last easter weekend blah blah…

chug chug chug went the boat as we came into the lock.

there was a little lad all dressed up smart for easter in his blazer and shirt and with a lady on crutches who i imagined was his gran and another lady who may have been mum.

when anyone, especially children, hangs about at locks they need a bit of entertaining. i think so anyway.

so i gave the kid the old “yaaaaaargh” treatment.

i got out the plastic cutlass and waved it about and said i’d cut his head off with it and drew the deadly plastic blade across my own throat. i had my plastic hooky-hand on too for added authenticity.

“you!” i snarled, waving my plastic cutlass, “gimme all your treasure, ye scurvy dog!”

“i haven’t got any” said he.

“ahaaaarh! but you must have some of them easter eggs!” said i.

“i’ve eaten them all” said the smartly dressed young man.

“then, i’ll have to cut you like this (draws cutlass across stomach) and like this! (draws cutlass from guzzard to zilch - you get the motion)”

there was some discussion about how come i had a hooky-hand. i maintained that my hand had been bitten off by a crocodile when i was in the jungle.

then i took off the pirate hooky-hand and waved it about with my cutlass and, guess what?, the smartly dressed young man saw through me straight away. he no longer believed that my hand had been bitten off by a crocodile at all, nor that i was a proper pirate.

i didn’t get any treasure, i didn’t get to disembowel any easter eggs, in fact i didn’t have any fun with that encounter whatsoever (not much!) and blazer boy went away with his his mum and gran and i hope he will remember the day when he defeated a pirate by his steady wit and a sharp eye for a plastic hook.

“you weren’t supposed to see that” i said, winking, while i pretended to put the hooky-hand back on. so ha ha. and yaaaaargh!

how come kids love rubbish pirates so much?

i made a mistake. i told the truth. i told the truth and would not go back on it. there is a comment on my last blog that maybe you should have a look at so that you can understand how i have upset a dear, dear friend by not lying.

AND WHAT OF ‘LOVE’?

it’s just a name. that’s all it is. perhaps when i used that word i just meant infatuation.

having been dumped by two women who both, coincidentally, went off to india to do whatever i drew my horns in and tried and tried not to tell people that i loved them when i didn’t.

there is a poem in richard brautigan’s book, ‘the pill versus the springhill mining disaster’, when he says, on splitting up with someone, that “it’s so good to wake up in the morning and not have to tell you that i love you". or something like that.

when we tell anyone that we love them we often lie. we debase the currency by doing this. LOVE is a horrible word because it is used so flippantly. if we were to go about telling everyone that we loved them we would be looked at askance because, like all liars, we could not be believed after we had been tumbled.

what are the gradations of love? should we say, “i love you my dear daughter but i love your grandma more because she is my mum"?

i was obsessed twice and learned my lesson in the end; the shutters come up, the heart gets stamped on, the teeth get kicked in and then off you go to lick your wounds.

there is no such thing as love. should we ‘love’ the fuehrer? should i meet up with vodka mick and tell him that i love him? should we love our fellow man? - of course not, because we do not.

there is a special place in our hearts that we keep for the people that we hold dear, a place inviolate that will never, ever, go away. of course there are gradations, of course there will always be people or things that we hold in a higher or lesser regard at different times of our lives.

trouty, i’m so sorry that i upset you through semantics. but i am cynical and regard “i love you” along the lines of “your cheque is in the post".

you might well say, “ooh, he’s trying to weasel his way out of it", but i’m not. i simply regard LOVE as being one of the most abused and hallmark card style hideous words in the dictionary and so i have excised it from my vocabulary.

what’s that you say? speak up why don’t you.

well don’t blame me. it was stu’s idea. i had to go with the first offer as that is the law. so. ‘pants, and their many uses’. hmmmm. *taps nails on teeth*

i had a lucky pair of pants. where they are now i couldn’t tell you. they were black and i wore them when i took exams at the police college. i passed them at the first and from then on the pants became the lucky pants. i wore them for every exam until i passed my probationer’s some two years later. every exam i took i had to wear the lucky pants. 28 exams in all. so they worked. but where are the lucky pants now? i wonder.

i had another pair of pants (quite a few actually). but the pants i refer to were a pair of boxer shorts that were white with green polka dots on. when i walked from land’s end to john o’groats i was up in scotland somewhere and had to sleep the night underneath a flyover on the A9. i will not go into details but those pants got left behind.

stu suggests that i write about pants and their many uses. i can write about pants but not of many uses. i can only think of one use. putting on to cover the knob and back crack. that’s about it really. if only i could say that i had hauled a salmon out of the tweed or put out a fire with my undercrackers but i never did.

when i got to john o’groats i was so relieved. got my picture taken with a lovely black eye that i had got in a fight. i stayed the night in the youth hostel and the very next day i headed for home by catching a bus and then changing for the coach to inverness or somewhere. i was on the coach heading south and guess what i saw? white with green polka dots, stuffed away under an underpass…

that’s about all i have to say about pants and i can’t really think of any other uses for them. but thanks for the suggestion, stu. oh, but there is one more thing. i only loved two women in my whole life. the first was cathy and the next was alison c. alison c. was a genius (she probably still is, i hope) and got a double first at uni. she was a member of the rcp and will always be the coolest woman i have ever had the pleasure and privilege of knowing. i gave her a pair of my black pants and put them on her before she went off to india. she liked them. they were clingy.

