke a distant memory of the perpetually smiling face of Mr Fong, my Form and Maths Teacher from school. I concentrated on transforming to pale yellow mixture, now transferred to the oily, hot pan, into fluffy, golden, eggy clouds.

“Doesn’t quadratic have something to do with four?” I asked when Kit Kat paused for breath. He was still applying a thin layer of butter, precisely from corner to corner to the first slices of toast to have pop out of the toaster.

I sighed, put down the pan and grabbed another knife. Quickly I slavered the cooling remainder of the toast with deft strokes of buttery goodness. “I’m sorry Kitten, I haven’t done algebra for over 30 years, I don’t think I can help you with your homework,” I said dishing the buttered toast out onto three plates and piling even portions of scrambled eggs over the top.

“I wasn’t asking for your help, Mater,” he said with a look of bemusement. “Can you pass me the ketchup?”

*******

Dear Reader, have a Song… ❤

 

 

 

 

Knot Barred… With Update

cover2b

Yes, Dear Reader, The Underdog Anthology is well on nigh…

*I am not a princess, Clicky! …/looks aghast… *

*/sniff… Sandwich Queen, maybe… Now stop interrupting me…*

Anyway, as I was saying, Dear Reader, The Underdog Anthology will be published very soon…

*No, Clicky, my pen name’s Roo B. Doo… sounds like RooBeeDoo…*

wise-words

*Yeah well I’m rather more fond of a shamble than Tiff… /shoos away assistant… Now, stop butting in…*

Leggy, the Underdog, is keen not to make the cover too attractive to children. Personally, I think the little buggers could do with reading the superbly written horror, sex and violence that unfolds inside…

cover3a

*/Squints… It’s his pub, Clicky… Leggy’s the gaffer and I fully respect that… Now fuck off for a minute, I want to put the poem in…*

As an ‘Afterword’ in his other short story collections, a literary giant is giving a kicking – Lewis Carroll in ‘Dark Thoughts and Demons‘, and Edgar Allan Poe in ‘Fears of the Old and New‘.  For The Underdog Anthology, Leggy enticed me into a bit of vandalism…

 

loading_wait_doctor_who

*Oh yeah… Anyone that knows me, noses there was only one giant, I’d take on, Clicky…*

So, Dear Reader, reproduced below is my afterword contribution to The Underdog Anthology… Sonnet 6+6+6…

ode-by-a-smoking-brexiteer

Dear Reader… Have a Song ❤

*******

Update

Dear Reader, we now have a back cover…

Tales of the Logistician’s Logistician: Calendar Girl

previously-at-the-lol
Clicky for the joy of abseiling

Recently I joined Arse-about-Facebook and was pleasantly surprised to see that a former colleague had added photos of what had been a little project I’d managed at the start of the 21st Century: The Staff Calendar. Having newly joined the company, it proved to be an excellent way to find out the full extent of the services offered to clients, and some of the faces that implemented those services, ensuring their smooth running.

It started one day as I sat behind Big Boss’s desk. He was out and about, as was his norm, so I taken the opportunity to eat my lunch in his cool, dark office. I was searching for some scrap paper to catch the salady drips that escaped my ham salad sarnie (extra onion, extra mayo) when I realised that the page I’d scavenged wasn’t scrap at all. It contained several hand-drawn, rough sketches with interesting punny titles: ‘Reservoir Bogs’; ‘Lock Stock & Two Smoking Vaccums’; ‘Not Everything in Black & White is Read’ and ‘You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Skip’.

I wiped the crumbs and sandwich filling gloop from the page as best I could, and after I’d finished eating took it back to my own desk, where I filed it in my ‘Bring Forward’ system, so that I could ask Big Boss about it the next time he ventured in.

“Oh, it’s just some ideas I’ve had for a staff calendar,” he told me a week later. “I think it would be a fun way of marketing what we do that includes the staff.”

I agreed and twenty minutes later, we’d thought up half a dozen more ideas. Big Boss’s face, which had looked tired and pinched on arrival at the office that morning, now looked light and boyish. He instructed me to find a graphic design company that could advise us on feasibility and cost, before he set out again for an afternoon with clients and potential clients in back-to-back meetings.

Coincidentally, the graphic design company I’d selected had been the recipient of high praise at a social gathering Big Boss had attended the evening before I met with him, to give him an update on my search. I hadn’t heard of synchronicity then, but he gave me the go ahead to get the calendar made.

