"Rawl aht ver Barrel........"

I've been hanging on to do this post and it's taken a lot longer than I thought, hence the radio silence.  Actually there are a couple of things to tell you about but I think I'll split them into 2 posts.  Sorry, boring administrative detail there.  However, my blog = my internal monologue made manifest.

Remember my lovely new saxophone that I bought a little while ago, back in June?  When I was in the shop - Chamberlain Music in Haslemere, Surrey - my eye fell on all the digital pianos and I noticed how small and neat they were and, more importantly, that you could play them with headphones and they'd be silent!  I live in a small cul-de-sac that is packed with houses, we're all very close to each other, and the walls are not amazingly thick.  And, naturally, in the summer everyone has their windows open and you can hear what's going on.

Generally, though, we're a very civilised bunch and are considerate about noise - I mean, I've only had to call the police out a couple of times over the 16 years we've lived here and that was due to more than noise, there was violence involved but I won't go into that here.

About six or so years ago, our immediate neighbours (we shared an adjoining wall) installed a piano in their study on the ground floor.  It was a traditional, upright piano, and they started having lessons and then practising on it.  Neither of them were absolute beginners, but I still got hear every single note.  This didn't bother me, but it did underline to me how much noise travels through these houses.  Because of this, I try to restrict my sax playing to when the neighbours are out.  (The piano-playing ones moved out about 4 or 5 years ago, and the new ones don't seem to play any musical instruments at all). I am nothing if not considerate.

But seeing the digital pianos in Chamberlains got me thinking.  I used to play piano in my very early teens - I can't remember exactly when, something like between ages 11 and about 14, I think.  I had proper lessons and was studying for Grade V piano/Grade I theory when I got all teenage-flouncy about it and decided I'd rather spend my spare time hanging out down the park with boys than practising endless bloody scales.  So I stopped.

Now, of course, 35 years later, I rather regret it.  I didn't find it easy to play, it was not one of the instruments that came naturally to me (I'm better on wind instruments - recorder, clarinet, sax) but it taught me everything I know about the technicalities of music - how to read it, notation, theory, etc.  So I started thinking.  We don't have a lot of space in our house but these new digital pianos don't take up much room.  The keyboard itself is a standard 88-key size but there are no strings, so there's no upright bit.  The only space you need to find is for the width and depth of the keyboard.  And I managed to find about 3 places in our house where one could fit! 

I broached the subject with TLH and he seemed quite positive about it, so I said, as with my sax, I'd start saving up my earnings from jewellery sales and proof-reading, and I'd do some online research to find one that would suit my purposes.  I decided I could live quite happily with a Roland F-110 digital piano. 

I started saving but it was going a bit too slow for my liking so I negotiated with TLH and we decided that he'd chip in the rest of the money and I could have the piano as my Christmas present for this year.  A bit early, yes, but what the hell?  I never know what I want for Christmas so am, consequently, a bit tricky to buy for (unless it's books and CDs but they're a bit unimaginative), so this solves that problem!  Hooray!

We popped back into Chamberlains on the Saturday before August Bank Holiday.  TLH had not been there before and, like me the first time I went there, was entranced by all the different instruments in the showroom - everything from harmonicas to full size grand pianos.  He picked up a ukulele and immediately got ribbed by the staff for playing the opening chords to 'Stairway to Heaven'!

(pic from "Wayne's World" for those bemused by the reference)

He'd not seen any of the digital pianos before so I showed him the one I was interested in so he could get an idea of the size, and a very helpful saleschappy ran through its features and showed us comparable keyboards.  But my mind was made up, and so the order was placed.

Of course, things never really go smoothly, do they?  It transpired that Chamberlains didn't have any in stock but they would contact Roland to deliver one to me directly.  After a few days, Chamberlains emailed to say that, unfortunately, Roland didn't have any in stock either and were waiting for a shipment which should arrive within a couple of weeks!!  I was peeved but, obviously, there's not a lot I could do and, in any case, I'd waited 35 years for a piano so what's a couple more weeks, huh?

