CRIME II, AND COOKERY

guess what? john the bosh seems to have been burgled again.
this time the criminal has made a right old mess. let me tell you how the crime was discovered.
john the bosh returned home and to his surprise the kitchen floor seemed to have developed an unusually ‘crunchy’ type texture. it was almost as if a burglar had got a pound of sugar out of a top cupboard and chucked it on the floor. some raw spaghetti had been added to the sugar-topped vinyl and the whole lot rather well spread about.
it seemed to be the work of a pathetically amateur criminal.

now john does not hang about when a crime has been committed. he searched the premises and a suspect (megan the lurcher) was found hiding behind the kitchen door.

here is a rather predictable transcript of the interview which then took place:

suspect: (i’m in for it now)
john the bosh: YOU FUCKING LITTLE BASTARD!!!
suspect: (i couldn’t help myself)

at this point, mr the bosh then rolled up a copy of the daily mirror and smacked his own hand with it.

suspect: (he hit himself, not me, so i don’t care)
john the bosh: AND LOOK WHAT YOU’VE DONE TO MY BEST SHOES!!! I’LL HAVE TO WEAR EXTRA LONG TROUSERS NOW!!!
suspect: (i’ll try giving him that soppy look that he likes and then go and hide in the bedroom while he sweeps up. it’s not my fault if i can’t use a dustpan and brush).

the suspect then made a speedy getaway.

so that was the crime bit, now comes the cookery bit…

because i am so great and fab and also brilliant at cooking, i can cook anything what i want and i can make a meal out of just about anything. well, not sugar and raw spaghetti but really just about anything, including stuff that i find outdoors.

my diet is largely prescribed by the contents of the cheap shelf at tesco. today was no exception. today i had cheap smoked haddock. i would rather not have haddock that had been dyed yellow but, when the pennies count, there you go.

so, i cooked up onion and garlic and red pepper and cherry tomatoes. i added arborio and basmati rice. seasoned stock was added and then chopped up boiled eggs and finally the pieces of haddock. the end result was a kind of cross between risotto and kedgeree. oh, it had some peas in too.

my dinner was yum but that’s because i am so great and i know how to cook things. i may not know how my microwave typewriter works but i can cook stuff like they do on ‘ready, steady cook’.

voodoo doll stats: today’s pin goes right into bliar’s eye
swig stats: a few in the pub and a few at home
fag stats: 16
suggestion stats: have a look at sixthseal.com

sleep well, dear reader, and if you wish very, very hard you might find that i will cook your dinner for you. goodnight!

UPON DUMPLINGS

i had thought about writing a little about my grandma’s house keys. but seeing as i have done very little today except more dumplings i shall write about dumplings instead and you will just have to wait until i have done absolutely nothing in a day before you hear about grandma’s keys.

now then. dumplings.
when the rain has been falling and it is a wee bit chilly, what you want is dumplings as they stick to your ribs. vegematarians can eat them, just like normal people can, as long as they use vegematarian suet.

god (who does not exist) only knows what a vegetable suet is made out of. i think it might be some of the crud scraped out of a vegan’s armpit; that’s why i use the normal stuff. but atora make both kinds. now listen up.

first of all i make a vegetable stew type thing:
get a pot with a lid that can go in the oven. it’s easier with a metal one that can go on the hob too; saves mucking about.
into the pot goes olive oil and some chopped onion and garlic. cook it about a bit while you chop a carrot and some potato. you have to chop quite finely so that it all cooks. put in a couple of handfuls of green lentils and some chopped celery and red pepper. in goes a drained can of cannellini beans or similar and a tin of chopped tomatoes. keep stirring and add a pint of vegetable stock cube watery stuff. and maybe some swig. or whatever.

get that bubbling on the hob and warm the oven up to about gasmark 6 or something.
then you can make them deelish dumplings.

to make 6, i use a cereal bowl and put in about twice as much self-raising flour as suet (don’t ask me how much as i never measure anything). i add black pepper, white pepper and today i added some rosemary that was stolen out of a garden. put in a pinch or two of salt and start mixing it all up with a metal spoon.
prepare a floured board.
then i put on a good squirt of tomato puree and a little cold water until i have a reasonable mix. you can’t go wrong really if you add the water a little at a time.
when the mix looks about right, spoon out dollops about the size of a walnut onto the floured board. sprinkle more flour over and then shape into, erm, dumplings with flour on. then you plonk them onto the top of the bubbling stew, slam on the lid, bung it all in the oven.

by now you deserve some swig, so go and have some for a while,

normal people might like to prepare some meaty stuff at this point.

you will be able to smell the lovely smells of the dumplings cooking. try leaving them in for about half an hour and then see what’s going on. if they need more time then leave them in. but when they are done, just scoff them all up.

maximum recommended dosage for dumplings is 3.

then, rubbing your distended balloon of a stomach, you may ease back your chair, have a smoke, swig a swig and feel that, just for once, all is well with the world.

swig stats: medium
boat trip stats: work in progress
fag stats: 9

goodnight, dear reader, and happy dumplings to you.

*TAPPING TEETH WITH FINGERNAILS*

this is what i do when i’m trying to think of something.

well, i woke up…
(no, that won’t do)
well, i got up and had the dry heaves…
(no, that’s no good either)
well, i went to tesco when it wasn’t raining but when i came out of tesco it started to rain.
(this is more like it)
so i came home again and listened to the radio. erm, hancock and steptoe and son.
(now we’re cooking, keep going h., you can do it)
um, then i listened to the radio a bit more.
(frankly h. i think that ‘flagging’ is the word for this)
today i read something written by someone that i would like to call a friend. this person’s life is disintegrating and it looks like they are too. i’m rather worried but there is nothing that i can do.
there are now six names out of eight for the proposed boat trip in septemberish. anyone called lordhutton or M may care to have a look at simong’s fora in the ‘general’ section.
(keep going, not much more to do now)
erm, then i cooked the tea…
(oh for heaven’s sake, not bloody food again)
…which featured dumplings in view of the weather being arse and dumplings being fab.
i read the paper for a bit and laughed and swore about bliar rowing like mad for the shore. for years i have been telling that man how awful he is and now everyone in the whole wide world, with the possible exception of cherry letter-box-gob and his master in amerikaland, agrees with me.
(little bit political there)

so, all in all, a good day.
nothing too horrendous has happened and i have been proven right yet again.
hoorah!

night, dear reader, and, if you have faith, please pray for my friend. as you know, i don’t have faith but i do have my fingers crossed.

PROOF THAT GOD DOES NOT EXIST

proof 1.
well, i went out today because i have to maintain my most delicious caches. i have to maintain all of them, not just the most delicious ones. what i meant was that they are all delicious. omally had told me that the catch had been enbustified on ‘weyside wander 2′ but he gave me a smallish metal fuse box thing which i spent some time camouflaging today. and off i plodded, not for the good of my health but just to make sure my cache was ok for future finders. so i done all that and had a bit of a swig and then, guess what, the heavens opened and it lashed down. oh, it poured. trouty had to make a hat out of a plastic bag that she had bread in for the ducks.

proof 2.
i trod in some mud.

proof 3.
you get bread in stupid bags. you get bread in bags that are made out of some kind of gossamer (stop sniggering, not that kind) kind of plastic that has little holes in to make the bread go stale nice ‘n’ quick. when you try to get the bread back in it falls apart and crumbs go everywhere.

proof 4.
when you do a sausage or two under the grill they are disobedient. you do them on one side but then you have to balance them to do the other sides. they always roll over again and everything goes wrong.

proof 5.
i haven’t got any money.

proof 6.
you have to go to skool when you don’t want to but, when it seems like it might be quite fun, you aren’t allowed to.

proof 7.
children get blown to bits as a direct result of the greed of bliar, his lust for vice-presidency of the world, his utter dreadfulness and paucity.

proof 8.
that it doesn’t matter what you do; you WILL get ripped off

proof 9.
all the misery, poverty, hunger, disease, misfortune, unhappiness, war, inequality, death and disaster in the world.

proof 10.
that (ahem, here comes my catchphrase) nothing ever works. especially my rubbish printer.

so i think i have proven a major theological claim here. no, really, you should listen to me on this one. i know.

anyway, if i was god (which strangely enough i do not seem to be, although i deserve to be), i would do a better job of it. i would make everything all nice for everyone and then everyone would be happy and would love to go to church and light all candles and that and sing a nice song about how fab i am. but if i was god i wouldn’t even want people to spoil their day off doing all that because i am so great and i would still make everything all nice for everyone whether i liked them or not.

so god is a load of old rubbish really. and the biggest joke of all is that he doesn’t even exist.

stat stats: 0

dear reader, can you tell me this? why is it when things go wrong i say ‘oh, for god’s sake’?

perhaps he does exist. but he’s not very good at it. that’s all.