so thanks for the topic, stu. surprising what these things turn up.

music stats: ska and lots of peter hammill. he suits my mood. i can cry and smoke and drink. i feel like i’m standing on the coast, the east coast, norfolk or somewhere and hear the destroyers out on the north sea going ‘woop woop’ like they do and feel the salt tang on my lips. i can sit on the dunes, in the marram grass, and i’m happy here.

kind of home.

and all because stu said ‘pants’.

cheerio, i’m going out on the water and won’t be about for a while.

it isn’t often that you get the opportunity to say “shut up” to your own dad.

but dads going on about being dead isn’t that funny.

we is all going to be dead, true fact. but i don’t want to think about it because dads go on for ever.

anyway. firearms. obviously i should have one because unlike lordy i am really great. i should have a great big blunderbuss for blasting scummers and i should have a rather tasty colt python handgun for blasting scummers with. i shall fill my blunderbuss with black powder and nails and my revolver with soft-nose dum-dums.

so that’s that.

as i stalk about the place i really do wonder about this and that and the other…

dad says that i have a dark side and i know he don’t like it. i don’t like it that much either come to that. there is a really dark side to me that rears up and although it doesn’t make me do bad things it makes me think in a black way.

actually, i’m rather a good person. i care about my fellow man and wouldn’t hurt a fly.

but i live in another place. a place that is far removed.

if you understand this then i am surprised. and happy and grateful.

ignore me. the black dog is after me. i might get my arse bitten.

OW OW OW, GET OFF ME!

you never ask for the dog to bite you, but when it does it does it does. hard.

it has been brought to the attention of dr the thirst (b.a. hons cantab, phd, std, etc etc) that some of his fruity language may have caused some offence.

well, so what?

if a bit of swearing indicates a paucity in the vocab stakes then the good doctor must be considered a bit of a thickoe.

so is the doctor thick or is he just using language as it should be used? you work it out. go on. YOU work it out.

try standing out in a thunderstorm when a lightning bolt strikes down nearby and there is an enormous clap of thunder that seems like the sky is tearing.

try being in a fight.

try being chucked.

try being in a plane crash (in nearly all black box recordings the last word heard is ‘SHIT’).

anyway. the ‘henry the thirst swearing college’ is up for membership. if you don’t know quite how to swear or why or when then the good doctor can help you. for a measly 20K you will know how to use the word ‘wank’ or even the phrases, ‘arse’ or ‘fuck cakes’ right in front of the queen mum (except she’s snuffed it).

LESSON ONE

ok, here we go. think of the rudest, most sweariest swear what you can think of. right, got it now?

send it by electronical mail to this address:

tony@lyingbloodywarcriminalshouldbehangedforkilling100000
civiliansinanillegalwarandsuckingrightupbush’sjacksie.com

oh dear. where’s my medicine?

cheerio.

well, i started to type a bit out and then wanky old aol decided to disconnect and it’s in a bad mood.

so you will just have to guess how fab my blog would have been.

(clue: not very fab)

but it is a sign of my current mental stability that i can lie back, listen to ska, not get annoyed, not defenestrate rubbish computer etc.

however, let me warn you, dell 2350, that if you fuck with the guv for much more that you will get a serious and good fucking hiding.

ahem.

the blog that got a bit written wasn’t of this tone at all. it really wasn’t.

and then….

WeeeeOOOooOOoOooOOOHHHHHH. BANG!!!

bloody norah! it’s happened again!

(jules, you will have to read back)

i got another message from a woman from my past. the last time i remember seeing jules was over the front counter at brixton nick when i had just copped a boot in the face and my bottom lip was bust and i was bleeding. we had, ahem, ‘arrested’ (ie. had a massive fight with, an escaped prisoner) and i got a fairly good kicking in the process. i had agreed to meet her for breakfast but that didn’t happen. no wonder she was annoyed.

sometimes i felt it was good to wear the big, white, ten-gallon hat of the good guy. and other times i thought i was stupid to do it.

last night ken and i were out after little shits who stoned old alf’s boat and tried to break the windows. police were called. do you know? i can never, ever leave off this copper mentallity and gawd bless me for it. any evening i’d go out and take a screwdriver in the chest for what i thought was right. i might be an arsehole but at least i’m on your side; and if i’m not on your side then you are no friend of mine.

goodnight dorrie.
goodnight jules.

nature notes: the celandine is out. swans beating down the cut and nesting. kingfishers. the goosegrass is coming up; it will be all over everywhere in a minute. lesser-spotted woodpeckers knocking their brains out all over. grass snake swimming over the cut. frogspawn. red dead nettles…..

just go out and look about you; look around…

anyone at a loose end for easter?

nighty night. xxx

it was all quiet in thirst hall. little did doctor h t thirst suspect what kinds of mayhem would descend and shatter every particle of peace that he held so dear.

an irish wolfhound stretched himself and yawned in front of the blazing log fire in the massive marble fireplace. back to sleep he went to dream of juicy bones and some nice injections off the vet. the doctor snoozed in his armchair, he had saved enough lives for today and, besides, three bottles of port and three of brandy would be enough to sedate nearly all of ‘the faces’.

then the noise started.

zheeeeeeeoooooOOOOOOoooooowwwww CRASH!!!

it was a message on yahoo which i don’t use all that much except for geocaching stuff these days. it was a message from friends reunited which i hadn’t looked at for months and months. it was a message from someone called peter, someone i didn’t know at all…

i opened the message, the detonator kicked off and the whole thing went BANG!