2 weeks came and went, still no piano.  Chamberlains chased Roland down for me and, finally, FINALLY, it was delivered yesterday.  It arrived in a box the size of a coffin which took up most of our entrance hallway and weighed a bloody ton. Why, yes, that is my Bet Lynch leopardskin raincoat on the bannister...



There was no way I was going to be able to get that upstairs on my own, so I had to wait all day until TLH came home to nearly rupture himself getting it up the stairs.



We started to put it together:



And it fits exactly into the space I found for it in the dining room end of our sitting room:



My word it's a lovely thing.  Chamberlains gave me a free bench (which is very well made and obviously would cost a few quid) and a pair of free headphones.  Delivery was free too.



And this is the lid up:



Because it's a digital piano, it has all these 'voices' and settings so you can make it sound like a harpsichord or a honkytonk piano or even, should you so desire, a machine gun and a passing ambulance.  Not sure what Mozart would say to that but TLH had a fine old time last night plonking around on it and playing with all its features:



Me, I'm just happy for it to sound like a piano, be silent when I want it, and to not take up too much room.

So this morning I've spent about an hour familiarising myself with the "joys" of scales.  I bought myself a book of easy Grade 1 & 2 pieces and horrified myself finding out how difficult they are!  Still, got to start somewhere, I 'spose, and Minuet in F is as good a place as any, although perhaps I have to be a small child to be able to play it properly as I'm nowhere near this good:

Ten Years Ago

Like the lovely sas it hurts my heart to keep seeing pictures of planes hitting buildings but I can't stop watching.  There will be many millions of words written about the tenth anniversary of 11 September 2011 (forever to be known as 9/11), all of them far more eloquent than anything I can come up with so I won't try.

I will say, though, that this week, ten years ago, TLH and I were on holiday in New York.  He'd been a couple of times before on business, but I'd never been before.  The weather was stunning, we stayed in a fabulous boutique hotel (The Hudson Hotel, right next to Columbus Circle), we'd met up with some old friends from University who had moved out to the States some years before and we had a rare old time doing all the sights.

One day, towards the end of our week's stay, we decided to jump on a bus and go down to the Battery to do the obligatory Staten Island Ferry trip and stop off at Ellis Island Museum.  On returning to the southern tip of Manhattan,we wandered around a bit, and TLH stopped walking in a square with a metal statue of a man holding a large golden globe on his shoulders.  He asked me if I wanted to go up 'there'.  'Where?' I said, 'up there', he replied, pointing directly upwards.  I stared upwards and realised we were at the bottom of the World Trade Centre Towers.  I hadn't spotted them.  This may sound weird but there are so many tall buildings in NY that once they go above your eye-line, you don't tend to notice individual ones, unless you're specifically looking up.  They were SO tall I could barely lean back far enough to take them in.  They were intimidating and freaked me out a little.  I remember discussing with TLH about the car bomb placed in the underground car parks at the WTC in 1993 and how lucky it had been that the buildings hadn't collapsed then as, seeing how tall they are in real life, the amount of wreckage and damage that would have been caused would be unimaginable.  I also remember wondering if they'd ever caught the guy who had tried to blow them up.

It was very hot, I was tired, we'd been on the go all day and it was about 4pm, so I declined a trip to the observation deck.  We'd also been up the Empire State Building the day before and I wasn't entirely sure that the vista afforded from the top of the WTC would have been all that different.  I also clearly remember thinking 'I'll go up there next time we're here - after all, they're not going anywhere'.......

We left New York on, I think, 9 September 2011.

This was the photo I took from the Staten Island Ferry.  Within about 3 days of this picture being taken, the Towers were gone.

My Desk

Hello!  Been a while, hasn't it?

I'm not very good at keeping up a steady flow of writing.  I'll post something long-winded on the blog and then be quiet for weeks, then post a few shorter ramblings, then be quiet again.  It doesn't mean I'm not doing stuff that I could turn into a blog post, it's just I can't be arsed.  And I'm finding as I get older, I can't be arsed even more.

