Katyboo1’s Weblog

You will be glad to know that Tom sent me my very own graveyard yesterday after reading my plaintive demands on this very blog.  He also sent me an aquarium with a yellow duckfish in it, and an egg which is going to hatch into something, we know not what, in the next three days.  This is all terribly exciting and a bit like Christmas.  As I am not entirely ungrateful, or selfish, I sent him a purple octopus for his aquarium as a thank you. It doesn’t do to be churlish in these things.  What goes around comes around as my mother tried to explain to my children at the weekend.  Apparently she was giving them a lecture on the dangers of teenage drug use.  She has warned me, because she feels that she was quite confusing and I may get asked some strange questions in the next few days (probably not: ‘Mum, do you know the street value of a gram of speed?’ I don’t think my mother is that clued up).  I am preparing myself for the worst - possibly even a telephone call from the school.

I am now wondering what else I can ask for that people will supply me with (with reference to the aquarium rather than the speed).  It’s a bit like being a celebrity and getting a free goody bag.  I do note that nobody has sent me a Philip Treacey hat or a pair of Christian Louboutin’s yet.  Perhaps Philip and Christian are not yet converts to the world of blogging.  Maybe I will have to write to them both (grasping of Glenfield) to give them a gentle but encouraging prod.

Apparently I have to feed the fish in my aquarium, but I do not know how you know this, or when it is appropriate to do this or even how you do this and where to acquire fish food in a virtual world.  Presumably a virtual pet shop, but I have not seen one yet.  Tom sent me a message to say that he has fed them because, ‘they needed it’, but how did he know this? Perhaps, along with being a wizard he is able to mind meld with fish.  This would be very cool, and he could have his own television show as: “The Fish Whisperer.”  I could be related to someone spookily famous.  I am now even more excited than before, if that is at all possible.  You know I don’t get out much.

I did find out something quite disturbing about fish when I was watching my latest fix of QI.  Apparently when fish are belly up and glassy-eyed on the top of the fish tank when you come down for breakfast in the mornings, they may not in fact be dead, contrary to popular belief.  They are very easy to overfeed (do you see now why I am worrying? Eh?) and being too podged with fish food can give them constipation which messes with their swim bladder.  A swim bladder is what keeps fish swimming along jauntily in a straight line, and if it goes on the fritz they can end up floating belly up on the surface of the water.  The way to treat them is to starve them for a couple of days, whereupon they will have a nice satisfying pooh, relieve the pressure on their over-stressed swim bladder, and then boing back to life, albeit still being glassy-eyed, because that’s just how fish are.  This is very heartening news if you are a fish and could mean many more years of close friendship with the small plastic diver in the bottom of the tank.

For me however, this news is very troubling. This probably means that I am a fish serial killer and am on their top ten most wanted website, with a tea strainer in one hand and the handle of the toilet flusher in the other.  Oh God!  That’s some serious karmic debt I’ve probably incurred, and I hate to think about the owners of fairgrounds.

They’re probably roasting in fish hell as we speak. I am now beginning to worry about my responsibilities as the owner of a busy part of the virtual universe.  As if I didn’t have enough problems with my fish already.  What will happen for instance, when my egg hatches?  Will I have another mouth to feed?  I already have three children, a husband and an inscrutable duckfish to nourish.  It’s a responsibility, and I just don’t know if I’m up to it.  What happens if I kill it?  Tom gave me a Furby once, not a virtual one, a real one (I don’t know if he’s trying to encourage my maternal instincts or send me to an early grave.  I will try to think kindly of him.  He buys me cakes).  It was for Tilly for when she got older.  It got knocked off the table on the second day we had it, and sustained a serious brain injury.  I don’t think it was me that did it, but as its new parent, albeit in loco parentis until my child reached maturity, I really shouldn’t have left it alone on the table.  It was very irresponsible of me.  It kept making horrible, mangled cheeping noises and wouldn’t stop.  I obviously couldn’t take it to a furby doctor, or even a vet.  In the end I panicked.  It took two weeks in the airing cupboard wrapped in a duvet for it to die.

It was awful, and it was my fault. It was furbicide.  Could this be history repeating itself?  I must just face the fact that I am a murdering bastard and get on with things.  There is no other way around it.  Never give me your pets to look after.  Never give me your clothes to iron and don’t even get me started on the massacre of plant life.  Needless to say this house is a pot plant free zone.  Not because I don’t like greenery, I do.  I just have the opposite of green fingers.  Black, withered, zombie fingers is what I have.  It’s a wonder I’ve managed to rear three children as it is.  I even killed a cactus once.

You note that I haven’t had any worries about my graveyard.  That’s easy.  All the things in the graveyard are dead already, it’s not like I’ve got to spray the zombies with Baby Bio or anything.  They can fend for themselves I think, and I suspect that they’re old enough and dead enough to look after themselves without having to come running to me every five minutes.  Having said that, I will probably go to my Facebook profile tomorrow to face a dead fish and the whole page littered with ravening but needy undead!  Perhaps that is where my forte lies, in neglecting the undead so that they can thrive.  If anyone’s thinking of buying me any housewarming presents perhaps you can just get me something from the Hammer Horror Archives that can pretty much fend for itself.  Christopher Lee would be nice.  He’s quite tall, and I bet he could get the cobwebs from those tricky corners if pushed.  Having said that, he probably quite likes cobwebs and I would find him using his patented spider flute to actually encourage them to nest in the house.  Hmmm, I think we’ll scrap that idea after all.  Let’s stick to saving up for those Christian Louboutins instead.