and in the meantime i was cooking the dinner in the kitchen of thirst hall prior to serving up a delish meal in the state dining room (oi, butler, get buttling in here and shift that wolfhound, i don’t want my pork chop snaffled again. well take it out the back and shoot it then, i’ll buy a new one tomorrow) and i had to use THAT cooker. yes, you know the one. the EVIL cooker. after our most recent falling out the cooker has been a sullen, brooding thing and is obviously scared of me. the door that nearly caused cooker defenestration has behaved itself. tonight’s feast was to be: pork chops, roasty spuds, stuffing balls, purple sprouting brocodiles and ordinary brocodiles and yorkshire puds and gravy. yum yum yum.

what do you mean the bomb thing? this is more important. i’m talking about cooking which is one of the most very important things in the world.

i put two plates up on the rack thing under the grill to warm up. keen readers will know what happened next. i opened the oven door with some difficulty because it is a shite. the seismic force of my efforts caused the two plates to jump off the cooker and hurtle towards earth at approaching terminal velocity (120mph or so). one of the plates thought that i would enjoy a saucepan filled with boiling water and brocodiles all over me but because it was a rather crap ninja plate all it did was knock the lid off. then there was a smashing noise as both plates killed themselves on the floor. then there was a swearing noise as all my getting betterness evaporated and i thought about phoning rampton or broadmoor to get myself booked in before……

anyway, where were we?

oh yes, the dinner was nice in the end. except now i only have two plates left so i can’t invite anyone round for scoff unless you want to eat out of an old hankie box or a saucepan.

what’s that you say? oh, the e-mail.

well, that was from a lovely woman that i knew when i was 21 and that was way back when. she had been offered a tenner for a book that i lent her nearly a quarter of a century ago and she never gave it back. her husband said she should track me down and return it and thanks to friends reunited she did.

i was ab-soo-lartly gobsmacked.

cheers dorrie, hope you read this, see you soon.

goodnight you all. sleep well

my cyber stalkers will be aware that i asked his royal maj, jazzy o, king of all the swedes about who did the ska version of ‘i’m in the mood for love’ just recently. i hadn’t got the name quite right so no wonder that my, ahem, 24hr record dealer couldn’t find it for me.

“no, you wazzock” said oldsmelly, “it’s by lord tanamo, as any fule kno”

so then i repaired to my 24hr record dealer to, ahem, legitimately purchase as much ska music as i could lay my grubby, thieving mitts on overnight.

haul thus far:
bad manners - this is ska
desmond dekker and the specials - jamaica ska
prince buster - enjoy yourself (seriously great track)
lord tanamo - i’m in the mood for love
prince buster and the maytals - the jungle
lord tanamo - mattie rag
lord tanamo - if you were mine

prince buster doing ’ska town’, ‘judge dread’ and ‘al capone’ are in the post unless my 24hr record dealer goes ‘ping and shuts down, erm, i mean operates an early closing policy meaning that i won’t be able to legitimately purchase said waxings.

all of which gives me the ideal opportunity to exercise my new trousers.

lurking henry fans who pounce upon my every word will know that i purchased a mean set of strides from the hospice shop in west byfleet to cheer myself over the medical results thing. ah, but what they don’t know is just how fab the trousers turned out to be. they are the most brilliant trousers that i have ever had. ok, so what if they are marks and sparks? but they are fab. elasticated waist, nylonny fabric in a grey/olive colour (says ‘graphite’ on the label) lined at the top and down to the knee and then below knee level a sort of string vest type lining. the cut is fantastic and makes me look a)hard, b) butch, c) boaty, d) very attractive, e) great, f) wonderful etc etc etc ad nauseum.

this evening i cooked kippers (undyed ones, natch) and some more splot made from green lentils and red lentils amongst other things. i said to trouty, “do you know, there is no one else in the whole world having kippers and splot for their tea". and more fool them for not doing it.

so now i must leave you as i bop and skank about thirst hall in the world’s most marvelous trousers. ‘i’m in the mood for love’ by lord tanamo has a really great drummer on there. he has a great big splash cymbal which must have been the size of a dustbin lid.

“i’m in the moooood for lurve” - kersplashshsh goes the cymbal. hoorah!

i’m making a cd for dad with a load of eddie calvert on it (trumpeter extraordinaire) but any leftover bits of space will get filled up with ska.

if that doesn’t get him dancing i don’t know what will but he won’t be wearing the world’s fabbest trousers; they’re mine.

interesting fact: when a doctor tells you that you are pretty well, all of a sudden you are.
victory fact: the battle of julianna’s blog took place yesterday. poor old anonymous took a good hiding when all the commenters turned on he/she/it like a gypo’s greasy dog and the ensavagement was wonderful to see.

all in all a great day. isn’t it great when the wind is at your back and the road rises to meet your tread?

goodnight everyone.

yesterday i was bricking it. the meeting with the good doctor lawrence when the weewee tests and the four tubes of blood tests came home to roost. oh lawks.

anyway, to west byfleet i did go and picked up a pretty nifty boating outfit: fab trousers for 3.5 quids and a jumper for 4.0 quids. you can never go wrong in the hospice shop; best charity shop in the whole world ever.

to the doctors where i sat and cringed and waited for the good doctor to announce “mr w please". gulp.

i love my doctor. he’s the only one i’ve ever had who has half-way ever understood me and he is a seriously good bloke.

he consulted his compluter screen. “i see we have had a letter” he said. he meant the letter that i had had from the hospital following the follow up from when i was whizzed into casualty with my gastric bleed. “well, that was a waste of time” he said.

he looked at the screen. all the results were there from all the tests that i have had. i was bricking it, big styleee.