BANGED UP AGAIN

i used up all my going out allowance at the weekend. so today i stayed in. i can understand agoraphobia and hope i’m not going to get it even worserer but perhaps i am. i never get panic attacks out on the moors or up on the downs but stick me in a supermarket and i start to sweat and think that i’m going to die. which is a shame.

it’s a very good job that i do not suffer with cyber-agoraphobia seeing as a picture of my arse has now been published for world-wide delectation.

but sometimes i can’t go out. i know it sounds drippy and it’s hard to explain but i am finding it more and more difficult. ah well, perhaps i will tomorrow.

the stat machine is broken again.

goodnight, sweet reader. do you want me to get you anything from the shop? no? well, good job too because i didn’t even get myself any fags today. perhaps tomorrow will be different.

TIREDY-PIREDIES

god (who does not exist) knows that i used to be able to make a nuisance of myself with the best of ‘em. i used to be able to stay up all night being seventeen kinds of an arsehole but i just can’t do it anymore it seems. i once walked from perth to pitlochry in a day with an enormous pack on. i have walked over thirty-five miles at a stretch on quite a few occasions but now i think those days must belong in the chilled marble halls of memory because i just can’t do it any more.

DOCTOR THE THIRST: (consults notes) well, myself. it is quite plain to me that you are utterly bollocksed.
ME: but…
DOCTOR THE THIRST: but me no buts, you are clearly a pile of old pants and i think you should chuck yourself in a wheelie-bin.
ME: yeah, well and all that but i used to be really great and everything.
DOCTOR THE THIRST: well, you certainly aren’t now, you are a load of old rubbish and you should stop dwelling upon the times when you were actually fit for anything. you should jump in a skip and stop annoying everyone.
ME: but…
DOCTOR THE THIRST: i warned you about saying ‘but’. now get out of my surgery before i call the police.

ahem.

there are three men to blame for my condition. i shall name the guilty men. they are messrs merman, omally and pharisee. they made me stay up way past bedtime and now i’m all tired. they made me walk about, ooh, four miles and now i’m cream-crackered.

i really must face the facts. i’m 45 now and my inbuilt talent for being a rascal has waned like these things do. i’d like to see roger bannister run a mile in under four minutes now; i bet he couldn’t do it. it happens to us all. the golden days of youth slide away while we’re not looking and then, when we turn around, we see that they have poked two fingers up at us and that life will never be the same again.

but we had a lovely weekend. trouty took the funniest photo in the whole world ever of merman asleep in a chair (he says he wasn’t) with three hairy arses being pointed at him. so that was good. the nettle thing that i cooked was not good, but at least we tried it and the casserole was yum.

swig stats: dismal. i’ve been hopeless at swiggitude today
enjoyment and happiness stats: about half a nadger short of maximum
free chairs stats: 2

dear reader, i must leave you. mummy’s little soldier has had a busy day and must rest his weary head.

(secret note to grockles: cheers lads! (raises glass) until we meet again, eh?! i am drinking to your health. swig swig swig)

OH WELL, MIGHT AS WELL GET THIS DONE NOW

i am putting three grockles up this evening (stop sniggering at the back there).

merman and omally and pharisee are coming to stay (what’s that you say? god, who does not exist, help me?)

so today i went out to gather the fresh garlic mustard and stinging nettles that i am going to feed them. no, i really am going to make them eat it and i don’t know what it will taste like either so it will be a good experiment if not a tasty treat.

i got myself all in a nervous twiddle because i can’t really cope with things like this like normal people can and i had a panic attack in tesco and i have been breaking out in cold sweats all day. merman has been to stay before a couple of times but the others haven’t and i’m wrung out with nerves.

i had a few soothing swigs to calm myself down. then i had some more. if them grockles don’t get here soon i shall be in a coma and they will have to help themselves to the chicken casserole that is knocking out tasty aromas from the oven as i type this out. they will just have to cook their stinging nettles themselves.

what’s that you ask? where are them tardy old grockles? merman telephoned from papercourt lock, the prettiest lock on the rivey wey and godalming navigation. they had gone there to find one of my caches, ‘weyside wander 3′, and pharisee’s car had explodified itself. a hose has split and they will have to wait until the RAC man turns up to mendify it. then they will go to tesco (presumably to buy swig, although they needn’t bother because i already did that) and then pitch up here. that’s the plan, anyway.

i’m cooking this casserole for them because i thought they might be a tad peckish and i was going to put dumplings in as well. but look at the weather! although i don’t like heat i do love the really strong sunlight and the fantastic shadows that it casts. i don’t know why this would be; it feels like echoes from a previous existence. things seem to resonate for me sometimes and i don’t know why. i’m pretty sure that i have been born before though.

quiet victorian industrial buildings bathed in really strong sunlight make me feel like a child. now i wonder why that would be?

dear reader, count your blessings. you are not my neighbour and so you will not have to endure the frightful racket caused by an unhealthy combination of grockles, myself and swig.

ooh!, they just got here!
bye for now.

THEFT

an awful crime has been committed in byfleet.

john the bosh owns a lurcher called megan and when he went home he thought that megan would have protected his home and property. but apparently she had been outwitted.

when john the bosh got in he found the fridge door open. this meant trouble. john knew that he could rely on megan because he gives her two bonios when he goes out.

here is a list of the missing items that were taken by the burglar:
three raw sausages
four rashers of bacon
half a tin of corned beef that john wanted to put in a sandwich
the contents of a tub of flora margarine

the burglar had chewed an onion and left bits of it all round everywhere.
erm, can anyone see where this is going yet?

when john the bosh discovered the crime he acted immediately.

the suspect was rounded up and interviewed in the following way. here is a transcript of the interview:

john the bosh: YOU FUCKING LITTLE BASTARD!
megan the lurcher: woo woo woo
the interview was then suspended while the suspect hid behind the bed headboard.

now john would never, ever hit or mistreat the dog in any way. but megan has found out how to open the fridge and so he has now taken to propping the whole thing shut with a broomhandle. poor john, he is such a lovely bloke.

he got woken up at five o’clock this morning by a dog licking his face. there was megan’s face on the pillow, next to his, and she had got into bed with him. she wakes him up when the sun comes up and they really love each other.

but she should stick to her bonios and not eat his corned beef out the fridge.

me? myself? i?
i spent the afternoon in the pub. i copped the knock with croaky bob because he thinks he knows everything. he thinks he’s right about everything and tried to tell me where i’m going wrong. like i don’t know already.

never mind. my house and my life might be falling down but i have grockles to cater for tomorrow. life will carry on whether i’m there to see it carrying on or not. it was my daughter, melissa’s birthday yesterday. many happy returns, twizzle. i wonder if she will ever see this?

i love her so much, but i can’t tell her how much because everything has gone so wrong.

so, dear reader, if you have a little dog to lick your face at dawn, you are lucky. and if he or she has nicked your corned beef it’s not really the end of the world.

LOOK CLOSELY AT MY CRACK. GO ON, LOOK AT IT!

i dressed up all smart today because i hoped that i would see paul gotoltog in the pub at lunchtime. i had my groovy trousers from the charity shop on and my ‘bliar’ tee-shirt that trouty made. i also wore my brown cord shirt from a charity shop in saffron walden. i looked the utter hound’s gonads.

before i went out the door i realised what the best record of all time ever was. so that was good.

when i went out of the door i had a bit of a shock. there was a man in a blue shirt and a tie lurking outside thirst hall. a collar and tie hovering near the front door always spells trouble. i fronted him with an enquiring eye.
“are you mr dooley?” i was asked.
“no, i am not” i said.
“well mr dooley lives in number 7b, so he must be your neighbour” said the chief of the detective club “i’ve come to see his crack".
“well, i’ve got a crack to show you” said i, and i showed him a lovely fresh crack.
“no", he said, “i think that THIS is mr dooley’s crack” and then he showed me the most horrid looking crack i ever want to see.

the really bad thing about the crack was that it is in my bedroom wall. the whole building is subsiding and thirst hall is about to land in the road. so that’s a bit of a fucker.

honestly, as if i haven’t got enough to put up with. the bloke with the tie on said he thought that insurance would cover it. god (who does not exist) only knows how this is going to end up. oh well.

off to the pub of ultimate swearification to see if paul was there but he wasn’t. but plenty of other people were.

oh, i laughed my head off this afternoon. i can’t name names or really tell you what it was all about as i am not a grass but, as with all pub conversations, it was all so pissingly funny that my sides still hurt. you should have been there.

there are three grockles coming to stay on saturday and the building is already structurally damaged. i’m going to make a special side-dish of nettles and garlic mustard. if that doesn’t blow the walls out i shall be surprised.

when them grockles arrive i shall play a couple or three of tracks and rather loudly:
‘give booze a chance’ by the bonzos (for mallers)
‘god only knows’ by the beachboys (widely considered to be the best record ever made)
‘young, gifted and black’ by bob marley and marcia griffiths (which lord henry of thirst has officially declared to be the bestest record ever made in the whole wide world, universe, etc. ever)

swig stats: the usual
depression stats: none at all. my mood is rather light

have a good kip, gentle reader, and when you wake up remember that one day you won’t.