There are some 'ta-dah' posts in the offing, as I've recently started doing cross-stitch and am enjoying it very much.  But I'll post more about that later as, today, I want to introduce you to my desk.

I was reading Belgian Waffle's post about her newly-excavated desk and, at the end, she asked "What do you have on your desk?" and I thought "You don't wanna know" and then changed my mind because, well, someone might be interested plus it's a record of what I was doing at this time on this day, so this is a post about my desk(s).  With pictures.  Lots and lots of pictures.

In our house there is a tiny third bedroom upstairs.  It will take a single bed and a chest of drawers and that's about it.  I use this as my 'study' although it's known as 'the Jewellery Room'.  Because this is where I make my jewellery.  My husband is Welsh and very literal and very logical, which, I'm sure you'll agree, are admirable traits to have, and which I am trying to emulate.  I do other things in the Jewellery Room apart from making jewellery - I keep my lovely saxophone in there so it doubles up as a music practice room.  We keep most of our DVDs in here too, as well as my wool stash, so it trebles up as a storage room.  We have yet another computer and printer in here so this is where I do my 'serious' typing, i.e., "proper" correspondence, blog posting, etc., and where I fiddle about with my photographs online as well, so it quadruples as, um, a room where that sort of thing happens.

Anyway, some pictures, I think:

This is the view from the doorway.  As you can see, I have two desks at my disposal.  The one to your left is my main desk, where I construct jewellery.  The one on your right is used for cutting and gluing glass.  It also has drawers that have collapsed as it is an old crappy desk that is falling apart (a bit like me, really).  The eagle-eyed amongst you will also notice my lovely sax sitting in its stand.  It's a lovely, lovely thing *wistful sigh*.

Behind the door is hanging pouchy thing that contains various stuff, such as old jars, a rolled up poster of a Dale Chihuly glass exhibition that I really must get round to framing sometime, my old Pentax ME Super SLR camera that I got from my mum for my 21st birthday and hanging on the wall is a framed poster of an album cover from one of my favourite bands of all time, Magazine:

Signed by the band, no less (this says 'Howard Devoto'):

Moving round, we have an Ikea spice rack that makes ideal shelving for small jars for beads, pearls, etc.  It's not terribly clear but tucked into the top is a postcard of Mnajdra Temple in Malta, built in 2800BC, which I visited a few years ago, and hanging from the shelf is a papier mache, black and white painted mask from Singapore, given to me by an old boyfriend.  Oh look!  There's the computer screen with Belgian Waffling's actual post about her desk!

Then we come to the actual work surface of my main desk.  Oh lordy. Yes, I know it's cluttered, clutter is what I do and I do it very well. There are two lamps, a bead design board, tools in pots and glasses, jars and pots full of pearls and semi-precious stones, and tucked in the far right is my mini hi-fi/DAB radio with my iPod perched atop.

On the wall above my main desk is a monthly calendar and various images that I like comprised of birthday cards, postcards (from the Royal Academy and Sedona) and photos that I've taken.

Above the photos are a couple of shelves that house my ring binders, magazines, speakers and other stuff.

The top shelf has a couple of my very favourite things, an Elvis Cow and my 50p stuffed Piranha:

This brings us round to the windowsill which, you'll be pleased to hear, I recently spent several hours tidying.  There's a money box in the shape of a lady's head that I've had since I was about 9 years old and is one of only two things I've still got from my early childhood (everything else someone either threw out or gave away), there's a Mexican votive candle in a tall jar with a Union Jack flag, a large flat curved bean thing from Hungary and another candle stuck into it, a small picture of an Andy Goldsworthy installation, four empty jars, a plastic dinosaur, some old business cards and a tape measure. All most useful, I think you'll agree.

