here’s a treat. tomorrow morning i have to go for a fasting blood test because of being a diabetic and all that. fourteen hours on nothing but water. o h, and i have to take a wee-wee sample as well. theyre pretty thorough, i’ll grant them that.

i won’t blog much because i feel too lurgied and i’ll just go to bed in a minute.

and anyone who said i might have avian flu can jolly well cluck off.

(geddit? see what i did there?)

goodnight and sweet dreams…

trouty got the lurgy.

and now i’ve got it.

so i’ll see you tomorrow (hopefully).

goodnight.

when i came back from woking yesterday i travelled by train. so you can see where this one is leading.

when vodka mick and i set out i bought a return ticket from geoff at the station. he’s a really nice bloke and i always have a bit of a laugh with him. when i go to the ticket place he pretends to hide behind the counter when he sees me coming because i’ve had words with him in the past about the paucity of service and the vile state of the station and loads of moans. but i know it’s not his fault so i just rant at him because he has the badge on. but he is such a nice man and it’s just a little game that we play.

anyway, i got my return ticket and then off we went on our little escapade. in woking i had a few but was not intoxicated when i felt that what i really wanted was to be at home. indoors, where it is safe. i might have a diabetic fit at any time and i’ve had them before and don’t want another. i wanted to be at home so much that i thought about getting a cab home but that would cost 7.5 quids which i couldn’t really afford so i went to the station to get the train home.

woking station is a load of rubbish. to get to platform 3 i have to go over the lines, up and down the stairs, and then walk about half a mile to get to the platform. whoever built the place must have been mentally ill. i digress; the train i wanted to catch was supposed to leave at three minutes past and i had, guess what, just missed one. what a surprise.

so i started the hike up to platform 3 as the cold wind blew the litter about and the expresses thundered through. but never mind, thought i, there is a copy of ‘the new worker’ in my bag and a copy of ‘delicious’ magazine what is all about food and i shall entertain myself for half an hour amongst the misery of platform 3.

but what was this?

at the entry gate was a gang of gestapo men. as i walked through the gate there was a little tosser dressed in a greatcoat that he had augmented with a filthy old scarf and he had a peaked cap of great importance on.

he said: “ticket” in the rudest way you can imagine. now i’m a scruffy looking shambler, he probably thought that i didn’t have said ticket. but i did. and i produced it and as i did so i felt my hackles rise to the occasion and i thought to myself ‘i’m not having this’.

i said: “you’re really rude” and he said “what, for asking for your ticket?” and i said,” no, it’s just the way you ‘asked’ for it” and he looked at my ticket and grunted and was SO disappointed that he couldn’t stick me on for one. i snatched my ticket back after his professional perusal had finished and walked on by listening to his sad loser cry of “no, THAT’S really rude” ringing in my ears.

i sat on the bench (specially designed to stop people sleeping on them, ie uncomfortable) and swang my feet and looked about me. there were eight of them, yes, EIGHT little tossers and they were smoking and laughing and all dressed up in their stupid little greatcoats and peaky hats and looking like some kind of gang of squaddies in charge of a prison camp and then all of a sudden i was back at school and looking at that horrible mob who i always hated, jumped up authority, nasty little bastards.

the train pulled in and i heard one of them say “i can feel a penalty fare coming on” and they started rubbing their hands with glee.

they did catch one person and i don’t mind them protecting their revenue even though it is well overpriced. but it shouldn’t take eight of them; you need a ticket to get through the greyhound traps to get out. and as for the little hitler outfits and slouching about going “ticket” when they aren’t fit to lick my boots, it’s just not on.

“i’m only doing my job” is the traditional refrain. yeah? really? well do it fucking properly you stupid little cunt. that’s what i say.

BREAKING NEWS

i am sad today because trouty is not well. we were going boating today but because she is ill she won’t be here and vodka mick has failed to appear and it is cold. trouty has a leak in her loft and her compluter has broken. badly.

ah well. i’ll just potter about. i might even have a bath or wash up or something. or listen to the clock tick.

tick, tick, tick…

regular readers will know that yesterday i did something daft. i agreed to go to with vodka mick to woking to see this little shitbag called eugene and try to prise 130 quidsworth of debt out of him that VM has bought from eugene’s creditors (of which, more later).

the plan was to fence the junkie in and basically turn him upside-down and shake him until 130 quids fell out. the plan was doomed to failure because smack-heads are rubbish and won’t have the money anyway and i might have got stabbed and all for other peoples’ mistakes.

but eugene has gone to ground. i had a nice mixed grill and started to feel a bit better. there is a smell about hunting people down that is really rather good. you seek him here, you seek him there, you seek the little shit everywhere. now, you might say that hunting eugene is a not good thing but i disagree. mick needed help on this one and i HAD to help him. i may well be a sick cripple but i still look about number one size and that i could cause some serious fucking damage. and i think that little bastards need sorting out. if you don’t sort them then they have won, and i won’t have that.

eugene stole a bicycle and flogged it to a bloke in the pub in woking for 30 quids. it was outside and matey thought that was a good buy. but it was more like ‘goodbye’ to his money because when he handed it over the next thing was that the money and the bicycle had gone.

my little delve back into wetherspoon pub society reminded me of the olden days. i no longer do the pub thing and have never bought stolen property in my life and never will. but it takes you back to basic instincts. lucky for eugene that we couldn’t find him and kick him to bits in the bogs or frogmarch him to the canal and chuck him in.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT…

vodka mick took me to a working mens’ club. i’d never been in one before. if you like formica and vinyl and darts and pool and racing on the telly then this is the place for you.

everyone was pissed. several people were clearly ’special needs’. it was like a horrible cross between the painting of absinthe drinkers and a hogarth engraving.

it was fucking vile and i felt uncomfortable.

but then i wound my neck back in and i realised that these people, these dear, sweet people had welcomed me into their world and i felt bad about about myself.

i talked, or rather listened, to a bloke who wanted to tell me about wafer biscuits that you can get from the ‘innovations pound shop’ in woking. apparently you can get three packs for a quid. not just strawberry pink ones but also chocolate and lemon and another one. and all just for a quid. and trousers in primark are good value. and while all this was going on there was a bloke knocking out baccy and fags and booze that he had been to belgium for.

and i thought to myself: ” you miserable, sneering, fucking begrudger” because i had all these thoughts up my sleeve.

these people were beautiful in their way. the barman had an unusual nose. everyone was really drunk but they were a true society. i was invited to apply for membership but i said no. i was in. if only everyone could behave with the dignity of these people.

i say ‘these’ because i don’t belong there but i was made so welcome. the whole thing was so awful, like a social security office with a bar and everyone all pissed up.

i’m middle class. always have been, always will be. but i’m so sick of my snot-nosed ways. these are real people and i bless them because they are something i can never be. vodka mick welcomed me into his world and all the rest of them were great. ok, so you have to talk about biscuits for a bit but that’s really rather good.

so now i listen to ‘he wants you’ by nick cave and the bad seeds.

and half of me wishes that i could really DO that kind of society; it’s poor and sad and lonely if you are a cunt like eugene is, but if you are straight up and treat people nicely then you are welcome.

i sound so snobby. i wish that i could be like mick and fall into this gorgeous and gentle world. but i can’t.

in the club i picked up a copy of the ‘new worker’, the weekly paper of the new communist party of britain. i flipped through it. i looked about me. and i knew whose side i was on.

now all i have to do is stop being an elitist wanker and get my head round what i really want to see and get off my big fat butt and do something. my son leads marches against the criminal war in iraq and i do nothing.

at least i didn’t get stabbed today.

goodnight.

vodka mick doesn’t piss about when it comes to heroes; he has no time for beckham.

here comes his his top three:

1. lord horatio nelson.
his leadership qualities.

