she’s that bloke that looks like a horse. isn’t she?

(i was going to do a blog about amerikalanders not signing the kyoto agreement and driving 20 foot in a gas guzzler hummer to have a breakfast of pancakes, bacon, 16 eggs, grits, more bacon, more pancakes, maple syrup, more eggs, invading iraq to steal oil, cwahfee, ornge jooce, pork fat, ice cream, cwahfee, eggs, bacon, steak, french frahs, pyancakes, and i’ll have that all again please. except they don’t say please. but i won’t because the horror of hurricane katrina is no laughing matter.)

here’s a thing. is it trouty’s birthday or not? you work it out. i can’t.

i just heard on the radio that in amerika they wanted to fly food into the devastated area. hot food and sandwiches.

now, don’t get me wrong. as you know i hate bush and bliar. i will go to my grave shouting that bliar is a war criminal. bush should engage the protesters and speak to them.

anyway, she DOES look like a bloke. and a horse.

goodbye.

i haven’t blogged for ages.

trouty said “we’re going to be in a film” and that surprised me. when you go to the shop and then you come back and then wow, what a surprise, you are going to be in a film then that is a surprising thing. we were going to be in a film.

the producer had banged on the roof of the boat. the film was called ‘the sins of the father’. the boat was termed ‘picturesque’. three days later the crew turned up.

i got given a walkie-talkie thing. ’steve to dave, can you go back to the starting point?’

the river was running and i hadn’t really got that much of a clue. back and forth we went. back and forth. back and forth.

we think we will wind up on the cutting room floor. but we are promised tickets for the thingummyjig, the premier thing. it’s in leatherhead.

we are film stars.

the kodak cx4200 had died. i realised that this morning as i went through all the instructions for it that i could find on the net. one of the first bullet points said “what you can do with your digital camera"; i thought that summed up the situation rather well.

so i walked to the camera shop to see if i could afford a replacement and there i saw a kodak d×7630 special offer 30 quids off. it has a staggering 6.1 megapixels as opposed to the puny 2.0 i had wielded previously. but i couldn’t really afford it. which was a shame.

as i paid for it i reflected that by dint of not smoking and drinking it had paid for itself already really. my new shoes will just have to wait i thought to myself as i trudged across the carpark. yes, perhaps there was an element of swagger in my step as i contemplated the awesome power of my 3x optical zoom, my 24 fps video capability with on board microphone and speaker, my punch-packing lithium ion rechargeable battery…

carefully putting my son’s birthday later this month to the very back of my mind i popped into tesco. if my camera could be of high resolution then so could i. i bought mineral water instead of my usual ginger pop and some herbal tea (’revitalising’ cinnamon and cardamom) and some salady stuff. i WILL make myself healthy, i WILL.

i got back home, unpacked my bits and bobs, put my mighty battery on to charge, downloaded my whizzy new software, made sure i had all the little bits and pieces, unpacked the camera from its protective layers, noticed the blemish in the coating of the lens, unplugged the battery, packed up all the bits and pieces and went all the way back to the shop.

at the shop they were all baffled. after much head scratching they decided that it had a blemish on it and was faulty. i could have a new one. but there wasn’t a new one as i had had the last in stock.

using the awesome power of my mighty brain i suggested that i could have the display one out of the case. so that’s what i did and now i’m sitting here writing this and waiting for the red light on the battery charger to be a green light so that i can go out and take some mediocre snaps with a bit of kit that i will never understand.

but never mind that. it has cheered me up and it will encourage me to go outside and that can’t be a bad thing. so i resolve to health myself up and see if i can outlive my new camera.

fag stats: none at all and never again.
swig stats: none at all thank you very much.
battery stats: the light’s still red, hurry up hurry up.
RIP stat: pete atkinson from farncombe boathouse. apparently he was only 56 which is no age at all. and he was a heavy smoker. note to self, do not smoke ever again.