In the middle of the windowsill is my badger skull:

And now we swing round to the other desk. This is where I cut little pieces of glass that will then go into my glass kiln down in the garage to be fused, so there's a cutting mat, metal ruler, glastac glue, various other glues, cutting implements, small sheets of glass in plastic containers.  When I took this picture I had also just been sorting out some necklaces in preparation for my next craft fair - these don't usually live on this table.  There's also a sort of black metal tree display unit thing which currently has some of my fused glass window jewellery hanging from it, and leaning against the wall is a photo I took at Avebury in the winter of 2009 of a standing stone viewed through wintry trees: 

In the picture above you can just make out my earring stand, here's a better picture, including some pieces that I'm gluing together, ready to go into my stock - earrings, rings and brooches:

Next to this desk there is a tall set of shelves that houses boxes of necklace/bracelet boxes on the top shelf, more pots and stacks of containers full of beads:

And then lower down are our DVDs and CDs, and on the floor in front is the bag that I cart all my jewellery around in, with a toolbox perched on the top.  And, no, I'm not going to explain the NSFW card of Gay Biker Jesus on the wall (I would just say, though, that you can double click on all the pictures in order to get a really good, close-up view...)

And finally, looking back through the door, on the left there is a large square wicker basket which I use to store my old hard copy photographic prints, on which is a framed photograph of my late father, a birthday calendar above that, and above the light switch is a painting I did.  On the door of the cupboard are photos (of TLH) and postcards (of engravings by Norman Atkinson).

Finally, and as if I haven't crammed enough stuff into this room as it is, there is often to be found a large, elderly, grumpy, arthritic cat, usually in the most awkward places possible, either behind the chair where he's in danger of being rolled over:

Or right under the desk where's he in danger of being trodden on:

So, then, that's a tour of my desk(s), I'll bet you're feeling a lot happier about your so-called 'clutter' now, aren't you?!?

A day out!

I'm shattered.

Sylvester, our ancient and noisy cat, was very good and let me lie in until 7 this morning (he's normally grumbling at us by around 5.30) but, even so, it feels like I spent last night on the piss.  Which is odd, really, because yesterday was spent with the inestimable Katyboo (plus friends and family) doing very genteel things like going to the theatre and eating cake.  I'm such a lightweight.

I spent the morning at home alone as TLH had returned to his native homeland in order to construct flatpack furniture for his mam and stay over, and he left at about 7.30.  I got the 10.28 up to Waterloo, then the tube to Leicester Square and pootled about until our scheduled meeting time of 12 noon outside the theatre.  I was a little concerned that we'd not recognise each other but bearing in mind that my deciding to slap on some unaccustomed makeup plus my pink hair resulted in me ending up with a more than passing resemblance to Ronald McDonald, there was little difficulty in them spotting me in the heaving throng of bloody tourists.

It was a very nice surprise to discover that the Boo clan does actually exist and aren't just a figure of my deranged imagination.  And it shouldn't really have been a surprise to me to find that, literally within 5 minutes of meeting for the very first time, Katy and I were chatting about how much more perky properly fitted Rigby and Peller bras make your boobs.

Indeed, conversation between the 5 of was free ranging and organic, and included (but was not limited to) the following:

• Whether or not the old Queen Mary had been given syphilis by her husband
• The wisdom of importing Nazi memorabilia from Germany in order to make a killing (sorry) on eBay
• Why crowns aren't more acceptable as everyday wear
• That antique bakelite and diamante jewellery should be worn for doing the housework in
• My inability to tap dance properly - I can do the feet but not the arms, and perhaps I'd be better suited to Irish riverdance stuff
• Whether we could set up Katy and her dad in a shop to read tarot cards and do spiritual readings
• Why 'esoteric' bookshops always smell of soap (it's the incense)
• Pondering whether anyone was going to order 'Sauteed Dragon Whiskers with Two Kinds of Preserved Egg' on the menu
• Or, indeed, the 'Braised Duck's Web with Fish Lips'.  For realz.
• That you can change the sex of Gecko offspring depending on whether the egg is kept hot or cold.
• That someone has seriously misunderstood the meaning of the word 'diet' if they think that includes the consumption of a large pork pie
• The makes and colour of various combine harvesters
• Back in 1981 seeing Donald Sinden in blackface playing the lead in Othello, depicting the mad scene by just waving his hands around a lot and moaning
• The wisdom of trying to save money by constructing a much-needed neckbrace from (unused) old-style sanitary towels with loops and then being sent to school in it by your mother
• Whether it would be possible to convince one's husband to wear a bandalero made from (unused) Tampax

....and so on.