2. john travers cornwall vc
for staying at his post, awaiting orders, while mortally wounded.

3. william macfadzean vc
he selflessly jumped on top of a load of grenades to protect his mates on the first day of the somme

that’s his top three.

bearing in mind that in german ther is no different word for victim or sacrifice i have to think of three heroes of mine….

this is difficult…

1. edith cavell

2. john peel

3. peter cook or charles bukowski

it’s SO hard to choose.

VM knows a lot about military and naval things and i don’t so my choices are rather stupid.

to have heroes is a good thing but i don’t have as many names that i can’t reel off. i should have said ‘anyone who was in the maquis’ or the levellers (the 17th century men, not the band) or…

what do YOU think?

it’s a difficult one. name your three…

this will be interesting.

bye from VM and me. xxx

i thought i would do a blog as things went.

for example, i have found a man in new haw who has worse hair than me and he is called roger and works at brooklands tesco.

i met up with vodka mick in the pub of ultimate swearification. he explained that the reason he had posted knives and chains through my door a month ago was because he was going to london.

he now uses a pipe and wears a flat cap. this puts me so much in mind of when my brother cranked up a family joke. this is of a man who knows a lot yet says nothing. he puffs thoughtfully on his pipe as everything goes wrong about him.

watching a woman trying to park a car or me trying to wind a boat makes pipeman just stop and cup and finger his briar and just puff. he never says anything. never has to. i want to be pipeman. anyway, we have had this joke going for years and now vodka mick has gone for it full time. he has the coat and cap and whiskers and the pipe. i told him to go up to pyrford lock and stand there shaking his head sadly and puffing on the pipe. it’s jack hargreaves stuff.

on the way home i saw a car. it was not a good car. it was white and the engine sounded very bad. the driver kept revving. oh, it DID sound bad. and then i saw that a cruel finger had inscribed in the filth at the bottom of the driver’s door, “i am a wanker"…

and that made me laugh out loud on the street.

right - now for live cookery. bacon and prawn stir fry. i just made that up….

…i’ve done a bit of prepping…

now i have to do some more. but i’ll have music on. elvis costello….

still prepping…

ah! now i’m eating it and it’s brilliant. bet your dinner isn’t as nice as this…

bacon and prawn stir fry. i just made it up but then i would because i’m so great

stats:
for me inventing a meal - hoorah!
for trouty being in london - boo!
for me not smoking a fag even when offered one by vodka mick at lunchtime - hoorah!
for dadblog getting loads of hits and making him happy - hoorah

cheerio

many people are just too busy to keep their eye on the noodle ball. but i’m happy to do it; it’s good to have something to do.

when i was up at tesco the other day i was feeling sad about the rubbish state of my cooking pots and so i poked moodily amongst the this’s and thats and then, goodness me, what was this i saw?

well, it was a wok. there were some 28cm ones for over 8 quids and then…. la lA LAH!!!

i got a tesco value wok, 30cm size, for 2 quids 44 pees.

so i set to work on my first stir fry thing that i’ve tried for years. there’s an awful lot of chopping goes with stir frying. oh, how easy it sounds. first get the oil really hot until it’s smoking and then chuck in the onions and garlic and ginger. add some salt (this stops the oil smoking and is something i did not know but i do now. keep stirring…

on the first occasion i tried sharwood’s medium egg noodles. these come in a sort of ’shredded wheat’ style biscuit shape. you have to cook them and boil them up and then put them under cold water to refresh (technical term) and then leave to drain.

after i had spent about 18 months trying to prep the chicken and veg and all with a knife that simply wasn’t up to the job (one of those ‘never go blunt’ ones that lasts about a year before it DOES go blunt and then you slip and stab yourself in the eye) i was ready to commence stir frying. i knew i had to have everything to hand and be (like a good scout) prepared.

IGNITION!

i stirred, i fried, i stirred again. this went on for quite a while. then it came to dishing up time and i found the whole sorry mess rather sad and disappointing. trouty said that she liked hers (but the next day she moved back to london to continue breaking her computer) and then i cooked my load. if i hadn’t already had my insulin and needed to get some carbs into myself i wouldn’t have bothered. it was rubbish.

FRYING SOLO

so today i planned to cook myself a clear vegetable stock and cook some vegetable chunks in it and add two organic chicken thighs, that i had grilled earlier, to warm through. serve to self with bread. but no…

“no", i said to myself.” i shall not be defeated by the noodle nor the wok!”

so back to the wok i went. i looked at the plastic perforated spoon that i had used for stir frying before. it looked a bit flatter (aka melted) at the end. oh well. everything was all systems go. i had onion, loads of garlic, loads of fresh ginger root, carrot and brocolli. i had the chopped up already grilled chicken thighs, plus i had a secret weapon up my sleeve (well, it wasn’t up my sleeve, it was on the worktop).

as i have said before, i cook by the seat of my pants. the first time i had tried to follow, a bit, the recipe off the sharwood’s pack and of course it had all gone a bit disappointing and i like to bring a bit of flair to cooking…

so this time i did it my way. it was a million times easier and i span, i danced, i had the music up just a tad, i span the soy sauce bottle like tom cruise in ‘cocktail’ i stirred and i whirled like a dervish and then…

secret weapon time…

AMOY, ‘STRAIGHT TO WOK’ NOODLES

these are the kiddies to have. four sachets in the pack and i used two for my fry. they are great. so my votes are:

sharwood’s: ‘boo, you stink’
AMOY: ‘yes, yes, yes - the brand loyalty has just sunk deep into my DNA’

AND THE REST…

i’m miserable because trouty is not here but up in horrible london. tomorrow i’ll go and see the boat and try not to be sad and pump the bilges and check the oil and grease the gland. unless it’s snowing. in which case i shall build a snowman.

night night.

oh, ruddy marvelous!

when i was cooking a joint of pork in the oven yesterday, trouty complained of acrid fumes and vacated the kitchen, closing the kitchen door behind her. perhaps it was a bit smoky but i thought no more of it at the time.

today i was going to cook some baked potatoes and some parsnips and some frozen spinach to have with some of the cold roast pork from yesterday. all the cooked things i would do in the oven at the same time to make life easy and to save on the gas.

i oiled the spuds, i salted them, i put them into the oven and then i noticed that the door wouldn’t shut properly. knackers.

it is the kind of door that opens like a house door with hinges on the side, not one that goes up and down. i went back a bit later and the door had opened itself and all the heat was coming out of a three inch gap.

