Thursday 8th May – Beelzebub’s Brown Ford Fiesta

I’ve got an hour before I have to go and pick Oscar up from Nursery and I need a break from Leonardo Da Vinci.  I’ve just spent the last two hours reading about casting a giant bronze horse and how to do it.  If you ever need tips or are thinking of making your own, mail me and I’ll send you diagrams.  As a heads up, apparently it’s best to use the sand casting technique alongside the lost wax system or it will all go horribly wrong.  These are the things I need to spend my life finding out.  I don’t know how I’ve managed to get by before now.  It’s a revelation that will change my life.  Tally ho!

 I’ve also answered questions in my first on line tutorial on the subject.  I avoided the direct questions about Leo himself and stuck to ones on the pros and cons of primary and secondary historical sources.  That way I wouldn’t be in danger of writing something like: ‘That Leonardo, he’s a bit crap really isn’t he?’ which are the thoughts I’m beginning to form regarding his Da Vinciness.  He seemed to do a lot of :’I've started but it’s unlikely that I’ll finish’ along with; ‘Go on then, I’ll take your money but I’m not promising anything’…Somewhat unreliable.  I’m glad I didn’t have to ask him to paint a picture of my mother for her birthday.  He’d turn up with it five years after the funeral and demand payment in full.  That’s the kind of sloppiness we’re talking about here.  Add that to the pink frocks and it’s just a disaster in the making.  I don’t care if he did invent the first helicopter.

I finished my book about the serial killing brother/crime combination last night.  It could have been great.  Instead it had more plot holes than a Swiss Cheese and some really terrible, terrible lines.  Something like: ‘Should I kill her brother?’ to which the answer was: ‘She’s not just a cop, she knows a lot about meterology as well.’ which seemed to be all the answer he needed to let her live.  Perhaps this explains the dearth of news stories about weathermen slaughtered by knife wielding maniacs, I don’t know.  Frankly I don’t care.  I’m not reading any more of his books again.  Apparently they’re frequently on the New York Times bestseller list.  This amazes and baffles me.  I know I had a proof copy, but that’s to do with punctuation and spelling not bad writing.  Nothing can excuse the bad writing.  Heinous.  And he was obsessed by sweat.  He wrote about it in nearly every chapter.  It was more off putting than the killing bits.  Do I need to know how much the average Alabama homicide detective sweats for the duration of one average novel? No I don’t.

I am now reading a book that a lady called Maria Savva sent me asking me to review. I’m only two chapters in, so I’ll keep you posted.  I did warn her that I’m hyper critical and rather anal and she sent it to me anyway, so she’s clearly quite brave.  Maybe she thinks I’m nicer than I appear.  It’s not true.  In between that I’m also reading Leon Battista Alberti ‘on painting’, which was hugely influential on Leonardo apparently.  I couldn’t say.  It’s not hugely influential on me. It’s rather like eating a bowl of dust for the eyes.  Nevertheless it is short.  This is a good thing.

Yesterday when we got home from school I threw the children out in the garden with all the toys and some big buckets of soapy water so we could clean all the garden grime and garage dust off of things and they could play.  They had a marvellous time.  Oscar’s shoes still haven’t dried out properly and I have officially lost his sunhat, never to be found again.  I was rather worried, because he is very fair and doesn’t have a huge amount of hair.  In the end I dug something out of the dressing up box.  This meant that he was naked except for his sandals and a rather fetching pink petal shaped satin hat with green leaves poking out the top.  Bless the poor boy.  I was very good to him and didn’t take any photographs with which to show his future girl friends how adorable he was.  I really must buy him a proper, manly sun hat as a matter of urgency.  He can’t prance about looking like tinkerbell forever.  Not that I’m against boys dressing as Tinkerbell in principle, but I do think they should be given the choice rather than forced into it.