Should you get the opportunity to meet Ms Boo in the flesh, I would highly recommend it for, not only is she most entertaining, she knows where the good cake shops are, a skill to be much admired and one in which I am sadly lacking.

The play?  You want to know about the play?  Okay.  We saw Dr Who and Donna in 'Much Ado About Nothing' at Wyndhams Theatre.  Now it's well known in Jones Towers that my critical faculties are sadly lacking - I enjoy pretty much everything; I'm very easily entertained.  And I thoroughly enjoyed this - yes, there was some scenery-chewing and a fair amount of slapstick but it all worked really well, and the cast looked like they were enjoying themselves too.  The audience gave them a standing ovation which, for a Saturday matinee two-thirds through the run, is good going.  Needless to say, reviews have been terrific and tickets are like gold dust but if you can get one, do go, it's terrific fun.

And my day ended with being able to get home in time to watch on the Proms the National Youth Orchestra playing Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet suite which had me snivelling like a baby.

All round, a bloody fab day!

Finally did it.....sort of....

I wrote this post over a year ago.  It was a post about dying my hair properly pink.  I was umm'ing and ahh'ing about it but decided I would probably do it, when I finally plucked up the courage.

I finally plucked up the courage.  And it's sort of worked.  But, hey, look, I took pictures to show you the progress.  However, a bit of backstory first:

I decided last week that I'd had enough of shoulder length hair.  It clogs up the bath plug.  It makes the back of my neck hot which means, every summer, I have to sleep with it pinned up high on top of my head.  It takes an age to dry and I hate, hate, hate it hanging all wet and limp around my neck but I also don't like using a hairdryer.  The plus points to having long hair is that it doesn't cost you anything at the hairdresser because, um, I didn't go to a hairdresser.  When the ends got splitty or the fringe too long, I just took a pair of scissors to it myself, and job's a good 'un. Or, at least, a respectable 'un.

Having a complete restyle in a fancy schmancy salon would cost an arm and a leg but I found a friend of a friend who works in a salon during the day and does private customers (clients? patients?) after work for a very reasonable price.  So I contacted her and she came round on Wednesday this week and she hacked it all off.

In the back of my mind I'd been preparing for this, and the subsequent bleaching and dyeing, so had been growing the old colour out and letting my natural, fag-ash grey colour dominate, so that I could start from a clean slate, as it were.

Anyway, this is what it looked like before I let Hannah get her magic scissors on it:

Sort of fairly nondescript, shoulder length bob that's pink at the ends but greying on the top.

Hannah then did this to it:

And suddenly I was turned into my mother.   This is no reflection at all on Hannah's skills as I think she did a really good job, it's just, all of a sudden I seem to have developed the neck of an almost-50 year old woman which had been successfully hidden by lots of hair before, and even though I am an almost-50 year old woman, I don't really want any of her bodyparts knocking around - know what I mean?  The haircut itself was fine but I was just not sure about it.  I felt a bit 'mumsy'.

TLH arrived home, though, and decided he loved it and made me put my new sunglasses on so he could take a picture and, I must admit, it doesn't look too bad here, but then I always look better slightly out of focus:

Thursday (yesterday), I decided I might as well slap the bleach on that I'd bought and see what happened.  If I didn't like it, I knew I'd got some brown hair dye and also some Eastern European hooker purple colour hair dye in the cupboard left over from when I used to dye it that colour, so, if the worst came to the worst, I could always use either of those.

When I used to bleach my hair totally peroxide white, back in the 80s, I used to use a brand that didn't have added colour - the idea was that you bleached the feck out of your hair, then added the colour that you wanted.  And, stupidly, I thought that was what I had bought this time.  Turned out it was a brand that had a colour already in it.  In this case it was 'gold'.  Oh well, I thought, let's give it a go and see what happens.

