Sometimes you write a blog and it’s all seamless and smooth and lovely. Other times you write a blog and it’s all lumpy. Sometimes you have lumpy thoughts, but you don’t want to insert them into an otherwise smooth kind of moment. Then you find you have a collection of random thoughts which were quite nice, and sort of amused you in a gentle and entirely non-threatening way. You think; ‘It’s a shame to waste those. I’ll save them up until I’ve got enough and then I’ll post them all in a lump.’ And that’s what this is. A lumpy, bumpy randomly thought out collection of stuff that has flitted through my brain in recent times:
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I bought some Jelly Baby ice lollies because they were on offer at the supermarket and they looked small enough for Oscar to handle without ending up inside the lolly screaming to be let out. It said on the packet that the jellies were ‘wobbly’. I thought they were lying. They weren’t. I got one out of the packet for Oscar to eat on the way home from the supermarket. I pulled it. It stretched. I pulled it some more, it stretched. I finally wrenched it out of the packet, by which time it was about three feet long and droopy (very visually disturbing). Oscar held it by the stick and the lolly broke in half. One half plummeted onto his shorts and made him shriek and then he burst into tears. I wrestled it away from him and ate the fallen bit to see if they tasted as weird as they looked. They do. I can see why they’re on special offer. It’s a bit like eating orange flavoured, frozen glue. Quite, quite disturbing.
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My friend Daf sent me a superb quotation which I will recreate for you here with the aid of future technology (i.e. cut and paste). ‘A compromise is the art of dividing a cake in such a way that everyone believes he has the biggest piece’ Ludwig Ernhard I don’t know who Ludwig is, but you’ve got to be impressed by such a massive intellect when applied to the world of cake. There aren’t enough philosophical cake based quotations around in the world for my liking and it’s good to see the balance being redressed finally. Ludwig may be my new hero. It will now transpire that when I finally get around to looking him up on Wikipedia that he was in favour of compulsory mass genocide for the over twenty ones and responsible for the discovery of ricin tipped umbrellas no doubt.
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I was reading in the news that the toilet on the International Space Station is finally fixed after two weeks of being broken. What it didn’t make clear was: a) what they all did for two weeks while the toilet was out of order, as it’s not as if you can just pop next door and b) who they managed to get in to fix it. I bet their hourly rate was astronomical. It’s only confirmed my deep and lasting desire never to have to go into space. No cakes, no bookshops, no trees and apparently no working bog. Nice one.
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On my daily perambulation through the world of news I also came across a fabulous picture of my favourite potter Grayson Perry in his delightful, home made ensemble which he wore to the opening of the Royal Academy exhibition this year. He looks like the high drag version of Little Bo Peep. If you have a look you can just see a silk appliqué of what looks like his treasured teddy bear, Alan Measles on the front of the skirt. Go Grayson, go! You are a potting God.
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I may be developing a fixation with Dan Cruikshank. I recorded some of the Hay-on-Sky programming last week for those times in the day when I get to sit down and there’s nothing else to watch. I want Mariella Frostrup’s job, so I thought I’d do some research (I also want her face, her hair and her enviable figure please). Please note that these were recorded last week and that today is the first time I’ve had a chance to sit down and watch one. The lovely Dan was on, being interviewed about his book about the architectural wonders of the world. There’s something so ineffably sexy about men who are deeply enthusiastic about what they do, even if they do look rather odd. People who fall into this category include:
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Ray Mears
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Jeremy Clarkson
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James May
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Alan Titchmarsh
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Diarmuid Gavin
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Simon Schama
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Michael Woods
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Stephen Fry
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Gerard Depardieu
It’s enthralling. There he was bless him, Dan Cruikshank looking like a tiny mole who had only just been let out into the daylight, blinking and squeaking away and I just suddenly felt an unbearable rush of tenderness towards the man. Lord love him and all who sail in him.
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My mum told me today that the machine builders use for drying out a room full of wet plaster is called a Rhino. I asked her why. She said that she didn’t really know. We agreed that it was unlikely that real, wild rhinos do this in their natural habitat, although it would be quite cool to think that on the Veldt when you’re building a house and it’s a big soggy, all you have to do is tempt a rhino to come and squat in your living room and all would be well. Apparently the larger version of the Rhino, the machine, rather than the animal, is known as an elephant. Mum said that this made more sense because the flapping of the elephant’s ears would probably help to dry the plaster quicker. Rhinos however have stupid ears like little twists of paper, so how they help with plaster I really don’t know. Perhaps they have very hot breath. It would be weird and more than a bit confusing if real big rhinos were called elephants. Perhaps small elephants are called rhinos. It all got a bit surreal after that and we agreed to move on to other, less complicated issues.
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I found out today that if a man dies in Thailand, his son has to become an honorary monk for the day of the funeral as a mark of respect for their father. I think this is quite a nice idea. It happened to someone I know. What isn’t so nice apparently is that they shave your hair off to do this in the most authentic way. Not just all the hair on your head, your eyebrows too. I found this a little challenging as one would hope at a funeral that people would be going for the ’sad’ look rather than the ’surprised and startled’ look. Apparently it takes quite a while for shaved off eyebrows to grow back. So that’s what Stag nights and Thai funerals have in common. Bizarre eh?
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