i had a major fit. being mentally unstable i genuinely can not cope with things that don’t work. “oh, that’s fucking brilliant! now i can’t ever cook anything in the oven and i’ll have to throw everything in the freezer away and just live on cup-a-soup and beans on toast and…” was how i went on. except with more rude swears in. in fact i swore so much that you would have been forgiven for thinking that bliar had just rung the doorbell and asked if he could count on my vote.

the catch on the door is a kind of ‘male/female’ variety where a metal penis fitted to the cooker gets captured between two sprung rollers that are located inside the door. or. rather, in this intance, it no longer does. so, i set to work with a will. actually i did not use a will, i used a teaspoon. there is nothing i like better than working on metal that has been heated up to gas mark 5 and using improvised tools. i concluded that a spring inside the door had gone and then i wondered what i could do about it. what are the chances of spares or of me knowing what to do about trying to get the door apart. then i hung my head and i wept and did a few more swears and cursed god for making something go wrong and all horrible every single day and i administered foot therapy to the cooker which made it retreat about three inches into the wall because it was scared.

i put the parsnips in.

later i wanted to put the spinach in and guess what? stop the presses and hold the front page because it worked this time.

so kicking broken things makes them better again, but i had better examine the door tomorrow when it and i have both had a chance to cool down.

WEATHER NEWS

it’s been a lovely, sunny day and we haven’t had any of this threatened snow. this is a shame because i wanted to watch out of the kitchen window while people going to the station skidded and flailed their arms about and fell over and enjoyed a refreshing colles fracture.

ah well, maybe tomorrow.

nighty night.

when i buy footwear the general pattern is for me to wear them everyday until they explode. i know a gentleman should have a pair of handmade shoes from messrs lobb for every day of the week to give the shoes a break (plus appropriate ridin’ boots and walkin’ boots and such) but i am not a gentleman and i haven’t got any money so my feet spend a lot of time locked inside a pair of steel toecapped boots that i bought in saffron walden for 30 quids.

poor boots. i feel sorry for them. knowing the amount of rich, acidic cheese my feet must be applying to their insides makes me feel a tad guilty but i can’t afford loads of footwear so they will just have to do the job every day (unless i fall in the cut. i have emergency not very good plimmies for those occasions).

anyway. i’m so charitable that i like to give my boots some time off when possible and so i walk about (indoors) in bare feet or sometimes socks if my feet are cold. whenever i go through a doorway i always raise my toes like turkish slippers because when i was a little boy, in hemel hempstead, i got my big toe caught under an incoming door and the toenail got ripped off revealing the raw quick and hurt like buggery bollocks. so that’s why i do that.

but what i do now is stub my toes. i don’t do it that often but i do it more often than i should. i walk about the place or on the boat without the lights on or without paying attention and then, all of a sudden…

OW OW OW YOU FUCKING OW STUPID (insert bedleg or tableleg or whatever) FUCKING OW OW OW THAT REALLY, REALLY HURTS. OW.

and i did it yet again the other day. i’m always doing it. so i will have to wear my steel toecapped boots 24/7 just to be on the safe side.

the government has declared that stubbing your toes is one of the most painful things you can ever do. and for once, i agree with them.

OTHER THINGS
i always cook by the seat of my pants, i don’t FOLLOW recipes although i do read them and get a few ideas from them. yesterday i did stuffed peppers and they came out not too bad at all. and i did potatoes and carrots and sprouts and brocolli and some invented kind of stuffing balls that were more like stuffing splats. i like eating my veggies. when this list of cancerised grub came out we went through it and, ha ha ha, we didn’t have any of the cancerful foodstuffs because we don’t eat that kind of rubbish. in fact we don’t eat any kind of rubbish. just great, simple, delicious food that you have to put a bit of time and imagination into cooking. i love cooking.

and my eddie calvert obsession appears to be on the wane.

erm…. that would appear to be all for the time being. thank you for listening.

bye for now.

i see this olympic committee have been over here getting their snouts in the trough, feasting on gourmet grub at buck house and getting put up for free in luxury hotels. i wonder who footed the bill? or, rather, i don’t wonder because i already know full well.

the only satisfactory thing about the freebie jolly was that they had to go to number ten (should be number two, really) and have to endure the smell of weasel coming off bliar. i hope they packed their gasmasks.

what on earth is this olympics thing all about? we are told by messrs bliar, coe (i dislike him) and livingstone (don’t care about him as i don’t live in london and haven’t got a car and he did get the thames barrier built which is a good thing) that having the olympics here will be great because it will bring millions of pounds into the country. it may well do; straight into the pockets of hoteliers, publicans, prostitutes, steroid dealers, television companies and, in short, everyone except the people who will be conned into paying for it. it’s always the same old story; put the poll tax up and everyone will still be paying for it for years (the montreal olympics still isn’t paid for) and bliar will milk it for all he is worth (in my opinion, not much) and whatever the budget is you can bet it will be four times that if this crack-brained scheme does get its arse off the ground.

we will get much-needed sports arenas and transport and road improvements we are told. well, if they are so much-needed why haven’t we got them already? what we don’t need is a load of disused velodromes with tumbleweed blowing about behind the chained gates. just look at the wretched dome if you want to see how this lot will turn out.

and they will stick this load of old rubbish in one of the last green spaces in east london and ruin hackney marshes.

there was an idiot on the radio (phone-in caller) whose little chest was puffed up with pride as he said he could imagine taking his children to the ‘waste of money’ mega-arena and see world class atheletes. i hope that paris gets these wretched, curse of a games and then the silly man can just hop on eurostar and spend all his money over there. or he could buy himself a telly and watch people running round and round on that.

i think that what should happen is that people who want the olympics here should pay for it but that people who don’t shouldn’t have to. there should be an opt out clause.

and look how much money they have wasted thus far. shovelling in the sea bass and the duck with halal chicken option. some stupid statue has been put up in trafalgar square and underground stations now smell, miraculously, of disinfectant rather than urine.

like i say, if we really needed these things before we should have had them and making people pay through their poll tax for all of it so wealthy people can live high on the hog, get their snouts in the trough and use the limelight is sickmaking.

‘disgusted’ of new haw

when i last saw mark at the marina he was looking troubled. the engine is not behaving well. something is filling the engine’s sump and it isn’t oil. so it’s either diesel or water. there’s nothing else it can be.

mark phoned the bloke at lister and he said it was water. but it isn’t. i know this because although i’m an idiot i’m not entirely stupid. oil floats on water and when water gets into the engine it emulsifies and you wind up with a load of mayo in the sump. so i know it’s not water that’s getting in there. and mark couldn’t disagree.

i know for a fact that it’s the injectors that are the problem but what i said to mark was to do a bodge on whatever it was that was weeping. he hadn’t thought of this but i had my edward de bono alternative solutions hat on. so that’s what he did and still the bill came to about a million pounds.

so now the boat is back on pelican wharf and we are at home. trouty took a lovely picture today of me using the royal windlass that was presented to us by the king of swedes, mr omally, and it also featured a beautifully captured pair of arse cheeks (mine) but the piccie has got lost inside the compluter and nothing anyone can do will retrieve the gorgeous snap.

honestly, what a disgrace! all i want to do is e-mail a photo or two of my bum to discerning collectors and admirers and now my stupid compluter won’t do it. AND the fucking thing has lost nearly all my eddie calvert stuff into the bargain.

when it comes to defenestration time i think i know who will win.

sleep well.

when mr or dr the thirst enwonkified himself (thinks: bollocks and arsecakes to this, i may be back later)
ahah! trouty has just turned up. mark says the engine might work. i say it might not. but we shall get out of there tomorrow.

anyway, that sounds raving mad.

trouty says that i’m stupid and that geoff and everyone shou…….