I filled the newly cleaned sandpit with warm water and they had their baths in the garden last night.  They thought it was marvellous.  I used to put Tilly in the garden with a washing up bowl when she was a baby.  She was just the right size to sit in it.  It saved me from buying her a paddling pool for twelve months, and I didn’t have to worry about it popping on a thistle.  Oscar was never going to fit into a washing up bowl.  Actually we may have got him into one some time last winter, but we probably wouldn’t have gotten him out again, and it seems a tad unfair to stick him in a bowl of water in the garden in November, so I refrained.

I’ve promised them that I will get some sand at the weekend, and that I will dig out the proper paddling pool and the hose pipe so they can pretend they’re on the beach.  This will mean two things are bound to happen; first, it will snow at the weekend, and second, Oscar will undoubtedly pooh in the new sand much to the girls’ merriment and Jason’s consternation.  These are the rules of childhood, and they must be carried out.

So that’s it really.  I’ m immersed in the Renaissance, I’ve got eyestrain from reading too many review copy books late into the night, and I’ve fallen behind with the housework because I can only cope with being disciplined in one or two areas, and everything else must go to hell in a handcart.

I’m still obsessed by what people are searching for.  It provides me hours of endless amusement, because that is the sort of sad person I am, and it’s better than looking into fifteenth century problems with bronze casting.  Here are some gems from this week:

Aliens in my food

I presume this one comes from the U, S of A.  I have discussed Alien abductions at great lengths in much earlier blogs.  Please try there, although I don’t believe I ever talked about aliens in my dinner.  I have to admit that I would be disappointed if I’d gone to all the trouble of cooking a decent dinner only to find that it was infested by creatures from outer space.  I’m not really sure whether you’re looking for confirmation that aliens do in fact exist in your food, or whether you’re just making a statement, or possibly even a cry for help before some bogey green thing comes shooting out of your lasagne and eats you first.  I’ve had dinners where I’d wished they’d been inhabited by alien life forms who would quickly beam them up to the mothership for analysis and save me the agonising effort of eating them.

How do Kingfishers Sleep?

Carefully I would imagine. They have rather spiky beaks, and I doubt that they go for the on their front option, because it would just ruin the mattress, unless they had one of those massage beds with the hole for your face to poke through.  That would work.  I imagine a careful side manoeuvre, or possibly sitting up with some very good padding to avoid falling down and getting stuck beak first in some silt.  I doubt they bother with bedclothes due to the lack of opposable thumbs, and Kingfisher sized bedding shops.

How to beet nemises

I presume you are a child bent on world domination, or an illiterate evil genius.  My first piece of advice on making forays into the world of evil genii, and in dealing with your ultimate foe would be to learn to spell.  It’s going to give you a great advantage, particularly when it comes to reading the instructions and/or assembling the parts of your acme torture devices.  Unless of course you are actually talking about turning nemises (perhaps a small rodent) into beets, in which case, as previous root vegetable discussions, please write to gardener’s question time. You might want to include drawings, as your spelling is clearly not up to scratch yet.  This will avoid confusion and your having to add Gay Search to your hit list of possible nemesises (I have no idea what the plural of nemesis is. Most people only have one I think) when you rise to ultimate power, beetroot in hand.

How are dodecahedrons used today?

To make kingfisher’s beds.  they use them as propping material to stop them falling out of trees.  See above.

Is making holes a sign of pregnancy?

It depends what food cravings they’re having and how they’re appeasing them.  If you see a lot of holes, a slightly rotund looking woman, who will be tired and who spends most of her time popping to the toilet, and she has bulges in her cheeks rather like an overactive hamster, I’d say yes.  If they’re making holes in you for asking stupid questions it’s debatable.  If they cry afterwards and then eat some jam and beetroot sandwiches, I’d still say yes.

What did mammoths really look like?

Teeny weeny versions of Bernard Cribbins crossed with a new born chick.  Sort of fluffy and with a beard and twinkly eyes.

Beelzebub Card

I didn’t know Beelzebub had a particular day of celebration.  Did Helen Steiner Rice write the verse inside?  I expect it’s been masterminded by those evil genius’ at Hallmark to create extra revenue in the dip between Father’s Day and Halloween.  I am almost certain they will have pictures of brown Ford Fiesta’s on the front.