Over the next couple of months I worked with Big Boss and the graphic design company to refine the images, buy props and hire costumes, prep staff members to be involved and then get them to the studio for photography, hold their clothing, not peek when asked, make the teas and coffees, and then select the best images for inclusion, layout of each page and quality of the paper it would be printed on. It was a meaty project and I relished getting my teeth into it.

“We should have a party to launch the calendar,” Big Boss decreed after the first nude photo shoot, obviously buoyed up with the way it was going. “Invite the staff and clients.”

“And client secretaries,” I suggested. “They’ll be the ones that receive the calendars first and dish them out.”

He liked that idea. “Tate Modern owes us a favour or two, I’ll get us room there for the evening.” Big Boss could be quite persuasive.

And so, organising the launch party, sending invites, creating a presentation and buy thoughtful gifts to say ‘thank you’ to the staff involved was added to my list of things to do. Thoughtful Man helped me select and obtain the music that would accompany the revealing of each image in an animated Powerpoint show. I’d barely used Powerpoint before, let alone animate anything with it; it was a learning curve that held me in good stead for the rest of my career thereafter.

I didn’t compère the show – Big Boss did that; he’s an extremely accomplished public speaker. I ran the slide show and cued the music. The evening was a great success.

We had 13 months in our calendar; when you work in logistics you tend to plan just a little bit ahead… Clicky on each image to hear the accompanying Song 😉

january-lock-stock

february-thinker

march-thunderbirds

april-saving-bryan

may-the-fourth

june-tennis

july-reservoir-bogs

august-jaws

september-star-trek

october-twins

november-black-white-read

december-usual-suspects

january-727

Wibble Wobble Warble… Word!

Dear Reader, this past month has been a most peculiar one…

wibble (v.) 1871, from wibble-wobble (1847), a colloquial reduplication of wobble (v.).

*I don’t think it’s just me, Clicky… Others have been feeling peculiar too…*

wobble (v.) 1650s, wabble, probably from Low German wabbeln “to wobble;” cognate with Old Norse vafla “hover about, totter,” related to vafra “move unsteadily,” from Proto-Germanic *wab- “to move back and forth,” perhaps from PIE *webh- “to weave” (see waver). Form with -o- is from 1851. Related: Wobbled; wobbling. The noun is attested from 1690s.

*Interesting! Tell me, did you look at the possible… probably root of the word ‘wobble‘, Clicky?

I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
[Stevie Smith]

*I posted a comment about ‘the hand wavers’ yesterday at The Slog …/looks perplexed… Oh it still doesn’t seem to have appeared…*

*Bugger! … /sad face… How disappointing, Clicky… I pointed out how smokers are right here in front everyone’s faces, but people are conditioned to wave both us and our grievances away… It was awfully clever in a “Can you see what it is yet?” sort of way… I mean, it’s not white, heterosexuals of sound mind who are bearing the brunt of the bans… Although we, too, are affected, rich and poor…*

*Mind you, JaxtheFirst made an very interesting observation last night., Clicky.. how the Anti Smoking hand-wavers have distanced themselves with their hatred and intolerance… This ‘War on Tobacco’ they’ve been waging for these past 400 years… /clucks dismissively… Are they waving-waving or waving-drowning?*

warble (v.) late 14c., from Old North French werbler “to sing with trills and quavers” (Old French guerbloiier), from Frankish *werbilon (cognate with Old High German wirbil “whirlwind,” German Wirbel “whirl, whirlpool, tuning peg, vertebra,” Middle Dutch wervelen “to turn, whirl”); see whirl (v.). Related: Warbled; warbling. The noun is recorded from late 14c.

have-a-song

*Have a Song, Clicky? …/rueful smile… Oh, okay then… /pats snout…*

 

Smokin’ Smokers: Part 2 -Laud Nose Watt…

laud (v.)”praise highly, sing the praises of,” late 14c., from Old French lauder “to praise, extol,” from Latin laudare “to praise, commend, honor, extol, eulogize,” from laus (genitive laudis) “praise, fame, glory.” Probably from an echoic PIE root *leu- and cognate with Old English leoð “song, poem, hymn,” from Proto-Germanic *leuthan (source also of Old Norse ljoð “strophe,” German Lied “song,” Gothic liuþon “to praise”). Related: Lauded; lauding.

nose (v.)”perceive the smell of,” 1570s; “pry, search,” 1640s, from nose (n.). Related: Nosed; nosing.

watt (n.) unit of electrical power, 1882, in honor of James Watt (1736-1819), Scottish engineer and inventor. The surname is from an old pet form of Walter and also is in Watson.