“hmmm, well your HBA has come back at 7.5″ (this is a historical blood sugar level, it’s well under 8. hoorah!) “so that’s not bad”

“blood pressure, when did we last check you? urrrrm, yes that was excellent”

me: “but what about my liver?”
him: “i was just coming to that” click mouse click click…

him: well, you see there on the graph, sixty is about normal and then we saw you and then you were in hospital and it was getting rather bad, see where that peak is?”
me: ” yes”
him: “well now it’s gone right back down again and it’s only a little tiny bit above normal” (looks confused)
me: “have you got the samples mixed up?”
him: “no, you are healing yourself but you don’t want to die of liver failure because it’s very messy and painful and all your skin falls off. just because you have a good LFT count doesn’t mean you can drink more to make up for it”
me: “well what about my kidneys then?”
him: “there’s nothing wrong with them”

so, apart from a bit of a high LDL (low density lipids) cholesterol count which means i have a 9% chance of having a stroke in the next ten years i am certain to win a gold medal at something athletico. well that’s what he says, but he’s only the best doctor ever.

i showed him the lump on my thumb. “oh, that’s a cyst” says he (not what he said last time) “but look! i’ve got one too” so we compared these arthritic/node/cyst things.

he’s going to bust a gut to get me into a detox and treatment centre, sometime soon.

we shall see.

later we went to addlestone and to the boat and it was good. i knocked up ken and chris and ken told me that his engine that he had suspected as going all wrong was in fact working ok. it was just that HE wasn’t working it ok. we had a bit of a laugh and then i went back to the boat and changed into my ‘new’ clothes from the charity shop. we had just got into bed to huddle together for warmth when there was a bang on the roof. ken and chris and graham came in and we chewed the fat and spoke of this and that.

walking home i thought of so many bloggerisational things but now i can’t remember them.

so, in summary, not a bad day at all.

music stats: i have legitimately purchased loads of ska tracks from the 24hr record dealer and ‘lord tanamo’ is the fairy on my christmas tree at the mo.

invite stats: it’s a very old joke but “do you want to come on my boat?” still applies. (you have to know cockney to geddit) but anyway, i know that dad, merms, oldsmelly, lois and others would like to - so, if you fancy a bit of noodling around on the cut and doing all the hard work while trouty and i laugh at you then please let us know.

we have a boat and boats are meant for sharing. all bloggers welcome. bring your own swig and if you fancy eating bring a sarnie or two too.

let me know. and in the meantime, sleep well and may your god go with you.

RIP: dave allen.

today we went downstream to see the charley rose.

on the way we saw some canoe type people of middle-aged type years trying to relive their fast receding youths by canoeing over the weir at coxes lock. it will forever remain a disappointment to me that i didn’t actually get there in time to see the newbie of the group go over but i did have the pleasure of watching him floundering about and trying to climb up the lock moorings dragging a boatful of manky water behind him. his mates helped him though. it was like a cross between ‘just william’ and ‘last of the summer wine’.

the boat was fine when we got there and i wandered down the moorings and tried to have a bit of a chat with some of the clique types that were up at the far end. they gave me a bit of a brush off so i made a careful note of their names and their boat names in my hating / death list book and wandered back to the charlotte rose.

we were going to go home but then we saw that ken and chris were on their boat, bracken, so we stopped for a jolly old laugh. poor chris has got extreme lurgy and ken was in a great and, as is always the case, extremely funny mood. i don’t know how she puts up with him.

tomorrow, after my visit to the good doctor lawrence, we are going to go back and see them again as they wait for an engineer to turn up.

on return home i prepared splot.

tonight’s ingredients were: onion, carrots, garlic, lemon, bacon, yellow split peas, purple sprouting brocodiles, red spring onion, green lentils, vegetable stock and cider.

and very nice it was too.

now it is bedtime. i’ve just been watching a fox from the kitchen window. have fun foxy! don’t get run over!

goodnight everyone.

there can be no doubt that i’m not very well. as regards to the lurgy i seem to be picking up a bit; only a few hacking coughing fits and sneezings today. but the rest of me is really falling apart:

peripheral neuropathy: not good
type 1 diabetes: have you ever heard of that being good?
arthritis: node on thumb now the size of a broad bean, savage pains intermittent
broken toes: hurt a lot every now and then
hair on head: less and less of this to worry about but kitchen scissors trim up performed by madame trouty of ‘maison trouty, peruquiers to the gentry’ is rather good
hair on chin: somewhat greying. i shall soon be the best silverchin gorilla of the lowland towpath, i just have to wait until they have hanged chas the lengthsman
injuries sustained whilst educating cooker door: healing a bit
incipient agoraphobia: much better thanks
depression: virtually non-existent
anxiety: bad, but not that bad. no panic attacks in tesco recently
vision: really rubbish. i have to put my inadequate specs on my forehead and hold the paper about two inches away from my nose or wear my specs and wonder if my eyeballs have gone back-to-front
drifting leg pains: all hail the miracles of ibuleve and panadol

as regards stealth, this is what i do when i’m feeling a bit weird. i play the radio softly or maybe a bit of music. don’t upset the neighbours. creep about a bit. don’t go out. read food magazines. wonder what day i will die on. think about leaving a letter regarding funeral and that. i just keep myself to myself.