WELL, FUCK EVERYONE TO BITS!!!!

i’ve got a big gun. it’s got loads of lurking bullets in it. i can saw you in half with my machine gun.

erm. i think i’d better go and have a lie down.

once i saw a girl from claremont fan court school on the bus. and i still love her.

fuc (i nearly said a nasty) fff

i got called, amongst other things, a rascist in here not so long ago. this is not true because i say so. i really don’t care if you have a white face or a black face or a whatever coloured face. but people with orange faces like kilroy-silk, well, really.

if i wanted to go into politics, which i don’t although i should because i should be in charge of the republic, then i wouldn’t paint myself orange. and his hair looks ‘mid-life crisis’ too.

i haven’t done much today except think about things. obviously the crawling nasty known as bliar came under my scope. he has made a stupid speech trying to suck and bum his way back in to power. it went along these lines: “i realise that i have been caught out” phony smile and gulp “and what i want to say is that although” sweat sweat “i have ordered the slaughter of thousands of innocent” winning smile “civilians so that our dead soldiers could steal oil for my mate george” points hand with fingers drawn in like he does so it doesn’t look threatening like he’s been taught “it really is very important that although the country is falling apart and i am a cunt you should vote for me again".

sorry if i bore you. i will never stop going on about the mass-murderer and war criminal. he disgusts me. rise up! rise up!

i’d like to see teflon talking about the serious subject of dogshit. i’d like to hear him say that he wants to use all his power to stamp down on dogshit; to really put his foot down on dogshit.

another thing i’ve been musing about is the fact that XX chromosomes make you eat toilet paper. all men know that a bog-roll lasts about a month in a bloke house. but you get a woman in and then it goes up to about two rolls a day. this is because people with no Y chromosomes have to eat toilet paper and wrap loads of it round their fists like boxers. don’t ask me. i just report the facts.

apart from the fact that i have developed ‘old man smell’ which is as amusing as it is disturbing i must say how much i hate frank sinatra…

frank sinatra was a horrible man. none of his cacky gack is welcome in my house. i’ve been listening to a duet with him and dean martin and i felt sick. he sang and referred to himself as ‘old blue eyes’. he might just as well have wanked.

so i’ve listened to a lot of eddie calvert and other stuff. the boat is sick, i am sick, and tomorrow i’ll look out of the window. what will i see? i wonder…

and please don’t vote for bliar.

getting up in the middle of the night to catch a cab at 08:30 does not cheer me greatly. but getting the boat back does. so, off to the marina at the crack of dawn and there she was, floating about in the dry (latterly wet) dock which was still being filled. and she looked really good.

after a while we got fed up with the waiting so i went to lurk about near the offices and mark, the engineer, came out.
“so you want an oil change, do you?” he asked.
“yes” says i “the oil level in the sump keeps going up”
and then he stopped walking and said something like “that’s not a good thing".

i know full well that it is not a good thing. that’s why i asked for an oil change because i don’t want the engine to explode but i don’t know what to do about the problem. everywhere i go i try to get a bit of free advice but everyone tells you different things. it might be the injectors. it might be the lift pump. is it water or diesel that’s filling up the sump?

mark’s face looked grave as he heard the cash register in his head go ‘bing!’ and tried to disguise the fact.

we sat inside the boat and had tea while mark took the side off the engine and then one of the rocker covers (i do know a bit) and then we heard an “eeooh” kind of sound. was it a good sound or a bad one we asked.

when engineers make that sound you can feel ‘wallet atrophy’ immediately.

mark had found a leak round one of the injectors. to have them both serviced would cost about 300 quids. but wait! what was this?! hang on and we shall phone lister (lister are the makers of this vintage engine) and see if they can help.

they sure did help. helped them fucking selves to money, or attempted to. matey from lister told mark that it wasn’t diesel coming up but water caused by the previous owner overheating the engine. they suggested that the cylinder head should come off and be gone over and it would cost about 800 quids.

so, fuck a duck and jesus h on a hairy bike.

so then i had a couple of ideas because i am NOT an engineer but i’m not a complete idiot either. my ideas were that if this mystery fluid that no one can identify is water why does it not sit at the bottom of the sump because oil floats on water and i pay close attention to my dipstick (stop sniggering) and it hasn’t emulsified at all, and the next thing was why not just bung some heatproof mastic around the weeping bit?

so the bodge option was gone for. a newish engine would cost about 8000 quids. the lister runs fine except it might need its oil changing four times a year.

so not the best of days, the boat is still at pyrford basin and i haven’t had the chance to use the official windlass that was given to me by the king of swedes and i was looking forward to that.

THING THAT I REALLY LOVED RECENTLY
who is this ‘drain slug’? i wondered when drain slug romped home about 100 lengths in front to a well deserved win in the DUG.
and when he said “i am drain slug, son of boggle” it really made me happy and i laughed.

so, thank you drain slug. even when the day is a right pooer my memory of your kitchener and fab star trek style introduction cheered me.

night all.

the blacking got done.

i hope it’s really finished because putting the second coat on top of exactly the same stuff made it hard to see what you had done and what you hadn’t. we might as well have tried to do it in the middle of the night. with no lights on. with bags on our heads.

anyway, the bastard job is finished. it wouldn’t have got done without omally. my trilby is in a state of perma-doff in his direction.

then we went to the anchor by pyrford lock so that we could lunch mallers in deep gratitude (as opposed to launch him in deep water). in the pub was the most incredible arse and unfortunately it wasn’t the barmaid’s. some people like really big tits and, if they do, they should have been in the anchor this lunchtime because one of the biggest in the whole world ever was there.

he was aged between, oooh, let’s say 55 and 60. he was sitting quite near us, with his mate, and he had the loadest voice. this cued raised eyebrows and ‘looks’ between trouty and mallers and myself. he also had a really annoying loud, high-pitched laugh a bit like michael bentine on mind-bending drugs. he also had a fucking necklace on and a really fucking stupid beard that he had trimmed to leave a little vertical strip on his chin and some sort of mad side-chops.

he was the most annoying person i have seen for quite some time. when two women turned up and joined them (and his mate kept taking photos of mr stupid) trouty said that she wouldn’t touch him with a bargepole. but i would. i’d have shoved him into the cut with it and held him under.

after lunch we went to do the cache, ‘parabolic flight’. this is ‘near’ the pub, sort of round the back of the rhs gardens at wisley. this cache was the first that trouty and i bagged when merman came to stay one year-and-a-day ago and showed us how caching worked.