I’M DOING MY DOODY

there is not much in my blog notebook that i haven’t already enbloggerified.

here is an item what i wrote, a bit of advice to learner bloggers:
“life makes itself up and then you just write it down".

then i have a note comparing the merits of carrier bags vs. shopping trolleys.
trouty has a shopping trolley. i tease her about it but it really does the job. one day she put so much stuff in her trolley that it broke and i had to mend it with araldite.
the thing is that whereas trouty can have a shopping trolley (smart, matt black and brushed steel, not a tartan one) it is against the law for a man to be seen with one.
but shopping trolleys make sense. they make life easy. i wish it wasn’t against the law for me to have one. but it is.

john the bosh came into the pub of ultimate swearification one night with about six carrier bags of stuff. his fingers had nearly been cut off by the sawing actions of the needle-thin handles. i suggested that his life would be easier if he got a shopping trolley.
well, the aerosol of cider that went off was quite remarkable as he spluttered half his pint onto the floor. the thing is that, although they are sensible, it is against the law to be a bloke with a trolley. but at least we have carrier bags.

in amerikaland you can only get one bag of shopping. i know this because i’ve seen it on the telly. you can only get one bag of shopping because they only have brown paper bags with no handles. amerikalanders have to come back into their duplex or condo or apartment or whatever it is they live in with a big brown paper bag under one arm. it always has a french loaf sticking out. don’t ask me why; i’m not an amerikalander.

why don’t amerikalanders use carrier bags to saw their fingers off? perhaps the use of impractical brown paper bags is their doody. their doody? yes, their doody.
amerikalanders love to do their doody because they can’t say ‘duty’ properly.
’soldier, do your doody!’
‘yes sah. i will do my doody!’
and they can’t say ‘premier’ or ‘orange’ without making me want to vomit and laugh at the same time.

swig stats: not very much
fag stats: ah, the sweet taste of a dog end
depression stats: i am not at all depressed. i wonder if it’s something i ate or eat that does it? it comes and goes like a ghost this black dog.

have fun, dear reader, and if you have trouble doing your doody see a doctor.

THEY CALL IT ‘THE CAESAR’

i woke up today. this is something that i usually (not always) manage to do. i sat upon the edge of the bed and endured the dry heaves that alcoholics are prone to. there is nothing to do about the dry heaves; you just have to heave in a dry kind of way. it goes away in the end, especially if you have a top-up.

all was going swimmingly in that first minute of my day, especially my eyesight, until i saw the brown envelope that had come through the door. brown envelopes ALWAYS mean trouble. the letters inside never seem to say ‘hoorah, you are the king’ or ‘because you are so good here’s a million pounds’. and, true to form, neither did this one.

“the total amount you owe is £14,592.52″

this is what the child support agency said to me in their threatening letter. of course, i owe them nothing of the sort and never have done. they think that i do because they made a mistake five years ago and, no matter what i did, would not rectify it. i have spoken to them many times but all they say is that i have to give them all my money or they will steal it from my wages.

the CSA are untouchable. they just think of an amount, double it, and then steal it from you. the CSA have so far cost me a job that i held for fourteen years, my share in the profit on my house (about 60k), my nerves and, as an end result of that, all my possessions which were stolen when i had nowhere to live. they started to persecute me again at the end of last year and as a result i went on the piss bigtime and got the sack.

what’s that you say? why don’t i just pay up what i owe and stop moaning? well, i’ll tell you why, it’s because they made a mistake and never rectified it. i have spoken to my mp and the citizen’s advice bureau and nobody will do anything at all. i do not owe them this money and never have done but nobody ever listens. whenever i telephone them i speak to somebody different and they all say ‘oh yes, see what you mean’ but still the demands keep coming. if i was fit to work they will just steal the money from me so what’s the point? i am now a benefit scrounger.

this is not just me you know. many decent people have taken their own lives as a direct result of the machinations of the CSA. i asked them to take me to court so the judge could have a good laugh at them. ‘oh no’, they said, ‘we don’t do that’.

i have offered to meet them and to get this mess sorted out and, as always, to pay a reasonable amount. they don’t want to do that. these fucking cunts have ruined me, destroyed my life, driven me to the brink of madness and total and utter despair. they have killed people and driven a large amount of the working population into the black economy. they are utterly worthless and should be shut down.

*ahem, breath into this paper bag for a bit, h.; calm down, old son.*

on the roadside today i saw some tiny pink and white poppies, so that was nice.

if anyone knows how to knock some sense into these twats i would be grateful if they could kindly let me know.

the good news is that i am no longer depressed. i’m just really fucking livid.

thanks, dear reader, for your time. sweet dreams.

THE EYES ARE THE WINDOWS OF THE SOUL

i realise that i have been blogging in a rather downbeat way of late so, as i felt chirpier today, i got all excited and selected a crisp new notebook for blogging notes. usually i forget everything in two seconds flat so i thought that to write things down would help.

i started off like this:
1. toilet rolls - brand new - the starting off thereof.
how bloody annoying is a new toilet roll? i don’t mind one layer being glued down but why the first ten? then you have to shred it all up with your fingernails until it looks more like a bogbrush than the bogbrush does. but, never mind, i can usually get the thing to start unravelling without wasting more than half of it.
then:
2.having checked out of the window to make sure it was a beautiful day i opened the front door. guess what? yes, it started to rain. this is yet another piece of evidence that god who does not exist has got it in for me. so i made a note in my special ‘evidence’ book.
next:
3.horror at thirst hall. on the nearly top step in the communal stairwell reposed a massive shit. this turd was obviously of human origin. pressing myself against the wall i made my way, carefully, around it.
and then:
4. i noticed that a neighbour’s TVR Tuscan had been scratched right across the bonnet and both wings by a little bastard. i don’t admire this car at all, i’d rather have an aston martin, but i felt a real twang of pain when i saw that nasty, vindictive, pointless, horrid scratch.
shortly:
5. i was on my way to the gilded emporium that is tesco when i saw yet another car with a ‘personalised’ number plate. there are loads of them round here. although i hate them all, the ones i really hate are the pathetic ones with the letters all squashed up and a black-topped screw rammed in to make 11 look like 1+1 in the sad, desperate hope that it might resemble an ‘H’.
later:
6. at the pub of ultimate swearification the byfleet area swearing competition was in full flow. it was quite funny.
so:
7. off to the canal and some nature notes. the note in my blogging book says ‘justice for wildfowl’. i remember that this was supposed to be ironic but i can’t remember what i was supposed to be blogging about it. so that’s that as far as the notebook has been completed for today.

8. anyway. i have, this evening, been introduced to the world of MSN messenger but i am really a stranger in a strange land where that is concerned.

9. best of all i found some pink oxalis, some willowherb and on the towpath a bank of garlic mustard. the latter does smell of garlic when bruised and it is also edible. in the olden days it used to be eaten with salt fish or with mutton stew. i expect it would be good in a nettletop soup. so i picked some, licked the dog piss off the leaves and then ate some of it. and it was very, very, nice.

dear reader, i am cheerful today. i hope you are too. goodnight.

eh? what about what?
10. oh yes, the eyes/window/soul thing? well that’s the first thing that i wrote in my blog notebook. i had caught sight of myself in the mirror and wondered if my soul is yellow with pink edges and a hard black dot in the middle. perhaps it is.