with OL’ THIRSTY

there are a couple of things that i would like to see but i haven’t seen ‘em yet. one of these things is a small boy with his head stuck in a saucepan and another is a small boy with his head stuck in some railings. i was reminded of this the other day when i was walking past some nice old railings in addlestone. not many people know how much i like old railings, probably only me and trouty i suppose. if i have told anybody else i should imagine that they have forgotten; it isn’t very important but, strangely, it means quite a lot to me. some of the railings that i like remind me of a walk along what must have been the grand union canal when i lived in leicester forty years ago. my class went for this walk and i remember the grass and that we had luncheon meat sandwiches and some cheese ones. and i remember the railings.

yes, i am very fond of agricultural ironwork. the eponymous gate involved in my fab cache, narnian gateway, rang a bell with me as soon as i saw it all those years ago in the middle of a winter woodland. the kind of fencing i like is victorian i suppose and generally in rack and ruin and i would like to photograph these things when i see them and have a little collection of my favourite items digitally snapped and stored away in a folder for me to review in my dotage should i be lucky enough to have one. but that little scheme has gone to pot for the time being as my camera has given up the ghost. it’s only a 2meg one but it was fine when it was working. i can’t afford to replace it and i’ve tried to get it mended but it’s all old fashioned now. they don’t make or sell them any more and no one is interested.

so, no snaps of ironwork for me today and no snaps of the new lock gates i saw them fitting on the basingstoke canal (lock #2, woodham flight). the lock had been pumped dry and i had a nose around to see what i could see. it was interesting; i ‘ve never seen an empty lock before. there were two bicycle frames and a smashed up payphone in there amongst the beer cans.

no photos then of some of the interesting things i have seen of late. we took the boat out on the thames and then back again and all the way to godalming and then pottered back home. we saw a grass snake swimming near getty’s old home at sutton place, near guildford. a kingfisher flew into the boat, did a quick circuit of the bed, squeaked and went back out again. herons we have seen and pantomime horses galore. the other morning i was talking to graham our mooring warden. i saw a mink on his shed roof. it turned out that there were two young mink and i took lots of snaps and got to within two or three feet of them. sadly only two or three of my pictures came out.

this morning, on my way to the doctors, i saw two mushroomy fungus things lying by the towpath. my fungus book is on the boat but i reckon they were related to ceps and possibly boletus edulis or boletus russula but i must do a lot of checking. the flies had got to them so they weren’t worth doing anything with but i haven’t seen such a thing around here before. i wonder how they got here. it will be a good project.

one of the many things i had to talk to the doctor about was restless legs. this is a most aggravating thing. my legs get all sort of tickly inside and i feel that i have to move them about. usually this happens in bed but last night i was just sitting there and it happened so i decided to go out for a walk. i went down to the canal and saw bats flying in the dusk.

my excellent doctor says that this is caused (legs, not bats) by me drinking and that this has damaged the sort of insulation on my nerves and they are short-circuiting. the only remedy is yet more boring vitamin b where i had hoped for something more entertaining and, ahem, recreational. he has also sent a letter off to a tame rheumatologist who i must see about my arthritis which is now giving me some serious misery.

so we’re a bit alike, my camera and me. both falling apart, not really working properly. but we see some fantastic things along the way that’s for sure.

swig and fag stats: none at all

when i was in tesco scoring another goal in the tesco game (tub of florentine sauce, shelf price 1.18 quids, till price 1.49 quids - yessssss! my sharp eyes didn’t let that one pass) i bought some bananas. now then, is it me or are bananas, like wagon wheels, getting smaller?