this cache meant walking on a public footpath which runs through a golf course. and now the caveat blog title comes into play. if you like golf, don’t read this because you WILL be offended…

i hate golf courses. all the land round there used to be woodland and fields when i was a boy and used to fish the river wey. now a lot of it is golfland which looks like teletubby land. all the horrible landscaping and little green hills and sandpits. and loads of wankers of the tarby ilk dotted about the place.

i was annoyed by the notices on the public footpath (that they couldn’t do away with) telling me to watch out for high-speed, rock-hard projectiles being fired at me by people in funny hats with pom-poms on. well, when they built the bloody course they should have made the public footpath the most important thing and put notices up telling the golfers “watch out for henry as he might come over and take your golf bat off you and break all your teeth with it and wrap it round your neck like a cravat". but there’s no justice in this stinking rich area.

then, i kept seeing these green things everywhere. they looked a bit like village pumps. i went to investigate. what they were was a sort of sad little carwash for golfballs. they are called “par aide” and are truly some of the saddest things i’ve ever seen. what they are, right, is a little stand with a thing on top full of soapy water. you put the golfball in and twizzle it around. there are towels for drying, ahem, your balls (this an assumption; it may have been a masturbation facility) and a little thing like a sort of boot cleaner with more soapy water in which i imagine is for morons to launder their golf bats in.

now, golfers are very lazy people. you can tell this because some of their stupid trolleys that they drag about are electrically powered. and they like to go in those stupid little clown cars because they are so fucking bone-idle. and some of them are so lazy that they have to get a slave to carry their golf bats around and get them out of the electric trolley for them. and this brings me on to explain what i would like to shout at these arses in a jeering manner…

golfers have a long and well documented history of dressing up as congenital idiots who are trying to assemble a ‘wardrobe of the mad’. not only do they dress up stupid but they ARE stupid. when they are waving their golf bats around and injuring passers-by and it starts to rain, what do they do? do they do the sensible thing and put on a long overcoat? do they frying pan. when have you ever seen a golfer in a sensible long coat? no, what they do is get their golf bat trolley slave (called a ’scabby’; technical term) to fish around in the electric trolley and get out a ‘golf umbrella’. well, it might as well be a fucking pub table umbrella because they are about 12 foot in diameter.

and what i want to shout at golfers is: “oi! you don’t want to stick your balls in that stupid gizmo, it won’t make you play like tiger woods, what you want to do is learn to lick your own balls and then rub on your stupid pringle jumper you stupid copper/freemason/property developer/councillor/bastard".

LATER

mallers found his cache and then we walked back in snowy sleet and got home and said goodbye to mallers.

oh, and it’s my birthday and i had a great one. and i got loads of things. and cards. and now i’m tired and i will listen to eddie calvert a bit more and have a bacon sarnie and go to bed because we have to get up very early in the morning to get the charley rose back in the water.

the end.

unsurprisingly i did NOT spring out bed like a new born baa-lamb gambolling. omally and i had stayed up far too late listening to music and swigging and being silly.

BLACKOUT
we went to bed (not together) in the small hours following the sound of nothing coming from the compluter and the look of nothing at all because the light had gone out. arsecakes.

i have a keymeter thing for the electric. last time i looked at it, it had nearly six quids in it. so i was convinced there had been a power cut. seeing as how i live bang next door to a massive bit of the national grid this theory was a bit optimistic on my part. we groped (stop sniggering) our way to bed and i hoped the freezer didn’t go into meltdown mode.

in the morning i re-energised the electrickeryfication as i am so clever (used key in emergency mode) and then off we whizzed to the marina to continue the endless scraping. the boat is a bit like a tardis but back-to-front; when the outside is being scraped and painted it is as big as a liner but when you are inside it and wandering about with two hot saucepans there is nowhere to put them.

neil grafted; he really did. ‘wind-up ken’ arrived with a piece of glass to fit the front of the stove and steve delivered the blacking. then the blacking was painted on for the first coat and now the charlotte rose looks ‘bot-spollock’ and really great. the bitumen will go off overnight and then tomorrow we can put the second coat on.

steve says that as he has no one going into the dry dock we can leave her there until monday morning to let the second coating dry and not wreck it by floating her too early.

DINNERTIME
my hands were contaminated by the thick, tarry, waterproof bitumen. i tried washing them twice but just succeeded in turning the nailbrush black. luckily, a lot came off on the food when i did the cooking (sausage risotto thing).

AND THEN…
now we are sitting here, chewing the fat and drinking beer (mallers) and swig (me) and listening to elvis costello.
(the fat chewing was nothing to do with the risotto)

and so, i suppose, to bed…

goodnight and god (who does not exist) bless you.

on thursday trouty and i went to get the charlotte rose off her mooring and take her up to pyrford. to meet omally. to get the boat near the drydock at pyrford where she was booked in for bottom blacking.

trouty found another windlass that someone had left at new haw lock. so that’s another for the collection. when we moored at pyrford i knocked the pins in and broke the neck of the hammer. the head flew off and fell in the cut. oh well. i didn’t even do a rude swear, i just walked to the marina to buy a new one.

i cooked some splot and mallers pitched up a little later. always good to see such a fine friend. we all stayed on the boat overnight and did some jollyficationalising.

in the morning we went into the basin and eventually got into the dry dock. the blokes there seemed a tad grumpy but eventually the one who works the dry dock seemed to mellow and take pity on us. he told us what we had to do to prepare the boat and checked the sacrificial anodes. what we had to do was scrape off all the blacking (sort of tarry paint) that had been a bit badly put on in the past, and looked at our dismal collection of wallpaper scrapers that i had foolishly thought might be up to the job. he went away and came back with a kind of uberscraper and lent it to us.

what a job! omally set to it with a will and trouty got cracking big-time. steve at the basin said that he thought that three hours of hard graft should do it but i think that he must have got his hours and weeks mixed up.

but the boat is now nearly scraped back to the steel and tomorrow will get blacking smeared on, probably rather badly.

then it will have to dry off a bit and then we go away on sunday.