“ONE DAY A REAL RAIN WILL COME AND WASH ALL THE SCUM OFF THE STREETS”
Travis Bickle - “Taxi Driver”

whoa whoa whoa! before you raise your eyes to heaven, clap your palm to your forehead, shake your head sadly and then shunt the mouse pointer towards the ‘red box with an X in’ at the top right…

i’m not ALWAYS miserable you know. well, yes, i suppose it DOES seem like it, but i’m really not always glum. not on the outside anyway. and i have been blessed with a talent to amuse and a talent to write and i have been told on more than one occasion that i have a voice that would sound good on the radio. so i started thinking about these little treats that were bestowed upon me by god who does not exist because today i was ‘rained-in’ and that is official.

locked into my lonely garret here in the east tower of thirst hall i moodily rubbed the grime away from the cracked pane and peered out at the deluge as it fell down ALL DAY. the rain may well have washed some of the kinds of scum round here off the street and, for all i know, it may have shifted a few dog turds too. and down it fell. although i wasn’t ‘ahoyed’ by a bearded type in an ark going past the window i felt justified in not going out today, for the second day on the bounce, because if i had done i would just have got wet and not really enjoyed myself at all. so i stayed in and wondered about things.

who is my own worst enemy? i wondered. yes yes yes, don’t all shout out the answer; it was a rhetorical question.

some of the grief that my own worst enemy provides for me stems from things like this:

i have a very high boredom threshold.
i have no ambition.
i can entertain myself very well, thank you very much, and can live (although not comfortably) inside my own head and make myself laugh out loud when i think about things in a certain way.

but there is something that will always put the mockers upon everything that i fail to do, attempt, accomplish or achieve and that is FEAR.

i’m so frightened of failure that i never want to attempt anything but, today as the rain poured down and i was indoors again, i realised that i don’t want to spend the rest of my life feeling like this. doing nothing, going nowhere, making myself laugh on empty railway stations because there is no one else to do it and no one for me to make laugh except myself.

when i last went seriously mad, about five years ago in brighton, i had an idea of writing a little booklet called ‘the small issue’ and selling it on the streets in photocopy form. of course, i never did it. i never do anything. but i’d better do something because if i don’t it will be like this forever.

i suppose i’m just waiting for the pans of the scales to be filled with more desire for a happier life on one side than there is fear in the other.

i wonder if it’s still raining? i wonder if the rainstreaked pages of ‘the small issue’ would get washed off the pavement and into the gutter and float down the drain?
i wonder if anyone would ever buy a copy? i wonder if the fear will ever be washed away - like the scum that it is.

sleep well, dear reader, dear friend.

UMPIRE’S VERDICT: ‘NOT OUT’

and the umpire is quite right to have come to that decision because i have not been out of the house today. well, i have, but only onto the balcony so that doesn’t really count so the umpire is quite right, technercally.

it was a beautiful day. i know because i saw it through the window yet i didn’t want to go out into it even though the bluebells are forming their bluey hazes in the woodlands.

i conclude that the reason for this is my old adversary, depression. i am well aware that alcohol is a depressant. i’m very well aware of this. but i do not stop; i cannot.

it is such a waste of a life to spend half of it lying in bed and listening to the radio. it is such a shocking waste to spend the other half of it swigging and smoking fags and talking utter bollocks. it is such a waste and i’m not sure how this has happened to me. i never asked for this to happen but it always been the same. the assumption that it always WILL be the same just encourages more gloom.

crikey, what a glumster i am. but i have to write all this down because i just have to. i do like to laugh at funny things but i never seem to really ENJOY anything.

anyway. today i had a row with my rubbish printer which is quite hopeless (nothing to do with me, you understand; it is all the printer’s fault). and i had a bath. when you have depression you stop eating and you stop washing and you stop going out and you stop going to bed at bedtime. you stop getting up at getting-up time and about the only thing that you do START doing is going on about yourself in a rather unpleasantly self-obsessed way.

perhaps tomorrow will be different. but i’m not holding my breath.

listening stats: ‘just the way i’m feeling’ by feeder which i cleverly played in my head while i was in the bath and a 3 hour programme in celebration of spike milligan which was on the radio.

night, dear reader, don’t get depressed (perhaps i should have mentioned my exhortation before you started reading this!) ;o)

LOST AND FOUND

lost:
well, i went back to one of my caches today for a couple of reasons. ‘weyside wander 2′ has recently been the subject of barbed comments because somebody couldn’t find it. as well as posting a criticism they also took the trouble to send me a rude e-mail. so i thought i should pop along to do some maintaining and also to pop a new TB into the box. i rechecked the co-ords and they were accurate to within two feet. the bad news was that a travel bug that i had brought back from yorkshire and put into the box has been pinched. someone has taken it and kept it. i went through the logbook and i have a good idea who the culprit is. but the travel bug is lost.

another thing that is lost is my appetite. i can’t think where it might have gone to. i can usually do some serious knife-and-forking with the best of them but of late, i just can’t be bothered. this evening i left a potato and yesterday i left 4/5ths of pizza.

found:
something rather wonderful has been put onto the intermaweb. a rather fantastic site that i visit rather often has been recently updated in a wonderful way. i refer, of course, to the bbc online radio site. bbc7 which plays classic comedy and drama and stuff has had a ‘listen again’ facility bolted onto it. i used to have to listen to it live but now i can rummage into its depths and listen to what i want, when i want. so tonight i have been listening to ‘idle thoughts of an idle fellow’, written by my hero, jerome k jerome, and read by hugh laurie, and ‘just william’ stories read by martin jarvis.

and that was something that i ‘found’ to be very pleasant indeed.

i can’t be frying panned with stats and so, dear reader, i shall bid you a fond farewell, curl up in the old armchair and listen to a bit more ‘just william’.

ROSIE

today i had to hoy to the dss office to hand in a sicknote. this is a very depressing place. children playing with mcdonalds happy meal toys were sucking upon the urine stained upholstery. i have been signed off ‘indefinitely’, or, as my doctor wrote, ‘indefinately’ so that is rather good. i asked the lady behing the bullet-proof glass what this meant. i know what ‘indefinitely’ means but you have to be sure with these people. she had to make a phone call. apparently indefinitely means kind of for a while. i might well have to go for a medical. if i do i will just turn up late ponging rather of swig and make a medium nuisance of myself.

what’s that i hear you say? what an idle scummer? - no, actually, i’m not. i’m actually ill and have the doctor’s certiflicate to prove it. you wait until your world implodes like mine did and then you will need a smidge of help. i hope that you get it.

today i committed CRIME. i stole something and thereby contravened section 1 of the theft act 1968. i immediately arrested myself and summarily sentenced myself to laugh out loud. what i stole was an advert off the train; i had to pinch it because it was so funny and i didn’t have my camera with me. it’s only a bit of cardboard; report me if you like but i really don’t care. anyway, by publishing this online they will get more out of it, or will they? see what you think…

“steve redgrave:
admiral’s friendly staff want to give you a cheaper car insurance quote

to win a gold medal i had to practice seven days a week, 49 weeks a year, for four years.
whatever the weather, we were on the river. some days every muscle of my body would be exhausted or my back would be hurting, but it didn’t matter. to be a champion you have to make sacrifices. it’s quite simple. THE TEAM THAT WORKS THE HARDEST, …WINS.

sir steve redgrave five-times olympic champion

call admiral or buy online 0800 600 800″

now, is that not the shittest advert in the whole world ever? i just had to steal it because it made me cry with laughter. i’m looking at it now and i can see the piccie of sir steve redgrave five-times olympic champion in his tracksuit. what a load of old rubbish! it’s such a shame that i had to bend it in half to get it into my rucksack because i would like to have it framed and hang it in the bog.

after the misery of the dss i went to wetherspoons where i saw hop-along-nigel trying to write out a defence for mick the smuggler. mick has had his car and loads of booze and fags taken off of him by hm customs and excise. he has to go to court to appeal and try to get all his gear back and i hope that he is successful. but let me ask you…
who is paying for all this?

i’ll tell you who. YOU, yet again are paying for someone to get done when he is just trying to make a dishonest living. i was reading the guardian for free the other day in the shop and there was quite an interesting article about smackheads. the two of them needed 100 quids a day for scag and they didn’t care how they got it, but get it they would. this meant that they had to rip-off 500 quidsworth of stuff from the likes of you and me in order to fund the habit EVERY DAY. the fence only gave them 20% so they go out on the rob all day.

i think that heroin addicts should be given as much pure diamorphine as they want and then when they die they can just be scooped up and shoved in a wheelie-bin. it doesn’t matter. they are lost anyway. it would just save everyone getting burgled and robbed and hideous scag-hags prostituting themselves.

and i think that the government of this country needs a severe looking at. when it gets to the stage when i think i deserve a parliamentary seat then obviously things have gone badly wrong.