So onto my head it got plastered while I sat and watched a minor black and white Alfred Hitchcock flick on the box ('Shadow of a Doubt' with Joseph Cotton - pretty good, actually):

 (By the way, these are all pictures that I took of the process to send to TLH during the day, so he could see what I was up to!).

The end result was quite interesting, a sort of pale goldeny biscuit colour.  And because I had so many different colours in my hair to begin with - naturally dark, grey, silver white, pink - it looked like I'd had highlights:

I actually quite liked the colour, and was half tempted to keep it.  But then I knew that was not going to fulfil my dream of having pink hair so decided that I'd carry on with my plan.

This morning, Friday, I had to nip out to run a few errands before I got down to it, so it eventually took me until lunchtime to get up to the bathroom, brush in hand.

This is the colour I'm using - Special Effects Atomic Pink:

Which looks blood red in the bottle and is, actually, that colour when you put it on, but comes out pink.

I'd squirted out about a third of the bottle into the bowl, loaded up the dye applicator brush, raised it to my head and then stopped.  I almost, ALMOST bottled it, right there.  I started wondering what the hell I was doing?  What was I trying to achieve?  For Christ's sake, I'm forty-bloody-eight years old with the figure of a grandmother, not some willowy eighteen year old art student.  What if I hated it?  What if it looked really, REALLY stupid?

Then I remembered that it's just hair, it grows out.  And I have two packs of back-up 'normal' hair colour that I can use if I freak out.  And - okay, I admit it - while I do want people to notice me, I really, honestly don't give a toss what they think about me; I just don't want to be invisible.  Zandra Rhodes is my role model.

So I took a deep breath and started plastering it on:

No going back now!  Oh God - what have I done?????

You're supposed to leave it on for 15 minutes, and the colour will be brighter depending on how porous and/or bleached your hair is.  I left it on for 45 minutes, as I wanted to be sure the colour was as strong as it would go.

You know what?  It's fantastic:

I think it would have been even brighter if I'd managed to get my hair peroxide white to start off with, rather than biscuity golden, but I still think the colour's pretty good.  Plus it's actually brighter pink in real life, and, yes, I know there's gratuitous cleavage in that shot - don't say I'm not generous to you all...

So here I'm looking like my mum still but at least I'm ROCKING PINK HAIR, DUDES!!!

And here's a final, glamorous, sunglasses shot which I think is pretty cool and badass, melonfarmers!

I'm now feeling MUCH happier about the haircut and am pleased I plucked up the courage to go ahead with it.  Admittedly, I haven't left the house yet to show it off in public but I'm off to London tomorrow to finally meet up with the fragrant Ms Katyboo for the first time so she'll be one of the first of my friends to see it and have her retinas burnt out!

Who, me? Overshare? D'you think?

I had a bit of a first today.

Today was the very first time I've done housework in the nude.  Yes, you read that right, completely starkers.  Before you think I've gone all German and naturist on you, I shall explain.

I've started running again.  I had a bit of a hiatus - throughout the whole of May, June and half of July I only ran 8 times which averages out at about 1.25 runs per week, which is a bit rubbish really.  But the weather was often against me and then I sort of 'forgot' that I was supposed to be running.  The weather from mid-July, though, has been much improved.  Plus I also remembered that I'd got a portable blood pressure monitoring machine so thought I'd better check it one morning a coupla weeks ago and it was a bit higher than I would like.  Admittedly I'd woken that morning with a tickly throat and had, in fact, just had a massive and prolonged coughing fit before strapping on the armband, which can't have helped, but even so, I thought, time to step up the running again.

So I'm trying to get back into the habit of going out if not every other day (it's best not to run every day, a day's break in between is optimal for muscle recovery, etc., and, yes, that does include shamblers like me) then the day after that - what's that, every 2 days? every 3?  It's maths and counting, I can't do maths and counting, but you know what I mean - run on Monday, rest Tuesday, possibly go out Wednesday and, if not, then definitely Thursday (but Wednesday if I feel up to it), you get the picture.