PUBLIC ANNOUNCEMENTIFICATION:

i hereby wish everyone in world wide web land to know that mr oldmally has worked his knackers off. he has been very helpful in many, many ways. i won’t go on, but he’s my kinda guy (if you see what i mean).

we all got filthy. no, i mean really dirty. oh, stop sniggering! and tomorrow we do it all again.

and then we get the boat back and we can go to sleep listening to the sound of the rain on the roof.

goodnight.

after the blistering row in simon’s blog about the blessed ellen i soothed my brain in a musical way.

trouty has opened my ears to eddie calvert. the man’s a genius! 24hr record dealer has supplied me with ‘cherry pink and apple blossom white’ and ‘trumpet cha cha cha’

i’d never heard of eddie calvert before and i was gobsmacked to hear him play. i swiftly supplied mallers with these golden waxings. mallers is a proper jazzman so i thought it best to pass on the good news.

dadblog is now up and running thanks to the cleverness of simong and dad has already started causing trouble, i mean posting, on it. you can see the link up there on the right.

it was a funny thing getting my dad involved in all this. i wanted to invite him into my world and now he’s here. i shall read his blog every day and maybe i will, one day, understand him better. blogging is great because you have to open up yourself and let the whole world know what you are on about, how mad you are, how much it hurts, how many rude swears you know, what happened to you and what you think.

or whatever you want.

and today trouty came back from the shops with a camera. it is a kodak cx7300 and better than mine which is a kodak cx4200. it has loads more pixels that live inside it (pixels are the little elf things that paint the magic pictures inside it - technermological) and she paid much less for hers than i did for mine. still, i don’t care because i take great pictures with mine, mostly of my arse, and she will have broken hers or chucked it in the cut by the end of the week. so i’ll have the last laugh.

oh, and i received an official letter from the government department of who is right and who is wrong. they say that apparently everything i think and say is right, correct and blah blah (flicks through document) absolutely brilliant and that everyone else is wrong.

so that puts the ellen argument to bed then, doesn’t it?

hooray stats: me - loads. eddie calvert - loads. dadblog - loads. simong for making the dadblog - loads.

boo stats: bliar - i can’t get enough loads on the page; it’s not big enough.

sleep well.

i will not try to be funny or clever-clogs about this.

ellen macarthur is, without doubt, a colossal inspiration, a hero and absolutely fantastic.

i don’t give a monkey’s about when england lose at cricket or do a bit of rugby or when beckham fouls someone and loses us the world cup.

but when ellen came in over the line and broke the record, after all that she had been through, i cried real tears.

so this will not be an attempt at a humourous blog it will simply be this:

ELLEN MacARTHUR, YOU ARE WONDERFUL AND YOU MOVED ME WITH YOUR EFFORT AND YOUR DIGNITY. SAFE HOME. AT LAST.

there is no one in the whole world can do what she did. she’s my hero.

g’night.

a few things have come to the attention of mr the thirst today.

following on from my observation on ‘little old man’ , guess what i saw today? loads of little old men, that’s what.

i went to the hospital on the hospital bus and i saw a great little old man. he had the full kit on. he was going hospitalwards too. at the hospital i saw even more great little old men and they were all full fig. while i was doing the doings we saw a little old man who couldn’t find his way out of the building. he had the full little old man outfit on and he had a hearing aid on too.

we had overheard him at the desk asking for his way to the bus-stop. then we saw him wandering about. trouty took him outside (for a snog, i shouldn’t wonder) and showed him the way. little old men are great. he had a hearing aid and said “i’m stone deaf". he was a fantastic stone deaf little old man.

public transport is rubbish. when i came out of the hospital i had missed the bus home by two minutes. the next wasn’t scheduled for two hours. i said a rude.

later i had to go to the doctor. he is quite a nice bloke. as i know a fair bit about matters medical i just tell him what to do but he doesn’t respect my medical skills and will persist in going about things in his own way. when i asked him for opiate alkaloid painkillers he said “you’ll be lucky". sometimes i think he thinks he knows more than i do.

all i got was more miserable blood tests. if i was my own doctor i would give myself fun stuff instead of draining out my own precious bodily fluids. oh well. whatcha gonna do?

to get to the doctor i had to go by train. so i bought a return ticket which cost one million pounds. and neither ticket was checked. this gives me the pip. if i pay one million pounds for a ticket i want it to be checked at least seventeen times and i want to see guilty, ticketless people kicked out onto the live rail at high speed. it’s only fair.

another thing i noticed was that someone who goes round calling himself ‘dad’ has started his own blog inside my blog and he has been getting far more fan mail than i do. this is all very well as i believe that a blog is a blog and you have to put up with whatever comments you get. hmmm. perhaps this ‘dad’ bloke should get a blog for himself as everyone loves him more than they do me.

here’s a great idea: i can send him my secret log in and he can do my blog while i’m away. acksherly that IS a good idea. who votes for ‘dad blog’?

lastly, i was reading the label on my shirt from the charity shop (1.75 quids). yes. my life really IS that exciting. i saw saw that the germanland language for cotton is baumwolle. this reminded me of when i asked the germanlandlanders at work if the german for cotton wool was ‘baumwollewolle’. they looked at me as if i was raving mad.

so will you do stand-in blogs for me, dad, or what?

really lastly, i was at the doctor’s and got fed up. too fed up to cook splot. so we are just having them crispy frozen roast potatoes for tea. and some swig.

cheers, everyone.

when people get out of my way i like to say thank you. when people come past and i get out of their way and they don’t say thank you i get annoyed. often i will say “oh, that’s quite alright” because i want to to provoke a fight or make them feel like the scum that they are. the people that don’t say thanks are chavs and burberry clad scumbags who call people like me ‘iggnerant’ because for a brief flash the knife goes in and they know, oh, they know, that they should have said thank you and that they are just worthless pieces of filth. no much how much money they might ever have they will never be anything because inside themselves they cannot even be bothered to thank someone for getting out of their way.

today, under the railway bridge, i saw a little old man. if granada tv had cast a man who was small, little and old and dressed him up a bit like albert tatlock out of coronation street they couldn’t have done much of a better job.

i am big and burly. although i am quite ill i look like i might tear your head off. i wouldn’t want to fight me. and now i have my scuzzy cap and my big ol’ beard i do look like a wee bit much.

and when i went under the bridge there was only room for one pedestrian at a time. at the other end was ‘little old man’. he was really great; he had old man shoes and corduroy old man trousers. he was little and had the proper glasses and the overcoat and everything. he had a flat cap just like mine.

i made very sure to stop and thank him for his politeness in letting me and trouty through and to wish him the very best of days.

i like to imagine that he was a widower being invited to his daughter’s for sunday lunch and making his way there. but i’m sentimental. perhaps i should have grabbed hold of him and dragged him back to mine for roast lamb, purple sprouting brocolli and frozen roasty spuds.

there should be a lot more proper little old men around here and a lot less proper little bastards.

UPON HEROIN

i’ve been thinking about this since the results from some university up in sweaty sock land said that a habit could be maintained without damaging work and home life.

if you are one of the rolling stones (ahemcoughkeefahemcough) and you have loads of money this may be true. but if you are a teenager and have to steal from your family or prostitute yourself then that is a ‘not good thing’.

the few encounters with opiates that i have ever had have been nothing but great. this is because opiates are great. it’s no good moaning about youngsters doing smack. they do it because it feels good and why not? you are 15 and you wake up on a sink estate in blackburn or wherever. the electric has been cut off. there is no food in the cupboard. you hate your mum. and then, with smack, all the pain goes away.

these things make me think. but i’m not the sir blair in charge of the police who has to decide on policy. i’d legalise everything to cut the crime rate but there we go.

little old man didn’t look like he’d ever done drugs (possibly, like me, just in hospital) and didn’t look like he was trying to score. in my imagination i would like to see people like little old man in allotments or watercolours of victorian cottage herbaceous borders.

it will never happen now.

ah well.

before you say ‘that’s because you are’ i have to say ‘i feel a bit peculiar’ and then go on to describe in an eloquent way what’s going on.