Walter masc. proper name, from Old North French Waltier (Old French Gualtier, Modern French Gautier), of Germanic origin and cognate with Old High German Walthari, Walthere, literally “ruler of the army,” from waltan “to rule” (see wield) + hari “host, army” (see harry). Walter Mitty (1939) is from title character in “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” by U.S. short story writer James Thurber (1894-1961).

*******

Sunday evening and all was quiet in the Library: Thoughtful Man was out working the mean streets of Southend; Things 1 & 2 were busy online making war and making friends, and our living, breathing hot water bottle was diligently practicing for any future, upcoming Sleep event at the Olympics. Poppy lay curled, molded around my backside, under my thick woolen cardie, snoozing and warming the small of my back. I’ve often mused how, dooshounds are more feline than canine. Well, ours is anyway.

Chores completed for the day (at least until the return of a weary Thoughtful Man), I was luxuriating in space and time, skipping through universes that I access via my book, listening to pictures and feeling out the sharp edge of words in conversations.

I wasn’t alone: Clicky was with me, of course, accompanied by the dynamic duo, Cath Fine and her significant other Nick O’Teen. All remained steadfastly to hand as I flitted and floated, fleetly fleed and flied, feeling roam free.

The telephone rang, causing Poppy to poke a curious nose out from under the cardigan she was using as a tent.

“Alright darling?” Thoughtful Man voice piped through, “I’ve just dropped off in Laindon and thought I’d come home now.”

I wasn’t disappointed: Laindon is a good fare. “Okay sweetie. We’ll have dinner when you get back.”

“Yeah, I won’t be long. Listen,” he paused, ” I’ve had an idea for a smoker you can write your next post about.”

I was momentarily nonplussed; Thoughtful Man doesn’t usually read my wibblings. “What? Who?”

“Slush,” he said. Now I was really confused and repeated the name back to him.

“No, Slash. The guitarist from Guns N’ Roses,” he replied.

I thought for a moment and tried to picture the personage in my mind. “Curly black hair, wears sunglasses and top hat?”

“That’s the one,” Thoughtful Man confirmed. “He smokes on stage, sticks his cigarette in end of his guitar. There’s bound to be lots of photos of him smoking.”

I took a drag of Nick and a slurp of Cath, and briefly pondered his suggestion. Clicky, always quick off the mark, got busy. “But you don’t like Guns n Roses,” I answered. Well, he doesn’t.

“No, but I think you should do one on somebody that’s not dead. Look we’ll talk about it when I get home. Do you fancy pizza?”

Pizza! I crossed ‘washing up’ off my mental list of potential future chores, happily agreed with his suggestion, and rang off after an embarrassing number of ‘byes’ that’s really more associated with first flush of romance rather than 26 years into a stretch.

“Pizza?” came the mournful voice of Thing 1 from the darkened nook of the Library, “Can’t we have Chinese?”

*******

Dear Reader, I’m not gonna do Slash. He gave up smoking in 2009 after his mum died. He fails the ‘Bravery’ criteria. But I do like the idea of profiling somebody alive… Thoughtful Man, a firm anti-monarchist, will probably hate me for this butt…

prince-harry-bravery
CLICKY for Bravery
prince-harry-sexy
CLICKY for Sexiness
prince-harry-cleverness
CLICKY for Cleverness
prince-harry-generosity
CLICKY for Generosity

Okay, okay, I freely admit, he’s no Barry Sheene, but he is alive and still smoking, and as for the fifth criteria, well, he did cause an interesting stink…

prince-harry-pong
CLICKY for Outrageous Pong

*******

happy-question-mark

*I dunno, Clicky, it’s a bit weak… /bites nail… And Thoughtful Man really doesn’t like royalty… /spits… It could all hinge on the Song… What do you reckon?*

*By George? …/rolls eyes… Okay, then…*

Smokin’ Smokers: Part 1 – Polishing up the Benchmark

benchmark (n.)also bench-mark, “surveyor’s point of reference,” 1838, from a specialized surveyors’ use of bench (n.) + mark (n.1); figurative sense is from 1884.