why was this rant called ‘rosie’?
because i was listening to tom waits when i started tip-tappiting away. and he was playing to me a song called…

ROSIE

UPON TWINNING

as i staggered to tesco to get some swig in i noticed the roadsign:
‘welcome to weybridge - twinned with rueil-malmaison, france’

now this got me to thinking because i was sure that hove used to be twinned with the very same place but i can’t prove it until i go back there for my daughter’s birthday and have a look at the sign that i think that i remember.

now what the frying pan is the point of twinning towns? do you ever remember waking up in the middle of the night with sweat pouring down you and thinking ‘oh, thank god who does not exist, at least i can go back to sleep realising that my town is twinned with royan’

here’s how the twinning system works:

mayor of english provincial town and his missus step off jet at merdeville airport.

le maire: bien venue mon ami et votre femme. (femme vraiment? sacre bleu) voulez vous une tasse de thé?
the mayor: jolly nice to see you again, monsewer claude, je am tres pleased to be here yet again at the taxpayers’ expense. quand est dinner?
le maire: pas de probleme mon vieux chum. nous avons le systeme de la ‘reep-off enorme’ avec le ‘twinning’ qui est ridicule et merde pour la taxpayer.
the mayor: ha ha.
le maire: enjoyez vous, etreing le mayor dans votre petit cité, scumton?
the mayor: oh yes monsewer claude, i am enjoying very much, tres much as you would say, being the mayor and avez la freebees tres enorme tres much indeed.
le maire: ooh la la, quand puis-je visiter pour une vacance dans une cinque-etoile hotel de la scumton? (si c’est hotel existe? - raises eyebrows)
the mayor: oh, ha ha, some crystallized fruits would be lovely.
lady mayoress: i’m so pleased to meet you
le maire: (zut alors! quelle cochon!) moi aussi madame *kisses hand*
the mayor: allez up, monsewer, je am starving for free grub
le maire: pas de probleme, la restaurant est au coin de la rue, et tout libres.
the mayor: very good. about half-past five i think. come along dear, hurry up.

so, that’s how it works. and here’s the really, really good bit…
YOU pay for it all.
they have their jollies and YOU pay. that’s a grand idea isn’t it? the country is deliquescing but you can sleep soundly in your bed knowing that your town is twinned with some kind of slum in europe that has never been visited willingly by anyone at all except your mayor because YOU paid for him to get there.

what did YOU ever get from your town’s twin town? i’ll tell you what, you got jack except a visit from the mayor of merdeville and guess who paid for it?

anyway, my rant is over and i must report a very pleasant evening in the pub of ultimate swearification. trouty and i conversed at length with john the bosh (who must have said ‘bosh’ at least fifty times) and with boxy. croaky bob had gone home; he really doesn’t look at all well.

this was one of my favourite bits of the conversation:

boxy: so i went round john’s to see his dog and for a bit of dinner but she kept hiding from me
john the bosh: yeah, she was just hiding behind the settee so i give him a biscuit
me: what, for his dinner?
boxy: yeah, for the marrowbone goodness

oh well, perhaps you just had to be there.

i love pub conversations. if only i could remember these things for more than two seconds i’d write them all down. it’s not just me, trouty was crying with laughter.

sounds: oh, quite a few. ‘joe’s head’ by the kings of leon at the moment
swigs: oh, quite a few.

gentle reader, when you are asleep there are loads of things going on that you don’t know about. but then you wake up and while i’m asleep you do things that i don’t know about.

spooky. don’t have nightmares, and don’t have twins neither.

EARWORM

this is what the people of the low countries call it when you get a tune into your head and can’t get it out again. that is to say, they don’t call it earworm, they call it ohrwurm or something. but that’s beside the point.

that dreadful ‘my way’ gives me an earworm all the time but fortunately it’s the sid version that i get in my head and not the frank one. but today i had an unexpected visitor in earwormland. i was in tesco minding my own business when in popped ‘young, gifted and black’ for a non-stop visit to my head. who the bloody hell did this?, i wondered to myself (the record, not the earwormification).

after a pleasant evening of swigging in the company of john the bosh in the pub of ultimate swearification i was still left wondering. i just didn’t know who had made that record. john was on fine form and really made me laugh out loud as we discussed poverty, water rates, lurchers, crosswords, haggis being like a quatermass experiment, tv licences, radiotherapy, the inefficiency of the dss, never being told what you are entitled to claim for and the possibility of a tax refund. we also spoke of what we will do when we share the 13 million pound prize in the lottery on wednesday. but i still didn’t remember who had made that bloody record.

once indoors i decided that a visit to my 24 hour record dealer was in order. i was soon put out of my misery; it was by bob and marcia. was it available? was it frying pan.

so i’m left with my earworm to listen to (about a 20 second sample) and a couple of rather happy thoughts:

carol had found a picture of the blazing police car that bob and i thoughtlessly abandoned in brixton due to it being upside-down and on fire. the picture may be enjoyed in the comments of my last blog.

and i have been given a present. a shiny new premium membership of puzzledonkey3 which is due out very shortly (so we are led to believe) and for which i am profoundly grateful. i expect i will have the whole shebang cracked by saturday at the latest.

listening stats: ‘young, gifted and black’ by nina simone and by urethra franklin but not, alas, by bob and marcia.

so sleep well, my dear reader. as you slumber you may rest assured that i shall stay up all night swigging on your behalf, smoking a few fags and behaving in a manner that is neither big nor clever. it’s not easy but hey, someone has to do it, so it might as well be me.

RIOT

i can’t find a picture of the car that bob and i nearly got killed in, but then i’m not very technermological.
a crisp fiver goes to the first finder of the pic that shows the gp car on fire outside burton’s.
in the meantime, have a look at this and you may get the flavour of what i mean.
http://www.mylambeth.co.uk/brixton/community-revealed-brixtonriots.htm

these were the most extraordinary of times. we tried so hard and failed so badly. i remember walking up railton road (i could always do it on my own, i only had a bottle thrown at me once) and saying ‘good morning gents’ to a trio of special brew lovers that were congregated in a doorway.

do you know what one of them said?
‘don’t call me a toilet’

oh well.
i’ve blogged twice today so don’t forget to read my rubbish below.

this evening i have been drinking. i have also been listening to:
beach boys - ‘god only knows’ and ‘heroes and villains’
hawkwind - ’silver machine’
hendrix - ‘voodoo chile’
led zep - ‘whole lotta love’

all of which knock modern music into a bollocky cock-shaped hat.

jimi is on now and i’m listening to noel redding trying to keep up. it must have been rather difficult for him. my friend, steve gardener, taught me how to listen to music from a kind of ‘this is how it’s all put together’ angle. so now when i listen to things i don’t just hear jimi or, indeed, jimmy doing their stuff. i listen to everything, even the drummers.

i posted a couple of music things on ‘favourite things’. one was sandy denny and the strawbs where you can hear the guitar go wrong on ‘who knows where the time goes’ but they released it anyway because it is so beautiful. the other one was alvin lee and ten years after doing ‘i’m going home’ at woodstock.

the sound of that drummer smashing the fuck out of his kit and giving the cymbals a hard time is really something to hear.

i wish that i was young again and musical. i wouldn’t be sitting here like this, that’s for sure.

SHHHHHHHH! - IT’S A SECRET

an ex-colleague of mine (one who i held in the greatest regard) was working one day on the front desk at croydon police station when a man came in and asked him a question.

‘can you tell me how to get to the masonic lodge?’

bob was not a mason, but he was very, very funny.

‘no’, he replied, ‘it’s a secret.’

now i’m not a mason either, although i have been on the wrong end of a masonic handshake at least twice in my life. it’s a funny feeling when you can detect what’s going on but you can’t respond. it’s a nasty feeling when you know that you just didn’t get the job that you were being interviewed for though. you have to know the handshake thing (i have been shown but i just can’t remember how to do it) and there are confirmers that are dropped into conversation. there are little secret words that masons get taught as well. as far as i know the first is ‘boaz’ and the second is ‘joachim’. there must be many more secret words before you get made ‘the grand poobah of the imperial wardrobe’ or whatever.

masons have to have these little tricks in order to recognise each other but really they are quite easy to spot. do you know anyone who drives a jaguar, wears a stupid little pringle jumper when playing golf during the working week and who gets planning applications rubber-stamped at the drop of a hat? well, he’s a mason.

the reason that i mention this is that i have been invited to join a secret society. this is the first time that anything like this has ever happened to me and i am chuffed to bits. although i have never been barred out of any pubs it has sometimes been a bit of a close shave (several previous convictions for going to sleep on a bar stool and for falling off them) but i have never really been invited to join anything before. apart from lock-ins in boozers, at any rate. so now i feel really happy.

food stats: skate wings grilled with butter and pepper
swig stats: about 3 litres

what happened to bob? well, he got a 163 (complaint) out of it and was busted to work at brixton which is where i met him. we were in a car together during the second brixton riot. we got bricked until the windscreen came in and then we abandoned the car at the junction of atlantic road and brixton road. i went and hid behind a bus and bob stood on the corner and swore at the arsonists who turned the car upside down and set it on fire. our car was on the front page of the papers the next day.

so, dear reader, please be careful before you irritate the thin skin of a mason. you might find out that life gets a great deal shittier than it was before.