it is grand to have a high boredom threshold. this has helped me in many jobs. while not being keen on repetetive tasks i can quite happily do nothing but just be there for aaaaaaages. i live in my head and make myself laugh and think of little jokes and things. i remember the old days and the fields and the woods. i remember being little and some of the really stupid things that i have done when i was older and should have known better.

if i sit on a train or walk along the road and i can make myself laugh then that is a good thing. but these last few days i have been out of sorts. my legs and feet and one of my fingers have been agony with the arthritis but that’s not it. i’m not even depressed. just, ooh, out of sorts is the only way to describe it.

i spent a lot of today reading a magazine called ‘olive’. no, it’s not about olive off ‘on the buses’ (more’s the pity) but about food. in some ways the magazine is really annoyingly rubbish due to their house style but some of it is rather good and the photos are a bit mouthwatering.

so i listened to ‘grandfather’s clock’ by burl ives and thought about getting a memory stick to back up my compluter that i can’t understand. i flicked listlessly through the magazine and thought about omally coming to stay on the boat and in the flat starting next thursday. he might well be getting a dish called ‘london particular’ that i can cook on top of the wood-burning stove when we moor at pyrford and wait for him to turn up.

this dish looks good to me as it is a kind of splot. as everyone knows, splot is the food of the gods so oldmally might well be faced with what looks like a bowl of splot but a bit different thanks to those great (not) people at ‘olive’ magazine.

oh, i’m just out of sorts. i’ve got to go to the hospital and to the doctor on monday. so it might be the worry of that.

i don’t know.

i don’t wash very often. i have convinced myself that i don’t smell and that it is washing that makes the smellofluous bacterium propogate. there are people that never wash their hair and i hear that after a few manky weeks it doesn’t matter any more. every now and then i have a bath (more often ‘then’ than ‘now’) and rub a bit of underarm charm on. in the olden days people didn’t bother washing for months and so what? we live in an age where overcleanliness runs rife. i have so little hair that it doesn’t need washing really and i’d like to live in a society where washing your hands every fifteen minutes was considered bonkers.

the belief that you have to eat a peck of dirt before you die is fine as far as i’m concerned. children who crawl about in the garden and eat worms and mud get protected against all these new-fangled allergies. when i was a boy no one was allergic to peanuts. now they all are. children are meant to fall into stinging nettles and get stung by bees and wasps. they are designed to make rafts and fall into rivers and drink filthy water as a result.

children should eat snow and what is in it and they should lick the paint off toys and kiss the dog. but these days children get given hypoallergenic blue pop to drink and eat rubbish food that they think grows on supermarket shelves rather than growing in fields or running about in them. no wonder they are all allergic or hyperactive or just plain little bastards.

but today i was cold so i thought i’d have a bath. which i did. and now i am encrustation free and smell of chemicals and all detergenty.

so i am socially acceptable but i don’t feel comfortable. there is a fad on at the moment for people to swig some good bacteria stuff into their tummies. that’s right, the yoghurt stuff. they swig the bacteria in and think that’s great and then they strip themselves on the outside by scrubbing themselves with detergent.

how lovely now we all smell of fucking lemons and pine and all the rest of it.

it’s no wonder kids are mad as a dog on a rocket because they don’t go out and they don’t get filthy and they don’t behave like the animals that we are.

after that bath thing i negated a trip to the boat because the weather was a bit rubbish and because the trust have taken the joy out of boating. never mind; maybe tomorrow.

then to tesco where the cheap shelf provided more bacon for the freezer and i picked up a curry. would i adulterate it? of course i would. i chucked in some small fiery green chillies and i felt it doing me good and harm at the same time as i woofed it down.

on the way back i stuck my head round the door of the pub of ultimate swearification to see if john the bosh or vodka mick were in there. but they weren’t.

so, all in all, an ordinary day.

at least i didn’t get run over by a lorry but i bet some poor sod did.

adios amigos.

paulV helped me to find a track the other day.
it’s called ’softly whispering i love you’ or something like that.
paulV said it was by ‘the congregation’ and lo, i looked at that and saw that it was good.
except it wasn’t for, yay, it did verily sound like a load of old rubbish off a coffee advert in the 70s.
and the thought in the supreme mindframe went “arsecakes".
and so, laydees an’ gennlemen i did sore repair to the 24 hr record dealer and again sought spiritual advice from st paulV. and let me tell you that my calls for help were answered because i heard this message “download for free the paul young version what was done by st paul (young out of the Q-tips)”
and lo, it was downloaded (eventually) and it was good.
except it wasn’t for verily it was a pileth of pantaloons.
so lemme tell you, boys an’ girls, laydees an’ gents that the version of ’softly whispering i love you’ is still on the loose. you hear me? it’s loose. come on; get down.
get in, tune out, drop dead and freak it.
you givin’ me earworm bro’
what i NEED to hear is that one mo’ fo’ track that DOES IT for me.

and when i do i will be happy because it is a great song. i want to hear the faltering voice and guitar. good tune for my funeral if i can only get the right version.

and on that note i shall leave you.

there is a good and happy way to start the day.

this is when a letter that you thought was a bank statement that arrived last august and never got opened turns out to be that most mysterious and elusive of things. when it turns out to be… (dah duh daaaaaah!!!) a cheque in the post.

in recognition of my hard work, services to mankind and selfless contributions the inland revenue decided to award me the princely sum of 416.31 quids. they did this in august and i didn’t know. but i do now.

after the great gas bill fiasco the other day this may help to repair the dent in my bank account and provide a goody or two for the nearest and dearest. i can’t believe that i had that kite for so long that it would have expired in three day’s time.

it will be great not to be overdrawn for a while.

the bloke in the bank said “you don’t see these every day� and eyed me as if i might just have made the cheque myself and i was so happy that i went home and burned the dinner.

the spinach with bits of bacon done in the oven turned out ok. the potatoes and celeriac caught a bit while i was doing a quiz with trouty on 60s and 70s music. we also had a kind of salmon en croute thing that was off the cheap shelf in tesco and very reasonably priced.

“lightly oil a baking tray� it said. the baking try was lightly oiled (so was i). “brush with egg or milk� it said. i brushed it with milk.

“put it in the oven for 25 mins at regulo 7″ it said and that is what i did.

now comes the, ahem, parting of the ways…

because what it did NOT follow on to say was “now go down the tool hire shop and get yourself a kango hammer if you think that you will ever get this fucking thing off the baking tray. well, you won’t so go back to the tool shop and get a club hammer and bolster and ask if there is a strong bloke who does odd jobs at a reasonable hourly rate. get him to bang the shit out of it while you explain to tool-hire bloke how you broke his kango hammer".

i have to have what’s called ’sacrificial anodes’ welded to the boat’s hull later on.

here’s an easier method. wrap the bloody things in pastry, lightly oil the hull, brush with milk and then slip the boat into the poxy oven at regulo 7 for 25 mins and they will never, ever come off.

if i spent all year beaching on the gnarliest reefs in the world they still wouldn’t come off.

anyone want to buy a baking tray (slightly used)?