At the moment I'm averaging around 1.8 miles per run but I'm also suffering from bloody shin splints again and the only 'cure' that I can find online is 'don't do too much, or go too fast, too quickly' so I'm trying to keep the pace slow but steady so it doesn't get too painful.  Therefore I'm resigned to not seeing the far side of a 2 mile run for a very, very long time, but that's okay.  Slow and steady will get there, I hope.

Anyhoo, I went out this morning at about 9.30am and went my usual route - down the road, into the meadow, along the path down the edge of the poppy field (which, this year, had no poppies in it but was spectacular last year) and into the corn (maize) field which has grown as high as an elephant's eye.  I wonder what variety it is since it's MASSIVE.  The corn I grow at the allotment is lucky to make it to 5 feet tall but this stuff has to be 7 or 8 feet tall.  I usually get through one of the cornfields before the voice on my C25K iPhone app chimes in with 'you are halfway through your workout', which is the cue for me to turn round and head on home.  It was a lovely morning, blue sky, sunny with scuds of cloud and just this side of bearably hot.  I shambled home, sweat literally pouring off me, shut the front door and plonked myself into the chair in our hallway while I checked the stats on my iPhone (I'm SUCH a geek) and took my shoes off.

It dawned on me then that we'd left our sitting room curtains closed this morning (we often do this as the sun comes up on that side of the house) so rather than go all the way up two flights of stairs to strip off my sodden running gear and then eventually traipse back down two flights of stairs with it to put in the washing machine, I could take it all off in the hallway and just load it into the washing machine in our ground floor utility cupboard right there and then.  Head on upstairs, pass through the sitting room (on the first floor) and carry on upstairs to the bathroom for a shower; curtains are closed, no horses (or neighbours) would be startled by the amazingly pink and wrinkled suit I was apparently wearing, job's a good 'un.  So mote it be.

I was on the final, skyclad, approach to the bathroom when I suddenly realised that I had told myself that I was going to do the hoovering today.  I'm not very good at doing housework - I have a bloke's natural inability to see clutter and dust and stuff and so it doesn't bother me.  Until it does.  Like now, when the cat gets stuck to the floor because it's so sticky and we're fending off giant tumbleweeds of his discarded cat hair spiralling around in various corners when there's a draught.  I know I have to get the hoover out but I hate doing it - a three-storey house has a lot of floor space and two flights of carpeted stairs are a right pain in the hole to do.  Plus - and this is the whole point of my rambling - hoovering always, always gets me very hot and extremely sweaty - I've been known to need a shower after doing it.

You're ahead of me, aren't you?

I had a lightbulb moment.  I halted my progress to the bathroom, turned back and headed off into the garage to get the Henry.  Stark bollock naked.

Took me about 40 minutes to hoover everything and, yes, I did get very hot and sweaty again, and I felt perfectly justified for doing it au naturelle when I felt the big trickles of sweat running down from under my giant lolloping boobs (can I offer you some bleach for your mind's eye?  It's just over there, help yourself...), knowing that it wasn't soaking into the clean clothes I'd have put on following my post-run shower because I wasn't wearing any and I hadn't had one!  Hooray!

So that's how I spent my morning - how was yours?

PS.  Yes, of course I had a shower afterwards - I'm not completely without standards, you know!

PPS.  I'm getting all my hair cut off next week.  Finally.  After threatening months ago to do it, the time has finally arrived.

Which wolf to feed?

I'm not given to airy-fairy, arty-farty New Age bollockspeak but occasionally - just occasionally - I read something that makes me stop and think for a second (and then continue on my normal, ramshackle way).

I read this today and I'll just leave it here because I actually quite like it:

”My son, there is a battle between two wolves inside us all. One is Evil. It is anger, jealousy, greed, resentment, inferiority, lies, & ego. The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, humility, kindness, empathy, & truth.” The boy thought about it, and asked, “Grandfather, which wolf wins?” The old man quietly replied, “The one you feed.”