To persevere with the mournful themes of death and imminent decay that I started with, today has been very grey don’t you think? The weather is horrible.  It’s cold and rainy and the sky is what I believe they call louring.  It feels like it’s about three inches from the top of my head and that I should be wearing some kind of hard hat when venturing forth in order to stop the sky from crashing down on my head and killing me outright (Chicken Licken - lowbrow kid lit, but hey!).  I hate this kind of weather.

I’m all for a bit of cold, and I don’t mind rain that much (after all, I lived in Wales for three years.  You get immune to a little trifle like torrential rain).  It’s the bleakness of it all I can’t stomach.  I was going to take Oscar to the park down the road today for a brisk constitutional.  As it was, I woke up with a stuffed up head and a sore throat, and he is still pouring with snot and dribble because of his teeth, so we pretended that we had gone to the park and stayed at home instead.  I often find that this is much the best course of action.

The little known first world war poet, Ivor Gurney wrote a whole diary about a marvellous trip he had taken to Paris.  He detailed all the places he had visited, and the ambience of Parisian life with marvellous verisimilitude.  It turns out that he never went to Paris, and wrote it in his cell in an insane asylum shortly before he died.  I think he came from Shropshire, which would explain a lot.  I once spent a very trying weekend in Ludlow and I don’t think I’ve ever been the same since.  The flapjack was a huge disappointment, which only added insult to injury.  It was reminiscent of chewing through a large bolt of fabric without the benefit of a glass of water.

I could turn into a modern day Ivor Gurney if the weather doesn’t buck up a bit soon (see, I’m already going retro – buck up a bit!  What am I thinking of?).  Being shut up in a small house in Glenfield with three children is roughly akin to being kept in an insane asylum, so apart from the fact that I haven’t suffered shell shock, we have a lot in common.  On certain days, when the noise levels are particularly high, and CBeebies is so piercing that lumps of plaster are falling from the ceiling I feel that I could probably feign shell shock quite adequately too.  The horror! The horror! (Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad).

I am going out this evening with my friend and partner in crime, Andrea.  We are going to the local arts cinema to see the Kenneth Branagh adaptation of As You Like It.  Unlike Beowulf, I am not expecting great things, as all the reviews for this have been terrible.  In fact Andrea sent me one which said something like: “As You Like It?  No. You Won’t!” Pithy, and to the point.  We discussed this, and decided that we would go anyway in the spirit of literary enquiry.

We are limbering up to do a third year Open University Course about Shakespeare in Production.  We are both very busy doing other random things, and so this will not take place for at least eighteen months, but in the meantime we feel that we must show willing and do our bit, by watching anything Shakespearean that passes our way so that we can litter future essays with: “If one bears in mind the amazing sense of chiascuro used in the Branagh production of 2007” etc, or enter conversations with: “Well, really darling, the use of antithesis in the 2008 tragedy season was simply sublime.”  Next year we will be wearing full Elizabethan costume for several weeks so that we can, you know, really, like, empathise with the characters.  We will adopt the method acting approach.  I am going to prance about in the woods dressed as a donkey whilst wooing the Queen of the Fairies and Andrea is going to dress as her shipwrecked twin brother and talk in a deep brown voice.  We are such professionals.

Apparently this version of As You Like it has flying ninjas in.  Now, I’m slightly hazy on the finer plot points, as it’s been a very long time since I’ve seen it.  But I think I would have remembered if there had been any flying ninjas in it, mainly because it would have been the most exciting thing to happen in what I vaguely remember as being rather a dull and run of the mill play.  I’m sure it has some cross dressing in it, although this is not as exciting as it sounds (a bit like Orthodox Jewish Lesbianism - see last week), as pretty much all Shakespearean comedies (and I use the term comedy in the loosest possible sense) have people splitting their sides with hilarity and downright amazement as it turns out that Derek is really Ethel and that Marina has always been Reg, and that somewhere along the line they’re all actually second cousins who haven’t seen each other since Aunty Mabel’s funeral in ’77.

I’m hoping that the ninjas turn out to be a revelation, as ninja’s generally do, and that I can at some point incorporate them into an essay on the relevance of Shakespeare to a modern audience who only really understand being karate chopped in the windpipe by men in pyjamas, and not the finer points of blank verse.  I think there’s a good case for ninja’s being both contemporary and quite important.  I’d want one around in a moment of adversity.  In fact, if Ray Mears would train to be a ninja, he’d be the perfect man in a crisis, rather like the human embodiment of a Swiss Army knife.

I like wearing pyjamas.  Perhaps one day I could be one.  I could be one of the very rare band of ‘slothful ninjas’, who sit around in their pyjamas all day watching television and poking pink wafer biscuits through the slot in their headgear. I will of course, keep you posted on my findings (like you think for one second that I wouldn’t!  I’d tell you if my tea bag looked a bit interesting now wouldn’t I?).

In the meantime, I have to go and do second service dinner. First service was when Oscar decided that he hated poached chicken breast with tomatoes in balsamic vinegar and mashed potato and threw it up the wall screaming.  I’ve come upstairs to calm down for five minutes which seemed a much better plan than my first one, which was to batter him repeatedly over the head with a teaspoon.  Now it’s the grown ups turn, not to be battered like an angry boiled egg, just to eat tea.  Andrea is coming later, as she’s suddenly had the revelation that she’s going to Cuba in two days and needs some Cuban friendly clothing (A big Cigar and a grass skirt I think).  Needless to say, not an easy job in the middle of November in the East Midlands.  Good luck to her…