ONE HOORAH

to those great people at the inland revenue. - HOORAH!

ONE BOO

to me for not opening envelopes. - BOO!

SPECIAL, EXTRA BONUS BOO

to my wretched stomach and the tube that goes from there to my arse for not working properly and being ill. - BOO!

all in all a good day, thanks to those lovely folk at the inland revenue.

what’s that you say? you don’t like them at all? well i won’t hear a word said against them.

goodnight.

i made a vegetable stew for dinner.

it had the following in: swede, celeriac, onion, garlic, sugar snap peas, carrot. oh, and it had some chopped up bacon in as well so it wasn’t a vegetarian dish but it was mostly.

i added a can of v8 tomatoey juice and a bit of swig.

then i made up a dumpling mix with vegetarian suet, salt, pepper and OH MY LAWD! i used plain flour instead of self-raising. but i had some baking powder to hand so i bunged some of that in.

four dumplings were manufactured and in they went. and, do you know? they were about the best dumplings i’ve ever dumpled.

every time i eat dumplings i lapse into a dumpling induced coma. you can’t not do. dumplings are the greatest somniferous foodstuff known to man. well, to this man anyway.

when i woke up in the old armchair i thought i’d better type this out and go to bed before trouty gets annoyed with me like she did last night when i stayed up too late doing the dad blog related stuff.

THREE BOOS

the ira not decommisioning arms - BOO

everything the rubbish government does - BOO

herr bush’s state of the onion address - BOO

ONE HOORAH

the way that the dad blog thing turned out - HOORAH!!!

nighty night.

(and it does say ‘onion’ on purpose. that’s my idea of humour)

i’ve just done something that might either be really stupid or really good.

but as i did it the list of stolen music (i meant to say ‘legitimately purchased) of stuff that i have pinched off the net started up with ‘downtown’ by petunia clark.

dad, i know it’s petula. i was doing a joke.

so that it is a good omen. ‘downtown’ was a bit of a background theme in my childhood.

what i did was gave my dad the link to my blog. yes, i know. daft of me. shouldn’t be done. but you don’t know so shut it.

blogs are for blogging and for healing pain. they are screams in the dark from frightened animals. they work because the pain comes out.

so. i took a bold step and told him. and now what is the worst that can happen? well, the ceiling might fall in or bliar might sue me or my dad might never speak to me again.

we shall see.

i shall now sit back, listen to some music, read some poetry by bukowski, have a swig and put my fingers in my ears and wait for worlds to collide and the earth to explode.

but you have to tell dads that you love them. that’s what they’re for.

if you can then do it now. tomorrow might be too late.

goodnight (again).

what a nice way to wake up. i had the radio on. it’s always on. this morning i awoke to the news that blair-faced bliar has decided to get tough on sick people claiming benefit. he thinks that sick people should be made to work. that’s a good plan. i believe that a similar policy was introduced in eastern europe about sixty years ago. what he should do is build some work camps for people to be locked up in and really earn their luxurious benefit. that would serve the lazy lie-about ill people right if they had to get up off their scrounging arses and pick oakum or use their wheelchairs to spin mills and generate electricity for nice honest people like mr bliar. really, hard working folk who have a gob like a letter box and who can earn 20, 000 quids for one hour’s work giving an onerous after-dinner speech should not have to pay tax to support these scroungers.

life is hard for people who have flats in bristol that they let to arms manufacturers instead of using them to house their pissed-up children. imagine having to go public and tell all those lies? you don’t get paid for making things up you know. no. not at all. the mentally ill and the disabled should be forced to do all the filthy jobs that people who are far too good to do them don’t want to do. and they should do them for a pittance. they should do them for less than the stingy benefit that great people like (for example t. bliar esq) hard working types provide.

anyone would think there was an election in the offing. remember the vote snatching fox hunting fiasco. the liar said he would ban it. he didn’t. then, years later when he was called a liar for it he fudged it again. he’s scraping his nails down the wall trying to hold on to power. even his own chancellor says that he cannot believe a single word that comes out of his slimy gob.

now he wants to get tough on people that have less to live on in a fortnight than he would spend on lunch (except he doesn’t pay because it’s all free and even if he did YOU would foot the bill).

vote murderer; vote bliar.

the next thing that happened was i thought i should sort out my gas bill. i had got an estimated one and so i used the fantastic interweb thing to give them a proper reading. it didn’t work, of course and all i got was a red bill asking for 39 quids. so this morning i phoned them and spoke to a (seriously, honestly) nice lady. i gave her the current meter reading. she did a recalculation. the revised bill was 113 quids. and i shit my pants. after i had done that i paid up. (mental note - do not use gas, eat cold things and wear jumpers)

after this start to the day i was disgruntled.

i’d better get some rest. i need to build my strength up for when i’m forced to lick dogshit off pavements for 40 quids a week so that bliar can win his election.

i beg you, i really, really do, please don’t vote for him.

goodnight.

the weird thing about meeting my dad was already documented. meeting him in a slip road was very odd. that was on friday.

we went out on the boat over the weekend but due to feeling sick about the poison-penner (already documented) we turned around at pyrford and went back to the mooring where YOU MUST LEAVE YOUR BOAT IT’S THE LAW.

the stove was kind of mended. trouty had dropped a poker through the glass in the stove door. no ordinary glass this, my brother told me that a new bit would cost 60 quids plus VAT cost price. having laundered my undercrackers i phoned around and discovered a bit in uxbridge that would cost 14.26 quids inclusive. all i have to do is get there. arsecakes.

so i went to see stuart at the chandlery. he cut me a bit of some asbestoslike substance that fitted like a dream. i put it in with heat-proof mastic using a gun that i borrowed from him (note to self: buy skeleton mastic gun) and i didn’t make too bad a job of it. the flames are now invisible but what the hey? it works.

in the cab office to get a ride home with all our stuff there was a cabbie bloke next to us and he turned round in profile and i thought “hold on". he went out to his mercedes and i said to the cab controller “is that bloke called martin?”
“yes” he said.
“martin farnfield?”
“yes”
“hold on a minute” says i, “i’ll be back in a tick”

and out there was martin who i went to junior school with. so we said hello and shook hands and that. he doesn’t work there, he was just dropping in. well spooky.

then today i took a picture of a bracket fungus that trouty had spotted. i’m sure that it is edible but have no means of checking right now. in a certain rubbish chatroom i was bewailing the fact that a book by roger phillips about mushrooms and fungi was not for sale at all on eBay. i really want that book. there were three people in the room. two of them and me. one of the other two people said that they had this marvelous book in a box ready for the charity shop and that i could have it for nothing.

that is weird as well and i’m not sure whether i want the weird stuff to continue because it is weird or whether these things have been good that they should continue.

a boffin has made me a thing to help me post photos. so i’ll try to post one. i’d like it to be a picture of the bracket fungus but it might turn into a picture of my arse. god help me there will be a picture of something on here.

put your sunglasses on.

well the blue line thing filled up. i wonder if that means a piccie will appear?

perhaps a fourth thing will happen?

i wonder.