as regards wealth, well, i have some lottery tickets. if i buy a lottery ticket i won’t check it for weeks. this annoys the heck out of trouty who has zero patience. but i like to get full value for money out of my one quid stupidity tax. if i don’t check my ticket then i might have won something at least but if i do check it then i will find out that i haven’t and get all sad. so i have about, oooh, three tickets in my wallet and i can dream of what i will do when i hit the jackpot…

the current little whimsies are:

peace and quiet. philanthropy. health and dentistry. victorian agri-industrial buildings. short-wheelbase landrover. planting mixed broadleaf woodland. doing secret good things. learning things by employing disenfranchised lecturers and tutors to teach me how diesels and central heating sytems work, a few weeks out with david bellamy or somesuch so that i know all about plants and fungi. buy an island off scotland with clear skies and a telescope so that i can watch the stars again. a 55′ narrowboat called ‘dragonfly’ but it would have to be a new one because i can’t bring myself to rename a boat. a big gun, probably a rather posh left-handed purdey. a painting by edward hopper. some good mischief. and i might try to rescue my friend martin, from way back when we were lads, because he has gone a bit mad and we could do all the things we used to do again. we could dam streams and blow things up with petrol and dig things out of streams and go panning for gold and build treehouses and life would be like it always should have been, a glorious golden time, no litter, make a go-kart, skid on frozen ponds.

all it would take is about ten million quids.

i might check them tickets on tuesday but i might not. dreams are brilliant; much better than being awake.

regular readers of this, the most fabulous blog in the whole world ever, will know that it is a well known fact that nothing has ever worked, never will do neither.

so what a surprise to the mighty brainal power of thirst when today only one thing went a bit wrong and that everything else went really rather well.

1. i got up and nursed toes and arthritic joints with ibuleve (it really works) and put my clothes on and everything and then vodka mick turned up bang on time. we had arranged to go to the boat and fit fenders and i thought that he might forget. but he didn’t. (GOOD THING)

2. had some swigs (GOOD THING)

3. walked all the way up the cut to addlestone, maintained superb cache ‘weyside wander2′ and replaced number thingy on tree. (GOOD THING)

4. got on boat and faddled about with the fenders. had some swig. mick did some splicing. neither of us fell in. set stove to fire up first thing next time. no water in bilges. (GOOD THING)

5. took boat out onto the canal. sported brand new lycra and leather cycling type fingerless gloves. coxes lock was set in our favour. spoke to chas the lengthsman who was chainsawing up a load of trees. he agreed to leave a pile of logs for me to burn in the stove in a secret stash. (GOOD THING)

6. up to new haw lock. it was in our favour and we were well ahead of time. zoomed (at a moderate pace) to byfleet boat club in order to visit the chandlery. (GOOD THING)

7. SLIGHT HICCUP. i called in at the chandlery because i asked them a while ago if they had any lines (rope) that i could use for centre lining so i could use the boat single-handed. they didn’t have any but i got a call yesterday saying that they had some and could i come and have a look at it. so there we were. mick and i discussed the matter and reckoned i could get away with 26 feet of line using 6 foot across the top of the boat and just one 20 foot line that could run from that and swing either way (if you see what i mean). at the chandlery they had taken it into their heads that i had ordered 20 metres of lovely, silky black nylon line. now i didn’t have the energy or the desire to fight in order to dispute this. so i coughed up. 40 fucking quids later we went back to the boat. (NOT A GOOD THING)

8. winded the boat without hitting anything and set sail back to new haw where the lock was once again in our favour. (GOOD THING)

9. running out of swig we got close in to where chas and his mate had been doing tree work. the secret stash was FULL of nicely sawn up logs. all i will have to do is split them. mick trundled loads of them up to the boat (there are still loads left - cheers chas!) and promised to lend me his ‘log grenade’ which is a sort of four-pronged affair that you whack with a hammer and it splits logs into four (what a surprise) with no fuss or bother. (GOOD THING)

10. coxes lock was against us but 25% not with us rate is well acceptable (AVERAGE THING)

11. winded boat outside pelican without hitting anything all day. put boat to bed. went to pub for a quick one and use the loo. (GOOD THING)

12. walked to tesco and then came out to see bus that we wanted disappear like bloody ectoplasm. (POTENTIALLY NOT GOOD THING)

13. another bus turns up at the end of his run. we ask if he is going to byfleet. no, he is not. he is going back to the depot. the depot is near where i live. we are welcomed aboard and taken to new haw station, which is exactly where i wanted to go, driving with all the lights out and no fare required. we reward driver with a handsome tip. (MOST DEFINITELY VERY GOOD THING)

so my philosophy is confounded by the events of today. my old philosophy was that life was just a series of major disappointments interspersed with minor disappointments. but then i wondered that if i was expecting disappointment then i couldn’t, per se, be disapponted when i was disappointed. so then i cranked it up a notch to the new, radical approach that’ nothing works, never has done, never will do’.

and now today has buggered everything up because nearly everything worked quite well and, last time i looked, even the oven door did too.

back to the philosophical drawing board, i suppose.