FED UP TO THE BACK TEETH

i have now firmly resolved never to do anything again as there is no point and nothing ever works. nothing has ever worked and nothing will ever work so i will now spend the rest of my life in a catatonic state with a glazed expression and dribble coming out of my slack gob.*

the reason for this decision? well, i was in the sweary pub with vodka mick and he told me some lyrics from a diggers’ song. the diggers lived in a kind of squatter camp and farmed just up the road from here, near st george’s hill, in what is now the most expensive place in the country. the digger camp was destroyed and they got kicked off (what’s new?) the land and vodka mick told me a lyric from a digger song that was going to be something to do with my title for today’s blog. so i wrote it on a bit of paper and stuck in in my fag packet. guess where that bit of paper is now? it disappeared, so thank you very much god who does not exist. i don’t really care whether it is your birthday or whatever, i just wish that you would stop ruining my life. everywhere i go round here i see people who live in houses worth a million pounds and see them driving round in cars that are worth 30 thousand pounds. but i have to walk everywhere, the water bastards want 20% of my poxy weekly income, and today i burned my hand on a rubbish saucepan.

the lyric went something like: ‘as your houses they pull down, so the gentry will come down’. i’m sorry that i can’t relay any more of this folk song but god who does not exist evidently does not want me to. or he wouldn’t have made me lose the bit of paper.

so once i was wound up by losing a scrap of paper i started to dwell upon the charade that is the iraq war. i was at junior school with captain simon hamilton-jewell who got killed in this horrible disgrace of an adventure. i probably only spoke to him twice and i’m not quite sure how to spell his name correctly but i do remember him and now he’s dead. he died to keep bliar in power and in the governmental hope that we could steal oil from another country for the amerikans.

and then the anger twists in my stomach so much that i can hardly breathe.

i love my country yet i hate my government. this makes the loss of a scrap of paper with the lyrics of a folk song from hundreds of years ago pale into insignificance but it does set me to thinking.

if bliar wants a war he should see me in the pub carpark and i’ll kick his head in. otherwise i should prefer that instead of flying round the world, pretending that he is important, he pulled his finger out and sorted the heap of rubbish that he has made this country into.

in short, i hate the pixie-faced, lying little twat.

swig stats: can’t afford it, thanks bliar
fag stats: can’t afford ‘em, thanks bliar
AK47 stats: wish i had one
GCHQ stats: hope you all enjoyed my typings. we know you read them.

thanks to the catharsis of blogging, dear reader, i am now much calmer. i do hope that you didn’t eat too many easter eggs and weren’t sick all over your duvet cover and had to put it in the washing machine before your mum found out.

*no, omally, that is NOT ’situation normal’

I DONE A GOOD THING BUT THEN BLOGGER WAS ENBROKIFIED BUT THEN WHEN IT WAS MENDIFIED I STILL MANAGED TO BORE EVERYONE WITH SWAN-FEEDING

oh dear. carol was the first to tell me the news. it was coming up to half-past-blog but i still hadn’t done mine. then ned confirmed the technermological truth, that ‘blogger’ was not publishing anyones carefully crafted works of extreme importance.

if i had wasted time typing out my usual length of bore, and then found this out the hard way, there would have been blood on the walls of thirst hall and the compluter would have been defenestrated yet again. so thanks to ned and carol for preventing ugly headlines about my lovely self in the ‘new haw gazette and nosepoker’.

anyway, the good thing what i done was to make up a dinner that was not only edible but actually rather toothsome. i was down at new haw lock (yes, i DO know that i go on about the canal) and there was a pair of swans there, the pen was in the water but the cob was out on the bank and a big sod he was too. a boat came upstream and was trying to moor in the tail of the lock while two boats were in the lock coming downstream. there was a woman in the pointy end (technermological boaty term) of the boat and she confessed to surprise at how big a swan looks when it’s out of the water. so i acted all big and clever and fed them with tesco value white and then, when they had scoffed all that, i plucked some sweet, sweet grass from the bank to give to them. swans like to eat grass. i love to feed swans in front of people who are scared of them, it makes me feel that this is one of the limited range of things that i am actually good at.

the correct response to a hissing swan is ‘oh, shaddup!’ by the way.

on the way home i resisted the temptation to interfere with locking procedures and merely stood and watched the boats going through while i thought about what to make for din-dins and this is what i decided upon:

in the centre of the plate was a piece of wholemeal with seeds bread, toasted and covered with a mashed-in grilled tomato, topped with strips of bacon steak, topped with sliced haloumi cheese and grilled. this was surrounded by plenty of a variety of splot made with onion, garlic, red lentils, green lentils, sliced new pots, carrot, vegetable stock and with a hint of swig.

and bloody lovely it was too.

i really love inventing things to eat and really hate the confines of recipeland. so that’s two things that i’m really good at; feeding swans and feeding myself with gorgeous grub.

swig stats: i don’t seem to have been REALLY PISSED OUT OF MY HEAD for ages
nature stats: long-tailed tits and what i think was woundwort

happy easter egg day, gentle reader.

TESTING, TESTING, ONE-TWO-THREE

oh dear, blogs aren’t being published.

poor old carol, poor old ned.

i’m so glad i was told before i wasted time writing one and then had to defenestrate the compluter in a fit of rage.

UPON DUMPLINGS

today, i have mostly been doing bugger all.

but i did cook the dinner. we had salmon with lemon, butter and mushrooms for starters and then moved on to the grand finale; ‘dumplings II’.

ned had asked me whether i had added herbs to ‘dumplings I’. well, i hadn’t, so into today’s mix went a few finely chopped sage leaves. they were ok but nothing that extra special.

so that’s dumplings for two days on the bounce. i wonder when, or if, the day will come when i do not feast upon dumplings.

probably when the weather improves (ooh, i just sounded optimistic) and i will choose a nice salad with nary a dumpling in sight. we shall see.

there is one thing thing about dumplings that is not mentioned on the packet of ‘atora’, and that is the extreme ‘post-prandial fatigue syndrome’ that they bring about shortly after consumption. perhaps if i continue to eat dumplings i will start going to bed at a reasonable hour instead of staying up all night swigging and being ridiclious. i can hardly keep my eyes open.

health stats: my ‘adhesive capsulitis’ really knacks
swig stats: must try harder
fag stats: normal but feeling guilty about doing something so stupid
overheatedness stats: if you can’t afford central heating there is no need to worry; just eat dumplings.

happy saturday, gentle reader, and should you be going through netherton tunnel i hope your galoshes don’t leak.

NATURE NOTES

the third and final cache in the ‘weyside wander’ series got planted today. i love the canal so much so i picked three lovely parts of it that i wanted other people to see and that i could walk to in order to maintain the boxes. papercourt lock is the venue for the last one because it is such a pretty lock and i can just about walk there and back again. i walked for seven hours today (well, apart from two visits to the anchor at pyrford lock and one visit to the plough at byfleet and a swig refuelling stop at tesco).

it rained a bit, on and off, but when it wasn’t raining the weather was gorgeous and papercourt lock looked beautiful this afternoon. the cache got put into a forked tree below what will soon be an enormous bank of stinging nettles; hey, no one said they all have to be easy!

trouty spotted a fox on the opposite bank as we made our way down the towpath and it seemed to being followed by a magpie. then i saw a heron take off from the waterside and slowly beat its wings away over the fields. when i set the cache i spooked a cock pheasant that flew vertically through the tree cover and then a few minutes later trouty saw a wren (she says she did but i didn’t see it; she might have been making it up).

trouty nearly got her thumb pecked off by a swan when she was just trying to give it some nourishing wholemeal with seeds in (from tesco - top loaf!) and then we saw a tragic sight. i was looking at some flowers on the towpath when i saw a blackbird’s eggshell. it had a bit of yolk and some blood in it. then trouty saw two more eggs just nearby. they had squirrel toothmarks in them.

there is a lock near newark abbey ruins. a narrowboat named ’spirit of the night’ was going through and i ‘ahoyed’ the skipper because i recognised his boat from the moorings up at pelican wharf near ‘weyside wander 2′. we had a bit of a boaty chat and that made me feel so good.

but now i feel so tired. we walked our little legs off today and so i will leave it here i think. ‘weyside wander 3′ is still pending approval but keen cachers might want to poke around before the stingers grow too tall in the vicinity of N51.17.977 and W000.31.260.

grub stats: a lovely bacon, lentil and beans and veggies stew with homemade dumplings. trouty licked her plate and screamed for more but there wasn’t any more dumplings so she will have to wait until tomorrow. hoorah! for dumplings; they really are the sort of grub you want when you’ve been out in the showers all day.

happy holidays, dear reader.