some people know that i live very close to a railway line. very close indeed. perhaps less than a hundred metres. and sometimes we get a steam train coming down the line. they are usually pulling some pullman type carriages and seem to be filled with people dressed up and probably dining and playing a murder mystery or some such. i don’t know about steam engines so don’t ask me but they are nice to see every now and then as they chuff their way through byfleet and new station without stopping. i can’t blame them for that as the station looks like something out of east germany circa early seventies. and sometimes they toot the whistle.
anyway, this morning i was lying in bed and minding my own business when there was a really loud screaming whistle as one of these things came down the track. i had the window open and it (the whistle, not the window) made all the hairs on the back of my neck stand up as it was so loud and unexpected. i imagined the driver and fireman to be laughing skeletons dressed in ragged dungarees and pulling on the whistle as the ghost train sped towards west byfleet and beyond…

READER’S VOICE: never mind that old rubbish, what about this simon ‘joke’ you promised us?

very well. you see it was quite a while ago when simon g came to see us and when he did he was wearing his best shirt. this was a t-shirt with a breast pocket. and in that pocket simong, being simong, had been keeping some butter. and what with being so close to the throbbing bosom of simong the butter had melted and had spread itself luxuriously amongst the greedy fibres of his garment.
it was only recently i realised that instead of calling him simon g all this time, i should have been calling him…

wait for it…

SIMON GHEE!!!

ha ha ha ha ha ha, whooo hoo hoo, ha ha etc.

bye for now!

the weather woke me up this morning. the rain thumped down so loudly that it actually woke me; although i was not disturbed by the solitary clap of thunder that occurred at about 06:00 ( according to our special mystery guest whom we shall meet later).

you may remember that not so long ago i was wishing for rain but now i’m not so keen on the stuff. this weather gives me no end of grief in my aching, rheumaticky, arthritic fingers and toes and legs and arms and the wet stuff fills the boat up with wet and it all needs to be got out and thrown into the canal and hasty sprinkles of dilute washing-up liquid as a dispersal agent must be applied to the diesel film that results.

i like the rain. what i don’t like is the pain and the nuisance aspect of it but it’s filling the canal back up so i mustn’t grumble.

along the towpath i squelched and i saw adam the lock-keeper at new haw moodily painting his lock’s paddle gear with red oxide. he is painting three locks at the moment and the rain has disrupted his painting plans. that’s why he is moody.

off i went again and picked and munched some cob nuts on the way. on the towpath i saw a particularly horrendous dog poo. it was of the diarrhoea type and looked a bit like raw sponge cake mix. what i want to know is how come these dog owners manage to squeeze their pets out like toothpaste tubes while i’m not there to reprimand them and make them scoop it up and put it in their pockets. i shall have to disguise myself in camouflage type clothes and hide by the towpath in order to surprise them. and what a coincidence when…

at cox’s lock, who should i see disguised in camouflage type clothes and lounging about by the towpath. his face is the colour of a dirty brick and his only possessions seem to be a tom sharpe paperback and a bottle of cider in a carrier bag. yes! that’s right! it’s our old friend vodka mick! hoorah! hail fellow well met!

vodka mick comes with me to the boat and tells me about the clap of thunder while i scoop two thousand litres of rainwater out of the bilges. later, on the way back home, i find an old jawbone with some teeth in it and mick tells me about the trails left by freshwater mussels in the soft sandy bed of the cut. he’s going out shooting foxes tonight.

READER’S VOICE: what about these so-called ‘jokes’ then?

oh very well. near our mooring there is an ants’ nest. just ordinary black ants but apparently they are rather adventuresome and a few of them have climbed up the mooring lines and made themselves at home on board. having found two earwigs in a packet of ryvita i am not keen that the ants start making free with the sugar supply so they get lobbed back out when apprehended. trouty caught one the other day but as she was feeling a bit buddhist she just grabbed it by the scruff of its neck rather than killing it. i asked her if she was going to throw it out of the living quarters through the door. she said that she was. so, i said (sorry, i’m laughing myself now and i know what’s coming next!) anyway, i said (hang on, i’m trying to compose myself, sorry about this) so, anyway, i said…

“it will be ANT ON DECK!!”

d’you geddit? see what i did there?

oh please yourselves.

next time: more jokes, perhaps my one about simon.

nighty night.