sleep well. xxx

my brother came round yesterday evening. he presented an invitation to his wedding for which i thanked him. i didn’t want to, ahem, piss on his sandwiches OR his fireworks but i do have a couple of problems with it all.

i shouldn’t think that he will ever see this or meet any of you lot so i feel that i can point out here what concerns me:

he’s getting married in dorset. he doesn’t live there, he lives here. but that’s where he’s going. i won’t go on about him because that wouldn’t be fair but i will go on about me as i don’t really know what to do.

so from my point of view i will have to travel by train down to dorset, take a taxi to a b&b, take a taxi to the bash (i’m not invited to the registrar’s office), enjoy bash, hand over present, take taxi to b&b, pay b&b bill in the morning, faint, get up, take taxi to station, go back home.

i will also have to buy a pair of proper shoes. i do have a suit but it wouldn’t look so good with my steel toe-cap boots or manky boat plimmies. so i will have to buy a pair of shoes that i will only wear once ever.

and i can’t afford all this.

the first time he got married i was his best man. this time i’m not. the temptation to say that i can’t make it is rather strong but i don’t want to cause trouble. but 200 quids is well over a fortnight’s money for me. i don’t know what to do. weddings are awful in my opinion; the grief they cause.

my brother is deeply suspicious of beards. perhaps he was scared by a tramp in a woodshed when he was a little boy, i don’t know, but he HATES mine. and while i was in the loo he said to trouty that he wanted her to persuade me to cut it off and made scissor motions with his fingers.

bloody families, bloody weddings…

OVEN UPDATE

i administered such a fantastic hiding to the cooker yesterday. and guess what? this morning the door worked and shut properly and behaved itself. this kind of proves my theory that kicking things makes them work. but if you want to follow my therapy plan please remember to don your steel-toecapped boots because one thing is still broken and that’s my 2nd toe, right foot. it looks like a salt and vinegar nik-nak with a red grape stuck on the end. and it hurts.

WEDDING REPRISE

i think i’m going to blow this one out. it wasn’t my idea, i didn’t come up with the arrangements and i can’t afford to do it. so i will just have to send a record token in the post and bollocks familial relationships for the rest of my life.

oh well, see you tomorrow.

bad mistake this morning. first of all i tried to get the bin bag out of the thing that i put it in. of course, that didn’t work and the bin bag started to disintegrate because nothing ever works. all the teabags and fag-ends and gunge started to fall out on the floor so i got a new bin bag and started to decant. still the original bin bag wouldn’t give up the struggle. i administered a good kick but then regretted it because instead of having my steel-toecapped boots on i was wearing my slippers and i suspect i may have broken a toe or two.

the battle was won by me picking up the contraption and smashing it down on the floor a few times while swearing loudly. but nothing ever works; i don’t know why i ever am so stupid as to hope that anything ever will.

to celebrate my pyrrhic victory over the recalcitrant binbag i thought i would cook some croissants in the oven. regular readers may remember that the oven and i had a severe falling out recently because of its reluctance to close properly. then, it miraculously healed itself and started working again, just to annoy me, and yesterday i roasted some beef in the oven and cooked some roasty spuds.

bearing in mind today’s title, let me ask you a question. the question is: “do you think the oven door worked this morning or was it perhaps not working?”

of course it wasn’t working because nothing ever has worked or ever will work. so i had a fight with the cooker. it didn’t swear as much as i did but it put up a pretty good fight. it broke my watch strap and made me pretty upset. in return i buckled the door so much that i had to use a wooden spatula to get the door open when i wanted to get the croissants out. and they were a little underdone but nothing ever works so that’s not surprising.

other things that don’t work in the kitchen are the cold water tap which has a wonky washer in. sometimes you can’t turn it on, sometimes you can’t turn it off. “oh yes", i hear you say, “you want to change that washer". and i would do except that there is no stop-cock in my flat so i can’t. i asked the landlord and he says there is no stop-cock but there might be one in the flat upstairs. nothing works.

the kitchen light is a fluorescent strip. does it work? well, what do you think?

the little prong things never fitted into the socket things they were supposed to fit into. when the strip went i bought another and tried to fit it. after the socket bit had snapped off and broken irredeemably i mended it with a bit of duck tape. after that had pinged off and the tube fell on the floor and broke i went and bought another strip. there is now more duck tape on the light fitting than there is left on the reel.

so now i’ve got a broken watch, broken toes, a bruised hand, a crap oven, a rubbish tap, a stupid light and the firm conviction that nothing works, never has worked, never will work.

and that’s just my kitchen.

don’t get me started on everything else that doesn’t work but i must just allow myself another pop at the bliar regime:

smell the lying weasel trying to crawl the votes he craves. do you know, the only pledge that bliar has made since 1997 and actually achieved is the hunting with dogs thing? that’s the only promise he has kept. since 1997.

the fat, odious slug, prescott must have something big on the grinning, lying pixie. how on earth can he have stayed where he is?; gobbling up the freebies, assaulting demonstrators, going a hundred yards in a chauffeur driven car, having five homes ponced off union subscriptions…. etc…. etc…. et bloody cetera….

and now fatty has been caught out booking a FIVE THOUSAND POUNDS A NIGHT hotel suite in cannes for three nights for some stupid jolly, snout in trough, expedition.

if i met either of these two i would beat them up worse than i did my cooker. my cooker is just useless and doesn’t work. at least it’s not a fat, lying, thieving, war-criminal, mass-murdering, duplicitous piece of SHIT!

