I still want an Irish Terrier, you know, and who can blame me? Sometimes I sit and stare into the blind, Cyclopean eye of the thing that I love best, YouTube, and watch video snips of other peoples’ Irish Terriers. I Google for images of Irish Terriers. When I went to see my Mum the other day because she has fallen over and sprained her foot I found I was talking about Irish Terriers.
If YOU are an Irish Terrier and you have nobody to wuv oo then give me a call.
Next we have another little face to look at…
That’s right! It’s him! The thief that I saw over the road! I had my bicycle stolen in a burglary in 1994 and I’m still cheesed off about it so I’m quite pleased to think that this particular bicycle thief might be on his way to GAOL as I type this. Of course the British Transport Police have grabbed all the glory for themselves but considering the quality of this collar who can blame them?
Now we come to my cultural tip…
MANY years ago, like back in the 90s, I used to drink in a pub called the Neptune. There was a bloke called John that worked behind the jump there and he used to bring in a tape of music that he liked to play during his shift. And that’s where I first heard THIS LOT.
The PIZZICATO FIVE were a prolific, arty, Japanese combo of the (mostly) 90s. I had to think long and hard before I chose whether to tip the video for BABY LOVE CHILD, which is a great song, or the one I finally plumped for, TWIGGY TWIGGY.
Why not let the sound of the Pizzicato Five be your musical mantra for the summer?
You may have missed the link before so here it comes again:
My son, Alex, AKA Youngblood, is writing a, er, THING on the interweb super-highway. He posts the episodes in a blog format every now and then. I just read the most recent one and now I’m all excited.
So now I’m doing a sort of updated version of standing up and clapping when he comes on as a shepherd or a giraffe or something in the Nativity Play and I expect I will get told off for using my video camera and I can already feel hands tugging at my tweed jacket and hear myself being urged in whispers to sit down.
The point is that I am very proud of what he is doing. And impressed. And, of course, I’m worried that he’s not getting the thousands of readers that he deserves. So here’s embarrassing Dad doing some advertising.
If I have a quibble it’s that because it is in a blog form it is written with the posts front-to-back and so new readers will have to start by rummaging in the archives until they are up to date. I expect the archiving can be adjusted though. Cough.
AND he does all the pictures too in a sort of technermological way that is beyond the comprehension of Papas.
The sun goes up and the sun comes down and each day I get a little bit older and a little bit madder. Today I was trying to explain to Trouty the difference between HER umbrella and MY umbrella. She didn’t think there was a difference but, well, she wouldn’t, would she?
The umbrellas started off being the same but as soon as one of them had been used they became HERS and MINE. I don’t really want to get into explaining what the difference in case you start thinking I’m as mad as Trouty thinks I am but it has to do with whether they have been used properly and, most importantly, put away properly. So, today I wanted to go to the shop and it might have rained so I took an umbrella and put it in my bag. But. BUT. What if it was the wrong one?
I had to go and find the other umbrella and I had to take the covers off them to compare because I knew how I had put my umbrella away so it HAD TO BE THE SAME.
Luckily the other umbrella looked like a dead crow that had been poked into the cover so I knew I had the right one in the first place. The right umbrella and yet another confirmation of the self-diagnosed OCD that is now on my list of ailments.
It drives me NUTS when the tidying-up fairy hides things. I notice when the loaf of bread has been shortened by two slices. I have to do things to bring order into my life and if the things get out of order I don’t really understand them any more and I lose interest in them because they don’t exist in my world any more. This has been happening more to me since I stopped drinking because now I can remember things.
When things that I do start making me feel too weird I do try to rein them in a bit. I used to count things like, when chopping a carrot, I would count the chops of the carrot for no reason at all. I used to count magpies and do the rhyme. Whenever I saw a sachet of salt in the little basket by the till at the Amex staff canteen I would say ‘SAVOUR’ to myself in my head. These last few things annoyed me so I tried to stop them but other things make my life properly ordered so I keep doing them to keep myself comfortable.
Like Fridays…
Friday is Boozological Group day. The first thing that I want to do is leave the house at 08:30. It doesn’t matter what time I get up but I have to leave at 08:30 to walk to the bus stop. I get to the bus stop at 08:45 and the bus isn’t due until 08:58 so I could leave the house a little later - except I couldn’t because I have to leave at 08:30 or I feel weird. The bus might come, and go, early and then I wouldn’t know. And I can’t bear not knowing.
I have to know about all things. What I would like is if everyone would form an orderly queue and inform me about everything so that I can decide whether I need to know about it or not.
Then, when I get to the hospital I have to get a coffee from Outpatients (not from anywhere else) and then I have to go and wait for my Group to start.
Last Thusday I got a phone call (number withheld - that shouldn’t be allowed) telling me that the Group was cancelled due to staff sickness.
AAAAAaaaAaAAAaAAAAAaAAAaaaaAaAAAAGGGGHHHHH
As a result I have spent too much time thinking about drinking and thinking about not drinking which is something I don’t spend much time thinking about in the usual run of things. I haven’t drunk any booze but I’d rather spend my thoughts on other things. Maybe I’m growing up a bit and I have to get through this phase and onto the next.
My Group is good for me but it could be that it’s time for me to move on. Flap my wings a bit. I enjoyed art therapy but when it was time to move on from there I moved.
Art therapy was where I did this rather fabulous painting of ‘The Drowned Man’…
and the reason I chose to try painting on black paper was because I had been looking at the ‘Black Paintings’ of Goya…
Here’s one called ‘Old Men Eating’.
I liked the way that a face was lifted from the dark background by showing the highlights and I had been looking at this technique employed by the late Denny Dent in this clip. You may have seen this before as it is the beginning of the film, ‘Jimi plays Monterey’, and if you haven’t seen it before, ENJOY!
Have a sniff. Have a listen. If you screw your eyes up you can see them. Can you hear them calling to you through the green veils of the years?
Tchoh! You’ve got no soul, you haven’t! There’s cress beds under all that lot and you CAN still see them if you try hard enough. This picture is taken from up on the towpath near where that strange mooring post is; the one that’s an old piece of rail, bent like a hairpin.
I like to think that boats tied up to that old post while they collected the watercress to take to the market at Covent Garden. Never having actually been a watercress farmer myself I have to imagine an awful lot of what goes on in my head when I look at the old beds here, just above Coxes Lock. I bet the cress was cut by hand, like it still is today, and this would be done just about daily and for a large part of the year. And then the bunches taken in wooden trays down the Wey and onto the Thames and the Wey cress ending its days as a garnish on a steak served up in a Victorian London chophouse.
Further along from where I took the picture, at the other end of the beds I found this old, dead machine.
Hasn’t it got the shape of an old plough? It could well have been knocked up at a smithy, this old cutter. Underneath that manky, perished tyre is what looks like a spoked, chunky, bicycle wheel. I reckon that there was an engine of some sort on the left hand side driving, and balancing, the cutting arm which would have been to the right. This ‘pusher’s-eye-view’ shows what I mean.
I wonder if it was used to keep the towpath bank tidy or if it was used to keep the cressbeds neat? That’s where it died, after all. But cress is cut by hand. I know because I looked it up on the internet.
Look at the ferocious teeth. If you snuck up behind someone and snipped through their tendons, just at the back of the ankle, you could fell them like a tree.
I make all this stuff up as I go along to bring order to my world so it doesn’t really matter whether I make it up right or make it up wrong. But I like to think that I’m right.
Here’s a catchy tune to cheer you up. It’s lovable Herman Dune singing ‘I wish that I could see you soon’.
I like it when the ladies are singing and I don’t care that it sounds like Jonathan Richman.