An online friend, who’d spent the day in Birmingham, sent me through a photograph and a trivia question yesterday evening…

twitter-pix-of-barry-sheenes-racing-helmet
“Zoom in to the area below the centre of the visor of Barry Sheene’s 1976 helmet. What do you spot? And for 10 points, what was its purpose?”

As I was sitting up in bed at the time – Thoughtful Man and I were catching up on a saved episode of ‘Pointless’ (I’d just got a Pointless Answer with Rutherford B. Hayes …/buffs nails) – and my iPad would only blow the image up so far, I decided to give it a good, hard stare and hazard a wild guess…

roobs-helmet-guess

I was hopelessly wrong of course, but my friend is nothing if not incredibly kind…

barry-sheenes-daytona-racing-helmet
“Close, but no cigar. Sheene was a chain smoker, so he drilled that hole in his helmet so he could have a few drags on the race start-line immediately before the flag fell. It’s sad, I bet only a handful of Suzuki staff & visitors would even realise that hole existed in one of their historic exhibits.”

We wrote about the Bonhams Stafford auction a few weeks back and pulled out our pick of the products then.

Top of our list – aside from the many, many motorcycles that we would have loved to have been able to drop some pound notes on – was the 1974 Bell race helmet that is said to have been worn by Barry Sheene during his infamous Daytona crash in the same year.

It was up for sale at the weekend with a reserve price of just £5000; and even at this amount it was way past our budget. But it eventually sold for £15,625 (including sales premium).

Not too bad for a lid that’s over 35 year’s old, is scuffed out of recognition and even has a hole drilled into the front chin-guard for a cheeky cigarette!

If Dear Reader is at all unfamiliar with Barry/\ Sheene, there now follows a short information film, detailing the bad breaks that befell him in pursuit of his racing dreams…

 

Just what I’ve come to expect of a smoker in these Times of official sounding statements like ‘SMOKING WILL KILL YOU’ and ‘YOUR LITTLE DOG, TOO‘ – Bravery and Sexiness… Don’t believe me on the amount he smoked?

And he was famous for his pong…

Then my online pal went and sent through two more attributes I constantly find in the majority of smokers that I encounter: Generosity and Cleverness…

dainese-first-innovative-back-protection
“Another factoid about Sheene: In his early days of racing, the leathers riders wore were simply that. Just leather. A number of riders broke their back during a crash, and Sheene considered the visors on his helmet. He got 8-10 of them and wired them up like the armour on an armadillo – They’d be flexible in one direction & rigid in the opposite direction. It worked, and he literally gave away his ‘invention’ to Italian leathers maker Dainese http://www.dainese.com/en_en/timeline/#time_2 “

Bravery, Sexiness, Cleverness, Generosity and a certain X Factor (in Mr Sheene’s case, his smell), it occurred to me that these would be fine criteria to judge others by…

So, if Dear Reader has any suggestions for recipients of the title ‘Smokin’ Smoker’, please let me know in the comments and I would be happy to consider…

*/ponders… Is that Have a Song, Clicky, or are you making a suggestion?*

*By George, I think he’s got it… /smiles broadly…*

Eric and ‘Erbie

Dear Reader, inspired by a recent conversation with the JenEus Burger woman, in comments at the LoL last week, I thought I’d delve once more into Mother’s family remembrances of war.

This post will be about Herbert, my grandfather, and my great uncle Eric. He was born in Germany, but let’s start with some photo/images of Grandad Packer, Herbert… ‘Erbie…

grandad-in-ww1
The lad Herbert Stephen James Packer ran away to fight in WW1
grandad-in-egypt-ww2
Capt. Herbert S.J. Packer wearing a fez in Egypt in WW2
grandads-business-card-after-ww2
Mr H.S.J. Packer Importer/Exporter until he retired
grandad-and-grandaughter-roobee
Grandad Packer, with pipe, entertaining his grandaughter Roobee some time after 1967 and before 1977

Extract from ‘A Family History for Ruth and Julia (Gawd ‘Elp Us!)’, a.k.a. ‘The Ma Papers’ by Judith Eileen Newton (formerly Shewan, née Packer)

I do not know when or how Aunt Anne met Eric because she had been engaged before, but she met him and brought him home for tea. What a shock for Poppy Alger! He did not like strangers at the best of times, but when Eric arrived, and he turned out to be German, well for God’s sake…  Although we were not at war at that point, Poppy still remembering the First World War, and had not altered his opinion that the only good German was a dead one.