have a nice day y’hear…

still ill this morning, waking on the boat, head full of the funniest dreams.

got back home after putting the boat to sleep and walking back down the cut. and spring is kicking in. the birds are all well at it and the trees are blossoming and in just a few weeks they will all be kicking off. after the snow of saturday it just feels like now might be the end of all that cold stuff, that spring is here and summer just around the corner.

there was a letter from the hospital when i got back in. what a depressing read. i won’t bore you with the details.

i’m a bit tired and miserable so forgive me but…

i might do some more in the morning.

goodnight.

in view of the facts that 1. omally is coming tonight, 2. i have therefore to go to tesco and buy swig and grub for the boat (and for oldmouldy) and 3. that i have written my mother’s day card out and if i don’t post it it hasn’t a chance of getting there (or has it, there is a brand new cache gone in and i think it’s just up the road from mum’s house. meh, i’ll just post it anyway and let the post office do their worst. i’m sure they won’t let me down on that one). anyway, in view of all that i thought i should do a quick blog now to keep you all happy and i can always do another one later when omelette and i have had a sniff of the barmaid’s apron.

HEALTH MATTERS:
i looked in my bag of health and found i’d run out completely. d’oh! *slaps forehead* no wonder i’ve been feeling so run down of late. last night i made trouty a health drink but she didn’t seem very grateful and she didn’t even finish it. it was made of slice of lemon and some lemon pulp, ginger root, garlic and honey all made up with boiling water. i thought it smelled quite nice but it didn’t get hoovered up very quick. trouty thought that i should drink some of it but her health is more important than mine so i insisted that she have it all. today she packed her bags and headed for london.

my cold seems to be in remission. and it can bloody well stay there. i’ve got to go out on the cut in minus degrees this weekend.

MY MAD MUSINGS:
this morning i was thinking about ‘performance related pay’, not a subject i’ve had much to do with for the last five years but it irked me then a treat and this morning it popped up again in my pop-up toaster of a head.

you know when you have to do that stupid appraisal charade? boss knows how much you are going to get, he has had it planned out for ages - “all my mates and a couple of bumlickers will get 1% over the rate of inflation, henry and all the other stinking plebs will get next to nothing. oh, alright then, just nothing. i’ll tell them they are off the top of the scale but point out the ‘performance related pay’ factor to keep them jumping through hoops".

i always wanted to turn the tables and in my reverie i pictured a scene like this:

me: “hello, is that boss? would you mind popping over to my shirkstation please? no, right away please because i have an important meeting in the coach and horses at one o’clock”

boss turns up looking a bit pasty and sweaty

me: “ah hello there boss, good to see you, pull up a chair. oh, i haven’t got another chair so you will just have to stand up. now then as you know i review the rewards and benefits that you produce on an annual basis *riffles through paperwork* and i’m afraid you have slipped, or rather fallen down on a few aspects such as basic pay, out of hours rates and on overtime rates. now then, as you know and have known from the start, i operate a strict policy of pay related performance and therefore *riffles paperwork a bit more* this year i’m grading you as a category 4 and this year i will be rewarding you with 7.5% less work than i did last year.”

boss: “wha..? b b b b but that’s well below the rate of workflation! you can’t treat me like this! i have golf club subscriptions and a 4x4 for the missus to pay for!”

me: “sorry son, market forces” *puts on coat and goes to pub for important meeting with the times crossword.

THE END.

might see you later, might not, but you have a great weekend, take a piccie of your ostrich and send it to mallers for his gallery. i’ve never done it myself but i gather it’s a popular pastime.

byeeeeeeee!

i have felt so ill for so long that i haven’t been near the boat. today i feared that it might be at 45 degrees while the band played on down at the cruiser stern.

this pesky cold has had me in its grip for a few days now so, as i felt a little better, today was a good day to visit the beautiful charlotte rose and think about salvage.

the weather was really good. bloody cold but sunny and blue skies. at new haw lock i saw two trust blokes who were trying to get a great big fuck- off barge propelled by a little tiny punt thing with an outboard on the back into the lock. i gave them a bit of a hand (which they weren’t entirely happy about) and chewed the fat with #1 trust bloke. he said that when they came through coxes lock and past the millpond where all the trees have been taken down he had to crab sideways because of the freezing, howling wind.

we walked up to the boat and HOORAH! she was still on the good side of the water. i slopped the crunchy icepools off the aft cover and greased the gland and went under the hatches to clear some water from the bilges. i turned the engine over and ran her for a bit. graham, the mooring warden, has got a nice little staffy so i took a tin of dog food and a chewy bone thing down to his boat and tied it to his door. i had bought them for john the bosh’s lurcher, megan, but he never turned up and now i discard him. after what he has done, which i won’t go into, he is no longer welcome at thirst hall so graham’s dog got the benefit.

then, later on when i stuck my head out of the covers i saw graham wandering about and talking on his phone and he gave me the ‘hang on a minute sign’ and later when he was free we had a chat. we discussed the complete stuck-up knob-ends at the boat club, one of whom had made a malicious complaint about us, and graham said “i told you they were like that". he hasn’t heard anything from the trust about us so it has probably been put to bed. he has another problem with a bloke on a different boat who is going through a divorce and living on his boat on his mooring which is strictly not allowed. graham will turn a blind eye to us if we tell him what we are doing and we fuck off out of it next day and he is a really nice bloke and i wouldn’t give him grief. but this other bloke is taking the piss. oh, and the mooring fees have just gone up 7%. we went to the pub to warm up and then we went home.