REMOVE EXCESS MOISTURE WITH A SOFT, LINT-FREE CLOTH

trouty was in london and i really wanted to plant the most wonderful travel bug in the world, ‘grassington gecko’, in one of my caches. so i got cracking straight away and went as fast as i possibly could all the way to my armchair.

i did some swigging and did some reading. i had a peaceful day all by myself and used the excuse of april showers to not go and place the TB. trouty arrived on the train at 17:15 and i went to meet her. what a lovely day it was, now that it had stopped raining. she said that it hadn’t rained in london; oh, how we laughed as we thought of the wet surrey rain moving up to the smoke now that she was back in the now dry new haw area. so off we went up the towpath for cache maintainance and TB placing purposes. oh, how we laughed as we fed the ducks and swans, oh, how we stopped laughing when the big black cloud appeared. oh, how we did not laugh at all as the heavens opened.

this is naught but an april shower we thought as we sheltered under murray’s bridge. this is a bit much for an april shower we thought as the daylight was fading and we kept trudging through the puddles on the towpath. it poured down.

i walked straight past the anchor pub because there was not a moment to spare. the cache was fine and the box was stuffed so i had to take out a swedish chef doll to get grassington gecko in and the lid back on. the contents of the box were dry whereas we were not. back we trudged.

i did not call in at the anchor on the way back. i did not call in at the plough in byfleet village on the way to tesco. i wanted to be at home in the warm and dry. eventually i was.

i changed my clothes and hung my cagoule thing up to dry and rather regretted having walked in a downpour for three hours. but the cache is ok and the TB is inside it and the rate that cache is being found he won’t be there for very long and i’ll be clocking up the miles on his tracking record.

and while we were in tesco we got some atora suet because we wanted dumplings after an ordeal like that. i hope it rains tomorrow; the dumplings will be all the better if the weather is lousy again. i was too knackered to cook them tonight so we just had soup and bread instead. oh well.

swig stats: exceedingly slim
soakingness stats: exceedingly moist

next time i go out, dear reader, would you be kind enough to shout ‘brolly’ at me before i shut the door?

TRISTAN UND ISOLDE - PRELUDE AND LIEBESTOD

what the frying pan is a zip file?

i’m happy that they exist because all six ‘uncle’ books are now in my safekeeping (well, nearly, the last one is only 84% downloaded). and they can be in your cyber hands too, dear reader, should you care to visit my ‘uncle’ books thread at simonG.org

richard wagner had the hang of an orchestra. especially the brass section. but i never knew about wagner until i went to live in berlin in the late seventies.

jack hinderliter was an american and what we might now call a traveller although in those days he was more of what you might have called a hippy. i worked with him in the warehouse and enjoyed his laid-back company. a very nice fellow indeed until you got to talk to him: then it got scary.
i went to jack’s only once. he drank nothing but very strong coffee for a massive caffeine kick and played wagner really loud and did the conducting too. he loved his wagner, did jack.

the music of richard wagner got purloined by the nazis but much of it is not only powerful but beautiful. it wasn’t particularly beautiful for me in that flat in north berlin when mad jack was whizzed off his nut on caffeine and conducting for all he was worth but i came to appreciate it later.

they were funny days. hutters was there for a bit so he might tell you. especially about the comfyness of a hard wooden floor in a certain flat in, i think, kreuzberg.

anyway, i have wagner on and it brought back memories that i thought i might share with you. it was the nazis that were nazis; don’t blame richard wagner, just give him a listen. preferably without a speeded-up yank conducting all over the place.

sorry, just thought i’d drop that little note in.
h.

BLOGGER HAS MOUTH WASHED OUT WITH SOAP AND APOLOGISES

i would like to apologise to anyone that i have offended by my extensive swearification of yesterday.

the strong language content that appeared from the start and throughout the show was brought about by a combination of rage, fear and strong swig quaffed in the company of vodka mick in woking. i’m not sorry that i did it but i am very sorry if i upset anyone apart from myself - i never want to upset anyone really, i’m just not very good at coping with life at the moment.

here’s what happened to me today:
i went to the doctor and got signed off indefinitely (or, rather, ‘indefinately’ [sic]. hee hee, even my doctor can’t spell, although he is a lovely man and the best doctor that i have ever had) with alcohol dependency. this means that i will never work again and that for me the war is over. so i had better get used to poverty, or rather even more poverty, never having had two bobs to rub together in the first place.
then i went to my brother’s shop to give him a birthday card, a lottery scratchcard and a tin of ‘black bullets’ sweets from yorkshire. but he wasn’t there.
then a minor miracle occurred. it was pissing down with rain again and trouty wanted to get a cab home but i suggested a trip to the bus-stop to see if there might be one arriving at some stage this week (public transport around these parts being best described as ‘arse’) and just as we got to the stop a bus pulled up and on we hopped. we were delivered home for a mere two quids. i think that god who does not exist cannot have recognised me because i had my hood up. so that fooled his all-seeing eye.

when i got home i thought i should tackle the problem of my feet which feel as if they have too much blood in them, so i went to bed and listened to the radio and went to sleep for a bit while my blood went to my head for a holiday.

after a bit i got up and tried to summon up the courage to look at my blog. i was fearfully expecting to see that a blog nazi had cancelled it due to too many rude swears in there from yesterday. but they hadn’t and, to my amazement there were actually nice messages in there instead. so i felt a bit better about things all round.

i would like to thank everyone for their kind wishes and considerations and to apologise again for being drunk and unpleasant yesterday. i’m very sorry.

good thing what i done stat: posted a link on fave things so that everyone can, ahem, acquire ‘uncle’ books
best thing listened to today stat: a ’steptoe and son’ from 1972 off of BBC7, it was really funny
cache stats: two people found ‘weyside wander’ today, in the piss-down rain and all

gentle reader, i’m sorry about yesterday. you know how you sometimes see a boozed-up tramp having a fight with himself on a bench and shouting incoherently? i think i must be the cyber equivalent. sleep well and leave the swigging to me.

ANGER MISMANAGEMENT

i do have a problem with anger. trouty is keeping her head down (stop sniggering omally or i’ll kill you with a big gun) and i’m not surprised. the problems are that nothing works and everything goes wrong…

a water bill was delivered to thirst hall. it said a payment of 416 quids was called for and so i telephoned them, at my expense, and said that i haven’t got any money and pointed out that a bill for 3 years worth of water all in one go was a bit much. they thought that a payment of 9 quids a week was reasonable but i did not because i only get 54 quids a week. so i went to see the good people at the dss, again, at my expense.

no prizes for anyone who can see where this one is going because it is frankly far too easy.

‘lay it all down’ by john martyn is a good track. in fact i’m going to have it on again because it soothes me and i realise that if i kick the fucking shit out of my compluter i won’t be able to hear it. and i just put norah jones on as well. so i’m calming down a bit. poor trouty; she has gone to hide in another room. i’m a monster.

‘come away with me’ by norah jones is a soothing ballad. it is on here now and it was on in the pub after i’d been to see the miserable shits at the dss. the first time i went there i saw a fellow who could neither read nor write. as i am so helpful and love my fellow man i helped him fill his forms in for a crisis loan. a little later that day i saw him at woking station; he was so pleased that they had given him over 70 quids and he was going up to london to buy some heroin. what do you think i got?

‘don’t know why’ by norah jones is a bit of a relaxer but i’m getting annoyed with my lovely self for listening to this old bollocks. i’m so angry that i haven’t eaten, trouty is staying well clear, the tight knot of misery is working in my stomach and the black tsunami of depression has crashlanded on thirst beach again.

what do you want from me? i have every right to feel as i do and if you don’t want to read it you don’t have to. neither do i have to put up with the easy listening sounds of norah jones any longer. i’m rummaging for the darkness and for jimi hendrix. aaah, that’s better…

‘voodoo chile’ by jimi hendrix is a top tune. i remember when jimi died and seeing the fab posthumous strobe-lit thing on TOTP. i’m breathing more easily now. the intense white heat of anger is fading a little.