And Eric was very Germanic, he would click his heels when he shook your hand. There was even a strong suspicion that he was Jewish. It appeared that when Eric’s mother and father, on realising what was happening in Germany with the Black Shirts and the like, wanted to get Eric out. They sent him to England, to an aunt, when he was in his teens and she had brought him up.

He could speak English and German, of course, and was very upper crust. At this point Nanny Packer had not yet met Grandad, and I suppose that when she did meet him, Ann and Eric were the only people that knew that Grandad was already married. They set up a close friendship between them and used to go on holiday together. They were often in Switzerland and Germany.

On one trip to Germany in the thirties, they were all of them having dinner in a restaurant when the doors burst open and in marched a bunch of Black Shirts demanding everyone’s papers. They were all petrified because although Eric had changed his name from Erich Zonningfeld to Eric Summerfield, they were scared that someone would smell a rat – Eric had been speaking in German to the waiter. But, as luck would have it, the Black Shirts were only interested in checking passports; they believed the family four were all British and left them alone. However, none of them visited Germany again until after the war.

Eric joined the army and fought for the British. It was very important that he held a British passport – it would have been suicide to fight for England with a German passport. Grandad Packer said he worked in intelligence and translation, but we never did find out what exactly he did.

Anne and Eric got married in September 1939 on the day war broke out. The air raid sirens actually went off during the reception.

By this time, Grandad Packer was technically too old to fight as he was born in 1903, but because he had fought in the First World War and he was an army reservist officer, they asked him to come back as they were desperate for experienced soldiers to train the new soldiers. He re-enlisted and they had him training troops and other things to do with Intelligence.

He was a very intelligent man and trying to get information from Grandad Packer was very hard; to say he was a silent man was an understatement. My biggest regret is that when he was alive I did not talk to him enough. Basically I really was not interested, but now, of course, that it is too late, I would like to know everything.

Dear Reader, I searched through the Huntley & Palmers biscuit tin containing all the photos and papers that came to me following Mother’s death last year, but could find scant information and no images of Eric in his salad days…

anne-and-eric-in-paper-celebrating-ruby-wedding-anniversary
Local news announcement of Anne & Eric Ruby Wedding Anniversary
news-of-erics-death
Notice of Eric’s Death
erics-grave-died-4101982
Eric’s final resting place

Have a Song…

 

Stormy Whether or Knot…

Thoughtful Man just rang me from work.

“We’re gonna be hit by a storm tonight. It’s all over the news,” his voice crackled down the line.

Some light key tapping revealed the worst. “Oh, you’re not going to continue working in that are you?”

“Probably not. Hardly anyone out anyway. Pay day is a week away and then there’s Christmas to think about,” he said. He sounded cold and lonely; in these days of Uber-bollocks, hospitality business-busting smoking bans and a surfeit of surly fares on drug-fuelled jollies, a cabby’s lot is not a happy one.

“Okay, baby. If it gets too bad, just come home.”

Loopy looked at me intently, craning his neck away from his game as I finished the call. “What’s up with dad?”

“Nothing,” I reassured him, “apparently we’ve got a storm on the way.”

“A storm? Will the internet go down?” Nice to see Thing 1 has his priorities straight */rolls eyes…*

angry-angus
CLICKY for LINKY

*Knot in the mood for much tonight, Clicky… slightly fucked off with others that really should know better… /sigh… Come, cheer me up…*

*/:D Ah you are a good assistant… /settles back and pats snout…*

Dear Reader… Have a Song…

 

Meeting Midnight

twelve

*Clicky? …/shakes head and places finger on lips…*

legs-suggests-a-theme-to-roob
CLICKY: Have a Song

meeting (n.) “action of coming together,” Old English gemeting, verbal noun from meet (v.). Meaning “gathering of people for discussion, etc.” is from 1510s. In 17c., it was applied generally to worship assemblies of nonconformists, but this now is retained mostly by Quakers