yet another stir-fry for dinner. i’ve taken all my tablets (don’t iron tablets taste foul?) and now i’m listening to peter hammill doing ‘plague of lighthouse keepers’ and other things.

tomorrow my friend omally will arrive but trouty will be gone to london town. so omally and i will have to amuse ourselves and on saturday we should meet up with KK who is visiting friends nearby and doing one of my ‘weyside wander’ caches. and then we shall hoist the jolly roger and set sail upstream, past the freezy blasts of coxes, and on towards pyrford. we won’t get further than that because pyrford lock has a closure on it. but there is a pub there and i can pick up the two pipe fenders that i’m owed off stuart and julia, them great people at the TLC chandlery.

i’m looking forward to a weekend of waving plastic cutlasses and plastic hooky hands at children and making a nuisance of myself. might even apply a bit of red paint to boat but it is really too cold to do it. we shall see.

HEALTH STATS:
10% ill, maybe 15%.

sleep well.

this morning i was thinking about my mad enthusiasms.

i’ll do the times crossword for about three months on the bounce and during that time complete it about three times. and then i won’t look at it again for a year. i’ll eat haggis with tatties and neeps four days running and then not touch it for a while. these days the victim is stir-fry and i’m liking it very much. i wonder how long this enthusiasm will last…

trouty cut my hair today using kitchen scissors. i wouldn’t say that the result was exactly symmetrical but i look leaner and meaner rather than wild man of borneo.

HEALTH ISSUES

1) what’s all this about ‘man size tissues’? tesco value tissues are rubbish and i know. one good blow and they dissolve. so now we have man-size and they are about half the size of a pillowcase. are men supposed to have noses about seventeen times the size of lady noses? how sexist!

this cold is retreating albeit slowly. in the meantime i should change my name to ian phlegming.

occasionally i get little pimples on my thighs. my brother gets them too. when squeezed they leave a really big red blotch. perhaps the condition is due to wearing filthy trousers covered in diesel and stuff.

my cold seems to have given me asthma. i have coughed so much that my stomach muscles feel like i’ve done 200 sit-ups. and now i get paralysed with breathing difficulties and stopped dead in my tracks. like being gassed. until i can regulate my breathing i just have to freeze solid. but it seems to be getting better, day by day, slow progress, get there in the end, puff, wheeze, pant pant, etc.

arthritis is the current concern because it has now started to hurt. anon must have been sticking pins in his voodoo doll of me because it really does hurt. on some of my fingertip knuckles i have grown what are called ‘nodes’ and these are the large bumps that you see on some arthritic people. in the main they don’t hurt at all but every now and then, when anon jabs in another needle, it really, really bloody hurts and i have to rub myself with ibuleve (it works a treat) and take painkillers.

i get it in my feet and in my knees and i have neuralgia in all the bits in between. falling apart is not a great feeling but there you go.

on tonight’s menu is yet another stir-fry, this time with chicken and prawns and wilted salad and beansprouts and onion and garlic and ginger and honey and noodles.

so yum yum.

oh, the weather god? yes, well we were going to go boating today. we got as far as the pavement and it started to snow. we walked to the bus stop and then looked at each other. then we walked home again.

cheerio.

the appointment was for 09:15 and so off to the station to catch the 09:00 to west byfleet to visit the clinic and see draclia.

the ticket office was closed and the shutters were down. there was a bit of a queue at the ticket machine and the clock was ticking. would the train be caught?

a teenage girl in front of me was trying to buy a ticket by feeding the machine in rather a laborious fashion with loose change. when she had run out of change she was still 7 pees short. so, she returned all the change and started trying to straighten out a crisp fiver to put in the machine. dear lord.

eventually, tickets purchased, i legged it to the platform and oh, what a surprise; the train was seven minutes late so i needn’t have got in a flap. and another delight, there was a gestapo man lurking on the platform with his lovely peaked hat of authority on his head and his greatcoat stuffed to bursting with ticket machines and ticket price books and all sorts.

we stood quite close to him and made loud remarks about how rubbish everything was. i noticed that the next train to woking was cancelled.

at the clinic i got there just in time to clock in for the blood letting and i saw the notice taped to the desk: “patients arriving more than 20 minutes late will have to re-book an appointment".

if i had spent a crisp fiver on fares and then the train had been cancelled instead of just late and i had bust a gut to get there and then been sent away again in order to repeat the sad saga in a week’s time i would have gone bonkers. but anyway…

a hole got knocked into my arm and the phlebotomist sucked up FOUR vacuum test tubes of my crimson life juice.

after that we went for a coffee and then home again. what was this on the mat? a lovely letter? a bargain offer? had i won a prize? (opens envelope……) wow! there certainly was a huge amount of money involved. a 190 quids water bill.

so i fanned my sweaty, pallid face with the letter from the water bastards and i wondered to myself why jumpers are so itchy.

later on i did another fab stir-fry so the day ended on an up note. i suppose.

and the highlight of the day was the campaign of terror that lbc radio have got going over delia smith’s rant at norwich last night. they have edited it down and keep going “now we have delia from norwich on the line, what do you think about postal services, delia?” and then they keep playing it.

so, ha ha ha ha ha!

sleep tight.