‘i believe in a thing called love’ by the darkness is fantastic, pomptastic really. if you ever feel so miserable that you want to smash your head against a wall then…

oh, what’s the fucking point?

what on earth is the fucking point?

there isn’t one. sorry to have taken up your time. bollocks to everything.

HEADLINE: SNOOZING BLOGGER MISSES BOAT

eh? what? *screws up eyes, blinks, and makes ‘plap plap’ sound with gob*

the soporific effect of tesco pie (kate and sidney for me, chicken and mushroom for trouty) with mashed up swede and carrot was proven conclusively here at maison thirst this very evening.

mummy’s little soldier (myself) had only had a mildly busy day today. i looked out of the window after a few restorative and nourishing swigs; what a lovely sunny day it was. time to go on the daily run* to tesco in order to ensure that my account at the national bank of swig remained firmly in the black. so i put all my clothes on (well, not ALL my clothes, just a sufficient amount) and picked up my swig-bag. i opened the front door to my slum dwelling here at maison thirst.

what a complete and utter HID BAST! it was, of course, raining. if any local farmers want their crops refreshing with an april shower or two then all they have to do is hand me a crisp fiver and i will bother to get dressed and open my front door. precipitation is guaranteed.

as an aside, it has just said on the radio that people are more likely to die if they live in smoke-filled homes or something. but aren’t we all likely to die? is anyone in the whole world UNLIKELY to die? surely the government would want everyone to smoke so that they get loads of revenue and no one lives long enough to pick up more than a year’s pension. they can’t possibly want everyone to hang around being a nuisance until they are ninety three and having their arse wiped with a J-cloth by a begrudging care assistant in an old git’s home at great expense, can they?

anyway, where was i? oh yes, i went to tesco and got swig but there wasn’t anything much on the cheap shelf. except for some chicken but i’ve already got some in the freezer. so i went back home and put the new swig in the fridge and got some cold swig out of the fridge and went up the towpath to put a travel bug (called baboo bug) into one of my caches (called weyside wander 2).

the cache had been found by someone who had not logged their find. they had also not hidden it again very well so i got all that sorted out and popped the TB in and had a bit of a swig behind a tree and all that kind of thing. and then i hand-fed a swan on coxes mill pond which makes me feel good. the swan gets free bread and i get my thumb pecked but it makes me feel cool, particularly when a passer-by is watching and obviously thinking ‘hey, that cool bloke looks really cool with his swan communication skills’ (the swan is thinking ‘hey, that fat, bald bloke is waving stale bread at me, i’ll go and get some and not be too fussy about his thumb, neither’).

i helped a plastic (shudder) boat through coxes lock which has a really bastardly stiff paddle at the downstream end. so that was good. and i did a bit more unasked for lock duties at new haw lock as well. i do realise that boating types may not particularly want a fat, balding bloke who smells a bit of swig poking his nose into their riparian activities but it makes ME feel good. and that’s the most important thing.

to cut a long and boring story short, i then went home and swigged and cooked and conked-out. when i woke up it was late and everyone had gone to bed and there was no one to play with and really a bit too late for blogging. but blog i did and now it’s 3 in the morning and i have some things that i must do tomorrow: i have to sort out the mad water bill, post toffees to simong, arrange something with the doctor that i should have done a week ago but didn’t and do something about my brother’s birthday which is on tuesday but i only remembered today.

depression stats: lifting
swig stats: medium
snooze stats: extensive
talking a load of old bollocks stats: even more extensive

dear reader, you seem to be asleep right now. i hope you have a grand snooze with no scary dreams and that monday and the workaday week is kind to you. take care.

*’run’ = trudge in this instance

THE DARK HALLS OF COMEDY

i was thinking about peter cook in the pub today. i also thought of tony hancock and spike milligan. and lenny bruce.

humour comes from a nasty and unforgiving place. it comes from waking up in the morning and going, ‘oh, so i’m still alive again’. i tried to explain this to trouty but i don’t think that i made a very good job of it. in fact, i’m not making a very good job of it now.

the best jokes come from weariness with life, with the understanding that everything is absurd and also largely rubbish. and then thinking of something awful to say.

what i was doing was wondering why so many comedians are so deeply unhappy and drink heavily and take drugs. perhaps it’s a mindset thing, perhaps there are very many people who see the world through my eyes, with bitterness and a fair amount of woe. i was just wondering.

now don’t get me wrong; i’m not saying that i’m a great comedian and that i should belong in the company of the aforementioned for one single moment. what i am saying is that i can empathise with them and that i understand the way that they must have felt. the black tsunamis of depression are no stranger to me but the thing that keeps me going is that there is always a joke in there somewhere. no matter how shitty the day there will always be a joke. so that’s something.

i’m not really explaining this very well, but i know what i mean.

anyway, i saw my brother and his girlfriend in tesco today and i knocked off another cache. it did not rain and i’m eating some olives with lemon and herbs so that’s all very well. but the darkness does descend. well, it doesn’t so much descend as come crashing down.

so it was a good day, all in all, nothing wrong with it at all. not a single thing to moan about but here it comes….

call it ‘black dog’ or what you will but here it comes: DEPRESSION.

but i bet i think of a joke though.

here’s to peter cook and his breakfast lager, here’s to tony hancock and his whisky bottle, here’s to viv stanshall opening the door without his trousers on. and here’s to everyone who feels like i do; walking through the woods and staring like a madman, having a swig because there is nothing else…

but, at the end of the shittiest of days, there is always a joke.

on my tombstone i want ‘he loved to laugh’. because although i’m depressed i still love a laugh. i really do.

cache stats: found one
misery stats: clinical depression
fag stats: a few
swig stats: one is too many and a thousand is never enough

sometimes, dear reader, there isn’t a joke at the end. so that’s funny in itself.

isn’t it?

OF YORKSHIRELAND AND THE HOUSE IN WHICH LEONARD NIMOY DOES NOT LIVE

it’s much better up there you know. it really is.

we had apex tickets for the train. this makes train travel halfway affordable. you have to get the right train, no messing, and if you do your seats are reserved. which is good. the train was bang on time but king’s cross station was vile; we had to spend some time in a pub there and i saw a lot of fat people with ridiclious hair-dos. the pub trainee manager looked like he’d cut his own hair with a pair of nail scissors, and he made me wait for five minutes until eleven o’clock before he would sell me swig.

nearly all the seats on the train appeared to have been urinated on, but you have to sit where you are told so that’s that. we got off at leeds and made the connection for skipton. the bus went at about 200mph all the way to grassington which was where we were staying. and what a place it was.

the cottage was in the middle of grassington, a yorkshire village all made out of stones all piled up one on top of the other. like drystone walls but a bit more orderly like. it’s in wharfdale and the river runs through it. well, nearly. we fed the ducks.

our first cache led us to a pub carpark. we went off and found it (going a bit wrong but got there in the end) and then went back to the pub where we got locked in for sunday afternoon when i told the landlord about geocaching and that his pub was mentioned in the geocaching listing. he was well chuffed.

we went back the next evening and won the pub quiz by half a point thanks to a good music round. we got 20 quids in vouchers and so i bought a small round and gave all the change to the fell rescue service which is the pub’s home charity thing. that went down very well so i thought i’d introduce the saxomastraw to yorkshire. a woman called mo is taking a busload of grannies to see cliff and when i saw her later in the week she told me that they are all making saxomastraws to play on the coach when they go to see him. i feel guilty.

in the pub we were told that ‘doctor spock’ [sic] had a house up the road. when we went to do our second cache we made enquiries and found out that leonard nimoy does not live in that house (or does he?) but that patrick stewart does live a bit further up.

the weather was beautiful. we saw lapwings and a wren’s nest. we saw gambolling lambs and coltsfoot… loads of things.

anyway, i won’t bore you with any more. suffice to say that it was a very special week and that in my opinion, upnorthland is a lot better than downhereland.

and we had log fires.

swig stats: copious
telly stats: how shite is that 24hr quiz rubbish?
misery stats: zero, until i got home and found a water bill for 416.28 quids. i thought the landlord was supposed to pay that.
cache stats: found 19, placed 3
face stats: smiley

gentle reader, i’m glad to be home - even though modern life is rubbish and everything stinks. you see, i unamused you for too long. sleep well.