As it happened, Dear Reader, I spent quite a bit of time this afternoon pondering a devastatingly good blog post by Anna Raccoon…

https://twitter.com/AnnaRaccoon1/status/799281443683737600

Please, use Clicky and read it for yourself… I dare you not to be touched by this wonderful woman’s words. Take your time; I’ll wait…

owl-2

*******

I spent this morning in the Blue Universe…

With first Brexit, and now Trump, I have the sense that a spirit of revolt is spreading across the West. I’m looking forward to seeing a bushfire of similar revolts spreading across Europe. Revolts against authority, revolts against top-down control, revolts against social engineering, revolts against the entrenched political elites. These things are catching: when people see other people doing something, they’re inclined to think that they could do it too. It gives them ideas.

Well, we are at Le Crunch point in regards to the ‘Crisis’ Winter season, the Fourth Turning…

*Excellent timing, Clicky! New in from The Rev?… Sparkling stuff! …/thinks… Why don’t you give Dear Reader a Song, whilst I go an indulge myself. There’s a good Clicky… /pats snout…*

A horse, I’m hoarse… */cough…*

Dear Reader, Apols! Butt I am laid a little low, with a bug, brought in off the street by a Healthy visitor…

*Clicky, that’s watt everyone says to me… /coughs into fist… ‘Scuse, me for that, Click… /wipes hand on trouser leg…*

*/lights fag… Don’t look at me like that… smoking helps… /small hack… helps to get the shit up and off…*

*******

First remembrance of a horse… I was five and our class went on a visit to the local Nick… and there were stables, and this horse… It was the biggest, whitest thing I’d ever seen… and a policeman picked me up from the straw-covered floor, and on put me on it’s back… Magnificent horsey stood placidly, with gentle snorts and tail-flicks whilst a wiggling, giggling slip of a girl stroked its velvety neck, and burying her face deep in it’s silky mane… All the other kids played with batons and badges, but I stayed in the stable… And I cried when it was time to leave, to go home…

*******

“Like Shadowfax?” Kit-Kat said with a cocky grin. We were standing in the Kit Chinwag room of the house (the place of food). He was damp and ruddy-faced from the rain-sodden walk home from school.

I stopped and looked up at Thing 2, who now towers over me “Who?”

He stripped off his school tie from around his neck and looked at me with a faint look of disgust. “Gandalf’s horse? Shadowfax… Oh do come on Mater!”

*If you like, Clicky… though I doubt Gandalf was employed as a Brixton Bobby in 1972…/small cough with side order of squint… What you trying to suggest?*

*Oh course I’m fucking decent? What sort of question is that?!*

*Ah… yeah… I don’t actually want to hang the Righteous fuckers… I just fink they’re a bit… /taps temple… mentally ill-like… ‘cos of their phobia toward smoke… /drags some more… Nuffin’ wrong with letting them accumulate rope, though… We’ve knot had much luck in stopping ’em with that particular pursuit…*

*******

Other best remembrance of a horse… In Barbados on holiday in the early 90s. Thoughtful Man and I decided to explore the Highlands… on horseback, as you doo, even though neither of us had ridden a horse before… I was on this big chestnut-coloured creature, with a shaggy, blond mane… sitting ram-rod with fear at the sheer power of the muscles quivering beneath my legs… No crash-helmets provided but worn, leather reins to grip… We set off, follow the leader… he seemed to know where he was going… Well it was his turf, so I just let him do his thing… And then, once in sight of the final destination, he opened up and galloped… And I squealed with delight at the rush, and lost my headband, whipped away by the cool but oh so warm air streaming over me…

*******

“We also went horse-riding in Antigua,” Thoughtful Man reminded me. “But that was shit though because of all the rubbish on the beach.”

“Yeah that wasn’t as good,” I replied, “And then in Arizona, but that was just too hot and cactussy to go any faster.”

Thoughtful Man agreed and turned back to his PC. He was putting Clicky through his paces tending to his Arse-about-Facebook ‘Kingdom’; his favourite game, all neat and full of surprises.

“And don’t forget we owned shares in a horse once,” he said. “That was fun.”

*My first ring-tone, Clicky… I loved that phone, it opened up, like wings, for the qwerty keyboard… /clears throat… I need a sweetie, Clicky… /hold up hand… No, I’ll get ’em… you stay there and… /gets up… Have a Song…*

*/jumps about… Ore that other one, Clicky… Both are good…*